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VI. Hotel Terminus The inherently unstable interdependency of history and memory has dominated recent discussions of the Holocaust, with aesthetics and the arts figuring importantly in this dynamic. Two essays, Charles Dellheim’s ‘‘Framing Nazi Art Loot’’ and Marion Kant’s ‘‘Lewitan and the Nazification of Dance,’’ examine how Nazi determinations of aesthetic validity helped to decide both the fates of individual Jews and—more surprisingly—the status that their artistic endeavors still retain in our collective consciousness. A third essay, Susan Rubin Suleiman’s reading of the Marcel Ophuls’s film Hotel Terminus (lending its name to this concluding section), describes how the documentarian’s self-aware aesthetic pose enabled him to confront a subject that transcends merely factual representation. Rather than simplify the inherent moral complexities of the Holocaust in terms of elementary dichotomies like truth and denial, memory and forgetting , or property and theft, Charles Dellheim asks why the issue of ‘‘Nazi art loot’’ has lately become so fashionable as a Holocaust morality tale. Its current saliency certainly derives in part from recent exposé of Swiss collaboration during World War II, from recent bitter controversies over reparation payments, and from a glut of lawsuits surrounding Nazi-stolen treasures. Yet Dellheim’s essay retreats from this current ‘‘surfeit of memory ’’ and its comforting judgments in order to assess the lengthy preceding period of neglect. He reviews the history of depictions of Nazi art theft by recalling the methods and mentalities of a group of United States Army ‘‘monuments men’’ that had been assigned the task of ‘‘protecting and salvaging artistic and historical monuments’’ in Allied-occupied Europe. Dellheim illuminates the role in efforts to recover art masterpieces played by German Jews like Captain James Rorimer (later the director of the Metropolitan Museum) or—even during the war itself—the French partisan Alexandre Rosenberg. Depictions of these men and their activities in subsequent memoirs, monographs, and movies occasion Dellheim’s reflections on the reasons behind the conscious and unconscious suppression of the Jewish identities of the principal victims of Nazi art pillaging in postwar culture . This in turn begs the question of why, in the first place, modern Euro- 316 Hotel Terminus pean Jews became conspicuous, not so much as practitioners of art but as its dealers, owners, and patrons. What is clear is that the Nazis stole so much art from Jews both because Jews owned so much of it and because anti-Semitism made them all too easy to dispossess. Both factors, as Dellheim indicates, point to the critical function played by art in sustaining many modern Jews’ claims to possess the cultural qualifications for legitimate membership in European society—the very status the Nazis set out to destroy. The dance critic Joseph Lewitan was a Jewish artistic mediator along the lines described by Dellheim. That his important role in the history of twentieth-century German dance has been largely forgotten is also consistent with Dellheim’s analysis, in which the significance of modernity’s countless Jewish artistic sidemen and middlemen has been occluded. In her rediscovery of Lewitan, Marion Kant makes the added point that Lewitan ’s field of modern dance was the only avant-garde art form officially embraced by National Socialism, a fact that renders the Jewish critic’s role all the more complex. In the hands of choreographers like Mary Wigman and Rudolph von Laban, modern dance aestheticized the Nazis’ Volkisch and neo-Romantic ideals. Through his pioneering journal Der Tantz (founded in 1927), Lewitan combated these tendencies without ever succumbing to a facile rejection of modern dance itself. Yet with the 1933 Nazi seizure of power this precarious balancing act proved impossible to sustain. Accepting the Jewishness imposed upon him by the regime’s racial categories , Lewitan eventually fled Germany. But he appeared little at home in overtly Jewish milieus, preferring instead to submerge himself indistinctly into New York’s émigré society. It seems that by conferring Jewishness upon him the Nazis had succeeded in rendering Lewitan anonymous, an art-historical non-person, so to speak. Perhaps this is why he did not seek to reconstitute his role in the postwar world of dance criticism. His was the bygone modern dance moment of Weimar Germany: once Nazi appropriation managed to forcibly resolve that moment’s internal contradictions (e.g., experimental and essentialist, avant-garde and nationalist) into a totalistic aesthetics, no room remained for Lewitan’s indisputable but highly individual place within that history. The strange...

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