In the early 1950s, a number of public and ecclesiastical institutions in Nuremberg, West Germany bought, sold, and exchanged medieval illuminated manuscripts. A museum acquired a Christian gospel book but sold two haggadot from its collection; a church gave away a mass book made for it four hundred years earlier; the city library sold a Hebrew liturgical manuscript it had held for centuries. These transactions were fraught for a variety of reasons. Not only were monetarily and culturally valuable objects changing hands, but, just a few years after the Shoah, Jewish cultural artifacts were leaving German public collections. And all of this was taking place in the “most German of all German cities,” a Nazi-era sobriquet for Nuremberg that had been given a new twist when the city that had hosted the annual Nazi party rallies became the site of the trial of the leading Nazi war criminals.
This lecture, drawing on extensive archival research, attempts to answer such questions as: What did it mean in the early 1950s for a German museum to acquire a spectacular Ottonian gospel book? For a church to give an American donor a liturgical manuscript that had been made for it? For German public institutions to sell Hebrew illuminated manuscripts to an émigré German Jew living in Israel? These transactions are placed in their political and social context. Germany, accused of the worst crimes in the history of mankind, was struggling to reestablish itself. One of the ways it tried to do this was by reshaping the relationship of its medieval past to its modern present.
Organised by Dr Jessica Barker, Senior Lecturer in Medieval Art History at the Courtauld. This event is kindly supported by the International Center of Medieval Art (ICMA), and the drinks reception sponsored by Sam Fogg.
Speaker:
William J. Diebold is the Jane Neuberger Goodsell Professor of Art History and Humanities (emeritus) at Reed College. He was educated at Yale and Johns Hopkins and has published extensively on early medieval topics, including his book Word and Image: An Introduction to Early Medieval Art and articles on Carolingian and Ottonian manuscripts, ivories, and medieval texts about art. More recently, his research has been on the modern reception of the Middle Ages, especially in twentieth-century Germany, and has led to such publications as “The Nazi Middle Ages,” “Medievalism,” and, most recently, Medieval Art, Modern Politics (co-edited with Brigitte Buettner).
