From Sunday's TIMES and NEWS-STAR
For
the past three generations, books and movies, documentaries and museums and oral
histories have told and retold -- still tell us -- of World War II.
But
sometimes it takes a celluloid soldier – George Clooney comes to mind! – to get
us to really pay attention. Or to hear of it at all.
Thank
you George! You can never replace the original Father of Our Country, but you
have never been more George to me than you are right now. I just hope your
movie’s good.
Clooney
directs and obviously had plenty to do with bringing to the big screen a WWII
story few have known anything about until recently. “Monuments Men” opens
Friday with a cast star-studded – Damon, Blanchett, Goodman, and even Bill
Murray, in his first war movie since “Stripes,” unless you count “Ghostbusters
II.” Plus George!
This
is not a “shooting” movie. There will be some, but such was
Europe
in the 1944. The movie will be souped-up, not true to the book, but the premise
and the history lesson will be the same.
“Monuments
Men” is the story of soldiers, roughly 350 men and women, who worked to find,
recover, save and return billions of dollars’ worth of hundreds of thousands of
items stolen by the Nazis during WWII. This ultimately included everything from
wedding rings to fine china to furniture to Raphael’s “Portrait of a Young
Man,” which remains at large, last seen in Poland in 1945.
The
movie is based on the 2009 book “Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves,
and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History,” by Robert Edsel. I bought it three
years ago, then lost it for two -- much like Jan Vermeer’s “The Astronomer” was
lost, along with train car loads of other works, compliments of Hermann Goring.
But it was found two weeks ago; I’ve finished it. Until now, I’d never known,
and sadly had never thought of, any of this.
But
then, neither had most anyone else.
The
job description of the Monuments Men was, as described by Edsel, simple: “…save
as much of the culture of Europe as they could during combat. These men not
only had the vision to understand the grave threat to the greatest cultural and
artistic achievements of civilization, but then joined the front lines to do
something about it.”
These
men and women were from 13 countries. Most of them were historians, architects
and curators, and most volunteered in the newly created Monuments, Fine Arts,
and Archives section, or MFAA. When, after miles of red tape, they showed up in
Europe in groups of 2’s and 3’s, or alone, they didn’t even have a typewriter
or a Jeep.
In
their own way, they battled. They marked maps so Allied aviators could avoid
culturally important sites. They inspected sites as soon as sites were
liberated, and soon the regular soldier caught on that what was being saved in
canvas and marble and parchment was “worth something.” They searched for clues
and discovered stolen treasure, everything from Monet to Michelangelo, in
castles, in nondescript storage areas, in massive underground caves, all
confiscated by the Gestapo, and most transferred by rail to the Motherland so that
Hitler, a failed commercial artist, could one day build the world’s most
majestic cultural museum and town. He had it all planned.
Makes
you wonder if any of this would have happened had he not been rejected as a
young man by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Couldn’t he have simply applied
the next year? “Seems instead,” one of my cultured buddies said, “he took
‘disgruntled’ a bit too far.”
After
the war, the Monuments Men worked to return as many recovered artifacts as
possible to their owners or their countries of origin. They received little
acknowledgement, then or thereafter. Even those in today’s art community knew
little of what their former curators and directors had done to, in Edsel’s
words, “preserve the world’s cultural heritage.” Congress didn’t even
officially acknowledge their contribution until the 63rd anniversary
of D-Day.
But
that’s because, as they had quietly performed their jobs at war, they returned
and quietly performed their jobs at home. There’s an art to that.
· The National WWII Museum in New Orleans plans to
open its Monuments Men gallery in 2016 as part of the museum’s new Liberation
Pavilion.
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