Suzanne Loebl’s Plunder and Survival
From the beginning, the task of writing a meaningful book on this subject appealed to both my intellectual and emotional selves,” Suzanne Loebl writes in the acknowledgments to Plunder and Survival: Stories of Theft, Loss, Recovery, and Migration of Nazi-Uprooted Art (Bloomsbury). This “slice of history” shaped her life: “I was the Jewish child growing up in Nazi Germany; the hidden teen in German-occupied Belgium; the refugee failing to obtain a visa to escape continental Europe before it was too late; the fortunate European Jew to have survived the Holocaust; and the immigrant determined to live a productive American life.”
With coauthor Abigail Wilentz, Loebl has produced an in-depth art-historical examination of a dark time for European culture. Plunder and Survival represents a significant addition to our understanding of how and why the rapacious Nazis sought to erase art and artists they didn’t like.
Loebl refreshes our memory of the rise of Hitler, an account that tracks closely with the ascension of our president. One example: the Enabling Act of 1933, an emergency decree suspending most civil liberties in Germany, including free expression, freedom of the press, proper assembly, and protection from home searches. That same year, Joseph Göbbels published a five-point manifesto that included this directive: “No artist with Marxist or Bolshevist connections should be mentioned henceforth.”
While identifying many of the villains, including opportunistic art dealers and collectors, Loebl also honors those individuals who risked their lives to safeguard the looted artwork. One person in particular stands out: Jeu de Paume curator Rose Valland (1898–1980) spied on the Germans and informed the French Resistance of the destination of Nazi shipments, which helped protect the art from Allied bombings and would later facilitate its recovery.
Stories of Theft, Loss, Recovery, and Migration
of Nazi-Uprooted Art.
Loebl traces the journey of many individual paintings, including van Gogh’s famous Portrait of Dr. Gachet, 1890, originally “the pride and joy” of the Städel Museum in Frankfurt. When the museum organized the 2019 exhibition “Making van Gogh: A German Love Story,” they included the empty gold frame from which the painting was stolen.
Loebl’s choice of artworks to illustrate the book is inspired. The twenty-three images include a number of works considered “degenerate” by the Nazis, among them, paintings by Kirchner, Chagall, Grosz, Kokoschka, Klimt, Beckmann and Schiele. Most moving, if you will, is Hermann Lismann’s Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini (1923), which portrays the ill-fated lovers in Dante’s Inferno. Loebl’s aunt Else Bamberger brought the painting to America in 1943. The author’s family gave it to her in 1958; she treasures it.
Many such moving moments mark Loebl’s narrative. Visiting an exhibition in Liège, Belgium, in 2014 commemorating the 75th anniversary of the infamous auction in Lucerne, Switzerland, when the Nazis attempted to monetize the “degenerate” art they had confiscated, Loebl discovered that her “gracious host and chauffeur” was Jean Pierre Grosfils. “As a teen hiding from the Nazis,” she recalls, “I had been his nanny.” That her granddaughter Naomi accompanied her on this trip was, she writes, “living proof that in the end Hitler’s evil purpose had failed, though the cost in suffering, lost lives, and lost art is too enormous to fathom.”
The chapter “Artists in Exile: Adieu, Europe, Hello, America” highlights the valiant efforts of several individuals, including Varian Fry and Hiram Bingham IV, to rescue anti-Nazi artists, writers, intellectuals, scientists, and others during World War II (the 2023 Netflix series Transatlantic dramatized their mission). Art historian Martica Sawin’s landmark study Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (1995) documents the impact of this influx of some of these émigrés on the art world.
Loebl is a seasoned writer. Previous books include At the Mercy of Strangers: Growing Up on the Edge of the Holocaust (1997), America’s Art Museums: A Traveler’s Guide to Great Collections Large and Small (2002) and, most recently, America’s Medicis: The Rockefellers and Their Astonishing Cultural Legacy (2010). She is also the author or coauthor of a number of health-related texts, including the Nurse’s Drug Handbook, 1989.
Loebl notes that during the eight years it took her to write Plunder and Survival, the topic continued to evolve. These recent headlines in the New York Times bear this out: “Nonprofit Gets Two Paintings Stolen by Nazis Pulled from Auction” and “Museums Lobby Against Strengthening a Holocaust Art Recovery Law.” She has been using Substack to report on ongoing recoveries while sharing stories from her book. She is a champion of art and truth.
—Carl Little