译文连载[附英文原文]：邪魔画商 （二）
二、审美清户[Aesthetic Cleansing]
这批画作落户于康纳利斯在慕尼黑公寓的始末本身，就是一场悲剧。剧幕起源于1892年，医生及社会评论家麦克斯·诺尔道出版的《堕落论》一书，他在书中提到世纪末的欧洲所出现的一些艺术和文化创作是病态思潮的产物。他举出一些他个人的眼中钉为例，特别提到高蹈诗派、象征主义，还有易卜生、王尔德、托尔斯泰及左拉的追随者。
希特勒的种族理想主义受到诺尔道一书的影响。而诺尔道身为布达佩斯一个犹太教牧师之子，他同时指出欧洲日益严重的反犹太主义倾向是欧洲社会堕落的另一体现。这一点却似乎在希特勒身上没有起到任何作用。
1933年，希特勒掌权，他宣布向“文化解体”发起“无情宣战”。他下令查封“堕落艺术家”以及他们的作品。以他的标准，这包括一切有别于传统表现形式的艺术：不但是新兴的表现派、立体派、达达派、野兽派、未来派和主观现实派，就连被普遍接受的梵高、赛尚、马蒂斯的印象派和康提斯基的梦境印象派也包括在内。他们统被归类为犹太布尔什维克艺术。尽管这些许多作品并非出自犹太艺术家之手，可在希特勒看来，其仍然浸淫和体现着对犹太布尔什维克，这对德国的道德基准起着腐蚀作用。这些艺术家是文化上的犹太布尔什维克，整个现代画派都掌握在犹太画商、犹太画廊业主和犹太收藏家的手里。因此，只有铲除这一部分的艺术才能让德国走回正轨。
也许希特勒在对同代艺术家的生命和事业的摧毁里存有一定的报复因素，因为他自己的艺术家梦想无疾而终。而这场审美清户涉及所有艺术形式。表现主义以及其它前卫形式的电影遭禁，导致一批如弗理兹·朗、比利·万尔德等电影人游走好莱坞。卡夫卡、弗洛伊德、马克思、万慈之类“不够德国”的著作被覆之一炬。爵士之类的音乐虽未遭严禁，却也被视为异调，作家贝尔托·布莱希特、托马斯·曼、斯蒂芬·茨威格也流亡国外。这个独具一帜的审美清户运动孕育助长了之后令种族清洗成为可能的思潮。
三、堕落美展[The Degenerate Art Show]
葛利是显赫的德裔犹太家族，其家族产生的艺术家和艺术人士可以追溯到十九世纪早期。康纳利斯其实是康纳利斯三世，他的曾叔祖父康纳利斯一世是作曲家，祖父康纳利斯二世是巴洛克艺术与建筑历史学家，著书等身。当希特勒掌权时， 康纳利斯的父亲希德布兰已经被两所艺术机构开除：在兹维考的一所美术博物馆，开除原因是借助展出有争议的现代美术作品而“追求一种公然侮辱德国民族风气的艺术路线”；在汉堡的艺术学院，他不仅因为艺术品味，还由于他的祖母是犹太人而被开除。就像希德布兰22年后写到的，他开始为性命担忧。他留居汉堡，开了一间传统艺术画廊，同时在暗中开始以极便宜的价钱从逃亡或是急需现钱的犹太人手中收购禁画，这些犹太用兑现后的款项支付惊人的资产外流税以及后来制定的犹太人财富税。
1937年，帝国公众娱乐宣传部长约瑟夫·戈培尔发现了“废物生财”的良机，于是成立了一个专门协会，负责向公众和私人收集堕落派作品。这个协会将收集到的大量作品，在“伟大祖国美术展”举办的次日以“堕落艺术”的名义展出。 “伟大祖国美术展”宣布着位于慕尼黑摄政街崭新雄伟的德国美术院的成立，展出的都是“热血与祖国”之类审查通过的美术作品。而“你即将在堕落艺术展上看到的，则是残缺的作品，疯狂、粗糙、低能。”第三帝国视觉艺术部部长、堕落美术展馆长阿道夫·齐格勒在开幕仪式上这么说。当时参观人数达到两百万，平均每天两万人，是参观 “伟大祖国美术展”人数的四倍。
在美术展举办的同年，科学教育部专门出了一本小册子，指出“达达派、未来派、立体派以及其它的流派主义全都是犹太主义寄生在德国土壤中结出的毒花。其作品就是犹太问题极需彻底解决的最强有力证明。”
一年之后，戈培尔成立堕落派艺术开发协会，尽管希德布兰有犹太血统，仍因他的渊博知识和在德国境外艺术界的人脉，被任命为协会的四人成员之一。这个协会的任务就是将堕落派艺术品在国外出售，所得用以收购传统作品，筹建世界上最大的博物院，元首已经将博物院选址在奥地利林兹。 希德布兰本人可以通过支付外币的形式以个人名义收售这些画作，他对此时机是充分利用。在接下来的数年，他用便宜得不能再便宜的价钱收购了300幅堕落派作品。另外一个臭名昭著的画盗荷尔曼·戈林则囊获1500幅之多，这其中有梵高、蒙克、高更以及塞尚，战后估价在两亿美元左右。
图1：康纳利斯的公寓楼
其它：在康纳利斯公寓里发现的部分作品
Aesthetic Cleansing
How the collection had ended up in Cornelius Gurlitt’s Munich apartment is a tragic saga, which begins in 1892 with the publication of the physician and social critic Max Nordau’s book Entartung (Degeneration). In it, he postulated that some of the new art and literature that was appearing in fin de siècle Europe was the product of diseased minds. As examples of this degeneracy, Nordau singled out some of his personal bêtes noires: the Parnassians, the Symbolists, and the followers of Ibsen, Wilde, Tolstoy, and Zola.
The son of a Budapest rabbi, Nordau saw the alarming rise in anti-Semitism as another indication that European society was degenerating, a point that seems to have been lost on Hitler, whose racist ideology was influenced by Nordau’s writings. As Hitler came to power, in 1933, he declared “merciless war” on “cultural disintegration.” He ordered an aesthetic purge of the entartete Künstler, the “degenerate artists,” and their work, which to him included anything that deviated from classic representationalism: not only the new Expressionism, Cubism, Dadaism, Fauvism, futurism, and objective realism, but the salon-acceptable Impressionism of van Gogh and Cézanne and Matisse and the dreamy abstracts of Kandinsky. It was all Jewish Bolshevik art. Even though much of it was not actually made by Jews, it was still, to Hitler, subversive-Jewish-Bolshevik in sensibility and intent and corrosive to the moral fiber of Germany. The artists were culturally Judeo-Bolshevik, and the whole modern-art scene was dominated by Jewish dealers, gallery owners, and collectors. So it had to be eliminated to get Germany back on the right track.
Maybe there was an element of revenge in the way Hitler—whose dream of becoming an artist had gone nowhere—destroyed the lives and careers of the successful artists of his day. But all forms were targeted in his aesthetic cleansing campaign. Expressionist and other avant-garde films were banned—sparking an exodus to Hollywood by filmmakers Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, and others. “Un-German” books like the works of Kafka, Freud, Marx, and H. G. Wells were burned; jazz and other atonal music was verboten, although this was less rigidly enforced. Writers Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, and others went into exile. This creative pogrom helped spawn the Weltanschauung that made the racial one possible.
The Degenerate Art Show
The Gurlitts were a distinguished family of assimilated German Jews, with generations of artists and people in the arts going back to the early 19th century. Cornelius was actually the third Cornelius, after his composer great-great-uncle and his grandfather, a Baroque-art and architectural historian who wrote nearly 100 books and was the father of his father, Hildebrand. By the time Hitler came to power, Hildebrand had already been fired as the curator and director of two art institutions: an art museum in Zwickau, for “pursuing an artistic policy affronting the healthy folk feelings of Germany” by exhibiting some controversial modern artists, and the Kunstverein, in Hamburg, not only for his taste in art but because he had a Jewish grandmother. As Hildebrand wrote in an essay 22 years later, he started to fear for his life. Remaining in Hamburg, he opened a gallery that stuck to older, more traditional and safe art. But he was also quietly acquiring forbidden art at bargain prices from Jews fleeing the country or needing money to pay the devastating capital-flight tax and, later, the Jewish wealth levy.
In 1937, Joseph Goebbels, the Reich minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, seeing the opportunity “to make some money from this garbage,” created a commission to confiscate degenerate art from both public institutions and private collections. The commission’s work culminated in the “Degenerate Art” show that year, which opened in Munich a day after “The Great German Art Exhibition” of approved “blood and soil” pictures that inaugurated the monumental, new House of German Art, on Prinzregentenstrasse. “What you are seeing here are the crippled products of madness, impertinence, and lack of talent,” Adolf Ziegler, the president of the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts, in Munich, and curator of the “Degenerate Art” show, said at its opening. The show got two million visitors—an average of 20,000 people a day—and more than four times the number that came to “The Great German Art Exhibition.”
A pamphlet put out by the Ministry for Education and Science in 1937, to coincide with the “Degenerate Art” show, declared, “Dadaism, Futurism, Cubism, and the other isms are the poisonous flower of a Jewish parasitical plant, grown on German soil. . . . Examples of these will be the strongest proof for the necessity of a radical solution to the Jewish question.”
A year later, Goebbels formed the Commission for the Exploitation of Degenerate Art. Hildebrand, despite his Jewish heritage, was appointed to the four-person commission because of his expertise and art-world contacts outside Germany. It was the commission’s job to sell the degenerate art abroad, which could be used for worthy purposes like acquiring old masters for the huge museum—it was going to be the biggest in the world—the Führer was planning to build in Linz, Austria. Hildebrand was permitted to acquire degenerate works himself, as long as he paid for them in hard foreign currency, an opportunity that he took full advantage of. Over the next few years, he would acquire more than 300 pieces of degenerate art for next to nothing. Hermann Göring, a notorious looter, would end up with 1,500 pieces of Raubkunst—including works by van Gogh, Munch, Gauguin, and Cézanne—valued at about $200 million after the war.
