SHOULD INDIVIDUALS BE ALLOWED TO COLLECT NAZI ARTIFACTS?
They say that a man’s home is his castle but it would probably be more accurate to say that a man’s (or a woman’s) home is his museum. Most of us tend to accumulate artifacts related to the subjects that interest us. Movie fans often fill their walls with movie posters. Or perhaps they have an album filled with the autographed photos of famous actors, or a shelf full of books about the cinema. The musicians I know tend to fill their houses with guitars, keyboards, vinyl record albums, concert posters, and other such stuff. The home of one of my neighbors is a veritable shrine to the works of artist and author Edward Gorey. My wife and I once knew a man who was passionate about two high-quality brands: Rolls Royce and National Geographic. The large living room of his Silicon Valley home was a monument to both brands. When you entered his front door you saw that the left side of room was completely dedicated to National Geographic memorabilia. The right side was completely dedicated to Rolls Royce memorabilia. An invisible line seemed to run down the middle of the room.
My own home, as you can imagine, is a museum of popular fiction. But it is much more than that. My wife is an avid knitter and oil painter, so the house is also filled with books about knitting and art. My wife has an entire dresser filled with yarn and knitting needles. Her paintings hang on many of our walls. We are both into folk art, and our house contains a lot of that as well.
On September 29, the New York Times ran an opinion piece by Menachem Kaiser called “What Kind of Person Has a Closet Full of Nazi Memorabilia?” Kaiser’s essay notes that there is a huge demand for Nazi memorabilia in America and elsewhere. In America, collectors can purchase Nazi memorabilia at various trade shows (such as the Ohio Valley Military Society’s annual Show of Shows) and online sites such as LiveAuctioneers (which deals in all sorts of antiquities). Kaiser writes, “Many collectors ascribe to Nazi artifacts the moral status of war trophies, plunder from a fallen enemy. Victorious American soldiers marched in and filled their pockets with Nazi goods, because they wanted mementos, because they were greedy, because that’s the way of war – this seems to be the preferred origin story as to how any given artifact came on the market – and any ideological ickiness thus drained away. No one would accuse those victorious American soldiers, no matter how extensive the collection, of being too into Nazis.”
I hate Nazis as much as any decent person does, but I certainly don’t object to ordinary people collecting artifacts of World War II that display some sort of Nazi symbol. In fact, I encourage it. Kaiser is a graduate of an ivy league university (Columbia) and, like most cultural elites, he believes only his elite tribe is capable of properly contextualizing problematic art, history, music, film, whatever. He writes:
“…from everything I’ve seen and from everyone I’ve spoken to, my sense is that, for the most part, the collectors are sincere and are not harboring any Nazi sympathies. At the same time I don’t think their sincerity or sympathies are all that germane. The very concept of ‘Nazi memorabilia’ is a misapprehension of these artifacts, a mistreatment of a fraught material history; it relies on and feeds an insidious distortion of World War II, is never just an accumulation of facts; it’s a narrative, constructed with more or less deliberation but constructed all the same…Turning Nazi artifacts into tradeables, far from fulfilling some sort of preservationist mandate, in fact mutes what’s historically meaningful about them. The purpose of preservation is not merely to ensure artifacts aren’t lost or damaged, but to place them in proper context, to narrativize them.”
Nazi artifacts, as even Kaiser concedes, are not exactly rare. Tens of millions of items featuring Nazi crosses and swastikas and death’s heads and so forth were manufactured during Hitler’s reign. Trying to get them all out of private hands and into highbrow museums would be impossible and, in my opinion, undesirable. Kaiser appears to have blind faith in highbrow institutions such as elite colleges and museums. He writes:
“The more time I spent in the world of Nazi memorabilia collection, the more I spoke with collectors and scholars and the platforms, the more clear it became to me that, ideally, the artifacts should be in public custodianship…Public and public-facing institutions such as museums and archives can preserve and make accessible even the ghastliest material history, and can do so responsibly, treating artifacts not as collectibles or relics but as elements of a story. Public custodianship also functions as a kind of spiritual safekeeping, upholding the historical value while suppressing monetary or sentimental or even mystical value…I recognize this is an ideal, not a solution. There’s no enforcement mechanism to ensure that these artifacts end up in the hands of museums and historical organization; the First Amendment seems to forestall regulation of the sale or possession of Nazi artifacts.”
That damned First Amendment! Far from being fair-minded custodians who preserve historical material and make it accessible to the public while imbuing it with narrativization (whatever that is) and context, many of today’s most prestigious museums are ideologically driven and treat much of our cultural history in a trivial fashion. Here, from June of this year, is Jason Farago reviewing, for the New York Times, an exhibit of the works of Pablo Picasso which was hosted by the Brooklyn Museum and curated by stand-up comedian Hannah Gadsby:
“A whole cast of professional art workers – conservators, designers, guards, technicians – has been roped in to produce ‘It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,’ a small exhibition opening Friday at the Brooklyn Museum. (It’s a title so silly that I cannot even type it; I am cutting and pasting.) The show, one of many worldwide timed to the 50th anniversary of the Spanish artist’s death in 1973, is essentially a light amusement following on ‘Nanette,’ a Netflix special from 2018. In that routine, a sort of blend of stand up and TED talk, Gadsby riffed on having ‘barely graduated from an art history degree,’ at the bachelor’s level, and attempted a takedown of the Spanish artist: ‘He’s rotten in the face cavity! I hate Picasso! I hate him!’ Now this entertainer has come through the museum doors, but if you thought Gadsby had something to say about Picasso, the joke – the only good joke of the day, in fact – is on you…[T]his new exhibition backs away from close looking for the affirmative comforts of social-justice-themed pop culture…There’s little to see. There’s no catalog to read. The ambitions here are at the GIF level…Unsigned texts in each gallery provide basic invocations of gender discrimination in art museums, or the colonial legacy of European modern art, while next to individual works Gadsby offers signed banter. These labels function a bit like bathroom graffiti, or maybe Instagram captions. Beside one classicizing print of Picasso and his lover Marie-Therese Walter: ‘I’m so virile my chest hair just exploded.’…There’s a fixation, throughout, on genitals and bodily functions. Each sphincter, each phallus, is called out with adolescent excitement; with adolescent vocabulary, too. What jokes there are (‘Meta? Hardly know her!’) remain juvenile enough to leave Picasso untouched.”
If you need further evidence of just how ill-equipped many elite institutions are to “narrativize” important aspects of history and culture, read this essay about the Guggenheim Museum by Helen Lewis, which was published last year in the Atlantic:
When Lewis sought input from Chaédria LaBouvier, one of the curators at the Guggenheim, she received this response (which LaBouvier posted on her Twitter page for all to see): “Fuck you…should you fuck this up – which you will – I will be on your ass like white on rice on a paper plate in a snowstorm at a KKK rally.”
These are the types of people and institutions that Menachem Kaiser apparently believes are the only entities capable of responsibly archiving and displaying Nazi memorabilia. Me, I’d rather see that memorabilia in the hands of thousands of individual collectors. Some of those collectors may be irresponsible jerks. Others may just be amateur World War II history buffs who are attracted to stuff that was brought back to America by their fathers or grandfathers who fought in that war. But if the demand for this memorabilia is as widespread as Kaiser claims, then surely, among the collectors, there must be dozens, if not hundreds, of people who, though lacking elite credentials, are seriously interested in World War II history and perfectly capable of viewing and displaying their Nazi memorabilia in the proper context. I’d much rather see Nazi memorabilia spread out among as many people as possible. Conglomerate it all in the hands of a small cadre of elites and you are only likely to get a single narrative about it all. And that narrative can change quickly depending upon the whims of our elites. Many young people in the left-wing social justice sphere these days have a hatred of Israel and Zionism that borders on anti-Semitism. Twenty years from now, these young elites will be in charge of mainstream museums and university history departments. Who knows how they will interpret the anti-Semitic tropes of the Nazis when this happens?
About fifteen years ago, at a Sacramento flea market, I purchased a diary kept by a young Japanese American while he was a prisoner at the Gila River internment camp in Arizona. The diary covered all of 1944 and was one of the most fascinating things I have ever read. It included dozens of names of the people who cycled in and out of the camp. It gave a day-by-day account of everything happening in the camp: the meals eaten, the movies watched, the athletic competitions, school dances, and so forth. I searched online and could find nothing like it. Letters and drawings made by interned Japanese Americans are plentiful, but I couldn’t find any diaries covering an entire year. I contacted several museums that specialize in Asian-American matters and offered them the diary free of charge. But no museum wanted it. It remains in existence because some junk collector bought a box of whatnots at an estate sale. He took the box to a flea market, where I dug through it and found the diary. I bought it and tried to offload it on a museum, but none were interested. I was working at a bookstore one day, when Kiyo Sato, a Sacramento author who had published a book about her own experiences in an internment camp, came in to autograph a stack of her books. I mentioned the diary to her and told her I was having trouble getting it into the hands of someone who might preserve it the way it deserved to be. She asked to see it. I gave her the diary and it turned out that she knew the man who had kept it. Eventually she helped me get it to that man’s children (they insisted on paying me $40 for it, twice what I had paid at the flea market). This is just one reason why I do not share Menachem Kaiser’s faith in elite institutions as guardians of either history or culture. Sometimes it is better to leave much of that material in the hands of passionate amateurs, even if they lack elite credentials.
Kaiser believes that right-thinking Americans (by which, of course, I mean left-leaning Americans) should try to discourage the buying and selling and collecting of Nazi memorabilia by stigmatizing and shaming those who engage in these practices. Many contemporary social-justice warriors currently revere Che Guevara, a man who oversaw (and often participated in) the torture and killing of hundreds of prisoners at Cuba’s infamous La Cabana penitentiary between 1959 and 1963. God knows who these social-justice warriors will be worshiping twenty years from now. I, for one, would not like to consign Nazi memorabilia to the sole custody of such elites. I say that it is better off to disperse it among every history buff who wants a piece of it. It shouldn’t be controlled by any one ideological faction. Who knows what rough beast, its hour come round at last, might be slouching towards the Smithsonian to take over as curator.
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