Conservation and Art History || The Politics of Derestoration: The Aegina Pediments and the German Confrontation with the Past

The Politics of Derestoration: The Aegina Pediments and the German Confrontation with thePastAuthor(s): William J. DieboldSource: Art Journal, Vol. 54, No. 2, Conservation and Art History (Summer, 1995), pp. 60-66Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777463 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 09:06

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.89 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 09:06:40 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caa

http://www.jstor.org/stable/777463?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


The Politics of Derestoration The Aegina Pediments and the German Confrontation with the Past

01illiam J. Diebold

It needs a particular courage not to overcome the past but to live with it still.-Geoffrey Hartman'

he pedimental sculptures from the Temple of Aphaia at Aegina (Munich, Glyptothek) are among the most famous and important artistic remains of ancient

Greece, dramatically illustrating the crucial stylistic shift from the archaic to the classical in Greek art. Soon after their

discovery in the early nineteenth century, the Aegina sculptures were extensively restored by the Danish sculptor Bertel

Thorvaldsen. Thorvaldsen's additions were in turn removed

during the 1960s. Most assessments of the removal-the so- called derestoration-have been favorable, with Thor-

valdsen's work condemned as a distortion of the Greek originals.2 A few critics have argued that, because Thorvaldsen's additions were part of a complex early-nineteenth-century Gesamtkunstwerk (German for "total work of art"), they should not have been destroyed. What has not been recognized, however, is that the removal of the Thorvaldsen restorations not only sacrificed a nineteenth-century past for the sake of

an ancient one, but also destroyed a remnant of a more recent

and problematic German history, that of National Socialism.

This article argues that, after the Second World War, the

neoclassical style of the restored Aegina pediments and their

presence in a museum located on Munich's K6nigsplatz associated them with Nazism and made them politically problematic works, ripe for destruction. If my introduction of

twentieth-century German history into the story of the de-

restoration of the Aegina pediments is convincing, then the

pediments are an important example of the exceptionally complex (and potentially insoluble) problems surrounding restoration decisions.

In 1811 the substantial remains of the east and west

pediments of the late archaic temple of Aphaia were found on

the island of Aegina in the Saronic Gulf near Athens by a

party of British and German travelers. The works were ac-

quired in 1813 by Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria (later

King Ludwig I), who arranged for them to be restored in

Rome between 1816 and 1818 by Thorvaldsen, whose work

Ludwig held in exceptional esteem.4 Many of the Aegina sculptures were extremely fragmentary, so Thorvaldsen's

work was often extensive (figs. 1 and2). In keeping with then-

prevalent concepts of restoration, he left no gaps and tried to imitate the Greek originals as closely as possible, working in

marble and carefully imitating the weathering of the originals on his restorations.5 The restored pediments went on display when the Glyptothek, a museum of ancient art founded by

Ludwig and housing his collection, opened in 1830.

Thorvaldsen's work came under serious attack in 1901, when Adolf Furtwingler, the Glyptothek's director, re-

excavated at Aegina and found the pediments' bases. These

allowed him to see that Thorvaldsen's restoration was incor-

rect; the overall composition was wrong, as were the positions of some of the figures. Most notorious was a warrior from the

east pediment: Thorvaldsen had reconstructed him lying on

his back, but Furtwdingler's excavation showed that he was

originally standing (fig. 3). Furtwdngler called the restora-

tions "the black spot in the history of the Aegina sculptures," but his only corrective was to display alongside a colored

plaster, reduced-scale model of his reconstruction.6

In 1965 Dieter Ohly, the Glyptothek's director, said, "The way to the liberation of the Aegina pediments from their

neoclassical bonds was cleared by the loss of the splendid decoration of the Glyptothek's interior," the result of a bomb

that struck the museum in 1944. Between 1962 and 1966

the Thorvaldsen restorations were removed, and the pediments were reinstalled for the 1972 reopening of the Glyp- tothek. This installation, still on view, is a curious hybrid,

brought about by a desire to display highly fragmentary

originals in a pure but comprehensible way. It includes as

many of the fragments as can be placed, even if some figures are represented by only a single foot or knee. Plaster and

artificial marble casts of fragments excavated by Furtwingler and Ohly that remain in Greece were also incorporated. For

the many modern restorations in plaster, no strict principle was followed; instead, decisions were made on an ad hoc

basis, with aesthetic judgment the primary criterion.8 "Inor-

ganic" forms (notably shields) were filled out in full (an odd

exception is figure W XII, whose shield remains unrestored

because it would have obscured the museumgoer's view of

him). The curators also restored small gaps, for example in

the musculature of the limbs, when they believed they could

SUMMER 1995

60



FIG. 1 Warrior O II from east pediment of the Temple of Aphaia, Aegina (before derestoration); from D. Ohly, Die Aegineten: Die Marmorskulpturen des Tempels derAphaia aufAegina (Munich: C. H. Beck, 19761

FIG. 2 Warrior O II from east pediment of the Temple of Aphaia, Aegina; from Ohly, Aegineten.

imitate the original perfectly. (Ironically, most of these fills

are plaster casts taken from Thorvaldsen's marble restora-

tions.) A few areas believed essential to the viewer's compre- hension (e.g., joints) were also partially and abstractly re-

stored to give a better sense of the figure. Where support for a

fragment was lacking, gleaming metal rods were inserted as

substitute limbs. These, in tandem with the perfect circles of

the restored shields, give the installation an abstract, mod-

ernist look that corresponds closely in appearance to the

stripped-down modernism of Josef Wiedemann's interior re-

design of the museum. The decision to remove the Thorvaldsen restorations

was not controversial within the Glyptothek. Reaction within

the archaeological community has also been generally favor-

able (in Europe classical art is solely the province of archae-

ologists, and art historians, who study postclassical Western

art, are members of an entirely separate discipline). Propo- nents cite archaeological accuracy as the principal ground for

the derestoration. The Thorvaldsen installation certainly contained errors, but even some archaeologists have ques- tioned whether the present display of fragments is any truer to

the intentions of the Aegina sculptors than was Thor-

valdsen's.9 Also central to the decision to derestore (but

rarely admitted) was Thorvaldsen's low reputation as an artist

in the 1960s. Indeed, Jiirgen Paul has argued that the primary motive for the derestoration was aesthetic because the

archaeological improvements brought about by the removal of

the Thorvaldsen additions could have been demonstrated

equally well through casts."

Criticism of the derestoration has come primarily from

art historians and has centered on the issue of the destruction

of nineteenth-century history. Thorvaldsen's restored Aegina

pediments have been called "the most carefully conceived

restoration of ancient art ever executed," and they were

central to a complex and highly integrated Gesamtkunst-

werk." The restored pediments were displayed facing each

other in the Aegina room of the Glyptothek, a neoclassical

structure endowed by Ludwig and designed by Leo von

Klenze. The floors and walls of this gallery were covered with

rich, colored marbles, while the lunettes and the vaults had

painted stucco decoration meant to enhance the pedimental

sculptures (fig. 4).12 Everything fit together perfectly in

Klenze's Glyptothek. The Aegina pediments were firmly anchored by the

architecture and decoration of the Aegina room, and that

room in turn had a fixed place in the museum's sequence of

galleries. Sculptures were displayed chronologically (the

Glyptothek was the first museum to adopt this now-standard

display technique on a consistent basis), so the restored

pediments were in one of the first rooms of the museum.13 The last gallery housed postclassical sculptures and its

stucco decoration depicted four sculptors who (in Klenze's

ART JOURNAL

61



FIG. 3 Warrior O III from east pediment of the Temple of Aphaia, Aegina (before derestoration); from Ohly, Aegineten, fig. 39.

FIG. 4 Engraving after Leo von Klenze, Aegina Room of the Glyptothek; from Ohly, Aegineten, fig. 5.

words) "contributed immensely by leading art back to the one true path of antiquity."'4 One of these was Thorvaldsen, two of whose works (including a bust of Ludwig) were on display in the room.15 Such interlocking systems of self-reference are characteristic of the nineteenth-century Gesamtkunstwerk and make it impossible to remove one piece without damag- ing the whole.

The context for the Aegina pediments was not limited to the space of the Glyptothek's galleries, for the museum was

part of a larger neoclassical architectural complex, the

K6nigsplatz, a large square designed by Klenze for Ludwig. Two other buildings on the square, Friedrich Ziebland's Corinthian Ausstellungsgebiude (opened 1845) and Klenze's Doric Propylien (finished 1862), complemented the Ionic Glyptothek.16 The Propylilen, a gate modeled on the

entrance to the Athenian Acropolis, celebrated the installation of Ludwig's son Otto as the first King of Greece and fulfilled his dream of turning Munich into "Athens on the Isar." Critics of the derestoration argued that Thorvaldsen's work on the Aegina pediments was also a part of that dream and should not have been sacrificed.

Ohly and his colleagues believed, however, that the severe damage to the Glyptothek during the Second World

War relieved them of the burden of preserving the Ge- samtkunstwerk created by Ludwig, Klenze, and Thorvaldsen. On that point they may well have been right. But the neoclassical K6nigsplatz was not only a nineteenth-century Ge- samtkunstwerk. The square, including the Glyptothek and the restored Aegina pediments, had also been made into a

classicizing whole during the twentieth century. This more

modern ensemble survived World War II intact and was badly

damaged by the removal of the Thorvaldsen restorations; no fuss was made about its destruction, however, because its context was not one that postwar Germans were eager to

preserve. Klenze's design for the Kbnigsplatz left the square's

east side open. In the mid 1930s the square was closed by a screen of four buildings running along the east side of the Arcisstrasse. The patron of these buildings was the Nazi

party, whose headquarters, the so-called Brown House, lay

just behind the new buildings. Their architect was Paul

Ludwig Troost. The row of four buildings breaks into two

pairs (fig. 5). At the north and south ends are two huge structures: the Fiuhrerbau, which housed Hitler's Munich office and apartments (the Munich Pact was signed here in

1938), and the Verwaltungsbau der NSDAP (Nazi Party Ad- ministration Building). These buildings, identical on the

outside, are distinguished by their massive size, their elon-

gated proportions (275-foot facade length and 60-foot height), and their lack of elaborate ornament. The inner pair, com-

prising the identical Ehrentempel (Temples of Honor;fig. 6), is more remarkable. These were square structures of the Doric order, with a three-step podium and six square, fluted

piers on each side. These piers supported a simple, classiciz-

ing architrave instead of a full roof. Each temple had a square central well, filled with the bronze sarcophagi of the sixteen men killed in the failed 1923 Munich putsch, the first Nazi

attempt to seize power. It was this event that brought Hitler a

prison term, an occasion he used to write Mein Kampf. In that book Hitler argued: "The geo-political signifi-

cance of a focal center for a movement cannot be over-

emphasized. Only the presence of such a place, exerting the

magic spell of a Mecca or a Rome, can in the long run give the

movement a force which is based on inner unity."'7 Munich,

SUMMER 1995

62



officially designated by Hitler as the "Hauptstadt der Be-

wegung" (Capital of the Movement), was that central place for the Nazis. And no spot in Munich was more central than the

Konigsplatz. Hitler dedicated Mein Kampf to those killed in the putsch (whom he termed "blood witnesses of our move-

ment") and noted that they had been denied common

burial.18 In 1935 he arranged for their bodies to be moved to the Temples of Honor. According to a contemporary guidebook, this transformed the structures into "the national shrine of the German people." 19 By the terms of Hitler's will, the Fuhrer himself wanted to be buried in the temples.20 The

temples were also known as the Ewige Wache, the dead (it was

believed) serving as "eternal sentries" for the Third Reich. Each sarcophagus was inscribed with Der letzte Appell (the last roll call) and hier, the imagined response of the dead to that call. Each year the November 9 anniversary ofthe putsch was commemorated. The route of the insurrectionists from the Birgerbriiukeller to the Feldherrnhalle was reenacted and thence to the K6nigsplatz, where a large crowd gathered. The names of the dead from 1923 were read; after each name the crowd shouted, "Hier."21

An effective Gesamtkunstwerk is meant to collapse the differentiation provided by time and space. The mid-

nineteenth-century viewer of Klenze's K6nigsplatz, for exam-

ple, would have wondered whether he was in modern Munich or ancient Athens. The Nazi K6nigsplatz is a fine example of the Gesamtkunstwerk's eliding of difference, its ability to make everything seem a part of everything else. The ceremonies on the square blended 1923 with the present of the late

1930s, implying that the men in the sarcophagi were still "here" and suggesting that both the dead and those present in the square were sentries answering the same roll call. But the National Socialist Kinigsplatz went further, not only blending 1923 with the 1930s and 1940s, but also obscuring the line between the Nazi here and now and two other pasts that are the stock in trade of the Glyptothek: classical antiquity and

Ludwig I's Munich. Hitler and his followers were fascinated with antiquity

(hence the classical style of Troost's party buildings). The

K6nigsplatz was called Acropolis Germaniae (in a startling reminder of Ludwig's Athens on the Isar), and Hitler claimed, "Never has mankind been nearer to antiquity in appearance and sensibility than today."22 This last point was made

visually in Hans W. Fischer's 1935 book Menschenschbnheit, which juxtaposed works of art with photographs of contemporary people, mainly athletes. In one two-page spread, a warrior from the east pediment at Aegina (see fig. 1) was

juxtaposed with a modern javelin thrower (fig. 7). Almost as important to Hitler as the classical was the

FIG. 5 Munich, view from K6nigsplatz looking east with (from left to right) Glyptothek, FUhrerbau, Ehrentempel, Verwaltungsbau, ca. 1938; from Der Knigsplatz 1812-1988, exh. cat. (Munich: Staatliche Antikensammlung und Glyptothek: [1988]), 52.

FIG. 6 Munich, view from northern Temple of Honor looking south to southern Temple of Honor and Verwaltungsbau, ca. 1936; from Alex Scobie, Hitler's State Architecture: The Impact of Classical Antiquity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 357.

neoclassical, in particular Ludwig I, whom Hitler saw as a model.23 An article in the official Nazi art magazine said that in Munich:

not much of note has taken place architecturally since the time

of Ludwig. But a great architectural idea, lacking since the

days of Ludwig I, stands before the Fiihrer's eyes. What

[Ludwig] began, what he desired, what was however only partially completed, the Fiihrer is continuing. He has taken

possession of the great inheritance in order to take it further and complete it.24

An architectural critic wrote in 1936 of Troost's activities on the K6nigsplatz, "The party buildings in Munich. . . seek a connection to a tradition. . . that is capable of expressing the

spirit of the movement perfectly: the tradition of neoclassicism."25 Not surprisingly, given this interest in Munich

ART JOURNAL



FIG. 7 Javelin thrower; from H. W. Fischer, Menschenschonheit (Berlin: Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft, 1935), 23.

neoclassicism, Thorvaldsen came in for special praise from

Nazi writers. In a 1944 article in Die Kunst im Deutschen

Reich, Paul Ortwin Rave spoke of Thorvaldsen as a prime example of "the contact, so fruitful for our intellectual life, of the Germanic-Nordic character with the south, with antiquity."26 This idea of the productive union of north and south

has been a commonplace in Germany since at least the time of Goethe, so it is not surprising that another article in the

same journal made similar claims with reference to Troost,

saying that on a visit to Italy as a student, "Troost sought and

found, as once did Schinkel and Klenze, the synthesis of

German feeling and its relative, Hellenic spirit."27

Borrowings from 1923, from the Munich of Ludwig I, and from ancient Greece made the Nazi K6nigsplatz a richly evocative Gesamtkunstwerk, one in which every part of the

ensemble was endowed with meaning. Significance was as- cribed to the structure of Troost's buildings: "The Temples of

Honor, ... with their clear tectonic structure of vertical piers and horizontal architraves, are an incomparable expression of uncompromising battle."28 Albert Speer, writing in 1944, when the Nazis were close to defeat, took inspiration from their architectural form: "Our faith in victory is unshaken. The buildings of Paul Ludwig Troost, the first, strong stone

symbols of the movement, are part of this. It is they, as much as anything, that strengthen our belief in victory and fortify our will to attain that victory."29 A 1936 guidebook to Munich went so far as to claim that the hardness of the granite paving stones laid by the Nazis on the Kbnigsplatz was a mirror of the

spirit of the dead buried there. o Joseph Goebbels summed

up the square's exceptional symbolic importance in a lapi-

dary 1935 diary entry: "Here the Filhrer wrote his will in

stone."31

Such hyperbolic claims meant that the significance of the Kdnigsplatz was overdetermined; not surprisingly, then, the square kept its meaning long after the defeat of the Nazis in 1945. As Winfried Nerdinger recently put it: "On the

K6nigsplatz, old residents of Munich still hear thousands of voices shouting 'Here."'32 Since the Nazi buildings on the

Konigsplatz were not damaged by the bombing that devas- tated Munich and that virtually destroyed the Glyptothek, the

problem of how to de-Nazify the K6nigsplatz arose after the war. Three strategies were pursued, which I call transformative adaptation, oblivion, and destruction.

The most complex of the three is transformative adaptation. In 1948 a crude form of this was attempted: the Fithrerbau was converted into Amerika-Haus, an American cultural center. The transformation was crude because the

only exterior signal of the building's new function was the

substitution of the arrow-bearing American eagle for the

swastika-holding Nazi eagle above the main door. 33 A similar direct substitution of American for Nazi functions took

place on June 8, 1945, just over a month after the American liberation of Munich, when the Americans held a military parade on the K6nigsplatz, the old Nazi parade ground. In

1948, after the Fiihrerbau and the Verwaltungsbau were

given to the Bavarian government, transformative adaptation became somewhat more subtle. The two huge Nazi buildings were used for cultural functions in an attempt to free them of their original historical associations. Thus, the Fiihrerbau housed the reading room of the destroyed Bavarian State

Library, and the Verwaltungsbau was the home for the Central Art Collecting Point, which attempted to repatriate works of art stolen by the Nazis. This strategy of "artistic reeducation"

(to quote Nerdinger) continues to this day: the Fiihrerbau houses the Hochschule fur Musik; the Verwaltungsbau, the Zentralinstitut fir Kunstgeschichte, the Graphische Samm-

lung, and the archaeological institute of the University.,4 Transformative adaptation is a difficult tactic in the

late twentieth century because it implies that form and function are separable; modern eyes and minds, however, have been trained that the two are intimately related. The conse-

quences of this modern dictum that "form follows function" are not hard to find on the Kdnigsplatz and in the Glyptothek. Because it was preferred by Nazi architects and artists for

party commissions, neoclassicism was perceived as a Nazi

style and fell into deep disfavor after the Second World War.

According to the architect Leon Krier, "Classical Architec- ture was implicitly condemned by the Nuremberg Tribu-

SUMMER 1995

64



nal."35 Krier made the same point even more trenchantly in a cartoon (fig. 8). 36 The neoclassical style of Troost's buildings on the K6nigsplatz (and of Thorvaldsen's restorations of the

Aegina pediments) was associated with Nazism and made these works problematic candidates for transformative adaptation. But there were two other de-Nazification strategies potentially available: oblivion and destruction. Neither re-

quired that form and function be divorced. With the hindsight of fifty years, oblivion is not hard to

find on the Kanigsplatz. The story told in this article has never been published; none of the twentieth-century build-

ings on the square bears any marker of its original date of

construction or function; in 1948 trees were planted along the Arcisstrasse to screen the Nazi buildings from Klenze's

nineteenth-century K6nigsplatz.37 But oblivion is hard to

practice in the presence of concrete symbols of what one wants to forget, be it Troost's huge buildings or the Thor- valdsen restorations. As a result, destruction has a long history as the handmaid of oblivion on the Ki6nigsplatz. The

Temples of Honor, for example, withstood Allied bombing but not American occupation. They were dynamited in 1947 as

part of the de-Nazification process (their podiums are still to be seen, now overgrown and forgotten). More recently, in

1987-88,the Nazis' granite paving of the K6nigsplatz was

replaced by walkways and grass in imitation of Klenze's

original design. In contrast to the silence surrounding the derestoration of the Aegina pediments twenty years earlier (in

many ways a parallel case), the removal of this paving met with sharp and telling criticism. Nerdinger again:

The green Konigsplatz seems to lead back to Klenze and

Ludwig I without a gap .... What's shocking is not only this

totally open display of repression through destruction, but also the related illusion that, through the removal of a structure, one can free oneself from history. But the Konigsplatz can never again be only a neoclassical square.38

The historical legacy of the Nazi era is an exceptionally difficult burden. It has been called "unmasterable" and "the

past that will not pass."'39 In the 1950s Theodor Heuss, the first president of West Germany, called for a "Bewdltigung der Vergangenheit" ("an overcoming of the past"). Vergangen- heitsbewdltigung has official sanction as the proper German attitude toward their past, but it is a difficult idea, for it

implies a "mastery" or a "conquering" of the past (compare the related word Gewalt, force) rather than a more reciprocal negotiation with that past.40 Vergangenheitsbewdltigung is particularly problematic when it takes place through physical destruction, as it did with the derestoration of the Aegina pediments, rather than historical understanding.4' Further-

ARCHITECTURE +DESTIN

IE'E o x -114$ 44fA'

IDE E DEE JDE E A . /V.f

eA-

FIG . 8 Leon Krier, Architecture + destin, drawing from Krier, "An Architecture of Desire," in Albert Speer: Architecture 1932-1942, ed. Leon Krier (Brussels: Archives d'architecture moderne, 1985)1 217.

more, some people know their history better than others and so are better (or worse?) "masters" of the past. Nerdinger cites a chilling example of how ineffective destruction can be: on the night of Rudolf Hess's death in 1987, neo-Nazis with torches gathered on the steps of the Feldherrnhalle, the site of the Munich putsch of 1923. Yet the Feldherrnhalle had

ostensibly been de-Nazified forty years earlier, when the Americans destroyed Troost's monument commemorating the

putsch only four days after they liberated Munich.42 The Thorvaldsen restorations of the Aegina pediments never at-

tracted such unwanted attentions, nor were they likely to

have, for they were not the explicit Nazi relics that the

Feldherrnhalle monument was. But even if they had been,

they should not have been removed for, to end where I began: "It needs a particular courage not to overcome the past but to live with it still."

Notes

1. Geoffrey Hartman, "Introduction 1985," in Bitburg in Moral andPolitical Perspec- tive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 7. 2. The term "derestoration," my translation of the German Ent-Restaurierung, is

frankly polemical and an exceptionally accurate description of an unusual historical

circumstance.

3. The two most thorough discussions of the derestoration, with additional bibliography, are Jirgen Paul, "Antikenergiinzung und Ent-Restaurierung," Kunstchronik 25

(1972): 85-112; and Michael Maass, "Nachtriigliche Uberlegungen zur Restau-

rierung der Agineten," Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archdologischen Instituts: Athenische Abteilung (1984): 165-76. The best account in English is Heiner Knell and Hanno-Walter Kruft, "Re-opening of the Munich Glyptothek," BurlingtonMaga- zine 114 (1972): 431-36.

4. Throughout this essay I call the restorations the work of Thorvaldsen, although the

extent of his personal contribution seems to have been fairly small; see Raimund

Wiinsche, "'Perikles' sucht 'Pheidias': Ludwig I. und Thorvaldsen," in Kiinstlerleben in Rom: Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844), exh. cat. (Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 1991), 313-15. The attribution question is loaded; proponents of the derestoration are anxious to minimize the participation of such a famous artist as

Thorvaldsen in favor of such little known or even anonymous craftsmen as the marble

workers in Thorvaldsen's Roman atelier.

5. For an excellent account of Thorvaldsen's work in relationship to nineteenth-

century theories of restoration, see Lars Olof Larsson, "Thorvaldsens Restaurierung der Aegina-Skulpturen in Lichte zeitgen6ssischer Kunstkritik und Antiken-

auffassung, Konsthistorisk tidskrift 38 (1969): 23-46. 6. Cited in Dieter Ohly, "Die Neuaufstellung der Agineten,"ArchiiologischerAnzeiger

ART JOURNAL

65



(1966): 516. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from German are my own. 7. Ohly, "Neuaufstellung," 515. 8. For a brief statement of the principles of restoration, see Dieter Ohly, DieAegineten: Die Marmorskulpturen des Tempels der Aphaia auf Aegina (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1976), l:xv. I am extremely grateful to Klaus Vierneisel, director of the Glyptothek, and Martha Ohly-Dumm, a researcher there, for their generosity in going through the

Aegina installation in the Glyptothek with me and explaining the reasons for each decision on the restoration. 9. Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, Introduzione all'archeologia classica come storia dell'arte antica, ed. L. F. dell'Orto (Rome: Laterza, 1976), 76; and Inga Gesche, "Bemerkungen zum Problem der Antikenerginzungen und seiner Bedeutung bei Johann Joachim Winckelmann," in Forschungen zur Villa Albani, ed. H. Beck and P. C. Bol (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1982), 453-55. Adolf H. Borbein, "Archiologie und historisches Bewusstsein," in Archdologie und Gesellschaft, ed. B. Andreae (Stutt- gart: Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1981) indicates the difficulty of the

Aegina case. Borbein argues against derestoration in general as a denial of history (see pp. 63-65), but defends the Aegina derestoration saying it was "scientifically necessary" (see p. 75, n. 72).) 10. Paul, "Antikenergdinzung," 101. Interviews with Vierneisel and Ohly-Dumm in March of 1994 indicated that Thorvaldsen continues to be held in low esteem at the

Glyptothek; this is in striking contrast to his prominence in the art world as a whole. 11. Larsson, "Thorvaldsens Restaurierung," 24. 12. Elianna Gropplero di Troppenburg, "Die Innenausstattung der Glyptothek durch Leo von Klenze," in GlyptothekMiinchen 1830-1980, exh. cat. (Munich: Glyptothek, 1980), 199-201. 13. Alexander D. Potts, "Die Skulpturenaufstellung in der Glyptothek," in Glyp- tothek Miinchen, 258-83. The postwar Glyptothek has dispensed with the strict

chronological arrangement. The pediments are now in two rooms on the north side,

originally meant for receptions, separated by a small caf6. 14. L. von Klenze, Sammlung architektonischer Entwiirfe (Munich: J. G. Cotta, 1830), 7. 15. Gropplero di Troppenburg, "Innenausstattung," 208. 16. An earlier plan had been to place a Thorvaldsen museum on the site of the

Ausstellungsgebdiude! Wiinsche, "Perikles," 321. 17. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf trans. R. Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), 347, cited in German in Karl Arndt, "Filmdokumente des Nationalsozialismus als

Quellen fir architekturgeschichtliche Forschungen," in Zeitgeschichte im Film- und Tondokument, ed. G. Moltmann and K. F. Reimers (Gittingen: Musterschmidt-Verlag, 1970), 50. 18. Hitler, Mein Kampf v. 19. B. Spahn, ed., Miinchen: Hauptstadt der Bewegung (Berlin: Verlag fiur vaterlin- dische Literatur, [1937?]). 20. Werner Maser, Hitler's Letters and Notes, trans. A. Pomerans (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 151. cited in Alex Scobie, Hitler's State Architecture: The Impact of

ClassicalAntiquity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 64. 21. For accounts of these ceremonies, see Jay W. Baird, To Diefor Germany (Bloom-

ington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 41-72; and Hans Giinter Hockerts,

"Mythos, Kult und Feste: Miinchen im nationalsozialistischen 'Feierjahr,'" in

Miinchen: "Hauptstadt derBewegung, ""exh. cat. (Munich: Klinkhardt und Biermann,

1993), 331-41. 22. Alexander Heilmeyer, "Die Stadt Adolf Hitlers," Siiddeutsche Monatshefte 33

(December 1935), cited in Scobie, Hitler's State Architecture, 63; "Der FiUhrer eroffnet die 'Grosse deutsche Kunstausstellung 1937.'" Die Kunst im Dritten Reich 1

(July/August 1937): 60. For general surveys on the Nazis and antiquity, see Volker

Losemann, Nationalsozialismus undAntike (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1977); and P Villard, "Antiquit6 et Weltanschauung Hitlkrienne," Revue de l'histoire de la deuxi me guerre mondiale 88 (1972): 1-18. 23. Hermann Giesler, one of Hitler's architects, reports that Hitler wanted to make a film about Ludwig so that the king would be known outside Bavaria; Ein andererHitler

(Leoni am Starnberger See: Druffel, 1978), 243. Hitler also expressed his interest in

Ludwig during his 1933 speech to celebrate the laying of the cornerstone of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst; Max Domarus, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen 1932-1945.

(Neustadt a. d. Aisch: Verlagsdruckerei Schmidt, 1962),

1:316. 24. Alexander Heilmeyer, "Das junge Deutschland baut seiner Kunst ein eigen Haus,"DieKunst imDrittenReich 1 (July/August 1937): 14. For similar sentiments by Heilmeyer, see a speech he gave in 1934, printed as "Paul Ludwig Troost," Die Kunst im Dritten Reich 1 [February 1937]: 46. 25. L. F. Barthel, Kunst und Volk,

1936, cited in Arndt, "Tilmdokumente," 42, n. 9.

Karl Fiehler, Nazi mayor of Munich, explicitly connected Troost's buildings with the

great Munich artistic tradition of Klenze and Thorvaldsen; see Spahn, Miinchen: Hauptstadt. 26. Paul Ortwin Rave, "Bertel Thorvaldsen zu seinem hundertsten Todestag am 24.

Mairz 1944," Die Kunst im Deutschen Reich 8 (1944): 71. The relationship between Rave's scholarship and his politics is in need of further study. Rave served as

provisional director of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin during the Second World War.

That position, his decision to publish his Thorvaldsen article in Die Kunst im

Deutschen Reich (the name given to Die Kunst im Dritten Reich after 1939),

and the

text's nationalistic tone would suggest that he sympathized with the Nazis. On the other hand, the facts that Rave served as director of the Nationalgalerie until 1950; that his 1944 monograph Thorvaldsen, which was destroyed in proof in 1943, was

finally published in 1947 with special permission of the American authorities; and that he was the author of the first major condemnation of Nazi policy on the visual arts, Kunstdiktatur im Dritten Reich (Hamburg: Gebr. Mann, 1949), all suggest that Rave was a complex figure. For a brief biography, see "Degenerate Art": The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991), 403. 27. Heilmeyer, "Paul Ludwig Troost," 38. 28. Hans Kiener, "Der Baumeister des Hauses," Die Kunst im Dritten Reich 1 (July/August 1937): 21. 29. Albert Speer, "Paul Ludwig Troost," Die Baukunst: Kunst im Deutschen Reich 8

(1944): 3. 30. Cited in Sabine Behrenbeck, "Festarchitektur im dritten Reich," in Kunst auf

Befehl, ed. B. Brock and A. Preiss (Munich: Klinkhardt und Biermann, 1990), 221.

31. Joseph Goebbels, cited in Klaus Backes, Hitler und die bildenden Kiinste (Co- logne: Dumont, 1988), 152. This was a trope of Nazi writing about the K6nigsplatz: Werner Rittich wrote, "The spirit of the new era has become stone here" (Architektur und Bauplastik der Gegenwart [Berlin: Rembrandt Verlag, 1938], 36); according to Karl Fiehler, Munich's mayor, "Nothing corresponds better in the clarity of its

organization to the essence of the National Socialist Party than the rebuilt Kii- nigsplatz" (Miinchen baut auf [Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, (1937?)], 70); and

Gerdy Troost claimed that her husband's Munich buildings were "gebauter National- sozialismus" (Das Bauen im neuen Reich, 5th ed. [Bayreuth: Gauverlag Bayreuth, 1942], 1:10). 32. "Bauen im Nationalsozialismus," in Bauen im Nationalsozialismus: Barern 1933-1945, exh. cat., ed. Winfried Nerdinger (Munich: Klinhardt und Biermann,

1993), 9. 33. See the photograph in Claus-Dieter Schwab, "Kultur zwischen Kontrolle und Kleiner Freiheit: Amerikanische Kulturpolitik in Miinchen am Beispiel der Informa- tion Control Division," in Triimmerzeit inMiinchen, ed. F. Prinz (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1984), 60. 34. Nerdinger, cited in Der K6nigsplatz 1812-1988, exh. cat. (Munich: Staatliche

Antikensammlung und Glyptothek, [1988]), 8. On the difficulties caused by other

examples of architectural transformation, see Winfried Nerdinger, "Umigang mit der NS-Architektur: Das schlechte Beispiel Miinchen," Werk und Zeit, no. 3 (1988): 22-24. The strategy of transformation was much used in the immediate postwar period. Three interesting examples relating to Munich: the bronze sarcophagi from the Temples of Honor were to be melted down and cast into two bells -which would sound for friendship and understanding of peoples"; the printing plates for the first

postwar edition of the Siiddeutsche Zeitung, the leading Munich newspaper, were made from the plates used to print Mein Kampf: the stone to rebuild the destroyed Herz-Jesu church in Neuhausen came from Hitler's private cinema at Obersalzberg. See W. Selig, ed., Chronik der Stadt Miinchen 1945-1948 (Munich: Stadtarchiv,

1980), 65-66, 87, 423. 35. Leon Krier, "An Architecture of Desire," in Albert Speer: Architecture 1932-1942

(Brussels: Archives d'architecture moderne, 1985), 217. See also Mortimer G.

Davidson's flat claim that "today Neo-classicism is associated with the Third Reich in

people's minds", Kunst in Deutschland 1933-1945 (Ttibingen: Grabert. 1992), 1:42. 36. I am grateful to Minott Kerr for bringing this drawing to my attention. 37. K6nigsplatz, 67. 38. Nerdinger, "Umgang," 23. Cf. Hans-Michael Herzog's tellingly titled article,

"Gelungene Nazifizierung-misslungene Entnazifierung: Der K6nigsplatz in

Miinchen" ["Successful Nazification-Failed De-Nazification: Munich's Kd-

nigsplatz"], Kritische Berichte 17 (1989): 104-16. 39. Note the title of Charles S. Maier's book on the "historians' debate," The

Unnmasterable Past (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). One of the crucial

early salvos in the Historikerstreit, by Ernst Nolte, was titled "Vergangenheit, die nicht

vergehen will." I cite the title from the English translation in Forever in the Shadow o/

Hitler, trans. J. Knowlton and T. Cates (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press.

1993). 40. See Hartman, Bitburg, 115. For a thorough study of the problems surrounding

h'rgangenheitsbewiltigung, along with a detailed bibliography, see Peter Dudek,

" Vergangenheitsbewlltigung': Zur Problematik eines umstrittenen Begriffs." Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B 1-2 (1992): 44-53. 41. Nerdinger has called the removal of the paving of the Konigsplatz "Vergangen- heitsbewiltigung by destruction": for

Herzog, the same event was "Vergangenheits-

bewiltigung understood in respect to form, not content." Nerdinger, "Bauen," 10:

Herzog, "•Gelungene," 113. 42. Nerdinger, "Umgang," 23; Selig, Chronik, 43.

WILLIAM J. DIEBOLD, associate professor of art history at

Reed College whose principal area of research is the early Middle Ages, is currently working on a book on Carolingian

writing about art.

SUMMER 1995

66



Documents

Conservation and Art History || The Politics of Derestoration: The Aegina Pediments and the German Confrontation with the Past