Nazi-looted cultural property

Audio recording available: All contributions from the autumn conference Die Peripherie im Zentrum (“The periphery at the centre”) available online

All con­tri­bu­tions from the dig­i­tal au­tumn con­fer­ence or­gan­ised by the Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion en­ti­tled Die Pe­riph­erie im Zen­trum. Vergessenes, Ver­drängtes und Ver­nach­läs­sigtes in der Prove­nien­z­forschung (“The pe­riph­ery at the cen­tre. What is for­got­ten, sup­pressed and ne­glect­ed in prove­nance re­search”) are now al­so avail­able in the form of an au­dio doc­u­men­ta­tion.

Record­ings of both the pre­sen­ta­tions and the pan­el dis­cus­sion held the day be­fore the con­fer­ence can be found here (Ger­man on­ly). The fo­cus of the con­fer­ence on 14 and 15 Novem­ber 2022 was prove­nance re­search in­to Nazi-con­fis­cat­ed cul­tur­al prop­er­ty in a re­gion­al set­ting, on a small scale and at the mar­gins: for ex­am­ple, speak­ers shed light on re­search car­ried out in­to lo­cal town his­to­ry col­lec­tions in south­ern Low­er Sax­ony and on the bor­der to Den­mark, they stud­ied the rob­bery of the ev­ery­day items from the Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion in oc­cu­pied East­ern Eu­rope and they in­ves­ti­gat­ed the “util­i­sa­tion” of con­fis­cat­ed re­moval items in the free ports of Bre­men and Ham­burg. They al­so ded­i­cat­ed them­selves to per­se­cut­ed per­sons who have on­ly re­cent­ly re­ceived greater at­ten­tion, such as Sin­ti and Ro­ma and Freema­sons.

On the day be­fore the con­fer­ence, 13 Novem­ber 2022, the Ger­man Lost Art Foun­da­tion or­gan­ised a pan­el dis­cus­sion at Hal­ber­stadt Town Hall in co­op­er­a­tion with Moses Mendelssohn Akademie Hal­ber­stadt. The fol­low­ing took part in the de­bate: Jut­ta Dick (Board of Di­rec­tors of Moses Mendelssohn Akademie Foun­da­tion Hal­ber­stadt), Ju­lia Hirsch (de­scen­dant of the Hirsch fam­i­ly from Hal­ber­stadt), Prof. Al­fred Ja­co­by (ar­chi­tect of the new syn­a­gogue in Dessau and Hon­orary Chair of the Jew­ish Com­mu­ni­ty in Of­fen­bach am Main), State Rab­bi Alexan­der Nachama (Jew­ish Com­mu­ni­ty of Thuringia) and Dr. Dr. h.c. Her­mann Si­mon (Found­ing Di­rec­tor of the New Syn­a­gogue Foun­da­tion Berlin – Cen­trum Ju­daicum). The dis­cus­sion was mod­er­at­ed by tele­vi­sion ed­i­tor Ste­fan Nölke of MDR-KUL­TUR and fo­cused on the ques­tion of how the re­con­struc­tion of Jew­ish his­to­ry can con­tribute to the re­vival of Jew­ish life in Ger­many – es­pe­cial­ly with re­gard to the pe­riph­ery. It was record­ed by MDR and is avail­able as an au­dio record­ing in the ARD au­dio li­brary for one year.