Monuments Men

The monuments men : Allied heroes, Nazi thieves, and the greatest treasure hunt in history.
Edsel, Robert M. New York, N.Y. : Center Street, 2009.

I had never heard of these people (almost every single one a man), nor of their work. Nor of this book. I do remember seeing commercials about the film. A couple of weeks ago a Peninsula Library patron highly recommended I read the book, so I took it out.

It started weak, but immediately got good and strong. A team of art experts was charged with saving the art treasures of Europe that Nazis had stolen. How they went about it is little short of miraculous. Well written book, fast paced, yet a disappointing last chapter fizzles. Nonetheless, a wonderful book.

This is a sample of the writing style, which I enjoyed greatly, and of the people:

“George Stout, who had taught Kirstein at Harvard during his graduate years, was aware of the brilliance of the new private. He was also, probably aware of his shortcomings: his easy frustration, his mood swings, and his distaste for army life. Whether by accident or design — and knowing Stout it was almost surely by design — Kirstein was assigned the perfect  partner: Monuments Man Robert Posey of George Patton’s Third Army.

    If ever there was an odd couple, it was Posey and Kirstein: a quiet, blue-collar Alabama architect and a manic-depressive, married yet homosexual, Jewish New York bon vivant. Posey was steady, while Kirstein was emotional. Posey was a planner, Kirstein impulsive. Posey was disciplined, his partner outspoken. Posey was thoughtful, but Kirstein was insightful, often brilliantly so. While Posey only requested Hershey’s bars from home, Kirstein care packages included smoked cheeses, artichokes, salmon, and copies of the New Yorker.

    Together, the two men could go a lot further in the army than either could go alone.” (225)

Kirstein was a surprise; well, so were the others. These men did great things, and they are unknown. Alas, the film seems to be a sanitized, prettified version. But, such is Hollywood.

The extent of Nazi looting was staggering. No just paintings and sculptures (and, in fairness, it is pointed out that half of the French museums holdings were plunder from Napoleon's military campaigns). They stole church bells, too. Personal belongings, and not just of Rothschilds. Not content to have stolen in victory, they planned to destroy in defeat. Thanks in great part to the Monuments Men, such crimes were not added to the heinous toll.

The Debt

Anthony Lane (not David Denby, as I mistakenly misremembered) reviewed this film in the New Yorker 21 September 2011 issue.
As with Spielberg’s “Munich,” there is an awkward, irresoluble tension between the movie’s urge to thrill and the weighty pull of the historical obligations that it seeks to assume. How much, to be blunt, should we be enjoying ourselves? What do we owe to “The Debt”? Whatever the sum, it is more than the film itself, gloomy with unease, seems able to repay.

It received a 6.9 rating in IMDb.com, and a 76% - 67% rating in RottenTomatoes. I have a calendar entry on 26 August 2011, moved up from earlier. I finally got it yesterday, and watched it last night. I rather liked it.

I liked it quite a bit. The three less renowned, younger, actors do much better work than the older, more renowned actors. All six rather botch the Israeli accent, but, again, the three younger ones do better with it.

A.O. Scott in the Times: The labors of the cast help to make “The Debt” a compact, reasonably clever and sometimes piquant entertainment, but they also make you aware that it could have been more.

Aimée & Jaguar : a love story, Berlin 1943

Saw on book cart.

Defiance

Based on the real-life Bielski brothers. A Hollywood version of a real life group of Jews who did not submit to Nazi oppression, but fought back. Of course there has been criticism of it, yet it, for me, was very moving.

Daniel Craig and Leiv Schreiber do magnificent work.

Allan Corduner plays Shamon Haretz, the old school teacher of the brothers. He played Monty Woolley in DeLovely.

Hospitality Department

We Were Merchants. (2009). Hans J. Sternberg, with James E. Shelledy. Louisiana State University, 141 pages, $29.95






Hans J. Sternberg - A Nazi sign warns against shopping at Jewish-owned stores in Aurich, Germany. The truck is parked in front of a shop owned by relatives of the author of 'We Were Merchants.'



A not unknown tale of Jews driven out of Germany by Nazis; this family left in 1936, and 1938. Winding up in Louisiana, they became merchants, and built a successful and popular store.

Hans J. Sternberg - Trying on a prom dress in the late 1940s at Goudchaux's department store in Baton Rouge, La.


Some details are unique.

Mr. Sternberg says that the family found Baton Rouge an "accepting community" from the beginning—the local country club had been admitting Jews since well before the Sternbergs arrived. He didn't experience anti-Semitism as much as he witnessed bigotry against blacks. The racism was especially overt during the civil-rights era. One day at Goudchaux's, Mr. Sternberg relates, a white woman shopper was holding a crystal bowl when a black sales clerk asked if she needed help. The woman said "yes" and asked her to fetch someone. When the black clerk said she was a salesperson, "the woman looked at her, held out the piece of expensive crystal in front of her, and slowly parted her hands. The bowl fell to the floor, smashing to pieces, and she strutted out of the building."

Goudchaux's was unusual for the Deep South in that the store employed black sales clerks and disdained the common policy of barring blacks from trying on clothes in stores. But Mr. Sternberg does not portray the store owner as a saint: "My father did bow to Louisiana law when it came to segregated bathrooms and drinking fountains."

Strange combination of social facts: lack of anti-Semitism, allowing blacks to try on clothing but not drink from a water fountain.

The store was also anomalous in the way it approached the retail business. Erich Sternberg, and later his sons, seemed to have a genius for promotion—hiding a $500 diamond ring in a box of Cracker Jack has a way of bringing in shoppers—and for nurturing lifelong customers. For years, a child could walk into Goudchaux's with a straight-A report card and get a nickel for an icy bottle of Coke from the store vending machine. Within a year of buying the business, Erich had instituted home delivery, an unusual practice at the time. And rather than wait on sellers to offer a limited range of fashions— and force customers to make do with whatever was available—the Sternbergs undertook their own buying trips to Japan, London, Paris and Milan. In my family, receiving a Christmas gift purchased at Goudchaux's meant somebody really cared.

Other retailing innovations followed. Goudchaux's, Mr. Sternberg says, was one of the first big department stores to provide interest-free charge accounts. By the 1970s, the store's best customers were offered "gold cards," interest-free charge plates that cost $30 annually but included travel insurance and discounts on products and services. Soon the cards were bringing in more than $1 million a year; later, American Express bought exclusive rights to the use of the name "gold card."

That was quite an innivation. These days gold cards are no longer the top notch in credit; Amex has black and plum, Chase now has sapphire.

At its height, as the expansion continued, the company ran 24 stores in Louisiana and Florida. From a clothing shop with $270,000 in sales when Erich Sternberg bought Goudchaux's, the family business was ringing up $480 million in sales by 1990.

Then Josef Sternberg died from a heart attack in 1990. Two years later, Hans decided to let go—his children and grandchildren showed no interest in carrying on the family's mercantile tradition. He sold Goudchaux's/Maison Blanche for $277 million, more than 2,500 times what his father had paid. Many Louisianans felt like an old family friend had passed away. I know I did.

The Stranger

A pretty good thriller with Orson Welles playing a professor in a small-town college who is about to wed the daughter of a Supreme Court justice (who, explicably, has a sort of British-inflected, gentry accent). Loretta Young plays the Justice's daughter, and seems far too melodramatic, though perhaps it is to be expected in a 1946 film. Edward G. Robinson plays a Mr. Wilson (he does not have a first name) an investigator from the War Crimes Commission who releases a second-tier Nazi in the expectation that he will lead Wilson to the real prey: Franz Kindler.

HWPL has an interesting book on Robinson's career, The cinema of Edward G. Robinson.

Occupied France: 5 Books

1. Occupation 944.0816 O
By Ian Ousby
St. Martin's Press, 1997

Nothing can be more degrading for a nation than to be occupied. In the case of France, the German Occupation even extended to the ancient practice of hauling people off to be slaves -- in this case as forced laborers in German factories. Ian Ousby's "Occupation" is an outstanding introduction to this horrible-fascinating subject. The author's apparent disqualifications -- not a historian and not a scholar of French history -- are the very qualities that make him an excellent guide for the general reader who knows nothing about the subject and wants lucid answers to the simple questions: What really happened, what was heroic, what was shameful, and in what proportions did they flourish in the same soil and why?



2. Vichy France 320.944 P and 944.0816 P *
By Robert O. Paxton
Knopf, 1972

Nearly four decades ago, Robert O. Paxton's "Vichy France" touched off what came to be regarded as a sort of Copernican revolution in studies of French collaboration. Paxton was the first to show that the collaborationist policy of the French government in occupied France was voluntary -- even, as with Vichy's anti-Semitism, anticipating and going further than the Germans had asked. Paxton's classic inspired young French scholars, opening the way to a flood of works that seems to widen with the passage of time. Justice done? Far from it. French television regularly broadcasts fictional stories of the Resistance but rarely one of collaboration. A year ago, President Nicolas Sarkozy said in an address to his nation: "The true France was not at Vichy [and] never collaborated." Official myth and historic fact continue to live side by side. And shame persists.

3. France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944 [also gets differing Deweys: 944.0816 J, 940.5421 J]
By Julian Jackson
Oxford, 2001

This is the fullest one-volume account of both the high politics of Vichy and the daily life of the French populace, written by Julian Jackson, an eminent authority on the Occupation. One of the book's many virtues is the honest way it explores the subtleties and complexities of "collaborationism." Was a mayor, honest and efficient before the Occupation, a collaborator for continuing to be an honest and efficient mayor under the Nazis? Was the owner of a factory making equipment for the Germans guilty of collaboration for keeping his plant going so that his employees could earn money to buy food? "France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944" is densely packed with fact and analysis and may be too detailed for some readers, but it is an indispensable reference work for anyone interested in the topic.

4. Paris in the Third Reich
By David Pryce-Jones
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981

After having been stranded in 1940 in France as a 4-year-old, David Pryce-Jones returned to the country many years later to write this eminently readable and marvelously illustrated large-format book about daily life in the capital during wartime. The text concludes with a number of historically valuable interviews with German Occupation officials and some key collaborators. The book includes more than 100 photographs, many of them in color, rare at the time. But reader beware: Some of the photos are by André Zucca, a collaborationist photographer for Signal, a magazine established by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to convey the idea that occupied France was a happy place. An exhibition in Paris last year of 250 of these photographs created a scandal, demonstrating how the Occupation remains a raw subject to this day.

5. Occupied France
By H.R. Kedward
Blackwell, 1985

In a mere 80 pages, studded with shrewd observations distilled from years of study, H.R. Kedward, now an emeritus professor at the University of Sussex, takes the reader through the Occupation at a gallop. Collaboration and resistance began the same day -- the moment the armistice was signed on June 22, 1940 -- and Kedward shows that from the start, the two responses to German rule had myriad meanings and myriad practitioners. Blacks and whites shade into gray in this account, but true villains and true heroes remain. Resistance, whether refusing to speak to a German on the street or committing acts of violent sabotage, may often have been ineffective, but it was a vital help to Allied forces come D-Day. The central lesson of "Occupied France" and the other titles is simple. Collaboration -- like appeasement before it -- failed totally because it willfully misread Hitler's intentions.

Mr. Spotts is the author of "The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Occupation" (Yale University Press, 2009)

*: 320.944 P and 944.0816 P
An interesting commentary on libraries and cataloguing. Same book is classified in two different ways: 320 is political science; 944 is General history of Europe; France & Monaco.

A Terrible Splendor

"A Terrible Splendor"
By Marshall Jon Fisher
Crown, 321 pages, $25

Fisher, M., (2009). A Terrible Splendor. New York: Crown


Tennis is not my game, but this seems a wonderful book about much more than tennis.


The case for the greatest match or game or championship ever played – that staple of bar arguments – inevitably has to be based on something more than simple drama on the field, court, course or ice. The confrontation between two opponents should also speak in a larger way about the world at that moment. A lot of tennis has been played since 1937 – and for pure athletic drama, nothing could top the 1980 Wimbledon final between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe – but in Marshall Jon Fisher's rich and rewarding "A Terrible Splendor," he makes a strong claim to greatest-ever status for Budge vs. Cramm in the Davis Cup.

on July 20, the players who had faced each other in the final there [of Wimbledon] were back again. Don Budge, a 22-year-old American, and Baron Gottfried von Cramm of Germany, 28, were scheduled to meet in the sport's premiere team competition, the Davis Cup.


The English were rooting for Cramm: it'd be easier for England to defeat Germany than the US.

Cramm had other supporters that July day, but their backing sent a chill through him: Nazi officials sitting in the royal box expected him to win for the glory of the fatherland. A victory would also reassure them about his patriotism. The German star had refused to join the Nazi Party, and in April he had been interrogated by the Gestapo regarding allegations of homosexual activity – a crime in Nazi Germany. The handsome, aristocratic Baron von Cramm desperately needed to redeem himself against the homely young American who had learned to play tennis on public courts in California. Cramm's prospects were not encouraging: In the Wimbledon final, Budge had beaten him easily in straight sets.

Cramm's story provides the emotional ballast of "A Terrible Splendor." In contrast to Budge, whose father was a truck driver, Cramm was a dashing blond member of the German aristocracy, single-mindedly pursuing the game on the court of the family's summer castle and later at Berlin's exclusive Rot-Weiss Club. "Every year that von Cramm steps onto the Centre Court at Wimbledon," reported one observer, "a few hundred young women sit a little straighter and forget about their escorts."

In addition to the two on-court competitors, a third player looms large in "A Terrible Splendor": Bill Tilden, a tennis superstar of the 1920s who had done much to popularize the sport in America but who had also long feuded with the tennis bureaucracy in the U.S. The American tennis establishment, Mr. Fisher says, was leery of Tilden's off-court flamboyance and rumors about his sexual tendencies. (In the 1940s, Tilden was jailed twice on morals charges involving teenage boys.) In 1937, Tilden was unofficially coaching the German team, having been rebuffed by the Americans.

I know the name of Bill Tilden, but nothing more; his coaching Germany is a surprise.

In the stadium, the largely British crowd chants "Deutschland! Deutschland!" as Cramm takes a 3-1 lead in the fifth – but then Budge storms back. A reporter for the New York Herald Tribune will write that the players were hitting winners "off balls that themselves appeared to be certain winners." James Thurber called the display by both players "physical genius." But someone had to win, and, in the end, Budge prevailed.

"A year later," Mr. Fisher writes in the long final chapter, "Gottfried Cramm was in prison." Here we learn about the postmatch fates of the characters we've met, and as many intriguing storylines emerge as in what has gone before. This is especially true of Cramm: He was imprisoned for "deviant" behavior, released after a few months, drafted into military service and eventually sent to the Russian front after war breaks out. Remarkably, he survives – and, perhaps even more remarkably, goes on in the 1950s to marry the American heiress to the Woolworth fortune, Barbara Hutton. Troubled by addiction and depression, Hutton had also long nursed an obsession with the dashing German. A friend observed that Cramm "didn't really want to marry her but thought that he could help her."

On the evidence of "A Terrible Splendor," that appraisal is entirely believable. In a life filled with glory and hardship, Cramm seems to have conducted himself unfailingly with honor and sportsmanship. His depiction by Mr. Fisher is a fitting tribute.