The Past in the Present, turning points
New York Times, Tuesday, September 11, 2001 (Microfilm, National Library NY, 2004)
Anna retable, Utrecht. Defacement 7 March 1580
Willem V, Assen. Defacement 1795 (2005). In 1794 the French army came to the aid of the Patriots in the Netherlands, shortly after their own king had been dethroned and beheaded. This prompted Stadtholder Willem V to flee to England and from 1795 the Batavian Republic was a fact. During this period, also known as the French Era, the archipelago of the East Indies (present-day Indonesia) officially became a Dutch colony. The French Era ended when Emperor Napoleon was forced to abdicate in 1813. Willem V’s eldest son, Willem Frederik of Orange-Nassau, returned on 30 November 1813 and, following the Congress of Vienna in 1815, was officially pronounced Willem I, King of the United Netherlands, which at that time extended to present-day Belgium and Luxembourg. In 1958, having laid at rest in Braunschweig for more than 150 years, the remains of Willem V, his entrails excepted, were re-interred in the family vault of the House of Orange at the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church) in Delft. Dowager Princess Wilhelmina, the former Queen of the Netherlands, refused to attend. She pronounced that she had no desire to pay her last respects to a sovereign who had fled his own country, though she had herself fled to England when the Germans invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. This painting of Stadtholder Willem V was damaged in 1795 by Patriots in Assen.
Alt Wien 1908. (Washington, 2005) In October 1908 this watercolor was part of the portfolio submitted by Adolf Hitler in a second vain attempt to be admitted to Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts.
Ypres 1914-1918. (2007) This ordnance survey map was used by the British army during the First World War to indicate the battlefield around Ypres in West Flanders.Ypres was hemmed in on three sides by German troops for the duration of the First World War. The Germans failed to capture the town, despite ambitiously planned battles in which half a million soldiers lost their lives. The Germans first used lethal chlorine gas on the Western Front during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915. Mustard gas was first deployed on a large scale during the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917, earning it the nickname yperite. The town itself was utterly devastated in the process. After the war there were calls to leave Ypres as it was rather than rebuild it, as a macabre memorial. The town was, however, restored to its pre-war state, largely thanks to financing from the Wiedergutmachung, the ‘reparations’ exacted from Germany. Reconstruction took more than 40 years. To the left of the map, which covers an area less than 35 kilometres across, stands Steenvoorde, the place where the Iconoclastic Fury erupted in the Low Countries in 1566.
Becelaire 1917 (Washington, 2005) Adolf Hitler made this watercolor painting during the First World War when he wasencamped in Becelaire, a municipality in the vicinity of Ypres. Although in February 1914 Hitler was found physically unfit to serve in the Austrian army, when the First World War broke out he was granted permission to join the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment as a message runner. After just two months of training this regiment fought in the bloody First Battle of Ypres; of the 250 men in Hitler’s company only 42 survived. Hitler himself was wounded twice during the war. In October 1916, shrapnel hit him in the face during the Battle of the Somme and he spent five months in a hospital in Berlin. An attack with mustard gas in the night of 13 – 14 October 1918 left him blind for three months. Hitler was still hospitalized when he learned that Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany was forced to abdicate on 9 November 1918. The armistice was signed two days later, which greatly dismayed Hitler. He later explained that at this point he decided to enter the political arena, in order “to save Germany”.
Madonna of Nagasaki, Defacement 9 August 1945. In the morning of 9 August 1945, the B-29 Superfortress ‘Bock’s Car’ flies over the city of Kokura. This city is the primary target of ‘Fat Man’, the second American atomic bomb. Fat Man contains a plutonium core, which is more powerful than the uranium core of ‘Little Boy’, the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima three days before. ‘Bock’s Car’ circles above Kokura for 45 minutes, because a layer of clouds prohibits the bombardment. Having crossed the city three times without finding an opening, pilot Charles W. Sweeney diverts to Nagasaki, only to find it obscured as well. But at 11:00 the clouds break open and the bombardier can visually target Nagasaki. By that time, the plane is running out of fuel, so Sweeney decides to drop the bomb almost immediately. Fat Man explodes more than 2.5 kilometers from the projected hypocenter, right above Urikami Cathedral, then the biggest Catholic church in Southeast Asia. Among the estimated 40,000 to 75,000 casualties are 8,500 of Nagasaki’s 12,000 parishioners, who constituted the largest concentration of baptized Christians in Japan at that time. Two months later, a Japanese Catholic priest discharged from military service visits the ruins of the cathedral. After an hour of praying and looking for a memento, he notices the scorched head of the Madonna lying in the debris.
Map showing Polish military maneuvers as part of a Warschau Pact invasion plan. The projected invasion of Western Europe involved the atomic bombing of several cities (marked by red bombs on the map), followed by massive troop movements towards the Federal Republic of Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium. Polish soldiers would serve as cannon fodder, marching into contaminated territory. Army leadership estimated that radiation sickness would render them incapable about seven days into the war, at which point fresh Soviet troops from Ukraine and Belarus would take over. Wojciech W. Jaruzelski, Poland’s communist Minister of Defense, signed the map in 1970. At that time, the US had 3,900 nuclear warheads and the USSR had 3,100. Jaruzelski was elected prime minister in 1981. In 2005, the anti-communist government of Poland ordered the Polish Institute for National Remembrance (IPN) to open the country’s controversial Warschau Pact archives to historians. This decision ran counter to the Russian government’s policy of keeping these archives closed. Access to the map for the purpose of taking photographs was requested repeatedly, but the IPN formally denied it. However, after two and a half years of bureaucratic hassle, an IPN historian unexpectedly answered a telephone call and sent photographs of the map that he had made during a press conference of the Polish Minister of Defense in 2006. These pictures were then combined into a reconstruction of the original map. This composition stems from the historian’s choice of photographing only certain segments of the map.
The watercolors, (Washington 2005) After the Second World War the US army discovered four watercolors by Hitler in a German castle. They belonged to Heinrich Hoffmann. The US army found about 2.5 million negatives in this same castle, some of which would serve as evidence in the Nuremberg trials. The watercolors were classified as “military objects” and transferred to the US, where they disappeared into the vaults of the Pentagon and simply labelled ‘The watercolors’. In 1982, while conducting research for his book ‘Adolf Hitler: The Unknown Artist’, Billy F. Price came across the watercolors and acquired the rights to them from Hoffmann’s heirs. A long drawn-out legal battle about ownership of the watercolors began in 1985. Billy F. Price – who proclaimed himself an internationally acknowledged expert on Hitler’s art and owner of one of the largest collections of Hitler’s artworks, but was described by the US Court of Appeals as a “Texas Businessman” – sued for 99 million dollars in damages for being denied the right to exploit the works. However, it was maintained that the very brush strokes on the painting had such incendiary potential that they had to be guarded from the gaze of all but screened experts. The US government’s position was, however, as clear as day: ‘The United States is entitled to retain Hitler memorabilia which came into our nation’s possession because we won the war.’ The US government eventually won this 18-year-long legal wrangle in 2002 before the Supreme Court decreed that the watercolors would never again be allowed to leave the vaults of the Army Center of Military History.
Questioning History, curated by Frank van der Stok, Dutch Photography Museum, Rotterdam
Installationview of New York Times, Tuesday, September 11, 2001 at The Art of Iconoclasm curated by Sven Lütticken at Bak, Utrecht