by Jon Lackman | 15 April 2010 | Books
According to The Forward, in a new book The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses Stephen H. Norwood describes the “utter destruction of the academic career of art historian Jerome Klein, one of the most popular teachers at Columbia, for publicly protesting Nazi crimes,” at the hands of Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler. Reviewer Jerome A. Chanes writes, “What can be done to recognize these actions 65 years later? With the luxury of hindsight, it might not be a bad idea, in the first instance, for Columbia to remove the ‘Butler’ from the university’s Butler Library.”
It’s striking to read how Oxford and Cambridge (unlike Harvard and Yale) rightly refused to participate in the Nazi-sponsored 550th-anniversary celebrations at Heidelberg.
http://mj.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/kjm013v1
For a related but inverse topic, see this upcoming talk in New York on the “monuments men” – members of an Allied military service unit charged with the preservation and restitution of artworks damaged during WWII Nazi lootings, many of whom went on to become prominent art historians and museum directors:
http://www.ifar.org/upcoming_event.php?docid=1270147396
And, in a serendipitous moment of overlapping historical inquiry, a conference in Munich will address the German counterpart:
http://www.zikg.eu/main/2010/kunstschutz/index.htm