It’s hard to believe that 80 years after the Second World War there’s still so much still to be settled about the Nazi crimes. With every layer of history that is peeled away some new travesty seems to emerge, horrifying and hypnotising in equal measure. Film has tracked this evolution, from Billy Wilder’s Death Mills (1945) showing the world for the first time the skeletal survivors, the apparatus of death and the corpses of victims, via Claude Lanzmann’s epic nine-hour collection of testimonies Shoah (1985) and onward.
However powerful a drama such as Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) may be, it is only documentary that can really open up the dark heart of the Holocaust, allowing us to scrutinise for ourselves the faces of the perpetrators and their acolytes as they apologise or self-justify, whether they squirm or preen, whether Adolf Eichmann in his bullet-proof Jerusalem dock, or the ageing former members of the Hitler Youth interviewed by Luke Holland for his remarkable Final Account (2020). The documentary camera captures every twitch and evasion, every half-truth and sideways glance.
And so it is with The Spoils, Jamie Kastner’s new film, due for its British premiere at the 2024 UK Jewish Film Festival. The director, whose wife and co-producer’s grandmother was a concentration camp survivor, admits he was surprised to find there was still something new to say about the Nazi era. “There are so many endless, endless horror stories out of that time, you think you’ve heard it all, and then you hear some other unbelievable thing,” he says.
Romantic figurehead: Düsseldorf Stadtmuseum director Dr Susanne Anna with a self-portrait by Wilhelm Von Schadow
The thing that Kastner uncovered is the still ongoing fight for justice over stolen works of art. From 1933 onwards, German Jews had property of any value either confiscated or forcibly sold off for a fraction of its true market price – silverware and tableware, books, furniture, clothing, jewellery, textiles – millions of items that can never be traced and much of which is probably even now ensconced in German homes or showcased in antiques stores.
“You begin to think of the Holocaust as the biggest smash- and-grab job ever,” says Kastner. “What a brilliant scheme! You can steal all this stuff from people, and you kill them all so that neither they nor their descendants can come back to claim it.”
It’s an issue I grappled with myself in my novel Reparation (2019). Attempting to untangle the relative claims of past and present and the value of a life, I started with the arguments for financial compensation, but my story quickly devolved into one of art theft. I chose art because of its uniqueness and the special emotional resonance it has to both owner and beholder.
But, as Kastner points out, there’s something else particular about art. It’s different because “art has provenance”, a complete record of ownership which is key to its value.
The director puts German gallerist Max Stern centre stage, and follows the epic fight by his heirs to reclaim hundreds of works. Unlike the triumphant endings of dramas such as The Monuments Men (2014), starring George Clooney, and Woman in Gold (2015) with Helen Mirren, The Spoils opens up a very dark seam. It’s a trail of broken promises and obstruction, a vicious backlash and a battle that is far from over.
Collector of art: Max Stern in 1937 before he fled Germany
A leading light of the pre-war Düsseldorf art world, Stern was forced to sell his substantial personal collection of hundreds of paintings at knock-down prices, and later to hand over most of the receipts to the Third Reich before escaping with his family to Canada. In Montreal, starting with virtually nothing, he built himself up again until he was at his 1987 death a “great Titan” of the country’s art market.
Childless, he left his considerable estate to three universities, which established a foundation in his name. Its curators have made it their mission to retrieve hundreds of his stolen paintings, but they have had a fight on their hands. What emerges is a concerted campaign in some quarters to oppose restitution.
“In some regards,” says Kastner, “you have to appreciate the efforts that Germany has made to deal with its past, relative to other countries”. But that attitude is not universal, “I think there is a certain tone-deafness in the highly legalistic, litigious terms in which this issue was being parsed and debated.” Nothing shocked him more than the headlines generated by the public debate over the ownership of valuable pieces. One read, “They say ‘Holocaust’ but mean ‘money’.”
Kastner tells me he has traced a murky trail linking some of those who are against restitution and the far-right AfD party, which won large gains in recent elections.
This is the tenth feature from the Toronto-based director who comes from a family of filmmakers, and who is also a journalist and TV producer.
His other specifically Jewish work, Kike Like Me (2007), which he wrote and presented, has also been screened at the UK Jewish Film Festival and was broadcast on BBC4.
Despite the fact that hundreds of art works from Stern’s collection alone are still missing, Kastner is surprisingly upbeat about where the tale leads. “One thing I liked about this story is that in spite of all the darkness, both the good guys and the bad guys are non-Jewish Germans. In this film, we see non-Jewish people trying to track down the truth and fighting to pursue the truth and justice.”
Gaby Koppel is the author of Reparation (Honno Press 2019, £8.99) and produced national events marking Holocaust Memorial Day for BBC Television in 2001 and 2005
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