The Ghost of Berlin's Degenerate Art

 

Berlin, Germany.

Late one bitterly cold and dark afternoon, a construction worker, part of a crew digging a new subway station in the heart of Berlin, spotted a strange object tumble off his front loaders shovel. Jumping to the ground, he cleared off as much of the frozen caked earth as possible, to reveal a bust of a women. Later, as winter turned to spring and spring to summer, more objects were unearthed.  Researchers learned that the first sculpture- circa 1920's- was the work of a boldly brazen, but all most forgotten artist, Edwin Scharff. 

Into the fall and winter, excavators unearthed a further trove that included;  “Dancer” by Marg Moll, "Standing Girl" by Otto Baum, as well as long buried fragments that included 

both the ghostly head of Emy Roeder’s “Pregnant Woman” and another head by Otto Freundlich. 

These works were products of the German Weimar Cultural Era created by the devastation of World War I, as Victorian values and morals were cast aside by a new generation. Placing a premium on unrestrained artistic freedom, they created the greatest intellectual/artistic explosion in European history while living to explore their sexuality to the fullest, as in the famous and infamous dark underground cabarets. 

Also from this era, Hitler, rose out of the great Reichstag fires with the last of his soul dying, the failed art student and the closeted homosexual, giving way to a heartless monster who extinguished the last embers of his humanity by rounding up these art forms from Museums through out Germany. Then, building a fire of hatred around them by creating “Degenerate Art” shows that included "comedy" films ridiculing this art, before finally vanishing them forever into the cellars of his Reich Propaganda Ministerium,
right before he graduated on to exterminate vast segments of the German population.But, although it's not exactly known how, the above "sign posts" leading back to these nightmare years, escaped. 


Michael Kimmelman in his New York Times article,"Art's Survivors of Hitler's War" writes that archaeologists think the art came from a building( once located on the site)then owned by Erhard Oewerdieck, an escrow agent and tax attorney. Oewerdieck, risked his-and his families-life by helping Jews and persecuted artists escape Nazi Germany. The theory holds that an Allied air bombing raid collapsed Oewerdieck's building straight down into the earth. But how the art originally found its way into Oewerdieck's hands still, remains a mystery.