Abstract

Abstract
Paved with Good Intentions: The Development of German and American
Holocaust-era Looted Art Restitution Institutions

Alyssa Stokvis-Hauer

This thesis presents insights into how conceptualizing and pursuing Nazi-looted art and cultural heritage restitution has changed since 1945 in the United States and Germany. The text presents historical and institutional analyses of the two major restitution institutions in these countries; the New York Financial Service Department’s Holocaust Claims Processing Office (HCPO), and the Magdeburg-based federal institution known widely as the German Lost Art Foundation, or more correctly as the Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste, formerly the Koordinierungsstelle für Kulturgutverluste located first in Bremen and then Magdeburg.

The past views of guilt, justice, and restitution as a moral imperative in the years immediately following World War II vary substantially from the contemporary ethos that characterizes the restitution of Holocaust-era spoliated cultural objects. Through the 1940s and 1950s German suffering shaped post-war German imperatives, while the American approach was heavily influenced by media coverage which highlighted American heroism and virtue, alongside a reluctant custodianship balanced with efforts to engage in effective restitution prerogatives. As such, the ascendancy of moral purpose and a politics of memory and regret in the 1990s is a significant shift. Filling a gap in World War II era spoliated art restitution research, this text uses institutional and cultural comparisons to bring to the fore patterns and changes within national self-narration or identification that influence institutional organization or practices. Drawing from archival documents, interviews, and secondary literature, this shift is approached and analyzed through a framework of discursive institutionalism, collective memory, and national identity construction.