Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art by Darsie Alexander and Sam Sackeroff (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art by Darsie Alexander and Sam Sackeroff
• Jessi Rae Morton (bio)

afterlives: recovering the lost stories of looted art
Darsie Alexander and Sam Sackeroff
Yale University Press
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300250701/afterlives/
280 pages; Print, $50.00

Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art, by Darsie Alexander and Sam Sackeroff, began as an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York, and its first run was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. For those of us who were unable to view the exhibition in 2020 or during its second presentation (from August 2021 to January 2022), Alexander and Sackeroff's book provides a potential alternative by incorporating and cataloging large portions of the exhibit. The book consists of four essays, one each by the authors as well as contributions from Julia Voss and Mark Wasiuta, alongside numerous photos, reproductions of artworks, and smaller sections dealing with specific elements of the topic in more detail.

When Afterlives first arrived in my mailbox, its physical presence was immediate and undeniable. With its stunning cover and its many pages of images, the book appears more like a coffee-table book than an academic text. The physical presence of the book is part of its main point, after all. Alexander and Sackeroff offer an opportunity to engage with objects and artworks that have been looted, lost, and damaged, and their book powerfully presences these objects. According to Alexander's essay, Walter Benjamin "understood that history … is capable of inflicting blows not only on the people who get erased from its record but on things that either survive or don't." Afterlives "is populated by the testimonies of those objects and the people who helped them survive to be seen today."

Afterlives prioritizes the idea that "all works of art tell stories, but sometimes they are also actors in a larger and broader narrative." In this case, the [End Page 144] broader narratives are World War II, Nazi looting, and the Holocaust. Following the book's introduction, in an essay that focuses on visual art, Alexander points out that some works reproduced in the text "were destroyed or remain lost, surviving only in reproductions." She provides a thorough overview of the process of Nazi looting, including how books and artworks were sought, documented, and transported. She also explains the recovery and preservation efforts with special attention to actions by women which have sometimes been overshadowed by the better-known Monuments Men in other works on the subject.

In his essay "Reconstructing Culture," Sackeroff prioritizes books and ceremonial objects of particular significance to Jewish communities, emphasizing that "while history concerns events that have occurred in the past, it is communicated through objects that exist in the present." This essay also highlights the work of Hannah Arendt and Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, which "mounted a sustained counteroffensive against the Nazis not in the war-torn landscape of Europe, where the damage was permanent, but in the war-torn landscape of history, where some damage could perhaps be undone." These efforts, by Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Salo Baron, Morris Raphael Cohen, and countless others, are key elements of the work Afterlives accomplishes. Despite their cultural significance, some of the objects discussed will not be familiar to non-Jewish readers, and for many this will be a first encounter with the stories of how such objects were stolen, recovered, and redistributed. As with the objects themselves, the book serves to presence the people whose lives were touched by looted art, making the stories available to those who may not have encountered them elsewhere.

Mark Wasiuta continues this work in his essay "The Architecture of Dispossession," which focuses on the role of buildings and space in storing and displaying objects and art, including a discussion of the projection screen and its positioning during the trials at Nuremberg. This essay allows for a clearer presentation of the ways in which an artwork may be viewed "as both art and as something other." In the cases of looted art from World War II, it becomes quite difficult to view the artworks as artworks; instead, they become imbued with additional layers of significance...