Cultural vandalism: scourge of our age

GEOFF SIFRIN

TAKING ISSUE

One inspiring current example is the decision of the German government to invest $3,2 million in the next nine years to help save Bauhaus-style buildings in Tel Aviv.

Anyone familiar with Tel Aviv will know the beautiful “White City” district, concentrated around Rothschild Boulevard. It is the world’s largest concentration of Bauhaus buildings – there are more than 4 000 of them – and was declared a Unesco World Heritage site in 2003.

Its architects were mainly Jewish design pioneers who were students of the German architect Walter Gropius. They fled the Nazi regime in the 1930s to what was then Palestine, not just because they were Jewish, but also because their artistic leanings were deemed “degenerate” by Hitler. Tel Aviv is indelibly marked by their architectural and artistic influence.

Over the decades, the buildings have been adversely affected by the salty sea air of Tel Aviv, particularly their original elements such as wooden and metal windows and doors, which cannot be easily replaced. Some buildings have been refurbished by private individuals.

The investment in the White City will help Israel preserve this architectural treasure and, ironically, also help preserve a fascinating part of German culture. A Bauhaus Centre in the Max-Liebling House will open in 2017.

Of course, nobody can forget that Germany is itself historically guilty of cultural vandalism. Under Hitler in the 1930s, various art forms were outlawed and targeted as inappropriate for German “Aryan” culture. Jazz music, for example, with its many black performers and musicians. Jewish composers such as Felix Mendelssohn and Gustav Mahler, were disparaged and condemned. In Leipzig, a bronze statue of Mendelssohn was removed.

Nazi ideology heavily influenced “acceptable” art, architecture, music and films. Hitler effectively decided there were two forms of art – un-German degenerate art of the likes of Pablo Picasso; and classical realistic art that represented all that was good about Nazi Germany and Germans.

He said clearly in “Mein Kampf” what he thought of modern art such as Dada, cubism and impressionism: “This art is the sick production of crazy people. Pity the people who are no longer able to control this sickness.”

Weimar Germany was famous for the avant-garde artists who worked there. But for Hitler, they were nothing more than “a Jewish-Bolshevik cultural hoax”. Many artworks were actually destroyed by the Nazis. For him, true “German art” was the exaltation of a superior race, military might and physical health.

Right here in Johannesburg, another collection of endangered cultural treasures is sitting right under our noses in the old CBD. Johannesburg is home to the third largest collection of art deco buildings in the world – after New York and Miami.

Sadly, Johannesburg has allowed this magnificent district to deteriorate, and some of the buildings have been hijacked and taken over by squatters, with electricity, water and sewerage systems cut off.

They have become places of squalor, their lobbies used as toilets and their elegant balconies piled high with garbage. But brave entrepreneurs – several of them Jewish – are going in and refurbishing them, one by one.

The iconic Anstey’s Building and others radiate the ship-like features which characterise the art deco style – a metaphor for the immigrant mindset of the people who came over the oceans to America and South Africa. It would be fitting if this magnificent district was also declared a World Heritage Site.

In a world gone mad, where barbarism is paraded as faith, it is essential to celebrate the people who are cherishing beautiful things rather than destroying them. Sadly, however, all societies still contain their bigots and cultural thugs – including Germany, where anti-Semitism is rising ominously, as it is other parts of Europe. But today’s German government is to be congratulated for being on the right side.

Geoff Sifrin is former editor of the SAJR. He writes this column in his personal capacity.