Why Books? Some New Ones At the Library

 While picking up my next Book Club book at Loussac Library, I went up stairs to peruse the new book section.  In this day of 300 character social media posts, I find books a great place to retreat to a deeper way of knowing about the world.  

So here are, in no real order, some of the books I looked at in the New Books section. 

Hush:  How to Radiate Power and Confidence… by Linda Clemons   (for an audio intro:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FyKL-6OvyE )

I saw Hush first   This is a self-help book to give the reader "power and confidence."  The "without saying a word" more than suggests it's going to be about body language.  There's a link above to an audio intro to the book by the author, who let's you know she can tell all your secrets by the way you hold and move your whole body as well as parts of your body.  

Language is Gesture -  by David McNeill     I saw this second book, ostensibly on an overlapping topic a bit later.  This is more of an academic book outlining this idea that language is based on gesture.

"Abstract:

A new way of viewing language, as a dynamic mode of meaning-making of which gesture is a fundamental part.

When David McNeill began his work on gesture more than forty years ago, language and the action of speaking were regarded as separate realms. But language, says McNeill in Language Is Gesture, is dynamic and gesture is fundamental to speaking. Central to his conception of language, and distinct from linguistic analysis, is what McNeill calls the “growth point,” the starting point of making thought and speech one. He uses the term “gesture–speech unity” to refer to the dynamic dimension of adding gesture to speaking. It is the growth point that achieves this unity, whereby thought is embedded in gesture and speech at the same time.

Gesture is the engine of language. It is foundational to speaking, language acquisition, the origin of language, animal communication, thought, and consciousness. Gesture is global and synthetic and brings energy; speech is linear and segmented and brings cultural standards. The growth point is a snapshot of an utterance at its beginning psychological stage, the starting point of unifying thought and speech. Growth points create gesture–speech unity by synchronizing a bundle of linguistic features with a gesture that carries the same meaning. This gesture–speech unity is a form of thought, a unique form of cognition."  [From Linguist List]

I found the similarity of the covers of these four books interesting.  

The Rolling Stone's review title is 

"OZZY OSBOURNE’S ‘LAST RITES’ MEMOIR  IS HAUNTING, REVELATORY, AND OFTEN DEEPLY SAD"

Rolling Stone offers 14 things they learned that hadn't been in other Osbourne bios.  There was nothing I needed to know, but if you're a big Osbourne fan, maybe , . .

From Kirkus on Sumner:

"A skillful blend of legal history and biography that honors the 19th century’s foremost champion of civil rights..".

Given today's Supreme Court ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act, perhaps we can bring Sumner back to life to help fight again for civil rights.  The decision is 36 pages.  Kagan's dissent is 48 pages.

 

Also from Kirkus on Lionel Richie's book:

"There’s an abundance of love and gratitude in this wildly entertaining, utterly charming memoir."

Roosevelt, also from Kirkus

"Roosevelt’s forceful life is portrayed as the embodiment of America 'as it was meant to be.'

Baier, chief political anchor for Fox News, is a prolific biographer whose volume on Theodore Roosevelt joins his works on George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan. The author’s portrait of the 26th president draws on Roosevelt’s writings, diaries, letters, speeches, and other biographies. Baier sketches Roosevelt’s transformations to politician, president, soldier, writer, and naturalist. .  .

This portrait of an iron-willed president digs only so deep."

I wonder if the author embraces Roosevelt's trust busting and preservation of natural wonders in National Parks.  

When All the Men Wore Hats, Susan Cheever

 The Cheever book looked particularly interesting, though I've only read a few of her father's short stories.  

From Spectrum Culture:

"When All the Men All Wore Hats, the second study by author John Cheever’s daughter Susan, follows Home Before Dark, her longer 1984 memoir, inevitably repeating some of the material. Both accounts blend candor and tact, respect and pain, as she delves into his sense of never quite belonging to the patrician New England-New York smart-set her father limned.

John came from a checkered New England legacy, one that, like the many floundering characters in his short stories, trended downward. Susan archly observes: “The New Yorker was the stern father who would occasionally hand you a dollar and tell you to go and buy yourself a new fifty-dollar shirt.” Cheever’s standout stories mostly had been published before the 1966 success of the adaptation of The Swimmer into a Burt Lancaster film, and John didn’t publish more than a handful of stories at the magazine that had cemented his mid-century reputation after that."

Cloud Warriors, Thomas E. Weber 

 From Princeton Alumni Weekly:

"As his reporting proceeded, Weber began to focus on why more accurate forecasts don’t necessarily translate into better outcomes, in lives and property saved. Weather satellites, radar stations and the specialized scientific knowledge to understand the data they produce are all important, he concluded — but a key, underappreciated factor is how to manage human psychology.

A turning point came with Weber’s interview with a social science expert who traveled to locations that had recently been struck by tornadoes. As her colleagues were focusing on estimating wind speeds and damage patterns, this researcher was asking community members about the warnings they’d heard before the storm and how they decided to take the actions they did.

“I realized then that there was a huge push in the weather world to start better understanding people, as well as the atmosphere,” Weber says. 'The real issue is, how do you get people to make the safest decisions? You have to communicate that to people in a way that gets them to treat it with a gravity that is appropriate to the danger. It’s a complicated chain of events.'”

Empty Vessel:  The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge, by Ian Kumekawa 

From the New York Review: 

Over the past few decades journalists and academics have chronicled the “lawless ocean,” documenting widespread human rights abuses in the shipping and fishing industries and what might be termed “the outlaw sea.” In Empty Vessel, Ian Kumekawa, a historian at MIT and Harvard, finds that the seas are in fact replete with laws—but that many of them are designed to get around other laws, to exploit or create loopholes, or to obtain regulatory and tax advantages, all with the goal of maximizing profits for shipping companies. This parallel offshore universe of laws and contracts was slowly built up by lawyers, corporations, and territories that function as tax havens, enabling them to reap profit without paying their due—and becoming central to what we call globalization.

Empty Vessel tells the story of a single barge, from its construction at a Swedish dockyard nearly half a century ago to its current status as a rusty, “laid up” accommodation barge for oil workers in the port of Onne in Nigeria. (The book also cursorily follows its sister ship, an identical vessel built at the same time, which had a similar course over the years.) By tracking the ship’s many lives—as a floating barrack for British troops during the Falklands War, as a prison ship moored at Pier 36 in Lower Manhattan and then in Portland, England, and as a temporary housing barge for assembly line workers in West Germany—Kumekawa charts the dramatic transformations that the world economy has undergone since the 1980s: globalization, the decline of manufacturing, financialization, neoliberalism. The ship’s trajectory lays bare both the physical infrastructure of the global economy—in the form of ships, ports, and the workers who operate them—and the invisible legal architecture without which it would be impossible. 

The Injustice of Property - Steven Przybylinski

From Project Muse:

"With the rise of homelessness in many U.S. cities, municipal governments are sanctioning organized encampments as an official strategy for sheltering unhoused people. Examining the shortcomings and consequences of these municipal policies, The Injustice of Property explores how unhoused individuals living in self-managed encampments navigate and organize themselves within and against the confines of liberal property systems. Through ethnographic research in Portland, Oregon, a paradigmatic city in advancing this model of homeless shelter, Stephen Przybylinski details the everyday struggles of self-managed encampments to highlight how key contradictions inherent to liberal ideology maintain property as a means of structuring sociopolitical equality. He argues that justice cannot be realized for unhoused communities within the liberal model of private property due to how liberalism and liberal ideology prioritize the rights and values of property over the personal rights of self-governance.

The Injustice of Property is a conceptually robust and empirically rich account of the limits of liberal thinking regarding what “just” property relations look like for unhoused and housed people alike. The book shows that while encampment communities struggle to establish alternative property relationships to the traditional model of private ownership, the injustices that residents of encampments face provoke a necessary reevaluation of how beneficiaries of property systems influence who can become housing stable and on which terms. This insightful book reveals how the injustices surrounding Portland’s encampment communities reflect the limits and injustice of liberal property more broadly."  

The Cost of Being Undocumented, by Alix Dick and Antero Garcia

From interview on UUWorld:

Dick: I would like people to understand that the decisions that immigrants make were never made lightly. Nobody leaves home by choice. When people read this book, I want them to understand that what happened to me could happen to anybody. It’s a privilege to think that tragedy will never hit you.

A black-and-white portrait of Antero Garcia, couthor of "The Cost of Being Undocumented."

Antero Garcia: Taking the “cost” part of the title, I hope readers see that the costs of undocumented life are so much more than just financial numbers. Sure, we offer a financial estimate of what living undocumented has cost Alix at the end of the book. However, more importantly, I want readers to understand the toll of living away from family, of navigating language and social barriers, of losing the opportunities for youthful joy in a new country. The financial costs also go both ways: while existing economic reports point to the fact that undocumented individuals actually provide a net-benefit to the U.S. economy, Alix’s story also highlights the ways wage theft, out-of-pocket medical expenses, and inaccessible university costs actually extract even more income for the most marginalized individuals in this country.

 I pulled out a few more books, but this is a good enough selection.  In this time of social media, influencers whose test for truth is how many viewers they have and how much money those viewers bring, and a president who's truth is measured by his own perceived best interest, taking a mental vacation from all that and reading a few books feels like a luxury.  

And it's a good time to support your local library.  Most have a new book section.  You can even find a comfy chair and just lose yourself in the library.  

The Long Winter - Snow Finally Removed In Our Neighborhood

 

Temperatures like -5˚F and lower have been pretty common morning temperatures.  Temps like these weren't uncommon in 20 or 30 years ago, but they didn't linger for three months.  There might be a spell of cold (down to -20˚F) for a week or even two.  But the below zero temps didn't hang around all winter. More recently there have been winters when it never got below zero and others when it only happened a few times.

This winter is different.  It's been below zero frequently since early December.  

[If you're confused, it's an indoor/outdoor thermometer.  Red is for inside and navy blue is for outside.]

And here it is mid March and it's still below zero when I check the thermometer in the morning.  

The chart below from the Anchorage Daily News gets the point across .  Two days our high temperatures were below the normal low temperatures.  Three other days they were just slightly above the normal low.  

And we've also had lots of snow.  One morning there was a deep horn blowing outside.  I looked out to see  a garbage truck faced with a car parked on one side of the street and the berm on the other side so far out in the street that the truck couldn't get past.  I went out and talked to the driver.  "I can't do this street because I can't get by."  I asked if I could bring my garbage can around to the other side so he could take it.  I did and he did.  And then the guy came out to move his car.  I think he works the night shift.  

But at one corner, the snow was piled up so high and so far out into the street, you couldn't see if there were cars coming down the cross street.  

But this Thursday afternoon, there were plows on the street and they had no parking signs in front of every house for Friday.  I've suggested some kind of notification so that people could move their cars for the plows, because you never know when they are going to come. So this is a big improvement.  I managed to get my car up our driveway.  

Then Friday, they spent the whole day in our subdivision plowing snow and shooting it into dump trucks to haul away.

It takes about 30 seconds to fill a dump truck.  They have a line of dump trucks, so as soon as one is full, the next one pulls up.  I'm not sure where they are dumping all the snow.  It couldn't be too far because the trucks were back in line quickly.  

Our street is back to its normal width.  The surface of the road was scraped as far as they could go.  Still some snow, but not the several packed down inches.  

Of course, today we got more snow, but so far it's really only a light dusting.  

And Friday was the day the stove man was coming over to fix the oven door, which decided not to open when my wife wanted to get some chicken legs and yams out.  But with the snow plows, there just was no place for him to park. He kept calling after each job to see if it was clear for him.   Eventually I was able to get my car out of the driveway and over to the university and he could get into our driveway.  

Let me add that I'm reading Coming Into The Country which was released 50 years ago next year.  This is a book club book.  I read it when I got to Alaska, when it came out.  Much of the book is focused on Eagle, Alaska and the folks who live in cabins along the Yukon tributaries near Eagle.  Those folks had normal temperatures in the winter of -20˚F to as low as -60 and -70˚F.  So -10˚ is not that big a deal.  You just have to be dressed for it.  

Sunday Solidarity Group Growing

Every Sunday people concerned about the survival of US democracy show up at Loussac Library - 4th floor.  I'm not sure quite how to describe the event.  It's a gathering place to connect with like minded people.

Looking through the photos on my phone, it appears the first time I came was December 21.  At that time there were about 15 or 20 people attending.  The numbers seem to be climbing each week.  There were over 40 people there tonight.  

It's a place to find folks to help with your pet political project.  A place to just see that there are others who are concerned enough about the attacks on democracy to show up Sunday afternoon.  A place to find projects that fit your schedule and comfort level.

Sometimes there's a speaker.  Always there are POMs (Public Official Messages) on which to write your thoughts to your members of Congress.  Someone then takes them to Rep. Begich's and Senators Murkowski's and Sullivan's offices.  They've delivered about 700 POMs so far since November. 

There's also information about other groups working toward the same goals.  They also pay attention to people's mental health.  A couple of weeks ago, there were two therapists who work with people who have experienced political trauma.  

Several tables were for writing postcards.  At this table people were writing cards to US Senators who someone decided might be persuaded to vote against funding ICE further with first reining them in.

I wrote one to someone in California whose district had been redrawn in response to Texas gerrymandering to gain five GOP seats, telling the voter that his district had changed and when the primaries and general election were.  

There was a table for making sandwiches for the homeless.  People had brought in sandwich fixings and people were going to take them to a group that gathers food like this from all over Anchorage.   

More post card writing.  This one was for Mazon, and people were sending post cards to the Secretary of Agriculture regarding foreign aid that feeds the poor, particularly children.  

Before the Sunday Solidarity group meets, a book club meets from 2pm-3pm.  They are currently reading a book called Capitol Crude:The Impact of Oil on Alaska Politicsby Lisa A. Weissler.  Weissler was a legislative staffer for many years and this is an account of the building of the pipeline, the influence of oil money on the legislature, the

history of the unsuccessful attempts to build a natural gas pipeline.  We read a few chapters a week.  

It's particularly interesting because I know the names of so many of the people involved, and I know many of them personally.  Next week we'll read about the political-corruption trials which I blogged starting in 2007.  

AIFF2025: The Nazi's Massive Thefts Of Art During WW II

[Note:  This is an AIFF2025 (Anchorage International Film Festival) post because I will discuss below Plunderer:  The Life And Times Of A Nazi Art Thief, a film shown at the festival.]

[Note 2:  This post has taken on a life of its own as I've been writing it.  It now seems to be about the role of art as a commodity in the Holocaust, but on a higher level, as what one of the interviewees in Plunderer said:  Art is one of the three major unregulated industries in the world:  art, arms, and drugs.  As I write this, I keep uncovering new twists and turns.  It's taking me a while to post this because I'm trying to articulate the most important of the twists and turns clearly.  I'm sure I'm muddling some and missing others.  But there is a lot to learn from studying how the Nazis systematically stole art during their rule over Germany and how the world has, for the most part, let it slide.  There are also lessons for today.]

The Beginning - Let's just assume there is no beginning.  We simply have to jump in somewhere and start discovering things.  And if we're observant, remember enough details,  and are lucky, we'll start to see how everything is connected.  If not, we'll end up with random facts and impressions which are too vague and disconnected for us to take any lessons from.

• I knew that the Nazis stole art.  What I didn't realize until recently, as I'm reading Susan Ronald's Hitler's Art Thief, is

how massive this undertaking was.  This was not simply incidental, opportunistic looting.  It was a highly organized, preplanned effort to scoop up all the great art held by European museums and by private collectors, particularly Jewish families with art collections.  

Organized at the highest level, under the auspices of the RBK (Reichskammer den Bildenen Kunst - or Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts), art dealers were sent across Europe to compile an inventory of artwork in museums but also in the private collections of wealthy Jews - paintings, sculptures, drawings - and other valuables including jewelry, tapestries, and even church altars.  And once the Germans occupied a country, these agents of Hitler and Göring went out like art vacuum cleaners to suck up the best items and send them back to several repositories. - for the private collections of people like Göring and Hitler and for great German museum Hitler was planning for his thousand year Reich. 

Art had already been on the German leaders' menu during in WW I.  After his victory, Hitler planned to open a museum in Linz, Austria, his home town, that would have the world's most spectacular collection of art.  But some was also for Hitler's private collection and also for Göring's.  And much was also used to raise needed foreign currency to fund Hitler's war.  There were elaborate work-arounds set up to overcome the Allies' official bans on looted art.  Some pieces were sent directly to dealers in England and the US, but much, maybe most, went through auction houses in neutral Switzerland.  

There were also issues with currency - the German Mark not being worth much in the Allied countries.  And conflicts with Hitler's edicts condemning degenerate art - modern, abstract works which included artists like Picasso, Matisse, and Chagall.  But the work of these artists commanded high prices and, as I mentioned above, one of the objectives of this art looting was to raise foreign currency.  So while there were symbolic burnings of such art, most of it was diverted and sold.  I'd note that author Susan Ronald questions how many pictures of value were actually burned.

But as organized as this all was, the art historians/dealers who located and confiscated the art, arranged to get all the paperwork to remove the art from occupied countries, to transport it, and to get paid, found  lots of ways to divert art works to either their own private stashes or to export and sell overseas.  

There were so many items - thousands and thousands - and various destinations within the Reich hierarchy that keeping track of every item was difficult.  

Again,  because this is key: from what I can tell, there were two main objectives of the Reich's art project.  First was to gather the greatest collection of art anywhere to display when the Germans conquered the world.  (Hitler did start out as an artist.)  Second, was to raise foreign currency reserves to purchase armaments.  

There were four officially designated art dealers - Hildebrand Gurlitt (the main subject of Ronald's book); Karl Buchholz; Ferdinand Möller; and Bernhard A. Böhmer - who worked, nominally, under the RBK.  And they worked with many other art dealers and art historians to locate, confiscate, and fence art.

Pause to take a breath and figure out where we are

I'm telling you all this because until I started reading Hitler's Art Thief I didn't realize how organized and all encompassing this Nazi art theft was.  I probably should have.  Basically, I'd known that various heirs (generally Jews, or the heirs of Jews who had been send to death camps or forced to flee) had sued to get back individual works of art after (I believe) the piece showed up somewhere - generally in an auction catalogue or a museum.  

The Reich  had designated huge warehouses to store work.  And they even used salt mines toward the end of the war to store art works to keep the winning Allies from finding them.  And individuals involved often stored their plunder in Swiss bank vaults, protected by the super strict Swiss secrecy laws. 

Most notably among movies about getting back stolen art, there was Woman in Gold about the Beverly Hills dress shop owner who sues Austria to get back a painting stolen by the Nazis from her family in Vienna.  I've written about this film and personal connections to the main character.  Woman in Gold, as I recall it, focused mainly on the legal and political battle to get back that one painting.  I certainly did not get from that film a sense of the level of art plundering the Nazis did.  It may have been there, but it wasn't the focus of the film.  I did get a sense of how difficult it was to fight to recover family property after the war.  How expensive the fight was and how long it took,  And how difficult it is to prove your family owned something when all your possessions were confiscated or you are forced to flee with just what you can carry.  

Another hint of this was in Anthony Doerr's book, and then the Netflix series, All The Light We Cannot See - includes

"A sergeant major in the German army who certifies and evaluates art, jewelry, and gems, Reinhold Von Rumpel is major figure in the novel."  (From Fandom)

The movie is about a museum worker who takes a famous diamond to keep it safe from Nazi plunderers and Von Rumpel's persistent pursuit.   

We even watched The Monuments Men, though I really don't remember much about it.  This was about the American art historians who came as government officials right at the end of WWII to find the art looted by the Nazis.  Ronald discusses this group and the limits on their investigations and abrupt cancellation of the project.  One of them is featured (not positively) in Plunderer - Theodore Rousseau, a curator for the Metropolitan Museum of art.

The Anchorage International Film Festival in December of last year (it's January 1, 2026 as I write, 'last year' for the first time referring to 2025 [It's January 4 as I continue to review and revise this post]) showed the film  Plunderer:  The Life and Times of a Nazi Art Thief.   This film focused on one particular art dealer, Bruno Lohse, who does appear in Susan Ronald's book, but plays a much lesser role.  While Plunderer shows us at the end the seven or eight pieces Lohse had hidden in a Swiss bank vault worth perhaps $100 million, the focus is on Lohse,  who was not one of the four official Nazi art thieves, and not on the bureaucratic machine the Nazis created to steal the greatest artworks in Europe.  

[NOTE:  The movie PLUNDERER IS AVAILABLE ON PBS PASSPORT in two parts as part of the Secrets of the Dead series.] 

Plunder  came about, it appears, because the historian - Jonathan Petropoulus - who is both the narrator and a key figure in the documentary - learned the Lohse was still alive and tracked him down and interviewed several times.  He concludes that Lohse was using him to find out what he (and others presumably) knew about Lohse.  He also concluded that Lohse lied to him regularly and with great charm. The film is probably an important piece of evidence that others can use as they paint the whole picture of this operation.  I doubt this movie would have been made if Petropoulus had not had his conversations with Lohse.  

Similarly, Hitler's Art Thief got written, according to the author, by accident.  

"I was an investment banker specializing almost exclusively in the restoration of historic buildings and landscapes and their conversion to alternative use." (p. xv)   

As an investment banker she took a trip to Zurich to meet a

"prospective investor and his personal bank manager . . .it was necessary to go to the bank's vault to verify the share certificates, certificates of deposit, jewels, and art." 

While in the vault, 

"I noticed that a sliding wall was slightly ajar.  I saw the fringes of what I believed was a nineteenth-century landscape painting and the letters "RLITT" labeled beneath the frame.  Rlitt?  Gurlitt? Could that be a painting by Louis Gurlitt, the nineteenth-century landscape painter?  I wondered aloud without realizing it.  The bank manager swiveled around suddenly and glowered at me, pushing the wall shut.  "No, That's the twentieth century Nazi art dealer," he huffed. (p.2) [Louis was the grandfather of the Nazi art thief Hildebrand Gurlitt.]]

The manager realizes he's committed a serious blunder in the super secretive world of Swiss banking and blames Ronald for looking where she shouldn't be looking.  But at lunch, where the bank manager had a bit too much wine, he apologizes profusely for how he had behaved.

"The bank manager's groveling became so overwhelming that I couldn't help but feel sorry for him.  It's not often a Swiss bank manager makes such a faux pas. 

So, I was mischievous and played on his sudden change of heart helped along by his nervous drinking.  I popped the searing question, mustering my best innocent voice, and asked if there was a twentieth century dealer called Gurlitt.  Was there ever! the bank manager exclaimed.  He wasn't just any art dealer - he was Hitler's art dealer.  Hildebrand Gurlitt was his name."

That's how the author, a woman specializing in appraising art, learned about Gurlitt.   There was another trigger for her - she inherited several items of looted Nazi art as well. 

I'd note, before moving on, that I find the title, Hitler's Art Thief, a bit misleading, because there were, as I mentioned above, four officially designated Nazi art thieves and many, many others who worked with or for those four. Bruno Lohse was one of the others.  

Another pause, to catch up on details to get a sense of the magnitude. 

It says 'Massive Thefts' in the title of this post.  How massive are we talking about?

Let's just look at the value of the stash of looted paintings the heir of Hildebrand Gurlitt still had in 2013, almost 70 years after the end of WWII.  

But first a bit about Hildebrand Gurlitt's family so this makes a bit more sense..

Hildebrand Gurlitt had two children, Cornelius (born 1932) and Benita (born 1935).  They both were children during WWII while their father was traveling Europe collecting paintings and they grew up with great art.  They both were told a story about their father that made him a hero saving art from the Nazis.  Ronald paints Cornelius, who was his father's heir, as a bright, but odd child and adult. Possibly on the autism spectrum. Hildebrand died in a car crash in 1956 without having passed on to his wife or his children his secrets for how to liquidate the paintings when they needed to. Cornelius lived in his mother's Munich apartment  for 40 years after her death in 1968 with the paintings stacked in the apartment.  He never changed the name on the ownership, never paid income taxes, and never had a computer or used the internet.  And he paid everything in cash, 

The magnitude.  Ronald writes:

"There were the original 1,407 artworks found in Cornelius's Munich flat, followed by some twenty-two further paintings in the possession of his brother-in-law, followed by another sixty-odd in Austria that burgeoned to over 250 fifty [sic] artworks.  Then, belatedly, there was the Monet found in Cornelius's hospital bag after his death.  By anyone's reckoning, the looted portion of the find must be worth somewhere around a billion dollars." (pp. 319-320) (emphasis mine)

This does not include other works that Gurlitt had stashed away in Swiss bank vaults like the one that Ronald stumbled upon accidentally that got her started writing this book.  

Nor does this count what the other three official Nazi art thieves managed to run off with. Or the other art dealers who worked with them. Nor the art work in Göring's and Hitler's collections or the works.  Nor the works they managed to export and were sold in auction houses or directly to collectors.  

Ronald suggests that getting valuable paintings was an underlying motive to send Jews to death camps

I hadn't thought about this.  Probably it went well beyond the paintings.  In the book and movie Lady In Gold, if I recall correctly, we see the Nazis take over not just the art, but everything including the apartment itself.  This is mentioned also in Plunderer.  

The belongings of Jews were confiscated, in many cases, well before they were carted off to concentration camps.  Jews were forced to sell their household goods at very low prices.  I knew this in part because letters from my grandfather in Germany in the early 1940s to my father who had gotten to Chicago told of having to sell their furniture at pennies to the dollar.  In other cases, as with my step-mother, when she got out of work camps after the war and returned to her family home in Bratislava, neighbors were living in her family home and other neighbors had different pieces of furniture and silverware. They said they thought everyone was dead.  In fact my stepmother was the only survivor in her family, but it also shows that people of Bratislava had a good idea of what happened at the camps.   

It was then my stepmother decided she needed to make her way to England.  And eventually the US.

This is some of the background I already knew when I read the following in Hitler's Art Thief:

"I want to impress on the reader that it is a gross misapprehension to believe that looted art is somehow a lesser crime of the Nazi era.  Attached to each artwork is at least one human tragedy and death.  Art is intended to unite people of disparate backgrounds in a combined cultural heritage that transcends national boundaries.  It takes many forms, as literature, music, fine art, film, and more.  It connects our souls.  The wholesale theft of art from museums, private individuals, libraries, and archives was highly calculated and well organized by the criminal regime of the Third Reich." (p.5)

She comes so close to articulating that the loss is not merely the personal loss of the owners, but the loss of cultural heritage of all humans.  She continues:

"Many Jews, Christians, atheists, and political opponents lost their lives because of their collections.  Those who somehow survived never recovered the bulk of their possessions - be they artworks, real estate, stocks, jewels, cash, or gold - giving rise to new laws, restitution departments at auction houses, and an entire insurance industry." (p.5)

Again, on a personal note, my mother, after filling out extensive paper work, eventually received Wiedergutmachung  payments.  The closest English word is reparations.  The German word literally means "make good again".  I didn't know anything about this when I was young and believe that there was some token compensation for the loss of the family house and business (a mens clothing store) and I understand there was something to compensate my mother for the loss of opportunity when she was no longer allowed to go to school and the further education she would have gotten.  She did get monthly checks until she died.  

I include this because unlike most countries that have committed heinous crimes against humanity, the German government did make attempts to acknowledge what had been done, to include the Holocaust in school curricula, and in some way to compensate those who had everything taken from them.  But, of course, the millions who died in concentration camps never had the chance to apply for any compensation.  

I include this also to point out that I had personal family experiences that gave me more awareness of the holocaust than most people might have had, but I had never put so many of the pieces together to begin to understand the role that confiscating art and other property played in the Third Reich.  

Ronald goes on:

"Some artworks now reside as ill-gotten gains in museums across the world - perhaps in a museum in your hometown or where you live.  Much lingers beneath Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich [the street that holds Swiss banks with vaults protected by secrecy laws including the one vault where she first encountered the name of Hildebrand Gurwitt] and elsewhere in Switzerland.  Those who salvaged some of their heirlooms or riches remained deeply scarred, afraid, and guilty that they'd somehow survived.  Few returned to Germany, some returned to France.  They often passed on this guilt and shame to their children.  The looting of art deprived these families of a crucial link to their personal histories;  memories that remain dear beyond the value of the paintings - often mental pictures of the last time the dispossessed saw their loved ones alive." (p.5)

Other lingering issues raised:

Lack of accountability - most of the art dealers had few to no negative consequences.  Some, like Gurwitt spent time in detention while his case was examined.  But the American interrogators had various obstacles in Ronald's telling -  poor translators, no access to critical files, limited time, and the State Department's loss of interest. They had way too many cases to handle each well.   Gurliff was eventually let go. and as was made clear above, he retained an enormous fortune in stolen art.  Ronald writes that that is also true of the other art dealers.  It was also true of Bruno Lohse (from Plunderer).  The focus went to Nuremberg and those involved in killing Jews (and others) in the concentration camps.  But even that tended to be focused on the top tier.  In a footnote on page 299, Ronald writes:

"Karl Wolff was rearrested in 1962 when the trial of Adolf Eichmann presented evidence that he was responsible for the deportation of Italian Jews to concentration camps.  In 1964, he was found guilty of the deportation of Jews to Treblinka and Auschwitz and the massacre of Italian partisans.  He was released in 1969."

Getaway drivers get longer sentences than that. 

US museums and art dealers, including the biggest ones, and including Jewish dealers,  knew who they were dealing with, looked the other way, and profited from the trade of illicit art

In the movie Plunderer there's a segment on the Ivy League educated curator of the Metropolitan Museum of art, Theodore Rousseau.  

 "Rousseau began his World War II service as an assistant United States naval attaché to the American embassies in Lisbon and Madrid, Spain. At war’s end he began service with the Office of Strategic Service (OSS) and was assigned to the Art Looting Investigation Unit (ALIU). Responsible for uncovering information regarding Nazi looting, the ALIU was formed in 1944 to function as the intelligence component of the MFAA. Also assigned to the unit were Monuments Men Lt. James S. Plaut and Lt. Cdr. S. Lane Faison, Jr. After months of interrogating hundreds of Nazi officials and collaborators on the whereabouts of looted works of art, each of the three officers submitted in-depth reports regarding the three most important Nazi looting programs: the activities of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) in France (Plaut), the collection of Adolf Hitler intended for his massive Führermuseum in Linz, Austria (Faison), and the collection of Hermann Goering (Rousseau)." (From the Monuments Men and Women website)

Lohse, according to Plunderer, got out of prison in 1950.  Then he contacted the three ALIU investigators who had interrogated him.  He gained traction with Rousseau who was by then a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The link goes to a PDF - which you need to download to see - of two eulogies for Ted Rousseau on his death by Thomas Hoving, the director of the Met, and a curator, Margaretta Salinger.     

Paul Lohse (the art dealer subject of Plunderer) wrote to Rousseau after the war proposing to sell him art.  Jonathan Petropoulus, in the film, pages through a thick folder of correspondence between Lohse and Rousseau.  Petropoulus quotes Met director Hoving calling the period of the 50s and 60s "the age of piracy."  As one of the ALIU investigators  who interrogated Lohse  - who spent time in prison for his Nazi era art wheeling and dealing - Rousseau knew that the art he got from Lohse was, at best questionable and at worst stolen.  Petropoulous asserts Rousseau knew he was buying stolen art.  Lohse's name was never or rarely in the paperwork of paintings he sold, but the film makes it clear that he was skilled at hiding behind middlemen. 

Petropoulus mentions  two top art dealers in New York - Rosenberg and Stiebel and Wildestein and Company - who dealt with Lohse. They assert that the Met has 44 rooms that have at least one painting purchased from the Wildesteins.   Looted paintings were scrubbed clean on the back so the ownership couldn't be found.  

Everyone stalled, for decades and even forever, the return of artworks to their original owners

This is clear if you follow any story of a family trying to retrieve stolen art.  The film Lady in Gold is a good example.  

NOTE:  I've reread lot's of Hitler's Art Thief several times.  And watched the Plunderer again.  Each time more things fall into place.  So I don't expect too many folks to 'get' this post.  But at least maybe there will be a heads up note where you keep the Nazis and the Holocaust in your brain.  

And if you're a member of PBS - Watch Plunderer Parts 1 and 2.  

Why does this matter today?

Given that we now have a president, whose ex-wife said he kept a copy of Hitler's speeches next to his bed, and White Nationalists with swastikas rubbing elbows with the highest levels of government, we should pay attention.  Not necessarily about art.  Hitler was a would be artist.  Trump's career has been about putting up buildings with his name on them, and the schemes he uses to fund and build these edifices. He's also a master con artist and law avoider.  Characteristics he has in these conman skills in common with the Nazi art dealers who stole fortunes worth of art.  

But this is also about our inability to know everything and that's a big issue now.  Trump has broken so many norms, rules, laws, and articles of the constitution, it's hard to know where to begin.  Is there a hierarchy of sins?  

In this story there are so many issues and so many details to track down, that rumors and fantasies fill the spaces between the lines.  And often the truth, when we glimpse it, is worse than those rumors.  Where to begin?  Will only the most outrageous infractions get attention and the others slide?

For those who know little, read little, are not careful about their sources of information, it's easy to take a few stray facts and come to conclusions.  Conclusions that at best grossly simplify things.  At worst miss the truth by a wide margin.  

This whole exercise reminds me once again to be humble about what I know, to be careful about what I claim, and to let my readers know the sources of information I'm using.  

* For those who might question that statement, there's so much evidence you simply have to willfully disbelieve it. His biggest financial backer (to my knowledge) gleefully gave a Nazi salute on stage, and swastika adorned White Nationalists, regularly pledge their support for Trump.  

And a side note:  Two pages (that comes to four sides) were torn out of the index of the copy of Hitler's Art Thief I got from the library.  Who does that?  Did they want the info on those pages?  They have a camera on their phone.  Did they need paper for something?  There wasn't toilet paper in the library bathroom? I'm sure there was something else they could have used.  Is this a plot by someone named in the book to hide something?  Check the book in your library to see if pages 369-70 and 377-8 are missing.  Probably not, because then they would have taken out the pages referred to in the index.

I'm going to post this, but I may proof it one more time in the next week to edit errors and typos, and to make points more clearly.  [Tuesday January 6, 2026 - I've gone through this and made edits to make things clearer, to eliminate unnecessary duplications, fix commas.  I don't think I changed anything substantive.]

Yes, Frank, I'm Still Here - Cold and Personal Hotspots

 Frank commented on the previous post that it's been ten days since my last post.  I hadn't realized it was so long.  

It's been cold, generally between +5˚F and -7˚F (-15˚C and -21˚C) and so it takes a little more energy and mental fortitude to go outside.  But I walked over to the University library (about a mile each way) to drop off some books that were due.  I was able to do some of that inside buildings.  About half outside.  I did enjoy seeing this book displayed in the new books section:   

I was clearly enjoying my 'right to be cold.'

Then there were other details to catch up on.  Paying bills and making year end contributions to organizations that are fighting to save our democracy, feed the hungry, etc.  

Our trip to Turkey got me into the world of eSims.  These are electronic Sim cards so you are getting data service in the country you are in, not using up expensive roaming from your home phone provider - in our case ATT.  Instead of physically replacing the sim card in your phone, you canto do it electronically via the internet and it automatically turns on when you land in the host country.  In learning about eSims I realized that there are eSims for the US, and in many cases they were significantly cheaper than local internet access and even phone service.  We settled on a company called Saily which worked fine. 

I have been doing battle with Alaska Communication Service (ACS), formerly Anchorage Telephone Utility (ATU) for a while.  Our internet speed is miserable (1 MBPS) and despite three years of promises of fiber, nothing has changed.  So, before our trip, I cut off our granherdfathered in landline/internet package and vowed to use eSim or find something better when we got back.  

It turned out I could use our ATT unlimited data and a personal hotspot with my laptop.  Bingo.

Well, not quite so fast.  I got a text from ATT that my 10GB per month limit for personal hotspot was

75% used up by the tenth day of our billing cycle.  I checked our bill - J does that bill - and it says unlimited data.  There's nothing on there about personal hotspots.  I went to ATT and talked to the guy I'd talked to before our trip to Turkey.  I liked him then and I still do.  He said that yes there was a 10GB limit to personal hotspot.  It wasn't on the bill, but it was in the contract which he brought up on his tablet.  We have an over 55 package, which he told me was only available for three months and adding 20GB (for a total of 30GB per month of hotspot) would be an extra $34 and I'd have to buy a different plan, though my wife could stay in the old plan.  No, I couldn't simply buy 20GB and patch it on the the plan, you have to buy a whole plan that has more GB of personal hotspot use. And because the over 55 plan was no longer available, I couldn't go back to it if I didn't like the new one.  

We discussed the eSim options. He told me he uses personal hotspot for his internet, and I left saying I'd check what was available before committing to the new plan.

Turns out ATT's $34 for 20GB is not a bad price.  But I was able to get 20GB through Saily for $23 for a month.  But that was a special, normally it's $30, which is not much less that ATT's $34.  But when I was looking for eSims for our trip, I saw that prices change rapidly and constantly.

You do have to go into settings and then the cellular section of your phone and add the eSim which I did.  It's not without obstacles, but it's not that hard.  And Saily has a good chat option that worked well when I needed it.  

After a day and a half I was down to 18.2 GB.  What was happening?  Turns out I was using the Saily instead of my ATT for my data on my phone.  So I've remedied that (back to the cellular section of settings and shutting off Saily when I didn't need it) and we'll see how long the original 20GB last.  I can still use the ATT for personal hotspot, but at a drastically slower speed - worse even than our ACS internet speed.  But knowing that I can plan.  For instance, opening this blogger page and writing here was reasonable.  But uploading pictures wasn't working, so I turned on Saily to do that, then turned it off.  (I know some of you are rolling your eyes and saying it's not worth all that trouble.  But I have a 1997 car with a tape deck, no heated seats, and no video for backing up and no hookup to charge my phone.  People are addicted to luxuries that didn't even exist 30 years ago and they are paying for them as well.)

It would be easier to just go with the old ACS, but even though we were grandfathered in to the landline/internet package, they kept raising the price.  The email addresses that had been free were now $5 a piece.  The free 100 minutes of interstate calls now was $5 a month too.  We never used that but they said it was part of the package and couldn't be waived.  Then there's the $25 late fee if you don't pay the bill by the exact due date.  No grace period any more.  While I was traveling I couldn't pay the bill, because when I went on line to pay, instead of their website, I got a page saying the country I was in (Tükiye) was blocked.  

And instead of sending me an email saying my bill is due in a few days, like VISA does and Chugach Electric does, they send that email the day after it was due.  The other utilities have grace periods and their late fees are either a percentage of the bill or much less than ACS's $25.  This is clearly deliberate.  If a thousand customers pay a $25 late fee, that's $25,000 a month, $300,000 a year.  I've asked to get the name of the CEO so I could write a letter.  None of their officers are on their website.   Wikipedia lists Matthew McConnell as the president and CEO and the parent company as ATN International. [They list the officers now, and the CEO is not Matthew McConnell]  They are owned by a Massachusetts  company - ATN International -  and the most I could get out them was that some of the officers live in Anchorage.  

So now I'm down to two emails with ACS.  I've set up substitute emails.  One is for this website.  The new one is listed in the right hand column.  And I got a $25 late fee charge for a $10 bill for the two emails!  It's called predatory and this sort of ruthless business is supported by the Trump administration which has taken off the limits to these kinds of charges that were introduced by Biden administration.  

I just have to go through the other alaska.net email so I can be sure I replace that address with the new one for organizations that need to contact me.  And I need to hear from.

And so, even if the personal hotspot adds an extra step or two to get my laptop connected to the internet, I think it's worth it (certainly it's much cheaper).  But also because the tech world is constantly changing our options and researching eSims before our trip enlightened me to this new option.  I feel like I'm only 10 or 20 years behind the times.

OK.  I guess I'll stop here.  I was going to skim over a number of other things I've been doing, but clearly I'm not good at skimming.  Often my titles get written after the post because I'm not sure what the post is going to cover.  The combination of cold and personal hotspots is a very accidental title, but I love it.  

So Frank, thanks for reminding me I needed to get back on here.  

Topics that got left out:

• Hitler's Art Thief
• Sunday solidarity meeting
• Chanukah party
• David Brown, author
• Gaining daylight after the solstice
• Flowers blooming inside 
• Replacing my lost VISA card
• AIFF2025 left over posts to write

The Museum of Innocence

“3 We don’t need more museums that try to construct the historical narratives of a society, community, team, nation, state, tribe, company, or species. We all know that the ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are richer, more humane, and much more joyful.​

4 Demonstrating the wealth of Chinese, Indian, Mexican, Iranian, or Turkish history and culture is not an issue—it must be done, of course, but it is not difficult to do. The real chal­lenge is to use museums to tell, with the same brilliance, depth, and power, the stories of the individual human beings living in these countries.

5 The measure of a museum’s success should not be its ability to represent a state, a nation or company, or a particular history. It should be its capacity to reveal the humanity of individuals.”        

    -Orphan Pamuk, Manifesto of the Museum of Innocence  

I started the book Istanbul by Turkish Nobel Prize winner Orphan Pamuk before we left for Turkey.  It was going to help me get a feel for the neighborhoods of Istanbul.  

But in Istanbul, I learned of another Pamuk book that people recommended. The Museum of Innocence. An intriguing aspect was the fact that there is a Museum of Innocence in Istanbul that is related to the book. More than that.  It’s part of the book.  So much so that if you have a copy of the book, you get in free.  Mine was an audio book from the library so I didn’t get in free.

The Museum of Innocence - The book

Kemal is part of the post Ottoman Empire 1970s elite.  Rich, educated, well travelled, and engaged to even richer Sibel. But one day he reconnects with Füsun, a cousin, part of a poorer side of the family,  he hasn’t seen since she was a child.  They begin a passionate love affair that takes over his life and the book.  

In telling this bizarre and tragically obsessive love story, Pamuk also reveals layers of socio-economic webs that capture and tie together the people of Istanbul. 

There’s the decaying legacy of the Ottoman Empire, which the elite try to cover with European fashion and culture, though the physical remnants of thousands of years of Byzantine and Ottoman engineering and architecture dominates people’s lives.   

A key theme, I’m guessing the theme of the book’s title, involves the difference between what’s allowed of men and women.  Virginity before marriage is daringly challenged by upper class women who flirt with European mores, but ultimately they live in Turkey and even the chic look down on marrying women who have slept with someone other than their fiancee.  

Kemal has taken the virginity of both his fiancée and his lover.  In the first instance it would not be a problem if they didn’t break off the engagement.  In the latter case, we learn late in the book, it does, very much matter to Füsun. 

There’s also a fair amount on Turkish cinemas and movies.  

I have to admit that at one point I was getting weary of Kemal’s over-the-top obsession with Füsun.  But I’m sure there are readers who can relate to that situation better.  And it all works - as a novel and as a museum - in the end.  

Listening to the book, means I got to hear how names and places were pronounced, but not how they were spelled.  So some neighborhoods challenged me as I tried to locate them on maps.  But overall, the book gave me a richer sense of Istanbul than I would have otherwise noticed, and also reminded me how Istanbul was wrapped in millennia of nuance that I would never come close to understanding.  

The Museum of Innocence - The Museum

It’s easier to do pictures from a museum, than from a book - especially an audio book.  

The Galata Tower is a major landmark in Istanbul. This first picture is from the Istanbul Modern (the modern art museum.). The tower is the one on the left.  The other one is a minaret from a mosque.  

Here we see the Tower from across the Golden Horn in Eminönü.  The Galata bridge is the black line that goes from the middle of the left side across the water.     Below you see it much closer up.  

The map should give map people a better sense of things.  The Galata Tower is pretty much in the middle of the map.  The Museum of Innocence is about where the red marker is.  Istanbul Modern is toward the water below the blue marker that says European side.  

The picture looking out over the water was taken a bit to the right of the southern side of the bridge, about where it says “Hamam.” 

(All the land here is on the European Side.  The waterway going up to the left is the Golden Horn which has a series of bridges and ferries crossing it.  The Asian side would be in the right, but isn’t shown.)

The hotel we stayed at when we were in Istanbul, was right near the mosque (Ayasofia) at the bottom. 

This is all pretty close.  From our hotel to the museum was maybe 4 or 5 km.  

The ‘start’ on the map is where we started up the hills to the Museum.  Though we went by the Galata Tower on the way. Not very direct.

The streets are cobblestone, steep, and narrow.  Sometimes cars come through.  More often motorcycles.  

The Museum of Innocence is in an old house in a neighborhood near where much of the book takes place.  All the cabinets are labeled by chapter and are filled with items which Kemal says he collected during the events of the book, but which the author, who is a minor character in the book, said came from various collections and from thrift shops,

Each cabinet (or larger display) is numbered with the corresponding chapter of the book.
 

The sign at the bottom of this one says:

“In those days [1970s], even in Istanbul’s most affluent Westernized circles, a young girl who ‘gave herself’ to a man before marriage could still expect to be judged harshly and face serious consequences:  If a man tried to avoid marrying the girl, and the girl in question was under eighteen years of age, an angry father might take the philanderer to court to force him to marry her.  It was the custom for newspapers to run photographs with black bands over the “violated” girls’ eyes.  Because the press used the same device in photographs of adulteresses, rape victims, and prostitutes, the photographs of women with black bands over their eyes were so numerous that reading a Turkish newspaper in those days was like wandering through a masquerade.”

On the fourth floor is the bed where Kemal and Füsun met.

New Inspiration From A Long Time Hero

Just in the opening intro to Robert Caro’s Working, I was inspired to take on a project I’d put off for a couple of years now.  Caro reads his audio book and talks about how when writing the Power Broker he realized he needed to document the human cost of all the parkways and bridges and slum clearance Robert Moses built.  I have such a project to pursue in Anchorage.

I guess I’m getting ahead of myself.  My bookclub is reading Working this month, and while the time zones don’t work out for me to zoom in, Caro has been a hero of mine for just about 50 years.  Caro’s first big book - The Power Broker - is about Robert Moses who created  a mesh of overlapping ‘authorities’ - park authorities, transportation authorities, port authorities - that gave him a working income that he controlled and the power to create public works projects that transformed the landscape of New York City.  I should be clear - Caro never found any indication that Moses was in this business to make money, but rather to fulfill his visions of how to create infrastructure that would improve life for New Yorkers.  They money he made through tolls and bonds went to build his vision.  

Caro tells us in the intro that he wanted to understand how Caro had wielded so much power for close to 50 years, power over mayors, governors, and other elected  officials, though he had never been elected to any office.  He talks about advice he  (Caro) got early on about doing research on documents - read every page.  

Caro worked full time on The Power Broker for over five years.  It came out in Fall of 1974 about when I’d finished my Masters in Public Administration and was working on my doctorate.  And I would have read it right after it came out - maybe the Spring of 1975.  And as I started teaching as a doctoral student, The Power Broker, at least parts of it (it’s over 1100 pages) were part of the readings in my intro class until I retired.  One of the questions I had about the book - as did many others - was how did Caro find out all the stuff he had on Moses.  This book answers that question 

I’ve mentioned “Thick Description” several times lately, and as I listened to Caro talking about the need to get the stories of the people Moses displaced with his projects, I realized this was an example of thick description as well.  (I hadn’t thought about that before since I’d been using Caro’s book long before I’d heard about thick description.). https://whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/2015/07/who-am-i-who-are-you.