Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art

by Darsie Alexander (Author), Sam Sackeroff (Author), Julia Voss (Contributor), Mark Wasiuta (Contributor)

By the end of World War II an estimated one million artworks and 2.5 million books had been seized from their owners by Nazi forces; many were destroyed. The artworks and cultural artifacts that survived have traumatic, layered histories. This book traces the biographies of these objects—including paintings, sculpture, and Judaica—their rescue in the aftermath of the war, and their afterlives in museums and private collections and in our cultural understanding. In examining how this history affects the way we view these works, scholars discuss the moral and aesthetic implications of maintaining the association between the works and their place within the brutality of the Holocaust—or, conversely, the implications of ignoring this history.