Touches You

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

If stripping a country of its art is akin to rape, then "The Rape of Europa" should be labeled a snuff film in the abstract sense. The Nazis not only violated the architecture of each city, they eviscerated it, by leveling everything they came in contact with to the ground. Germany penetrated so many European mothers, the audience may feel bludgeoned by the monotony of their serial greediness. "The Rape of Europa" gets repetitive but that's not the fault of the filmmaker. He has to tell the whole story; to leave any country out would be unconscionable, even though an unabridged comprehensiveness to the Nazis' relentless plundering of Europe's most prized possessions inevitably leads to audience fatigue. By the time the Nazis reach Russia, we're spent, exhausted, by their insatiability for beautiful things.Adolph Hitler was a real piece of work, wasn't he? But are we ourselves, entirely innocent? If Gustav Klimt's "Gold Portrait of Frau Bloch-Bauer can sell at auction for $135 million dollars, doesn't such an exorbitant price make us accidental Nazi sympathizers in the sense that we too place such a high value on art over the welfare of people? Think about how many mouths $135 million dollars could feed. A human life must be cheap; that's why people kill each other all the time without a second thought. Conversely, no sane person alive would willfully stick a knife or squeeze a bullet into a Vermeer.In "Schindler's List", Spielberg shows us a glimpse of the coordinated system by which the Nazis robbed the Jews, in a train station scene where officials instruct the doomed men and women to label their luggage as a way of obscuring their impending liquidation with faux-rationality. The train leaves, but the suitcases and bags stay behind. In a small back room, the suitcases are opened up and its contents are sorted out, itemized, and appraised. In bringing the story of material dispossession to the foreground, "The Rape of Europa" goes on record as being the only film about the holocaust with a happy ending. After the war ended, the art was recovered, and cultural heritages were kept intact.Is a work of art equal to a human life? Of course, not. That's why an exhibit like "Bodies"(the cadavers of Chinese dissidents as representational art) gets under people's skins. The corpses, fascinating as they may be, goes against human nature, because it sides with art; it treats the unclaimed bodies like a rumor.

How much is a life worth? How much is a great cultural work of art worth? It's impossible to assign a value to either, except to say they both are invaluable. The Rape of Europa is a fine, fascinating documentary about the German plunder of significant art during WWII, organized as meticulously as the Germans organized the murder of millions of human beings. This film illustrates and explains the wholesale looting on a vast scale of easily a fifth of Europe's significant cultural treasures. And where these treasures were considered a part of Jewish or Slavic culture, they were destroyed. While the Nazi leaders were psychopathic, racist thugs, it's important to remember that their crimes were made possible by all those German men and women, mostly not Nazis, who worked each day at making stealing and killing possible, then returned to their homes to play with their children, eat their braised rabbit, make love to their spouses and then start the next day again. One can't plead ignorance when one is filling a syringe with poison in a mental institution, or attaching explosives to a beautiful Renaissance bridge, or typing an order for more pencils while smelling the near-by crematoriums at work. This is the banality of evil that makes widespread evil possible. Hitler was fascinated by art. He considered himself an artist of the first rank. As German dictator, he was determined to bring to Germany all the great art of Europe. He had plans for a huge art museum at Linz, his childhood home. He determined what was good art and was not art (modern art was Jewish art, in his view, and should be destroyed). With German thoroughness, his minions drew up of lists of cultural treasures, raided public and private museums in occupied countries, destroyed what they disapproved up, and organized incredible amounts of transport to bring this art into Germany. All the while, taking their cue from Hitler and Goering, Nazi functionaries and German Army officer suddenly became passionate art collectors. All they had to do was take what they wanted. German bureaucrats knew what they were after even as German troops invaded a country. For Slavic countries like Poland, it was a matter more of destroying a culture than taking the art. When German soldiers were at the front in need of clothes, ammunition and supplies, when gasoline was always in short supply, thousands of boxcars were filled with looted art and sent by special trains back to Germany, continuing even as the war was almost over. When Allied bombing began in earnest and when the invasion of Italy began, it became clear that, while the Allies did not know the extent of German looting, widespread destruction of Europe's cultural heritage by the Allies should be avoided where possible. Thanks to Dwight Eisenhower, a small group of young American artists, curators and art historians were recruited to join the Army and identify and try to preserve what they could as the fighting moved forward. These men, called the monuments men, are the heroes of this story. There were fewer than four hundred of them doing a risky job with few resources and not much clout. They performed incredible feats of preservation, working to save great art and return it from where it was looted. If the first half of The Rape of Europa is shocking, even after so many years have passed, the second half is almost redeeming. For these men, several of whom are interviewed, their work was clearly intensely satisfying. They were saving an essential part of what makes us civilized. The Rape of Europa covers a great deal of ground, perhaps too much, but it all is fascinating. Probably separate documentaries could be made about the immense effort it has been taking to make museums today return works of art they possess to the descendants of those who once owned the art...or to the young German who now has undertaken to return looted Torah crowns to the Jewish descendants...or the huge work during the war of museum curators and staff to pack and hide their museums' art from the Germans...or to the middle-aged, unremarkable French woman who was able to secretly keep lists of individual works of art and their destinations that the Germans were sending out of Paris...or the behavior of the German armies in Italy who destroyed without rational reason great historical buildings and bridges as they retreated north...or all that art the Soviets looted from Germany which now sits in the thousands in the basements of Russian museums. What separates humanity from other animals is that we create art...and that we are so easily led to destroy the art we create, as well as to kill vast numbers of our brothers and sisters.

European museums are filled with antiquities from all over the world. Did the Louvre hide those treasures, or were they forgotten by the German Army – or by these film makers in the editing room? The truth is that "war-booty" is a common European cultural heritage. Change the subject to the art and artifacts of conquests and murders in the past and the debate is very different. The New World Peoples have their religious artifacts strewn throughout European museums. When will they be returned? That's not the subject of the film some would say. Wrong! That's exactly the subject of the film, but we see only the part of the debate the film makers want to show us, as if the German army invented "war-booty," as if European "art" were the only valuables in the subject museums.Where is the concern about the "plundered" antiquities in Iraq? The film makers look at the past and make no comment about the "plundering" occurring today? These film makers believe the entire world is blind and in doing so show their own blindness. Return all antiquities/art to the countries from which they were removed.

"There are a hundred thousand men born to live and die who will not be as valuable to the world as one canvas." Sherwood Anderson The Nazis disposed of more than 6 million Jews; we may never know how many works of art they plundered from the great museums and private residences of Europe, but it's safe to estimate those works in the millions as well. The estimable documentary Rape of Europa gives a sometimes beautiful account of the loss at the hands of Adolph Hitler, a failed artist with a dream of building a world-class monument in his Austrian hometown of Linz, and his sybaritic lieutenant, Hermann Goering.The atrocities are counterbalanced by the heroic efforts of Europeans and American Monuments Men to save the works, the former spiriting the art away to alpine hideouts and the latter helping allied bombers avoid museums and scrupulously cataloging the returning pieces. The transportation of the fragile Winged Victory from the Louvre to the countryside is more exciting than any modern CGI masterpiece.Almost as an afterthought, the film shows the incomprehensible destruction of churches and homes whose ancient architectures are cultural museums themselves. I had forgotten the extent of the damage inflicted by both the Germans and the Allies on medieval cities.In a tone of reverence, a bit like the understatement of Night and Fog, narrator Joan Allen recounts the horror of Nazis carelessly trucking away priceless masterpieces during invasions and bombing bridges and museums vindictively as they retreat. Meanwhile an obscure clerk is heroically marking down the transactions so that 60 years later works can be returned to their rightful owners.Gustav Klimt's "Gold Portrait of Frau Bloch-Bauer," which opens the documentary, eventually is returned to its rightful owners and later fetches $135 million at auction. Such a transaction is a crass vindication of the atrocities, but such symbolism is all we may have left to remind us, as this documentary so incisively does, that demons roamed the earth stealing the soul out of whole civilizations.