National Treasures explores the fate of French art and heritage during the Nazi occupation of France, revealing the roots of contemporary cultural policy in the Vichy era and exposing a hidden convergence of resistance and collaboration in French museology.

Defending National Treasures explores the fate of art and cultural heritage during the Nazi occupation of France. The French cultural patrimony was a crucial locus of power struggles between German and French leaders and among influential figures in each country. Karlsgodt examines the preservation policy that the Vichy regime enacted in an assertion of sovereignty over French art museums, historic monuments, and archeological sites. The limits to this sovereignty are apparent from German appropriations of public statues, Jewish-owned art collections, and key "Germanic" works of art from French museums. A final chapter traces the lasting impact of the French wartime reforms on preservation policy. In Defending National Treasures, Karlsgodt introduces the concept of patrimania to reveal examples of opportunism in art preservation. During the war, French officials sought to acquire coveted artwork from Jewish collections for the Louvre and other museums; in the early postwar years, they established a complicated guardianship over unclaimed art recovered from Germany. A cautionary tale for our own times, Defending National Treasures examines the ethical dimensions of museum acquisitions in the ongoing noble quest to preserve great works of art.

Between 1942 and 1944 the Germans sealed and completely emptied at least 38,000 Parisian apartments. The majority of the furnishings and other household items came from 'abandoned' Jewish apartments and were shipped to Germany. After the war, Holocaust survivors returned to Paris to discover their homes completely stripped of all personal possessions or occupied by new inhabitants. In 1945, the French provisional government established a Restitution Service to facilitate the return of goods to wartime looting victims. Though time-consuming, difficult, and often futile, thousands of people took part in these early restitution efforts. Stealing Home demonstrates that attempts to reclaim one's furnishings and personal possessions were key in efforts to rebuild Jewish political and social inclusion in the war's wake. Far from remaining silent, Jewish survivors sought recognition of their losses, played an active role in politics, and turned to both the government and each other for aid. Drawing on memoirs, oral histories, restitution claims, social workers' reports, newspapers, and government documents, Stealing Home provides a social history of the period that focuses on Jewish survivors' everyday lives during the lengthy process of restoring citizenship and property rights. It examines social rebirth through the prism of restitution and argues that the home was critical in shaping the postwar relationship between Jews and the state, and in the successes and failures associated with rebuilding Jewish lives in France after the Holocaust.

Built around 1200 and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site that draws more than a million visitors and pilgrims each year, Chartres Cathedral is one of the jewels of Western Civilization. How Chartres Cathedral and its priceless stained glass (today the largest such collection in one location) survived World War II’s widespread destruction of cultural monuments is one of the great stories of recent history. Saving the Light at Chartres begins half a decade before World War II, when a young French architect developed a plan to save the cathedral’s precious stained glass. As war engulfed Europe in the fall of 1939, master glass artisans dismantled the hundreds of windows, and soldiers, tradesmen, and laborers with local volunteers crated thousands of glass panels, stowed them in the crypt, and months later—just before German invaders reached Chartres—hauled them across the country to an underground quarry. This effort to save the stained glass is but a prologue. By August 1944, the U.S. Army had broken out of Normandy and was racing across France toward Paris and the Seine. Chartres became a key battleground. Allied bombing blew out the cathedral’s temporary window coverings, and when the Americans—assisted by French Resistance fighters—entered the city in the face of unexpectedly heavy defiance and snipers in the cathedral, many soldiers believed German artillery spotters were occupying the cathedral’s spires. When Colonel Welborn Griffith Jr.—a senior operations officer of Twentieth Corps in Patton’s Third Army—arrived, some were pressing to countermand the army’s standing order to avoid the cathedral and threatened to destroy it to neutralize the German spotters. Griffith was skeptical. He inspected the cathedral himself, climbed its towers, but found no Germans, so he rang the bell, waved an American flag, and ordered that the cathedral be spared, saving it from destruction. Griffith would be killed later that day. Victor Pollak tells both stories—the rescue of the windows and Colonel Griffith’s fateful role—in a compelling narrative. Saving the Light at Chartres honors the government and local teams who saved the windows, the Resistance that performed a vital role in the liberation of Chartres, Welborn Griffith, and the enduring treasure that is Chartres Cathedral.

Sidney's Defence of Poesy—the foundational text of English poetics—is generally taken to present a model of poetry as ideal: the poet depicts ideals of human conduct and readers are inspired to imitate them. Catherine Bates sets out to challenge this received view. Attending very closely to Sidney's text, she identifies within it a model of poetry that is markedly at variance from the one presumed, and shows Sidney's text to be feeling its way toward a quite different—indeed, a de-idealist—poetics. Following key theorists of the new economic criticism, On Not Defending Poetry shows how idealist poetics, like the idealist philosophy on which it draws, is complicit with the money form and with the specific ills that attend upon it: among them, commodification, fetishism, and the abuse of power. Against culturally approved models of poetry as profitable—as benefiting the individual and the state, as providing (in the form of intellectual, moral, and social capital) a quantifiable yield—the Defence reveals an unexpected counter-argument: one in which poetry is modelled, rather, as pure expenditure, a free gift, a net loss. Where a supposedly idealist Defence sits oddly with Sidney's literary writings—which depict human behaviour that is very far from ideal—a de-idealist Defence does not. In its radical reading of the Defence, this book thus makes a decisive intervention in the field of early modern studies, while raising larger questions about a culture determined to quantify the 'value' of the humanities and to defend the arts on those grounds alone.

“Succeeds in explaining how and why a war-ravaged city suffering acute shortages invested its scant resources in protecting and reconstructing monuments.” —Slavonic and East European Review Saving Stalin’s Imperial City is the history of the successes and failures in historic preservation and of Leningraders’ determination to honor the memory of the terrible siege the city had endured during World War II. The book stresses the counterintuitive nature of Stalinist policies, which allocated scarce wartime resources to save historic monuments of the tsarist and imperial past even as the very existence of the Soviet state was being threatened, and again after the war, when housing, hospitals, and schools needed to be rebuilt. Postwar Leningrad was at the forefront of a concerted restoration effort, fueled by commemorations that glorified the city’s wartime experience, encouraged civic pride, and mobilized residents to rebuild their hometown. For Leningrad, the restoration of monuments and commemorations of the siege were intimately intertwined, served similar purposes, and were mutually reinforcing. “A most welcome addition to the historiography of Europe’s bombed cities and their reconstruction after World War II.” —Journal of Modern History

Museum Worthy examines the history behind works of art that were looted in western Europe by the Nazis during the Second World War and never returned to their rightful owners, instead claimed by postwar governments of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands for display in museums, embassies, ministries, and other public buildings.