Art and Ethnic Hatred : Anti-Semitism is far from dead in formerly communist Europe

Last Monday, Germany formally returned seven major French artworks to France. The seven--including two important paintings by Claude Monet, “The Louveciennes Road” and “Snow at Sunset”--were among 28 works confiscated from French Jews by the Nazis and held in more recent years by the communist regime in East Germany. All 28 works are now to be returned. The ceremonial transfer of the first seven by Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Kohl to France’s President Francois Mitterrand opened a two-day conference on a variety of political and economic subjects.

The transfer made little news in the United States, but it may be read as yet another reminder that communism did not just keep the lid on the caldron of ethnic hatreds in Eastern Europe; in many ways it actively kept that pot boiling.

Internationalist in its founding years, communism in power covered over its failings by appealing to majority chauvinism against ethnic minorities. The Russification of national minorities in the Soviet Union is the best-known example of this, but there were others: Communist Romania, for example, was brutal with its Hungarian minority.

And virtually everywhere in the Eastern Bloc anti-Semitism was not just tolerated but fostered. Bolshevism-come-to-power appealed to supposed peasant authenticity against capitalism as Jewish and as “cosmopolitan” just as pre-World War II fascism had pitted peasants against allegedly Jewish, “cosmopolitan” Bolshevism.

Western Europe’s postwar recovery from prewar anti-Semitism, such as it has been, has not been matched in Eastern Europe. Reunited Germany’s return of East Germany’s loot to the French is a clear and honorable step in the right direction, but it is also a reminder of how long a journey remains to be made.