Sections offered SPRING 2022:

CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd S&H credit; COLL (CASE) S&H Breadth of Inquiry credit

Class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html

For permission to enroll, email rsteele@indiana.edu and include university ID number

In May 1945, US Army Major Ralph E. Pearson came upon a vast collection of paintings in the salt mines of Altaussee, Austria. These paintings taken from museums, galleries, and private collections all over Europe, and including masterpieces like Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altar and Vermeer’s “Painter in his Studio,” demonstrated more than the Nazis’ brutal pursuit of spoils of war. As attentive observers of Nazi cultural politics already understood, this collection reflected the extraordinary importance the Nazis attributed to the visual arts. The Nazis’ explosive interventions into the field of the visual arts domestically and internationally raise questions that have only gained in importance over time. The period since 1989 in particular has seen a burst of interest in the Nazis’ looting of art and concerted international efforts to return stolen property to its pre-war owners. Moreover, the nature of the relationship between Nazism (and fascism) and the arts has attracted new attention, reflecting the search for new ways of theorizing the workings of power through cultural and aesthetic practices.

Exploring the Third Reich and the postwar struggle to come to terms with the regime’s legacy, be it in legal, artistic or institutional terms, this class stresses the connection between cultural production and historical context. To enable students to engage critically this crucial connection and its assessment in (mostly recent) scholarship, the class pursues a twofold approach: we will combine the introduction to the era’s major events and basic ideological framework with a close look at the aesthetic objects under discussion. In so doing, we will juxtapose different forms of reading and analyses, explicitly framing topics in terms of both content and medium. This allows us to shed light on the ways in which the role of an artifact shifts when looked at from different disciplinary perspectives (art history, history, law, journalism, literature). In turn, the class asks how these various perspectives shape the way we think and write about the subject matter. Taking Leopold von Ranke’s 1831 dictum “History is a science and an art” as our motto, the class aims to hone students’ analytic skills as much in the area of object study and textual analysis as in the arena of methodology and conceptual thinking, thus teaching them that any form of (art) historical writing, including their own for this class, is inevitably a creative act shaped by the viewpoint, expressive possibilities, and cultural background of its author. This lesson aims to sharpen students’ self-awareness as both writers and readers and provide them with a sophisticated tool kit which they can apply to their academic pursuit broadly perceived—and beyond.