Postwar
Poetry
As the Allies stood knee-deep in the rubble of European victory, they cast about for swastika-stamped souvenirs.
What they nabbed was a legendary hoard: nothing less than the written history and imagination of all Nazidom—
dissertations, blueprints, correspondences, expositions, archives schematics, abstracts, treatises, manifestos, patents, ethnographies.
Everyone wanted it, but only members of the large-predator guild could possess it. There came a wild scramble by a swarm
of government agencies—self-rationalizing actors seeking to further national interests. Dollars and Machiavellian statecraft were employed
in the name of cultural restitution (nobody wanted to say intellectual reparations—“reparations” being a term out of style
since the Treaty of Versailles). In the following geopolitical scrum they snarled, tore, clawed. Bigger was better. The scavengers were left
with the watery dregs, igniting decades of vicious litigation— a caesural crisis portending conflicts to come.
Author’s Note
By now, if only from viewing a trailer for the 2014 film, most everyone has heard of The Monuments Men. Its bureaucratic acronym was MFAA (Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives). A creature of the Roosevelt administration, it was tasked with the salvage and repatriation of cultural objects—painting, statues, etc.—across Europe after WWII. But the MFAA had a less conspicuous governmental counterpart called the Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications (whew)—the IDC.
The IDC was interested in paper. Fittingly, and at least publicly, it was made up of librarians, archivists, and microfilm technicians. Less publicly, it employed spies, journalists, black marketeers, and opportunists of every stripe. Some of this paper chase was portrayed as altruistic in its return of looted religious texts such as Torah scrolls. But the sharp end of their activity was directed, covertly, toward military and industrial intelligence. Bookshop and library inventories were subject to confiscation. Much of what was carried off was determined by whose country’s field agents got there first. In recently liberated Paris, one rookie IDC book-hunter commandeered a cache of French industrial patent abstracts concerned with rockets and jet propulsion. He requisitioned a two-and-a-half-ton truck and sent the lot stateside, never mind that they should have been returned to the French authorities.
Understandably, hardship and confusion reigned in Europe in the aftermath of the fighting. While trainloads of seized documents rolled across shifting borders, both citizens and infantrymen burned paper to stay warm. A junk dealer who scavenged the wartime diaries of Joseph Goebbels from a bombed-out Berlin ministry sold them to an American intelligence officer for five cartons of cigarettes. It will never be known how many books were stolen from homes and museums by individual French, British, and American soldiers.
It all came down to the Western powers versus Russia as they jockeyed for geopolitical dominance in what would predictably evolve into the Cold War, a struggle that only ended in 1991 with the collapse of the USSR. But its ending has done little to dampen the worldwide obsession with accumulating knowledge about one’s neighbors. Nowadays, political power, even more so, turns on the collection and spin of information. Paper documents and hard drives are primary spoils in every theater of conflict. Let the winners take all—until History shifts once again.
“Postwar” was inspired by a book review of Warrior Librarians by Kathy Peiss. The reviewer was Neal Ascherson in The London Review of Books.