Peary, as everyone knows, achieved the North Pole in 1909–but only with the aid of the Thule Inuhuit of Northwest Greenland (the so-called Polar Eskimos, sometimes also called Inuit.) The Thule people, who were particularly fond of Peary’s Inuhuit-speaking companion, the remarkable African-American explorer Matthew Henson, provided the decisive margin of ecological knowledge and survival skill for a goal that most of them considered absurd. And before Haberstock, there was Robert E. The Augsburg museum, at least, only exhibits stolen Jewish art, not the original owners’ heads our great halls of science, by contrast, jealously hoard the remains (pickled brains especially) of thousands of Native Americans as well as their looted culture. From a Native American perspective, our national flagship museums of ethnography–Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian, the Field (in Chicago) and the Peabody (at Harvard University)–are little more than charnel houses built by grave robbers whose deprecations we continue to celebrate as heroic feats of exploration and science. Yet we should not feel too smug about our own marble trophy cases of empire. Otherwise the museum refuses continuing requests to open its archives or acknowledge the sinister provenance of its treasures.
Three salons of purloined art in the Schaetzle Palace now glorify the philanthropy of the “Haberstock Foundation.” After a storm of protest from the World Jewish Congress, curators have removed their benefactor’s noble bust from the entrance. Its collection of Baroque masterpieces was assembled by the infamous Karl Haberstock, Hitler’s favorite art pimp, who prized paintings from Holocaust victims while other Nazi thugs were pulling out their fillings.
We are most recently reminded of this elementary fact by the controversy over the Augsburg Municipal Art Museum in Bavaria.
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