BERLIN.  Research presented in Berlin for  the first time at the end of last year has tarnished the reputation of  Wilhelm von Bode (1845-1929), the former director general of the Kaiser  Friedrich-Museum, now called the Bode Museum. It was renamed after Bode  in 1956 when the Communist East German government decided to shed the  museum’s imperial name. Bernhard Maaz, the director of Dresden’s  Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister and Kupferstich-Kabinett, revealed in a  lecture marking 50 years of the national museums’ central archive  (Zentralarchiv der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin), that Bode—despite his  respect for the artist Max Liebermann and the fact that his museum was  subsidised by a number of German-Jewish sponsors—displayed strong  anti-semitic tendencies in his letters to Hans Posse, a protégé of Bode  who was appointed director of Dresden’s Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in  1910. 
Maaz quoted some of  Bode’s correspondence in his lecture at Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie.  In a letter to Posse in 1927 Bode wrote: “I have one serious reservation  about your candidate [Nikolaus Pevsner, applying for a scholarship at  the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence], which I have indeed  already expressed openly to you: his race.” 
Bode  has traditionally been viewed with a certain amount of reverence within  the Berlin museum sector, although art historians may already be  familiar with Bode’s anti-semitism from reading his memoir, Mein Leben  (published posthumously in 1930), in which, for example, he denounces  what he calls the Verjüdelung (increasing Jewishness) of German social  and professional circles in 1918, after the end of the first world war. 
Unfortunately,  Bode’s viewpoint reflects the attitude of the vast majority of  Germany’s ultra-conservative bourgeoisie of the period. The fact that  the “candidate” in this case, Pevsner, was to become a key figure in art  history, shows that excellence was powerless in the face of the  prevailing anti-semitism.
It  is the ambiguity of both Bode’s and Posse’s character which is  intriguing. Although Posse backed students like Pevsner, he was later to  become Hitler’s envoy for the Sonderauftrag (special commission) set up  in 1939 to amass an art collection for the planned Führermuseum in  Linz. For Posse’s role in the assembly of the collection—which included  works seized from Jewish collectors—later generations discredited him as  an art historian.
But,  according to Maaz, Posse’s role needs to be re-evaluated as he made  significant achievements prior to his recruitment by Hitler, including a  comprehensive overhaul of Dresden’s Gemäldegalerie. In 1926 he staged  an international exhibition presenting the avant-garde as the valid  German art form of its time. The show featured works by Otto Dix and Max  Beckmann, among others.   
A  large selection of works in his Galerie Neue Meister, then part of  Dresden’s Gemäldegalerie, were confiscated by the Nazis for being  “degenerate” and Posse was forced into retirement in 1938. Hitler  rehabilitated him for his own purposes, perhaps, Maaz suggests, because  his promotion of “degenerate” art made him susceptible to coercion.  “Posse probably thought that if he could not do anything for modern art  then he would devote himself to building a museum of old masters,” said  Maaz.
A book devoted to the correspondence between Bode and Posse is slated for publication this year.  
 
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