Sept. 21


GERMANY:

Nazi shadow over Berlin art show


Berlin is welcoming one of the world's biggest private collections of
20th century art for a seven-year stay -- but the celebrations are being
tempered by a debate over Germany's Nazi past.

In a nation where the guilty legacy of earlier generations still weighs
heavily, Friedrich Christian Flick -- the billionaire heir of a World War
II-era arms supplier -- is accused of trying to erase the stigma of his
family's Nazi history by making his art collection public.

The Berlin municipal government -- hungering to restore the city's
reputation as a cultural capital 60 years after the Nazis and World War
II pushed the avant-garde out -- has embraced Flick's massive collection,
arguing that the art speaks for itself. Even Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder
has waded into the controversy, agreeing to open the exhibit Tuesday night.

Ahead of the opening, Flick urged his critics to put aside questions
surrounding his past.

"I have always tried to separate my family history from the collection,
from the art and the artists -- the collection should not be seen with
ideological glasses," Flick said at a news conference. "I want to make it
clear, that I have never said I want to excuse the dark side of my family."

Flick, who lives most of the time in Switzerland, will show a collection
of 2,500 pieces of modern and contemporary art -- from modernist sculptor
Alberto Giacometti to contemporary work like Bruce Nauman's neon
creations and Nam June Paik's video installations -- at Berlin's
Hamburger Bahnhof contemporary art museum and in a remodeled warehouse at
the site over the next seven years.

Critics have accused Flick of tax dodging, failing to pay into a fund for
Nazi-era forced laborers, and whitewashing his family history -- which
included the use of slave labor at his grandfather's munitions factories.

The German politicians who have welcomed him, after his hometown of
Zurich rejected the collection, have been painted as desperate for a bit
of glamor in the economically struggling German capital.

At the opening Tuesday evening, billboards reading "We call for free
entry for former slave laborers" and "Tax fugitive, show your treasures!"
were to greet the cream of Berlin society.

Two trucks have been hired to drive through the city bearing the same
slogans -- on a route running by the museum, major media outlets and
Schroeder's Chancellory.

The exhibit is really about "the erotics of money," said artist Frieder
Schnock, who along with his wife, Renata Stih, designed the protest signs
that hang outside the museum.

"If you come to a poor city like Berlin, everyone welcomes you if you
show the money," Schnock told The Associated Press. But "if you inherit
money, you inherit responsibility."

Flick's grandfather, Friedrich Flick, was sentenced by postwar Germany in
1947 to seven years in prison for crimes that included the use of slave
labor in his arms factories and the "Aryanization" of Jewish property.

Released early in 1950, he rebuilt his business in West Germany before
his 1972 death.

The grandson -- whose playboy image has helped make him a regular in
European celebrity magazines -- sold his shares in the family
conglomerate for US$60 million after his grandfather's death and then
built up his riches through investments. The Flick group was later sold
to Deutsche Bank for US$2.5 billion.

Flick deflects criticism over the slave labor fund issue by saying
individuals are not required to pay into it. He also points to his own
fund set up to combat racism as evidence that he repudiates his family's
Nazi past.

Germany's main Jewish groups have been critical of Flick for years, but
this week took aim at the government for accepting the collection.

"For a little bit of glamor in the impoverished parlor of the republic,
Gerhard Schroeder is opening the exhibit along with the collector ...
under the motto: What do I care about all this blather from yesterday?"
Michael Fuerst, a member of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, wrote
for the news Web site Netzeitung.

At Berlin's Free University, Eva Faridi told students about her time as a
forced laborer in a Flick munitions factory, filling grenades with
explosives in shifts that lasted up to 12 hours. She had been shipped
there from Auschwitz, where most of her family had died.

The native Hungarian, who now lives in Budapest, said she believes in
forgiveness.

But also in remembering.

"The exhibit must be wonderful because art is art," she said. But she
added that there should be a sign out front: "Greetings. Very many slaves
worked in 1944 and 1945 under inhuman conditions for this exhibit."

(source: Associated Press)