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As long as there are movies about Nazis, there will be movies about the art they looted
Early on in Pascal Bonitzer’s film Auction, Andre (Alex Lutz). a self-serving and sleazy art dealer, is placating a condescending, cruel, and racist art owner. “You have to stop at nothing for a sale,” he tells his intern.
The French film vividly brings to life the deceptive and hypocritical high-stakes world of prestigious art dealers operating in a Parisian universe of money grubbing and bad faith.
Based on a true story, it recounts what transpired in 2005, when a major work by Expressionist artist Egon Schiele, “Wilted Sunflowers,” was discovered in a home in a suburb of Mulhouse, France.
The 1914 painting originally belonged to the Jewish Austrian collector Karl Grunwald and had last been seen in public at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1937. In 1938 Grunwald fled Vienna for Paris, saving as many paintings as he could in a storage unit. They were ultimately looted and auctioned off.
Grunwald made it to America, while his wife and children were killed in concentration camps. For the rest of his life he futilely tried to recover his stolen paintings. Following his death in 1964, one of his sons persevered in his late father’s pursuit.
Bonitzer places the Schiele in the home of Martin (Arcadi Radeff) a highly moral, arguably sentimentalized, young factory worker who has no idea of its monetary value or backstory. Concepts of “provenance” are alien to him; he could use some money and just wants to do the right thing. So do the rightful heirs.
The whole story ends on a positive note as the painting gets sold at auction and the young worker is given an equal share in the sale.
It is estimated that more than 600,000 paintings, decorative items and other aesthetically and culturally valued items were summarily stolen from Jews during the War. Approximately, 100,000 have never been recovered.
Auction is only the latest in a long line of works centering on Nazi-looted art.
Perhaps the best known film in this sub-genre is 2015’s The Woman in Gold, which starred Helen Mirren as the patrician Maria Altmann, who works in tandem with her dogged attorney to retrieve six paintings by Gustav Klimt, one of which was a portrait of Maria’s aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer I.
The Klimts were ripped off by the Nazis during World War II and exhibited in Austria at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere until 2006. After a lengthy and byzantine legal battle, a number of the works were returned to the Altmann Family, which sold the Adele portrait for $135 million to Ronald Lauder who proudly displays the work in his Neue Galerie.
It would seem axiomatic that any stolen art should be restored to its original owners or, more usually, their heirs. For some, however, it’s a grayer area filled with moral and legal questions, starting with how the work was obtained. Was it purchased in good faith? If the current owners(let’s add “s”) truly didn’t know its origins should they be allowed to keep it? If not, how much compensation, if any, should they receive?
And, more broadly, who should own great art — a private collector or a museum? Doesn’t the public have a right to see great art? Wouldn’t it be better for a museum to have and display the work rather than a family who may hide it in its basement?
One of the most interesting elements in the “Gold” story, which was also addressed in the documentaries Adele’s Wishes and Stealing Klimt was the Austrian government’s contention that Adele, who succumbed to meningitis in 1925, had in fact left the painting to her husband with the stipulation that when he died it would go to the Austrian gallery. Therefore it was rightly theirs.
But if the will existed — and that was debatable — was it legally binding since Adele’s husband was forced to flee the country in the wake of Germany’s annexation of Austria, which Adele had no way of anticipating? Her will, if there was one, was predicated on the idea that he would die at home and that his art collection would remain intact and in his possession when he passed.
The Rape of Europa, a comprehensive and detailed documentary on pillaged art also touches on the dilemma surrounding Adele’s portrait, but it places the crime in a wider context, considering the questions that emerge when one country or culture appropriates the art of another. Still, it makes clear that the most egregious example is the Nazi seizure of Jewish art.
Much of the art in question, modern, abstract and acclaimed by the likes of Picasso, Kandinsky, Klee, much of it owned by Jewish collectors, fell into the category that Hitler dubbed “degenerate,” which gave him the opportunity to further dehumanize those owners. Most of the paintings were destroyed while others were sold for enormous profits in order to underwrite a massive build up of armaments for the Third Reich.
The documentary, The Portrait of Wally, is a searing indictment of MoMA and other major American art institutions that supported MoMA in a less-than-exemplary 1997 episode.
The film recounts the brouhaha surrounding Egon Schiele’s painting of his mistress Wally, owned by Lea Bondi, a Jewish Austrian art dealer before it was grabbed by the Nazis in 1939.
Prior to landing at MoMA it was housed in Rudolph Leopold’s Austrian museum. Leopold was a classic double dealer, pretending to be on the side of the original owners and their heirs when in fact he had no intention of handing over the painting.
But when the painting was on loan to MoMA, the Bondi heirs demanded that it be returned to them. Rudolph refused, which led to a 13-year criminal investigation launched by New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, during which time the painting was held by the United States government.
According to the film, MoMA and other art institutions sided with Rudolph because they were afraid that aligning themselves with the Jewish family would mean that museums across the globe would no longer lend their works to American museums for fear that they might potentially lose their art or have to pay big bucks to have it returned.
Ultimately in 2010 the Bondi heirs prevailed. The Leopold Museum paid them $19 million for the painting’s return. That case succeeded in opening the floodgates to many others. And a surge of films on the topic followed.
Movies centering on Nazi-looted art have been around for decades, such as John Frankenheimer’s 1965 action thriller The Train starring Burt Lancaster; and 39 years later George Clooney’s The Monuments Men, both loosely inspired by factual events.
Set in 1944, shortly before the end of the war, The Train is a suspenseful and well-acted account of a French resistance fighter (Lancaster) determined to intercept a train carrying Nazi looted art from France to Germany without destroying the art.
Set in the same era, the starry Monuments Men, co-written and directed by George Clooney and featuring Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, and Cate Blanchett, among others, depicts a unit of historians and archivists on a mission to locate and salvage works of art across Europe before the Nazis had a chance to steal and destroy them.”
Despite the caliber of talent involved, e.g., the film was seen as problematic because of its failure to point out that many, if not most, of these art works had belonged to Jews and were brutally confiscated from the original owners, many of whom had been carted off to concentration camps to be killed.
Clooney and his Jewish co-writer said that their purpose was to explore not the experience of any one group but the profound significance of great art and the violation that’s perpetrated when it is stolen, or worse, destroyed.
Both Clooney and Frankenheimer’s films also touch on the moral quandary of whether a great painting is more valuable than a human life. If the risk to save the art is that high is it worth taking?
For me the most affecting film on lost art is Elizabeth Rynecki’s 2018 documentary Chasing Portraits, her freshman endeavor. Even though — perhaps precisely because — at times it feels more like a home movie than a professionally honed flick it reveals an emotional core that is unexpectedly moving.
Equally relevant, her film centers on paintings that were scattered after the War. They may or may not have been looted, but their fate was directly tied to the Nazi regime that forced Jewish residents to escape without their precious belongings.
Rynecki grew up surrounded by the art of her great-grandfather Moshe Rynecki, who was murdered at Majdanek in 1943. His evocative expressionistic works portray the day to day life of Polish Jews prior to the Holocaust. Of his estimated 800 works, 120 remain in Polish and Israeli museums and private collections abroad.
Throughout her life Rynecki had wanted to see these works, not to reclaim them, but to uncover how they ended up where they were. She serves as a historian and witness, her great grandfather’s art a link to her family and Jewish heritage and a world that is gone forever.
The film follows her as she travels from Canada to Poland and Israel where she is, by turns, regarded with suspicion or more usually snubbed outright. Many owners, some Jewish, cannot believe that she is not there for restitution. In one of the strongest scenes, a Polish collector, a gentile, wraps up and hands over to Elizabeth one of her great grandfather’s paintings, unsolicited.
It’s a story that lingers and will no doubt continue to inspire more documentaries and feature films. Just this week, The Guardian reported that the heirs of a Jewish couple are suing The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York over a Vincent van Gogh painting they say was plundered by the Nazis.
‘Auction’ is currently screening in New York at Film Forum.
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Why I’m vibing with the pope’s first big statement
I have long been obsessed with the Vatican and the inner workings of the papacy. (I majored and did my Master’s in religious studies.) But usually other people are not as tickled as I am by analyzing the newest theological statements from the Holy See.
Not this week. Pope Leo XIV just put out his first encyclical — the term used to refer to official statements outlining the church’s stance on a topic — and it has gone viral. “Spitting fire right out the gate,” said one of many similar trending posts, as though the encyclical was a rap song.
The topic is buzzy: AI, which the pope casts as one of the greatest threats to human flourishing and morality. (The encyclical is titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity” in English, if that gives you the gist.) “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur,” it opens, “ is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”
The document notes many of the concrete risks of AI — sexual abuse, distortion of facts, job loss — and calls for pragmatic solutions. But it is, at its heart, a testament to what makes humans human, written with palpable adoration for the people of the world: our creativity, our empathy, even our weaknesses. It’s a declaration that machines can never have the ineffable qualities of God’s children.
Structuring our world around technology, Leo writes, reduces “creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.”
Later, in a paean to the importance of deep thought over easy answers, he goes on: “The speed and ease with which answers or summaries can be obtained risk extinguishing the desire to ask questions,” he writes, calling on the world “to protect our young people from the promise of the perfect machine” and warning against rendering “human thought seemingly superfluous precisely when it is most needed.”
“Magnificatus Humanitas” is a major statement, both in length — more than 43,000 words — and in symbolism. A pope’s first encyclical indicates the issues they believe are most important to the church, and signals the likely direction of their papacy.
That direction, for Pope Leo, is to be a voice for moral leadership, writ large. He addressed the encyclical not only to Catholics or even Christians, but “to all men and women of goodwill,” and cited thinkers like Hannah Arendt and J.R.R. Tolkien alongside the Bible.
It’s a declaration of a new — or, arguably, very old — relevance for religious leaders. As people rush through our increasingly fast-paced, frantic world, striving to keep up with the newest technology or geopolitical shift affecting markets and jobs, the slow-moving, zoomed-out perspective of religious leaders seems to be more and more important.
The Vatican held massive authority both moral and military for much of Western history. But its sway faded in the modern age. As democracy rose, Christianity broke into factions and religion’s prominence weakened, leaving the Church without the same ability to bestow a divine mandate on nations and rulers.
So many modern popes have kept their sights more narrowly focused on the theological. Even Pope Francis, who was a liberal, modernizing force for the church, and spoke out strongly on topics like the environment and immigration, focused three of his four encyclicals on Christian theological concepts like the Sacred Heart and Christianity as the world’s guiding light.
Pope Leo, however, seems to have found his way to modern, secular relevance by speaking out clearly on major issues of the day. He notes that he drew inspiration for “Magnificatus Humanitas” from Pope Leo XIII, an influential pope in the late 1800s and the inspiration for the modern Leo’s own papal moniker, whose 1891 encyclical “Rerum Novarum,” on the economy and conditions of the working class, was criticized for insufficient focus on the Gospel. The current pope’s own document is remarkably concrete and political.
Making political statements isn’t new for Leo, but the encyclical canonizes his boldness into an official form. In the past few months I’ve written about the ways in which Pope Leo has used sermons and statements to directly counter those made by U.S. leaders. After Pete Hegseth made a speech implying the U.S. military is doing God’s will, the pope gave a homily saying that prayers for war cannot be heard by God. He has made strongly worded comments about the rights of immigrants as Trump announced increased ICE raids, and made a point of appointing foreign bishops in American parishes. He has refused to visit the U.S. despite the fact that he is American and has been invited numerous times, including for the nation’s 250th birthday; he is instead planning to visit an island that serves as a refugee landing point in the Mediterranean.
It’s not all that surprising that Leo is making pronouncements on the justness of wars; popes have always given commentary on the world, albeit often less pointedly. Of course, Catholics have always looked to the pope for moral leadership — though that is increasingly under question, as renegade Catholics doubt the pope. (Even J.D. Vance, a Catholic convert with a book coming out about his conversion, has warned the pope to be “careful” with his theological interpretations — a near heretical statement. That’s how Protestantism came about.) The difference today is that everybody is listening.
I think the reason is that there is a certain ineffable quality that can’t be accounted for in so much of modern-day discourse in our metrics-focused world. Everything needs to be provable with a statistical analysis or some quantifiable indicator, or it needs to be as profitable as possible to extract value. But so much of what is most valuable in the human experience is intuitive — experiences and emotions like love, joy, transcendence. Connection with each other. Religious leaders have been honing the language to talk about these qualities for centuries, and they guard one of the only arenas in which the intangible remains central.
Of course, there are also plenty of issues with religious institutions, and the Vatican in particular is famous as a site where abuses of power were hidden and protected. But “Magnifica Humanitas,” and its virality, points toward a new relationship with religion, and a newly important role for it to play.
Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking, a hope for my own increased importance as a religion reporter.
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How can I live freely as a Jew in a world where strangers rip my mezuzah off my doorframe?
Twice, the mezuzah on my front door was ripped off.
The first time, I was shocked. The second time, I made a decision that still pains me. I did not put it back up.
This was before the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
That is the part I keep coming back to. The fear did not begin after the Hamas attacks. It was already there, intruding with the quiet calculation of whether a small Jewish symbol on my home made me less safe.
A mezuzah is not a political statement. It makes no argument about a government or a war. It is a sacred object, a marker of memory, a tiny declaration that says: Jews live here. I thought about that mezuzah again recently when the Anti-Defamation League released its annual audit showing that antisemitic physical assaults in the United States reached record highs in 2025. That increase reflects something many Jews already feel in daily life: the slow erosion of ease, the daily calculation of whether to speak up or stay quiet — things I have felt since the first time my mezuzah was violently torn off my doorframe.
Since then, the realm in which I feel safe as a visibly Jewish person has been shrinking from all directions.
After the Oct. 7 attack, the bulletin boards in my apartment building began filling with calls to boycott Israel. Campaign flyers for a Jewish political candidate who came to speak there were defaced with Hitler mustaches. I learned to scan the walls before I scanned my mail.
This was not happening on a campus quad or in some distant place. It was happening where I live.
Then, among my mother’s things, I found a Star of David necklace from the 1930s — marcasite set against black onyx, delicate and old. A boyfriend had given it to her when they were both 14.
I put it on in Florida, where I spend much of my time caring for my mother. I loved wearing it. It felt like more than jewelry. It felt like inheritance, memory, and a small way of carrying my family with me.
But when my mother knew I was going back to New York, she told me to take it off.
My mother is 102. She is not easily frightened. She has lived long enough to know when the temperature in the room has changed. She was not making a political argument. She was trying to protect her daughter.
I still wear that Star of David. But I admit I am selective. In New York, there are moments when I leave it visible and moments when I tuck it under my shirt. That calculation itself tells me something about the world I am moving through.
Recently, in a private Facebook group for women essayists, I shared a personal piece I had written for the United Kingdom-based Jewish Chronicle about how Oct. 7 changed life for my mother and me. It was not a political manifesto. It was a reflection on fear, Jewish identity, aging and visibility.
And still, I was attacked by other writers.“What about Gaza?” I was asked. The message was clear: even my personal Jewish pain had to pass a political test before it could be acknowledged.
That is the narrowing.
This ugliness is coming from more than one direction now. It stems from old conspiracy theories on the right and newer moral certainties in some of the progressive spaces where I once felt most at home. Different language brings about the same result: Jews become less human, less particular, less entitled to fear.
That collapse is what frightens me most: the definitional collapse between Jew and Israeli; Israeli and Israel’s government; Jewish symbol and political provocation; mezuzah and target.
As Jews like me reckon with that collapse, we must reckon with how much we’ll go along with it.
Right now, too often, Jews are being asked to choose between our own safety and our compassion for others. We should be able to prioritize both. I am a Zionist. I believe in the right of the Jewish people to a homeland. I also believe Palestinians are human beings who deserve freedom, dignity, and protection from suffering.
These beliefs should not cancel each other out. They should make us more careful, more humane, more committed to truth.
Yet now we must choose between speaking about antisemitism and being accused of indifference to other hatreds. That is no way to live.
Since Oct. 7, I have found myself going to synagogue on Shabbat, something I never did before. I was a High Holiday Jew. Now I seek out rooms where I do not have to explain why this moment feels frightening. I have learned where I feel seen. I have learned who can hold my fear without turning it into an argument.
The mezuzah I did not put back up is small. It fits in the palm of my hand.
But what it represents is not small: memory, faith, survival, home, and the right to be visibly Jewish without fear.
When I did not put it back up, I told myself I was being practical. But now — after Oct. 7, the bulletin boards, my mother’s warning, and the explosive allegations I’ve seen travel through respected media without sufficient care or verification — I understand it differently.
I was not just protecting a doorframe. I was learning to shrink.
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Podcast: A lively conversation in Yiddish with actress Lea Koenig
ס׳איז לעצטנס אַרויס אַ פּאָדקאַסט מיט דער באַליבטער אַקטריסע אין ישׂראל, ליאַ קעניג, וועלכע איז הײַנט צום בעסטן באַקאַנט ווי די ייִדיש־רעדנדיקע באָבע פֿונעם פּערסאָנאַזש שלום שטיסל אין דער ישׂראלדיקער טעלעוויזיע־סעריע „שטיסל“.
אינעם שמועס באַטייליקן זיך אויך יניבֿ גאָלדבערג — דער מחבר פֿון אַ נײַער ביאָגראַפֿיע וועגן איר אויף ענגליש; דער איבערזעצער און דראַמאַטורג מיכל יאַשינסקי, און דער ייִדישער זינגער און קולטור־טוער חיים וואָלף. דעם פּאָדקאַסט האָט טראַנסמיטירט די באָסטאָנער ראַדיאָ־פּראָגראַם „דאָס ייִדישע קול“.
ליאַ קעניג גיט איבער אירע זכרונות במשך פֿון איר לאַנגער קאַריערע אין ייִדישן טעאַטער, ווי אויך אינעם העברעיִשן טעאַטער, טעלעוויזיע און קינאָ. כּדי צו הערן דעם פּאָדקאַסט, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
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