The artist Claus Bergen, born in Stuttgart in 1885, was successful not only during the Nazi period and was known beyond the German-speaking regions. In the 1964 April edition of Life magazine, the editors published the laudatory article \u201cMost Adventurous Sea Painter of His Day\u201d and used some of his works to illustrate an article about naval battles in the First World War. Bergen\u2019s career had begun in Wilhelminian Germany, and with the display of his paintings of the Battle of Skagerrak in the Munich Glass Palace exhibition in 1918, he established himself as a marine artist and received numerous orders for such paintings from that time on. In the mid-1920s, he completed several large-scale paintings on behalf of Oskar von Miller (1885\u20131934), which were used to decorate the naval hall of the German Museum in Munich, at the time the largest natural science museum in the world.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n In May 1941, the battleship \u201cBismarck\u201d, a propaganda object built to demonstrate the technical superiority of the German military navy, and the heavy cruiser \u201cPrinz Eugen\u201d put to sea for \u201cOperation Rhein\u00fcbung\u201d. They were to engage in the trade war in the North Atlantic and attack the convoys bringing supplies to Great Britain. On 23 May, the two German ships were sighted by the British Royal Navy. Shortly thereafter, on 24 May, a historic naval battle took place in the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland. Together, the \u201cBismarck\u201d and the \u201cPrinz Eugen\u201d sank the British battle cruiser \u201cHood\u201d, then the most formidable ship and the pride of the Royal Navy. The Royal Navy thereupon set all available warships against the \u201cBismarck\u201d. The pursuit ended with the sinking of the \u201cBismarck\u201d in the North Atlantic on 27 May 1941. The Nazi leadership instrumentalised the death of the German sailors and glorified the fall of the \u201cBismarck\u201d with heroizing rhetoric as a sacrifice for \u201cFolk and Fatherland\u201d. Claus Bergen \u2013 who had been a member of the NSDAP since 1932 and had been awarded the War Merit Cross 2nd Class in 1944[2]<\/a> \u2013 depicted the Battle of the Denmark Strait and the sinking of the \u201cBismarck\u201d in large-scale paintings. They were finished in 1944 and 1949 \u2013 the last months of the Nazi dictatorship and the year of the founding of the Federal Republic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The nearly three-metre wide oil painting \u201cHeavy Cruiser \u2018Prinz Eugen\u2019 in the Battle of the Denmark Strait\u201d was presented in 1944 at the \u201cGreat German Art Exhibition\u201d (1937\u20131944) in the House of German Art in Munich and purchased there for 25,000 Reichsmarks by Adolf Hitler. The Nazi propagandists interpreted the event it portrays as a victorious battle in which the German Kriegsmarine<\/em> demonstrated the superiority of Nazi Germany over Great Britain\u2019s naval power. Each year Bergen presented works at the \u201cGreat German Art Exhibition\u201d (GDK), often with programmatic content. These included \u201cRan an den Feind\u201d (GDK 1941, Attack the Enemy) and \u201cGegen England\u201d (GDK 1940, Against England). In 1939 he showed the painting \u201cWikinger\u201d (Vikings), which can be understood[3]<\/a> as a reference to the racial-ideological legend of the \u201cbloodline of the German Vikings\u201d.[4]<\/a> After the war \u201cHeavy Cruiser \u2018Prinz Eugen\u2019 in the Battle of the Denmark Strait\u201d and other paintings by Bergen were confiscated by the American military government and brought to the USA as part of the \u201cGerman War Art Collection\u201d (GWAC).<\/p>\n Claus Bergen was represented with several paintings in this collection of around 9,000 works. Accordingly, the American military government must have seen his paintings as putatively Nazi art and\/or as glorifying the war. That meant that they had to be inaccessible to the German population. Nowadays, this policy of the \u201cpoison cabinet\u201d[5]<\/a> is no longer acceptable. But in the context of the Potsdam Agreement and the knowledge of the Allies about the intensive dissemination and propagandistic contextualization of art under the Nazis, it was entirely understandable. The restitution of ten of Bergen\u2019s paintings, including \u201cHeavy Cruiser \u2018Prinz Eugen\u2019 in the Battle of the Denmark Strait\u201d, took place in 1979 upon the initiative of the German lawyer and Claus Bergen collector Hanswilly Bernartz from Cologne. He achieved the return of the works through a lawsuit. He expressed his opinion in an interview that was broadcast in 1979:<\/p><\/p>\n\n\n \u201cI have always held these expropriations of the Americans to be unlawful and denoted them as such. I see no legal basis for it at all, for if you look here, for example, (\u2026) these are all historical motifs and they do not consist of military works that could somehow justify [the Americans] taking them away, practically plundering them, stealing them.\u201d<\/em>[6]<\/em><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n The assertion that the GWAC consisted of cultural goods stolen by the victorious power is just as untenable as the attempt to deny that Bergen\u2019s works contain military content, and it negates the real aim of denazification. The return of the artworks was important for Hanswilly Bernartz and could possibly be seen as a revisionist act.<\/p>\n In 1986, 7,000 additional works from the GWAC were turned over to the Federal Republic and have been reposited in the DHM since the end of the 1990s. There they are available for scholarly research.[7]<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cHeavy Cruiser \u2018Prinz Eugen\u2019 in the Battle of the Denmark Strait\u201d as well as the painting \u201cThe Last Battle of the \u2018Bismarck\u2019\u201d, completed in 1949, are on display In the DHM exhibition. The latter picture shows the battleship \u201cBismarck\u201d a few hours before it was sunk in the North Atlantic on 27 May 1941. In 1963, the industrialist Hermann Reusch donated it to the naval school in Flensburg-M\u00fcrwik. The ceremonial handover took place exactly 22 years after the event it depicts, on 27 May 1963. Claus Bergen took part in the festivities, and in his speech naval captain Gerhard Bidlingmaier commemorated \u201c(\u2026) the battle and the sinking of the \u2018Bismarck\u2019\u201d.[8]<\/a> This was entirely in line with Hermann Reusch, who donated the painting with the aim of \u201cfilling a gap at the naval school in the depiction of the Second World War that existed until now\u201d.[9]<\/a> At the ceremony, the approval of Bergen\u2019s political naval painting was unbroken, once more evoking the rhetoric of the dubious sacrificial death of the sailors.[10]<\/a><\/p>\n When we were developing the concept for the exhibition on the \u201cDivinely Gifted\u201d artists, we were very aware of the potential misinterpretation of the works we were showing and asked ourselves why, for example, was it important to present the paintings of the \u201cPrinz Eugen\u201d and the \u201cBismarck\u201d. They are, in fact, prime examples of the core subject of the exhibition: the continuities of art and artists of National Socialism before and after the war. The two paintings by Claus Bergen clearly form a narrative coherence and exemplify the problematic culture of remembrance of the victims of the Second World War in the early Federal Republic as well as the way the (cultural) legacy of the Nazi period was dealt with.<\/p>\n\n\n [1]<\/a> Cf. Hormann, J\u00f6rg-Michael: Claus Bergen. Marinemaler \u00fcber vier Epochen, Koehler Verlag, Hamburg, 2002, pp. 75\u201378.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [2]<\/a> Cf. Spruchkammerakte Claus Bergen, Staatsarchiv M\u00fcnchen, SpKA_K_119_Bergen, Claus sowie Schreiben Ministerialdirektor Hinkel an Claus Bergen, Benachrichtigungsschreiben \u00fcber die Verleihung des Kriegsverdienstkreuzes II. Klasse ohne Schwerter, 30. M\u00e4rz 1944, BArch, R 9361\/V98477.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [3]<\/a> Cf. Herzog, Bodo: Die Berliner Kunstausstellung im Jahre 1940 \u2013 \u201eHelden des U-Boot-Krieges\u2026 Rassisch hochwertiges Menschenmaterial\u201c, in: Kritische Berichte, Heft 1, Jg. 12, 1984, pp. 62\/71\u201372.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [4]<\/a> Cf. Claus Bergen at www.gdk-research.de<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n [5]<\/a> Cf. Voss, Julia: Ein Tabu wird gebrochen, in: FAZ, 17.10.2011<\/p>\n\n\n\n [6]<\/a> Feuer und Farbe. Das Dritte Reich und seine Maler zwischen Heros und Horror, Itzchak Pruschnowski, SFB, 1979.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [7]<\/a> In the course of the dissertation project \u201c\u2018A Potential Threat to the World?\u2019 Zur Genese, Funktion und Rezeption der German War Art Collection\u201d (WT), Darja Jesse is doing research on the GWAC at the DFG graduate school \u201cIdentity and Heritage\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [8]<\/a> Schreiben Kapit\u00e4n z. S. Dr. Schneider-Pungs an Hermann Reusch, Flensburg-M\u00fcrwik, 6. Juni 1963, Archiv Marineschule M\u00fcrwik, CAEC9185 Bergen \u2013 Bismarck 1963-06-06 MSM<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"View](\"\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/YS29993_DHM_Yves-Sucksdorff_1000-px-2.jpg\")
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