Injustice and profit

Presented by the Badisches Landesmuseum (DE)

The online event will take place on Tuesday, June 3, 2025 at 5 p.m. and is free of charge. The presentation will be held in German.

The event will be recorded.

Content

Seemingly unsuspicious - for a long time, this was the role ascribed to museums during the Nazi era. Even more: due to the state-ordered confiscation of objects (‘degenerate art’), they were even regarded as victims. But with the ‘Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets’ in 1998, the realisation prevailed: All museums and institutions preserving cultural assets were proven to have profited from the looting of Jewish-owned cultural artefacts. Now the Badisches Landesmuseum is facing up to its past. The exhibition shows around 70 objects from the museum's own collections: Ceramics, paintings, sculptures and textiles from antiquity to Art Nouveau. The exhibits being presented for the first time were all unlawfully confiscated from their owners during the Nazi era: They illustrate the extent to which the Badisches Landesmuseum profited from the robbery of the Jewish population. One focus is on the years 1933 to 1945, but two acquisitions from the 1970s are also presented. Another theme of the exhibition is the museum's function as a powerful visual backdrop: The former residential palace was at the centre of political campaigns by the Nazi regime and the palace façade and the square in front of it were used for rallies. The exhibition design also illustrates the work of provenance research: large-format illustrations of newspaper cuttings, confiscation lists and press photos explain the source material and provide important information about the history of the castle.