Errol Morris: Bamboozling Ourselves Part 3

Bamboozling Ourselves (Part 3)

By Errol Morris

The Nazi Aesthetic

I was interested in the controversy surrounding a book of watercolors and drawings that is given only cursory attention in Dolnick’s book. Jonathan Lopez [10] puts the book, “Teekeningen 1,” front and center. It is in fact a framing device for his argument. References to “Teekeningen 1″ occur at the very beginning and near the very end.

JONATHAN LOPEZ: The book was found in Hitler’s library at the central offices of the Nazi government, the Reichschancellery in Berlin.

ERROL MORRIS: Tell me about this.

JONATHAN LOPEZ: I actually own a copy of this book. It’s an enormous tome with gold lettering and a big red insignia right in the center. So it’s got the red, black and gold colors of the Nazi party across the front of it. Some of the art in it is just kitsch; some of it has very strong Nazi-istic overtones.

Cover design, Teekeningen 1; Private Collection.

And it is paired up with poetry, most of it written by Martien Beversluis, a really hardcore Nazi friend of Van Meegeren’s. The whole project seems to have been conceived as a collaborationist gesture. And at some point in 1942, Van Meegeren signed a copy using artist’s charcoal. And he inscribed it: “To my beloved Führer in grateful tribute – Han van Meegeren.” [Dem geliebten Führer in dankbarer Anerkennung gewidmet von Han van Meegeren.] Some friend of his who was able to actually get this book to Hitler, or some friend of a friend, delivered it because it was found in Hitler’s library just days after the end of the war.

ERROL MORRIS: How did the inscription come to light?

JONATHAN LOPEZ: Even before anyone knew anything at all about Van Meegeren as the forger of Vermeer, there were people in and around Amsterdam who knew about him because of his pro-Nazi reputation. So when a young Dutch reporter, Jan Spierdijk, found the book in Berlin, it was news. One of the Resistance newspapers, De Waarheid, published Spierdijk’s account of what the inscription said. It was not a huge piece of news because Van Meegeren was not a famous person at that point, but it was such an outrageous thing that it made it into the newspaper. The newspaper did not print a facsimile of the inscription until months later. The original July 11, 1945, article had the content of the inscription noted only in the text of a sidebar to Spierdijk’s article about visiting the Reichschancellery.

Read the rest of this installment at the NYTimes.com