The Museumgoer

Nina Siegal, interviewed by Stephanie Pisarevskiy ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

Nina Siegal As Nina Siegal observes in our May 29 issue, history is often found in the margins: a scribbled diary entry, a name scrawled on the back of a stolen painting, or, the subject of Siegal’s essay, a museum quietly watched by a woman no one thought to notice. Rose Valland was an unassuming curator at the Jeu de Paume, a museum in Paris that during World War II served as a sort of clearinghouse for art plundered by the Nazis. By keeping careful notes and otherwise avoiding notice, she was able to help recover thousands of looted artworks after the war. “Valland was unremarkable enough to fade into the background,” writes Siegal, “a trait that served her particularly well when she began to act as a spy.” Siegal is a regular contributor to The New York Times, where she often writes about art and art history, the legacy of World War II, and Amsterdam, where she lives. She is the recipient of a Whiting Foundation Grant and the author of the history The Diary Keepers: World War II as Written by the People Who Lived Through It, as well as three novels. Earlier this month, I wrote to Siegal to ask her about memory, language, and the strange power of staying still and silent.   Stephanie Pisarevskiy: Your article evokes such vivid scenes from Paris and the Jeu de Paume. Do you have a favorite memory or story from your time there?  Nina Siegal: I live in Amsterdam, and Paris is just about three hours away on the high-speed train, so I’ve been many times. My favorite trip, though, was my first at age nineteen when a group of my friends were spending a semester there, and I flew over from my home in New York. There was so much to see, but what I remember most was lying around reading Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being out loud with my dear friend, Alex, and practicing my fledgling French skills on unsuspecting natives. Another beautiful memory I have of the city is when I spent three full days, from morning till night, at the Louvre, visiting every single room and gallery, for a guide I was writing for The New York Times. I was “trapped” in the museum in the best possible way. My favorite book as a child was From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, in which two kids run away from home to live inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art; this felt to me like an adult version. Both Valland’s story and the diaries you translated for The Diary Keepers rely on quiet acts of observing, eavesdropping, and memorizing. What draws you to these forms of “soft resistance”?  Because I’m a writer, I guess it’s crucial for me to believe that mere words can somehow make a difference. I get excited by all forms of cultural resistance, those quiet and thoughtful efforts, often overlooked, that may not be flashy heroics but that nonetheless can have a significant impact. I know other authors’ words have certainly given me strength and the will to fight back. Soldiers on the battlefield and armed resistance weren’t our only defenses against fascism during World War II. In The Diary Keepers I include several firsthand accounts of World War II that people wrote under the most extreme circumstances—imprisoned in a concentration camp, for example, or fleeing persecution, or taking enormous risks to hide people who were fleeing. I can’t imagine the stress these diarists were under, and yet they managed to put their experiences on paper so eloquently. I feel that there’s a special category of heroism for people who can focus on quiet acts of creation while so much destruction is taking place around them. These people contribute to historical memory, which requires the ability to imagine a more perfect future, even as the world appears to be falling apart. Figures like Rose Valland and the diarists who recorded World War II in their journals understood that if we survive the war but lose our art, our literature, or our individual humanity, future generations will not understand what we fought for in the first place. How did Valland use her “invisibility” to continue her work at the museum?  Rose Valland worked as an assistant and later as a curator and manager of the Jeu de Paume for many years without receiving any payment. At that time women rarely received a salary for museum work. Nevertheless, she dedicated her life to the museum—while doing other work for pay—and continued to do so under the harshest of conditions. When she was asked to act as a spy for the French Resistance, her “invisibility” was perhaps her greatest asset. She didn’t let on that she could read German or that she had a female partner at home who was half-German. She was quite unassuming, remaining in the background and performing her role without calling attention to herself. If the German occupiers had had the ability to see her true intelligence and skill, they would have certainly considered her to be more of a threat, and potentially forced her out of the building. Of course, at a certain point they did indeed notice her—toward the end of the war, she learned that there were plans to have her liquidated because she’d seen too much. Luckily, they never realized quite how much she knew or how actively she was undermining their work. Do you see Valland’s strategic self-effacement as a particularly feminist form of resistance?  During the war, when it made sense for Valland to go largely unseen, I wouldn’t say that she was self-effacing but rather strategically covert. From the feminist perspective, we can see her as a woman who didn’t recognize or adhere to any of the limits that others hoped to impose on her. So yes, I’d certainly consider her a feminist heroine. It must have taken enormous courage for her to continue to work among all the Nazi art agents, including high-ranking Nazi officials like Hermann Göring and Alfred Rosenberg, and to keep her cool and her wits, hating them as much as she did. In Valland’s memoir, The Art Front, I am afraid that she was perhaps too self-effacing. She clearly didn’t want to trumpet her own heroism. As a result, she left out a lot of specific detail about precisely how she worked as a spy, what it felt like, and which artworks in particular she could take credit for saving. It’s estimated that her work led to the recovery of some 60,000 artworks that had been looted from France. I wish she’d had a little more pride in sharing the details of what it took to do that. Diaries often serve as both personal and historical records. How do you think the ubiquitous but ephemeral personal narratives of the digital age—blogs, tweets, TikToks—might be integrated into the historical record?  This is such an interesting question. One could say that people write less often about their lives in the digital age, and yet we are probably the most well-documented generation in history. We are constantly making digital imprints of our experiences with snapshots, tweets, and posts. Do these add up to a record that’s as fully fleshed out as a diary written in longhand? My guess is probably not. But they do provide us with a lot of data about how we go through life, and through crises. I wonder if someday a brave Ph.D. student will be able to gather up all those TikToks and make sense of human experience in the twenty-first century somehow. I would not be surprised if that’s already happening. For me, what is so engaging about the World War II diaries is their long-form aspect. Every one of them had a “plot twist” that I wasn’t expecting. People’s lives are never predictable. Crazy things happen to even the most ordinary people, especially in a time of war. What struck me was how the very mundane aspects of daily life were contrasted with jaw-dropping moments of history. Someone travels to pick cherries at a farm, and out the window of their tram they see 15,000 Jews being rounded up in a city square. But then it’s off to the farm to eat cherries. It’s the contrast of horror and banality that one finds remarkable, and you can’t get that in a tweet. What do you hope your readers get from your work? Is there a lasting question or feeling you want to leave them with?  I suppose I want my readers to see that we are all, in a way, simultaneously victims of our historical circumstances—we have no control over where we happen to be born or under what rulers—as well as individuals with real agency. We don’t need to be bystanders, and we don’t need to pick up weapons to preserve our values. Even in the smallest of ways, we can promote beauty, value, and knowledge, and can do our little bit to engage and fight back against injustice and cruelty.   More by Nina Siegal at nybooks.com The Spy in the Jeu de Paume The detailed information gathered by the French curator Rose Valland about the Nazis’ looting of artworks made it possible for the Allies to recover tens of thousands of them after World War II.     For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the Review’s website. And let us know what you think: send your comments to editor@nybooks.com; we do write back.     Special Offer Subscribe for just $1 an issue Get the deal Politics   Literature   Arts   Ideas You are receiving this message because you signed up for e-mail newsletters from The New York Review. 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