The online edition of Hans Posse’s notebooks (1939-1942)

Juliane Hamisch1

1 Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Kartäusergasse 1, 90402 Nürnberg [email protected]

Abstract. Among the papers kept by the Deutsches Kunstarchiv (German Art Archive) at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg are five notebooks by art historian Hans Posse. Posse was highly regarded as director of the Picture Gallery (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister) from 1910 until his death in 1942. He was also appointed ’s special representative in summer 1939. In this position he was responsible for assembling a collection for the so-called Füh- rermuseum planned for the city of . He was also tasked with preparing and conducting the redistribution of Nazi looted art among the museums of the Ger- man Reich. In his notebooks, Posse documented his travels as Hitler’s special representative. As the director of one of the most important picture galleries in Europe, he had formed connections with museums and research institutions for all throughout Europe over the years. His networks consisted of art historians and scholars, of Nazi organizations, art dealers and agents, as well as private collec- tors. Posse regularly visited depots where confiscated works of art were held. He assessed these works of art, often writing down names, prices, and the conditions of purchase or takeover. His approach of art selection and acquisition can be re- constructed through the notebooks. These papers should thus be of fundamental importance for research regarding art looting by the Nazis as well as Nazi art and museum politics in general. However, the notebooks have been widely ignored by research so far. This is at least partly owed to the fact that their content is not understandable without a considerable amount of effort due to the abbreviations and often non-contextualized nature of the notes. Therefore, the project “Kommentierte Online-Edition der fünf Reisetagebücher Hans Posses (1939-1942)”, which was funded by the Deutsches Zentrum Kultur- gutverluste from April 2017 until March 2020, aims at making this source avail- able to the public and enabling further research. This is achieved by publishing the notebooks in the form of a digital edition (https://editionhansposse.gnm.de/). The edition deals with the content, not with the aesthetic or linguistic quality of the text. It focuses on the identification of actors, places and objects and the re- cording of their relationship with Posse as well as with each other, The main source is Posse’s text itself, of course, which is transcribed, annotated and commented on. The transcriptions, including annotations and comments, can be viewed alongside the digitized pages of the original notebooks. All other con- tent - except for secondary sources such as additional literature - is derived di- rectly from the text or its annotations, supplying further information on refer- enced entities such as persons, institutions, places, and works of art and creating a separate instance for each mentioned individual. The annotated text passages are linked directly to the respective instance. The information on the individuals 2

is enriched with authority data and other supplementary content, thus providing additional points of access for researchers. The data are assembled, structured and published via an instance of the virtual research environment WissKI (Wissenschaftliche KommunikationsInfrastruktur) (http://wiss-ki.eu/). WissKI was chosen because it facilitates the creation of cross-references between individuals and the visualization of these links by providing back references almost automatically. Moreover, by using semantic technology the nature of the relationships between different individuals can be expressed directly through the data model. The data model is implemented by a domain ontology based on the Erlangen Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) (http://erlangen-crm.org/), the OWL imple- mentation of the CIDOC CRM (http://www.cidoc-crm.org/). According to the CIDOC CRM, which is an event-based ontology, the individuals are linked with each other and with the transcription via events. As there is always a certain de- gree of interpretation concerning the annotation of the text, all of the aforemen- tioned individuals are linked with the text of the notebook via attribute assign- ments (E13). By relinking the assigned individuals to their respective references dispersed throughout the text of the notebooks, the ‘history’ of those individuals can be followed, thus demonstrating the entire spectrum of Posses’s art looting networks.