Gerald Reitlinger

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Gerald Reitlinger, portrait by Christopher Wood from 1926.

Gerald Roberts Reitlinger (born March 2, 1900 in London , † March 8, 1978 in St. Leonards, Sussex ) was an English historian , archaeologist and author .

Life

He was born in London to the London bankers Albert Reitlinger and Emma Brunner. After finishing school at Westminster School , he served briefly in the Middlesex Regiment during World War I and then studied cultural studies at Oxford . He then studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and Westminster School of Art to become an artist. His pictures were exhibited during his stay in London. Between 1927 and 1929 he was editor of the art magazine Drawing and Design .

From 1930 to 1931 he took part in an excavation funded by the Field Museum in Chicago, then a second for Oxford University, where he was assistant director. Until his second service, this time in World War II , he collected Syrian and Persian ceramics and wrote several books about his travels to Armenia, the Middle East and China.

Because of health problems he lived a secluded life. His marriage to Dorothy Jardas soon ended in divorce, and in 1945 he remarried, this time to the wealthy widow Eileen Anne Graham Bell.

After the war he began to write his first book The Final Solution about Nazi Germany and questions of the Holocaust , which was published in 1953, followed by the title SS: Alibi of a Nation in 1956 . In 1960 he published the first part of his study of the 18th century art market in France, The Economics of Taste .

Reitlinger died in 1978 of a brain hemorrhage in the St. Leonards nursing home in Sussex.

During his lifetime he was an avid collector of Asian and Islamic ceramics. He bequeathed his large collection, which was damaged by fire shortly before his death, to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, where it is now the Gerald Reitlinger Gallery.

In 2017 the historian Götz Aly and René Schlott made public that the Munich Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ) had refused to publish The Final Solution in German in 1953 , “because - as it is in the protocol - the plans for their own comprehensive history of National Socialism would "disturb", said Aly. This discovery - as well as two negative reports from the IfZ on Hilberg's work The Destruction of European Jews , which delayed its German edition by 18 years - led to a controversy about the institute's past that had not been dealt with.

Gerald Reitlinger was a cousin of the Austrian industrialist Friedrich Reitlinger .

Publications

  • A Tower of Skulls. A Journey Through Persia and Turkish Armenia , London: Duckworth, 1932.
  • South of the Clouds. A Winter Ride Through Yün-nan , London: Faber & Faber, 1939.
  • The final solution. The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939–1945 , London: Vallentine, Mitchell 1953.
    • German edition: The final solution. Hitler's attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939–1945 , Berlin: Colloquium Verlag 1956. ISBN 3-7678-0807-2 .
  • The SS. Alibi of a Nation 1922–1945 , London: Heinemann 1956.
    • German edition: The SS tragedy of a German era , Munich: Desch 1957.
  • The House Built on Sand. The Conflicts of German Policy in Russia 1939–1945 , London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1960.
    • German edition: A house built on sand. Hitler's policy of violence in Russia 1941–1944 , Hamburg: Rütten & Loening 1962.
  • The Economics of Taste , 3 volumes, London: Barrie & Rockliff 1961–1970.
    • Vol. 1: The Rise and Fall of Picture Prices 1760–1960 , London: Barrie & Rockliff 1961.
    • Vol. 2: The Rise and Fall of Objects d'Art Prices since 1750 , London: Barrie & Rockliff 1963.
    • Vol. 3: The Art Market in the 1960s , London: Barrie & Rockliff 1970.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Eastern Ceramics and Other Works of Art from the Collection of Gerald Reitlinger: Catalog of the Memorial Exhibition. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1981.
  2. ^ Alan Posener : “German contemporary historians defended Deutungshoheit” , Die Welt (Berlin), October 26, 2017
  3. ↑ Georg Gaugusch : Who once was. The upper Jewish bourgeoisie in Vienna 1800–1938 . Volume 2: '' L – R ''. Amalthea, Vienna 2016, ISBN 978-3-85002-773-1 , pp. 2899 and 2902.

Web links

Commons : Gerald Reitlinger  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Reitlinger, Gerald
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Reitlinger, Gerald Roberts
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British historian, art historian and writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 2, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH March 8, 1978
Place of death Sussex