Word: germanic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Transactions" by Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff (No Telephone to Heaven, Abeng). As wonderfully bizarre as it poetic, it tells the story of a traveling salesman hawking American goods and culture ("Witch hazel. Superman. Band-Aids, Zane Grey. Chili Con carne...Camels") on a Caribbean island who buys a poor German girl that he finds on the roadside. Before taking the girl home to his sterile wife, they go to an enchanted spring/hotel/tourist attraction run by a woman with an obsession with Jet magazine...
...would have bought German Bonds or stocks there would be value in the fund, but we bought U.S. government bonds so we could add it to your credit card. Like the man who knew seven languages but had nothing to say in any of them, it is all show. The Economist magazine equated this action to leaving your generation a whole bunch of I.O.U.'s to pay off. So there you have it: cheating, lying and fraud...
...plunder was so great, the U.S. government later estimated, that by 1945, German forces had seized or coerced the sale of one-fifth of all the world's Western art. Some of the thousands of looted works were brought back to the Reich. But others were shipped abroad, principally to New York, where the art market continued to function even as fighting raged in Europe. One painting cited by the U.S. Treasury, Van Gogh's The Man Is at Sea, was apparently slipped out of France by a New York dealer who then sold it to Hollywood idol Errol Flynn...
...Degas may have much in common with hundreds of lost works. Landscape with Smokestacks first came into the family on June 9, 1932, when it was acquired at a Paris auction for 10,000 francs (U.S. dollar equivalent at that time, $740) by Simon's grandfather, Friedrich Gutmann, a German-Jewish banker living in Holland. With the onset of World War II, part of the family collection, which included 10 Old Masters and several other Impressionist canvases, was sent to France for safekeeping, only to be seized there by the Nazis. When Germany invaded the Low Countries, Gutmann...
...advisers can readily ascertain a work of art's true origins. In many cases, dealers known to have bought or sold art for the Nazis turn up in a work's chain of custody, a red flag signaling a potentially looted object. In the case of Searle's Degas, German dealer Hans Wendland, who operated all but openly as a fence disposing of the Nazi trove, apparently transferred the painting during the war. "It's just obvious that people buying art need to do their homework, just as they would when they purchase real estate, used cars or even livestock...