I recently posted an item about Penguin Classics bringing out an edition of Steal This Book this summer. That reminded me of something I posted on my site The Memory Hole several years ago, regarding the lost sequel to Steal This Book:

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In one of Hoffman’s last interviews (published in Pranks! from RE/Search Publications (1987)), Andrea Juno asked him: “Have you ever considered writing a sequel to Steal This Book?” He replied:

I did–it was 500 pages long. I submitted it to a publisher who went bankrupt and lost it–the only copy. I was totally heartbroken because it was the definitive work on counterfeiting, jewel smuggling–you name it. It’s what people think Steal This Book is.

In the introduction to Steal This Book, Hoffman gave some hints about what else could’ve been in the lost sequel:

Watch for a special edition called Steal This White House, complete with blueprints of underground passages, methods of jamming the communications network, and a detailed map of the celebrated room where according to Tricia Nixon, “Daddy loves to listen to Mantovanni records, turn up the air conditioner full blast, sit by the fireplace, gaze out the window to the Washington Monument and meditate on those difficult problems that face all the peoples of this world.”

After WWII, the US Army took (i.e. looted) 9,250 Nazi-era artworks by Germans, bringing them to America. Most have been returned, but 450 objects remain in the Army’s possession. All of this art, in the US and Germany, is kept away from the public and very little of it has been seen.

Professor Gregory Maertz of St. John’s University has spent years tracking it down, and he has photographed every one of the 9,250 works and has amassed 50,000 related documents. He’s working on not one, not two, but five books about these controversial, unviewable works that form a lost chapter in art history:

His research on the real canon of Nazi art is appearing as a trilogy—The Invisible Museum: Unearthing the Lost Modernist Art of the Third Reich (forthcoming, Yale UP), House of Art: A Cultural History of Nazi Germany, and The Last Taboo: The Rehabilitation of Nazi Artists in Postwar Germany—and in two free-standing volumes, Modernism and Nazi Painting and Nazi Art: Images, Texts, and Documents.

You can listen to his lecture, “Nazi Art in Museums? Canonization and Controversy,” and read his article “The Invisible Museum: Unearthing the Lost Modernist Art of the Third Reich“:

The importance of these materials lies in their ability to shatter two of the most enduring myths associated with Nazi Germany and its post-war occupation. The first myth to crumble on contact with the evidence is that official American policy with respect to German cultural properties did not include art looting. The second and most stubborn Nazi-era myth dispelled by my discovery of the “German War Art Collection” is that of the complete ideological incompatibility of the National Socialist aesthetic with Modernist painting.

According to the master narrative of 20th-century German art history, the opening of the Entartete Kunstausstellung [Degenerate Art Exhibition] in July 1937 in Munich’s Haus der Deutschen Kunst [House of German Art] rang the death knell of the avant garde in Nazi Germany and the practice of “real art,” that is, Modernism, resumed only after the fall of the NS regime. The pages that follow will provide evidence for the startling fact that certain types of Modernist art not only survived in Germany after 1937, but that “Nazi Modernism” was produced under the official patronage of Adolf Hitler and the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht [the German Armed Forces High Command]. That the production of Modernist art could have been sponsored by the very institution responsible for the bloody conquest and brutal occupation of Europe is not inconsistent with the crucial role played by violent imagery and militaristic rhetoric in other strands of Modernism, such as Italian Futurism and British Vorticism. But until now evidence has been lacking or insufficient to support such an apparently counterintuitive concept as “Nazi Modernist” art.

{The image is Dunkirk by Otto Engelhardt-Kyffhauser, from Nazi War Art: 1940-1944. It is not necessarily one of the looted works covered by Maertz.}

{Thanks to Susan Maret, Ph.D.}

From the Washington Post:

Yes, she liked to read the Bible, but she devoured gothic romance novels, too.

The fact that so little is known about Martha and that she has been cast throughout American history as First Frump is, in part, her fault. In the days after George Washington died, she, as was the custom of well-known people of her time, burned all their correspondence. So we know George wrote two youthful love letters bursting with yearning and passion to Sally Fairfax, even though she was the wife of his good friend. We have a really bad poem he wrote as a teen to a young Virginia beauty (”Rays, you have, more transparent than the sun . . . “). We have no idea what he wrote to Martha.