Norman Palmer’s study “Museums and the Holocaust“ was published in 2000. Palmer broke new ground with this work. Only shortly before, 44 states had agreed in Washington to take a new approach to dealing with “Holocaust-era assets“. Today, this is predominantly linked to the demand to find a “fair and just“ solution for cultural property seized as a result of Nazi persecution, beyond all legal regulations. At that time, the focus was not on cultural property in the same way. In fact, many participants – not least the German delegation – were more urgently concerned with the treatment of insurance policies from the National Socialist era. With regard to cultural property, on the other hand, the general awareness of the problem was still barely developed. The first public institutions had even begun to investigate the provenances of their holdings only at the end of the 1990s, but even after the Washington Conference it took years before research and the handling of its results proceeded along institutionally more or less secure lines. When Norman Palmer wrote his book, there was still no clarity about the relevant sources, no standards for their evaluation and no agreement about the consequences to be drawn from an unclear or obscure provenance.

Today, things are different in many areas. The second edition of Palmer’s work, which appeared in 2021, came, seen in this light, into a different world. After Palmer’s death in 2016, the director of the Institute for Art and Law, Ruth Redmond-Cooper, procured the second edition, and one can see at first glance that this is not just a new edition, but basically a whole new work; the number of substantive contributions has almost doubled, and while 20 years ago restitution seemed to consist mainly of spectacular individual cases, a systematic field of research has now opened up. Today, no public institution can afford to do without a historical investigation of its holdings. This is true not only for Germany, but also for many other countries that suffered directly or indirectly under the rule of National Socialism or profited from it.

In three sections, a total of 22 contributions illuminate the range, but also the ambivalence of the topic. The first part describes „The Issues Confronting Museums and Claimants“. After an introduction to the extent of Nazi art theft (Norman Palmer, pp. 1–7) and the role of state legislation in it (Leonie Schwarzmeier, pp. 8–13), Ruth Redmond-Cooper and Charlotte Dunn describe the difficulties that nationally differing ideas of statute of limitations and property transfers can mean (pp. 14–23). Charlotte Davy and Alexander Herman then address the challenges of international lending between museums (pp. 24–33), before Jacques Schumacher takes a focused look at the practice of British museums (pp. 34–50).

This already leads into the second part, which provides concise summaries of the different restitution principles in eleven countries under the title „National Perspectives“. In addition to some European states, these also include Israel, the USA and Australia – the extent, scope and consequences of the National Socialist art theft are thus once again depressingly demonstrated. However, the overview also shows how differently the consequences of National Socialism are assessed in the various countries. For example, the example of Greece (Anna Roza, pp. 212–228) shows that the state’s restitution efforts concentrated primarily on cultural property taken from Greek institutions, while cultural property formerly owned by Jews received much less attention. Efforts at restitution were thus less concerned with the specific context of the Holocaust than with the war and the hostile occupation of one’s own country in general. Of course, such different emphases also show that international or at least European standards of restitution do not exist. Constructing them can only succeed if one ignores the entire historical context.

In contrast, the third part is much more concise. Under the – probably not compelling – title „International Perspectives“, it begins with a brief historical account of the activities of the Monuments Men, who had already begun during the war to secure cultural assets and prepare their restitution (Ian Upjohn, pp. 285–292). Two individual accounts deal with the so-called Schwabing Art Find (Stepahnie Drawdy, pp. 293–302) and the Max Stern Restitution Project (Debbie de Girolamo, pp. 303-312), although a certain arbitrariness can hardly be concealed in the selection of these two projects in particular. The Gurlitt case received its international character not least because of Cornelius Gurlitt’s testamentary decision to bequeath the collection to the Kunsthaus Bern, while in the Stern Restitution Project Canadian, US, Israeli and – not always voluntarily – German institutions actually worked together from the beginning.

The reprint of the conference report on the anniversary event of the Washington Conference 2018 (Emily Gould, pp. 313-317) could have been dispensed with. The same applies to the appendix (pp. 318-338), which publishes several documents without any discernible system – from the London Declaration of 1943 to the HEAR Act of 2016 – all of which are readily available on the internet.

Twenty years after its first publication, the book as a whole has gone from being a pioneer’s report to a handbook. This achievement can hardly be appreciated highly enough. The extent of the National Socialist art theft is thus once again emphatically brought to light – at a glance, as it were. It remains striking, however, that the field is still predominantly dominated by practitioners. At first glance, this is obvious, since dealing with the restitution of looted art is often linked to concrete holdings or concrete claims and thus has a strong practical relevance. However, the subject as a whole repeatedly takes on the character of an academic fire brigade: there is a fire somewhere, and provenance research goes out to put it out. The volume also shows at which points the discipline could benefit from a stronger connection to general history. It would be desirable if this connection could be expanded even more in the future.