In this important, sensitive, stimulating, but also occasionally irritating book, Peter Chametzky has provided a series of finely argued and well-documented case studies involving twentieth-century German works of art, using individual objects or larger spans of an artist’s career as catalysts for exploring the knotty problem of art’s relationship to history. Chametzky’s chosen examples—objects or artists firmly established in the discussion of German art in the context of modern society and its catastrophic manifestations—include Max Beckmann’s 1913 painting The Sinking of the Titanic and 1930s triptych Departure; Hannah Höch’s large-format Dada collage Cut with the Kitchen-Knife Dada through Germany’s Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch (1919–20); George Grosz’s lost painting Germany: A Winter’s Tale (1917–18); Willi Baumeister’s subversive collaged postcards of 1941; the sculpture of Arno Breker; the work of Joseph Beuys; and, in a concluding chapter, Gerhard Richter’s mural commissions for a socialist party headquarters in Dresden in 1957 and for the Berlin Reichstag in 1999. At the same time, many of the chapters serve as assessments of the artists’ careers as a whole, and Chametzky is even able to weave in concise comparative discussions of important moments in the history of art outside his purview.

The book implicitly makes one large (but mostly unconvincing) theoretical claim and one narrower (but productive) one. The grander assertion is reflected in the book’s main title, Objects as History. This phrase reflects Chametzky’s belief that his chosen objects are not just historical objects, in the trivial sense that each can be treated as a historical event with causes and consequences to be explained, but rather that, “from Beckman to Beuys and beyond, German art objects—large and small, public and private, surviving and lost—have enacted and embodied history” (215). They are “representatives, rather than representations, of twentieth-century history” (1). Indeed, “the object itself became a historical actor” (24). The theoretical force of these assertions, whose terms shift from iteration to iteration, is not clear. Certainly, the idea that works of art have agency is a powerful rhetorical and hermeneutic device with which one can have great sympathy. Some of Chametzky’s objects can indeed be discussed in related ways that enhance their symbolic value: he sees Beckman’s Departure, a painting about a journey that since the war years has been in New York, as telling “both its own and its creator’s exile stories” (30), because it was as much “displaced” as the émigré artist himself; Grosz’s painting, unlocated since the 1930s and therefore underinterpreted, is seen as “a lost and silenced victim of the [Nazi] regime,” while Höch’s collage, long unexhibited but rediscovered in the early 1960s and now canonized, is “an eloquent survivor” (50). Richter’s 1957 mural, now destroyed and, it is claimed, virtually absent from the scholarly literature on the artist, “has enacted the history of the country [the now defunct German Democratic Republic] whose ethos it was created to represent” (200–201). However, it is not clear how much these poetic congruencies between the fate of objects and the fate of people or countries are tangential, or specific only to a very few examples. Part of the effectiveness of this book can be traced to Chametzky’s acute sense for the especially resonant object.

The narrower basis for Chametzky’s investigations is the conviction that the meaning of a work of art is decisively affected by its historical and geographic circumstances as these have changed over time, and that these meanings accrue cumulatively. “The art object is . . . defined and redefined in the ever-changing present” (33). He couches this point in a contrast between Michael Fried’s apodictic conclusion “presentness is grace,” interpreted as implying an ahistorical, timeless moment of engagement, with “presentness is place” (3), a phrase that is often (perhaps too often) repeated.

Consider, for example, the fourth and longest chapter, on Baumeister’s anti-Nazi works. Here Chametzky returns once again to the site of his professional debut, a pioneering and revelatory study of the handful of private, collaged postcards that Baumeister created around 1941 by “alter[ing] reproductions of Nazi-approved art into scurrilous anti-Nazi images” (100). While Chametzky has previously used these “occasional” works, so apparently out of synch with Baumeister’s otherwise more classically modernist career as an advocate of abstraction, to counter received interpretations and to explore the question of degrees of oppositionality in an artist’s work, he now rethinks these works in gendered and ethnic terms, finding a larger and more complex subversiveness in them. He states that this interpretive plunge was prompted by the use of one of Baumeister’s altered postcards on the cover of a 1998 book about narratives of transsexuality. Chametzky sees this as an act of “rewriting” (here disproportionately ennobled by invoking Harold Bloom’s concept of “strong misreading” (99)), just as Baumeister’s collage had itself “rewritten” the postcard illustration of a painting by Adolf Ziegler. Chametzky’s foundational interest in this sequence of contexts in which works of art are received, interpreted, and re-interpreted is further highlighted by the chapter’s concluding “Postscript in the Present” (a feature of most of the book’s chapters). In it, he tells the story of refinding a postcard sent to him years earlier by one of the original recipients of Baumeister’s collages, a postcard that itself was a reworked version of Baumeister’s own reworking. This modest personal anecdote becomes a springboard for reflection on the circulation of images, the status of art, and the object’s ability to “[materialize] histories that I have and by which I am touched” (135). In this case and others like it, some readers may question whether these personal moments deployed as part of the historical argument can carry the interpretive weight they are asked to bear.

The chapter on Baumeister also exemplifies the web of subtle and usually unforced interconnections between the author’s chosen examples, recurring themes that help to give the book a unity and coherence that makes it more than the sum of its parts. Chametzky sees Baumeister in these collaged postcards as portraying himself as a “hybrid being” (a “Mischwesen”), a “transgendered multiethnic subject continually in process” (127)—indeed (in a daring iconographic argument invoking circumcision and cigars) as part Jew. The Jewish allusion links back to the extensive discussion of Höch’s and Grosz’s works. Chametzky approaches both through the lens of Jewish themes and uncovers a rich range of reference to Jewish culture in both their works. The Baumeister chapter also sets up the discussion of Arno Breker, the official Nazi sculptor whose works Baumeister also parodied in his postcards. In turn, Breker is set up as a foil (largely) for Joseph Beuys, in whom Chametzky sees a “debt to Nazi sculpture and sculptors” (164) that has been neglected. Other resonances weave satisfyingly between and among the chapters.

Chametzky is formidably well-informed and sure-footed. Lapses are very rare: to signal a few, Wolfgang Mattheuer appears as Walther (4); Ben Willikens as Wilkin (211); Grisha Bruskin as Krisha (211); “prämiert” is mistranslated as “premiered,” rather than “awarded a prize” (95); and “temerity” is used for its opposite, “timidity” (210). Consistent throughout is a pleasantly sober style and an attractively personal tone. Almost all the “Postscripts in the Present” relate in some acknowledged way to time Chametzky spent in Germany around 2005, and the reader can sense, in the extended recourse to invigorating comparisons with select (and often little-known) films, the presence of the author’s wife. We learn she is a “brilliant film scholar” (xi). The book’s epigraph is a quotation from a poem by the author’s mother. An authorial personality (a bit contrarian) also emerges in the persistent (and highlighted) use of art that may have been overlooked, slighted, or undervalued. By beginning with the apparently marginal or minor works (or with underappreciated aspects of major works), Chametzky is able to conjure a richly textured and delicately evoked panorama of key issues and events in the history of German art.

For many reasons, German art seems a highly fertile area for considering the relationship of art to history. In a sense, Germany since 1900 has simply had more history (of the kind that counts) than most countries, and German artists have repeatedly engaged with (or been forced to engage with) that history. Chametzky’s book is one of the richest attempts to grapple with the detailed complexities of that engagement to appear in a long time. When reflecting in his closing sentences on how German works of art have enacted and embodied history, he surprises the reader with this casual aside: “No doubt many that derive from other nations and their artists have also” (215). That may be, but Chametzky’s book itself is a powerful and profound demonstration of how special and extreme the German case is. It is probably this uniqueness that ultimately underlies the large and ongoing international appeal of modern and contemporary German art, a puzzling multi-decade success that itself is likely to continue and thereby ensure many future contexts for this art to elaborate further meanings. The works discussed in this book will enter those future contexts enhanced and enriched by Chametzky’s challenging attentions.