The Private Made Public - A Connective &Comparative History of the Liebermann-Villa &the Zorn House

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While progress has been made concerning provenance research in connection to WWII following the 1998 Washington Conference, the majority of the research focus has been on public institutions. Public institutions are not, however, the only actor affected by the atrocities of WWII, nor the only actor that has shaped the cultural heritage landscape. It is therefore high time to turn our efforts towards private actors and Jewish Country Houses. The "The Private is Public" project centres around the belief that it is vastly important to conduct comparative research that focuses on how cultural actors conduct provenance research, why they initiate these projects and what the outcomes are, in order to gain a greater understanding.Possible research questions are: What incentives motivate private actors to instigate provenance research projects? How are provenance research projects by private actors implemented? What impacts have provenance research projects by private actors yielded? The "The Private is Public" project will apply a national and transnational level of inquiry, as Jewish Country Houses are found all over the world and are shaped by their specific contexts. The focus will be on three nations: the UK, Germany, and Sweden. These nations have been chosen primarily for two reasons: 1) Their individual historical position in WWII (one Axis power, one Allied power, and one 'Neutral' nation) and their unique connections to the events that followed WWII, which can be studied through the lens of provenance research projects instigated by private actors and the effects these projects have had on the history of private actors, the public memory of the Holocaust, and the legacies of WWII; 2) The three nations also occupy different points on how far the implementation of provenance research has come.As previously mentioned, the majority of scholarly contributions with connections to provenance research have focused on public institutions. A study focusing primarily on private actors is, therefore, at the forefront of scholarly pursuits. Conducting a comparative study focusing on the three chosen nations is based on preliminary research, unique - quite possibly the first of its kind. The study holds the possibility of gaining a deeper knowledge about specific private actors, as well as yielding a greater understanding on a national and transnational level. It is well-known that objects looted during WWII were dispersed all over the world. It is therefore of great importance to compare knowledge about the different layers of provenance research projects, conducted by private actors on a transnational scale, as it holds the possibility of facilitating new insights for international provenance research. The project will be interdisciplinary and employ a combination of disciplines, methodologies, and sources. The theoretical framework will mainly be acquired from the academic fields of History, Art History, and Cultural Science, e.g., Heritage Studies, Jewish & WWII Studies, and Critical Provenance Research. The method will combine qualitative techniques, mainly semi-structured interviews, case studies, and comparative analysis. The study will have national and transnational levels of inquiry. The study will employ a wide variety of sources, such as interviews, archives, museum records, seminal works on Nazi-looted art, WWII legacies, and more. The interdisciplinary nature of this project is partly based on the fact that provenance research by its very nature is interdisciplinary, and therefore demands a flexible and multifaceted framework. "The Private is Public" is part of the AHRC-funded 'Jewish Country Houses' project led by Professor Green, and part of the research will take place at the Liebermann-Villa, under the supervision of Dr Wasensteiner (expert in the field of Third-Reich era provenance research and Anglo-German cultural relations). A preliminary thesis structure is available on request.