Expand Your Knowledge With A Fascinating Tome About History With The Monuments Men Book
History is much more than a bunch of names, places, events and dates. For each event in the past, there are countless stories of people, both ordinary and exceptional, who had a role to play. The Monuments Men book tells one of these stories and makes history come alive at the same time.
At the beginning of 2014,
a new movie directed by George Clooney hit cinema screens. Along with Clooney himself, the cast includes actors like Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, John Goodman and Bill Murray and tells a fascinating story set during World War II. While the movie isn't entirely historically accurate, it's based on the
Monuments Men book that tells the true story of this episode in history in fascinating detail.
The author of the non-fiction work is Robert Edsel. Edsel used to make his money as head of the oil company he had started. After he sold his company for quite a bit of money in the 1990s, he moved to Florence, Italy with his family. Admiring the city's great art treasures, he started wondering how these sculptures and paintings survived World War II, which had devastated most of Europe. Then he embarked on a quest and found an amazing answer.
The story really starts in 1933, with Hitler becoming the Chancellor of Germany. Hitler was an art lover and dreamed of Germany having an art museum filled with some of the world's most priceless artworks. To obtain these artworks, his officers confiscated, looted and robbed wherever they went. The main problem however was that the Nazis had some very particular and peculiar ideas about art and if they didn't think that a piece had artistic merit, they would sell or even destroy it.
Alarmed by the developments, the Allied Forces founded the Monuments Men. Officially the organization was known as Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives and abbreviated to the MFAA. They were an eclectic group of soldiers and civilians, often with an art or museum background, who had volunteered to be involved in the program. The group's members were from the USA, Britain, France, the Netherlands and other countries, thirteen in total.
The Monuments Men not only worked to protect Europe's artistic heritage from the Nazis and the destruction of war. They were also detectives in a sense. They searched for those items that the Nazis had already stolen and then returned these items to their proper owners. Even though they had very few resources, they managed to recover at least five million items from Nazi caches.
One resource that the MFAA did have was the invaluable information gathered by Rose Valland, one of their members. This Frenchwoman had worked at the Jeu de Paume Museum during the war. The Nazis had used this Parisian museum as a place from where to send the artworks they had looted during the Occupation of France to secret locations in Germany. Valland risked life and limb by noting down the pieces that came to the museum, who these had belonged to and where they were being sent.
Cate Blanchett's character in the movie is based on Rose Valland. Valland's story is told in a separate book that would make a wonderful companion to Edsel's book about the MFAA. Edsel also wrote several other books on the subject, including a riveting one about how Italian treasures such as Da Vinci's 'The Last Supper' was saved from being destroyed.
To find books about the work of the Monuments Men, you have different options. Search for them online and order them with the help of a few clicks. Otherwise, browse your local bookstore or ask at the library.
