1 Time, Trials, and Trepidations: Holocaust Art Restitution in Temporal Context Anne van den Bergh Righting Wrongs Dr. David Scott May 2017 Introduction In the spring of 2017 I attended a lecture sponsored by the Fordham Art Law Society, which had made all kinds of elegant arrangements on the 21 st floor of a silvery stern skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan. Raymond Dowd, who delivered the key address on Holocaust art restitution, did so very engagingly, pulling from recent casework to underscore the contemporaneity of Nazi-looted art restitution practices. Indeed, making reference to Milton Esterow’s 1964 New York Times article titled Europe Is Still Its Plundered Art, Dowd emphasized that Europe continues to chase its looted treasures to this day, and in fact more viciously so than ever before. The reparatory project following World War II’s unconditional surrender has undeniably been “the most sweeping in history,” prompting the recovery of over 10 million art and cultural objects of an estimated worth in the billions of dollars (Teitel, 2000, p. 122). Elsewhere referred to as the “last prisoners of war,” cultural artifacts confiscated during the Nazi reign have come to hold near-mythical appeal to a global community dedicated to “making whole what has been smashed,” a community, one might argue, in the grip of a politics of militant anticruelty (O’Donnell, 2011; Torpey, 2006; Meister, 2011). In alliance against the return of evil, news media, legal praxis and university curricula, to name just a few, have grown firmly committed to telling and retelling the stories of the Holocaust, thereby tapping into the seemingly inexhaustible iconography of genocidal massacre. In this “fin de siècle human rights culture,” transitional justice has become an increasingly prominent lens through which to address historical wrongs