Tuesday, November 9th, 2010 Eleven sculptures derided by the
Nazi Party as degenerate art have been found in a bombed out
cellar in front of City Hall in Berlin. Workers uncovered the
sculptures over the course of several months while digging to
build a new subway stop. Unlike many other European capitals,
Berlin was something of a sleepy town for most of its history,
and what with the extensive bombing during World War II, subway
excavations don’t usually turn up much in the way of historical
gems. The street where these sculptures were found,
Königstrasse, was a busy, bustling thoroughfare before the war
which was so intensely bombed in 1944 that there was basically
nothing left but the skeleton frames and foundations of a few
buildings. They were bulldozed and the rubble buried, so the
only thing remaining to be found today are the cellars of
buildings, hence the almost miraculous survival of the
sculptures. Even before the bombing art the Nazis considered
degenerate — anything modern, basically, from Pica