The material practices of responsibility through visual art are demonstrated in this chapter, focusing on Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter. As a mode of taking responsibility for restitution through practice, I analyse the way two of their art works resist or collaborate with their processes of creation and places of viewing. Interleaving my research interludes to Munich into the text, I contend that beholding an Anselm Kiefer sculpture (Sternenfall) in MONA in Tasmania in Australia opens up the artwork to a reassessment of what it might mean to take responsibility for restitution in Australia. I argue that beholding a copy of a Gerhard Richter painting (Birkenau) in the Reichstag in Berlin means taking responsibility for restitution is staged on the threshold to the German Parliament.

For centuries, art has been one of the spoils of war, often taken by the victor--and often destroyed in combat. What rules govern how art is treated in and after times of armed conflict? This chapter considers practical and ethical challenges of protecting art and antiquities in times of war and how attitudes toward protection of cultural property have evolved, leading to the Hague Convention of 1954; how art has been treated as part of war reparations; legal and ethical issues applicable to the recovery of art in the aftermath of World War II, particularly in light of the Holocaust and the Third Reich’s historically unprecedented, large-scale dispossession of art; and international efforts to coordinate the return of art wrongfully taken in the years prior to and during World War II