Union activist ARTISTIC ARC


Union stalwart Anita Halpin is leading a project to unite art history and radical politics, drawing on her extraordinary family history. Conrad Landin reports


A


nita Halpin has a voice that carries – as any NUJ activist who has heard her speak at delegate meetings or TUC events can attest. And, like many trade unionists of her generation, she chooses her words and her


commitments carefully. Since joining the NUJ in the 1970s, Halpin has been one of


the union’s most prominent lay activists. She served as president in 1994–95 and was a longstanding NUJ treasurer and member of the TUC general council. Now 82 and largely retired from her union positions, she


seems busier than ever – as the figurehead of a vibrant publishing project bringing art history and radical politics together. It’s all thanks to a side of Halpin’s story that will have passed many of her union comrades by – and, for once, it’s not something she arrived at by choice. Born Anita Hess in 1944, she was the child of Jewish emigrés


Hans and Lili Hess, who had fled Nazi Germany along with Hans’s mother Tekla. Te family made a remarkable contribution to the visual arts – Tekla and her husband Alfred as collectors and patrons of expressionist artists and their work in interwar Germany, and Hans as a curator and Marxist art historian in Britain. But for Halpin, there was never any time for looking back.


Her union activity jostled for space with her career as a PR and comms journalist in the medical sector, senior positions in the Communist Party and bringing up her son, Boris. Her husband Kevin had an equally illustrious vocation in the trade union movement, founding the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trades Unions in the late 1960s to resist anti-strike legislation. Hans and Lili had both died in the mid-1970s and their


house in Sussex was cleared. Halpin and Kevin got their papers but, with a baby and the demands of politics and trade unionism, they never had time to go through them. When Kevin died in 2017, Halpin began to think again about the three rusty-green filing cabinets in her attic. “It was a quite simple choice,” she recalls. “Do I live in the


past and continue to mourn my father, or do my family live in the future?”


18 | theJournalist Hans Hess had been expected to go into a management


role at his parents’ shoe factory in Erfurt, central Germany. However, a series of seismic events – first the Wall Street Crash, then the rise of the Nazis – put paid to that. It was only after fleeing to Britain, internment as an ‘enemy alien’ in Canada and war work on a Leicestershire farm that he ended up a curator. Te head of the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, Trevor


Tomas, had heard that the Hess family – famous for their art collection – were in town, and gave Hans a job. He played a key role in putting on an exhibition of German expressionism before the war was over – entitled, diplomatically, ‘Mid- European Art’. He later became curator of York Art Gallery and a visiting lecturer at the city’s new university in the 1960s. Fast forward to 2019 and, with the help of two other NUJ veterans – former Morning Star journalist Kenny Coyle and


Be wary of the records


Archive research can provide a fascinating insight into domestic life and political entanglements – but records of turbulent times can be subject to abuse. At the Berlin conference


in April, art historian Henry Keazor of the University of Heidelberg presented his research on the collectors Nicola and Franz Moufang. Deliving into their many volumes, he found that Nicola – a Nazi collaborator – had fashioned guestbook entries to cast himself in a better light after the war.


Journalists and historians


alike must assess historical documents carefully. Katja Hoyer, whose recent book Weimar narrates the Weimar Republic through the people of its eponymous city, found that diaries held in local archives enabled her to tell a much more personal story. She was confident enough not to worry about the authenticity of her protagonist Carl Weirich’s account – because he was frank about his support for the Nazis. There have also been famous cases of outright


fraud. In 1983, German news magazine Stern claimed to have bought the diaries of Adolf Hitler, and licensed serialisation rights to The Sunday Times. The Murdoch-owned


paper asked its non- executive director, historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, to certify their authenticity – and he duly obliged. Other historians disagreed, and forensic analysis established they were present-day forgeries. Frank Giles, the editor of the Sunday Times, was sacked by Murdoch.


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