Yusen Logistics has significantly strengthened its logistics presence in Duisburg; acquiring a new warehouse and expanding its storage capacity by 8,700sq m The total storage capacity of the multi-warehouse site is now 62,000sq m The expanded Duisburg storage complex is located in the largest inland port in Europe It has excellent access to major road networks and is in close proximity to a container terminal with rail and inland waterway connections to the ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp Questioning the legitimacy of supposedly waste-derived biofuels – an industry said to be in the .. ocean carrier group ONE and freight forwarder Yusen .. Kerry Logistics UK has appointed freight industry veteran Colin Eeles (above) as its new business .. Japan’s NYK Group has moved further into the logistics sector Japanese shipping group NYK Line’s forwarding arm The use of passenger aircraft to fly cargo-only is expected to continue this year Maersk is reportedly in the market for a top five forwarder as huge shipping line .. email: [email protected] email: [email protected] email: [email protected] email: [email protected] email: [email protected] This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic leads the discussion and a community of writers contribute to the dialogue sending her decidedly modern sketches to a cousin in Milwaukee while another artist created paintings that fueled the Nazi propaganda machine We look at the divergent fates of two artists under the Third Reich The artists are the subjects of two separate exhibits here Milwaukee School of Engineering associate professor of history Patrick Jung talked about his research on the life and work of German artist Erich Mercker in a live chat on Tuesday Mercker's work is on view at the Grohmann Museum TRANSCRIPT It is one of the thorniest questions for art historians: What are the moral obligations of artists working under repressive regimes a deft artist whose work served to glorify the power and might of the Third Reich But an exhibit and biography about the artist has brought new facts to light — including the artist's membership in the Nazi Party — allowing for such questions to be opened up The nature of Mercker's career during the Third Reich was raised in articles by my former colleague Whitney Gould and me when the Grohmann Museum opened in 2007 at the Milwaukee School of Engineering Mercker was the most represented artist at the museum which exhibited artists with Nazi ties without providing that historical context Art museum curators and scholars generally agree that exhibiting works made even to glorify the Nazis can be legitimate The art world has often explored the work of Leni Riefenstahl great pains are made to place her in context "The museum didn't know the extent of his participation with the Third Reich" in 2007 nothing about Mercker written in English and very little in German The largest trove of works by Mercker in the world is at the Grohmann Museum a museum that celebrates labor and industry through art Jung spent four years investigating Mercker's background interviews with Mercker's now-elderly daughter Annemarie Mercker visits to the National Archives in College Park and the translation of many primary documents for the first time openly contends with Mercker's participation in the Nazi Party and its official exhibitions The research was funded by MSOE and the engineer and industrialist whose art collection is the basis for the museum the biography is sympathetic and at times reads like a defense of the artist and an overstatement of the significance of his work Jung describes Mercker's work as being "appropriated" by the Nazis and demonstrates the artist's interest in industrial scenes that reflected German nationalist thought before and after Hitler's dictatorship Mercker's decision to join the Nazi Party in 1933 "flowed from the same body of thought that had shaped his art." "Everyone wants to know about his Nazi years," Jung said in an interview in his mind he didn't really understand that he had Nazi years until 1945 when the whole edifice came crashing down he was just the German artist he had always been," said Jung But a "Nazi artist" is precisely what he should be called a leading scholar on art during the Third Reich era His recently published book "Artists Under Hitler" from Yale University Press makes case studies of several cultural figures who sought accommodation with the Nazi regime He also benefited from the overblown art market Hitler created for these shows making the equivalent of about an extra $100,000 per year in today's dollars Mercker also painted more industrial landscapes and tightened his brushwork more often veering away from his more loose Impressionist style typically unfavored by Hitler to the major sites of the Third Reich after Adolf Hitler's seizure of power," Mercker wrote in a 1940 magazine article "The highways and all the locations where great works of architecture grew from the ground at breakneck speed really captured me The status of my paintings was considerably heightened through significant contracts from the Führer for paintings dealing with technical subjects that were to be exhibited at the Reich Chancellery This required that for years I almost exclusively painted technical subject matter." The GDK artists played a crucial role in the rise of the regime and in the war The images were published in exhibition programs sent to the front "The other thing about Mercker's work — because they reflect the German building program because they reflect the glorification of work because they reflect Nazi military prowess — these are works that convey an image of what the Nazis would have called a revised Germany," Petropoulos said Works like Mercker's conveyed an unreality the "subjective social reality" Hitler wanted to convey adding that it was unlikely that Mercker would not have understood this It's also unlikely that Mercker did not know of the cruelty of the Nazis "Recent scholarship shows that the German people were very well informed about the terror and violence and other abuses on the part of the regime," Petropoulos said "The concentration camps were publicized in newspapers It was very clear that terrible things were happening." did not know about the Holocaust or the other horrors perpetuated by the Nazi state until after the war," he writes in the book from MSOE Press Jung writes that Mercker "played no role in the many crimes of the Nazi state and thus could not be implicated in any substantive manner." Jung argues what was not known was who was being imprisoned and oppressed "Most Germans assumed the inmates were criminals and not political prisoners and prisoners of war," he wrote in an email exchange There is evidence that Mercker expressed a disdain for Hitler at the very end of the war in letters he exchanged with his daughter.I'm not sure this tells us anything meaningful about his mind-set prior to that A chilling little sketch of Hitler in a red cape from those letters is included in the book Jung also points out that all of the work at the Grohmann Museum is "clean," meaning none appears to have been exhibited in the GDK or purchased by the Reich or its leaders Mercker often made several versions of his works and those in the museum were among later iterations Though Jung was able to study Mercker's detailed log books dates for many of the paintings remain unknown records suggest most of the works were sold and perhaps made after the war and the question for the museum to ask is whether it is acquiring the best and most representative works of an artist it has chosen to invest in and seems to suggest that history forgive him for his participation in the Nazi propaganda machine "The great tragedy that befell Mercker and his fellow industrial artists was that their works were appropriated by a criminal regime that blemished a great and significant genre of art," he writes referring to a small group of artists who painted industrial landscapes "Should we forgive Mercker and other artists who compromised themselves during the twelve years of Hitler's dictatorship was in receiving Nazi patronage while his contemporaries were famously deemed "degenerate." this was the real moral compromise artists like Mercker made," Jung said in a follow-up email exchange Jung also describes Mercker as a great artist who translated the art historical idea of the sublime or the grandeur and unsettling beauty of the natural landscape into industrial scenes in a revolutionary way Mercker was certainly a very talented artist and an exceptional technician with intimate knowledge of his industrial and construction subjects Was Mercker a victim of Nazi appropriation Was it immoral for him to accept the patronage of the Third Reich Jung has created a biographical sketch from an almost nonexistent historical record for a little-known German artist who is probably more representative of the average German than many of the more well known artists who have been the subject of much Holocaust-era scholarship a case study that lacks the analytical nuance applied in Petropoulos' studies of Walter Gropius and that's appropriate for a sensitive historical period lay the groundwork for more scholarship and larger questions to be asked how did artists of a secondary rank define or sustain what Petroploulos calls the "subjective social reality" of the Nazis Why did such artists continue to create art for the regime particularly after the start of the war in 1939 How did the creep of extremism become entangled in existing philosophies about art and culture "The research into Erich Mercker is a natural extension of museum scholarship...," said James Kieselburg II who said he'd like to see the research expanded to include other artists who made works of industry the more we can place art and artists in historical context MSOE and the Grohmann plan to make the archive publicly available one worth approaching with humanity and empathy particularly from our privileged distance of so many decades "Erich Mercker: Painter of Industry" is on view at the Grohmann Museum Mary Louise Schumacher is the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic. She writes about culture, design, the urban landscape and Milwaukee's creative community. Art City is her award-winning cultural page and a community of more than 20 contributing writers and artists. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram Keep up with the art scene and trends in urban design with art and architecture critic Mary Louise Schumacher musings on architecture and her picks for what to do on the weekends Need ideas for things to do in Milwaukee? Plan the perfect weekend and find drink specials with the Best of Brew City Recommended Reading Blog: Books editor Jim Higgins highlights things worth reading View All Blog Posts View More located near the confluence of Germany’s Rhine and Ruhr rivers through which the ID of each container being loaded on a vessel is digitally recorded and compared with the ship’s loading list within seconds The system also records the condition of each container including the integrity of the customs seal which creates machine vision systems for the logistics and other industries developed the system using high-resolution 12K cameras that the port tested on two cranes The test indicated a recognition rate of almost 100% the system records the condition of the loading unit in high-resolution images Several specially developed algorithms work in the background making the data immediately available to the port’s crane management system and terminal operation system Rivergate will initially be used on a crane at the Duisburg Trimodal Terminal (D3T) at logport I in Duisburg-Rheinhausen and on a crane at the GWW terminal at logport II in Duisburg-Hochfeld The camera systems will enable efficient and transparent condition documentation and recording in real time even at night and in poor weather conditions Don't have an account?