One wonderful facet of academic life is the opportunity to live temporarily in places other than one’s own home. Research projects, visiting professorships and the rhythm of the university calendar make it possible to spend weeks, months or even a year in some other city or country. Professors swap homes with colleagues in distant places, settle in apartments of other nomads or rent other short-term spaces.

And there you find yourself, with some small percentage of your wardrobe, none of your usual kitchen accoutrements, little of your library, away from the decor you’ve painstakingly put together and few of the life souvenirs you’ve acquired. 

You find yourself, in other words, away from your stuff. 

Most of my colleagues reflect on how startlingly liberating it feels to be away from your stuff. You feel light and portable – a better version of you. “We don’t need so much stuff,” you find yourself thinking. You don’t miss any of the things left behind. You find yourself suddenly cured of attachment to things material, vitally connected to the intangibles that matter. And as the time to return draws near, you think it will be so odd to go back to all that stuff.

But then you’re home, and it’s not odd at all. We reconnect to our possessions quickly and happily. Because for most of us, our stuff helps define us and anchor us to time, place and context. That we save letters, photos, our children’s macaroni paintings; that we treasure challah knives and kiddush cups passed down through generations; that we collect dolls, tchatchkes, watercolours, first editions or sugar cubes – this accumulation of stuff does not mean that we are superficial or materialistic. Except for the relatively few true ascetics, we human are creatures who make meaning in padding our nests. Our things are a physical sign of the web that connects us with our past, our present, our world, our people.

I thought of the importance of stuff recently when I saw Woman in Gold, the film that traces the restitution of a famous Klimt painting to Maria Altmann, whose Austrian Jewish family had owned it before it was plundered by Nazis during World War II and made its illicit way into a museum in Vienna.

The film succeeded in dramatizing an unusual story of art recovery without allowing the story of a painting, however magnificent, to eclipse the greater, more devastating story of the Jews of Europe under Nazism. Art may sometimes be recovered, the film reminds us at several key points, but murdered victims cannot.

The painting is truly amazing. Seen in its New York gallery, it dazzles. But Altmann treasured it not because it was great art or because it was valuable, but because it was a portrait of a much-loved family member. 

For most of us, the stuff we treasure doesn’t add up to millions. Still, we value our family artifacts no less, and for much the same reasons: they connect us to those who came before, to those we love, to our own stories, to ourselves. But no ambitious curator would eye them with envy. They would not end up on auction at Sotheby’s.

In Woman in Gold, the Klimt painting becomes something more than itself. It becomes a symbol of all that was outrageously taken from the Jews of Europe – and of the enduring absence of accountability, and the insistence on justice, or at least, truthfulness about the past. Ironically, the painting’s masterliness and value made its postwar possessors fight to hold on to it and at the same time allowed its rightful owner to locate it and demonstrate its provenance. 

After seeing the film, I thought about the everyday stuff taken from ordinary folk during the war. These things – family heirlooms, photos, sentimental gifts and the like – would be no less precious to their inheritors, but are impossible to locate, impossible to recover.