Nostalgia for the Future: Modernism and Heterogeneity in the Visual Arts of Nazi Germany 9783838272818

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ibidem Press, Stuttgart

Inhaltsverzeichnis Acknowledgments Preface Chapter 1 War Art/Art War: Controlling the Legacy of Nazi Modernism The German Wartime Art Project The 1951 Repatriation of the German War Art Collection The 1986 Repatriation of the German War Art Collection The German War Art Collection in Washington, D.C. Modernism and Wehrmacht Patronage Chapter 2 Eugenic Art: Hitler’s Utopian Modernism Easel Painting On the Mechanical Reproduction of Art in the Third Reich The Munich Exhibitions Resurgent Völkisch Art The Blue Knight Chapter 3 Nazi Modernism and the Mobilization of Christian Artists Christianity and the Origins of National Socialist Ideology

War, Apocalypse, and Nationalist Christianity Mobilization National Socialist Neo-Paganism Christianity, National Socialism, and Modernity Munich and the Mobilization of Christian Artists Key Figures: Oskar Martin-Amorbach, Richard Heymann, and Hans Spiegel Chapter 4 Baldur von Schirach and “Degenerate” Art in the Service of Nazi Culture Vienna The Nazi Culture War Artistic Context Alternate Nazi Canons Chapter 5 Radioactive Art and the Rehabilitation of Nazi Artists Canonical Art and the Case of Arno Breker Radioactive Art Collaboration The Cases of Emil Nolde and Christian Schad Denazification Rehabilitation Degenerate Artists Bibliography I. Interviews

II. Archives and Museum Depots III. Late Weimar and Nazi-Era Exhibition Catalogues IV. Quoted Sources V. Background Sources Figures Copyright

Acknowledgments The scholarship presented here would not have been possible without gaining access to repositories of objects and files of documents pertaining to the German War Art Collection and Adolf Hitler’s acquisitions at the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen, the so-called NS-Reichsbesitz, as well as other related collections. For these opportunities, I wish to express my thanks to the following people: Mitchell Wolfson, Jr., founder of the WolfsonianFIU, who threw open the museum’s vast depot and library holdings to me as well as his extensive private collection; Renée Klish, former curator of the U.S. Army Center of Military History in Washington, D.C., who guided me through the Army’s art vault and allowed me to make photocopies of the files related to the German War Art Collection; Gordon W. Gilkey, leader of the U.S. Army’s German Wartime Art Project, with whom I spent many hours on two visits to the Portland Art Museum, and who shared his personal archive and presented me with a number of photographs and other artifacts associated with his duties in postwar Germany; Harald König and Heidrun Kemnitz, officials in the Bundesvermögensamt in Berlin, who granted my request to make research photographs of the objects in the German War Art Collection repatriated in 1951 and to examine the active files relating to the custody of both the German War Art Collection and the NS-Reichsbesitz; Iris Lauterbach at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich, who helped me reconstruct the history of the Munich Central Collecting Point; Hans Ottomeyer, the visionary former director of the Deutsches Historisches Museum, and his remarkable assistants, Hans-Jörg Czech and Esther Sophia Sünderhauf, who granted unfettered study of the 1951 and 1986 sections of the repatriated German War Art Collection as well as the NS-Reichsbesitz, and who invited me to join the curatorial team that organized the exhibition Kunst und Propaganda im Streit der Nationen (2007); Ernst Aichner, the former director of the Bayerisches Armeemuseum in Ingolstadt, who provided lodging in the museum’s medieval fortress (and astonishing hospitality) during the week I spent studying the objects in the German War Art Collection repatriated in 1986; Chris Dercon, former

director of the Haus der Kunst, and Sabine Brantl, the museum’s archivist, who privileged me with being the first scholar to examine and photograph the museum’s archives pertaining to the administration of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen, and the postwar Abwicklungsstelle; Dr. Lauchs, the courtly director of the mysterious Abteilung V at the Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, who authorized my transcriptions of artists’ Fragebögen; Meg L. Melvin, curator of the National Gallery of Art Photography Archives, who located photographs proving that Gilkey’s confiscations included works of art removed from the Central Collecting Point; Stephen A. Mize, archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, who showed me the correspondence between Elie Wiesel, the museum’s founding director, and Caspar Weinberger, U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Defense; the staff of the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, where I discovered the property records relating to works of art seized by the Monuments Branch from the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, including Saliger’s Doppelakt; and Line Daatland, Karin Hindsbo, Erlend Høyersten, Frode Sandvik, and Erik Tonning with whom I worked on the exhibition Kunst i Kamp at KODE: Art Museums in Bergen, which brought together objects from the German War Art Collection and the NS-Reichsbesitz. I also wish to express my enormous sense of indebtedness to the colleagues who wrote on behalf of my applications for grants and fellowships which made the research and writing of this book possible: Mark Antliff, Omer Bartov, James G. Basker, David Craven, James Engell, Robert Fagles, Matthew Feldman, Alfredo Franco, Roger Griffin, Sabine Hake, Henry Millon, Steven Mansbach, John T. Paoletti, Erik Tonning, and Nancy H. Yeide. Thanks to their support, my work on this project benefited from the time, money, and resources provided by the American Council of Learned Societies, CASVA at the National Gallery of Art, the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, KODE in Bergen, the NEH, the National Humanities Center, the Rockefeller Foundation, the University of Bergen,

Teesside University, the Wolfsonian-FIU, and the Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University. Additional gifts of time, library access, and technical assistance came with a Visiting Research Professorship in the German Department at Duke University, where I began writing this book; a fortnight’s residency literally in the Deutsches Historisches Museum where I examined the repatriated German War Art collection following the consolidation of its 1951 and 1986 sections; and, during the completion of the first draft of this book, a blissful month as the guest of the “Christianity and Modernism Project” at the University of Bergen. A second draft was written during research leave at my cottage in the village of Gravir on the Isle of Lewis, and final revisions were completed in George Bridge and Paula McDowell’s magnificent house in Griggstown, New Jersey. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at St. John’s University, under the stewardship of Dean Jeffrey Fagen, generously supplemented my grants with research leave and travel funding. My colleagues and students in the Department of English have likewise been supportive during the long gestation of this book. My research also benefited from feedback I received on lectures and talks at Duke, North Carolina State, Princeton, Rutgers, Villanova, Wake Forest, the Universities of Bergen, Cal State LA, Cal State Long Beach, Georgia, Iowa, Konstanz, Manchester, New Mexico, Northampton, Otago, Teesside, and York, as well as at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, CASVA, the Slought Foundation at the University of Pennsylvania, the Deutsches Historisches Museum, the Wolfsonian-FIU, the National Humanities Center, and Yale-NUS College in Singapore. In addition, I am grateful to the following people for their input and support: Chris Ackerley, Susanne Baackmann, Fabio Barry, Kim Bergen, Nicholas Blaga, Margot Brandlhuber, Christopher Browning, Peter Bunnell, Mark Byron, Peter Chametzky, John W. Coffey, Michèle Cone, Caroline H. Cooney, Elizabeth Cropper, Jay Curley, William C. Donahue, Florence Dore, Josiah Drewry, Wolf-Dieter Dube, Modris Eksteins, Richard J. Evans, Sarah Farmer, Monika Flacke, Matteo Fochessati, Finn Fordham, Hal Foster, Peter Fritzsche, Christian Fuhrmeister, Sara Galletti, Kata Gellen, Roger

Griffin, Olga Grlic, Ruth V. Gross, Geoffrey Harpham, Robin C. Hemley, Keith Holz, Paul B. Jaskot, Martin Kagel, Aristotle Kallis, Scott Klein, Lutz Koepnick, Claudia Koontz, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Marianne Lamonaca, Irving Lavin, Cathy Leff, Patricia Leighten, Timothy Lenoir, Thomas Y. Levin, Michael J. Lewis, Chris Löhr, Frank Luca, Peter Lukehart, Deborah Lutz, Nancy MacLean, Paula Michaels, Michael McKeon, Michael B. McKinley, Neil McWilliam, Elizabeth Mansfield, Jörg Merz, Hans-Ernst Mittig, Bella Muccari, Jakob Norberg, Philip Nord, Lynn H. Nicholas, Peter Nisbet, Therese O’Malley, Morna O’Neill, Peter Paret, Jonathan Petropoulos, Thomas Pfau, Barbara Picht, Achim Preiß, Uwe Puschner, Ruben David Quintero, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Rochana Rapkins, Sven Reichardt, Wolfgang Schmidt, Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Sarah Schroth, John Beldon Scott, Craig Hugh Smyth, Heinrich von Staden, Kristine Stiles, Dan Stone, Robert Swanson, Maria Taroutina, Maiken Umbach, Richard Unger, James van Dyke, Kirk Varnedoe, Eirik Vassenden, Gerhard L. Weinberg, Gennifer Weisenfeld, G. William Whitehurst, Carolyn Williams, Isabel Wünsche, and Andrés Zervignon. Together with everyone else working on the visual culture of Nazi Germany, I owe a major debt to the work of Peter Chametzky, Peter Fritzsche, Christian Fuhrmeister, Olaf Peters, Jonathan Petropoulos, Pamela M. Potter, Ines Schlenker, Alan E. Steinweis, and James van Dyke. Equally indispensable to this project has been the work of Mark Antliff, Omer Bartov, Modris Eksteins, Richard J. Evans, Roger Griffin, Jeffrey Herf, Ian Kershaw, Mark Mazower, Eric Michaud, Gavriel Rosenfeld, Timothy Snyder, Nicholas Stargardt, and Thomas Weber. Portions of the research for this book were published previously and in different forms. I am thankful to the editors of these volumes and special journal issues for the opportunity to share early versions of my research with a learned readership. Parts of Chapters 1 and 5 were first published in the special fascism issue of Modernism/modernity XV: 1 (January 2008): 63–85. Chapter 2 is an expansion of an article published in The ‘New Man’ in Radical Right Ideology and Practice, 1919–1945, ed. Matthew Feldman, Jorge Dagnino, and Paul Stocker (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), pages 87–104. Chapter 3 is based on an article published in Modernism,

Christianity, and the Apocalypse, ed. Erik Tonning, Matthew Feldman, and David Addyman (Brill, 2015), pages 166–186. A preliminary version of Chapter 4, on Nazi maverick Baldur von Schirach’s patronage of modernist art, was published in the journal Patterns of Prejudice 50 (2016): nos. 4–5: 337–358. Sections of Chapter 5 appeared in the collection Art and Artistic Life during the Two World Wars, ed. Giedrê Jankeviciuté and Laima Lauckaité (Vilnius: Lithuanian Cultural Research Institute, 2012), pages 387– 411. Many of the works of art published in this book, chiefly objects in the German War Art Collection, are reproduced here for the first time. Others, including works by Emil Nolde and Erich Heckel, have not been seen since the 1930s. Several objects were lost in artists’ studios that burned as a consequence of the Allied bombing of German cities or, like Gustav Klimt’s Musik II, disappeared in the final months of combat as the war came home to the Reich. Still others, like Franz Radziwill’s Stilleben mit Pfeife [Still Life with Pipe], were destroyed in the Nazi pogrom against modernist art. For assistance with copyright clearance and the acquisition of images on an ambitious scale, I wish to thank Anne Dorte Krause at the Deutsches Historisches Museum, Dr. Markus Raeder at the Bayerisches Staatsministerium der Finanzen, Sabine Brantl at the Haus der Kunst, Andreas Hagenkord at the publisher Georg D.W. Callwey, Hans-Peter Copony at Stiebner Verlag, Paul Rachler at the Künstlerhaus in Vienna, Amy Silverman at the Wolfsonian-FIU, Shannon Morelli at the National Gallery of Art, Carsten Jäger at the Rudolf-Hengstenberg-Gesellschaft, Liza Fuegenschuh at the Gustav Klimt Foundation, Lis Linnet Herrschildt at the Nolde Stiftung Seebüll, Birgit Harand at the Städtische Galerie Rosenheim, Ines Otschik of the Christian Schad Stiftung, Sarah M. Forgey at the U.S. Army Center of Military History, Todd Leibowitz at the Artists Rights Society, and Barbara Roosen at VG Bild-Kunst. Special thanks to Imogen Stuart in Sandymount near Dublin, who provided a photograph of her father, the art critic Bruno E. Werner, and to Hazel Caine Corte-Real in Cascais, Portugal, whose hospitality during my research visit in October 2017 has only been exceeded by her generosity in approving the reproduction of works of art created by

her grandfather, Eduard Schloemann, as well as the cherished last photo of him before he was killed in action on the high seas. Valerie Lange acquired this book for ibidem Verlag and was unflaggingly helpful in answering countless questions as I prepared the text and negotiated the labyrinth of German copyright clearance for many of the images published here. Florian Bölter designed and formatted the text. Unless otherwise indicated, translations from German to English in the text and notes are my own. My deepest expression of gratitude goes to those who sustained me on this long journey: April Alliston and her family, George Bridge, Neko Case, Matthew and Claire Feldman, the late Jinx and Juju, Jane Sharp, Stephen Sicari, Erik and Fionnuala Tonning (and Erik’s parents and sons), Richard Vogel, and Frederick Wegener. Lastly, this book is dedicated to my ‘ohana—the Lens, Parkers, Coatses, and Imries.

Preface The origin of this book can be traced to a pregnant encounter, some years ago, with Mitchell Wolfson Jr., the renowned collector of fascist art and propaganda artifacts, in Princeton, New Jersey. Not long afterward, I found myself in the Wolfsonian in Miami Beach, standing before Ivo Saliger’s Doppelakt [Double Nude] (fig. 1), a painting submitted for inclusion in the 1945 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung [Great German Art Exhibition] (which never opened) at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst [House of German Art] in Munich. By digging into the Wolfsonian’s acquisition records, I discovered that the provenance of this work by one of Adolf Hitler’s favorite artists is full of anomalies. Firstly, by virtue of the postwar settlement made between the victorious Allies and Austria, the former Ostmark of the defeated Nazi Reich, Saliger (1894–1987), as an Austrian citizen, was exempt from the sanctions imposed on German artists whose works had been purchased by the Führer. Such penalties included the expropriation and sequestration of these works of art by American occupation officials—a policy that has continued into the present even as the custody of such objects passed from Bavarian officials in Munich to the German Federal Republic’s official memory repository, the Deutsches Historisches Museum, in Berlin. Second, following the collapse of the Nazi regime in May 1945, Doppelakt was, after vetting by the U.S. Army’s Monuments Fine Arts and Archives Branch, released from the basement depot of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst into the hands of the artist in newly independent Austria. At this point, Saliger’s painting disappears from the historical record. But then, in 1985, 40 years after its repatriation, a sales receipt shows that Mr. Wolfson bought the work from an art dealer in Salzburg. While examining Doppelakt in the Wolfsonian, I wondered: “What was the fate of other works of art produced under the patronage of the Führer, the Nazi Party, and other state organizations? And did all such works resemble Saliger’s strangely contemporary and not neoclassical looking nudes? Could there have been, in a dictatorship noted for its polycratic dysfunctionality, exceptions to the stylistic orthodoxy associated with exhibitions held in the Haus der

Deutschen Kunst?” It was at this moment that an investigation began that led me to museums, archives, and depots in Washington, D.C., Portland, Oregon, Munich, Ingolstadt, Berlin, and Vienna. It was on these journeys that I encountered paintings, sculptures, and graphic works that challenged, in a completely radical way, our understanding of the visual arts of Nazi Germany. In the catalogue that accompanied the recent exhibition Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany (2014), Olaf Peters declares that National Socialism “produced mediocre, politically motivated art and aesthetic irrelevancies” that “undermined the conditions of real art and destroyed artistic modernism.”1 It is not the objective of this study to make aesthetic judgments on the works of art admired by Hitler and his entourage. Rather, this book argues that National Socialist art is a far more complex and nuanced phenomenon than Peters lets on. Indeed, the evidence for the claims made here is based on the countless cases in which “real” (i.e., “degenerate” modernist) artists were selected to represent the Reich’s “mediocre” and “irrelevant” aesthetic ambitions. Moreover, it is clear that Peters’ position reflects an inversion of the “Nazi hyperbole” that exaggerated the dangers of modernism—the “Feindbild in the cultural arena”—of the Weimar era. Pamela M. Potter recently noted that “by taking this hyperbole at face value, arts fields for many years also helped to construct what was essentially a caricature of Nazi cultural conditions, vividly representing the era as a dystopia of artistic constraint, authoritarian micromanagement, and kitsch,”2 when even the briefest acquaintance with the patronage mechanisms of the Third Reich reveals that such a dystopian construct was socially and politically an impossibility. Of course, many works of art that appeared in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen manifest an attempt to create a “modernist antimodernism”—an experiment predicated on the need to enlist the visual arts in the horrific biosocial engineering of a racial utopia. But many artists who participated in the eight annual Munich shows—at least 64 in total—saw works of theirs removed from museum collections during the great purge of 1937, and this figure does not include the many entartete Künstler who participated in the supplemental exchange exhibitions that opened in the Haus der

Deutschen Kunst starting in December 1938. The best-known of these artists—because their works were either accessioned to the NS-Reichsbesitz, i.e., Hitler’s personal collection, or were confiscated for being “degenerate”—include Rudolf Belling, Ewald Jorzig, Georg Kolbe, Paul Ludwig Kowalski, Anton Lamprecht, Werner Peiner, Josef Pieper, Emil Scheibe, Kurt Schwippert, Hans Spiegel, Rudolf Schlichter, and Will Tschech. The dovetailing between the presentation of official art in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen and the purge of entartete Kunst is, of course, striking. That same official art-degenerate art overlap is just as pronounced when we examine the 56 Wehrmacht combat artists whose works were confiscated as “degenerate,” but who nonetheless participated in the 1943 and 1944 Munich shows as well as in the modernist exhibition sponsored by Baldur von Schirach, Junge Kunst im Deutschen Reich [New Art in the German Reich], and were also put forward, by Party proxies Peter Breuer, Bruno Kroll, and Bruno E. Werner, as trustworthy fabricators of the “new art” of the “new Germany.” The question, then, that must precede any aesthetic judgments about Nazi art, is this: which Nazi artistic idiom is under consideration? That of the painters who languished in internal exile prior to their reemergence in the service of the Wehrmacht, whose distinctively modernist work survives in the 9,176 objects in the German War Art Collection? That of artists anointed as paradigmatic figures in Party-sponsored publications such as Münchner Künstlerköpfe [Munich’s Leading Artists], Deutsche Maler der Gegenwart [German Painters of the Present], Deutsche Plastik der Gegenwart [German Sculpture of the Present], and Die Kunst für Alle [Art for Everyone]? That of works exhibited in Junge Kunst and other heterodox exhibitions, such as the Gustav Klimt Ausstellung? Or simply the official art displayed in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen, which is the only Nazi idiom that Peters acknowledges to have existed. The conventional wisdom challenged by this book holds that the visual arts in Nazi Germany embody a backward-looking conservative or pastoral völkisch aesthetic with no room for dissent. This now outmoded position was the product of an overreliance, in

terms of evidence, on a relatively small number of objects—the 775 works purchased by the Führer at the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen between 1937 and 1944—and, for a framing argument, on a “totalitarian-structuralist-intentionalist-fascist” paradigm of interpreting art produced under Hitler. The limitations of this approach were ably demonstrated recently by Potter.3 To be fair, in the decades following the end of the Second World War, the only works of art associated with Nazi patronage readily available to scholars or viewable by the public belonged to the NS-Reichsbesitz. Such a circumscribed pool of evidence in turn gave rise to a disproportionate focus on Hitler’s personal collecting activity—a classic case of overdetermination. In other words, the collective tendency to ascribe “aesthetic nazification” (which was actually a multi-causal phenomenon with a diverse, polyvocal group of artists, patrons, and critics) to the actions of a single individual, even if he served as the regime’s patron-in-chief, or to a few of his paladins, fostered neglect of a vast multiplicity of causes, conditions, and practices that contributed to the heterogeneous rather than monolithic quality of the visual arts of Nazi Germany. At the very least, the examination in this book of the German War Art Collection and the NS-Reichsbesitz (as well as additional objects represented in exhibitions other than the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen and in prominent Nazi-sponsored publications) has confirmed that strict stylistic coherence and uniformity were notably lacking in works of art produced with Nazi patronage. Indeed, it is the central contention of this book that a surprising number of modernist idioms flourished, not just in the shadows of the Nazi dictatorship, but openly and with the enthusiastic support of the regime’s most powerful individuals and institutions. This book does not claim to be an exhaustive study of Nazi art, but rather identifies the presence of at least four modernist idioms in the cultural body politic of Hitler’s Germany. The emergence of these modernist idioms out of Nazi patronage is shown to be caused by the overwhelming presence of “degenerate” modernists in the ranks of “official” artists and by the response to an increasingly radicalized and volatile arts scene, in which experimentation in self-adjustment to Nazi aesthetic norms resulted in stylistic departures from the regime’s effort to articulate a

future-oriented, eugenic style in the annual exhibitions at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst. Evidence of these idioms was discovered upon gaining access to the German War Art Collection, the NSReichsbesitz, and the records of the collecting activity of Hitler at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, which revealed the identity of the artists, their stylistic tendencies, the appearance of their works, their sources of patronage as well as exhibition and sales history, and the postwar disposition of their work. As discussed in Chapters 1, the modernist art of Nazi Germany includes thousands of paintings and works on paper executed in neo-impressionist, expressionist, surrealist, and Neue Sachlichkeit modes by German combat artists, which were exhibited and sold under the aegis of the Wehrmacht, but were seized by units of the U.S. Army in 1945–46, and remain sequestered and out of public view. In disproportionate numbers, artists recruited into combat art units had been classified as entartet or “degenerate” which should have excluded them from participation in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen. Chapter 2 presents a new analysis of the Naziera works of art best known to scholars and the public—those purchased by the Führer at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst. In this analysis, many of the apparently traditional elements of these works —e.g., idealized nudes and heroicized agricultural and industrial workers—are subjected to a fundamental reassessment that reveals that these conventions were appropriated by artists working in the regime’s signature eugenic style in order to make them serve a far more radical, modernizing agenda—namely, by offering the Volk an emulative glimpse of its biological future, based on nostalgia for lost Aryan perfection, before the future had arrived, these artists foreshadowed and instigated the realization of the National Socialist biosocial utopia. The discussion in Chapter 3 examines how, following the closure of the traditional venue for the exhibition and sale of their work (the Münchener Kunstausstellungen [Munich Art Exhibitions]), Christian artists in Germany adjusted their work in accordance with Nazi preferences. By repurposing religious tropes and iconography to function as potent fascist symbols, these artists, who were associated with a tradition in every way hostile to National Socialism, found themselves serving the eugenic, future-oriented

aesthetic of the regime. The focus in Chapter 4 is on artists who entered “internal exile” after January 1933, but who nonetheless participated in regional exhibitions, joined the Wehrmacht combat art program—the Staffel der Bildenden Künstler [Squadron of Visual Artists]—and saw their work reproduced in aesthetically ambivalent publications, all of which oscillated between conforming with and transgressing Nazi aesthetic norms as foregrounded in the NSReichsbesitz pictures. In addition, a preponderance of internal exiles and combat artists were selected for the daring modernist exhibition hosted by Schirach in 1943. Struggling to articulate an accommodating modernism, these art producers have not previously received their due. Finally, based on previously unexamined archives, Chapter 5 reconstructs the legal and administrative frameworks devised by the U.S. military government to accomplish two tasks: firstly, to control the postwar circulation of German art properties associated with Nazi patronage, and second, to denazify and rehabilitate artists tainted by collaboration with the regime. These included both canonical and forgotten figures in the twentiethcentury history of art. This chapter also offers the first postwar examination of denazification documents submitted to occupation authorities by artists represented in the NS-Reichsbesitz and the German War Art Collection.

1

Olaf Peters, “From Nordau to Hitler: ‘Degeneration’ and AntiModernism between the Fin-de-Siècle and the National Socialist Takeover of Power.” In Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany 1937 (Munich: Prestal Verlag, 2014), 33. 2 Pamela M. Potter, Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 35. 3 Potter, op. cit., 38.

CHAPTER 1 War Art/Art War: Controlling the Legacy of Nazi Modernism The existence of a collection of 9,176 Nazi-era works of art formed by the U.S. Army in 1946 had long been suspected by journalists and scholars of fascism and the Third Reich. Mysterious as its origin is, elements of the German War Art Collection have been featured in museum exhibitions, discussed in the mass media, and reproduced in books. But aside from a few familiar, frequently exhibited objects, such as Hubert Lanzinger’s Der Bannerträger [The Flag Bearer] (1936) (cover), which was discovered by U.S. personnel in the Führerbau [Führer Building] and moved to Munich’s Central Collecting Point in the Verwaltungsbau [Party Administration Building], where U.S. Army Air Force Captain Gordon Waverly Gilkey seized it in 1946, knowledge of the whereabouts, the full contents, and the provenance of this collection, the largest surviving remnant of Nazi visual arts culture, has eluded researchers for seventy years. Exhibited under its original title Führerbildnis [Portrait of the Führer] at the 1937 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung, Der Bannerträger is one of the most frequently exhibited pieces in the Army Art Collection held at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. However, until the opening of the exhibition Kunst und Propaganda im Streit der Nationen, 1930– 1945 [Art and Propaganda in the Conflict of Nations] at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in January 2007, Lanzinger’s painting had not been reunited with works of art from the other branches of the German War Art Collection or with the NSReichsbesitz objects1 since its seizure by Gilkey. Of additional interest is the fact that Der Bannerträger was one of only a handful of contemporary paintings selected for the Linzer Sammlung [Linz Collection], artworks associated with Adolf Hitler’s personal collecting activity.2 The importance of the German War Art Collection lies in its identity as a counter-archive, a counter-canon of works of art associated with alternate modes of representing “official” German visual arts culture in the twilight years of the Hitler regime. Through

its representation of war by tropes and styles associated with modernism the Wehrmacht’s map of extreme violence and terror is transformed by Nazi aesthetics into a utopian landscape elevated above atrocity—a landscape cleansed of racial inferiors that was ultimately to be colonized by the German Volk. The creative space governed by military authority exerted a disinhibiting influence over the creative process and functioned as a geography of radical openness and catharsis and even a potential site of resistance to the more restrictive aesthetic norms governing the civilian arts scene in Nazi Germany. As the historian Norman Davies has put it, “Oddly enough, the front-line zone of maximum physical danger, under fire from the enemy, became a zone of psychological liberation,”3 which embraced armed combatants as well as combat artists. Legal, commercial, and scholarly interest in the restitution of Holocaust-related cultural assets has mushroomed in the past few decades or more. Scholarship on the American treatment of German cultural property has focused on salvage and restitution efforts rather than the U.S. Army’s official art looting initiatives that functioned for two years in the American zone of occupation and targeted contemporary German art.4 Because the idea of Americansanctioned cultural theft contradicts the valiant and thoroughly Hollywoodized narrative (thanks to the 2014 film The Monuments Men) of the U.S. Army’s rescue of art treasures looted by the Nazis in occupied Europe, scholars have previously not observed that the same Army unit that led the salvage and repatriation effort—the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Branch—was also responsible for the confiscation of contemporary German art. They did so both as perpetrators—in forming the collection known as the NSReichsbesitz—and as facilitators in the formation of the German War Art Collection by other Army staff. Until now no systematic investigation has been done on the confiscation orders that were issued in the early period of U.S. occupation—the same orders that played a significant role in constructing a sanitized history of twentieth-century art from which Nazi modernist works of art were excluded. Impounded and concealed from all but the most determined, the contents of the U.S. Army’s collection of Nazi art remained unexamined for more than 60 years. Such concealment, in

turn, facilitated assessments of German art of the period in which works associated with the Führer’s collecting activity at the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen predominated over all other kinds of art produced with Party or state patronage in Nazi Germany. The resulting master narrative could not help but be narrow, oversimplified, and incomplete. Inspection of the two collections formed by the U.S. Army—the German War Art Collection and the NS-Reichsbesitz—was discouraged by their complex custodial history and obstructed by rivers of bureaucratic red tape. Indeed, before 2005 the German War Art Collection was divided into three depots administered by three separate institutions—the U.S. Army’s Center of Military History, which continues to retain 450 objects; the Bayerisches Armeemuseum in Ingolstadt, which maintained custody of the 7,100 paintings and works on paper which were repatriated to West Germany in 1986 until 2005; and the 1,626 objects returned to West Germany in 1951, which were in the trusteeship of the Bundesvermögensamt and stored in a facility in Karlshorst-Berlin also until 2005. As for the NS-Reichsbesitz, the collection of 775 paintings associated with Adolf Hitler, it was transferred in 1998 to the ownership of the Free State of Bavaria and to the custody of the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. Then, in 2005, matters were simplified enormously when the 1,626 objects in Karlshorst and the 7,100 objects in Ingolstadt were transferred to the Deutsches Historisches Museum “on permanent loan” from the Federal Republic of Germany. Nonetheless, even armed with knowledge of the location of the objects, the reconstruction of their provenance has been complicated by the access policies of the Nazi art repositories, which, even for well-credentialed researchers, range from the remarkably hospitable to the capriciously Kafkaesque. Attempts at studying and then divulging the contents of both the German War Art Collection and the NS-Reichsbesitz collections have also been impeded by the disposition of related documents, few of which are housed in the expected and accessible confines of the U.S. National Archives or the German Bundesarchiv. Moreover, some archived sources were sealed until fairly recently (e.g., the Historisches Archiv of the Haus

der Kunst), while others were cached in obscure locations lacking even the most basic facilities for conducting research. Still others, after their contents were studied and photographed by the author, were moved to unspecified locations where they might be lost to researchers forever. Thus, the task of deciphering the tangled provenance and stylistic heterogeneity of the German War Art Collection and the NS-Reichsbesitz required the invention of a forensic methodology that could be applied to the nearly 10,000 works of art excluded from any previous reckoning of cultural production during the Third Reich. Documentation supplying the provenance of the 775 works forming the NS-Reichsbesitz is kept separate from the works themselves. Indeed, until the author was invited to inspect the Historisches Archiv of the Haus der Kunst (fig. 2), there was no evidence for the existence of any such documentation. The embarrassment of riches that was subsequently discovered will need some time to process, but a few glimpses of the trove of documents are offered here. For example, each artist who submitted works to the jury of any of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen has a corresponding Künstlerkarte [artist card] on which is recorded his or her participation, such as the number and kind of works submitted for each year of the exhibition. In addition, with the onset of the American occupation and the opening of the Abwicklungsstelle [settlement office] of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, which was tasked with seeing to the return of the thousands of art properties crowding the basement corridors of the Troost-designed building (fig. 3), the actions taken with respect to the aforementioned works are noted on each card. A representative example is the Künstlerkarte of Carl (Karl) Busch (fig. 4), who participated in all but two of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen (1937 and 1943), the latter being the year of his assignment to the Wehrmacht’s Staffel der Bildenden Künstler. His distinctive fusion of post-impressionism and surrealism can be seen in the works seized for the German War Art Collection (fig. 5 and fig. 6). As we can see in a pre-war picture (fig. 7), Busch’s “degenerate” style was mobilized in his service as a member of the Staffel and was on display in Baldur von Schirach’s show of modernist art, Junge Kunst im Deutschen Reich.

Despite the challenges presented by the dispersal of provenance records in often unmapped, inaccessible locations, it was ultimately possible to compile a complete photographic record of the contents of the German War Art Collection and thousands of related documents, which provided the basis for this book. The importance of these previously unexamined materials lies in their ability to shatter two of the most enduring myths associated with Nazi Germany and its postwar occupation. The first myth to crumble upon contact with the evidence is that American occupation policy with respect to German cultural properties—unlike that of the Soviet Union—did not include officially sanctioned art looting, which the evidence clearly shows it did. The second and most enduring Naziera myth dispelled by the discovery of the German War Art Collection is that of the production of modernist art ceased with the wholesale purge of such works from German state collections in 1937. Anti-modernism was, of course, an axiomatic component of National Socialist ideology, and yet the Wehrmacht combat art confiscated by the American occupation army offers undeniable proof that modernist art was produced with the patronage of organs of the German state. According to the master narrative of twentieth-century German art history, the opening of the Entartete Kunstausstellung on July 19, 1937 in Munich’s Hofgarten rang the death knell of the avantgarde and the creation of “authentic art” in Nazi Germany, which only resumed after the fall of the National Socialist regime. The following chapters will provide evidence not only for the survival of the creation of modernist art in Germany after 1937, but also that such modernist art was produced under the official patronage of Adolf Hitler, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, and other institutions and individuals with close ties to the Nazi Party and state. That the production of modernist art could have been sponsored by the very institution responsible for the bloody conquest and brutal occupation of Europe is not inconsistent with the crucial role played by violent imagery and militaristic rhetoric in other strands of modernism, such as Italian futurism and British vorticism. But until the contents of the German War Art Collection were thoroughly examined, the evidence was lacking to support such an apparently outlandish or

counterintuitive concept as Nazi modernist art. Similarly, references to the transgressive nature of the Junge Kunst im Deutschen Reich exhibition have until now focused on the resulting contretemps. In Chapter 4 detailed analysis of the artists and objects is offered in order to suggest how an exhibition of modernist art could open in the Reich’s second largest city as late as 1943.

The German Wartime Art Project After defeating Hitler’s armies on the battlefield, the victorious Allies were, of course, concerned to prevent any possible revival of National Socialism. Acknowledging this concern, the Potsdam Agreement signed by the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union on August 1, 1945 signaled the intention of the occupying powers “to prevent all Nazi and militaristic activity or propaganda.”5 While this objective included the suppression of National Socialist media and politically compromised events, American authorities were alone, however, in officially designating contemporary German artworks as potentially dangerous instruments of a possible Nazi revival. Among the various attempts by the United States to control the cultural legacy of National Socialist Germany, none has influenced the history of German art in the twentieth century more but is as little known as the U.S. Army’s German Wartime Art Project. The brainchild of Colonel H.E. Potter, Chief of the U.S. Army’s Historical Division, United States Forces European Theater (USFET), based in Höchst, a suburb of Frankfurt am Main, the German Wartime Art Project came into being as the operations arm of the Historical Division that would implement Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall’s directive that German art throughout the American zone should be confiscated and shipped to Washington, D.C.: “[T]o provide for the collection, processing, preservation, and control of war paintings, photographs, maps, trophies, relics, and objects of actual or potential historical interest or value produced during the present war which are or may become the property of the War Department, an Historical Properties Section is established in the office of the Army Headquarters Commandant.”6 In quick succession, additional regulations were issued that gave German Wartime Art Project personnel a free hand to enter German homes and businesses in order to inspect private property, to interrogate occupants, and to impound works of art whose provenance or subject matter connected them to the Third Reich. For example, an order issued on November 7, 1945 directed that a collection should be made “of all available paintings, watercolors,

engravings, and drawings showing troop activities, views of battlefields, military installations, industrial or home front activities produced by German artists during the war.”7 In accordance with this edict, U.S. Military Government Regulations were revised to stipulate that “all collections of works of art relating or directed to the perpetuation of German militarism or Nazism [were to] be closed permanently and taken into custody.”8 To insure that all cultural property subject to seizure was, in fact, secured, the Military Government of Germany, United States zone, published Article I, Law No. 52, which decreed that “all property within the occupied territory owned or controlled directly or indirectly, in whole or in part, by [the German Reich] shall be subject to seizure of possession or title.”9 The U.S. Occupation Army’s definition of “property” included any and all assets in possession of the former Nazi German state, the NSDAP, and prominent office holders in and supporters of the regime. Thus endowed with sweeping powers, the U.S. Army laid claim both to looted art (so-called “aryanized” art properties) as well as propaganda materials and war art. The decision to repatriate artifacts with clear German, pre-Nazi era titles actually came much later, and only after a firestorm of criticism greeted the initial decision to ship 200 Old Masters paintings to the United States which had previously been housed in the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin after being salvaged in the Merkers salt mines by the Monuments Branch.10 It was in this politically charged atmosphere—and amid claims that the United States Army was behaving in a confiscatory manner that differed little from the Soviet Union’s trophy-hunting brigades— that U.S. Army Air Force Captain Gordon Waverly Gilkey, after failing in his ambition to be assigned as a Monuments Branch officer or an Army combat artist, arrived in Europe at the beginning of 1946 (fig. 8). Printmaker, educator, and collector, Gilkey is today best known as the founder of the Gordon W. and Vivian Gilkey Center for Graphic Art in the Portland Art Museum, which houses his extensive collection of 25,000 art prints. Included in this celebrated collection are approximately one hundred objects that Gilkey confiscated from German artists but did not transfer to U.S custody as part of the

German War Art Collection. It is a sad duty to report that Gilkey, a folk-hero to many in his native Oregon, was an art thief.11 In a letter dated February 8, 1946, Colonel Potter, chief of the Historical Division, invited Gilkey to lead the German Wartime Art Project: “Your letter written 9 January reached me just as the subject of War Art was under special administrative scrutiny; and it is particularly apropos that we have reached a decision to do some further work in collecting documentary paintings of war and current interest. There is an interesting field of work here, and your record shows qualifications well adapted to it.”12 Consistent with the pared down force levels of the U.S. Army of Occupation, Captain Gilkey was to serve alone on his mission of seeking out and seizing Nazi cultural property, armed simply with his Colt .45 sidearm and the sweeping authority he carried as the bearer of General Marshall’s orders. Designed to function as the occupation Army’s counterpart to the fighting Army’s Monuments Branch, which was mobilized in the runup to the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943, the Historical Division had, however, a radically different mission. While Monuments officers were responsible for securing, cataloging, and then repatriating thousands upon thousands of art treasures looted and expropriated by the Nazis throughout occupied Europe, the Historical Division was tasked with coordinating the traditionally chaotic grab for war booty by providing for a more systematic collection and preservation of trophies of the recently concluded war. In a clear acknowledgement of the inadequate performance of American combat art programs to record the feats of arms of both U.S. soldiers and their adversaries, no German trophies were deemed as desirable to the U.S. Army as works of art produced by Wehrmacht combat artists. For chief among the Army’s stated goals in acquiring German art properties was the provision of works of art to adorn the walls of the offices of high-ranking officers in the Pentagon, the U.S. War Department’s gargantuan new administration building, which opened in 1943. Along with trophy-quality contemporary German artworks, whose provenance linked them to the National Socialist regime and the battlefields of Europe and North Africa, U.S. Army personnel also seized art properties legitimately acquired by pre-Nazi governments.

What this means, of course, is that Captain Gilkey was authorized to engage in punitive actions against German cultural institutions as well as individual artists. Not previously known is that Monuments Branch personnel not only assisted Gilkey in making his selections for the German War Art Collection, they also pursued their own confiscatory agenda that was, as we shall see in Chapter 5, in accord with American denazification policies. Over a six-month period, from mid-1946 to spring 1947, despite limited staffing and logistical support, Captain Gilkey accumulated 9,176 works of art. Many of these objects fell into his hands with the discovery of the postwar hiding place of Luitpold Adam, a leading German combat artist, Hauptmann [captain] in the Wehrmacht, and former head of the Staffel der Bildenden Künstler [Squadron of Visual Artists], a freely circulating combat art unit of hand-picked artists who recorded the exploits of various branches of the Wehrmacht across the vast geographical range of its operations. Formed in 1940 on direct orders from Hitler to the German military high command, Adam’s unit was comprised of 80 artists who embedded with Wehrmacht units serving at the front and in occupation duties throughout Europe. From the selection of artists to the organization of artists’ working procedures, the exhibition and sale of their work, Adam exercised an astonishing degree of individual initiative and flexibility in supervising the Staffel. As a semiautonomous branch of the Nazi cultural bureaucracy whose activities were geographically dispersed, the Staffel was not subject to direct Party oversight. Thus, as the Reich expanded and then later collapsed, and military lines of communication and control were extended into the marginal spaces of Europe, a radical dynamism entered into the cultural activity associated with German military conquests as well as defeats. In this sense, the Staffel’s modus operandi was more akin to that of a collaborating arts organization in an occupied country—a zone of greater artistic freedom and heterogeneity—than to the Munich-centric exhibition culture that was the focus of state and Party patronage at the annual Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen. As a prime example of the law of unintended consequences, while it was on Hitler’s command that the Staffel was formed, many of the conscript artists recruited by Adam

had progressive modernist affiliations in their careers prior to the Machtergreifung. In fact, 56 members of Adam’s team had seen their work confiscated in 1937, but this matter did not disqualify them from service in the Staffel and from exhibiting and offering their works for sale at Kunst der Front exhibitions all over occupied Europe (fig. 9). On at least one occasion, the Staffel’s patron accepted Hauptmann Adam’s invitation to view examples of its work (fig. 10). The works of art produced by Adam’s artists were intended to hang in museums (military and civilian) and to decorate soldiers’ barracks, dining rooms, and officers’ clubs. Following the collapse of the Third Reich, Adam personally evacuated his unit’s huge stock of field sketches, watercolors, and graphic works from the Staffel’s headquarters in Potsdam to the Bavarian Forest, where he divided the objects into separate caches and hid them in castles and humbler dwellings scattered over the picturesque countryside. Under Captain Gilkey’s collegial interrogation—artist to artist— Adam revealed the locations of the hidden works of art and led the American officer to three major depots near the scenic towns of Zwiesel, Frauenau, and Rottach-Egern. Adam made it clear that his cooperation was, however, conditional on Gilkey’s promise that the impounding of the Staffel objects would be merely temporary. After being exhibited in Washington, D.C., they would, Gilkey assured him, be restituted to the artists. This promise to Adam was, of course, a ruse, as Gilkey admitted to the author that he never had any intention of returning the confiscated works of art nor had he the authorization to do so. Adam’s disappointment in Gilkey’s failure to make good on their agreement, which he carried to his death in 1952, is echoed by the many artists or artists’ heirs who corresponded with Gilkey in later years, seeking the promised return of their paintings, drawings, and prints. Others expressed their surprise and outrage in letters to Max Dirrigl, the acting director of the Abwickungsstelle, which was housed in the former Haus der Deutschen Kunst, or in their Fragebögen or denazification questionnaires. Gilkey’s confiscation of individual artists’ personal collections of art is also cited as a cause of emotional as well as financial distress by his victims and their heirs in both their letters to Gilkey and in their

Fragebögen.13 It was correspondence between individual artists and the Abwicklungsstelle, whose functions were funded by the Americans for five years, that frequently triggered the denazification process. As artists discovered, the restitution of works of art could not take place until Fragebögen and, in cases where the artists had been Party members, Spruchkammer [denazification tribunal] documents accompanied written requests for canvases or sculptures stored in the cavernous basement of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst.14 As an administrative satellite of the Central Collecting Point (CCP), Troost’s building thus became a key site in American attempts to the denazify German postwar culture. Aside from the works of art traced to the Führer’s personal collecting activity, which were taken to the CCP, the Haus der Deutschen Kunst was eventually—after the Abwicklungsstelle ceased operations—cleared of its unholy hoard of Nazi-tainted objects. The release to artists of all works but those associated with Hitler contributed to the former objects’ conversion from transgressive artifacts to exchangeable cultural commodities on the art market. The fact that relatively few objects (775) were flagged by the Monuments Branch from the thousands of paintings stored in the Haus der Deutsche Kunst suggests that the vast majority of works of art produced in Nazi Germany were harmless representatives of a culture deemed both normal and normative rather than aberrant and contaminated, and were thus indistinguishable from works that were in vogue during the late 1930s and early to mid-1940s. After persuading Adam to reveal his hiding places, Captain Gilkey’s second-most important source for Nazi art was the Munich Central Collecting Point, where works of art salvaged in Americanoccupied Bavaria and western Austria were taken into protective custody and processed for repatriation to their respective countries of origin. Organized by Monuments officer Craig Hugh Smyth and housed in the Verwaltungsbau, one of the two identical NSDAPcommissioned buildings designed by Paul Ludwig Troost (the other being the neighboring Führerbau), the Central Collecting Point would also serve as Gilkey’s temporary depot until he transferred his collection to U.S. Army Historical Division Headquarters based in the I.G. Farben chemical conglomerate’s office campus in suburban

Höchst. Like the NS-Reichsbesitz, the collection of Nazi art formed between 1945 and 1946 by Monuments officers, Gilkey’s German War Art Collection included paintings acquired for collections associated with Hitler, such as the latter’s personal collection of contemporary German art, and the collections of the Führerbau and Reichskanzlei. Virtually all of the NS-Reichsbesitz paintings and dozens of objects in the German War Art Collection were originally purchased at the annual Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen that were held from 1937 to 1944 in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst. In a previously undocumented intervention by non-Monuments personnel in the Central Collecting Point, Gilkey was clearly authorized to enter the storage rooms and make his selections from among the paintings that had been tagged by the Monuments Branch, as a consequence of their association with the Führer’s collecting activity, for inclusion in what would come to be known as the NS-Reichsbesitz.15 Salvaged in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, the art collections associated with Nazi Party offices and Hitler’s private residence on Prinzregentenplatz, these pictures had been impounded on the basis of their provenance: all were identified as property of the former Reich or were traceable to leadership figures such as Hitler’s confidant and photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. In addition, Gilkey selected portraits of Nazi officials, architectural paintings, battle scenes, pastoral landscapes, and depictions of historical and mythological subjects that included leading symbols or echoed dominant themes and tropes of Nazi propaganda. As a result, the NS-Reichsbesitz contains few leadership portraits or Second World War combat scenes. Although such images had been purchased with Party funds or personal resources associated with Hitler, these objects were diverted to the German War Art Collection, which was shipped to the United States rather than deposited in occupied Germany. Prior to their overseas transfer, a selection of the objects acquired by Gilkey were featured in a special exhibition for Allied VIPs at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main (fig. 11). The centerpiece of Gilkey’s exhibition was a painting, Emil Scheibe’s Hitler at the Front (fig. 12), which was neither a Staffel production nor had been exhibited in one of the Große Deutsche

Kunstausstellungen.16 In his zeal for the mission, Gilkey seems not to have noticed that Scheibe’s painting exhibits many of the hallmarks of Neue Sachlichkeit/Verism (a movement with which the artist was associated), including grotesquely exaggerated facial expressions and the wild gestures of inmates in an asylum. It is a lampoon which has more in common with the satirical paintings of George Grosz and Otto Dix than the idealized portraits of the Führer that were frequently exhibited in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen. Besides Lanzinger’s Führerbildnis/Der Bannerträger, other works that Gilkey seized with Haus der Deutschen Kunst connections include the central panel of Hans Schmitz-Wiedenbrück’s triptych, Arbeiter, Bauern und Soldaten [Workers, Farmers and Soldiers] (fig. 13), and Anton Lamprecht’s portrait of Leutnant Matl (fig. 14), which had been produced during the artist’s time with the Staffel. Another work, a portrait in profile of the Führer by Conrad Hommel, was taken by Gilkey after it had been registered by Monuments officers in the Munich Central Collecting Point (fig. 15). Additional evidence that these two operations—the Monuments Branch art restitution program and the German Wartime Art Project, the U.S. Army’s official art looting squad—overlapped was also discovered in the Archives of the National Gallery of Art, which holds the registration photographs of paintings that Gilkey removed from the Central Collecting Point, took into his custody, and then shipped to Washington, D.C. Among the works of art photographed and registered at the Central Collecting Point are four watercolors by Adolf Hitler that were ultimately accessioned to the German War Art Collection and have since been claimed as U.S. property by an Act of Congress. One of these watercolors was initially set aside by Monuments officer Ernst Breitenbach for return to Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s personal photographer, confidant, and the work’s owner of record.17 The other three watercolors were at first designated to join the NS-Reichsbesitz, the body of 775 “nonmilitaristic” and “non-Nazi” paintings found in the Führerbau, Reichskanzlei, and Haus der Deutschen Kunst, vetted by the Monuments Branch and occupation government officials, scrutinized by Gilkey, and then assigned to the legal if not physical custody of

the civilian Ministerpräsident of Bavaria. However, before the closing of the Wiesbaden Collecting Point in 1950, all four Hitler watercolors were once again removed from German custody and shipped to Washington, D.C., where the decision was made to add them to the German War Art Collection in the early 1950s.18 Additional confirmation of Monuments Branch complicity in Gilkey’s official art trophy hunting expedition was recently discovered in letters sent by artists seeking the return of embargoed paintings to the Abwicklungsstelle of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst. In his replies to such queries, Max Dirrigl, the long-suffering chief of the Abwicklungsstelle and former accountant of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, who had been kept on after the U.S. Sixth Army seized the valuably intact museum building following the Battle of Munich, indicates that Monuments officers had condoned Gilkey’s confiscations because the pictures in question had met the latter’s criteria for requisition. One such artist who tried in vain to retrieve her work from American custody was Helga Tiemann. Her painting Abschied [Farewell] (fig. 16), which had been submitted to the jury of the 1945 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung, is an elegiac image that captures the claustrophobia and fatalism of life in the last year of the war. Despite its more than mildly subversive, anti-war subject— soldiers bidding farewell to loved ones before boarding trains that would take them to violence and death at the front—Tiemann’s picture was earmarked for seizure by the Monuments Branch and turned over to Gilkey. Dirrigl’s reply to Tiemann (fig. 17) is representative of the official response in such cases: “We received your letter of 13 July 1946 and wish to inform you that your work, Farewell, was confiscated by Captain Gordon W. Gilkey, Head, War and Occupation Art, Historical Division, U.S. Forces European Theater (USFET).”19 The case of Eduard Schloemann, who enjoyed a varied career before the war, is also instructive. As a young officer who survived frontline service for four years in the First World War, Schloemann was, in succession, a leading modernist painter in northwestern Germany, a member of aviation pioneer Günther Plüschow’s expedition to Patagonia, and a prominent specialist in marine painting who sold 7 works to the Führer at the Große Deutsche

Kunstausstellungen. What makes these sales to Hitler so remarkable is that Schloemann was of Jewish ancestry (50%) on his mother’s side. Also, Schloemann was another artist whose works had been confiscated and destroyed in 1937 (fig. 18), but who enjoyed success at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst before being recruited for service in the Staffel der Bildenden Künstler (fig. 19). Schloemann’s granddaughter speculates that he made the decision to enlist in the Kriegsmarine (fig. 20), early in the war, and at the advanced age of 52, in order to protect his mother and sister from the unwanted attentions of the Gestapo.20 Schloemann’s sister, Ilse, was one of the many survivors of Staffel artists who contacted U.S. Army officials seeking the release of works of art seized by Gilkey.21

The 1951 Repatriation of the German War Art Collection On the arrival of Gilkey’s collection in Washington, D.C. in 1947 U.S. Army lawyers were horrified to discover that Gilkey, as leader of the German Wartime Art Project, the occupation Army’s official looting program, did not begin operations until a year after the German surrender. This meant that he had thus contravened the Protocols of the Allied Control Commission. These rules required occupation property control officials to distinguish between National Socialist state and Party property, on the one hand, and the private property of individual German citizens, on the other. Therefore, Gilkey’s confiscation activity, which blurred the lines between public and private property and exercised U.S. authority over German civilians in a manner that could, at times, be construed as arbitrary if not abusive, was retroactively deemed to have been illegal. There were also glaring problems with the provenance of many pictures that Gilkey deemed subject to seizure but lacked Wehrmacht or Propagandaministerium stamps, stickers, or other evidence of links to the Staffel or other National Socialist institutional patronage, suggesting that such objects were private property at the time they were confiscated. In interviews with the author just before his death, Gilkey freely admitted that he had raided the private studios and residences of Staffel artists and seized all works of art that were present, regardless of whether they bore visible evidence of Nazi provenance, theme or style. It is no wonder, then, that for decades afterwards, Gilkey continued to receive queries about the works of art he had acquired in this way.22 Typical of these is the letter from Herbert Agricola to Gilkey dated March 12, 1947: “Dear Captain, there was a thrill [sic] when I came back tonight the day we met in Munich. I found my home topseyturvey checked for paintings from they took 265.”23 In fact, angry charges of theft and claims for restitution lodged by German artists continued to make their way up the chain of command in both West Germany and the United States for decades after the German Wartime Art Project wrapped up its duties and Gilkey was

demobilized in 1947. German artists even appealed directly to Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, and Reagan to release their works of art, for which, in some cases, they held receipts signed by Gilkey. On the defensive after the firestorm of criticism that greeted the U.S. Army’s extremely risky shipment of the 200 Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum paintings to Washington in order “to protect” them, Army lawyers were acutely sensitive to perceived violations of West Germany’s freshly restored sovereignty and the civil liberties of German citizens. The Army’s solution to the legal and political crisis developing over Gilkey’s confiscation of contemporary German art was, unlike the case of the Old Masters paintings, immediate repatriation to Bonn. Both programs—the confiscation of contemporary German art and the taking into “protective custody” of the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum works—had their origins in the early postwar honeymoon phase of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry. Initially, at least, both countries were inclined to pursue a policy of extracting cultural reparations from defeated Germany. Thus it was in an atmosphere charged with retributive fervor that the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum paintings and the German War Art Collection were shipped to Washington. Only after the former caused a public relations nightmare for the Army, in both the U.S. and West Germany, were more legitimate-sounding rationales invented for the transoceanic shipment of the masterpieces to America, chief among them being the need to safeguard the pictures in advance of a feared Soviet invasion of Western Europe. According to this worst-case scenario, accessioning the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum pictures would put the National Gallery of Art on a more competitive footing with its chief rival among American museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Despite the undisguised enthusiasm for the transfer of the pictures expressed by such prominent individuals as Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas and Harlan Stone, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (and member of the National Gallery’s board of trustees), John Walker, the Director of National Gallery of Art, issued strenuous denials that such a plan was ever afoot, even as he threw his weight behind the perilous scheme. Senator Fulbright went so far in his enthusiasm for the temporary confiscation of the German Old

Masters that he sponsored legislation that prevented the repatriation of the pictures to Germany until after they had completed an additional two-year tour of thirteen American museums.24 Returning the German War Art Collection to West Germany was, however, motivated by more than respect for the legal niceties of the postwar order or by fear of being compared to the insatiably acquisitive Soviet occupiers of East Germany. In 1951, as the Korean War reached a bloody stalemate, U.S. Army officials were eager to improve relations with the newly sovereign Federal Republic of (West) Germany. This required rehabilitating, as far as was possible, the West German military, the post-Nazi incarnation of Adolf Hitler’s war machine, whose troops and tanks blocked the Red Army’s invasion route into Western Europe. For America’s cold warriors, placating West Germany with the repatriation of the German War Art Collection took precedence over taking a principled stand on the issue of restituting Holocaust cultural assets, including the Linzer Sammlung of art, formed by Hitler and his agents through thousands of dubious transactions and outright thefts. Destined for the vast museum complex designed by architect Hermann Giesler, the Linzer Sammlung was to have transformed Hitler’s frowzy hometown into the capital of European civilization. Thus with revisionist haste and perhaps unseemly pragmatism, 1,626 works in the German War Art Collection, which amounted to slightly less than a quarter of the total number of objects seized by Gilkey, were suddenly re-categorized by Army lawyers with bureaucratic ingenuity as “non-military military art” and loaded onto a freighter bound for West Germany. With Army lawyers uncertain as to what should be done with the bulk of the less innocuous German War Art Collection, the issue of their repatriation remained in limbo for the next 25 years. Far from jubilant over this gesture of Cold War solidarity from their U.S. patrons, the government of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer left the crates containing the German combat pictures lying on a pier in Bremerhaven for two years before finally claiming them. Then, in 1953, in an act of supreme but perhaps unintended historical irony, the repatriated objects were shipped south to Munich and deposited in the Verwaltungsbau, site of the former Munich Central Collecting Point, which then temporarily housed the Bayerisches

Haupstaatsarchiv before it gave way to the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, a think tank and art history library, which continues to occupy the Nazi Party’s former Munich headquarters. This comedy of errors reached its climax in an aide-mémoire dated July 6, 1976, in which the West German Ambassador to the United States, Peter Hermes, inquired as to the whereabouts of the works of art returned to the Federal Republic in 1951 “with the understanding that they would be returned by German authorities to their rightful owners. As the appropriate German authorities have difficulties in locating the 1,600 [sic] objects, the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany would be grateful to the Department of State if the Department could be helpful in forwarding a copy of a possible protocol on the handing over to any German authority of the 1,600 [sic] items, or any receipt signed by a representative of a German authority.”25 20 years passed, however, before German authorities took any action with respect to the objects repatriated in 1951 and discovered in 1953. Catalogued in the 1970s, the 1,626 pictures then passed into the control of the Bundesvermögensamt [Federal Property Office]. From the reunification of Germany in 1990 until 2005, the repatriated works of art were housed, with an additional dollop of irony, in a storage facility on the grounds of the Bundesamt für Strahlenschutz [Federal Office for Radiation Security] in BerlinKarlshorst in the former East (fig. 21). There the radioactive “nonmilitary military art” was stored alongside the unclaimed remnant of the Linzer Sammlung, which, in other words, contained the orphaned objects that had been intended for the gargantuan museum in the Führer’s hometown (fig. 22). In 2005 the 1,626 pictures were transferred to the administration of the Deutsches Historisches Museum where they were reunited with the NS-Reichsbesitz.

The 1986 Repatriation of the German War Art Collection Another 35 years would pass before U.S. Army lawyers found a solution to the legal dilemma posed by continuing custody of the 7,100 objects left behind in 1951. Then, in 1986, after ten years of protracted bilateral negotiations between a succession of German and American administrations, this body of objects finally left the United States. This little-known American contribution to Germany’s effort to overcome its Nazi past was preceded in 1985 by President Ronald Reagan’s ceremonial visit to the German military cemetery in Bitburg. This, in turn, sparked a major controversy when it was disclosed that members of Heinrich Himmler’s Waffen-SS as well as regular Wehrmacht soldiers were buried there. Interviews with Jack F. Matlock, Jr., a Reagan foreign policy advisor during this episode, revealed that the restitution of Nazi art and the President’s wreathlaying at Bitburg were related elements in a public relations campaign designed to win Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s support for the “Star Wars” missile defense program and the installation of U.S. Pershing intermediate range nuclear rockets on West German soil.26 The process of repatriating the German War Art Collection had begun four years earlier but without the missiles as a quid pro quo. On May 12, 1981 Congressman G. William Whitehurst [R-Virginia] introduced legislation (H.R. 3555) that authorized the return of the U.S. Army’s collection of looted Nazi art to West Germany. The original impulse behind Whitehurst’s bill was, however, unrelated to any overarching geopolitical strategy. In 1976, while serving as the U.S. Congressional liaison to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Whitehurst befriended several high-ranking West German naval officers who had presented the case for repatriating the Army’s war trophies, which lay moldering in a Richmond, Virginia warehouse, to West Germany where they could be properly displayed in a military history museum and serve a public, openly didactic and prophylactic function against fascist taste. That same year, already under the influence of his new German friends, Whitehurst sponsored a prior, less-ambitious bill that instructed the Army to return ten naval war

paintings by the prominent marine artist Claus Bergen (1885–1964) to West Germany.27 In subsequent press and television interviews (and in conversation with the author), Whitehurst steadfastly maintained that the West Germans were deserving of an even more magnanimous gesture from their old foe and new Cold War ally.28 Not everyone in official Washington shared Whitehurst’s staunchly pro-German bias or applauded his legislative gestures of good will. Indeed, his second and more comprehensive Nazi art repatriation bill that was passed in 1981 encountered fierce opposition from the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Commission. A newly established federal agency, the USHMC was chaired by Elie Wiesel, the Auschwitz survivor, bestselling author, and future Nobel Peace Prize winner (1986), who imperiously demanded that the entire German War Art Collection be transferred to his embryonic museum without a building. In a previously unpublished letter to Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defense, dated May 28, 1981, Wiesel’s intentions are unmistakable: “As Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, I am writing to request that the four watercolors by Adolf Hitler and more than 6,000 [sic] works of art commissioned to glorify the conquests of Nazi armies in Europe and North Africa [be transferred] to my authority. The Holocaust Memorial Council is unquestionably the appropriate repository for such materials [. . .] We respectfully submit that these materials should be in our Nation’s Holocaust Museum.”29 Wiesel was so effective in lobbying allies in Congress, the State Department, and the Reagan White House that the resulting interagency squabbling delayed the return of the Army’s collection of Nazi art for a further five years. As a concession to opponents of what had become the bureaucratically inevitable repatriation of the German War Art Collection, the Secretary of the Army formed a committee with representatives from the main warring factions within the U.S. government—the Army, which was staunchly pro-return, and the State Department, which was adamantly contra repatriation, and a neutral party, the Smithsonian Institution. Other appointees included an assortment of Capitol Hill functionaries, but not a single professional art historian. Chaired by Jacob K. Javits, the

distinguished former U.S. Senator from New York, whose profile as a moderate Jewish Republican was stressed as a positive factor in Army correspondence debating the wisdom of his appointment, the committee was charged with screening the 7,100 works of art in the German War Art Collection retained by the Army for the presence of any obvious National Socialist themes and symbolism. Objects that failed this vetting process would, it was stipulated, not be going back to Bonn. In the end, 400 pictures and sculptures were set aside as either offensive or potentially politically explosive. These objects, along with 50 others deemed to be of exceptional documentary and historical value, such as the four Hitler watercolors, were assigned to permanent U.S. custody.30 Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the political climate in Bonn had changed considerably in the decade since the West German Foreign Office first approached the U.S. about the possibility of restoring the rest of the Army’s collection of Nazi art to West German custody. In an aide-mémoire dated October 18, 1977 Ambassador Hermes once again submitted a special request to the State Department: “Since [1976] a number of heirs to the artists concerned have, for reasons of piety and reverence, applied to the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany for restitution of the paintings. Some German archives and museums would like to integrate the paintings as historical documents in their collections. The Government of the Federal Republic of Germany [. . . ] requests the U.S. Government to restore the entire collection.”31 Officially citing concern for the sensitivities of artists’ heirs offered cover for a looming public relations debacle as surviving artists and heirs sued in court for the return of works of art seized by Gilkey. Further impetus for the dramatic shift in attitude toward the repatriation of the German War Art Collection was created by the airing of Holocaust, the American TV miniseries featuring the young Meryl Streep and James Woods, on West German television in January 1979. The publication of excerpts of Joseph Goebbels’ Tagebücher later that same year is credited with triggering a belated enthusiasm among West Germans for initiating the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung [overcoming the past]. Additional momentum for confronting the Nazi past was generated in 1983 with

the election of the first members of Die Grünen or the Greens Party to the Bundestag, the West German parliament. With levels of German historical consciousness and sensitivity to Nazi-era crimes rising to a postwar high, the arrival of the repatriated German War Art Collection in 1986 sparked a vigorous debate concerning the proper disposition of these “radioactive” objects. For their part, the Greens favored public display of the returned artworks over continued sequestration, arguing that to demonize the artifacts would turn them into icons of a new Nazi mythology and lodestars of a possible Nazi resurgence.32 But exhibiting the 7,100 repatriated works of art was never given serious consideration by Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s conservative Christian Democratic majority government. Releasing the pictures to surviving artists who produced the works or to their heirs was also ruled out, even though the West German government had formally agreed, in its negotiations with the United States, to honor artists’ claims for restitution. Ultimately, the decision was taken to seclude the repatriated artworks in the basement of the Bayerisches Armeemuseum in Ingolstadt. It was there that the 7,100 works of the German War Art Collection remained for two decades, surrounded by weapons and military paraphernalia dating from the Middle Ages to the fall of the Berlin Wall, pending their ultimate transfer to Deutsches Historisches Museum.

The German War Art Collection in Washington, D.C. The repository housing the 450 works of art that were held back from the large-scale repatriation in 1986 was situated in a satellite branch of the U.S. Army Center of Military History for 25 years. In the basement of a modern office building the controversial objects were stored, while loans of paintings and sculptures were handled by the Army’s tank training school. In 2013–2014 the German War Art Collection was relocated to Fort Belvoir in Virginia where it will be housed until construction of the Army’s planned museum is completed. The Department of the Army, despite eagerly pressing the case for repatriation of the German War Art Collection in 1951 and, again, from 1981 through 1986, remains unwavering in its insistence that the 450 works of art it controls remain in its custody. After rejecting the Army’s own Historical Advisory Committee’s recommendation in 2001, which was authored by committee chairman and eminent historian of Nazi Germany, Gerhard L. Weinberg, that the remaining 450 works be returned to Germany, top military officials tasted vindication in November 2004. In that month the U.S. Supreme Court announced its refusal to review a lower court decision that held that the U.S. Army was not obliged to return the four Hitler watercolors in the German War Art Collection to one Billy F. Price. In 1989 Price, a Houston businessman and Hitler memorabilia collector, acting on behalf of Henriette, Heinrich Hoffmann’s daughter and the widow of Nazi leader Baldur von Schirach, launched a legal challenge to the Army’s claim to the watercolors and sued for millions in restitution. A Texas District Court initially ruled in favor of Price, awarded Schirach a multimillion-dollar judgment, and ridiculed the Army’s rationale for sequestration that “four architectural paintings could be ‘rallying points for a possible revival of Nazism.’” Controversial, above all, because it threatened to undermine the legal basis for the pending investiture as property in the U.S. Library of Congress of Heinrich Hoffmann’s collection of millions of photographic negatives that was discovered and seized by the Army in the early days of the occupation, this 1989 decision in

favor of Price and Frau von Schirach was subsequently reversed by the Texas Court of Appeals. Then, in 1999, after the plaintiff—the U.S. government—appealed, the case was moved to Washington, D.C. where a District Court again ruled in favor of the U.S. Army. In 2001 and, again, in 2003, Price and Frau von Schirach were twice rebuffed by the courts. In 2002 and again in 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the Army’s successful appeal of the original 1989 Texas judgment in favor of Price and Heinrich Hoffmann’s heirs.33 In 2004 Brigadier General John Brown, outgoing head of the U.S. Army’s Center of Military History, was interviewed about the Army’s view of the legal status of Hitler’s watercolors and the other 446 objects in the German War Art Collection that remained in the custody of the United States. When asked if the Army’s continued sequestration of these works, which had been determined to be in violation of U.S. and German laws in 1947, could not also be construed as a violation of the 1907 Hague Convention and the 1970 UNESCO treaty on cultural property, he replied, “No. That would only be true if the objects in the ‘German War Art Collection’ could be defined as cultural property or art. Our position is that these paintings are not art.” General Brown’s statement was consistent with the announcement of U.S. Army policy on the status of the German War Art Collection nearly fifty years earlier. In a memorandum issued on October 13, 1955 Colonel Howard S. Levine of the Army’s Judge Advocate General’s Office addressed both the specific legal status of Adolf Wissel’s Porträt Dr. Alexander Matting (the wartime rector of the Technical University of Hannover), which was seized by Gilkey and then held back from the 1986 repatriation because of the presence of a Nazi Party badge on the subject’s lapel, and, more generally, the legality of the U.S. seizure and continued custodianship of German cultural property. Adumbrating a position that would become the Army’s institutionalized opinion on the German War Art Collection, Colonel Levine insisted that “the design and use of the portrait for propagandistic and militaristic purposes destroyed the otherwise cultural and sacrosanct character of such property and rendered it subject to confiscation.”34 Wissel was, of course, a leading presence

in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen, and is one of the undeniably talented artists associated with the Führer’s patronage.

Modernism and Wehrmacht Patronage The huge and multifaceted body of work produced by the Staffel der Bildenden Künstler in a variety of media and employing familiar modernist techniques and devices resists easy classification. Contrary to what one might expect, given the Nazi aesthetic orthodoxy assumed by many scholars or commentators to have dominated the German home front, especially the Party-sponsored Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen, German combat artists exercised considerable freedom in representing the experience of war, the variety of landscapes in which they found themselves, and the diverse human types they saw in the ranks of German soldiers, Allied prisoners, and the civilian populace. The examples reproduced here suggest the wide range of styles and subject matter displayed in the surviving Wehrmacht paintings, sketches, and prints. While a small number of objects portray Nazi leaders, prisoners of war, forced laborers, and refugees, most of the 9,176 objects do not function as conventional facist propaganda. The vast majority document combat, depict landscapes, and portray German soldiers in the modes of post-impressionism and neo-expressionism. Thus if the works in the German War Art Collection do serve a propaganda purpose, they do so in the vernacular of art and frequently in conventions associated with avantgarde modernism A thorough examination of these politically compromised works of art reveals that few of the 450 objects in the custody of the U.S. Army are actually the work of combat artists. Instead, the majority of the objects held back by the Department of the Army’s Javits Committee in 1986 were produced by civilian artists and were exhibited in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen. Several of them were in fact purchased for Hitler’s private collection, such as Albrecht Kettler’s Organisation Todt [The Fritz Todt Organization] (fig. 23) and Schmitz-Wiedenbrück’s Arbeiter, Bauern und Soldaten (fig. 13), but neither of the producers of these works served as combat artists in the German military. In addition, neither of these paintings serve a documentary function of reconstructing events on the battlefield. Instead, these works seek to glorify the biosocial mission of the German Volk under the leadership of the NSDAP.

These civilian works of art in the German War Art Collection are more overtly National Socialist in iconography than the paintings and graphic works produced by artists serving in the Staffel der Bildenden Künstler. This is owing to the fact that the initial Monuments Branch vetting of works of art purchased by Hitler at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst would have yielded “official” paintings in large numbers (i.e., portraits of Party leaders) that triggered automatic confiscation. Also, but even more crucially, the pictures taken into custody were works of art that met Monuments Branch expectations for regime-approved art. The non-military paintings in the German War Art Collection that had been acquired by the Führer at the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung were understood to embody an alternative to the transgressive “degenerate” styles of modernism. In this way, we can see that the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen paintings in the German War Art Collection were selected from the same pool of objects from which the Monuments officers flagged objects for the NS-Reichsbesitz. But the many times more numerous objects retained in Washington, principally the works of art produced by members of the Staffel der Bildenden Künstler, underscore the eclectic, heterogeneous nature of Nazi aesthetics and bear the unmistakable features of expressionism, postimpressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit, surrealism, and other modernist movements. In the two repatriated sections of the German War Art Collection (numbering a total of 8,726 works), which were produced exclusively by combat artists, the modernist element is even more pronounced, as we shall see below. Similar divergences can be seen by comparing the repatriated portions of the German War Art Collection and the works of art in the NS-Reichsbesitz. That the combat art component in the German War Art Collection reveals obvious affinities with several styles of modernism, while the objects in the NS-Reichsbesitz reflect the aesthetic ideals pronounced by Hitler, Goebbels, and Rosenberg, can be explained by the radically discrepant confiscation procedures followed by Gilkey’s German Wartime Art Project and his Monuments Branch colleagues at the Central Collecting Point. The NS-Reichsbesitz, like the civilian art in the remnant of the German War Art Collection in the custody of the U.S. Army, is more

conventionally National Socialist in style and iconography because it consists exclusively of paintings purchased by Hitler and other Nazi leaders at the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen. Gilkey, by contrast, cast his collecting net more widely, thus insuring that the Army’s cache of Nazi art would be more broadly representative of artistic production during the Third Reich than the NS-Reichsbesitz, which reflects the specialized purpose of the exhibitions conducted in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, namely, to showcase the regime’s eugenic utopian aesthetic. This more inclusive quality of the German War Art Collection prevailed because Gilkey’s guiding criterion was that the objects he targeted for confiscation had to have been produced with the support of Nazi patronage—individuals or institutions. He had concluded, erroneously, however, that only members of the NSDAP were eligible to join the Reichskulturkammer [Reich Chamber of Culture] and thus exhibit their work in the shows installed in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, or to serve in the Staffel der Bildenden Künstler. Consequently, Captain Gilkey did not discriminate between works of art produced by Wehrmacht conscripts, who, prior to their joining the Staffel, in disproportionate numbers, were likely to have been marginalized practitioners of modernist styles, or the regime’s most favored court artists who were shielded from mandatory military service.35 Gilkey justified his confiscations on provenance alone and the false assumption that any artist working either in a Wehrmacht propaganda unit or openly on the home front was a Party member. Simply put, every work of art that Gilkey stumbled upon in his travels throughout the American zone, regardless of style and iconography, was deemed fair game for the Army’s “art detective,” as Gilkey described himself in later years. This included a large number of works that exhibit modernist traits and were produced by artists who had experienced persecution or professional failure following the Machtergreifung and, until they were conscripted into the Wehrmacht and recruited for the Staffel, had no choice but to seek refuge in internal exile.36 Works that fall into this category and whose appearance is not predictable by the patronage that supported their production include Ulrich Ertl’s Finnisches Mädchen [Finnish Girl] (fig. 24) and

Polarlandschaft mit Drahtsperren [Polar Landscape with Barbed-wire Fence] (fig. 25), both of which were produced during his service in Finnland; Walter Hensellek’s Abwehr [Defensive Action] (fig. 26); Fritz Junghans’s Sonnenuntergang an der Duhna [Sunset on the River Duhna] (fig. 27); Max H. Mahlmann’s remarkably unheroic and unidealized portrait of a Landser, a German foot soldier (fig. 28), weary from combat; Rudolf Hengstenberg’s Panzer nähern sich durch ein Kornfeld [Tanks Approach Through a Field of Wheat] (fig. 29), which reveals the artist’s affinity with cubism, the movement he was associated with as a young man working in Paris; Otto Meister’s quivering post-impressionist Olymp in Regen [Mount Olympus in the Rain] (fig. 30); Gottfried Meyer’s abstract landscape (fig. 31) and his nearly abstract Figurengruppe [Group of Figures] (fig. 32), which was published by the Wehrmacht in a portfolio of similar works by Meyer; Berthold Rothmaier’s painting of anti-aircraft searchlights in a surrealist night-time landscape (fig. 33); Walter Schmock’s Im Waggon [In a Railcar] (fig. 34) which depicts the ordinary life of German troops being sent to the front; an expressionist landscape by Hugo Troendle (fig. 35), whose works were confiscated as degenerate in 1937; Emil Rizek’s Finne mit Schlitten [Finnish Soldier with a Sleigh] (fig. 36) whose expressionist treatment of the subject lends it an exotic air; a painting by Ernst Widmann (fig. 37) that is just one of dozens of modernist landscapes by this artist in the German War Art Collection; Heinrich von Schrötter’s neoexpressionist drawing of German soldiers marching through a forest (fig. 38); Carl Busch’s allegorical Spähtrupp I (mit Tod) [Reconnaissance Patrol I (with Death)] (fig. 6) and his empathetic treatment of Russian refugees, Flüchtlinge in Russland (fig. 5); the aforementioned Helga Tiemann’s moving Neue Sachlichkeit-inflected depiction of soldiers taking leave on their way to the front (fig. 16); and, finally, the anti-modernist campaigner Wolfgang Willrich’s strikingly modernist landscape, Tundra in der Dämmerung [Tundra in the Twilight] (fig. 39). Gilkey’s principle of selection produced results that are both paradoxical and problematic. They are paradoxical because a high percentage of the confiscated German combat art is neither propagandistic, according to the Army’s own legal criteria as applied

in 1951 and 1986, nor stereotypically National Socialist in ideological content, iconography or style. They are problematic because examination of these objects raises fascinating and, for some, troubling questions, such as, exactly how much National Socialist ideology actually imbued the art of the Third Reich and how resistant were modernist aesthetics to being mobilized for Nazi propaganda purposes? Even more challenging to conventional understanding about the operation of patronage mechanisms in Hitler’s Germany is the possibility that National Socialist patronage of the arts actually condoned or even abetted the work of artists in modernist styles, which is one of the main questions examined in this book. Due to overexposure in high-profile exhibitions, a handful of objects in the NS-Reichsbesitz and in the German War Art Collection have come to serve a function that was never intended for them when Monuments officers in occupied Germany created the existing collection out of the works of art left behind in the depot space of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst or in public buildings—that of a de facto canon of National Socialist art. Our overfamiliarity with certain works in the NS-Reichsbesitz combined with the continued sequestration of the more various German War Art Collection has meant that, aside from Lanzinger’s Der Bannerträger, the only paintings produced during the Third Reich that scholars and the public have actually seen belong to the NS-Reichsbesitz. Even though this collection was never removed from West Germany and its constituent objects technically belonged to the Free State of Bavaria (as a consequence of the postwar division of property that had belonged to or was associated with the NSDAP), the collection remained in the official custody of the United States until 1963.37 After a series of exhibitions of objects from the NS-Reichsbesitz were staged in West German art museums in the 1970s and 1980s,38 the “Arno Breker/Museum Ludwig” controversy of the late 1980s revived a debate over the status of these objects. The question emerged as to whether works of art produced in Nazi Germany should ever be displayed in art museums.39 The consensus among German museum professionals that coalesced around this issue in the 1990s was that henceforth Nazi art would be exhibited only under certain carefully observed conditions, e.g., in history rather than art museums, and not without

being responsibly framed by contextualizing materials. Violators of this emergent protocol risked the opprobrium of their peers and attacks in the press. A notable exception to this policy was the controversial 1999 exhibition of 140 meticulously restored paintings from the NSReichsbesitz that was curated by Achim Preiß at the Gauforum, a Nazi-era building in Weimar. Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne [Rise and Fall of Modernism] functioned as a coming-out-party of sorts for these works, which had only recently been transferred from the custody of the Oberfinanzdirektion in Munich to that of the Deutsches Historisches Museum. Aufstieg remains the most extensive show in the postwar exhibition history of the NSReichsbesitz. With the return of Hitler’s collection to German control in 1963, these pictures were housed in the Hauptzollamt in Munich. Starting in the mid-1970s, this imposing edifice—empty but for the NS-Reichsbesitz and related objects, such as one of Hitler’s desks and one of his massive globes (ridiculed as a child’s plaything in Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940)—enjoyed the dubious distinction of being a pilgrimage destination for both serious scholars and Nazi fetishists. Now, after 20 years, Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne is considered a dark chapter in the exhibition history of the NS-Reichsbesitz, chiefly because curator Preiß installed the pictures without sufficient contextualization and in tandem with a representative selection of paintings produced in the Communist Democratic Republic of Germany. The explicit comparison between the two dictatorships provoked condemnation in the German media and incited some memorable protest actions by artists from the former East.40 Violations of the unofficial taboo on exhibiting Nazi art in museums continue to be treated with scorn in the German press and among museum professionals, as was made abundantly clear again in the reviews and press coverage of the exhibition of Arno Breker’s works in the German city of Schwerin, Zur Diskussion Gestellt: Der Bildhauer Arno Breker [For Discussion: The Sculptor Arno Breker] that opened in 2006. By contrast, the inclusion of Lanzinger’s Der Bannerträger in Das XX. Jahrhundert: Ein Jahrhundert Kunst in Deutschland [The 20th Century: A Century of Art in Germany] (1999)

in Berlin’s Altes Museum and in Kunst und Propaganda im Streit der Nationen, 1930–1945 (2007) at the Deutsches Historisches Museum, reflected strict observance by the curatorial teams of the consensus museum protocol. Media coverage and the reaction of colleagues to both exhibitions were universally positive with respect to the installation of controversial works of art. In the former, Der Bannerträger was hung as a component of the wall text outside the section of the exhibition entitled Die Gewalt der Kunst [The Violence of Art]. In Kunst und Propaganda, Lanzinger’s portrait of Hitler as a Knight Templar was framed by video screens and vitrines bristling with contextualizing materials. In both exhibitions the tainted object was kept apart from the “real” or canonical art in such a way that no spectator could have mistaken it for an independent element of the installation. Safely designated as a “mere” propaganda artifact, Der Bannerträger functioned in these exhibitions as a political prop or an ideological signifier rather than an autonomous work of art. Albeit fragmentary and largely one-dimensional because all the objects in it were exhibited in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen and collected in the name of Adolf Hitler, the NS-Reichsbesitz continues to meet the expectations of art historians who cling to the belief that National Socialist anti-modernist agitation, which culminated in the July 1937 Entartete Kunstausstellung, succeeded in squelching modernist artistic practice in Hitler’s Germany. As a result, Nazi art in all its varieties remains absent from the “real” history of art in the twentieth century. The ubiquitous influence of the NS-Reichsbesitz and the prominence of scholarship which focuses on this fragment of the total number of objects exhibited in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst between 1937 and 1944 are also responsible for any lingering traces of this rigid dualism —“official art” versus “degenerate art”—in standard treatments of twentieth-century German art. Meanwhile, the German War Art Collection, despite its vastly greater size (9,176 objects as opposed to the 775 objects in the NSReichsbesitz) and surprising stylistic heterogeneity and unexpected subject matter, remains virtually unknown and thus unacknowledged as representative of artistic practice in Nazi Germany. However, as the examples discussed and represented here suggest, a more

systematic study of the German War Art Collection has the potential to shift our focus from the aesthetic rupture between avantgarde and eugenic modernism to the now documentable relationship between various modernist idioms and official Nazi patronage. It will be seen in the chapters that follow that the most privileged as well as marginalized artists in Nazi Germany found ways of accommodating themselves to the regime’s fluid aesthetic without tortuous contortions and without making drastic aesthetic compromises. Aside from a small group of so-called “god-gifted” artists, such as Arno Breker, Oskar Martin-Amorbach, Ivo Saliger, and Josef Thorak, most German artists not subjected to racial or political persecution continued to work without adopting the aesthetic template of the new court art as exemplified in the NS-Reichsbesitz. As evidenced by the contents of the German War Art Collection, the exhibitions of the Staffel der Bildenden Künstler, and the Junge Kunst exhibition of 1943, modernist artists continued to work and exhibit their creations openly without experiencing censorship. Indeed, many modernist artists—those who served in the Staffel, participated in Junge Kunst, or saw their work reproduced in Die Kunst für Alle—were supported by Party or state institutions. These artists moved seamlessly between the strict boundaries of state-sanctioned taste and the more liberal space for stylistic innovation afforded by the battlefront or in exhibitions outside Munich. Acquaintance with the German War Art Collection makes manifest the need to grant that National Socialist patronage mechanisms produced a type of modernist culture—not just in architecture, sculpture, film, and design, where by far the most scholarship on National Socialist aesthetics has been concentrated, but also in painting and the visual arts generally. Many of the finest existing commentaries on Nazi art do not cite the limited pool of objects on which they are based (the NS-Reichsbesitz) or indicate awareness of the German War Art Collection and its potential to revise our understanding of the relationship between the patronage of the Nazi regime and the production of modernist art during the Third Reich. Knowledge of these works of art will foster study of the institutions in Nazi Germany that supported the diverse forms of official art that are represented in the German War Art Collection,

their exhibition history, and their status in museums and in the art market. The rediscovery of the 9,176 works of art in the German War Art Collection—the “invisible museum” of Nazi art—has also made possible the reconstruction of the history of American interventions in postwar German cultural life and to assess the impact of these policies on our understanding of Nazi aesthetics, especially concerning the range of artistic expression and experimentation permitted to artists working in officially sanctioned and supported programs. As the examples reproduced here demonstrate, there were multiple official art forms in the Third Reich, including statesponsored variations on the modernist vernacular that co-existed with the utopian eugenic idiom associated with the NS-Reichsbesitz and the Führer’s collecting activity.

1

“Property of the National Socialist Reich,” the bureaucratic label for the vast art hoard of 775 objects collected by Adolf Hitler at the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen from 1937 to 1944. 2 See Hanns Chris Löhr, Das Braune Haus der Kunst: Hitler und der “Sonderauftrag Linz,” Visionen, Verbrechen, Verlust (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2005). 3 Norman Davies, No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 1939– 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2006), 232. 4 See Nicholas (1995), Petropoulos (1996), Feliciano (1998), Edsel (2009), and Yeide (2009). 5 Section II, Paragraph A, 3, b, ii. 6 Memorandum No. 345–45, “Historical Properties, War Department, Washington, D.C., June 11, 1945, Paragraph I.” U.S. Army Center of Military History. 7 Letter from Colonel W.C. Strecker to Major Hermann Williams Jr., November 7, 1945. U.S. Army Center of Military History.

8

Title 18, Military Government Regulations, OMGUS, 18–401.5. U.S. Army Center of Military History. 9 U.S. Army Center of Military History. 10 See Nicholas 369–406. See also documents cataloged in RG2, RG7, RG14, RG32, and the papers of Edith Standen, S. Lane Faison, Charles Parkhurst, E. Parker Lesley, and Walter I. Farmer, National Gallery of Art, Gallery Archives, Washington, D.C. 11 The actual number of Gilkey’s thefts may be significantly higher. The number of 100 was arrived at following a cursory inspection of the Gilkey Collection in the Portland Art Museum. 12 Letter from Colonel H.E. Potter to Gilkey, February 8, 1946. U.S. Army Center of Military History. 13 Private Papers of Gordon W. Gilkey and Abteilung V, BHSA. 14 Letter of Max Dirrigl, Chief of Abwicklungsstelle in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, to OMGUS and the MFAA, November 3, 1945: “As you know, all the independent artists have been checked during the last weeks by ‘Gewerbeamt München’ concerning their political trustworthiness and only those being absolutely free from objections get the permission (license) also to practice in the future.” Haus der Kunst, Historisches Archiv, HdDK 53. 15 Interview with Gordon W. Gilkey. 16 It is likely that Scheibe’s painting was submitted for the 1945 show at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, which did not take place. 17 Until now, Breitenbach’s controversial role in assembling both the NS-Reichsbesitz and the German War Art Collection has escaped the attention of scholars of the American occupation of Germany. 18 “Special Receipt,” Wiesbaden, Germany, June 29, 1950: 241 paintings in total were shipped to Washington, D.C. for inclusion in the German War Art Collection. U.S. Army Center of Military History. 19 Letter of Max Dirrigl to Helga Tiemann, July 24, 1946, Haus der Kunst, Historisches Archiv, HdDK 53. 20 Interview with Hazel Caine Corte-Real. The author concluded after examining Schloeman’s “Ariernachweis” [Aryan certificate] that the evidence “proving” his mother’s “purity of German blood,” was a transparent fairytale. The Schloemanns were, however, quite

wealthy and thus could afford to pay whatever bribes were necessary to acquire this crucial document. 21 Letter from Lieutenant Colonel C.D. McFerrren, Office of the U.S. Army Center of Military History, to Ilse Schloemann, March 30, 1955: “This is in reply to your . . . requested reconsideration of our decision in refusing to return the paintings executed by your brother Eduard Schloemann. The paintings in question were done by your brother while he was employed by a branch of the German Armed Forces during World War II and as such are subject to the regulations and policies applicable to captured military property. We regret to advise you that in view of the above, it is not possible to return the paintings to you.” Courtesy of Hazel Caine Corte-Real, Cascais, Portugal. 22 Interview with Gilkey. 23 Private Papers of Gordon W. Gilkey. 24 See RG2, RG7, RG17, RG32, Gallery Archives, National Gallery of Art. 25 U.S. Army Center of Military History. 26 Interview with Jack F. Matlock, Jr. 27 Representative Whitehurst introduced H.R. 11945 on April 6, 1976: “To authorize the Secretary of the Army to return ten paintings to the Navy of the Federal Republic of Germany.” Archives, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. 28 Interview with G. William Whitehurst. 29 Letter from Elie Wiesel to Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defense, May 28, 1981. Personal Correspondence of Elie Wiesel. Archives, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. 30 U.S. Army Center of Military History. 31 U.S. Army Center of Military History. 32 For background on the Greens Party and the Nazi art controversy, see Staeck (1988). 33 See William Honan, May 8, 2001, The New York Times; Max Fisher, April 2, 2002, The Washington Post; William Honan, June 8, 2003, The New York Times; and the BBC Website, November 30, 2004. Court documents, U.S. Army Center of Military History.

34

U.S. Army Center of Military History. Interview with Professor Gerhard Weinberg, former chair of the DAHAC, January 2004; interview with Brigadier General John Brown, Chief of the U.S. Army Center of Military History, March 2004. 35 Some interesting facts concerning the membership of the Staffel: 289 artists in total rotated in and out of the Staffel; 169 members of the Staffel exhibited works in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen with a majority of those works appearing in the war years of 1942, 1943, 1944; 120 did not participate in the shows at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst; 56 artists had seen their works purged from German museums as degenerate; and 46 Staffel artists exhibited in Junge Kunst. 36 Interviews with Gordon W. Gilkey. Private papers of Gordon W. Gilkey. See also Gordon W. Gilkey, “German War Art, Office of the Chief Historian, Headquarters, European Command, 25 April 1947.” U.S. Army Center of Military History. 37 Haus der Kunst, Historisches Archiv, Volume 10A, and Bundesvermögensamt, Berlin. 38 For example, see Kunst im 3. Reich: Dokumente der Unterwerfung, Katalog zur Ausstellung, ed. Georg Bussmann (Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurter Kunstverein, 1976). 39 See Staeck, op. cit. 40 See Achim Preiß, ed. Der Weimarer Bilderstreit: Szenen einer Ausstellung: Eine Dokumentation (Weimar: VDG, 2000).

CHAPTER 2 Eugenic Art: Hitler’s Utopian Modernism “There is only aristocracy of birth, only aristocracy of blood.” –Friedrich Nietzsche (Der Wille zur Macht 942)

“We are determined to develop a new race, not in the imagination but standing here before us . . . . We must create a new mankind. Our people must not succumb to the degeneracy of the current day . . . . National Socialism is the determination to create a new man.” –Adolf Hitler

As we saw in Chapter 1, many of the works of art produced by the Staffel der Bildenden Künstler reflect the modernist orientation of its members. These objects are immediately recognizable by their cubist, expressionist, Neue Sachlichkeit, and surrealist traits, and their presence in the German War Art Collection reflects the instability at the core of Nazi aesthetics. However, there was an artistic idiom, the only original style to emerge in response to the regime’s patronage, that was based on Nazi ideology and directly linked to the state’s murderous forays into eugenics and genocide. In fact, by the time that Reinhard Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, the murderous biopolitics of the Third Reich had been shaped by a decade of German artistic practice under the patronage of the NSDAP, regime leadership figures, and state-run organizations. It is this reciprocal relationship between applied aesthetic theory and applied eugenic policy in Hitler’s dictatorship that is the focus of this chapter. The preconditions for the emergence of Nazi Germany’s “eugenic art” were, firstly, the institutionalization of the assertion of the superiority of the German Volk and, second, a “total claim” of the fascist state on the members of the Volksgemeinschaft. In plain language, the state insisted that it controlled sexual reproduction. This led to the implementation of “positive” eugenic policies that sought to increase the number of Germans with desirable, i.e.

“Nordic,” racial traits, such as the SS-Lebensborn [fountain of life] breeding program and the abduction of children in countries occupied by the Wehrmacht with phenotypically desirable traits as well as “negative” eugenic policies, such as the destruction of genetic threats to the German Volk. The latter included mass sterilization, euthanasia, and genocide as essential components of Nazi state policy.1 In keeping with the “futuristic” nature of National Socialism and, in Mark Mazower’s words, “the phenomenal will to believe in utopia,”2 the creation of a new type of human being would issue in “a new morality, a new social system, and eventually a new international order.”3 Indeed, “renewal” as a central Nazi trope was, as Johann Chapoutot explains, “less a matter of creating or instituting something new and more about restoring something ancient” that was associated with what was organic, authentic, and a “return to the moment of origin.”4 Underlying this policy was the implicit understanding that the Volksgemeinschaft was at best an imaginary concept that “had only ever existed in romantic imaginings of a lost ‘golden age’ before industrialization.” After centuries of political flux and countless border changes, “Germany” was not a homogenous nation but, according to Nicholas Stargardt, “a highly differentiated and often conflictual modern society.”5 Thus, to bring the Volksgemeinschaft into being would require a monumental effort. As one young true believing National Socialist expressed himself in a wartime letter, “a new and true image of humanity is arising in us, after we have followed a false, and increasingly distorting image of humanity for so many hundreds of years.”6 What is most remarkable about this latter observation is that it suggests the inherently visual nature of the evolutionary end-goal of this process of purification. The utopian project of reconstructing the German nation was, at heart, an astonishingly subjective exercise in visualizing a new and more perfect biological future. Accordingly, the regeneration and rebirth of Germanic humanity—the ultimate goal of the National Socialist rebellion against the legacy of the Enlightenment—was to be anticipated in the visual arts of the Third Reich, and these were to be revitalized by combining the genetic

prerogatives of the Volksgemeinschaft with the state’s attempts at monopolizing artistic production in Nazi Germany. The medium for this fantasy was figurative painting and sculpture. Despite the presence of certain anachronistic tendencies that led the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Thomas Mann to characterize National Socialism as “an explosion of antiquarianism” (e.g., the SSAhnenerbe’s obsession with archaeological fragments of an imaginary Aryan past), the “general thrust of the movement,” according to Modris Eksteins, “was futuristic. Nazism was a headlong plunge into the future.”7 And this future-orientation was predicated on the construction of “the new order, the new kind of society, the new way of life, the new conception of man.”8 The second precondition for the artistic representation of idealized and human prototypes driven by National Socialist ideology was the establishment of a link between the genetic imperatives of the state and attempts to monopolize German cultural production. In other words, in the realm of the visual arts the regime adopted the German state’s traditional patronage role and thereby created enormous incentives for artists to recognize that their self-interest lay in forging a eugenic aesthetic: “National Socialism,” as the Führer insisted, “is the determination to create a new man.”9 And Hitler was not alone among the leading figures of the regime to call for the production of art to be invested “with a real eugenic power.” Indeed, Walter Darré, the Nazi agricultural specialist insisted that “art should serve eugenic racial selection.”10 However, before the fascist “new man” could be born, he first had to be imagined as the product of the artistic patronage of the Nazi state. The subordination of the visual arts to the biosocial agenda of National Socialism—to the creation of a new kind of human being— was contingent upon the public’s acceptance of what Hannah Arendt called Hitler’s “fictitious world of totalitarian movements,” along with its appurtenant iconography and style.11 The National Socialist search for “transcendence and regeneration,” as compensation for a disillusioning modernity, was, however, not directed at an idealized, golden age of the past, but was instead focused on an as yet unrealized future. Such longing, according to Roger Griffin, “makes

the future no longer a neutral temporal space for what destiny or providence will bring, but a site for realizing transformative cultural, social, or political projects through human agency.”12 But the chief dreamer in charge of National Socialism exceeded even these lofty ambitions, and Hitler sought nothing less than to renew the “biological substance of the nation.” This process was emphatically “not reactionary, but revolutionary, not anti-modern, but a bid to create a new type of modernity, even if the sense of historical destiny which legitimated this vast undertaking often drew on mythical images of its historical and racial past”13 that were, of course, idealized fictionalizations. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat has suggested, the mobilization of German painters in order to create a eugenic art that would anticipate the National Socialist utopia expressed “the desire to develop a model of modernity that would supplant liberal and leftist conceptions of contemporary life.”14 The resulting “fascist model of modernity”— transhistorical, non-linear, formally abstract and anti-mimetic— proceeded from Hitler’s radical inversion of the conventional Enlightenment teleology of progress that charted humanity’s growth from a condition of brute nature towards an increasingly sophisticated state of civilization. The Führer rejected this paradigm on the grounds that it generated pathogens of Nordauian decadence. “Progress,” in National Socialist terms, was to be achieved by a nostalgic return to an imaginary pre-modern state of Nordic racial perfection. But this condition could only be recovered by bringing about the biological purification of the German Volk in a utopian future. The regeneration and rebirth of Nordic humanity—the ultimate goal of the National Socialist rebellion against the legacy of 1789–was to be prefigured in the visual arts of the Third Reich. The nostalgic “futurism” of National Socialism was intended to be a wholly indigenous modernist style rooted in German artistic tradition which eschewed the liberal, decadent, foreign-influenced cultural legacy of the Weimar Republic.

Easel Painting In Nazi Germany the “new man” was, paradoxically, to be engineered by the archaic practices of easel painting and sculpture, the traditional low-tech media privileged by Wolfgang Willrich above photography and literature for their superior capacity to engage the empathy of the viewer: Neither words nor photography have the power to call forth at once the clearest representations and enthusiastic participation. Only the plastic arts can do that . . . When it comes to feeling, and above all to the eye’s judgment as to whether a feature is noble or not, words and concepts are far too inadequate masters. The art of the painter or the sculptor, by contrast, can convey directly to the subconscious what should be worshipped and what should not and can do so with insistent penetration.15

Einfühlung [empathy] is the vehicle for identification with and engagement in the national project of biocultural renewal. Works of art have the power to draw spectators out of egoic self-involvement and facilitate their absorption into the otherness and the shared destiny of the Volksgemeinschaft. In order to re-racinate German art as a counter-measure to the influence of decadent American, Jewish or “negro” popular culture, Nazi patronage offered incentives for the production of works of art that represented “healthy” fascist manifestations of humanity. Verisimilitude was not a desideratum for Hitler’s eugenic art because, as we saw above, modernist “realism” implied an unflinching critique of contemporary society rather than the construction of utopian racial fantasies. From the outset Nazi figurative representation was focused on postulating aspirational paradigms for a youth-oriented society to relate to as it evolved toward racial perfection. According to Baldur von Schirach, in an essay published in 1942, all genuine creative impulses, whether embodied in works of art, politics, or armed struggle, are directed toward truths that are eternal: Art serves not reality but the truth . . . . Any artist who believes that he should paint for his own time and follow the taste of that time has not understood the Führer at all. Nor has our Volk created its Reich just for its own time . . . .Any commitment on the part of the nation covers the whole of eternity. The same

applies to art, which is a struggle for immortality on the part of mortals . . . . Even if, among the countless artistic creators, that sacred goal of highly human and artistic life is but rarely achieved, any work that has pretensions to be art must absolutely manifest a thirst and pressing desire for eternity. The perfect artists Michelangelo and Rembrandt, and Beethoven and Goethe, do not represent an appeal to return to the past, but show us the future that is ours and to which we belong.16

Indeed, as Eric Michaud observed, Schirach explicitly “contrasted photographic ‘reality,’ which conveys only the present, to the ‘truth’ of painting, which is oriented toward the future.”17 Of course, as we shall see in Chapter 4, Schirach and Hitler might have employed similar rhetoric to describe the vaulting aesthetic ambitions of the Reich, but they clashed over Schirach’s patronage of modernist artists whom the Führer had condemned as “degenerate.” The attempted monopolization of cultural production by Nazi elites has until now concentrated our gaze chiefly on architecture, film, and public spectacles. This focus has influenced our analysis of easel painting, namely, by assuming that it, too, was similarly mobilized by the regime. However, the deeply private and individualistic nature of this medium made for a complex relationship to totalitarian patronage. For example, unlike the construction of Speer’s Reichskanzlei [Reich Chancellery] and other Partysponsored edifices, which involved “the mobilization of vast resources and labor that so often was influenced, shaped, or directed by other political goals,”18 easel painting was neither subject to the kind of regimentation that characterized the relationship between the state and various branches of the construction industry nor, for that matter, the technical infrastructure and staffing of film production. Even as the war progressed, and the German economy fell under increasingly centralized control, easel painting continued to be less than fully regulated by the Nazi state’s cultural bureaucracy. From the seizure of power to Hitler’s suicide, it was up to individual artists to determine how they would cooperate with the regime. This task was complicated, of course, by constantly evolving, locallybased administrative, organizational, and display contexts. Unstable variables produced results that were neither predictable nor monolithic, including the unexpectedly heterogeneous exhibitions

sponsored by the Wehrmacht throughout occupied Europe as well as organizations sponsored by Schirach, the renegade Party leader and patron of the arts, during his time as the Führer’s representative in Vienna (see Chapter 4). For example, in Johann Schult’s reclining nude (fig. 40) and in Kettler’s muscular laborers (fig. 23), Nazi eugenic representation attempts to resolve the flux and the disintegration of human form by projecting the perfected bodies of the future onto canvas. Frequently these figures were concretized in iconography that lauded agrarianpastoralist ways of life. However, Nazi eugenic representation is a type of formalism that is neither naturalistic nor realistic at its core. In the paintings by Schult and Kettler, the human body has been manipulated through extreme idealization until it functions as an anatomical abstraction. These idealized, eugenically utopian human forms are just as conceptually speculative, just as resistant to mimesis, as are the abstract constructions of avantgarde modernism. In contrast to these proleptic paradigms of human physical perfection, the sculpture Mädchenfigur [Figure of a Girl] (fig. 41) by Toni Stadler appears unfinished and formally resistant to the representational conventions of Nazi aesthetics. But even for artists anticipating Hitler’s preferred nostalgic pastoralist trope, such as Oskar Martin-Amorbach (fig. 42) and Werner Paul Schmidt (fig. 43), the latter’s citation of discernibly “degenerate” devices—flat perspective and non-naturalistic figuration—is ultimately disqualifying and unmobilizable, whereas in Martin-Amorbach’s remarkably compressed image we see three major examples of palingenetic iconography: the plowman, the sower, and the mother and child, all of whom are appropriately Nordic in appearance, which thus links the valorized pastoral occupations of the peasantry to racial health and fecundity. However, what the Führer envisioned as the new art befitting his eugenic fantasies of Nordic racial perfection was altogether a different thing from even Adolf Wissel’s völkisch masterpieces, in which farmers and peasants exude nostalgia for a pastoral world threatened by onrushing modernization. Völkisch manifestations of longing for a vanishing world were, of course, deemed vastly less offensive than the distortions of avantgarde modernism, and such

images continued to be produced, exhibited, and sold in great quantities for the duration of the twelve-year Reich. But the National Socialist embrace of völkisch artists such as Wissel was never deemed more than a stopgap, a provisional solution for the cultural crisis that Hitler was determined to resolve. The true destiny of the German Volk could only be revealed in a fully realized racial utopia that was to be anticipated in eugenic representation rather than the documentary, völkischly-inflected clinical or documentary realism of Neue Sachlichkeit of the teens and twenties. Thus the völkisch and the eugenic camps of contemporary German art were divided on the proper means of giving birth to the National Socialist “new man.” Their disagreement emerged out of a disjunction between the graphic descriptions of perceived racial and developmental pathologies that underlay völkisch cultural politics—see, for example the photographs reproduced in both Paul Schulze-Naumburg’s Kunst und Rasse [Art and Race] (1928) and Wolfgang Willrich’s Säuberung des Kunsttempels [Cleansing the Temple of Art] (1937)—and specimens of eugenic anthropological perfection that the Haus der Deutschen Kunst was built to display. Indeed, the persecution of progressive modernist art by the Nazis was inspired by a desire to purge German state museum collections of pictures and sculptures that were said to depict human abnormalities. The pseudo-scientific, quasi-forensic approach to biocultural racism associated with völkisch theorists and artists such as Wissel and Willrich not only served an instrumental function in legitimizing the deaccessioning of progressive modernist art, it also spurred murderous efforts at “purifying” the German Volk. The utopian human forms displayed in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen were intended to move the debate over the role to be played by art in the Nazi biocultural revolution from descriptive tropes of decadence and degeneracy (such as were put on public view in the Entartete Kunstausstellung) to prescriptive prototypes of racial perfection.

On the Mechanical Reproduction of Art in the Third Reich Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) famously claimed that mechanical reproduction inevitably vitiates the “aura,” as he called the unique authenticity adhering to original works of art that magically influences the spectator. Removing the original artifact from its historical context —the “fabric of tradition”—caused it to be desacralized and thus liberated from the task of providing comforting illusions that traditionally compensated for the gross inequality inherent in feudal and capitalist societies: “For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.”19 In other words, the value of a work of art in reproduced form is no longer a function of its connection to cults, whether religious, magical, or merely aesthetic. Replication through photography demotes all images to the same status—as profane copies of identical status. In the modern era of potentially infinite reproduction, no object enjoys the privileged, cultic status conferred upon an original nor exerts the original object’s magical potency. “Instead of being based on ritual,” Benjamin observes, the function of art shifts away from the realm of the supernatural and “begins to be based on another practice— politics.”20 The autonomy of the artifact as an aesthetic object serving a higher cultic purpose is exchanged for transparent purposiveness as yet another weapon to be deployed in class struggle. A key component in Benjamin’s critique of fascist aesthetics is the idea that, under capitalism and its fascist stepchildren, works of art will continue to function in the same cultic fashion, even though art has been freed from its original dependency on religious rites. The art historian Mark Antliff effectively summarizes this part of Benjamin’s argument: “fascism seeks to overcome the sociopolitical dissension caused by capitalism by imposing an aestheticized ideology on the fragmented and pluralistic flux of contemporary society.”21 Thus Benjamin not only “correlates the aestheticism of l’art pour l’art with F.T. Marinetti’s futurist defense of fascist

violence,”22 he sees in much of early Nazi art, principally völkisch art with its traditionalist focus on figuration as well as the vast scale of Nazi public spectacles, which were highly ritualized and full of performative gestures that sought to anchor Hitler’s regime in the main current of German history, as nothing more than a continuation of the function of art in bourgeois society that it enjoyed until the revolutionary decades after the First World War. The promulgation of a specific National Socialist aesthetic, and the foregrounding of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen in the regime’s cultural agenda, reveal that the Nazis did not simply aestheticize politics; they wholly transformed their biosocial project into a work of art. Nazi cultural interventions represent the culmination of a process begun during the romantic period, namely, the substitution of religion by art. Following the Nazi seizure of power, the civic religion of politics becomes conflated with the civic worship of art by a regime self-identified with art and obsessed with its own aestheticization. Despite the immense authority Benjamin has long wielded as a critic of fascism, it seems clear that he failed to anticipate the special function assigned to art reproductions under the Hitler regime. In 1935, when Benjamin’s essay was written, the art scene in Nazi Germany was in still flux—the internecine culture war between traditionalists and modernists was raging—and a consensus on the preferred style of the regime had yet to emerge. Indeed, more than two years would pass before the opening of the Entartete Kunstausstellung and the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung in July 1937 marked the emergence of an inchoate and only superficially coherent policy on the visual arts. Nonetheless, with this temporary cessation of the “hot” culture war came the assignment of supreme didactic responsibility to the visual arts in Hitler’s Germany. Where Benjamin saw the function of original works of art—as devotional objects in churches, at first, and then in private galleries for viewing by a privileged elite—and images created by photography for simultaneous mass or collective experience as separate, incomparable categories of objects, the auratic function of the original artifacts and, in a radical leveling gesture, mechanically reproduced copies of paintings, were merged under National

Socialism. In Hitler’s Germany faith in the efficacy of futuristic technology was such that there was no perception of incompatibility between the assertion of the aura of works of art produced with the support of Nazi patronage mechanisms and the mass reproduction of original objects.23 Moreover, the gigantic print run of art magazines and art reproductions of works featured in the eight successive Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen denotes nothing less than an undiminished confidence in the auratic power of individual works of art—multiplied in tens of thousands of reproductions and distributed throughout the Reich—to exercise an Aristotelian community-forming function. At the same time, German museum practice under Hitler broke decisively with the bourgeois tradition and asserted a wholly reconceived and central role for art in the fascist public square. After all, it was art that would consummate National Socialist revolutionary objectives by unleashing the creative energy of each member of the Volksgemeinschaft and channel it into their own self-transformation as the fascist “new man.” While Benjamin had asserted an elitist, essentially aristocratic conception of the function of images within traditional patronage networks, under National Socialism the functions of devotional objects and works of art displayed in public exhibitions were conflated, and museum attendance and the collection of art by ordinary ethnic comrades were elevated to top priorities. According to a major premise of progressive modernism, the signs of the coming of an aestheticized new order were to be visible only to a chosen few, who, gifted with prophetic vision, would serve as the true avantgarde, the guides and interpreters of the coming revelation to the masses. The Nazis, by contrast, as befitting the Roman Catholic upbringing of the Führer and many Party archons, sought to establish a universal church with a semiotics accessible to the masses. Theirs was to be an image-based culture whose iconography, like that of the symbolic language of the exterior and interior ornamentation of medieval cathedrals, could be readily understood by the Volk. Medieval culture, deemed an historical apogee of the German creative spirit, was prized by the Nazis. The revival and emulation of medieval, renaissance, and romantic styles, tropes, and symbolism, which were encouraged by the regime’s

patrons, strikes contemporary observers, at best, as pastiche, and, at worst, as mobilized anachronisms. However, the appropriation of historical styles for the national cause serves as yet another example of Nazi efforts to provide an authentic aura for contemporary German art by binding artistic practice in the Third Reich to traditional and modernist practices simultaneously. Confidence in the efficacy of modern technology to enhance the propaganda value of images also accounts for the unprecedented volume of arts-related periodicals and books published by the NSDAP and its subsidiary cultural organizations. It was by means of the mass distribution of art journals—especially Die Kunst im Dritten Reich, Kunst dem Volk, and Die Kunst für Alle—that the direct experience of the aura—the formerly privileged experience of viewing original artifacts in situ—was transformed into a collective process that could be shared even by German soldiers on the farflung battlefields of Europe and North Africa, thanks to the shipment of pocket-sized Wehrmacht editions of Kunst dem Volk. For National Socialist aesthetics, the auratic force of the original objects was not only imparted intact by means of mass reproduction it was, in fact, enhanced by a collective, ritualistic process of reception. Lavishly produced, Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung-related posters and reproductions bore the quasi-religious, cultic emblems (e.g., Richard Klein’s head of Athena bearing a swastika) testifying to the authenticity of the copies. Similarly, photographs of the exhibition rooms of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst which was consecrated as a “temple” to the “new” art of the Third Reich, enjoyed wide distribution. The absorption of cultic rites—the cornerstone laying, the ceremonies of the Richtfest, parades, and blessings—that incorporated elements of ritual were reclaimed from Christianity and resacralized as National Socialist community-building customs. As opposed to Benjamin, the Nazis saw photography not as a medium that alienated the viewer from the auratic potency of the original objects and thus dispelled authenticity from the viewing of a copy, but rather as a method of transferring authenticity from the original to a multiplicity of copies in a process analogous to that most central Nazi ritual, the “Blutfahne” [blood flag] ceremony (fig. 44). A relic of the November 1923 Beer Hall Putsch that was stained with

the blood of coup participants shot dead by Munich policemen, the “Blutfahne” was revered by National Socialists in the way that the “Spear of Destiny” and the “True Cross” are sacred to Christians. On key dates on the Nazi calendar, such as during the Reichsparteitag [Reich Party Congress], the Führer would proceed down a rank of comrades, each of whom is holding a new Nazi Party banner, and stop before each standard and sanctify the new flag with a consecrating touch of the original “blood flag.” Obviously, this ritual mirrors transubstantiation, the miracle of the Eucharist in the Roman Catholic mass, as the newly woven Party banners become, with a caress of the fabric soaked with the blood of Nazi martyrs, offspring of and coequal in authenticity to the original artifact. By this process, the new banners are converted into “blood flags” that henceforth will have the capacity to confer their sanctity to other flags.

The Munich Exhibitions The fate of modernism in Nazi Germany cannot be separated from an examination of relevant organizational structures and the operation of patronage mechanisms during the Third Reich. Ultimately, the chief beneficiaries of the cessation of the Nazi culture war in July 1937 were, however, not the older, more conventional, predictably völkisch artists who had received their training in the last decades of the nineteenth century and found themselves marginalized from the end of the First World War until the seizure of power by the much-reviled “Weimar system” of arts patronage. The latter was blamed by Nazi ideologues for, among other things, privileging globalized modes of modernism at the expense of indigenous German artists and local traditions. Despite the apparent natural affinity of older, völkishly-oriented German artists for an authoritarian government, National Socialist patronage actually targeted younger artists who had been radicalized not by trench warfare (which they missed) but by education in the Nazi system and the poverty to which artists as an occupation were condemned in the 1920s and early 1930s. But a major conumdrum faced the Party as a consequence of offering its support to a younger generation of artists who were the intended standard bearers of eugenic art: many had been affiliated with progressive modernist groups that included DADA, the Bauhaus, and the Novembergruppe. This paradox would bedevil the regime and undermine its claims to aesthetic coherence till the end of its existence. The anti-modernist crusade that crystallized in the deaccessioning of 5,000 paintings from German state museums in June 1937 was motivated less by aesthetic preferences and more by the desire to exact revenge on political foes, in particular the leftleaning artistic rivals of völkisch proto-Nazi painters and sculptors. Proof of the political rationale for organizing the Entartete Kunstausstellung just a month later can be gleaned from the glaring errors that caused works by renowned progressive artists Rudolf Belling, Albert Birkle, and Rudolf Schlichter to be included in both the Entartete Kunstausstellung and the first Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung. In the affidavit that Arno Breker submitted to his

denazification tribunal,24 the sculptor affirms that the deaccessioning of art from German state museums and the hasty organization of the Entartete Kunstausstellung by the painter and Party operative Adolf Ziegler under orders from Goebbels were extempore “wild actions” not approved in advance by Hitler. He speculates that the Entartete Kunstausstellung was so clumsily installed with mocking DADA-style labels and wall texts in the Institute of Archaeology (a narrow, cloister-like building in the Hofgarten) because it was a last-minute solution. By serving up extreme examples of modernist departures from the conventional realist tradition, the Entartete Kunstausstellung was intended, according to Breker, to distract attention from what would be received as the colossal failure of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung to articulate a coherent and distinctive—as opposed to familiar völkisch works—National Socialist style going forward. Breker, who was one of the most privileged artists in the Third Reich and a close acquaintance of the Führer, also intimates in his Spruchkammerbescheide that it was the association of the first generation expressionists, such as Nolde, Heckel, Pechstein, and Marc, with the 1920 November Revolution that permanently compromised expressionism in the eyes of the Rosenberg faction in the Nazi culture war. Self-serving as all claims made in denazification documents might be, Breker’s testimony does help explain why works by the second generation of expressionists are nearly universally present in exhibitions organized with Nazi patronage. The unintended consequences of this decision could not have been foreseen when, in January 1937, a call for submissions to the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung was circulated in newspapers throughout the Reich. Local artists joined their colleagues from all across Germany and submitted their work in the expectation that the Haus der Deutschen Kunst would function as a replacement for the Glaspalast which had staged the Münchener Kunstausstellungen before and during the Weimar Period. But because these artists skewed völkisch as to the subject matter and style of their work they were deemed nearly as unacceptable as emissaries of the regime’s new aesthetic order as the progressive modernist artists pilloried in the Entartete Kunstausstellung.

Despite the Führer’s intervention in the vetting of objects, the final selections suggest that even he and the sycophantic Hoffmann were incapable of making clear distinctions between the three categories of art that, according to Nazi cultural policy, were to be kept separate: works of the despised progressive modernism, works by völkisch artists associated with the pre-1937 Münchener Kunstausstellungen which were meant to be hived off into the newly reorganized Münchener Kunstausstellungen (1938–43), and the prized but elusive works of art that successfully embodied the regime’s eugenic projection of the “new man.” An artist’s presence in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen provided legitimization and enrichment, and thus the submissions rate was enormous. Joan Clinefelter explains the economic incentives at stake: While artists received an average of three to five times more for their work in 1921 than they had in 1913, the prices of canvas, paint, and linseed oil had doubled; turpentine and paint had quintupled. In all, if the artist’s materials represented 8 percent of the price of a painting in 1913, they now [in Weimar] represented 22 percent of the price. Meanwhile, basic living expenses—heat and light, rent and food, transport and clothing—had increased 800 to 1,000 percent. As the inflation worsened, sales plummeted. Prices were so high and sales were so low that many artists had to apply for economic assistance. More than 29 percent of Munich’s artists applied for aid from a local artists’ assistance league in 1921, compared to less than 13 percent in 1913.25

In the end, the number of artists who submitted works to the jury approximated nearly the entire membership of the Reichskammer der Bildenden Künste: 14,300 oil painters, 2,900 sculptors, 2,300 commercial artists, and 4,200 graphic artists. When figures for all of the eight Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen are combined 2,465 artists were selected for the Munich shows. 13,482 objects were exhibited; and over 600,000 people paid admission to attend the exhibitions. Hitler’s purchases at the Munich shows alone amounted to a staggering 6.8 million Reichsmark. But the road taken to a successful series of exhibitions of contemporary German art was neither direct nor smooth. The focus on works by contemporary artists was entirely adventitious and would not have become the template for the

exhibition had the Führer not deviated from the original plans for the use of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst. Rather than a selection of canonical German works of art representing Zweitausend Jahre Deutsche Kultur [Two Thousand Years of German Culture], which nonetheless remained the celebratory focus of the opening festival parade, Hitler peremptorily decreed that the emphasis of the first and all subsequent Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen should shift from historical masterpieces to contemporary art without, however, offering any clear criteria for vetting the submissions aside from insisting that “nothing” be accepted “that is unfinished or problematic,” as Adolf Wagner, Gauleiter of Bavaria, put it. Hitler had placed the organization of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung as well as the Entartete Kunstausstellung into the hands of Joseph Goebbels, who was Rosenberg’s liberal opponent in the Expressionismusstreit, and Ziegler. According to a tale often told, 1,500 works objects were initially chosen for the show, but Hitler was reportedly so appalled during a preview, calling them “regular Bolshevik art” (Goebbels), that the jury was sacked and replaced by Heinrich Hoffmann. A former student of painting at the Munich Academy and Hitler’s photographer and confidant, Hoffmann culled the original checklist to 884 objects by 550 artists.

Resurgent Völkisch Art In the summer of 1937, with the resolution of the RosenbergGoebbels dispute in the former’s favor, modernist art was, with the deaccessioning of 5,000 paintings from German state-owned museums, effectively excluded from the public sphere. But in art historical terms, this was a strange, supererogatory victory: by this time, of course, nearly 20 years after the end of the First World War, avantgarde modernism was not only an obvious anachronism, it was also a proverbial straw dog. Reviled by leftwing and conservative critics alike, by 1937 its practitioners had predictably moved on, entered internal exile, or fled the country. Indeed, it is useful to recall that, for purposes of official patronage and state propaganda, major powers like the Soviet Union, France (under the Third Republic and Vichy alike), as well as the United States favored a conventional figurative realism. Similarly, across the European continent, modernist art was treated as either transgressive or passé. However, the counterrevolutionary victory over the avantgarde left created new problems for the cultural management of the regime that emanated from Nazi sympathizers on the right. Far more irksome to Nazi cultural policy makers in the first years of the Third Reich was the resurgent völkisch artistic tradition that sought to fill the void created with the demonization of the avantgarde. In historical terms, völkisch art was related thematically to regional pastoralism, as seen in Wissel’s Jungbäuerinnen [Young Peasant Women] (fig. 45), and stylistically to the perspectival distortions and built-up surfaces of post-impressionism and secondgeneration expressionism. With respect to patronage, völkisch artists depended upon the support of the bourgeoisie, the Nazis’ principal class enemy, and to the conservative cultural establishment whose grip on cultural affairs was not lessened by the Nazi seizure of power. Moreover, völkisch artists had been unreliable allies in the Nazi culture wars of the 1930s because their work manifested unstable oscillations between the poles of academic traditionalism and modernist experimentation. Most damning of all from a National Socialist perspective, völkisch artists offered few glimpses of the

new, regenerated, and purified humanity that was to be the greatest gift of Hitler’s regime to the German Volk. The presence of works of art by völkisch artists in exhibitions set up under Nazi patronage was, of course, tolerated. How else could it be? They formed a majority of working artists who had not been excluded on the grounds of Weimar-era political or organizational affiliation. But acquiescence in the participation of these artists should not be confused with full-throated Nazi enthusiasm for völkisch art. Temporary, provisional adoption of the völkisch style (most closely associated with the Münchener Kunstausstellungen) as the Nazi court style would continue, so the rationalization went, only until a sufficient number of younger artists emerged on the scene who had no experience of pre-seizure of power institutions, that is, no association with the Münchner Künstlergenossenschaft, the Secession, and the Neue Secession, or had been trained at the Munich Akademie. This venerable institution had served as one of the principal breeding grounds for avantgarde artists prior to the First World War and then during the Weimar Republic. Encumbered with reservations on each side, the alliance between self-mobilized völkisch artists and the NSDAP was necessarily uneasy, frequently quarrelsome, and, given the Führer’s impatience for the emergence of a new generation of wholly Nazified artists who would render aesthetic compromises with holdovers from the detested Weimar Period unnecessary, intended to be short-lived. This marriage of convenience was, however, like so many other coalitions forged by the Nazis in their first years in power—with the SA, the Deutsche Zentrumspartei [German Center Party], and the Roman Catholic Church—merely a useful expedient, an ad hoc, on-the-fly deferral that was not designed to serve as a permanent accommodation. But then, according to a contemporary observer of the Nazi state, “contrary to surface impressions of monolithic unity centered on the Führer and of administrative efficiency, if not wizardry, the party and the Reich represented an ‘authoritarian anarchy’”26 in cultural matters as in other realms. The post-Second World War polarization between “degenerate” and “official” art in our understanding of the cultural life of the Third Reich has obscured from view the awkward period when Munich-

based artist groups vied for cultural supremacy in the months following Hitler’s rise to power. Preexisting arts organizations were not disbanded and absorbed into the Reichskulturkammer until September 22, 1933, which means that for nine months the three major artist organizations in Munich—the Künstlergenossenschaft, the Secession, and the Neue Secession—continued to function as before. Chief among their duties was the collaborative staging of Munich’s annual contemporary art exhibition scheduled for the summer of 1933. Not even the mysterious burning of the Glaspalast in June 1931, the city’s main convention center, which had hosted the annual Munich art show since 1854, could interrupt the opening of the 1932 and 1933 exhibitions. These were held in the borrowed quarters of the Deutsches Museum, which continued to serve as the regular exhibition venue from 1932 until 1936, the year before the Haus der Deutschen Kunst welcomed the inaugural Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung. Confusion about Nazi plans for the visual arts in Munich was evident in early press coverage in which the replacement museum, designed by Paul Ludwig Troost, was called the Neue [new] Glaspalast. Contemporaries could be forgiven for assuming that even provisional, colloquial adoption of this name for the first edifice built by the Nazi regime signaled more than a symbolic commitment to carrying on the tradition of the Glaspalast exhibitions. For nearly 80 years, the iconic building had received the latest work of local artists along with special exhibitions of canonical German art, such as the irreplaceable romantic-era paintings that were destroyed in the Glaspalast conflagration in 1931. Such an explicit identification with pre-existing Glaspalast exhibition practices only served to increase the urgency of confronting the dilemma facing the Münchener Kunstausstellung organizers following the seizure of power: the question of what was to be done with the legion of local artists, a majority of whom waited in pre-collaborative readiness to serve the regime, but whose völkischly-inflected work failed to embody the utopian aesthetic vision adopted by the Führer. Notwithstanding these seemingly intractable problems, from 1933 until 1936 a delicate balance between völkisch and Nazi modernists held firm as the Münchener Kunstausstellungen prospered as they

previously had in the Weimar Period. Originally, of course, the new Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen were not intended to compete with the Munich tradition of presenting contemporary German art in Parisian salon-style exhibitions for sale to the public. In fact, on the occasion of the Richtfest or topping-out ceremony for the Haus der Deutschen Kunst (fig. 46 and fig. 47), held on June 29, 1935, Adolf Wagner, Gauleiter of Munich, announced that the first exhibitions to be installed in the new purpose-built “temple of art” would buttress National Socialist claims to cultural greatness by co-opting the past achievements of German and Nordic artists—that is, canonical masterpieces—and leaving out any references to the toxic minefield of contemporary art. The first of these, grandiosely conceived as Zweitausend Jahre Deutsche Kultur, would have, despite the expansive range conveyed by its title, more tightly focused on the 400 years of cultural production in the German-speaking lands between the careers of Albrecht Dürer (d. 1528) and Lovis Corinth (d. 1925). Conceptualized in mid-1935 when the Expressionismusstreit—the internecine Nazi culture war conducted between the Goebbels and Rosenberg factions of pro- and antimodernist Party loyalists—was still under way, the hubristic idea of celebrating two millennia of German artistic achievement, which would have meant including the work of modernists, was not yet as hotly controversial as it would become in just two years’ time. Similarly, the second exhibition concept broached by Wagner, 100 Jahre Deutscher Malerei und Plastik [100 Years of German Painting and Sculpture] was hatched without foreseeing the slash and burn treatment that would be meted out to twentieth-century art in the summer of 1937. Thus, at its relaunch in 1938, the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung was immediately seen to be both more fully representative of the art of greater Germany and more attuned to the regime’s vision of eugenic art than the heterogeneous and hastily reorganized Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung of 1937. Excluding Munich artists who would otherwise have had no choice but to submit works for the 1938 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung, which set them up for likely rejection and consequent loss of income, also permitted the 1938 jury (dominated by Heinrich Hoffmann) to avoid

inflicting further humiliation on these artists by excluding objects that were either too traditional or too progressive to meet Nazi aesthetic expectations for the shows in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst— namely, to reimagine the Volksgemeinschaft in a eugenically utopian fashion. The omission of the work of many local artists from the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen served another objective central to the propaganda value of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst: paintings selected for the Party-sponsored Munich shows combined didactic and devotional functions that focused the spectator’s gaze on the central purpose of the National Socialist biocultural revolution: the creation of a purified Volk, an aristocracy based on a genetically transmitted biocultural inheritance. Here we see the impact of Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of the morality of the strong, healthy, and free, which was attributed to the figurative sculptures and paintings in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen, in which the National Socialist fantasy of the Nordic community of blood was manifested in idealized, utopian human forms. In addition, the coming perfection of the German Volk, as depicted in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen, revealed a world in which the deformities of socio-economic class-consciousness and heightened modern economic globalization, especially the alienation experienced by proletarianized labor and obsolescent artisanal craftsmen, were eradicated. The representation of perfect equilibrium between peasants and their rural occupations, on the one hand, with urbanized workers in industry, on the other, was a function of the National Socialist inversion of the traditional capitalist privileging of heavy industry as an evolutionary advance from the feudal occupations of the peasantry. In contrast to this, the Nazi social hierarchy formed a pyramid whose apex was occupied simultaneously by peasants, steelworkers, and soldiers as depicted in Schmitz-Wiedenbrück’s triptych, Arbeiter, Bauern und Soldaten. The latter employment is not, as in liberal democracies, depicted as a frightful but necessary evil. In Nazi Germany warcraft is deemed a sacred calling. The soldier is not just the defender of the nation’s borders, but of the nation’s racial wealth as well. The central panel (fig. 15) imagines representatives of the three branches of the

German military—the Heer, the Luftwaffe, and the Kriegsmarine— standing side-by-side at their posts, ready to defend the fatherland. Despite the widespread borrowing of a diversity of historical styles associated with the Nazarener, Jugendstil, symbolism, postimpressionism, neo-expressionism, and Neue Sachlichkeit, the development of Nazi court style did not reflect a rejection of modernism per se and a flight into the past. Instead, it constituted the embrace of an eclectic assortment of futuristic advances—in the realm of technophilia as well as aesthetic practice—that resulted in a new syncretic, eugenic, and utopian Nazi modernism. Such selectivity accommodated and mobilized artists, styles, and iconographies by being constantly in flux, endlessly in formation, and perpetually open to additions and further developments.

The Blue Knight One of the most notable Nazi appropriations of iconography associated with progressive modernism was the painter Hubert Lanzinger’s adoption of Wassily Kandinsky’s „Der Blaue Reiter“ meme for his equestrian portrait of Hitler, Führerbildnis/Der Bannerträger (1937). This subject was perhaps also suggested by the First World War German soldier’s song, „Die blauen Dragoner” [“The Blue Dragoons”],27 which was later appropriated as an SA and SS marching song in the 1930s: The blue dragoons, they ride, Playfully through the gate, Fanfares accompany them, Echoing brightly to the hills.

The neighing stallions, they dance, The birches gently sway, The little flags on the lances Flutter in the morning breeze.

Tomorrow, they must ride away, My beloved will be with them. Tomorrow, they will ride far away, Tomorrow, I will be left here alone.

The blue dragoons, they ride, Playfully through the gate, Fanfares accompany them, Echoing brightly to the hills.

Lanzinger’s portrait, confiscated by Captain Gilkey and retained in the custody of the U.S. Army, functions as a revealing example of how modernist artistic elements were transformed in the course of Nazi mobilization. Creative cross-fertilization and boundary crossing were central to this process, resulting in unexpected metamorphoses as Nazi court artists revised and co-opted aspects of modernist discourse and iconography. Even “Der Blaue Reiter,” a quintessential expressionist trope, becomes so completely absorbed into the work of Nazi court artists that its origins are rendered indistinguishable or interchangeable from successive völkisch or National Socialist appropriations. As we see in Chapters 1 and 4, expressionism was the ghost in the machine of National Socialist artistic production that materialized in the less predictable exhibition contexts governed by Nazi entities with semi-autonomous cultural policies, such as the Wehrmacht and independent-minded Party officials. Our assumptions about the function of art in the twentieth century, so overwhelmingly informed by avantgarde modernism, differ radically from the Führer’s eugenic prescription for German art. As a result, the works of art produced under his patronage are relics of an imaginary as alien to our time as Socrates’ utopian vision in Plato’s Republic. Indeed, for Hitler and his followers, art was no mere commodity in a market economy, but served both as the medium of prophecy and a powerful cure-all for social disorder, cultural decadence, and biological deformity. Preceded in his views and proleptically legitimized by Plato, Hitler understood art to be a naturally seditious force in society. Cultural production required direction to shape the new elites, the “new men,” who would lead the master race in pursuit of its destiny. The Nazis, like artists on both the right and left, “regarded art as the matrix from which the future would be born,”28 and this emphasis on art as a transformative force in society paralleled the revolutionary and potential of art claimed by the avantgarde. However, in contrast to avantgarde modernism, which embodied a critique of the conditions of modernity, eugenic representation offered an escape from the alienating, dehumanized features of life in the modern world by reimagining a nostalgic conception of premodern human perfection as the pinnacle of National Socialist

biosocial engineering. Hitler’s eugenic art was intended to elevate the German Volk (a transitory, unstable, and contingent human substance) into stable, paradigmatic, supranatural forms. As opposed to Soviet Socialist Realism, Nazi eugenicism does not seek to represent “reality” in a manner that would anchor the proletariat and the peasantry in the present moment, but rather offers a vision of a utopian future that seeks to win the commitment of the Volk to work for its own salvific biological purification.

1

It is estimated that between 12,000 and 16,000 children were born in occupied countries in Lebensborn facilities, while upwards of 250,000 children were kidnapped by the SS. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws for the Protection of Hereditary Health banned interracial marriages and paved the way to the forced sterilization of 400,000 and the beginning of a campaign of euthanasia that targeted children and others with congenital illnesses and mental disabilities. See Volker Koop, Dem Führer ein Kind schenken: Die SS-Organisation “Lebensborn” e.V. (Cologne: Bohlau, 2007). 2 Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage, 2000), 125. 3 Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York: Mariner Books, 2000), 303. 4 Johann Chapoutot, The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting as a Nazi. Trans. Miranda Richmond Mouillot (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2018), 35, 38. 5 Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms (New York: Vintage, 2016), 53. 6 Letter dated March 21, 1942. Quoted in Stargardt, op. cit., 211. 7 Thomas Mann quoted in Eksteins, ibid. 8 Mazower, op. cit., 183.

9

Quoted in Peter Levandra, The Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2002), 327. 10 Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany. Trans. Janet Lloyd (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004), 126. Quoted in Michaud, ibid. 11 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian, 1958), x. 12 Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 50. 13 Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London and New York: Routledge, 1991, 111. 14 Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 120. 15 Quoted in Michaud, op. cit., 162. 16 Baldur von Schirach, Zwei Reden zur Deutschen Kunst (Weimar: Gesellschaft der Bibliophilen), 16. 17 Michaud, op. cit., 129. 18 Paul B. Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy (London: Routledge, 2000), 219. 19 Walter Benjamin, „Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit“ (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”). In Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 224. 20 Benjamin, ibid., 223. 21 Mark Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 32. 22 Antliff, op. cit., 33. 23 In February 1942, Hitler’s stated: “I openly admit that I’m a fool for technology.” Quoted in Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent 1889–1939. Trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Knopf), 539. 24 HdDK 38/BHSA.

25

Joan L. Clinefelter, Artists for the Reich: Culture and Race from Weimar to Nazi Germany (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005), 27. 26 W. Petwidic, Die autoritäre Anarchie (Hamburg, 1946). Quoted in Eksteins, op. cit., 317. 27 Text by G.W. Hamssen, 1914. Included in SA Liederbuch. 28 Michaud, op. cit., 97.

CHAPTER 3 Nazi Modernism and the Mobilization of Christian Artists Despite the strong anti-religious bias of National Socialism, one of the richest sources of Nazi iconography was exploited with the mobilization of artists chiefly associated with the production of Christian art during the Weimar Republic and the first four years of the Third Reich. This rich vein of appropriation was anticipated by the absorption of leading elements of the Christian belief system and ritual practice into the fabric of National Socialism. According to the revised National Socialist version, the salvation narrative followed a familiar tripartite pattern: the prophecy of a German messiah-figure, the emergence out of obscurity of the longed-for Führer, and his deliverance of the German people from poverty, injustice, and servitude. By annexing Christian eschatology for its own purposes, National Socialism reanimated the Hegelian idea of German history by postulating the coming of the Führer and the reunion of the Volk with the divine as occurring within the Volksgemeinschaft. This chapter examines the remarkable transformation of Christian tropes into key leitmotivs in National Socialist visual culture.

Christianity and the Origins of National Socialist Ideology The popular version of the origination myth of National Socialism ideology as the work of apostate intellectuals who nonetheless infused the new godless system with the tone, feeling, and rituals of discredited religious practice requires revision in light of recent, compelling research. Like many of the failed attempts to explain the origins of National Socialism, previous critiques of religion in the Third Reich have been framed in a binary structure—Christianity versus Nazi neo-paganism. Of course, from a Derridean perspective,1 the Western philosophical tradition, which culminates in National Socialist Germany (as the philosopher and Nazi Party member, Martin Heidegger, fervently believed and taught2), rests on arbitrary pairs of binaries—sacred/profane, mind/body, signifier/signified, innocence/experience, civilized/savage, raw/cooked, pure/impure, German/Jew, healthy/diseased, etc. All of these dualisms in the National Socialist lexicon are descended from the binary structure of Western logocentrism, suggesting the limitations of philosophical discourse in this tradition. Furthermore, Michel Foucault3 revealed how in Western epistemology even the oppositional members in binary formations are ultimately complicit with the power represented by the dominant entity in the pair. Thus, in the healthy/diseased and the German/Jew binaries each entity is utterly absolutist in defining the category it stands for and yet is also utterly dependent on the other, supposedly subordinate or inferior entity, for the intensification of its own identity. Each is precisely what the other is not. However, each would not be what it is but for the existence of the other. Modernism as a semiotics of representation holds these binaries in suspension, while simultaneously incubating, nourishing, sustaining, and situating opposing forces and entities in a creative antithetical relation. Presented in National Socialist aesthetic discourse as vehemently opposed to modernist tendencies toward abstraction, artistic figuration in the Third Reich is coextensive with symbolic, mythical, and sacral forms of representation. This accounts for the

heavily allegorical element in National Socialist representation as well as the syncretic ease with which National Socialism mimicked the typological method of reading historical events as prefigured in Holy Scripture. Under Hitler, as secular history becomes the arena in which divine revelation will be manifested, typology as a mode of historiography is applied to post-biblical events. According to the Nazi reading of history, after centuries of victimization, the German Volk is disclosed as the “new Israel,” the re-embodiment of the chosen people blessed by destiny. Such a rebranding of the “chosen people” became necessary, of course, after the Jews were deemed to have fallen from the favor and lost the protection of divine providence.4 Similarly, when National Socialists identified Adolf Hitler as the longed for messianic leader, “the returned Jesus,”5 they were interpreting post-biblical history according to a typological template adapted from the Christian tradition—a pattern that Hitler appropriates in his autobiographical Bildungsroman Mein Kampf (1925–26). The appropriation of Christian eschatology by National Socialism made possible the reunion of the German Volk with the divine and with it, the end of ordinary time. The Nazi utopia is foreseen as a timeless zone similar to the era of the Second Coming of Christ. But instead of the spiritually elect, the Nazi paradise will be populated by the racially pure. Rather than equality based on sanctity, the chosen ones in Hitler’s paradise are bound together by membership in the community of blood. The extermination of the Jews and, with them, racial impurity—a horrible inversion of the rebirth and eternal life associated with conversion to Christianity—and the “rescue” of Nordic blood by the kidnapping and coercive breeding of blonde and blue-eyed children in the zone of Nazi conquest—were preconditions for the Aryan salvation prophesied by Hitler. The idealist philosopher Ernst Cassirer’s analysis of symbols and the phenomenology of knowledge is a mighty tool for assessing the function of symbolism in Nazi culture.6 Inspired by art historian Aby Warburg’s teachings on ritual and myth as the original sources of archetypal representation, Cassirer declared that man was above all “the symbolic animal.” However, symbols are “not . . . mere figures which refer to some given reality by means of suggestion and

allegorical renderings, but . . . forces each of which produces and posits a world of its own.”7 In other words, symbols are not mere imitations; they do not represent aspects of reality or serve as metaphors of reality. Instead, symbols, according to Cassirer, embody “organs of reality.” In image-based religions, such as Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism, and in the affiliated aesthetic system of Nazi Germany, symbols are not, in contrast to Platonic and Nietzschean scepticism regarding mimesis and the truth content of language, mere empty signifiers but representations of “the totality of Being.” For Hitler’s artists, especially those who were trained and worked for a time in the Christian artistic tradition, it is by the agency of their symbols that man “reveals reality to himself, and himself to reality, in that he lets himself and the environment enter into this plastic medium, in which the two do not merely make contact, but fuse with each other.”8 Thus it could be said that in Nazi art symbols function precisely as they do in the mythical thinking that invests Christian art, which as Cassirer explains, “comes to rest in the immediate experience . . . the sensible present is so great that everything else dwindles before it.”9 The spectator who stands before a painting hung in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst (or in a Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation church in Upper Bavaria) experiences the object in sheer, unmediated immediacy. To paraphrase Cassirer, spectators who lose themselves in the work of art and expend all of their energy on the object thus live in the object. In the absolute immediacy of the spectator’s experience the work of art becomes a “momentary god,”10 to which the spectator is enthralled. Such an object is not an inferior simulacrum of reality—as Plato famously condemned poetry and representation generally—but, as in the mythical thinking of preliterate cultures, an embodiment of reality in its entirety. Indeed, the ideal spectator in National Socialist terms also experiences works of art without mediation. Traditionally, however, the experience of spectatorship has been a complex process mediated by professional art historians and art critics, whose positions are inherently conservative, cautious, and canonical. The promulgation of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’ revolutionary ban on art criticism in November 1936 was

an attempt to replace the prevailing ex cathedra style of aesthetic judgment with Kunstbetrachtung [the judgement-free contemplation of art]. The function of art spectatorship was no longer passively to appreciate the artistic treasures of the past according to the dictates of experts. Henceforth, the whole purpose of this interaction was to bring the viewer directly under the “sacred canopy” of National Socialism and thus, in historian Roger Griffin’s words, offer immediate access to “existential shelter from a cosmos devoid of intrinsic spiritual purpose and which, if contemplated without the protective lens of myth, makes nonsense of all human efforts to create anything of lasting value.”11 The “sacred canopy” of National Socialism was built upon the promise of the apocalyptic destruction of the flawed, unregenerate present world and its replacement by a regime of utopian perfection. Apocalypse, for religious as well as secular thinkers, despite its suggestion of a prophesied millennial catastrophe, is associated as much with the destruction of the old as with the emergence of a new world, with cultural rebirth, with the disclosure of hidden meaning that had been masked from human perception during centuries dominated by falsehood and deception, and with the appearance of an emissary from God bearing His message. Eschatology and related speculation characterized late nineteenth-century German theology and dominated cultural discourse during the First World War. Creative artists and thinkers who promoted this kind of protoNazi speculation included the composer Richard Wagner, whose music dramas, especially Der Ring des Nibelungen (1848–1874), belong among the canonical works most closely associated with Hitler’s regime; the historian Oswald Spengler, whose biological and organic analogizing in Der Untergang des Abendlandes [The Decline of the West] (1918 and 1922) foreshadowed National Socialist notions of biosocial engineering; and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Wagner’s English son-in-law, who became a noted völkisch writer and propagandist of German nationalism.

War, Apocalypse, and Nationalist Christianity During the First World War—a period charged with eschatological significance and seen as a test of faith and a signal of Germany’s special destiny, a trope that becomes central to the cultural politics of National Socialism—it was commonplace for priests and pastors in the pulpit, politicians in the Reichstag, and intellectuals in the media to invoke biblical correspondences with the momentous events of the present. From the outset, as historian Macgregor Knox explains, German Christians of all denominations saw the war “as apocalypse, as a last judgment to be carried out by the Volk itself in God’s service.”12 Convinced of Germany’s moral, spiritual, and cultural superiority, the Volk discounted the fact of Western material and manpower domination in the outcome of the war. Ideology trumped the increasingly grim reality of the war in the trenches, even after the decisive intervention of the United States in 1917. For many Germans, the war was deemed neither an affliction nor a necessary evil—terms that would describe common attitudes among the Western Allies. In Germany the war was seen as, ultimately, a spiritual test, and killing was deemed not merely an unfortunate necessity of war, but a vehicle of transcendence. There was even a studied anachronism in the symbolism of the uniforms and headgear that German troops wore in battle. Their distinctive Siegfried helmet, the product of the modern technology of steel fabrication, combined German medieval symbolism with unavoidable historical and religious overtones. In a surprisingly unanimous chorus, modernist intellectuals and literati on the left and right closed ranks in support of the German war effort. In the words of historian Modris Eksteins, “the Great War was the psychological turning point, for Germany and for modernism as a whole.”13 Emblematic of this pan-cultural war enthusiasm, the influential founder of sociology Max Weber wrote: “However it turns out, this war is great and wonderful.”14 For Thomas Mann, war with the West meant “purification, liberation, and an immense hope.” Moreover, war removed the “wolfish-mercantile” materialism, the “can-can-shimmy morality,” and the “cockroaches of the spirit” of the

decadent democracies.15 Even the novelist Heinrich Mann, a cultural hero of the left, was convinced of the truth of the paradox that “under military dictatorship, Germany has become free!”16 These comments are similar in spirit to Hitler’s ecstatic, quasi-expressionistic response to the declaration of war: “Stormy enthusiasm; I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time.”17 Moreover, Thomas Mann’s anti-capitalist rhetoric of wolves and cockroaches suggests how ecumenical hatred of the West was in Germany and conjures up uncomfortable parallels to the imagery of the notorious anti-Semitic propaganda of such Nazi-era films as Der ewige Jude [The Eternal Jew] (1940). Despite Heinrich Mann’s sympathy for German wartime dictatorship, his books landed in the piles of books burned in 34 German university towns in the Spring of 1933. His brother Thomas’s works were not incinerated in the early Nazi book burnings, even though he was later stripped of his citizenship in 1936. This restraint may have as much to do with Mann’s Nobel Prize in literature (1929) as with the palpable resonance between his pre-seizure of power writings and Nazi political and cultural pronouncements.18 The leading proponent of war as a transcendent experience was Ernst Jünger, a novelist and much-decorated war hero, who sustained fourteen battle wounds and earned Germany’s highest honor for gallantry, the Pour le Mérite or Blue Max. Jünger claimed to speak for his contemporaries when he asserted that “machines cannot win battles, even if battles are won with machines—a very great difference . . . . Here every day proves that the will knows no impossibilities . . . . The overpowering desire to kill gave my feet wings.” Invoking Heraclitus, a favorite pre-Socratic philosopher among conservative intellectuals, Jünger noted that war, “father of all things, is also our father; it has hammered, hewn, and tempered us into what we are.”19 Fellow Frontsoldat and novelist, Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, confirmed his generation’s total identification with the First World War: “They told us [in 1918] the war was now over. We laughed. For we ourselves were the war.”20

For Germany, the horrifying magnitude of total defeat—the loss of two million war dead and four million wounded—was consecrated by nostalgia for the shared sacrifice and camaraderie of the trenches. The sacred realm of the Fronterlebnis and the sense of community formed there laid the foundation for the central National Socialist concept of the Volksgemeinschaft. The sanctifying fire and blood of the war also served as the crucible in which extremist German politics, nationalist religion, as well as art and literature, especially the work of the expressionists, were forged into tropes that were readily available for appropriation by National Socialism as a way of sacralizing and authorizing völkisch fantasies. The shared experience of life at the front superseded all social, class, and cultural barriers on both right and left (e.g., Jünger’s novels of the right and Erich Maria Remarque’s of the left demonstrate the ecumenism of the trenches), transforming the body politic into a biomass based on consanguinity and a folk memory of shared suffering at the hands of Germany’s decadent and culturally inferior enemies. In Remarque’s memorable phrase, “only the fraternity of death remains, the comradeship of the fated.”21 The ultranationalist writer, Gottfried Feder, laid claim to the war experience: “National Socialism is, in its truest meaning, the domain of the front.”22 As Eksteins observes, “Hitler and National Socialism were to be, in the end, the most obsessive and successful exploiters of the war.”23 Indeed, following the reformation of the NSDAP in 1925, Hitler promised the German people that National Socialism would recreate Germany as a “cohesive Volk-community . . . that fondly recalled the authentic Volksgemeinschaft” of 1914.24 However fantastical, the idea of the Volk community lay at the heart of Hitler’s eschatological reading of history as the Bavarian Protestant Bishop Meiser announced in a sermon on the invasion of France: “The hot breath of history strikes us in the face. Without doubt we cannot measure the greatness of the world event of today . . . a new world is arising out of the primal depths of being. Our German people stands at the center of this event.”25 Germany’s economic calamity in the postwar years— exacerbated by hyperinflation and the Wall Street Crash of 1929—

heightened the perception of crisis to such an extent that Hitler’s ultra-apocalyptic remedies appeared fully consistent with the millenarian rhetoric and imagery that circulated during the war years and into the Weimar period. Indeed, the apocalypse of defeat ushered in and legitimized extremist responses such as the Alldeutscher Verband’s [Pan-German Association] Bamberger Erklärung [Bamberg Proclamation]. In a fusion of nationalist Christian and völkisch elements issued while the National Assembly met in Weimar on February 16, 1919 to form the new postwar German constitution, the proclamation claimed to embody the “völkische Weltanschauung [worldview].” Anticipating the racism at the core of National Socialist ideology, the Bamberger Erklärung described race as “the key to world history,” the “struggle for survival” as the foundation of existence, and the Jews as the “lowest of races,” a “ferment of decomposition,” “fungus of putrefaction,” and “parasite of the peoples of the Aryan race.”26 The coming conflict between the German Volk and the Jews would take the form of a cosmic struggle between good and evil. The fate of Jesus Christ, construed as a victim of a Jewish conspiracy, anticipated Hitler’s rise from obscurity to become the Führer and successor to Christ as Germany’s messiah.

Mobilization Despite such overt parallels between National Socialist and Christian modes of Kunstbetrachtung as well as their similar dependency on apocalyptic symbols and millenarian rhetoric, historians have persistently approached National Socialism as intrinsically antithetical to Christianity. Any useful analysis of the relationship between National Socialism and Christianity must first renounce a binary framework. On closer examination, the evidence contradicts the influential secularist intellectual history approach popularized by Fritz Stern, who postulated that the ideological roots of Nazism could be traced to the crisis of faith identified by Nietzsche as the “death of God.” As a consequence, attempts made by conservative, völkisch, and proto-Nazi writers to replace Christianity with a quasi-religious worship of the state would necessarily retain the “tone” of religion “even after the religious faith and the religious canons had disappeared.”27 In Stern’s view, as summarized by the historian Richard Steigmann-Gall, “Nazism . . . served as a replacement faith . . . for a defunct Christianity”28 rather than as a co-ideological, syncretizing system of beliefs, ethics, and guide for behavior that existed in parallel with National Socialism. According to this perspective, a long and deeply entrenched postwar tradition of characterizing National Socialism as a secular, alternate religion has managed to obscure both the reciprocal nature of this relationship and the robustly destructive and simultaneously creative dimension of Nazism’s mobilization of Christian iconography. National Socialism’s dynamic capacity for self-transformation by syncretistic adaptation, exemplification, and absorption of the structural, semiotic, and ideological components of Christianity—by adapting its beliefs and practices to fit within the hard exoskeleton of existing ideologies and bureaucracies—perfectly elucidates the central National Socialist mechanism of institutional Gleichschaltung. In practice this process worked simultaneously in two directions. Each entity—the parasitic Nazi organization as well as the victimized host—entered into a process of mutual accommodation that defined both as one mutually and reciprocally absorbed aspects of the other.

Rather than by decapitating Weimar-era leadership figures of institutions that survived the seizure of power, Gleichschaltung simply carried over and legitimized the membership of pre-existing bodies—that is, those deemed worthy in racial terms and thus salvageable for service to the German Volk. The appointment of Nazi acolytes might, in exceptional circumstances, be deemed necessary to duplicate and thus bolster the existing leadership structure, such as in the Vidkun Quisling-Josef Terboven coadunation in Norway,29 whose parallel office structure serves as a prime example of the polycratic redundancy of bureaucracies within the German Reich. However, in almost every case,30 either domestically or in the lands the Nazis conquered, the elimination of pre-existing elites was deemed much less preferable than encouraging the incentivized collaboration of pre-existing leadership structures as well as the retention of rank-and-file members of entities targeted by the Nazis for mobilization. Insufficient numbers of qualified or experienced Party members in most learned or technical professions made this policy a necessity. In all such instances of mutual collusion, the risks and the potential rewards of collaboration were shared equally by the Nazis and the pre-existing elites, which created a powerful incentive on both sides of the equation as well as a dynamic synergy between the conquerors and the colonized. The recruiter and the recruited were equally invested in making their relationship work. National Socialism’s mobilization of Christianity is analogous to the assimilation of Judaism and elements of Greco-Roman and Germanic paganism into the Christian belief system and ritual practices. But then National Socialism and Christianity are similar in structure and organizational behavior—syncretistic, messianic, evangelistic, and heavily dependent on propaganda for increasing the number of their adherents through conversion. As the avowed enemy of the Jews, the NSDAP burnished its credentials at the same time as an ardent defender of Christianity against Bolshevism and touted the typological identity of Hitler as a latter day savior not only of the German nation, blood, and religion, but also of European civilization. As we have seen, there are many prominent symbolic and ritual correspondences between Christianity and National Socialism: besides the typological parallels between Christ’s struggle

and the Führer’s Kampfzeit there is the central role of self-sacrifice and willing death which is central to their shared central message of resurrection and rebirth; a shared obsession with blood—the sacredness of the Volk’s blood, spilling blood, drinking sacrificial blood—with blood serving as medium of purification and the transfer of energy as in the baptismal blood ceremony of the Teutonic Knights appropriated for the ritual initiation of Himmler’s Schutzstaffel; a preoccupation with controlling certain symbolic artifacts such as the “Blutfahne” (fig. 44). Finally, there is the relationship between the central symbol of Christianity (the cross) and the unholy Hakenkreuz or “hooked cross” of National Socialism.

National Socialist Neo-Paganism For decades, scholarship on the Third Reich and the established Christian churches mischaracterized National Socialist attitudes toward Christianity. More recent critics—Richard Steigmann-Gall, Wolfgang Altgeld, and Helmut Walser Smith—have revealed that much of the völkisch and racist content of Nazi ideology had already found a receptive home “among particular varieties of Christian belief well before the arrival of Nazism and even before the turn of the twentieth century.”31 Indeed, Altgeld has demonstrated that the concept of a “national religion” was received favorably within Protestant circles as early as the Wars of Liberation in the early nineteenth century.32 German romantic poets, thinkers, and painters, such as Theodor Körner, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Caspar David Friedrich forged the original links between Christian faith, German nationalism, and cultural production. Then, starting in the late nineteenth century, prominent features of völkisch ultra-nationalist ideology were adopted by mainstream Christian churches. Both the proto-Nazi völkisch movement and German Christianity were then subsequently radicalized by the First World War as elements from both the völkisch, aryanosophic wing of the fledgling NSDAP and the nationalistic state churches came together in the 1920s to give National Socialism its unique style and belief system. Such ideological radicalization was widespread and crossed political— liberal, conservative, Socialist, and Communist—as well as cultural —völkisch and avantgarde—lines. For all these groups the common enemy was the West—especially Western parliamentary democracy and finance capitalism, which was further demonized by the association of liberal institutions with the supposed corrupting influence of the Jews. In contrast to the conventional and now superseded view held by church and intellectual historians of the tense cohabitation of ideas of nationalism and Christianity, Altgeld and Steigmann-Gall have shown that “the relationship between being Christian and being national was marked more by synthesis” than by hostility.33 Indeed, any potential conflict between the Nazi state and, for example,

Roman Catholicism, was a result of the Church’s recent history of engagement in German politics rather than a response to Catholic theology per se. Consequently, antagonism towards the political power exerted by Christian churches led to measures that sought not only to curtail Church influence but also to mobilize the various Church bureaucracies on behalf of the Volksgemeinschaft. Even before coming to power Hitler had addressed this matter in a Reichstag speech delivered on January 30, 1929: “On one point there must be no uncertainty: the German priest as servant of God we shall protect, the priest as political enemy of the German state we will destroy.”34 But the regime’s actions to restrict the political influence of the churches should not, again, be confused with official state hostility towards Christianity. Similarly, the personal antiChristian bias of prominent Nazis did not generally bleed into professional behavior or impede the discharge of their official duties. In fact, all the major leadership figures in the regime, Hitler included, frequently and ritualistically expressed tolerance and even admiration for various aspects of Christianity, from the early twenties right up until the collapse of the regime. There is an overwhelming body of evidence supporting this interpretation, such as statements Hitler made in speeches before the Reichstag. For example, on February 1, 1933, following his appointment as Reichskanzler, Hitler asserted that “The National government . . . regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life.”35 And then, on March 23, 1933, in a speech justifying the Ermächtigungsgesetz, the Führer proclaimed that Christianity is “the unshakeable foundation of the moral and ethical life of our people.”36 Hitler proceeded to keep faith with his stated position on Christianity by signing the Reichskonkordat with the Holy See just a few months later on July 20, 1933. In exchange for requiring that German bishops swear an oath of loyalty to the Nazi government and ending all political activity, which meant dismantling the politically influential Deutsche Zentrumspartei, the Church retained autonomy of religious institutions and practices. Even though a number of Christian theologians recognized in National Socialism a dangerous adversary, there were just as many religious leaders who advocated

accommodation with the Nazi regime, such as Archbishop Konrad Gröber of Freiburg, Bishop Wilhelm Berning of Osnabrück, and the powerful Cardinal Adolf Bertram, leader of the German Roman Catholic Church and leading proponent of Gleichschaltung, who, while opposing a Catholic burial for a Party official in 1930, changed tack in 1932 and sought permission from the Vatican to join the NSDAP.37 Many leading Nazis, Hitler and Heinrich Himmler first and foremost, were, moreover, born into observant Catholic families, as were Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Julius Streicher, Reinhard Heydrich, Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller, the top donor to the NSDAP Fritz Thyssen, and Rudolf Höß, the commandant of AuschwitzBirkenau. Another cause for lingering misunderstanding about the relationship between National Socialism and Christianity is the disproportionate and pervasive media attention focused on the bizarre world of Heinrich Himmler’s Schutzstaffel (SS). As a result, studies that emphasize the collaboration of Christian leaders and institutions with the Hitler state—such as the work of John Cornwell and Daniel Goldhagen38—are routinely dismissed as extreme, since “everyone knows” that the Nazis were neo-pagans at heart and thus ideologically predisposed to take anti-Christian positions that led inevitably to the persecution of Christians and draconian efforts to suppress and/or supplant Christianity with a new pagan “religion” of National Socialism. Of course, there were countless cases of persecution. Roman Catholic priests—chiefly Polish clergy—were subjected to barbaric cruelty and arbitrary murder.39 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the most prominent Protestant theologian to resist the regime, was arrested and executed in the Flossenbürg concentration camp just weeks before it was liberated by American troops. Still other atrocities—such as the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses for their refusal to acknowledge the authority of the Nazi state and the crushing of the Weiße Rose conspiracy, whose members were motivated by their Christian faith—do suggest that the Hitler regime had no patience for the potential of Christians to offer resistance. But these acts of state violence and repression obscure a more important truth—that the relationship between the Nazi regime and

Christian institutions in Germany was mutually beneficial to the Nazi state and to the state-supported Churches. The intense co-ideological relationship between National Socialism and Christianity is powerfully exemplified in the fusion of German nationalism and the fervent Roman Catholic faith that motivated Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg’s plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Oberst Stauffenberg’s belief system coalesced during his youthful association with the poet Stefan George when it was confected into the notion of the mystical “sacred Germany,” a phrase that was on the failed assassin’s lips as he was shot by firing squad in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock on the night of July 20, 1944.40 The postwar apotheosis of Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators as saints of the German resistance reached its zenith with the release of the hagiographic Hollywood film Valkyrie (2008) that features the unlikely casting of Tom Cruise in the leading role. However, among a host of inaccuracies, the film blatantly airbrushes Stauffenberg’s initial enthusiasm for Hitler’s war of conquest, his belief in the special mission of the German Volk, and his intention to continue the war following the coup d’état. Nor does the film succeed in explaining how Stauffenberg’s extreme German nationalism could possibly be reconciled with his devout Christianity or how these two pillars of his faith could have inspired him to commit high treason. However lurid the Schutzstaffel’s associations with paganism, Heinrich Himmler’s obsessions had little bearing on actual Nazi policy with respect to Christianity. For all their eccentricities, the leading neo-pagans in the regime—Himmler, Alfred Rosenberg, Martin Bormann, and Baldur von Schirach—constituted a tiny minority in Nazi leadership circles and even they were more tolerant of Christianity and their observant personnel than is generally understood. In fact, according to Steigmann-Gall, Himmler feared that “the average SS-man would not be able to distinguish between attacks on the churches”—as political entities and thus as potential rivals or sources of opposition to Nazi rule—“and a preservation of Christ.”41 Moreover, in a 1937 memorandum addressed “to all SSleaders from Standartenführer [full colonel] on up” Himmler directed that “in ideological training I forbid every attack against Christ as a person, since such attacks or insults that Christ was a Jew are

unworthy of us and certainly untrue historically.”42 National Socialism’s ambivalence toward Christianity was also reflected in the views of Schirach, head of the Hitler Youth and the Gauleiter of Vienna, and another leading neo-pagan Nazi. In a speech given in December 1933 he remarked: “They say of us that we are an antiChristian movement. They even say that I am an outspoken pagan … I solemnly declare here, before the German public, that I stand on the basis of Christianity… In no manner does the Hitler Youth restrict the religious activities of its members.”43 Although he was very much a “new ager” avant la lettre—a vegetarian, teetotaler, and dabbler in alternative medicine—Hitler did not share the occultist fantasies of his “treuer Heinrich” [loyal Heinrich]. Indeed, in Mein Kampf, the transcripts of his Table Talk, and in remarks recorded by Albert Speer, Hitler ridiculed Himmler’s obsession with German pre-history and the work of the SSAhnenerbe. On one occasion the Führer noted that while “the Romans were erecting great buildings . . . our forefathers were still living in mud huts; now Himmler is starting to dig up these villages of mud huts and enthusing over every potsherd and stone axe he finds.”44 Furthermore, Dietrich Eckart (1863–1923), an early mentor of Hitler’s and one of the most important early Nazi ideologues, embraced the Christian messiah as the precursor figure of the coming Führer and a crucial role model in the midst of the postwar chaos engulfing Weimar Germany: “In Christ, the embodiment of all manliness, we find all that we need. And if we occasionally speak of Baldur, son of Odin, our words always contain some joy, some satisfaction, that our pagan ancestors were already so Christian as to have indications of Christ in this ideal figure.”45 Similarly, in remarks recorded in the Table Talk on October 21, 1941 Hitler said that Jesus Christ “must be regarded as a popular leader who took up his position against Jewry. He set Himself against Jewish capitalism, and that is why the Jews liquidated Him.”46 The trope of Jesus as a revolutionary leader betrayed by a corrupt establishment was obviously borrowed for Mein Kampf as was the mythic quality of Hitler’s rise from obscurity to leadership of the Party, and the Reich,

and defender of the Volksgemeinschaft against the imputed corrupting influence of the Jews. Only in the inverted ethical universe of National Socialism could Himmler fret about Nazi anti-Christian and anti-Semitic propaganda negatively impacting SS-men in the fulfilment of their barbaric duties. Only in the same dystopian universe could Schirach feel obliged to deny any conflict between the training of Hitler Youth and the practice of Christianity. What this bizarre cohabitation of ideology and religion suggests is that National Socialism did not supplant Christianity in the belief system of rank-and-file Party members and SS-men. Far from it: Christian observance and faith in National Socialism were capable of cohabitation because the latter became an extension of the former, just as in the sphere of visual propaganda images such as Martin-Amorbach’s Madonna mit Kind [Madonna with Child] (fig. 48) functioned simultaneously as signifiers in both Christianity and National Socialism—in the former, as the Messiah and His doting mother; in the latter, as an allegory of the rebirth of the German Volk. The fact remains that whatever their anti-Christian biases were, the neo-pagans in the regime did little to alienate SS-men, Party members or the still largely Christian identification of the vast majority of the German populace. Himmler’s avowed paganism, the regime’s incentivized recruitment of religious elites, and the murderous Nazi persecution of Christian religious and laity that followed the Machtergreifung have, however, obscured the remarkable creative alliance forged between Christian artists and their Nazi patrons. The participation of Christian artists in major Nazisponsored exhibitions was central to the formation of the distinctive utopian modernist aesthetic of National Socialism and these artists made significant and previously unaccounted for contributions to the invention of National Socialist iconography, most notably in converting traditional Christian imagery into distinctively fascist palingenetic emblems.47

Christianity, National Socialism, and Modernity One factor that cemented the affinity between Christianity and National Socialism was their shared ambivalence toward modernism and modernity. From a progressive, secularist perspective, Christianity and National Socialism could both be seen as implacably anti-modern, anachronistic forces in society that opposed change. On the other hand, even though many obvious anachronisms were built into the DNA of the National Socialist project, Hitler envisioned National Socialism as a revolutionary, truly avantgarde force that would transform all aspects of German society, including traditional religious rites. By this, Hitler meant, of course, to Germanize and “de-Jewify” the state churches, but this process had actually begun decades prior to the seizure of power and intensified during the First World War. Then, during the culture wars of the Weimar Period, which saw the rise of reactionary cultural organizations, such as Alfred Rosenberg’s Kampfbund für Deutsche Kultur [Fighting League for German Culture], that opposed modernist trends in the arts, National Socialist ideology and Christianity become increasingly conflated, overlapping, and consanguine—not identical twins exactly but sharing a strong family resemblance—who were brought closer by their mutual hostility toward perceived common enemies. National Socialism’s position on modernity was, however, highly ambivalent. Modernity was not simplemindedly associated with existential threats to Germany’s survival; modernity was also positively identified with freedom and the possibility of escape from the post-1918 present in which defeated Germany was demonized and punished as a pariah state. Modernity served, moreover, as the launching pad toward Germany’s utopia and in many areas— especially in communications technology, aviation, rocketry, and design—National Socialism made aspects of the utopian future familiar in the present. It was also in modernity that the signature iconographies and rhetorical styles of Christian art, völkisch nationalism, and the avantgarde dovetailed as a consequence of a shared preoccupation with apocalyptic crisis and imminent rebirth. This fusion of Christian and National Socialist iconography and symbolism contradicts the widespread but mistaken belief in a

general Weimar cultural libertinism—a myth perpetuated by popular treatments of avantgarde culture and Hollywood films such as director Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1970) that depict modernist culture in isolation from its more nuanced and not always wholesome sociopolitical background.48 As Knox explains, “for all of Weimar’s celebrated toleration of aesthetic, sexual, and political experimentalism, its organizational subcultures remained almost uniformly German-national or even overtly völkisch in flavor, with the exception of organizations within the Socialist or Communist orbits.”49 The overwhelmingly nationalist, proto-fascist cultural and political bias of many Weimar institutions and their leadership is prima facie evidence of the complex and interdependent, symbiotic relationship between the avantgarde and affiliated or supporting artist organizations, exhibition juries, and patronage mechanisms. Examples include such transformational figures in the modernist canon (and some of the few genuine conservatives) who represented the apparently contradictory amalgamation of extreme nationalist political commitments and progressive artistic techniques as the painter Emil Nolde, the novelist Ernst Jünger, the poet Stefan George, and the pre-seizure of power Thomas Mann, whose attacks on the Western powers during the First World War and his scepticism concerning parliamentary democracy during the Weimar Republic are virtually indistinguishable in their vehement bellicosity from attacks emanating from the proto-Nazi and völkisch camps. Even Heinrich Mann, darling of the left, expressed views that are surprisingly consonant with the anti-republican consensus on the right. That modernist practice in the arts was not incompatible with proto-fascism is not all that surprising, given that “right-wing” and “left-wing” modernisms were both engendered in the same nurturing matrix of German nationalist cultural politics and religion in which hatred of the West was its distinguishing and unifying feature. Even prior to the Machtergreifung, after which the newly nazified state took over the traditional outsized role of German government patronage of the visual arts that dated back to the time of Bismarck, artists of diverse ideological commitments and stylistic approaches gravitated toward the NSDAP—not out of idealism or in a spontaneous act of crass opportunism, but rather as a deeply felt

response to long-held grievances by members of the intelligentsia. As the First World War permanently shifted the center of German economic activity from agriculture and traditional craftsmanship to heavy industry, the adverse economic impact of the war was exacerbated, first, by hyperinflation, and then, by the Great Depression, leading to the pauperization, chiefly, of intellectuals and artists as well as those in skilled occupations. Economic collapse combined with technological advances, such as photography and the cinema, directly threatened the economic security of artists working in traditional media, and diminished the value of the objects they produced as consumer goods, none more so than easel paintings and handmade prints. Increasingly distraught and dispossessed farmers, artisans, war veterans, and artists emerged as the main targets of National Socialist propaganda. Ironically, the livelihood of artists in Germany was endangered by the very advances in media technology identified with National Socialist propaganda and cultural production—photography and film. Once again, the Janus-like nature of National Socialism revealed itself in its simultaneous embrace of the most futuristic innovations—radio, cinema, and ballistic missiles —along with the anachronisms of oil painting and woodcuts. No artists were courted by the NSDAP more assiduously than those working in the most traditional media and subject matter. Painters, muralists, and printmakers formed a core Nazi constituency whose support for Hitler led to an expectation of significant state and Party patronage after January 1933. Such hopes were reflected in the pre-1933 political affiliations and voting patterns of a representative sample of artists whose works were purchased by Hitler at the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen from 1937 to 1944.50 Despite a diversity of backgrounds as to region of origin, training institution, political affiliation, religious confession, and war service, German artists in disproportionately large numbers gravitated toward the NSDAP. They also demonstrated a willingness to adjust their work as needed to conform to Nazi aesthetic conventions in order to attract the patronage of the Führer, other Nazi elites, and ordinary museum-goers whose taste had been formed in the preceding decades by the collective experience of war, economic austerity, and political upheaval. For Christian artists

seeking to negotiate a viable career path in the Hitler state, it was imperative that they not squander their talent but to enlist it in the service of the Volksgemeinschaft. Thus there were compelling social, economic, and political-ideological reasons for artists to collaborate with the patronage system put in place under National Socialism.

Munich and the Mobilization of Christian Artists Already in the latter years of the Weimar Republic, in the significant annual art exhibitions of 1930, 1931, and 1932 held in Munich, völkisch and modernist as well as Christian and secular artists coexisted and comingled, as did secular and religious works of art and aesthetic conventions. Then, from 1933 onwards, following the nationalization of what had been an annual exhibition sponsored by local artist organizations, the inclusion of Christian-themed works of art in German exhibitions presupposed their thorough aryanization, which was in keeping with the co-opted Positive Christian Church’s insistence that Jesus had not been a Jew. By the 1937 opening of the first NSDAP-sponsored Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung in the purpose-built Haus der Deutschen Kunst on the edge of the Englischer Garten, the absorption of Christian iconography into the lexicon of National Socialist imagery had become so complete that even traditional Christian subjects, such as the Madonna and Child and the Deposition from the Cross—tropes that previously functioned as devotional images or scenes from the life of Jesus— had been wholly mobilized and transformed into icons of Nazi modernism. The artists and objects discussed below demonstrate how this mobilization process worked, resulting in the fusion of traditional Christian and National Socialist symbolism. Hitler’s designation of the “Führerstadt” [Führer City] Munich as “Hauptstadt der Deutschen Kunst” [Capital City of German Art] in an official proclamation in 1933 only formalized what was already the city’s de facto status. As home to the venerable Akademie der Bildenden Künste [Academy of Visual Arts], several of Germany’s greatest museums, and myriad dealers and auction houses, Munich could justly claim to be the center of the art market and of arts education in Central Europe. Munich also sponsored the largest annual exhibition in Germany, the Münchener Kunstausstellung, which was held from 1897 to 1931 in the Glaspalast, continental Europe’s answer to London’s famed Crystal Palace. A crossroads for progressive experimentation and academic realism, the Münchener Kunstausstellung was also the most prestigious exhibition in Europe

east of Paris. It was, in particular, the creative dynamism generated by the confluence of modernist and conservative elements in Munich’s art schools, artist organizations, and exhibitions that gave the city its unique status in the art world of the Weimar Republic. That Hitler should also have anointed Munich as “Die Hauptstadt der Bewegung” [Capital City of the Movement], that is, the crucible of National Socialism and extremist politics generally, served only to underscore this improbable but productive alliance between traditional and progressive culture that set Munich apart from other major artistic centers, such as Berlin, Cologne or Düsseldorf, where the conservative element was much less pronounced. In 1938 the city’s two honorary titles were merged into one, “Hauptstadt der Bewegung und Hauptstadt der Deutschen Kunst.” It is entirely consistent with the chameleonic nature of modernity that Munich was host to the birth of the German avantgarde and the NSDAP—a distinction embodied in the city’s double moniker. Alongside the Akademie, with its all-star faculty (including Franz von Lenbach, Franz von Stuck, Carl Theodor von Piloty, Carl von Marr, Franz Defregger, Heinrich von Zügel, and Franz Xaver Fuhr) and students who would later become canonical figures (such as Max Slevogt, Franz Marc, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Giorgio de Chirico, Lovis Corinth, and Otto Mueller), the two most influential artist organizations in Munich, the Künstlergenossenschaft and the Secession, were the chief sponsors of the annual Münchener Kunstausstellung. Formed in 1858 under the leadership of Franz von Lenbach, the Künstlergenossenschaft held the Erste Internationale Kunstausstellung [First International Art Exhibition] in the Glaspalast in 1869. Creative tensions between the two groups led to a schism in 1892 when 92 artists, in an insurrection against the reigning academic style and its institutionalized face in the leadership of the Künstlergenossenschaft, broke away and formed the Vereinigung Bildender Künstler München [Association of Munich Artists], which was later known simply as the Secession. Associated in our memory with the emergence of the avantgarde the Secession and its later spin-off, the Neue Secession, included some of the most important artists of the early modernist period in Germany—the aforementioned von Stuck along with Hans Thoma, Wilhelm Trübner,

Max Liebermann, and Lovis Corinth. For five years, in keeping with its declared independence, the Secession conducted its exhibitions separately from those of the Künstlergenossenschaft. This bifurcation of the academic and proto-avantgarde tendencies into two major annual exhibitions continued until 1897 when a period of détente ensued and the two groups mounted the first revamped Münchener Kunstausstellung in the Glaspalast. Unifying the two largest organizations brought together all of the leading tendencies and styles associated with the incipient modernist movement— naturalism, post-impressionism, symbolism, and the Jugendstil—into a giant mega-exhibition. Over the next three and a half decades the Münchener Kunstausstellung showcased the diversity of emergent modernist innovation in the visual arts, including works associated with the main expressionist groups Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, as well as the Novembergruppe, DADA, Neue Sachlichkeit, and the Bauhaus. So comprehensive was the Glaspalast show that even Christian artists, who belonged to the Künstlergenossenschaft, the Secession, and the Neue Secession, participated in the exhibition well into the twilight years of the Weimar Republic. The annual Münchener Kunstausstellung had become so central to the cultural life of the city that the Glaspalast fire in 1931, which caused the destruction not only of 3,000 works of contemporary art but also dozens of irreplaceable masterpieces of German romanticism that had been installed in a special exhibition, was an event that sent shockwaves through Munich’s art scene.51 Whatever doctrinal or stylistic differences had caused the original schism between the Künstlergenossenschaft and the Secession, for 36 years the annual exhibition provided a locus for the display of transideological comity. By causing the physical displacement and splintering of the two sponsoring entities, the loss of the Glaspalast disturbed the equilibrium in the Munich arts scene that had prevailed since 1897 and triggered a period of instability as well as organizational crisis that extended from 1931 until the opening in 1937 of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, the long-anticipated replacement for the Glaspalast. Indeed, in September 1933, on orders from Joseph Goebbels, the Künstlergenossenschaft, the Secession, and all other cultural bodies that had maintained their

independence after the Nazi seizure of power and harnessed the creative tension between traditional and progressive tendencies in German art, were dissolved, and all artists were required to join the Reichskulturkammer. An anodyne entity called the Kameradschaft der Künstler München [Fellowship of Munich Artists] emerged as an omnibus replacement and local nexus of control that all members of Munich artist organizations were also required to join. While the Künstlergenossenschaft and the Secession had been stripped of organizational authority for the Münchener Kunstausstellung of 1933, the Kameradschaft der Künstler München—essentially what the Münchener Kunstausstellung had been prior to rise of the Secession in 1892—was assigned responsibility for the re-emergent 1938 show until its last incarnation in 1943. In the 1931 Münchener Kunstausstellung Christian art was organized into a separate, freestanding category with 17 associated artists—eight sculptors, seven painters (Joseph Bergmann, Josef Eberz, Paul Thalheimer, Hans Vogl, Joseph Wackerle, and two future members of the leading Wehrmacht combat art unit, the Staffel der Bildenden Künstler, Olaf Jordan and Anton Lamprecht), one mosaicist, and one fabricator of stained glass windows. But these were merely the artists professionally affiliated as Christian artists. In addition, Christian motifs were represented more broadly by 20 artists in sections of the exhibition dedicated to the Künstlergenossenschaft (Theodor Georgii, Peter Kálmán, Josef Kuisl, Karl Andreas Manetstätter, Wilhelm von Ruckteschell, Paul Scheurle, Karl Schultheiss, Hermann Urban, and Heinrich Waderé), the Secession (Karl Caspar, Wilhelm Maly, and Walter Teutsch), and the Neue Secession (Anton Grimm, Hermann Spatz, and Paul Thalheimer). The section occupied by Christian art in the 1932 Münchener Kunstausstellung consisted of works by 15 artists, including such prominent names in both the Weimar Period and the Nazi art scene as Karl Blocherer, Hermann Kaspar, Oskar MartinAmorbach, Eugen Mayer-Fassold, and Karl Theodor Protzen. In another arcane discipline, “Reproductions,” Christian motifs were represented by 14 artists, among them Hans Gött, Josef Henselmann, and the venerable Milwaukee-born German-American, Carl von Marr.

In 1933, in an unprecedented cultural coup d’état, responsibility for the annual Münchener Kunstausstellung was stripped from the Künstlergenossenschaft and Secession and taken over by Nazi functionaries. As a result, the raison d’être of the annual exhibition was transformed from a display of Munich’s newest art in all its diversity to a showcase of the emergent pan-German modernist Nazi aesthetic that had aspirations of challenging the pre-eminence of Paris, New York, and Berlin as the artistic capital of the world. The dispersal of progressive artists was not immediate nor was the banishment of Christian artists complete, but the first Nazi-mobilized Münchener Kunstausstellung, rechristened as the Staatliche Kunstausstellung München [State Art Exhibition Munich] of 1933, featured only two works that were overtly Christian in theme, and both were representations of the Madonna, including Oskar MartinAmorbach’s Madonna mit Kind (fig. 48). Furthermore, no Christianthemed objects were displayed in the 1934 and 1936 exhibitions, and only one—an expressionist sculpture of Christ by Oswald Hoffmann—was included in the 1935 exhibition. To compare these stark figures with the last years of the Weimar-era Münchener Kunstausstellung is to realize how quickly Christian-oriented artists, whose training and careers were identified with decorating churches and making easel paintings and sculptures of Christian motifs, selfmobilized and adapted their traditional themes and methods in order to create the images that provided the visual realization of Nazi ideology. Richard Felgenhauer’s Vision (fig. 49) is a prime example of a work of art that converts a traditional Christian trope, that of the Annunciation, into an icon of Nordic fertility that is inserted into a nostalgically rendered pastoral landscape peopled by robust examples of hygienic rustic humanity. Intriguingly, the separation of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen and Münchener Kunstausstellungen from 1937/1938 through 1943/44 was foreshadowed by the original split in 1892 between the Künstlergenossenschaft and Secession. In fact, the establishment of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung as a successor to the Münchener Kunstausstellung was motivated by ambitions similar to those that inspired the Secessionists: to elevate the Munich art world to the level of foreign artistic culture (which

included the rest of Germany, especially Berlin and Düsseldorf, northern and western cities deemed foreign to the Bavarian sensibility), and to create, popularize, and proclaim the art form appropriate for the expanding Reich, one that reflected the Nazi regime’s cultural ambitions and utopian orientation. As a result, the notorious “cultural cleansing” of the Nazi era would have, at least on an organizational level, looked familiar to long-time observers of the Munich arts scene; it represented yet another schism, a repetition of earlier episodes in the fractious history of the city’s artist organizations. The Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen may also be compared to the Münchener Kunstausstellung following the seizure of power as the Secession was to the Künstlergenossenschaft in its time, for the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung actually embodied a far more radical break with artistic tradition than did the Münchener Kunstausstellung. This seems especially counterintuitive, given that the Secession and the Neue Secession, with their significant foreign membership associated with cubism, DADA, and surrealism, were linked to the intellectual leadership of Franz von Stuck, while the Künstlergenossenschaft was more closely aligned with the academic realism championed by the renowned Munich Akademie professor Karl von Piloty. Large-scale state purchases of art (and the state’s facilitation of public commissions) had previously supplied the rationale for the annual shows sponsored by the Künstlergenossenschaft and Secession for decades leading up to the seizure of power. Even after the traditional annual Munich exhibition was divided into two shows in 1938, state patronage remained crucially important to the success of the new Party-sponsored exhibitions in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst as well as the relaunched Münchener Kunstausstellung in the Maxilianeum, one of the city’s architectural monuments. With so many artists in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen representing regions outside Munich and Bavaria, the lion’s share of purchases thus benefited artists previously unaffiliated with the Münchener Kunstausstellungen. This was, of course, consistent with the original objectives of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung, which was, firstly, to enlarge the pool of contributing artists and, second, to raise the international profile of the city’s leading annual

exhibition. In this sense the goals of the exhibition organizers were met, but still left unresolved was the problem of how to placate the Munich-based artists who were excluded from the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung. Abruptly deprived of exhibition sales (in the wake of the cancellation of the 1937 Münchener Kunstausstellung and its replacement with the inaugural Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung) on which they had previously depended, these key constituents of the Nazi regime found themselves in financial difficulties that could with justice be laid at the feet of the Nazi Party. One solution arrived at was the implementation of Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung Ergänzungen [exchange exhibitions] in December that significantly increased the participation of local artists whose work could not be showcased in the regular shows that opened in July. Although a high percentage of Munich artists whose works could not be accommodated in the regular Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen —former members of the Künstlergenossenschaft, the Secession, and the Neue Secession—were invited to participate in the exchange exhibitions, another more extensive solution was needed. The expedient settled on after some internal debate was to resurrect the annual Glaspalast exhibition that would run concurrently with the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung from 1938 to 1943. The notion of two-tiered, twin exhibitions in Munich had, as we have seen, first emerged with the formation of the Secession in 1892, when 92 artists, led by Academy Professor Bruno Piglheim, seceded from the Künstlergenossenschaft and formed the Munich Secession. Thus another pattern established in the 1890s—state purchases at both the Künstlergenossenschaft and the Secession exhibitions—was replicated with the launch, in 1938, of the revamped Münchener Kunstausstellung as a competitor with the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung. Given the urgency with which the Hitler state treated the chronic poverty of German artists, the chosen solution to the state patronage crisis (as the Nazi takeover of the Münchener Kunstausstellung was deemed from the perspective of artists who had been affiliated with the Secession and Neue Secession)—to resurrect the former Glaspalast show—would replicate the “exhibition for sale” formula that guided the formation of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung and insured that artists

“working toward the Führer” would be rewarded by inflated prices for their work. This was a sign of the regime’s awareness of the necessity of providing an outlet—creative as well as commercial—for artists whose work was völkisch and thus acceptable in aesthetic terms but was not directly engaged in imagining and instigating the emergence of the Nazi racial utopia.

Key Figures: Oskar Martin-Amorbach, Richard Heymann, and Hans Spiegel In Oskar Martin-Amorbach’s (1897–1987) Madonna mit Kind (fig. 48), exhibited at the 1933 Münchener Kunstausstellung, the racial identity of the mother and the Christ child is unambiguous, based on the Nordic physiognomy, hair color, and pigmentation of both subjects. In its self-consciously traditional subject matter, flattened perspective, matte surface, and archaic use of egg tempera—an ancient medium associated with devotional paintings on wood panel —Martin-Amorbach’s Madonna mit Kind functions both as an homage to the Nazarener, the devoutly Roman Catholic German artists who, in the early nineteenth century, sought to reinvigorate Christian art by reviving the style and technique of Italian and German Old Masters, and as an anticipatory representation of idealized German racial purity that was the objective of Nazi Germany’s homicidal biosocial engineering. With his background as a Christian artist working in hyper-traditional media, MartinAmorbach seems an unlikely creator of some of the most potent National Socialist symbols and images. However, along with every member of his generation, frontline experience in the First World War proved to be a turning point. Martin-Amorbach served at the front for two years in the hazardous role of messenger before being severely wounded and sent home. In 1920 the self-taught artist accepted an invitation to study as a “master student” with Franz von Stuck at the Munich Akademie. At this point Martin-Amorbach’s career trajectory was identical to that of many better-known modernist artists, such as Albert Weisgerber (1878–1915), who also studied with Stuck, and Franz Marc, a fellow Akademie student and Frontsoldat (both Weisgerber and Marc were killed in action), as well as the foreignborn non-combatants Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, who are Stuck’s most famous protégés. In the years leading up to the seizure of power Martin-Amorbach established himself as a leading practitioner of Christian painting. The installation of his 25-meter square Kreuzigung [Crucifixion] fresco in the interior of the

Glaspalast led to a steady stream of church commissions for large format panel paintings as well as hyper-traditional murals. After the Machtergreifung, Martin-Amorbach’s success paralleled that of fellow Stuck pupil and Hitler favorite, Wilhelm Emil (Elk) Eber (1892–1941). Eber belonged to the tiny fraternity of practicing artists who joined the SA or brown shirts,52 in whose vocation were blended the aesthetic and German nationalist elements that came together during the Wars of Liberation in the work, for example, of Caspar David Friedrich. Of the 619 German artists whose Fragebögen were collected and preserved by the Monuments Branch because their work was purchased by the Führer, only 19 or 3% admitted to having been active members of the Sturmabteilung.53 During the conflict-ridden transitional period between January 1933 and the July opening of the 1937 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung, Martin-Amorbach branched out from the parochial niche of decorating the walls of Counter-Reformation Bavarian churches to become one of the most celebrated artists associated with National Socialism. In 1938, a year after the triumphal appearance of his picture Der Sämann [The Sower] (1937) in the first Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung, Martin-Amorbach joined the NSDAP. Almost immediately, he found himself in the coterie of highly privileged artists whose works were included in each of the eight annual Party-sponsored exhibitions in Munich. Fittingly, it was in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, built with gifts from the Party’s biggest donors, where Martin-Amorbach exhibited his most iconic paintings, all of which powerfully objectify Nazi ideology. Besides Der Sämann (1937), which would hang in the Reichsministerium für Erziehung und Volksbildung [Reich Ministry for Education and the Formation of the Volk], Martin-Amorbach’s corpus of nostalgic pastoral fantasies includes Im Tagewerk (1938) (fig. 42) and Bauerngrazie (1940). Motivated by status anxiety created with the loss of the traditional niche enjoyed by practitioners of Christian art, Martin-Amorbach shape-shifted from a provincial Roman Catholic artist to one explicitly associated with the iconography of the NSDAP. However, Martin-Amorbach’s acceptance of Nazi patronage cut both ways. On the one hand, his reported income peaked at 30,036 Reichsmark in 1941 and 27,476 Reichsmark in 1942, while, on the other, a U.S.

Military Government of Germany hearing that took place on July 29, 1946 issued an “adverse recommendation” as to his further employment.54 Richard Heymann (1900–1973), Martin-Amorbach’s slightly younger contemporary, worked in completely secular genres before the seizure of power. Afterwards, however, he quickly adjusted and began to specialize in converting Christian iconography into multivalent political topoi that are among the most effective National Socialist emblems to be exhibited in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst. Des Volkes Lebensquell (1937) [Life Source of the People] (fig. 50), a painting Heymann showed at the inaugural 1937 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung, demonstrates the total nazification of the traditional Christian trope of the Madonna and Child. Here the expansion of the traditional family group from two figures to four denotes the politically correct, in Nazi terms, qualities of fecundity and domesticity equated with motherhood, in particular, and femininity, generally, in Hitler’s Germany. The landscape with the sun breaking through the clouds and the mother figure’s peasant attire allude to the rural countryside as the incubator of the healthy Nordic race and the symbolically significant role of the peasantry as well as the emphasis in the representation of women in National Socialist propaganda in traditional, maternal roles. The introduction of the older boy in the Deutscher Jungvolk uniform (the branch of the Hitler Youth for boys under the age of fourteen), brandishing a model airplane and gazed upon with evident pride by his beaming younger sister, accomplishes the dual purpose of signifying the Nazi Party’s combined roles as educator of Germany’s youth and patron of futuristic technological advances. Similarly, Karl Mader’s Mutter in Ährenfeld [Mother in a Ripe Field of Wheat] (c. 1941) (fig. 51) appropriates the Madonna and Child trope. Iconographically compact and stripped of any overt Christian symbolism, Mader’s picture amplifies the fertility of the young nursing mother by placing her in and mirroring her condition with a fully ripened field of wheat ready to be harvested. While Heymann was also a product of the Munich art world and only three years younger than Martin-Amorbach, his career differed in significant ways from that of his near contemporary.55 A Lutheran

in majority Catholic Bavaria, and too young to have seen service in the First World War, Heymann was also never associated with völkisch political or cultural organizations. Indeed, prior to the seizure of power, as Heymann indicated on his Fragebogen, he had voted for the leftist Social Democrats.56 However, the absence of religious or political predictors of Nazi sympathy in his background had no impact on Heymann’s striking success as a consummate Nazi symbol maker. Nor did Heymann’s decision to eschew Party membership limit his commercial appeal: 1943 and 1944 were the years of his highest earnings—16,150 and 15,600 Reichsmark, respectively. On the contrary, Heymann’s lack of formal Party affiliation served him well in the postwar years. Despite the prominence of his work in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen as well as his participation in the exhibition Deutsche Künstler und die SS, [German Artists and the SS],57 he was completely exempted from the denazification process. By contrast, Martin-Amorbach was compelled to appear as a defendant before a Spruchkammer where he faced the threat of punishment for his Party membership. Another key difference in their wartime experience was that Heymann was conscripted into the ranks of fighting soldiers and was severely wounded in 1942. While Martin-Amorbach did take part in the 1940 invasion of France, he was subsequently relieved from further Wehrmacht service following his inclusion on the Führer’s “Gottbegnadeten-Liste” of “divinely gifted” artists deemed too valuable to risk losing in battle. Freed to work without interruption, Martin-Amorbach quite obviously benefited from Hitler’s patronage and his income spiked during the years of the bloodiest fighting: 1941 (30,000 Reichsmark), 1942 (27,400 Reichsmark), 1943 (19,000 Reichsmark), and 1945 (30,000 Reichsmark). Another traditional Christian trope that was absorbed into the lexicon of National Socialist iconography can be seen in Kameraden [Comrades] (1937) (fig. 52) by the “degenerate” artist Hans Spiegel (1894–1966). Depicting a German soldier in the trenches of the First World War—the primal scene in the National Socialist imaginary— tenderly shouldering a wounded or dead comrade as if he had been lowered from the post transsecting the trench wall, Spiegel’s painting transforms the canonical Deposition from the Cross trope into a

stage on which is succinctly dramatized the central origination myth of the NSDAP as the camaraderie of the front (Frontgemeinschaft) and, with it, the bonds reinforcing the Volksgemeinschaft that will become universal with the advent of the National Socialist utopia. In addition, Spiegel’s variation on the deposition exemplifies the synthesis that occurred in the Nazi mobilization of Christian iconography: the suggestion of the traditional Christian connotations of sacrifice, pathos, and agape that emerge with the act of personally bearing the whole weight of Christ’s body remain intact. In addition, they are enriched by the accretion of more context-specific associations with the Fronterlebnis of the First World War as well as the ubiquitous impact of the war that helped forge bonds between disparate social and class sub-groups in wartime Germany. Spiegel, the senior most of the artists under discussion, exemplifies the vicissitudes faced by established artists with modernist credentials with the resolution in 1937 of the Nazi culture war of the mid-thirties. Having received his training in Stuttgart, he joined renowned modernists and fellow Stuttgart natives Oskar Schlemmer and Willi Baumeister as a member of the Berlin chapter of the Novembergruppe. In 1924 Spiegel joined the Stuttgart Secession. This group consisted of artists—Baumeister, Albert Birkle, Jakob Wilhelm Fehrle, Paul Kälberer, Bernhard Pankok, Hans Purrmann, and Peter Schober—whose experience in Nazi Germany ran the gamut from internal exile and the sacrifice of careers to selfmobilization and successfully attracting the patronage of the regime. Spiegel, who exhibited Kameraden in the 1937 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung following an earlier career phase which was identified with cubism, enjoyed a complex relationship with the Nazi cultural apparatus. In another curious example of the inconsistencies associated with the Nazi assault on modernism, four of Spiegel’s paintings were “beschlagnahmt” [seized] from museum collections in Munich, Stuttgart, and Stettin in 1937. His “degenerate” bona fides notwithstanding, a year later Spiegel was invited to serve on the Vorjury [pre-selection jury] of the 1938 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung. But Spiegel’s appearance in the 1937 show was not to be repeated. Furthermore, in 1938 Spiegel was replaced as director of the Stuttgart Akademie by the sculptor and member of the

“Gottbegnadeten-Liste,” Fritz von Graevenitz. The Allied bombing of Stuttgart in 1943–44, which destroyed Spiegel’s studio and much of his oeuvre, followed by the Allied victory, left what remained of his career in ashes. As punishment for his success in Nazi Germany, Spiegel was relieved of his position as professor at the Stuttgart Akademie. Fittingly, his chair was filled by Baumeister, his long-time friend and colleague, who returned from internal exile in a remote Bavarian village. In early twentieth-century Germany, Christian artistic iconography, prior to its annexation by National Socialism, could, when restricted to its customary doctrinally determined semaphorism, seem anachronistic, “degenerate”, and even, from a Nazi perspective, unacceptably Jewish when illustrating Old Testament narratives without aryanized modification. One has only to consider such apocalyptically charged images as Emil Nolde’s Kreuzigung [Crucifixion] (1912), Lovis Corinth’s Ecce Homo (1925), or the lesser-known Eugen Kerschkamp’s Flucht nach Ägypten [Escape into Egypt] (c. 1936) (fig. 53), all three of which are masterpieces of avantgarde modernism that derive much of their visual energy and emotional charge from the soon-to-be banned styles and techniques in which they were executed. The impression of a division between contemporary Christian and secular art was intensified by the strict separation, in pre-Machtergreifung German art exhibitions, of the two types of art into different categories and divided exhibition spaces. This bifurcation not only reflected traditional genres within the artistic profession based on chosen media, such as oil painting, printmaking, and sculpture. Organizational affiliations and exhibition categories were also determined by factors such as the artists’ regions of origin, the institutions where artists received their training, and, perhaps most importantly, whether artists identified with the academic tradition or schools of modernism. Finally, there were professional bodies for artists who specialized in depicting or sculpting animals and others for artists who worked as copyists reproducing well-known masterpieces, a thriving if already arcane discipline in the early 1930s.

Christian art was also an arcane discipline during the latter days of the Weimar Republic. Far from dying out, the experience of war and suffering on a massive scale increased the popularity of Christian tropes of prophecy, apocalypse, and Christ’s sacrifice. Indeed, with the adoption, modification, and incorporation of Christian iconographic elements into the Nazi symbolic lexicon, such formerly anachronistic, sectarian religious motifs emerged as powerful symbols of Nazi eugenic utopianism. Instead of sequestering such objects in side galleries because they were produced by a marginal group of artists clinging to the most archaic of traditional genres, works by newly mobilized, formerly Christian artists were unveiled as central props in Nazi stagecraft and mythology, and thus were selected for the signature art exhibitions of the Third Reich, the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen.

1

See, for example, Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 2 Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 3 See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006). 4 On the theological rationale for the replacement of the Jews by the Germans as the “Chosen People,” see Stargardt, op. cit., 76. 5 Stargardt, ibid., 312. 6 Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), a leading idealist philosopher and famed antagonist of Martin Heidegger, fled Germany when Hitler came to power. 7 Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth. Trans. Suzanne K. Langer. 1946. In The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature.

Ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press. Pages 635–40. 8 Ellman and Feidelson, ed., op. cit., 637. 9 Ellman and Feidelson, ed., ibid., 637–38. 10 The philologist Hermann Karl Usener (1834–1905) introduced this phrase in his study Götternamen [The Names of Gods] (1896). The influential art historian Aby Warburg was one of his doctoral students. 11 This is a phrase that Roger Griffin very constructively appropriates from the sociologist Peter Berger’s influential analysis of modernity. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, 75. 12 Macgregor Knox, To the Threshold of Power, 1922/33: Origins and Dynamics of the Fascist and National Socialist Dictatorships (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 172. 13 Eksteins, op. cit., 328. 14 Quoted in Knox, op. cit., 170. 15 Both passages quoted in Knox, ibid., 170, 171. 16 Quoted in Knox, ibid. 17 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1943), 161. 18 There is, most notably, Mann’s novella Wälsungenblut [The Blood of the Walsungs], written in 1906 but not published until 1921. Also relevant is the conclusion to Der Zauberberg [The Magic Mountain] (1924) in which the protagonist, Hans Castorp, descends from the mountaintop sanitarium to the flat lands where he elects to find his fate alongside his countrymen in the trenches. 19 Quoted in Knox, op. cit., 282. 20 F.W. Heinz, Sprengstoff (Berlin: Frundsberg, 1930), 7. 21 Quoted in Eksteins, op. cit., 281. 22 Le Crapouillet, July 1933, 40. Quoted in Eksteins, ibid., 309. 23 Eksteins, ibid., 298. 24 Quoted in Knox, op. cit., 358. 25 Quoted in Stargardt, op. cit., 105–106. 26 Quoted in Knox, op. cit., 285.

27

Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), xxv. 28 Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 6–7. 29 Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War (London: Penguin, 2008), 373: “Only in Norway was a native fascist leader placed in power.” 30 Poland is the major exception to this pattern. The decapitation of Polish society by destroying its elites was, in fact, Nazi policy in the West and Soviet policy in eastern Poland. Reinhard Heydrich is reported to have said that Nazi policy would effect a “clear-out: Jews, intelligentsia, priesthood, aristocracy.” Quoted in Evans, op. cit., 16. 31 Steigmann-Gall, op. cit., 7. 32 Wolfgang Altgeld, Katholizismus, Protestantismus, Judentum (Mainz: M. Grunewald Verlag, 1992), 52. 33 Steigmann-Gall, op. cit., 7. 34 Frankfurter Zeitung, February 1, 1939. Quoted in Steigmann-Gall, ibid., 253. 35 Max Domarus, The Essential Hitler: Speeches and Commentary, ed. Patrick Romane (Wauconda, Illinois: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 2007), 211. 36 Domarus, ibid., 236. 37 Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930– 1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 75. 38 See John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (New York: Viking, 1999) and Daniel J. Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002). 39 Stargardt, op. cit., 4: “1,000 priests were among the victims of SS terror.” 40 Evans, op. cit., 640. 41 Steigmann-Gall, op. cit., 131. 42 Quoted in Steigmann-Gall, ibid.

43

Quoted in Steigmann-Gall, ibid., 143. 44 Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 94–95. 45 Dietrich Eckart, Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin (Munich: Hoheneichen-Verlag, 1924), 36. 46 Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–44: His Private Conversations, trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1953), 76. 47 Denoting the central role of resurrection and rebirth in fascist ideology and symbolism, Griffin’s brilliant adoption of “palingenesis” is, of course, indebted to Emilio Gentile (1875–1944) who, in turn, credited his coining of “the sacralization of politics” to Eric Voegelin’s concept of “political religion.” 48 Peter Gay’s sentimental sugarcoating of modernism in Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968) influenced an entire generation. For a study of the period that acknowledges the complicity of cultural elites with the radical right, see Erik Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 49 Knox, op. cit., 267. 50 Abteilung V, BHSA. 51 The exhibition in question was Werke deutscher Romantiker von Caspar David Friedrich bis Moritz von Schwind. 52 Abteilung V, BHSA. 53 Besides Eber this group included Carl von Dombrowski, Otto Ehinger, Gerhard Eisenblätter, Wilhelm August Goebel, Theo Guillery, Carl Helmig, Hans Hemmeter, Wilhelm Herberholz, Arthur von Hüls, Josef Kainz, Michael Mathias Kiefer, Ernst Liebermann, Georg Mayer-Pröger, Gisbert Palmié, Harald Schmal, Johann Schult, Alfred Thielemann, Willy Waldapfel, and Hermann Zottlitzer. 54 Abteilung V, BHSA. 55 Heymann attended the Munich Akademie from 1920 to 1925. 56 Abteilung V, BHSA. 57 Other artists who joined Heymann in this particularly egregious act of collaboration included Arno Breker, Conrad Hommel, Fritz

Klimsch, Rudolf Lipus, Oskar Martin-Amorbach, Paul Mathias Padua, and Wolfgang Willrich.

CHAPTER 4 Baldur von Schirach and “Degenerate” Art in the Service of Nazi Culture Scholars have previously noted the surprising degree of modernist experimentation in music, literature, film, architecture, and design that flourished in National Socialist Germany. Less well known is the coexistence of modernist idioms in the visual arts alongside the regime’s officially sanctioned, much more restricted range of aesthetic preferences. The main focus of this chapter is a modernist exhibition that opened in 1943 under the official patronage of Baldur von Schirach, the Führer’s personal representative in Vienna. The significance of Junge Kunst im Deutschen Reich [New Art in the German Reich] lies in its assertion of a modernist variant of official National Socialist art that, similar to the stylistic experimentation associated with the Staffel der Bildenden Künstler, clashed with the orthodox aesthetic norms associated with the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen. In addition, other modernist candidates put forward for this “official” designation are reviewed. Together these initiatives suggest that the cultural landscape of the Third Reich was a far richer and a great deal more heterogeneous place than is generally understood and one that generated powerful symptoms of cognitive dissonance—the gap between the regime’s anti-modernist rhetoric and actual cultural practice in Nazi Germany. Schirach belonged to the core group of Adolf Hitler’s associates who were tried and convicted for war crimes at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal in 1946. The product of an aristocratic and cosmopolitan home, the culturally ambitious Schirach spoke English as his first language and, through his mother, was descended from two signers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.1 His father, also of American descent, was a prominent theater director, most notably, of the National Theater in Weimar. Schirach studied German literature and art history at the University of Munich. He was, like countless other young German intellectuals, drawn to the NSDAP’s projected image of youthful vigor and idealism, and he joined the Party in 1925 at the tender age of

eighteen. In 1932 this most precocious and talented of Nazi insiders cemented his niche in Hitler’s inner circle by marrying Henriette, the teenaged daughter of Heinrich Hoffmann, the Führer’s photographer, art consultant, and confidant. At the time, Hoffmann proudly described his son-in-law as “a delightful young man, partially of American descent, with the slim, well-proportioned body of an athlete, a keen intelligence,” and, with reference to Schirach’s cultural interests, “a great enthusiasm for the modern school of art,”2 which did, of course, set him apart from the Führer, and would lead to a colossal dressing down during their final face-to-face meeting at the Berghof in February 1943. While still a student, Schirach was placed in charge of the NSDeutscher Reichsstudentenbund [NS-Student League of the German Reich], the Party entity responsible for the nazification of German universities. His success in bringing university-level education into alignment with National Socialism was rewarded with promotion to Reichsjugendführer [Reich Leader of Youth] on June 17, 1933. This promotion served Schirach’s interests in countless ways, not least of which was shielding him from accepting responsibility for 30 Deutsche Künstler [30 German Artists], an exhibition of expressionist works of art organized by members of the Reichsstudentenbund that opened on July 22, 1933 in Berlin.3 The previous month, on June 29, Otto Andreas Schreiber, one of the curators of the exhibition, gave a speech at a conference on Jugend kämpft für deutsche Kunst [The Young Fight for German Art], in which he identified the expressionist artists associated with Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter groups as the artists of the “New Germany,” thus striking a blow against the anti-modernist Rosenberg faction in the Party. Despite being no longer in charge of the Reichsstudentenbund at the time of the controversial exhibition, Schirach’s pro-modernist fingerprints are nonetheless unmistakable, and 30 Deutsche Künstler was the most public expression of support for avantgarde modernism by an affiliated National Socialist organization until the opening of Junge Kunst a decade later. Rescued from the indignity of this potential blot on his record, Schirach assumed the leadership of the Hitlerjugend [Hitler Youth], the primary institution for the indoctrination of German children and

adolescents as well as the main conduit for recruitment into the Reichsarbeitsdienst [Reich Labor Service], the Wehrmacht, and the SS. To buttress his credentials for the role of Reich pedagogue-inchief, Schirach published two key texts—Die Hitler Jugend–Idee und Gestalt (1934) [The Hitler Youth—Idea and Form] and Revolution der Erzierhung (1938) [The Revolution in Education]—that also highlight his contribution to forging the cult of the paternalistic and godlike Führer among Germany’s youth. Schirach also published two volumes of original poetry. The first, Die Fahne der Verfolgten (1933) [The Flag of the Persecuted], was offered to the public as his own original writing. The second, Das Lied der Getreuen (1938) [The Song of the Faithful], consists of pro-Nazi poems ascribed to Austrian members of the Hitlerjugend (but ghostwritten by Schirach) during “the years of persecution,” from 1933 to 1937, when the NSDAP and its affiliated groups were banned in pre-Anschluß Austria. Typical of the hagiographic, Führer-centric encomia in Die Fahne der Verfolgten is the poem „In uns ist die Schweigen” [“The Silence in Us”]: The sacred silence of all-powerful time grows within us. Serious, steady, and solemn are our ranks. Then, as the sacred hour wills it, a god Endows our ardent longing with blessings: Thus our prayers are heard and your desire is sated. And of your longing, we are also aware. Deep in your breast you know: Our mouths are speaking of you.4

Written for fellow initiates in the cult of the Führer, both volumes of poetry were dedicated to Adolf Hitler, and the stanzas are characterized by a quasi-mystical, völkisch tone as well as a vocabulary of worship that emulates the esoteric poems of Stefan George. One might have thought that such effusive flattery would have solidified Schirach’s position in the regime’s hierarchy. However, in

1940 he abruptly left his position with the central government in Berlin to take part in the German invasion of France. Notwithstanding his bookish manner, the poet, pedagogue, and exReichsjugendführer earned the Iron Cross Second Class for gallantry in combat. Despite such battlefield heroics, on being demobilized, Schirach did not return to Berlin. Instead, he was sent to the political backwater that was Nazi Vienna.

Vienna “Gau,” a medieval word meaning “district” or “region,” was absorbed into the National Socialist lexicon based on its perceived urGermanic authenticity. In theory, Nazi Gauleiter [regional leaders] were merely supposed to advise local government entities to ensure harmony with Party doctrine. However, in reality they exercised absolute power in their assigned districts, especially when that power was amplified by a dual appointment as Reichsstatthalter [Reich governor] as Schirach’s was. The ranks of the 45 alt Reich and Ostmark [Austrian] Gauleiter were routinely filled by Nazi alte Kämpfer, Hitler’s colleagues during the Party’s years of struggle. Prone to committing faux pas that drew attention to their unsuitability for high office or any official business, many Gauleiter were wholly unprepared for the discharge of governance duties or interpreted them to include naked self-enrichment and often brutal exploitation of the governed populace. Moreover, the very presence of such figures, who were endowed with arbitrary authority in the Nazi governing apparatus, is evidence of the regime’s redundant organizational structure as well as the potential for comic opera results when Gauleiter intervened frivolously in local administrative affairs following their invocation of the Führerprinzip, which required absolute obedience from those further down the hierarchy. With nearly two million inhabitants, Vienna was the largest city by area and the second largest city by population in the Reich. Lacking in political power, but rich in cultural history, the distance of the vast former capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from Berlin afforded Schirach the opportunity to chart an independent course in cultural policy that clashed significantly with the direction set for the visual arts in Berlin. In addition to hosting the annual exhibitions of the Gesellschaft Bildender Künstler Wiens [Viennese Society of Visual Artists], the nazified local arts organization to which members of the Reichskulturkammer also belonged, the new Gauleiter also sponsored independent projects of his own choosing. One of these was the exhibition Junge Kunst that opened on February 6, 1943. While this chapter is concerned with Schirach’s patronage of this and

other exhibitions, his most consequential deed as Vienna’s Gauleiter revealed his dual nature as a Kulturmensch and a mass murderer. In September 1942, as the deportation of Vienna’s Jews to Nazi death camps was imminent, Schirach dared to frame the event as “an active contribution to European culture.”5 Echoing in significant ways the transgressive features of 30 Deutsche Künstler—namely, the inclusion of works by artists banned as “degenerate”—Junge Kunst was the most visible and defiant expression of Schirach’s independence from and violations of Nazi aesthetic norms. By blurring the boundaries between forbidden progressive modes of representation and those that had won official favor in Munich, Schirach threatened the myth of monolithic cultural standards that the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen were meant to embody and to emblazon across the cultural landscape. 30 Deutsche Künstler and, later, Junge Kunst, offer clear evidence that, in Riccardo Bavaj’s words, “in no way was modern art totally excluded” from Nazi Germany.6 However historically significant, Junge Kunst was, like so much Nazi culture, a strange ad hoc phenomenon. It was derived from Junges Schaffen [New Creation], an exhibition organized by Wilhelm Rüdiger that opened in Weimar in the summer of 1942. Schirach was so taken with Rüdiger’s show, that as we shall see below, he arranged for its transfer to Vienna with the addition of Austrian artists (14 in all, five of whom were Viennese),7 so that the exhibition would be representative of the whole Reich. But this was not Schirach’s only controversial intervention in the still unresolved Nazi culture war. He also sponsored an exhibition of Gustav Klimt’s work in the former Secession building on Vienna’s Friedrichstraße, which was scheduled to overlap with Junge Kunst and run from February 2 to March 14, 1943. Curated by Fritz Novotny (1903–1983), a Cezanne specialist and, according to his Wikipedia entry, “an uncompromising antifascist,” the Gustav Klimt Ausstellung stands out as the largest and most complete Klimt exhibition ever mounted. It also constituted a bold, even radical attempt to assert Klimt’s canonicity in bold defiance of his official Nazi designation as “decadent.” Even more audaciously, Schirach did not flinch from condoning the inclusion of Klimt’s

portraits of Jewish subjects who belonged to the artist’s circle of patrons, collaborators, and friends.8 A majority of the works of art in the exhibition were borrowed from private collections. Several, including Musik II (1898) and Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), had been extorted or stolen from their original Jewish owners. Adele BlochBauer I, after being restituted to its rightful owner only in 2006, survives, of course, in New York City’s Neue Galerie, but Musik II (fig. 54) was lost during the war. In addition to Junge Kunst and the Gustav Klimt Ausstellung, Schirach arranged for works by Käthe Kollwitz and Egon Schiele (both of whom were officially condemned as “degenerate”) to be put on display in Vienna’s Albertina museum. While Junge Kunst drew 9,084 visitors and was forced to close three weeks early, the Klimt exhibition drew 24,096 visitors and ran for its scheduled length.9 The potential for scandal generated by Junge Kunst—and its related exhibitions—comes into sharper relief when the opening of the exhibition is seen in the context of the political and military crisis that emerged in the autumn of 1942 and the winter of 1943, the real turning point in the war in Europe. Indeed, the maelstrom lapping at the shores of the Reich can be captured in a series of snapshots: in the months leading up to the opening of Junge Kunst, British and Commonwealth armies defeated the vaunted Afrika Korps at the Second Battle of El Alamein, AngloAmerican troops invaded French North Africa, and, after the most consequential battle of the entire war, Feldmarschall Friedrich von Paulus surrendered the German 6th Army at Stalingrad. As the fate of the Thousand-Year Reich was being decided on the Russian steppes, modernist art reared its much-maligned head—not in some out-of-the-way, underground, small-scale or unofficial venue where it might have gone unnoticed or tolerated—but in an extensive exhibition of the work of some of the most prominent German modernist artists in the Künstlerhaus, Vienna’s most prestigious exhibition space, under the sponsorship of Hitler’s personal representative.

The Nazi Culture War At the very moment when the Reich’s soft underbelly was exposed to its enemies, Junge Kunst signaled the resumption of the Expressionismusstreit, the internecine culture war between claimants to the title of the “true” avantgarde in Nazi Germany, that was supposed to have concluded with a conservative victory in 1937. The main details of that conflict, a behind-the-scenes debate over the artistic taste appropriate to represent the Reich during the four years between the Machtergreifung in January 1933 and the opening of the Entartete Kunstausstellung on July 19, 1937, were these: Joseph Goebbels, Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda [Reich Minister for the People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda], and his “liberal” comrades, such as the novelist Ernst Jünger (who commissioned two portraits of himself from the artist Rudolf Schlichter, the only artist aside from Rudolf Belling and Albert Birkle to have works by his hand included in both the Entartete Kunstausstellung and the 1937 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung), were in favor of adopting expressionism as the regime’s preferred modernist school. Opposing these Nazi modernizers, across a field littered with the corpses of careers and the ruins of priceless deaccessioned museum collections, were Alfred Rosenberg, leader of the Nazi Außenpolitisches Amt [Foreign Office], Wilhelm Frick, Reichsminister des Innern [Reich Minister of the Interior], and Wolfgang Willrich, the combat artist and author of the quasi-official guide to the “degenerate” art show, Die Säuberung des Kunsttempels (1937) [Cleansing the Temple of Art]. In addition, the years of the Western Allies’ fightback saw Party and state sponsorship of civilian art exhibitions supplemented and ultimately subverted by the far less ideological patronage of the Wehrmacht, which, as we saw in Chapter 1, was associated with loosened surveillance and more liberal vetting of artists conscripted into service in the Staffel der Bildenden Künstler. As a result, especially in the last two years of the war, the Wehrmacht’s modernist aesthetic made a profound impact on the 1943 and 1944 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen (and in the submissions for the 1945 show) and, for all practical purposes, appropriated the Haus

der Deutschen Kunst as a site for the expression of cultural resistance. As we shall see in greater detail below, Staffel artists were also prominent in Junge Kunst. Despite Hitler’s having expressed his position on progressive modernist art in Mein Kampf (where such works of art are described as “the sick production of crazy people”), Goebbels had taken advantage of the absence of explicitly stated policy guidelines to indulge his taste for expressionism. Besides hanging works by Emil Nolde in his official residence, Goebbels commissioned two portraits from another “degenerate” artist, Leo von König, one of himself and the other of his two youngest daughters. Adopted by right-wing art lovers in the Weimar years as a definitively “Germanic” art form, expressionism was esteemed as much for its völkisch pastoral motifs as it was for the heroes’ deaths suffered in the First World War by the expressionist artists Franz Marc and August Macke. Support in crypto-fascist circles inspired some conservative artists, poets, and writers with modernist bona fides—such as Jünger, Schlichter, Nolde, Heckel, Pechstein, Dix, Radziwill, Schmidt-Rottluff, Gottfried Benn, and Christian Schad in Germany as well as Edvard Munch in Norway—briefly to consider the Nazis as their allies and potential patrons. Indeed, the inclusion of Schlichter and Schad in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen as well as the elevation of Benn to the Preußische Akademie der Künste [Prussian Academy of the Arts] led to scenes of shockingly obsequious behavior by writers and artists hopeful of continuing their careers in the Third Reich. The most consequential of these was the publication of the Gelöbnis treuester Gefolgschaft [Pledge of Loyal Followers] on October 26, 1933 in the Vössische Zeitung. In an act signifying his willingness to get behind the regime’s cultural program, Benn signed this document (along with 88 other signatories, including Rudolf G. Binding, Otto Flake, Hanns Johst, Otto Loerke, and Bruno E. Werner). The statement Benn signed is worth quoting in its entirety: Peace, work, freedom, and honor are sacred possessions of every Nation and the prerequisite of genuine coexistence among peoples. The consciousness of power and of recovered unity, our sincere desire to serve the inner and outer peace without reservation, the deep conviction of our tasks to rebuild the Reich, and our determination to do nothing which is not

consistent with ours and the fatherland’s honor, lead us in this solemn hour freely to promise you, Herr Chancellor, our most loyal obedience.

Not to be outdone in expressing their servility to the new regime, leading visual artists, led by the sculptor Ernst Barlach, were quick to signal their own vassalage. Barlach responded to his expulsion from the Preußische Akademie by joining other eminent artists in signing the notorious Aufruf der Kulturschaffenden [Proclamation of the Culture Producers] which was published on August 18, 1934 in the Völkische Beobachter. The propaganda purpose of the proclamation was to rally the support of Germany’s intelligentsia and creative professionals for the referendum on the Gesetz über das Staatsoberhaupt des Deutschen Reiches [Law Concerning the Head of State of the German Reich] that sought to unify the offices of the Reichspräsident and Reichskanzler in the person of Adolf Hitler. The text of the proclamation reads in part: “We believe in the Führer, who has fulfilled our earnest desire for harmony. The Führer prompted us, in turn, to stand by him in confidence and loyalty. None of us would shrink from expressing this loyalty when called upon. We place our hope in this man . . . [and] take our place in the Führer’s entourage.” Despite their newly avowed enthusiasm for Hitler, the visual artists on the list of signatories found that their admiration was not necessarily reciprocated, as works by Barlach, Heckel, and Nolde were offered up as leading examples of decadent non-art in the Entartete Kunstausstellung. Indeed, two years after Barlach signed the proclamation, an order was issued in Munich for the confiscation of his book of 56 illustrations published under the title Zeichnungen [Drawings] by Piper Verlag. Barlach appealed directly to Goebbels, expressing genuine disbelief that every drawing in the book could be deemed objectionable: Herr Reich Minister, I cannot believe that a law for the protection of the German Volk mandates the invocation of this law in response to the illustrations at issue here. Indeed, I cannot bring myself to take seriously the charge that my illustrations might be seen as endangering public safety, and it is easy for me to express my primary objection . . . that the belief on the part of the Bavarian political police that they should need to protect the public by applying such heavy artillery is by no means commensurate with my work as an artist . . . . For my obligation is not, Herr Reichsminister, to assert my so-called interests but rather, now that I have been forced to defend my moral

integrity, to erase the grave stain that has been placed upon it. I must do everything in my power to have this confiscation overturned.10

Nolde also wrote to Goebbels, seeking the release of the 1,052 works of art that had been removed from state museums on the grounds that they were “degenerate.” Citing his unimpeachable credentials as a true German nationalist as well as the sacrifices he made as an artist during the time of struggle, Nolde demanded that “the defamation” raised against him be halted, This [defamation] I find especially cruel, particularly since even before the National Socialist movement I, virtually alone among German artists, fought publicly against the foreign domination of German art, against the corruption of art dealers and against the intrigues of the Liebermann and Cassierer era. It was a battle against vastly superior forces which for decades hurt me financially and professionally. When National Socialism also labeled me and my art “degenerate” and “decadent,” I felt this to be a profound misunderstanding because it is just not so. My art is German, strong, austere, and sincere.11

It was thus a devastating blow to Nolde, the alte Kämpfer, whose landscapes celebrate the natural beauty of his native North Schleswig region (fig. 74), to see his nine-part Leben Christi (1911– 12) placed at the very center of the Entartete Kunstausstellung the previous July. Schirach, by contrast with Goebbels, was far more sympathetic and offered Nolde his protection as well as studio space. Despite emerging somewhat shamefaced as the loser in his dispute with Rosenberg, Goebbels quickly appropriated antimodernism as the new official stance of the Propagandaministerium and assumed responsibility for coordinating the regime’s formerly random or “wild” acts of anti-modernist cultural vandalism into something resembling a coherent policy. This change of tack was signaled by the purging of thousands of works of avantgarde modernism from publicly owned collections throughout Germany and the hasty organization of the Entartete Kunstausstellung, which was completed in just one week. Ironically, Goebbels’ ambitious undertaking (with the painter Adolf Ziegler acting as his accomplice and front man), from the plundering of German state museum holdings to the staging of the Entartete Kunstausstellung and the

Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung, was itself characterized by errors, inconsistencies, and incongruities. (The worst of these was clearly the inclusion of “degenerate” artists in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung and völkisch favorites in the Entartete Kunstausstellung.) Some 40 months after the Nazi takeover, the flaws in both exhibitions confirmed the improvisatory nature of the National Socialist administration of the arts, which anticipated the inconsistencies in cultural policy represented by Junge Kunst and the exhibitions of combat art sponsored by the Wehrmacht. Contrary to the expectations placed on the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen by Party propaganda (as exhibitions that revealed a mature, fully formed National Socialist eugenic style), for professional artists in Nazi Germany “working towards the Führer” involved adapting, chameleon-like, to hybridic, heterogeneous, and constantly mutating cultural expectations that resulted in a state of permanent experimentation, unending flux, and the instability of formal templates. It is no surprise, then, given its organizational shortcomings, that the Entartete Kunstausstellung, which consisted of no works of art created after 1925—and was thus, in essence, an historical “problem exhibition” of vices, pathologies, and derangements emblematic of the despised Weimar era of liberal democracy—offered no useful hints as to what qualities were objectionable and were to be avoided by artists working in 1937 and beyond. In fact, far from a recent development, the stigmatization of artists working in modernist styles was consistent with völkisch attacks on these artists during the Weimar years. Not even Ziegler’s explicit association between avantgarde modernism and mental and physical abnormalities in the wall texts of the exhibition was original, since this was a transparent borrowing from Schultze-Naumburg’s obscene proto-Nazi, bioaesthetic tract, Kunst und Rasse (1928). With its numerous depictions of Nordic racial fantasies and idealized rural utopias too often mistaken for the definitive statement of Nazi aesthetic ideals, the 1937 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung was very nearly cancelled on the eve of its much-ballyhooed opening. Despite the investment of four years in the construction of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, vast oceans of ink spilled in the Nazi

press touting the cultural objectives of the regime, and the thousands of submitted objects vetted by the jury, there was still no consensus concerning the “new art” of the “new Germany.” Indeed, so dismayed was the Führer by what he saw during a preview of the objects selected for the inaugural Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung that he demanded that the vetting be redone. His criticism, in turn, caused the understandably offended Gerdy Troost, chair of the jury and the widow of the building’s architect, to resign, leaving Heinrich Hoffmann, a former art student like Hitler, to revisit the selections. Thus, as a result of administrative chaos and the lack of a consensus over what the “new art” should look like, the artists and objects in the 1937 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung did not reflect the Führer’s aesthetic preferences, represent a settled expression of Nazi state taste, or offer an artistic blueprint for the future. In the absence of a clearly articulated National Socialist style, each of the eight Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen represents, on the one hand, a discrete moment in the cultural life Third Reich—a dipper drawn from the endless stream of cultural production swirling past the Haus der Deutschen Kunst (like the nearby glacier-fed river, the Eisbach)—and, on the other, a snapshot of fugitive attempts by artists to bring their individual creative endeavors into alignment with Nazism’s Weltanschauung. The overwhelmingly ad hoc nature of both the creative process and the vetting of objects for each successive iteration of the annual exhibition, was, of course, consistent with the improvisatory character of the whole Nazi enterprise. The failure of the Munich shows to articulate a predictable and stable artistic template was, of course, troublesome, but was nonetheless consistent with the nature of Nazi aesthetics: never fulfilled, always in process, a permanent artistic revolution advancing towards an aestheticized utopian fantasy of Nordic biological perfection.

Artistic Context Rather than an imposition of alien cultural ideas, the putatively revolutionary content of Nazi aesthetics should be familiar to students of Western thought. The National Socialist insistence on the utility of art—namely, the requirement that art should directly influence or reflect human conduct, because, following Aristotle, mimesis or representation is deemed by National Socialism as coextensive with human action—was literal in its application of aesthetic principles associated with classical antiquity. Such views were, of course, wildly out-of-step with the commodification of art in Western societies and the progressive tendency to liberate artistic creation from the burdens of verisimilitude. If the Führer’s cultural universe seems bizarre seven decades after the demise of the Third Reich, it is a function of his radical invocation of Hellenic teachings on the status of the artist and the artifact in the modern world, on the one hand, and his equally anachronistic antipathy to the imperious rise of the modern art market and the decline in demand for traditional artistic media as a response, on the other. Authorization for the Nazi attack on avantgarde modernism as “degenerate” could be found in no less a source than Socrates’ judgment (as mediated by Plato in The Republic) that artists who eschewed their responsibilities as educators of the young and thus interfered with the chief prerogative of the state to train future elites —which was common to both ancient Athens and Hitler’s Germany and was Schirach’s main contribution to the Nazi state—would be subject to censorship and exile. In the end, by invoking basic Western values, National Socialism burdened the arts with greater responsibility for Bildung or education within an authoritarian state structure than any theorists since the time of the ancient Greeks. What has often been described as parvenu vulgarity in Hitler’s attack on progressive modernist art should actually be understood as an extreme but literal assertion of the utility of art that was derived from a reading of one the West’s foundational texts. In this light, Schirach’s audacity in sponsoring Junge Kunst as a challenge to Munich aesthetic norms was an expression not only of his pride as a connoisseur of contemporary art. In addition, despite

being banished to Vienna, Schirach had not lost the sense of entitlement that sprang from his aristocratic class origins and his privileged status as Hitler’s friend. Moreover, Schirach was also one of the two “Americans” in the Führer’s inner circle. The other was the Harvard-educated Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl in whose country house in Berchtesgaden the injured Hitler found refuge after the November 1923 putsch. As highly-educated, fluent English speakers, Schirach and Hanfstaengl were, like Goebbels with his doctorate in German literature from the University of Heidelberg, more open to liberal Western influence in the sphere of artistic taste than the more völkischly-oriented alte Kämpfer. The works of art displayed in Junge Kunst suggest that Schirach’s pro-Western cultural bias predisposed him to prefer avantgarde modernist art over the utopian eugenic modernism associated with the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen. The opening of Junge Kunst on February 6, 1943 announced the emergence of a fourth modernist variant of “official” art to claim the imprimatur of the National Socialist regime after, firstly, the eugenic art of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen and, secondly, the modernist Wehrmacht exhibitions, and, thirdly, the body of Nazi modernist images created by artists formerly associated with the production of Christian art. Collectively, these four modernist idioms reveal the artistic context of Nazi Germany in all its complexity. It would be difficult to establish aesthetic harmony out of such disparate bodies of objects. In its scale—with 175 participating artists and a total of 584 works on display (of which 234 were oil paintings, 247 were prints of various kinds, and 108 were sculptures made of stone, wood, metal, and plaster), Junge Kunst was comparable in scale to the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen. Stylistically, most of the objects in Junge Kunst challenged the Führer’s prohibition against “unfinished” surfaces—the loose, quick application of pigment with a palette knife which was associated with postimpressionist and expressionist emotionalism and subjectivity—that he most abhorred in modernist paintings. Thus it was to be expected that one Herbert Neumayer, a reviewer for the Völkischer Beobachter, referenced the comparatively unrefined, “incomplete” nature of many of the works of art in the show and compared them to

the turbulence of a storm and the cloudiness of Apfelmost, the unfiltered apple cider that is a popular beverage in Austria.12 Laden with the symbolism associated with many of the major developments in Vienna’s cultural history, the Künstlerhaus (built in 1865–68) was a consequential choice of venue for Junge Kunst. By inviting modernist artists to appear alongside aesthetically (and politically) uncontroversial artists associated with the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen in Junge Kunst, Schirach seemed determined to effect a reconciliation of the original rift in Vienna’s cultural scene that dated from the 1892 secession—a rupture that had reemerged in 1937 with the official expulsion of modernist artists from public life. Moreover, Schirach and his proxies, Walter Thomas and Wilhelm Rüdiger, were certainly aware that the Künstlerhaus had hosted the Entartete Kunstausstellung when it opened in Vienna on May 7, 1939.13 Thus it would not have escaped notice that, of the 175 artists who participated in Junge Kunst, 53 had been declared “degenerate” in 1937, and seen their works expropriated from museum collections. To approve the inclusion of works by these artists in Junge Kunst was therefore a “provocation,”14 and part of a strategy adopted by Schirach and his cultural advisors to “break out of the sterility of the official Munich exhibitions,”15 on the one hand, and, by reopening the debate over expressionism, “to throw open a window to progressive modernism,” on the other.16 In its inclusive scope and in the symbolism of the Künstlerhaus as its exhibition venue, Junge Kunst thus constituted a direct challenge to the aesthetic orthodoxy that was symbolized by the Haus der Deutschen Kunst and the Party-sponsored exhibitions held there. Thomas, the well-connected cultural “fixer” Schirach brought with him to Vienna in 1940, insisted on hiring Rüdiger, a veteran of Munich’s art scene and curator of Junges Schaffen, to organize Junge Kunst. Rüdiger was notably effective in persuading the internal exiles Eduard Bäumer, Anton Kolig, and Anton Mahringer to join both successfully self-mobilized figures, like Paul Mathias Padua, Hermann Kaspar, and Bernhard Bleeker, as well as artists who were virtually unknown or not seen in public since 1937, such as Gerth Biese, Erich Glette, Josef Hegenbarth, Ferdinand

Lammeyer, and Hans Wimmer. Biese’s nudes, (fig. 55) with their genuine eroticism and ghostly post-impressionistic rendering, are a radical departure from the frigid eugenic utopianism dominating the figurative paintings in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst. Fritz Burmann’s “pastoral surrealism” in Abend in Moordorf [Evening in a Village on the Moor] (fig. 56) is strikingly reminiscent of the work of Radziwill, but his work is also represented in the NS-Reichsbesitz: the Führer purchased Blick aufs Meer [View of the Sea] (fig. 57) at the 1939 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung for 1,800 Reichsmark. Lammeyer’s Moor im Böhmerwald [Moor in the Bohemian Forest] (c. 1942) (fig. 58) is another haunting image of a desolate landscape rather than the fugitive pastoral fantasyland that is conjured in Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung pictures of the Nazi utopia (e,g., works by Hermann Gradl, Werner Peiner, and, of course, MartinAmorbach). Glette’s Porträt meiner Tochter [Portrait of my Daughter] (fig. 59) is an intimate treatment of a family member that distances itself from the formal posing familiar to visitors to the Haus der Deutschen Kunst. Hegenbarth’s Hund [Dog] (fig. 60), a portrait of a family pet captured in a playful, life-like pose, is the notorious “green dog” ridiculed by Hitler during his dressing down of Schirach at the Berghof (see below). Padua’s Blumenstand [Flower Stall] (fig. 61) evokes the spirit and style of post-impressionist Paris and represents a radical shift in style and subject matter from the many heroic works that he exhibited in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen, such as Der 10. Mai 1940 [The Tenth of May, 1940] (fig. 62), and reveals the shocking capacity for self-adjustment on the part of this relatively young artist. In his foreword to the exhibition catalogue, Rüdiger celebrates the presence of “the large number of artists who are serving in the Wehrmacht as well as the works of young artists who have given their lives in the fight for Germany.” It was, moreover, despite the reminders of death and sacrifice, “a show of living German art,”17 a reference that insiders would have recognized as a jibe against the “Haus der toten Kunst” [house of dead art] as the Troost building had come to be known. Previously, Thomas had arranged a private showing of Nolde’s works and a meeting with Schirach in May 1942. Later that year, the Völkischer Beobachter (November 1942)

published excerpts from “a major address in which [Schirach] opined on current problems on the visual arts,” which foreshadowed the Gauleiter’s provocative intervention on behalf of modernist art: The crisis of painting can be explained by the absence of representatives who set a direction, as has been the case to a considerable extent with our architecture. It turns out that we not only have important architects, but also a new architecture, while at the same time, we have no painting, although we have many clever, and indeed a few important painters.18

Schirach’s alternate roster of “official” artists representing the latest work in the German Reich blurred the line between völkisch art and avantgarde modernism, and thus recreated the grey zone that had characterized the art world in Germany from the seizure of power until the opening of the 1937 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung. The perception of Junge Kunst as an act of cultural insurgency is a function of the artists selected for the exhibition. Plucked from the nether regions of internal exile on the home front or enlisted from the ranks of combat artists, 63 artists or fully 36% were making their first appearance as representatives of “official” National Socialist culture. Of the 46 members of the Staffel der Bildenden Künstler who appeared in Junge Kunst, 31 exhibited previously in no other civilian art exhibitions in Nazi Germany. 15 of the artists in this group would go on to participate in the heavily war-influenced 1943 and 1944 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen, including Carl Busch, Anton Lamprecht, Paul Mathias Padua, and Werner Paul Schmidt. A total of 15 women artists participated in Junge Kunst, more than in any of the eight Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen. Ten artists make their only recorded showing in an exhibition during the Nazi period in Junge Kunst, and only eight artists or 4.5% were members of the Nazi Party. Generational differences between Junge Kunst and the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen are even more striking: 133 artists in Junge Kunst were 54 years old or younger—12 artists were aged between 22 and 33 (born 1910–1921); 67 artists were aged between 34 and 43 (1900–1909); 54 artists were aged between 44 and 53 (1890–1899); 33 artists were aged between 54 and 63 (1880–1889); and nine artists were aged between 64–73 (1870–1879). This data suggests the remarkable preponderance of genuinely “junge” artists

with a modernist bent who were either associated with regional artist organizations and patronage machinery that were decoupled from the Party’s domination of the cultural scene in Munich or were assigned to the Staffel der Bildenden Künstler, which operated well outside the range of Party and Gestapo scrutiny. With respect to the genres represented in the show, Junge Kunst also broke with norms associated with the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen. Many objects were idiosyncratic and nonmonumental—types not countenanced by the jury in Munich—such as self-portraits and intimate renderings of wives, lovers, children, and even pets. Landscapes with abstract qualities dominated Junge Kunst as would have been the case in an exhibition of Die Brücke. Among the sculptures in the show many depicted “primitive,” nonAryan subjects, which were clearly taboo in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen, as well as the discomfiting realism of Wimmer’s bronze portrait of Il Duce (fig. 63). Schirach’s competing state-sponsored style to that of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen creates a kind of retroactive cognitive dissonance that transports the spectator back in time to the conflict years of the Nazi culture war. But this whiff of chaos is emblematic of the art scene in Nazi Germany as a whole after 1937. An anticipation of Schirach’s remarkable intervention in Nazi cultural politics can be found in a little book that he published in 1942, Zwei Reden zur Deutschen Kunst [Two Speeches on German Art]. Anticipating the major contribution to the cultural life of the Reich by artists serving in the Werhmacht, Schirach asserts the essential role that strife, conflict, and battle play in realizing the more exalted vocation of the visual artist in Nazi Germany as compared to the liberal capitalist Weimar Republic. Prior to the Nazi social and cultural revolution, art had meaning only insofar as it could be monetized and converted into a marketable commodity. For us, by contrast, the work of art is something else entirely. We yearn to experience the struggle of the creator with the object of his creation—that eternal struggle whose value you cannot fully appreciate unless you are blessed to have observed combat firsthand. Therefore, we have the courage and the strength in the midst of the largest armed conflict in world history to reveal the wealth of the visually creative force of our Volksgemeinschaft.19

Schirach’s essay confirms the central contribution of the Fronterlebnis to the formation of National Socialist aesthetics, thus echoing the Führer’s address at the opening of the 1937 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung, in which the National Socialist insistence on art as the expression of the individual character of peoples was highlighted alongside the idea that physical struggle unto death forms the crucible of genuine artistic expression. However, the work of the Staffel artists exhibited in Junge Kunst displays a kinetic dynamism that contrasted sharply with the taste for repose and timelessness in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen. With the inclusion of works of art by Wehrmacht modernists, “decadent” internal exiles (which implied their rehabilitation by a high ranking officeholder of the NSDAP), and by established artists that nonetheless broke with Munich conventions of self-adjustment, it is clear that Junge Kunst manifested an attempt to assert that progressive modernist techniques and subject matter were legitimate expressions of National Socialist taste. In this way, Junge Kunst is comparable to earlier efforts published between 1937 and 1940, to articulate a more inclusive, less overtly polarized vision of German art following the Nazi seizure of power. Three of the most ambitious of such attempts merit some consideration here.

Alternate Nazi Canons Bruno Kroll’s Deutsche Maler der Gegenwart: Die Entwicklung der Deutschen Malerei seit 1900 [German Painters of the Present: The Development of German Painting since 1900] was published in January 1937, six months in advance of the opening of the Entartete Kunstausstellung and the first Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung. “Gegenwart” [the present] is, like “junge,” another word in the National Socialist lexicon that is freighted with suggestions of modernity, newness, and contemporaneousness. Kroll, an historian, prolific arts journalist, and author of monographs on fashionable artists such as Leo von König, Philipp Franck, and Arthur Kampf, which were, like Deutsche Maler der Gegenwart, printed by the Rembrandt Verlag, an NSDAP-sponsored publisher of books with a mission to package highbrow culture for easy consumption by the Volksgemeinschaft. Thus armed with apparent Party approval, Kroll sets out to frame the National Socialist narrative on modernist art in an attractive canonical package. The result is not, in Kroll’s words, a “work of art history scholarship” per se (and thus not presenting an historically consistent or coherent vision) but instead “a picture book for the German Volk.”20 And yet, despite Kroll’s disclaimer, which is wholly consistent with Goebbels’s ban on art criticism issued on November 27, 1936, just months before Deutsche Maler der Gegenwart is published, he does advance an implicit argument about art history as seen through a National Socialist lens. In stark contrast to the vulgar inconoclasm of the Entartete Kunstausstellung, Kroll’s version of Nazi taste is appreciative of the legacy of impressionism, embraces expressionism’s “return to nature” as central to Nazi aesthetics in the months leading up to the GoebbelsZiegler purge, and relies on high quality reproductions to bolster its narrative. Because it appeared in print just six months before the opening of the twin exhibitions in July 1937 one might have expected that Kroll’s quasi-canonical roster of artists would anticipate the binate split between “degenerate” and approved artists. But the Party stalwart Kroll does not foresee the exclusion of a number of artists from the first Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung who are designated

in his book as standard bearers of the new Nazi aesthetic.21 Indeed, as late as the publication of Kroll’s book, it seemed beyond dispute that Radziwill, politically sound if stylistically eccentric, was in the vanguard of contemporary German artists. The work of Franz Doll appears in four of the eight Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen. His painting Familienbild [Family Portrait] (c. 1937), reproduced in Deutsche Maler, might be iconographically consistent with the National Socialist emphasis on family and, with the flower in the mother’s hand, fecundity. But Doll’s picture challenges the viewer by exercising a mild alienation effect caused by its appearance as a highly formal artifact rather than an exercise in saccharine naturalism or easily digested neoclassicism. Another surprising painting in Deutsche Maler is Georg Schrimpf’s Landschaft mit Kühe [Landscape with Cows] (1930). The strangely preternatural repose of Schrimpf’s landscape, populated in this picture with reclining bovines in the posture of cats curled beside a fireplace, was nonetheless identified as a representative example of the “new” art of Germany by Kroll. Even though the work of 74 artists is represented in Deutsche Maler as embodying National Socialist aesthetic values, only 25 actually appeared in the 1937 Munich show, including Werner Peiner, Heinrich Knirr, Hermann Gradl, Conrad Hommel, Edmund Steppes, Adolf Wissel, and Heinrich von Zügel. While 49 artists were not accounted for in any of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen, 15 did show their work in Junge Kunst (among them Theo Champion, Günther Graßmann, Ludwig Peter Kowalski, Anton Lamprecht, H.R. Lichtenberger, and Richard Pietzsch), one (Lovis Corinth) was ignominiously consigned to the Entartete Kunstausstellung, but a shocking 37 of the artists given Kroll’s approval had their works confiscated by Ziegler and his men. The presence of so many modernist artists in Kroll’s volume, who are described as enjoying the regime’s imprimatur in early 1937 only to be purged a few months later, strikes a discordant note, which suggests just how unsettled the cultural scene in Germany was between the publication of Deutsche Maler and the opening of the Entartete Kunstausstellung in July 1937. Despite all of the triumphalist pageantry and exuberant rhetoric that prefaced the

opening of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung on July 18, the disparate visions offered in the Entartete Kunstausstellung (Adolf Ziegler), the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Heinrich Hoffmann), and Deutsche Maler (Kroll) serve as a vivid reminder of the volatility, the role of individual improvisation, and the lack of a coherent, consistent, and fixed Nazi state policy on the visual arts even at this crucial moment in the cultural history of the Third Reich. Published by Peter Breuer in July 1937, Münchner Künstlerköpfe [Leading Munich Artists] was another attempt to promote a Partyapproved vision of German art. Intriguingly, even Breuer’s book, which was published to coincide with the opening of the 1937 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung, features a group of artists that differs markedly from the artists actually selected for the first Partysponsored Munich show. Out of a total of 125 artists Breuer considers to be in the brown vanguard only 24—19% or less than one out of five—were selected that month to appear in the first Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung. The works of 32 of Breuer's artists were subjected to confiscation in the weeks leading up to the Entartete Kunstausstellung. 21 artists went on to participate in Junge Kunst. Demonstrating the absolute lack of consensus about Nazi art, even among those politically vetted experts assigned to render authoritative aesthethic judgments, there are only six artists in Breuer’s book who appear both in the 1937 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung and in Junge Kunst (Bernhard Bleeker, Otto Coester, Otto Dill, Richard Knecht, Fritz Koelle, and Hans Wimmer). The works of art represented in Münchner Künstlerköpfe and Deutsche Maler der Gegenwart suggest what the initial selections for the first Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung might have been prior to Hitler’s fabled intervention, which would have meant a much larger contingent of progressive modernists than was finally unveiled in July 1937. Münchner Künstlerköpfe is interesting above all for its assertion of the continuing relevance of purged Munich-based artists in the new sphere of Nazi patronage. Breuer’s roster of artists includes (like Kroll’s) the “degenerate” Hans Gött, Günther Graßmann, Hans Lichtenberger, Georg Schrimpf, and Max Unold as well as purged modernist artists Max Cordier, Edgar Ende, and Ludwig Peter

Kowalski. Ende’s Die Märchenerzählerin [Teller of Fairytales] (1936) (fig. 64) could, like many of his works produced after the Machtergreifung, be construed as mythologizing aspects of the National Socialist new order. However, in this painting, nostalgic echoes of the Brothers Grimm and a celebration of childhood are combined with a disturbing suggestion of the cynical role of mythmaking in Nazi Germany. Kowalski’s Ochsengespann [Team of Oxen] (c. 1935) (fig. 65) embraces Nazism’s nostalgic pastoralism but does so in an uncompromising and ultimately unmobilizable avantgarde style. Similarly, Schrimpf’s Mädchen mit Hund [Girls with a Dog] (c. 1936) (fig. 66) falls, like all of the artist’s work, within the thematic lexicon of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen. However, the world envisioned here does not mimic nature. The women and their miniature dachshund do not conform to the Führer’s eugenic utopianism, but belong to a bizarrely idealized, unconventionally beautiful world. In the end, Breuer’s artists enjoy scant success in the Third Reich. Most disappear into internal exile, only to reemerge in Junge Kunst, Die Kunst für Alle, and Kunst der Front exhibitions of the Staffel der Bildenden Künstler. One of the most remarkable assertions of a counter-canon of officially-approved artists was, like Kroll’s Deutsche Maler der Gegenwart, published by Rembrandt Verlag. Deutsche Plastik der Gegenwart [German Sculpture of the Present] appeared in 1940 and was the work of Bruno E. Werner (1896–1964), one of the most influential cultural journalists of the 1930s (fig. 67). Best known for his founding of the cerebral journal die neue linie [The New Line], Werner also served on the editorial board of the right-of-center newspaper, the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, and was a frequent contributor to Die Kunst für Alle.22 Werner also owns the distinction of being the only German-Jewish intellectual to sign the Gelöbnis treuester Gefolgschaft in October 1933. Consistent with being a loyal follower of the regime, one of Werner’s last articles for the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung was a “Münchener Sonderbericht” [“Munich Special Report”], published in July 1937, which reported on the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung and the Entartete Kunstausstellung and in which he cleaved to the Party line. Nonetheless, in 1938, despite such conspicuous displays of

obedience, Werner lost his position with the newspaper. It is indeed odd, given his ouster, that he continued to edit die neue linie and was permitted to publish the consensus-touting Deutsche Plastik two years later. Featuring photographs of works by Barlach, Kollwitz, Wilhelm Lembruck, Kurt Schwippert, Renée Sintenis (fig. 68), and 27 other sculptors whose work was removed from museum collections in 1937, the publication of Deutsche Plastik was deemed so controversial that the entire printing was pulped before it could be distributed.23 Although the publication of Deutsche Plastik was five years removed from Werner’s last published article in Die Kunst für Alle, it is clear that he is still pursuing the agenda of Die Kunst für Alle in the former’s pages: namely, to throw a spotlight on the work of artists who were marginalized after 1937 and, in doing so, to offer an alternative site to the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen for the display of regime-friendly art. Withdrawn at the moment of publication or not, Deutsche Plastik is the perfect emblem for the aesthetic anarchy prevailing in the Third Reich even as late as 1940. If not anarchy, then the sponsorship of Werner’s book by elements in the Party lends credence to the utter instability of the Nazi canon. The journal Die Kunst für Alle is interesting, too, because the hundreds of images reproduced in its pages reflect National Socialism’s schizoid aesthetic. Perhaps no artists’ careers in Nazi Germany embody the ambiguity of the regime’s position on modernism better than Otto Geigenberger (fig. 69), Ernst Huber (fig. 70), and Milly Steger (fig. 71). Geigenberger is a supreme example of a “degenerate” artist, several of whose works were removed from museum collections and destroyed in 1937, but who nonetheless appeared in leading exhibitions and publications in the Third Reich, including the 1938–44 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen, Junge Kunst, Deutsche Maler, and Münchner Künstlerköpfe. Huber, another “consensus figure,” was represented in the 1939–41 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen as well as in Junge Kunst. Most interesting of all, is the case of the sculptor Steger, who appeared in the 1937 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung, even though two of her works were confiscated as “degenerate” prior to the opening of the show.

This aesthetic schizophrenia lingers until the last issue of Die Kunst für Alle, published in December 1944, in which genre pieces and clumsy imitations of neoclassical tropes by the sculptor Irmintrud Ferdin-Rummel are featured. She is one of the most frequently appearing female artists in the journal, so her presence is not unusual. But incongruously, we also find articles praising the work of two Junge Kunst participants, the Austrian painter Anton Steinhart and Hanna Nagel, whose drawings of women in confinement are among the most striking modernist images published in the Third Reich. The last artist to be considered is Willi Geiger, 48 of whose works were confiscated in 1937, and who had been dismissed from his teaching position in Leipzig. Great tension is generated by the publication of Ferdin-Rummel’s Nazi kitsch together with modernist works by the internal emigrants Steinhart, Nagel, and Geiger. Such ambivalence was, of course, already present in the pages of Die Kunst für Alle during the Weimar years, but it reemerges in the journal’s final volume without being resolved, which amounts to a belated restoration of the journal’s previous reputation as a mediator between official regime preferences and norms and those associated with avant-garde modernism. To a contemporary reader familiar with Die Kunst für Alle’s roster of “degenerate” artists, their appearance in Deutsche Maler, Münchner Künstlerköpfe, Deutsche Plastik, and Junge Kunst would, pace the Führer’s reported comments on Schirach’s show (“Kulturbolschewisten, Reaktionäre, die Opposition”) [“cultural Bolsheviks, reactionaries, the opposition”], strike one as stale, perhaps, depending on one’s taste, but certainly not “new” (jung). In this sense, the work showcased in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen was, as we saw in Chapter 2, meant to inspire the Volk to enlist in a radical biosocial experiment. By contrast, books like Kroll, Breuer, and Werner’s sought to reassert the socioaesthetic relevance of the work of pre-existing artistic elites, who had avoided the most extreme sanctions (Mal- and Ausstellungsverbote), but who were largely absent from the Munich shows on the grounds that their work was, on the one hand, too derivative of impressionism and expressionism, and, on the other, not sufficiently engaged with the regime’s utopian eugenic mission for the visual arts. Even though

these elites remained in a state of pre-collaborative readiness from the time of the Machtergreifung and into the late 1930s, this cultural gerontocracy could not escape its prior association with the liberalism and decadence of the Weimar era. These artists represented not the “neues Leben” of National Socialism and the Party’s vision of a transformative eugenic revolution, but rather the status quo ante. The lasting importance of Junge Kunst lies in its embodiment of a top Nazi official’s use of modernist art as both an assertion of state power and as an act of cultural insurgency against the Nazi cultural leadership. Schirach’s gesture was seen as especially provocative in the immediate aftermath of military debacles and disturbing manifestations of domestic unrest, such as the actions of the Weiße Rose resistance group.24 A vast library of scholarship has demonstrated the links between taste, style, and power in the Third Reich, and Junge Kunst confirms these connections in unexpected and unorthodox ways. On the one hand, Schirach was the consummate Nazi insider: a Party member since he was of legal age, a handsome specimen of Nazi physical beauty, the hand-picked husband of Henriette Hoffmann, and a high-profile embodiment of the Nazi paradox of intense engagement with high culture coupled with enthusiasm for the regime’s genocidal agenda. On the other hand, in contrast to Gauleiter who observed their cultural obligations in a perfunctory manner, Schirach took an active interest in promoting the arts and advancing the cultural life of Vienna. In addition, Schirach’s cultural biases—which can only be described as pro-modernist—set him apart from those in the Nazi leadership whose taste was shaped in utter dependency on the views of Hitler, Goebbels, and Rosenberg. The antagonism between the aesthetic preferences represented in Junge Kunst and the series of eight Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen reflects how cultural production in Nazi Germany was overwhelmingly subject to the personal whims of individual patrons. Schirach’s rejection of the Nazi orthodoxy governing the visual arts in Munich was not simply a by-product of a more liberalized or loosened management of cultural policy during the latter years of the war. His patronage of modernist art in Vienna was

also decisively influenced by the bureaucratization of the Führer’s peremptory leadership style. Rather than transparency and clear lines of authority in the realm of culture, a proliferation of conflicting, redundant, and obfuscating orders, visions, plans, policies, and exhibitions cluttered the Nazi cultural landscape. The aesthetic dissonance produced by Junge Kunst, which was so clearly at odds with the cultural agenda embodied by the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen, is thus not attributable solely to the influence of the connoisseurship of Schirach, the exhibition’s chief benefactor, it was also an outgrowth of the complex operations of the Nazi culture industry from the time of the seizure of power until the collapse of the regime. Another contributing factor to Schirach’s insurgency was lingering resentment at the underrepresentation of Austrian artists in the Munich exhibitions.25 Moreover, style and taste constantly evolved as artistic practice, the public mood, and the available pool of objects fluctuated in response to socio-political events and the impact of deteriorating physical conditions on the lives of artists. Chief among these latter factors was the steady degradation of the transport system by Allied bombing, which restricted the shipment of works of art to and from exhibitions, cut inventories of art supplies, such as canvas, plaster, bronze, and oil paints, and took a heavy toll on stock in artists’ studios. Indeed, in their Fragebögen artists based in urban areas nearly unanimously complained of the burning of their studios and the destruction of paintings that directly resulted from bombing raids. This double loss—of working space and stocks of completed works of art—constituted a kind of ecumenical punishment for artists across the aesthetic spectrum in Nazi Germany. For all of its perceived violations of National Socialist aesthetic norms, Junge Kunst ran for nearly five weeks. The Führer, who expressed puzzlement at Schirach’s antics (“What does the work of these old fogies have to do with us?”26), nevertheless allowed his favorite to remain at his twin posts and left the dirty work to the usual suspects. In a report submitted to Goebbels by Ziegler, Junge Kunst is described as an exhibition of “a moderate form of degenerate art.”27 In his memoirs, published almost 25 years after the opening of Junge Kunst and 20 years following his release from Spandau

Prison, Schirach describes Hitler’s reaction (and other facts) with a good deal of imprecision: In January 1943 [actually a month later] we opened the exhibition “New Art in the German Reich” in the Kunsthalle [it was actually the Künstlerhaus] in Vienna. Seven days [five weeks] after the opening, this exhibition was closed by Hitler. He called me to the Berghof. It was a command reception. Hitler offered me no chair and he remained standing. One step behind him, Bormann—Hitler’s shadow—took his position. Quiet and icy cold, as I never seen him before, Hitler said: “Herr Schirach, I do not want such exhibitions. That's sabotage.”

The conversation then turned to address a particular work of art that was installed in the exhibition, Josef Hegenbarth’s Hund (fig. 62). Bormann handed the Führer a reproduction and then the latter turned to Schirach and said: Look at this picture—a green dog! That’s what you printed in a quarter of a million copies [in the pages of the Hitlerjugend newspaper, Wille und Macht]. With this you mobilized all the cultural Bolsheviks and the reactionaries against me. That is not youth education, that is education of the opposition! Once and for all, that stops immediately! Otherwise I'll cut off all funds for Vienna.28

Hitler then dispatched another regime toady to inspect Junge Kunst. Benno von Arendt, whose official title was Reichsbeauftragten für das deutsche Bühnenbild [Reich Commissioner for German Stage Design], reported back to the Reichskanzlei that the exhibition consisted of “liberalistische Schweinerei” [liberal pig filth]. A few days later, Thomas recalls, he received notice to close the exhibition. His account of what then transpired between Schirach and the Führer on the Obersalzberg is far more dramatic and terrifying, than what the Gauleiter confided in his memoirs. According to Thomas, Schirach reported that he “was forced to listen to some truly unpleasant things. The Führer spoke of cultural opposition. And Goebbels chimed in, too.” The Führer then ordered him to the Russian Front and said goodbye with the following words: “I will give you two things: a compass, so that you will find your way when you are cut off from your unit. And a small pistol in case you, for whatever reason, do not know how to operate the compass.”29

Incurring the wrath of Hitler and Goebbels (the latter considered Schirach “the number one cultural enemy”30) was enough to close Junge Kunst on March 7, three weeks earlier than planned. The excuse offered the public in the Viennese media cited fears of straining an already overburdened railway system.31 Junge Kunst thus has the distinction of being only the second officially-sponsored National Socialist art exhibition to be cancelled on the grounds of “alleged suspicion of including degenerate works of art” and the second to have been the responsibility of Schirach. The first, 30 Deutscher Künstler, was organized under the aegis of the Reichsstudentenbund and opened in Berlin on July 22, 1933, less than a month after Schirach had moved on to his new post as leader of the Hitlerjugend, which suggests that the exhibition was planned while Schirach was still in charge. Featuring the works of several artists—including Nolde, Heckel, and Schmidt-Rottluff—who would later be condemned as “degenerate,” the exhibition closed three days later on orders of the Reichsminister des Innern, Wilhelm Frick, a notorious anti-modernist.32 However, in an extraordinary act that would foreshadow the relative leniency with which Schirach was treated in the wake of the Junge Kunst scandal, after all references to its sponsorship by a Nazi organization were removed and the exhibition organizers—Otto Andreas Schreiber and Fritz Hippler— were expelled from the Reichsstudentenbund, 30 Deutsche Künstler was permitted to reopen in the privately owned Galerie Ferdinand Möller.33 Such a bizarre compromise was the work of Walter Funk, Wirtschaftsminister [Minister for the Economy] and Präsident of the Reichsbank (and, with Schirach, a co-defendant at Nuremberg), who, as a fellow patron of modernist art, interceded with Goebbels, his ally against the Rosenberg faction in the Nazi culture war, and won a reprieve for 30 Deutsche Künstler. Viewed from Berlin, Schirach’s cultural leadership of Vienna was indeed nothing less than “kulturelle Opposition”—cultural resistance —and further evidence of that city’s famed “Kunstliberalismus” [artistic liberalism]. However, as Goebbels confided in his Tagebücher, the Führer remained convinced that Schirach was “a good man with far too little political experience . . . . [who] had fallen

into the hands of Viennese reactionaries . . . .”34 For the artists whose works were selected for Junge Kunst, life remained fraught with peril. Those who had previously been absent from public life briefly resurfaced in Vienna before reentering internal exile or returning to the front lines of the war. There they waited to resume their careers until the war came to an end. Artists who were more successful at self-adjustment worked in multiple modes, including the “degenerate” styles represented in Junge Kunst and the eugenic utopianism of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen. Those whose works were sold in Munich found life to be equally perilous as the air war intensified, but endured the dangers they confronted with a lesser degree of hardship.

1

Contemporaries noted that Schirach affected an American accent when he spoke German. 2 Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler was my friend: The Memoirs of Hitler’s Photographer, Trans. R.H. Stevens (Barnsley: Frontline Books, 2011), 130. 3 Among the artists whose work appeared in 30 Deutscher Künstler were Ernst Barlach, Erich Heckel, Alexander Kanoldt, Franz Marc, Gerhard Marcks, Otto Mueller, Emil Nolde, Christian Rohlfs, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. 4 Baldur von Schirach, Die Fahne der Verfolgten (Berlin: Zeitgeschichte Verlag, 1935), 11. 5 Quoted in Ernst Klee, Kulturlexikon zum Dritten Reich (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2007), 536. 6 Riccardo Bavaj, Die Ambivalenz der Moderne im National Sozialismus: Eine Bilanz der Forschung (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2003), 154. 7 The Austrian artists were Maximilian Florian, Max Frey, Alfons Gräber, Erich Miller Hauenfels, Ludwig Kasper, E.A. Mandelsloh,

Paul Mathias Padua, Igo Pötsch, Anton Steinhart, and their Viennese colleagues were Franz Karl Delavilla, Ernst Huber, Ferdinand Kitt, Viktor Pipal, and Rudolf von Zeileisen. 8 These patrons and subjects included Adele Bloch-Bauer, Emilie Flöge, Ria Munk, Mada Primavesi, Fritza Riedler, and Josef Lewinsky, the great classical Viennese actor. See Dan Bischoff, Newark Star-Ledger (October 7, 2016). 9 Wladimer Aichelburg, „Das Künstlerhaus: Zum Verzeichnis der Ausstellungen 1868 bis 2010,” which is available on the website Wladimer Aichelburg: 150 Jahre Künstlerhaus Wien 1861–2011 at www.wladimeraichelburg.at/kuenstlerhaus/ausstellungen/verzeichnis (viewed August 5, 2016). 10 Letter from Ernst Barlach to Joseph Goebbels dated May 25, 1936. Translation in Third Reich Sourcebook, ed. Anson Rabinbach and Sander L. Gilman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 493–494. 11 Letter from Nolde to Goebbels dated July 2, 1938. Translation in Voices of German Expressionism, ed. Victor H. Meisel (New York: Prentice Hall, 1970), 209. 12 Völkischer Beobachter (Viennese edition), February 9, 1943. 13 The Viennese Entartete Kunstausstellung attracted 147,000 visitors. 14 See Karin Hartewig, Kunst für Alle: Hitlers Ästhetische Diktatur (Nordestedt: Books on Demand, 2017), 102. 15 Oliver Rathkolb, „NS (Un-) kulturpolitik in Wien, 1938–45.” In Im Reich der Kunst. Die Wiener Akademie der Bildenden Künste und die faschistische Kunstpolitik. Ed. Hans Seiger et al. (Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1990), 293. 16 Hartewig, ibid. 17 Wihlem Rüdiger, ed. Junge Kunst im Deutschen Reich 1943. Veranstaltet vom Reichsstatthalter in Wien Reichsleiter Baldur von Schirach. Februar–März 1943. Im Künstlerhaus Wien (Vienna: Ehrlich und Schmidt, 1943), 13. 18 Quoted and translated in Jonathan Petropoulos, Artists Under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2014), 185. 19 Baldur von Schirach, Zwei Reden zur Deutschen Kunst (Weimar: Gesellschaft

der Bibliophilen, 1942), 16–17. 20

Bruno Kroll, Deutsche Maler der Gegenwart: Die Entwicklung der Deutschen Malerei seit 1900 (Berlin: Rembrandt Verlag, 1937), 7. 21 Artists identified as paradigmatic by Kroll but who were not selected for the 1937 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung include Theo Champion, Lovis Corinth, Hans Gött, Günther Graßmann, Willi Jaeckel, Arthur Kampf, Leo von König, Hans von Marées, Otto Poetzelberger, Hans Purrmann, Franz Radziwill, Georg Schrimpf, and Max Unold. 22 Between 1925 and 1935, when his by-line last appeared, Werner published 38 articles on a wide range of subjects, including German modernist painters and sculptors such as Lovis Corinth, Alfred Partikel, Ernesto di Fiori, and Albert Birkle. 23 This claim appears in Werner’s Wikipedia entry and was confirmed by Werner’s eldest daughter, the sculptor Imogen Stuart, in an interview with the author. However, the plentiful supply of fine copies of Deutsche Plastik that are available on the used book market conflicts with the family legend. 24 On February 4, 1943—two days after the German defeat at Stalingrad—graffiti reading “Freiheit” and “Nieder mit Hitler” appeared on buildings in and around the University of Munich. On February 18, the siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl were caught distributing anti-regime flyers in the main building of the university. On February 22, the Scholls and their co-conspirators were brought before Roland Freisler, the notorious presiding judge of the Volksgerichtshof. After a cursory review of the charges, the accused were condemned to death and beheaded. 25 On average, Austrian artists constituted just 8% of the participants in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen. They were vastly underrepresented in the Munich shows even compared with another aggrieved group of artists, those artists associated with the Münchener Kunstausstellungen. See Jan Tabor, „Die Gaben der Ostmark: Österreichische Kunst und Künstler in der NS-Zeit.” In Hans Sieger, ed., op. cit., 277–294.

26

Quoted in Heinrich Hoffmann and Henry Picker, Hitler Close-Up, comp. Jochen von Lang (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 97. 27 Berlin Document Center: Files “Gerdy Troost.” Quoted in Oliver Rathkolb, „Die Wiener Note in der deutschen Kunst: Nationalsozialistische Kulturpolitik in Wien 1938–1945.” In Kunst und Diktatur: Architektur, Bildhauerei und Malerei in Österreich, Deutschland, Italien und der Sowjetunion. Ed. Jan Tabor (Baden: Verlag Graßl, 1994), vol. 1, 335. 28 Baldur von Schirach, Ich glaubte an Hitler (Hamburg: Mosaik Verlag, 1967), 288. 29 Tabor, op. cit., 294. Tabor casts doubt on the reliability of Thomas’s narrative. His postwar memoirs, published in 1947, depict him as “a party-free theater expert,” even though the facts are that Thomas joined the NSDAP in 1937 and that thenceforward his professional life was inseparable from service to the Party. Tabor also argues that Junge Kunst should not be interpreted as an act of “resistance to National Socialism, but as a case of intra-factional conflict between Nazi grandees.” 30 Baldur von Schirach, ibid., 287. 31 Aichelburg, op. cit. 32 Janos Frecot, „Marginalien zur nationalsozialistischen Kulturpolitik.” In Zwischen Widerstand und Anpassung: Kunst in Deutschland 1933–1945. Ed. Jonas Frecot et al. (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1978), 80. 33 Christian Saehrendt, ‚Die Brücke’ zwischen Staatskunst und Verfemung: Expressionistische Kunst als Politikum in der Weimarer Republik im Dritten Reich und im Kalten Krieg (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2005), 47–48. 34 Quoted in Rathkolb, „NS (Un-) kulturpolitik in Wien, 1938–45,” 269.

CHAPTER 5 Radioactive Art and the Rehabilitation of Nazi Artists The punitive measures taken by the Allied occupation—especially the Americans—toward the revenant of National Socialist visual culture in postwar Germany suggest an acceptance of the notion that art produced with the patronage of the NSDAP, the Wehrmacht, and mobilized pre-existing organizations was irreversibly contaminated by Nazi ideology. This quality was deemed to be contagious and thus might infect successive custodians. Connected with this assumption was the idea that German artists themselves were tarnished by their collaboration with the regime, a stain that was not to be erased by actions taken by similarly befouled German legal institutions that survived into the post-Nazi era. As historian Norman Davies has amply demonstrated in his challenge to conventional Second World War verities: Totalitarian regimes can extract a measure of collaboration from all those who fall into their grasp. They can coerce people to observe deviant norms, to oppose their own best interests, to give support to undesirable goals, and to work for unwanted war efforts. Except for those who physically flee for the woods, everyone is contaminated. Therefore, examining the phenomenon of collaboration . . . is complicated. Firstly, it could be a collective as well as individual activity . . . . Secondly, collaboration often overlaps with the category of victimhood.1

Ultimately, collaborators in Nazi Germany were motivated by the most universal of human catalysts: self-preservation. It was thus an awareness of the human complexities of collaboration that inspired the two-pronged U.S. policy of expropriating publicly owned and privately held works of art associated with the patronage of the Third Reich, on the one hand, and implementing a judicial process of political rehabilitation for artists that held out the promise of clemency and a fresh start, on the other. As we shall see below, the main problem with the idealistic reeducation plan of the Americans was that relatively few collaborating artists were Party members, either active or nominal, and therefore

few artists could be classified as true believers rather than as mere “ordinary” Germans pursuing their careers and supporting their families. This meant that only a tiny percentage of working artists in Nazi Germany were ever subjected to denazification—aside from submitting their Fragebögen, which was obligatory for members of all professions. If Party membership—which exceeded eight million individuals or 10% of the population2—was accepted as the prerequisite for punishment and separation from positions of responsibility, then the task—“a vast exercise in political and social engineering”—assumed gigantic proportions: in 1945 and 1946, 1,600,000 questionnaires were processed and 373,000 certified Nazis were dismissed from positions of responsibility. 120,000 of these Party members were held in U.S. internment camps.3 The enormity of the challenge facing the Allies was double-barrelled: how to root out those Germans responsible for Nazi war crimes while simultaneously seeking to assist the German populace that was struggling to survive in a ruined country experiencing a succession of historically severe winters. As historian Frederick Taylor reminds us, conditions in Germany following the defeat of Hitler were shocking. In Berlin alone “an estimated 12,000 died of malnutrition in the first postwar year” and, even a year later, “the food situation was truly catastrophic.” An American official starkly characterized the choices faced by the occupation authority: we either “starve ‘em, shoot ‘em or feed ‘em.”4 In the winter of 1946 Germans were receiving just 1,000 calories per day in the British Zone. By March in the U.S. Zone, “the figure had dropped to 1,313. Germans were better fed in the Soviet Zone . . . . On May 26, 1946 [deputy military governor Lucius] Clay spoke of a ‘nutritional disaster.’”5 The combination of severe winter weather and obdurate American attitudes toward the Germans created a perfect storm of suffering. Besides outrage at recently discovered German atrocities,6 the harshness of the American approach was fuelled by a misunderstanding of the fluid nature of Nazi Party membership—that is, how the categories of true believer and crass opportunist often overlapped. At the outset of U.S.-led denazification, it was assumed that NSDAP membership was a prerequisite for artists to receive

state or Party patronage. Indeed, as we saw in Chapter 1, Captain Gordon W. Gilkey, one of the foremost American officials responsible for German cultural property, erred in assuming that only Party members were qualified to participate in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen. Appalled by the scale of German art thefts and other war crimes, Gilkey and members of the Monuments Branch failed to recognize the improvisatory and essentially conciliatory nature of the Nazi mobilization of cultural producers. The American morality-driven, Manichean perspective on the conflict with Nazi Germany fuelled the activities and attitudes of U.S. occupation officials, including Gilkey, whose personal appetite for retribution was stoked by his massive ambition and the eagerness of one who had arrived in Europe after the fighting stage of the war had ended, but who was still determined to make a significant contribution to the Allied victory. Indeed, Gilkey’s enthusiasm for occupation duty contrasted sharply with millions of GIs who agitated to be sent home as quickly as possible. On January 7, 1946, 1,000 U.S. troops staged a protest rally. On January 9, 4,000 GIs marched on Army Headquarters in Frankfurt to take their grievance directly to General Joseph T. McNarney, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s successor as Supreme Commander of SHEAF. Subsequently, in early 1946, around the time of Gilkey’s arrival in Frankfurt, 4.75 million Americans had been sent home through Operation Magic Carpet. By the summer of 1946, only 250,000 U.S. soldiers remained in Europe. A few months later that number was reduced to 200,000.7 In order to maintain a high degree of consensual participation in exhibitions—it was a top priority to demonstrate that such activities flourished under Nazi management—the Hitler regime had lowered the bar for exhibiting in even the most prestigious art shows to mere membership in the Reichskammer der Bildenden Künste [Reich Chamber of the Visual Arts], a subset of the Reichskulturkammer. Since all professional artists were required to join the Reichskulturkammer, this was an essentially meaningless credential, except for a relatively small number of artists who were disqualified for racial or political reasons. Despite the apparent regimentation of cultural life under Hitler, the new Nazi organizational apparatus had little measurable impact on exhibition practice in Germany. In fact,

when a larger pool of the art exhibitions held during the period is examined—and not simply the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen —we see that membership in the Reichskulturkammer, rather than adapting artistic production to meet National Socialist norms, actually made possible the continuity and smooth working of exhibition machinery, patronage, and sales of art. Moreover, the Reichskulturkammer actually facilitated the collaboration of artists, even those inclined to express dissent or enter internal exile, by channelling their efforts into service to the state and Party. The formation of units of combat artists in the Wehrmacht was another way that the regime mobilized and thus salvaged the efforts of “degenerate” artists or others who had been rejected for membership in the Reichskulturkammer. Thus, rather than a vehicle of censorship, surveillance, and control, which has been the conventional position taken by historians of the period, the Reichskulturkammer functioned as an enabling instrument of aesthetic rehabilitation.

Canonical Art and the Case of Arno Breker Scandal as opposed to criminality was associated with another category of politically compromised cultural artifacts in the immediate postwar period. As we know, the National Socialists plundered not only German but all of European cultural history for masterpieces that could be mobilized for their ideological purposes. Major historical figures adopted as mascots by the Nazi regime—such as Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Caspar David Friedrich— were, of course, either temporarily expelled from the canon or remained there with some major caveats. Shakespeare, Dürer, and Rembrandt, despite Nazi attempts at mobilizing them for their biocultural aesthetic agenda, survived the war without stigma or taint. But any disgrace lingering from the exploitation of these figures in the name of the regime or its ideology must be distinguished from the dishonor of the willful, knowing, voluntary collaboration of living artists. Their fate bears comparison with that of the painter JacquesLouis David, whose prominent role in the cultural life of Napoleonic France is similar to that of sculptor Arno Breker in Hitler’s Germany. David was, of course, eventually rehabilitated and elevated to a central place in the nineteenth-century canon, but Breker remains marginalized, seemingly in perpetuity. In the view of most historians of German art, he is, at best, a curio, a relic of the era’s questionable taste, and an icon of opportunistic and profitable collaboration. It is only fair to point out, however, that Breker’s collaboration was not conducted entirely on the regime’s terms. Because he was such a prominent figure in the contemporary art world, with patrons in every major European art market, his collaboration did not come cheaply. According to Spruchkammer documents dated March 5, 1946, Breker was judged to have been a Mitläufer or follower and fined 100 old Reichsmark (an utterly risible sum).8 This penalty was based on his accession to the NSDAP on May 1, 1937 and his receipt in 1940, on the occasion of his fortieth birthday, of the Golden Party Badge, which was purely honorary given his late admission to the Party. After the March 5, 1933 election, the last to be held in Germany until the postwar period, there was a flood of new applicants to join the

Party, the so-called Märzgefallenen [March “victims” of collaboration], who were considered the worst of the opportunists. Following a ban on new members between May 1933 and 1937, those who joined in 1937 were considered “Mußnazis” [those who were forced to join out of concern for their careers]. Therefore, with the presentation of the Golden Party Badge, Breker’s status as a “Mußnazi” was, ironically enough, nullified in the eyes of the true Party faithful who had all joined prior to March 1933. In his own defense, Breker claimed that up until 1936 he had had no relationship with the Party and no position within it. It was only after he had been awarded second prize in the international art competition attached to the 1936 Olympic Games that he came to the attention of the regime and was summoned to a meeting with Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. The outcome of this meeting was Breker’s first state commission for his sculpture Prometheus. Two years passed before he once again stood before a high-ranking figure in the regime. This time it was Reichsminister Albert Speer who offered Breker commissions related to the vast scheme for the re-design of Berlin. Altogether Breker estimated that he had received three million Reichsmark for two busts and three full-figure sculptures. This sum did not, however, include Breker’s use of the vast atelier in the Dahlem quarter of Berlin that was built for him on the orders of Speer and leased to the artist for the token rent of 2,000 Reichsmark per month.9 Breker’s surviving works belong to an artistic anti-canon comprised of works forbidden and transgressive because they are deemed utterly compromised by association with the Third Reich. No period in German cultural history offered as much raw material for ideological exploitation than romanticism and related cultural activity of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, whose tropes and iconography were mobilized so thoroughly that it would not be a stretch to describe Nazi visual culture as an expression of romantic revivalism or “meta-romanticism.” Until the rise of National Socialism, it was, however, still possible to consider the chauvinist component in German romanticism—its celebration of regionalist particularism and grassroots resistance to French occupation of German-speaking lands—as intrinsic to its aesthetic

achievement. Friedrich’s images of Gothic ruins, moonlit landscapes, and melancholy scenes from the German Wars of Liberation, seemed, however, ready-made for mobilization by National Socialism and for incorporation into its cults of death and regionalist kitsch. After nearly 30 years of scholarly labor—a process of denazification and cultural re-certification—an exhibition in 1972 at the Tate London signalled that Friedrich’s postwar rehabilitation was complete.10

Radioactive Art As we saw above in Chapter 1, attempts at controlling the postwar circulation of German art produced during the Nazi era were undertaken by two units of the United States Army, the Monuments Branch, best known for its heroic efforts to salvage the artistic patrimony of Europe, and Captain Gilkey’s German Wartime Art Project. Motivated by the prominent role that contemporary German art played in Nazi propaganda, the Monuments Branch and German Wartime Art Project mounted the only official art looting actions authorized by U.S. leaders in occupied Europe. While the role of Monuments officers in the confiscation of Adolf Hitler’s personal collection of contemporary German art remained a well-kept secret until now, Gilkey, as we saw in Chapter 1, hungry for honors and distinctions, boldly organized an exhibition of selected examples of confiscated German combat art that opened at the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt am Main on December 6, 1946 (fig. 13). After Gilkey’s very public unveiling in war-torn Frankfurt, the German War Art Collection entered the twilight world of sequestration. Political infighting, first in the United States, and then, following repatriation, in West and now unified Germany, has kept these works of art out of the public eye and scholarly notice.11 Far different has been the fate—and thus the influence on academic discourse—of the 775 paintings assembled by the Monuments Branch from Hitler’s private collection (the NSReichsbesitz) that agents on behalf of the Führer purchased at the eight annual Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen. These pictures remained in nominal American control in West Germany until the late 1960s. Then, in 1974, the first exhibition of a selection of these objects opened in Frankfurt, Kunst im 3. Reich: Dokumente der Unterwerfung [Art in the Third Reich: Documents of Subjugation], which coincided with the publication of Berthold Hinz’s pioneering study, Die Malerei im Deutschen Faschismus: Kunst und Konterrevolution (1974) [Painting in German Fascism: Art and Counterrevolution. In the absence of an expansion of the known pool of objects dating from this period, Hinz’s book has served as a

standard treatment of the art of Nazi Germany. The synchronicity of the 1974 exhibition of long-suppressed works and the appearance of the first serious postwar scholarship on Nazi art led logically if inaccurately to an over-identification between Hitler’s personal collection and Nazi art in general. Indeed, the contents of Hitler’s collection have come to serve as a metonym for all of Nazi art and the eight Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen have come to stand for all exhibitions in Nazi Germany. Even without considering the 9,176 objects in the German War Art Collection and the thousands of exhibitions held outside of Munich12 during the lifespan of the Nazi regime, at 775 objects out of 13,482 objects exhibited in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen and their Ergänzungen, Hitler’s purchases at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst represent less than 5.75% of the total number of objects exhibited between 1937 and 1944. Since only 775 objects were confiscated out of the many thousands processed by Dirrigl in the Abwicklungsstelle,13 the disproportionate representation of certain artists and genres in the pictures purchased by Hitler has skewed our understanding of the nature of the works of art exhibited in the regime’s main art show. Of course, such a close identification between the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen and Hitler’s collecting activity was in keeping with the jury’s—and the Führer’s—ambitions for the shows, but assumptions about the other 94% of the objects included in the eight annual exhibitions should not be made on the basis of Hitler’s purchases alone. There is, however, a huge exception to the dominant place of the Munich shows in our perception of the visual arts in Germany at this time: the 1937 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen will forever be associated with its infamous “counter-exhibition” (to use James van Dyke’s apt phrase), the Entartete Kunstausstellung. It was Hitler and Nazi ideologues like Schultze-Naumburg and Willrich, who created the ultimately misleading dialectic of “degenerate” modernist versus the “new” German art of the future that the two exhibitions were intended to compare for the edification of the Volk. The Entartete Kunstausstellung was not, it must be emphasized, an exhibition of contemporary art of the mid- to late 1930s but rather a retrospective exhibition of avantgarde modernism produced between 1900 and

1925. Held between 1937 and 1944 and travelling to cities across the Reich, the Entartete Kunstausstellung and its local variants were intended to function as a Schreckenskammer [chamber of horrors] at which spectators were invited to gawk at the aesthetic monstrosities that had been, as Nazi propaganda would have it, foolishly purchased using state funds during the “corrupt” and “decadent” Weimar Republic. Both exhibitions attracted vast crowds. Indeed, Goebbels and Ziegler failed to anticipate the German public’s attachment to the modernist art associated with the Nazi regime’s hated democratic predecessor. With over two million visitors in total, the Entartete Kunstausstellung is still among the most visited exhibitions in history. Similarly huge attendance figures (4.4 million visitors in eight years), colossal entrance takings (5.6 million Reichsmark), and exorbitant prices paid for the works displayed in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen (16.1 million Reichsmark in total sales) could not disguise the anxiety of the organizers that few, if any, of the works shown in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst could have stood on their own apart from the ample surrounding tissue and bone of ideologically-driven pageantry of parades and other ancillary events. Therefore extraordinary sums were lavished on related parades and festivals—a tradition adopted from the long-running annual Münchener Kunstausstellungen—that marshalled 6,403 costumed marchers, more than 450 horses with riders, and 26 elaborately decorated floats.14 As far as the U.S. Army’s Monuments Branch was concerned, not only was Hitler’s collection of pictures deemed to consist of emblems of Nazi racial hatred and militarism, the contents of the NSReichsbesitz and the German War Art Collection were, as products of National Socialist patronage, deemed contraband in se (in and of itself unlawful to possess) and thus too dangerous to remain in circulation. With the de facto criminalization of NSDAP membership stated openly in the Potsdam Accords, the targeting of contemporary German art by Gilkey and his Monuments Branch colleagues was therefore legitimized by an exaggerated assumption of the presence of Nazi Party members among the artists active in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen as well as those who were

conscripted as combat artists. The political toxicity of the contraband works of art confiscated by units of the U.S. Army was thus transferred, as implicit evidence of criminality, to the individual artists who had made them and had benefited from the patronage of the NSDAP, the Nazi state, the German military, and mobilized local artist organizations.15 The possibility of the rehabilitation of “collaborating” artists presupposed crucial assumptions concerning the degree of privilege conferred upon them by Nazi Party membership. Were the artists whose works were seized as a consequence of U.S. Army orders to be treated as unscrupulous collaborators who had sold their souls for Nazi patronage? Did their refusal to enter internal exile and their decision to participate in art exhibitions like Schirach’s Junge Kunst or Kunst der Front, hint at some dark facts—hitherto unknown— about the National Socialist mobilization of the German arts establishment as a whole? Why was it that even “degenerate” artists were successfully co-opted by the state via recruitment into combat art programs? As the denazification process got underway the presence of the work of modernist artists in both the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen and in Wehrmacht combat art units suggested that the toxic criminality that attached to individual artists who had benefited from Nazi patronage would also potentially infect the entire profession and its institutions. Indeed, a review of the Münchener Kunstausstellungen prior to January 1933 and the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen from 1937 to 1944 suggests that, far from being marginal figures or hard-core Nazis, the artists who most required rehabilitation had been mainstays of the arts scene in the Weimar Republic. Their return to respectability would contribute mightily to the resurrection of German art from the ashes of the Third Reich. For this reason, a bureaucratic process was devised to afford artists the possibility of removing the taint associated with their cultural collaboration in Nazi Germany.

Collaboration Confiscation of works of art in the regime’s anti-modernist purge did not preclude an artist’s appearance in Münchner Künstlerköpfe (32 artists), Deutsche Maler der Gegenwart (37 artists), Deutsche Plastik der Gegenwart (32 artists), the Staffel der Bildenden Künstler (56 artists), in the high-profile Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen (64 artists in total and 44 alone who appeared in the 1943 and 1944 shows), or in Junge Kunst (53 artists). As Rainer Schlösser, Goebbels’s head of theaters, confided in a letter to a colleague, the inclusion of “liberal” elements in state-supported cultural activities was justified “because they cater to a certain section of the audience and ensure that [these culture producers] ultimately remain under our control.”16 Indeed, given that 64 artists whose works were collected by the Führer were also subject to removal on the grounds that they were deemed “degenerate,” it would be fair to conclude that the National Socialist regime administered the visual arts either with remarkable restraint or with extreme confusion. Nazi forbearance was, however, occasioned in equal measure by tolerance for artistic pluralism and the need to offer incentives to artists to collaborate. The regime’s keenness for artists to participate en masse in its cultural programs was met with eagerness on the part of artists to collaborate and to engage in self-adjustment or mobilization. Out of 23,700 (see page 67) card-carrying members of the Reichskammer approximately 10,000 submitted works for inclusion in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen.17 With a conversion rate of 2.5 Reichsmark to the U.S. dollar in 1936, artists’ annual incomes as reported in the Fragebögen averaged between 4,000 and 6,000 Reichsmark or $1,600 and $2,400. To put these figures into perspective, in 1935–36 the median family income in the United States was $1,600 per year. With prices paid for individual paintings in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen peaking at 60,000 Reichsmark,18 the incentive for artists to participate in the Munich shows was hard to resist for all but the independently wealthy. In addition to financial security, collaboration offered artists the prospect

of continuing to work in prestigious teaching posts and to be eligible to receive commissions, both public and private. In their Fragebögen many artists reveal an additional, unexpected motive for collaboration: the possibility of “helping” Jewish colleagues, “degenerate” artists, and dissidents, and of acting out the double-agent fantasy of impersonating a supporter of the Nazi state who subverted its designs from deep inside the belly of the beast. This is a major trope in denazification testimony. It is also a common plot device in Holocaust-themed fiction and films in which the dramatic climax is structured around the intervention of Aryan collaborators in saving Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. Salient examples of this kind of film include Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002) and Jan Hrebejk’s Divided We Fall (2000). Both films —and the narratives appended to Fragebögen and denazification tribunal documents—exemplify the instrumentality of saving Jews as a means of restoring manifest collaborators to the moral certitude of internal exiles, which converted them into “good” Germans. In these and other films of the postwar era, the choice between cultural collaboration and internal exile during the Third Reich is primarily constructed as a binary that parallels the dualism of “degenerate” art and “official” art that was acceptable to the regime. According to this model, individual artists faced a stark choice— either to collaborate and thus validate Nazi cultural policy, including the persecution of Kulturbolschewisten [cultural Bolsheviks], or to retreat into internal exile, a decision that required artists to eschew the creation of art and thus avoid functioning as beneficiaries of Nazi patronage. But just as a binary model is inadequate to describe the range of stylistic variation in the visual arts of Nazi Germany, a dualistic structure is also deficient as a means of predicting the appearance of works of art produced with Nazi patronage. The phrase “internal exile” was coined by the anti-Nazi writer Frank Thieß to describe writers and artists who elected to remain in Germany after 1933 rather than seek sanctuary abroad. In an article published in the Münchener Zeitung in 1945, Thieß controversially attacked the exiled novelist Thomas Mann’s stance of outspoken moral superiority taken, without risk to himself or his family, while his brother and sister writers languished in the prison house of Hitler’s

Germany. However morally compromised internal exiles might have seemed to German writers who fled to sunny California, the former were nonetheless genuine victims of Nazi repression and eyewitnesses to Nazi crimes. The most prominent internal exiles among Weimar Germany’s cultural elite included political opponents of the Nazis such as Otto Dix, Erich Kästner, Oskar Schlemmer as well as Nazi Party members Emil Nolde, and Franz Radziwill—all of whom were ultimately coerced into creative silence. In the case of purged conservative artists, their absence from the public sphere embodied a reproach against the Party and the regime they once supported.19 Artists whose cultural activity in Nazi Germany does not fit neatly into the binary of collaboration or internal exile constitute a much larger group that happens to include the names of several canonical20 artists who participated in art exhibitions from 1933 to 1945. Their participation in Nazi-sponsored exhibitions demonstrates that in no realm of cultural activity were the categories of banned and approved works more fluid than in the visual arts. Film, literature, and music production were less problematic to control as each required complex and expensive industrial processes or the support of large organizations—publishers, radio stations, recording facilities, and orchestras. Banned authors, composers, and films merely had to be placed on lists to block performance or publication. By contrast, art exhibitions could only take place with the acquiescence of mobilized local, regional, and national authorizing bodies. Nonetheless, the binary categories of collaboration and internal exile are inadequate to describe a situation that was constantly in flux and only rarely produced results that could be seen as either consistent with the regime’s vaguely stated aesthetic values or as flaunting them utterly.21 Such fluidity was, however, to be expected when aesthetic expectations were never, aside from the false binary of “degenerate” versus approved art, consistently revealed, but were, instead, presented, from exhibition to exhibition, in an endless variation of changeable forms. This dynamic situation was also consistent with Hitler’s idea of utopian eugenic representation—that is, a non-mimetic style that was intended to offer in the present moment idealized archetypes of the German Volk in a future state of

racial perfection—that by its very nature presupposed an unstable, evolving mode of figuration. Non-conformity with the rhetorically ambitious but obscurely articulated standards and goals of Nazi aesthetics (which is not to be confused with conscious dissent) was also unavoidable for reasons of deliberate government policy. In Nazi Germany, unlike the Soviet Union, the state “did not attempt to achieve monolithic cultural authority.”22 Apart from the annual Munich shows, which were intended to function as a showcase for Hitler’s personal patronage of the arts and were therefore carefully orchestrated by Heinrich Hoffmann, who headed up the jury, the Nazi hierarchy preferred to influence the visual arts through the mobilization of existing local organizations and their traditions through consent rather than through coercion. Thus, rather than replacing existing arts administrative bodies with new, fully nazified personnel, it was standard Nazi practice to extend legitimacy to organizations—with their leadership intact—which pre-dated Hitler’s appointment as Reichskanzler in January 1933. This was as true in the alt Reich as well as in the “new territories” annexed to Germany and in occupied countries, such as Norway, for example, where home-grown Nazis oversaw the mobilization of existing institutions to serve the “new European order” in the exhibition Kunst og Ukunst [Art or Non-Art] that opened in Oslo in April 1942. As evidence of this practice, few leaders of local artist organizations or juries were replaced after 1933 or even after the grand climacteric of July 1937 when the opening of the Entartete Kunstausstellung announced closure of the ongoing row between Goebbels and Rosenberg as to the future of modernist art in Nazi Germany. Intriguingly, the practice of making collaborators out of pre-existing organizations suggests that these groups, in accordance with völkisch, proto-Nazi taste and cultural values that had come to dominate the Weimar arts scene well before January 1933, had been, so to speak, pre-mobilized before the Nazi seizure of power.23 In fact, for individual artists as well as artist organizations, cultural collaboration with the regime presupposed a continuous, on-going process of individual and group adjustment to shifting aesthetic norms and institutional overhauls.

Precisely because of the constant repetition of ritualistic rants against “degenerate” art in the Nazi-controlled German media, it is not generally understood that the anti-modernist attitude in cultural matters was largely a settled issue in Germany well before 1937. Indeed, far from being associated exclusively with National Socialism, völkisch pastoralist-agrarian conventions permeated mainstream German art before 1933. Even leading avantgarde artists, such as the founding members of Die Brücke—Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Max Pechstein—had already thoroughly and völkischly self-mobilized in the late Weimar years and into the twelve-year Reich. An eerie example of self-adjustment is Erich Heckel’s Pflüger [Plowman] (c. 1930) (fig. 72), which was exhibited in the 1930 Deutsche Kunstausstellung [German Art Exhibition] in the Glaspalast. Other modernists who adjusted their work include the “degenerate” Otto Dix and the loyal Nazi Franz Radziwill (fig. 73). Evidence for a groundswell of self-mobilization is found in the annual Munich exhibitions from 1930 to 1932 in which Heckel, SchmidtRottluff, and Pechstein exhibited pictures that were fully völkisch in style and iconography. In adopting völkisch conventions, these old warhorses of German expressionism had, perhaps, assumed that they would be safe from persecution as “degenerate” artists, as such attacks against expressionism had become de rigueur at least since the publication of Schultze-Naumburg’s Kunst und Rasse [Art and Race] in 1928 and the formation of Rosenberg’s Kampfbund für Deutsche Kultur in the same year. Significantly, what is missing from the völkisch pictures of the Weimar era and the pre-1937 Naziadministered Münchener Kunstausstellungen (1933–36) is emphasis on the anticipatory visualization of the regime’s eugenic utopia. Indeed, the pastoral and agrarian themes of völkischly-inflected art, despite being closely associated with right-wing, nationalist politics in the 1920s and 1930s, would have struck contemporary visitors as passé and far-removed from Hitler’s radically transformative plans for the utopian eugenic art of the Third Reich. The fundamental conflict facing the founding members of modernist groups like Die Brücke was that they were still identified with the historical avantgarde at a time when Hitler sought recruits for a completely “new art” that would embody the future-oriented

ambitions of the “new Germany.” Heckel and his fellow expressionists were little better than relics, rooted in the past, whose support for the regime was cause for embarrassment. In truth, the somewhat conventionally avantgarde appearance of the vast majority of pictures in Junge Kunst is consistent with the fact that most of their 175 creators were born before 1900. As representatives of an earlier phase of bourgeois modernism, they were dismissed as unmobilizable and thus incapable of doing the cultural work of the regime. For Hitler, the modernist conventions of the avantgarde were not merely decadent. They were sterile anachronisms. Futureoriented or proleptic representation is a type of modernist formalism. Since Nazi ideas of racial perfection were wholly idealized, formal constructions, art that seeks to represent this perfection is not bad mimesis as it is so frequently described by critics; it is not mimetic at all. The human subjects in the paintings of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen are closely related to the machines of Italian futurism, the buildings of the Bauhaus, or the sculptures of Arno Breker, Fritz Klimsch, and Josef Thorak. The takeover of the 1932–36 annual Münchener Kunstausstellungen and their conversion into the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen was not simply a power grab by Nazi philistines, but a long-planned fascist cultural putsch aimed at overthrowing the authority of the entrenched bourgeois arts establishment in Munich. This effort subverted the decades-old monopoly of power exercised by the Munich Akademie and artist organizations associated with both the avantgarde (the Secession and the Neue Secession) and völkisch traditionalism (the Künstlergenossenschaft). Instead of seeking to mobilize the older generation of Secessionists and their more radical offspring in the Neue Secession, the Nazis instead disproportionately offered their patronage to younger artists who were neither beholden to Akademie mentors nor had become invested in the academic style associated with Carl von Marr and Karl Theodor von Piloty, on the one hand, or the progressive modernist styles that grew out of the teaching of Franz von Stuck, on the other. The chief function of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen that replaced the Münchener Kunstausstellungen was fundamentally

pedagogical: Party-sponsored exhibitions were intended to encourage a new generation of artists to create the art of the utopian future of the Nordic race and to educate the public to appreciate eugenic art as an emblematic foretaste of a coming National Socialist reality. Surprisingly, the Führer was also determined to make the annual Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen more broadly representative of the “new” German art by making participation in these shows more accessible to artists from outside Bavaria and not associated with Munich institutions. Designated by the Führer as the “Reich capital of culture,” Munich needed a more rather than less inclusive reputation if it was to emerge from the massive shadow of cultural relevance cast by Berlin. The Prussian capital and seat of the central government had come to dominate the German arts scene during the short lifespan of the Weimar Republic. Our previous failure to acknowledge Hitler’s supra-regional plans for the Munich shows made it impossible to grasp his broader intentions for the visual arts in Nazi Germany. Consistent with Nazi emphasis on rebirth, the outsiders who participated in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen tended to be considerably younger than the established Munich artists whom Hitler sought to displace.24 Free of false binaries, the history of German art in the years after 1930 reveals how progressive experimentalism associated with DADA, expressionism, the Bauhaus, and Neue Sachlichkeit evolved into figurative representation with a dominant völkisch tendency in the Weimar period that persisted into the Nazi years. The great advantage of this style—generally described as “expressive realism” by postwar art historians—was that it could be deployed as either a compliant, collaborative style or a dissident style associated with internal exile or even “degenerate” art. In such circumstances, as, for example, former avantgarde artists völkischly self-mobilized in advance of the Machtergreifung, cultural collaboration was neither a static nor predictable process. From one exhibition to the next, artists could thus be perceived as collaborating to a greater or a lesser degree, depending on the patron organization’s politico-aesthetic orientation. Thus one must speak of degrees of cultural collaboration or of what one might describe as relative “collaborative distance,” such as that, for example, separating the Große Deutsche

Kunstausstellungen, the modernist Wehrmacht exhibitions, and Junge Kunst im Deutschen Reich. In addition, there is the collaborative distance between the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen in Munich and regional exhibitions in Berlin as well as between civilian exhibitions in the alt Reich and in the Ostmark on the one hand, and Wehrmacht-sponsored exhibitions in annexed or occupied territories, on the other. In all of these shows local variations on avantgarde modernist or völkisch themes were permitted as long as they were organized under the aegis of National Socialist authority.

The Cases of Emil Nolde and Christian Schad For American occupation officials concerned with the denazification of German culture in the immediate post-Nazi years, drawing clear legal distinctions between collaborators and non-collaborators among artists active in Nazi Germany was difficult to achieve, especially when so many successful artists continued to lead active careers from 1933 to 1945 without having joined the NSDAP. Even among artists who were Parteigenossen [Party comrades], their experiences in Hitler’s Germany varied in unpredictable ways. Consider, for example, the paradox-ridden cases of two artists in the modernist canon, Emil Nolde (fig. 74) and Christian Schad (fig. 75), who were both long-time Party members. Nolde joined the Danish branch of the Nazi Party in the 1920s and was active in the nationalist agitations of the German minority in his native southern Jutland. In 1934 he published his Hitleresque memoir, Jahre der Kämpfe [Battle Years], which is filled with vicious rants against Jewish art dealers, fellow artists, the Munich Akademie (which rejected his application for admission), and Danes, the majority ethnic group of the region. Despite Nolde’s solid Nazi credentials, the support of his patron Joseph Goebbels, and a personal appeal to Schirach (conveyed by Walter Thomas), more than 1,000 of his works were removed from German public collections and, in 1941, he was slapped with a Malverbot.25 As a consequence, the alte Kämpfer Nolde is considered one of the chief martyrs of the National Socialist purge of “degenerate” art. Schad, who joined the Nazi Party on May 1, 1933 (the date set aside for the pro forma investiture of thousands of opportunists) never suffered the indignity of being classified as a “degenerate” artist or the career destroying imposition of a Malverbot. In fact, at the very moment that Nolde suffered the humiliation of being included in the Entartete Kunstausstellungen, Schad was honored with the inclusion of a portrait and a landscape in the 1937 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung as well as other shows in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst (fig. 75). Unlike Nolde, whose prodigious secret output during the war years was technically “unbemalt” [unpainted]

because forbidden, Schad enjoyed the freedom to exhibit his work, accept lucrative commissions for portraits, including Wehrmacht officers in full uniform, and publish cover illustrations in popular magazines. Schad’s chameleonic talent for stylistic adjustment and career advancement is, however unseemly it might appear for an artist of canonical stature, typical of cultural collaborators in the period. Schad’s output during the Weimar Republic, which includes a number of Neue Sachlichkeit masterpieces, such as Selbstbildnis mit Modell (1927) [Self-portrait with Model], Egon Erwin Kisch (1926), and Operation (1929), did not disqualify him from enjoying Nazi admiration and patronage. Intriguingly, in these pictures what might be described as the objective, almost clinical interest of the artist in the subject serves to mobilize the spectator’s gaze in a similarly impersonal way. The detached observation of the decadent, freakish, and openly erotic subjects in Schad’s canonical pictures bears comparison with the grotesque forensic photographs in propaganda tracts by Schultze-Naumburg and Willrich, in which pseudo-scientific racism is brought into alignment with the eugenic aesthetic preferences of National Socialism. Moreover, it seems reasonable to surmise that the clinical, quasi-photorealistic quality of Schad’s paintings made even his more scandalous works acceptable to Nazi juries and patrons because his Neue Sachlichkeit method of representation neither sanctions its decadent or pathological subject matter nor calls attention to itself. Therefore, given the similarities between Schad’s clinical realism and the Nazi quasi-diagnostic approach to modernist excesses as symptoms of decadence and disease, it is unsurprising that not a single canvas of Schad’s was deaccessioned or earmarked for destruction in Hitler’s assault on modernism. Schad’s professional survival in Nazi Germany forms a vivid contrast to the fate of fellow Party members Nolde and Radziwill, who had sought to serve the cultural agenda of the Hitler state but were shunted aside because of their undeniable links, respectively, to expressionism and surrealism. The varying shapes of these three careers demonstrate how unpredictable was the lot of collaborators with the regime, and reflect the varying trajectories of modernist

artists who were engaged in the internecine National Socialist struggle over which style was truly avantgarde. For Nolde, the postwar restoration of the pre-1937 artistic status quo meant that the salvation of his reputation was dependent upon convenient amnesia about his time as a brown-shirted street fighter. By contrast with the relative ease with which Nolde revived his career following the Second World War as well as the high esteem in which Radziwill’s work is now held, Schad fell victim to his all-too-eager embrace of the regime and the association of his signature style with the taste of the Nazi period. The return of “degenerate” modernism to its canonical niche accelerated Schad’s descent into obscurity. For the rest of his rather long life, Schad produced, in endless repetition, works in the modified Neue Sachlichkeit cum “Heimat” style that won him commissions in Hitler’s Germany and afterwards. It was not until the 1960s and the emergence of the photorealism movement that Schad and other artists associated with Neue Sachlichkeit enjoyed an enthusiastic rediscovery. Apologists for Schad, if they acknowledge his Party membership and years of collaboration, like to cite the financial difficulties he endured in the early 1930s to justify his decision to join the NSDAP in 1933, making him, at worst, a Mußnazi. Dependent on his father’s support until the Great Depression wiped him out, Schad was, however, just one of many thousands of artists who sought the patronage that was the due of collaborators with the regime.

Denazification The emphasis in postwar discussions of cultural life in Hitler’s Germany has been almost entirely focused on the artist victims of Nazi repression who suffered persecution, exile, and even death as a result of their political and cultural commitments.26 Aside from celebratory affirmations of the central position occupied by modernist art in the twentieth-century canon, there is actually very little real understanding of the political and bureaucratic process by which both purged and collaborating artists were professionally rehabilitated in the postwar era and saw their works, which had once been respectively condemned as “degenerate” or “Nazi,” reintegrated into the canon. To begin with, the legal definition of collaboration as a form of criminal behavior during Hitler’s dictatorship—and the original impetus for censoring Nazi-era cultural artifacts—was defined by the Allies in the Potsdam Accords as close association with the NSDAP. Thus the legal basis for the Allied control of German cultural activity after May 1945 was predicated on outlawing membership in the NSDAP, which followed from the leading role assigned to the Nazi Party in organizing the art world under Hitler. Accordingly, the criminalization of artistic practice as a form of political collaboration was adopted by the American occupation authority as the guiding rationale for requiring denazification before artists could continue their careers. A study published by the American “Institute on Reeducation of the Axis Countries” in June 1945 had underscored the necessity of denazification by concluding that “only an inflexible long term occupation authority will be able to lead the Germans to a fundamental revision of their recent political philosophy.”27 Formal denazification was initiated with the sweeping requirement that every German adult had to complete a Fragebogen or questionnaire consisting of 131 questions that sought to collect data on educational attainment, financial records, and political activity. The heart of the Fragebogen—questions 41 through 95— concerned membership in Nazi Party organizations—from the incredibly innocuous, such as the Deutsche Radfahrer-Verband [the

German Cycling Association], to the incredibly sinister SS and SA. By December 1945 completed questionnaires had been submitted by 900,000 Party members eager to get on with their lives. As we saw above on page 142, 140,000 people were deemed so seriously compromised by their voluntary answers that they were immediately removed from positions of responsibility in the public sector and 120,000 Party members were temporarily interned in eleven American detention centers, many of which were repurposed Nazi concentration camps. The impact of such candor would radically undermine the veracity of future submissions which inspired the wholesale mockery of the process as a “whitewashing.” In cases where individual Germans sought permission to resume occupations, apply for a job, or to recover embargoed property— including works of art secured in the storerooms of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst—evidence of Party membership as indicated in Fragebögen would trigger the next step in the denazification process: an appearance before a Spruchkammer. The suspicion of the Allied occupation authorities also fell on artists whose works were collected by the Führer and his cronies. Indeed, in cases where Monuments officers traced the provenance of canvases recovered from the basement depot of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst to Hitler, this finding generated a demand that Fragebögen and tribunal transcripts be forwarded to the U.S. Army’s Abwicklungsstelle before the claims of artists and buyers of works of art could be considered.28 In other words, there was an assumption of criminal collaboration—membership in the NSDAP at the very least—as a prerequisite on the part of artists who enjoyed the Führer’s patronage. Structurally and ideologically speaking, the denazification of artists in Allied occupied postwar Germany unfolded as an oddly bifurcated process. On the one hand, the United States attributed such genuine complicity in Hitler’s crimes to contemporary German art that 10,000 objects were subjected to confiscation. On the other hand, the artists who had produced the confiscated works were obliged to participate in legal proceedings that were intended to eliminate any lingering moral or political taint attached to their names and to permit their reintegration into the institutions of the German

art world. The high-minded approach of the American occupiers, who sought to erect barriers against the poisonous National Socialist past and simultaneously open a gateway to a democratic future, was undermined from the inception of Allied re-education policy by the innumerable compromises that had to be made between the unrealistic ambitions of the U.S. and the astonishing magnitude of the task of denazifying a many tentacled profession, not to mention the population of the largest portion of occupied Germany. Indeed, as Nicholas Stargardt observed, the challenges facing the Allies were so great because “so many German men and women played active roles in the mass organizations of the Party that no sharp line can be drawn between regime and society.”29 In addition to the unmanageable scope of the Allied denazification project, there were also significant external factors that undermined American attempts at removing the fascist taint from German culture. For example, in 1946, just as full-scale denazification was poised to begin, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives abruptly and radically de-funded the Allied occupation of Germany. This fiscally prudent, perhaps, but also politically motivated return to America’s traditional isolation from European affairs, placed enormous pressure on the U.S. Military Government to speed up plans to transfer many occupation tasks, including denazification, to the embryonic West German state. In response to the urgent signals coming from Washington, occupation authority officials hurriedly adopted a bureaucratic strategy reminiscent of Nazi Gleichschaltung: rather than thoroughly scrubbing German institutions of ideological contagion and then restaffing them with certifiably denazified personnel, OMGUS [Office of the Military Government of the United States] opted instead to empower existing German institutions without substantially changing either their leadership or rank and file. In practice, this meant permitting former Party members to resume positions of responsibility in state bureaucracies, professions, and private corporations. Especially in Bavaria, “where American efforts at denazification had gone further than in the other Western zones,” it was estimated that “77% of Finance Ministry officials and 94% of judges and state prosecutors were former Nazis.”30

Even though a classified report of the U.S. Military Government released on January 15, 1946 aired concerns about the perfunctory nature of denazification under the Americans (“The present procedure fails in practice to reach a substantial number of persons who supported or assisted the Nazis”), on April 1, 1946 a new occupation authority law transferred responsibility for the denazification process to the 545 Spruchkammer or denazification courts called for in the 1946 Befreiungsgesetz [Law for the Liberation of Germany], which had been drafted by OMGUS.31 The latter stipulated that the tribunals assign each of the 900,000 Party members identified in their Fragebögen to one of the following five categories: 1. Hauptschuldige [Major Offenders] 2. Belastete [Offenders or Activists] 3. Minderbelastete [Lesser Offenders] 4. Mitläufer [Followers] 5. Entlastete [Exonerated Persons] The swiftly instituted Spruchkammer, supported by a mammoth bureaucracy of 22,000 German civilians who were screened by U.S. Special Branch officers, functioned according to the traditional structure of Anglo-Saxon judicial proceedings: charges were read out, witnesses were deposed, court rulings were issued, and penalties were assessed. What is most interesting about the workings of the tribunals is that, in a large number of cases, the process encouraged the defendants to reveal, often in quite dramatic fashion, the ways in which they had secretly resisted the regime. For example, Hermann Urban (1866–1946), who was born in New Orleans and submitted his questionnaire in both German and English, was one of the most accomplished and highest earning artists of the older generation. He freely admits to having voted for the NSDAP in the all-important 1932 and 1933 elections and to joining the Party in 1933. Despite claiming that he did not “owe his artistic reputation to the Party, which had been well-established even prior to the First World War, both inside Germany and abroad,”

Urban nonetheless produced witnesses who, according to the established formula, testified before his denazification tribunal that the defendant “was a passive Party member who was always inwardly an opponent of the regime.”32 Franz Xaver Wölfle (1887–1972), a highly decorated member of the artistic establishment in Bavaria, joined the Party in 1933 and ascended to the rank of Organisationsleiter in 1941. An exhibitor at all of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen from 1938 to 1944, Wölfle nonetheless makes a number of remarkable—and undocumented—exculpatory assertions in his questionnaire: as a “member of a [forbidden] Free Masons lodge” and “because [he] had multiple times provided sanctuary to a Jew and because his daughter was raised in a Roman Catholic institution, he was alienated [but never expelled] from the Party.”33 Even more extraordinary is the testimony given under oath by a witness, one Walter Kaufmann [identified as a member of the board of the Daimler-Benz Corporation], on behalf of the artist Hugo Geißler (1895–1956), who joined the Party in 1930 and exhibited works in each of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen from 1938 to 1944: “I was really shocked to hear in today’s court proceedings that Herr Geißler was a Party member before 1933. Given his outspoken attitude [toward the regime] and the avantgarde nature of his artistic output, I had no reason to believe that he was an activist in relation to the Party.” Still more remarkable is the claim made by Herr Kaufmann that Geißler “intervened in a compelling way on my behalf after I was sent to a Concentration Camp in June 1944 for actively opposing the regime’s Racial Legislation.” This testimony was cited as crucial in leading to the tribunal’s judgment that Geißler was “only a nominal member of the Party and thus a Minderbelasteter [lesser offender].”34 While it beggars belief that a “nominal” Party member possessed the kind of clout with which Kaufmann credited his rescuer Geißler, the impact of this kind of ritual disclosure seems to have been to pardon Germans generally by characterizing the standard relationship of individuals to the regime as one of opportunism and expediency, if not outright disobedience and resistance.35 As a result, the denazification courts tended overwhelmingly to treat evidence of corruption, even the

most craven cases of self-enrichment during the Nazi dictatorship, as pardonable offenses that were only minimally (and, one could say, cynically) sanctioned by tribunal judges. By contrast, conduct consistent with naïve faith in the regime was almost always punished as a criminal act. Typical of the former kind of pardonable excuse for Party membership is that offered by the painter (and Party member since 1926) Hugo Hagenkötter (1882–1967), who completed a French questionnaire (in both French and German) when he found himself in the French Zone of Occupation in the southwest corner of Germany. Even though Hagenkötter was entitled to wear the Golden Party Badge, awarded to the first 100,000 earliest and continuous members of the NSDAP, the so-called Goldfasane [golden pheasants], and exhibited works in each of the last seven annual exhibitions at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, the tribunal judged him, incredibly enough, “never to have been a Nutznießer or beneficiary of the Nazi system.” The totality of evidence cited by the tribunal to support its conclusion is that the defendant “never felt compelled to leave the Roman Catholic Church.” Hagenkötter’s behavior as a Party member was further mitigated by “the material hardship he endured as a result of the Great Inflation,” which overwhelmingly influenced his decision to join the Party in “the hope of improving his social condition.” Despite his strikingly low membership number, which led “automatically to the conferral of the Golden Party Badge,” he was nonetheless absolved of greater complicity because he “never served the Party in a leadership position.” And even though “he lost all of his possessions in a bombing raid and lived in the most modest circumstances, he never sought to benefit from his status as an alte Kämpfer.” Thus, “contrary to superficial outward signs, [Hagenkötter] is to be seen as merely as a Mitläufer [follower].”36 The largest group of convicted artists were, in fact, the 79 who were classified as Mitläufer or followers. They were fined relatively small sums. Only two of the 133 artists were placed in the more complicit category of Minderbelastete [lesser offenders] and faced only slightly higher monetary penalties (and no periods of incarceration) than followers, but these fines were still denominated

in Nazi-era Reichsmark, the value of which was wildly inflated and hence virtually worthless. The latter more seriously charged artists were the renowned sculptor Kurt Schmid-Ehmen (1901–1968) and the painter Josef Waldemar Keller-Kühne (1902–1991), who served in the Waffen-SS as a combat artist in Poland and Holland. A product of the prestigious Munich Akademie, where he was accepted as a master pupil under Bernhard Bleeker (1881–1968), the first chairman of the avantgarde Neue Secession, few artists of the period would become as closely dependent on the regime’s patronage as Schmid-Ehmen. After joining the NSDAP in 1930, he became a protégé of architect Paul Ludwig Troost, who facilitated his first commissions as well as a personal friendship with the Führer. Notable among Schmid-Ehmen’s commissions are the monument to the martyrs of November 9, 1923 erected in the Feldherrnhalle, the eagles adorning the Party buildings in Munich, the eagle relief in the smoking room of the Neue Reichskanzelei (now in the collection of the Imperial War Museum in London), the massive eagle displayed in the Reichsparteitagsgelände [Reich Party Congress Grounds] in Nuremberg (and seen in Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary of the 1934 Reichsparteitag, Triumph des Willens), and the nine-meter high bronze Reichsadler mounted atop the Deutscher Pavillion (designed by Albert Speer) at the Paris International Exposition in 1937 (for which he was awarded the Grand Prix de la Republique Française). Schmid-Ehmen was also invited to exhibit in all of the annual Munich art shows, both pre- and post-Machtergreifung, from 1931 to 1944. Hitler purchased his Speerträgerin [Woman Bearing a Spear] at the 1938 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung.37 Despite or perhaps because of his fame, Schmid-Ehmen managed to avoid making an appearance before a Spruchkammer in Munich until very late in the denazification process—in September 1948—where he was judged to belong to the third group—Minderbelastete [lesser offenders]— and fined a mere 200 of the newly introduced German Marks.38 Bearing a conspicuously low Party membership number (32,045) as well as being the only prominent German artist who first belonged to the Allgemeine or regular SS, Keller-Kühne participated in all of the annual Munich exhibitions except for the inaugural (and problematic) 1937 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung. Uniquely

among all of the artists whose Fragebögen and Spruchkammer testimony were bundled together for safekeeping by the Abwicklungsstelle in response to OMGUS and Monuments regulations, Keller-Kühne appeared before a denazification tribunal that was convened in 1947 inside an internment camp—the Arbeitsund Internierungslager Moosburg [Moosburg Civilian Internment Camp Number 6], which had been converted from a camp—Stalag 7A—for Allied POWs to a camp for Germans being screened for possibly compromising political behavior. After reviewing KellerKühne’s production as a combat artist and comparing it with all of his surviving work since 1922, the Spruchkammer concluded “that the evidence shows that the defendant is politically a totally disinterested person. As an artist, only his art concerned him and [his association with] National Socialism did nothing to change this orientation.” Conclusive proof for this is seen in the fact that “despite his membership in the SS, he [like Hagenkötter] never left the Church.” In addition, “the defendant intervened on behalf of a detainee in a Concentration Camp and was, as a consequence, reprimanded by his office of the SS. Furthermore, he offered support and advice to someone who had been arrested for making anti-Government statements.”39 Uncannily similar is the exculpatory testimony offered on behalf of the painter and Party member Karl Lotze (1892–1972) by witnesses who, after studying his works of art, determined that “he was certainly no Nazi activist. Rather he was an unpolitical person” who was simply “one of the many victims of the lying propaganda of the Party.” (This claim suggests that it was not unusual for “degenerate” painters to be Party comrades, however nominal.) The tribunal took seriously Lotze’s claims to have helped two Jewish people to emigrate, and to be a victim of politically motivated harassment because of this intervention. So the dominant formula emerges once again: the defendant was no “Aktivist,” he was a helper of Jews, and only nominally took part in Party business. All of the witnesses emphasized that Lotze had joined the NSDAP for idealistic reasons—that the Nazis “would improve the country and revive German art”—and was almost immediately disillusioned by the Judenpolitik of the regime (by “politics relating to the Jews,”

Lotze could hardly have been surprised by the regime’s post-1933 actions or the prominence of anti-Semitism in Nazi propaganda).40 Affirming the popular belief that the Spruchkammer targeted less important and therefore more vulnerable “small fish” of the NSDAP, none of the visual artists on the so-called “Gottbegnadeten-Liste” assembled by Goebbels in 1944, or those named to the supplementary “Führerliste” issued in 1945, were subjected to judicial penalties appropriate to their privileged status.41 Ultimately, efforts made by the Monuments Branch to criminalize the act of benefiting from Hitler’s patronage were, without exception, rebuffed by the denazification tribunals. The case of the Bavarian pastoral painter Sepp Hilz (1906–1967), one of the Führer’s favorite artists, is revealing. An early Party member (from 1927 onwards) and a mainstay of the annual Munich exhibitions, Hilz was summoned to appear before the Spruchkammer assembled in his native Bad Aibling. There, among friends and neighbors, the sympathetic court proceedings included witness statements by the town’s Bürgermeister and a committee of representatives from political parties that had been banned during the Nazi dictatorship. These influential deponents unanimously attested in their evaluations that “Hilz had inwardly kept his distance from the Party.” While it was admitted “that Hilz had earned a huge income through the sale of his pictures,” he was “not a Nutznießer in the sense of the law for the Liberation of Germany” because “the pictures by Hilz were not sold because he was a Party member; they were sold because of the overwhelming artistic talent that his pictures manifested.” In addition, a “bundle of affidavits taken under oath clearly state that Hilz was neither an active Nazi nor had he made any concessions to the Nazi Reich in his artistic work.” Somewhat paradoxically, the Kommission für Kulturschaffende in München [Commission for Culture Creators in Munich] declared in its expert opinion (appended to the other witness statements) that “Hilz should not be grouped among the true Nazi painters, even though his manner of painting and representation very much pleased Nazi bigwigs.” Moreover, “he was not to be unfairly punished for appearing frequently in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst because even the works of outspoken anti-Nazi artists were exhibited there.”42 In conclusion, the Kommission insisted that Hilz

was not to be faulted because “his artistic development and technical perfection first appeared in the years after 1930 and that his greatest works seemed to emerge in tandem with the rise of the Third Reich.” Leaving the best for last, the most compelling evidence that the Kommission cites in its lenient assessment of Hilz’s engagement with the Nazis is that he “never personally met the Führer nor did he ever execute any portraits of Nazi leaders.”43 The fascinating cases of Ewald Jorzig (1905–1983) and Edmund Steppes (1873–1968) reveal how success in the Third Reich can be misconstrued during denazification as predictive evidence of Party membership. Consistently rewarded as a reliable producer of dramatic and colorful industrial scenes that embody the creative dynamism of the “new Germany” under National Socialism, Jorzig participated in all eight Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen and Hitler purchased his works at the 1938 and 1940 shows. Despite being the beneficiary of the regime’s patronage and granted permission to take three long furloughs from Wehrmacht service (March 1–October 10, 1941, August 1–October 1, 1942, and February 1–October 1, 1944) in order to complete works for the Munich exhibitions, Jorzig reveals in his Fragebogen that he had never joined the NSDAP. Moreover, he asserts that he painted in a consistently modernist idiom that led to the selection of five of his paintings for the controversial exhibition of contemporary art, Junge Kunst, held in Vienna in 1943, and the confiscation of several works in 1937. The fact that Jorzig was admired by high-ranking Nazi patrons while working as a modernist challenges some of the most entrenched positions concerning the culture industry in Nazi Germany. Steppes, who studied with Paul Klee under Heinrich Knirr at the Munich Akademie and emerged from the early modernist milieu of the Munich Secession, presents a bundle of paradoxes. A Party member since 1932, who later served on the board of the Staatsakademie für Rassen and Gesundheitspflege [State Academy for the Maintenance of Racial Health], Steppes was drawn to the circle of völkisch nature worshippers and ultranationalists who gathered around the mystic and author Dietrich Eckart. It was through Eckart that Steppes was introduced to Hitler. In 1923

Steppes began contributing articles to the Völkischer Beobachter and later, he was bold enough to side with Rosenberg in the attack on expressionism, which Steppes regarded as a retreat to the past.44 As he asserted in his testimony before the Spruchkammer in Deggendorf on September 30, 1947, he had previously exhibited at the Venice Biennale and was well-regarded in artistic circles decades before joining the Party. However, his career was really made at the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen, where the Führer acquired at least one of his paintings every year.45 These purchases included Paladine des Pan (1942) [The Paladins of Pan], which sold for 15,000 Reichsmark (fig. 76). More successful than his fellow surrealists Edgar Ende and Franz Radziwill in ingratiating himself with the Nazi leadership (Steppes, too, was added to the “Führerliste” that exempted him from serving in the Volkssturm), his prominence in Hitler’s Germany was nonetheless contradictory. His dream-like landscapes populated by fabulous beasts strike us as out-of-step with the conventions of figurative idealism that dominated the Munich shows. Even though Steppes was served with a denazification fine of 1,000 essentially valueless old Reichsmark, the expert opinions solicited and considered by the tribunal were, uniquely in those consolidated in the Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, in disagreement about the artist’s degree of complicity with the regime. On the one hand, a Dr. Popp insisted that Steppes was already a well-established figure in the Munich art scene before he received his Party membership card: Well before the seizure of power, the defendant began showing his pictures in the Glaspalast exhibitions. The fact that Steppes also then allowed his works to be hung in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst is actually no proof that he supported any Party objectives or sought to benefit from this association. The manner of the defendant’s artistic activity can in no way be described as Nazi. Moreover, Steppes did not receive any commissions from the Party so there were no material advantages gained [by his membership].

In contradiction to this, Steppes’ son-in-law testified that his motives for participating in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen were purely economic: [he] had no choice but to exhibit his works in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst because it was only through this exhibition that an artist could be brought to

the attention of the public and promote the sale of his work. There is no indication of political motives playing a part in his professional activity.

The evaluation of Steppes solicited by the tribunal from the Kommission für Kulturschaffende in Munich may be far less generous concerning the artist’s character, but nonetheless confirmed that his behavior was motivated by financial gain: “the person concerned [in this proceeding] joined the Party in order to get the reins in his hand . . . . [H]e had always exhibited in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst and used his elbows to place himself at the forefront of the Nazis and thus earn a massive amount [of money].” A request from the tribunal that the Kommission send an expert witness to be questioned in person in connection with Steppes’ case was not honored for reasons not elucidated in the court documents, but which could have been the result of poor travel conditions or an understandable reluctance on the part of Kommission members to confront Steppes’ family members and supporters sitting in attendance. Apparently acting on his own initiative, the chairman of the tribunal decided to invalidate the sceptical evaluation of the Kommission while giving complete credence to the transparent rationalizations offered by his friendly witnesses: “since there is no evidence of political activity on behalf of the Party, and indeed, it being understood that the defendant joined the Party for idealistic reasons and afterwards demonstrated an aversion to the Party, therefore [Steppes] is to be placed in Group IV [followers].”46 A Bavarian painter, graphic artist, and book illustrator, Ernst Liebermann (1869–1960) produced realistic figurative paintings of female nudes that strongly resonated with Hitler and his confidant, Heinrich Hoffmann, the primary curator of objects for the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen. Purchased by the Führer at the 1941 Munich show for 4,000 Reichsmark, the painting Am Gestade [On the Shore] is particularly evocative of the kind of soft-core eroticism that is an important sub-genre of National Socialist court art in which athletic nudes with contemporary hairstyles strike mildly suggestive poses in vaguely classical landscapes. A Party member since 1933, Liebermann (not to be confused with Max Liebermann (1847–1935), the impressionist painter and former president of the Preußische Akademie who was marginalized because of his Jewish origins)

participated in every one of the eight Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen and was one of the highest earning artists in Nazi Germany. His income peaked in 1942 at 36,000 Reichsmark. In the final months of the war, Liebermann was added to the “Führerliste” of artists whose talents were deemed too valuable to risk in combat. In April 1948 he was, however, tried in a denazification tribunal, found to be a Mitläufer, and levied a fine of 2,000 virtually worthless pre-reform Reichsmark. One of the few defendants to speak out against the widely perceived hypocrisy of the denazification process was the sculptor Josef Röwer (1903–?), who was briefly a Party member (1943– 1945) and came before a Spruchkammer in 1946. A participant in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen from 1938 to 1944, Röwer was, at the time of the Nazi capitulation, bombed out of his Berlin studio and coping with the total loss of his life’s work. In the section of his Fragebogen under “Remarks,” Röwer confronted the inquisitorial nature of American cultural cleansing head on: “What would an American freelance artist say to these questions? What happened to the highly prized individual freedom that every American is so proud of?”47 In Bundeskanzler Konrad Adenauer’s first official address to the Bundestag on September 20, 1949, he spoke for his countrymen when he said: “Much unhappiness and much damage has been caused by denazification.” In 1951, at the conclusion of five years of German-administered denazification, the U.S. Military Government declared that the program had been nothing more than a “counterproductive witch hunt.” 48 Travelling far and wide across Germany during the war and in the first years of the occupation, Margaret Bourke-White, an American war correspondent, confided that she had “yet to find a German who will admit to being a Nazi.”49 With the Allied occupation winding down, the Korean War becoming an emergency, and West Germany re-arming and poised to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), there was no hope of reversing the judicial atrocities committed by the denazification tribunals whose actions were consistent with the lackadaisical approach to the prosecution of the exponentially more severe crimes associated with the Holocaust.50 Thus the arts bureaucracy in

postwar Germany was permitted to continue virtually unchanged from its fully mobilized Nazi-era incarnation.

Rehabilitation For artists who had joined the NSDAP, submitting to the authority and judgment of the denazification tribunals was only the first step in the process of rehabilitation. In order to resume their careers, they would first have to submit their work to postwar exhibition juries and in this way ascertain if there was still a place for them on the exhibition circuit and in the art market. For artists who had been persecuted by and whose careers suffered under the Nazis, the path to rehabilitation was, not unexpectedly, lined with thorns. Material evidence of persecution documented by “degenerate” artists in their Fragebögen, was, of course, very likely to be accepted at face value, but its effect was apt to be diluted when even self-acknowledged Party members felt emboldened, in their denazification affidavits, to justify their collaboration on the grounds of their own “victimization” by the regime. In a surprisingly high number of the 133 Fragebögen submitted by NS-Reichsbesitz artists who had joined the NSDAP (and thus were subject to appearing before tribunals), defendants insist that they had done so only after succumbing to irresistibly coercive peer pressure. Typical of such maneuvers, the painter Ferdinand Staeger (1880–1976), a Party member from 1938 onwards, nonetheless claimed that he was “in active opposition to the visual arts policy of the Gauleiter Adolf Wagner”—the replacement of the 1937 Münchener Kunstausstellung with the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung—and insisted that he openly expressed the view that “every hardworking Munich artist, regardless of the artistic movement he belonged to, deserved to exhibit his work in public.” Moreover, Staeger takes credit for resurrecting the annual Münchener Kunstausstellung in 1938, which then ran concurrently with the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen until 1943. Staeger is also careful to add, “my personal action [which benefited the local Munich artists who had been excluded from the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen] was completely contrary to the original intentions and arrangements of the Gauleiter.”51

Among the most senior members of the older generation of artists collected by Hitler, Albert Stagura (1866–1947) was frank about his purely economic motives for joining the Party in 1937. This was a tactic that, as we have seen, was calculated to win the sympathy of the tribunal: “my pictures were rejected from the [first] Haus der Deutschen Kunst exhibition [which] meant artistic and economic ruin, and the destruction of my very good name as an artist. So my application to become a Party member had only one objective: to rebuild my artistic reputation among my exceedingly large circle of admirers and artist colleagues.” Furthermore, even after he entered the brown fold, so to speak, he claims to have pushed the boundaries of cultural opposition to the regime by taking a leading role in organizing the Die Kunst für Alle exhibitions, where works rejected from the pre- and post-Nazi seizure of power Münchener Kunstausstellungen and the later Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen were displayed. In sharp contrast to the image of the dissident artist that Stagura portrays in his Fragebogen, he actually benefited from exhibiting works in all but one of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen (1938–1944), and his reported annual earnings peaked in 1942 at a very handsome 20,400 Reichsmark. Staeger was an even more dominating presence in the Munich art scene than Stagura, as his works were included in every one of the pre-1937 Münchener Kunstausstellungen (1930–1936), in all of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen (1937–1944), and in all but one of the post-1937 Münchener Kunstausstellungen (1938–1942).52 However implausible the rationalizations offered by defendants Staeger and Stagura may seem to a contemporary reader, the dynamics of the Spruchkammer were skewed toward leniency in their judgments of the accused, regardless of how deserving they were of admonition or punishment. This inclination toward exculpation was baked into the denazification program when the no doubt well-intended requirement was added that serving members of tribunals must be selected from among the neighbors and relatives of the defendants. Since people chosen to serve on tribunals were, of course, aware that they, too, might be required to appear before a Spruchkammer comprised of equally vulnerable or even previously vetted peers, they tended to be charitable in their judgments. In

addition, as Allied observers noted with concern, tribunal members were frequently subjected to harassment, including blatant death threats, from a skeptical local population. These factors combined to encourage defendants and judges alike to view themselves as scapegoats for an Allied-imposed denazifaction process that was all too easily derided as “victors’ justice,” whose design flaws and faulty execution led to the disproportionate punishment of countless small offenders, while the “big fish” escaped prosecution. In the context of a “collective guilt” mentality, the Allied pursuit of collaborators inevitably converted their quarry into martyrs before the German public. As compensation for such counterfeit atonement, nearly every artist subjected to denazification was treated with clemency. Even if so inclined, apart from levying fines in the debased but still legal tender of the Third Reich (which continued to circulate throughout the Allied zones of occupation until the currency reform of 1948), German-run denazification tribunals had no power to impose additional sanctions on collaborating artists, thereby avoiding the potentially embarrassing restriction of such artists’ postwar activity in a manner reminiscent of the ways in which certain “degenerate” artists had been professionally marginalized, if not completely silenced, during the Nazi dictatorship.

Degenerate Artists In contrast to collaborating artists, the toxicity affixed to many artists deemed “degenerate” by the Nazi regime lingered in the postwar period as no provision was made by the American occupiers for the public exoneration of artists who had been defamed and persecuted under Hitler. Again, unlike their collaborating peers, whose success in Hitler’s Germany was supported by a vast propaganda machine, “degenerate” artists who had been purged and subjected to bans on making and exhibiting works of art faced a postwar audience and art market whose taste and cultural preferences had been formed in National Socialism’s dreadful crucible of racial hatred and antimodernist bias. Neither an official apology nor financial restitution was forthcoming from the fledgling West German Federal Republic. No mechanism was established for judicial decontamination—no “de-degeneration” process—that paralleled the denazification tribunals, and so, after decades of attacks emanating, first, from conservatives like Schultze-Naumburg starting in the 1920s and then, later, from Nazi ideologues such as Rosenberg, Goebbels, and, of course, the Führer, the stench of scandal could not fail to cling to purged artists. Instead, “degenerate” artists had only one hitor-miss method of erasing the stains of Nazi persecution (which included allegations that they were Communists, traitors, perverts, or, at the very least, mentally ill), and the single vehicle of professional redemption open to them was showing their work in exhibition spaces formerly forbidden to them (to some “degenerate” artists but not to all), such as the freshly denazified Haus der Kunst, alongside their now rehabilitated former colleagues and rivals, the artist collaborators who had supplanted many of them after the definitive purge of July 1937 and usurped their teaching positions as well as their patrons and commissions.53 In 1949, as the first denazified Große Kunstausstellung to be held in the ideologically sanitized Haus der Kunst began accepting submissions from all German artists, both formerly “degenerate” artists and former collaborators as well as younger artists trained in Nazified institutions, for the first time since 1932. Artists in all three

categories confronted a theoretically level competitive playing field, but much had changed since 1932 when the last Münchener Kunstaustellung opened before the Nazi seizure of power. The most obvious of the transformations noticed by visitors to the first Große Kunstausstellung was the re-use and re-branding of familiar techniques and iconographies by participants on both sides of the aesthetic rupture that emerged during the Nazi culture wars and which continued and intensified with the Cold War division of Europe into Eastern and Western blocs. The omnipresent völkisch iconography symbolizing rebirth or palingenesis that had done service for the agendas of the right, left, and religious parties of the Weimar Republic, and then had been mobilized opportunistically by collaborating artists in the Third Reich (e.g., figures 42 and 51), was now resurrected and reinterpreted by rehabilitated artists—both former collaborators and the formerly persecuted—as heralds of the two new German societies that were coming into being, the West German liberal democracy, which embraced avantgarde modernism and its legacy, and the East German Communist dictatorship, which imposed the new orthodoxy of Soviet Socialist Realism. It was thus in the legitimizing postwar recycling of völkisch and National Socialist iconography into images appropriate for democratic West Germany, and the rebranding of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen into the Große Kunstausstellungen, that the reintegration of both persecuted modernist artists and their collaborating rivals into the West German art scene occurred in what was essentially a reconstitution of the pre-1937 Münchener Kunstausstellungen. This led to the remarkable side-by-side exhibition of works produced by artists identified with radically differing sensibilities, politics, and experiences during the Third Reich—those who fled as refugees or entered internal exile as well as those who sought and benefited from the regime’s patronage. It was also in the context of the new Große Kunstausstellungen in the Haus der Kunst that many important post-Nazi reputations were made, including those of Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Anselm Kiefer, and Gerhard Richter. The denazified Große Kunstausstellungen thus functioned as a memory-burdened stage for the simultaneous display, throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and

1970s, of the work of the rising generation of artists alongside the work of surviving “degenerate” as well as artists who had collaborated with the Nazi regime. Moreover, it was the Haus der Kunst juries, made up of artists in the two latter groups, reunited for the first time since 1936, which selected the participants for each Große Kunstausstellung and thus demonstrated how the reconstituted pre-Machtergreifung status quo decisively influenced the development of German art in the 1950s and beyond. With the discovery of the Fragebögen and denazification files of the 619 artists whose works were collected by the Führer and later confiscated by American property control officers, it is now possible to reconstruct the process by which the guilt and shame of cultural collaboration were expunged through a special process of judicial decontamination. Of this group, 133 admitted Party members testified before German denazification tribunals. 27 artists were, on the basis of their personal testimony or witness statements, deemed “entlastet” [relieved of guilt] or deemed “nicht betroffen” [not involved], while an additional 25 were acquitted of any crimes, however nominal, by means of Christmas amnesties, which were issued periodically to lighten the caseloads facing the denazification courts by simply dropping all charges against defendants whose cases were pending. A handful of lucky ones were fully exonerated for reasons not specified in surviving court documents. In the end, less than 10% of the cases assigned to Spruchkammer were actually brought to trial. Denazification certificates came to be known as “Persilscheine,” invoking a popular brand of detergent, and tribunals were derided as “Mitläufer [follower] factories.” In all of the American Zone, “Germanized denazification rapidly descended into a farce.”54 Once denazified, despite intensive efforts at reorienting German cultural institutions along American capitalist and Western European democratic socialist lines, German artists who had been active during the Third Reich resumed their nostalgic march away from contemporary trends and once again embraced a native tradition with romantic and völkisch roots that was defiantly representational rather than abstract. Overwhelmingly, these artists continued to focus their energies on evoking regional landscapes and sentimental scenes of rural occupations and physiognomies that were little

different from the eugenically utopian depictions of the German Volk associated with the era of Nazi collaboration.

1 Norman Davies, No Simple Victory: First World War II in Europe, 1939–1945

(New York: Viking, 2006), 108, 377–378. 2

Of these 8 million Party members 1.5 million were considered “hardcore” Nazis based on their having joined the NSDAP before January 1933. See Frederick Taylor, Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 227, 255. See also Mazower, op. cit., 239. 3 Taylor, op. cit., 268. For statistics on Fragebögen, see Perry Biddiscombe, The Denazification of Germany, 1945–1950 (Stroud: Tempus Publishing, 2006), 61. 4 Taylor, ibid., 201, 205, 220. 5 Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 366. 6 Following the earlier liberation of camps in Poland by the Red Army, the U.S. Army made its own discovery of German atrocities with the liberation of Dachau and other German camps in the Spring of 1945. 7 Taylor, ibid., 266–267. 8 To put fines denominated in “old” Reichsmark into perspective, Taylor observes that “the value of the old Reichsmark soon fell so low that hundreds or thousands were required to purchase everyday items” (ibid., 199). 9 The most authoritative discussion of Breker’s career is found in Jonathan Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford UP, 2000), 215–271. 10 William Vaughn, ed. Caspar David Friedrich, 1774–1840: Romantic Landscape Painting in Dresden—Catalogue of an Exhibition Held at the Tate Gallery, London, 6 September–16 October 1972 (London: Tate Gallery, 1972). 11 Exceptions to the sequestration of the German War Art Collection were the exhibitions Kunst und Propaganda im Streit der Nationen at

the Deutsches Historisches Museum in 2007 and Kunst i Kamp at KODE in Bergen, 2015–2016. 12 See Martin Papenbrock and Gabriele Saure, eds. Kunst des frühen 20.

Jahrhunderts in deutschen Ausstellungen. Teil I: Ausstellungen deutschen Gegenwartkunst in der NS-Zeit. Eine kommentierte Bibliographie. (Weimar: VDG, 2000). 13

Haus der Kunst, Historisches Archiv. See Ines Schlenker, Hitler’s Salon: The Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich, 1937– 1944 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007) and Robert S. Wistrich, Weekend in Munich: Art, Propaganda and Terror in the Third Reich (London: Pavilion Books, 1996) and Sabine Brantl, Haus der Kunst, München: Ein Ort und seine Geschichte in Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Allitera Verlag, 2015). 15 The Yalta Agreement set the stage for the criminalization of cultural activity under the Nazis with its insistence on the removal of “all Nazi and militarist influences from public office and from the cultural and economic life of the German people.” 16 Quoted in Stargardt, op. cit., 410. 17 Haus der Kunst, Historisches Archiv, Künstlerkarten. 18 Haus der Kunst, Historisches Archiv, Depotbuch der Bilder. 19 See James van Dyke, Franz Radziwill and the Contradictions of German Art History, 1919–45 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 2011. 20 “Canonical” here describes artists whose careers bookended the twelve-year duration of the Nazi dictatorship and were not sullied in future years by their association with regime patronage. This group of artists includes Rudolf Belling, Lothar-Günther Buchheim, Oskar Coester, Willi Geiger, Werner Gilles, Erich Glette, Erwin Henning, Tom Hops, Fritz Koelle, Leo von König, Georg Kolbe, Anton Leidl, Rudolf Nerlinger, Paul Mathias Padua, Wolf Panizza, Oswald Poetzelberger, Karl Theodor Protzen, Clara Rilke-Westhof, Rudolf Schlichter, Georg Schrimpf, Ernst Schumacher, Carl Schwalbach, and Max Unold. 21 See Alan E. Steinweis, Art, Ideology and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual 14

Arts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 133– 139. 22 Thomas Nevin, Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914– 1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 141. 23 See Peter Ross Range, 1924: The Year That Made Hitler (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2016), 12: “The word has been rendered as popular, populist, people’s, racial, racist, ethnicchauvinist, nationalistic, communitarian (for Germans only), conservative, traditional, Nordic, romantic—and it means, in fact, all of those.” Quoted in Thomas Weber, Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 117. 24 Abteilung V, BHSA. 25 Whether such restrictions were officially imposed on the artist remains a contested matter in Nolde scholarship. 26 Among the most prominent artist victims of Nazi persecution, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner committed suicide and Felix Nussbaum was murdered in Auschwitz. 27 Quoted in Taylor, op. cit., 253. 28 One such claim was submitted by Albert Speer from his cell in Nuremberg for the portrait bust of himself that was commissioned from Arno Breker and was held in the depot of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, Historisches Archiv, HdDK 53. 29 Stargardt, op. cit., 517. 30 Stargardt, ibid., 567. 31 Quoted in Taylor, op. cit., 270. 32 HdDK 42/BHSA and Haus der Kunst, Historisches Archiv, Depotbuch der Bilder. 33 HdDK 42/BHSA. 34 HdDK 39/BHSA. 35 Regarding Germans who helped Jews or those who got into trouble for opposing Nazi racial legislation, Stargardt explains: “Each of these helpers would have had different—and probably confused— motives, ranging from anti-Nazi sympathies and humanitarian compassion to the search for a useful excuse” for membership in the Party as well as the SS and SA (op. cit., 516).

36

HdDK 39/BHSA. 37 Klee, op. cit., 527. 38 HdDK 41/BHSA. 39 HdDK 40/BHSA. 40 HdDK 40/BHSA. 41 Arno Breker, Hermann Gradl, Sepp Hilz, Arthur Kampf, Fritz Klimsch, Georg Kolbe, Willy Kriegel, Werner Peiner, and Josef Thorak were on the original “Gottbegnadeten-Liste.” Other artists deemed to be “Künstler im Kriegseinsatz” [artists serving the war effort] were added to the “Führerliste,” including Karl Albiker, Claus Bergen, Ludwig Dettmann, Erich Erler, Fritz von Graevenitz, Richard Klein, Fritz Mackensen, Alfred Mahlau, Richard Scheibe, Franz Stassen, and Joseph Wackerle. 42 A total of 64 “degenerate” artists who participated in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen are included in the NS-Reichsbesitz. 43 HdDK 39/BHSA. 44 For background on Steppes, see Andreas Zoller, Der Landschaftsmaler

Edmund Steppes (1873–1968) und seine Vision einer „deutschen Malerei“ (Grafenau: Mosaik Verlag, 2000). Concerning Paladine des Pan, which stood out as a “curiosity” at the 1942 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung, see Christoph Dieckmann, “Das grüne Gral,” Die Zeit (1. Dezember 2011, nr. 49/2011, online edition): “Chamois and squirrel eye each other with racial-hygienic intent. Is this not a little degenerate? Dalí for brown shirts.” 45

HdDK 42/BHSA. 46 HdDK 42/BHSA. 47 HdDK 41/BHSA. 48 Quoted in Taylor, op. cit., 351–352. 49 Quoted in Taylor, ibid., 374. 50 Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 48: Konrad Adenauer, the West German Chancellor, insisted that the price for rearming in defense of the West was the absolution of the German military of any lingering war guilt: “there has been no breach in the honor of the former German Wehrmacht . . . . The age of collective guilt is now at an end.” 51 HdDK 42/BHSA.

52

HdDK 42/BHSA. 53 Concerning the rehabilitation of “degenerate” artists, distinctions must be made between a figure like Erich Heckel, who was instantly restored to his canonical niche by participating in the postwar Große Kunstausstellungen, and his contemporary Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, whose posthumous rehabilitation occurred somewhat later, at the documenta (1955), documenta II (1959), and documenta III (1964). 54 Taylor, op. cit., 284.

Bibliography I. Interviews Hazel Caine Corte-Real, Cascais, Portugal. Gordon W. Gilkey. Portland, Oregon. Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Princeton, New Jersey. Lynn H. Nicholas, Washington, D.C. Craig Hugh Smyth, Cresskill, New Jersey. Imogen Stuart, Sandymount, Republic of Ireland. Gerhard L. Weinberg, New York City and Efland, North Carolina. G. William Whitehurst, Norfolk, Virginia. Mitchell Wolfson, Jr., Miami Beach, Genoa, Berlin, and New York City.

II. Archives and Museum Depots Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv (BHSA), Munich. Bayerisches Armee Museum, Ingolstadt. Bundesvermögensamt, Berlin. Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin and Spandau. Historisches Archiv, Haus der Kunst, Munich. National Archives, College Park, Maryland. Gallery Archives, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Photographic Archives, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. New York Public Library. Private Papers of Gordon W. Gilkey, Portland, Oregon. U.S. Army Center of Military History, Washington, D.C. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C. The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach.

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Figures

Fig. 1. Ivo Saliger (1894–1987), Doppelakt [Double Nude] (c. 1940). Oil on canvas, 132.1 x 154.9 cm. Published with the permission of The Wolfsonian–Florida International University (Miami, Florida), The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection (TD1990.282.1). Photo by Bruce White.

Fig. 2. Photograph of the interior of the Historisches Archiv, Haus der Kunst, Munich. Photo of the author.

Fig. 3. Photograph of the basement of the Haus der Kunst where works of art were stored during and after the war. Photo of the author.

Fig. 4. Photograph of Carl/Karl Busch’s Künstlerkarte, Haus der Kunst, Historisches Archiv, HdDK 53. Photo of the author.

Fig. 5. Carl/Karl Busch (1905–1973), Flüchtlinge in Russland [Refugees in Russia] (1942/44). Oil on canvas, 74.5 x 100 cm. German War Art Collection (Gm 2005/91), Deutsches Histo-

risches Museum, Berlin. Fig. 6. Carl/Karl Busch (1905–1973), Spähtrupp I (mit Tod) [Reconnaissance Patrol I (with Death)] (1943). Oil on paper, 48.25 x 68.60 cm. German War Art Collection (Gr 2006/255.11), Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin.

Fig. 7. Carl/Karl Busch (1905–1973), Kartoffelernte [Potato Harvest] (1934/35). Oil on fiberboard, 74 x 100 cm. Photo and reproductions rights courtesy of Galerie Ostendorff, Münster.

Fig. 8. Photograph of Captain Gordon W. Gilkey (1912–2000), U.S.A.A., Chief of the German Wartime Art Project (1945). Collection of the author.

Fig. 9. Kunst der Front [Rijksmuseum exhibition, Art of the Front] (1943). Ink on paper, 86.4 x 61 cm. Published with the permission of The Wolfsonian–Florida International University (Miami, Florida), The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection (TD1995.31.4).

Fig. 10. Photograph of Adolf Hitler attending the Kunst der Front exhibition, in Berlin, January 1945. Standing beside the Führer is Hauptmann Luitpold Adam, Chief of the Staffel der Bildenden Künstler. Collection of the author.

Fig. 11. Photograph of Captain Gordon W. Gilkey, General Joseph T. McNarney (center), U.S.A.A., Military Governor and head of U.S. Forces European Theater (1945–47), and Colonel H.E. Potter, Chief of the Historical Division, USFET (1946). They are viewing Emil Scheibe’s Hitler at the Front (see fig. 12) in Gilkey’s exhibition, A Selection of German War Art: The Wehrmacht on all Fronts, 1939– 1945. For all Americans and Allied Personnel, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, 7 thru 15 December 1946. Headquarters, U.S. Forces, European Theater, Historical Division. Collection of the author.

Fig. 12. Emil Scheibe (1914–2008), Hitler at the Front (1943). Oil on canvas, 204.5 x 285.1 cm. German War Art Collection, Army Art Collection (G.O.1.6104.47), U.S. Army Center of Military History, Fort Belvoir, Virginia. (© 2018 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photo: akg-images / © Emil Scheibe / DACS.) Fig. 13. Hans Schmitz-Wiedenbrück (1907–1944), Arbeiter, Bauern und Soldaten [Workers, Farmers, and Soldiers] (1941). Central panel of the triptych. Oil on canvas, 210 x 251 cm. German War Art Collection (G.O.6462.47), Army Art Collection, U.S. Army Center of Military History, Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Photo and reproduction rights courtesy of Stiebner Verlag.

Fig. 14. Anton/Adolf Lamprecht (1901–1984), Leutnant Matl [Portrait of Lieutenant Matl] (1944). Mixed media on paper, 86.9 x 66.2 cm. German War Art Collection (Gr 2006/205.4), Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. Photo published in the catalogue of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung 1944 (Munich: Verlag Knorr & Hirth, 1944). Photo and reproduction rights courtesy of Stiebner Verlag.

Fig. 15. Central Collecting Point Registration photo of Conrad Hommel’s Porträt des Führers (accessioned to the German War Art Collection, Army Art Collection, U.S. Army Center of Military History, Fort Belvoir, Virginia), Munich, Spring 1945. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gallery Archives. Craig Hugh Smyth Papers. 28MFAA-G7_14417_008.

Fig. 16. Helga Tiemann (1917–2008), Abschied [Farewell] (1944). Pastel and chalk on paper, 75.4 x 93.8 cm. German War Art Collection (Gr 2006/279), Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. Photo by S. Ahlers. (© 2018 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.)

Fig. 17. Letter from Max Dirrigl, Chief of the Abwicklungsstelle in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, to Helga Tiemann, July 24, 1946. Haus der Kunst, Historisches Archiv, HdDK 53. Photo of the author.

Fig. 18. Eduard Schloemann (1888–1940), [Untitled] (c.1925). Confiscated and destroyed in 1937. Photo courtesy of Hazel Caine Corte-Real, Cascais, Portugal.

Fig. 19. Eduard Schloemann (1888–1940), Schiffs-Konvoi im Mittelmeer [Naval Convoy in the Mediterranean Sea] (1943). Oil on canvas, 65.5 x 81 cm. German War Art Collection (Gm 2005/254), Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin.

Fig. 20. Photograph of Staffel der Bildenden Künstler artist, Eduard Schloemann (1888–1940), in Kriegsmarine uniform (1940). Courtesy of Hazel Caine CorteReal, Cascais, Portugal.

Fig. 21. Photograph of exterior, Bundesamt für Strahlenschutz, former depot of the German War Art Collection, Berlin-Karlshorst. Photo of the author.

Fig. 22. Photograph of interior, Bundesamt für Strahlenschutz, former depot of the German War Art Collection, Berlin-Karlshorst. Photo of the author.

Fig. 23. Albrecht Kettler (1898–1975) Organisation Todt [The Fritz Todt Organization] (c. 1943). Oil on canvas, 198 x 180.85 cm. German War Art Collection, Army Art Collection (G.O.1.3814.47), U.S. Army Center of Military History, Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Photo and reproduction rights courtesy of Stiebner Verlag.

Fig. 24. Ulrich Ertl (dates unknown), Finnisches Mädchen [Finnish Girl] (1941). Oil on canvas, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Photo published in Die Kunst für Alle (Heft 11, August 1941). Photo and reproduction rights courtesy of Stiebner Verlag.

Fig. 25. Ulrich Ertl (dates unknown), Polarlandschaft mit Drahtsperren [Polar Landscape with Barbed Wire] (1944). Watercolor on paper, 50.15 x 64.75 cm. German War Art Collection (Gr 2005/145.10), Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin.

Fig. 26. Walter Hensellek (dates unknown), Abwehr [Defensive Action] (1943/44). Gouache on paper, 50.15 x 64 cm. German War Art Collection (Gr 2006/221.25), Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin.

Fig. 27. Fritz Junghans (1909–1973), Sonnenuntergang an der Duhna [Sunset on the River Duhna] (1943). Watercolor on paper, 45 x 58.5 cm. German War Art Collection (Gr 2006/43.23), Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin.

Fig. 28. Max Hermann Mahlmann (1912–2000), Landser [Infantryman] (c. 1943). Oil on canvas, 60.7 x 48.7 cm. German War Art Collection (Gr 2006/47.2), Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. (© 2018 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.)

Fig. 29. Rudolf Hengstenberg (1894–1974), Panzer nähern sich durch ein Kornfeld [Tanks Approach Through a Field of Wheat] (1943). Watercolor on paper, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Photo and reproduction rights courtesy of the Rudolf-Hengstenberg-Gesellschaft, Bremen.

Fig. 30. Otto Meister (1887–1969), Der Olymp in Regen [Mount Olympus in the Rain] (1943). Watercolor on paper, 47 x 61.7 cm. German War Art Collection (Gr 2006/57.16), Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin.

Fig. 31. Gottfried Meyer (1911– ?), [Untitled] (1943). Watercolor on paper, 15.4 x 38.6 cm. German War Art Collection (Gr 2006/58.9), Deutsches Historisches

Museum, Berlin. Photo by I. Desnica.

Fig. 32. Gottfried Meyer (1911– ?), Figurengruppe [Group of Figures] (1943). Blue ink on paper, 11.3 x 21 cm. With catalogue number, Gilkey’s initials, and labeling as by Meyer in Gilkey’s handwriting. German War Art Collection (Gr 2006/58.21), Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin.

Fig. 33. Berthold Rothmaier (dates unknown), Nächtliche Landschaft mit Flakscheinwerfern, die ein Flugzeug fokussieren [Night Landscape with AntiAircraft Searchlights Focusing on an Airplane] (1943). Watercolor and gouache on paper, 44.45 x 39.35 cm. German War Art Collection (Gr 2006/171.1), Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. Photo by S. Ahlers.

Fig. 34. Walter Schmock (dates unknown), Im Waggon [In a Railcar] (1943). Gouache on paper, 36.8 x 44.8 cm. German War Art Collection (Gr 2006/152.54), Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin.

Fig. 35. Hugo Troendle (1882–1955), Alushta, Krim [Alushta, Crimea] (1942). Watercolor and colored chalk on paper, 43.1 x 48.5 cm. German War Art Collection (Gr 2006/122.19), Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin.

Fig. 36. Emil Rizek (1901–1988), Finne mit Schlitten [Finnish Soldier with a Sleigh] (1943). Gouache on paper, 42.5 x 30 cm. German War Art Collection (Gr 2006/177.20), Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin.

Fig. 37. Ernst Widmann (dates unknown), Karst zwischen Trient und Fiume [Karst Landscape Between Trent and Fiume] (1943). Gouache on paper, 29.5 x 42 cm. German War Art Collection (Gr 2006/106.128), Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin.

Fig. 38. Heinrich von Schrötter (dates known), Soldaten der Infantrie auf den Marsch durch einen Wald [Infantry Marching Through a Forest] (1944). Charcoal on paper, 44.8 x 36.8 cm. German War Art Collection (Gr 2006/147.3), Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin.

Fig. 39. Wolfgang Willrich (1897–1948), Tundra in der Dämmerung [Tundra in the Twilight] (1943/45). Watercolor on paper, 30 x 40 cm. German War Art Collection (Gr 2006/111.18), Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. Photo by I. Desnica.

Fig. 40. Johann Schult (1899–?) Aktbild einer jungen Tänzerin [Nude Portrait of a Young Dancer] (GDK 1941). Oil on canvas, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Purchased by Martin Bormann for 10,000 Reichsmark. Photo published in Kunst dem Volk (August 1941). Reproduction rights courtesy of the Freistaat Bayern.

Fig. 41. Toni Stadler (1888–1982), Mädchenfigur [Figure of a Girl] (1932). Pink and yellow cement, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Photo published in Peter Breuer, Münchner Künstlerköpfe (Munich: Verlag Callwey, 1937). Reproduction rights courtesy of Georg D.W. Callwey GmbH & Co.

Fig. 42. Oskar Martin-Amorbach (1897–1987), Im Tagewerk [In the Daylight Hours] (GDK 1941). Oil on wood panel, 110 x 205 cm. Purchased by Adolf Hitler for 5,500 Reichsmark. NS-Reichsbesitz (Gm 98/361), Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. Photo by A. Psille.

Fig. 43. Werner Paul Schmidt (1888–1964), Erntezeit [Harvest Time] (1935). Oil on canvas, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Photo published in Die Kunst für Alle (Heft 11, August 1936). Photo and reproduction rights courtesy of Stiebner Verlag. (© 2018 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.)

Fig. 44. Photograph of Adolf Hitler and the official carrier of the „Blutfahne,” Jakob Grimminger (1892–1969), performing the „Blutfahne” [Blood flag] ceremony, Nuremberg, Reich Party Rally, September 3, 1933. 34.4 x 25.3 cm. Photo: akgimages.

Fig. 45. Adolf Wissel (1894–1973), Jungbäuerinnen [Young Peasant Women] (1937). Oil on canvas, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Photo published in the catalogue of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung 1937 (Munich: Verlag Knorr & Hirth, 1937). Photo and reproduction rights courtesy of Stiebner Verlag.

Fig. 46. Photograph of the „Richtfest” [Topping-Out Ceremony], Haus der Deutschen Kunst, June 29, 1935, Munich. Heinrich Hoffmann (German, 1885– 1957), photographer. Gelatin silver print, 23.8 x 18.1 cm. Published with the permission of The Wolfsonian–Florida International University (Miami, Florida), The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection (TD1991.218.10). Photo by Lynton Gardiner.

Fig. 47. Photograph of the „Richtfest,” Haus der Deutschen Kunst, June 29, 1935, Munich. From left to right: Albert Speer, Gerdy Troost, Adolf Hitler, and honorary curator, August von Finck, in the unfinished interior. Heinrich Hoffmann (German, 1885–1957), photographer. Gelatin silver print, 18.1 x 23.8 cm. Published with the permission of The Wolfsonian–Florida International University (Miami, Florida), The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection (TD1991.218.32). Photo by Lynton Gardiner.

Fig. 48. Oskar Martin-Amorbach (1897–1987), Madonna mit Kind [Madonna with Child] (c. 1932). Egg tempera on wood panel, 66 x 52 cm. Inventory number 502. © Städtische Galerie Rosenheim. Photo by Martin Weiand.

Fig 49. Richard Felgenhauer (1895–1958), Vision (c. 1940). Oil on board, 81.3 x 86.4 cm. Published with the permission of The Wolfsonian–Florida International University (Miami, Florida), The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection (XX1989.34). Photo by Lynton Gardiner.

Fig. 50. Richard Heymann (1900–1973), Des Volkes Lebensquell [Life Source of the People] (GDK 1942). Oil on canvas, 150 x 113 cm. Purchased by Adolf Hitler for 10,000 Reichsmark. NS-Reichsbesitz (Gm 98/224), Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. Photo by A. Psille.

Fig. 51. Karl Mader (1884–1952) Mutter in Ährenfeld [Mother in a Ripe Field of Wheat] (c. 1941). Oil on canvas, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Photo published in Kunst dem Volk (Juni 1941). Reproduction rights courtesy of the Freistaat Bayern.

Fig. 52. Hans Spiegel (1894–1966), Kameraden [Comrades] (1937). Oil on canvas, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Photo published in the catalogue of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung 1937 (Munich: Verlag Knorr & Hirth, 1937). Photo and reproduction rights courtesy of Stiebner Verlag.

Fig. 53. Eugen Kerschkamp (1880–1945), Flucht nach Ägypten [Escape into Egypt] (c. 1936). Oil on canvas, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Photo published in Die Kunst für Alle (Heft 1, Oktober 1936). Photo and reproduction rights courtesy of Stiebner Verlag.

Fig. 54. Gustav Klimt (1862–1918), Musik II [Music II] (1898). Oil on canvas, dimensions unknown. Destroyed in 1945. Photo published in Gustav Klimt. Ausstellung 7. Februar bis 7. März 1943, Ausstellungshaus, Friedrichstraße, Ehemalige Secession, ed. Fritz Novotny and the Reichsstatthalter [Baldur von Schirach] (Vienna: Chwala, 1943). Photo and reproduction rights courtesy of the Künstlerhaus, Vienna.

Fig. 55. Gerth Biese, (1901–1980) Freundinnen [Girlfriends] (c. 1942). Oil on canvas, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Photo published in the catalogue of Junge Kunst im Deutschen Reich im Auftrag des Reichsstatthalters & Reichsleiters Baldur von Schirach. Ausstellung Februar–März 1943 im Künstlerhaus Wien, ed. Wilhelm Rüdiger, (Vienna: Ehrlich & Schmidt, 1943). Photo and reproduction rights courtesy of the Künstlerhaus, Vienna.

Fig. 56. Fritz Burmann (1892–1945), Abend in Moordorf [Evening in a Village on the Moor] (c. 1942). Oil on canvas, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Photo published in the catalogue of Junge Kunst im Deutschen Reich im Auftrag des Reichsstatthalters & Reichsleiters Baldur von Schirach. Ausstellung Februar–März 1943 im Künstlerhaus Wien, ed. Wilhelm Rüdiger (Vienna: Ehrlich & Schmidt, 1943). Photo and reproduction rights courtesy of the Künstlerhaus, Vienna.

Fig. 57. Fritz Burmann (1892–1945), Blick aufs Meer [View of the Sea] (1938). Tempera on canvas, 118.5 x 148.5 cm. Purchased by Adolf Hitler at the GDK 1939 for 1,800 Reichsmark. NS-Reichsbesitz (Gm 98/113), Deutsches Historisches Museum. Photo published in Die Kunst für Alle (Heft 2, November 1939). Photo and reproduction rights courtesy of Stiebner Verlag.

Fig. 58. Ferdinand Lammeyer (1899–1995), Moor im Böhmerwald [Moor in the Bohemian Forest] (c. 1942). Tempera on canvas, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Photo published in the catalogue of Junge Kunst im Deutschen Reich im Auftrag des Reichsstatthalters & Reichsleiters Baldur von Schirach. Ausstellung Februar–März 1943 im Künstlerhaus Wien, ed. Wilhelm Rüdiger (Vienna: Ehrlich & Schmidt, 1943). Photo and reproduction rights courtesy of the Künstlerhaus, Vienna.

Fig. 59. Erich Glette (1896–1980), Porträt meiner Tochter [Portrait of my Daughter] (c. 1942). Oil on canvas, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Photo published in the catalogue of Junge Kunst im Deutschen Reich im Auftrag des Reichsstatthalters & Reichsleiters Baldur von Schirach. Ausstellung Februar–März 1943. Im Künstlerhaus Wien, ed. Wilhelm Rüdiger (Vienna: Ehrlich & Schmidt, 1943). Photo and reproduction rights courtesy of the Künstlerhaus, Vienna.

Fig. 60. Josef Hegenbarth (1884–1962), Hund [Dog] (c. 1942). Watercolor on paper, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Photo published in the catalogue of Junge Kunst im Deutschen Reich im Auftrag des Reichsstatthalters & Reichsleiters Baldur von Schirach. Ausstellung Februar–März 1943 im Künstlerhaus Wien, ed. Wilhelm Rüdiger (Vienna: Ehrlich & Schmidt, 1943). Photo and reproduction rights courtesy of the Künstlerhaus, Vienna. (© 2018 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.)

Fig. 61. Paul Mathias Padua (1903–1981), Blumenstand [Flower Stall] (c. 1942). Oil on canvas, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Photo published in the catalogue of Junge Kunst im Deutschen Reich im Auftrag des Reichsstatthalters & Reichsleiters Baldur von Schirach. Ausstellung Februar–März 1943 im Künstlerhaus Wien, ed. Wilhelm Rüdiger (Vienna: Ehrlich & Schmidt, 1943). Photo and reproduction rights courtesy of the Künstlerhaus, Vienna.

Fig. 62. Paul Mathias Padua (1903–1981), Der 10. Mai 1940 [The 10th of May, 1940] (c. 1941). Oil on canvas, 110 x 70 cm. Whereabouts unknown. Photo published in the catalogue of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung 1941 (Munich: Verlag Knorr & Hirth, 1941). Photo and reproduction rights courtesy of Stiebner Verlag.

Fig. 63. Hans Wimmer (1907–1992), Mussolinibüste [Bust of Mussolini] (1942). Bronze, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Photo published in the catalogue of Junge Kunst im Deutschen Reich im Auftrag des Reichsstatthalters & Reichsleiters Baldur von Schirach. Ausstellung Februar–März 1943 im Künstlerhaus Wien, ed. Wilhelm Rüdiger (Vienna: Ehrlich & Schmidt, 1943). Photo and reproduction rights courtesy of the Künstlerhaus, Vienna.

Fig. 64. Edgar Ende (1901–1965), Die Märchenerzählerin [Teller of Fairytales] (1936). Oil on canvas, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Photo published in Peter Breuer, Münchner Künstlerköpfe (Munich: Verlag Callwey, 1937). Reproduction rights courtesy of Georg D.W. Callwey GmbH & Co. (© 2018 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.)

Fig. 65. Ludwig Peter Kowalski (1891–1967), Ochsengespann [Team of Oxen] (c. 1935). Oil on canvas, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Photo published in Peter Breuer, Münchner Künstlerköpfe (Munich: Verlag Callwey, 1937). Reproduction rights courtesy of Georg D.W. Callwey GmbH & Co.

Fig. 66. Georg Schrimpf (1889–1938), Mädchen mit Hund [Girls with a Dog] (c. 1936). Oil on canvas, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Photo published in Peter Breuer, Münchner Künstlerköpfe (Munich: Verlag Callwey, 1937). Reproduction rights courtesy of Georg D.W. Callwey GmbH & Co.

Fig. 67. Photograph of the journalist and art critic, Bruno E. Werner (1896–1964). Courtesy of Imogen Stuart, Sandymount, Ireland.

Fig. 68. Renée Sintenis (1888–1965), Fohlen [Foal] (1939). Bronze, dimensions and whereabouts known. Photo published in Bruno E. Werner, Deutsche Plastik der Gegenwart (Berlin: Rembrandt Verlag, 1940). Reproduction rights courtesy of Imogen Stuart. (© 2018 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.)

Fig. 69. Otto Geigenberger (1881–1946), Bei Brügge [Near Bruges] (c. 1938). Oil on canvas, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Photo published in Die Kunst für Alle (Heft 2, November 1938). Photo and reproduction rights courtesy of Stiebner Verlag.

Fig. 70. Ernst Huber (1895–1960), Dorf im Mühlenviertel [Village in the Windmill Region] (c. 1938). Oil on canvas, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Photo published in Die Kunst für Alle (Heft 1, Oktober 1938). Photo and reproduction rights courtesy of Stiebner Verlag.

Fig. 71. Milly Steger (1881–1948), Singendes Mädchen [Singing Girl] (c. 1933). Bronze, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Photo published in Die Kunst für Alle (Heft 1, Oktober 1934). Photo and reproduction rights courtesy of Stiebner Verlag.

Fig. 72. Erich Heckel (1883–1970), Pflüger [Plowman] (c. 1930). Oil on canvas, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. Photo published in the catalogue of the Deutsche Kunstausstellung München in Glaspalast 1930 (Munich: Verlag Knorr & Hirth, 1930). Photo and reproduction rights courtesy of Stiebner Verlag. (© 2018 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.)

Fig. 73. Franz Radziwill (1895–1983), Stilleben mit Pfeife [Still Life with a Pipe] (c. 1933). Confiscated and destroyed in 1937. Photo published in Die Kunst für Alle (Heft 7, April 1933). Photo and reproduction rights courtesy of Stiebner Verlag. (© 2018 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.)

Fig. 74. Emil Nolde (1867–1956), Pferd und Fohlen in Landschaft [Horse and Foal in the Landscape] (1916). Oil on canvas, 74 x 113 cm. Photo published in Die Kunst für Alle (Heft 9, Juni 1934). Photo and reproduction rights courtesy of Stiebner Verlag. (© 2018 Stiftung Ada und Emil Nolde, Seebüll.)

Fig. 75. Christian Schad (1894–1982), Kind im Gras [Child in the Grass] (1930). Oil on canvas. Private owner. (© 2018 Christian Schad Stiftung Aschaffenburg / Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.)

Fig. 76. Edmund Steppes (1873–1968), Paladine des Pan [Paladins of Pan] (GDK 1942). Tempera on fiberboard, 120 x 100 cm. Purchased by Adolf Hitler for 15,000 Reichsmark. NS-Reichsbesitz (Gm 98/558), Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. Photo by S. Ahlers. (© 2018 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.)

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Cover picture: Hubert Lanzinger (1880–1950), Führerbildnis/Der Schirmherr der Deutschen Kunst/Der Bannerträger [Portrait of the Führer/The Patron of German Art/The Flag Bearer] (1936/GDK37). Oil on wood panel, damaged, 153.5 x 153.5 cm. German War Art Collection, Army Art Collection (G.O.1.4247.47), U.S. Army Center of Military History, Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Photo by Pablo Jimenez-Reyes. Reproduction rights courtesy of Stiebner Verlag. Reprinted with kind permission. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.

ISBN-13: 978-3-8382-7281-8 © ibidem-Verlag

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