Goebbels could always count on Hitler’s absolute abhorrence of Expressionism, Cubism, Dadaism, in fact, anything that smacked of modernism. “The artist Hitler,” as he was frequently described in the Nazi press, preferred nineteenth-century realism, especially pastoral landscapes, bucolic scenes of peasant life, nursing mothers, sturdy bare-breasted peasant women, and square-jawed men. These paintings were aesthetically banal, trending into kitsch, but that was not the standard by which the Nazis judged them. They were powerful ideological expressions of the National Socialist “Blood and Soil” ethos, subtly blurring the line between the overtly political and the artistic. While in painting Hitler favored the quotidian, in sculpture, as in architecture, his taste ran to the monumental, preferring Arno Breker and Josef Thorak, who carved colossal supermen that guarded the many mammoth structures created by Hitler’s favorite architects, Paul Ludwig Troost and Albert Speer. Needless to say, the Bauhaus, the center of modernist architecture and design, closed in 1933 under pressure from the regime.
The climax of the campaign against “cultural bolshevism” came in the form of a major exhibition Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) that opened in Munich in July 1937. Six hundred fifty paintings and sculptures, all forbidden since 1933, were hauled from the storage vaults of German museums and collected for the show—Klee, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Chagall, Cézanne, van Gogh, and the usual German suspects were all there. The exhibit was mounted in a gallery on the Hofgarten arcade, a short distance from the monumental House of German Art, where a much larger exhibition of state-approved “Great German Art” opened the day before. The motivation behind the Degenerate Art show, as a guide to the exhibition made clear, was “to display the common roots of cultural anarchy and political anarchy and reveal the perversion of art as cultural bolshevism.” The public was invited to see for themselves “what museums from all over Germany had purchased with taxpayers’ hard-earned money and displayed as art.”
The Nazi press was aflame with lurid descriptions of the perversions the public could view—dismembered front soldiers, pimps, whores, dope fiends, alcoholics, starving children, grotesquely fat, cigar-chomping capitalists. The exhibition was divided into nine stations, among them “Shameless Mockery of Every Religious Sensibility,” “The Political Background of Degenerate Art,” “Bordellos, Whores, Pimps,” and “Idiots, Cretins, and the Deformed” (an underlying theme of the exhibition was a putative link between mental derangement and the distortions of the art on display). The title of one section was simply “Jews,” featuring Jewish artists (there were only five in the exhibit) and their un-German work. The paintings were crowded together, hung at odd angles in poor lighting, and staggered like a twisted lattice from floor to ceiling—as if, ironically, Expressionist artists had planned the display themselves. On the walls were scribbled captions in bold black letters that ridiculed the featured artists and their works. It was, in Nazi parlance, a freak show.
Predictably the exhibition drew savage reviews in the Nazi-dominated press but also long lines, attracting more than two million visitors in Munich before it went on the road in November. The New York Times reported that the show had drawn three times as many visitors as the officially approved German art exhibit just down the street. “Many were foreign tourists, especially American and English, but also many German art students, for whom the show was perhaps their last opportunity to see modern art.” Attendance was not hurt by the fact that admission to the museum was free, and “the common Volk,” people who had probably never ventured into an art gallery and were not in tune with the latest artistic trends, were much in evidence.
In the fall, the Degenerate Art exhibit began a tour of twelve German cities that extended into 1939, always accompanied by withering commentary by local Nazi reviewers and ordinary visitors. “The artists ought to be tied up next to their pictures so that every German can spit in their face,” one visitor to the Munich exhibit angrily grumbled, “but not only the artists, also the museum directors who, at a time of mass unemployment, poured vast sums into the ever-open jaws of the perpetrators of these atrocities.” After inspecting the confiscated works, Goebbels was filled with contempt. It was “the sort of garbage that after a three hour inspection makes one want to vomit.” He was proud that he had “cleansed the museums.” He had performed a service for the Reich.
And yet, as in Munich, the show attracted unprecedented crowds in Münster, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Cologne, Kiel, Bonn, and Essen, as thousands flocked to the galleries to see the forbidden paintings. More people visited the Degenerate Art exhibition than any other in history. Everywhere the reviews were blistering—the works on display were the rotten fruit of the November Republic, pacifist, sexually degenerate, Jewish, and Bolshevik, but as one newspaper reported, “the rush to see the exhibition [in Berlin] is extraordinary. One has to find a special way over backstairs and through a courtyard to avoid the crush of the exiting masses colliding with the new arrivals.” Whether the visitors were drawn by prurient curiosity or a desire to get a final glimpse of modern art that was bound for extinction is impossible to know. But when the traveling exhibition finally closed in early 1939, Time magazine estimated that at least three million Germans had viewed it. Goebbels considered it a great success. When the show’s national tour finally closed, many of the nearly priceless works slipped into the private collections of prominent Nazis; more than nine hundred were sold abroad, the proceeds going to the Reich government; and more than four thousand were burned in the courtyard of a Berlin fire station.
Given the resounding success of the Degenerate Art exhibition, a show of degenerate music inevitably followed. Initiated in Düsseldorf, the program showcased and reviled atonal symphonic music. The Nazis were also appalled by American imports such as blues, jazz, and swing, which were especially popular with younger Germans, and condemned them as “Negro music.” As one SA publication commented, “We, the younger German generation, are . . . aware of the fact that the legacy of a great past in the field of music places a special obligation on us. We, the people of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Handel, cannot and will not any longer allow one of the noblest blooms of cultural life to fall increasingly victim to degeneration and to ultimate degradation to satisfy the demands of big-city night clubs and international bordellos.”
Speaking to representatives of German theater in May 1933, Goebbels had laid out the Nazi vision of the role of culture in the Third Reich. The National Socialist revolution, he proclaimed, was introducing a new spirit into German life, and it was the task of the artist community to infuse society with this new spirit. “Individualism will be conquered and in place of the individual and its deification, the Volk will emerge. The Volk stands in the center of all things. The revolution is conquering the Volk and public life, imprinting its stamp on culture, economy, politics and private life. It would be naïve to believe that art could remain exempt from this.” Art could no longer “claim to be apolitical or nonpartisan. It could not claim to have loftier goals than politics.” In an earlier time when politics was “nothing more than the battle of parliamentary parties screaming at one another,” artists “might claim the right to ignore politics, but not at this historic moment.” The goal of the regime, and with it Germany’s artists, must be nothing less than to “conquer the soul of the nation.”
While culture set the tone and symbolic content for the regime, the educational system was a critical target in the transformation of German sensibilities. The control and coordination (Gleichschaltung) of the university proceeded quickly and with precious little opposition. In a toxic brew of ideological zeal, petty jealousy, and personal ambition, colleagues betrayed one another, denouncing current behavior as well as actions from the pre-Nazi past. There were few genuine Nazis among the professoriate before 1933, but the Nazis could count on widespread sympathy for their vigorous nationalism, their rejection of Versailles, and their contempt for the parties that had signed the hated document. As a result, the Nazis found many fel
low travelers among the academics. Opposition to the regime among the professoriate was almost unheard of, and when dissent was voiced, it invariably focused on specific policies that directly affected professional standing or practices and did not question the nature of the regime or Nazism’s core values.
However much the regime might count on sympathy from conservative academics, it also sought compliance in other more draconian ways. No one could assume an academic position without first attending a six-week course conducted by the National Socialist Lecturers Association, a course that included not only political indoctrination but military drill and physical training. All schools in Germany were public institutions and hence all faculty and staff were subject to the Aryan Paragraph of the Civil Service Law of April 7, 1933, which expelled social or racial undesirables from teaching posts in primary and secondary schools as well as in universities. Despite the personal pain and despair that accompanied the expulsions, the action provoked virtually no resistance. Jews, who made up just over one percent of the population, made up 12 percent of all professors and a quarter of Germany’s Nobel laureates, most in physics and mathematics. Luminaries such as Albert Einstein, Max Born, Fritz Haber, James Franck, and Hans Krebs, all of whom were or would become Nobel Prize winners, were unceremoniously pushed out of their positions or resigned under pressure. In all, some 15 percent of all university professors were dismissed; by 1934 some 1,600 out of 5,000 university faculty had been forced out, roughly one third of whom were Jews or were married to Jews. The number of dismissals in physics and chemistry was particularly high, including eleven Nobel laureates. When Bernhard Rust, the Nazi minister of education, asked the director of the prestigious Göttingen Institute for Quantum Physics if his institute had suffered as a result of the dismissal of the Jews, he responded: “Suffered? No, it hasn’t suffered, Herr Minister, it just doesn’t exist anymore.”
While the professoriate had been lukewarm toward the Nazis before Hitler’s assumption of power, university students had been among the most ardent supporters of the NSDAP. The economic woes of the 1920s had created a large academic proletariat, and the Depression worsened that situation. Each year 25,000 students graduated from the universities, most with little hope for employment, in part a result of the draconian cuts in the civil service from the Brüning and Papen austerity programs. Those hoping for a position in teaching discovered that one in three academics was unemployed, and even recent graduates in medicine and law encountered problems finding positions. A sense of gloom settled over the student body of the universities, and the Nazis were the clear beneficiaries. Already in 1931, 60 percent of all university students supported the National Socialist Students Association in nationwide student elections. Nazi-inspired anti-Semitic demonstrations took place at the universities all across the Reich as students demanded a quota for Jews in the student body. Students also found the Nazis’ rabid nationalism appealing, as well as the party’s unrelenting assault on “the Weimar system.”
On April 12, 1933, the Nazi German Students Association’s Office for Press and Propaganda announced a nationwide “Action Against the Un-German Spirit,” which was to climax in a literary purge, a “cleansing” by fire. The students presented their action as a response to a worldwide Jewish “smear campaign” against Germany and “an affirmation of traditional German values.” They published a blacklist of “un-German” authors, including Freud, Kästner, Remarque, Heine, Heinrich Mann, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Emil Ludwig, and dozens of others. Local chapters were to pepper the press with news releases, sponsor well-known Nazi figures to speak at public gatherings, and negotiate for radio airtime.
The NS Student Association also drafted “Twelve Theses Against the Un-German Spirit,” a manifesto that deliberately evoked Martin Luther’s rebellious 95 Theses of 1517 and his burning of the Papal Bull that excommunicated him and his followers. Three hundred years later in 1817, German students, embittered by Prussia’s refusal to lead a movement for national unification, reenacted Luther’s act of defiance by torching, among other things, Prussian military manuals and other symbols of Prussian authoritarianism. For the students, the tradition of book burning was associated not with reactionary impulses but with defiance against authority and with strong nationalist sentiments. Placards publicized the Twelve Theses, which attacked “Jewish intellectualism,” asserted the need to “purify” German language and literature, and demanded that universities be centers of German nationalism. “Germany’s most dangerous adversary is the Jew,” the document read. “If a Jew writes in German, he is lying. The German who writes in German but thinks in an un-German way is a traitor. We want to eliminate the lie; we want to brand the treason. . . . We demand from the German student the will and ability to overcome Jewish intellectualism and all the liberal manifestations of decay associated with it. Students and professors should be selected on the basis of their thinking in the German spirit.” This month-long campaign culminated in a coordinated wave of book burnings in Munich, Dresden, Breslau, Frankfurt, Kiel, and other cities, but the dramatic torch-lit demonstration on Berlin’s Opera Plaza attracted by far the most attention, both in Germany and abroad. For weeks, students had been removing “un-German” books from libraries and universities and storing them in their headquarters in the Oranienburgstrasse. After hearing a rousing speech by the new Nazi professor of political pedagogy Alfred Bäumler, hundreds of students, many wearing SA uniforms, others in their purple and green fraternity caps, gathered at the Oranienburgstrasse and piled hundreds of books into vans and private automobiles.
At just past eleven, the students began marching toward the government quarter, picking up more students along the way. Carrying torches and singing nationalist songs, they swept through the rain-slick streets toward the Opernplatz, where the cars and vans, filled with “un-German” books, parked at the edge of the wide plaza. While an SA band blared out marches and rousing Nazi songs, the students formed a human chain, passing the books hand to hand from the cars and vans to a pyre of wooden beams in the center of plaza. There a tepid fire struggled against an intermittent drizzle, and the students heaved armloads of discredited books into the flames. Speaking one after another, nine students solemnly read out their lines for the event: “Against class warfare and materialism! For the people’s community and idealist way of life! I consign to the flames the writings of Marx and Kautsky. Against decadence and moral decay! For discipline and virtue in the family and the state! I consign to the flames the writings of Heinrich Mann, Ernst Glaeser and Erich Kästner.” On and on as the works of Toller, Tucholsky, Ossietzky, Preuss, Rathenau, and dozens of others disappeared into the bonfire.
At the height of the event and with cameras rolling, Goebbels addressed the crowd, urging the students on. “The age of an exaggerated Jewish intellectualism is now at an end,” he declaimed into a radio microphone. “The breakthrough of the German revolution has cleared the way for the true German spirit.” The students had their role to play. “When you students claim the right to throw into the flames the rotten fruit . . . then you must also see it as your duty to replace this garbage with genuine German values.” The effect was not quite the dramatic conflagration that the student organizers wanted; it had rained throughout the afternoon and early evening and for a considerable period of time the great heap of books simply smoldered in the damp air, but the book burnings of May sent shockwaves around the world. In Germany, a country renowned for its learning, its education, its books, it had come to this.
By the mid-1930s there was an air of stagnation and depression in the academy, affecting both faculty and students. In 1932 university enrollment stood at roughly 118,000, approximately 20 percent of whom were women. By 1938, enrollment dropped to 51,000, only 6,300 of whom were women. Although enrollment at technical high schools rose in 1939, the regime had deprived itself of a cohort of gifted scientists and engineers. This fact would have crucial implications for the war effort. It was typical of a self-destructive streak in
Nazi ideology that infected the party and the regime it controlled. Standards plummeted, and by 1939 complaints were increasingly voiced about the poor quality of university students, who in turn complained that their work suffered because of lack of time to study. After 1935 many were siphoned off to the army, whose officers complained about the low quality of their educational preparedness.
Especially debilitating to faculty and students alike was the plague of political denunciations that swept through Germany’s schools. As early as February 1933 a delegation of university professors felt compelled to make a formal complaint to Vice Chancellor Papen, warning that “denunciations, lack of discipline, and slavish conformity” to political currents represented “a danger not only for the schools but the nation as a whole.” Papen listened but could do little, and the situation did not improve. Denunciations became so numerous that in 1936 Education Minister Bernhard Rust was moved to warn students to relax their vigilance and not subject their professors to political reliability tests. For the most part, the record of the students and their professors was one of accommodation and support. There was occasional carping, to be sure, but the complaints tended to be minor and were not directed against the nature of the National Socialist regime.
* * *
Nazi infiltration of society was not limited to Germany’s cultural and educational elites. The Nazis sought to mobilize Germans of all ages and in all walks of life, organizing retreats, excursions, and training sessions in various occupational fields, but the young were the primary targets for indoctrination. The Hitler Youth (HJ) had been founded in the early 1920s and was treated as a sub-formation of the SA. Throughout the party’s rise to power, the HJ remained a small but active organization with little funding and few followers. In 1932, at the height of Nazi popularity, it counted only 35,000 members, and had little influence in the party leadership. That changed in 1933 when membership began to climb, soaring to more than five million by the close of 1934.
The Third Reich Page 38
