The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  Yet, as in other areas of culture, Goebbels realized that entertainment was important to keep people contented and take their minds off the problems of the present. He managed to fend off Rosenberg’s attempt to prioritize overtly ideological literature, and from 1936 onwards, the best-seller lists were dominated by popular literature with only an indirect political relevance. The comic novels of Heinrich Spoerl, such as Burnt Rum and Red Wine Punch, which sold 565,000 copies from 1933 to 1944, were extremely popular; they satirized the ‘little man’ of the Weimar years, unable to readjust to the new climate of the Third Reich.

  Even more widely read were Schenziger’s scientific novels, which balanced out the nostalgia purveyed by ‘blood-and-soil’ literature by celebrating modern inventions, scientific discoveries and industrial growth: his Anilin was the most popular of all novels published in the Third Reich, selling 920,000 copies from 1937 to 1944, and he followed this up with Metal, which sold 540,000 copies between 1939 and 1943. Foreign writers continued to be published in Nazi Germany if they did not overtly offend the Nazis’ ideological susceptibilities; Trygve Gulbranssen’s romances, with titles like And the Woods Sing for Ever and The Legacy of Björndal, published in German in 1934 and 1936 respectively, both sold over half a million copies by the time the Third Reich was over, and another world best-seller, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, found 300,000 German purchasers within four years of its publication in German in 1937 and was only the most popular of a wide variety of American cultural offerings imported into Germany during the 1930s.111 Many that had been published before 1914 and were still thought by the regime to be more or less acceptable continued to sell in their hundreds of thousands. They offered to those who sought it a return in the imagination to a sane and stable world. Just as popular were the reliable pleasures of a well-known author such as Karl May, whose turn-of-the-century stories of the Wild West some have seen as adumbrating Nazi values before their time; certainly, they were enjoyed by many committed Nazis, including Hitler himself.112 Ordinary Germans did not swallow Nazi literature whole; on the contrary, they chose for themselves what they wanted to read, and from the mid-1930s onwards, much of this was not overtly Nazi at all. The success of the Nazi ambition of creating a new human being permeated by Nazi values was as limited here as it was in other areas of German culture.113

  PROBLEMS OF PERSPECTIVE

  I

  Alongside the ‘new objectivity’ (Neue Sachlichkeit), Expressionism was in many ways the dominant movement not only in German literature but also in German art during the Weimar Republic.114 Its most widely acceptable face was represented by the sculptor Ernst Barlach, whose work was heavily influenced by the primitive peasant art he encountered on a visit to Russia before the First World War. Barlach produced solid, stumpy, stylized, self-consciously folksy sculptures of human figures, first of all carved in wood, later in other media such as stucco and bronze. The figures were usually given a monumental, immobile quality by being depicted draped in stylized robes or cloaks. They were popular, and he received numerous commissions after 1918 for war memorials in many parts of Germany. Elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1919, he had become an establishment figure by the mid-1920s, and was known for his hostility to abstraction, his critical distance from the rest of the Expressionist movement itself, and his steadfast refusal to engage in party politics. His art might have been expected to appeal to the Nazis, and indeed Joseph Goebbels recorded his admiration for one of Barlach’s sculptures in a diary entry in the mid-1920s and was said later to have displayed two small figures by Barlach in his house.115 The Propaganda Minister invited Barlach, along with some other Expressionist artists including Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, to the opening ceremony of the Reich Chamber of Culture, and his inclination to support them was backed by a campaign launched by members of the Nazi Students’ League in Berlin for a new kind of Nordic modernism, based on an Expressionism purged of Jewish artists and abstract images.116

  But these efforts foundered on the hostility of Alfred Rosenberg on the one hand, and the refusal of Barlach himself to compromise with the regime on the other. Rosenberg denounced Barlach and the Expressionists in the pages of the Racial Observer and branded the Berlin students as outmoded revolutionaries along the lines of the disgraced Nazi leftist Otto Strasser. For his part, Barlach refused the invitation to the opening of the Reich Chamber of Culture. He had come to feel the hostility of the regime at a local level, and commissions for war memorials, plans for exhibitions and publications of his writings started to be cancelled soon after the appointment of Hitler as Reich Chancellor in January 1933. His monuments to the war dead had already run into criticism in the early 1930s from right-wing veterans’ associations such as the Steel Helmets for their refusal to portray German soldiers of the First World war as heroic figures dying in a noble cause. Germanic racists accused Barlach of showing German soldiers with the features of Slavic sub-humans. Living in the strongly National Socialist province of Mecklenburg, Barlach began to be exposed to anonymous letters and insults posted on the front door of his house. He felt obliged to withdraw his acceptance of a commission for a new war memorial in Stralsund under this pressure.117 Barlach had stayed in Germany partly because he hoped that the Third Reich would respect the creative freedom of the artist, partly because, given the kind of work he did, it would not have been easy for him to make a living elsewhere.118 By the beginning of May 1933 he was already disillusioned. ‘The fawning cowardice of this magnificent era’, he wrote bitterly to his brother, ‘makes one go red up to the ears and beyond to think that one is German.’119

  Barlach’s unacceptability to the regime became clearer in 1933-4. The most controversial of his war memorials was a large wooden sculpture located in Magdeburg Cathedral. It showed three figures - a helmeted skeleton, a veiled woman pressing her fists together in agony and a bare-headed man with a gas mask between his arms, closing his eyes and clutching his head in despair - rising from the ground in front of the stylized forms of three soldiers, draped in greatcoats and standing side by side. The soldier in the middle has a bandage on his head and rests his hands on a large cross with the dates of the war on it, thus forming the centrepiece of the whole ensemble. Soon after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, the press began to carry petitions for its removal, encouraged by Alfred Rosenberg, who described its figures as ‘little half-idiotic, morose-looking bastard variations of indefinable human types with Soviet helmets’ in the Racial Observer in July 1933.120 While negotiations dragged on between the Propaganda Ministry, the Church and the Party about its removal, the press campaign against Barlach escalated. Allegations that he was Jewish prompted Barlach to respond that he did not want to issue a public rebuttal since he did not feel insulted by the claim. His friends researched his ancestry and published evidence that he was not Jewish. It filled his heart with sadness, he wrote, to think that such a thing was necessary.121 The memorial was eventually taken down towards the end of 1934 and placed in storage.122 Barlach defended himself from widespread attacks on his art as ‘un-German’ by pointing to the fact that its roots lay among the North German peasantry amongst whom he lived. Now in his mid-sixties, he found it difficult to understand how his sculptures could arouse such venomous hostility. In an attempt to deflect it, he signed a declaration in support of Hitler’s assumption of the headship of state after the death of Hindenburg in August 1934. But this did nothing to assuage the Nazi Party leadership in Mecklenburg, and the regional government began to remove his works from the state museum.

  Many of Barlach’s admirers, including enthusiastic supporters of the Nazi movement, found such treatment difficult to accept. The Nazi girls’ organization official Melita Maschmann, for example, admired his work and could not understand why he had been branded by the Nazis as ‘degenerate’.123 In the end, however, Barlach fell foul of the regime because his work went against the Nazi glorification of war, because he refused to compromise his art, because he responded assertively to crit
icism and because he made no secret of his dislike of Nazi Germany’s cultural policies. In 1936, the Bavarian police seized all the copies of a new book of his drawings from the publisher’s warehouse in Munich. They were acting on the orders of Goebbels: ‘Have banned a crazy book by Barlach,’ he wrote in his diary: ‘It isn’t art. It is destructive, incompetent nonsense. Disgusting! This poison must not enter our people.’124 The Gestapo added insult to injury by describing the drawings as ‘art-bolshevik expressions of a destructive concept of art not appropriate to our age’. The book was placed on the index of forbidden literature. Despite his continued protests at the injustices to which he was being subjected, Barlach became progressively more isolated. He was forced to resign from the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1937. ‘When day after day one has to expect the threatened, deadly blow, work stops by itself,’ he wrote. ‘I resemble someone driven into a corner, the pack at his heels.’125 His health underwent a serious decline, and he died in hospital of a heart attack on 24 October 1938.126

  The kind of sculptor for whom the Nazis could feel a genuine enthusiasm was Arno Breker. Born in 1900, Breker belonged to a younger generation than Barlach. During his student days he had produced a number of sculptures that clearly showed the older man’s influence. A lengthy stay in Paris, from 1927 to 1932, put him firmly under the aegis of Aristide Maillol, whose figurative style now shaped his own. During a sojourn in Rome early in 1933, when he was working on the restoration of a damaged sculpture by Michelangelo, he met Goebbels, who recognized his talent and encouraged him to return to Germany. After winding up his affairs in Paris, Breker duly obliged. Previously unpolitical, indeed as an expatriate not very well informed about German politics at all, he quickly fell under the spell of the Nazis. Breker’s style was framed mainly by non-German influences - Classical Greek sculpture, Michelangelo, Maillol. Some of his busts, like one of the Impressionist painter Max Liebermann, completed in 1934, were penetrating, subtle and full of illuminating detail. But soon he was smoothing over the rough edges of his work, rendering it more impersonal, and giving it a more monumental, less intimate quality, projecting toughness, hardness and aggression in his figures rather than the softer human qualities with which he had endowed them in the 1920s. By the mid-1930s, Breker was producing massive, musclebound, superdimensional male nudes, Aryan supermen in stone.127

  This soon paid dividends. Prizewinning entries in a competition mounted in 1936 on the theme of sporting achievement won him an increasing number of official commissions. In 1937 he joined the Nazi Party to smooth the way for further official patronage. Breker became personally acquainted with Hitler, who put his bust of Wagner in his private quarters in Berchtesgaden. He was nominated ‘Official State Sculptor’ on Hitler’s birthday in 1937 and given a huge studio with forty-three employees to help him with his work. He became an influential figure, lionized by Goring and other leading Nazis and protected by them from any criticism. In 1937 his work was given a prominent place in the German pavilion at the Paris World Exposition. In 1938 he designed two massive male nudes to be placed at the entrance to the newly built Reich Chancellery - Torch Bearer and Sword Bearer. Others followed, notably Readiness, in 1939, a muscly male figure frowning in hatred at an unseen enemy, his right hand about to draw a sword from its scabbard to begin the fight. Breker became a wealthy man, enjoying a huge variety of favours and decorations, including several houses, massive subsidies and of course large fees for his public work. Lifeless, inhuman, striking contrived poses of unbridled menace, and embodying the empty, declamatory assertion of an imagined collective will, Breker’s sculptures became the hallmark of the public artistic taste of the Third Reich. Their almost machine-like quality placed them unmistakeably in the twentieth century; they looked forward to the new type of human being whose creation was one of the primary aims of Nazi cultural policy, unthinkingly physical, aggressive, ready for war.128

  I I

  By the time Breker came to public prominence, the cultural managers of the Third Reich had effectively disposed of abstract, modernist art of the kind they were accustomed to describe as ‘degenerate’. Hitler’s own tastes played a role here greater perhaps than in any other area of cultural policy apart from architecture. He himself had once attempted to make a career as an artist, but from the very beginning he had rejected modernism in all its varieties.129 Once in power, he turned his prejudices into policy. On 1 September 1933 Hitler told the Nuremberg Party Rally that it was time for a new, German art. The coming of the Third Reich, he said, ‘leads ineluctably to a new orientation in almost every area of the people’s life’. The effects ‘of this spiritual revolution’ must be felt in art too. Art must reflect the racial soul of the people. The idea that art was international must be rejected as decadent, and Jewish. He condemned what he saw as its expression ‘in the cubist-dadaist cult of primitivism’ and in cultural Bolshevism and announced in its stead ‘a new artistic Renaissance of the Aryan human being’. And he warned that modernist artists would not be forgiven their past sins: In the cultural sphere, too, the National Socialist movement and leadership of the state must not tolerate mountebanks or incompetents suddenly changing their colours and thus, as if nothing had happened, taking a place in the new state so that they can talk big about art and cultural policy . . . Either the monstrous products of their production at that time reflected a genuine inner experience, in which case they are a danger to the healthy sense of our people and belong in medical care, or they were just done to make money, in which case they are guilty of fraud and belong in the care of another appropriate institution. In no way do we want the cultural expression of our Reich to be distorted by these elements; for this is not their state, but ours.130

  Nineteen thirty-three had seen, accordingly, a massive purge of Jewish artists, abstract artists, semi-abstract artists, left-wing artists and indeed almost all the artists in Germany at the time who had any kind of international reputation. Declarations of support for the new regime, even Nazi Party membership since the earliest days, as in the case of the primitivist painter and sculptor Emil Nolde, failed to save those of whose earlier work Hitler disapproved. The few artists of distinction who remained in the hope of better times to come, like Ernst Barlach, were quickly disillusioned.131

  In 1933, Jewish, Social Democratic, liberal and leftist art museum directors had been summarily removed from their posts and replaced with people deemed by the Nazis to be more reliable. The Folkwang Museum in Essen was even put into the hands of an SS officer, Klaus Graf Baudissin, who had the museum’s famous murals by Oskar Schlemmer, an artist closely associated with the Bauhaus, painted over. Yet art museum directors continued to show works of which the more extreme wing of the Nazi Party disapproved. Even Baudissin, a trained art historian, kept works by Oskar Kokoschka, Franz Marc and Emil Nolde on show well into 1935. The Director of the Bavarian State Painting Collections, Ernst Buchner, a Nazi Party member since 1 May 1933, fought for the right to exhibit the work of a Jewish-German artist such as the Impressionist Max Liebermann and in 1935 successfully resisted attempts by the Reich Education and Religion Minister Bernhard Rust to force him to sell off works by Van Gogh and the French Impressionists, to whom the Nazis objected not least because they were not German. When Hitler personally removed the long-term and pro-modernist Director of the National Gallery, Ludwig Justi, from his post in 1933, his successor, Alois Schardt, organized a spectacular new exhibition of German art that included works by Nolde and a variety of Expressionists. Visiting the gallery for a preview, Education Minister Bernhard Rust was outraged. He immediately fired the new director and ordered the exhibition to be dismantled; Schardt emigrated to the United States after presiding at a small Berlin gallery over an exhibition of work by Franz Marc that was closed down by the Gestapo the day it opened in May 1936. Schardt’s successor Eberhard Hanfstaengl, previously a gallery director in Munich, fared no better; he fell foul of Hitler when the Leader paid a surprise visit and saw some Expressionist works on the wal
ls. On 30 October 1936 the new wing of the National Gallery was closed after it had housed an exhibition that included paintings by Paul Klee.132 Similar closures now followed elsewhere. Over the period since the middle of 1933, gallery and museum directors, including those appointed by the Nazis themselves, had fought a cultural guerrilla war against the demands of local Nazi bosses to remove paintings of one kind or another from exhibition. A few, like Hanfstaengl, had continued to purchase modern art, though he discreetly left it out of the museum’s published catalogue. But the time for such compromises and evasions was now over.133