The Third Reich in Power

by Evans, Richard J.

  From the very beginning, some of the most fanatical of the Nazi art gallery and museum directors organized shows of the modernist works they had withdrawn from exhibition, under titles such as ‘Chamber of Art Horrors’, ‘Images of Cultural Bolshevism’, ‘Mirrors of Decadence in Art’ or ‘The Spirit of November: Art in the Service of Decay’. Those exhibited included Max Beckmann, Otto Dix and George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc, August Macke, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Emil Nolde. German-based foreign artists such as Alexei Jawlensky and Vassily Kandinsky also featured, alongside the inevitable Cubists and avant-garde artists from other countries.134 The inclusion of Macke and Marc caused particular controversy because they had both been killed on the front in the First World War, and veterans’ associations objected to the insult their proscription did to their memory.135 Some of the earliest of these exhibitions, held already in 1933, had aroused strong protests on the part of art-loving visitors, leading in some cases to their arrest. But within a very short space of time, such opposition became impossible. By the mid-1930s exhibitions of this kind had been mounted in sixteen different cities. Hitler visited the most important of them, in Dresden, in August 1935. Close inspection of the offending works prompted him to deliver another lengthy diatribe against them at the Nuremberg Party Rally shortly afterwards, the third time he had used this occasion to lecture his followers on the subject. Clearly, Goebbels needed to fall into line if he was to prevent Rosenberg, Rust and the other anti-modernists from taking over the lead in cultural policy. So, in June 1936, he acted. ‘Horrible examples of art Bolshevism’, he wrote in his diary, ‘have been brought to my attention’, as if he had not seen them before; ‘I want to arrange an exhibit in Berlin of art from the period of degeneracy. So that people can see and learn to recognize it.’ By the end of the month he had obtained Hitler’s permission to requisition ‘German degenerate art since 1910’ (the date of the first abstract painting, by the Munich-based Russian artist Vassily Kandinsky) from public collections for the show. Many in the Propaganda Ministry were reluctant to go along with the project. Its political opportunism was cynical even by Goebbels’s standards. He knew that Hitler’s hatred of artistic modernism was unquenchable, and so he decided to gain favour by pandering to it, even though he did not share it himself.136

  The exhibition’s organization was entrusted to Adolf Ziegler, President of the Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts, and a painter of classical nudes whose pedantic realism earned him the popular nickname of the ‘Reich Master of Pubic Hair’.137 Armed with commissions from Goebbels and Hitler, Ziegler and his entourage toured German galleries and museums and picked out works to be taken to the new exhibition. Museum directors, including Buchner and Hanfstaengl, were furious, refused to co-operate, and pleaded with Hitler to obtain compensation if the confiscated works were sold abroad. Such resistance was not tolerated, and Hanfstaengl lost his job at the Berlin National Gallery as a result. One hundred and eight works were seized from the Munich collections, and comparable numbers from museums elsewhere.138 When the Degenerate Art show opened in Munich, long recognized as Germany’s art capital, on 19 July, 1937, visitors found that the 650 or so works it contained were deliberately badly displayed, hung at odd angles, poorly lit, and jammed up together on the walls, higgledy-piggledy, under general titles such as ‘Farmers Seen by Jews’, ‘Insult to German Womanhood’ and ‘Mockery of God’.139 Ironically, the diagonal lines and the graffitoid slogans on the walls owed something to the design techniques of the Dada movement, one of the exhibition’s prime targets. Here, however, they were intended to express a congruity between the art produced by mental asylum inmates, a major point of discussion amongst liberal psychiatrists under the Weimar Republic, and the distorted perspectives adopted by the Cubists and their ilk, a point made explicit in much of the propaganda surrounding the assault on degenerate art as the product of degenerate human beings.140

  Hitler toured the exhibition before it opened to the public, and devoted a major part of a speech on the eve of its inauguration to a ferocious denunciation of the works it showed:Never has the human race been closer in appearance and temperament to Antiquity than today. Sporting, competitive and combative games are steeling millions of youthful bodies and they are increasingly taking on a form and constitution that have not perhaps been seen for a thousand years, indeed have scarcely been dreamed of . . . This type of human being, my art-stutterer gentlemen, is the type of the new age. And what do you knock together? Malformed cripples and cretins, women who can only arouse repulsion. Men who are nearer to animals than to humans, children who, if they lived so, would virtually have to be regarded as curses of God!141

  He even instructed the Reich Interior Ministry to investigate the defective visual capacities he thought had partly led to such distortion. They were, he thought, inherited. Cubists and others who did not stick to slavishly accurate representations of their human subjects were to be sterilized.142

  In fact, the most important criteria for the selection of works to be displayed in the exhibition were not aesthetic, but racial and political. Of the nine sections into which it was divided, only the first and the last were based on aesthetic criteria. The others pilloried the subjects chosen rather than the manner in which they were depicted. The first section covered ‘barbarism of representation’, ‘garish-coloured blobs of paint’ and ‘deliberate contempt for all the basic skills of the visual arts’. The second showed work deemed to be blasphemous, and the third political art advocating anarchism and the class struggle. A fourth section displayed paintings showing soldiers as murderers or, alternatively, as war cripples. According to the catalogue, in these pictures ‘the deeply ingrained respect for every soldierly virtue, for courage, bravery and readiness for action is to be driven out of the people’s consciousness’. A fifth section was devoted to immoral and pornographic art (most too disgusting to be shown, it was claimed). A sixth part of the exhibition showed the ‘destruction of the last remains of racial consciousness’ in pictures supposedly presenting negroes, prostitutes and the like as racial ideals. In a similar way, a seventh section was devoted to paintings and graphic works in which ‘the idiot, the cretin und the paraplegic’ were depicted in a positive light. Section eight was given over to the work of Jewish artists. The last and biggest section covered the ‘ “isms”, that Flechtheim, Wollheim and their Cohnsorts [sic] have hatched up, pushed and sold at knockdown prices over the years’, from Dadaism to Cubism and beyond. All of this, declared the catalogue, would show the public that modern art was not just a fad: Jews and cultural bolshevists were mounting a ‘planned attack on the existence and continuation of art altogether’. Five out of the brochure’s ten illustrated recto pages carried antisemitic messages just to underline the point.143 Modernist art, as many Nazi polemics of the time claimed, was above all the product of international, foreign influences. Art had to return to the German soul. As for modernism, one writer concluded with the fervent wish: ‘May the degenerate suffocate in its own filth, without anybody sympathizing with its fate.’144

  The exhibition was enormously popular and attracted over two million visitors by the end of November 1937. Entry was free, and massive press publicity drew people’s attention to the horrors it contained.145 The exhibits were, the papers proclaimed, ‘shoddy products of a melancholy age’, ‘ghosts of the past’, from the era when ‘bolshevism and dilettantism celebrated their triumphs’. Lurid descriptions and illustrations showed readers what they could expect to see when they went to the exhibition.146 In its first few weeks, at least, it was visited mainly by people from the Munich lower middle classes, many of whom had never been to an art exhibition before, and by the Party faithful, eager to imbibe a new form of antisemitic hatred. The stipulation that children and young persons were not to be allowed in because the exhibits were too shocking added an element of titillation to entice the eager public. Despite this, some young people did attend, among them the seventeen-year-old Peter Guenther, who went in
July. The son of a liberal art journalist who had been expelled from the Reich Chamber of Literature in 1935, Guenther knew a fair amount about paintings. He found the atmosphere at the exhibition frightening and intimidating. The visitors, he reported later, commented loudly on how incompetently executed the works displayed were, and how there had been a conspiracy of art critics, dealers and museum directors to fool the public, a sentiment encouraged by the fact that a number of the exhibits had price tags attached to them indicating how much they had cost (‘paid from the pennies paid in tax by the German working people’). One painting by Erich Heckel came with a price-tag of a million Marks; the exhibitors did not say that this had been paid in 1923, towards the height of the hyperinflation, and was in fact worth very little in real terms. Some Party groups who visited the exhibition telegrammed the Propaganda Ministry with messages such as: ‘The artists should be tied up next to their pictures so that every German can spit in their faces.’ Carola Roth, a friend of the artist Max Beckmann, noted how while older visitors went round the exhibition shaking their heads, younger Party activists and brownshirts laughed and jeered at the exhibits. The atmosphere of hatred and loudmouthed ridicule allowed no dissent; indeed it was an essential part of the exhibition itself, turning it into yet another mass propaganda exercise for the regime. Later on, however, when young Peter Guenther paid a second visit, the atmosphere was, he reported, much quieter, with some visitors lingering in front of artworks they clearly enjoyed and which they had come to see for what they suspected might be the last time. Yet overall, the exhibition was clearly a success. Like much else in Nazi culture, it allowed ordinary conservative citizens the opportunity to voice out loud prejudices that they had long held but previously been hesitant to reveal. 147

  Many of the artists whose work was on display were either foreigners, like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, or Oskar Kokoschka, or had emigrated, like Paul Klee or Vassily Kandinsky. But some of the artists who featured in the exhibition had stayed on in Germany, in the hope that the tide would turn and they would be rehabilitated. Max Beckmann, whose last solo exhibition had been as recently as 1936, in Hamburg, left for exile in Amsterdam the day after the opening of the Degenerate Art exhibition. Though far from well off, Beckmann was still painting. He was supported by sympathetic dealers and foreign admirers in the following, difficult years.148 Others were not so fortunate. 149 The Expressionist artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, who at this time, like Beckmann, was in his fifties, had already been living for most of the time in Switzerland since the 1920s, but he depended far more than Beckmann did on the German art market for his livelihood. Until 1937 he did not give up hope. But in July 1937 he was finally expelled from the Prussian Academy of Arts, and many of his works were confiscated from German collections by the Ziegler commission, which exhibited no fewer than thirty-two of them in the Degenerate Art show. Kirchner was already ill, and for some years he had lost his way as an artist, never really recapturing the greatness of his period in Berlin from 1910 to the mid- 1920s. For him this was the last straw. ‘I had always hoped that Hitler was for all Germans,’ he wrote bitterly, ‘and now he has defamed so many and really serious, good artists of German blood. This is very sad for those affected, because they - the serious ones among them - all wished to, and did, work for Germany’s fame and honour.’ A fresh round of confiscations of his work only deepened his despair. On 15 June 1938 he destroyed many of the works he kept in his rural retreat in Switzerland, stepped outside the house, and shot himself in the heart.150

  III

  Meanwhile, the regime, in a way that was characteristic of its decision-making in other areas too, took the opportunity of the exhibition to pass legislation generalizing the policy it represented. Hitler declared the day before the exhibition opened that the time for tolerance was at an end:

  From now on we shall wage a remorseless war of cleansing against the last elements of the subversion of our culture . . . But now - I will assure you here - all those cliques of chatterers, dilettantes and art-frauds who puff each other up and so keep each other going, will be caught and removed. As far as we’re concerned, these prehistorical, antediluvian cultural stone-agers and art-stutterers can go back to their ancestral caves to carry on their international scrawlings there.151

  The ‘chatterers’ indeed had already been silenced by an order issued by Goebbels on 27 November 1936 banning art criticism, which, he said, had been ‘elevated into a court of judgment over art in the era of foreign, Jewish domination of art’. In its place came ‘art reporting’, which was to limit itself to simple description. In an art world where everything exhibited in public museums and galleries was there with the approval of the Propaganda Ministry and the Reich Chamber of the Plastic Arts, art criticism could seem too much like criticism of the regime.152 To ensure that modernist works could no longer to be put on public display, Ziegler declared in his opening address that the country’s galleries would soon be stripped of such excrescences altogether.153 Goebbels told the Reich Culture Chamber shortly afterwards that the ‘frightening and horrifying forms of the “Exhibition of Degenerate Art” in Munich’ showed ‘botched art works’, the ‘monstrous, degenerate creations’ of men of ‘yesterday’, ‘senile representatives . . . of a period that we have intellectually and politically overcome’. On 31 May 1938 a Law for the Confiscation of the Products of Degenerate Art was promulgated. It retrospectively legalized the seizure of degenerate artworks not only from galleries and museums but also from private collections, without compensation save in exceptional cases ‘to avoid hardship’.154 The confiscation programme was centralized in the hands of a commission headed by Adolf Ziegler and including the art dealer Karl Haberstock and Hitler’s photographer Heinrich Hoffmann.155

  The commission increased the number of artworks seized to around 5,000 paintings and 12,000 graphic works, drawings, woodcuts and watercolours from a total of 101 art galleries and museums all over Germany.156 Some non-German works were returned to foreign institutions and individuals who had loaned them to German museums, some forty were eventually given back, and some were exchanged. In addition, Hermann Göring reserved fourteen of the most valuable pieces for himself: four paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, four by Edvard Munch, three by Franz Marc and one each by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin and Paul Signac. He sold them off to raise money to buy tapestries to adorn Carinhall, the palatial hunting lodge he had built in memory of his first wife; an illegal piece of profiteering which hinted strongly at how he would behave when the art of other European countries was at his disposal.157 Moreover, as artists in exile and their supporters abroad quickly organized counter-exhibitions of ‘Twentieth-Century German Art’, most notably in London, Paris and Boston, they drew attention to the reputation many of the banned artists enjoyed abroad. The Nazi regime simply could not ignore the demand for modernist German art in other countries in its search for badly needed hard currency. Goebbels began negotiations with Wildenstein and other dealers outside Germany and remodelled Ziegler’s commission into a body more closely under his control. Set up within the Propaganda Ministry in May 1938, it included three art dealers and was charged with the disposal of the confiscated works. Over the next few years, up to 1942, over a million Reichsmarks from the sale of up to 3,000 confiscated artworks were deposited in a special account in the Reichsbank. The most public transaction was a sale of 125 works by Ernst Barlach, Marc Chagall, Otto Dix, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Max Liebermann, Henri Matisse, Amadeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Maurice Vlaminck and others at the Galerie Fischer in Lucerne on 30 June 1939. All but thirty-one of them found a buyer. Some of the proceeds went to the museums and galleries from which the works had been seized, but most of them were put into a London account to enable Hitler to buy paintings for his personal collection. In this way, a good number of the confiscated artworks survived.158

  The great majority, however, did not. The total sum realized from the Lucerne auction, just over h
alf a million Swiss francs, was disappointing even by the standards of the day. The knowledge that the regime was confiscating and offloading large quantities of modern art caused prices to plummet in behind-the-scenes sales as well. One painting by Max Beckmann, Southern Coast, went for only $20. It seemed that big profits were not to be made from them after all. A million Reichsmarks was little enough in the end. Although two further auctions were planned, another small sale was held in Zurich in August 1939, and private transactions took place all the way up to 1942, the looming threat of war made the transport of large quantities of artworks abroad increasingly inadvisable.159 Their disposal was made more difficult by the fact that Hitler had personally inspected the collection of 12,167 remaining pieces in a warehouse in Berlin and forbidden their return to the collections from which they had been removed. There seemed little alternative but to destroy those that had not been sold. After all, in the eyes of Ziegler and his commission they were artistically worthless anyway. On 20 March 1939, therefore, some 1,004 oil paintings and 3,825 watercolours, drawings and graphic works were piled up in the courtyard of the central fire station in Berlin and set alight. The bonfire was not attended by the public or accompanied by any formal ceremony or public announcement. None the less, it bore strong reminiscences of the earlier book-burnings of 10 May 1933 that had consumed the works of Jewish, left-wing and modernist writers on the public squares of Germany’s university cities.160