National Socialist art

National Socialist art. The art endorsed and encouraged by the Nazis from 1933 to 1945—that is from the time when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany as head of the National Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter-partei) until the end of the Second World War. Hitler, who had been an unsuccessful painter in his youth, realized that art could have immense propaganda value and used it to promote the cult of his own personality as well as the Nazi ideas of Nordic racial superiority and ‘Strength through Joy’ (Kraft durch Freude). Hand-in-hand with this policy went the repression, ridicule, and eventually destruction of art that conflicted with Nazi ideology (see DEGENERATE ART).

On 15 October 1933 Hitler laid the foundation stone of a new museum, the House of German Art, in Munich, and the city celebrated with a Day of German Art. The architect of the museum was Paul Ludwig Troost (1878–1934), who was Hitler's most trusted adviser on art; after his death, Albert Speer (1905–81) became Hitler's chief architect, adapting Troost's stark, bludgeoning classicism to works on a megalomaniac scale. In April 1935 Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, issued a decree bringing all artists under the jurisdiction of the Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer), founded in 1933, and artists were ordered to produce a ‘racially conscious’ popular art. Two years later Goebbels declared: ‘The freedom of artistic creation must keep within the limits prescribed, not by any artistic idea, but by the political idea.’

In 1937 the House of German Art opened with an exhibition of such approved art—the Great German Art Exhibition, the first of an annual series that went on until 1944. These eight exhibitions were huge: all but one of them showed over a thousand works (the average number was about 1,200) and well over 500 artists were represented at each one. Hitler intervened personally at the preview of the first exhibition, rejecting 80 pictures with the remark ‘I won't tolerate unfinished paintings’ and accepting works by certain artists who had previously been rejected. He entrusted the organization of the seven exhibitions that followed to his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. Within the next few years some 20,000 officially approved paintings were disseminated to museums throughout the country, where they took the place of the degenerate works that had been purged. They were removed from public view at the end of the war and have only recently started to emerge again.

The fact that these works have so long been kept in storage indicates the strong feelings that they still arouse. In The Arts of the Third Reich (1992) Peter Adam goes so far as to say that Nationalist Socialist art ‘whether it be in the form of fine arts, architecture, film, literature, or music, cannot be considered in the same way as the art of other periods. It must be seen as the artistic expression of a barbaric ideology. One can only look at the art of the Third Reich through the lens of Auschwitz.’ Many of the militaristic pictures are certainly hard to stomach, but among the other genres there is much that could be closely paralleled in the academic art of any other Western country (not least the discreetly salacious nudes that were seen in abundance at the Great German Art Exhibitions). Reviewing Adam's book, David Watkin attacked the ‘astonishing crudity’ of the author's view and wrote: ‘what surely strikes the unbiased observer is the mild and traditional character of most of the images reproduced in his book. This is the kind of art and architecture which would have been produced in Germany in the 1930s whoever was in power.’

In Art in the Third Reich (1980), Berthold Hinz had earlier expressed a similar view to Watkin: ‘thousands of artists sent thousands of works to the official art exhibits held in the Third Reich. Art works in such vast numbers could not simply be willed into being … It is inconceivable that several thousand painters, graphic artists, and sculptors would suddenly have renounced their artistic heritage and submitted to any official decrees on art … These artists were not necessarily politically committed—many artists successful under National Socialism would later cite this point to exonerate themselves—but subscribed to pictorial and formal traditions that the art policy of the regime found useful, or at least not objectionable.’

Among Third Reich painters a representative figure is Adolf Ziegler (1892–1959), who was appointed president of the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts (Reichskammer der Bildenden Künste) in 1936 and as such was responsible for choosing the works shown in the infamous ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition in 1937. He specialized in paintings of nudes and was nicknamed ‘the master of German pubic hair'. Among sculptors, the best-known figures were Arno Breker, Georg Kolbe, and Josef Thorak (1889–1952), who was ‘popularly nicknamed “Professor Thorax” because of his preoccupation with Herculean masculinity … his gigantomania inspired the story of a visitor who had asked the studio assistant about the sculptor's whereabouts, only to be told “The Herr Professor is up in the left ear of the horse.”’ ( Richard Grunberger, A Social History of the Third Reich, 1971). See also TOTALITARIAN ART.