CHAPTER ONE

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Deconstructing Modernism

AFTER THEIR ASSUMPTION of political power on January 30, 1933, the National Socialists systematically set out to destroy Modernism in the arts throughout Germany, to make room for their own kind of culture, but they had made plans to do this several years before. They wished German culture to be related to the core values of their ideology, representational not abstract, clear and clean aesthetics and not crooked corners, inspired by what they perceived as the virtues of the Nordic race, extolling the natural beauty of the countryside against the ugliness of industrial cities, exuding the strength and confidence of a racially pure Germanic people in opposition to alien and specifically Jewish influences. Most of this culture should be created anew; whatever was useful from the past might be skillfully integrated, provided ancestral traditions were considered in support of the rising generation.

The Modernism that had first to be demolished had characterized the culture of the Weimar Republic, from 1918 to 1933, although numerically the creators of modern art had been in the minority, compared with conventional artists. Their often daring efforts had come about, not least, as a form of reaction to the horrors of World War I, as this war was attributed squarely to the ancien régime of Kaiser Wilhelm II and its philistine elites, and they were paralleled, in the political realm, by the formation of a democratic republic. In that sense, both the new politics and culture were experimental. But some of the Modernist arts, such as Expressionism in painting and, in music, the mature operas of Richard Strauss such as Elektra and Salome, reached back before the time of the Great War; moreover, by no means were all Modernists republican or politically left-wing.1 By the same token, there were conventional artists who believed in a new, democratic form of government.

After the armistice of November 1918, writes Peter Gay, “all artists, or nearly all, were seized with the quasi-religious fervor to make all things new.”² They wanted to try bold experiments with new forms and contents, of artistic objects, of artistic processes. They congregated in the Novembergruppe – Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith, and Walter Gropius – and in December 1918 proclaimed: “The future of art and the seriousness of this hour forces us revolutionaries of the spirit (Expressionists, Cubists, Futurists) toward unity and close cooperation.”³

What followed was the artistic regime of the Bauhaus movement shortly after the establishment of the political republic in 1918, a movement that was to put its cultural stamp on the Weimar era. The Bauhaus masters under Gropius focused on new design and painting, first in the town of Weimar by early 1919 and after 1925 in Dessau, where architecture became a core subject. In Dessau itself a signature building was erected, with its clean rectilinear form and flat roof textbook-like in the Gropius mold.⁴ Still, in late summer of 1923, the Bauhaus had assembled representatives of virtually every important artistic discipline freshly conceived for an exhibition in Weimar. Standing for music and critical journalism was Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, who was a follower of dodecaphony, or twelve-tone music, evolving at that time with Arnold Schoenberg as its pioneer. In Weimar, Stuckenschmidt took part in a “Musical Cabaret,” for which he had written an avant-garde score inspired by Dada, that seemingly inchoate new movement, which dressed in sensual nonsense works of the visual, literary, and sound arts. Hermann Scherchen contributed, the most progressive conductor of the Weimar era next to Otto Klemperer, and Hindemith premiered his recently composed Marienleben song cycle, marked by the composer’s new predilection for polyphony. Ernst Krenek put in an appearance, whose jagged jazz opera Jonny spielt auf (Jonny Plays) would be the hit on German operatic stages in 1927.⁵

The Bauhaus had its own jazz band, and jazz was becoming the rage in Germany, even with – for this country – a typically over-pronounced drumbeat reminiscent of marching bands, after its prior introduction from the United States into England and France. In the 1920s, jazz was played by German combos in the large cities, chiefly Berlin, in dedicated clubs such as the Rio Rita or Moka Efti, but also in huge emporiums such as Scala and Wintergarten that Adolf Hitler and his propaganda expert Joseph Goebbels sometimes patronized because of operettas featured there, and in cabarets, where stars and starlets of film and operetta, like the young Trude Hesterberg, performed. Jazz also appeared in film, even the first meaningful German talkie The Blue Angel with Marlene Dietrich in 1930, a coy violin student in Weimar when the Bauhaus had started there. For this film the jazz pianist Friedrich Hollaender, later of Hollywood fame, had written the music.6

Filmmakers as such were not at the 1923 Weimar exhibition, but several of the Bauhaus artists were interested in movie-making or photography, such as the painter and designer László Moholy-Nagy, whose new techniques included placing objects directly onto unexposed film. Three feature films were to stand out in the republic and gain eternal fame as avant-garde works of high art: Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920), Metropolis (1927), and Mädchen in Uniform (1931). Dr. Caligari showed angular background scenery, oblique walls with borders and ceilings askew. The characters were shifty, morally good or bad or, simultaneously, both: the viewer was confused. Horror was pervasive. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis repeated the play on good or bad, with an evil robot called Maria imitating a physically and morally beauteous maiden, also called Maria. In Mädchen in Uniform lesbian love shone through the plot, exemplifying the republic’s greater tolerance in sexuality, but also the authoritarianism exercised in private schools, a not so veiled criticism of hierarchical structures implanted in the past that had refused to go away.⁷

Among the painters at the 1923 exhibition were the Bauhaus’s own Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Kandinsky had developed abstract painting around 1910 and in Weimar created, among many others, an oil on canvas entitled Auf Weiss II (On White II), in 1923: two black sharp spikes crossing each other, against an abstract of yellow and reddish triangles, a black circle, and other geometric shapes, all on an off-white backcloth. Klee painted somewhat less geometrically and also less abstractly but often in miniature; his Angler of 1921 is finely chiseled; he is standing on a thin board above the water, elegantly handling his fishing line, against a backdrop of gentle blues and whites.8

An early expert on theater at the Bauhaus was Lothar Schreyer (a polymath who also had a doctorate in law from Heidelberg University, painted, wrote prose, and edited an arts journal). He designed and staged a Mondspiel, a “Moon Play,” which was performed in Weimar in the early 1920s to, alas, little acclaim; later, the Bauhaus painter Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadisches Ballett was more successful. Outside of Weimar, Max Reinhardt was still instrumental in Berlin, although his fame as a theater director had reached its first peak already before the Great War, and now he excelled most particularly as a teacher. As dramaturgs, Leopold Jessner and Erwin Piscator were his most illustrious colleagues, both of them dedicated socialists who saw eye to eye with the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht on the need for the theatrical arts to serve the masses, and thus society.⁹ A pace-setting actor just growing into maturity in the mid-1920s was Gustaf Gründgens, who, an androgynous bisexual, was briefly married to Erika Mann, the bisexual daughter of the Nobel laureate Thomas Mann. She helped him in the performance of cabaret, but at that time Gründgens too clamored for revolutionary theater, as he brilliantly starred as Goethe’s Mephistopheles from Faust, yet also in roles created by the new dramatists of Expressionism: Frank Wedekind, Carl Sternheim, and Georg Kaiser. Reinhardt would call Gründgens to Berlin in 1928.¹⁰

Several of the multitalented masters at the Bauhaus composed poetry and prose. The most prolific major writers in the Weimar Republic were Gerhart Hauptmann and Thomas Mann, but neither of them was a member of the Weimar Sturm und Drang, as they were intellectually and aesthetically more beholden to the pre-war era. More typically representing the new Weimar dynamics were Brecht with his socialist concerns and Alfred Döblin, a Berlin Jewish physician ministering to the city’s poor with a deep understanding of and compassion for the socially downtrodden. In his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz of 1929 the lead character, Franz Biberkopf, emerges from prison determined to go straight, but through his surroundings becomes embroiled in new complications that distract him. Döblin’s book clearly illustrated the need for social change and individual compassion. But it also warned about ascendant Nazism.¹¹

Social change was not really something the Nazis were interested in during the 1920s, to say nothing of the attendant political risks. Moreover, a cultural agenda for them was virtually non-existent in the early half of the decade. They were too busy establishing themselves politically and were interrupted in their political progress by the Nazi Party’s tightly circumscribed area of influence (with a presence merely in Bavaria), Hitler’s November 1923 Munich putsch and his detention in Landsberg prison until Christmas 1924. After his release, Hitler was too busy organizing new outposts all over Germany and winning popular support, a process that was many times hampered by German states forbidding him to speak publicly.

This began to change in 1927, when at the national Party convention in Nuremberg in late August, Hitler announced a few opaque guidelines for what he viewed as cultural renewal.12 They were not to be mistaken for a blueprint for a “culture state,” or the intention to regard politics as “the highest form of culture,” as has recently been claimed.¹³ Indeed, future developments before and after 1933 do not bear this out; culture was to be subordinated, was to serve propaganda; in that context, “politics as a form of culture” amounts to a meaningless metaphor. Nonetheless, Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s early Munich paladin who had established himself as the official ideologue of the movement, was not slow to take up the cue and found a Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (KfdK), or combat league for German culture. It was supported mainly by politically right-leaning cultural elites such as the Munich publisher Hugo Bruckmann and his wife Elsa, and Winifred Wagner (the composer’s daughter-in-law) in Bayreuth. As such it received an official charter and called for more founding members in May 1928. In a manifesto by Rosenberg, followers were asked to fight in an all-out effort against contemporary literature and the liberal content of the largely city-based (Jewish) press, such as the Frankfurter Zeitung. Implicitly, modern music, architecture, the visual arts, and other sub-disciplines of Expressionism were attacked.¹⁴ Following this, local cells of the Kampfbund were founded, like the one in the Goethe town of Weimar under the völkisch theater expert Hans Severus Ziegler. In Weimar, Ziegler set the tone by delivering an inaugural address, identifying one of the chief enemies of National Socialism, international Communism. His lecture was entitled “Bolshevism threatens German Culture.”¹⁵

Defamatory work against Weimar republican accomplishments by active members of the Kampfbund began in earnest in 1929. By this time, much characteristic avant-garde art of the republic had become discernible, such as the satirical paintings by George Grosz and Otto Dix, Gropius’s Dessau Bauhaus, Weill and Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, and the Weintraub Syncopators’ jazz dazzlings in Berlin. Rosenberg himself lectured in April, identifying a “trend toward greater sensuality in art,” which he regarded as a threat to German culture.16 One of the most pernicious spokesmen for his league would now be Gropius’s rival, the architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg, who advocated traditional architecture, houses with gables instead of flat roofs, and expansive, ornamental, and comfortable old-style interior designs, such as were found in first-class ocean liners. He became the Nazis’ earliest champion of a völkisch art, traveling much on the speaker’s circuit. In 1932 he published a booklet, comparing Modernist paintings to the random pictures by patients in German insane asylums. In Munich that year the architect organized a public exhibition dominated by a similar theme.¹⁷ Additionally, the right-wing poet Hans Friedrich Blunck gave a lecture in front of university students in the spring of 1932, in which he castigated the vulgarized eroticism inherent in Weimar art and mannerist modern music.¹⁸ At the end of the republic, the Nazis had drawn up blacklists with the names of actors whom they considered Marxist or Jewish, to be sent to stage directors and film companies for boycotts to be launched. Fritz Kortner, Heinrich George, and Gründgens were among the names.¹⁹ At the beginning of the Hitler regime, right-wing authors, among them Rosenberg’s stooge Walter Stang, summarized the attempts of their Weimar-era fight against what they regarded as the excrescences of the republican avant-garde: “jazzband, Nigger song and Negro art,” in addition to “erotics of an alien race” and “Bolshevist agitation.”²⁰

When in January 1930 the Nazis wrested control of the government of Thuringia, based in the town of Weimar, after a popular regional vote, Hitler managed to have one of his confidants, the jurist Wilhelm Frick, installed as the leading minister of the new cabinet. Well programmed, Frick embarked on a veritable purge of the Thuringian cultural establishment. Not least because of those cultural raids, apart from other changes, political and economic, that the Nazis implemented in Weimar, this was their first experiment in manipulative democracy, since they considered themselves, correctly, as the victors in a constitutionally legal election process. But such nominal correctness rendered them not less, but more dangerous, because they could do much evil under the guise of legality. For the Modernist culture of the storied Goethe town, this spelled nothing less than demolition. As Ziegler had had a hand in drawing up ordinances for change, he became the new chief of Weimar’s national theater. Now forbidden were the staging of modern plays, the performance of atonal music or jazz, visiting cabarets or risqué circus acts. As Schultze-Naumburg was taking over as head of what remained of the Bauhaus, Schlemmer’s frescoes that had been created in the school were deleted, and seventy Expressionist paintings, including works by Klee and Kandinsky, were removed from exhibits in the ducal museum. All scheduled films were censored, especially those with merely a touch of eroticism.21

Disruptive and destructive activities by increasingly radicalized adherents of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), which was picking up steam amidst rising unemployment in the late 1920s, pleased no one on the outside of that movement, especially if they had looked favorably on certain manifestations of Modernism such as films by Lang or intelligent comment in a liberal-bourgeois newspaper. Rather than engaging in nihilist destruction, the Nazi culture brokers would have been more successful had they managed to introduce new artistic and other cultural forms persuasively in line with their ideology, undeniably original, and easily consumable. But in this they failed early, as they would fail again later: hence the early hallmarks of indigenous Nazi culture were a low level of output and poor quality. There was, for example, no film made celebrating Nazi street-fighter heroes by a Nazi-leaning film company, and very few novels by the end of the republic managed to describe the Party’s rise to strength in the past few years.²² Instead, the Nazis were forced to resort to products of culture long tried and true, declare them unjustly neglected and now to be embraced with fervor. Hence for pliable material they were looking to German conventional art mostly of the nineteenth century, to the homely, traditionalist and feel-good architecture of the kind Schultze-Naumburg was promoting, and to novels depicting World War I idols. If little of that could be declared National Socialist in character outright, the Nazis were still able to claim that every new political movement needed precursors and that in their case the inherent purpose of such earlier art ultimately was to lead to specifically Nazi creations. And indeed, most of the artworks the Nazis eventually produced were syncretic, derivative of an earlier, representational and reactionary, culture.

For its followers, most of whom, at the beginning, came from Germany’s conservative educated classes, the Kampfbund proceeded to sponsor a conventional cultural program, in gradual steps. The league’s journal, Deutsche Kultur-Wacht, presented its readers with “a combination of serious cultural feature stories and völkisch treatises.”23 Demanding “racial rejuvenation” of art by way of a return to völkisch sources, Schultze-Naumburg organized art shows of nineteenth-century painters Wilhelm Leibl, Franz Defregger, and Hans Thoma, but also works of the German Renaissance.²⁴ The combat league became especially busy in the support of Nazi-minded musicians, who for one reason or another were opposed to the new Modernism. For example, the violinist Gustav Havemann, who had been playing Schoenberg and Hindemith with his vaunted Havemann Quartet, experienced a conversion to National Socialism in 1932; it was then that he assumed the conductorship of the Kampfbund’s own orchestra and from there on continued to serve the Nazi cultural agenda well by performing only traditional works.²⁵ Other musicians who were now lifted into the Nazi Olympus were composers Max Trapp and Paul Graener, minor figures in the German world of music but influential as teachers at the academy of music and the Stern Conservatory in Berlin.²⁶

Always closely watched by the directors of the combat league, if not Hitler and Goebbels themselves, artistic activities unfolded on the rightist fringe of German political life, stretching from film to art criticism, but inevitably beholden to Germany’s traditionalist cultural past. Hence the South Tyrolean Luis Trenker, a veteran World War I officer and ski instructor with nature-boy charm, made films at the turn of the 1920s about nature’s beauty in the Alps, when he was not meeting for trysts with a young mountain-obsessed actress named Leni Riefenstahl. His movies appealed to patriotic sentiments among Germans, through images of rootedness in valley pastures and conquest of native mountain peaks, especially by conjuring up the unity, across the Alps, between Bavarians, Austrian Tyroleans and their German-speaking cousins in Italian Alto Adige.²⁷ Here, as later, there was a strong patriotic, even chauvinistic subtext. Toward the end of the republic, more kitschy agrarian-based novels were published than ever before about Germany as the home of simple yet trusty peasants.²⁸ Schultze-Naumburg risked more daring analyses between Modernist works of art and staid German classics such as the static Bamberg Horseman, an authoritarian icon, and Blunck extolled traditional German folk dance and German folk song, hoping for a broader renaissance of a Teutonic tribal value system to be galvanized into endurable form by a government under Hitler.²⁹

A PURGE OF THE WEIMAR ERA

At the end of February 1933 the actor Hans Otto was given notice that he would be dismissed from the Prussian State Theater in Berlin. After more than 100 appearances in the 1932–3 season, Otto performed for the last time as Kaiser in Goethe’s Faust at the end of May. He refused offers from the Vienna and Zurich theaters, because he did not wish to give in to oppressive Nazis. Instead, he went underground, until in mid-November he was arrested by Nazi storm troopers (SA) in a small café on Viktoria-Luise-Platz. In SA and Gestapo headquarters, he was beaten until unconscious, then thrown from the building onto the street. He died in a Berlin hospital on November 23.30

The young, handsome, and hugely popular Hans Otto was a typical representative of the Weimar culture the Nazis wanted to destroy. He had starred in classical plays as much as in Weimar-era pieces, such as dramas by Wedekind or Strindberg. But he was also a Communist functionary. Jan Petersen, too, was a Communist, and a journalist working out of Berlin. Lucky enough not to be caught by the Nazi regime, he wrote a book detailing Berlin proletarian life during the last phase of the Weimar Republic, in which the Nazis were not spared. Having baked the manuscript pages into a cake, he disguised himself as a ski tourist, this way smuggling them across the border with Czechoslovakia during Christmas 1934. As the book could be published abroad, Petersen himself escaped to Britain, via Switzerland, in the mid-1930s.³¹

Another Communist actor, thirty-two-year-old Wolfgang Langhoff from Düsseldorf, spent most of 1933 in the concentration camps Papenburg-Börgermoor and Lichtenburg. In Papenburg he wrote the words for the swamp-soldier song, which, with its defiant refrain, would be proudly adopted by many future inmates: “We are the moor soldiers/Marching with our spades into the moors.” Released early in 1934, Langhoff fled to Switzerland, where he, the young man “with the knocked-out teeth,” as Thomas Mann noted, met with the writer’s family in a transitory refuge.³²

Other, formerly well-known Weimar-era artists made it out of the Third Reich more easily, as they were not on the political left. The conductor Erich Kleiber, for example, originally an Austrian and especially fond of music by Alban Berg, was impelled to leave the Reich in 1935. Kleiber’s anti-Nazi cachet was ambiguous. Previously, along with Wilhelm Furtwängler, he had aided Hermann Göring as a member of a Nazi film censorship board. During the Röhm Purge of June–July 1934, Kleiber was heard to express his hope, among a close circle of friends on the island of Sylt, that Hitler, the “savior of Germany,” had not been harmed. But as one of the avant-garde conductors of the Weimar Republic, Kleiber eventually had to make his home in Argentina.33

And then there were the suicides. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the painter born in 1880, had been influenced by Kandinsky and French neo-Impressionists. In 1905 he had co-founded the Dresden avant-garde movement Die Brücke, along with Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. The year 1911 found him in Berlin, where he indulged in street scenes, varieté and circus themes. Animated by the company he kept, especially prostitutes, he became addicted to morphine and eventually was drinking one liter of absinthe a day. Having volunteered in World War I, he suffered a nervous breakdown. He retired to a Davos sanatorium during the war, and after his release in 1917 he stayed in Switzerland. But the main market for his work remained in Germany, and Kirchner considered himself a German patriot. That the Nazis, upon their ascent to power, could not abide his paintings but dismissed them as degenerate, puzzled and annoyed him. “We founded Die Brücke to encourage truly German art, made in Germany, and now it’s supposed to be un-German,” was his complaint, but the Nazis included his works in their “Degenerate Art” exhibition in July 1937 and stripped him of his fellowship in the Prussian Academy of Arts. Living in a farmhouse near Davos, yet despairing on account of his substance addictions, the Nazis’ rejection, and what he saw as political turmoil in Germany after the Anschluss of Austria, Kirchner shot himself near his house in June 1938.³⁴

After January 1933, Kirchner and his progressive artist consorts, irrespective of their political leanings, were viewed by most National Socialist politicians as proponents of a culture that had to be eradicated. More strongly even than in the last half of the Weimar Republic, those politicians associated the Modernist cultural currents that had burst forth after World War I with the German defeat, the prominence of Jews as creators or managers, left-wing or anarchic politics, and an aesthetic distortion of content and form. Twisted sexuality, derelict behavior, atonality, “Nigger jazz,” perverse dance routines, pimps and whores, images of cripples and beggars – all were manifestations of “asphalt culture,” touted as Dada, Cubism, Expressionism, or l’art pour l’art, charged their Nazi critics. This flotsam was the product of the big city rather than values organically linked to the countryside. Culture in Germany had become tainted by foreign influences and hence been rendered un-German. The individual had been more important than the community, a national community defined by its members’ purity of blood. “Sick people and the demented do not belong on a stage,” ranted Propaganda Minister Goebbels; Expressionism had to be fought because it attracted “the shrill, the unharmonic and the ill” – in the words of the art reviewer Karl Hans Bühner.35

Many measures taken by the Nazis against art and artists were spontaneously enforced by state-sanctioned paramilitary bands such as the storm trooper SA, the SS, or the army veterans’ association Stahlhelm, particularly early on in the regime. But other measures were based on legislation, such as the Reichstag Fire Decree of February 28, 1933, and the Enabling Act of March 23. Both had roots in Article 48, the emergency law of the Weimar Republic, which was technically still in place.³⁶ Special legislation regarding culture was also passed, such as the Schriftleitergesetz of October 4, 1933, an editors’ set of strangulating codes for regulating the press.³⁷ But the singularly most flexible and potentially most lethal piece of legislation for the new censors turned out to be the Law for the Reconstitution of the Civil Service, proclaimed on April 7, 1933. Its paragraph 4 stated that persons of dubious political persuasion who would not unequivocally back the new state could be dismissed from the state bureaucracy, with only three months’ pay. Paragraph 3 targeted Jews in the same manner, and paragraph 2 decreed that officials lacking the correct “aptitude” must be let go.³⁸ This law was immediately meant to eliminate civil servants with all their traditional rights of tenure, including pensions, and hence it was well suited to marginalize suspect artists employed by state institutions at all levels, be they municipal, regional, or national. Into this category fell opera singers, for instance at the Prussian State Opera in Berlin, or actors at the municipal theaters in Hamburg and Düsseldorf. But beyond the civil service, the law also came to be broadly used by non-government institutions, such as teachers’ associations or physicians’ leagues. In the realm of culture, therefore, any band of Nazis with an anti-Modernist bent was liable to refer to it in attempts to terminate unwanted colleagues.

In addition, expulsion from the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin, which had been a token of republican culture, was meant to signal shame for all its members, affecting all artistic disciplines. An early victim was Heinrich Mann, the head of the academy’s writers’ section, who was dismissed by President Max von Schillings on February 15.39 A composer, von Schillings’s colleague Arnold Schoenberg, who had taught at the academy since 1925, followed in March, after Schillings had declared that “the Jewish influence at the academy must be eliminated.” Schoenberg and his small family had fled to Paris by May 17.⁴⁰ Also during May, the Jewish honorary academy president, Max Liebermann, declared his resignation from that post and his definitive retreat from the school. In a statement of justification, published by the press, Germany’s foremost Impressionist painter maintained that he had devoted his entire life to German art and that “art had as little to do with politics as had lineage.”⁴¹ By that time, in a process that would last for months and even years, Jewish, left-wing, or pronouncedly Modernist artists were either being dismissed outright or pressured, like the sculptor Ernst Barlach, to resign on their own volition.⁴² Only one of them protested in the course of her resignation. The esteemed novelist Ricarda Huch, politically more to the right of center but cherishing tolerance, let Schillings know that she rebuked “several of the measures by the new government,” including the current demand that academy fellows sign a declaration of loyalty to the regime. Huch was correct in assuming that her protest translated into an instant severance from the institution, as she retreated to her private home.⁴³

Turning to individual artistic disciplines, from the German stage alone, not counting the film industry, 10 percent of all pre-1933 personnel were ousted during the first months of the Reich, and one-third of all directors, many of those Jews. In Munich, the entrepreneurial theater Intendant Otto Falckenberg, who had favored works by Brecht and other Modernists, was briefly incarcerated by the secret police, but then released.⁴⁴ Falckenberg had notoriously championed the genres that were now taboo: the Naturalism at the turn of the last century and, subsequently, Expressionism, which began before World War I. Dramas in those genres featured the psychology of individuals in their interpersonal, often conflicted, relations, rather than positivist dynamism in racially defined communal settings, preferred by the Nazis. Authors from the Naturalist school, whose works were now officially shunned (constituting almost one-half of the Weimar repertoire), included Hermann Sudermann, Arthur Schnitzler, Frank Wedekind, Walter Hasenclever, Ernst Toller, and Carl Zuckmayer.45 Georg Kaiser, the most prolific Expressionist dramatist of the 1920s, was having his latest play Der Silbersee (The Silver Lake), a quasi-socialist object lesson, premiered simultaneously at three theaters in the Reich in late February 1933. In Magdeburg, to a score by Weill, the Communist Ernst Busch was singing and playing the leading role. Stahlhelm and NSDAP functionaries declared the performance forbidden, causing its untimely cancellation. Similar interruptions occurred in Erfurt and in Leipzig, where the Jewish composer Gustav Brecher had contributed the soundscape. Brecher later had to flee, killing himself in Belgian Ostend in 1940.⁴⁶

Many German actors of the stage also played in films; indeed, similar prohibitions would affect the movie scene too. Hence actors who had been featured in typically Weimar-era films lost their jobs. One of these was the formerly much-beloved Hertha Thiele, who had played in the left-wing, Expressionist classic Kuhle Wampe (Who Owns the World?, 1932), co-written by Brecht and co-starring Busch. After she had refused to impersonate Erna Jänicke, the girlfriend of Nazi hero Horst Wessel, who had been murdered by the Red Front in 1930, she lost her certification as a German actress and eventually left for Switzerland. Apart from Kuhle Wampe, many other films produced during the Weimar Republic were proscribed, because of unacceptable themes or styles, or because leading actors were Jewish. The half-Jewish director Fritz Lang’s Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (1933), for instance, appeared as too Expressionist, quite apart from the murky racial pedigree of Lang himself. Several special laws aiming for prohibition were passed after January 1933, the most important being the one of February 16, 1934, when an all-inclusive censorship decree was promulgated.⁴⁷

In a culture setting where, on a scale of one to ten, Richard Wagner occupied a ten and jazz and atonal music a one, much German traditional music was able to survive under the Nazis, while most modern works were cast aside. Characteristically, the Nazis condemned truly atonal compositions such as those by Schoenberg and his pupil Alban Berg, but in addition they made the convenient mistake of conflating atonality with any form of cacophony, which for them included not only jazz but also modern if not yet dodecaphonic pieces, for instance those by Hindemith or Hermann Reutter. Of Reutter, Goebbels said as late as January 1938 that he would oppose his candidacy, as an “atonalist,” for a position at Frankfurt’s conservatory, for which Reich Education Minister Bernhard Rust had earmarked him. (Here the conflict between two Nazi ministers was typical of the heterogeneity of Third Reich gubernatorial structures; in the culture domain, Goebbels usually won out: a strange constellation of competencies in Hitler’s model of government, which will deserve another, closer, look in Chapter 2.)⁴⁸ As far as Berg was concerned, his opera Wozzeck was rejected for its atonality; beyond that, its social message, reflecting post-World War I humanitarian impulses, was disdained by the Nazis. So was Berg’s opera Lulu, featuring a harlot, over the Berlin premiere of which the Modernist Erich Kleiber, not originally anti-Nazi, was impelled to leave Germany. Under this pressure other musicians also left, while some, after having been fired from an opera stage or symphony orchestra pit, tried to make do in other jobs. Among the former were Hindemith and Vladimir Vogel, a Modernist but not atonalist, yet branded as such; Berg, always an “Aryan” Vienna resident, died there on Christmas Eve 1935 after a lethal bee-sting infection.⁴⁹

One last Weimar-style performance of opera took place at the Berlin Staatsoper on February 12, 1933, after having been rehearsed months before. Its avant-garde creators were Jürgen Fehling, the stage director, and Otto Klemperer, the conductor; Oskar Strnad was the stage designer. This partially surreal interpretation of Wagner’s Tannhäuser was meant as an anti-Bayreuth demonstration, opposing a style that Wagner’s dowdy son Siegfried had still championed and traditionalist-leaning Nazis favored. Klemperer and Strnad were Jewish, and both of them left the Reich – Klemperer for the United States and Strnad for his native Austria, where he died in 1935. Fehling, however, remained in Berlin, entering into a tenuous relationship with the regime.⁵⁰

As before, much music was transmitted over the broadcasting system, the structure of which was now changed and its contents modified. Radio had been an instrument of propaganda the Nazis had not fully realized before January 1933, for two reasons. First, Hitler had limited opportunities for public speaking after his Landsberg imprisonment in 1924; as such it was a privilege extended to him depending on the presence or absence of censorship exercised by individual German states. This was not conducive to broadcasting. Second, the idea of radio was intimately connected to the era of the Weimar Republic during which it was created, making propaganda mavens of the Nazi Party like Goebbels suspicious and wary.51

That changed after the Nazis’ rise to power. In a speech on August 18, 1933, Goebbels suggested to his followers that radio was a superb instrument of political control and henceforth was to be neatly accommodated to the Nazi Führer principle. In its current shape it had to be cleansed of the effect of abuses by its former staff, such as corruption, a sinecurial infestation, and bloated salaries – quite apart from any changes to its thematic content.⁵² The purge of Weimar radio personnel now getting under way targeted leading broadcast officials, among them the Intendanten of almost all local stations of the former nationwide Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft (RRG). Several of them, after losing their positions, were put on trial, as was the founder of German broadcasting Hans Bredow; some committed suicide.⁵³ Ernst Hardt, the chief of Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne, had had prior experience as Intendant of the Nationaltheater Weimar and, like many of the others, was a staunch Social Democrat. Although his Cologne imprisonment lasted only a few days, he emerged from it impoverished, seeking refuge with his married daughter in Berlin.⁵⁴

Parallel to the purging of radio personnel, Goebbels, who officially oversaw all aspects of broadcasting following his appointment to the propaganda portfolio by Hitler in March 1933, initiated changes to the programming. As a first step, elements of modernity, such as “Nigger jazz,” were scheduled for elimination. Music by Jewish or even half-Jewish composers fell into this category, as did some foreign compositions. By contrast, music by “German composers” was supposed to be stressed. In this context, Beethoven’s works were regarded as a strong antidote to “the sport of dissonance, the incest of harmony and the chaos of form.”⁵⁵

A combination of spontaneous paramilitary enforcement and statutory regulation also caused changes in the situation of the press. First targeted were the left-oriented newspapers, such as the Social Democratic Vorwärts and the Communist Party’s Rote Fahne. An emergency law of February 4, 1933, added a legalistic veneer to sudden outbreaks of violence, so that by March all leftist broadsheets had been effectively stopped.⁵⁶ Subsequently, many middle-of-the-road bourgeois papers also became victims of the regime in short order, as did confessional ones. If they were not forbidden outright, they were amalgamated or repossessed. And so, where there had been over 3,000 newspapers in Germany by January 1933, there were only some 2,000 four years later. In many cases, apart from the firing or incarceration of old newspaper personnel, buildings and other assets were confiscated or acquired by Party businesses for nominal sums. As for the staff, beyond the emergency decrees of spring and early summer, on October 4 the new editors’ law (Schriftleitergesetz) was promulgated, whose paragraph 5 outlined criteria for sackings. Besides non-“Aryan” lineage, those deficiencies of journalists were mentioned that were apt to prevent a “spiritual guidance for the public.” Such perceived shortcomings would provide ideological or – in the case of culture – aesthetic reasons for dismissal.57

A few case histories reveal the proportions of institutional upheaval and human suffering. The SA stormed the headquarters of the Social Democratic Münchener Post, wreaked havoc in the halls, and arrested those not able to flee. The Catholic weekly Der gerade Weg, also in Munich, with a history of pre-1933 opposition to the Nazis, was overrun and Franz Gerlich, its chief editor, manhandled on the spot; he was later murdered in Dachau. The high-bourgeois Frankfurter Zeitung meanwhile, a mainstay of liberal-conservative opinion in the Weimar Republic and famous for its feuilleton section, was visited by policemen as early as March 31, 1933, who arrested some of the editors. The result was that the (at that time still Jewish) owners were cowed into submission, and the paper was remodeled into a showpiece Nazi medium. And the Neue Badische Landeszeitung in Mannheim was prohibited on March 1, 1934, presumably after it had been discredited as anti-regime by a Nazi insider. Its chief editor Heinrich Rumpf tried to work in a lending library for a while, but then committed suicide.⁵⁸

Different conditions than for radio and the press obtained for other arts, because here creators were individually more independent. In architecture, for example, only architects employed by institutions could be dismissed, from the bureaucracy, teaching, and state or regime-beholden firms. Self-employed ones relied on their order books for income and could stay in Germany, unless harm could come to them as Jews or political leftists. As far as architectural style was concerned, as yet no Nazi consensus appeared to evolve, and therefore no systematic discrimination, on that account.

Nevertheless, there is no question that after January 1933 the Weimar-republican architectural Bauhaus style, initiated by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius in Dessau, was out of favor. Gropius and other associates of the vaunted Ring architects, such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, were officially marginalized. “The so-called New Objectivity constructed smooth façades and empty walls,” explained the culture bureaucrat Otto von Kursell in 1933.59 As part of that movement, the Bauhaus was accused of preferring a flat roof over a peaked one such as traditional German houses possessed, which was judged technically awkward and aesthetically unpleasant; Bauhaus style tended to emphasize horizontal lines instead of Gothic, vertical ones. Rather than German, it was “Bolshevist” art and fully in keeping with Weimar’s “asphalt culture.”⁶⁰ By and large, Nazi ideologues wanted to return to the historicist traditions of pre-war architecture, with emphasis on a rural rather than urban character.⁶¹

Not least in order to purge unwanted colleagues, including several of the Ring such as Gropius’s friend Erich Mendelsohn, the Verband Deutscher Architekten (VDA), the republican near-monopoly association of German architects, was infiltrated by a Nazi group close to former architect Alfred Rosenberg and, later in 1933, was integrated into Goebbels’s newly founded Reichskulturkammer (RKK, Reich Culture Chamber).⁶² In April 1933 the Berlin remnants of the original Weimar Bauhaus fell victim to Nazi censors; the school was closed after decisive action by the chief Party ideologue Rosenberg, a pompous obscurantist. Bauhaus-influenced architects lost their positions: Ernst Wichert at the Frankfurt School of Arts and Crafts, Hans Scharoun and Adolf Rading, “designers of some of the most radical housing developments built during the Weimar Republic,” both at Breslau’s Academy of Arts. Hans Poelzig was driven from an architectural school in Berlin, and Robert Vorhoelzer from the Technische Hochschule in Munich. But most lesser disciples of the Bauhaus were retained in state-administrative or teaching positions, as they were able to adapt themselves to the regime’s own requirements. Heavily marked by the Bauhaus aura, both Gropius and his successor Mies van der Rohe tried to get by as self-employed consultants. They offered their services to exhibitions sponsored by the regime, Gropius even designing swastika-flagged sites for an event in 1934, “clearly pandering to the Nazi regime.” Later that year, however, he had found it too difficult financially and decided to move to Britain, hoping for better times. But even after he had arrived at Harvard University in 1937 he insisted that he was not there as an immigrant, but for “serving German culture.” Mies van der Rohe, after similar disappointing experiences in Germany, followed Gropius to the United States in 1938, while their mentor Peter Behrens remained in the service of the Third Reich.63

For the Nazis, painting and sculpture constituted a much more contentious issue than architecture, for the latter always served practical purposes, no matter the design. Avant-garde pictorial art of the post-World War I era was placed in disrepute by critics believing in Rosenberg or Goebbels, whose remarks were made to concur with judgments that Hitler himself (who had failed the exam for the Vienna Academy of Arts) had made as early as the mid-1920s, in Mein Kampf. Here he had spoken of “Cubism and Dadaism,” to be subsumed under “the Bolshevism of art.” When in key public speeches from 1933 to 1937 Hitler repeated those phrases almost verbatim in reference to modern art, he never bothered to qualify them, such as demonstrating that he knew the difference between the various new art forms – Dadaism or Cubism, Impressionism or Expressionism. Inevitably and simplistically, he linked all such movements to degeneracy, to a sick corporeal and mental state, and to Jews.⁶⁴ Hence Rosenberg’s sycophant Robert Scholz charged in 1933 that Karl Hofer, Klee, and their friends were involved with Expressionism and Cubism, and thus had brought “the poison of artistic nihilism” to Germany. Wolfgang Willrich in 1934 reproduced examples of Emil Nolde’s and Barlach’s work, which were supposed to demonstrate their path to “degeneracy, on to distortion and smuttiness.”⁶⁵ From their often unintelligible scribblings it is clear that these Nazi censors hated modern art’s color schemes, not reflecting nature, and shapes or forms, non-representational or abstract.

Based on such ideology, Nazi authorities embarked on a two-pronged, mutually complementary policy: removing unwanted objets d’art from public view and showcasing them, in especially arranged exhibitions, for all Germans to see and reject. In June 1933, Hitler himself received a group of anti-Modernists, including the chief Bauhaus enemy, the architect Schultze-Naumburg, and ordered 500 avant-garde paintings to be removed from the Kronprinzen-Palais, Germany’s national gallery in Berlin, based on photos they had showed him. In October 1936 he acted again to order the Kronprinzen-Palais’s doors shut for good. Next to Hitler’s actions, regional galleries were closed or thinned out chiefly by followers of Rosenberg. In Munich, the Bavarian Minister of the Interior and Gauleiter Adolf Wagner snatched pictures from an exhibition of Berlin artists in 1935. In Essen, the new director of the Folkwang Museum, Klaus Graf von Baudissin, withdrew works by Kandinsky, a native of Russia, whom Baudissin called “uprooted” in the process. Concomitantly, exhibitions designed as horror shows were organized, starting with Mannheim in 1933 – a project that then traveled to Munich and Erlangen. Mannheim was followed by Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, Chemnitz, and especially the art metropolis Dresden. Here Hitler was so impressed with what he considered degenerate art that he ordered the exhibition to travel throughout Germany. Institutionally supportive of these early activities was Rosenberg’s Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur, aided by a fanatically Nazi art society, the Deutscher Kunst-Verein (German Art Society), under the leadership of the obscure painter Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder.66

Dismissals from the German art world began immediately after the Nazi takeover and lasted for years. One of the first to go was the republic’s aesthetic mentor, Reichskunstwart Edwin Redslob, who had presided over the format of state funerals as much as over the design of coins and stamps. Museum and gallery directors were dismissed, such as Gustav F. Hartlaub from the post in Mannheim, or Carl Georg Heise from the Hamburg Museum. From their teaching positions, Karl Hofer was removed in Berlin, Willi Baumeister in Frankfurt, and the Bauhaus sculptor Gerhard Marcks in Halle. The early Bauhaus’s Paul Klee was forced to leave Düsseldorf’s Academy of Arts, moving back to his native Switzerland in late 1933.⁶⁷

Several of Klee’s colleagues did not have such an easy way out of the Nazi dilemma and sought, in fact, to re-engage themselves after their initial dismissal. Their cases deserve scrutiny. Otto Dix was an Expressionist who had crossed over to Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), an extension of Expressionism but also a reaction, in that its protagonists turned to a sharply focused verisimilitude, as in a detailed photograph – in contrast to the exaggerated shapes and colors of the preceding genre.⁶⁸ Extreme realism and social criticism were hallmarks of Neue Sachlichkeit, and therefore Dix’s brothel scenes were castigated by prurient Nazi fanatics as “vulgarities of the lowest taste.” The Saxon government released Dix from his Dresden academy post on April 8, 1933, in line with the new civil service order. He moved to his brother-in-law’s castle near Lake Constance, acutely short of money, endured exclusion from all exhibitions in 1934 and, apart from minor local appointments, had to lie low until 1945.⁶⁹ Max Beckmann too lost his professorship, at the Frankfurt Städelschule early in 1933, attempted basic survival in Berlin and later, during July 1937, when hundreds of his paintings were featured at Munich’s “Degenerate Art” exhibition, fled to Amsterdam, and from there to New York. In 1935 the Nazi critic Carl Linfert, who happened to dislike the fanatic Rosenberg, had tried to save Beckmann’s skin by attempting to dissociate him publicly from Expressionism – an unpersuasive attempt, even from today’s perspective.70 The painter Oskar Schlemmer tried everything under the sun to reverse his dismissal from the Bauhaus, now in Berlin, in April 1933. Penurious and eager for adaptation, he insisted in a letter to Goebbels that he belonged to “the type of artist which National Socialism needs.” To Baudissin he wrote, pleading in Bauhaus aesthetic terms: “Is National Socialism not a form idea? After all, a whole Reich is supposed to be formed, newly formed!” And he saw a place for himself in this novel, productive process.⁷¹

In addition to all these actions, the Nazis stopped the influence of Weimar-era books through censorship of existing ones, manuscript publication indictments, and a spectacular nationwide book-burning. Modernist writers who had teaching appointments at universities or schools were few and far between; less prominent ones were able to adjust by changing their scripts. The extreme treatment of a few famous freewheeling authors was to serve as a general threat to anybody not toeing the line. Thomas Mann, for instance, who was abroad on a speaking tour when the Nazis came to power in January 1933 and would not return to Germany until after World War II, was shown to have lost his Reich citizenship in December 1936, along with his Bonn University honorary doctorate. His older brother Heinrich had fled to France already in February 1933, conspicuously losing his citizenship in August of that year.⁷²

Nazi literary critics eyed for extermination works by Communists and Social Democrats or by Confessional (Lutheran) Christians, volumes on women’s emancipation, pacifism, sexuality, and trivia. Non-fiction broadly included all literature of the Weimar avant-garde, as well as Jewish and certain international authors’ books, such as those by the French Communist Henri Barbusse and the American social critic Upton Sinclair. There were blacklists by various Party and government agencies, some drawn up long before January 1933. On the basis of those, renowned publishers such as Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Rowohlt, and Propyläen were told to halt production and distribution of books in the styles of what the Nazis regarded as Naturalism, Expressionism, Dadaism, and New Objectivity. Public and lending libraries had to give up a good proportion of their stock. Already in December 1933 over 1,000 titles had been prohibited or cashiered; this number would climb higher in the years that followed.73

Public and university libraries were explicitly targeted by the book burnings of May 1933. Evidently instigated by Goebbels himself, who was backed by Hitler, they took place at most German universities. On the basis of the already extant blacklists and aided by representatives of the KfdK and criminal police, members of a Nazi student association (DSt) selected indexed titles by authors already declared off limits. The search extended to school libraries and was also supposed to motivate individuals to relieve private collections of their dross. After weeks of preparation, the burnings took place, well coordinated, on May 10; various NSDAP and Party affiliate members, such as SA and SS, put in appearances. Adorned in academic robes, university faculty assisted students – Professor Ernst Bertram in Cologne, Professor Hans Naumann in Bonn, and Rector Leo von Zumbusch in Munich. In Frankfurt the books were dragged to the burn site on a manure cart drawn by oxen, in Mannheim horses towed an execution wagon. Thus in Würzburg, at least 280 books were destroyed; this would have been the standard in other university towns. In Göttingen a portrait of Lenin crowned the book pile; the Weimar-republican flag was draped to defile others.⁷⁴

In Berlin the auto-da-fé’s choreography demanded the presence of Propaganda Minister Goebbels himself. From an open car, he delivered a speech honoring the event’s all-encompassing motto, “Against the un-German Spirit,” at Kaiser-Franz-Josef-Platz between the Staatsoper and Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität. He riled against Jewish intellectualism and the materialism of November 1918 and urged the students to toss into flames “the spiritual scum” of years past. The works of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Heinrich Mann, Carl von Ossietzky, Erich Maria Remarque, and other pre-eminent authors as far back as the nineteenth century, were then thrown onto the pyre, each with a denunciation.⁷⁵

NEW NAZI CONTROLS

Purging the cultural establishment of vestiges of the Weimar-republican cultural era was one thing, but keeping the realm clean of future malformations was another. Inasmuch as the Nazis had been using the existing laws of the republic immediately after they came to power in January 1933 and persisted in exploiting them for the fortification of a tightening dictatorship, this was ideally applicable in the cultural realm. Hence the Nazis carried on basing new laws on old ones, but they also created some novel laws specifically tailored to their needs and not grounded in the Weimar legislative system.

One of the first laws thus promulgated was the Reichsfilmgesetz of July 14, 1933, designed to commence organizational and thematic control of the German film industry, which was in disarray. Under it, a provisional Filmkammer (Chamber of Film) was installed, incorporating anyone involved in film production.76 It stipulated that any new film script had to be handed to the authorities for prior authorization and that directors and actors be vetted. One film that fell victim to these procedures was Horst Wessel, which was forbidden on October 9 of that year, on the day of its scheduled premiere in Berlin. The film, designed as a paean to the Nazi martyr Wessel, a Berlin storm-trooper leader murdered by Communists in January 1930, was judged “to do neither justice to Horst Wessel, whose heroic figure it belittles through inadequate representation, nor the National Socialist movement, on which the state now rests.” After it had been returned for re-editing and many cuts, the film was reissued under the title Hans Westmar, finally approved by the censors and first shown on December 13.⁷⁷

On February 16, 1934 the Reichsfilmgesetz film decree was passed. This allowed not only for a cleansing of the Weimar film canon, but also amplified the prerogative of the Nazi censors. To ensure an ideologically sound film review, the office of a Reichsfilmdramaturg was created, which now would oversee the business of proper script examination as well as the sanctioning of a finished picture. Not least because it turned out to work in a cumbersome and time-consuming fashion, Goebbels himself acquired a direct privilege of supervision over the Reichsfilmdramaturg from Hitler himself, in June of 1935. Supervision was enhanced even more after the Nazi regime began nationalizing the German film industry in 1936. In a roundabout manner, Third Reich films could be pulled from distribution if they violated National Socialist or artistic sensibilities – two elastic categories indeed.⁷⁸ It is not known exactly how many new German films were censored and then given a green light; the film scholar Gerd Albrecht lists thirteen films for 1933, fourteen for 1937, and twenty-three for 1941.⁷⁹

Also new was the editorial legislation of October 4, 1933, the Schriftleitergesetz, used to purge the Weimar press. In view of future publications, editors’ qualifications had to guarantee obedience to strict Nazi content standards. “It is incumbent on editors,” stated paragraph 13, “to deal with objects to be treated truthfully, and to judge them to the best of their knowledge.” Between the lines, it was clear that “truthful” was based on Nazi norms and the best of an editor’s knowledge could work against him if it ran counter to Nazi interests.80 The law reduced individual freedoms of independent writers to the point of subservience, making editors and journalists subject to the demands of political masters such as Goebbels. To facilitate controls, each contribution in a newspaper now had to be identifiable by author; anonymity was disallowed.⁸¹ Nazi press experts lauded this. Professor Emil Dovifat, from the University of Berlin, demanded that from now on the will of the highest leadership be fused with public opinion, so that the latter echoed the former, and a single unit be forged, “for the sake of the nation.” To this Guido Enderis from The New York Times objected, as he summed up the changes negatively: “Journalism as a free profession becomes a thing of the past in the Third Reich and in its place there is created a sort of personal union between the individual newspaper worker and the State, with the profession hedged in by stringent rules and regulations.”⁸²

Strengthening press controls further, a stop was put to analytical criticism on November 6, 1936. Analysis and criticism, of course, had been tokens of the intellectual world in the Weimar Republic. The new blanket measure, affecting mostly newspaper feuilletons (features) but also broadcasting, was decreed by Goebbels in his capacity as Propaganda Minister.⁸³ It meant that from now on only qualified Nazi authors were permitted comments about books, films, theater productions, objets d’art, or any other cultural medium. Because all of these, after January 1933, had to be motivated by a National Socialist spirit, there was, by definition, nothing for the writer to criticize. Henceforth an author, to be renamed “Kunstbetrachter” from “Kunstkritiker” – art observer from art critic – was to merely describe approvingly his or her preordained subjects rather than dissect them analytically, lest this be seen as criticism of the regime. This signaled that future creators who were long on Party ideology, even though they were short on skills, were welcome to step forward, at the expense of true talent.⁸⁴ The SS broadsheet Das Schwarze Korps characterized the workings of the new decree as ideal in a situation where “one views a work of art as a totality, meaning one does not abuse one’s expert knowledge through analysis.”85 Rudolf Kircher, chief correspondent of the formerly renowned Frankfurter Zeitung, applauded this when he remarked that an author henceforth had to place himself “in the service of a conscious cultural policy, which is meant as a decisive part of National Socialism’s work in the state and on the state.”⁸⁶

As for actual books, authors were cautioned not to place themselves on the existing blacklists, whose criteria were constantly expanded, and new ones issued. Apart from Goebbels and his tentacles, the criminal police also possessed the means to search and confiscate even private libraries, should this be warranted. Henceforth warned by previous examples, authors practiced self-censorship before handing in a manuscript to the boards to be examined, registered, and approved.⁸⁷ In this area, as Goebbels and the Reich Interior Ministry’s police forces were increasingly collaborating, Rosenberg, always vying with Goebbels for control, again sought a piece of the action. Having instituted an Amt für Schrifttumspflege, an office for publishers’ control, by June 1934 within the Party, he craved power over authors and publishers, only to remain impotent in the end. For just as his Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur was reduced to insignificance by 1935, in the face of Goebbels’s growing powers, Rosenberg’s censorship office was also eclipsed by his rivals, and thereafter effective only in the more limited realm of the Party.⁸⁸

Yet another new law of the regime was passed, on the instigation of Goebbels, on May 5, 1934, regulating the stage. This law placed all affairs of theater, opera, and operetta squarely under the jurisdiction of the Propaganda Minister. (Exempt were the Prussian state stages, as well as the state orchestras, of Berlin, Kassel, and Wiesbaden, which remained under the Minister President of Prussia, in the person of Göring.) Paragraphs 3 and 4 of the new law governed supervision over the proprietors and directors of German stages, whether governmental or private, while paragraph 5 determined which (new) pieces of tragedy, comedy, or opera were suitable to be performed.⁸⁹ As an executive under these new orders, a Reichsdramaturg was to be appointed, with powers of acceptance or rejection. These functions were fulfilled throughout the Third Reich by Rainer Schlösser, a World War I veteran and doctor in German letters (until his capture by the Red Army and eventual execution in 1945). Schlösser would receive and process proposals for all theaters, exercising judgment of the kind that soon caused writers for the stage, composers, and librettists to resort to self-censorship, pre-empting any indictments, just as in the case of book publishers.90

It has already been observed how, through the existence of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry (Promi), many facets of the administration of culture could be channeled, and how legislative action could be authorized and sustained. Yet another such administrative bracket was designed to further standardization and streamlining, this time on the personnel side. On September 22, 1933 the Propaganda Ministry was charged with the central coordination of artists, writers, and journalists in job-specific Kammern, or “chambers,” after the establishment of the Reichskulturkammer (RKK). In their completed form, the individual genre chambers constituted a horizontal order in accordance with the corporatist principle characteristic of fascist regimes, after the initiation of such (Syndicalist) chambers by Benito Mussolini in the early 1920s, originally conceived to avoid industrial class struggle. Six chambers were created, one each for writers, journalists, radio workers, theater artists, musicians, and visual artists (the provisional Film Chamber of July 14 was later integrated, with the Press Chamber eventually removed).⁹¹ In the judgment of historian Alan Steinweis, the conjoining of two parties of interest here promised advantages for both. “Signaling the regime’s readiness to reward loyalty to the state with opportunities for material gain and latitude for professional autonomy, Goebbels succeeded in winning the cooperation of conservative (or apolitical) non-Nazis; these artists believed that a chamber system consisting of self-regulating corporations would help promote professional agendas that had remained unfulfilled during the economically troubled Weimar years.”⁹² In future, as membership in those chambers became compulsory, “Aryan” Germans, with Jews progressively filtered out, could elect to collaborate with the regime artistically according to the ever-amplified guidelines. If they transgressed, as did the novelist Jochen Klepper within the Reich Schrifttumskammer (RSK, Reich Writers’ Chamber), they could face variably tight supervision or a writer’s ban leading to exclusion, which Klepper incrementally suffered. Klepper, actually a right-wing patriot, had committed the capital crime of staying loyal to his Jewish wife, one of whose daughters from a first marriage was scheduled for deportation to the East at the height of World War II. The entire family of three committed suicide before the SS could knock on their door, in December 1942.⁹³

A telling example of the Reich Culture Chamber’s key role in music is provided by the Hindemith affair. Hindemith had Jewish relations, had played with prominent Jewish musicians such as the cellist Emanuel Feuermann in the past, and had himself written music that bordered on the avant-garde. This had turned Hitler against him, and Rosenberg’s cohorts were determined to destroy him. On the other hand, Hindemith himself was intrigued by the possibility of exciting new ventures in the incipient Third Reich, and sympathizers close to Goebbels wanted him in the role of a nationalist innovator, notwithstanding his Modernist leanings. In February 1934, therefore, he was invited to join the Reich Music Chamber’s (RMK) leadership council, as part of the overall Reich Culture Chamber (RKK) structure; what eased his decision to accept was that Richard Strauss already acted as the RMK’s president, and conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler as Strauss’s deputy. In March 1934, Hindemith presented a symphonic version of his opera-in-progress, Mathis der Maler, under Furtwängler’s baton, in Berlin. It was well received, even in Nazi circles. Yet Rosenberg and Hitler continued their opposition, especially to a planned premiere of the composer’s forthcoming opera. To aid Hindemith, Furtwängler published an article in his favor, trying to excuse his earlier, more pronounced, exploits in the avant-garde and characterizing him as apolitical. Objecting to such interference, Goebbels, as president of the overarching RKK, now turned openly against both Furtwängler and Hindemith, who then resigned from the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. Like Hindemith, Furtwängler lost his RMK post, temporarily falling out with the Nazi regime. Without official ties to the RKK, the future of both musicians in the Third Reich looked uncertain.94

Apart from the RKK, the Nazi regime also used professional associations to keep artists in lock step. One such organization was the Reichsverband der Deutschen Presse, the Reich association of the German press, which exercised job-specific jurisdiction over all its compulsory members working in the newspaper sector. The quasi-legal basis for this had been the Nazi Schriftleitergesetz of October 1933. Within this jurisdiction any journalist could be hauled before a professional tribunal for whatever might be deemed a transgression against the Nazi code of aesthetics, or of politics. As a local history from Franconia in 1936 demonstrates, suspected journalists could be placed at the whim of capricious superiors for months on end.⁹⁵

And then there was continuous surveillance in some areas of cultural activity, implicitly, in film production, and again, explicitly, in the press and radio, with the latter two deemed so eminently political as shapers of public opinion. In broadcasting, programming was constantly reshaped on a weekly, if not daily basis.96 For the press, Goebbels had regular meetings scheduled in Berlin, which representatives of Germany’s main newspapers had to attend. Goebbels’s lieutenants issued press directives that had to be followed by newspaper editors to the letter, and had to be kept secret. For instance, in December 1935 they were instructed not to mention butter in the preparation of Christmas cakes, lest a false sense of agricultural plenitude arose. That December also, the readers’ attention was to be directed to a collection of speeches Minister Goebbels had just published. In September 1936 the sixtieth birthday of Nazi composer Georg Vollerthun was not to be announced, because of a pending charge of homosexuality against him. This and all other pieces of information were classified, subject to the threat of heavy penalties if released. When Walter Schwerdtfeger, a young journalist, was found to have passed on such instructions to foreign colleagues for several months, he was tried in 1935 and sentenced to a long term in penitentiary.⁹⁷

The governance of the Third Reich, including the administration of its culture, took place through the application of fixed laws, several of them newly minted, and arbitrary decision-making, undertaken by senior and the most senior leaders. This led to an admixture of multiple executive orders and private judgment by State and Party grandees. In culture, the superimposition of arbitrary, personal rule over written law was chronic throughout the Third Reich, affecting the freedom of artists as much as the quality of their work. At times, such a work’s very existence depended on the whim of a self-appointed censor, but also on a micro-managing Hitler.

Sometimes these censors, arrogating power unto themselves, could be relatively minor potentates. Alfred Rosenberg, with his drab personality, was merely a Reichsleiter in the Party. As such, he usually succumbed to functionaries who, next to their Party positions, also held office in governments of state, at Reich or regional levels, as did Göring as Prussian Minister President and Minister of Aviation and Goebbels as Reich Propaganda Minister. (In addition, Göring occupied the Party post of Reich Hunt Master and Goebbels that of Berlin Gauleiter.) But using whatever Party instruments he had, Rosenberg managed every now and then to outdo even Goebbels as a controller, such as when he caused Rudolf Wagner-Régeny’s opera Die Bürger von Calais, under Herbert von Karajan’s musical direction, to be removed from the program of the Staatsoper in Berlin, even under Göring’s sponsorship. The reason had been a libretto by Weimar-era Caspar Neher, which featured among the Calais citizens “a downtrodden group of people desperately brokering for peace,” as well as Neher’s bleak stage design. In January 1939 both were ill forebodings in an atmosphere where Nazi Germany was preparing for war. In addition, while the libretto had been based on a work by Georg Kaiser, the music was reminiscent of Weill’s.98 Next to a Reichsleiter, a Party department head, such as Rosenberg, a Gauleiter – Party district leader – could also interfere. This happened when Gauleiter Adolf Wagner of Munich – after messing with the city’s art – forbade a performance of Schiller’s drama Maria Stuart on Good Friday 1940, on the abstruse logic that a Catholic-tendentious piece would offend all Protestants. “The National Socialist state is disinterested in church matters of both confessions.” The real reason was, however, that Wagner, guided by his personal sense of taste, wished to remove Schiller’s classic from the playlists altogether. In this case, the Gauleiter had successfully overridden Goebbels’s Reichsdramaturg, Rainer Schlösser.⁹⁹

In his Prussian fiefdom, Göring usually had more power than Rosenberg and could rival even Goebbels as Gauleiter of the capital. When in 1939 a Berlin stage production of Shakespeare’s Richard II scheduled for the Vienna Reich Theater Week was declined by Goebbels’s Promi, Göring protested successfully. It had been the creation of his protégés at the Staatstheater, Gustaf Gründgens and Jürgen Fehling, and Göring’s wife, the former actress Emmy Sonnemann, stood behind it; Gründgens was to play the main protagonist. Goebbels did not demur.¹⁰⁰ In another instance, also in 1939, Werner Egk’s opera Peer Gynt was denounced by Göring to Hitler, possibly because the Minister President saw himself made fun of in the character of a fat stage troll (but probably also because he did not like the jazz-like dazzle). Yet Hitler, who had been enthralled by the music, dismissed his complaint, personally taking care that Egk became a favored artist, and even a department head in Goebbels’s Music Chamber.¹⁰¹

In June 1933, Hitler had accorded to Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry supervisory powers – in excess of the minister’s regular privileges – excised from other ministries, such as certain art supervision from the Foreign Ministry, and press and radio prerogatives from that of the Interior Ministry.102 Thus fortified, and over and above fixed clauses if need be, Goebbels could oversee culture production in any shape or form as he saw fit, whenever the spirit moved him. Usually, he concentrated on film reviews; he possessed studios both in his offices and two residences. In the course of this, he also discussed film outlines with directors and actors, as he did with Jenny Jugo in March 1935, regarding a Pygmalion project. Sometimes he went to great lengths to delay a film for which he desired substantial improvements, as in the case of Land der Liebe (Land of Love), which remained in limbo from April 1937 until it was finally approved in June. How many films Goebbels vetted personally – beyond any other routine controls – is not exactly known; experts estimate approximately two-thirds until 1942–3, and thereafter less than half. Yet even this is an astonishing amount, given the minister’s many other burdens.¹⁰³

Hitler, too, with studios both at the Reichskanzlei and his private get-away, the Berchtesgaden Berghof, was interested in scrutinizing cinema. He often viewed pictures with Goebbels, more typically with a coterie in private.¹⁰⁴ He decided to proscribe films such as Weisse Sklaven (White Slaves, 1936) starring Camilla Horn, because it touched on Bolshevism,¹⁰⁵ and Das Leben kann so schön sein (Life Could Be So Beautiful, 1938). Here Hitler had the government’s social policy in his mind: Life Could Be So Beautiful was the story of a newly married couple trying against all odds to make a decent living. The young hero was running up and down stairs peddling insurance, while his pregnant wife, helping financially with work at home, could not come to grips with life in their single, shabby apartment room. The message of this movie, that an indigent young couple can hardly afford to bring a child into their sad existence, was not lost on Hitler, who flew into a rage and forbade it. For a people professing lack of Lebensraum it was demographically impossible to conjure a scenario in which babies were not wanted.¹⁰⁶

However, as far as films were concerned, the most acute interest shown by Hitler was in the weekly newsreels. These embodied for him what film was all about: an ideal instrument for political control. He regularly commented on newsreels to Goebbels, and had some severely cut or modified. More so than in the case of feature films, Hitler was liable to override any decisions Goebbels had already made on them. Even long before the war broke out Hitler was adamant that newsreels display the heroic – rows of military men.107 This was a sure sign that Hitler knew many years ahead of time where his politics were to lead, to aggressive war in the course of which much of the art he was now in control of would also change.

THE QUARREL OVER EXPRESSIONISM

Gottfried Benn, the son of an East Elbian clergyman, took his leave from the military and began practicing pathology in Berlin in 1912, at the age of twenty-six. It was then that he published his first work, a thin volume of poems entitled Morgue, Benn’s impressions from his autopsies. Beneath the front cover of a violin-playing skeleton and a reclining nude girl, the fourth poem began: “Bedded on a pillow of dark blood there lay the blonde neck of a white woman/The sun created havoc with her hair, licking its way up her brilliant legs/. . . A Nigger beside her, his eyes and forehead ripped by a horseshoe’s iron/Was sticking two toes of his dirty left foot into her small white ear.”¹⁰⁸ Purporting to examine “the banality of human existence and its physical decline,” with its novel, direct, language this booklet became part of the Expressionist literary canon at the time. A follow-up volume, Söhne (Sons), was dedicated to the Jewish writer Else Lasker-Schüler, with whom Benn was romantically involved.

During World War I, Benn re-entered the army to serve as a field physician in Brussels, where he authored the so-called Rönne novels. The protagonist Rönne was Benn himself, obsessed with sexuality. In 1917 he became a dermatologist in Berlin, publishing Gehirne (Brains), a collection of prose, and poems under the heading Fleisch (Flesh); they appear nihilistic, showing a disdain for humankind, as his reaction to the cruelties of war. This work then paralleled the paintings of Grosz and Dix, equally cynical reactions to the Great War and its excrescences beyond the armistice of November 1918. Benn supplied the text for the secular oratorio Das Unaufhörliche (The Never-Ending) by Hindemith – he of the New Objectivity – which, after its premiere in 1931, was generally deemed nihilistic. In 1932, Benn was elected a fellow of the Prussian Academy of Arts and, unlike Ricarda Huch and others, he remained a fellow after the Nazi rise to power in January 1933, advancing to become provisional head of the poetry section in February.¹⁰⁹

As he explained in a radio address in the spring of 1933, Benn had been disillusioned with the Weimar Republic because of a degeneration of democracy and a corrupt liberal intelligentsia more interested in Ascona real estate than staying at home and working the soil by hand. By contrast, the youths currently supporting the new Reich were vitalist, vanguards of a new biological race, a “master race” of the type Nietzsche had once forecast. They shunned the intellectuality of the city and instead chose the organic order of the land. These were protectors of the white race, defending their priorities against lower species such as black colonial troops who had roamed Germany earlier in the service of the occupying French. Such a new form of rule was already being supported by the lower classes, rendering Communists and Socialists of old superfluous. Hitler’s populist, direct democracy deserved support, as did the new state he was in the process of constructing.110

In November, Benn published an article, “Affirmation of Expressionism,” in which he rued the regime’s critical stance toward that art form, emphasizing that he still believed in it. He elucidated that Expressionism was a European movement chiefly covering the years 1910 to 1925, with Spaniards such as Pablo Picasso adhering to it, as well as Frenchmen such as Georges Braque, Romanians like Constantin Brancusi and Russians like Wassily Kandinsky. In Germany, Hindemith was its representative, said Benn, and in Italy, Gian Francesco Malipiero and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the originator of Futurism, which Mussolini had adopted as an element of Fascism. In a more distant past, Nietzsche, Hölderlin, and Goethe had served as precursors, as had, not least, Richard Wagner. Benn invested Expressionism with political significance for the new National Socialist epoch by assigning to it an “anti-liberal function of the spirit,” and he hastened to add that the art form in and by itself did nothing to alienate the German people. After World War I a philosophy of destructionism had taken hold, declared Benn, and Expressionism had come forth to oppose it, as a “formal absolutism excluding every chaos.”¹¹¹

As a self-professed fascist as well as defender of an art form he knew most leading Nazis rejected, Benn had tried to square the circle – an exercise that was to count heavily against him. His fearless mention of the European universality of Expressionism as well as the names of non-“Aryans” as its proponents, such as Sigmund Freud and Marcel Proust, caused widespread hostility. He was accused of being a Jew – a charge against which he found it acutely necessary to defend himself publicly. He also published follow-up articles, singing the praises of the new regime, particularly in racist-eugenic terms, which, as a physician, he thought legitimate. But when in 1936 an anthology of his earlier poems, reaching back to 1911, appeared in print, the SS’s Das Schwarze Korps embarked on a massive attack, labeling his literary output “deviant obscenities.” Officially out of favor, Benn withdrew to the army, again practicing his trusted profession as a physician, within its ranks. He was to lose his membership in the Reich Schrifttumskammer in March 1938.112 And thus, one prominent attempt to salvage Expressionism for the Nazi regime by a Nazi had come to a pathetic end.¹¹³ This attempt did not stand in isolation.

Among the artists of the German avant-garde after World War I, the sculptor Ernst Barlach and painter Emil Nolde, next to Benn, stood out as veritable giants. Like Benn eventually, to the Nazis they appeared as emblematic of modernity in the arts and potentially liable for prosecution. Yet they followed different paths from one another, as they did from Benn, and came through the Third Reich in different ways.

Barlach was born in 1870 in a small Holstein town, the son of a country doctor. He studied in Hamburg and Dresden, then Paris in the mid-1890s. On a trip to Tsarist Russia in 1906 he developed a decisive talent for registering human expressions that was to characterize his style of modeling people. A year later he became a member of the Berlin Secession, as did many of Germany’s modern visual artists. He never married, but in 1906 had a son with a seamstress well below his social station. In 1907 he also began writing, mostly stage plays. In 1910 he moved to Güstrow, a small town in the north-east region of Mecklenburg. And here he developed what would make him excel as an Expressionist painter and sculptor: reduction of his human torsos to a minimal size, in relation to the hands and face, through which he aimed to show his subjects’ inner constitution. On Barlach’s humans, faces and hands tended to look exaggerated. Barlach served briefly in Sonderburg near Denmark during the war and thereafter re-emphasized, in his art, the biblical motifs on which he had already been working. In 1919 he became a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts, the eminent Jewish culture broker Paul Cassirer serving as his main agent, both for his graphic works and dramas. A recipient of the Kleist prize for literature in 1924, as a sculptor Barlach began accepting commissions for anti-war monuments after 1926. He produced important works until 1933, among them the soon famous honor monument in Magdeburg Cathedral and sculptures in Kiel from 1928, which were attacked by nationalist fanatics even then.114

After January 1933, Rosenberg loyalists attacked Barlach because his “solitary, ruminating individuals, introspective even in a group, contradicted every National Socialist ideal of German men and women, who find themselves by serving country and Führer.”¹¹⁵ Since he was losing his current Jewish agent Alfred Flechtheim, whose Düsseldorf gallery was forced to surrender to the Nazis in March, Barlach was selling less; contracts were not honored and he was being owed money. Soon he found himself in financial difficulties, with taxes in arrears and debts on a mortgage. Like Benn, he had to contend with accusations that he was Jewish but, unlike Benn, saw himself unable to do anything about it in public. He was aware that unorthodox radicals from the National Socialist German Students’ League (NSDStB) were in his favor, but realistically did not attach significance to that.¹¹⁶

In February 1934, Mecklenburg’s Gauleiter Heinrich Hildebrandt denounced Barlach in a speech. “Barlach may be an artist, but he is foreign to the German essence. It is incumbent on the artists’ estate to comprehend German man in his simple genuine form, as God has created him.” And he continued: “German man does not know of the peasant as a person stretched out lazily on the soil, but as a hard and self-confident man willing to overcome all vicissitudes, who cuts a swath with a brutal fist, indeed with a sword in his hand.”¹¹⁷ With only a few Nazis still willing to defend him in print and Rosenberg as vociferous as ever, Barlach’s health was deteriorating by the month.¹¹⁸ Hoping for some relief from the authorities, he joined other intellectuals and artists in signing a declaration of loyalty to Hitler in the summer. Half-convinced, he wrote in September to a friend that he would counsel all young people to join the Nazi Party, for “the best blood, the best qualities of character are merely good enough for it.”¹¹⁹ By March 1935, Barlach the dramatist was out of favor.¹²⁰

In 1936 his old admirer Joseph Goebbels turned openly against him after Rosenberg appeared to have won the Expressionism struggle ideologically. When in March the Bavarian political police forbade a book of the artist’s drawings and confiscated 3,149 already published copies in the Munich warehouse of Barlach’s publisher Reinhard Piper, Barlach wrote to Goebbels asking him to intervene: “The artistic value or non-value of my works exists beyond the decisions thought necessary by the political police.” Goebbels did nothing, but commented in his diary, most likely lying to himself: “This is not art any more. This is destruction, incompetent fake. Horrible! This poison must not enter the people.”121

In the following months, after works of his had been confiscated in ongoing exhibitions, Barlach was working less, selling less, becoming increasingly unwell in his isolated house in Güstrow, befriended only by his lover Marga Böhmer and, occasionally, her former husband, the Nazi-inclined art dealer Bernhard Böhmer (who actually tried to help him out with the authorities as best he could). Although he had to suffer loss of sales and the proscription of any shows, a formal indictment of Barlach’s profession as an artist was never uttered, however afraid of it he was. He became embittered, loath even to receive any visitors. The removal by the Nazis of his important Magdeburg memorial gave rise to cries for the dismantling of other of his statues. In 1937 alone, 317 of his monuments were impounded. The German public was encouraged to show its contempt for his works at the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in July. Forlorn, Ernst Barlach died on October 24, 1938, at the age of sixty-eight.¹²²

Much like Barlach, Emil Nolde has been canonized after 1945 as a martyr of National Socialism. But whereas Barlach had always been indifferent to the politics of the Third Reich (as he had been to that of the Empire and the Weimar Republic), Nolde, like Benn, was a Nazi early on, irrespective of the difficulties he encountered with the regime. It was therefore not appropriate to depict him as Max Ludwig Nansen, the intrepid resistance fighter in the Schleswig village of Rugbüll, as Siegfried Lenz did in 1968 in his novel Deutschstunde (German Lesson), with other German authors following suit. Not least, the venal Nolde’s own autobiographies have smoothed the path for such distortions.¹²³

Nolde’s path in the Third Reich turned out to be one between acclamation and defeat, with defeat stealthily winning the upper hand. He was born Hans Emil Hansen in Nolde, Schleswig, the son of peasants, in 1867. Of Danish-German lineage, he was part of an ethnic minority that opted for life in the German Reich even under foreign citizenship. He became a carver and draftsman and in 1892 began creating watercolors of mountain motifs in Switzerland. In 1899, Franz von Stuck turned down his application to the Munich Academy of Arts, eight years before Adolf Hitler would be refused by the academy in Vienna. But Nolde did visit the private Académie Julian in Paris, which taught painting in the staid academic style opposed to the new Impressionism. In 1901 he became a member of the Berlin Secession, a junction with Modernism, and two years later his paintings turned out to be very bright and intensive. During an exhibition in Dresden in 1906, Emil Nolde, as he now called himself, got to know artists of Die Brücke, which influenced his painterly style decisively yet again: expressive paintwork, simple pronounced shapes, with the emphasis on form. In 1911 the Berlin Secession repudiated Nolde’s pictures, now more imbued with biblical motifs, which led to a controversy with Germany’s leading Impressionist, the Jewish Max Liebermann, and Nolde’s eventual exclusion from that movement. This quarrel with Liebermann, the head of the Secession at that time, as well as with the art dealer Paul Cassirer, most certainly was the source of Nolde’s subsequent hatred of Jews, as well as his definitive rejection of Impressionism, which he declared to be French and degenerate. Such sentiments help to explain why Nolde became a follower of the xenophobic, anti-Semitic Nazis as early as 1920. Residing, after 1925, in the North Frisian hamlet of Seebüll, Nolde was elected a fellow of the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1931. He greeted the political victory of the National Socialists two years later with enthusiasm.124

At the beginning of the new regime Goebbels attempted to appoint this representative of what many regarded as “Nordic Expressionism” to the head of a Berlin art academy. But Hitler had found a Nolde painting on Goebbels’s premises and told him to remove it. With his traditionalist beliefs in art, the Führer hated Nolde because of his concentration on New Testament themes and “the violent distortions and colors in his work.”¹²⁵ At all events, when interviewed for the new position in the Propaganda Ministry, Nolde consented to a new ordering of the German art world, denouncing his old compatriot of Die Brücke and fellow candidate for the job, the “Aryan” Max Pechstein, as a Jew.¹²⁶ In the following months and years, in all probability aware of Hitler’s opposition and Goebbels’s wavering, Nolde fought hard for his recognition in the Nazi movement. He still had backers from its early days, one being Erna Hanfstaengl of the influential Hanfstaengl art-publishing family, who had shielded Hitler right after the fatal Beer Hall Putsch. At her private art gallery on Munich’s Karlsplatz, Hanfstaengl now made a point of exhibiting several Nolde paintings, “because we are here in the focus of the Nazis and theoretically all official Nazis have to pass by here.” She also planted several Nolde watercolors in her brother Ernst (“Putzi”) Hanfstaengl’s Munich apartment, so that Hitler, a personal friend of Putzi’s, would see them there.127 In November 1933, Erna Hanfstaengl prevailed upon her close friend Marga Himmler to get her husband Heinrich to invite Nolde to a banquet commemorating the 1923 November putsch; Captain Ernst Röhm, leader of the SA and an ox of a man, came to be seated next to him. Reflecting on this event, Nolde wrote shortly thereafter: “The Führer is great and noble in his aspirations and a genius man of action. He is still being surrounded by a swarm of dark figures in an artificially created cultural fog. It seems as if the sun will break through here and dispel this fog in the near future.”¹²⁸

However, if Nolde had thought of himself in this connection he was to be disappointed. Even though, like Barlach, he still had his admirers in the Nazi camp (and like Barlach signed the declaration of loyalty to Hitler in 1934), forces influenced by Rosenberg and no doubt riveted to Hitler were turning increasingly against him.¹²⁹ In Theodor Fritsch’s influential Handbook of the Jewish Question of 1935, Nolde was lumped together with Jewish painters, as he had been as guilty as they were of championing Expressionism, having tested aesthetic limits even more than they had.¹³⁰ Rosenberg’s follower, the painter and critic Wolfgang Willrich, wrote in 1937 that even if Nolde was politically acceptable, “his work and his imagination are sick,” totally in line with artistic Bolshevism.¹³¹ At this time Nolde was asked to leave the Prussian Academy of Arts; only after his strong protests in which he flaunted his Party membership was he, for the time being, allowed to stay. Nevertheless, by the time of the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in July, 1,052 works by Nolde had been confiscated from public displays, more than that of any other artist.¹³²

Although Nolde was given several of the boycotted paintings back as time went on, his overall situation did not improve. In August 1941 he was expelled from Goebbels’s Reich Art Chamber, and three months later came a formal order forbidding him to paint or sell any paintings.¹³³ Yet, however much the artist himself may have dramatized this injustice after World War II, he was in fact not prevented from painting in private, barring any sales. This he did, in the isolation of his northern village, after a 1942 meeting with Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach in Vienna, brokered by the admiring film star Mathias Wieman, had proved fruitless. As late as 1944, Nolde’s Danish wife Ada was writing letters to high-level individuals in the Party and in government, citing Nolde’s patriotism no less than his Party membership: “His followers, young and old, are all waiting for the day when the state will give him the recognition he is currently denied for some sad reason.”134

In the early Third Reich, Nolde, just like Benn, stood firmly in the camp of a number of National Socialists who championed Expressionism, thinking it would perfectly exemplify the new fascist spirit. To this group belonged university students, artists, intellectuals, and also politicians. Joseph Goebbels, as a young man with intellect and taste, had shown pro-Modernist leanings. Although he took issue with leading Expressionists such as Georg Kaiser, his own play, Der Wanderer of 1927, which exulted in a prophecy of the Third Reich, bore elements of Expressionism, as the critics noted at the time. Helmut Heiber, Goebbels’s first serious biographer, detected “Expressionist love lyrics” in the young man’s novel Michael, written between 1923 and 1929. And although in music, as his diaries show, Goebbels adhered to traditional forms as in the works of Beethoven, Richard Strauss, and – less so – Wagner, in the visual arts he admired the works of Ernst Barlach and Emil Nolde.¹³⁵

Expressionism in the Third Reich can be explained in three ways: a reaction against pre-existing art forms; the inability of the Nazis to create something ideologically apposite in the immediate term; and, in principle, the indifference of art, even in the late, conflicted, Weimar Republic, to politics. That is to say: the creators of modern art in the Weimar era were not necessarily left wing, even though many of them were; they could also be politically neutral (as was Barlach), or on the conservative to extreme right (as were Benn and Nolde).¹³⁶

The institutional struggle between Rosenberg and Goebbels served as a political background, against which the fate of Expressionism was decided. On June 29, 1933, National Socialist student leaders in Berlin, only weeks after they had burned books, staged a public event at Berlin University under the heading “Youth is Fighting for German Art.” Almost certainly, they had been influenced by an article in mid-March in the Berlin newspaper Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, intellectual in content and decidedly hostile to Rosenberg, authored by Bruno E. Werner. He was a thirty-six-year-old doctor of philosophy from Leipzig, on the political right, but an early admirer of the Bauhaus. Werner argued that “the new art” had been pioneering the national revolution in that it had fought against the liberal nineteenth century and the French model of Impressionism as early as twenty-five years before. At that time, painters of the art movements Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, notably Nolde, Barlach, Pechstein and Franz Marc, Klee and Lionel Feininger, had been in the vanguard.137 Rosenberg countered this with an article in Völkischer Beobachter, maintaining that even though Nolde and Barlach possessed talent, especially Nolde’s artwork was “negroid, bereft of piety, raw and without true inner power of form,” and some of Barlach’s “half-idiotic.”¹³⁸ But on June 29 Berlin university students organized in the Nazi Student League (NSDStB), allied with Goebbels’s Promi, picked up their cue from Werner and advanced their own arguments, contra Rosenberg, on behalf of Nolde, Barlach, and other Expressionists.¹³⁹ In Peter Paret’s able summation, “they believed in the mythic power of German blood, in the essential bond between the German people and the German artist who served the race, whose work expressed in spirit, if not necessarily in form or thematically, the Nordic, Aryan values that had sustained Germans through centuries of delusions and betrayals and that were now infused with political power and given new life by Hitler.” Anti-Semitism was enlisted, for Jews had introduced Impressionism to Germany, argued the students, and Expressionism was an antidote to it.¹⁴⁰

In the fall the controversy escalated. Hans Weidemann, head of the Berlin student group and a painter in his own right, founded a new journal with the title Kunst der Nation (Art of the Nation), which aimed to further “Nordic Expressionism” by featuring in its pages works by Nolde, Barlach, Käthe Kollwitz, and others. Encouraged, the pro-avant-garde director Alois Schardt opened a show of Expressionist paintings at the Berlin Kronprinzenpalast gallery in October, with an introductory lecture attempting to draw parallels between Expressionist exuberance and Germanic art of the Bronze Age. A month later, Benn’s “Affirmation of Expressionism” appeared in print. But on the other side Hitler had, at the Reich Party rally in September, been chastising all modern art as a “Cubist-Dadaist cult of primitivism.” Schardt lost his post at the national gallery a few weeks later and eventually fled to the United States; the future of the new journal was uncertain.¹⁴¹

In 1934 the demise of the students’ pro-Expressionist cause accelerated. Early in the year a book by the Nazi art critic Kurt Karl Eberlein appeared, What is German in German Art?, in which he asserted that currently the German battle was being waged “against the un-German, the foreign, the blood-alien, against the Romanic, French, Slavic-Russian, against everything non-national, antinational, international in German art.” He then questioned whether “it is very easy to argue that the German element is manifestly recognizable in these ‘Expressionist’ pictures.” Eberlein was only meekly rejected by the art historian Wilhelm Pinder, a National Socialist but internationally respected authority, who stated that his comments amounted to “a destructive judgment on the Expressionists,” without elaborating.142 And even though other moderately progressive art critics such as Winfried Wendland and Hans Weigert came forth in defense of the embattled art form, the latter holding that “the heritage of the best Expressionism” might be worth treasuring, their statements were timid, and they were writing under the shadow of Rosenberg.¹⁴³

The position of the chief Party ideologue had been strengthened on January 24, 1934 by Hitler, who had appointed Rosenberg “plenipotentiary for the supervision of the spiritual and ideological schooling of the NSDAP.”¹⁴⁴ Although this was merely a Party post, not a government one, Rosenberg himself arrogated powerful prerogatives to himself with reaches into all facets of public life and, as far as culture was concerned, assuming something like equilibrium with the offices of Goebbels and of Göring. And so he struck out again, charging that the students were being seduced by Jewish art dealers into drawing a line “from Grünewald via Caspar David Friedrich to – Nolde and consorts,” with the aim of summoning up the Expressionists’ “subhumanity.”¹⁴⁵ The Röhm Putsch at the end of June strengthened Rosenberg’s position as Hitler, in September, reiterated his resolve to purge “these charlatans.”¹⁴⁶

In 1935 the authorities cashiered Kunst der Nation. Otto Andreas Schreiber and Fritz Hippler, co-conspirators of Weidemann, had already been expelled from the NSDStB and were now seeking positions in Goebbels’s ever expanding operations. In the face of Hitler’s own traditionalist aesthetic predilections and opposed by an ambitious Rosenberg, Goebbels’s more progressive efforts were being attenuated. His executive powers, however, were growing by virtue of an expanded bureaucracy: his Propaganda Ministry, the Reich Culture Chamber with its variegated sub-chambers (although nominally part of the ministry), simply overwhelmed Rosenberg’s new office, whose KfdK was fading into oblivion. Its successor organization the NSKG (Nationalsozialistische Kulturgemeinde) became powerless, as it drifted into the orbit of Robert Ley’s Labor Front (DAF), the overarching National Socialist organization created to replace the independent trade unions after Hitler became Chancellor.147 In a speech in Weimar during May, Goebbels showed himself of two minds: he spoke against ambitious reactionaries, which could have buoyed the avant-garde, but he also railed against “cultural-Bolshevist attempts scheming to use National Socialism” to attain public recognition, which would have encouraged traditionalists.¹⁴⁸

After further polemics in the following months, in which the anti-Modernist forces showed more strength,¹⁴⁹ Hitler himself made the final decision during the opening of the “Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung” (“Great German Art Exhibition”) on July 18, 1937, sounding the death knell for the avant-garde. Hitler said: “Until the National Socialist assumption of power there existed in Germany a so-called ‘modern’ art, meaning almost every year a new one, as the term implies. National Socialist Germany, however, wants a ‘German art,’ and this is destined to be an eternal one, just as all creative values of a people.”¹⁵⁰

However, as the protagonists of Expressionism were fighting for survival, this allegedly subversive art was still manifesting itself in several ways up to and even beyond 1937. Still in 1933 and with the encouragement of Goebbels, Schreiber fled under the wings of Ley, who was ideologically more indifferent than either Goebbels or Rosenberg. He was in the process of building up his offices for “Strength-through-Joy,” and there Schreiber established a department of visual art. It was to show the works of Expressionists such as Pechstein, Marc, and Schmitt-Rottluff in factories throughout the land for the next ten years, until defeat at the battle of Stalingrad (1942–3) changed all the rules.¹⁵¹

Also in 1933, at least two pronouncedly pro-Nazi works of art still bore the stamp of Expressionism. One was the stage play Schlageter by Hanns Johst, which had its premiere in Berlin on April 20, the birthday of the Führer. Admittedly, Johst was a well-known Expressionist himself, from the days of World War I when he knew and admired Gottfried Benn; he conceived the prose of this drama as the republic was petering out. The Modernist touch showed especially toward the end of the play, as the German nationalist martyr, accused saboteur Albert Leo Schlageter, faces the French execution squad and exclaims: “One last word! One wish! Command! Germany!!! Awake! Break into Flames!! Burn! Burn monstrously!!”152

Moreover, ironically, the most Nazi of films, Hitlerjunge Quex (Hitler Youth Quex), which celebrated the martyr’s death of Herbert Norkus after he was murdered by Berlin Communist youths in January 1932, showed itself indebted to Weimar-era film. An observant viewer could not escape allusions to Kuhle Wampe (Who Owns the World?, 1932), Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, 1931), and Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück (Mother Krause’s Trip to Happiness, 1929) – all highlights of Expressionist cinema.¹⁵³ All spectacular, peculiarly Nazi Thingspiele, plays that flourished between 1933 and 1936, also bore a resemblance to Expressionist and workers’ drama, a factor that helped spell their doom.¹⁵⁴

In 1937, when Hitler personally caused a sea change in the German art world, the very building in which he announced it, the new, monumentalist, and neo-classicist Munich Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art), featured a flat roof and plain, functional construction, thus reminding viewers of the Bauhaus. “The museum’s blocky masses and flat surfaces,” notes historian Barbara Miller Lane, “free of all ornament save minimal base and cornice projections, and the horizontal orientations of the building, proclaimed its debt to the radicals of the twenties.” And the show that Hitler subsequently opened, the “Great German Art” exhibition, itself contained objets d’art influenced by the modern art style the Führer was now denouncing.¹⁵⁵ Also in 1937 the quarter-Jewish Jürgen Fehling directed Shakespeare’s Richard III at Berlin’s Prussian State Theater. An admirer of Barlach and himself a product of the Expressionist school, Fehling had asked his protagonist Werner Krauss, as the tyrant, to insinuate himself into the character of Joseph Goebbels – shadowy, ominously quiet, and with limping foot. The scenery onstage was bleak and economical, adorned with little but the occasional Bauhaus-like steel-tube furniture.¹⁵⁶ Fehling was walking a tightrope, but for the moment he survived critique.

EXHIBITIONS OF DEGENERATE ART AND MUSIC

At the “Degenerate Art” exhibition, which opened in Munich on July 19, 1937, Nolde was represented by over fifty of his artworks. Of Kirchner’s works, thirty-two were shown, after more than six hundred of his paintings had been confiscated from public museums. Barlach was represented by his bronze cast The Reunion and the prohibited book of drawings, shown in a glass case with other forbidden items, and labeled Kulturschänder (Defilers of Culture). As Barlach complained, a few leaves had been cut from the volume and displayed separately – unfairly, he thought, because they did not represent the entire book.157

Behind this exhibition was Joseph Goebbels, who had been realizing for some time that Rosenberg was outsmarting him in the presence of Hitler with his arch-reactionary, anti-Modernist ideas, even though the minister enjoyed the advantages of organization. In art, Hitler agreed with those ideas – however much he may have despised the empty self-importance of Rosenberg. So in order to safeguard any position of strength, Goebbels had at least to be seen as being in accord with such a cultural course, while at the same time putting his own, much sharper, administrative instruments to action. Hence, during the first half of 1937, he seized the initiative again, prevailing upon Hitler to authorize him to stage an exhibition of “degenerate art,” on the model of the earlier punitive exhibitions at Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, and Nuremberg. Goebbels conceived this venture as a convenient political manoeuvre that would effectively freeze out Rosenberg. Once mandated, he used Hitler’s authorization on June 30 to delegate Professor Adolf Ziegler, the current president of the Reich Art Chamber in the RKK, and safely within the Promi, to collect the required artifacts.¹⁵⁸

As Ziegler acknowledged subsequently in his Munich opening speech, such collecting was a mammoth job, for in order to accomplish it, he had to visit “nearly all German museums.”¹⁵⁹ To aid him, Ziegler had assembled a five-member committee, which included, besides himself, the ambitious Count Baudissin from the Essen Folkwang Museum and the venomous art writer Wolfgang Willrich, author of the treatise “Purging the Art Temple.” Allegedly under instructions from Hitler, the committee looked to confiscate works created after 1910, which was the year Kandinsky had presented the first-ever abstract painting, as well as the founding date of Herwarth Walden’s pace-setting Expressionist journal Der Sturm.¹⁶⁰ The principal museums called upon (with the reluctant acquiescence of the Education Minister Bernhard Rust, under whose jurisdiction they fell) were those in Frankfurt, Dresden, Düsseldorf, and Berlin. Approximately 5,000 paintings were culled as well as 12,000 prints; in the end upwards of 500 works of art were chosen for display, by altogether 112 condemnable artists. Broadly speaking, the style categories were Expressionism, Verism, Dadaism – the main areas of Modernist art, allowing for possible overlaps. Of storied movements, Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter were signally affected. Leading German artists such as Kirchner, Pechstein, and Beckmann were instant victims, but Ziegler also focused on the works of foreigners such as Picasso, Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, and Marc Chagall, seeking to smear those painters’ names.161

After Hitler and Goebbels had privately viewed the exhibits three days prior, the “Degenerate Art” exhibition opened in Munich, at the archaeological institute, on Monday, July 19. The entire German press, including the formerly bourgeois papers now under the restrictions of the critics’ guidelines from November 1936, waxed lyrical. “Trainloads of dirt” had been emptied into the museum’s halls, wrote the once venerable Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, “magazines and basements have opened up to disgorge their refuse,” shrilled the Münsterischer Anzeiger.¹⁶² The National Socialist organ National-Zeitung of Essen, Graf Baudissin’s haunt, ironically was in keeping with original Expressionist intentions when it stated that Expressionist colors literally screamed at the visitors, “instilling horror into us, with the wackiness of the lines, with the decadence of expression.”¹⁶³ The Nazi organizers had done their best to present the paintings in a most disadvantageous fashion, by hanging them obliquely from the walls and too close together, in primitive wooden frames and sometimes touching the floor.¹⁶⁴ Nolde himself complained about “the unfavorable light” and “red tags with spiteful slogans.”¹⁶⁵ In some cases, perfidiously, the purchase price paid by a public institution for a work with taxpayers’ money was indicated – many thousands of marks to shock the viewers. What was left unsaid was that these had been inflation-era amounts from the early 1920s when 10,000 marks would not even have bought a loaf of bread.¹⁶⁶

By all accounts the Munich show was popular.¹⁶⁷ Before it was sent on the road it had been seen, in the vast number of cases approvingly, by over two million men and women, free of charge – those under legal age were barred.¹⁶⁸ Originally scheduled to run until the end of September, it was extended to the end of November.¹⁶⁹ The effect of such defamatory displays on the artists concerned naturally was disastrous, even if some of them, such as the heirs of the sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck, received their exhibits back some time later.170 By the end of 1943, Karl Hofer was still mourning the loss of sixty of his paintings in his Berlin atelier alone.¹⁷¹

As the exhibition was sent on its way throughout Germany, it was introduced by a brochure guide authored by one Fritz Kaiser of Munich, on the authority of Goebbels’s offices.¹⁷² This explained in some detail the criteria by which the exposition “groups” had been assembled. Group one concerned itself with form and color – the accentuation of which had been central to Expressionist art. Here Kaiser deplored the culprits’ “motif selection” and “contempt of every craftsmanlike expertise.”¹⁷³ In group two Kaiser pretended Modernist artists like Nolde and Barlach had violated religious sensitivities – a ludicrous argument in a totalitarian state simultaneously fighting the two Christian Churches.¹⁷⁴ With group three Kaiser endeavored to demonstrate the “political background” of the exhibition: “artistic anarchy” had dominated those creators, with a Bolshevist “class struggle” as its goal.¹⁷⁵ As if all avant-garde artists in the republic had been on the political extreme left! Pacifist tendencies were singled out in group four, as crippled war veterans of the type Dix and Grosz had been painting were shown.¹⁷⁶ Group five presented artists’ works as emblems of bordellos: “for them humankind consists of whores and pimps.” Here intersections with the Marxist group were unmistakable.¹⁷⁷ Groups six and seven shone light on the significance of race, especially as it was tied to issues of eugenics: the spiritual ideal of Modernist art had been “the idiot, the cretin, and the paralytic.” Likewise, images of “Negroes and South Sea islanders” in the manner of Gauguin were condemned.¹⁷⁸ Stopping at group eight, the viewer had arrived at the problem of the Jews as exemplified by the canvases of Jewish artists such as Otto Freundlich and Ludwig Meidner, depicted on page 21.¹⁷⁹ (One drawback of the organizers in their hasty planning of the exhibition had been the scarceness of German Jews in their capacity as visual artists; hence the planners’ resolve to include foreigners like Chagall – when it came to art and Jews, merely the proverbial Jewish art dealer could serve as bogeyman. Max Liebermann, who had died in 1935, was spared, perhaps because he had simply been too famous.) Group nine, finally, attacked the concept of abstraction in the form of “isms,” using works by the former Bauhaus associate Johannes Molzahn and the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters.¹⁸⁰ The booklet then continued with a partial reprint of Hitler’s speech at the opening of the House of German Art, hours before the “Degenerate Art” exhibition.181 At the end was a comparison between two Modernist graphics with the drawing of an insane-asylum inmate, obviously based on Schultze-Naumburg’s examples from 1932. Which of the three was a dilettante’s work, went the riddle. “The upper right one! But the other two were once described as magisterial graphics authored by Kokoschka.”¹⁸²

That there were “groups” denouncing Jews and Marxists was hardly surprising for contemporaries. But the emphasis on the sick, more particularly the mentally ill, was a relatively novel twist in this German culture, even though Schultze-Naumburg and Hitler himself had publicly harped on the nexus between Modernist art and insanity for some time. Adolf Ziegler emphasized this point in his opening address, and the newspapers duly elaborated on it, the Hamburger Tageblatt excoriating “pathological phenomena and horror.”¹⁸³ Indeed, halfway through 1937 regime leaders were already preparing the case for what they were to call “euthanasia,” the forced mercy-killing of patients in insane asylums, which the people would have to get used to. Even then, they were sterilizing the so-called Rhineland bastards, children of unwanted unions between German girls and what were considered colored French colonial soldiers – occupation troops in western Germany after World War I.¹⁸⁴ One scholar who realized this connection well was Professor Carl Schneider of Heidelberg University, the director of its mental-illness care facilities, who in 1939, as the “Degenerate Art” exhibition was viewed in several German cities, would write a lecture on the subject of degenerate art and madness, holding that “degenerate art must be a truly sick art.” Schneider was about to assist the regime in its “euthanasia” policies, and years after that committed suicide in an American military prison.¹⁸⁵

The “Degenerate Art” exhibition migrated from Munich to Berlin, from there to Leipzig, Düsseldorf, Salzburg, Hamburg, and even smaller places like Weimar. In Berlin, artworks by Heidelberg asylum patients were included, for pictorial comparisons to evoke the onlookers’ derision; in Düsseldorf it was surmised that by mid-July 1938 some 100,000 Germans had seen the exhibits. Even in small-town Stettin by early 1939, 75,000 visitors had been counted.¹⁸⁶ By 1941, when the show was stopped in its path because of the war, several more municipalities had been covered; all told, visitors by then were in the hundreds of thousands. Apart from its punitive function, the show served as a deterrent: never again should decadent art corrupt healthy German culture.187

Toward that general aim, the string of legislative actions enabling boycott and seizure was continued. Even in August 1937, Göring, as Minister President of Prussia, authorized Bernhard Rust to search all museums for remnants of unwanted art; “eradication” was to follow, in the Prussian realm.¹⁸⁸ For the entire Reich, Goebbels by January 1938 was working on a more comprehensive law enabling authorities to confiscate, without compensation, all artwork considered devious, from private individuals as well as public institutions. With the Führer’s backing this was promulgated on May 31.¹⁸⁹ Three years later Ziegler redoubled his efforts to act against those “who produce works of decadent art or who distribute them in a capacity as artist or as broker.”¹⁹⁰

What happened to all the confiscated canvases, graphics, and sculptures? They were sold mostly abroad, often for the benefit of regime leaders such as Göring or Hitler himself, and more often than not for bargain-basement prices by Swiss art dealers with less than altruistic motives. In any case, they brought in welcome foreign exchange. Göring, who came from an upper-middle-class home with requisite tastes of Bildung, is said to have kept many items for his private enjoyment, selling others for personal profit that he did not like. Articles that could not be got rid of, however, were destroyed by burning, just as the books had burned a few years before. In the end, what the Nazis viewed as a winning situation for the Reich turned out to be, by all accounts, a deplorable loss for the civilized world.¹⁹¹

The “Degenerate Art” exhibition thereafter served as a role model. In May and June 1938 an exhibition of so-called degenerate music was staged in Düsseldorf, the town of Robert Schumann, whose occasional suspicion of Jews the Nazis liked to exploit for propaganda reasons.¹⁹² It was modeled on the Munich exhibition of nearly a year before. Under Goebbels’s sponsorship, it was organized by two men who worked for or were close to him: Hans Severus Ziegler and Heinz Drewes. Ziegler had already acted on behalf of Nazi cultural politics as the new Intendant of the Weimar national theater in Thuringia after January 1930. Born in 1893 in Thuringian Eisenach, this son of a banker with international connections spent time in Cambridge as well as German schools and attained his doctorate in German literature. (Ironically, Ziegler was related, through his mother, to the New York Schirmer music company that was publishing, after his forced emigration from Germany, much of the work of Schoenberg – whom Ziegler never tired of berating.) For the Nazi minister Wilhelm Frick he drafted the text against “Negro culture,” which would become notorious because it foreshadowed restrictions on a larger scale, three years hence in the Third Reich. After Hitler’s coming to power in Berlin, Ziegler advanced to the post of commissar for Thuringian theaters. In 1935 he was temporarily suspended, as the authorities investigated charges of homosexuality against him, from which, nonetheless, he was able to extricate himself. But as he emerged from those clouds, he tried to compensate for this by intensifying his efforts as an administrator of culture, now leaning heavily on Goebbels. In 1937 the Promi Minister appointed him a member of his Reich culture senate.193

In early 1938, Ziegler teamed up with conductor Heinz Drewes, another Thuringian well on his way to high achievements in the Nazi cultural establishment. Although Drewes had been born in western Germany, he had become Kapellmeister in Altenburg, a post he owed to Ziegler, ten years his senior, and where in 1930 he had also founded a KfdK chapter. In 1937, Drewes, now Generalintendant in Altenburg, was appointed by Goebbels to head the newly founded music section in the Propaganda Ministry, at arm’s length from the RMK, charged with screening compositions for elements “harmful to the German nation.”¹⁹⁴

In the spring of 1938, Drewes organized the Reich Music Festival (Reichsmusiktage) in Düsseldorf as a project of the Promi and, motivated by his high personal ambition and rabid ideological fervor, it is not surprising to find Ziegler superimposing an exhibition of degenerate music on that event. Goebbels had not exactly asked for that, but had not prohibited it either, so he allowed it to happen without fanfare.¹⁹⁵ Ziegler’s own ideological training had been rigorous and his views on music were fanatically fixed. An author of several treatises on culture in the past, he advanced the cause of völkisch art in a speech in Danzig, in February 1937, characterizing it as the quintessential antidote to Modernism. German folk songs were the epitome of “simplicity and elementary greatness in art.” They would defeat “all intellectual constructivism” and remove “the last vestiges of cultural Bolshevism, which are particularly discernible in the area of music and the visual arts.” Tonal or not tonal were “the be-or-not-to-be of German music and a question of one’s weltanschauung.” The union of melody, harmony, and rhythm was the essential, archetypal element of music, as it rang out in the folk song and spoke of “the German soul.” The problems posed by Hindemith, Igor Stravinsky, and that entire movement had to be solved, once and for all. Hence “a parallel exhibition to the Munich exhibition of ‘degenerate art,’ of all musical and opera experiments of the last three decades, exemplified by recordings of every kind, would open the eyes and ears to the infernal, bolshevistic attempts to destroy the inner balance, the feelings, and the senses of German man.”196

The official main event in Düsseldorf was the Reich Music Festival, opened there on May 22 and running until May 29. The opening speech was delivered by the composer Paul Graener, one of the vice-presidents of the Reich Music Chamber. Since this was to be a showcase of not only tolerated but expressly desired music in the Third Reich, Graener’s own new work Feierliche Stunde (Festive Hour) was featured by Düsseldorf’s Generalmusikdirektor Hugo Balzer, as a prime example. Yet if neither the composer nor the conductor was first-rate, they were both an expression of the specific quality of contemporary music in the new Reich. Objectively, the entire slate of offerings in the program was mediocre, apart from mainstays such as Beethoven, Richard Strauss, and Pfitzner, and peripheral activities threatened to dominate the music. Military marches were played, marching music was provided by the Reich Labor Service (RAD), mixed in with samples from the Nazi Reich symphony orchestra. There was a music camp staffed by the Nazi student league and morning music from the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend, HJ). There were open choirs alternating with chamber-music offerings and the premiere of the Ostmark Overture by Otto Blesch, a composer hitherto unknown. (Yet, oddly, there was also the premiere of Violin Music by the Dresden choir director Boris Blacher. Influenced by Milhaud, Satie, and Stravinsky, Blacher had written music with unconventional rhythms and in a jazz style. Being a quarter Jewish, Blacher was still permitted to be active in the Reich under the 1935 Race Laws.) Outright political activities on the side included an honor march by the participants to the Schlageter monument on May 26 at 3:30 in the morning – Schlageter had been shot by the French in the nearby Golzheim heath.¹⁹⁷ Goebbels closed the exhibition himself with yet another political statement, reminding listeners that music was the most German of the arts, if almost eliminated by international Jewry. Only in the last few years had National Socialism wreaked a change, in that it had “swept away the pathological symptoms of musical, Jewish, intellectualism.”198

Apart from a peripheral musicological convention, at which “the problem of music and race” was explored, Ziegler’s music exposition, open to the public on May 24, provided some welcome diversion from the drab offerings of Goebbels’s main festival.¹⁹⁹ The chief attraction to many must have been that he had arranged for listening booths to be available to visitors. Once inside, one pushed a button to hear the music of a defamed composer, be it Weill, Schoenberg, or Krenek, and pushing several buttons, up to eight simultaneously, produced the cacophony Nazis said was typical of atonal sound. In reality, having pushed for Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner, their combined sound would not have been dissimilar.²⁰⁰

As the Nazi music critic Karl Laux remembered after World War II, the exhibits consisted of “portraits, theoretical treatises, examples of written music and libretti, posters and stage props for music-drama works.”²⁰¹ Wall placards announced “principal perspectives of the new German music policy.”²⁰² The posters displayed the portraits of banned composers, usually with a disparaging caption. Under a painting of Tsarist Russian aristocrat Stravinsky, for instance, his racial pedigree was questioned; caricatures of the heads of Jewish operetta composers Leo Fall and Oscar Straus were shown.²⁰³ There was a photographic image of twelve-tone composer Anton Webern, said to have outdone even his “animal trainer” Schoenberg in the way he put notes to paper. Webern was included regardless of the fact that after the Anschluss of Austria, this resident of Vienna had sent his daughter to the local Hitler Youth, where she had met and married an Austrian storm trooper.²⁰⁴ Ziegler also played havoc with scriptures. Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre (Lessons in Harmony) of 1910 was condemned as the wellspring of dodecaphony, when in fact he had developed twelve-tone serialism only after its publication.²⁰⁵ Hindemith’s much more recent Unterweisung im Tonsatz (Instructions in Composition) was said to have had a similarly noxious function.²⁰⁶ On a poster, Schoenberg’s portrait, a photograph of the artist from 1924, was underwritten by a slogan, allegedly by a Jewish music critic: Schoenberg, a master of hysteria, creator of an “army of cramps.” Hindemith was shown in a photograph with his wife, “a daughter of the Jewish Frankfurt opera conductor Ludwig Rottenberg,” but it was suppressed that her mother was not Jewish. More convincingly conveyed was the impression which had motivated Ziegler in the first place, namely that degenerate music and degenerate art were but two sides of the same coin: Paul Klee’s Musikalische Komödie (Musical Comedy) was hanging on one wall while, even more plausible, Karl Hofer’s Jazzband was on another.207

The success of the music exhibition, which closed prematurely on June 14, was not anything comparable to the Munich art show of a year before, even though Ziegler had issued a carefully designed guide.²⁰⁸ In it, he reproduced his speech from the opening, interspersed with some of the more prominent images featured at the exhibition, such as Schoenberg’s portrait, but also, for example, a picture of Kurt Weill and one each of Ernst Toch and Franz Schreker – all prominent, and mostly Jewish, Modernists. In his article, Ziegler repeated the main themes of his earlier prose, hammering home that Jews in German culture had to be eliminated and that “art Bolshevism” was the exemplification of musical derangement. Ziegler had secured some professional advice from his Weimar musician cronies and now proceeded to pose as an expert musicologist when he stated that the quality of the music in an opera could be judged according to the nature of its libretto – an obvious attack on The Threepenny Opera and its authors Weill and Brecht, fixed in a notorious exhibit. He then moved on to a definition of music in terms of an organic law inherent in the triad. “The secret of all discovery ultimately lies in simplicity: if the greatest masters of music have been creative through a realization of tonality and the obviously Germanic element of the triad, then we have the right to brand those as dilettantes and charlatans who dismiss those elementary musical laws, trying instead to improve or enlarge on them using whatever tonal combinations, with the true aim of devaluing them.” He then ranted, more specifically, against the “atonality” of Schoenberg, contrasting it with “the purity of the German genius Beethoven.” Moving on, he indicted “the degeneration resulting from the intrusion of brutal jazz rhythms and jazz sounds into the Germanic music world.” One could not treat the great tonal development of a thousand years as an error, he concluded, instead one had to regard the masterpieces of that formidable period, including recent decades, as the crowning of the occidental spirit. Therefore, “whoever wishes to rearrange the borders of the sound combinations permanently dissolves our Aryan tone order.”²⁰⁹

After its less than enthusiastic reception in Düsseldorf the music show was put on ice, traveling to Weimar, Ziegler’s home turf, only in the spring of 1939, where in the state museum it was combined with the “Degenerate Art” exhibition. Ziegler arranged for a performance of Franz Lehár’s operetta Land des Lächelns (Land of Smiles), as proof of the degeneracy of this operetta in particular and as an overall theme, not being aware that Hitler was a connoisseur of all of Lehár’s works. (At the time, its Jewish librettist Fritz Löhner-Beda was wasting away in nearby Buchenwald concentration camp, soon to be murdered.) Such dilettantish improvisation may have had something to do with the fact that Ziegler was unable to make a permanent exhibit out of it, but in May the show moved on to Vienna. The war prevented further exhibitions.210

Goebbels’s Reich Music Festival was not yet doomed to oblivion, it was newly scheduled for years ahead. Whatever the quality of the original – still in 1938 German musicians of all stripes felt inspired enough to send in new proposals. For the 1939 event, they applied with 1,121 scores, among them 36 operas, 431 symphonies, works for choir and instrumental accompaniment, in addition to any number of chamber-music pieces.²¹¹ Were these applicants all mediocre? They were of course not Jewish and had not assayed works in the dodecaphonic or jazz idioms. In that sense, the exhibition of degenerate music must have borne some fruit. Apart from such narrow uses, in the wider cultural realm it has gone on record for having put the very final stop to any debate in the Reich involving Modernism.

Both the art and the music exhibition stand for institutionalized attempts by the National Socialist regime to eradicate Modernism, insofar as its proponents had managed to integrate themselves into the Third Reich. Because of Hitler’s speech in July 1937, declaring an end to what he defined as aesthetic aberrations, Modernism may be said to have come to an official end at that time, in the month of the “Degenerate Art” exhibition, with the music exhibition serving as a reaffirmation, even though certain manifestations of the movement continued on in isolation and often under cover – because no humanly motivated trend can be so suddenly extinguished, even in the most repressive dictatorship.²¹²

The elimination of aesthetic value systems as hallmarks of the Weimar Republic was aimed against shapes and forms, colors and sounds, experimental initiative, liberty, and tolerance – all ingredients of an open, inclusive society in the republic, as opposed to the strictures designed to serve the closed, exclusive community of the fascists, with narrow, prejudiced tastes. Immediately, one can detect parallels between the political progress of the Nazis and the growth of their anti-Modernist trends: as they grew in power after the general elections of September 1930, they intensified their campaign against republican Modernists, to the detriment of the latter. No holds were barred after Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933, when arbitrary street violence generated by SA storm troopers combined with questionable legislative powers to accelerate the damaging dynamics. Hence the Law for the Reconstitution of the Civil Service of April 7, 1933, was used early on in the regime to immobilize, even remove many Modernist artists and their creations, such as master painters in art academies and their works. Complementarily, new statutes were established to introduce censorship, with resultant self-censorship, such as Goebbels’s prohibition of art criticism in November 1936. Two years later he had decided on a law facilitating the confiscation of art from individuals and corporations without compensation. Also in 1938, Ernst Barlach died of a broken heart. By that time, the Third Reich as a political construct had reached its pinnacle of success, possessed of absolute power to destroy any obstacle in its chosen path of racial consolidation and external aggression. This was the year when the regime showed itself – so far – at its most devastating, as exactly two weeks after Barlach’s death it burned down Jewish synagogues, harmed Jewish men and women, and threw thousands of them into concentration camps, killing hundreds. Whereas in 1933 about 4,000 inmates, Jews and non-Jews, had been held in German camps, that number had climbed to 54,000 by the end of 1938.213 Jews of course had been, not coincidentally, highly instrumental in the rise of Modernism in pre-Nazi times.

In the process of demolition and the subsequent imposition of replacement constructs, yet to be discussed, the Nazi leaders frequently followed seemingly contradictory courses that today raise questions. For example, how is one to understand the sympathy extended to Expressionists like Barlach by students belonging to one group of Nazi-organized students in 1933, when during the same year students who belonged to another group organized, nationwide, the burning of undesirable books?²¹⁴ Both groups were totally Nazified, and yet, whereas one of them demonstrated sympathies for Modernism, the other one was hostile. Arguably, there were members in both who, at one time, showed pro-Modernist understanding, and, at another time, condemned the movement. Also puzzling is the relationship between Nazi lieutenants in their attitude to Modernism, for or against, with one faction of them winning out over another, as Rosenberg’s cohorts did over Goebbels’s, a former Expressionist sympathizer, in the quarrel over Hindemith, and then again in the final decision on the future of Modernism in the Third Reich by 1937. Was the intellectual Goebbels, in everyday dealings with Rosenberg from 1925 to 1938, not always much stronger than the witless Party philosopher? Upon closer observation, one discovers that in both cases involving Rosenberg, it was Hitler himself who gave the ultimate nod – not to Goebbels but to his rival. This suggests peculiarities in the leadership pattern of the Third Reich, the intricacies of which must be subjected to further scrutiny.