How to crush a nation's soul: The Nazi crusade against "degenerate" art

In July 1937, artist Marc Chagall discovered that his paintings were enjoying a star turn in a singularly unexpected venue — an exhibition organized by the Nazi Party in Munich, the birthplace of its political fortunes. Chagall’s work often addressed explicitly Jewish themes: In one such painting, a bearded rabbi takes a pinch of snuff in ochre-yellow surroundings, his wry eyes looking in the direction of the viewer but not necessarily at them. How one is meant to interpret this painting, or the artist's intent, is not clear.

Adolf Ziegler, the Nazi functionary charged with overseeing the exhibition, perceived no ambiguity. He provided the supposed answer for "The Rabbi" and every other artwork displayed alongside it. "Look around you at these monstrosities of insanity, insolence, incompetence and degeneration," he declared in his opening address. "I would need several freight trains to clear our galleries of this rubbish ... This will happen soon."

But through the end of November that year, at least, this "rubbish," served as a useful prop for the Third Reich’s campaign to excise society of its corrupting elements and usher in a new era in which art represented the superior virtues of the German nation, as the Nazis saw it. The “Degenerate Art Exhibition,” as it was unsubtly named, drew an audience that eventually exceeded two million visitors. 

It featured 650 works confiscated from German museums and judged by a panel to represent "decadence," "weakness of character," "mental disease," "racial impurity" and other hallmarks of Weimar-era modernity. The exhibition included an entire room dedicated to the "Revelation of the Jewish Racial Soul" and featured paintings by and about the ethnic and religious group whom the Nazis largely blamed for Germany's supposed moral and material decline. 

That room and others also included works whose subject matter offended reactionary Nazi sensibilities for other reasons, such as Otto Dix's "The Trench": a gruesome tangle of human remains, discarded weapons, leaking brain matter and faces, suspended in agony in the aftermath of an artillery bombardment, with a soldier’s body propped up by a tripod of fixed bayonets high above the carnage. In another of Dix's works, the drypoint "War Cripples," disfigured veterans return home, many of them with limbs missing — a common sight across Germany after World War I. (Dix was himself a combat veteran.)  Such depictions of war, the curators wrote in the exhibition catalogue, were tantamount to "military sabotage."

"Here, the 'art' enters the service of Marxist propaganda for conscientious objection," the catalog essay continued, referring to the practice of resisting conscription on moral grounds, even under threat of punishment by the state. Dix’s art was deemed an “insult to the German heroes of the Great War.” Elsewhere in the exhibition, one could visit the "Insanity Room,” which displayed abstract paintings. The Nazis were not fans. “In the paintings and drawings of this chamber of horrors, there is no telling what was in the sick brains of those who wielded the brush or the pencil,” the catalog explained. 

Once the point had been made, some of these artworks were burned. Others, however, fell into the hands of collectors, including a number of high-ranking party officials. The Nazi penchant for playing the role of art critics and connoisseurs, combined with the party's aim of attaining complete control over all aspects of German life, resulted in a far more heavy-handed effort to twist the form and spirit of art to political ends than the scattered bleating characteristic of today's culture wars. In this campaign, the Nazis styled themselves as saviors, rather than mere destroyers, of culture. “You artists live in great and happy times. Above you the most powerful and understanding patron the Führer loves artists, because he is himself one. Under his blessed hand a Renaissance has begun," proclaimed propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

Art, as the Nazis understood it, was to be the reference point by which the German master race recognized its own superiority, and must be used to serve its ends. “True art is and remains eternal,” Hitler once said. "It does not follow the law of fashion. Its effect is that of a revelation arising from the depths of the essential character of a people.” 

Indeed, Nazi artists spared no effort in ferreting as much inspiration as they could from the pre-modern and mythic German past — the wars of the Nibelungen, the medieval Reich, the Teutonic crusades in the Baltic, the Protestant Reformation — and making extrapolations about the timelessness of German virtue. The Nazis even infringed on cultural prerogatives claimed by Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy, citing Germanophile philosopher Houston Steward Chamberlain’s claim that the German people, by right of Aryan blood passed down from the Greeks and Romans, were destined to revive the “lost ideal” of classical beauty. 

Revival was indeed the operative word. The Nazis held that German society had become diseased by the advent of modern art — meaning not just works that questioned or contradicted Nazi policy, but any kind of art bearing the hallmarks of modernity: visually distorted Expressionist paintings, atonal music unfettered by a central key, edifices of the Dada movement that defied aesthetic logic. As such, it was their mission to expunge such art from the public memory. 

Even before seizing national power in 1933, the Nazis implemented test cases on the state level. In 1930, the Nazi Party chief in Thuringia and state Minister of Education and the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, issued orders to remove 70 Expressionist paintings from the Schloss Weimar museum, fire the director of another museum for displaying modern art in its exhibitions, and ban all pacifist or antiwar books and films, including Erich Maria Remarque’s legendary World War I novel “All Quiet on the Western Front.” 

The sources of modern art, according to social critic Max Nordau, were decadent, corrupted societies whose artists, afflicted with “degeneration” as a form of mental illness, could only produce work reflecting their degenerate selves. But what the Nazis seized upon most fervently – although they certainly didn’t admit to inspiration from Nordau, who was both Jewish and a Zionist — was his claim that an individual’s mental deformity lay in the presence of physical deformities like “multiple and stunted growths in the first line of asymmetry, the unequal development of the two halves of the face and cranium… etc.,” and his prescribed solution: “Characterization of the leading degenerates as mentally diseased: unmasking and stigmatizing of their imitators as enemies to society; cautioning the public against the lies of these parasites.” Here was the framework by which the Nazis attacked modernists not just as purveyors of low-quality creations, but also as perverted, dangerous and, whenever applicable, racially inferior. Artistic works that eschewed the so-called Nordic ideal of beauty, in subject or in style, were likewise condemned for undermining German high culture. 

Nazi architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg later pushed Nordau’s theory of degeneration further down the slippery slope, arguing that it was not social conditioning that produced such despicable degenerates, but race, and in particular race-mixing. Only racially pure artists could produce art that embodied classical ideals, he argued, while their racially-mixed colleagues could create only disorder and monstrosity. Nazi leaders like racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg embraced Schultze-Naumburg’s theory as a magnificent insight. Nordau, who had declared that composer Richard Wagner — perhaps the Nazis’ most venerated cultural icon — possessed a “greater abundance of degeneration than all the degenerates put together with whom we have hitherto become acquainted,” would no doubt have disagreed. 

While Nordau’s distaste for Wagner – whose operas were embraced by Hitler with quasi-religious fervor – was not “racial” in nature and may have been inflated by the composer’s notorious antisemitism, questions over what qualified as degenerate art illustrated how nebulous the concept was. Goebbels and Rosenberg squabbled over whether some forms of modern art should have a place in the new Germany, with the former taking great pains to keep Expressionist artists such as avowed Nazi Emil Nolde in the political fold and dispel criticism that Nazi cultural policy was overly reactionary. "We National Socialists are not unmodern; we are the carrier of a new modernity, not only in politics and in social matters, but also in art and intellectual matters,” Goebbels argued. “To be modern means to stand near the spirit of the present Zeitgeist. And for art, too, no other modernity is possible.”

In the first year of Nazi rule in Germany, the Expressionists continued to enjoy Goebbels’ patronage. And in the battle for practical control of the party’s cultural policy, Goebbels, a far more consummate politician and organizer than the pedantic Rosenberg, appeared to seize the upper hand; in September 1933, Goebbels founded the Reich Chamber of Culture, which all working German artists were required to join, Aryan certificate in hand. (Its members, of course, were all artists whom Goebbels considered to be loyal Nazis and sufficiently “Nordic” in ethnicity and character.) But the next year, Hitler himself declared that all forms of modern art were degenerate and had no place in his Germany, which would not “be befuddled or intimidated” by modernist “charlatans.” Rosenberg received an even harsher rebuke from Hitler, who preferred Greek and Roman classicism to Rosenberg’s neo-Gothic aesthetic and denounced “those backwards-lookers who imagine that they can impose upon the National Socialist revolution, as a binding heritage for the future, a ‘Teutonic art’ sprung from the fuzzy world of their own romantic conceptions.” 

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With the party’s cultural doctrine now clear, artists who previously enjoyed Nazi patronage suddenly found themselves stripped of official sanction and saw their art torn from museum walls. Ernst Ludwig Kirschner, an Expressionist painter who privately disdained the Nazi regime, sought to assure Nazi authorities that he was “neither a Jew nor a Social Democrat,” but was expelled from the Prussian Academy of Arts anyway. The aforementioned Emil Nolde, who had condemned the paintings of “half-breeds, bastards, and mulattoes” in his 1934 autobiography, could not stop government officials from removing 1,052 of his works from museums, the most of any artist in Germany. Some of his paintings, in fact, wound up in the 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition, alongside Dix’s antiwar compositions and Chagall’s rabbi.

The mass removals were codified in 1938 by the sweeping Degenerate Law Act, which declared that “products of degenerate art that have been secured in museums or in collections open to the public before this law went into effect… can be appropriated by the Reich without compensation.” Nazi officials, on the other hand, were happy to be compensated for unloading undesirable works of art to foreign collectors. Those that couldn’t be sold abroad or hidden within officials’ palatial homes were consigned to the bonfires. In 1939 alone, 4,000 paintings met such a fate. 

Artists who complained too much about any of this, or who were suspected of defiance, soon faced worse fates. Shortly after his disgrace, Expressionist painter Max Pechstein received teaching offers from schools in Mexico and Turkey, but Nazi authorities refused to grant him an exit visa and left him to languish in rural Pomerania until the end of the war. In 1939, Dix was thrown in jail over an improbable accusation that he was involved in an assassination attempt against Hitler. Max Beckmann fled to the Netherlands in 1937, only to watch German tanks enter Amsterdam in 1940. In a desperate bid to preserve “degenerate” art he had produced in exile, Beckmann hid his “Departure” in the attic and wrote on the back of the canvas: “Scenes from Shakespeare’s 'Tempest.'" He came under police surveillance, but was not arrested.  

More conformist artists, on the other hand, enjoyed much more flattering official reviews. Just blocks away from the infamous Degenerate Art Exhibition, Nazi officials staged a competing show, the “Great German Art Exhibition,” whose centerpiece was an enormous canvas featuring Hitler on horseback and in immaculate plate armor, gazing toward the future and carrying a Nazi flag. For all of Hitler’s obsession with aesthetics, art had become politics by other means. Degeneracy had not been replaced by morality, wrote artist Oskar Schlemmer, but by “tried and true purveyors of kitsch.”