Nazi Art Essay Research Paper Many people

Nazi Art Essay, Research Paper

Many people know that Adolph Hitler was an artist in his youth as an Austrian, but just how

much art played a role in the National Socialist Germany seems to get underrated in the history

books. Just as a racial war was waged against the Jewish population and the military fought the

French and the Slavic people, an artistic cleansing for the Germanic culture was in progress.

Special Nazi units were searching the ancient arts of antiquity for evidence of a great Germanic

race that existed well before history. Hitler had monuments and museums built on a grand scale

with carefully designed architecture that would last a thousand years. Art of this nature was a

priority because Hitler wanted to capture Chronos, not Gaea. He wanted to dominate the rest of

time, not the limits of Earth.

Hitler was born and raised in the town of Linz. As a youth he studied art, primarily as a painter

capturing mostly the surrounding Alpine Mountain landscapes that he grew up with, but he also

had an interest in architecture. When he turned eighteen he applied to the Vienna Art Academy,

and was rejected. Along with art, Hitler was fascinated with Linz, Antiquity, and Wagner. It was at

this time in his youth that Hitler and his friend, Kubicheck would try to finish an opera that

Wagner had abandoned. This opera was about a leader trying to establish the Roman Empire by

overthrowing the Papal government in Rome. Hitler would remember “It was in that hour it all

began.”1

Hitler thought of Wagner and art as the basis for a new government, nation, and people. It is

not just coincidence that he would be surrounded by National Socialist leaders with background

in the arts. Joseph Gobbels, the Minister of Propaganda and head of the Reich Chamber of

Culture, was an experienced writer and aspiring poet. Rosenberg was a painter and Von Sherot

wrote poetry. Hans Frederick Munch of the Reich’s Chamber of Literature said “This government

born out of opposition to rationalism knows the peoples inner longings and dreams, which only

the artist can give them.”2 Less than three months after coming to power, the Nazis issued

“What German artists expect of their new government” in March of 1933. One of the first projects

of the Nazi regime was the House of German Art (Haus der Deutschen Kunst), a large museum.

Quickly the Third Reich was forming it’s own style of art, as identifiable as Soviet “Social-

Realism”, but symbolizing the national and racial policies. And while the Soviets tended to

emphasize Literature, the Nazis focused on Visual art and Architecture. Nazi art was Neo-

Classical with a twist of German romanticism, heroicism, and nostalgia for the times of yore.3

In the beginning there was debate on what exactly the Nazis were looking for in art. It is well

known that the Third Reich was extremely hostile to Avant-Garde artists, but before the Nazis

came to power, Joseph Goebbels took to the opinion that some German Expressionists were

compatible with National Socialist ideas. These artists include Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich

Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Ernst Barlach, and Emil Nolde. Nolde was even a Nazi party

member, but these artists could hardly be called “Nazi artists”. They declared nationalism and

were very anti-capitalist. The Expressionists promoted sensation and passion over rational logic

and were heavily into primitive German culture. Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg, and other senior

Nazis attacked these modern artists as incompatible with the Nazi ideal because of there strong

opposition to authoritarianism and the individualism expressed within their work.4 Albert Speer,

commissioned to decorate Goebbels home would later write: “I borrowed a few watercolours from

… the director of the Berlin Nationalgalerie. Goebbels and his wife were delighted with the

paintings—until Hitler came to inspect, and expressed his severe disapproval. Then the minister

summoned me immediately. ‘The pictures will have to go at once; they’re simply impossible’.”5

Upon the assumption of power, almost all modern art was attacked and artists of all sorts fled the

country as work was confiscated and art schools were closed.

There are many reasons Hitler attacked modern art. Such groups as the Dadaists and the

Bauhaus had close connections with the Soviet schools of Constructivism and Suprematism.

These groups, while not necessarily Communist, were overly leftist ranging the gauntlet from

Socialism to Anarchism and was extremely anti-military. Hitler also attacked the aesthetics of

modern art. The Bauhaus was ultra-modern and cosmopolitan in it’s designs. It’s creations were

seamless global industrial works that lacked a recognizable element of German tradition and

craft. And other movements such as Cubism and Expressionism that distorted the picture to

analyze colour, shape and space, Hitler found to be an example of the “Degeneration” of culture

and race. On the day of the German Arts Festival in 1937, Hitler opened a dual exhibition to

commemorate the House of German Art, One of Nazi approved art called the Great German Art

Exhibition (Grosse Deutsch Kunstausstellung) and another exhibition of Degenerate Art

(Entartete Kunst).

“From the pictures sent in for exhibition, it is clear that the eye of some men shows them things

other than they are—that there are men who on principle feel meadows to be blue, heavens

green, the clouds sulfur yellow. Either these ‘artists’ do really see things in this way and believe

that in which they represent—then one has to ask how the defect in vision arose, and if it is

hereditary the Minister of the Interior will have to see it that so ghastly a defect shall not be

allowed to perpetuate itself—or, if they do not believe in the reality of such impressions but seek

on other grounds to impose them upon the nation, then it is a matter for the criminal court.” Hitler

stated on the House of German Art’s inauguration.6 This connection of degenerate art and

physical disability was best linked by Paul Schults-Naumberg’s book, Art and Race published in

1928. This book paired up modern paintings and sculpture with photographs of diseased and

misshapen people. A film was made in 1936 on this principle and shown in almost every city.

This brings forth the question of what Nazi approved artwork was. Goebbels ordered “racially

conscious” art that was “within the limits prescribed, not by any artistic idea, but by the political

idea.”7 The Nazi art had to represent Nazi ideas such as the Aryan body, healthy and beautiful.

The male would be strong and active, a superman, either a warrior, proud and heroic reaping

victory after victory or participating in sport and shaping the body for battle in a friendly

competition that would help shape his opponent preparing him for the same battle. And the

female would be the lovely Nordic superwoman, a mother to birth and teach a generation of men

for work and battle. Another popular theme in Nazi art was the German landscape. Hitler was

very fond of the snow covered peaks of the Alps, but the portrait and genre paintings are of more

political and historical significance.

Paintings of various figures high in the Nazi government were popular in art exhibits during

the regime. Portraits of party officials, doctors, genocide experts and architects have been found

in abundance in nazi cellars after the war. Usually the paintings were patterned on Renaissance

and Baroque styles. Such paintings as Heinrich Knirr’s Portrait of the Fuhrer painted in 1937 show

Hitler posed in a powerful but stable position. Obviously based on Baroque works, this piece has

a non-descript background of trees and clouds that give an outdoor atmosphere without

specifically stating a place or time. It relates to a nature setting that could easily be Germany or

whatever place that the viewer happens to be. He is dressed in military uniform like the

noblemen that were in full armour when this style was developed.

Another portrait of Hitler that confuses the barrier between Baroque and Nazi art even more is

The Flag Bearer by Hubert Lanzinger sometime after 1933. This torso shot of Hitler riding a

horse has him dresses in a suit of pure silvery armour, undented and unblemished, like a

Teutonic knight. He carries a red flag with the Nazi swastika. In this painting Hitler is bringing a

salvation through warfare. Like a crusader in this painting, Hitler seems to be a visual

complement to his speaking on how war and permanent revolution strengthen a nation and it’s

people. The horse is black, and the background white. His armour is pure and polished. The only

distinct colour is the red Nazi flag. Separated and pure are the colours, like the people of the

new Germany are to be in Hitler’s eyes.

Such genre paintings of the period like Gisbert Palmie’s The Rewards of Work also use the

separation of colour to represent purity of race. The golden seamless cloth being woven by the

man at the bottom right of the picture flows around a centered beautiful Aryan woman. The

cloth’s colour matches her blond hair. The background is a rural farmland setting. The various

fields can be distinguished from each other. The figures are out of time. A man picks fruit and a

woman harvests grain while sewing and the caring for animals is being carried out in the picture

plane form a unity of the rural people (volk) and the cycle of nature. Their equipment for

performing these tasks of labour are outdated. They use a spinning wheel for sewing and

dressed in Renaissance costumes to express the anti-modern position of the Nazi government.

1936 had brought Germany the eyes of the world with it’s Olympic games. In 1937 Hitler

proclaimed: “Never was mankind closer than now to antiquity in it’s appearance and it’s

sensibilities. Sport contests and competitions are hardening millions of youthful bodies,

displaying them to us more and more in a form and temper that they have never manifested nor

been thought to possess for perhaps a thousand years.”7 The much anticipated boxing match

between the Aryan and the American negro proved German racial superiority to the watching

world. And the Olympic village built for the games was a utopia as grand and bogus as the

villages Potemkin built for Catherine the Great of Russia. Nazi architecture would be the

achievement of the century. Hitler wanted to outshine Paris. By 1950 Hitler planned to have a

new German capital ready. After the House of German Art, Hitler planned many buildings. He

wanted to reconstruct a Germany in the Grecco-Roman style. His obsession with antiquity is

clearly diplayed in his “ruins principal” that he formed with Albert Speer in 1934. This idea would

have the new constructions collapse in on themselves after a period of abandonment that left

ruins similar to such famous structures as the Acropolis in Athens. Hitler said “If here in the

distant future archeologists should dig the Earth and strike granite beneath, Let them stand bear-

headed in front of a glorious idea that shook the world.”8

Forty cities had monumental building projects planned by Hitler and Speer. In 1939 a new

chancellery was built because the old one was a “piddaly cigar box” in Hitler’s words. Such

buildings as large as his “Great Hall” that could sit one hundred eighty thousand people and

would be seventeen times St.Peter’s in Rome or his sports hall that held four hundred thousand

people can far better be described in Richard Harris’s novel Fatherland that has a setting of

1960’s Germany after the hypothetical Nazi winning of World War Two. But the fact is that the

Hitler lost his war. Even in defeat he was preoccupied with the art and architecture of the Third

Reich. Losing battle after battle, Hitler received the final model for his plans of a “Hitleropolis” in

his hometown of Linz on February 9th, 19459 and while in his bunker he studied the project for

hours on end. He called doom art’s highest form of expression obviously bases on the firey

ending to some of Wagner’s operas. A grand German fall would fill other German generations

with inspiration. Hitler tried to obtain a timeless existence through the immortality of art. Although

Germany has yet to rise again from its own ashes, we still remember Hitler and his infamous

deeds. One could say he was successful.

Bibliography

1. Architecture of Doom. Directed by Peter Cohen. 90 Minuets. First Run Features. Videotape.

2. Architecture of Doom.

3. Payne, Stanley G. A History of Fascism 1914-1945. Madison: The University of Wisconson

Press, 1995. pp196-198

4. Clarke, Toby. Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc,

1997. pp62-63

5. Nicholas, Lynn H. The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and

the Second World War. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. pp10-11

6. Harris, Robert. Fatherland. New York: Harper Paperbacks, 1992. p276

7. Clark, Toby. p37

8. Architecture of Doom.

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