Art As Politics In The Third Reich

The political elite of Nazi Germany perceived itself as a cultural elite as well. In Art as Politics in the Third Reich, Jonathan Petropoulos explores the elite's cultural aspirations by examining both the formulation of a national aesthetic policy

Nearly fifty years after the collapse of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, the officially sanctioned art of his National Socialist regime remains largely unknown. Since 1945, few people have seen these controversial works: many were destroyed in World War Two bombings; most of what survived is hidden away, accessible only to scholars. In Art of the Third Reich, Peter Adam--who grew up in Berlin in the Hitler era--has gone back to Germany after years in England as a BBC documentary-film producer and made an extensive study of the art of the National Socialists. Adam explores its complex ramifications, which led to a traditional German style linked to nature, family, and the homeland and to the suppression of modern art--associated by the Reich with large cities, internationalism, and decadence. Painting, sculpture, architecture, film, and all the other art disciplines were compelled to serve as vehicles for the transmission of National Socialist ideology, intended to forge the people's collective mind in the Nazi mold. Hitler's belief that architecture was the most forceful manifestation of absolute political power lay at the heart of his grandiose schemes for redesigning Munich, Berlin, Nuremberg, and more than a score of other German cities. Hitler also virtually created a new art--the art of manipulating mass emotions, which he skillfully used at Nazi Party rallies and in mass sports events, such as the notorious Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936. How this art form was enacted against a backdrop of colossal architecture makes a fascinating and important leitmotif in this study. The research for this engrossing book took Adam to hidden repositories in both the United States and Germany. Fromoften tattered books and magazines of the period, he has gleaned many of the 321 illustrations covering the broad spectrum of National Socialist art, which scholars are now beginning to recognize as an essential source of information about the perplexing Third Reich.

The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany presents a new interpretation of National Socialism, arguing that art in the Third Reich was not simply an instrument of the regime, but actually became a source of the racist politics upon which its ideology was founded. Through the myth of the "Aryan race," a race pronounced superior because it alone creates culture, Nazism asserted art as the sole raison d'être of a regime defined by Hitler as the "dictatorship of genius." Michaud shows the important link between the religious nature of Nazi art and the political movement, revealing that in Nazi Germany art was considered to be less a witness of history than a force capable of producing future, the actor capable of accelerating the coming of a reality immanent to art itself.

Hitler's aims and motivations have been reassessed to examine his perverse obsessions and show how his artistry destroyed any sense of individuality and linked the German people with his own drives.

This lucid and comprehensive collection of essays by an international group of scholars constitutes a photo-historical survey of select photographers who embraced National Socialism during the Third Reich. These photographers developed and implemented physiognomic and ethnographic photography, and, through a Selbstgleichschaltung (a self-co-ordination with the regime), continued to practice as photographers throughout the twelve years of the Third Reich. The volume explores, through photographic reproductions and accompanying analysis, diverse aspects of photography during the Third Reich, ranging from the influence of Modernism, the qualitative effect of propaganda photography, and the utilisation of technology such as colour film, to the photograph as ideological metaphor. With an emphasis on the idealised representation of the German body and the role of physiognomy within this representation, the book examines how select photographers created and developed a visual myth of the ‘master race’ and its antitheses under the auspices of the Nationalist Socialist state. Photography in the Third Reich approaches its historical source photographs as material culture, examining their production, construction and proliferation. This detailed and informative text will be a valuable resource not only to historians studying the Third Reich, but to scholars and students of film, history of art, politics, media studies, cultural studies and holocaust studies.

This provocative study asks why we have held on to vivid images of the NazisÕ total control of the visual and performing arts, even though research has shown that many artists and their works thrived under Hitler. To answer this question, Pamela M. Potter investigates how historians since 1945 have written about music, art, architecture, theater, film, and dance in Nazi Germany and how their accounts have been colored by politics of the Cold War, the fall of communism, and the wish to preserve the idea that true art and politics cannot mix. Potter maintains that although the persecution of Jewish artists and other Òenemies of the stateÓ was a high priority for the Third Reich, removing them from German cultural life did not eradicate their artistic legacies. Art of Suppression examines the cultural histories of Nazi Germany to help us understand how the circumstances of exile, the Allied occupation, the Cold War, and the complex meanings of modernism have sustained a distorted and problematic characterization of cultural life during the Third Reich.

Profiles five key figures in the art world of Nazi Germany who plundered art masterpieces from museums and private collections across Europe at the behest of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich--museum director Ernst Buchner, art critic Robert Scholz, dealer Karl Haberstock, art historian Kajetan Muhlman, and sculptor Arno Breker.

From 1933 to 1945, the Reich Chamber of Culture exercised a profound influence over hundreds of thousands of German artists and entertainers. Alan Steinweis focuses on the fields of music, theater, and the visual arts in this first major study of Nazi cultural administration, examining a complex pattern of interaction among leading Nazi figures, German cultural functionaries, ordinary artists, and consumers of culture. Steinweis gives special attention to Nazi efforts to purge the arts of Jews and other so-called undesirables. Steinweis describes the political, professional, and economic environment in which German artists were compelled to function and explains the structure of decision making, thus showing in whose interest cultural policies were formulated. He discusses such issues as insurance, minimum wage statutes, and certification guidelines, all of which were matters of high priority to the art professions before 1933 as well as after the Nazi seizure of power. By elucidating the economic and professional context of cultural life, Steinweis helps to explain the widespread acquiescence of German artists to artistic censorship and racial 'purification.' His work also sheds new light on the purge of Jews from German cultural life.