Art Ideology And Economics In Nazi Germany

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.

"Culture and the arts played a central role in the ideology and propaganda of National Socialism from the early years of the movement until the last months of the Third Reich in 1945 ... This volume's essays explore these and other aspects of the arts and cultural life under National Socialism ..."--Cover.

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.

While we often tend to think of the Third Reich as a zone of lawlessness, the Nazi dictatorship and its policies of persecution rested on a legal foundation set in place and maintained by judges, lawyers, and civil servants trained in the law. This volume offers a concise and compelling account of how these intelligent and welleducated legal professionals lent their skills and knowledge to a system of oppression and domination. The chapters address why German lawyers and jurists were attracted to Nazism; how their support of the regime resulted from a combination of ideological conviction, careerist opportunism, and legalistic selfdelusion; and whether they were held accountable for their Nazi-era actions after 1945. This book also examines the experiences of Jewish lawyers who fell victim to anti-Semitic measures. The volume will appeal to scholars, students, and other readers with an interest in Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and the history of jurisprudence.

The consequences of Germany's twelve-year Nazi regime continue to reverberate and to spark debate among scholars and the general public. In this volume leading scholars present provocative essays probing the nature, history, and aftermath of the Nazi regime, including its connections to the Federal Republic of Germany after the war. The essays address the nature of Nazism as reflected in contemporary perceptions of Nazi Germany in the United States; the origins and character of fascism; the many forms of antisemitism; German scholars' efforts to promote persecution in the Third Reich; the role of ethnic Germans in the anti-Jewish and anti-Slavic policies of the Reich; the actions of German police in the occupation of eastern Europe and in the Holocaust; Hitler's style of leadership; the nazification of the German military high command; and the politics surrounding the memory of Nazism and the Holocaust after 1945. The Impact of Nazism employs diverse approaches, exploits a variety of new and long-available sources, and asks new questions, making clear the profound connections between the Nazis and the world that survived them. Alan E. Steinweis is an associate professor of history and Judaic studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts. Daniel E. Rogers is an associate professor of history at the University of South Alabama. He is the author of Politics after Hitler: The Western Allies and the German Party System.

In the first chapter on the German military’s unlikely function as an incubator of modernist art and in the second chapter on Adolf Hitler’s advocacy for “eugenic” figurative representation embodying nostalgia for lost Aryan racial perfection and the aspiration for the future perfection of the German Volk, Maertz conclusively proves that the Nazi attack on modernism was inconsistent. In further chapters, on the appropriation of Christian iconography in constructing symbols of a Nazi racial utopia and on Baldur von Schirach’s heretical patronage of modernist art as the supreme Nazi Party authority in Vienna, Maertz reveals that sponsorship of modernist artists continued until the collapse of the regime. Also based on previously unexamined evidence, including 10,000 works of art and documents confiscated by the U.S. Army, Maertz’s final chapter reconstructs the anarchic denazification and rehabilitation of German artists during the Allied occupation, which had unforeseen consequences for the postwar art world.

Essay from the year 2011 in the subject History Europe - Germany - National Socialism, World War II, grade: 72.0%, Durham University, language: English, abstract: According to Jonathan Petropoulos, Arno Breker was arguably the artist most admired by the Nazi leaders and most celebrated by the Nazi regime. As such, Arno Breker does not represent a simple cog in the National Socialist cultural machine, but rather occupies a position of almost unrivalled prominence and esteem in the cultural history of the Third Reich. Importantly, within recent academic analysis of art and culture under the National Socialist regime, there has been an ostensible recognition among historians and art historians alike that our manner of approaching figures such as Breker must be altered significantly. Culture, and especially art occupied a position of unique significance in Nazi Germany, and the cultural policies of National Socialism worked to aestheticize politics and ideology. Indeed, Taylor and van der Will argue that under Adolf Hitler, Fascism came to represent a form of government which depended on such aestheticized politics, whereby the cultural programme was transmogrified into the ‘aesthetics of political symbolism’. It is within this vital framework of understanding that one must approach the multifarious motives for Arno Breker’s acquiescence with the Nazi regime after 1936-7. Although Breker possessed a truly impressive artistic pedigree prior to his ascent to fame in Nazi Germany, he did choose to continue his career, arguably in a different artistic style and approach, under the Nazis. It is in this decision that historians claim can be found Arno Breker’s ultimate undoing as an artist. The palpable changes evident in the sculptor’s artistic style raise the issue, as elucidated by Alan E. Steinweis, of the distinction between artists’ ‘passive compliance’ and ‘active collaboration’ with the regime’s cultural policies. However, the case of Arno Breker raises problems beyond Steinweis’ significant, but simultaneously constricted, scope of approach. The very motivations for his collaboration are overshadowed by the politically-dictated culture of which he became an indispensable part. One must question to what extent Arno Breker was transformed under National Socialism from a sculptor and an ‘artist’ into a purely political artist functioning to propagandize the ideological tenets of the Nazi regime.

In this up-to-date, succinct, and highly readable volume, Alan E. Steinweis presents a new synthesis of the origins, development, and downfall of Nazi Germany. After tracing the intellectual and cultural origins of Nazi ideology, the book recounts the rise and eventual victory of the Nazi movement against the background of the struggling Weimar Republic. The book details the rapid transformation of Germany into a dictatorship, focusing on the interplay of Nazi violence and the readiness of Germans to accommodate themselves to the new regime. Steinweis chronicles Nazi efforts to transform German society into a so-called People's Community, imbued with hyper-nationalism, an authoritarian spirit, Nazi racial doctrine, and antisemitism. The result was less a People's Community than what Steinweis calls a People's Dictatorship – a repressive regime that acted brutally toward the targets of its persecution, its internal opponents, and its foreign enemies even as it enjoyed support across much of German society.