Berlin полностью

Despite its purge of the Prussian Academy, the Nazi regime’s policy on the visual arts was not unified or consistent in the early years of the Third Reich. Hitler came out against modern art in his speeches on culture at the Nuremberg Party rallies of 1934 and 1935, and Göring, who would later emerge as the Reich’s premier art-looter, made clear his preference for traditionalist painting. But Goebbels was partial to some forms of modern art; he kept a Barlach sculpture in his Propaganda Ministry office, hung impressionist paintings in his Gauleitung office, and displayed works by Käthe Kollwitz in his private residence. The propaganda minister fought hard to limit the influence of Alfred Rosenberg, whose rigid vblkisch anti-modernism he considered primitive and stifling. Aware that Berlin’s reputation for artistic creativity was on the line, he stated that, “We guarantee the freedom of art.” In mid-1935, however, Goebbels began giving way to Hitler’s insistence that art reflect “healthy” German traditions and perform a clear didactic function. The minister’s embrace of this view brought to an end what flexibility there had been in the regime’s policy on the visual arts.

The emergence of a harder line in this domain was signaled by the appointment in 1936 of Adolf Ziegler as head of the Reichskammer fur die bildende Künste (Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts). Known for his startlingly realistic nudes, a specialty that won him the sobriquet Reichsschamhaarpinsler (official pubic hair painter of the Reich), Ziegler was an archconservative of the “blood and soil” school. Along with Goebbels, he organized the Third Reich’s infamous Ausstellung entartete Kunst (Exhibition of Degenerate Art), a display of 730 artworks that the Nazis considered representative of “un-German” aesthetic values. The collection, 282 which had been confiscated from galleries and museums around the country, included works by Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Kokoschka, Georg Grosz, Max Beckmann, Ernst Barlach, Otto Dix, and Emil Nolde—to name just a few. The exhibition opened in Munich (Goebbels would have preferred Berlin) in July 1937 and attracted masses of viewers, many of whom undoubtedly wanted to pay their last respects to works that they were not likely to see again in the near future. When the show moved on to Berlin it prompted a similar response. At the time they opened their display of “degenerate” art, the Nazis also mounted the Great German Art Exhibition. As the name suggests, this show featured works that the regime considered emblematic of the best German traditions. The site was Munich’s House of German Art, which was the only new art museum to be built in the Third Reich. The fact that Munich, not Berlin, got this prize reflected Hitler’s determination that his favorite city should serve as the “Capital of German Art” during the Third Reich. This role can be seen as compensation for Munich’s loss of political clout, a process that continued in the Nazi era despite the Führer’s partiality toward his adopted hometown.

In the realm of music, if not in the visual arts, there could be no doubt that Berlin was the German “capital,” and its standards of artistic competence remained fairly high despite the departure of some leading figures. Recognizing the importance of music in the German tradition, the Nazis sought to exploit it for their own purposes. Peter Raabe, the second president of the Reichsmusikkammer, declared: “[Music is] to serve a social function, to be clearly defined in subordination to the general aims of National Socialism, and to be denied traditional autonomy.” Germans and Jews, it was further argued, could not produce similar musical compositions or even interpret music in the same fashion. As Goebbels proclaimed: “Jewry and German music are opposites; by their very nature they exist in gross contradistinction to each other.”