Overview
In 1933, Adolf Hitler appointed Josef Goebbels Reichminister für Volksaufklärung und Propganda (Reich minister for public enlightenment and propaganda.) In turn, Goebbels created the Reichskammern, subchambers each in charge of specific public media such as film, the press, and art. The Reichskammer dur Bildenden Künste (Reich Chamber of Visual Art) was responsible for ensuring that painting, sculpture, and other visual media within Germany supported the political aims of the Third Reich. Adolf Ziegler was appointed to head this Reichskammer, and until 1937 his job consisted primarily of promoting and fostering good” German art, approved by Goebbels, the Nazi regime, and the Fuehrer himself.
Nazi officials view the “Entartete Kunst” exhibit
The Nazi authorities, in line with their reactionary position towards the culture of the Weimar era, regarded the rising popularity of modernist expression in art with alarm and concern. On June 30, 1937 Goebbels empowered Ziegler as part of a six-man commission to travel throughout the Reich, confiscating art they deemed dangerous, subversive, or “degenerate.” In the course of their work, the commission would plunder over sixteen thousand works of art from German museums and private collections.1
Why was this art labeled “degenerate?” In 1892, Max Nordau wrote a book titled Entartung (Degeneration), and borrowed the term from the biological sciences to apply it to the minds and brains of modern artists. Modern society, wrote Nordau, had infected the minds of these artists, making them less than human.2 The ideology pleased the new Nazi regime, and after their rise to power in 1933 began to influence public policy towards art more directly. In particular, the racist and anti-semitic themes of Nordau’s work (subsequently developed by other German authors) dovetailed with the official race policies of the Reich. When devotion to such “degenerate” philosophies as Dadaism, Expressionism, Bolshevism, and Zionism could be explained through a physical deformity, the Nazi political authority gained that much more power to weed out dissidents and malcontents.
The Great German Art Exhibition of sanitized artistic craftsmanship attracted over four hundred thousand spectators. Entartete Kunst, in comparison, saw over two million visitors file through its small, cramped exhibition space.
In July of 1937, over six hundred and fifty of the confiscated artworks were put on public display in Munich under the title Entartete Kunst. The day prior, on July 18th, the Grosse Deutsche Kunstasstellung (Great German Art Exhibition) of state-approved “healthy” art had opened in the same city to tepid public response, despite state-sponsored pageants and parades. The two exhibits would run side-by-side in Munich for the next four months. The Great German Art Exhibition of sanitized artistic craftsmanship attracted over four hundred thousand spectators. Entartete Kunst, in comparison, saw over two million visitors file through its small, cramped exhibition space. During the traveling phase of the exhibit, from 1939 to 1941, an additional one million Reich citizens would view the artwork on display.3 Despite the wild popularity of the show (or perhaps because of it), over one half of the exhibited works were lost or purposefully destroyed by the Nazi authorities. A similar fate befell a similar percentage of the sixteen thousand works collected by Ziegler’s commission.
The Book
As a student of European history, I was familiar with Nazi treatment of dissident artists, and the regime’s proclivity for stark, realist images of apple-cheeked Germans marching behind their Fuehrer. However, I had never heard of the Entartete Kunst exhibit, and had no grasp of the extent of the damage done to modern German art. After finding the book Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, I had my idea for my website. Written in 1991, the book is a companion to a show mounted by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1991 which reunited as many of the original pieces from Entartete Kunst as possible.
The heart of the book is a photographic reconstruction of the exhibit, drawn from contemporary photographs — the Nazis were nothing if not nuts for documentation. If hypertext is the future, or at least the future sibling of text, then surely a hypertextual, virtual museum is the natural descendant of an illustrated museum reconstruction.
Audience
Who is the audience for such a site? Since the subject is at the conjunction of several fields of historical research, those with interests from a broad spectrum could be drawn to it in the course of their research. Students and scholars of German history, naturally, would find it useful and specialists in the interwar and Nazi periods specifically. Art historians, I hope, will be pleased with the ability to view this show in a format as close to its original presentation as possible, at least in content if not in exact form. Of course, particular attention will have to be paid in order to avoid attracting an audience drawn to Nazi history for exploitative, political, or racist reasons as opposed to strictly scholarly interest.
Continue reading about why the site will be made digital.