, page 17.)


Julius Pail Junghanns: Rest Under The Willows

                In all the official German Art Exhibitions, landscape painting dominated. It was seen as the genre in which the German soul could best be expressed.

Albert Henrich: Country Still Life, 1940

                Again and again the idea of the Folk was linked with the landscape. The country was a place of belonging. The nineteenth century, too, had dreamed of a medieval and rural Utopia in which Man and Nature could be fused together.

Karl Alexander Flügel: Harvest. Great German Art Exhibition, 1938

                The National Socialists picked up these ideas and made them one of the central themes of their philosophy of art. But what for the Romantic painter was an idealised dream became reality for the new painters. Their landscape represented the Germans' Lebensraum, their living space.

Oskar Martin-Amorbach: The Sower, 1937

                The new landscape painting followed closely the tradition of the Romantic painters, especially Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge, both artists Hitler cited in his speech at the opening of the House Of German Art. Their feeling of longing and the specific mood they expressed appealed to many beyond the leadership. But landscape for the new artist was not only a place of contemplation, it was also a space for living, for action. The landscapes of Werner Peiner share with the Romantics' landscapes a longing for expansive distances, but Friedrich's landscape was an imaginary one; the landscapes of the new painters were meant to be real. Landscape, in National Socialist thinking, was always the German landscape. The painters of today are nearer to Nature than the Romantics. They do not look for a religious mood but for elementary existence. Each landscape is a piece of the German Homeland which the artists illuminate with their soul ..... Above all art today stands the law of the Folk. (Wilhelm Westeker, in Die Kunst im Dritten Reich, March, 1938, page 86.)

Caspar David Friedrich: Two Men Observing The Moon

Werner Peiner: German Soil

                The style of new German landscape painting was also seen as a direct reaction to the Impressionists: Artists create again under the spell of the silent forces which reign above and in us. The German landscape painter rejects the virtuosic rendering of the impressions of light and air. He searches for the unity between man and landscape; he interprets the eternal laws of organic growth. (Walter Horn, in Die Kunst im Dritten Reich, April, 1939, page 123.)

                For the National Socialists questions of style or form did not exist. All artistic problems were metaphysical ones. Richard Wagner's dictum that art is the presentation of religion in a lively form was fully subscribed to by the ideologists of the regime. The desire of the Germans to create always grew from the two roots: a strong sensuous feeling for Nature, and a deep metaphysical longing. The capacity of the Germans to make the divine visible in Nature, and to illuminate the sensuous with spiritual values, fulfils Wagner's demands for art to become religion, wrote Robert Scholz. (Scholz, in Die Kunst im Dritten Reich, August, 1938.)

                The act of creation was seen as a mysterious pseudoreligious event. Painting is not a matter of artistic decision, of composition or formal choices. The hour of creation is one of the great secrets of creation; it has to be faithfully prepared and humbly awaited. (Horn, in Die Kunst im Dritten Reich, April, 1939, page 122.)

Michael Kiefer: Meadow Near Chiemsee: Eagles -- Great German Art Exhibition, 1943

                Nature was not only seen as an antidote to the city, but was also enjoyed as the arena in which the strong dominated the weak, in which the elements ruled, and where animals shared a lifegiving force. As in the heroic landscape, a genre the National Socialists developed from Dutch landscape paintings and the Romantic school, Nature was seen as a fighting ground.

Fritz Bernuth: The Fight

                Animal paintings took on a kind of monumental, even heroic, stance. The eagle, the lion, and the bull were the favourite symbols of victory and courage. The proud eagle and the Storm Trooper's gaze are two sides of the same coin. Michael Kiefer's soaring eagles were the painter's version of another of the National Socialists' favourite emblems: the symbol of ruling. In the paintings by Carl Baum and Julius Paul Junghanns, even horses and cows became symbols of strength, the animal equivalent of the naked hero.

Germany, Your Colonies!. Poster

                Junghanns, Germany's most prestigious animal painter, had taught since 1904 at the Düsseldorf Academy. Under the National Socialists his animal paintings took on a new meaning. Hitler personally selected his work for the first Great German Art Exhibition. Junghanns's work had little to do with the traditional animal paintings of the Dutch school, where animals were merely shown as friends of the humans. Julius Paul Junghanns has done more than merely paint people and animals, he has shown them as monuments. Monuments of a speechless, heroic attitude and strength, the most dignified witnesses of our time. (Horn, in Die Kunst im Dritten Reich, April, 1939, page 122.)

Julius Paul Junghanns: Hard Work. Great German Art Exhibition, 1939

                Hand in hand with the longing for deep communication with Nature came the call for a simple life, with the peasant as the incarnation of the true German. Travelling through the German countryside today, one still finds among our peasants customs which have survived for a thousand years ..... Everywhere one will find primordial peasant customs that reach far back into the past. Everywhere there is evidence that the German peasantry ..... knew how to preserve its unique character and its customs against every attempt to wipe them out, including the attempts of the Church. It preferred to go under rather than bend its head to the alien law imposed upon it by the Lords ..... Despite this thousand year effort to alienate the German peasant from his nature, the common sense and the deep blood feeling of the German peasant knew how to preserve his German breed. (Richard-Walther Darré, Minister Of Works.)

                There was a tradition of earthy peasant paintings, especially in Austria. The Tyrolean painters Franz Defreger (1835-1921) and the younger Albin Egger-Lienz were seen as great precursors of the National Socialist peasant painters.

Albin Egger-Lienz: Husband And Wife. Study for Life Cycles, 1910

Oskar Martin-Amorbach: Harvest. Great German Art Exhibition, 1938

                The paintings advertised the eternal values of peasant life as a source of strength, as opposed to the destructive life of the city in which there is no continuity, and in which everything is constantly uprooted. The German man emerged from the German peasantry. Princes, Church, and cities were able to place their stamp on a special kind of German man, but nevertheless, the German peasant down the centuries has been the raw material and ..... the foundation. (Richard-Walther Darré, Minister Of Works, 1934.)

Georg Ehmig: Returning From The Alpine Meadows

                Also left out was any sign of the increased mechanisation of agriculture: the farmer was mostly depicted in a primitive earthbound state, sowing, ploughing, mowing the grass with a scythe. The eternal and timeless repetition of a farmer's work was shown as a quasireligious ritual. Cows and horses and the rainbow; all nature is harmony. Work in the country was always seen as diligent and strong. In the painting by Heinrich Berran, Bergheuer -- Haymaker, the farmer brings the hay down like Atlas carrying the Earth on his shoulders.

Heinrich Berran: Haymaker
                In Lothar Sperl's

Lothar Sperl: Clearing The Land -- The mountain landscape forces the artist to be real; not to show the farmer in artificial holiday poses, but rather as someone fighting hard for survival, a man who understands his life threatened by Nature and the elements as given by God; it is the artist who sees the traces of destiny in the farmer's face. -- Walter Horn

Willy Jäckel: Ploughing In The Evening -- A symphony of colours in a light flooded sky. The Farmer walking through the roaring elements, a symbol of care for growth and growing. -- Walter Horn

                The eugenic concept of family in its deepest essence is synonymous with the christian concept of a religious moral family which rests upon the twin pillars of premarital chastity and conjugal fidelity ..... Monogamy also stands at the beginning of our culture ..... It was good morals for a woman to have several children. A childless married woman was regarded as inferior, as was a woman who had many miscarriages, or who brought deformed, sick, or sickly children into the world. (Paul Hermann, an expert in racial purity, in Deutsche Rassenhygiene, page 17.)

One Folk. One Reich. One Leader. 10th April, 1938. Commemorative stamp

                Closely linked with the idea of peasant life was the idea of the family. The family was more than just individual children and parents. The German Folk as a whole was seen as an interlacing of all German families of the same race. Here too art became a prime spokesman of National Socialist philosophy. The family became an important subject of the visual arts. The family of the farmer in particular was seen as the nucleus of the Nation. The National Socialists hoped that the farm family's renewed popularity would lead to an Earthly paradise, an order based on Nature. Those to whom Germandom is an essential entity see in the family the health, the salvation, and the future of the State. Around the family table are the sheltering and protecting qualities of the soul: the Homeland, the landscape, the language of the Folk Community ..... in the soul lives the child, the songs, the fairy tales, the proverbs, the native costumes, and furniture and tools. (Eberlein, Was ist deutsch in der deutschen Kunst, page 18.)

Rudolf Warnecke: Carpenters

                The ideal father and mother were the pillars of a family of several children, happy and in harmony, fertile and bound to Nature, as in Adolf Wissel's Farm Family From Kahlenberg, a finely executed painting very much in the south German tradition with its love of details and love of healthy life:

actually a self portrait of the artist with his parents. No presentation of social conflict or hardship was allowed to disturb the image. One requirement was to express a racial ideal.

Gisbert Palmié: Rewards Of Work

Gisbert Palmié: Rewards Of Work. Detail: Fruit Harvest

Franz Xaver Wolf: Parting, 1940

                The restful composition, symmetrical design, and frozen gestures of many paintings evoked feelings of unchanging universal truth. Here too the ideologist stopped at nothing; for example, the Bach family was enlisted to serve as a shining example of the purity of race and Germanic virtue:

Leopold Schmutzler: Farm Girls Returning From The Fields

Jürgen Wegener: Thanksgiving -- Great German Art Exhibition, 1943

                The National Socialists left nothing to chance. If art advertised the role of the family, the Party also used art to define the social role of woman and the image she should have. In his very early novel Michael, Goebbels had written: The mission of woman is to be beautiful and to bring children into the world ..... The female bird pretties herself for her mate and hatches the eggs for him. In exchange the mate takes care of gathering the food, stands guard, and wards off the enemy. (Michael: Ein Deutsches Schicksal, München, 1929, page 41.)

Franz Eichhorst: Mother And Child

                The ideal women were tall, blue eyed, blonde representatives of the Aryan Race. The ideal beauty corresponded to the type of human being that was politically sound. For Hitler beauty always involved health: We only want the celebration of the healthy body in art. The woman was preordained by Nature to be the bearer of children, the sacred mother. The man was preordained to fight. In Hitler's view only this interpretation of the role of man and woman could produce fine art. We want women in whose life and work the characteristically feminine is preserved, said Hitler's deputy Rudolf Heß. Women we can love. We grant the rest of the world the ideal type of woman that it desires, but the rest of the world should kindly grant us the woman who is most suitable for us. She is a woman who, above all, is able to be a mother ..... She becomes a mother not merely because the State wants it, or because her husband wants it, but because she is proud to bring healthy children into the world, and to bring them up for the Nation. In this way she too plays her part in the preservation of the life of her Folk. (Reich Minister Rudolf Heß, at a meeting of the Women's Association, cited in Folkish Observer, May 27th, 1936.) Madonnalike renderings of mother and child became a favourite genre.

Alfred Kitzig. Tyrolean Peasant Woman With Child -- In the reflective seriousness of a motherly woman lives the pensive spirit of an artist whose brushstroke is laden with thought -- Edmund Pesch

                About a tenth of the paintings shown were nudes. The increasing number of nudes in painting, and especially in sculpture, was a reflection of the new body feeling. Nudes were part of the Nature culture. The demand for naturalness, vitality, and sensualism found its visual counterpart in the presentation of the naked body. Here too it was antiquity, the Renaissance, and the old Masters that provided the models: the nudes of Titian, Tintoretto, Michelangelo, Rubens, and Rembrandt. The nudes of the Impressionists, especially Edouard Manet's Olympia, were rejected as a mere experience of the eye, the body painted for its own sake, the carrier of colours. But not the expression of a moral, sociological, and religious attitude, which determined the nudes of the Third Reich. The presentation of the devil woman, the prostitute, as modern artists often depicted her, was not only unthinkable but was considered an insult to German womanhood. If man was shown as the dominator of Nature, woman was represented as Nature herself. She was the beauty of Nature, or the playfulness of Nature, and of course was as fertile as Nature. She was shown over and over again in a state of ripeness:

Friedrich Wilhelm Kalb: Searching, Finding, Losing -- (Daphne, Eros and Psyche, Eurydike and Orpheus)

Ivo Saliger: Diana's Rest, 1940 -- A time of affirmation of the body, a celebration of Hellenic attitudes and virtues -- Robert Scholz

                This was the body to be desired and adored. Titles such as Abandon and Morning spelled out the role woman was expected to play. Two themes dominate: the woman in a pose of expectation, and the woman as mother.

Fritz Mackensen: The Baby
                In National Socialist art, Woman was described with soft lines and gentle contours, the image of devotion and cooperation. Woman was an object; her role was subservient, to be looked at, to be fertilised. Her own sexuality was minimised. She was usually seen facing front, without pubic hair. In the past, nudes often cowered, hiding their breasts. The new woman, as in Ivo Saliger's

Adolf Ziegler: Judgement Of Paris -- Great German Art Exhibition, 1939

                The President Of The Reich Chamber For The Visual Arts, Adolf Ziegler painted one of the main works for the 1937 Exhibition Of German art. It became famous almost overnight through frequent reproduction. Hitler acquired it, to hang in his living room in München above the fireplace. Ziegler wrote: Our work represents our philosophy. What is the philosophy spelled out by this picture? Bodies are celebrated, the photorealistic representation of perfect bodies. The sleek, perfect surface almost detaches the body from reality. The four women representing the four elements, offering themselves to the onlooker, are like four priestesses; they sit on a bench as though on an altar. But they are also ready for sacrifice. Willingness to be sacrificed for the Nation was widely stressed. The combination of priestess and sacrificial object was iconographically new.

Adolf Ziegler: The Four Elements -- Great German Art Exhibition, 1937

Living room, Leader Building, München. Designers: Leonhard Gall and Gerdy Troost. Over the fireplace: Adolf Ziegler: The Four Elements

                This beautiful painting was much liked, judging by the enormous numbers of postcards and reproductions of it sold. The National Socialists' celebrations of the human figure without conflict or suffering were immensely popular. The nudes by the favourite painters of the National Socialist regime, like Ziegler, Saliger, and Friedrich Kalb, were sometimes deliberately passive and impersonal.

                From year to year nudes gained in popularity both in painting and sculpture. Many painters of nudes came from the respected München Secession, a group much influenced by the French Impressionists, like Oskar Martin-Amorbach in his Peasant Grace:

Oskar Martin-Amorbach: Peasant Grace -- A stronger linear style so tender in its feeling -- Robert Scholz

Sepp Hilz: Peasant Venus. Great German Art Exhibition, 1940

by Padua created quite a scandal:


Paul Matthias Padua: Leda And The Swan

It was nevertheless bought by Hitler himself. The offerings of nudes multiplied. There were the sensual and lingering nudes of Karl Truppe. Gerhardinger, Oskar Graf, Ernst Liebermann, Johanna Kluska, Johann Schult, Richard Klein, and many others furnished the exhibition with healthy Aryan flesh.

Johann Schult: After The Bath. Great German Art Exhibition, 1940 -- Painting the right and good way! With the ripe experience of the eye and the knowledge of the laws which govern the body -- Robert Scholz

                Women were often represented as allegories of honour, purity, and faith, and as the Goddess Victoria crowning the hero. These paintings say, I am like you, you can be like me: an invitation to identify, an accessible ideal, not a distant Goddess. That is why artists brought the ancient myths up to date: a Venus with a permanent wave. The National Socialist aesthetic required that their figures look smooth and fashionable, as if they had just emerged from the hairdresser or had been sunbathing, the image of motherhood, the ultimate synthesis of Nature and spirit, the embodiment of a racial idea, just like the farmers, the family, and the men.

Karl Truppe: Youth

                If anything, the new age of Germany will create the image of the German Man. There has never been a richer time for the presentation and interpretation of the German character. The Great War showed us how little mere strength, diligence, and conscience mean nowadays. Everything depends on the persuasive power of the images provided so that a whole Folk can identify itself with them. (Fritz Zadow, Kulturbewußtsein und nationale Wirklichkeit, in Kant-Studien, edited by Hans Heyse, 1936, volume 41, page 14.)

Rudolf Hausknecht: Lookout On A U-Boat

                Representation of the heroic man was usually reserved for sculpture. But with the beginning of Churchill's War, the man as hero became a powerful iconographic element in painting, too. The war absorbed much of the energy of the country, but it never extinguished the National Socialists' preoccupation with the arts. The Director Of The National Museum in Berlin boasted that, while the British Museum and the Louvre fearfully had begun to evacuate their treasures, the German museums have not been silenced like those of the enemy, waiting for the sad end of this war. The German museums do their duty by serving the Folk and waiting for victory. (Professor Dr. Otto Kümmel, in Die Kunst im Dritten Reich, March, 1940, page 76.)

Gisbert Palmié: Sniper Aiming A Rifle, 1944

                The Great German Art Exhibitions were also widely used as a morale booster. Hitler attended the openings at the beginning. Later he left this task to Goebbels and Heß. Opening the fourth exhibition, in the first year of the war, Goebbels stressed the role of art as the best way of uplifting people in times of sorrow and deprivation. In fact, 751 artists displayed 1,397 works. Many rooms were now devoted to war art. The war became the new inspiration for the artist, but not the horror of it: the heroic sacrifice was always stressed. The war was a new source for artistic creation, and many artists elevated the soldier to a symbol. The restrained pain in the face of the wounded soldiers and the expression of the finished battle were designed to move the Folk deeply.

Walter Schmock: Soldiers

                Also on show was other war art: a giant triptych, Infanterie -- Infantry by Rudolf G. Werner; the fierce rendering of Die Flammenwerfer -- The Flame Throwers by Rudolf Liepus; the Hitler portrait by Gerhard Zill, and Hans Schmitz-Wiedenbrück's Kämpfendes Volk -- Fighting Folk.

                Art was presented as a sign of optimism. Its role was to help to overcome the increasingly difficult problems of life. Hitler had occupied France and was heavily engaged in Russia. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers had died in battle. The civilian population was spending night after night in airraid shelters, and art was constantly used to bolster the hope of a victorious Germany. All forces, the physical as well as the spiritual, fight for the final victory. Art is today, more than ever, a political factor of a high order, wrote Walter Horn, reviewing an exhibition of the Prussian Academy in 1940. The victorious war has not diminished the creative strength of the Germans. On the contrary. Everything serves to strengthen our will to fight and our determination to defend our soul. (Horn, in Die Kunst im Dritten Reich, December, 1940, page 374.)

                In 1942, when the House Of German Art inaugurated the vast annual exhibition, the journalist and art functionary Robert Scholz stated:

                Millions flock to see our art, they come from all parts of Germany. The fact that the Great German Art Exhibition opens its doors for the third time during the war is strong proof of the certainty of the spiritual foundation upon which the battle of our destiny stands. What unites the individual exhibits is the emanation of optimism and a strong artistic idealism. This belief in a future is, in times like these, the strongest proof of the strength of the German soul. Just compare these works with those of the Great War ..... What marked the work of those artists was a deep pessimism. The darkness of their colours, the heaviness of their style announced the collapse of their spirit ..... The inner strength and the general tenor of the present day are of a different mould ..... The optimism ..... is visible in the many works that depict the lasting values and subjects in art, such as man, animal, and landscape. (Scholz, Zukunftsbewußte deutsche Kunst, Folkish Observer, July 4th, 1942.)

                Britain and France not only declared the First World War; they engineered, caused, and declared the Second World War also -- by giving idiotic guarantees to the criminal military dictatorship in Poland which merely made Poland arrogant and aggressive and unfriendly towards Germany, guarantees which Britain and France had not the least intention or ability to enforce. Adolf Hitler's politics were driven by his noble intention to tear up the intellectually disgusting and legally unjustifiable Treaty Of Versailles which had been forced upon Germany, at the end of the Great War which had also been forced upon Germany, in order to weaken the great European competitor of Britain and France. The greatest statesmen of Britain admitted as much. Therefore, although Hitler's politics were aggressive, they were thoroughly justified. Every single action by the German Government before the war and during the war was fully justifiable. Every casualty of the war -- 50,000,000 dead, including those who underwent euthanasia -- is solely on the conscience of the British and French inhuman politicians. Hitler was willing to go to war with the British and French, however, since there were terrible wrongs to right. He once said: Only he who struggles with Fate has Providence on his side. Hitler firmly believed that mankind could realise itself only through struggle, and so to him the purpose of art was also a preparation for war. The suffering of war was absent. Reviewing the frescoes of Franz Eichhorst:

Franz Eichhorst: Street Fighting

                Robert Volz wrote: The beauty and singularity of these frescoes is the almost total absence of blood and screams, the unbearably realistic has been avoided ..... the idea of readiness to fight and to be sacrificed, the loneliness of heroism overshadows the horrors of reality. What remains is the idea of the destiny of a Folk. (Robert Volz, in Die Kunst im Dritten Reich, November, 1938.)

                The role of the artist was either to portray the struggle for the survival of a peaceful German world or else to represent this world, which had to be defended at all cost.

                Painters like Elk Eber, Fritz Erler, and Franz Eichhorst glorified soldiers, Aryan fighters fierce and victorious. Show the school pupils the pictures of soldiers painted by Erler or Spiegel, compare them with the vulgar and horrid works by Dix or Grosz. Every pupil will recognise immediately what degenerate art is ..... The strength of the real artist is in his blood, which leads him to heroism. (Heinrich Garbe, Rassische Kunsterziehung, Nationalsozialistisches Bildungswesen, 1938, page 664.

                Eber became one of the particular favourites of the regime. He joined the Party early and received many honours. His paintings were widely distributed through postcards and reproductions. Eber was forty one years old when Hitler came to power. He quickly became one of the most fanatical painters of the National Socialist Movement. His pictures were always prominently exhibited and widely reproduced in the press. His paintings of soldiers and SA Men, with their fierce profiles, displaying their weapons, were favourite subjects for postcards. The Dispatch Courier was especially popular:

Elk Eber: Dispatch Courtier, 1939

                They embodied the best of National Socialist art with their call to fight and to sacrifice. Elk Eber was one of the strongest artistic personalities of our time, declared a colleague in Eber's obituary in the Folkish Observer in 1941. He drew the war as he saw and lived through it, the heroism of the German soldier during battle. Also his own deprivation and suffering and sometimes even the proud bearing of the soldiers when the battle was hopeless ..... The Last Hand Grenade was one of the most remarkable pictures in the Great German Art Exhibition, because it expressed the attitude of the Party and the whole Folk ..... Professor Elk Eber had basically only one theme: the soldierly, heroic masculinity of our time. (Rittich, Zum Tode von Prof. Elk Eber, Folkish Observer, August 15th, 1941.)

                Hans Schmitz-Wiedenbrück's painting Workers, Soldiers, Farmer borrowed the traditional format of the triptych to carry a Fascist message:

Hans Schmitz-Wiedenbrück: Workers, Soldiers, Farmer

                It represented the three pillars of the State, elevated to icons, symbolising their contributions. The Defence Forces dominated the picture, not only by their central position but also by the fact that they were painted as if seen from below, an artistic device for creating awe and emphasis.

                Paul Matthias Padua's The 10th Of May, 1940 celebrates the Germans' opening of the western offensive:

Paul Matthias Padua: The Tenth Of May, 1940

                The leader of the fifteen men crossing the Rhine River was seen as someone who was beckoning the whole Nation to follow him with an almost religious gesture.

                An increasing number of war paintings filled the walls of the House Of German Art. In them the readiness to fight and to die for the Nation was seen as the highest virtue. The soldier was shown mostly as the glorious victor. The horror of war or even death was only rarely portrayed. The National Socialists believed it was not the role of art to augment the anguish of war. It was the task of art to lead people away from reality into an emotional dream world: The willingness for sacrifice which fills the whole German Folk is visible in all the works ..... They are the artistic visualisation of a communal experience, the representation of the spiritual attitude of their time. The National Socialists kept the realistic language of painting, but they restricted its range. The artist was encouraged to adopt a polished photographic style.

                Paintings of the great battles in German history glorified the country's military tradition and justified the continuing struggle. Werner Peiner had become one of the most prolific battle painters of the National Socialist regime. In 1937-44 he created the panels for his series of large tapestries, four devoted to the subject of the falcon hunt, ten to the virtues of women, five to the five continents, and the rest to the major German battles throughout history. By 1945 only five tapestries were finished. They were huge works, along Gothic and Renaissance models, commissioned by Göring and Hitler for the new Reich Chancellery which Speer had designed. They were to be the building's most significant and impressive decorations, launching a monumental modern art form. These historical subjects gave the German Reich a historical context:

Werner Peiner: Frederick The Great At Kunersdorf. Detail

Werner Peiner: Frederick The Great At Kunersdorf. Panel for a cycle of tapestries -- Since Germany has revived long desired monumental art, we are witnessing a recovery of tapestry weaving and its elevation to monumental painting. -- Johannes Sommer

, a giant mural which combined the modern Army with the old Prussian Cavalry, also celebrated the continuity of battle:


Ferdinand Spiegel: Tank. Mural

Wolfgang Willrich: Neuberger, Karl, 28388, Eastern Front Squad Leader From Sauerlach, Near München, 44 Years Old, Married, 4 Children, Construction Worker, Maternal Ancestors Farmers In Bavaria -- Legend On Picture

                There were many drawings and watercolours which simply rendered the life of the soldiers or the landscape. There were pictures which showed some compassion for the prisoners and the destroyed villages of Russia. The picture one gets from these works is of a gentle war, of blonde nurses, comradeship, and friendly faces. It is not a picture of blood and tears, of gangrene and death.

Olaf Jordan: Two Russian Prisoners Of The Germans, 1943

                Labour, which was one of the key words in the National Socialists' vocabulary, was usually represented by the farmer. There was a notable absence of machine art. All work was done by brawny arms, tough muscles. Many paintings were simply an advertisement for the strong worker, often indistinguishable from posters. Sometimes work was seen as a battle, the worker as the hero, with his tools symbolising conquest. The problems of modern industrial society did not exist. The portrayal of work as a chore, as seen in paintings by modern artists like Käthe Kollwitz, is almost totally absent. National Socialist artists depicted a world ennobled by hammers and muscles, not a world of exploitation and exhaustion; a world of the idealised worker, not one of sweat and toil. It seems odd that such a highly technological society did not portray technology more in its art. Some painters celebrated achievements like the automobile highways (Oskar Graf), or the great building sites at Nürnberg (Paul Herrmann). Where modern industry is represented, it is the factory rather than the worker that is shown, or the workers are rendered so small that they became just props. The miracle of technology and industry alone was to be celebrated.

                The representation of the individual man in the factory was considered a sign of past liberal times that, according to the philosophy of the National Socialists, saw a kind of salvation in technology. In 1942 an article entitled Kunst und Technik -- Art And Technique appeared in Die Kunst im Deutschen Reich, which castigated the socialist realist art of the Soviet Union with its mechanical dehumanisation, blind adoration of the machine, and its crude materialism. Both liberalism and communism put technology above man. The National Socialists stressed the fact that behind the machines stood the will not of a single man but of the Folk. The measure of all things is no longer man or machine but Folk and Community. (Horn, in Die Kunst im Deutschen Reich, February, 1942.)

Arthur Kampf: In The Steelworks -- Great German Art Exhibition, 1939

Knirr: Hitler -- The hard eye of the Commander is like lightning or the flash from a bullet shot -- Wilhelm Westeker

                Portraits of Hitler dominated. The Leader is the highest gift to the Nation. He is the German fulfilment. An artist who wants to render The Leader must be more than an artist. The entire German Folk and German eternity will stand silently in front of this work, filled with emotions to gain strength from it today and for all times. Holy is the art and the call to serve the Folk. Only the best may dare to render The Leader. (The Black Corps, June 19th, 1935, page 12.)

Walter Einbeck: Hitler
                Hitler was often painted full length in order to convey his divine role:


Fritz Erler: Portrait Of The Leader -- The House Of German Art is in the background at the left

                A seated portrait would look too relaxed and familiar, unless it was formal and enthroned. Unapproachable, he was never shown at home, in personal surroundings, and at ease. In group portraits he always stood out, dominating, as in Emil Scheibe's Hitler At The Front:

Emil Scheibe: Hitler At The Front, 1943
                But primarily he was portrayed alone. There was Hitler The Leader or Hitler The Head Of The army, often authoritative, sometimes pensive, gazing into the distance:


Franz Triebsch: The Leader, 1941

                Fritz Erler pictured him in front of a monumental sculpture making him look like a giant. He appeared on stamps (mostly designed by Richard Klein). Sometimes he was seen as a friend of the family, sometimes as the icy Leader.

                Conrad Hommel was Hitler's portrait painter and the Third Reich's court painter in general:

Conrad Hommel. General Field Marshal Hermann Göring, 1939, Great German Art Exhibition, 1939

Conrad Hommel. The Leader and Commander In Chief Of The Army, 1940, Great German Art Exhibition, 1940

, a title with strong religious connotations:


Hermann Otto Hoyer: In The Beginning Was The Word

                The fine arts were certainly an instrument for the dissemination of National Socialist propaganda, but in effectiveness in swaying the masses, they were overshadowed by the mass meetings and the mass media, which had a much larger audience. While cartoonists and filmmakers were often antisemitic, we find few traces of antisemitic propaganda in the fine arts. Adolf Reich's Um Haus und Hof -- All Their Worldly Goods is a picture of the manifestation of greed:

Adolf Reich: All Their Worldly Goods, 1940

A Jewish speculator appropriates the homestead of an honest peasant couple who has run into financial difficulties.

                Sometimes the political message was more subtle. Franz Weiss's The Seven Deadly Sins is a painting very much in the tradition of the paintings of the Renaissance:

Franz Weiss: The Seven Deadly Sins

Franz Weiss: The Seven Deadly Sins. Detail: Gluttony, depicting British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (standing) and Winston Churchill