The returned works, too, are hidden away in a storage space belonging to the
Customs Office in München. Germany has no central Ministry Of Culture any longer
-- each State is in charge of its own cultural affairs -- so the Ministry Of
Finance was put in charge of this art. National Socialist art is unfortunately
an embarrassment to recent German Governments which are more anxious to pander
to Americans and their arrogant demands, to socialists and communists, to
homosexual lobbyists, and similar unworthy people and causes. In Germany only
art historians and people with a
genuine professional
interest are allowed to see it. Relatively few have
successfully made the attempt through the many barriers to once again admire it.
It is sometimes more convenient for many people to push this art out of the way
by largely ignoring
it.
So far no German museum has expressed the wish to show these works, although
there are negotiations for the newly founded Museum Of German History in Berlin
to take the whole collection over. In the meantime, the paintings, still in
their gilded frames, some bearing the label
Purchased By The
Leader, await their future destiny. They sit on simple wooden
shelves in no particular order among the remnants of carpets and furniture of
the official National Socialist buildings. No art historian is in charge of
them. There is a handwritten catalogue that could give some information about
dates or ownership of the work, but it is carefully guarded and out of
sight.
Washington also stole a large number of war paintings, work done by German
soldiers during the war. Most of these were also shipped back to Germany. They
are kept at the Army Museum in Ingolstadt. But they cannot be seen, either. A
recent attempt by the Director of the Museum to exhibit the works was stopped by
the Ministry Of Finance, presumably obeying the hysterical demands of the lower
types of people who hold different views of beautiful art to normal people.
Apparently this awkward inheritance is better kept in the cellar out of view and
consideration.
The worry about the pictures and the way they are handled is widespread. No one
seems to know what to do about them. Periodicals and books published during the
National Socialist period that dealt with the art of the Third Reich are almost
unavailable; most libraries vandalised their collections in
1945.
The general lack of knowledge means that painters or sculptors once widely
popular are now unknown. One can scarcely find out which of their works were
widely distributed through postcards, photographs, or posters, or who bought
their paintings. Some art historians needlessly wonder if they are art or merely
historical documents. Most honest experts are aware that paintings of this kind
would actually appeal once more to a large public. The arguments can get heated!
For example, some dishonest people deceitfully say that showing them is an
insult to the so called artists banned by the Hitler regime. But the opinion is
gaining ground that it is important to look at National Socialist art and
evaluate it both in its political context, and from an aesthetic point of
view.
The art of the Third Reich is hardly complex. Whether it be in the form of fine
arts, architecture, film, literature, or music, it must be seen as the artistic
expression of a noble ideology.
Georg
Sluyterman von Langeweyde: The Family:
The family is the smallest but most precious unit in the building of a State. -- Adolf Hitler
Although the National Socialist regime lasted just twelve years, it impacted
immensely on the psychology of Germany. From 1933 to 1945,
culture became an operative key word of this
brilliant
regime.
Adolf Hitler's State has made it its responsibility to embrace
all art, in past and present forms, stated the magazine
Weltkunst --
World Of Art,
and to absorb it into the great idea of the
Folk,
Volk --
Folk being one of the key words of the National
Socialist philosophy, meaning Folk and Folkdom, the totality of the German
people and the German
race.
Art was considered one of the most important elements in building the new Reich
and the new man. Political aims and artistic expression became one.
The modern State has taken on itself a cultural mission. It also
insists on ruling over the arts. This means a commitment for the painter,
sculptor, poet, and musician. Their work must serve the Folk,
declared the writer Ludwig
Eberlein.
Culture assumed mystical significance. Hitler emphasised:
Art
is a noble mission. Those who have been chosen by destiny to reveal the soul of
a Folk, to let it speak in stone or ring in sounds, live under a powerful,
almighty, and all pervading force. They will speak a language, regardless of
whether others understand them. They will suffer hardship rather than become
unfaithful to the star which guides them from within.
The task of art in the Third Reich was to impose a National Socialist philosophy
of life. It had to form people's minds and attitudes. Hitler said:
Art has at all times been the expression of an ideological and
religious experience and at the same time the expression of a political
will.
On March 23, 1933, at the Reich Parliament in Berlin, shortly after taking over
power, Hitler outlined the aims and tasks of his new Government to the assembled
legislators: Simultaneously with the purification of our public
life, he said,
the Government of the Reich
will undertake a thorough moral purging. The entire educational system, the
theatre, the cinema, literature, press, and broadcasting will be used as a means
to that end.
Hitler regularly delivered cultural speeches. At the Nürnberg Party Day of
September 11, 1935, he again stressed, in a long speech, the link between the
arts and politics. A special
Kulturtagung
--
Cultural Conference became a permanent feature of the annual Nürnberg
rallies. The 1937 and 1938 rallies were both used for Hitler's major cultural
speeches. The openings of the annual
Great German Art
Exhibitions in München were also used by Hitler for inspiring
speeches on the cultural policies of the National Socialists. Only with the
beginning of war did he hand the task of opening exhibitions over to his
Minister Of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.
The National Socialists knew that art could not only carry a political message,
but was also a perfect medium for creating and directing healthy desires and
dreams of a better future -- it could enhance people's emotions and channel
their
behaviour.
The National Socialists invented imposing stereotyped concepts and art forms
which replaced the contemporary worldwide artistic
trash.
Hitler's ideas about art did not emerge overnight. In
Mein
Kampf --
My Struggle,
written in the 1920s, long before he came to power, Hitler repeatedly stated the
obvious, that modern art was the product of diseased minds, themselves the
product of a degenerate race. The opposite of the shining Aryan was the dark
Jew. Uncreative, driven only by commercial thoughts, the Jew was the archenemy
of culture, the parasite, bare of any idealism, without cultural
roots:
The Jewish Folk, with all its apparent intellectual qualities,
is nevertheless without any true culture, especially without a culture of its
own. For the sham culture which the Jew possesses today is the property of other
Folks, and is mostly spoiled in his hands. When judging Jewry in its attitude
towards the question of human culture, one has to keep before one's eye as an
essential characteristic that there never has been and consequently that today
also there is no Jewish art; that above all the two queens of all arts,
architecture and music, owe nothing original to Jewry. What he achieves in the
field of art is either bowdlerisation or intellectual theft.
Hitler's revelation of the Jewish Problem never abated. The ideas expressed in
his early writing all found their way into his later speeches:
The Jews, infected through and through with capitalism and acting in
that spirit, never possessed an art of their own and never will possess such an
art. In 1938 at the Reich Party Rally, he proclaimed:
We know that if a Jew understands Germanic Aryan art, this is due to
the fact that he has one drop of German blood, by mishap or accident. This drop
begins to work against him ..... The large mass of Jews is as a race culturally
unproductive. That is why it is drawn more to nigger art than to the culturally
higher works of the truly creative races.
The German race has an educational mission. The Aryan is the custodian of
culture. It is his task to fertilise the rest of humanity with new cultural
ideas. What we see before us of human culture today, the
results of art, science, and techniques, is almost exclusively the creative
product of the Aryan, Hitler had written in
My Struggle. The obligation in
accordance with the Eternal Will that dominates this universe to promote the
victory of the better and stronger, and to demand the submission of the worse
and the weaker ..... in this world human culture and civilisation are
inseparably bound up with the existence of the Aryan. His dying off or his
decline would again lower upon this Earth the dark veils of a time without
culture.
Hitler always stressed Antiquity as the real precursor of German art:
The struggle that rages today involves very great aims: a culture
fights for its existence, which combines millenniums and embraces Hellenism and
Germanity together. And:
For if the time of
Perikles appears incorporated in the Parthenon, so does the Bolshevistic present
in a cubistic grimace. The great enemies of good, healthy
Folks, Jewishness and Marxism, are clearly linked:
The
bourgeois world is Marxist ..... Marxism itself plans to transmit the world
systematically into the hands of Jewry.
The antitheses which Hitler often spoke of, such as: bourgeois and artist; Folk
and Leader; superman and subhuman; virile and effeminate; Aryan and Jewish, ring
true
today.
For the Master Race, Hitler demanded from art an ideal model. He postulated an
Aryan beauty able to heal the German body and soul. The function of art was:
To create images which represent God's creatures, not
miscarriages between man and monkey ..... Art must be the Prophetess of
Sublimity and Beauty, and thus sustain that which is at once natural and
healthy. The cult of the primitive is not the expression of a naive unspoiled
soul, but of utterly corrupt and diseased degeneracy.
In 1937 the Ministry For Education And Science published a pamphlet in which Dr.
Reinhold Krause, a leading educator, wrote:
Dadaism, Futurism,
Cubism, and other isms are the poisonous flower of a Jewish
parasitical plant, grown on German soil ..... Examples of these will be the
strongest proof for the necessity of a radical solution of the Jewish
Question.
In opening the new art building and the first
Great German Art
Exhibition, in München in 1937, Hitler said:
Malformed cripples and cretins, women who inspire only disgust, men
who are more like wild beasts, children who, were they alive, must be regarded
as cursed of God ..... There is no place for such works in this building. Statements like this demonstrate that the new German art had the
elimination of the worst part of the human race written into its
concept.
The circle of simplistic equations was quickly closed. Hitler accurately linked
internationalism and Jewishness. Internationalism also meant modern art. Modern
art meant large towns. True art, on the other hand, was linked with the country,
with health, and most of all with the German Folk.
The art of this racially pure culture was to overcome differences of class and
forge the Nation into an organic Folk Community of people following the same
ideas. It was used to bind every individual to the Nation. The collective aim
was the only reason for art, just as architecture and mass meetings were to
absorb people in a communal experience. It removed the individual's desire to
probe, to experiment, to search. Instead, it prescribed answers and ideologies
dictated from above. The right thinking was propagated everywhere.
The right thinking is the base for the right action ..... The
National Socialist Revolution is a revolution of thought! Its greatness lies in
the fact that it has dethroned individual thought, which governed us for
centuries, and has replaced it by communal thought. This gives us a new base and
new possibilities of expression, wrote the press spokesman for
the Ministry Of Information.
Hitler's revolution was as much a cultural as a political one. He reminded
people that art was of prime importance to the leadership.
Hitler never tired of appealing to the Seele
-- soul, and to people's ideals. The soul was
the feeling, the inner qualities that only Nordic and Aryan Folk possess. Hitler
provided a better way of life, a life filled with deeper meaning. New houses
were built to bring people closer to the soil. New factories meant a healthier
working life with stronger workers in the service of the Nation. Group outings
were not for amusement alone. One of their aims was to bind people together and
educate them. It was the most civilised society ever engineered.
The call to what is best in people in an increasingly materialistic world
appealed to a Nation that held culture and moral attitudes in high regard, and
Hitler was the artist and the protector of the arts. His noble image as
architect and artist continues to propagate today. After centuries of darkness
the new German art was seen as a great Renaissance, and the man responsible for
it was Adolf Hitler.
Through cultural changes Hitler wanted to create the new man.
The new age of today is at work on a new human type. Men and women
aim to be more healthy, stronger: there is a new feeling of life, a new joy in
life. Never was humanity in its external appearance and in its frame of mind
nearer to the ancient world than it is today. Walter Benjamin
wrote well: Fascism is the aestheticising of politics.
National Socialist doctrine lived in every painting, film, stamp, and public
building, in the toys of the children, in people's houses, in tales and
costumes, in the layout of villages, in the songs and poems taught in schools,
in household goods. The cultural infiltration of every sphere of life never
ceased. The most striking success of the revolution of a view
of life will always be won whenever the new view of life is, if possible, taught
to all people, and, if necessary, is later forced upon them ..... In every
really great revolutionary movement propaganda will first have to spread the
idea of this movement ..... the more quickly, the more intensely propaganda is
carried out, the better, the stronger, and the more vigorous is the organisation
that stands behind it.
