Anti-kitsch exhibition in Cologne
It was the Minister, Dr. Goebbels himself, who said that a work of art is not required to make a program requirement effective, that it is not the symbols and events, but rather the underlying ideas that must take shape. It is not a cheap, anecdotal „immediacy“ that determines the value of art.
The very active Cologne chapter of the „Kampfbundes für Deutsche Kultur“ (The Fighting League for German Culture) acts entirely in accordance with the minister’s opinion, when it searches less for regulations for the art movement itself than those at the points where everyday life assumes form to see whether the measure and tact of national form correspond to the desired content of the National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft (People’s Community). Two events served this purpose.
„Away with the Kitsch!“ is the title of an exhibition at the art association. It is divided into two halves, black and white, as it were. On the left, in a plush and turned „salon“, all conceivable „national consumer goods“, from swastika wallpaper to sausage with the swastika - on the right, a modern kitchen/living room, with simple and unadorned utensils and Hitler’s portrait in modest graphics. As natural explanations serve children’s drawings with the theme „How it should not be“, in whose nightmare room from fleeing perspective, thanks to a childlike imagination, the walls, floors and all things are covered in the colours black, white and red in a tricky way and strewn with spidery swastikas. Meanwhile, a series of photographs, albeit at times randomly selected and questionable in their historical interpretation, but nevertheless attractively arranged in a text frieze, explains the meaning and decline of the sun symbol, from Egypt to the Middle Ages until our own time.
Thus, it seems the dignity of the symbol, which has never been used in the past on utility items and only recently for advertising purposes, is compellingly demonstrated. The lesson is obvious. Not without good reason was an advertisement for purposeful household and other appliances associated with it. Of course, in this context the question must remain unanswered as to why and on what grounds has the use of kitsch only been able to grow so much in recent times. Nevertheless, the defence of such exhibition means of national kitsch was undoubtedly effective.
(From: The Frankfurter Zeitung of July 18, 1933)
