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Opinion West German art - ‘Nazis welcome here?’

Hitler’s designated ‘divinely gifted’ artists, who basked in Nazi glory and favour, found welcome continuity after 1945 as the new art ubermenschen of the anti-communist Federal Republic, writes ANGUS REID

BERLIN has cemented itself together  with museums, malls, cycle lanes and autobahns. The past is memorialised and the traffic flows past. The Jews get a city block, the Gypsies get a grove and the gays get a drab bouquet.
 
Members of the Nazi high command who disagreed with Hitler’s war strategy get a naked bronze, bigger than life, of the Good Aryan. He stands as the victim of Nazism, at a comforting remove from the crimes he committed against humanity. What?

This is the so-called “Monument to German Resistance,” set in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock, the Nazi-era military HQ in Berlin that is still the military HQ in Berlin. It commemorates the spot where colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (who failed to kill Adolf Hitler on July 20 1944) was executed. Tom Cruise shot Valkyrie here and even though the world has yet to see the naked Tom Cruise, the resemblance is uncanny.

The bronze was created in 1953 by Richard Scheibe, one of 378 artists who were exempted from participation in the total war of 1944 because Hitler deemed them indispensible exponents of nazi ideology and placed them on the list of the “Divinely Gifted.”

Post-war, Scheibe was classified harmlessly as a mere “follower” of Nazism and forgiven. He was not only allowed to practice as an artist and to teach, but he received numerous state commissions and was invited to sit on juries that promoted the work of other “divinely gifted” artists.

There is not a trace of modernism, “Jewish degeneracy” or simple remorse in the heroic personifications of Germanness that he continued to churn out in the unbroken continuity of his career, and the same goes for almost everyone else on the list, as the excellent exhibition at Berlin’s new IM Pei designed Museum of German History amply illustrates.

In a neighbouring exhibition about the avant-garde Documenta exhibitions held in Kassel every five years, the myth of 1945 as “year zero” in German history and a clean break with the past is comprehensively exploded.

Half the committee that created and curated Documenta had been members of the Nazi Party, the SA or the SS, most notably Werner Haftmann. Far from rejecting Nazi prohibitions and embracing the “degenerate” avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s as they are supposed to have done, the aim of the new art was to create an instrument of cultural warfare with East Germany and the Soviet bloc.

It encouraged any kind of anything art (as long as it wasn’t Jewish) to wave the banner of “freedom,” and to insert itself into the global art market as “progressive” high-end commodities.

The German avant-garde was politically designed, in other words, to be distracting, commercial and anti-communist.

Josef Beuys himself – the superstar of Documenta – studied under the “divinely gifted” Joseph Enseling (famous for oversized personifications of German worker/peasants) in Dusseldorf.

Meanwhile, under cover of the exhibitionistic circus of Documenta, the unrepentant cultural darlings of the nazis continued to furnish the public spaces of the Federal Republic with mournful tombs, muscular types, rearing horses and other signifiers of German victimhood.

The current exhibition demonstrates this alarming and grotesque continuity with clarity and thoroughness, and contemporary Berlin demonstrates how the taste for monumental art and architecture not only persists to the present day but is actively modeled on the Nazi blueprint.

So far so unsurprising, and so impotently self-critical, but the implications of the exhibition and the areas it neglects are even more disconcerting. German taste and public debate is immensely influential in Europe and beyond. They set the paradigm.

So… how is the opposite experience in the GDR represented?  After all, they achieved a complete break with fascism, and fascist culture.

There is one desultory film of uniformed guards who are indifferent to the fate of the massive, racist and triumphalist sculptures that once adorned Hitler’s Olympic Stadium. There is one “divinely gifted” artist who changed his name to avoid detection and knocked off an indifferent Karl Marx in the GDR before defecting to the West. And that’s it. The social and cultural achievements of the East are dismissed and the triumph of the capitalist circus taken as reality itself.

But the influence of the “divinely gifted” goes wider than Germany. The composers Richard Strauss and Carl Orff were also on the list and are highly popular internationally. And while the monumental sculptures remain the easiest target in our own statue-toppling era, what about the painters? This area of cultural production is barely touched by the exhibition.

As a counterpoint to the famous “degenerate art” exhibition the Nazis staged annual exhibitions of “Great German Art” from 1937 onwards and throughout the war. And the majority of the exhibits weren’t muscular Aryans or idealised peasants, but landscapes.

While one might ask whether the Nazis were simply pandering to popular taste rather than creating it, they understood and modelled culture as a key instrument in the project of totalitarian domination. And the Nazi penchant for the “spiritual” experience of an empty landscape competently rendered continues to dominate popular taste. It was conceived as a visual opiate and designed to occupy the galleries to the exclusion of anything that smacked of “Jewishness”: anything critical, inventive, subjective, politically engaged or revolutionary.

We continue to live with this compromise. In popular taste there is a profound and “volkish” conservatism that co-exists alongside the incomprehensible and elite avant-garde. More than the monuments, it is the persistence of this uncritical and reactionary sensibility, the taste of Adolf Hitler, that is imposed on the populations through elementary art teaching, that is one of the lingering and repellent cultural legacies of the Nazi dictatorship. It exists in every state that ever came into relationship with it and that seeks to dominate its population. Including ours.

Recommended.

‘Divinely Gifted’. National socialism's favoured artists in the Federal Republic, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Unter den Linden 2, Berlin, until December 5.

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