The Rape of Europa (3 page)

In January 1933 Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and in March elections his party, aided by the fear and chaos surrounding the Reichstag fire and the suspension of civil rights, won its first majority. On April 7 a law was passed for “the re-establishment of the professional civil service.” This legalized the removal of any government employee who did not please the National Socialists. Museum directors and staff members, artists teaching at art schools and academies, city planners, and university professors were all employees of the state. For those who were not, Joseph Goebbels, the new Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, had proposed, on March 13, a new entity which would eventually regulate everyone connected with the arts: the Reichskulturkammer, or Reich Chamber of Culture. Membership in this umbrella organization was required of all artists, writers, musicians, art dealers, architects, and so forth. Those who did not belong could not hold jobs, sell or exhibit their works, or even produce them. Among those not accepted were Jews, Communists, and eventually, in the area of the fine arts, those whose styles did not conform to the Nazi ideal.

Art was very fashionable in the new regime. In October 1933, only months after becoming Chancellor, Hitler laid the cornerstone of the Haus
der Deutschen Kunst in Munich, his first major public building project. Only later did the fact that the ceremonial hammer broke in his hands assume significance.
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Alfred Rosenberg, the erstwhile art theorist, was made intellectual head of the Party, with the unbelievable title of “Custodian of the Entire Intellectual and Spiritual Training and Education of the Party and of all Coordinated Associations.” Frick was now named Minister of the Interior, and began appointing art commissioners in the provinces. Even the SS had an art branch, the Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage), which sponsored archaeological research worldwide in the hope of finding confirmation of early and glorious Germanic cultures. Councils of hitherto obscure artists appeared overnight to herald the
Völkisch
ideals; magazines proliferated: it was the hour of the opportunist. And alongside all these new organizations remained the old Ministry of Culture, trying as best it could to navigate the new waters in order to save itself and the treasures of its museums. It took four years to “refine” the Nazi art criteria; in the end, what was tolerated was whatever Hitler liked, and whatever was most useful to the government from the point of view of propaganda.

At the time of the dedication of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, a fancy booklet was published in several languages. The English version,
The Temple of German Art
, was aimed at the potential tourist trade in Munich. Along with site plans and architectural drawings, it featured reproductions of nineteenth-century German genre works by painters such as Spitzweg, von Kaulbach, and Boecklin, and a text in extraordinarily bad taste:

Vital powers will stream from the great temple of art, the enchanting breath from the mountain ranges in the south will course through its colonnades and around its cornices of lime-stone, and the blue sky of Munich will captivate the German and foreign visitors and will persuade them to tarry at the Bavarian city, the birthplace of national rejuvenation.

The “false art” of “mocking and contemptuous defamers of virtue and truth,” the fortunately anonymous author continued, had been shaken off by the people “at the clarion call of one who united within himself in highest potency all the noble characteristics of his race”; it would be replaced by truly Germanic art: “the breath of [the] nation’s nostrils.”

Just what this “breath” encompassed was not, at first, entirely clear, even to Hitler’s inner circle. Albert Speer, commissioned to decorate Goebbels’s house, wrote later:

I borrowed a few watercolors by Nolde from … the director of the Berlin Nationalgalerie. Goebbels and his wife were delighted with
the paintings—until Hitler came to inspect, and expressed his severe disapproval. Then the minister summoned me immediately. “The pictures have to go at once; they’re simply impossible.”
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Hitler wanted a complete break with the defeatism and leftist ideas of the Weimar years; he wanted no representation of the true face of war, and he had a basically petit bourgeois distaste for what he called “unfinished works.” The art-oriented could not fathom this for a long time. Some tried compromise. Max Sauerlandt, director of the Hamburg Kunsthalle, presented the Expressionists as exemplars of Nordic Germanic art. Others simply disagreed. In June 1933 National Socialist students in Berlin staged a demonstration protesting the increased prominence of “middle-class art” and praising the modern collections formed by Dr. Ludwig Justi, director of the Nationalgalerie since 1919. Despite this show of support, Justi was asked to leave his post by Ministry of Culture bureaucrats who wanted a more pliant director able to defend the modern collections while toeing the Party line. But Justi refused to “retire,” and embarrassed Culture officials were obliged to transfer him to a post in the art library until he reached the proper age.

The new director, Alois Schardt, a former assistant of Justi’s who had built up a similar collection at Halle, was immediately attacked by Rosenberg, Frick, and Schultze-Naumberg. In order to quiet the controversy, Schardt gave a lecture in which he attempted to define the nature of German art. Everything German was “dynamic,” he said. He approved of Gothic art, called Dürer’s Italian sojourn a “mistake,” applauded Grünewald, and claimed that dynamic consciousness had been returned to Germany by the Romantics and Expressionists whose styles he linked to ancient Germanic folk forms. The students were pleased with this association of revolution and nationalism, which made Expressionism an acceptable German tradition, but this was not what the Party had in mind and the Nationalgalerie was closed for “reorganization.”

Again Schardt compromised. He filled the lower floors with representational works by artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, Hans von Marées, and Feuerbach. The controversial paintings were put way upstairs, but in an elegant new installation in galleries beautifully painted in varying textures to match the predominant tones of each artist. Top works from other museums were brought in to fill gaps in each display. Nolde himself lent his
Christ and Children
from Hamburg. Schardt’s only concession was to leave out Klee and Beckmann, who were not his favorites in any case. Van Gogh and Munch were shown as “Germanic forerunners.”

Schardt had hoped to win over the regime with this spectacular presentation.
When Minister of Culture Bernhard Rust came to preview the installation before the opening, his only comment was, “Such a mule….” Schardt was fired. Rust did not dare reopen the museum, which was the subject of great speculation in art circles, as Schardt had left it. The minister now asked Eberhard Hanfstaengl, director of Munich’s Städtische Galerie, to take over in Berlin. This was considered a clever choice, not only because Hanfstaengl was an eminent expert on Hitler’s favorite nineteenth-century German art but also because his name was the same as one of Hitler’s well-known friends, “Putzi” Hanfstaengl. By judiciously juggling the exhibits and storing the more “offensive” works, Hanfstaengl was able to calm everyone down for the time being.
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In the provinces the process of eliminating unacceptable members of the art community was moving much faster. Museum directors who had promoted modern art were attacked one after another. Gustav Hartlaub, inventor of the term
Neue Sachlichkeit
(New Objectivity), which was applied to the most advanced group of German painters just after the war, was caught hiding “controversial” works in the cellars of his museum in Mannheim. One of them,
Rabbi
by Marc Chagall, was paraded around the city on a wagon with a picture of Hartlaub and the price he had paid for the painting mounted on the back.
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The Folkwang Museum in Essen was handed over to an SS officer, Count Klaus Baudissin, one of the few art historians in the Party. The Count promptly painted over the last of Oskar Schlemmer’s famous wall paintings, which adorned the rotunda of the museum; but until 1935, even he could not bring himself to close the last gallery in which works by Kokoschka, Lehmbruck, Marc, and Nolde were displayed.
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Dealers in “degenerate” art were not immune. In May 1936 the Nierendorf Gallery in Berlin, which had been under observation for some time, opened an exhibition of the works of Franz Marc, an Iron Cross winner in World War I. Schardt, now ex-director of the Nationalgalerie, was to give a lecture at the vernissage. The party and the exhibition were abruptly closed down by the Gestapo, and the next day the gallery owners received a letter explaining that a lecture on and exhibition of Marc’s works would endanger National Socialist
Kulturpolitik
and by extension “Public Safety and Order.” Schardt wisely departed for the United States, as one of the Nierendorf brothers had already done.
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The artists themselves were removed from their posts as teachers and members of public institutions: Klee in Düsseldorf; Kollwitz, Hofer, and Beckmann in Berlin; Dix in Dresden. Oskar Schlemmer, falsely accused by Nazi students of being a Jew, asked his employers for official confirmation of his position, and was given a “vacation” instead. On May 13, 1933, the Prussian Academy of Arts asked ten members, some elected as
recently as 1931, to tender their “voluntary” resignations. Dix, Schmidt-Rottluff, Kollwitz, and Liebermann (the president of the Academy and a Jew) obeyed, but Kirchner, Mies van der Rohe, Mendelsohn, and the ever-hopeful Nolde refused to comply. By 1938 all these, as well as Barlach, Pechstein, Hofer, and Kokoschka, had given up, and only Nolde, still a Nazi sympathizer, held out, believing it was his duty to “open the eyes of the people to art.”
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In response to this growing discrimination, many artists chose to leave Germany. Those who did not were condemned to limbo. The thorough fiendishness of the Nazi rules for artists who did not please the Chamber of Culture is still hard to believe, even after all we know of the National Socialist madness. It was not enough to destroy and ridicule their work and forbid its sale or exhibition. They were not allowed to work at all. “Degenerate” painters were even forbidden to buy art supplies. To enforce this, Gestapo agents made unexpected visits to their houses and studios. The smell of turpentine in the air or a container of wet brushes was grounds for arrest. The painter Willi Baumeister wrote:

No one knew I continued to paint, in a second story room in utter isolation. Not even the children and the servants must know what I was doing there…. Terrible was the idea that one would never again be able to show such pictures in public.

Eventually even this secret activity ceased when an SS captain was billeted in the second-story room.
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From Hitler’s point of view the measures were a success. In 1938 Oskar Schlemmer took a job with a firm which specialized in painting commercial murals in Stuttgart. By 1939 he was painting camouflage on factories and military buildings. Later he found refuge at an experimental paint factory in Wuppertal whose owner also employed Gerhard Marcks and several other banned artists. Schlemmer died in 1943. Ernst Kirchner committed suicide in June 1938, depressed by the expulsion of his life’s work from the German museums. Max Liebermann’s eighty-five-year-old wife was also a suicide in 1943, when she was faced with deportation to Theresienstadt. Liebermann himself had not long survived his forced resignation as president of the Prussian Academy. His highly representational pictures, just what Hitler normally loved, later would cause the purgers agonies of indecision.

Emil Nolde, who clung to his membership in the Chamber of Culture and the Nazi party even after hundreds of his works had been reviled or burned, conducted a long correspondence with Goebbels, trying to have what was left in the museums sent back to him. In 1939 the pictures were returned, but in 1940 he was again required to submit his entire artistic
production for the year to be examined. He was finally expelled from the Chamber of Culture on grounds of unreliability in August 1941 and from then on forbidden to paint. An official wrote him in November to say that his paintings had been presented to the Committee for the Assessment of Inferior Works of Art and as a result had been confiscated by the police. By now more than a thousand of his works had been taken. Nolde, then aged seventy-four, retreated to his house in the north of Germany, and despite the
Malverbot
(painting ban), resorted to what he called his “Unpainted Pictures”—hundreds of postcard-sized watercolors, painted on scraps of paper which could be easily hidden. In April 1943 he noted on the margin of one of these, “All my friends and acquaintances want to get me canvas, paper, and brushes, and cut the bonds that tie my hands—no one can.”
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Those not actually forbidden to work fared little better. Despite the fact that her son Peter had been killed in the First World War, Käthe Kollwitz was expelled from the Prussian Academy for her left-wing and antiwar ideas and forced to give up her studio in Berlin. She was allowed to carry on at home, but her works were banned from exhibitions and removed from museums. After one such episode she wrote:

There is this curious silence surrounding the expulsion of my work from the Academy show…. Scarcely anyone had anything to say to me about it. I thought people would come or at least write—but no. Such a silence all around us. That too has to be experienced.
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