Within hours of his appointment, Hitler began to consolidate his power. The next day, January 31, President Hindenburg agreed to dissolve the German parliament, the Reichstag, at Hitler’s request, pending a new national vote. The day after that, the Nazi leader kicked off an election campaign with his first address to the people. He chose the slogan “Attack on Marxism,” and squads of storm troopers now began literally to attack the two parties to which this label applied, the Communists and the Social Democrats, who also happened to be the NSDAP’s most powerful opponents in the Reichstag. Party offices were smashed up, newspapers were banned, activists were beaten and tortured, and this was only the beginning. On February 27, the Reichstag building burned, and Hitler used the fire as pretext for an emergency decree that suspended civil liberties, including freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of the arts, and freedom of the press. Nazi paramilitaries were authorized to carry firearms to enforce the new strictures and were enrolled as police auxiliaries.
All over Germany, storm troopers now visited bloody, unrestrained horror on their enemies. There was nothing sophisticated about their methods: They worked with jackboots and fists and truncheons, punching men and women alike, forcing Reichstag deputies to drink oil and urine, shooting those who resisted. They smashed their way around the country, robbing victims of cash and valuables and stealing their vehicles, roaring up and down city streets with banners flying and weapons on display. Tens of thousands of Jews, leftists, and liberals were dragged away under “arrest,” and even the makeshift jails began to spill over. This overcrowding problem was solved in mid-March, when Himmler established a new facility on the outskirts of Munich: the Dachau concentration camp.
As Germany recoiled, Hitler dissembled. He had long experience of commanding violence without implicating himself, and now he professed mild disapproval of the horrific acts his men were committing, blaming communist infiltrators or radical elements within the movement, while denouncing his enemies in extreme and violent terms. Local bands of storm troopers would, he knew, take the hint, and if specific directions were needed, Göring and other lieutenants could be relied upon to give them.
The NSDAP won 43.9 percent of the vote in the federal elections on March 5. Given the scale of the oppression wreaked by his followers, this was a poor result for Hitler: Of 45 million eligible voters, only 17 million had chosen him. Still, he was able to command a majority in the new parliament, and there was only one piece of legislation he now needed. The Enabling Act, which allowed the government to pass laws without the Reichstag’s approval, was put to a vote on March 23. Chanting storm troopers lined the Kroll Opera House, where the deputies now sat, jeering at those members of the opposition who had not yet been arrested or scared off. The atmosphere was so threatening that the leader of the Social Democrats, Otto Wels, carried a cyanide pill in his pocket in case he was dragged away by brown-shirted SA men. Only Wels spoke against the legislation, which passed by a large majority. The Weimar constitution was effectively void.
Over the following months, the SA, Stahlhelmers, and SS cut a swath through the remaining opposition, beating, murdering, and terrorizing with impunity. By June, Hitler had a near monopoly on power. “The road to the total state,” Goebbels crowed in his diary at the end of that month. “Our revolution has an uncanny dynamism.”
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Hitler laid out his cultural intentions even as he seized political control. In one of his first speeches as chancellor, at the Sportpalast on February 10, he declared that he would “bestow once more upon the Volk a genuinely German culture with German art, German architecture, and German music.” This would “restore to us our soul,” he said, and “evoke deep reverence for the accomplishments of the past, a humble admiration for the great men of German history.” In his Enabling Act speech of March 23 he announced a “thorough moral purging” of society, in which the education system, the theater, the cinema, literature, the press, and the radio would all be bent to the maintenance of the “eternal values residing in the essential character of our people.” There would also be a new direction for German painting and sculpture, since the heroic, racially hygienic Nazi era called for heroic, racially pure art, free from dirty “cosmopolitan” modernism:
Art will always remain the expression and mirror of the yearning and the reality of an era. The cosmopolitan contemplative attitude is rapidly disappearing. Heroism is arising passionately as the future shaper and leader of political destinies. The task of art is to give expression to this determining spirit of the age. Blood and race will once more become the source of artistic intuition.
In pursuit of this new art, Hitler commissioned a great new gallery, the Haus der deutschen Kunst (House of German Art), to be constructed in Munich. This first monumental Nazi building was designed by Paul Ludwig Troost, an architect Hitler had met at the Bruckmanns’ salon, who was most famous for designing the interiors of ocean liners.
Much as the SA did not need direct orders from the leadership but “worked toward the Führer,” state officials, party newspapers, and organizations needed little encouragement to take action in the cultural field. Weeks after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, Alfred Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), attended a public meeting of the Kampfbund in Stuttgart, where he heard the leadership announce that since the revolution was “above all cultural,” there must be “no remorse and no sentimentality” in “uprooting and crushing” National Socialism’s artistic enemies. In mid-March, Barr discovered that a major Oskar Schlemmer retrospective had been shut down by the city authorities after a vitriolic attack in the Nazi press. He bought one of Schlemmer’s works for MoMA “just to spite the sons of bitches.”
The critique of modern art continued to revolve around the unholy trinity of “Jewish,” “Bolshevik,” and “mad,” as a programmatic article in the Völkischer Beobachter made clear on February 25. Under the headline “From the German Artistic Kingdom of the Jewish Nation,” the Nazi art historian Wilhelm Rüdiger poured sarcasm over three categories of modern art, including “psychopathic art” and the parallel grouping “art connected with the degradation of all values.” Savaging by name Paul Klee (a “truly lamentable” artist, who “has Arab blood in him”), Hans Arp (“once a Dadaist—you know, the oxen are sitting on telephone wires playing chess”), and Max Ernst (simply “alarming”), as well as George Grosz, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, and Marc Chagall, Rüdiger noted:
What some call surrealism is what the other (healthy) people call having a screw loose. (See Prinzhorn, Die Bildnerei der Geisteskranken.) In fact, here the “Limits of Reason,” as a picture by Klee is titled, are not only reached, but far exceeded!
Aware that their moment had arrived at last, a group of völkisch art organizations, including chapters of the Kampfbund and Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder’s Deutsche Kunstgesellschaft, came together in Weimar in early March to form the umbrella organization Führerrat der Vereinigten Deutschen Kunst- und Kulturverbände (Führer’s Council of the United German Art and Cultural Associations). Immediately after the March 5 elections, the council published an appeal, “What German Artists Expect of the New Government,” demanding that the “proven soldiers of the cultural struggle” be given their reward for the battle with art Bolshevism they had been fighting for a decade or more. The council, which represented 250,000 members, spelled out five demands to the new government that would “precisely delineate the stages of the Nazi struggle against the avant-garde.” These were:
1. That all art showing “cosmopolitan and Bolshevik signs” be removed from German museums and collections. These should be put on public display, along with the sums spent on them, and the names of the officials responsible. Thereafter, the works should be burned, and their heat used “to warm public buildings.”
2. All museum directors guilty of “unscrupulous waste of public funds,” and who had hidden “trul
y German” works of art in storage, must be immediately suspended.
3. The names of all artists who had been “swept along by Marxism and Bolshevism” should no longer be mentioned in any printed publication.
4. Modernist architecture, including “residential boxes” and “churches that look like greenhouses,” should be banned.
5. Statues or sculptures in public spaces that offended public sentiment, including those by the Expressionists Ernst Barlach and Wilhelm Lehmbruck, should be removed as quickly as possible to make room for “German” works.
Almost all of these demands would eventually be met, though in truth, the influence of the Kampfbund and the völkisch groups was now on the wane, as the assault on modernism could now be led by the state itself. Under the policy of Gleichschaltung (coordination), all aspects of German life were to be brought in line with Hitler’s ideas. The principal tool in this reorganization was a powerful new government department charged with centralizing control of German culture and uniting the country behind the idea of national revolution: the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. The man appointed to run it was the creative Berlin Gauleiter who had already amply demonstrated his love for Hitler, Joseph Goebbels.
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At thirty-five, Goebbels was eight years younger than Hitler and a rare beast in the upper echelons of the party: a physically disabled and highly educated intellectual. Born with a congenitally deformed right foot, he had earned a Ph.D. from Heidelberg and spent much of the 1920s trying to become a novelist. He had long been sympathetic to modernism: In 1923 he penned a fictionalized autobiography, Michael, whose eponymous hero described Van Gogh as a “star” and “the most modern of the moderns,” brushing off the artist’s alleged insanity with “we, really all of us, are mad when we have an idea.” Visiting a museum in Cologne in 1924, he had admired the modern sculpture of Ernst Barlach, and described the “wonderful colors” of Emil Nolde. As he grew closer to Hitler, however, he was learning to adjust his views. When Albert Speer remodeled Goebbels’s Berlin apartment in the summer of 1933, borrowing some of Nolde’s paintings from the National Gallery to hang in it, Joseph and his wife, Magda, were “delighted,” Speer recalled—until Hitler paid a visit. Then they were mortified. “The pictures have to go at once,” Goebbels told Speer. “They are simply impossible!” In matters of artistic taste, it seemed there was only one opinion that really mattered. “We were all in the same boat,” Speer remembered. “I, too, although altogether at home in modern art, tacitly accepted Hitler’s pronouncement.”
Goebbels was hated by the more reactionary tendency within the Nazi cultural establishment. He would fight a long battle with Rosenberg over the regime’s artistic direction, while Schultze-Naumburg despised him almost on sight, calling the limping intellectual an “evil spirit” and an “angry snake.” His appointment was not welcomed by the arch-conservatives in the cabinet that spring, but it was one of Hitler’s inherent contradictions that he recognized the need for modern methods and technologies to deliver an age of allegedly eternal values, and he knew Goebbels and his propaganda ministry could be relied upon to devise them. The Volk had to start “to think as one, to react as one, and to place itself in the service of the government with all its heart,” Goebbels explained. “Technology must not be allowed to run ahead of the Reich: The Reich must keep up with technology. Only the latest thing is good enough.”
Aided by a slew of new laws, Gleichschaltung was applied with swift brutality. Until 1933, Germany had been a cultural powerhouse: Its writers and poets, musicians, filmmakers, and architects were recognized across the world, and its artists were feted most highly of all. This would be swept away in the coming cataclysm. Ernst Barlach wrote to a friend on the eve of Hitler’s takeover of power: “We all feel as if we are sitting on a volcano.” The radio “hurls rage, hatred and revenge, and snorts murder,” and people were fleeing abroad to avoid the rancid ideology, the threat of violence, and the parade-ground bellowing that could be heard from every direction. “The nationalist terror will probably outlast me,” he predicted.
Paul Klee was reluctant to recognize Hitler’s threat. A professor at the Düsseldorf academy in 1933, he tried not to let the new regime faze him. He “refused to be upset,” his son, Felix, recalled, and tried to carry on as though nothing had happened. But when a swastika was run up over the academy in March, he knew he could no longer continue to show up for work. Storm troopers rifled the family home in Dessau, turning everything upside down and taking whatever they wanted. The most hurtful loss was of their correspondence. A native of Bern, Klee left for Switzerland for a few weeks at that point, remarking: “They say the Bernese are slow moving, but I’d like to see them catch up with this one.” His wife, Lily, a stern and energetic Bavarian, went to the SA headquarters with a van and made them return the letters and postcards, proclaiming her triumph over the “blockheads” to all and sundry. Her victory was short-lived. Klee was declared “degenerate” and “subversive,” and suspended from the academy on May 1. Lily repeatedly told him: “You must leave Germany, there is nothing left for you to do here,” but he hung on until Christmas, when they emigrated to Switzerland for good.
The litany of artists targeted at this time is a roll call of great German names from the early century. Otto Dix was sacked from the Dresden academy, and Max Beckmann from Frankfurt’s; Oskar Schlemmer was accused by students at his Berlin art school of being Jewish (he wasn’t), then dismissed. Berlin was also the scene of the final demise of the Bauhaus. After relocating from Weimar to Dessau, it had once again fallen afoul of far-right politicians and was shut in 1931. Mies van der Rohe reopened it in a disused factory in Berlin the following year, but in April 1933 it was raided by police and closed permanently. In May, the Prussian Academy of Arts asked ten members to resign, including Dix, Schmidt-Rottluff, Kirchner, Kokoschka, and Mies van der Rohe. Kollwitz, the first woman appointed to the academy, was also the first to be dismissed. Barlach left in protest at Kollwitz’s removal. The academy’s Jewish president, eighty-six-year-old Max Liebermann, was also pushed out, as was Emil Nolde, whose membership in the Nazi party did not protect him.
Gallery and museum directors were targeted, too: Around thirty were removed from office in 1933. Gustav Hartlaub, an associate of Prinzhorn’s from his Heidelberg days, had amassed one of the best collections of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art in Germany at the Mannheim Kunsthalle, including three works by the Prinzhorn artist Paul Goesch. The Kunsthalle had already been subjected to a long-running attack in the pages of the Nazi propaganda sheet Hakenkreuzbanner (Swastika banner) by the Kampfbund’s Otto Gebele von Waldstein. No fewer than seven articles had appeared, dismissing Hartlaub’s entire buying activity and declaring again and again that he did not collect “genuine German art” at all. In January 1932, Hartlaub had complained to the director of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Alfred Hentzen. If such attacks were occurring everywhere, he told Hentzen, “we should think about how to defend ourselves together.”
By the spring of 1933, the moment for any such action was long past. Hartlaub was sacked on March 20 and Gebele appointed director instead. It was the new director’s job, the Nazis declared, to “uncover and eliminate” the gallery’s “Bolshevik art policy.” Gebele would put on a show to highlight the errors Hartlaub had made, as well as the role of Jews in the “disappearance of city funds.” On April 3, he marched into the gallery with a unit of armed SS and set to work. The following day, he opened the exhibition Kulturbolschewistische Bilder (Images of cultural Bolshevism) in two upper rooms. The first show in art history whose sole purpose was defamation, it featured almost a hundred works by Klee, Schlemmer, Chagall, Dix, Nolde, Beckmann, and others. They had been stripped of their frames, of which they were said to be “unworthy,” and hung deliberately badly. Captions gave each piece’s purchase price (which often dated from the time of hyperinflation, and s
o was misleadingly high) and, in some cases, information about the race of the artist or dealer. To give the show an illicit air, people under twenty were barred from entry. The propaganda accompanying Kulturbolschewistische Bilder encouraged the general public’s disapproval of avant-garde art, inviting the people with their “healthy sense” to judge the works themselves. Twenty thousand went to see it.
Not content with shaming modern art in the gallery, Gebele decided that a portrait of a rabbi by Chagall, who was of Jewish origin, should be paraded around town in a vehicle, accompanied by a large photograph of the Hartlaubs and a poster with the painting’s purchase price. This procession, reminiscent of the medieval pillory, traveled two miles from the Kunsthalle to the Hartlaubs’ family home before continuing to a well-known Mannheim store, where it was installed for public ridicule in the window, along with a sign that read “Taxpayer, you should know where your money has gone.” It remained there for several weeks. “The people gathered in huge crowds,” Hartlaub recalled, “and read a poster next to it, which stated that I had acquired this horrible creation for 3,500 reichsmarks of taxpayers’ money.” At one moment during this affair, Gebele asked Hartlaub how he could possibly have bought a painting of a Jew by a Jew—and an eastern Jew at that. Hartlaub replied that one of Hitler’s favorite artists had portrayed the same subject. “Mr. City Councilor,” he said, “Rembrandt also painted rabbis and Jews.”
The Gallery of Miracles and Madness Page 13