The Gallery of Miracles and Madness
Page 16
May the degenerate be mercilessly suffocated in their own filth, so that the healthy and noble may prosper and rule, alone and soon and forever, in our German art!
Reading this book, Goebbels concluded that the task set by Willrich was one he was well placed to execute. He took soundings among his cultural allies in the Party, including Speer, and the Reich Commissioner for Artistic Design, Hans Schweitzer, and met some resistance, but decided to press on nevertheless. By the end of June he felt able to discuss his idea for a Berlin “shaming” exhibition over lunch with Hitler. The Führer approved the idea of Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) in principle, but seems to have suggested moving the event to Munich, where it could be staged as a direct confrontation with the regime-sanctioned Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung. Hitler and Goebbels spent some time choosing a suitable leader for the new project. Schweitzer, an NSDAP propaganda veteran, was an obvious candidate, but he had shown little appetite for an action against modernism so far, and Hitler didn’t like his taste. Instead, they chose the man who was still licking his wounds after his humiliation in Munich, the president of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, Adolf Ziegler.
As a reward for the Goebbels initiative, Hitler treated him to a discourse on the proper thoughts to hold about art. “[Hitler] has great confidence in me,” the propaganda minister purred in his diary. “I will not disappoint him. Generous, where appropriate, but rigid and stubborn when it comes to principles.”
Goebbels briefed Ziegler the same afternoon. The following day, June 30, the propaganda minister signed a decree that would enable Ziegler to seize modern art from any museum or gallery in the Reich:
On the basis of an express authorization of the Führer, I hereby authorize the President of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, Professor Ziegler, Munich, to select and secure the works of German decay art [Verfallskunst] in German territorial and communal possession in the field of painting and sculpture since 1910, for the purpose of an exhibition. I ask you to give Professor Ziegler a great deal of support during the inspection and selection of the works.
It was an affront to every curator in the land that their art collections could be ransacked on the judgment of Ziegler, a painter of modest talent and little renown. It was also an assault on the states and municipalities that owned the works, and on the education minister, Bernhard Rust, who was responsible for museums and galleries. But Goebbels had circumvented all political opposition with a “Führer order,” and Rust did not dare challenge him. Instead, he responded with his own action against perceived “degeneracy,” ordering the closure of the remainder of the Kronprinzenpalais at the start of July.
Armed with the Goebbels decree, Ziegler rapidly assembled a group of “experts” for an art confiscation commission. As well as Schweitzer, it consisted of Willrich and Hansen and two stalwarts of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, Walter Hoffmann and Hellmut Sachs. Rust added a pair of his own observers: the ministerial adviser Otto Kummer, and Klaus Graf von Baudissin, an SS officer who would become notorious for saying that the greatest work of art ever created was the Stahlhelm, the German soldier’s distinctive steel helmet.
On July 1, 1937, the propaganda minister noted in his diary: “Ziegler authorization to confiscate the decay art given. He now drives off with his commission. We hope to make it in time for the Tag der deutschen Kunst. This will be a body blow.”
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As they climbed into their cars at the start of July, Ziegler and his companions had just two weeks to prepare Goebbels’s show of degenerate art. They covered two and a half thousand miles over the next ten days, combing the country from north to south in a perverse whistle-stop gallery tour. On Sunday, July 4, they reached Hamburg; on Monday, it was Bremen, Hannover, and Wuppertal-Barmen; on Tuesday, Hagen, Essen, Krefeld, Düsseldorf, and Cologne. They arrived in each city without warning, flashed a copy of Goebbels’s decree, hectored the frightened curators into submission, rifled their collections, and ordered them to hand the chosen works to a dispatch company, Wetsch of Munich, who would ship them to the Bavarian capital. According to Goebbels’s instructions, each “degenerate” artwork had to be accompanied by a report detailing how much it had cost the gallery, the date of the purchase, and the name of the individual who had bought it.
“Thank you for your efforts,” the instructions concluded. “Heil Hitler!”
In Munich, the works were taken to the Hofgarten arcades, an exhibition space Gauleiter Adolf Wagner had requisitioned a five-minute walk from the Haus der deutschen Kunst. This venue, which formerly held the plaster cast collection of the Archaeological Institute, consisted of a series of long, gloomy rooms, which would provide a perfect contrast to the light-filled new gallery that would host the officially sanctioned art.
At 11:00 a.m. on Wednesday, July 7, Ziegler and his party arrived at the Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin. The Nationalgalerie’s director, Eberhard Hanfstaengl, a cousin of Putzi Hanfstaengl, boldly told Ziegler that he viewed the art seizure action as an “execution,” and announced that he would have nothing to do with it. Instead, the job of assisting the commissioners fell to Hanfstaengl’s deputy, Paul Ortwin Rave. It was only day four, but Rave soon discovered that Ziegler had already fallen out with other members of his team, describing them as “idiots” and “gossips” with whom he didn’t even care to have lunch. Willrich, the most zealous and excitable of the bunch, repeatedly made inflammatory comments, and at one point Ziegler and Kummer withdrew from the “unpleasant hustle and bustle” he provoked. They should make Willrich director of a degenerate art museum in Munich, Ziegler joked bleakly, so that the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts would be rid of him.
The commission took just three hours to identify the works they would strip from one of the world’s great modern art collections. They began on the upper floor, with the controversial Expressionist galleries. These had been closed to the public for the past eight months, and a number of works were back with their private owners—a source of great irritation to Willrich, who couldn’t find many of the pieces he wanted to seize. Even so, paintings by Schmidt-Rottluff, Kirchner, Pechstein, and Nolde were added to the confiscation list without debate. Barlach was viewed as a “tragic case” and his sculptures were spared, though one of his drawings was chosen so that he was at least represented. The commissioners discussed Erich Heckel, especially his painting Sylt, which Schweitzer criticized for a “lack of aerial perspective,” but Ziegler ruled that this transgression was not quite serious enough. There was general regret that Heckel’s famous Zeltbahn Madonna had been returned. In the room devoted to Franz Marc and August Macke of Der Blaue Reiter, Ziegler remarked that although both had been killed fighting for their country, he had to make the selection purely on artistic grounds, and he arbitrarily ordered the right half of the space to be added to the list, including Marc’s Der Turm der blauen Pferde (The tower of blue horses).
Some commissioners came armed with their own pet hatreds. Baudissin brought along a monograph on Max Beckmann to help him identify the painting Die Barke (The barque), but the work was no longer in the gallery, so a landscape and a still life by the artist were listed instead. In the storeroom, where they quickly added to the list anything that was not “pleasingly” painted, Willrich was excited to find Nolde’s Christus und die Sünderin (Christ and the adulteress), exclaiming that he had already written about it as a “work of shame,” and now he was finally able to view the original. Ziegler himself seemed obsessed with Kokoschka and made a note of several works by the artist that were on loan to Vienna so that he could request them upon their return. Rave was alarmed to hear the commissioners’ open expressions of contempt: When he asked them not to damage the pictures, one of the group announced, “They still long to burn them in Munich,” to which a colleague responded that they “had not yet gathered enough of them together.”
In general, Rave thought Ziegler was well informed about the art of
the past thirty years, but for political expediency he had come to judge this material “with the eyes of the Führer.” When Rave asked if he couldn’t share his real views with Hitler, Ziegler said that he had tried and had even brought up the Führer’s own painting career as an example, presumably of a struggling contemporary artist, but the dictator had only laughed and refused to accept the “north German art of Expressionism” as a valid form. Hitler wanted nothing but good craftsmanship in Germany, Ziegler said, as this was the way to ensure a future artistic genius had every chance to develop. He had tried to explain this to Hanfstaengl, but the Nationalgalerie director wasn’t interested, and now he would have to take the consequences. Hanfstaengl would soon be fired.
With time running out, Ziegler split the commission up in Berlin. Willrich would deal with the eastern part of Germany, including Magdeburg, Halle, and Breslau, while Hansen would go north, to Lübeck and Kiel. Ziegler would head west and south, taking in Mannheim, Karlsruhe, Munich, and Stuttgart. They would cover the whole country by July 14, earmarking more than seven hundred works for transportation to the Entartete Kunst show, including a number by the Prinzhorn artist Paul Goesch, which had been bought by Gustav Hartlaub for the Mannheim Kunsthalle.
Some gallery directors tried to resist the Ziegler commission’s art confiscations by petitioning local party dignitaries. Others insisted that contracts were drawn up for the works that were taken, and insurance arrangements made. All such gestures would prove wholly futile.
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While the confiscation commission raced around Germany, the party leaders continued to plan for the great art festival in Munich. Having sacked Ziegler from the Große deutsche Kunstausstellung, Hitler had given the job to one of his oldest cronies, the photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. Hoffmann had endured enough of Hitler’s lectures to be closely attuned to his likes and dislikes; he often acted as his art dealer, collecting pieces by favored nineteenth-century painters such as Eduard von Grützner, Carl Spitzweg, and Hans Makart. These high Romantic talents showed remarkable technique, though they had nothing new to say to a modern audience, and Hitler appeared to be governed by what they weren’t as much as what they were. “I cannot abide slovenly painting,” he told Hoffmann, “paintings in which you can’t tell whether they’re upside down or inside out, and on which the unfortunate frame-maker has to put hooks on all four sides, because he can’t tell either!” The photographer tried faithfully to channel his boss’s taste, reediting the submissions so that Hitler “could take no possible exception.” Goebbels, meanwhile, worked on the speeches and the radio broadcasts that would accompany the festival.
On Monday, July 12, Goebbels and Hitler were up early for a cold, wet drive to Munich. After lunch at Hitler’s apartment, they went to inspect Hoffmann’s selection at the Haus der deutschen Kunst. It was one of the Nazi leader’s stipulations that everyone should be able to understand German art, and Hoffmann had done a thorough job of assuming the critical faculties of an SS layman. The exhibition now consisted of seventeen hundred works from which every attempt to portray the world as complex, difficult, morally ambiguous, ethnically diverse, ugly, or poor had been removed. What remained was propaganda, a glorification of land and blood and the Nazizeit, in which every Mann was a muscled hero, every Fräulein a sexless beauty, and every Frau had the state-prescribed quantity of at least four children. The Führer himself was a subject for several artists, one of whom had portrayed him as a mounted knight clad in silver armor, carrying a fluttering swastika flag. With so much craftsmanship and bounty, and so few troubling ideas, was it not a sheer pleasure to live in such a state?
The propaganda minister could barely contain his excitement: “It’s become quite wonderful,” he wrote. “The selected pictures are now also very beautiful, even better than the sculptures. There are not many, but especially selected. The Führer is very happy.”
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On the other side of Prinzregentenstraße, tensions were running high, as builders and exhibition managers worked round the clock in the race to get Entartete Kunst ready. Ziegler was in charge, but Willrich and Hansen provided the show’s structure and many of its slogans—borrowed wholesale from Willrich’s booklet—and extra personnel had been called in both to represent the interests of various branches of the regime and to help with the building work. There were frequent squabbles: One curator was overheard screaming that he would have an employee “arrested for sabotage.” On Friday, July 16, the opening day of the festival, Goebbels went along to check on their progress and to root out pictures he deemed unsuitable. Hitler arrived half an hour later. Ziegler took him on a tour, flanked by the propaganda minister and Hoffmann.
After the war, Hoffmann would claim that he objected to the inclusion of several artworks on the grounds that some in the party felt the exhibition went “much too far.” “If Goebbels insists on having his exhibition of Entartete Kunst,” he wrote, “he would be much better advised to concentrate his attack on artistic trash, and particularly on some of the trash which we ourselves are producing,” since “at least a third” of the pictures submitted to the Große deutsche Kunstausstellung fitted this description. If this intervention really happened, Goebbels did not record it in his diaries. Instead, he briefly described his and Hitler’s satisfaction:
It was the best thing I’ve ever seen. Outright insanity. We have no more concerns now.
14.
TO BE GERMAN MEANS TO BE CLEAR
Munich was resplendent. Millions of reichsmarks had been spent to turn the city into a stage set of super-Wagnerian proportions, the backdrop for an occult ceremony of mass worship, the second Tag der deutschen Kunst. The station square alone was clad in 250 red, white, and black Nazi flags. A hundred and sixty pylons lined the streets, reaching forty feet into the bright blue sky, and each was crowned with a giant symbol of cultural vigor: a horse, a torchbearer, a Pegasus, an eagle, or a theater mask. At one end of Brienner Straße, an entire triumphal arch had been constructed, while Karolinenplatz was designated a “memorial for heroes” and encircled with a wall of Nazi flags. Every aspect of the streetscape was dictated: Every house with a street front was lit with eight to ten lights in Hitlerian red; every shopkeeper had been told which color to use in their windows. The effect was to transform the city into a vast, intimidating interior, with the new artistic temple at its heart.
For five days, from the welcome speeches at the Deutsches Museum on Friday, July 16, to the “Farewell Evening of the German Artists” at the Hofbräuhauskeller on Tuesday, July 20, a cast of National Socialist characters acted out their rituals, with Hitler in the starring role. There would be receptions for the Reich and for the city, concerts and performances, public dance events, press conferences and briefings. On Sunday afternoon, a giant carnival procession would snake its way through town, as it had in 1933: This time there were thirty floats, five hundred horsemen, and forty-five hundred men and women in historical costume who followed a five-mile route past the holiest shrines and monuments of Hitler’s cult—the Führerbau, the twin Ehrentempel, and the Haus der deutschen Kunst itself. This parade, titled “Two Thousand Years of German Culture,” was designed as a live presentation of the Nazi myth, an immortal expression of the German soul, which again looted the canon of Western history to claim Hitler’s reign as the culmination of the glorious “Aryan” epochs of yore. Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, was portrayed here as a National Socialist, surrounded by the motifs of eagle, swastika, and torch. The might of Hitler’s “New Era,” meanwhile, was represented by the architectural models of buildings the Führer had commissioned or designed. Behind the floats, more than three thousand uniformed soldiers and paramilitaries would swing past, from the Wehrmacht, the SA, the SS, the National Socialist Motor Corps, and the Reich Labor Service.
The pageant was a work of cultural propaganda with a careful purpose: to delegitimize the
individual. Personality and difference were subsumed in a tableau of massed ranks and martial charisma. Even the city wore fatigues. True Germans would lose themselves in this expression of the ethnic community of the Volk and pledge their hearts to their dark Siegfried, who scanned his regimented masses with paternal approval. “We ourselves as a whole people walk in the procession of German skill, German history,” the program trumpeted. “Today we are not spectators, but a blood and cultural community.”
Goebbels had worried about rain. He needn’t have. At 9:00 a.m. on Sunday, the Haus der deutschen Kunst gleamed in brilliant sunshine as formations of SA and SS worked through their drills. The crowd pressed forward, “gripped,” as the sculptor Arno Breker remembered, “by the hypnotic power with which this völkisch festival addressed ancient depths.” At 11:00 a.m., Hitler climbed the red-carpeted steps to the gallery’s giant portico, where he was hailed in a short speech by Gauleiter Wagner as the “greatest of living artists,” before he swept beneath the stone imperial eagle into the building. He would address the nation from the gallery’s Hall of Honor, a double-height room of polished red marble, lit by enormous skylights, draped with a twenty-foot swastika, and packed with the invited elite: Wehrmacht generals, labor force leaders, approved artists. Another introduction, this time by Goebbels, eulogized Germany’s “master builder,” “the ideal combination of statesman and artist.” Then Hitler climbed to the podium. His words would be transmitted by loudspeaker to the thirty thousand who stood outside, and over the airwaves to millions more who sat by their radios at home.