Those who witnessed Hitler’s early speeches recalled their rhetorical power. This was his real gift. Each oration was shaped like an orchestral piece, with moments of piano, adagio, and fortissimo. He would begin in silence, standing at attention, before setting out in a quiet, almost humble voice. Gradually he would become animated, responding to the audience’s applause, shifting from side to side, using his extensive repertoire of practiced gestures to emphasize the words. As the roars increased, so did his volume and tempo, and he began to thrust and parry like a swordsman. In the early years, he had remarkable vocal control; by 1937, the subtlety and humility had largely gone, and his tone had grown harsher, more like a bark. In the ears of Paul Ortwin Rave, seated in the Hall of Honor, the words sounded increasingly like a thunderstorm.
The opening of the Haus der deutschen Kunst represented a new beginning, Hitler said. From now on, the nation would be home to a “new and true German art” that had nothing to do with “so-called modern art.” The very idea that art could be “modern” was ridiculous: Art was either valuable or worthless, immortal or transient; it could never go “out of date.” He had read the failure of modern art in the response of the German people who, in their natural “healthy feeling,” recognized it for the spawn of impudent presumption and frightening inadequacy it was. In particular, he scorned the modernists’ interest in children’s drawings, “primitive” art, and the work of the “retarded.” Troost’s great building was not for such “stumblebums,” but for a new national art based in race and blood and German-ness. Since, he announced, “to be German means to be clear,” it followed that the country’s culture must also be logical, true, eternal. Jews, Bolsheviks, internationalists, and democrats, with the aid of “so-called art criticism,” had destroyed the “natural perceptions” of German art. With such incomprehensible, faddish ideas as Impressionism, Dadaism, Cubism, and Futurism, the cultural Bolsheviks had poisoned the supply of common, decent Aryan art represented by the masters who had gone before. Why had they done this? Because they were artistic “dwarfs” whose own “unnatural smearing and dabbling” did not measure up to their great German predecessors. This mattered because in the future the nation’s cultural achievement would be far more important than anything in the political or economic sphere. There was no greater record of a people’s highest right to life than its immortal culture.
“Drunk with victory,” as Rave now saw him, Hitler moved to deliver his “bloated and scornful reckoning” with modernism. There appeared to be artists who had something wrong with their eyesight, he cried, since they depicted meadows as blue, sky as green, clouds as sulfur yellow. Anyone who painted in this way had to be either ill—in which case the medical authorities would prevent them from passing on their genetic diseases—or a fraudster, who should be dealt with by the criminal justice system. From now on, he forbade painters from using any colors other than those the eye perceived in the natural world. The naming of art movements would be banned, too, as would works of art that were not easy to understand and needed “a swollen instruction manual”: Such “stupid or impudent nonsense” would no longer be allowed to reach the German people. Buzzwords such as “inner experience” or “meaningful empathy” were just “lying excuses” for products that were worthless because their creators lacked skill. The exploration of the primitive, too, was “a blatant impudence or a stupidity”: Why would anyone want works that could have been made in the Stone Age? Portraying Germans in an unflattering manner was equally wrong: The new “type” of German was radiant, proud, a beacon of health and physical strength, but contemporary artists liked to portray them as “misshapen cripples and cretins, women who are abominations, men who are closer to animals than humans, children who [look like] a curse from God!”
As Hitler approached his denouement, the ranting reached a pitch that “had never before been heard in a political speech,” according to Rave:
As if taken from his senses, he actually foamed with rage, dribbling from his mouth, so that even his entourage stared at him in horror. Was it a madman who bent in paroxysms, waving his hands in the air and drumming with his fists?
“From now on,” Hitler shouted, “we will be leading a relentless war of cleansing…a relentless war of destruction against the last elements of our cultural decomposition!” Now, “all the mutually supportive and clinging cliques of chatterers, dilettantes, and art fraudsters will be dug up and eliminated!”
When the cacophony of applause had died away, the guests were invited to explore the new gallery, led by Hitler, Göring, and Ziegler. That afternoon, a motorcade delivered the Führer to a grandstand on Prinzregentenstraße, where, amid the shouted “Heils,” he watched parade floats pass by in the Munich sunshine. Afterward, there were receptions to attend and glasses to raise to the festival’s success. Goebbels was ecstatic. Munich was “like a singing island” that evening, he decided, and the parade had been “wonderful.” The speech had been a “classic,” the day “very holy.” Most important, Hitler was “very happy.”
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At five o’clock the following afternoon, Goebbels’s contribution to the Tag der deutschen Kunst opened at the Hofgarten arcades. Everything possible had been done to differentiate the “humiliation exhibition” from the art on display across the street. Where the Haus der deutschen Kunst was filled with natural light, the narrow, low-ceilinged rooms in the Hofgarten arcades were kept dim, with many of the windows covered. Where the paintings and sculptures in the Große deutsche Kunstausstellung were presented in acres of respectful white space, those in Entartete Kunst were bunched together, or even hung at crazy angles. It was part of the stagecraft that no senior regime figure would attend the event’s inauguration. Instead, the show’s opening was delegated to Ziegler, whose remarks were broadcast on all German radio stations that evening.
An angular man whose skinny limbs tended to protrude from the sleeves of his suits, Ziegler began by praising the festival and the magnificent temple of art that had been built across the street. Before the visitors went home, he said, he had a sad duty to perform: to show the people the dark elements that had dominated artistic creation in Germany before the coming of Hitler. These forces had not seen art as a natural and clear expression of life, but instead had cultivated everything “sick and degenerate,” while conniving critics had praised their material as the highest revelation and the “most modern thing.” “You see around us monstrosities of madness, of impudence, of inability, and degeneration,” Ziegler told his audience. “What this show has to offer causes shock and disgust in all of us.” On his tour of the country, he had been astonished to find that such works were still being exhibited. He and his team had gathered here just a fraction of the degenerate material they had found, since whole trains would not have been enough to carry all of the nation’s “rubbish.” He wanted to thank the German people, who, when they had been presented with the scrawlings of these “art Bolshevists” and “pigs,” simply rejected the whole “swindle,” and to thank the Führer, whom the people could unreservedly trust, and who knew which way German art must go. He concluded with an invitation: “Come and judge for yourselves!”
Tens of thousands of citizens took up Ziegler’s offer in the following days. Rave, who was among them, reported that the “crowd was always tremendously large,” and that thirty thousand people visited on the first Wednesday alone. Many were drawn there by the flyer that was tucked into the official Große deutsche Kunstausstellung program, encouraging the public to judge the two exhibitions together.
“Tormented Canvas—Mental decay—Sick fantasies—Mentally ill incompetents,” the flyer read:
Awarded prizes by Jewish cliques, praised by literary figures…such were the products and producers of an “art” on which the state and national institutions unscrupulously squandered millions of the nation’s wealth while German artists starved to death….
Com
e and have a look! Judge for yourself!
Visit the exhibition Entartete Kunst
Admission free
Children prohibited
Free admission had the dual purpose of encouraging visitors and implying that, unlike the works in the Große deutsche Kunstausstellung, the art here was of no value. Forbidding children from entering, meanwhile, borrowed the same propaganda technique Otto Gebele von Waldstein had used at Mannheim Kunsthalle four years earlier: It gave Entartete Kunst an illicit feel, equating it with horror or pornography. The visitors’ response was thus conditioned before they ever arrived at the Hofgarten arcades. Once there, they joined the crowd jostling to squeeze through the humble doorway, a tacit signal that they were now entering the world of the Untermensch. They were immediately confronted with a set of narrow stairs, which they climbed beneath the menacing gaze of Ludwig Gies’s sculpture of Christ on the cross. The gallery space at the top of the stairs was jammed with art as well as people: Six hundred works had been crammed into nine narrow rooms. The walls were daubed with slogans from speeches by Hitler, Goebbels, and Rosenberg, juxtaposed with pronouncements of artists, critics, and intellectuals that seemed idiotic in their new context. In most cases, the purchase price was noted, along with a large red note stating that the work had been “paid for by the taxes of the working German people.”
The first room was designed to offend the audience’s religious sensibility, as the label “Insolent Mockery of the Divine Under Centrist Rule” made clear. The second room, “Revelation of the Jewish Racial Soul,” was smaller: it included several works by Chagall, including the portrait of a rabbi that had once been paraded around Mannheim. In the third room, a whole wall had been given over to one of Hitler’s favorite bugbears, Dada, and daubed with an alleged quotation from George Grosz that read, “Take Dada Seriously, It Pays!” By accident or design, the exhibitors had hung works by Klee and Kandinsky here, neither of whom had ever joined the movement. Elsewhere in the third room, slogans accused artists of sabotaging national defense, insulting war heroes and German womanhood, and holding up the “cretin and whore” as ideals. On the west side of the room hung Max Ernst’s Erschaffung der Eva (Creation of Eve), which had been seized from Düsseldorf.
A fourth, smaller room mostly showed Die Brücke artists. Room five, the largest in the exhibition, exploited art’s links with psychiatry. Slogans on the walls here included “Crazy at Any Price,” over a group of works by Kandinsky and Klee, hung in a deliberately absurd step pattern; “Madness Becomes Method,” next to abstract works by Johannes Molzahn; and “Nature as Seen by Sick Minds,” over a selection of landscapes and still lifes by Schmidt-Rotluff and Kirchner. Rooms six and seven contained works by the war heroes Marc and Macke, including Der Turm der blauen Pferde, though these would be removed later after complaints from the German Officers’ Association. Two further rooms on the ground floor—which were barrel-vaulted and only thirteen feet wide—were not opened until Thursday, July 22, such was the time pressure Ziegler had been working under. These spaces would be hung with works by Klee, Barlach, Ernst, Mondrian, Dix, Kirchner, and Kokoschka, among others.
Ironically, the humiliation show was a far more engaging experience than the dull hush of the Haus der deutschen Kunst. Seventeen-year-old Peter Guenther traveled from Dresden that week to see the Große deutsche Kunstausstellung, which he found “disappointing and tiring,” and was drawn by the flyer to visit the Hofgarten arcades the following day. No one asked his age. He noticed that people in the “approved” gallery whispered as if they were in church, but they talked loudly in Entartete Kunst, and even spoke to strangers. The crowds of people who ridiculed the art and proclaimed their dislike gave the young man the impression that it was a staged performance intended to promote an angry atmosphere. Over and over, he heard visitors reading aloud the purchase prices and laughing, or making loud, angry remarks and demanding “their” money back. Guenther, the son of an art critic, decided that most of the audience hadn’t seen Expressionist works before and had probably come with the intention of disliking everything. He heard people remark that these “so-called artists” could neither draw nor paint, and that there must have been a “conspiracy” of dealers, curators, and critics, aimed at bamboozling the public. No one spoke up for the works or the artists represented, or attempted to challenge the condemnations.
Above all, Guenther was frightened. “I felt an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia,” he remembered. He remained very quiet and avoided catching anyone’s eye.
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From the first days, it was clear that Entartete Kunst was a hit, far more popular than the Große deutsche Kunstausstellung. More than a million visitors would shoulder their way through the overcrowded rooms of the Archaeological Institute by the end of August. As the Nazi press trumpeted the “artistic inferno,” Hitler and Goebbels traveled to Bayreuth for the Wagner festival, a long-standing fixture of the regime’s summer season. Hitler stayed as the guest of the family in the late composer’s villa, the Haus Wahnfried. (Wagner had explained his villa’s name, which means “mad peace,” with an inscription over the door that read: “Here where my madness has found peace, let this place be named Wahnfried.”) Basking in his victory, in the bosom of the Wagner clan, “Uncle Adolf” lavished approval and attention on Goebbels. “To the Führer at Haus Wahnfried, where I am also staying,” the minister noted in his diary for Saturday, July 24. “Führer very nice…The exhibition Entartete Kunst is a huge success and a big blow.” Here, between interminable operas, the pair discussed how to further exploit their confrontation with modern art.
Their first decision was that Entartete Kunst should come to Berlin in the autumn. Goebbels favored putting it on at the Kronprinzenpalais, where it would have a humiliating resonance. The Nationalgalerie should also be ordered to take a quarter of the works shown in the Große deutsche Kunstausstellung, which was to become an annual event. Eberhard Hanfstaengl should be sacked; Paul Ortwin Rave would be appointed director in his place.
Next, the two men decided that the confiscation of “degenerate” material must now be prosecuted systematically. Hitler gave Goebbels authority to seize all such works in German collections, and the propaganda minister telephoned Ziegler, telling him to “clean the museums.” To perform this vast, secret campaign—which Rave later described as “rape,” “looting,” and “mutilation”—required a dramatic scaling-up of the confiscation commissions. The extreme nature of the purge, which he estimated would take three months, appealed to Goebbels. “This is how it must be done,” he wrote. “Awaken the people’s interest by means of great actions.”
In mid-August, Rave was forced to look on in horror as a gang of anti-modern philistines, including Walter Hansen, rifled the Nationalgalerie’s priceless collection in a raid of “incomprehensible unscrupulousness.” Apart from the personal insults and moral wrongs inflicted on the artists and institutions, he estimated that the damage to the gallery’s inventory amounted to more than a million gold marks. Incalculable harm was also done to the country’s reputation. Goebbels had stipulated that “works of German degenerate art since 1910” were to be removed, but the commissioners also took works by foreign artists such as Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Munch, to whom, in an earlier life, Goebbels had once sent a congratulatory seventieth-birthday telegram. Hansen reviled Van Gogh in particular for his supposed mental illness. He even wanted to confiscate the works of Grünewald, whom he called psychotic, and Rembrandt, who had painted Jewish ghettos, but in these cases he was overruled. The seized art was taken to a former granary at 24a Köpenicker Straße, in the Kreuzberg district of east Berlin, which Ziegler had rented from the port authority.
On August 1, as reports continued to reach Berlin of vast numbers of visitors who had come to see the shaming art show, Goebbels noted in his diary that “[Hitler] is a fabulous man. All man and very real. He is very pleased about the success
of Entartete Kunst.” That day, they had an idea to “bang the advertising drum even more,” as Goebbels put it. They would produce a guidebook to educate the wider German public about the threat posed by degenerate and insane modern art. To reinforce their point, the booklet would include works from the Prinzhorn collection.
15.
THE SACRED AND THE INSANE
All over Europe, artists were on the run. Beckmann left for the Netherlands the day after Hitler’s speech at the Haus der deutschen Kunst: He would spend the next ten years in Amsterdam, trying to get a visa for the United States. Kokoschka was in Prague, where he painted Self-Portrait of a Degenerate Artist, his response to Entartete Kunst, which showed him sitting with arms folded while a man and a deer lurked in the forest behind him: the artist as fugitive. Ernst remained in Paris, where he would later be picked up by the Gestapo before fleeing to America with the help of Peggy Guggenheim. Klee and Kirchner were in Switzerland, where Klee produced hundreds of pieces that dealt with his fate. Kirchner, depressed, and fearful that German soldiers would eventually come for him, shot himself dead in the summer of 1938.
Those German modernists who hadn’t fled lived in a state of internal exile, working little or furtively, in some cases under surveillance. Barlach was forbidden from exhibiting and was spied upon in his own house. He saw his public works being torn down one by one, and died in Rostock, stressed and plagued by illness, on October 24, 1938. Schlemmer, who had five paintings in the Munich Entartete Kunst show, withdrew with his family in September 1937 to a remote corner of the Black Forest. He went on to work with an advertising company in Stuttgart, then a lacquer manufacturer in Wuppertal. Schmidt-Rottluff, Pechstein, Meidner, Hofer, Heckel, and Nolde were ordered to cease painting altogether. Nolde continued furtively: He abandoned oils, since the smell could betray him to the Gestapo, and instead embarked on a series of watercolors he called “Unpainted Pictures.” By the war’s end he had created more than thirteen hundred of these odorless images on small pieces of rice paper.
The Gallery of Miracles and Madness Page 17