The Gallery of Miracles and Madness

by Charlie English

  When it came to choosing professional art for the shaming show, Hitler and Goebbels personally picked out some works from the depot of confiscated art on Köpenicker Straße. They spent two hours going through the seized material. Hitler’s verdict was devastating: “No picture finds mercy,” Goebbels reported.

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  Saturday, February 26, 1938, was a day of glorious winter sunshine in the capital, and Goebbels took advantage of the weather to drive out to his villa on an island in Wannsee, where he played the racist card game Schwarzer Peter (Black Peter) with his children. Neither he nor Hitler would appear at the launch of the new edition of Entartete Kunst that afternoon. As at Munich, it was agreed that the senior leadership should not be seen in company with the degenerate art, although Goebbels had devoted a great deal of attention to it and had been unable to resist visiting the gallery several times during the show’s construction.

  At 4:00 p.m., lower-ranking party officials and their guests gathered in Room 12 of the Reichstag building. A portrait of Hitler had been placed at the front of the auditorium, adorned with laurels and flanked by Nazi flags, and as the audience took their seats, Beethoven’s “Coriolan Overture” drifted across from an adjoining room, where the Berlin Landesorchester had been seated for the occasion. Speeches were made, praising the Führer and lambasting “degenerate” artists. A “triple-victory” “Sieg Heil!” was shouted, and national songs were sung. Then the guests trooped out of the Parliament building and across the road to the Haus der Kunst, which had been decked out with more Nazi flags. Entartete Kunst filled seventeen rooms across the building’s three floors.

  The atmosphere here was “festive,” according to the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung’s correspondent. The reporters already knew what to expect: They had been thoroughly briefed by the new head of fine arts in Goebbels’s ministry, the former Völkischer Beobachter critic Franz Hofmann, and handed an “Information Sheet for Editors,” which emphasized the new tactic of comparing this art with that of the psychiatric inmates. The visitors were also given a copy of the new exhibition guide, which would go on sale to the public for 30 pfennigs. It wasn’t a catalogue as such, in that it didn’t list all the pieces of art on display, but it did contain many of the quotations and captions, as well as images of some works, and corresponded closely to the layout of Entartete Kunst from this point on. A quarter of its sixteen illustrated pages showed Prinzhorn material alongside professional art, mirroring the juxtapositions in the exhibition. These were accompanied by a crowing, sarcastic commentary stating that even these “sick” pieces were better than those of the famous artists. The first pairing, of a work by Paul Klee and that of an unidentified Prinzhorn artist, was captioned:

  Two “saints”!! The one above is called “The Saint of the Inner Light” and is by Paul Klee. The one below is by a schizophrenic from a lunatic asylum. That this “Saint Mary Magdalen and Child” nevertheless looks more human than Paul Klee’s botched effort, which was intended to be taken entirely seriously, is highly revealing.

  Two of the displayed Prinzhorn works were by Genzel. The first, Mädchenkopf (Head of a girl), made from chewed bread, was shown next to a sculpture by Eugen Hoffmann, a Communist from Dresden. The caption here read:

  This head of a girl is the work of an incurably insane man in the psychiatric clinic in Heidelberg. That insane non-artists should produce such works is understandable…This abortion [by Hoffmann], on the other hand, was seriously discussed as a work of art and included in many exhibitions in the past as a masterwork.

  The title of Hoffmann’s “monstrosity” was Mädchen mit blauem Haar (Girl with blue hair), and indeed, the guidebook scoffed, “its coiffure is a resplendent pure sky blue.” This was a clear transgression of Hitler’s ruling against non-realist colors.

  The second Genzel sculpture was Katze (Cat), which was placed next to a work by the Jewish artist Rudolph Haizmann:

  When an incurable lunatic, and an amateur into the bargain, models a cat, this is how it looks….But when Haizmann, praised in his day as a “sculptor of genius,” takes it into his head to create a “fabulous beast” to adorn a fountain, the resulting monstrosity looks like this picture. The inferior work weighs several hundred pounds, by the way.

  A later edition of the guide described Haizmann as “the Jew Haizmann,” and the work as a “Jew creature.”

  The fourth comparison matched a portrait by the Prinzhorn artist Georg Birnbacher with a pair of works by Kokoschka:

  Which of these three drawings is the work of an amateur, an inmate of a lunatic asylum? You will be surprised: the one on the right above! The other two used to be regarded as master drawings by Kokoschka.

  As at Munich, the exhibition and guidebook were divided into sections, though these had been fine-tuned since the show’s opening in Bavaria to better meet Goebbels’s propaganda objectives. Artworks from Berlin galleries had also been added to generate local interest. There were nine different groups, dealing with such Hitlerian themes as the “collapse of sensitivity to form and color,” the “shameless mockery” of religion, “Bolshevik” political art, treasonous anti-war art, “moral degeneracy,” and “negro art” and the decline of “racial consciousness.” The dictator’s most vaunted targets were saved for the last three groupings, with number seven assaulting modern art’s insane inspiration. Artists had created a “highly specific intellectual ideal, namely, the idiot, the cretin, and the cripple,” the exhibition organizers said:

  Even where these “artists” have portrayed themselves or each other, the resulting faces and figures are markedly cretinous. [O]ne thing is certain: to the “moderns” represented here, a mindless, moronic face constituted a special creative stimulus….Here are human figures that show more of a resemblance to gorillas than to men.

  Group eight targeted the Jews, particularly Otto Freundlich, whose sculpture Großer Kopf (Large head) had been sarcastically rechristened Der Neue Mensch (The new man) to give it an extra degenerate frisson: It also adorned the guidebook’s cover. Lastly, the show’s finale, group nine, lambasted all the movements within modern art, the so-called -isms, in a selection that, according to the guidebook, could only be entitled “Sheer Insanity.” In this “chamber of horrors” there was no telling what was in the “sick brains” of the works’ creators:

  In this “insanity group,” visitors to the exhibition usually just shake their heads and smile….But when we reflect that all these “works of art” have been removed not from the dusty corners of deserted studios but from the art collections and museums of the great German cities…then it is no laughing matter: then we can only choke back our fury that so decent a people as the Germans could ever have been so foully abused.

  The newspapermen diligently trumpeted the Berlin opening of Entartete Kunst in the press, noting with admiration the comparison with the new psychiatric material. The Frankfurter Zeitung’s correspondent reported that the Prinzhorn pieces “each show a similar motif of representation [as] the exhibited work itself, so as to demonstrate that the product of the insane person is closer to real nature than the representation of the painter or sculptor concerned.” The Berliner Börsen-Zeitung accused the professional artists of becoming ill on purpose: “The exhibition very cleverly juxtaposes works by real mentally ill people from the Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic with the works of the intentionally insane,” the reporter wrote. “They are indistinguishable…[in fact] the work of the intentionally insane is usually even more deformed.” The critic Robert Scholz picked up on the juxtapositions as an “especially impressive” part of the show: “Simulated and real nonsense are indistinguishable here.”

  It was soon clear that Goebbels had another hit on his hands, as Berliners and foreigners hurried to see the exhibition that had caused such a sensation in Munich. Lines of visitors formed outside, and inside the rooms were full to bursting. The Frankfu
rter Zeitung reported that the organizers had to designate a special exit, by way of a back staircase and a courtyard, “in order to divert the departing masses of visitors from the arriving ones.” More than 50,000 came in the first two weeks, 150,000 in the first month, 200,000 by mid-April. The party did all it could to boost numbers, keeping the show open until 9:00 p.m., seven days a week, to give the workers a chance to see it.

  Several eyewitnesses recorded that the atmosphere in Berlin was more somber than it had been in Bavaria, which was both the center of the völkisch reactionary tendency and the home of Nazism. Emil Stumpp, a press artist, visited the Haus der Kunst on a weekday—the show was crowded even then—and recorded that, though a small part of the audience reacted to the art with loud laughter, most people walked around with “stony faces.” He was relieved to escape into the air outside. Felix Hartlaub, the son of the former Mannheim Kunsthalle director Gustav Hartlaub, found the exhibition “a real hell.” “Audience deeply depressed,” he wrote to his father. “Demonstrative indignation or cheerfulness very rare.” In some cases, the pictures were openly appreciated, especially by young people, but there were many devout party members in the crowd, too. He also remarked on the presence of the Prinzhorn works. “In places,” he noted, “juxtaposition with Bildnerei der Geisteskranken.”

  There was another significant innovation for the Berlin leg of Entartete Kunst: the show was designed to be portable. Where in Munich the pronouncements of Hitler and others had been painted directly on the walls, in Berlin they were carried on posters and placards that could easily be crated up and shipped to the next venue. On May 8, after a two-and-a-half-month run that had been extended several times, allowing more than half a million people to see it, Entartete Kunst was packed with great speed and sent to Leipzig, where it opened at the Grassi Museum five days later, complete with its complement of Prinzhorn material. Over the next eighteen months, it would tour all around the Reich, to Düsseldorf, Salzburg, Hamburg, Stettin, Weimar, Vienna, Frankfurt, and Chemnitz.

  The exhibition always followed a similar layout, with the same Prinzhorn juxtapositions, and it was always greeted with jeering from the state-controlled press. In Leipzig, the Tageszeitung drew attention to the “introduction of derangement into art…the worship of idiocy…and finally the perfection of madness,” and celebrated the “relief and satisfaction that, as a nation, we have once and for all denounced such barbarity in cultural matters.” In Düsseldorf, the Remscheider General-Anzeiger noted the “daubings of the incurable institutionally insane, who never before held a paintbrush in their hands.” In Hamburg, the work of “mentally ill lay people” bore testament to the fact that “modern artists [had tried] to undercut the art of idiots.” Newspaper readers were asked to compare the “products of idiots” with those of professionals and decide, “Who was an artist—who is mentally ill?” In Weimar, where “degenerate music” was included for the first time, the Allgemeine Thüringische Landeszeitung pointed out that “one often comes to the conclusion that the work of the so-called ‘real’ artist looks even crazier than that of the mentally ill.”

  Wherever it went, visitors flocked to see the chamber of modernist horrors. By the time it closed in Chemnitz on August 26, 1939, six days before the outbreak of the Second World War, Entartete Kunst was the most-visited art show in history.

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  As the exhibition toured the Reich, Goebbels tried to work out what to do with the immense amount of confiscated art that had been stripped from German collections. A conscientious stocktaking of the east Berlin depot produced a six-volume inventory listing 16,500 works by 1,400 artists, seized from 101 museums in 14 cities. In the summer of 1938, the propaganda minister published the “Law on the Confiscation of the Products of Entartete Kunst,” which divided the material into three groups. The first, most straightforward category consisted of foreign-owned works on loan, which would simply be returned. The second group was made up of state-owned works, which were either valuable, and could be exchanged abroad for “high-quality” German art or for hard currency, or should be preserved for educational or propaganda purposes. The final category consisted of art that was “absolutely worthless” and would be destroyed. Goebbels made clear that these categories would cover all cases.

  Between the end of July and mid-September, the regime moved the state-owned works with international value to Schloß Niederschönhausen, a three-story chateau on the northern outskirts of Berlin. Eventually, 779 paintings and sculptures and 3,500 watercolors, drawings, and graphics earmarked for foreign fire-sale would be stored here. The treasure trove included art by Beckmann, Campendonk, Chagall, Corinth, Dix, Grosz, Heckel, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Klee, Kokoschka, Marc, Mondrian, Nolde, Pechstein, Rohlfs, and Schmidt-Rottluff. Hermann Göring, who always had an eye for loot, secured thirteen confiscated masterpieces from the chateau, by Cézanne, Van Gogh, Marc (including Der Turm der blauen Pferde), Munch, and Signac.

  A group of four hand-picked dealers were authorized to sell this material. Some clients were given direct access to Schloß Niederschönhausen, but the most notorious sales went through the Swiss art dealer Theodor Fischer. In October 1938, Fischer wrote to the Propaganda Ministry to suggest that the best way to “liquidate” Germany’s glut of art would be an international auction. The first of these would take place on June 30 the following year, at the Grand Hotel National in Lucerne. One hundred and twenty-six works were offered for sale, and dealers paid $21,000 for a Van Gogh self-portrait, $10,000 for a Picasso harlequin painting, and a little over $9,000 for a Tahitian landscape by Gauguin. Chagall’s Winter, La maison bleue (The Blue House), and Rabbiner (Rabbi) were also sold. Prices on the whole were low, both because the art world was aware of the illicit nature of the sale and because everyone knew the money would be used to prop up Hitler’s regime. Fischer didn’t help matters by showing obvious disdain for much of the work on offer. Paintings by Dix, Klee, Kirchner, Nolde, and Beckmann sold for insignificant sums. A second, poorly attended auction took place on August 26.

  As the cream of Germany’s modern art collections flooded the international market, a great quantity of seized material judged “unsaleable” remained in the Köpenicker Straße depot, and the head of the Fine Arts Ministry, Franz Hofmann, was itching to dispose of it. In November 1938 he wrote to Goebbels to tell him that the building would soon have to be cleared, since it was “urgently” required as a grain store, and a “final decision” was required. There was no need to keep the art for propaganda purposes, as Entartete Kunst was already abundantly supplied. Therefore, he stated:

  I propose to burn this remainder at the stake in a symbolic propagandistic act and offer to hold a correspondingly spicy funeral oration. I ask for your consent.

  Goebbels hesitated, responding that Ziegler’s opinion would have to be asked. On January 19, 1939, Hofmann tried again, urging that the 12,167 pieces still in the depot were the “scum of degenerate art which can be safely burned.” Three days later, he put the question to Goebbels once more: “I ask for permission, whether I may burn the remainder immediately, in order to free up the depot for the urgent need as Granary.” This time, Goebbels agreed, responding simply: “Yes! Dr. G.” The depot was cleared the following month. On March 20, 1,004 oil paintings and sculptures and 3,825 watercolors, drawings, and prints were burned in the courtyard of the main fire station in Berlin.

  The final report on the exploitation of the products of “degenerate” art in Germany stated that most of the sixteen thousand confiscated works were “completely unusable,” and that the majority had been destroyed or put into storage. Around three hundred paintings and sculptures and three thousand graphics had been sold internationally, for a total of “more than 10,000 pounds, approximately 45,000 dollars and around 80,000 Swiss francs.” In addition to these foreign exchange receipts, swaps had been made to a value of 131,630 reichsmarks. The foreign currency generated was allocated to
the rearmament program.

  Goebbels claimed this as a great achievement. In fact, he and Hitler had caused irreparable damage to Germany’s reputation as a world leader in the arts. The Nazis had liquidated one of the world’s greatest national collections of painting and sculpture, a collection that would be worth many billions of dollars today. The amount they raised in return would barely cover the cost of two Panzer tanks.

  17.

  FOXES WITH WHITE COATS

  On February 20, 1939, a boy was born in the small village of Pomßen, fifteen miles southeast of Leipzig, to Richard Kretschmar, a farm laborer, and his wife, Lina. The Kretschmars named their son Gerhard, but they were far from delighted with their new addition, since the baby was severely disabled. He was blind, he was missing parts of his limbs, and he may have suffered from convulsions. Richard Kretschmar took him to the University Children’s Clinic in Leipzig, where he was examined by the professor of pediatrics, Werner Catel. After hearing the bleak assessment that the boy would never be “normal,” Kretschmar asked if he could be given a peaceful death. When Catel explained that this would be illegal, the family wrote to Hitler to ask for special permission for “the monster,” as Richard described him, to be killed. Both Kretschmar parents were said to be ardent National Socialists.

  This terrible request reached Hitler’s private office in Berlin, the Kanzlei des Führers (KdF), where a senior administrator, Hans Hefelmann, picked it out from the two thousand or so private petitions that were made to the dictator every day. Hefelmann passed it up the chain of command, bringing it to the attention of his department head, Viktor Brack, and the KdF’s overall chief, the SS colonel and Nazi “old fighter” Philipp Bouhler.