The Gallery of Miracles and Madness

by Charlie English

  The account of Gustav Hartlaub’s experiences at the Mannheim Kunsthalle is largely from Zuschlag, “Die Ausstellung ‘Kulturbolschewistische Bilder’ in Mannheim 1933,” and Zuschlag, Entartete Kunst. Despite the anti-Semitic nature of Gebele von Waldstein’s attack, Hartlaub was not Jewish.

  There are minor discrepancies in accounts of the incident with the Chagall painting: Some say it was shown in a jewelry shop, or a cigar shop, or a bookshop—it may have moved between several Mannheim shop windows.

  The origin of the works by psychiatric patients put on display at the small Mannheimer Schreckenskammer, show at Erlangen is unknown, but the man responsible for the exhibition, Hermann Müller, was a doctor of psychiatry and medicine according to Zuschlag (Entartete Kunst). Children’s drawings were also included, to defame the professional artists. Franz Hofmann’s call for a “book burning” for art, and for artists to be sent to Dachau, was published in the Völkischer Beobachter on August 16, 1933.

  It is worth briefly setting out the story of the Berlin students’ attempts to defend German Expressionist artists—including Barlach, Heckel, Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff, and Nolde—against the Kampfbund in the summer of 1933, which is documented comprehensively by Brenner. The pro-modernist faction was led by Otto Andreas Schreiber, a Nazi student leader who represented Berlin art schools, and who called Rosenberg’s Kampfbund an “organization of cantankerous daubers.” A successful mass meeting held at Humboldt University on June 29, 1933, led to brief optimism that arts policy would be liberalized, and on July 22, an exhibition of “thirty German artists” opened at the Ferdinand Möller Gallery in the capital. Rosenberg responded to Schreiber by denouncing him and vilifying Barlach and Nolde, while Walter Hansen, later an initiator of the Entartete Kunst shows, described their action as an “act of sabotage.” Interior minister Frick shut the Ferdinand Möller exhibition down three days after it opened, and Schreiber was expelled by the National Socialist Students Association.

  Details of the community of cultural refugees in Hollywood are in Evans, as is Gerhart Hauptmann’s admission of cowardice.

  The attacks on Karl Wilmanns and his family are recalled by Ruth Wilmanns Lidz in “Ein erfülltes Leben.” Her brilliant career in America was documented in her obituary in the New York Times, “Ruth W. Lidz, 85, Yale Professor, Dies,” New York Times, October 13, 1995.

  Prinzhorn’s last months are covered in detail by Geinitz, “Hans Prinzhorn” and “Zur Biografie Hans Prinzhorns.” The final exchange of letters between him and Klages are in the Prinzhorn archive. His cause of death was a pulmonary embolism caused by typhoid. Watson’s eulogizing remarks are from “In the Teeth of All Formalism.”

  PART THREE: BILDERSTURM

  12. THE SCULPTOR OF GERMANY

  The decline of the German psychiatric system in the early 1930s has been captured by Burleigh in Death and Deliverance. The buildup to the first eugenics legislation, including promotion of the idea that a tidal wave of “useless individuals” was overwhelming Germany, and detail of the Prussian Health Council’s draft legislation, which was never passed, can be found in Mark B. Adams, The Wellborn Science.

  Hitler’s agreement with the idea that art could establish a model of the future German is reinforced by a 1935 Nuremberg speech, in which he stated that “art, precisely because it is the most direct and faithful emanation of the Volksgeist, constitutes the force that unconsciously models the mass of the people,” cited in Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany. Schultze-Naumburg explained the same philosophy as follows: “The most elevated ‘mission’ of art was to provide ‘goals’…to render visible ‘the image to be attained,’ and to fashion the future image of the race,” cited in Day, “Paul Schultze-Naumburg: An Intellectual Biography.”

  Goebbels’s line that “only under the hand of an artist can a people be shaped from the masses” is in Michaud. The Kladderadatsch cartoon, by Oskar Garvens, was published on December 12, 1933.

  Frick’s figures for the number of Germans suffering genetic “defects” are given in Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis. Details of the “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring,” including the number of denouncements from the medical profession, are in Friedlander, The Origins of the Nazi Genocide. The patient who tried to castrate himself with a breadknife is in Burleigh, Death and Deliverance.

  Wilhelm Werner’s biography was researched and recounted by Röske and Rotzoll in “Doppeltes Opfer,” after his pictures reached the Prinzhorn collection in two groups, in 2008 and 2010. His sterilization would not have taken the form of castration, but he used amputated testicles as a motif for emasculation.

  The statistic that 2,500 people in the Freiburg-Emmendingen area were sterilized is from Gabriel Richter, “Chronik der Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Emmendingen (1913–1949),” in Richter (ed.), Die Fahrt ins Graue(n).

  The correspondence between Mathes and Bühler’s guardians is in the Prinzhorn archive. The letter from Mathes to Wilfried Seitz was written on November 7, 1935. Seitz (b. Mannheim, 1899) was a church financial officer in Offenburg until 1937; Hauke Marahrens, Praktizierte Staatskirchenhoheit im Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen, 2014).

  The eugenic dragnet launched in 1936 is addressed in Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, which also details how Hermann Pfannmüller worked. Note that though concentration camps were extremely violent places in 1936, they were not yet extermination camps.

  13. CLEANSING THE TEMPLE OF ART

  Goebbels noted the flight to Munich with Hitler in his diary, June 5 and 6 (Tagebücher). The account of what the Führer liked to do on these trips is drawn largely from Speer, a veteran of many such visits, in Inside the Third Reich.

  Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, describes the first Tag der deutschen Kunst, in 1933, including the speech by Hans Schemm. Hitler’s aim in creating the Haus der deutschen Kunst, according to Michaud, was to summon “the genius of the race to manifest its eternity in the present day through concrete productions…and to draw the German people there so that…it would at last awaken to its eternal creative essence.”

  Olaf Peters, “Genesis, Conception and Consequences,” in Peters (ed.), Degenerate Art, lists some of the nine jurors: In addition to Troost and Ziegler, they included the sculptors Karl Albiker, Joseph Wackerle, and Arno Breker, as well as the painters Conrad Hommel and Rudolf Hermann Eisenmenger, and Hans Schweitzer of the Reichskulturkammer, who, according to Rave (Kunstdiktatur im Dritten Reich), published not very penetrating caricatures in the völkisch press under the Old Norse pseudonym Mjölnir (Hammer). Nicholas, The Rape of Europa, states that Troost was “only too aware of what was not acceptable, but still not quite sure what was.”

  Marlies Schmidt reconstructs Hitler’s viewing in detail in “Die Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung 1937” using various contemporary sources, including those of Eisenmenger, “Erlebte Vorarbeiten zur Eröffnung des Hauses der Deutschen Kunst.” Schmidt writes that Hitler’s furious “performance” was widely reported in the Nazi press, implying that Hitler and Goebbels thought there was an advantage to him being seen to behave in such a way.

  Gerdy Troost’s “swoon” is recorded in Rave. Hitler’s threat to “disband the jury” is from Goebbels’s Tagebücher, June 7.

  Hitler’s slapping down of both factions of the party over their art ideas, “molesting people and giving them the shudders,” is in Brenner, who also records the demise of Schultze-Naumburg’s influence, and the sense that art in Germany was becoming little more than a political weapon, “without fixed aims, without political theory or principles, without educational program or ideology.”

  The New York Times pronounced that Hitler’s Germany was “back in the fold of nations” in “Olympics Leave Glow of Pride in the Reich,” August 14, 1936. The secret memorandum that was being written the same month is cited in Zuschlag, Entartete Kunst, as is Goebbels’s
diary entry of November 15, 1936.

  The closure of the Kronprinzenpalais’s upper floor is in Rave, Kunstdiktatur im Dritten Reich, and Alfred Werner, “Hitler’s Kampf against Modern Art.”

  Rave describes the art of Wolfgang Willrich, the author of Säuberung des Kunsttempels, as “boring, flaxen blond noble-race heads of noble women and heroes.” The volume is available online at https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/​diglit/​willrich1937/​0148/​scroll. Goebbels’s diary entry of June 11 reads: “Yesterday…Reading: Willrich ‘Cleansing the Temple of Art.’ It is also necessary and I will carry it out.” On June 30, he noted that the previous day he had “lunch at the Führer’s…Degenerate Art exhibition approved. Probably Munich. I have the authority to confiscate the relevant pieces in all the museums.” Later in the lunch, he noted, “Führer talks to me in detail about art. Goes his way with certainty.”

  Many of the details of the confiscation commission’s race around Germany, including the Führer order Goebbels gave to Ziegler on June 30, are in Zuschlag, Entartete Kunst. Rave wrote a detailed firsthand account of the commission’s visit to the Kronprinzenpalais in Kunstdiktatur im Dritten Reich.

  Heinrich Hoffmann, by all accounts a bumptious character inclined to alcoholism, recorded his experience of curating the Große deutsche Kunstausstellung in his memoir, Hitler Was My Friend. He includes a story in which he tried to sneak modern art into the exhibition, devoting one gallery “to the moderns” as a “surprise” for Hitler. The result was disastrous:

  When we entered it together, I confess my heart was beating a bit rapidly. Hitler looked at a picture by a well-known Munich artist. Then he turned to me. “Who hung this one?” he asked and his tone was not exactly friendly.

  “I did, Herr Hitler!”

  “And that one?”

  “Yes, Herr Hitler—I chose them all!”

  “Take the whole damned lot away,” he rasped and stomped angrily out of the room; and that was the end of my attempt to curry Hitler’s appreciation for modern art!

  Horrified descriptions of Hoffmann’s edit of the Große deutsche Kunstausstellung are everywhere. Nicholas is typical in writing that it was a “stultifying display carefully limited to idealized German peasant families, commercial art nudes, and heroic war scenes.” Goebbels, of course, took a contrary view in his Tagebücher entry for July 12.

  My description of the installation of the degenerate art show is based largely on Zuschlag, Entartete Kunst. Hitler’s preview visit was captured in three photographs.

  14. TO BE GERMAN MEANS TO BE CLEAR

  Stefan Schweizer describes the transformation of Munich, and Nazi attempts to legitimize their theories of race and Volksgemeinschaft by turning cities into stage sets, in “Unserer Weltanschauung sichtbaren Ausdruck geben.” Peter Guenther gave a firsthand account of the tableau in “Three Days in Munich.” Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, describes the remarkable kitsch of the Tag der deutschen Kunst parade, in which neoclassical figures were drawn along by horses covered in swastikas, in turn led by men in Teutonic costumes. Quotations from the program are cited in Marlies Schmidt, “Die Große deutsche Kunstausstellung 1937.” Photographs of the day can be found online in the German national archives (www.bild.bundesarchiv.de).

  My descriptions of the day’s speeches (Hitler’s lasted ninety minutes) are taken from Domarus and Hitler, Hitler; Schmidt, “Die ‘Große deutsche Kunstausstellung’ 1937”; Hanfstaengl, Hitler, the Missing Years; Rave, Kunstdiktatur im Dritten Reich; Luttichau, “Crazy at Any Price” (for Ziegler); and Alfred Werner, “Hitler’s Kampf against Modern Art.”

  According to Arieli-Horowitz, Romanticism of Steel, on July 18, 1937, Goebbels told the Völkischer Beobachter: “National Socialism had successfully held up against the danger that the fight against cultural Bolshevism would lead to the extreme opposite of national kitsch of the Biedermeier variety, which is petit bourgeois and lacking all novel form.” He also said that “[Hitler’s] whole creation is a sign of artistic views. His policy is built according to truly classic forms. The artistic leadership of his state places him according to his essence and character as the first of all German artists.” In fact, kitsch was exactly where Hitler’s artistic vision led. Alfred Werner cites a poem, a take-off on Goethe, about the Haus der deutschen Kunst, which ran as follows: “That high-roofed columned mansion, long ago, today with Blood and Soil is all aglow, and Ziegler’s naked wenches moon at you, O Art, poor thing, what have they done to you!”

  The figure of thirty thousand is based on Munich newspaper reports, according to Rave. The Munich leg of Entartete Kunst would receive two million visitors to the Große deutsche Kunstausstellung’s 420,000, according to official reports. Zuschlag, Entartete Kunst, accepts that these numbers are broadly accurate.

  Details of the Entartete Kunst show itself are from Zuschlag, Entartete Kunst, and from Stefanie Barron, “Degenerate Art,” which re-creates the entire exhibition, room by room, work by work, and which includes Peter Guenther’s account of his visit as a seventeen-year-old. Several of my translations are from this book. The Entartete Kunst flyer is available in various sources, including online at Alamy.de.

  Among the slogans daubed on the walls was Hitler’s pronouncement at the party rally in 1935: “It is not the mission of art to wallow in filth for filth’s sake, to paint the human being only in a state of putrefaction, to draw cretins as symbols of motherhood, or to present deformed idiots as representatives of manly strength.”

  Hitler and Goebbels’s visit to the Wagner festival, and their brainstorming of new ways to exploit the “degenerate” concept, is documented in Goebbels’s Tagebücher. The account of a new Nazi commission rifling the Nationalgalerie is in Rave, Kunstdiktatur.

  15. THE SACRED AND THE INSANE

  The résumé of attempts by modern artists to escape Hitler are culled from numerous sources, including Grosshans, Hitler and the Artists; Wikipedia; max-ernst.com; paulklee.net; kirchnermuseum.ch; and Petropoulos, Artists Under Hitler. Petropoulos makes the counterargument that several artists tried to seek accommodation with the regime in its early years, and argues that modernism did not entirely stop under Hitler, but “continued on, despite the often hostile environment.” He does state, however, that the German émigré community during the Third Reich represented “the greatest assemblage of cultural talent ever to leave a country.” The story of Nolde’s persecution by the regime, despite being a long-standing member of the NSDAP, and his odorless miniatures, is in Emil Nolde and Werner Haftmann, Emil Nolde: Unpainted Pictures. Haftmann argues in this volume that emigration had a considerable influence on the development of modern art, as German ideas spread all over the world.

  For more on Nazi eugenic propaganda, see Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, which includes a chapter devoted to the “killing films of the Third Reich.” The eugenicists’ infiltration of the education system was widespread. In some areas, teachers were co-opted into the scheme: They would ask pupils to draw their family trees as a way to identify branches of alleged “hereditarily ill” relatives. The arithmetic “problem” is cited in Richter, “Chronik der Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Emmendingen,” in Richter (ed.), Die Fahrt ins Graue(n). Klee gives an account of the Freiburg school outing to Emmendingen and of the essays the students wrote afterward in “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat. He also cites Wilhelm Hinsen, who resigned as director of Eichberg at the start of 1938 and was a witness in the postwar trial of Eichberg personnel. Bernotat’s announcement that directors should “beat [patients] to death” is in Friedlander, “Registering the Handicapped in Nazi Germany.”

  Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, has details of the violent “shock therapies”; it was Fritz Ast, the director of Eglfing-Haar, who made the comment that these treatments would prevent patients from becoming “costly ballast existences.” The statistics for those treated at Emmendingen are from Richter, “Chronik.” Kle
e reports on the hunger punishment and short rations in “Euthanasie” im Dritten Reich.

  Among sources for Schneider, I have largely drawn on Maike Rotzoll, Bettina Brand-Claussen, and Gerrit Hohendorf, “Carl Schneider, die Bildersammlung, die Künstler und der Mord,” in Fuchs et al. (eds.), Wahn Welt Bild (2002), and Rotzoll and Hohendorf’s “Murdering the Sick in the Name of Progress?,” in which the authors cite Werner Janzarik, a professor of psychiatry at Heidelberg in the 1970s and 1980s, describing his predecessor as a “petit bourgeois sort of scholar, uncertain in matters of good taste.” Schneider’s art speech, “Entartete Kunst und Irrenkunst,” was due to be given July 19, 1938, but never delivered. It was published in Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten in 1939.

  16. THE GIRL WITH THE BLUE HAIR

  The resistance of Göring and Rust to using the Kronprinzenpalais for Entartete Kunst in Berlin derives from Rave, cited in Zuschlag, Entartete Kunst. That the introduction of Prinzhorn works was the most significant change is supported by the press handout, “Information Sheet for Editors,” in Annegret Janda and Jörn Grabowski, Kunst in Deutschland 1905–1937 and Klee’s “Euthanasie” im Dritten Reich. It is not clear whose idea it was to include the Heidelberg material: Possible candidates include Goebbels, Schneider, Pistauer, Fritz Kaiser (the Propaganda Ministry functionary charged with producing the guidebook), and Hitler himself. Pistauer’s recollections of his visit were given to Zuschlag almost five decades after the event, on March 10, 1990; this short, remarkable interview is in Entartete Kunst.