Not only did Goebbels largely replace the supervisory boards of Ufa and Tobis, he also involved himself directly in these companies’ productions:112 He reserved the right to approve the acquisition of individual artists;113 made casting decisions;114 assigned directing contracts; imposed bans on filming115 and directing;116 and evaluated screenplays.117 In short, he was determined “to intervene more firmly in film production by giving orders.”118 At the end of July 1937 he forbade “this everlasting singsong in entertainment films,” and he tasked Demandowsky with “cutting out never-never settings from films.”119
A few days later, angry at the “lack of quality in film,” Goebbels pulled a few directors off various projects.120 Obviously alarmed by Hitler’s “very stinging verdict” on these “bad films,”121 he summoned the heads of production and the artistic directors of the film companies and complained about “recent banal and uninspired kitsch films.”122 He ordered that films from the Weimar period in which “Jews are still to be seen” should be banned “lock, stock, and barrel.”123 He also set about the “de-jewification [Entjudung] of film exports”: The Party’s organization abroad ought to intervene in film sales to foreign countries.124 Together with Demandowsky he compiled a list of actors, directors, and screenwriters who were especially worth backing.125 He made a sustained effort (though clearly without striking success) to develop guidelines to limit salaries.126 He also developed his own subject matter: He closely supervised the production of the “autobahn film” Die Stimme aus dem Äther (The Voice from the Ether).127 In 1939 he developed an idea for a “press film”; the project, never realized, went under the working title “Die 7. Grossmacht” (The Seventh Great Power).128
Goebbels pronounced a mainly negative verdict on the “national-political” films that were made before the takeover of the big studios and reached the cinemas in the early months of 1937.129 The anticommunist films made in 1936–37 were not biting enough for him either.130 He was boundlessly enthusiastic—admittedly, after a good many improvements had been made to the screenplay131—about the film Patrioten (Patriots; his lover Lida Baarová starred in it), as he also was about Veit Harlan’s Der Herrscher (The Ruler), a picture about a captain of industry with a social conscience who bequeaths his capital to the state.132 Among the films appearing later in the year, he liked, up to a point, the satire Mein Sohn der Herr Minister133 (My Son the Minister) and the First World War epic Unternehmen Michael (Operation Michael), but he had reservations about both films.134 However, there was no end to his praise for Urlaub auf Ehrenwort (Leave on Parole).135 On the other hand, the project of a film “about Spain” that he was promoting came to nothing,136 as did an anticlerical Lola Montez film.137
In mid-1937 he managed to add the film company Terra to his stable.138 He wanted originally to liquidate Bavaria Film in Munich, but—with Hitler’s support and against Goebbels’s will—Gauleiter Adolf Wagner pushed through a re-founding of the company early in 1938 in order to preserve filmmaking in Munich.139
Goebbels now continued to pursue his objective of steering the film companies’ productions with the help of “artistic committees,” designed as a counterweight to the supervisory boards, with their predominantly commercial interests. At Ufa, this role was taken on by the director Carl Froelich and the actors Mathias Wieman and Paul Hartmann;140 at Tobis141 there were Emil Jannings and Willi Forst (Gustave Gründgens once again declined on grounds of overcommitment);142 and at Terra, most notably, Heinrich George.143 Yet complaints soon proliferated in Goebbels’s diary about the ineffectiveness of this system.144 While the number of filmgoers continued to rise in 1937, production costs were spiraling out of control, and film exports continued the steep decline that had begun in 1933.145
By the end of 1937 Goebbels was becoming increasingly critical of film production,146 and after a long discussion with Demandowsky he came to a terse and sobering conclusion: “Our films are just very bad.”147 At the end of November he gave a talk to leading film people to point out “mistakes and failings.”148 The comedies produced in the following few months he found particularly unappealing.149
In general it is striking that film production in 1938–39 was not primarily concerned with preparing for war: Only a handful of films from each year dealt with political themes. Neither do Goebbels’s diary entries suggest that he wanted to use film purposefully and extensively as psychological preparation for war.150
Apart from his direct influence on the film companies, Goebbels was ambitious to secure the quality of filmmaking in the long run by nurturing talent. In March 1938 he established the cornerstone of a film academy in Babelsberg.151 Within a two-year course of study, the training of future specialists in the artistic, technical, and financial aspects of cinema was to be carried out by three faculties.152 But Goebbels was soon expressing doubts about the head of the academy, Wilhelm Müller-Scheldt. Most of all he objected to Müller-Scheldt’s admissions policy,153 so he issued “a clear directive to select candidates suited to our time and our taste, i.e. beautiful women and manly men.”154
At the end of 1938 Goebbels concluded that the system of artistic committees he had been sponsoring so far was unproductive.155 After lengthy consultations156 he placed heads of production in all the film companies, to whom he issued instructions directly,157 in order at last to achieve total control over the production companies.158 In March 1937, in a further speech to filmmakers, Goebbels gave his reasons for appointing “independently responsible heads of production” and ending the experiment of artistic committees: The committees had not been able to prevail against the supervisory boards, representing as they did narrow financial concerns.159
Yet despite all his efforts, in June 1939 Hitler pronounced himself still “somewhat dissatisfied,” and Goebbels decided to take the problem in hand by changing the heads of production where appropriate.160 The propaganda minister continued to be skeptical about the effectiveness of his far-reaching interference in the German film industry, but at the same time he was not prepared to admit to himself the reasons for this. For all his general demand for improvements to the quality of pictures and for all his hectic giving of “orders” to the film industry and his personal intervention, Goebbels the film tycoon had not been able to give the huge conglomerate he had been running for two years clear and practical guidelines for adapting their film production in the medium term. An industry in which the gestation of a film normally took a year, from conception to finished product, could not be steered by “orders” and interventions à la Goebbels.
“GERMAN” AND “DEGENERATE” ART
In summer 1937 Goebbels was completely taken up with the reorientation of German art. His diary entries show clearly how strenuously he tried in these months to adjust to the dictator’s taste in art. Hitler, for his part, was evidently eager to put his propaganda minister (who in the early phase of the regime had not entirely rejected “modern” artistic tendencies as a matter of principle) on the right track by his very own efforts.
Goebbels flew with Hitler in June to Munich to view the almost-completed “Führer building” on the Königsplatz as well as the recently finished House of German Art. Together with his propaganda minister, Hitler went on to inspect the works chosen by a jury headed by the president of the Reich Chamber of Fine Art, Adolf Ziegler, for display in the “Great German Art Exhibition” with which the building was to be opened. Hitler was appalled, as Goebbels noted: “They’ve hung works here that make your flesh creep. […] The Führer is seething with rage.”161
The next day—they were both en route to Regensburg by now—Hitler returned to the subject: He would rather postpone the exhibition for a year than “display such muck.”162 Eventually Hitler decided to reduce the number of works to five hundred and left the selection to his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann.163
Alongside the Great German Art Exhibition intended to represent art in the Third Reich, in 1937 Goebbels planned an “Exhibition of Art from the Age of Decadence.” Init
ially meant for Berlin, it was moved to Munich. It was precisely the difficulties that had arisen over the selection of works for the Great German Art Exhibition that made it seem appropriate to define in a parallel exhibition exactly what art was not wanted in the Third Reich.164
At the end of June Goebbels gained Hitler’s official approval for the plan. The exhibition was to be curated by Ziegler and Schweitzer, although Hitler forcibly expressed his reservations about the former Angriff caricaturist.165 In order to requisition the relevant works, Goebbels gave Ziegler special permission, on the basis of “specially conferred Führer-powers,” to “take custody” of works of art from any public museum in Germany that fit his description of “German decadent art since 1910.”166 In haste, the commission in July 1937 visited thirty-two collections in twenty-eight towns, and requisitioned seven hundred works of art.167
This looting of art museums represented an affront to Education Minister Rust, with whom Goebbels was on a war footing. The offense was compounded by the fact that on Goebbels’s initiative artists shown in the Munich “Decadence Exhibition” were branded as “degenerate” even though they were teaching at state art schools or were members of the Prussian Academy of Fine Art.168 Goebbels’s strategy was clear: Rust was to be pushed into an untenable defensive position in the area of culture policy and his academy forced to close down, so that Goebbels could set up a “German Academy” under his own direction. Thus the threatened loss of prestige with Hitler over the business of the Munich art exhibition would be compensated for by a brilliant success.169
At the beginning of July the Goebbels family began their vacation preparations: They were off to Heiligendamm again. While Goebbels was supervising the packing in his Berlin house, he received a surprise call: “Führer’s on the phone: Wants to visit us on Schwanenwerder.” So the Goebbelses drove with their children back to Schwanenwerder to enjoy “a wonderful afternoon out there with the Führer.”170
The next day, July 3, the Goebbels family flew to the Baltic: “Wonderful rest. And I certainly need it,” confided Goebbels to his diary.171 After the family had just gotten settled in at Heiligendamm, there was another change in their vacation plans. Hitler urged them by phone to spend their vacation with him on the Obersalzberg; an invitation to do so had already gone out a few weeks earlier.172 So they packed up again and—with a short stop in Berlin—flew to Bavaria.173
The Goebbels family arrived on the Obersalzberg on July 9, where Hitler, as Goebbels recorded with pride, was “already waiting [for them] on the steps.”174 The following days were passed in all sorts of conversations, card games, and the obligatory home cinema. But the real reason for the pressing invitation was that Hitler wanted to instruct his propaganda minister thoroughly on the required direction of travel in cultural policy. On July 11 Hitler went with Goebbels to Munich; this time, Hitler was much happier about the works chosen for the Great German Art Exhibition.
On July 12 Goebbels left the Obersalzberg to fly to Berlin; Magda and the children stayed on in Berchtesgaden. On July 16 he flew back to Munich175 to visit, together with Hitler, the “Exhibition of Degenerate Art,” which opened a few days later in the Hofgarten Arcades, not far from the House of German Art. The show displayed six hundred works, including those by Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Otto Dix, Paul Klee, George Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Lyonel Feininger, and Franz Marc. In order to reduce the impact of the paintings, they were hung very close together, with an effect of randomness; titles of and commentaries to the pictures were written on the walls. By the end of November 1937, over two million people had seen this exhibition.176
After their joint visit to the exhibition, Goebbels spoke in Hitler’s presence at the annual conference of the Reich Chamber of Fine Art, and took part the next day, July 18, in the grand opening of the House of German Art.177 In the specially commissioned opening exhibition there were 1,200 predominantly conventional works of art on display, which, however, scarcely lived up to the exhibition’s claim to be the artistic expression of National Socialism and, in terms of quality, to continue the tradition of nineteenth-century art. But how could this claim possibly have been fulfilled?
What was on display were overwhelmingly historical and genre pieces, monumental landscapes, various “blood and soil” motifs, heroic representations of an “awakening” Germany, and portraits of the Führer. In Hitler’s and Goebbels’s opening speeches, there were signs of dissatisfaction with what was on display,178 which did not prevent Goebbels and Magda from acquiring pictures for the total value of 50,000 Reichsmarks on behalf of the Propaganda Ministry.179
Some months later, at the annual conference of the Reich Culture Chamber, Goebbels was even more open about the lack of quality in Nazi art, with regard not only to pictorial art but also to literature. The “great ideological ideas” of the National Socialist revolution, he said, had “for the moment such a spontaneous and eruptive effect […] that they are not yet ready for artistic treatment. The problems are too fresh and too new to lend themselves to artistic, dramatic, or fictional form. We must wait for the next generation to take on this task.”180
Taking what we may call the “lack of maturity” of Nazi art into account, it is not hard to see why Goebbels and Hitler opened both exhibitions almost in parallel. Since official cultural policy had trouble providing examples of what the new “national-socialist” art was supposed to be, it had to fall back on help from an exhibition showing what “decadence” in art was.
At the end of July Hitler declared himself pleased with the success of the Degenerate Art exhibition and ordered a catalogue to be published.181 The exhibition stayed in Munich until November and was then sent on tour around Germany: to Berlin first of all, where it could be seen for three months in 1938, after Goebbels himself had made a few changes.182
At the end of July, Hitler had given Ziegler the job of thoroughly “cleansing” the German art museums once and for all of these incriminating works of art. On his own initiative, Goebbels had already handed him the same assignment just a few days earlier.183 Ziegler’s commission then scoured the galleries, and presented the requisitioned works to Goebbels in November 1938.184 What he had in mind for them became clear at the end of 1938: “The saleable pictures will be sold abroad, the others collected together in horror exhibitions or destroyed.”185 Goebbels had begun to put requisitioning on a legal footing by January 1938. The law on taking possession of “degenerate art” products gave the power to requisition to a commission headed by him; the selected works were subsequently sold on the international art market.186
One of his appointments indicates how determined Goebbels was to adhere rigidly to Hitler’s taste in art: In autumn 1937 he made Franz Hofmann head of the Fine Art Department in the Propaganda Ministry. Hofmann was a hard-liner in artistic matters, who among other things had made a name for himself as art critic of the Völkischer Beobachter and had been a member of Ziegler’s commission since August 1937.187 Ever since 1934, when Goebbels was obliged to withdraw his first appointee, Weidemann, the Fine Art Department of his ministry had been leading a shadowy existence.188 In December 1937, furthermore, Goebbels ordered that foreign art exhibitions in Germany would in future require approval from him: Quite obviously, he wanted to close this kind of backdoor access for undesirable art.189
“DEGENERATE MUSIC”
In the early years of the regime, Rosenberg’s doctrinaire policies had caused the propaganda minister several setbacks in the area of music. Rosenberg had managed to force Richard Strauss to resign as president of the Reich Music Chamber, and his uncompromising rejection of the composer Hindemith had not only induced the latter to emigrate but also led Goebbels to oppose Furtwängler and remove him from his position as deputy leader of the Reich Music Chamber. Moreover, Rosenberg’s National Socialist Cultural Community had brought large parts of German musical life under its control. It functioned as concert organizer, coordinator of guest appearances and music c
ongresses, and publisher of the most important musical journal; it also supported its own record-listening circle.190
It was not until 1936 that Goebbels set up a separate music department in his ministry and appointed the conductor Heinz Drewes to lead it.191 Goebbels now attempted to strengthen his position in musical life. In autumn 1937, having assigned Drewes the task of “bringing the people to music,” he sought to strengthen Drewes’s position vis-à-vis the Reich Music Chamber, which since 1935 had been chaired by the conductor and musicologist Peter Raabe, a National Socialist.192 At the end of 1937 Drewes founded a Reich music office as a central censorship authority for music publishing.193
In spring 1938 Goebbels made a public bid for a leading role in music policy. On May 28, 1938, he gave a talk at the opening of the “Degenerate Music” exhibition, a ceremony introduced by Richard Strauss’s Festive Prelude, conducted by the composer in person.194 The opening of the show, based like the “Degenerate Art” exhibition on an initiative of Ziegler’s and reworked by Goebbels before the opening,195 pertained to the first “Reich Music Days” organized by the Music Chamber. The exhibition denounced “atonality” in music as “degenerate” or “Jewish” and held up the composers Schönberg, Berg, Hindemith, Weill, and Stravinsky as particularly horrifying examples.
Goebbels began his opening speech196 with a summary of achievements meant to demonstrate the upturn in German musical life since 1933. He emphasized that the precondition for this upswing was the “de-jewification” of the German music scene, especially the elimination of “Jewish music criticism.”
He seized the opportunity to make a statement of intent, sketching out the future direction of German music under the heading of “Ten Principles of Music Creation.” Initially, these consisted of a whole litany of clichés: “To be unmusical is the same for a musical person as being blind or deaf. […] Music is the art that most profoundly moves the human soul. […] The language of notes is sometimes more effective than the language of words,” and so on. In general, what Goebbels’s “principles” amounted to was a commitment to “popular music.” Goebbels made the point, among others, that there was a place for “the kind of entertainment music that is acceptable to the broad masses.” The equation of entertainment with popularity allowed Goebbels to spread an ideological fog. If music arose from “mysterious and profound forces rooted in the national character,” then it could only be “formed and wielded by children of the people in accordance with the needs and the untamed musical drive of the nation.” This naturally meant grasping that “Judaism and German music” were “opposites,” which “by their nature contradict each other in the starkest manner.” Inevitably, a reference to Richard Wagner’s publication Judaism in Music followed from this. Goebbels’s “principles” ended with a paean of praise for Hitler, who had “torn German music from the threat of decadence” and for whom music represented an “essential life element.”
Goebbels: A Biography Page 43