HOW DID NAZISM AFFECT THE ARTS AND MEDIA?

Weimar Art

One of the key features of a totalitarian state that distinguishes it from being just an authoritarian regime is the state’s ambitious goal to control every detail of an individual’s cultural life. Free time, free expression and artistic freedom, are freedoms that the totalitarian state cannot tolerate. As Hitler put it on the opening of the ‘Degenerate Art Show’ in Munich in 1937:

From now on we shall wage a remorseless war of cleansing against the last elements of the subversion of our culture ... But now – I will assure you here – all those cliques of chatterers, dilettantes and art-frauds who puff each other up and so keep each other going, will be caught and removed. As far as we're concerned, these prehistorical, antediluvian cultural stone-agers and art-stutterers can go back to their ancestral caves to carry on their international scrawlings there

Nazi cultural policy was an extension of the state propaganda machine discussed earlier. The Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda had seven departments to oversee propaganda and censorship. (Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, RMVP). Their role was to prevent the production, publication and dissemination of art that the regime did not value, and to invest resources, time and effort to the art that it did.

Art requires an audience. If the authoritarian state controls access to that audience, if it can control who can publish, exhibit, broadcast and distribute, then it can effectively control the art itself. The Weimar years had seen Germany, and Berlin in particular, become the European centre of the artistic avant-garde: expressionist art and cinematography, jazz and cabaret clubs, Bauhaus modernism and atonal music, anti-war literature and Jewish intellectuals led the way. Central to the Nazi Weltanschauung was a belief that cosmopolitan, ‘Jewish’, Weimar culture had been a corrupting influence of the German national psyche and must be removed. Censorship was therefore a central strategy of Nazi artistic policy.

The ‘burning of the books’ of May 1933 (Figure 1) was a symbolic beginning to the policy of undermining artistic independence. Many artists were expelled or voluntarily left the country, including the conductor Otto Klemperer, the composer Schoenberg and the singer and actress Marlene Dietrich. Fritz Lang, the director of the science fiction masterpiece Metropolis, was directing films in Hollywood by 1936. The list of intellectuals, especially Jews, who left Nazi Germany is very long and includes the physicist Albert Einstein, the author Thomas Mann and the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno. Books were banned, art was removed from galleries and music concerts featuring Jewish composers including Mahler and Mendelssohn were denied performance licences.
The single most famous example of the war on the Weimar avant-garde was the Entartete Kunst(Degenerate Art) Exhibition in Munich in 1937. The exhibition presented 650 works of art, that according to the Nazis ‘insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill’, all of which had been confiscated from German museums. One million people attended the exhibition in its first six weeks.

eXHIBITION OF DEGENERATE ART (1937)

Engineering human souls

For any totalitarian regime, it is not enough to merely censor unacceptable works of art. Just as important is the promotion of an aesthetic that fulfils the cultural goals of the movement. Until he found his calling as a soldier and demagogue, Hitler had been an artist. His years in Vienna before the war were spent avoiding paid work, painting and going to the opera. Perhaps more than any other aspect of domestic policy, Nazi cultural policy reflected the personal influence of the Führer himself. The Wagnerian Bayreuth Festival, which turned a minority interest event into a national festival, was typical of Hitler’s influence. In Vienna, he had regularly attended a performance of Wagner every night, even if that left little or no money for food. His taste in visual arts and architecture was conservative and classical; the Nazi patronage of the sculptor Arno Breker typified this. Breker designed two massive male nudes to be placed for the Reich Chancellery. As Richard J. Evans explains, ‘Breker's sculptures became the hallmark of the public artistic taste of the Third Reich’ and they were ‘unthinkingly physical, aggressive, ready for war’ (The Third Reich in Power). Breker became both a national hero and very rich, thanks to the Nazis.

Many historians argue that their cultural policies were among the most effective of the Nazi regime. Being able to divert almost limitless funds to artistic and cultural projects enables authoritarian states to produce artefacts that would not be possible where there are normal commercial limits. As we have already seen, filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will was a massive logistical exercise, well beyond the possibilities of any commercial studio at that time. Both the form and content of her work exemplified the celebration of authoritarianism. But it also made it possible for her to pioneer cinematographic techniques that are still admired and continue to influence filmmaking, including George Lucas’ Star Wars.

Even more significant was the role of the DAF, which through the ‘Strength Through Joy’ (KdF) organisation used its control of the arts to democratise culture that was traditionally the preserve of the elite. Artistic forms with high production costs such as touring classical ballet and orchestras could benefit from significant state subsidies, because of the propaganda role such prestigious cultural organisations might take. The KdF had its own ninety-piece symphony orchestra which continually toured the country: in 1938 over two and a half million people attended their concerts. One observer pointed out that the KdF 'made available at bargain rates tickets to the theatre, the opera and concerts, thus making available more highbrow entertainment to the labouring man.'