Hitler's Last Hostages Page 14
After the rally, Hitler enacted the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, creating separate citizenship levels for Jews and giving the state increased control over the lives of “deficient” humans.
The law was drafted by the party’s advisors and presented to the Führer in short summaries because Hitler “disliked reading files,” recorded his adjunct, Hans Wiedemann.84 Hitler set the broad principles of what he wanted—a process dubbed “working toward the Führer.” Individual pieces of legislative discrimination were often created without his direct involvement—but he had pointed the way.85
Once the laws had been passed, the NSDAP entered a ten-month legislative lull to prepare for the 1936 Olympics. Hitler originally loathed the idea of hosting the spectacle; it was anathema to think that that non-Aryans could be fit to challenge the master race. Goebbels encouraged the Olympics, however, as a way to make Germany appear tolerant to those worried about the nation’s increasingly bigoted policies and expanding army.
In the months before the Olympics, Putzi Hanfstaengl worked diligently as the Führer’s international spin doctor to cultivate the image of Hitler as a cultured artist-statesman. He arranged for the publication of profiles in the United States beginning in the second half of 1935. Colorful features and portraits of the Führer began to show up on the coffee tables of American houses. Life magazine featured a photo spread of “candid” pictures of Hitler wrestling with his German Shepherd, working at his desk, reading a newspaper in his Berghof solarium, and wearing “a checked coat that might be the envy of the Prince of Wales.”86
A New York Times article praised Hitler’s love of eighteenth-century German artists and his excellent taste in color schemes, his present preference being for blue, white, and gold. The New York Times Magazine upped the ante with a glowing profile titled “Hitler His Own Architect,” praising the dictator’s love of a green color scheme at the Berghof, where he had hung a picture of his mother in his bedroom, tended baby cacti, cultivated cherry trees, and sketched. The magazine writer generously and inaccurately described Munich as “the Mecca of German art, where Hitler went in 1912 to study architecture.”87
In the meantime, Hitler ordered the Nazi diehards to stay civil no matter the circumstances in the run-up to and during the Olympics, and they duly complied, even refraining from protesting when a Jewish European activist assassinated Swiss Nazi leader Wilhelm Gustloff in February.
After the Olympics, Goebbels and Hitler returned to preparing for the summer 1937 opening of the Great German Art Exhibition. In mid-January 1937, German newspapers published a call to German artists at home and abroad to submit artworks. Hopefuls submitted a staggering 15,000 pieces.
Paul Troost, the House of German Art’s original architect, had died in January 1934 at only fifty-five years old, a premature death that he superstitiously predicted after Hitler’s silver hammer broke at the Foundation Stone Ceremony. His thirty-three-year-old wife, skilled fellow architect Gerdy Troost, had taken over the project with Hitler’s full confidence and support and completed the building in April 1937. Architecturally speaking, this building, meant to embody Hitler’s regressive art program, was one of the world’s most progressive museum structures. It featured a layout that enabled the display of large-scale works within a structure that had a clear, unique style but, unlike many museums, did not threaten to upstage the artworks. It was imposing but streamlined; its colonnade supporting the roof evoked classical Greece and Rome but used simple lines for a modern feel.
The 55,000 square feet of floor space and 19,000 square feet of wall space were generous but not cavernous.88 Troost concealed wiring and pipes for modern functions including heating, ventilation, and lighting to create a clean atmosphere, also creating space for automatic fire alarms to avoid a disaster like the one that had destroyed the Glaspalast. She installed elevators to aid the elderly, injured war veterans, and those bringing children, all radically progressive measures at the time.89 Two bronze inscriptions above the entrance, however, managed to convey a message both inspiring and menacing: “Art is a sublime mission, which necessitates fanaticism” and “No person lives longer than the documents of his culture.”90
“The building is fabulously beautiful. One day it will be counted among the truly great buildings of our epoch,” wrote Goebbels.91 In May, Goebbels formed a selection jury that included Gerdy Troost and six artists, including forty-four-year-old Adolf Ziegler, known among Nazis as the “master of pubic hair” for his painstakingly clinical depictions of genitalia in supposedly romantic paintings of nudes.92
On reviewing the submitted artworks in early June, the jury mortifyingly realized that the expulsion of controversial artists and dealers from the Reich Chamber of Culture in the early 1930s, along with the lack of specifics from Hitler on what constituted “good” art, had produced a particularly mediocre submission pool. The would-be Great German Artists were largely a dully homogenous group of older men who showed few new techniques. If artists continued to work in this vein, the panel realized with alarm, German culture would surely atrophy, incapable of rising to the level that Hitler had prophesied.
“The sculptures are passable, but the paintings are in some cases outright catastrophic,” complained Goebbels upon seeing the selection. “The Führer is wild with rage,” he added. The review session challenged Goebbels’s relatively liberal taste in art and preferences for Nolde and Barlach. More broadly, it exposed the reality that, with diverse artistic viewpoints now silenced, the definition of what constituted the genre of Great German Art risked becoming lifeless.93 Sulking on a train with Goebbels on 7 June, Hitler railed against the jury. “Would rather postpone the Munich exhibition a year than exhibit such crap,” Goebbels noted in his diary as Hitler fumed.94 Ultimately, Hitler tapped Heinrich Hoffmann, his personal photographer, to cull a new selection from the submitted works, a task the fifty-one-year-old embarked upon with focused efficiency.
Mulling over how to improve the opening of the House of German Art and its inaugural Great German Art Exhibition, Goebbels spontaneously proposed to Hitler that they organize a Degenerate Art Exhibition to open concurrently, holding it near the House of German Art. By doing so, Goebbels reasoned, the Nazis would send a clear message that professional artists now belonged to one of two opposing camps: good artists and Degenerate Artists.
Hitler agreed, giving Goebbels less than a month to curate an exhibition that would damn the futures of dozens of artists who had prospered before 1933. Though German artists, including Nolde and Pechstein, had hoped to obtain the status of Great German Artist, this now created the possibility that they would be not merely left out of that exclusive circle but defamed by the Führer and exposed to the entire nation as degenerate, their livelihoods ruined. Goebbels enlisted the aid of Adolf Ziegler, an original jury member for the Great German Art selection whom Hitler admired for his painstakingly detailed nudes. With only weeks to prepare, the pair frantically worked to assemble a list of artists whose artwork they could vilify as examples of the type of degeneracy that Hitler was eliminating from his Third Reich. Ziegler was tireless, canvassing thirty-two collections in twenty-eight towns and selecting 650 artworks.95
On 9 July, as Ziegler was zipping around the country to find Degenerate Art and Hoffmann was evaluating approved works in Munich for the exhibition of Great German Artists, Goebbels drove to the Berghof with his wife, three daughters, and son to visit the Führer for a working vacation. As they pulled up to the house, Hitler was already waiting to see them. He gregariously greeted daughters Hildegard and Holdine and the only boy, Helmut, but he positively doted on the oldest, the precocious four-year-old Helga, who was his favorite. Over the next few days, the group played cards, watched movies in Hitler’s home cinema, and jubilantly discussed the upcoming exhibitions.96 Heading to Munich, Goebbels and Hitler reviewed the new selection of 884 works by 556 artists that Hoffmann had chosen. “The selected pictures are now very beautiful, even better than the scul
ptures,” Goebbels told his diary contentedly. “The Führer is very happy.”97 The man who had been rejected by Vienna’s Akademie der Künste was about to preside over the Third Reich’s determination of what was and was not great art. He accepted only 6 percent of applicants, a lower admission rate than the year he had applied to the academy.
The Great German Art Exhibition opened on 18 July, and the festivities kicked off with a gaudy parade stretching over seven kilometers and featuring 456 horses. The parade’s 6,403 participants paid tribute to 2,000 years of German history by dressing up in elaborate costumes from various epochs.98 Standing in front of a crowd of admirers, under blue skies that compliant journalists increasingly referred to as “Hitler weather,” the Führer ruminated on the 1933 groundbreaking ceremony for the House of German Art, ignoring the silver hammer fiasco.
“At the festive laying of the foundation stone for this building four years ago, we were all aware that not only the stone for a new house was to be laid but that the ground had to be prepared for a new and truly German art,” Hitler shouted.99 Weimar officials had neglected Germany’s cultural past and jeopardized her future, he said. “Yet with the opening of this exhibition the end of the mockery of German art and thus of the cultural destruction of our people has begun.” Then, using language that ominously echoed the words and phrases he used to justify genocide, Hitler concluded, “From now on, we will wage a pitiless, purifying war against the last elements of our cultural decay.”100 Goebbels was ecstatic. “An ecstasy of forms. Wonderful. We are all deeply moved. Most of all the Führer,” he chronicled.101
Adolf Ziegler, who had been on Hitler’s panel, had five works in the Great German Art Exhibition. One of them, The Four Elements, was Ziegler’s most famous; it featured four nude women with the painstakingly painted, almost clinically depicted pubic hair for which Ziegler was known.
The following day, on 19 July, the Degenerate Art Exhibition opened at the Hofgarten Arcades a few minutes from the House of German Art. Adolf Ziegler was chosen by Hitler and Goebbels to introduce it. He did so by effectively chastising German museums for having wasted the hard-earned savings of the German people on artworks.
A few days after the opening of both exhibitions, a seventeen-year-old named Peter Guenther came to Munich from Dresden, leaving with razor sharp memories of both exhibitions that he wrote down for posterity. Guenther’s father was a culture critic whom the Nazis had banned in 1935 because his second wife, Guenther’s stepmother, was Jewish. Growing up, Guenther had revered modern art, pasting reproductions of van Gogh’s artworks on his wall. Entering the House of German Art, he was struck by how quiet it was, despite the crowds. Visitors whispered, as if in a church. “It was obviously due to the semi-ecclesiastical atmosphere created by the size of the rooms, their decor, the impressive lighting, and the careful placement of the exhibits,” Guenther observed.102
At Hitler’s insistence, the exhibition featured none of Hitler’s own artworks and only seven portraits and five busts of the Führer.103 As the Nazi Party considered itself the church’s replacement, Christian art was absent, though the Nazis appropriated Christian symbolism and motifs. One such painting was by Hermann Otto Hoyer, an artist so obscure that he had never before been reviewed or profiled in the media. Hoyer painted the remarkably photorealistic In the Beginning was the Word, which depicts Hitler giving a speech to a small, rapt audience; the painting’s title, taken from the first line of the gospel of John, underscored the Nazis’ view of Hitler as a Christlike savior.
The first room in the Great German Art Exhibition featured three works arranged as a triad. In the middle was a portrait of Hitler by Heinrich Knirr, a seventy-four-year-old Austrian who depicted the Führer in a traditional statesman’s pose, sporting a brown uniform with a swastika armband and wearing his Great War medals, his hand on his hip and his body unrealistically buff. On the left hung The Last Hand Grenade by forty-five-year-old Elk Eber, who hailed from the Bavarian border with Austria. The work showed a soldier with huge hands, about to toss his final weapon, gazing reverently out of the frame toward Knirr’s toned Führer. On the right hung Eber’s Roll Call on 23 February 1933, in which a pair of strapping young Nazis are buttoning their brownshirt uniforms.
The next room housed Comradeship, a massive, homoerotic statue by Josef Thorak, a forty-eight-year-old Austrian who was Hitler’s favorite sculptor. Two naked men with rippling muscles, holding hands placed over the left man’s genitals, towered over the exhibition’s visitors. Peter Guenther was unimpressed: “I thought that they were intentionally attempting to imitate famous Greek sculptures I knew from books, but they lacked the grandeur and quiet balance that I considered to be the hallmarks of that art.”104 Busts of Mussolini, Atatürk, and Nazi leaders flanked Thorak’s statue.
Guenther wandered into the room featuring the exhibition’s most revered paintings. Ziegler’s Four Elements was spotlighted, showing four female nudes staring off listlessly. Nearby hung a work by Sepp Hilz, one of the youngest featured artists. Hilz’s work showed a country peasant undressing in her room, a thick red-and-white striped sock still on her foot. The nudes struck Guenther as “bland” and clinical. The proportions, even to a layman, appeared preposterous. The models’ shoulders were broader than their barely existent hips, their breasts were spaced wide apart, their chests seemed to have male dimensions, and their necks, though slender, supported heads that corresponded with the typical size of men’s heads. “It was not that I had been brought up a prude: on the contrary, my mother was very much in favor of anything healthy and natural,” noted Guenther. Natural these women were not.105 Ultimately, Guenther sought out works that were appealing due to their “unpretentiousness,” including a bronze of wild ducks by fifty-two-year-old Max Esser and a bronze of a young maiden playing the recorder by forty-eight-year-old Hermann Geibel.
In contrast with the stagnant, even backward content of the work, the young Guenther recognized that the exhibition’s layout and the museum’s architecture were trailblazing. A clearly marked red line guided visitors through forty rooms that ended at a modern gourmet restaurant with an electric kitchen and a bar—innovations in 1937. Floor runners created a clean look, and the works were well hung with enough space to view each piece in comfort. Rather than distracting wall placards, cards with information about each piece could be viewed in the middle of each room at comfortable benches perfectly suited for a quick rest.
As he left the exhibition, Guenther noticed a red card tucked into his complementary exhibition catalogue advertising the Degenerate Art Exhibition. “Check it out! Judge for yourself!” it said, so he made the short walk to the Hofgarten Arcades, sneaking in because minors were technically banned from the exhibition. In contrast to the stellar layout of the Great German Art Exhibition, the rooms of the archeology institute in the Hofgarten were narrow, the ceilings low, and the works badly lighted, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere.106 The dozen wall texts in a large, messy font carried slogans rather than information, including “Crazy at any price!” and “Even museum bigwigs called this ‘art of the German people’!”107 Adolf Ziegler had organized the show into nine themes: generally inferior color or form, blasphemy, anarchy, insults to the military, sexually deviancy, misrepresentation of nonwhites as fully human, positive depictions of the mentally and physically disabled, Jewish artists, and evil “isms”: Dadaism, Cubism, and Expressionism. Though Germans would quickly come to refer to the exhibition as one of degenerate Jewish art, only 6 of the 112 condemned artists were actually Jewish. Most of the doomed artists actually were Aryan.
In creating the show, the Nazis prioritized the shaming of artists who were still alive. Max Liebermann, the most prominent Jewish German artist of the era and the creator of Two Riders on the Beach, had already died in 1935—a man who had become seriously depressed after his fellow artists removed him as honorary president of the Academy of Arts. With Liebermann’s once popular works already banned and now largely forgotten, Goebbels had no
inclination or incentive to reignite interest in him.
The artists whom Goebbels had admired before Hitler’s rise to power suffered the most, as the Propaganda Minister was eager to prove his unquestioning loyalty to the Führer’s vision. The exhibition’s first room, which focused on religious art, removed any doubt about whether Goebbels had accepted Emil Nolde’s anti-Semitic gamble. There, the teenage Guenther observed works by the sixty-nine-year-old artist who had until then been so revered in Germany. Spanning an entire wall was Nolde’s Life of Christ triptych, next to which the Nazis had scrawled the wall text “Insolent Mockery of the Divine Under Centrist Rule.”108 Overall, thirty-six artworks by Nolde were on display in the exhibition, more than by any other artist.
In the third room, which focused on the ambiguous theme “Revelation of the Jewish Racial Soul,” sat the bronze statue Christ and John by Ernst Barlach, whom Goebbels had admired as a young man. Born after the Great War, the high schooler Guenther was particularly confused to see artworks that confronted the trauma of the Great War in a way that he considered reflective of what he saw in his daily life; placed next to each other were Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Self-Portrait as a Soldier and Otto Dix’s The War Cripples. Also on the wall hung The Trench, the painting that Konrad Adenauer, as mayor of Cologne, had blocked the city from purchasing.
Though he did not dare say it, Guenther was particularly impressed by Otto Dix, who had twenty works in the show, including Horse Cadaver and Corpse in Barbed Wire. Guenther understood how someone who had never seen such impoverished war cripples might be shocked, but residents of Berlin or Dresden, he noted, had often seen “men whose legs had been amputated or with other visible deformities sitting in the streets selling shoelaces and matches.” He recalled, “My mother frequently gave me a coin to put into the caps they had placed in front of them.”109