Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts 9780520282346, 0520282345

Table of contents :
Cover
Art of Suppression
Title
Copyright
Dedication
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
1. Visual and Performing Arts in Nazi Germany: What Is Known and What Is Believed
2. The Exile Experience
3. Occupation, Cold War, and the Zero Hour
4. Totalitarianism, Intentionalism, and Fascism in Cold War Cultural Histories
5. Modernism and the Isolation of Nazi Culture
6. Cultural Histories after the Cold War
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Art of Suppression Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts

Pamela M. Potter

UNIVERSIT Y OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Art of Suppression

WEIMAR AND NOW: GERMAN CULTURAL CRITICISM Edward Dimendberg, Martin Jay, and Anton Kaes, General Editors

Art of Suppression Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts

Pamela M. Potter

UNIVERSIT Y OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2016 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Potter, Pamela Maxine, author. Title: Art of suppression : confronting the Nazi past in histories of the visual and performing arts / Pamela M. Potter. Other titles: Weimar and now ; 50. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2016] | ”2016 | Series: Weimar and Now : German cultural criticism ; 50 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2016005856 (print) | lccn 2016007028 (ebook) | isbn 9780520282346 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520957961 (Epub) Subjects: lcsh: Arts and society—Germany—History—20th century. | National socialism and art. | Arts, German—20th century. | Art— Historiography. Classification: lcc dd256.6 .p68 2016 (print) | lcc dd256.6 (ebook) | ddc

Manufactured in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Ben and A. Jess Shenson Endowment Fund in Visual and Performing Arts of the University of California Press Foundation, made possible by Fred M. Levin and Nancy Livingston, The Shenson Foundation.

For my parents, in loving memory Ethel S. Potter (1915–2008) Sewall B. Potter (1918–2013)

contents

List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Acknowledgments 1. Visual and Performing Arts in Nazi Germany: What Is Known and What Is Believed

xi xiii xv

1

2. The Exile Experience

48

3. Occupation, Cold War, and the Zero Hour

89

4. Totalitarianism, Intentionalism, and Fascism in Cold War Cultural Histories

130

5. Modernism and the Isolation of Nazi Culture

175

6. Cultural Histories after the Cold War

215

Notes Works Cited Index

253 319 369

illustrations

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Paul Ludwig Troost’s House of German Art, Munich, 1937 6 Day of German Art procession, Munich, 1937 7 Page from the Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) catalog, 1937 8 Cover of the Degenerate Music (Entartete Musik) exhibition brochure, 1938 27 Models by Manfred Jonas, 1984, of the Brandenburg Gate, Reichstag, and Grosse Halle 29 John Heartfield, Adolf, the Superman: Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk, 1932 53 Advertisement for 1938–1939 season of MGM films in Germany 63 Stalinallee, East Berlin, 1954 120 Adolf Ziegler, The Four Elements (triptych), ca. 1937 186 Otto Dix, To Beauty (An die Schönheit), 1922 190 Closing scene of Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf!, 1927 191 German poster, Work Triumphs (Arbeit siegt), 1933–1945 196 American poster, Work to Keep Free, 1943 197 German and Russian Pavilions, 1937 Paris International Exposition 200 Adolf Wissel, Peasant Woman, 1938 212 Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930 212 Arno Breker, Readiness (Bereitschaft), 1939 213 Arlington Memorial Bridge statuary, Washington, D.C., 1939 213 Federal Reserve Board Building, Washington, D.C., 1937 214 Gallery in the Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) exhibition, 1937 248

xi

abbreviations

DAF DEFA DEP DI DVV FDGB FDJ FTM GAS GDR ICD KPD MFAA MOI MPEA

Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Workers’ Front, Third Reich) Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (German Film Stock Company, Soviet Zone of Occupation and East Germany) Direction de l’Education Publique (Division of Public Education, French Zone of Occupation) Direction de l’Information (Division of Information, French Zone of Occupation) Deutsche Verwaltung für Volksbildung (German Administration for Public Education, Soviet Zone of Occupation) Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (Free German Trade Union Federation, Soviet Zone of Occupation and East Germany) Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth, Soviet Zone of Occupation and East Germany) Film, Theater and Music Division of the Information Control Division (U.S. Zone of Occupation) German Art Society (Deutsche Kunstgesellschaft, founded 1920) German Democratic Republic (East Germany) Information Control Division (U.S. Zone of Occupation) Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Communist Party of Germany) Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section (U.S. and British Zones of Occupation) Ministry of Information (British Zone of Occupation) Motion Picture Export Association (United States) xiii

xiv

NDPD

abbreviations

National-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands (National Democratic Party of Germany, Soviet Zone of Occupation and East Germany) NSBO Nationalsozialistische Betriebszellenorganisation (National Socialist Factory Cell Organization, Third Reich) NSDAP Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) NSKG Nationalsozialistische Kulturgemeinde (National Socialist Cultural Community, Third Reich) NWDR Nordwest Deutscher Rundfunk (Northwest German Broadcasting, British Zone of Occupation and West Germany) OMGUS Office of Military Government, United States OSS Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency) OWI Office of War Information (United States) PWD Psychological Warfare Division (United States) RIAS Radio im amerikanischen Sektor (Radio in the American Sector, Berlin) RMVP Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (Reich Ministry of People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda, Third Reich) SA Sturmabteilung (Storm Division, Third Reich) SD Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service, Third Reich) SED Sozialistische Einheitspartei (Socialist Unity Party, Soviet Zone of Occupation and East Germany) SMAD Sowjetische Militäradministration in Deutschland (Soviet Military Administration in Germany) SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany) SS Schutzstaffel (Protection Squadron, Third Reich) SSMT Service des Spectacles, Musique et Théâtre (Service of Spectacle, Music, and Theater in the Division of Public Education, French Zone of Occupation) UFA Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (Universum Film Stock Company) UFI Ufa Filmkunst G.m.b.H (Ufa Film Incorporated)

acknowled gments

There are too many people to name who have inspired, challenged, and guided me over the many years that I have been thinking about this book, formulating its ideas, and preparing the final product. I began to consider the problems addressed here while teaching a course on Nazi cultural policy at the University of Wisconsin shortly after I arrived at the university in 1997. I was fortunate to get to know the legendary George L. Mosse, who shocked my undergraduates with his accounts of attending Nazi meetings as a Jewish teenager in Berlin and finding himself overcome by the enthusiasm of the crowd. Over the years, an increasing number of those enrolled in the course challenged me with probing questions and stimulating discussions, and I am grateful to my hundreds of students for their inquisitiveness. The realization that a book like this one was needed came in 2004, in a conversation I had with Michael Kater while we were both taking part in the Miller Symposium of the Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Vermont in Burlington. I had the opportunity to work out preliminary concepts for the book and get feedback on draft chapters in a teaching setting in 2013, thanks to my colleague, art historian Barbara C. Buenger, who agreed to co-teach a seminar of undergraduate and graduate students from the departments of art history, history, French, German, and musicology. Her expertise and the rich and varied backgrounds the students brought to the forum were invaluable resources for enriching my knowledge and testing my theses. I am grateful to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation for its generous support in the form of summer salary and student research assistantships. As a recipient of the Romnes Faculty Fellowship and the Kellett Mid-Career Award, I have had generous resources available to me to underwrite my research and the xv

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Acknowledgments

final preparation of this manuscript. I received travel support from the DAAD Center for German and European Studies, under the directorship of Marc Silberman, and I was also fortunate to benefit from sabbatical leaves provided by the University of Wisconsin at early and late stages of writing. This book has profited immensely from the inordinate time committed by cherished colleagues in the fields of history, art history, musicology, German literature, film and theater studies, and modern German history. Through careful scrutiny of the text at various stages, they pointed out factual and conceptual errors and offered crucial editorial suggestions. These colleagues include, in alphabetical order, Barbara Buenger, Jost Hermand, Paul Jaskot, Michael Kater, Jonathan Petropoulos, Marc Silberman, Alan Steinweis, and Richard Taruskin. I am additionally very grateful to the two anonymous readers who indicated the critical need to clarify the scope, methods, and purpose of the study. Thanks also go to my colleagues Mary Trotter and Andrea Harris for pointing me to resources in theater and dance studies, and to Patrick Jung for introducing me to the collection of industrial art at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. I have also been fortunate to receive excellent assistance from graduate students, who have taken on a wide range of tasks in research, editing, and manuscript preparation: Mary Allison, Justin Court, Christine Evans, Jennifer Gramer, Lesley Hughes, Berit Ness, Rebekah Pryor Paré, Sarah Reed, Melissa Sheedy, and Yi Hong Sim. At the University of California Press, my deepest gratitude goes to Mary Francis. I have profited from her undying faith in the feasibility of the project and her countless hours of coaching me through this long process. I am also thankful for the guidance and assistance of Bradley DePew, Zuha Khan, Dore Brown, and my copy editor, Genevieve Thurston, and I am grateful to the editors of the Weimar and Now series for including my work in their illustrious roster of seminal scholarship of modern German history and culture. Above all, I am indebted to my family. This book is dedicated to the memory of my parents, who instilled in me a love of learning, always took tremendous interest in everything I wrote, including this book, yet sadly did not survive to see its completion. They lived through the entire period I write about. My mother taught English to relatives who came to this country as Holocaust survivors. My father, a Jewish GI stationed in Germany during World War II, witnessed Eisenhower’s horror on the discovery of the conditions at the Buchenwald concentration camp, but he was himself shaken by the antisemitism he observed among his fellow soldiers while touring the camp. My most heartfelt gratitude, however, is reserved for my husband, Robert Radwin, and for my daughter, Sydney Radwin, who entered our lives at the beginning of this project and has not yet experienced life without “mama working on her book.” I am profoundly grateful to have them in my life, and I thank them for their patience, support, and encouragement. They have cheered me on with their love and humor throughout this very long journey.

1

Visual and Performing Arts in Nazi Germany What Is Known and What Is Believed

What do we know about the visual and performing arts in Nazi Germany? According to Wikipedia, “art of the Third Reich” was “the officially approved art produced in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. Upon becoming dictator in 1933, Adolf Hitler gave his personal artistic preference the force of law to a degree rarely known before. Only in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, where Socialist Realism had become the mandatory style, had a state shown such concern with regulation of the arts.”1 With regard to music, the History Learning Site reports that “the policy of ‘Gleichschaltung’ (coordination) meant that music had to conform to the Nazi ideal,” and that “Hitler, along with art, films and architecture, played a major part in what was musically tolerated and what was not.”2 The official site of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum further reinforces this narrative: “Goebbels began the synchronization of culture, by which the arts were brought in line with Nazi goals,” and he “supervised and regulated all facets of German culture. . . . Nazi aesthetics emphasized the propagandistic value of art and glorified the peasantry, the ‘Aryan,’ and the heroism of war. . . . This ideology stood in stark contrast to modern, innovative art, such as abstract painting, [which was] denounced as ‘Degenerate Art,’ as well as ‘art bolshevism’ and ‘culture bolshevism.’ ”3 In a nutshell, a common view of the arts and culture in the Third Reich holds that Hitler, with Propaganda Minister Goebbels at his side, controlled all manifestations of artistic creation and established rigid guidelines, according to their own personal tastes, of what was acceptable or unacceptable. They stamped out all forms of modernism and debased the arts, à la Stalin, to mere tools of ideology and propaganda. If this had been the case, then the arts might stand out as some of the most carefully monitored and rigidly managed spheres of Nazi society. We have learned from 1

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decades of intensive research and debate that the Third Reich was not a monolithic totalitarian dictatorship; instead, it evolved out of something more decentralized, improvised, and polycratic. We have come to understand that Hitler’s role in actual policy-making was far less decisive than it was previously believed to be. We have further learned of his aversion to associating his name with unpopular measures that would dilute his demagogic powers of persuasion. We also know that, instead of an aggressive enforcement of conformity to rigid ideological principles, there was a constant give and take in Nazi society. Public opinion was closely monitored, and the information was sometimes used to determine whether to pull back or conceal certain policies and actions to avoid risking revolt, such as in the case of the euthanasia program. Especially in the cultural arena, the intensity of anti-Jewish and anticommunist campaigns lessened after the first wave of targeted attacks against prominent celebrities, and any explicit restrictions on artistic production and taste failed to become high priorities on the Nazi agenda. To the contrary, many of the highestranking Nazi officials aspired to be seen as arts connoisseurs and patrons, if not artists, and they exhibited a wide variety of opinions on what constituted culture. Research conducted since the early 1960s has contributed to a composite picture showing that art, architecture, music, theater, dance, and film were operating under far fewer constraints than current popular conceptions convey, although the most favorable working conditions were reserved for those artists who had managed to elude political, religious, or ethnic victimization and exclusion. The earliest explorations of art policy in the Third Reich revealed a lack of central authority in Nazi cultural policy; the persistence of modern art (in some cases with the ardent support of Nazi organizations); and an absence of any definitive architectural style or aesthetic.4 In the 1970s, dissertations and theses looking at the performing arts in Germany showed how very little changed in day-to-day theater operations after the Nazis assumed power, how government control of the film industry was neither invented by the Nazis nor particularly invasive or detrimental to film production, and how music censorship was virtually impossible to carry out.5 Investigations also revealed that the administrative body credited with the “synchronization,” or Gleichschaltung, of the arts, the Reich Culture Chambers (Reichskulturkammer), was not a Nazi innovation but rather something that grew out of years of lobbying by creative artists for professional and economic security.6 Further research has continued to amass evidence to destabilize the notions that oppressive arts policies constrained all facets of Nazi cultural life. Such evidence, however, still tends to be ignored by the mainstream and even in academic circles, where scholars may still look for the stamp of Hitler’s personal taste and for signs of the Nazi elimination of the avant-garde. Nazi Germany: Confronting the Myths, published in 2015, successfully outlines and dismisses many myths about Nazi Germany, but it nevertheless singles out the Reich Culture Chambers as the epicenter of cultural Gleichschaltung and reaffirms Hitler’s power over dictating artistic tastes.7 The catalog of the 2014

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3

exhibition Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany 1937 at the Neue Galerie in New York reasserts that the National Socialists “produced mediocre, politically motivated art and aesthetic irrelevancies” and “undermined the conditions of real art and destroyed artistic modernism.”8 The purpose of this book is to understand why certain assumptions about the Nazis’ manipulation of the visual and performing arts have remained so compelling, even as mounting evidence continues to erode their credibility. Drawing on an extensive bibliography consisting primarily of Anglophone and West German histories of the arts published from the end of World War II to the present, this study offers a critical historiography of art, architecture, music, theater, film, and dance in the Third Reich. (It does not, however, include a study of literature, as explained below.) As a historiography, rather than a history, this book does not seek to draw on archival research to advance any new interpretations of what really happened to the arts in Nazi Germany. Instead, it uses as its primary sources existing histories of the arts, analyzing their genesis, development, interactions, tensions, and contradictions over the past seven decades. It considers how the circumstances of exile, the Allied occupation of Germany, the Cold War, and the complex meanings of modernism have profoundly influenced the characterization of cultural life in the Third Reich. Above all, it seeks to explain how the forces of global politics, intellectual traditions, and moral imperatives have at various points hindered progress toward a deeper understanding of the role of the arts and media in Germany in relation to their roles in other modern industrial nations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The ultimate goal of this work is to provide insights into the ways future endeavors may move in new directions, through changes in scope and approach and through a reformulation of the questions typically posed up to now. As my title, Art of Suppression, suggests, there is a cognitive dissonance between a belief in the Nazis’ wholesale suppression of creativity and evidence of more favorable conditions existing for artists than what we have been led to believe. Rather than trying to sustain a notion of such Nazi suppression, I suggest we look at the evidence supporting a postwar suppression of inconvenient truths about artistic productivity during the Third Reich, artists who enjoyed flourishing careers under Hitler, and similarities between “Nazi culture” and our own culture. Despite all the complications of this latter suppression, the Western world relied on it to come to terms with one of the most troubling puzzles of recent history: how Germany, the “land of poets and thinkers,” could have committed the atrocities of the Holocaust. As the West continued to revere and emulate so many of Germany’s artistic achievements even during the Nazi period, it was easier to come to terms with the harsh reality of modern Germany committing the brutalities of war and genocide if those twelve years between 1933 and 1945 could be isolated as a historical aberration that had little to do with the Germany of Goethe and Beethoven. In addition to the diachronic isolation of the Nazi years—an era

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that was bookended by the exuberance of 1920s Weimar culture and the postwar renaissance after 1945—a synchronic isolation maintained a clear barrier between “Nazi culture” and the culture of Germany’s adversaries by sustaining these assumptions about the Nazis’ destructive motives to dominate and degrade the arts. This mode of thinking not only skirted the obvious surface similarities among the artistic styles and techniques employed in Nazi Germany and elsewhere in the industrialized world but also kept at arm’s length any comparative analyses of public relations and mass communication that may have been common to all these systems in the 1930s and beyond. Before actually launching into the historiographic investigation that will take up most of this book, I will use the remainder of this introductory chapter to highlight the main features of the cognitive dissonance between what is believed and what is known about the arts in Nazi Germany. First, I look at what has come to symbolize Nazi culture, and then I offer a synthesis of research that has challenged many of these first impressions about Nazi control of the arts. I employ the term “nazification” to represent a consensus that credits National Socialism with effectively micromanaging all artistic activity (what I refer to as “structural nazification”) and with establishing and enforcing artistic guidelines (what I call “aesthetic nazification”). I then offer general considerations that could assist in resolving this cognitive dissonance. For one thing, it is important to distinguish between the Nazis’ concrete goal of identifying and removing “undesirable” individuals or groups from society and the far more abstract goal of identifying and removing “undesirable” artistic trends. In other words, the exclusion of certain people (Jews, communists, and others) may have been carried out with shocking thoroughness, but it did not necessarily lead to the eradication of their artistic influences. We also have to keep in mind that the Nazis’ boastful and violent claims of “purifying” German culture cannot be taken literally. These claims must be weighed against the known penchant at the time for bold rhetoric, ostentatious public displays, and manipulation of mass media. At the same time, that such messages were greeted at first with enthusiasm by those in the arts professions requires us to consider other factors that distinguish the German situation, such as the timeliness of Nazi promises to ensure order, unity, and international recognition for Germany in the wake of the disorder, disunity, and disgrace that followed the country’s defeat in World War I. Finally, a historiography of the visual and performing arts needs to keep in mind the disciplinary particulars and priorities of the fields involved, as well as the insularity and lack of communication among historical disciplines as a whole. NA Z I C U LT U R E : F I R S T I M P R E S SIO N S

Despite the contradictions inherent in assumptions about Nazi control of the arts, it is easy to imagine how one could have arrived at such an understanding in the

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first place. Neoclassical edifices, including stadiums, party grounds, and cultic open-air theaters designed explicitly for party ritual and pageantry, were built to last for a thousand years and stood as constant reminders after the war of the hubris of Nazi leadership. Hitler’s passions for art, architecture, and music (at least the music of Wagner) were well-known, lending support to the idea that he took an active role in steering all cultural policy and artistic production and, with the help of Goebbels, erected a powerful administrative structure to ensure conformity. Paintings and sculptures that filled Nazi Germany’s newly consecrated museums employed realistic styles and favored subjects that seemed to bolster ideals of racial purity and militarism. Above all, the thousands of individuals compelled to leave Germany despite their artistic and intellectual gifts, not to mention those whose lives were lost to the Nazis’ murderous campaign of intolerance, provide the most harrowing reminder of the zeal with which National Socialism identified, pursued, and eliminated its perceived cultural adversaries. When we think of “Nazi culture,” some of the most enduring symbols coming to mind will include Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens), the brilliant piece of film propaganda about the 1934 Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg, and her equally compelling cinematography for the filming of the 1936 Berlin Olympics; the sleek and imposing neoclassicism of the Berlin Olympic stadium, adorned with its heroic, muscle-bound statuary; Albert Speer’s party rally grounds at Nuremberg; and Paul Ludwig Troost’s monumental House of German Art in Munich (renamed after the war as House of Art, see fig. 1). If we wish to find out more, we will soon discover, for instance, that Hitler laid the cornerstone for Troost’s art museum amidst a pompous procession of the history of “German” art that borrowed shamelessly from antiquity, and that the museum’s grand opening in 1937 with the inaugural Great German Art Exhibition featured a collection of paintings and sculptures selected for their “truly German” quality (fig. 2). One year later, it was music’s turn in the spotlight with the debut of the Reich Music Days (Reichsmusiktage), a convocation of music organizations from around the country, which Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels opened with a speech on the “ten commandments” for German music. For a brief period of time, the Propaganda Ministry also financed the building of numerous open-air theaters designed for specially commissioned theater pieces (Thingspiele) that fused hypernationalist (völkisch) myth with such common themes as the martyrdom of Nazi heroes and the injustices of World War I. But even more shocking than these celebrations of “true German arts” were the public assaults on those who were considered to be enemies of German culture. Following the book burnings of May 1933, the public defamation and expulsions of many famous artists and intellectuals, and the closure of the progressive Bauhaus design school, two alarming events in 1937 and 1938 attacking “un-German” arts seemed to provide blueprints for Nazi aesthetics. The first was the 1937 exhibition

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figure 1. Paul Ludwig Troost’s House of German Art, Munich, 1937 (bpk, Berlin/Art Resource, New York).

Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst), which opened alongside the Great German Art Exhibition and the boisterous celebrations surrounding it. It featured a mocking display of modernist art that had been confiscated as part of the Degenerate Art Action and presented the works as creations by charlatans, racial inferiors, and the mentally deranged, all of whom had supposedly ruled the art world of the 1920s under the short-lived Weimar Republic (fig. 3). The second event was an exhibition on Degenerate Music (Entartete Musik), held during the Reich Music Days that took place one year later, in 1938. The exhibition vilified jazz, atonality, and the alleged Bolshevik and Jewish domination of German musical taste during the Weimar years. By this time, the Nazi government had established a complex bureaucracy of state and party administration that spread its tentacles into the arts. The Ministry of People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda (Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda), established in March 1933 and headed by Goebbels, had divisions for art, film, and music. It also oversaw the Reich Culture Chambers, which brought together all arts professions and industries into one central union, requiring all those engaged in arts-related fields to petition for membership to one of its seven chambers (which included separate chambers for art, music, film, and theater) in order to secure employment. Other state and party organizations also exerted their influence on the arts, such as the German Workers’ Front (Deutsche

What Is Known and What Is Believed

7

figure 2. Day of German Art procession, Munich, 1937 (akg-images).

Arbeitsfront, or DAF); the Education Ministry; and the Rosenberg Bureau, the notorious party agency under the leadership of Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, which was charged with ensuring ideological conformity in cultural and intellectual spheres of activity. The mere existence of so many overlapping structures that each claimed influence over the arts gave the strong impression that Hitler, Goebbels, and a few select others galvanized their resources to ensure that all facets of the arts could be closely monitored and directed. The multitude of bureaucracies also suggested clues for understanding the meaning of Gleichschaltung, the elusive term used at the time to describe a wide variety of acts of reorganization after the Nazi seizure of power. Ever since the end of World War II, the discovery and rediscovery of all these phenomena fueled the conviction that a tightly organized bureaucracy mandated the promotion of “pure” and “healthy” German art and the elimination of “degeneracy,” which was understood as all things modern and progressive. Nazi culture

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figure 3. Page 31 of the Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) catalog (1937), comparing drawings by Oskar Kokoschka to the work of mentally ill patients (bpk, Berlin/Art Resource, New York).

brokers had linked these “Bolshevist” cultural movements to a widespread Jewish conspiracy to control the hearts and minds of Germans and to dismantle Germany’s cultural legacy, and they used this distorted logic subtly and incrementally to bolster the rationales for exterminating European Jewry. As Allied troops liberated the concentration camps and discovered the horrors of mass extermination, they could only conclude that the physical wasteland they encountered was the inevitable outcome of a cultural wasteland in which Hitler had eradicated all traces of Germany’s past achievements. Enraged over the discovery of the Final Solution and aware of the hair-raising accounts told by German refugees, the Allies became convinced of the Nazis’ total manipulation and debasement of German culture.

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They were also inclined to believe the claims of German artists and performers who had remained in the country during the Third Reich, who told stories of the obstacles they had encountered under the Nazis but also presented themselves as indispensable for building a new democratic culture after the war. Considering the long and impressive legacy of German contributions to the arts, letters, and sciences, the West could only understand the Nazi phenomenon as a momentary aberration in Germany’s otherwise illustrious cultural history. This notion of a nazification of the arts—the twelve-year ideological domination and debasement of artists and their work—proved to be remarkably resilient. To be sure, an epithet such as “Nazi,” “nazification,” or any similar derivative never would have been uttered in the Third Reich in speaking of the arts; rather, the stated cultural goal of the National Socialists was to revitalize German (not Nazi) culture, in all of its forms. As a term often invoked in postwar writings, however, “nazification” (Nazifizierung) serves us well here as a historiographic construct. The term itself appeared in the American press as early as 1933,9 and in subsequent years it started to be used with increasing frequency in cultural histories appearing in both English and German. When employed in the context of the visual and performing arts, it tends to assume that the National Socialist machine succeeded in taking over institutions and organizations, imposing ideology, downgrading artistic quality, and brainwashing individuals or entire segments of society—in effect, causing all the presumed damage that would have to be undone after World War II through the Allied programs of denazification and reeducation. The concept and its implications have been repeatedly challenged, however, casting serious doubt on the implementation of either a structural nazification, in the form of a powerful cultural bureaucracy, or an aesthetic nazification, in the form of enforced guidelines for acceptable and unacceptable art. As this book will show, much of the research since the 1960s continually questioned the intentions of Nazi leadership to control artistic operations, let alone the existence of any successes, but it has also identified the Third Reich’s much higher priority, and the aggressive implementation of it: targeting individuals and groups of artists as enemies of the state and systematically excluding them from participating in German cultural life. A C O N C E P T O F S T RU C T U R A L NA Z I F IC AT IO N A N D I T S L I M I TAT IO N S

The greatest appeal of the concept of nazification in the arts is that it circumvented the troubling paradox of German civility and Nazi barbarity. The notion of structural nazification implies that the artistic community was powerless to fend off the regimentation of cultural life that came with the creation of numerous government and party administrative entities. But it also made it easy to overlook

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questions that should have been troubling from the start: Did the excessive bureaucratization of culture really facilitate total control, or did it breed competition, redundancy, and inefficiency? Could this bloated cultural administration realistically follow through on its blatant attacks on modernism and “degeneracy” with enforceable policies of censorship and artistic mandates? How would it have been feasible to carry out this kind of control over such a wide range of arts and media, many of which could be produced and consumed in any number of nonpublic venues? And, given the more pressing issues of fixing a broken economy, suppressing political rivals (including those within the Nazi ranks), ridding German society of any “enemies of the state,” and gearing up for war, how could Hitler, Goebbels, and other high-ranking officials have time on their hands to micromanage arts operations and dictate aesthetic guidelines? A few scholars started to entertain similar questions early on and began to address them by looking at what had predated the Nazi cultural infrastructure. The formation of the Reich Culture Chambers has attracted the most attention as definitive proof of Nazi designs on artistic control and the clearest illustration of the Gleichschaltung (which is variably interpreted as “coordination,” “synchronization,” “centralization,” “steering,” and “equalization”) of all cultural professions and industries. Yet research carried out as early as the 1960s revealed that the institution was neither a Nazi innovation nor an entirely unwelcome power play forced upon the artistic community. In the aftermath of World War I, the dissolution of court patronage and the assumption of cultural affairs by individual provinces and municipalities translated into a loss of economic security for vast numbers of those engaged in the visual and performing arts. With former court-sponsored institutions left to local jurisdiction, the diversity in economic resources and cultural attitudes gave individual states and cities the choice either to withhold funds or to lavish them on cultural institutions as they saw fit, inevitably creating gross inequities from place to place.10 Those working in the visual and performing arts who were trying to sustain their careers despite these regional inconsistencies also struggled with the ambiguity of their professional status and credentials. For example, policies regarding private music instruction varied from state to state, making it difficult for qualified teachers to compete with amateurs who were teaching for lower fees in regions that had no strict regulations. In addition, the growth of the film industry left many theater personnel uncertain about the future of their careers, and other technological advances threatened to render further types of live performance superfluous and raised legal questions about intellectual property. These circumstances paved the way for large numbers of special interest groups (Interessengemeinschaften) to lobby for the legal and economic protection of arts professions. They sought to standardize health and unemployment benefits, wage scales, professional certification, and training; mediate hiring and labor disputes; and, in some cases, obtain copyright protection. Most of these professions

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were represented by a number of competing and often redundant organizations, with memberships ranging from several hundred to over twenty thousand.11 In 1933, the new Nazi government set out to correct these inequities, taking steps to eliminate regional discrepancies and address demands for professional and economic security. But who would ultimately be capable of overseeing this ambitious program? The best-positioned individual up to that point had been Alfred Rosenberg, the only leading figure in the early years of the Nazi Party to display any interest in cultural questions. Author of the foundational ideological tract The Myth of the Twentieth Century (Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts), Rosenberg headed the Fighting League for German Culture (Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur), an elitist group of artists and intellectuals that was formed in 1928.12 Its influence came not so much from its large membership numbers as from its widespread geographic inclusion of a multitude of affiliate organizations, including a large number of special interest groups representing professional artists that attached themselves to the Fighting League’s departments (Fachgruppen).13 Hitler, however, had little faith in Rosenberg’s organizational skills and turned instead to Joseph Goebbels, the newly appointed propaganda minister, to carry out the needed reforms. Goebbels worked to devise a national umbrella organization for cultural professions, and he sold Hitler—a self-proclaimed artist—on the idea of creating the Reich Culture Chambers, over which Goebbels would preside. Its establishment brought cultural activities under the supervision of one Reich body that was devoted exclusively to a wide range of cultural matters. The Reich Culture Chambers, with its seven sub-chambers for music, theater, visual arts, literature, film, radio, and the press, promised, at least in principle, to revamp cultural affairs by implementing uniform practices and providing financial securities. The ideas behind the Culture Chambers date back prior to World War I, and they were reiterated by the Fighting League’s initiative to organize and protect arts professions and the unions’ bargaining measures for social and economic safeguards. The Culture Chambers’ central aim was to enlist the cooperation of cultural professionals by allaying their fears of threats to their careers and giving in to a number of their demands for financial and professional security. Goebbels worked closely with existing organizations, allowing them a certain amount of autonomy by preserving professional associations (Berufsverbände) and special interest groups (Interessengemeinschaften), collectively renaming them Fachverbände. The Fachverbände would continue to function within each of the Culture Chambers. This eliminated the competition that existed in the Weimar Republic among splinter groups with similar goals and appealed to a large number of prominent artists who would otherwise have felt no attraction to the Nazi movement.14 By the end of 1933, everything looked quite promising. The Reich Culture Chambers’ law provided that Fachverbände would be allowed to retain their own administration and finances. Each chamber was organized according to the

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“leadership principle” (Führerprinzip), occasionally with well-known cultural figures at the helm (most famously, the music chamber had the composer Richard Strauss as its president and conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler as vice president). The Culture Chambers became the obligatory unions for all practicing cultural professionals, broadly defined. The Reich Music Chamber, for example, included departments for composition, performers, orchestras, entertainment music, music education, choral music, church music, concert agencies, copyright questions, music and instrument vendors, and financial and legal matters, and it also had thirty-one regional offices.15 The Music Chamber boasted great accomplishments within a relatively short amount of time, including setting wages for professional musicians, establishing regulations for professional certification and for restricting amateurs from performing for money, introducing exams and training courses for private music instructors, and setting up a pension plan.16 Initially, in 1933, there was also no specific exclusion of Jews and other political, social, or ethnic “undesirables,” only of those not demonstrating “reliability and aptitude.” But in 1935, all of this changed when Goebbels, breaking his promise not to interfere with the chambers’ internal affairs, took away the financial independence of the Fachverbände (renaming them Fachgruppen) and removed some of the heads of chambers, replacing them with more malleable appointees. There were many reasons for this change of policy. These measures were part of a broader initiative in the Nazi administration to consolidate power, a move that included the Night of Long Knives, the bloody purge in 1934 of the Sturmabteilung (SA) leadership; the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws, which severely reduced the rights of Jews; and Germany’s rearmament, breaking of treaties, and overall preparation for war. Goebbels also felt that his liberal measures had been abused, and he sensed the need to strengthen his authority not only by reducing the autonomy of the chambers but also by setting up parallel departments within the Propaganda Ministry. He was also in the midst of turf battles with the heads of other entities, such as Robert Ley, head of the DAF, who was overseeing the consolidation of existing unions (including the NSBO, the Nazi Party workers’ unions, formed in 1928) and claiming that his organization had jurisdiction over arts professions as well; Bernhard Rust, minister of the newly established Reich Ministry of Education, an expansion of a former Prussian entity, who vied with Goebbels for control over arts institutions and their civil servant personnel (educators, museum directors, state architects); Hermann Goering, appointed as Prussian prime minister, who circumvented Goebbels’s authority to enhance the prestige of the Prussian museums, orchestras, theaters, and opera houses under his jurisdiction; and, above all, Alfred Rosenberg. Rosenberg’s well-known resentment toward Goebbels for grabbing the power he had coveted prompted him to waste no time in stirring up trouble by calling out Goebbels and others for what he regarded as ideological lapses. To calm these

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disturbances, Hitler issued to Rosenberg a vaguely worded order on January 31, 1934, authorizing him to supervise the ideological education of the party. Rosenberg took this order and unofficially created an entire office out of it, coining his own cumbersome title from the wording of Hitler’s communication: Deputy to the Führer for the Total Intellectual and Ideological Education and Training of the NSDAP. Better known simply as the Rosenberg Bureau (Amt Rosenberg), this base of operation offered him an opportunity to expand his questionable authority toward imposing a uniform ideology (Weltanschauung) on all German citizens, even though his sphere of influence was officially limited to the Nazi Party. Above all, it encouraged Rosenberg to compete with other high-ranking party and state officials, despite the fact that his effectiveness was constantly hampered by financial insecurity, formidable rivals, and his own uncompromising personality.17 For the next few years, Rosenberg proved to be mostly a thorn in the side of Goebbels and others, but sometimes this was enough to destroy individual careers. In his first year as Deputy to the Führer, Rosenberg challenged Goebbels’s authority on a handful of issues, including the famous cases of Richard Strauss, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Paul Hindemith, and Max Reinhardt. Rosenberg brought attention to Strauss’s collaboration with Jewish author Stefan Zweig on the opera Die schweigsame Frau, ultimately bringing about Strauss’s resignation as president of the Reich Music Chamber and the failure of the opera in question. He also raised objections to Furtwängler’s promotion of the works of Hindemith, a composer who—Rosenberg claimed—had exhibited decadent tendencies in his earlier years. The ensuing complications led Furtwängler to retreat from public life and resign from his position as vice president of the Reich Music Chamber (although he returned to his other posts after a public apology) and eventually resulted in Hindemith leaving Germany altogether.18 Rosenberg’s Fighting League had directed its earliest attacks against theater director Max Reinhardt, yet, as late as 1943, the Rosenberg Bureau was complaining about the continued influence of Reinhardt’s 1920s experiments. Similarly, Rosenberg’s barrage of attacks had no effect in bringing down celebrities with ideologically questionable pasts who were being protected by Goering and Goebbels.19 The Fighting League had, by this time, been absorbed into the DAF division for workers’ recreation, forming the National Socialist Cultural Community (Nationalsozialistische Kulturgemeinde, or NSKG).20 The DAF had also been a formidable contender for controlling cultural professionals before the Culture Chambers’ powers were fully consolidated. It managed to incorporate the existing educational activities of labor unions and night schools into its National Socialist Community organization, Strength through Joy (NSGemeinschaft Kraft durch Freude). The Cultural Community oversaw a wide range of departments in charge of cultural activities, including those for after-hours recreation (Amt “Feierabend”), adult education (Deutsches Volksbildungswerk), military liaisons (Amt “Wehrmachtheime”), sports (Sportamt), and vacation planning

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(Amt für Reisen, Wandern und Urlaub). As will be discussed below, the DAF, with its in-house factory exhibits, also became the unlikely refuge for modernist art. In 1938, Rosenberg managed to secure an independent budget after years of failed attempts at extracting funding from the Nazi Party and the DAF, but the order for total war mobilization ultimately diminished the entire Rosenberg Bureau to nothing more than a name until a new and unexpected opportunity opened up for him. Rosenberg had earlier proposed establishing the Hohe Schule der Partei, an elite school that would train party leaders, in an attempt to control National Socialist education at the university level. During the war, Hitler allowed Rosenberg to proceed with preparations for setting up research facilities and a party library.21 With limited financial resources for acquiring books for this library, he reached an agreement with the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD) and the Foreign Ministry to divide up the spoils of occupation, leading to Rosenberg’s most successful venture, the development of a special unit known as the Rosenberg Taskforce (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg), which would implement the large-scale seizure of cultural property in occupied territories.22 The Rosenberg Taskforce defied international law, extending its plundering activities to Masonic lodges; Jewish homes; state, community, and organization libraries; schools; universities; museums; and academies. Rosenberg also gained a strong ally in Hermann Goering, who authorized the taskforce to seize property for Hitler, for Goering’s own private collection, and for German museums, as well as for the Hohe Schule.23 As much as the new regime succeeded in conveying impressions of restoring order to the economic and professional chaos of Germany’s art world, the power struggles show that neither Goebbels nor any of his rivals—not even Hitler— wielded full authority over all aspects of cultural operations by any means. Historians have long argued that Hitler had no direct involvement in many of the affairs of state and that his function was, instead, that of symbolizing the steady hand leading Germany out of the chaos following Kaiser Wilhelm II’s abdication in 1918.24 But it may be more accurate to regard the project of cultural Gleichschaltung not so much an empty threat but more as an empty promise. Those working directly in the arts had little, if any, awareness of the behind-the-scenes internal rivalries. Instead, they held out hope for the economic securities promised by the new order. Indeed, evidence suggests that the proposed Gleichschaltung of arts professions was probably received less as a threat of forced control and more as a promise of long-soughtafter order and stability. As was noted earlier, the creation of the Reich Culture Chambers is often cited as the most comprehensive and aggressive means for total control of cultural life, and the Nazi-coined term Gleichschaltung comes up not infrequently in this context to convey the single-mindedness of Nazi leaders to micromanage every aspect of cultural activity. Yet we cannot assume that the term would have prompted such fear and revulsion among the majority of those in the cultural professions in 1933. Much to the contrary, given the multitude of grassroots

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attempts to organize cultural professions prior to 1933, the suggestion of Gleichschaltung would have more readily inspired confidence in a leadership willing to eliminate the perceived chaos of the preceding decades. The implementation of such a Gleichschaltung—with its successes in consolidating special interest groups and eliminating federalism—could very well have been interpreted as a necessary step toward reaching the long-sought-after goals of the artistic community, enabling many professions to establish uniform, enforceable systems of professional standards and credentials and secure their place in the German economy. Economics played a central role in other examples of what we have retroactively perceived as hostile government takeovers. On closer inspection, we can see that individual institutions as well as entire industries often welcomed the bailout prospects the newly created government provided, especially those of the Propaganda Ministry. At least at the outset, struggling institutions, organizations, and entire professions felt they had much to celebrate in the prospects of economic security offered by new government and party agencies. The largest bailout of all involved the film industry. Already closely tied with the military and with investors who were also conservative statesmen, German film studios were in serious financial straits in the 1920s, unable to compete in the international marketplace with Hollywood. The Nazi establishment of the Reich Film Chamber and the Film Credit Bank positioned lawyers and economists to head up a restructuring of major studios to make them function more effectively without taking them over completely. Only in 1942, in the midst of the war, was a more comprehensive nationalization of the industry finally carried out, with the aim of increasing film production and dominating the European market.25 The establishment of new sources of state patronage also benefited other private and semi-private entities. The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra had begun its life as a unique “orchestra corporation,” a structure that became untenable within a short period of time. In the 1920s, the orchestra appealed to numerous municipal, provincial, and federal bodies to take over its operations entirely, all to no avail, until the Propaganda Ministry presented itself as a willing partner. The organization averted dissolution by becoming a fully subsidized Reich orchestra, with each orchestra member selling his share of the “corporation” to the government, and its musicians were placed in the highest wage category.26 An even more prominent rescue mission was that of the Bayreuth Festival, the annual showcase of Richard Wagner’s stage works, which the composer himself had launched in 1876 in a theater complex he designed and built with lavish support from King Ludwig II of Bavaria. With performances of Wagner’s works in German opera houses falling off dramatically after 1926, and with the Bayreuth Festival facing financial ruin, Hitler channeled large sums of money into the festival to keep it running throughout the years of the Third Reich, and he averted its complete closure during the war by opening performances of Die Meistersinger to soldiers as part of an official “war festival.”27

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A similar situation transpired with Max Reinhardt’s internationally acclaimed experimental theater, the Großes Schauspielhaus, which the renowned Jewish director signed over to the state in 1933 to secure its future existence. Goebbels initially hoped to enlist Reinhardt’s continued involvement but ultimately failed to convince him to stay at the helm, even after offering him “honorary Aryan” status.28 The economic crisis had been difficult for all publicly subsidized theaters, despite various measures in the 1920s to try to protect personnel from losing their jobs (the Nazis—in the form of the NSBO—as well as the communists were consolidating unions to protect their party members from dismissal on political grounds). After 1933, the Reich Theater Chamber, a direct outgrowth of pre-Nazi movements to organize theater professions, was able to establish numerous programs to improve the economic, educational, and working conditions in these professions, resulting in a substantial rise in standards of living among theater personnel, thanks to established wage and benefits policies.29 The dance profession also profited from Theater Chamber policies and from the patronage of other organizations. Groups of dancers demanding more security benefited from raised professional standards, largescale education initiatives, and new employment opportunities in public theaters, Thingspiele, youth organizations, and Strength through Joy projects.30 A completely different sort of economics played out among art dealers, where— perversely—significant economic gains resulted from the seizure of art as part of the Degenerate Art Action and the subsequent sale of these items on the international marketplace. Transactions bolstered Goering’s plan to facilitate the sale of these works in exchange for much needed hard currency. Owing to explicit restrictions on displaying or selling seized artworks within Nazi Germany (although these rules were often ignored), a number of dealers simply chose to hold on to these works and kept them in their private possession, a practice that explains the trove of highly valued art discovered in 2013 in the possession of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of one such dealer. However, being stigmatized as a “degenerate” did not necessarily lead to the financial ruin of individual artists. There were no restrictions on selling or exhibiting any of the works of these artists that had not been seized as part of the Degenerate Art Action, and the “Aryans” among them did not necessarily face obstacles when it came to obtaining work or even acquiring membership in the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts.31 Ultimately, however, any assaults on artistic freedom in the visual and performing arts would have depended entirely on the inherent “controllability” of those arts. If any one medium could have been subjected to more government oversight than the others, it would have been film, an industry that had already been closely monitored by Weimar-era censorship, exploited by the military, controlled by conservative government interests, and supported after 1933 by public and private investments and safety nets operating under the watchful eye of the propaganda minister. The symbolic examples of Nazi cinema—such as Leni Riefenstahl’s

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Triumph of the Will and Veit Harlan’s antisemitic feature film, Jud Süss (Jew Süss)— have only reinforced the impression that all Nazi-era films touted loyalty to Hitler and hatred toward Jews. And evidence does show that Hitler and Goebbels considered controlling all media to be of the highest importance and that both men recognized the power of print, radio, and film in winning over the German public. Film was subjected to a formal process of censorship (which was also the case in many other countries, including the United States, especially during the war), but film censorship had existed in Germany since 1931 and allowed films to be prohibited if they were considered to be against “state interests.” Positive incentives for promoting acceptable films—such as the Prädikate, a ratings system to assess the educational merit of films and accordingly reward them with tax subsidies—also predated the Third Reich.32 Censorship guidelines were left intentionally vague, so most filmmakers chose to concentrate their efforts on projects with innocent escapist themes to avert possible censorship and on musicals that could be easily exported.33 Despite the iconic status Triumph of the Will has acquired as a “typical” Nazi film, film production during the Third Reich was remarkably diverse. The majority of movies produced at the time were intended for pure entertainment, and the desire of most filmmakers to compete in the international marketplace was in itself a strong deterrent to injecting German cinema with heavy-handed ideology.34 In the theater, German officials had learned well before 1933 that censorship had to be handled with extreme caution. Until 1918, theaters were required to have all scripts screened by the police for obscenity, blasphemy, or lese majesty, but in most cases, the authorities were surprisingly lax. They recognized the cathartic value of political satire and risqué entertainment and its ability to appease discontented citizens, and they also understood that the scandal of censorship could backfire by drawing more attention to a performance than they would have wanted. Heeding this wisdom, Nazi theater administrators even noted the potential of cabaret—the mode of entertainment most hated and mistrusted by Goebbels—to sway the masses, and they exercised considerable restraint when it came to enforcing measures aimed at silencing its satire and “decadence.”35 The creation of the position of Reich Dramaturgist (Reichsdramaturg) in the Propaganda Ministry may have inspired the profession to exercise caution, yet measures of conformity varied widely, depending on local politics and taste, and virtually no blacklists were ever implemented. Although the controlled availability of script rentals could determine which works reached production, repertoires during the Third Reich did not deviate much from those of the Weimar Republic, with the notable and glaring absence of communist theater.36 Music censorship was perhaps the least rigid, possibly because the variety and abundance of musical outlets lying beyond government or police controls would have complicated any attempts at enforcement. Music in state institutions could be more closely supervised, but policies ranged widely, from one official insisting that

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at least one new German opera be performed each season to another approving performances of works by the “Jews” Mendelssohn and Offenbach.37 Local music authorities spent much of their time coordinating the concert season and approving bookings to avoid schedule conflicts, but they lacked the authority to control programming decisions.38 The Reich Music Examination Office (Reichsmusikprüfstelle), set up to handle the huge task of overseeing all music publication in Germany, consisted at one point of only four staff members. It managed to compile a few published and unpublished lists proscribing certain “non-Aryans” as well as some “Aryans” (these lists included Alban Berg and Serge Koussevitsky, as well as the American Jew Aaron Copland, although Mendelssohn was conspicuously omitted), and it established a rule that dealers and publishers had to receive permission before disseminating the works of émigrés.39 Otherwise, music censorship became a priority only during the war, when restrictions on royalties and other payments prompted the banning of music from enemy countries.40 New recording and radio technologies further complicated music censorship, since they furnished purely private means of music consumption that therefore lay beyond the control of censors. Radio broadcasting, previously the domain of the military, had become an instrument of the state during the Depression, and reforms under Chancellor Franz von Papen enabled Goebbels later on to effect a complete takeover of all radio companies. At first, jazz was officially banned by Nazi broadcasting authorities, but it became evident that the German public was attracted to foreign stations playing music banned on German radio and would inevitably listen to foreign news broadcasts. So, during the war, German radio programs started to include works by jazz artists Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman, but they concealed their names, insisting that what they were playing was not “Negro and Jewish jazz” per se but rather the “relaxed, strongly rhythmic music” that soldiers desired.41 The German recording industry was suffering significant setbacks during the Depression but made an astounding comeback under the Nazis. The government made no gestures to take over the industry, and German companies ostensibly complied voluntarily with racial policies, eliminating Jewish composers and performers from their domestic catalogs and flooding the German market with marches, light classics, and film music. However, they continued to sell these “degenerate” products abroad.42 One of the measures regarded as most draconian was the banning of arts criticism (an act known as the Kritikverbot), although its motives and effectiveness remain elusive. Goebbels formally abolished all arts criticism in November 1936 and replaced it with objective reportage or “arts observation” (Kunstbetrachtung), stipulating that authors exercise “self-censorship.” However, the ban applied only to newspapers and not to trade journals. Neither the reasons for Goebbels’s Kritikverbot nor its effects are fully understood, yet there is evidence that artists themselves might very well have welcomed the measure as further protecting their

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interests, believing that critics wielded too much power in making or breaking careers without necessarily possessing the qualifications to make such judgments.43 Some saw this ban positively, considering it a weapon against corruption and dilettantism and hoping it would put an end to what they imagined as the Weimarera “dominance” of Jewish critics, whom they claimed had brainwashed the public.44 The actual enforcement of the ban, however, may have been exaggerated after 1945. We now know that Nazi-era film critics balked at limiting themselves to mere descriptions; hard-liners complained that “bourgeois” journals were not adhering to the ban, such that National Socialist journals that took it seriously were being muzzled by it and robbed of the chance for counterattack; and, as late as 1942, a doctoral dissertation concluded that the ban had only slowly and sporadically begun to take hold and that much confusion still reigned regarding the new expectations of the “arts reporter.”45 NA Z I F IC AT IO N A S A N A E S T H E T IC P R I N C I P L E

In May 1933, a group of Nazi students congregated in front of the Berlin Opera House on the main boulevard Unter den Linden to cast into the flames the works of authors they believed to have defiled the German spirit by denigrating the “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft), morality, the state, nobility of the soul, German history, national reconstruction, the war dead, the German language, and the immortal spirit of the German Volk.46 Two glaring examples of organized Nazi assaults on the arts would follow a few years later: the Degenerate Art exhibition, which premiered in Munich in 1937 before touring to other cities, and the 1938 Degenerate Music exhibition in Düsseldorf. These events, more than anything else, still stand out as the most blatant suggestions of Nazi designs on artistic freedom. By singling out specific artists, works, styles, genres, and schools as “affronts” to German culture, their venomous rhetoric and shock value deeply impressed arts historians. Yet closer examinations of these events show that they, too, were riddled with inconsistencies, revealing the shortcomings of any such objectives. Unlike the book burnings, the shrill condemnations of individual artists did not necessarily end careers, and the implied guidelines for “good” and “bad” art failed, for the most part, to translate into laws, restrictions, or polices that would erase the legacies or influences of art that was labeled “degenerate.” As was the case with structural nazification, scholars realized early on that they needed to look back to the years before 1933 to fully understand the context in which any aesthetic nazification may or may not have taken hold. Even though Hitler revealed early in his career his particular tastes in the arts and his political motivations for adopting antimodernist views,47 the goal of reaching a consensus among the various party factions thereafter only became more elusive, such that by 1933 any guise of unanimity hid a host of inconsistencies. The mandate to

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“cleanse” German culture of destructive foreign influences had been cited in the twenty-five-point Nazi party program of 1920, reiterated in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and “scientifically” explored in writings of the 1920s and 1930s about the racial components of the arts by men such as Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Hans F. K. Günther, and Richard Eichenauer, not to mention Alfred Rosenberg and “blood and soil” (Blut und Boden) author Richard Walter Darré. Yet there was little agreement on what would constitute “German” art, even within the Fighting League, where a disillusioned “culture-bearing” middle class, struggling with economic collapse and caught between powerful capitalist interests from above and proletarian mobilization from below, could find solace in the Fighting League’s accusations that both “materialists” and “Bolshevists” were destroying German culture.48 But, perhaps because the organization had only vague notions of what its members strove for culturally, the Fighting League sometimes ended up exercising restraint when confronted with attacks on the arts from those on the extreme right, gradually embracing this extremism only if its messages seemed to resonate with the broader public. Such was the case with the archconservative Deutsche Kunstgesellschaft (German Art Society, GAS), a völkisch organization whose extreme views surpassed even those of Rosenberg. From the beginning, its founder and constant driving force, Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder, solidified the society’s antiforeign, antimodern, and antisemitic agenda by targeting French impressionists and the secessionist (and Jew) Max Liebermann. Although all artists suffered from the economic vicissitudes of the 1920s, the GAS exaggerated the plight of “true German” traditionalists and, through its widely distributed news service and strategic alliances with other powerful völkisch organizations (and ultimately with the Nazi Party), managed to become a small but formidable entity. Perhaps its greatest impact came with Feistel-Rohmeder’s original idea in 1933 to purge galleries of modernist works, exhibiting them in a “chamber of horrors” to educate the public of past injuries to German art, posting the amounts of tax dollars used to purchase the works (often using astronomical figures that were a result of hyperinflation), and condemning them to being used as “kindling for the heating of public buildings.” All of these tactics would be co-opted by the curators of the Degenerate Art exhibition. However, in promoting “true German” art, the society’s journal, Das Bild, never really engaged in aesthetic discourse and instead defined its parameters around the genealogy, biography, and character of the artists it featured. Rosenberg’s art journal, Die Kunst im Dritten Reich, was similarly long on aesthetic rantings but short on contemporary examples that illustrated its ideals.49 The muddling of politics and aesthetics prior to 1933 emerges even more strikingly from a closer look at the history of the Bauhaus school of design, established in 1919 by Walter Gropius in Weimar, in the state of Thuringia. In the years following the First World War, the national recognition afforded to the Bauhaus

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garnered the support of local authorities in Weimar, but Gropius’s plans to reform art education and annex the existing Weimar art academy to the Bauhaus raised logistical concerns that escalated into xenophobic rants against the school’s foreign faculty and students. Wild accusations followed in the local press—of communist activism, foreignness, primitivism, machine-worship, insanity, and perversity that would be revisited and expanded in the Degenerate Art exhibition more than a decade later—all of which resonated with the overall public discontent arising from the inflation. The national attention these attacks garnered actually evoked much sympathy for the Bauhaus outside Thuringia, but much of the sympathy from the left actually credited the institution with a greater political mission than it warranted, ironically echoing its right-wing critics.50 Gropius and his associates moved the Bauhaus out of Weimar to Dessau in 1925, where the outspoken communist Hannes Meyer succeeded Gropius as the school’s director in 1928, only to be replaced by the more moderate Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1930, who tried to distance the institution from all political involvement. This did not stop right-wing opponents in Dessau from orchestrating the Bauhaus’s closure in 1932. The school, which had already been struggling financially, closed permanently early in 1933, after having moved to Berlin. Back in Thuringia, however, the Nazi Party, which had been the smallest in Germany, made an impressive showing in the provincial elections of 1930 and became part of the ruling coalition that ousted the communists and Social Democrats. Thuringia became the first testing ground for implementing a National Socialist cultural policy when Wilhelm Frick was appointed minister of the interior and of public education. Frick carried out a radical right-wing agenda, with ambitions to steer national cultural policy in the future. He enlisted three of the party’s best-known ideologues—Hans F. K. Günther and locals Hans Severus Ziegler and Paul Schultze-Naumburg—to assist in crafting and executing policies while the rest of Germany looked on in disbelief, even ridicule. Following a spate of bans (including on a guest engagement of Erwin Piscator’s theater troupe, works by Hindemith and Stravinsky, and the film version of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera), Frick cleared the Weimar museum of its modernist works. By this point, the region had gained a nationwide reputation for its extreme right-wing tendencies, and reactions in the press elsewhere regarded these antimodernist measures as ludicrous and probably short-lived. The Thuringian parliament shut down Frick’s activities in April 1931 because many of them were illegal, even though Frick had encountered little resistance from the public while enacting his radical measures.51 In the meantime, as Bauhaus architects had been gaining wide recognition, right-wing architects who had themselves thrown off the excesses of the nineteenth century and accepted the same principles promoted by the Bauhaus—most notably Paul Schultze-Naumburg—resented the growing popularity and acclaim enjoyed by

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Gropius and his associates. In the latter half of the 1920s, the stabilization of the currency following the hyperinflation in 1922 and 1923 had made it possible to address the housing shortage that had intensified since World War I, and the new approach (later popularly referred to as “Bauhaus style”), with its innovative functional designs, lent itself particularly well to meeting the needs of low-income housing. Resentful of these successes, Schultze-Naumburg exploited the racist rhetoric of the Bauhaus debates, targeting the school’s preoccupation with technical concerns and functionality, which he declaimed as a “Bolshevist” neglect of aesthetics and linked with an un-German, materialist, cosmopolitan race. The posturing against new architecture did not immediately resonate with the Fighting League or with the Nazi Party, however. Initially, the League’s newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, expressly praised the innovations of the new architecture in the housing projects, illustrating an important feature of the party that often gets overlooked: “what might be termed the ‘socialist’ strain in Nazi ideology.”52 However, the Fighting League soon discovered that Schulze-Naumburg’s speeches attracted huge crowds, and it consequently embraced his anti-Bauhaus campaign. The Völkischer Beobachter followed suit and reversed its position on architecture, capitalizing on Schultze-Naumburg’s popularity, devoting unprecedented space to architecture, and providing a forum for the fusion of anti-Bauhaus, antisemitic, anti-Marxist, and blood-and-soil attacks against the government that had commissioned the new architecture at the expense of “German architects and engineers.” Though garbled and inconsistent, these patchwork arguments gave the appearance of articulating what the Nazi Party would oppose. When it came to proposing a stylistic alternative, however, the party and government officials struggled over the next fifteen years to reach a consensus. Rosenberg proved far more explicit in his attacks on expressionist painting than on any modes of architectural style, and Hitler, in his first speech on culture at the 1933 Nazi Party Rally, even demanded that Nazi architecture adopt “crystal-clear functionalism,” which is hardly a repudiation of the Bauhaus school and could possibly even be interpreted as an endorsement of its doctrines.53 In the meantime, prior to 1933, dire warnings about the degradation of German music abounded from right-wing factions. At the turn of the century, composer Hans Pfitzner had vehemently attacked Ferruccio Busoni, accusing him of direct affronts to German art when the latter had encouraged composers to explore new realms. Pfitzner broadened his attacks in the 1920s to include condemnations of “Bolshevist” atonality, the “jazz-fox-trot” craze of musical Americanism, and the omnipresence of Jewish internationalists as enemies of German music. The venerable music periodical Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, at the time under the editorship of Alfred Heuss, took a decisive turn in the 1920s when it began to attack Jews, atonalists, and foreigners in the German music scene. Peter Raabe, who would later replace Richard Strauss as president of the Reich Music Chamber, issued a strong

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warning in 1926 that “German character” was in more danger than ever before. He complained that Germans danced the Charleston to the music of “Negro dance bands” and predicted that the next generation would be ashamed that their parents had acted like American apes. He further fretted that American films brainwashed Germans with grotesque humor, while German opera and theater languished. Raabe believed that “German character” had revealed itself as weak and had raised all things foreign to a much higher stature than they deserved. Other forces operating within German borders were also presented as “threats” to German culture, including the working class, the amateur movement, technology, and materialism. According to Hermann Unger, true Germanness in music had triumphed with Romanticism, but in the contemporary “proletarian” and technological era, standards had declined; anything foreign-sounding received praise, music was valued only for entertainment purposes and not for moral education, dilettantism had been elevated to the status of “folk art” and “art of the youth,” and Germans had “Americanized” themselves by making art a dispensable commodity. Unger proposed that Jews could be held accountable for the current free-for-all but that all of Germany was to blame for allowing Jews to finance and dominate cultural life.54 In addition to the blatant and deeply rooted antisemitism of all of this early rhetoric, one common theme touted by most of these reactionary cultural critics leading up to 1933 was the need to restore “German” values and respectability. Still adhering to core beliefs in the uniquely German forms of Bildung and Kultur (education and culture) as opposed to the more superficial Western Zivilisation, the cultured middle class of the 1920s felt threatened from all sides. Rampant street violence, increasing workers’ unrest, prostitution, poverty, and foreign profiteering had their cultural parallels in the spread of American jazz music and film, the biting satire and flagrant sexuality of cabarets and revues, communist theater, and the demoralizing depictions of all of these negative aspects of contemporary German life in the provocative testimonials of Dada artists. The cultural enemy of the middle class was the foreigner, the industrialist, the “Bolshevist” factory worker, and—the imagined engineer behind all of these threats to all things “German”— the Jew.55 When Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, Frick rose to the post of minister of the interior, local cultural bodies throughout the Reich came under National Socialist leadership, and precursors to the 1937 Degenerate Art and Great German Art exhibitions cropped up in several cities. Local officials and rightwing newspapers also launched smear campaigns against performing artists, leading cultural figures were dismissed from their positions, and other luminaries stepped down out of protest. Yet despite the veneer of unanimity, the consensus on what should be encouraged and what should be silenced in the crusade to promote German culture had not gelled and would continue to remain open to broad interpretation.

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The Degenerate Art exhibition, which was inspired by the local “chamber of horrors” showings organized by the GAS, was entrusted to curator Adolf Ziegler, a favored artist and head of the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts. It displayed artworks seized from public museums and arranged them in a cramped, chaotic manner (reminiscent of the 1920 Berlin Dada exhibit) to show how charlatanism, psychosis, and “Jewish” swindle ruled the Weimar-era art scene and robbed Germans of huge sums of tax dollars that were spent to acquire such so-called art for public institutions. The exhibition and accompanying catalog launched sweeping attacks on certain artistic movements and especially on individual artists and also compared various works to the attempts of mentally ill amateurs, targeting some artists who enjoyed well-established careers in Germany and, in some cases, were still regarded as respected citizens. Yet the path to Degenerate Art, which was first investigated by Hildegard Brenner in 1963 and fully explored in a recent book by Jonathan Petropoulos, had been a twisted one, with the heated debate over the “Germanness” of expressionist artists reaching its climax in 1934. The most vocal defenders of these artists were to be found among a younger cohort, who fought to protect what they believed to be a truly German art form. United in their opposition to the Fighting League’s aggressive promotion of völkisch art and spearheaded by leaders of the Nazi student organization, a group known as the Berlin Opposition promoted the works of artists such as Emil Nolde, Ernst Barlach, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner as “Nordic” and “Aryan.” Their leadership included many with leftist backgrounds, as well as Fritz Hippler, who would later produce the gruesome “documentary” film, The Eternal Jew (Der ewige Jude), in which he abandoned his earlier crusade and visually pilloried expressionist works as examples of the “Jewish spirit.” The Berlin students garnered support from other National Socialist student organizations around Germany and inspired hope among artists and the liberal press that more artistic freedom would be tolerated. Furthermore, rumors started to spread about Hitler’s attempts to reconcile with Barlach, Rust’s and Goebbels’s renewed support of Nazi Party member Nolde, and even Goebbels’s regrets about orchestrating the book burnings. More concretely, the student actions encouraged the National Gallery’s Kronprinzenpalais to pursue plans to feature modern art in upcoming exhibitions. Rosenberg, of course, struck back with an aggressive press campaign. With the Rosenberg-Goebbels rivalry threatening to spin out of control, Hitler had to arbitrate. In his speech at the Reich Party Rally of 1934, he put Goebbels in his place by denouncing the “cubists, futurists, Dadaists, etc.,” but also took a swipe at Rosenberg by warning against “those backward-lookers who imagine they can impose on the National Socialist revolution . . . a ‘Teutonic art’ sprung from the fuzzy world of their own romantic conceptions.”56 Eventually, the modernist exhibitions at the Kronprinzenpalais and at the private gallery of Ferdinand Moeller were shut down, and

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their “perpetrators” (including Hippler) were dismissed, although this did not stop the Ferdinand Moeller Gallery from exhibiting the work of more young, National Socialist expressionists. The journal Kunst der Nation (Art of the Nation), which had been founded by Otto Andreas Schreiber in November 1933 with the full support of Goebbels (who even contributed articles) as a forum for young National Socialist promoters of modern art, ceased publication in 1935. However, Goebbels assigned Schreiber and another leader in the student action, Hans Weidemann, to oversee the fine arts section of Strength through Joy and mount modernist exhibitions in factories.57 Even more inconsistencies were revealed in the selection process for the two contrasting events in Munich. The Degenerate Art exhibition was meant to stand as the counterexample to the inaugural show accompanying the opening of the House of German Art. Yet when this first exhibition, Great German Art, was being mounted, personal invitations to submit works went out to Emil Nolde, Ernst Barlach, and Rudolf Belling, all of whom would also be featured in the Degenerate Art exhibition.58 Goebbels had been an advocate of Barlach and Nolde, and Georg Schrimpf ’s paintings were found in the collections of Rudolf Hess and Richard Walter Darré, although all of these artists were featured in Degenerate Art. Not only that, but Belling’s sculpture Triad was displayed prominently in the Degenerate Art exhibition, while his piece Max Schmeling appeared in the Great German Art Exhibition (Albert Birkle also had works in both exhibitions). Gerhard Marcks had two of his works in Degenerate Art, but his Bronze Swimmer of 1938 went on to win a prize after being featured in a touring exhibition of German art in 1940. On the other hand, some artists who went on to become icons of Nazi art—Arno Breker, Richard Scheibe, Fritz Koelle, Carl Schwalbach, Olaf Gulbransson, and Werner Peiner—had initially been declared “degenerate” and had their works seized or destroyed. Most ironic was the fate of expressionist Franz Marc, whose Tower of Blue Horses had to be removed from the Degenerate Art exhibition when military heads protested the vilification of a fallen war hero. When the inaugural exhibition in Munich went on tour in 1938, further modifications resulted in removing the works of Barlach, Lehmbruck, Kollwitz, and—in response to complaints from the Dutch Embassy—Mondrian.59 After the show’s hugely successful opening in 1937, public interest in the vilification of modernism declined, and subsequent Degenerate Art exhibitions failed to attract the same numbers of visitors that had attended in Munich. Once modernist artists had been pushed to the periphery, the GAS’s rallying cries became redundant, and its promotion of traditionalists proved too conservative to accommodate the desired directions for the future of German art. The GAS had reached its peak of influence in the times when Nazi views on art were at their most ambivalent, and it had initially found an ally in Rosenberg, but the group also had been chastised for presuming to know more than the party. After 1937, while it might

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have been inadvisable—at the least—to persist with any outspoken advocacy of modern art, it was not impossible to view modernist works—even works by those artists stigmatized as “degenerate”—in smaller galleries and the factory exhibitions organized by the student leaders of the former Berlin Opposition. Some of the artists whose works had been seized would even secure government commissions in the years that followed.60 The 1938 Degenerate Music exhibition in Düsseldorf had even less influence on the diverse musical activities in the years that followed. Theater director Hans Severus Ziegler, the event’s curator and a close associate of Frick’s, was not a musician, and he relied heavily on the successful tactics employed in the Degenerate Art exhibition, mimicking the crowded and chaotic presentation of artifacts on walls strewn with graffiti-like commentary and linking music to modern art wherever possible (displaying, for example, two abstract paintings featuring musical subjects by the “degenerates” Paul Klee and Karl Hofer, with the inscription “Degenerate art and degenerate music hand in hand”61). The catalog’s cover depicted a black saxophonist with a Jewish star on his lapel, inviting suggestions of racial otherness, American degeneracy, and Jewish control (fig. 4). For the most part, the exhibition consisted of ad hominem attacks against the Jew Arnold Schoenberg and his student Anton von Webern; “Aryan” composer Ernst Krenek, whose hugely successful opera Jonny spielt auf! featured a black jazz musician as its central character; Jewish opera composer Franz Schreker, whose works had been successful throughout the 1920s; individual conductors and composers, both Jews and non-Jews, who were singled out for having proliferated “degeneracy” through atonal and twelvetone composition or other musical means; and Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, whose Threepenny Opera (Dreigroschenoper), a satire of capitalism, was purposely misrepresented by the curators as an endorsement of greed and corruption. Yet these attacks would hardly influence any future policy or practices. Most of the condemned individuals had either emigrated or died years before, but their influence did not go away entirely. Paul von Klenau, a Danish student of Schoenberg’s, managed to have his twelve-tone operas premiere on major German stages in 1933, 1937, 1939, and 1940, and Winfried Zillig, who also dabbled in twelve-tone composition, received commissions from the NSKG and held a position in a local office of the Reich Music Chamber. In the opera houses, new works thrived and even won Hitler’s praise despite having atonal and jazz-inspired scores reminiscent of Schoenberg, Krenek, and Weill.62 German composers were not cut off from international trends in new music either. Stravinsky (who was not named specifically in the exhibition catalog but referenced by his work L’Histoire du soldat) was anything but absent from Germany throughout the 1930s, and he was even regarded as a possible mentor and inspiration for young composers of the Third Reich. His style was indeed resonating in some of the most successful new works produced in the Third Reich, most notably Carl Orff ’s Carmina Burana.63 Hungar-

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figure 4. Cover of the Degenerate Music (Entartete Musik) exhibition brochure, 1938 (Rare Books Collection, Georgetown University Library).

ian ultra-modernist Béla Bartók was well received in the International Contemporary Music Festival in Baden-Baden, even after he made public statements against the Nazi government. Meanwhile, Hindemith, hoping for rehabilitation, also continued to have his music performed in Germany to rave reviews.64 Perhaps the most surprising survivor of these attacks was jazz. An intense antijazz campaign, begun during the Depression by German musicians’ fears of competition from the influx of foreign jazz musicians into the country following the currency stabilization in 1924, caused jazz to fall completely out of favor prior to 1933. Eventually, however, outspoken critics of jazz, such as Goebbels and Music Chamber president Peter Raabe, had to yield to the idiom’s growing popularity

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rather than risk subversion from Germany’s increasing number of jazz enthusiasts.65 Ironically, after the Degenerate Music exhibition, jazz actually enjoyed more success, and Third Reich policy seemed to follow the principle that it was better to be lenient and give the public what it wanted than to impose restrictions and risk defiance. Despite some harsh punishments imposed by local authorities, like in the case of the rebellious Swing Kids in Hamburg,66 central government measures against jazz were notably tentative. A further concession to the growing international popularity of jazz and swing was the formation of government-sponsored German jazz bands designed to appeal to German listeners. The most celebrated, Charlie and His Orchestra, also broadcast demoralizing parodies of American big band hits such as “FDR Jones,” “Hold Tight,” and “You’re Driving Me Crazy” to Germany’s enemies.67 When Goebbels banned all recordings featuring “non-Aryans” in 1938, many forbidden items could still be obtained legally, owing to ignorance about which American and British artists were Jewish or black. And despite stepped-up restrictions put into effect when the United States entered the war, German soldiers stationed in occupied territories served as a new resource for acquiring forbidden recordings, purchasing them outside German borders and bringing them back home. Jazz also managed to thrive in nightclubs, many of which were armed with doormen to screen for suspected spies and equipped with elaborate warning mechanisms and foils in the case of raids by the Music Chamber.68 The appeal of Americanism extended well beyond the jazz craze, with the German public attracted to American film, art, music, dance, literature, and sexual mores, as well as its entire consumer culture.69 Other arts were spared any horror shows comparable to the Degenerate Art and Degenerate Music exhibitions, but there were no shortages of representations of the grand ambitions of the party, the state, and their leadership in the architecture of the Third Reich. The Nazi chapter in architectural history is dominated by Hitler and Speer’s hugely ambitious plans to rebuild Berlin as “Germania,” drawing on ancient Greek and Roman prototypes in an effort to display global power. Massive structures were designed to dwarf not only the existing buildings in Berlin but also government centers elsewhere in the world (fig. 5). Yet the fact that these plans existed and that numerous neoclassical government buildings were erected during the Third Reich has tended to divert attention away from the multiplicity of styles employed in building projects throughout the Reich, including those originally cultivated in the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus has been portrayed as aggressively shuttered by the Nazis immediately after they came to power in 1933, an act that supposedly drove Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe into exile. However, biographical details have revealed that their departures were voluntary moves to take better positions and that they did not sever their ties to Germany. At one point, the two architects even accompanied Fighting League members in a meeting with Hitler to stake their claim in the new state.70 Eclecticism of styles devel-

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figure 5. Models by Manfred Jonas, 1984, of the Brandenburg Gate, Reichstag, and Albert Speer’s design (ca. 1940) for the Grosse Halle (“Great Hall”) (Landesarchiv Berlin).

oped continually from the Weimar years through the 1930s and beyond, and the influence of the Bauhaus persisted in the Nazi state, not only the school’s architectural styles but also its core educational principles. Even though the Bauhaus had acquired associations with “cultural Bolshevism” and “Jewish internationalism,” those who had past associations with the school generally encountered no obstacles to assuming leading positions in graphic design, advertising, sculpture, and photography.71 In theater, a cultic form of drama that praised German militarism and völkisch ideals in ritualistic fashion, dubbed with the old Germanic name Thingspiel, caught the attention of the Propaganda Ministry and Reich Theater Chamber in the first few years of the Third Reich. This led to commissions of suitable works and partially realized plans to build hundreds of Thingplätze, open-air theaters designed to accommodate the plays. Yet the brief focus on this eccentric theater form was only a momentary obsession, quickly abandoned because of its ideological heavyhandedness, and it had little effect on the continuation of the majority of theater operations, including the notorious political satire so characteristic of Weimar-era cabarets and revues. The theater world as a whole showed little evidence of bowing to demands to conform to aesthetic or political constraints. Some of the boldest experiments appeared on stage with the blessings of Goebbels, Goering, and even Hitler, and many former associates of Reinhardt, Brecht, and Piscator continued to

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carry out their artistic vision under the watchful eyes of Nazi leaders, on occasion even pushing the limits with productions that were critical of the system.72 As chief patron of the Bayreuth Wagner festival, Hitler himself condoned the engagement of talented personnel with modernist and even Marxist backgrounds.73 Furthermore, authors of Thingspiel dramas acknowledged the style’s late-expressionist roots and expressed their indebtedness to Reinhardt and Piscator for inspiring the entire Thing movement.74 Many other breakthroughs from the 1920s were adapted and repackaged as Nazi innovations. Weimar-era theater architecture and lighting techniques were the inspiration for Albert Speer’s staging of the Nuremberg party rallies. The “movement choirs” (Bewegungschor) of the 1920s were incorporated by choreographers Mary Wigman, Rudolf Laban, and Kurt Jooss into the Ausdruckstanz phenomenon, which was billed as the new “German dance” and reached its widest audiences with the ballet of the masses featured at the 1936 Olympic games.75 At the same time, spectacles that were overladen with Nazi ideology tended to fail dismally, and there was surprisingly little pressure to flaunt antisemitism on the theater stage, even to the point that some productions downplayed antisemitic interpretations, much to the dismay of Nazi theater critics.76 Overall, purely escapist entertainment attracted the largest audiences, and the number of productions of new comedies far outdistanced that of any other new works.77 The same was true of film, where movies geared toward entertainment far outnumbered the type of propaganda films we normally associate with the Third Reich. This was partly because the public clamored for diversion, but also because heavy-handed ideology had no place in the export market. Yet even the classic examples of Nazi films that were geared to indoctrinate and embolden members of the party and the Hitler Youth bore unmistakable signs of emulating experimental forerunners produced in Germany and elsewhere. As early as World War I, official news bureaus in Germany, Britain, and the United States carefully monitored the dissemination of information, and newsreels and war films in all three countries used strikingly similar techniques to portray their respective enemies in World War II.78 The most notorious Nazi martyr films (Hitlerjunge Quex, Hans Westmar, and SA-Mann Brand) borrowed from the leftist films of the Weimar era, and Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera influenced some of the most popular musicals by Detlef Sierck,79 who made a number of successful films in Nazi Germany before coming to the United States in 1937 and changing his name to Douglas Sirk. Film scholars, for their part, are increasingly recognizing filmmakers Leni Riefenstahl and even Fritz Hippler for their innovative filmic techniques.80 “NA Z I F IC AT IO N ” O R “D E - J EW I F IC AT IO N ” ?

To conclude at this point that cultural life in Nazi Germany consisted by and large of “business as usual,” however, would obviously be a tragic misrepresentation. For

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one thing, those active in the arts would have felt the need to proceed cautiously after witnessing the hounding of colleagues and the vitriol directed at their work. As the ad hominem attacks that dominated both the Degenerate Art and Degenerate Music exhibitions imply, the campaign to drive Jews and others away from participating in German cultural life was already well underway in the years leading up to these events, and the result was that thousands of artists and intellectuals had left Germany in the first few years after the Nazi Party had come to power. The targeting first of individuals and then of entire groups profoundly transformed the artistic community, and the many thousands who fell victim to Nazi slander were often still treated as objects of derision, even if their artistic legacy persisted in the continued work of their colleagues and students. Even if an aesthetic nazification was never fulfilled (and arguably never seriously pursued), a comparable process of removing people from participation in the arts was on its way to achieving full implementation by 1935, with the “de-Jewification” (Entjudung) of the artistic community. In November 1936, Propaganda Minister Goebbels boasted at a convocation of the Reich Culture Chambers: We now have German theater, German film, German press, German literature, German art, German music and German radio. The charge that was often made against us that it would be impossible to remove the Jews from artistic and cultural life because there were too many of them and that we would not be able to fill all of the vacant positions has been stunningly disproven. [Applause] This change in personnel, organization, and direction proceeded without any friction or disruption. And at no other time in Germany have German artists been so revered, and German art so desired and respected as it is today.81

By “German” arts and media, he meant an art and media world without Jews. Even though he could not claim it to be true, he may have hoped to imply that the regime had also expunged all influence of those forcibly removed. But even if the Nazi regime never accomplished a total eradication of what it considered to be Jewish or Bolshevist influences, it could nevertheless boast huge successes in driving out the individuals and groups it blamed for conspiring to destroy German culture. By the time of Goebbels’s speech, a radicalization of cultural policy had led to a significant reduction in the number of Jews practicing their professions.82 In the first few months of Hitler’s chancellorship, high-level purges did not spare the arts professions, an area where German nationalists and racists had argued for decades that Jews had held far too much influence for far too long. Under the authority of the Reichstag Fire Decree of February 1933, authorities stopped performances by prominent Jews (such as conductor Bruno Walter), citing public safety concerns. The first wave of purges involved hounding, dismissing, or otherwise humiliating

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an impressive roster of influential artistic personnel, not all of them Jews. Those with communist sympathies, such as Bertolt Brecht, along with his Jewish musical collaborators Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau, saw the writing on the wall and left Germany early on. More systematic purges came with the enactment of the Civil Service Law in April of that year, resulting in the removal of thousands of Jews from public employment. Universities, museums, radio stations, state theaters, orchestras, and other civil service areas were affected by this law. Most famous among these was the prestigious Prussian Academy of Arts, where the writer Gottfried Benn, who was serving as president in 1933, oversaw the maneuvers to oust Heinrich Mann, Arnold Schoenberg, Käthe Kollwitz, and others, followed by the expulsion and resignation of many more over the next five years.83 In the first year of Nazi rule, approximately eight thousand Jews were removed from cultural professions. Thus, by late 1936, the Culture Chamber members listening to Goebbels’s speech could see the effects ad hominem attacks and legislation had had on driving prominent Jewish cultural luminaries out of Germany, and their organization was on its way toward eliminating those who remained. The Reich Culture Chambers, which had been established in November 1933, was already in the process of developing means to single out Jews applying for membership and turn them down on the grounds of their lack of “reliability” and “suitability” (vaguely outlined in paragraph 10 of the Reich Culture Chamber Law), thereby excluding them from practicing their professions. Jews who had managed to join the Chamber early on were systematically expelled over the course of the next several years. In addition to denying Jews employment in cultural fields, there was a measure enacted in 1937 to ban Jews from attending public cultural events, although this became enforceable only in 1941, when Jews were required to wear yellow Star of David badges.84 Yet Goebbels was also fully aware that exceptions were possible, even allowed at the highest ranks, including his own. Goebbels, as Berlin’s regional party head (Gauleiter), oversaw world-renowned German theaters, the City Opera, and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Goering, as Prussian Prime Minister, took charge of prestigious opera houses, theaters, and orchestras, and he managed to protect his Berlin institutions from any financial or bureaucratic control by the Propaganda Ministry.85 The two found themselves in a fierce rivalry as both concentrated on getting the best and the brightest stars for their ensembles, and they ended up promoting the careers of several musicians, actors and directors known to be homosexual or to have had close associations with communists or Jews. Goering even granted special permission to allow performances by conductor Leo Blech and singer Alexander Kipnis (both “full Jews”), and to the singers Günther Treptow (whose grandmother was Jewish), Max Lorenz, and Frieda Leider (both married to Jews).86 The most famous exception he made was for Gustaf Gründgens, whom he convinced to assume the leadership of the Prussian State Theater,

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ignoring the actor’s former ties to noted leftist theater directors and writers. Gründgens’s Faustian bargain with Goering was immortalized in the novel Mephisto, by Gründgens’s former brother-in-law and associate, Klaus Mann, who was in exile in the United States. Though it was impossible to achieve a complete purge of all Jewish artists, removing them from the cultural sphere remained a high priority for the Nazi leadership. The few exceptions described above notwithstanding, one could rattle off an impressive who’s who of prominent Jews and communists who had been publicly humiliated by party attacks in the first years of Nazi rule. In the years that followed, the task of segregating and excluding the rest was set into motion. Witnessing the intensification of ad hoc actions, laws, and policies, growing numbers of Jews, communists, and other “undesirables” who managed to evade direct action came to realize that staying in Germany would be impossible. This resulted in skyrocketing numbers of refugees, especially after the pogrom of 1938 (euphemistically named Reichskristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass). Yet the “deJewification” of culture industries, while it may have increased job opportunities for “true Germans,” also suddenly created a sizable class of unemployed Jews. Apprehensive of the serious economic implications of this and acknowledging the public relations benefits that would come with “providing for” the abruptly disenfranchised Jewish community with some form of aid, Propaganda Ministry functionary Hans Hinkel worked together with Jewish leaders to allow Jews to conduct their own cultural programs. As a result, the Jewish Culture League (Kulturbund deutscher Juden) was founded in Berlin, where it sponsored lectures, exhibitions, film programs, cabarets, and dances and grew to include three theater ensembles, a chamber theater, an opera ensemble, two symphony orchestras, numerous choral groups, and chamber music groups. It then spread to at least one hundred cities and had over fifty thousand members by 1937. However, deportation and emigration quickly depleted the group’s personnel, and in 1941, operating at that point on a shoestring budget, it was dissolved by the Gestapo.87 By this time, certainly, Goebbels was able to “stunningly disprove” with even more conviction than before the skepticism of those who doubted the feasibility of removing Jews from artistic and cultural life on the grounds that “there were too many of them.” But did this “de-Jewification,” causing the numbers of “undesirables” in Germany to plummet, yield a culture that was noticeably more “German”? If making German culture more “German” could be accomplished solely by driving out “undesirables,” the Nazi Party could boast tremendous successes, particularly after the initial purges of cultural organizations, the draconian restrictions placed on Jews that prevented them from participating in German cultural life, and the resulting flight of thousands of individuals who had previously been active in cultural professions. However, any promises Goebbels may have wished to imply of establishing a new “German” art were based on false premises. No one

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could define what was either “German” or “anti-German” in contemporary cultural life, and transforming the nation’s culture into something more “German” in content, style, or approach was far too slippery and ill-defined a task to be seriously attempted, let alone achieved. T OWA R D A H I S T O R IO G R A P H Y O F A RT S I N T H E T H I R D R E IC H

Goebbels’s rhetorical sleight of hand also calls our attention to an important consideration that will be explored throughout this study, namely that one has to exercise extreme caution in interpreting primary sources from this period. As we will see repeatedly, the first impulse of scholarship on Nazi arts has been to take documents and events at face value. This has resulted in what some have described as scholarship itself falling victim to Nazi propaganda. Not only should we read Nazi hyperbole with a grain of salt, but we should also consider it as a key ingredient of the Nazi strategy to successfully win over the masses. The party wielded an unrivaled mastery of rhetoric, spectacle, and pageantry, which it exploited for purposes of promoting solidarity, as well as to demonstrate the brutal suppression of its enemies. As historian Alan Beyerchen observed: Nothing captures the imagination better than spectacle, and no political leaders in modern times have been more aware of this than the National Socialists. . . . The Nazis were masters at staging events that seized the attention and stamped indelible impressions upon the minds of all who participated and observed: the mass arrests and ruthless suppression of political opposition that followed the fiery destruction of the Reichstag building in February 1933; the united march of hundreds of thousands of S.A. brownshirts, Stahlhelm veterans, Reichswehr soldiers, and S.S. blackshirts through the German capital in March 1933; and the awesome orchestration of crowds and symbols during the Nuremberg party rallies.88

In the realm of the arts, spectacles also rose to new heights, leaving their own indelible marks on historical memory. The violence and hyperbole flaunted in the art world of the Third Reich projected the image of a single-minded aesthetic agenda and the power to enforce it, even though much of this image might have been built on Nazi publicists’ wishful thinking. Furthermore, we must remain mindful of the power this rhetoric, spectacle, ceremony, and mass ritual had in building a strong sense of community. Centuries of disunity among the various German-speaking courts were only partially mitigated by the unification of 1871, and the country’s defeat in World War I and terms of the Treaty of Versailles only further damaged national morale. The disorder, negativity, cynicism, and economic despair that plagued the Weimar Republic for most of its existence established a fertile ground for the Nazi Party’s optimistic

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messages promising much longed-for security and a common cause that could bind the nation together. Whether the promises were essentially empty mattered little at the outset, and the Nazis succeeded in inspiring many in the arts professions, along with everyone else, to do their part for the greater German community—the Volksgemeinschaft—which the party and the Führer had promised to restore to its past greatness. In this embattled climate, however, the message of unity found its greatest resonance in identifying a common enemy and constructing a vivid image of it (Feindbild). The Volksgemeinschaft concept was already acquiring racist implications, delineating the German Volk not only as the German-speaking nation but also as a biologically distinct “Aryan” race and heightening xenophobic rhetoric to dehumanize all other “racial inferiors” as breeds that could be exterminated without hesitation. The book burnings, the vilification of the Bauhaus, the films Jew Süss and The Eternal Jew, and the exhibitions of “degenerate” art and music were some of the more flagrant manifestations of Feindbild constructions in the cultural arena. Yet, by taking this hyperbole at face value, arts fields for many years also helped to construct what was essentially a caricature of Nazi cultural conditions, vividly representing the era as a dystopia of artistic constraint, authoritarian micromanagement, and kitsch. This dystopia was framed as isolated diachronically from the halcyon days of Weimar culture that preceded it and the Zero Hour (Stunde Null) that followed and isolated synchronically from the culture of those democracies that ultimately vanquished Hitler’s Reich. Historians Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer noted that the worldwide persistence of such caricatures of Nazi evil only contributed to the counterproductive tendency to make clear distinctions between us and them. This became strikingly evident with two successive shocks experienced shortly after German reunification in 1990. The first occurred in the late 1990s, when the highly controversial military exhibition War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944 (Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944) toured around Europe. It revealed in unequivocal terms that the hatred fueling the crimes of the Second World War could not be pinned exclusively to the rabid SS organization but rather could have infected any young German soldier immersed in the deeply ingrained antisemitism and anti-communism that had become part of the military culture at the time. The exhibition, unlike any academic confrontation with collective guilt that preceded it, showed photographs of atrocities that had been taken by German soldiers, who had then sent these pictures home to their families or kept them on their persons. Visitors to the exhibition could see photo documentation of their relatives or even of themselves taking part in the brutal murder of civilians at the Eastern front. The second shock was the publication of political scientist Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1997), which caused an uproar by proposing the singularity of German “eliminationist” and “exterminationist” antisemitism, an attitude that could

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be traced back for centuries and led directly to the Holocaust. Goldhagen’s reception in Germany was exceedingly positive, despite the barrage of criticism among historians pointing out the book’s numerous flaws. Looking at the jarring dilemmas posed by these two events, Jarausch and Geyer observed: Though Goldhagen boldly indicted all “ordinary Germans” for the crimes of the Third Reich, his figures were so stereotypically Nazi, so grimly determined to do their job, so solidly part of a by-gone age, that they might as well have lived on a different planet. In contrast, the Wehrmacht exhibition showed grandfathers, fathers, and brothers who resembled present-day family members laughing and clowning while presenting themselves in pictures of abominable crimes. . . . In distancing themselves from earlier crimes with great emotional effort, the Germans wanted to make sure that their past remained past. They could deal with stereotypical Germans of an earlier age but not with people like themselves being implicated in a past that looked like the present.89

This book deals with a similar, albeit less nefarious stereotype. The shocking revelations of the Holocaust understandably had a numbing effect on postwar cultural historians, not only because of the sheer number of people killed or of the degree of cruelty inflicted but also because of the unnerving paradoxes that challenged so many basic assumptions about Western culture: that the Germans, a people who had enriched the Western world with their literature, science, philosophy, art, and music, could commit unimaginable atrocities, and that, despite these barbarous conditions, cultural life could continue to operate, and even flourish in the Third Reich. It was far easier to presume that the arts struggled at the hands of the Nazi dictatorship than to analyze the paradoxical implication that they might have actually benefited, in some cases, under the new order. This was particularly challenging for the vast majority of arts disciplines that had long fostered specialization in the life and works of individuals, producing monographs and journals and sometimes building entire institutions dedicated to single writers, composers, or artists. Within these intellectual parameters, dealing with the Nazi phenomenon meant that Strauss specialists, for example, had to come to terms with the fact that the composer served as president of the Reich Music Chamber, even when they highlighted his pariah status for refusing to break off his collaboration with the Jewish author Stefan Zweig. Film scholars had to contend with the fact that G. W. Pabst had returned to Austria after the Anschluß to make films there. Barlach researchers knew very well that his work was targeted by Nazi Party zealots, but it was more difficult to reconcile his victimization with the fact that Goebbels was initially a Barlach enthusiast, that Barlach promoted his own work to Nazi officials as true German art, that he signed a petition supporting Hitler’s consolidation of power, and that some of his works were reissued during the Third Reich after his death. Scholarship on Fritz Lang, Ludwig Mies van der

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Rohe, and Walter Gropius similarly focus on their status as “exiles,” even though each had opportunities to stay in Nazi Germany, choosing to pursue options abroad not necessarily for political or ideological reasons. The countless denazification testimonies within the arts community that exaggerated victimization under the Nazis only added more fuel to the defensive tendencies already taking hold in these life-and-works investigations in the decades after the war. A further cause for arts disciplines to adhere to assumptions about both structural and aesthetic nazification was found in the persisting insulation of academic fields, beginning with historians’ tendencies to ignore the arts. For a long time, historians of the Third Reich very rarely concerned themselves with cultural policy or the role of the arts in their work, and, as we will encounter throughout this study, those who did offer revisionist interpretations on arts frequently encountered a cool reception. Many such attempts appeared in unpublished doctoral dissertations, isolated journal articles, and other studies that were simply overlooked, dismissed, or misinterpreted, and many of the younger scholars who offered these new interpretations went on to build careers with completely different specializations or dropped out of their fields altogether. In the 1990s, trained historians took a more concerted interest in cultural administration in particular, but their engagement with artistic matters almost always revealed a reluctance on their part to draw conclusions about aesthetic questions, especially regarding attitudes toward modernism. Even today, historians of the Third Reich argue that exploring the potential of “cultural history” will help deepen our understanding of the Nazi phenomenon,90 but their understanding of cultural history is something quite distinct from a history of the visual and performing arts. Instead, they are still embracing an understanding of culture as something more pervasive, echoing a reaction, dating back to the 1970s, against the traditional limitations of cultural history to elitist high culture. Thus their call for more cultural history actually seems to serve as a deterrent to reengaging with those more traditional objects of cultural history— namely art, architecture, theater, dance, and music. In the arts disciplines, canonical texts have always tended to gloss over the entire Nazi period and instead follow the course of German cultural history in the work of exiles. Art history reference works still credit Hitler and the Nazis with closing the Bauhaus and banning modernism, making special mention of the Degenerate Art exhibition but concentrating on the work of exiles (especially of Gropius, Mies, and Max Beckmann) as the sole representatives of German art of the period.91 Alternatively, they simply mention Nazi Germany within the broader concept of the antimodernist agendas of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.92 The canon of Western music history tends to excise the entire Nazi episode from its chronicles, portraying German music as essentially having gone into exile from the 1930s on and thus privileging the works of Hindemith, Schoenberg, Weill, and others.93 In theater history, the period either tends to receive no mention whatsoever or is

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subsumed within the context of totalitarian regimes, and the story of German theater, similar to that of art and music, is described as being carried on solely by exiles such as Brecht, Reinhardt, and Piscator.94 In dance history, the Nazi government comes across as having either forced an ideological agenda on dance schools or shut down all modern dance operations after the 1936 Olympic Games, with Laban and Jooss exporting their work into exile and Wigman staying on to defy the regime.95 As we will encounter in later chapters, when researchers trained in these arts disciplines started to venture into exploring the Third Reich, they were not only ill prepared—owing to their fields’ limited engagement with the period—but also ill equipped—owing to disciplinary insularity—to apply what had been learned in broader historical discourses that focused primarily on the causes of war and genocide. One of the earliest debates among historians of the Nazi period involved the applicability of theories of totalitarianism to describe the Nazi system. In a climate of growing mistrust of the Soviet Union, direct comparisons of Hitler’s Germany with Stalin’s Russia were widely explored throughout the 1950s. In the course of the 1960s, a new cohort of historians questioned this model, gravitating instead toward a Marxist-inspired concept of Fascism that attributed much of the Nazis’ successes to their collusion with big business. By the late 1970s, historians started borrowing from both totalitarian and Fascist models, having concluded that the Nazi system had been far more dynamic, diffuse, and decentralized than either model alone could support.96 Arts disciplines, however, seemed to be unaware of the weaknesses historians had uncovered in the totalitarian model. As a consequence, they not only favored a totalitarian concept that situated all artists in Nazi Germany as defenseless against the power grab of Hitler and Goebbels but also failed to recognize the politicized language of the earliest writers on art in the Third Reich, who published their accounts in the 1940s and 1950s and were all directly caught up in anti-Soviet politics in occupied Germany and the early Federal Republic. The vivid comparisons these eyewitnesses posed between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, rather than being recognized as Cold War rhetoric, were regarded for many years thereafter as authoritative and neutral. The next lengthy debate among historians was the intentionalist-functionalist (or intentionalist-structuralist) debate. “Intentionalists” were those historians who regarded Hitler’s will as decisive and National Socialist policy as consistent, ideology driven, and goal oriented, while the “functionalist” or “structuralist” camp placed more importance on changing institutions and social structures in determining historical outcomes. These debates revolved around Hitler’s actual involvement in policymaking as well as the question of whether war and genocide had been planned from the start and methodically carried out or had developed out of a series of unanticipated circumstances.97 For historians of the arts, it would have been important to be aware of the evidence these debates brought to light about

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Hitler’s aversion to decision-making, his more effective function as a symbol of authority, and his demagogic skills in rousing solidarity and xenophobia toward uniting the Volksgemeinschaft. Instead, these fields have tended to adhere to a more intentionalist stance that places much of the authority over the arts in the hands of Hitler and Goebbels, in the process largely shielding those active in the arts from any suspicion of having benefited from policies and programs established during the Third Reich. More recently, applications of social history (Alltagsgeschichte) to research on the Third Reich have delved deeper into assessing the power of the National Socialist message to appeal to a broader population. Studies on the German working class have outlined both the attraction and the complexity of the Volksgemeinschaft ideal, explaining that workers who might not have felt any strong feelings of solidarity found a common cause as soldiers in eradicating “racial inferiors,” even though this solidarity might have otherwise rested on shaky ground.98 Among cultural histories, the newer discipline of film studies led the pack in drawing from social history by exploring film as a form of popular entertainment, but for the established fields of art history, musicology, theater history, and dance history, the longer tradition of concentrating on high culture and its institutions kept scholars from looking into popular culture and mass media until much later. The result was that it took these fields much longer to acknowledge the public appeal of the Nazi message of promoting the Volksgemeinschaft and to gauge the effectiveness of rhetoric, ritual, and ceremony. In the last ten years, as scholars in these disciplines have moved in these directions, there has been a growing awareness—again approached only cautiously, in fits and starts—that the styles, approaches, and content of arts produced under Hitler often bear a striking resemblance to contemporary trends elsewhere in the world, even in Roosevelt’s America. Research in the field of women’s studies deconstructed impressions projected by Nazi propaganda about the subjugation of women, revealing instead that there had been widespread enthusiasm among German women for the movement and that they had participated outside the home in far more sectors of Nazi society than had been conveyed by the idealized Nazi rhetoric advocating that women should be restricted to the domestic realm.99 However, as most arts disciplines were focused on high culture, the relatively small number of women artists, composers, playwrights, and directors limited the prospects for carrying out such investigations in many fields. Nevertheless, film scholars were once again at the forefront of this new line of study, drawing on women’s studies research in their explorations of the star cult of German screen actresses. This engagement with the star system also positioned the field to lead the way in acknowledging the striking cultural similarities between the Third Reich and Western democracies and to greatly diversify the study of “Nazi film” (especially in the provocative work of Sabine Hake).

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In studying the Holocaust and its impact on the arts, arts disciplines bound to established practices turned their life-and-works investigations toward an intense preoccupation with the victims of National Socialism, discovering an ever-increasing number of lesser-known exiles and those who perished in the camps and adding investigations of their lives and their creations to this growing body of scholarship. Those scholars approaching the subject for the first time were deeply disturbed by the horrors of genocide, which prompted emotional responses from them, such as the suggestion that “Gleichschaltung was simply a euphemism for annihilation”; that the Degenerate Art exhibition, “like the war crimes, the concentration camps, and the murder of the Jews, still comes to people’s minds the world over when they think of German fascism”; or that “Hitler’s notion of an aesthetic ‘clearing out’ was similar to the Nazi ‘Final Solution’ ”; or making special mention of particularly perverse acts of terror, such as a requirement that prisoners condemned to the gas chambers construct the wooden boxes that would house Schiller’s papers.100 Disciplinary insularity also kept these fields at arm’s length from developments in Holocaust studies that were shedding new light on the motives of the perpetrators.101 In the mid-1980s, the “historians’ debate” (Historikerstreit) highlighted fundamental questions about whether the Holocaust was unique in world history, and it also opened up important new avenues for analyzing the motives and events leading up to the Final Solution. Had arts disciplines acknowledged these debates sooner, they would have found these findings very useful for understanding the climate in which German artists and intellectuals stood by as their colleagues endured attacks and degradation. As a byproduct of the Historikerstreit, historians of the Holocaust conceptualized the progress toward genocide as successive periods of increased radicalization, viewing 1933 to 1936 as a period in which the Nazi regime exercised a degree of moderation, as they were primarily focused on stabilization and achieving full employment. From early 1936 on, new laws incrementally stripped Jews of their property and their human rights and enforced segregation and expulsion. The Nazis coordinated these efforts with propaganda to justify the actions—which included the “degenerate” art and music exhibitions and culminated in the Kristallnacht pogrom—to the population. It was not until January 1939 that Hitler openly shifted from speaking about the relocation of Jews to calling for the annihilation of European Jewry. The war accelerated the process of the ghettoization, deportation, and mass murder.102 A lack of familiarity with aspects of radicalization and indoctrination has led many historians trying to come to terms with conditions for the arts in Nazi Germany to the monolithic perception that a complete nazification took hold of the country immediately in 1933 and maintained a steady grip on artistic activity until the end of the war. This unfamiliarity has also led to obstacles in interpreting the enthusiasm many in the artistic community expressed for Nazi policies, as

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scholars have failed to take into account the party’s initial promises of stabilization and moderation, the fact that the intensification of xenophobia was incremental, and the power of Hitler’s personality to inspire loyalty and instill in his followers the desire to carry out his will in an increasingly extreme manner. Many Germans welcomed the Nazis’ promises of employment and government stability as antidotes for the chaos of the Weimar Republic, and any lingering doubts about the party’s extremism were quickly supplanted by fierce nationalism once the war began. Artists were not immune to the Zeitgeist that was motivating the rest of the population. By this time, “ordinary Germans” had been so thoroughly indoctrinated with racist antisemitism, some from the very beginning of their educations, that they could carry out atrocities without pause or reflection. Simultaneously, so much care was taken throughout the years of the Third Reich to mold propaganda to appeal to German citizens that the relentless promotion of the Volksgemeinschaft idea ultimately encouraged many, including artists and intellectuals, to denounce their own neighbors and coworkers.103 • • •

The purpose of this introductory chapter is to provide a baseline of what is known about the arts in Nazi Germany by synthesizing evidence from a diverse range of work produced in the past fifty years that has challenged what is believed about Nazi culture. Having highlighted the cognitive dissonance between what is known and what is believed, I offered some preliminary considerations for why it persists by looking at the ways that disciplinary isolation has kept historians in various fields from sharing their methods, findings, and ideas. In the remaining chapters— especially the last three—I provide a more detailed historiographic analysis, investigating how and why we arrived at this state of affairs and how we can move forward in more productive directions. Proceeding chronologically, chapters 2 and 3 examine how basic assumptions about the nazification of cultural life first developed in the 1930s and 1940s, first before 1945, among refugees fleeing from Nazism, and then under the Allied occupation. The remaining three chapters are more purely historiographic and explore how these assumptions became integrated into the earliest cultural histories of the Third Reich and were sustained for decades thereafter. Chapters 4 and 5 look at scholarship throughout the duration of the Cold War, and chapter 6 provides an update of research that has been produced since the end of the Cold War, along with recommendations on how future scholarship might move toward a more interdisciplinary and cross-cultural engagement with arts under the Third Reich. The following two chapters describe the background to the writing of Nazi cultural history. Chapter 2, “The Exile Experience,” looks at both the challenges faced by refugees from Nazism and the direct and indirect roles they played in establishing basic perceptions about Nazi culture that still deeply influence our thinking.

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Cultural historians still grapple with Theodor Adorno’s purported declaration that no poetry could be written after Auschwitz and Walter Benjamin’s formulation of Fascism as an aestheticization of politics, not to mention Siegfried Kracauer’s foundational approaches to film analysis. Yet by contextualizing the ideas of these individuals as expressions of the uncertainties and insecurities they faced as strangers in foreign lands, we can begin to understand that many of the artists and intellectuals who stood out as the most vocal in proclaiming and redressing Nazi oppression did so in part under pressures to demonstrate their commitment to democracy in host countries where they were mistrusted as both Jews and communists. Especially during the war, they felt compelled to distance themselves as much as possible from all that was being cultivated back in Nazi Germany, even though they had strong ties to that same cultural heritage. Although arts disciplines have closely followed the development of German culture into exile and a large body of scholarship concentrates on exile studies, accounts of the experiences of exiles have often been romanticized. A consequence of this has been an idealization of the notion of Weimar modernism, which underlines the diachronic isolation of Nazi culture by presuming that there was a caesura in artistic creativity in Germany in 1933 and that exiles preserved the “good” Weimar culture that was completely uprooted and supplanted during the Third Reich. The visceral need to keep returning to the notion that a distinct brand of “Nazi” art and culture served the barbaric aims of Hitler resulted in a diachronic isolation of Nazi culture, cordoning off the Nazi era as a moment of temporary insanity in Germany’s otherwise illustrious cultural history, bounded on one side by the glorious era of Weimar modernism and on the other by the cultural restoration that came in the wake of the purgative Zero Hour of 1945. Chapter 3, “Occupation, Cold War, and the Zero Hour,” looks at the early postwar conditions that laid the shaky foundations on which cultural histories still largely rest, establishing the other bookend of the diachronic isolation of Nazi culture by differentiating it from all artistic creativity pursued in Germany after 1945. Shocked by the revelations of genocide, the Allies, assisted by the expertise of exiles returning to Germany as consultants, attempted to rebuild Germany’s cultural life with the ambitious yet fundamentally flawed projects of reeducation and denazification. Yet in their reluctance to replicate what they imagined as Nazi totalitarian control of the arts, the Allies ended up delegating most of the restoration of cultural affairs to the Germans themselves, leaving behind a postwar cultural landscape that was for the most part indistinguishable from that of the Nazi years. The German responses to the programs of denazification, reeducation, and later reorientation (the Western campaign to quell the spread of communism) took the form of a Zero Hour mentality that soon drove Germany’s cultural elite to look to the future while overlooking any holdovers from the Nazi past. At the same time, the intensification of Cold War animosities in the decades that followed the war shaped an approach to cultural history that paired

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Nazism with Stalinism and virtually eliminated the possibility of imagining that any tolerance for artistic freedom might have existed in the Third Reich. In chapter 4, “Totalitarianism, Intentionalism, and Fascism in Cold War Cultural Histories,” I embark on a closer historiographic investigation. First, I focus on the discourses in general history that successively embraced, revised, and sometimes discarded various overarching interpretations of Nazi history: the totalitarian concept, the debate over intentionalism versus functionalism, the challenges to the totalitarian paradigm with an alternative concept of Fascism, and the Historikerstreit. Second, I examine the extent to which these concepts and the debates surrounding them were acknowledged in investigations of the visual and performing arts. In arts scholarship, the notion of a totalitarianism that exonerated artists from any voluntary involvement in Nazi cultural production proved attractive and persisted despite being largely discredited in other historical discourses. Similarly, a form of cultural intentionalism that credited Hitler and Goebbels with close micromanagement of all artistic affairs held a comparable appeal. In the mid-1980s, however, as arts disciplines showed signs of taking their first steps away from these older paradigms of structural nazification, the Historikerstreit—with its warnings against relativizing the Holocaust—and simultaneous events in the art world that raised new questions about the pernicious effects of artistic products from the Third Reich slowed any progress toward placing Nazi culture within broader historical and global contexts. By neatly distancing Nazi culture from the culture of other industrialized nations, the caricature of Nazi evil has upheld a synchronic isolation that condones comparisons only with other dictatorships but keeps cultural comparisons with Nazi Germany’s enemies at arm’s length. Chapter 5, “Modernism and the Isolation of Nazi Culture,” turns to the problems of aesthetic nazification, starting with the early postwar revival of modernism that came to define the Cold War conflict between socialist realism and the Western tolerance for experimentation. In Nazi arts histories, this took the form of singling out expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), and the Bauhaus as the prime casualties of both National Socialism and Stalinism that needed to be rescued from their presumed oblivion. This made it difficult to acknowledge the evidence pointing to modern aspects of Nazi society, encouraging art and music scholars instead to go to great lengths to portray an aesthetic nazification that had been intent upon stamping out modernism. Film, theater, and dance studies concentrated less on antimodernism and more on the Nazis’ overall devaluation of art, relegating Nazi-era products to categories of mere propaganda and kitsch. For much of the Cold War period, presumptions about Nazi antimodernism were only slowly and cautiously challenged, with many questions remaining unanswered about the striking parallels that could be observed between the arts produced in Nazi Germany and arts created in other societies, including Western democracies.

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The final chapter, “Cultural Histories after the Cold War,” looks at how the fall of communism had the effect of reexamining parallels between Nazism and Stalinism and between Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic. In the arts fields, this led in some instances to revitalizing the tendency to exonerate the artistic community by insisting they were forced to comply with the whims of ruthless dictators. While the notion of Nazi antimodernism has proven to be resilient, new research on the economics of the art market has shed important light on the financial gains that fueled the seizure and resale of “degenerate art” and also points to other promising areas of exploration, such as concentrating more on the economic aspects not only of art, architecture, and film but also of music, theater, and dance; focusing on mass culture rather than high culture; and analyzing the power of rhetoric, ritual, and ceremony in fostering a positive sense of belonging to the Volksgemeinschaft while simultaneously mobilizing the German population to channel its hatred against the touted enemies of German culture. In order to conduct this broad historiographical analysis, it has been necessary to exclude some important areas of scholarship. I have chosen to focus exclusively on the visual and performing arts and to examine primarily the work done by scholars in the United States, Britain, and West Germany. There are several reasons for my focus on histories coming out of Anglo-American and West German traditions. As is widely acknowledged, the impetus for critical reflection on the Nazi past came initially from Anglo-American historians—many of them exiles from Nazi Germany—and the immediate responses to their work emanated from West Germany.104 Such reflections developed in a far more circuitous manner in East Germany, where cultural fields tended to focus much of their attention on gathering information about writers and artists in exile, and where completely different parameters for historical discourse would be established. My decision to limit my investigation to the visual and performing arts calls attention to the glaring omission of German literature, but, as I outline in chapters 2 and 3, German writers dealt aggressively with the atrocities of the past and their role in it immediately after World War II, and many of them made the conscious decision to engage politically and debate issues publicly, whereas other cultural practitioners managed to stay out of the spotlight during the postwar years. Similarly, during the student rebellions of the late 1960s and 1970s, scholars of German literature were the first to address the problems of suppressing the past by questioning and then summarily rejecting the notions of a “Zero Hour” and “inner emigration,” shedding light on the continuities that existed before and after 1945, both in the aesthetics of German literature and in the careers of successful writers. Other areas of cultural history, by contrast, still largely subscribed to the ideal of the “apolitical artist” and found it difficult to shake off such notions. As my main objectives are to focus on the ways historians have presented the effects of Nazi policies on artistic activity in Germany, I have also had to exclude

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other areas of scholarship that have yielded much important work but lie somewhat at the periphery of my project. Therefore, I will not investigate in any detail the voluminous literature on victims, exiles, or arts and artists under German occupation. By limiting my scope to the conditions for creative artistic activity, I must also pay somewhat less attention to the vast literature on the seizure of art from public and private collections in Germany, the wartime plundering of art treasures, and the attempts to return goods to their rightful owners after the war. I have also had to exclude areas of research that include much of my own prior work, namely investigations into arts disciplines in the Third Reich (e.g., art and architectural history, musicology, and theater history) and the scholarly and popular exploitation of historical figures (the so-called German masters) in constructing legacies of German cultural superiority. In this last area, David Dennis’s recent analysis of the Nazi Party–sponsored newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, provides fascinating insights into the wide range of such appropriations in the paper’s pages from 1920 to 1945.105 In my own prior work and the work of colleagues, scrutiny of the political manipulation of key composers such as Beethoven, Mozart, and Handel have shown that, to a large degree, these strategies were not exclusive to the Nazi period and can in fact be traced as a continuum throughout German history, from the late nineteenth century on.106 Finally, in scrutinizing cultural histories, I am most interested in how scholars treat the prewar period, largely because the war years witnessed measures that altered cultural operations significantly, but such measures were not necessarily unique to Germany. Wartime censorship accompanied the introduction of prohibitions on paying royalties to enemy countries, theaters shut down their operations during air raids, and governments invested in cinematic war propaganda that would be integrated into newsreels and feature films. In November 1943, Goebbels asserted: “I have decided to lift these restrictions on German intellectual life [Geistesleben] as soon as possible after the war. Every act of censorship by officials threatens the free development of cultural life. It also contradicts the idea of the Reich Culture Chambers, which is to guide cultural production, not micromanage it.”107 Additionally, my focus on the treatment of the prewar period highlights tendencies in arts scholarship to try to pinpoint a radical shift in 1933 and to view the entire twelve years of the Third Reich as a static period of repression rather than acknowledging both the continuum of pre-1933 trends and the stages of radicalization leading up to the war. While the reader may take issue with my exercising twenty-twenty hindsight to critically interpret past scholarship, my motives for taking on this task arise from my own personal journey of wrestling with these very same historiographical restraints (I have even liberally employed the term “nazification” in my own work). Over more than three decades, I have been engaged in one way or another in coming to terms with Nazi arts and culture, and in all these years this engagement has

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involved a struggle of one sort or another. In the early 1980s, as an undergraduate taking on the subject of music in the Third Reich for my senior thesis, I set out to uncover the insidious acts of those incorrigible Nazis engaged in musical life—primarily Richard Strauss and Wilhelm Furtwängler—only to discover that the “good guys” and the “bad guys” were not always so easy to distinguish, despite the ardent claims of biographers. My doctoral dissertation and subsequent book dealt with the history of German musicology, a project that allowed me to investigate the actions of lesser-known individuals and to draw my own conclusions without having to accommodate the highly emotional and often conflicting biographical accounts of musical celebrities. Feeling less compelled to come down on the side of good or evil, I was able to discern that, rather than identifying “Nazi musicology” and tracing the discipline’s nazification, it was necessary to illuminate the circumstances in which a group of scholars with a long tradition of reinforcing Germany’s pride in its venerable musical achievements found a common ground with the new Nazi leadership and welcomed the opportunity to offer their service to the Volksgemeinschaft. Meanwhile, in the classroom, my students and I struggled to make sense out of the vast literature that strove to pinpoint the idiosyncrasies of “Nazi culture.” These works typically suggested that an unidentified coterie of Nazi leaders closely controlled all facets of cultural life and imposed a distinct Nazi aesthetic, but they always fell short of supporting these claims with firm evidence. As an outside reviewer of book and article manuscripts, I would also frequently stumble upon uncritical references to Hitler and other unidentified Nazis operating at the epicenter of cultural affairs, suggesting that a cabal of well-positioned artists and politicians placed a high priority on the systematic control of the arts, only to sink German culture to its historical nadir. Few, however, question who those Nazis were and how such a power structure could have functioned within the complex mechanisms of modern artistic production and consumption. A true epiphany came a dozen years ago, when I was invited to take part in a symposium with top experts in the areas of arts and culture in Nazi Germany. During the event, however, I was struck by a glaring paradox. Even as these scholars expounded adeptly on subjects ranging from the inner workings of cultural policy to the aesthetics of individual arts, they were stymied when asked to describe what really distinguished the art and culture of Nazi Germany. When asked directly what constitutes Nazi painting and how one might distinguish it, for example, from the stylings of Normal Rockwell, one panelist simply answered: “I know it when I see it.” This response only served to underline some serious flaws at the very foundation of approaches to the cultural history of Nazi Germany. The evidence, synthesized above, that had challenged the implications of a complete nazification of German cultural life had been either overlooked or acknowledged as a collection of inconvenient details that threatened to undermine the more palatable conviction that there had been a totalitarian silencing of artistic

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freedom during the Third Reich. But the paradox of German culture surviving or even thriving amidst the hatred and suspicion of the Nazi years, difficult as it might be to comprehend, is nevertheless all the more important to analyze, because it holds a key to understanding how societies we regard as advanced and educated can so readily succumb to fear and xenophobia while continuing to feel justified in their course of action. As to the question of how those in the arts community could tolerate—and in some cases even celebrate—the subhuman treatment of their colleagues, the economic insecurity of arts professions lends credence to the development of a survival mentality that might have caused some among them to see opportunities in the elimination of competitors for scarce resources. It does not, however, explain how, on an interpersonal level, members of the community could condone the persecution of their closest associates. How could professionals in the arts community (at least those in the audience of Goebbels’s 1936 speech to the Reich Culture Chambers) not only tolerate but also applaud the often violent hounding and expulsion of so many of their own colleagues? As the next two chapters will investigate, those who fled Nazi Germany were the first to grapple with these difficult questions, as they wondered how they could have been driven out of their homeland while their own colleagues did little or nothing to help them. Some of these exiles who ended up in the countries that would eventually vanquish Nazism and occupy Germany after the war were commissioned by their new governments to study German society and unlock the mysteries of Nazism. Many more returned to their devastated homes as Allied soldiers and consultants, advising on what to do with a population that let itself be lured into murderous deeds and a culture that condoned these actions, and offering guidance on reforming, reeducating, and “denazifying” postwar Germany. Yet in their anger, confusion, and desperation, these exiles struggled more than anyone else to understand how a nation they once called their own, that cultivated the culture they shared and cherished, could have discarded them and exterminated those they left behind.

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The Exile Experience

In his 2001 book, Hitler’s Loss: What Britain and America Gained from Europe’s Cultural Exiles, Tom Ambrose referred to the “bizarre consistency” of the Nazis, especially in their “ruthless purging of Jews and modernists,” and concluded: “No wonder so few of the exiles bothered to return to their homeland after the war; the cultural landscape had been denuded by the Nazis as surely as Germany’s cities had been leveled by Allied bombers.”1 The metaphor of Hitler having wiped out his country’s culture with the same destructiveness of Allied bombs very much echoes the first impressions Allied officers had, leading them to assume that Hitler had, indeed, destroyed all vestiges of German culture and that exiles could preserve that culture only beyond the borders of the Reich. As was noted in the preceding chapter, arts disciplines tend to tell the story of German culture going into exile in the form of Weimar modernism. From early on, the typical narrative of cultural refugees fleeing Nazism portrays Western democracies welcoming them with open arms and providing the means for their creativity to flourish in the incubator of progress that is democracy. In reality, however, the situation of exiles was far more complicated.2 The countries they fled to were often as resistant to their artistic experiments as the Nazis were, and, as refugees, they were frequently met with mistrust. Artists and intellectuals who had fled Nazi Germany typically made stops in several countries and had to negotiate the differing cultural and political climates of each. As the war intensified, they came to realize that it was in their best interest to distance themselves as much as possible from the Germany they had left behind, taking care to enhance the distinctions between the Third Reich and the democracies allied against it. These were also the circumstances in which some of the accepted views of Nazi culture were first 48

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hatched. The exiles and their stories exerted an enduring influence on the writing of cultural history, but in many ways, both their experiences and the messages they were trying to convey were misunderstood by their contemporaries as well as by subsequent generations. Many cultural historians still confront the challenges posed by Theodor Adorno’s misquoted reference to the barbarism of writing poetry after Auschwitz and by Walter Benjamin’s reference to the aestheticization of politics as a foundation for their work.3 These are only the most prominent examples of the many ways in which German and Austrian exiles and their experiences left an indelible mark on the postwar confrontation with Nazi cultural history. As we will see in the following pages, the idea that exiles could effectively transport and preserve the best of German culture and nurture it beyond the Nazi sphere of influence oversimplifies the precarious situations these artists and intellectuals found themselves in. This chapter will start by examining the accepted narrative of the “brain gain” and the preservation of modernism and will go on to look beyond the narrative to trace the often perilous journeys that German refugees took across Europe and across the Atlantic, pointing to the challenges they encountered and their need to adapt to a wide range of differing political and cultural environments. This odyssey was notoriously difficult for theater and film professionals, owing to the language barrier, and there are well-known anecdotes of exiled German actors finding work only when wartime Hollywood needed them to portray Nazis. For visual artists, the path was not much easier. The global economic crisis during the 1930s had a devastating impact on the art market. Additionally, widespread conservatism in artistic taste put exiles whose art had been branded by the Nazis as “degenerate” or “Bolshevist” at a disadvantage to find acceptance elsewhere. Musicians and composers fared somewhat better, owing to the international esteem for German music, although they had to open themselves up to a wide range of often mundane and ill-suited employment options as well as to different tastes in music. The prospects for intellectuals were idyllic by contrast, as the international academic community had rallied to rescue them and constructed impressive financial networks to expedite their flight. The notion that exiles simply imported their aesthetics, ideas, and creative activities without disruption, however, completely overlooks the suspicion they encountered for being communists, Jews, modernists, and Germans. Fleeing from one destination to another with German troops at their heels, most had to modify their aesthetics, their professional activities, and their philosophies. Yet the work they did in exile has been pieced together to represent the complete antithesis of Nazi culture, and they are generally lumped into a single, uniform category invariably described as modernist, anti-Fascist, and progressive, solely by virtue of their exile status and with little regard to the wide range of political and aesthetic camps with which they themselves might have identified.

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T H E B R A I N G A I N A N D W E I M A R M O D E R N I SM

The story of artistic and intellectual migration has been an extremely popular subject since the war. It served as an inspiring parable during the Cold War, recounting the noble crusade to rescue Europe’s brain trust from the gas chambers—“a story to restore faith in humanity and in the fraternity of brains; a precious gleam of light in dark days of intellectual iron curtains.”4 One can only marvel at the staggering number of publications dedicated to exile studies since the 1950s,5 emanating from a wide range of international scholarly traditions.6 East German scholars tended to concentrate on writers and artists driven from Nazi Germany because of their communist leanings, who went on to form an anti-Fascist cultural front abroad, while West German researchers initially focused on reanimating all that the Nazis had labeled as “degenerate.”7 In the 1950s and 1960s, Anglo-American writers contributed with studies of the impact of emigration on academic fields, including those penned by some of the émigré scholars themselves.8 Exile studies (Exilforschung) then expanded to form a well-defined discipline that now embraces several disciplines and other parts of the world.9 Yet from the outset, much of the work dedicated to documenting the experiences of those fleeing Europe subscribed to a uniform narrative. The two most prominent themes were, first, the romanticized notion that both refugees and the countries that accepted them found a common ground immediately and reaped the fruits of the “brain gain” in quasi-utopian settings, as suggested by such titles as Exiled in Paradise, Driven into Paradise, The Muses Flee Hitler, and Hitler’s Loss; and, second, the belief that progressive Weimar culture, or Weimar modernism, found refuge from Hitler in these receptive host countries, immediately apparent in such titles as Weimar in Exile and Weimar on the Pacific.10 These narratives, set down as early as the 1950s in studies on the intellectual migration of the 1930s and 1940s, suggested that scores of artists and intellectuals escaped with the cultural riches they had salvaged from the free-thinking Weimar Republic, found a welcoming (if sometimes unsophisticated) market ready to receive their gifts, and, with few exceptions, easily integrated themselves into the fabric of their new environments without looking back.11 These popular versions nevertheless tended to gloss over obvious complications. First of all, the economic pressures facing all countries at the time fostered a general resistance to receiving refugees at any skill level. Of the intellectuals fleeing Germany, those who were self-funded obviously experienced the easiest transitions, and many of those lacking their own financial resources were assisted by the generous networks that had been set up to accommodate their relocation and allow them to resume their work. However, struggling theaters, a depressed art market, reduction in building projects, and shrinking resources for performers forced those active in the arts to seek alternate ways to make ends meet once they had passed the hurdle of

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gaining entry to new countries. Second, their economic challenges were compounded by antisemitic immigration policies, quotas, internment camps,12 and even the imprisonment and execution of refugees in the Soviet Union,13 not to mention the reluctance of host countries to jeopardize their relations with Germany. As Egbert Krispyn described with regard to the plight of writers, “this tendency on the part of the world’s leading statesmen and politicians to treat the Führer as if he were just another head of state made life particularly difficult for those who had fled the Third Reich. . . . In prewar days many exile writers therefore stressed the perfidy of the Nazis in order to justify themselves in the eyes of their reluctant and often downright hostile hosts.”14 Other artists and intellectuals might have similarly wished to highlight the barbarism of the system they had left behind in order to argue that Germany did not warrant normal diplomatic relations and thereby convince their new hosts to accept them as political refugees, but this message was not always welcome. They would hardly qualify for asylum in places such as Czechoslovakia or Austria (usually the first stops on their exodus), as these countries either harbored sympathy for Germany or feared German invasion—or both. They didn’t fare much better in countries to the west, such as Britain and France, which were still clinging to policies of appeasement.15 Even in the late 1930s and early 1940s, as Germany’s war aims became unequivocal and more exiles sought refuge in the United States, the intensification of anti-communism caused host countries to suspect many refugees of leaving Germany because of communist sympathies, driving some to abandon their leftist leanings and move to the right.16 Those in the Frankfurt School have even been noted for going to “absurd lengths to conceal their Marxist sympathies.”17 Facing rejection, internment, and arrest solely on the basis of their German and Austrian origins, many refugees felt the burden to convince their host countries that their values were distinct from what they had left behind and that they could embrace and uphold the democratic ideals of their new homes, as Keith Holz’s path-breaking study of artists in European exile demonstrates.18 There is much evidence that these émigrés had to sell their wares aggressively and distinguish themselves as custodians of a noble German cultural heritage imperiled by Nazi barbarism. It was this impulse, combined with the trauma of their own persecution and flight, that led them to overstate Nazi Germany’s repressive, antimodernist, and tightly controlled cultural environment and to profess their own contrasting mission to preserve the culture of the “other” Germany in exile until order could be restored back home. For those working in the creative arts fields, this meant accentuating the Nazis’ antimodernist pronouncements so that they could position themselves as direct opponents to them, while simultaneously sensing the growing urgency to shed the label of “cultural Bolshevism” bestowed upon some of them by Nazi propaganda. The romanticized accounts of arriving exiles that appeared in the 1950s and 1960s were tempered by new investigations in the 1980s that acknowledged the

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realities of restrictive immigration policies and the heavy reliance on private philanthropy.19 Still, the underlying assumption that host countries were ready to sustain the creativity and physical well-being of German émigré artists and intellectuals has persisted to this day, along with the notion that these individuals were welcomed because they were the custodians of Germany’s long and illustrious cultural legacies, and above all of a progressive Weimar culture or a “second modernism” that would find its new home in these democracies.20 Despite evidence that the preservation of modernism was hardly a priority for host countries dealing with large numbers of refugees, the narrative portrays the goal of getting these thinkers and artists out of Germany as the only way to preserve the rich culture of the Weimar years. It also presents that era as a golden age of artistic experimentation and open-mindedness that, even though it was not universally tolerated by Weimar conservatism, still managed to thrive in defiance.21 When we examine this phenomenon closely, we uncover the complex and problematic negotiations these exiles had to carry out with their new hosts and, especially after the war, with their colleagues who stayed in Germany. Additionally, we get a clearer picture of the conflicts existing within the exile community itself. While the exile narrative tends to place all refugees into the same camp— one defined as anti-Fascist, modernist, and progressive—this group was far more eclectic from the start, representing a wide range of political and aesthetic orientations. The inclination to lump them all together might have been aimed at defining the parameters of Weimar modernism in exile, and it served to reinforce the diachronic isolation of Nazi culture as something distinct from Weimar culture, but it has also had the effect of fostering an increasingly intricate and often contradictory understanding of modernism. A RT A N D A R C H I T E C T U R E

Prague, Paris, and London were typically the first European stops in the journeys of visual artists fleeing Nazism. Yet, as Keith Holz has revealed, complex diplomatic and cultural forces constantly challenged these artists to walk a virtual tightrope in their new surroundings.22 The democratic Czechoslovak Republic, established in 1919, had favored strong diplomatic and cultural relations with the West, especially with France, condemning Germany’s human rights violations and offering political asylum to German refugees. With its vibrant German-speaking cultural community, Prague was the obvious destination for artists fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933. But in the mere five years before the Germans annexed the ethnic German Sudeten region in 1938 and subsequently occupied Czechoslovakia, a gulf grew in the German-speaking artistic community between the modernist-leaning, exile-friendly factions in the capital and the proto-Nazi völkisch enclaves in the hinterlands. Already in 1934, the Czech government was showing signs that it

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figure 6. John Heartfield, Adolf, the Superman: Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk, 1932 (bpk, Berlin/Art Resource, NY; © 2015 Artists Rights Society, New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn).

wished to avoid conflicts in artistic matters with Nazi Germany. When the German Embassy objected to an exhibit at the Mánes Gallery in Prague that included John Heartfield’s famous photomontage of 1932, Adolf, the Superman: Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk (fig. 6), and other caricatures, the Czech police systematically removed the offensive pieces from the exhibit.23 Exile artists formed an anti-Fascist collective, the Oskar-Kokoschka-Bund (Oskar Kokoschka had fled Vienna and came to Prague in 1934, where the art dealer Hugo Feigl was exhibiting and selling his works), but in July 1937, the Degenerate Art exhibition threw the exile artists’ community into disarray. It became clear that these artists had no clear direction on how to coordinate their varied positions on aesthetics with their equally diverse political stances. At the same time, the press in the German-speaking

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Sudeten region heightened its rhetoric against the endorsement of “SovietBolshevist” art in cosmopolitan Prague and against the Czechoslovak government’s known support for internationalist culture, and the German acquisitions department of the state-sponsored Modern Gallery defied official policy and cooperated with the Nazi government in purchasing and exchanging artworks.24 The Munich Agreement of September 1938, by which France, Britain, and Italy essentially gave Germany free rein to annex the Sudeten region and then the rest of Czechoslovakia, brought a swift end to the Oskar-Kokoschka-Bund, as almost all exiled German artists hastily sought routes out of Czechoslovakia, dispersing to England, France, Norway, Poland, and the United States.25 In France, the short-lived Popular Front government led by Léon Blum, which lasted from June 1936 to June 1937, offered a favorable environment for exiled leftist artists fleeing the first wave of Nazi attacks on communists and other political opponents. A number of exiles with differing leftist views congregated in Paris and came together to form the Collective of German Artists (Kollektiv deutscher Künstler), although the group failed to agree on any one aesthetic direction and folded following the revelations of Soviet cultural repression and purges in late summer of 1936. The Popular Front collapsed and was followed by the Daladier government, which adopted a policy of appeasement toward Germany that compelled exile artists to exercise more caution. Nevertheless, the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich offered these artists another chance to unify on aesthetic grounds to oppose the Nazis, which led to the formation of the German Artists’ League (Deutscher Künstlerbund). But a group of communist exile artists broke away and hastily launched their own small, Dada-inspired exhibition titled Five Years of Hitler Dictatorship, which documented religious persecution, purges, racism, book burnings, Degenerate Art, press censorship, and the compliance of Germany’s allies. Not only did the German Embassy succeed in censoring parts of the exhibition and cancelling some of its events, but even the moderate press, such as the London Times, balked at the bold communist messages on display.26 After the French took part in the Munich Agreement, Daladier restricted further immigration from annexed Austria and imposed close surveillance on all foreigners, curbing their political activities and threatening them with deportation. When the more moderate German Artists’ League opened its own exhibition, Free German Art, it presented mostly works by exile artists in France, with a small section devoted to illustrating typical Nazi art and an inconspicuously displayed photograph of political prisoners to remind visitors that two hundred thousand political dissidents were incarcerated in Germany. The show was otherwise remarkably reticent about any political or artistic topics. In a twist of fate, the 1938 assassination in Paris of Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat, by Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish Jew, which served as the rationale for the Kristallnacht pogrom and Hitler’s proclamation to end peaceful relations with France, drew unexpected sup-

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port for the exhibition. French critics even focused new attention on the oppressive conditions for artists in Germany (who were compelled—according to one critic’s portrayal—to churn out photographic realism or face sterilization) in order to contrast their fate with the freedoms enjoyed by the exile artists in France.27 The last effort of Paris-based exiled artists was the preparation of an exhibition for the New York World’s Fair in 1939. It was to be called Germany of Yesterday— Germany of Today and would provide a didactic overview contrasting the country’s past and present. With the support of a well-known circle of prominent exiles and their advocates, including Alvin Johnson, Frank Kingdon, Thomas Mann, and Prince Hubertus zu Löwenstein, the exhibition would provide a comprehensive sweep of German cultural achievements to highlight that Nazi Germany was a historical aberration and to suggest that order could be restored once the menace was removed. Careful to disassociate the project from any existing leftist organizations, the organizers won enthusiastic endorsements from both the current and former mayors of New York, who agreed to serve on an American planning committee. The displays in the exhibition highlighted Germany’s rich cultural history and past German and American cooperation, contrasting this with the Nazi Party’s present-day persecution of the Jews, falsification of science, persecution of its religious and political opponents, and banning of what it deemed to be unacceptable literature, art, and film. The show also expressed hope that the exiles could revitalize Germany in the future. However, the exhibition was never mounted, not only because the French government ceded to German pressure to halt its installation but also because some of the New York organizers feared antagonizing Germany.28 Around the same time, President Roosevelt displayed similar caution when, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art in 1939, he praised the museum’s dedication to artistic freedom and castigated its suppression in Europe, although he didn’t mention Germany specifically.29 Exiled artists in Britain faced a cultural challenge of contending with a complete lack of interest in German art, let alone modernist art. English society was legendary for its aversion to “art for art’s sake,” anecdotally confining any artistic pursuits to amateur country gentlemen who were “more interested in portraits of their pets and horses.”30 Prior to the 1930s, British taste tended more toward French art than German art, and the British confined their appreciation of German and Austrian accomplishments to photography, design, and architecture.31 The Degenerate Art exhibition nonetheless prompted outrage among a small circle of the British elite. In November 1937, Lady Noel E. Norton envisioned an exhibit titled Banned Art, which would have a special focus on expressionism, and she intended to purchase the entire Degenerate Art exhibition from the German government, along with other modern German works.32 By April of the following year, however, as British appeasement policies leading up to the Munich Agreement led to strict censorship of any anti-German “propaganda,” the exhibition’s proposed name was

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changed to Twentieth-Century German Art, and the work of Georg Kolbe was to be included, despite his known support of the Nazi regime. Thomas Mann, by this time an outspoken critic of Germany, was removed from the list of honorary patrons, and the organizers broke off all arrangements to cooperate with the Free German Art exhibition in Paris, prompting Oskar Kokoschka to protest the organizers’ severely weakened anti-Nazi stance and to withdraw his works from the exhibition. When it finally opened, a full year after Degenerate Art, it covered a decades-long retrospective of German art rather than focusing on art targeted as “degenerate,” and a former diplomat at the opening ceremonies emphasized that it was “not merely nonpolitical, it was antipolitical.”33 The published material accompanying the exhibition not only played down politics but also alluded to the racial kinship of the Germans and British. The British press curiously reacted negatively to the London exhibition (especially to the large section on expressionism) but positively to the second annual Great German Art Exhibition, which was running concurrently in Munich.34 The deterioration of British-German relations soon had the unfortunate outcome of all Germans—even exiles—being categorized as potential enemies. However, it also cast a negative pall on “Nazi art” and sparked an interest in unveiling the sinister propaganda hidden in the art that was regarded as acceptable by the Nazis. When Germany violated the Munich Agreement and Britain started to prepare for war, the British arts community banded together to create the Artists’ Refugee Committee to rescue German exile artists fleeing Prague, but with many British now harboring anti-German feelings and unable to distinguish between Nazis and refugees, the action had to be publicized as a rescue of Jews and Czechoslovakians, rather than exiled Germans. Fears of espionage led to the mass interrogation of German refugees and, in some cases, even to their internment, generally forcing exile artists to keep a low profile. Exiled art historian E. H. Gombrich took it upon himself to educate the British public to reject any art produced in the Third Reich, owing to its supposed service to propaganda and absence of artistic merit, laying the groundwork for criteria that would later be adopted in identifying “Nazi art.” An anonymous article published in May 1940 similarly warned the British public that, although “to the innocent eye this Nazi art may seem beauty [sic],” it was imbued with the power to indoctrinate the German people.35 Americans were generally regarded as somewhat more open to modernism and foreign culture than the British, but there, too, exposure to German art prior to the 1930s had been limited. Galka Scheyer, a promoter of the works of Lyonel Feininger, Alexei Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee, had settled in Los Angeles in 1928 and sponsored numerous exhibitions in both Northern and Southern California, and the Busch-Reisinger Germanic Museum at Harvard had begun to amass an impressive collection of contemporary German works in the early 1930s.36 The most influential figure, however, was Alfred Barr, cofounder and director of the Museum

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of Modern Art in New York. Barr was passionate about expanding American awareness of modernism in all the arts and regarded German modernism—in contrast to other international schools—as expressly nationalist. In the museum’s 1931 exhibition German Painting and Sculpture, Barr chose to focus overwhelmingly on expressionist works as purely German, excluding German artists whose works he considered too French or international, drawing compelling distinctions between French and German art (even tracing the German emphasis of content over form back to the Middle Ages), and criticizing the French domination of the art world.37 At first, news of Nazi attacks on artists largely fell on deaf ears in the United States, owing to the country’s policy of isolationism and its reluctance to offend Germany. Thus, when Barr returned from a trip to Stuttgart in 1933 and reported on the efforts of the Fighting League for German Culture to crush “cultural Bolshevism,” the seizure of modernist works, and the closure of galleries and museums, he could not convince anyone to publish his reports and had to wait until after the war to see them in print. In 1935, the Busch-Reisinger Museum mounted a Georg Grosz exhibition, although the curator hesitated to include the artist’s blatantly anti-Nazi works. The same year, however, a Los Angeles County Museum exhibition of prominent expressionists and Dadaists prompted a reviewer to comment on “that outburst of expressionistic art which took place in Germany between 1907 and the rise of Hitler,” regarding it as “the last outcry of individualism before the inevitable march of collectivism.”38 The Degenerate Art exhibition finally provoked outrage in the American press over the suppression of freedom and regimentation of the artistic community.39 For fleeing German artists arriving in the United States, the prospects for maintaining a livelihood were nevertheless severely limited. Most had to quickly abandon any illusions that they would be able to make a living off of their art, although having a modernist portfolio was often a plus. Alexander Dorner, who was entrusted with directing the museum at the Rhode Island School of Design and later lectured at Brown University and Bennington College, was the former director of the Landesmuseum in Hannover, which had an impressive modernist collection, 270 works of which ended up in the Degenerate Art exhibition. Dorner was an advocate of abstract art, and his ideas influenced the curating principles of the Museum of Modern Art and promoted the widespread recognition of Buckminster Fuller.40 Those who qualified for teaching in higher education were exempted from immigration quotas,41 and this made it possible for Grosz to come to the United States to teach at the Art Students League in New York before opening his own school. Experimental enclaves started forming at colleges far removed from the academic centers of the East Coast, including at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where the former Bauhaus professor Josef Albers was fortunate to find work and went on to train such future luminaries as Robert Rauschenberg.42

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During its heyday, which lasted through the 1940s, Black Mountain also hosted Willem de Kooning, Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Walter Gropius, and numerous other international artists.43 Hans Hofmann established an art school in New York that laid the groundwork for a later generation of abstract expressionists, including Jackson Pollock.44 Art dealers also found opportunities in marketing modernist works. When awareness of German art peaked in the mid-1930s, the overwhelming emphasis was on expressionism, which is not surprising given the influence of Barr’s strong advocacy of the style. Even in the months prior to the opening of Degenerate Art in 1937, art galleries and museums in San Francisco, Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh had increasingly featured the works of artists that would be thrust into notoriety by the Munich exhibition. This can largely be attributed to the arrival in New York of exiled art dealers such as Karl Nierendorf and Curt Valentin.45 The list of dealers emigrating from Germany, Austria, and France in the 1930s is long and impressive, and the interest of these dealers primarily in expressionism and secondarily in surrealism is striking.46 Since 1920, Nierendorf had specialized in the works of artists belonging to the Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) and other expressionist groups. When he arrived in New York in 1936 and opened his gallery across from the Museum of Modern Art, the press welcomed the potential “to make America more familiar with the great figures in experimental Germany.” Reporting to his brother in 1936 that “sympathy for our homeland’s strong personalities can be won here and that a new market has opened, which will benefit all,” Nierendorf soon led the pack of German émigré dealers in capitalizing on the availability of seized “degenerate” art, the American acquisition of which was praised in Art News in September 1939 as “the strongest condemnation to the policies which barred these and similar artistic expressions.”47 The German government’s seizure and sale of “degenerate” works of art had made them readily available for German dealers who wanted to market them in the United States, and the denigration and censorship of these works by the Nazis only piqued the interest of American buyers. Curt Valentin came to New York shortly after Nierendorf and opened the Buchholz Gallery. Karl Buchholz was one of the few art dealers in Germany who had permission from the Propaganda Ministry to sell off the seized artworks, and he bought up modern masterpieces at depressed prices.48 When Valentin set up an exhibition of modern German sculpture in March 1937, a review noted that it contributed to “German art of the twentieth century . . . gradually becoming more familiar to the American public.”49 Many more museums and galleries across the country worked with the New York dealers to organize similar exhibitions in the following years, as the seizure and sale of “degenerate” works in Germany made a wealth of artworks available to American museums and collectors from 1938 on.50 In 1939, when the German government held an auction in Switzerland to sell off seized artwork, Valentin and

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other dealers demanded assurances that the proceeds would go to German art museums and not to armaments. Many of the works ended up in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Rhode Island School of Design, and Solomon Guggenheim’s collection, even though the assurances from the German government were most certainly violated.51 Exile histories subsequently credited the community of émigrés with introducing German modernist art to the uninitiated American public—not only through the exhibition and sale of paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts but also through the translation, publication, and distribution of the writings of modernist artists in the 1940s—bringing a “new sophistication” to what was widely considered to be a culturally deficient nation.52 The differences between the reception of German art and German architecture abroad were vast. For one thing, Nazi ideologues never staged a high-profile condemnation of any specific architectural trends comparable to the attacks on modernist painting and sculpture in the Degenerate Art exhibition. Despite radical right-wing protests over the Bauhaus’s alleged leftist leanings and its international orientation, many of its faculty and alumni continued to work in the Third Reich, and some even secured government and party commissions. Furthermore, unlike painting and sculpture, international admiration for German accomplishments in architecture had a long history, and foreign enthusiasm for Bauhaus innovation predated the school’s run-in with Nazi opponents.53 Thus, some of the more prominent architects later classified as exiles or refugees had actually voluntarily left Germany to join foreign firms and schools that were eager to exploit their talents. In many instances, these architects even left the country with the express consent of the Nazi government. An exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art highlighting the work of Gropius, Mies, and the Dutch architect J. J. P. Oud prompted one of Harvard’s deans to travel to Europe in 1936 to try to attract the three to Cambridge. Mies deferred, but following his futile attempts to reason with Alfred Rosenberg to accept the Bauhaus philosophy and keep the school open, he had to struggle to keep his career afloat in Germany. In 1938, he was invited to restructure the architecture curriculum at the Armour Institute of Technology (now the Illinois Institute of Technology) in Chicago, and he brought two Bauhaus associates with him. Gropius took a position in England in 1934 before accepting Harvard’s offer in 1937, bringing his colleagues Marcel Breuer and Martin Wagner with him, yet he seems to have maintained his loyalty to the German state all through this time.54 Gropius’s tenure at Harvard allowed him to further the cause of modernism by inviting his protégé Sigfried Giedion to deliver the lectures that would result in his influential book Space, Time and Architecture, a teleological history of art culminating in modernism.55 Britain had its counterpart to Giedion in the art historian Nikolaus Pevsner, who was instrumental in enlightening the British public about European modernism through his writing and teaching in the 1930s and 1940s.56

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Pevsner, who was dismissed from his faculty position in Göttingen in 1933 and then fled to the United Kingdom, had actually been an early admirer of Hitler despite his Russian-Jewish background. That the Bauhaus architects could prosper abroad thus had more to do with their international reputations and the symbiotic relations they had with their new homelands than with any moral imperative to save persecuted artists from Nazi barbarism. Yet, as the political tides changed, so did the accounts of how and why these architects had gone abroad. In the catalog accompanying the 1939 exhibition Bauhaus 1919–1928, Alfred Barr elaborated on the Nazi opposition to flat roofs, modern furniture, and abstract painting and wrote that the United States had become a haven for Bauhaus refugees. The exhibition attracted an unprecedented number of visitors to the museum, and a New York Times headline read: “NaziBanned Art Is Exhibited Here.”57 P E R F O R M I N G A RT S I N E X I L E

German playwrights, actors, directors, and other theater personnel fleeing Nazism struggled not only with language barriers but also with a global economic crisis that threatened the very existence of theater operations. But another significant hurdle facing theater professionals in exile—especially those in European exile—was political. Host countries were reluctant to risk alienating the new German government and also hesitated to embrace a community that included many who had been driven out for their Marxist leanings, which they openly expressed in their writings and on the stage. This reluctance, combined with the theater censorship enforced in many European countries, created an unfavorable climate and limited the opportunities for many of the German exiles in Czechoslovakia, the United Kingdom, and even neutral Switzerland.58 Most of their activities had to be confined to small-scale German-language theaters established by exile communities. In Prague, informal political theaters in the form of agitprop groups and cabarets sprung up sporadically from 1933 on. A small exile theater collective named Studio 1934 brought together Germans, Austrians, and Czechs to stage political cabaret and operetta, but it constantly had to dodge censors. From 1935 to 1938, even more modest undertakings by leftist exiles—including the poetry readings and song performances of the Unity Front Troupe (Einheitsfront-Truppe) and various amateur groups, as well as individual productions of works by Brecht and Clifford Odets—ran afoul of censors and were stopped abruptly after the Munich Agreement. In Zurich, the privately funded Schauspielhaus managed to evade some of the stricter censorship affecting state-supported theaters and opened its doors to German refugees. Its director, Ferdinand Rieser, staged works by exile playwrights until he himself fled to Paris in 1938, fearing threats from Germany. The theater continued to stage Brecht productions until as late as 1941.59

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In France and Britain, opportunities were just as scarce, owing to the precarious political climate in which the two countries were hoping to retain congenial relations with Germany. In Paris, from 1934 to 1938, the German exile performance collective known as The Lantern performed works by Brecht, fully aware that spies from the German Embassy were attending their performances.60 Aside from that, most attempts to organize an exile theater in Paris failed, despite the large number of theater personnel who sought refuge there. Even the most noteworthy productions of German theater, such as the scenes from Brecht’s Fear and Misery in the Third Reich that won Walter Benjamin’s praise, were staged on a modest scale and generally attracted audiences only from within the exile community.61 After England entered the war, the exile community formed the Free German Culture League (Freier Deutscher Kulturbund), which produced theater and other cultural events intended to introduce the British public to “the other Germany” that was not only living in their midst but also resisting Hitler within Germany’s borders (the latter was showcased in the league’s 1942 exhibition, Allies Inside Germany). The exile community succeeded in convincing the British Foreign Office to support their newspaper, with British officials acknowledging “the existence of two Germanies (a ‘good’ one and a Nazi one),” but they could not sway other officials, who seemed to hold all Germans, including refugees, under suspicion. Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden stated in 1941 that “the Nazi system represents the mentality of the great majority of the German people,” and the Labour Party’s international secretary, William Gilles, asserted in 1943 that “the Germans’ spirit is not really democratic.”62 But the challenges in Britain were not only political but also aesthetic, which meant that refugees were forced to grapple not only with British suspicion toward any German exiles but also with Britain’s cultural conservatism.63 Ernst Toller wrote and produced only one theater work, No More Peace, during his British exile, to mixed reviews.64 He received praise in retrospect for his persistence in raising consciousness about the Nazi scourge even in the face of threatened deportation, but his civil courage was not appreciated at the time.65 Those who fled to the United States encountered an economic strain on theaters that was not markedly better. Max Reinhardt’s greatest successes in the United States, including Midsummer Night’s Dream, came during a period that cannot be considered exile, as he was free to return to Germany up until 1937. At that point, however, the worsened economy could not support the costly ventures that had previously secured his success, and he died in 1943 after several failures on Broadway.66 Erwin Piscator, who had left Germany in 1931 and spent several years in the Soviet Union before fleeing from Stalinist repression, had somewhat more success upon his arrival in New York in 1939. There, he started theaters and a drama school (all of which struggled financially and had to close) and staged a few noteworthy productions, but the language barrier was always an issue, and he eventually returned to Germany in 1951 after being targeted in the Red Scare fueled

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by Senator Joseph McCarthy.67 Where the United States differed from Europe, however, was in its burgeoning film industry. Hollywood offered German-speaking exiles a wealth of opportunities, owing in large part to a long-standing German presence. Some of the most renowned German filmmakers had come to America long before Hitler had risen to power, including Ernst Lubitsch, F. W. Murnau, and Erich Pommer, all of whom had arrived before 1926. Despite a vibrant and growing film industry in Germany, America had long represented the cinematic promised land. The early influx of German film personnel was said to have created the atmosphere of an exclusive German club and was already credited in 1933 for seriously weakening the dominance of the German film industry.68 This atmosphere made it easier for those escaping Nazi antisemitism to gain entrée to Hollywood. Billy Wilder arrived in 1933, Otto Preminger in 1936, and Max Ophuls in 1938, after fleeing to France in 1933 (all three of them were Jewish). Douglas Sirk (born Detlef Sierck), who was married to a Jew, came in 1937, and Fritz Lang, who had one Jewish parent, left Germany in 1934, although his reasons for coming to the United States are the subject of some controversy, based on his own account of being approached by Goebbels to work with the regime and his decision to leave on the next train to Paris in April 1933, even though his passport shows that he actually left Germany for good only at the end of July.69 German stage directors and actors also found far more opportunities in Hollywood than on Broadway. Reinhardt’s singular success was his 1935 version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, starring Olivia de Haviland, James Powell, Mickey Rooney, and James Cagney. Even Brecht had an opportunity to prosper in Hollywood with the success of the 1943 film Hangmen Also Die, based on the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. Brecht and his composer-collaborator Hanns Eisler, who had also left Germany after being targeted as a communist, managed to break into the film industry with the assistance of Fritz Lang, who was by this time well established as a successful Hollywood director.70 The United States had also initially been cautious in maintaining civil relations with Germany, however, and the Brecht-Eisler-Lang collaboration, with its unequivocal anti-Nazi message, would not have been possible were it not for the fact that the United States had entered the war in 1941, closing Germany off as an export market for American films and opening the door to anti-German subject matter.71 Prior to that, Hollywood made great efforts to keep the German market open right up to the attack on Pearl Harbor (fig. 7). Louis B. Mayer reportedly consulted with the German consulate to determine whether the depiction of German characters in his films might offend German audiences, offering to change them to communists if they did. Censorship in both the United States (by Hollywood’s self-censoring Hays Office) and in Britain posed barriers for any films with anti-Nazi themes, such as Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 film, The Great Dictator. Warner Brothers, by contrast, closed their German office after their Berlin representative

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figure 7. Advertisement for 1938–1939 season of MGM films in Germany (Lichtbildbühne 31, no. 171, July 23, 1938).

was killed by Nazi street thugs in a random attack, and the studio then produced the first openly anti-Nazi film, Confessions of a Nazi Spy, released in 1939.72 But controversial new findings contend that studios up to that point had been careful not even to reference the Jewish identity of characters in their films so as not to offend Germany, and they had to deal with objections from Germans planted in Hollywood who lodged specific complaints to the Hays Office if film content was believed to be potentially anti-German.73 In general, most refugee filmmakers were pragmatists, avoiding controversial subjects and producing their fair share of

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B-movies alongside classics and films serving as pure entertainment.74 They did, however, mobilize like no other arts industry in expressing their opposition to German aggression, forming the Hollywood League Against Nazism (which later became the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League) in 1936. The league, which grew to a membership of five thousand, organized large-scale fundraisers featuring prominent entertainers; published a newspaper, Hollywood Now; aired radio broadcasts twice a week; and successfully staged a boycott of filmmakers Leni Riefenstahl and Vittorio Mussolini (the nephew of Benito Mussolini).75 Compared with those engaged in literature, theater, and film, who were tied to the written and spoken word, musicians spoke the “international language” of music and were therefore less hampered by linguistic difficulties abroad. But even more importantly, in most cases there was no need to “sell” German music or its custodians to a European or American public. The relative success of German musicians in exile is unquestionably tied to a long tradition of German musical export, which allowed a large number of music personnel to establish themselves abroad. With the internationally recognized position of Germany and Austria as musical leaders, a reputation that had been cultivated for centuries, host countries almost always regarded the exodus of musical talent as an opportunity to enhance their own musical standing, although this generally benefited only the most prominent celebrities. As with artists and writers, many musicians leaving Germany and Austria usually fled first to European countries, spending short sojourns in Austria, the Netherlands, and the Soviet Union76 and somewhat longer stays in Czechoslovakia and France. The large influx of German refugees into Prague from 1933 onward actually prompted the formation of orchestras consisting largely of unemployed German musicians, and many secured short-term engagements with the New German Theater (Neues Deutsches Theater) until economic pressures edged them out. As attacks on certain composers in Germany became known, concertgoers in Prague showed their solidarity with the victims by supporting performances of works of Jewish composers, of Schoenberg’s school, and of Krenek, Hindemith, and Stravinsky.77 From 1933 to 1936, only the most prominent of those fleeing to France, such as conductor Bruno Walter, were offered French citizenship immediately after arriving. France was very receptive to the idea of enriching its classical music offerings, and therefore it welcomed the opportunity for more frequent engagements of prominent conductors and soloists who had been shut out of Germany, such as Walter, Adolf Busch, Rudolf Serkin, Artur Schnabel, and Otto Klemperer, who planned to establish an independent touring opera company based in Paris. Yet the majority had to struggle to find acceptance or even face forced repatriation to Germany. As they had in Czechoslovakia, musicians in France fared well in securing short-term engagements in café, hotel, and restaurant orchestras until worsening unemployment led to the introduction of measures to restrict their participation. Those composers who could rely on other establishments, such as the

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workers’ movement (Paul Dessau, Kurt Weill, and Hanns Eisler), operetta stages (Paul Abraham, Ralph Benatzky, Hugo Hirsch, Jean Gilbert, Oskar Straus, and Werner Richard Heymann), and film (Karol Rathaus and Franz Waxmann), also found favorable conditions in France, at least temporarily.78 Musicians seeking refuge on British soil initially faced a chilly reception, although things gradually improved as the war progressed. After centuries of liberal immigration policies, the British Parliament introduced a series of restrictions between 1904 and 1920, partially in response to the influx of East European Jews. Furthermore, by the 1920s, the British position toward contemporary German music had become decidedly unfavorable. These factors combined made it particularly difficult for composers seeking opportunities in the United Kingdom, even though an overall respect for Germany’s musical heritage made for better circumstances for performers, musicologists, and music publishers. A few prominent composers, including Kurt Weill, Ernst Toch, Hanns Eisler, and Karol Rathaus, had marginal success in the British film, stage, and popular music scenes before moving on to the United States.79 The annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland led to the easing up of British restrictions on immigration, and approximately two hundred German and Austrian musicians entered the United Kingdom starting in 1938, although only a minority of them managed to pursue full-time musical careers in the country, relying on personal connections and sheer luck to secure primarily temporary engagements. The most widely recognized impact these German musicians had on British musical life was the reinvigoration of the Glyndebourne opera festival under Fritz Busch, Carl Ebert, and Rudolf Bing, whose Mozart productions achieved international acclaim. German and Austrian singers also sang roles at Covent Garden, and the BBC began to employ German performers, arrangers, conductors, and even critics and musicologists in a wide array of tasks, appointing composer Berthold Goldschmidt to the role of music director for the BBC’s wartime German broadcasts. Others who managed to secure success in Britain were conductor Walter Goehr, composer Hans Gal, and Wilhelm Furtwängler’s former assistant, Berta Geissmar, who worked for Thomas Beecham and became known for her autobiographical account of musical conditions in Nazi Germany. Additionally, the Free German Culture League offered refuge for leftist music figures, some of whom went on to become leaders in communist East Germany, such as Georg Knepler, Ernst Hermann Meyer, and the younger composers Andre Asriel and Wolfgang Lesser.80 Britain also ended up embracing the modern German dance movement, offering refuge to Rudolf Laban and Kurt Jooss. Although both managed to sustain their leadership in German experimental dance into the Nazi years (Laban left German in 1937, Jooss in 1934) and controversy exists over their status as exiles, they were able to continue to pursue their experiments under the patronage of the Elmhirsts at Dartington Hall in Devon. Jooss arrived first, and he and his company

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worked on new productions and continued to tour internationally. After discovering that the aged Laban had fallen on financial hard times in Paris, the Elmhirsts brought him to England to regain his health and continue writing about his philosophy of dance. Jooss eventually returned to Germany in 1949 to reestablish his school in Essen, while Laban stayed on and became a pioneer in movement education in Great Britain.81 The situation was just the opposite in the United States, however. The dance community held Wigman and Laban accountable for their continued activities in Nazi Germany and staged a boycott of the dance festival at the 1936 Olympic games, condemning new German dance as the dance created to the groans of men and women tortured in the concentration camps. It no longer needs percussion instruments for accompaniment; for the cry of hungry children, the beat of the soldier’s feet throughout the land, serve the dancer much better. A dancer in Germany today creating New German Dance needs no designer for costumes; the brown tunics splashed with the blood of many thousand anti-fascists—Jews and Christians, Socialists and Communists—could best express the pure Aryan soul.82

The United States was nevertheless the final destination for many cultural professionals who had tried first to establish careers in Europe, and musicians constituted the largest and most successful group among them.83 This was due in large part to a long tradition of German musicians achieving success in American musical life. A wave of German immigration beginning in 1848 had brought a host of German performers and educators, music publishing houses, and soloists and conductors to the United States, where they had laid the foundations for conservatories, amateur choral activity, and the performance of chamber music, symphonic music, and opera.84 Even in 1943, at the height of World War II, a music lover’s handbook published in New York guided its readers toward understanding a concert repertoire dominated by the works of Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, Wagner, and even Richard Strauss, at the time the most celebrated living composer in Nazi Germany.85 The flight of prominent conductors such as Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Fritz Stiedry, Erich Leinsdorf, and Wilhelm (William) Steinberg to the United States merely enhanced an already strong Austro-German presence in classical music. Other performers found jobs in conservatories, many of which boasted long rosters of past and present faculty members with German origins. Artur Schnabel, Eduard Steuermann, and Rudolf Kolisch, to name only a few, were able to strengthen the already firm position of Germans in America’s music education and contribute to the proliferation of chamber music in the United States.86 The field of American musicology received its greatest gains from this influx of scholars, many of whom had been unable to secure academic positions in their former homelands.87 For composers, the transition was more complicated. Some managed to establish themselves in education, in some cases taking teaching positions for the first

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time in their careers: Schoenberg taught at a conservatory in Boston before teaching at universities in California; Eisler was taken into the New School for Social Research; Stefan Wolpe taught at schools in Brooklyn and Philadelphia and at Black Mountain College before moving on to university posts after the war; Hindemith had a career at Yale before returning to Europe after the war; and Krenek taught at Vassar College and Hamline University.88 Yet even Schoenberg, who had only recently occupied the prestigious post of head of the composition master class at the Prussian Academy, had to make huge concessions. During his years in the United States, he turned unmistakably toward accessibility and engagement in tonal and melodramatic works, prompting critics to attribute the changes to the inescapable effects of Hollywood and his student Eisler to accuse his master of falling “prey to the delusions that accompany capitalist culture.”89 Others had far more success than Schoenberg at composing for the lucrative entertainment fields, in some cases having to compromise earlier socialist ideals that criticized these culture industries. Of Brecht’s collaborators, Kurt Weill was singular in his success as a Broadway composer, but the film industry offered even more opportunities to exile composers. Some had already worked for film studios in Germany, like Werner Richard Heymann, who composed for UFA studios in Berlin before scoring such Hollywood films as Bluebeard, Ninotchka, and To Be or Not To Be in a very “non-German” style. Franz Waxman, composer for more than two hundred films, including Fury, Rear Window, Rebecca, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (he won Oscars for the last two), managed to combine European and American styles, employing jazz instrumentation as well as Schoenbergian atonality. A few other émigré film composers, such as Karol Rathaus, Erich Korngold, and Ernst Toch, brought more traditional European sounds into their film composition and were able to boast simultaneous successes in the concert and opera world.90 What was especially groundbreaking, however, was not so much the enhancement of established musical institutions in the United States but the gradual introduction of a culture that privileged modernism and regarded composition as an elite, learned activity. The spread of this new ideology emanated more from intellectual discourse than from the exiled musicians themselves, and it largely centered on the figure of Arnold Schoenberg. American composers such as Roger Sessions had already begun to look closely at Schoenberg’s controversial compositional techniques in the 1920s.91 American composers gradually embraced what they believed to be Schoenberg’s approach to the social function of contemporary composition. In Vienna after World War I, Schoenberg and his followers formed the Society for Private Musical Performance (Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen), which premiered its works to select audiences without publicity, critics, or applause.92 The idea that the music of serious composers should not be subjected to the fickleness of the general public took hold in the United States,

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where an academic culture of composers was fostering the image of serious composition as an activity created and recreated by and for specialists within a rarefied intellectual setting.93 This new model of composer-as-scientist gained footing in large part because it coincided with the development of new curricula in American music education and scholarship. The Depression and the GI Bill caused a huge increase in the student population and created an unforeseen demand for teachers of basic music skills, such as harmony and counterpoint. Starting in 1934, the creation of the first doctoral programs in composition made it possible to acquire the credentials needed for university employment. But these conditions also created a perceived need for intellectual validation, fostering a culture that equated composition to scientific research and disdaining musical works that exhibited comprehensibility and mass appeal.94 The singling out of Schoenberg as the guru of this new compositional philosophy was the result of the concerted efforts of two of his disciples, René Leibowitz and Theodor Adorno. Leibowitz, a student of Schoenberg’s student Anton Webern, is credited with bringing Schoenberg’s and especially Webern’s work out of obscurity. A Polish-born Jew who moved to Paris in 1929, studied with Schoenberg and Webern in the early 1930s, and lived out the war in Vichy France, Leibowitz published Schönberg et son école (Schoenberg and His School) in 1946, a polemic that championed Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique as the only viable means of musical expression left to contemporary composers. Similarly, Adorno, a former student of Alban Berg and thus also a Schoenberg disciple, pointed to Schoenberg’s expressionism as a demonstration of musical autonomy, explaining the inaccessibility of Schoenberg’s works as a demonstration of their independence and subjectivity.95 T H E M IG R AT IO N O F I N T E L L E C T UA L S

On the whole, intellectuals experienced a much easier transition in establishing careers on foreign soil than their fellow refugees working in the arts, largely because of generously funded and well-organized networks. The establishment of emergency agencies kicked into high gear within months of the Nazi accession. In Europe, these included the Notgemeinschaft deutscher Wissenschaftler and the Comité International pour le Placement des Intellectuels Réfugiés in Switzerland, the Comité des Savants in France, the short-lived Steunfonds in Holland, and the highly successful Academic Assistance Council in the United Kingdom, along with other entities in Belgium, Denmark, and Sweden.96 As early as spring 1933, the United States also saw the establishment of numerous privately funded organizations for rescuing intellectuals, most notably the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Oberlaender Trust, and the Carnegie Foundation.97 Founded by Alvin Johnson in 1919, the New School for Social Research addressed the influx of émigré social scientists in the

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spring of 1933 after Johnson and Abraham Flexner, director of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, returned from travels in Germany and foresaw the impending exodus.98 By 1941, the school’s University in Exile had gathered twenty-six professors and assistants into its graduate program and thirty more in other departments and aided the placement of fifteen individuals at other institutions.99 Even before the entry of the United States into the war, the exile scholars at the New School directed their energies to aiding in military intelligence, embarking on the Research Project for Totalitarian Communication in April 1941 and, in 1944, on a study of Nazi propaganda in German radio.100 The fall of France to the Nazis in 1940 had reverberations for a large number of artists and intellectuals who, on the run from German troops advancing through Central Europe, had hoped to end their odyssey in Paris. But when France’s armistice with Germany included a provision to turn over all German refugees, the New School opened the École Libre des Hautes Études in New York, where it offered refuge to those intellectuals fleeing France and Belgium.101 Frank Kingdon spearheaded the formation of the Emergency Rescue Committee, enlisting the support of Johnson, journalist Dorothy Thompson, Varian Fry, and Thomas Mann, with generous funding from Ingrid Warburg (heir to the Warburg banking family) and others. Mann, who headed the European committee of the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, an organization issuing financial aid to German artists and intellectuals and founded by political refugee Prince Hubertus zu Löwenstein, sprang into action to rescue his brother Heinrich and his son Golo from France, and he also facilitated the immigration of other artists by supplying a list of names to Varian Fry.102 Fry’s underground rescue effort ran on money acquired through fundraisers, including one run by Alfred Barr, who wished to rescue artists such as Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, and Jacques Lipschitz. On the urging of Eleanor Roosevelt, the U.S. State Department authorized visas for refugees as long as they had no history of communist affiliation, but Fry constantly struggled with the State Department, the American consulate in France, and even the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, attributing their lack of cooperation to latent antisemitism.103 As we survey the more prominent among those “driven into paradise,” however, we find that those who arrived with their own financial resources, such as Thomas Mann, could more easily continue their work and pursue their artistic, scholarly, and sometimes political agendas. Thomas Mann was one of the lucky few who came to the United States as a celebrity and thus was not left to the economic vicissitudes that many of his fellow writers and artists endured. Shortly after Hitler became chancellor, Mann’s brother Heinrich became one of the early, highprofile victims of the purge of the Prussian Academy of Arts, and Mann himself was harshly criticized for his lectures on Wagner that alluded to the psychoanalytical aspects of the master’s work, piquing the ire of the German artistic elite. In

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1933, while he was on a lecture tour, his children urged him not to return to Germany. After refusing to take an oath of loyalty to Hitler, he, too, lost his academy membership. Unlike other exiles, however, Thomas Mann was allowed to hold on to his German citizenship until 1936, at which point his speeches and activities tried the patience of Nazi officials and pushed them to the breaking point. Still, in the three years between leaving Germany and having his citizenship revoked, Mann seems to have positioned himself as a prize to be won, wooed by both the literary community back home and the exile enclaves abroad.104 Having received an honorary doctorate from Harvard two years earlier, Mann already commanded tremendous respect and acclaim when he arrived in the United States in 1937, and he was showered with honors and welcomed as one of the world’s greatest living writers.105 That Mann was neither Marxist nor Jewish (although his wife, Katia, was a Jew) set him apart from the majority of writers and artists fleeing Germany, and it most likely shielded him from the prejudices they faced and gave him easier access to influencing public opinion. His fame allowed him to spread his message on his own terms, a message that not only urged the United States to defy German atrocities but also included many of the principles that would later guide the writing of Nazi cultural history: that “Nazi culture” was an oxymoron, that the Nazi “episode” was an isolated historical anomaly, and that the exiles were the only custodians of true German culture. Once he lost his German citizenship, he immediately heightened the rhetoric, openly attacking Germany and gradually taking a firmer stance in distinguishing himself as the leading exile spokesperson.106 In an appeal published in the New York Times in 1936, Mann notably painted Nazi cultural life as something that could exist “only in quotation marks,” writing that German artists and intellectuals had to struggle “under the dictatorial thumb” and the “paralyzing effect of totalitarian demands.”107 At an event held in his honor in New York shortly after his arrival, he further reinforced the notion that the Nazi phenomenon represented a historical anomaly with no past or future, “a period of night and winter” that was to be “no more than an unfortunate interlude.”108 One year later, having become an American citizen, he was generous in his praise of his new homeland but also unequivocal in urging it to stop the atrocities in Europe: “I know of no other land in the world where there lives so honest an aversion to evil, ready for action—the evil disfiguring the face of Europe today.”109 Emboldened to further demonstrate that he belonged in his new homeland with the now-famous phrase, “Where I am, there is Germany,” Mann made no secret of his admiration of Roosevelt and his faith in democracy, which he declared in 1938 in one of his first speeches in America, “The Coming Victory of Democracy.”110 When discussing any new developments in Germany, Mann focused on the spectacle of mass hysteria, describing political rallies as “scenes in the grotesque style, with Salvation Army methods, hallelujahs and bell-ringing and devilishlike

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repetitions of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth.”111 These views resonated with the American press, probably owing in part to his close contact with the influential American journalist Dorothy Thompson, who served as the Berlin correspondent for the New York Post and Public Ledger from 1925 to 1934, when she was famously expelled from Germany for expressing her concerns over the Nazi threat in her book, I Saw Hitler. Back home, she, too, became a vocal opponent to Nazism and an advocate for exiles, serving as a director of the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, issuing affidavits to secure entry for numerous writers, and opening her home to social gatherings that included the Manns and other émigrés.112 In addition to commenting on the political and social aspects of Nazi Germany, Thompson also painted a bleak picture of its cultural affairs, reminiscent of Mann’s portrayals, even though her observations merely took published pronouncements at face value, without assessing their effectiveness, and were colored by her growing commitment to unearthing Nazi barbarity wherever possible. In a 1936 essay appearing in Foreign Affairs, she described Nazi cultural policy as aesthetically backward and administratively omnipotent, outlining “vast powers, which cover the whole field of the spoken and written word, as well as pictorial, theatrical, and musical creation and presentation,” 113 and enumerating the benefits of the cultural “brain gain” of exiles, whom she considered to be the true custodians of Germany’s cultural greatness. Further building on this totalitarian image, Thompson draws a direct comparison to Russia, noting that “in cultural matters the parallelism between the two societies is close,”114 and managing to paint a vivid Orwellian picture of Nazi Germany as a cultural wasteland populated by enslaved grunts: The artists are assembled, each in his proper compartment, each properly certified as to ancestry and breeding, competency and ideology, each holding from the proper authority his license to create. No Jewish taint corrupts them; no breath of nonGermanic internationalism, of bourgeois secularity, of Catholic obscurantism perverts them. The green-uniformed hordes of the Work Army are ordered: “Dig! Plant! Build!” And they dig, and plant, and build. The Brown-uniformed hordes of the Storm Troopers are ordered: “March! Present arms! Collect the winter-aid fund!” And they march, present arms, and collect. And in the same manner the state says to the artists, so perfectly organized, so immaculately regimented: “Create!”115

There were also a handful of independent institutes (most notably the Warburg Institute, the Frankfurt School, and the Wiener Library) that, like Mann, could sustain themselves financially, and they were consequently able to exercise a greater degree of intellectual freedom. The Warburg Institute was founded in Hamburg by the Jewish banking heir Aby Warburg, whose passion for classical antiquity and Renaissance culture drove him to amass a huge collection of books and photographs and to sponsor a prestigious lecture series. After Warburg’s death

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in 1929, director Fritz Saxl contemplated moving the institute out of Germany as early as 1932. With the help of additional private funding from English benefactors, he was able to move it to London, where it remained an independent entity formally affiliated with the University of London. The music collection of Paul Hirsch—which comprised one of the most valuable collections of its time—had a similar fate, reaching a safe haven in the library of Cambridge University in 1936, where it was later purchased with government and private funds. The Wiener Library began as the mission of a German Jew, Alfred Wiener, to document Nazi and Fascist ideologies by collecting books and newspaper clippings. Wiener moved his collection first to Amsterdam and then to London in 1939, where it became a resource for military intelligence and was sustained initially with government funding and later with private support from the Jewish community.116 The greatest American success story in this regard was the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), commonly referred to as the Frankfurt School, whose associates managed to work independently, at least while their financial footing was secure during the first few years they were in the United States. In 1933, ten years after it was founded in Frankfurt with an endowment from the Weil family, the institute came under the direction of Max Horkheimer, who foresaw that the Nazi government would inevitably attempt to shut it down. He managed to transfer its funds to Swiss banks before the Nazis had the opportunity to seize its assets. The institute then went into temporary exile in Geneva until Columbia University offered it a home in 1934.117 Adorno joined Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse there in 1938, and they managed to carry on their work largely in isolation, continuing to write in German and insulating themselves from American cultural and intellectual trends.118 Horkheimer was known for his financial prowess, and even in the face of financial troubles during the war,119 his ability to sustain the work of the institute in Frankfurt, Geneva, New York, and later Los Angeles and to provide financial aid to Walter Benjamin in France as well as to over two hundred doctoral candidates and researchers has served as the central explanation for the independence of the institute’s activities.120 A certain embarrassment of riches during the Depression along with concerns about the members’ early connections with Marxism led them to keep to themselves as much as possible and to eschew any political involvement.121 Yet, this relative independence notwithstanding, the Frankfurt School’s eventual shift to an emphasis that would ultimately influence fundamental notions of Nazi culture was in part a result of financial reverses that forced the group to strive to accommodate new American patrons. A shaky relationship with Columbia University and a shift in personnel resulting from financial and institutional difficulties compelled Horkheimer to seek out a new, large-scale project that would exploit the talents of his circle and potentially attract outside financial support from American foundations.122 He hired a public relations firm, appointed an advi-

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sory board, and cultivated connections with other scholars, grant agencies, and private donors, especially within the Jewish community.123 The project proposal he put forth, titled “Cultural Aspects of National Socialism,” was to be codirected by Horkheimer, who would also direct the project’s anti-Christianity task force, and by Eugene Anderson, a historian at American University. Other task forces would be directed by Friedrich Pollock (“Bureaucracy”), Leo Löwenthal (“Mass Culture”), Marcuse (“The War and Post-War Generation”), Franz Neumann (“The Ideological Permeation of Labor and the New Middle Class”), and Adorno (“Literature, Music, and Art”). The project would focus on understanding the mechanisms of totalitarian society and especially its roots in pre-Nazi Germany, and the researchers were to draw on the materials at the institute and—significantly—on interviews with other émigrés. Horkheimer proposed situating the beginnings of Nazi anti-Christian tendencies in the works of Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche and analyzing Reichstag proceedings, pamphlets, newspapers, speeches, novels, and interviews with theologians living in American exile, not excluding the anti-Christian position of the left; Pollock would study government and industrial bureaucracy in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich and contrast them with counterparts in Western countries; Löwenthal would analyze mass culture by surveying rhetorical and visual elements of newspapers and popular biographies; Marcuse hoped to investigate the effects of World War I on families and youth, using materials issued by the German youth movement, biographies, reports of trials, and interviews with youth movement and education figures living in exile; and Neumann proposed using interviews, published autobiographies, government documents, and labor newspapers to trace the ideological similarities and differences between Marxism and Nazism, also scrutinizing elements of Weimar society that continued into the Third Reich.124 Adorno made no mention of interviewing fellow exiles, although he did cryptically refer to working with “the scholar in charge of the section on art,” who “held a high executive post in German art administration and had the opportunity to observe at the closest hand German administrative policy in this field.”125 In lieu of interviews, he would “use significant material in the German literature, music and art of the Weimar Republic and also of National Socialism, as a basis for disclosing underlying social or cultural tendencies.”126 His agenda appears to strive to delineate aesthetic categories, naming “expressionism and modern music” as “artistic currents that were especially closely connected with the political and cultural movements in [Weimar] Germany,” and drawing sharp distinctions between music composed with a public in mind, namely, “the community music of postwar inflation years (Hindemith, Weill),” and the atonal experiments of Arnold Schoenberg.127 He did, however, intend to scrutinize the expressionist movement for evidence of National Socialist sympathies and alluded to a seamless transition

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from Weimar middle-class reactions against “ ‘modernism,’ such as the putative distortion of the human face by radical painters, dissonance in music, the flat roof, and even jazz,” to “National Socialism’s liquidation of serious modern art.”128 The central ideas of this proposal would eventually reappear in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), one of the most influential works to come out of the Horkheimer circle, despite the fact that the Rockefeller Foundation ultimately rejected the project. Anderson had insisted that they tone down the theoretical foundations and emphasize a more empirical approach and that they deemphasize the elements of Christianity that allowed the Nazis to win support. He also accurately anticipated that the Rockefeller Foundation would have objections to supporting a project that focused on the relationship between Weimar democracy and Nazism. The idea that Nazi Fascism could have been nurtured in the lap of democracy and the warning that American society might be vulnerable to the same threats that plagued Germany were at the very least unpalatable to the foundation. As Roderick Stackelberg observed after looking at the various versions of the proposal and related correspondence, a fundamental revision that altered its entire thrust was to replace the original view that Nazism had been a beneficiary of Weimar democracy’s self-destruction with an emphasis on Nazism as the central culprit in bringing down Weimar democracy. The final version essentially grossly overestimated the singular power of Nazi aggression. The proposal nevertheless represents a fundamental shift in Horkheimer and Adorno’s thinking, moving away from economic analysis and direct critiques of capitalism—perhaps in deference to American sensitivity to such critique—and toward an acknowledgment of the far more powerful cultural forces that dampened revolutionary and democratic impulses in the Weimar Republic.129 Shortly after submitting the proposal, Horkheimer and Adorno left New York to settle in Los Angeles. Marcuse, Löwenthal, and Pollock joined them briefly before returning to the East Coast to work for the U.S. Office of War Information and the U.S. Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C. (discussed in the next chapter). Their attempts to replicate an independent existence within a university setting, similar to the arrangement they had had Columbia, failed in California, and the Los Angeles outpost remained a semi-official entity continuing to foster the independence that had characterized the institute’s existence to that point. This “branch” was all that remained of the institute after its New York offices shut down in 1944 and before Horkheimer and Adorno returned to Frankfurt in 1949. It was there, however, in the eye of the storm of mass culture that was Hollywood, that the two crystallized their theretofore scattered ideas on culture into Dialectic of Enlightenment, a work that would have a significant impact on the writing of cultural history. In the chapter on mass culture, Adorno and Horkheimer defend avant-garde and high modernist art by setting them off against the commodified mass culture they criticized.130 The chapter initially scrutinizes film, noting that it

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identifies itself as an “industry” rather than as an art and that it depends on cooperation with financial institutions for its very existence. They further contend that a lack of originality (sustained with the processes of standardization and interchangeability of components) renders all mass culture the “adversary” of the avant-garde and thereby the adversary of the “truth,” which is upheld by Schoenberg, Picasso, expressionists, and Dadaists.131 Oddly enough, just as Adorno had earlier condemned the standardization of popular music and jazz without ever really understanding their essence and execution, he and Horkheimer condemned Hollywood despite their minimal exposure to cinema,132 which highlights the intellectual isolation they maintained throughout their time in the United States. Despite briefly discussing the power of radio and advertising and the exploitation of language in the Third Reich, Horkheimer and Adorno directed their overall critique of mass culture at the American culture industry, such that they even chastise Chaplin’s film The Great Dictator for closing with an image of swaying cornfields that could have just as easily been used to suggest “Aryan” superiority.133 The debacle with the Rockefeller Foundation may have led Horkheimer and Adorno to divert their critique of capitalism toward critiquing popular culture, and it may have admonished them as well to downplay their theories that National Socialism had its origins in Weimar democracy, but they did occasionally revisit some of these earlier positions. In a lesser-known speech Adorno delivered at Columbia University in March 1945, “What National Socialism has Done to the Arts,” similar warnings to the United States come through. Adorno elaborated more on the German condition prior to 1933 and how it led inevitably to the Nazi calamity and warned of the possibility of Fascism surviving even after Germany was defeated. Indeed, it is striking to see how emphatically—and in uncharacteristic lucidity—he noted the continuities between the Weimar Republic and National Socialism. Focusing on music, the subject over which he had the most command, he observed: “It would be naïve to assume that the indisputable destruction of German musical culture has been brought about solely by a kind of political invasion from the outside, by mere force and violence. A severe crisis, economic no less than spiritual, prevailed before Hitler seized power. Hitler was, in music as well as in innumerable other aspects, merely the final executor of tendencies that had developed within the womb of German society.”134 He also brought up the continuity between the German folk and youth movements and the Hitler Youth, and even explicitly denied the existence of “a specific Nazi musical culture.” Even more influential on future cultural historians was the work of film critic Siegfried Kracauer, whose seminal book From Caligari to Hitler closely analyzed German cinema up to 1933 and suggested that the seeds of the Nazi mentality had been planted in the German psyche long before Hitler came to power. Kracauer had had close associations with Adorno and Benjamin in the Weimar years, but he worked outside academe as a journalist and novelist, receiving high praise for his

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writing from Thomas Mann. Dismissed from the increasingly conservative Frankfurter Zeitung in 1933, he went to Paris and remained there for as long as possible, preparing to flee to the United States with the hope of joining the Institute for Social Research. With the help of Thomas Mann and Varian Fry,135 he managed to escape Paris in 1941, but he unfortunately arrived in New York just as the institute was falling on difficult financial times. He accepted an assignment from the Museum of Modern Art to analyze Nazi war propaganda, leading to his 1942 essay, Propaganda and the Nazi War Film, which paid special attention to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will in addition to selected war documentaries. This report grew into his most influential work, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), in which he took no prisoners in his sociological and psychological analysis of not only Nazi film but also expressionist classics, concluding that trends in German film clearly reflect the inevitable decline of German society into Nazi barbarism.136 Kracauer’s 1942 essay reflects the thinking of other exile intellectuals in his desire to gain a clearer understanding of the workings of totalitarian dictatorships, looking for similarities between Russian and German tactics. Kracauer claims that totalitarian propaganda “differs from the propaganda of the democracies in that it does not appeal to individual understanding” and that it “withholds information or degrades it to a further means of propagandistic suggestion.”137 Focusing his analysis exclusively on newsreels and war documentaries and seeing no need to carry out a detailed comparison with American techniques that had been employed in films issued by the Office of War Information, Kracauer further observed that, while “propaganda of democracies . . . appeal to the understanding of the audiences,” Nazi war films attempt “to suppress the faculty of understanding which might easily endanger the basis of the whole system, and then try to lead the thus reduced mind in the desired direction.”138 He saw broader totalitarian devices in the Nazis’ ability “to impose their films upon the entire German population—with the result that within Germany proper no one can possibly escape them” and in the parallels to Russian films that won the admiration of Goebbels for their capacity to diminish the importance of the individual.139 Building on the 1942 essay, From Caligari to Hitler is a highly engaging work that interweaves German history and the history of the film industry with a persistent, even nagging, leitmotif of the inevitably of Nazism. Going all the way back to the first German films, Kracauer systematically breaks down the development of German film into a complex of components, all of which converge to reinforce the self-destructive nature he asserts is inherent in German culture. German despair and disillusionment, the immaturity and paralysis that impedes a true revolution, the impulsive drive to see tyranny as the only alternative to chaos—these are the recurring and increasingly threatening psychological impulses that Kracauer claims are worked out on the German screen, revealing the inevitability

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of the Nazis’ success in exploiting German insecurities. Yet the only analysis of actual Nazi-era films comes in the appendix, which is a revised version of Propaganda and the Nazi War Film. The essay had opened with a seemingly offhand statement that, especially in its revised wording in the appendix to From Caligari to Hitler, would nevertheless deeply impress film scholars thereafter. In 1942, it read: “Evidently all Nazi films are necessarily propaganda films; even the mere entertainment pictures that seem to be removed from politics.”140 By the time he revised the essay for the appendix, exhaustively showing in the book how all pre-Hitler films, regardless of genre, held the key to understanding the German decline, Kracauer seems more emboldened in his assumption, changing “evidently” to “to be sure.”141 Although From Caligari to Hitler ventures no further in subjecting Nazi-era entertainment films to the same scrutiny imposed on Weimar films, the assumption that all Nazi-era films needed to be treated as propaganda served as a point of departure for much of the study of Third Reich cinema thereafter. T H E I M PAC T O F T H E E X I L E E X P E R I E N C E O N C U LT U R A L H I S T O R I E S

The exile presence was to have a profound impact on the perceptions future generations would have of Nazi culture, but it also influenced the thinking of outspoken contemporaries, both directly and indirectly. As was noted above, Thomas Mann’s impressions of Nazi mass hysteria bore striking similarities to Dorothy Thompson’s characterization of the Third Reich, and they helped her to make the early connections between Nazism and Stalinism that would persist in cultural histories thereafter. Even more direct was the influence the Frankfurt School had on Clement Greenberg’s trendsetting views on modern art. As the threat of Nazism began to weigh on the American conscience in the late 1930s, the Frankfurt School scholars’ criticism of mass culture and advocacy of its perceived antipode, modernism, resonated especially well with the New York intellectuals with whom the Frankfurt School had begun to enter into a dialogue. As Thomas Wheatland compellingly argues—and contemporary publications such as the 1938–1939 volume of Partisan Review: A Quarterly of Literature and Marxism bear out—American leftists found themselves traumatized by the revelations of Stalinist oppression and the Hitler-Stalin Pact and scrambled to find an aesthetic position they could all agree on.142 This led some to idealize a seemingly counterintuitive cultural path toward a form of “working-class modernism” that would be distinct, on the one hand, from the lowbrow mass culture that seduced workers and, on the other hand, from the bygone bourgeois high culture that had fallen into decay. Their desire to distance themselves from Stalinism only galvanized their commitment to modernism alone, and they found much common ground with the Frankfurt School’s ever more sophisticated critique of mass culture. The New York

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intellectuals transitioned easily from rejecting Stalinist manipulation of the masses through mass culture to making a comparison between it and Nazi Germany’s analogous tactics, which, as Wheatland has noted, comes through in the aspects of Clement Greenberg’s highly influential essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” that echo Adorno’s cultural criticisms.143 The final volume of the institute’s journal, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, which came out in English in 1941 as Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, shows the degree to which the ideas of the American left and the Frankfurt School were converging. It included not only Adorno’s renowned essay “On Popular Music,” which harshly criticized the commodification of popular music (especially what he classified as jazz) for the purposes of making profit and lulling the masses into a false sense of belonging,144 but also Horkheimer’s “Art and Mass Culture,” which clearly portrays the Nazi regime as omnipotent and antimodernist and accuses it of keeping the masses in the dark by cutting them off from the shocking realities afforded by modern art: “In giving downtrodden humans a shocking awareness of their own despair, the work of art professes a freedom which makes [the Führer] foam at the mouth. The generation that allowed Hitler to become great takes its adequate pleasure in the convulsions which the animated cartoon imposes upon its helpless characters, not in Picasso, who offers no recreation and cannot be ‘enjoyed’ anyhow.”145 A close reading of Greenberg’s influential 1939 essay does, indeed, resonate with the sentiments of Adorno and Horkheimer in describing kitsch as a mass-produced, profit-driven commodity intended to placate the worker, who is too exhausted and alienated to “train” himself to appreciate high art.146 The avant-garde, on the other hand, is what Greenberg considers to be the true art for art’s sake of contemporary times; no longer of interest to the elite ruling class, it is therefore ripe to be appropriated by the masses.147 With regard to the situation in Germany, as well as in Fascist Italy and the Soviet Union, Greenberg concludes: “The encouragement of kitsch is merely another of the inexpensive ways in which totalitarian regimes seek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects. Since these regimes cannot raise the cultural level of the masses—even if they wanted to—by anything short of a surrender to international socialism, they will flatter the masses by bringing all culture down to their level.”148 However, Greenberg notably goes the extra mile to consider how, despite “Hitler’s personal inclinations” that established him as an “enemy of the avant-garde,” Goebbels could briefly court avant-garde writers and artists from 1932 to 1933 and how, despite the Nazis’ simultaneous condemnation of expressionism and “cultural Bolshevism,” they could welcome Gottfried Benn with great fanfare. These actions, according to Greenberg, were attempts to capitalize on the prestige of Germany’s leading cultural figures, although they were followed by more pragmatic concessions to the tastes of the masses to promote the illusion that the masses ruled.149 Although Greenberg’s reasoning seems strained, he distinguishes his argument from a more

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rigid consensus when he concedes that “progressive” artistic movements may have enjoyed some tolerance in Nazi Germany, even briefly (Greenberg notably limits these aberrations to the period 1932–1933, the eve of the Nazi takeover). Greenberg nevertheless upholds what would later develop into the intentionalist interpretation of events by placing much of the responsibility of cultural manipulation solely in the hands of Hitler and Mussolini, although he struggled to make sense of the latter’s dalliance with futurism.150 The wisdom Greenberg received from the Frankfurt School intellectuals resonated for decades, establishing a modernist aesthetic based on what was essentially an oversimplified portrayal of the dictatorships in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union as bent on suppressing modernism and manipulating the masses with kitsch. That Greenberg and others omit any direct reference to the members of the Frankfurt School in their writings on mass culture may explain why this connection went largely unnoticed, even though the historian Martin Jay identified this as the one area where the school’s walls of isolation might have been breached, and Wheatland later called much closer attention to it. Indeed, with the exception of a few Americans who acknowledged their debt to the intellectuals of the Frankfurt School, for the most part the writings of these exiles prompted more criticism than praise when they first appeared.151 It took at least three decades for the Frankfurt School’s early commentaries on mass culture to be “rediscovered,” but those who stumbled upon it were not necessarily prepared to consider the works in light of the circumstances in which they were conceived. This lack of contextual familiarity arguably led to the widespread attraction to Walter Benjamin’s most influential essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” The essay was published in French in the 1936 issue of the Zeitschrift at the urging of Horkheimer, who considered it to be a way for Benjamin to cautiously express his concern over the regressive cultural policy of France’s anti-Fascist Popular Front. Benjamin deliberately omitted any direct mention of the movement for fear of reprisals against the exile community in France. That the essay (the source of the concept of the “aestheticization of politics”) went on to exert such an enduring influence thereafter owed more to its unwitting prophecies about technology’s capacity to dilute the true essence of art than to its intended warning to contemporary French anti-Fascists.152 In the essay, Benjamin sets out to, among other things, explore relationships that would be useful for future “revolutionary demands in the politics of art” and discordant with Fascism, focusing on the ways in which art reproduced by technological means loses its “aura.” He starts by exploring the differences between stage and film (asserting that film diminishes artistic aura by distancing the actor from the audience and turning an artistic product into a commodity) and then goes on to investigate the differences between painting and film (claiming that film denies the observer the opportunity to contemplate it and instead expects only distracted observation, a process set in motion by Dadaism). It is the essay’s cryptic epilogue,

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however, that provided the most food for thought for making sense of culture in Nazi Germany. The terse and pithy aphorisms in the closing passages imply that Fascism, with its “Führer cult,” violates the masses by denying their rights and placating them with empty promises to “express” themselves, thereby debasing aesthetics to a political function, a process that can only lead to war. Benjamin abruptly ends the essays with the remark: “This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism politicizes art.”153 The encoded messages of the essay, according to Miriam Bratu Hansen’s careful contextualization, were meant to criticize Stalinist cultural repression and warn against the similar directions being taken by the anti-Fascist French Popular Front with their abandonment of modernism. Benjamin avoided mentioning the targets of his critique directly, which had the unintended consequence of leaving to posterity an idea-rich essay that opened itself up to broad interpretation as well as misinterpretation.154 The legacy of the Frankfurt School continued to spread in Anglo-American as well as West German intellectual currents. Adorno’s study The Authoritarian Personality, initiated during the war and published in 1950, was the work that enjoyed the most acclaim in the United States155 and among rebellious West German youth in the late 1960s, alongside The One-Dimensional Man by Marcuse.156 Students of the New Left on both sides of the Atlantic hungered for the messages of the Frankfurt School members, despite the concerns among these elder statesmen about superficial misreadings. Marcuse even rose to be considered the “prophet” of the student movement, a distinction he bore with some ambivalence.157 Horkheimer and Adorno both returned to Germany in 1949, where they were initially praised as leaders in reforming higher education in West Germany. In the 1960s, however, they were targeted by rebellious youth, who considered them to be members of the establishment.158 Students became frustrated with Adorno and Horkheimer’s reluctance to be more overtly activist and publicly rejected and humiliated them in a conflict that left Adorno dejected during the few remaining years of his life.159 The members of the Frankfurt School also continued to privilege modernism, even long after they had gone their separate ways. Marcuse’s final work, The Aesthetic Dimension, made specific pronouncements about the autonomy of art and the importance that it challenge conventions, which implied a promotion of the avant-garde.160 As for Benjamin, who could not be rescued from Europe and tragically took his own life in 1940, the discovery of his 1936 essay on art and mechanical reproduction in the late 1960s caused a stir because of its seemingly prophetic observations on technology and the arts, which have sustained the essay’s relevance up to the digital age. However, the essay’s cryptic messages also allowed it to be exploited at cross-purposes.161 Since the 1980s, the very elusiveness of Benjamin’s statements has been celebrated, leading to an explosion of interest in him as a “model for political ambiguity.”162 It is Theodor Adorno, the acknowledged expert on the visual and performing arts, whose thinking would have the greatest

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impact of all the Frankfurt School intellectuals on both the theory and practice of the arts. Adorno expounded upon his well-known criticisms of mass culture in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Philosophy of New Music, and his unfinished tome, Aesthetic Theory, drafted during his final years in Frankfurt.163 As artists and architects grappled with coming to terms with modernism and postmodernism after World War II, they turned to these later writings to test the applicability of Adorno’s methods toward critically assessing the meaning of a modernist aesthetic in their respective fields.164 And even though Clement Greenberg’s influential work arose out of intellectual exchange with the Frankfurt School, critics in the 1980s employed the writings of Adorno and Benjamin to find more sophisticated alternatives to Greenberg’s conflation of modernism with the avant-garde.165 It is in the art and science of music, where Adorno was most skilled and most eloquent, that he had the most widespread and lasting influence. As a regular lecturer in the 1950s at the Darmstadt summer institute, the veritable breeding ground for a new generation of European as well as American composers, Adorno guided young artists on a path toward rediscovering the compositional methods of Arnold Schoenberg to help them find a new voice devoid of the ideological baggage attached to musical practices of the recent past. Although his experiences as a university professor in West Germany ended tragically—when, shortly before his death in 1969, his students vehemently rejected his elitism and his failure to engage politically—he nevertheless had a deep, if somewhat delayed, impact on the field of musicology in West Germany and the United States, spurred not only by a heightened interest in the music of Schoenberg and his students (known as the Second Viennese School) in the 1960s and 1970s but also by an interest in applications of sociology and criticism to the study of music. Although his student Carl Dahlhaus, one of the leading West German musicologists of the postwar generation, somewhat ambivalently opened the door for his own students to rediscover the work on their own, Adorno’s ideas were not fully embraced in West Germany and the United States until the 1990s, when his originality and virtuosity in approaching music’s inherent meanings and its place in society could be fully appreciated.166 Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler continues to influence film studies today, not only because of its innovative analytical approach but also because of its assessment of German cinema. The flaws in Kracauer’s logic are obvious even to the uninitiated reader (my own first reading of this text as an undergraduate raised such red flags), and from the time of its publication it has engaged and enraged both defenders and detractors, especially because of its teleological assumptions that pre-1933 film foreshadowed Nazism’s inevitability.167 Nevertheless, his compelling alignment of individual films has allowed the work to remain a standard for film analysis. Even decades after film scholars had shot holes through much of his analyses, his work was described as having “a sort of critical stranglehold even over its most ardent detractors.”168 Scholars such as Anton Kaes began to acknowledge the influence of

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Kracauer and the Frankfurt School on film studies and to question and refine their methodologies after recognizing the shortcomings of their approaches, while as recently as 2010 Stephen Brockmann called for revisiting Kracauer for the skills and insight with which he analyzed individual films.169 For others, however, Kracauer’s overzealous generalizations on Nazi film still carry weight, as evidenced by a 2009 study that invoked his characterization from the first few lines of Propaganda and the Nazi War Film that “all Nazi films” are “more or less propaganda films,” in order to proceed to the assumption that “all [Nazi] films, fiction or nonfiction, were laced with ideological subtexts.”170 Yet there were other exiles who had a less enduring influence on film scholarship but whose insights could have taken the field in a completely different direction. Film critic Lotte Eisner fled to France in 1933, where she was briefly sent to a French internment camp as a Jewish alien. Eisner’s L’écran démoniaque, a panegyric to the brief flowering of expressionism in silent film, appeared originally in 1952 and was published in English in 1969 as The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt. Almost as a counterpoint to Kracauer, Eisner extolled the artistry of the dark and foreboding mood of German silent film, which she considered to have been borne out of the tragedies and hardships of the early 1920s. She marked a steep artistic decline with the introduction of sound, devoting only a few paragraphs to Nazi cinema and focusing exclusively on Riefenstahl’s best known works, Triumph of the Will and Olympia.171 H. H. Wollenberg, another film critic, who left Germany in 1933 to settle in London, published a brief overview of fifty years of German film in which, unlike Kracauer or Eisner, he exposed how this medium submitted to government intervention from its very beginnings. Having lived through the early years of Germany’s film industry and experienced its development firsthand, Wollenberg could report on its rapid growth and its economic struggles in the 1920s, which led to various acts of government and capitalist involvement: the passage of laws to protect the German film industry from foreign competition, the introduction of censorship, the large Reich government share in the establishment of UFA in 1917 (eight million of the total twenty million marks of capital), and the dominance of right-wing politics over the industry that took hold when Hugenberg, leader of the German National People’s Party (which helped Hitler rise to power), took control of UFA in 1927 as part of a media empire he was building. Thus, any arguments claiming the Nazis had conducted a hostile takeover of the film industry would have to take into account the Weimar-era events that paved the way for any such Gleichschaltung. Although Wollenberg rests on the assumption that the Nazis’ goal was to completely dominate the industry to turn it into a vehicle for propaganda (which he supports by citing the fact that the formation of the Reich Film Chamber predated that of all the other chambers), he nevertheless represents this Gleichschaltung as a gradual and cautious process that took complete hold only

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after the start of the war, and he acknowledges that Goebbels paid attention to the needs of the public by taking steps to increase the production of pure entertainment films. He also alludes throughout to the economic challenges facing the industry and the importance of export in sustaining profit.172 As a former insider in the industry, Wollenberg could understand better than Kracauer the politics, economics, and personalities that charted the course for film’s earliest development. Wollenberg was far less cynical than Kracauer in his views, and he saw artistic merit in much of what Kracauer deemed to be simply a prelude to National Socialism. He also unwittingly opened up questions about the Gleichschaltung of film production by pointing out that the industry had had a history of direct government involvement prior to the war and that, despite there being opportunities for an expeditious government takeover much earlier, the complete nationalization of the film industry was not carried out until 1942, when—arguably—the war effort made such a takeover more understandable (the U.S. Office of War Information had also enlisted the collaboration much of the American film industry). These intriguing paradoxes were left unresolved or, in most cases, completely ignored once Nazi film became a subject of serious inquiry, a full twenty years after Wollenberg’s slim volume appeared. Of course, the earliest and most publicly acknowledged effects of the exile experience on the German confrontation with its cultural past were to be observed in Thomas Mann’s dialogue with German writers. During the war, Mann was unrelenting, passionate, and uninhibited in challenging Germans to confront their shameful actions.173 After the war, Mann’s unabashed repudiation of German barbarity were met with varying responses—some of which were positive, such as Walther von Molo’s open letter inviting Mann to return as a “good doctor” to diagnose the ills of Germany and set it on a path toward healing, and some of which were negative, such as Frank Thiess’s defensive rejoinder that criticized Mann for casting stones without having experienced the tragedies of war firsthand. The title of Thiess’s response to Mann, “Inner Emigration,” invoked a term that would later be employed to exonerate writers and other cultural figures who chose to stay in Germany for the duration of the Third Reich. Mann turned down von Molo’s invitation to return in an open letter in which he expressed the fear that he would never be able to recognize the new Germany as the home he had left but also condemned all literature published between 1933 and 1945 as “less than worthless.” The rhetoric of these exchanges only intensified, with critics such as Thiess condemning Mann’s sanctimony, ultimately leading to a widespread neglect of Mann and other exile writers that lasted in West Germany well into the 1980s.174 This debate, however, is not without its ironies. In a 1934 essay, written prior to losing his German citizenship, Mann had actually expressed sympathy for “inner émigrés,” who, he believed, shared the same tragedy of homelessness with those who had left the country, and he had even expressed solidarity between the two groups as late

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as 1938.175 In a further ironic twist, in 1949, after Mann had became an American citizen, any effort on his part to ingratiate himself with his new compatriots backfired when he made his first visit back to Germany after the war. He got a chilly reception in West Germany, but the honors bestowed on him in communist East Germany provoked the House Un-American Activities Committee to throw Mann at the mercy of McCarthyism.176 W E I M A R C U LT U R E V E R SU S NA Z I C U LT U R E

The drive to distinguish Nazi culture and society from the democracies that defeated it has sustained the compelling narrative that Weimar modernism was born in a democracy and thrived on democratic soil. The bond between exile and modernism has been so firmly established that recent work has even conceptualized a notion of “avant-garde diaspora,” suggesting that a key component of modernism arises from experiencing life in a diaspora and the cultural displacement that comes with it, such as that experienced by refugees from Nazi Germany.177 But this narrative has also served to lump all refugees in the arts into a uniform category generally described as modernist and anti-Fascist, that is to say, progressive both aesthetically and politically. These tendencies have not only glossed over the diversity and individuality of these émigrés but also generated much confusion over understanding what such a modernist aesthetic would have meant to them. The term “anti-Fascist” started to be used to describe all exiles, particularly in the pioneer work on exile studies coming out of East Germany, and it persists to this day, even though it ignores the wide variety of political views among this large group and assigns the designation to individuals who never would have dreamed of allying themselves with the left.178 Although theater historians have focused much of their attention on the anti-Fascism of leftist playwrights fleeing Nazi Germany, some of the most famous Weimar experimentalists did not always stick to this course. Thus, Jean-Michel Palmier, who traced the legacy of “Weimar antifascism in exile,” admitted that Erwin Piscator’s work in the United States could hardly be described as anti-Facist.179 Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler’s work in Hollywood has also been noted as a lapse in their leftist convictions, yet this did not stop Brecht from criticizing any fellow émigrés who received financial support from American agencies, castigating the Frankfurt School for compromising their Marxist position by accepting money from the American Jewish Council, and even ridiculing Eisler, his close collaborator, for receiving a film music commission.180 Adorno was also a key player in promoting the idea that modernists were by and large progressive in their political actions. This led him to deem Schoenberg to be socially clairvoyant and in tune with the masses,181 despite the composer’s expressed nationalist sentiments and self-identification with the “bourgeois” traditions of the past;182 to label the more traditional composer Rudolf Wagner-Régeny as a Fascist,183 even though

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his success in communist East Germany garnered him praise as a composer for the masses and by association placed him in the anti-Fascist camp;184 and to presume, incorrectly, that the progressive twelve-tone composer Winfried Zillig, who actually sustained a successful career in Nazi Germany, must have been driven out of the Third Reich and gone into exile.185 In the enigmatic case of émigré composer Hindemith, Claudia Maurer Zenck brought evidence to light about his close association with leading members of the Fighting League for German Culture, his promotion of his opera Mathis der Maler as a decidedly German work, and his momentary rise to prominence as one of the leading composers of Nazi Germany. To defend himself in the face of attacks from Nazi extremists, Hindemith had used his Nazi connections, invited Hitler to attend one of his composition classes, and even defended his work by contrasting it with the “sonic orgies” of émigrés Weill, Krenek, and Schoenberg.186 Yet these revelations only encouraged Hindemith’s advocates to argue even more ardently against such “incriminating” findings and to defend Mathis der Maler as an inherently anti-Fascist work.187 Another tendency among scholars has been to try to assign modernist attributes to the works of prominent exiles, even when these exiles had clearly abandoned their earlier pre-1933 experiments or had never even embraced them at all. For example, in his attempt to establish a career in America, George Grosz felt undue pressure to return to the political Dadaist work he had resolutely abandoned in favor of more conservative figurative painting. Grosz came to the United States only days before Hitler became chancellor and got a teaching position at the Art Students League in New York, with no intention of ever returning to Germany. He found so much success after initially abandoning his satirical work of the 1920s that he was able to receive a Guggenheim fellowship and leave his teaching position. However, with the furor over Degenerate Art and the influx of surrealist and expressionist art and artists from Europe, Grosz could no longer sustain his new, conservative style. He contracted a public relations expert and turned his status as an exile and a “degenerate” into what Barbara McCloskey described as “cultural capital” to breathe new life into his career.188 The notions of Weimar and exile modernism also formed the basis of some of the earliest cultural histories of the Third Reich, written predominantly by a younger cohort of exiles trained outside Germany. For an entire generation of students, which I count myself to be a part of, there were few works to consult on twentieth-century German cultural history beyond those penned by historians who escaped Germany in their teens, received Anglo-American educations (in part from fellow émigrés), in some cases participated in the reeducation programs under the Allied occupation of Germany, and went on to write the first studies of Weimar and Nazi culture. For many years, the only introductions to the subject available in the English language were all by these younger German-Jewish émigrés: Fritz Stern’s The Politics of Cultural Despair (1961), George Mosse’s Crisis of

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German Ideology (1964) and Nazi Culture (1966), Peter Gay’s Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968), and Walter Laqueur’s Weimar: A Cultural History (1974). All four of these men had left Germany as teenagers, yet they carried with them a commitment to a German intellectual legacy that influenced their scholarship. Many of them emerged from a long-standing tradition engaging in the history of ideas, high and popular culture, and psychology, and they notably paid far more attention to recent German history and the history of the left than even their colleagues back in Germany were doing.189 Along with their older refugee colleagues and teachers, these scholars have been credited with inspiring an entire generation of Anglo-American historians to lead the way in critically confronting the Nazi past, serving as “watchdogs” from afar.190 In the realm of cultural history, these émigré scholars had more freedom than their German contemporaries to investigate the intellectual and cultural roots of National Socialism and to acknowledge the irrational forces of xenophobia and especially antisemitism that resonated among all economic strata of German society from the late nineteenth century on.191 At the same time, some of this work helped to perpetuate the notion of Weimar and exile modernism. Peter Gay’s concise and engaging Weimar Culture, published in 1968, weaves a narrative that Weimar modernism was able to thrive only in exile. Working from the premise of the existence of “two Germanies,” he sets up Weimar culture as an “outsider” phenomenon that could only briefly exist within Germany’s borders, “propelled by history into the inside, for a short, dizzying, fragile moment,” after which it was sustained by “the exiles who exported Weimar culture all over the world.”192 Gay aims the spotlight on the intellectual brilliance of three notable institutes that would go into exile (the Warburg Institute, the Institute for Social Research, and the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute) and extols the revolutionary foundations of the Bauhaus and expressionism (using the latter term as a general epithet for all artistic styles of the 1920s).193 Gay’s invocation of the sympathetic “outsider” persona may have been selfreflexive as well, reminding us that although the exile experience affected each individual differently, the disorientating struggle with identity had lasting effects. To be sure, the day-to-day uncertainties facing these German exiles who had been forced from their homeland were compounded by political and economic instabilities at every stop along the way. Even more fundamentally, however, their identity as Germans was thrown into turmoil. Siegfried Kracauer exhibited an exceptional degree of clarity in positioning himself as an outsider throughout his career, accurately assessing the political successes of Hitler that led to the dismissal of Jewish journalists like himself and producing a running commentary in his works on his outsider status.194 Adorno, by contrast, struggled with the vicissitudes of his sense of belonging, and his later writings offer a rich documentation of his tortured and complex confrontation with identity. Nurtured in a cultured middleclass home, fending off the escalating anti-Jewish threats in Germany by clinging

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to the fact that he was only half-Jewish, and ultimately fleeing when his teaching privileges were revoked, Adorno always hoped to return to the security of his sheltered childhood and the stimulating intellectual environment that had shaped him as a thinker. However, as his experiences in the United States were exposing him to things that would permanently alter his views on culture and democracy, the Nazi phenomenon had fundamentally undermined his nostalgic sense of his own Germanness. As Max Paddison concludes: “a considerable effort would be required in order to sustain a sense of conceptual continuity with, in particular, the German Idealist philosophical tradition and the Austro-German musical heritage, both of which the Nazis were in the process of systematically assimilating and compromising as part of their larger totalitarian project.”195 Like Adorno, the vast majority of cultural exiles came from families of assimilated Jews who for generations had dedicated themselves to internalizing and enriching German culture, only to be suddenly hounded by shrill condemnations asserting that their connection to Jewishness, no matter how tenuous or symbolic, negated their right to call themselves German. Their past and future contributions to German society were deemed worthless, their core beliefs in Germany’s stake in the advancement of civilization were shattered, and their acceptance into new homelands was compromised by systemic antisemitism and xenophobia lurking everywhere. Those who had been driven out of Germany solely because of their leftist leanings also encountered barriers to being fully accepted in their new host countries—even in the Soviet Union, where the shifting sands of ideological extremism left everyone on shaky ground. As referenced in the quote opening this chapter, many exiles chose not to move back to Germany after the war. Recent research has, however, demonstrated that exiles and remigrants actually had a profound influence on the reconstruction of postwar German society,196 although few cultural figures returned to Germany permanently. There are many reasons for this. While the most obvious was the painful memories of the persecution that drove them out in the first place, it is also true that few were invited back to take positions comparable to those they had held before the war, especially if they were Jewish, undoubtedly owing to the persistence of long-standing institutionalized antisemitism, above all in academic settings. Furthermore, those who returned as Allied soldiers and consultants encountered not only piles of rubble that hardly resembled the home they remembered but also the shock and pain of learning about murdered family members. They found little common ground with those who had stayed, and while clinging to the dream of restoring Germany may have emboldened them up to the end of the war, the harsh realities of all that had transpired forced many to reexamine even their images of the noble, untainted Germanness they had held dear. In the cultural fields as well, both during the war and in its aftermath, scores of exiles lent their expertise to Allied military intelligence operations and helped rebuild German

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cultural life under the occupation. The Nazi phenomenon forced them to try to make sense of the causes of the disruptions in their lives. Some pursued this task of reconciliation as a private, personal journey, while others made it a central focus of their creative and intellectual work, leaving an imprint not only on their own thinking but also on those who knew them, worked with them, and learned from them.

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Occupation, Cold War, and the Zero Hour

The end of World War II left Germans in a state of chaos. Survivors scavenged among corpses for food, water, and fuel, forced to compete for scarce resources with the floods of returning soldiers, liberated prisoners, and those who had been expelled from ceded eastern territories. All the while, they were also pondering the unknown of what the advancing Allied troops had in store for them. Rumors of death camps and death marches had circulated, but when American troops liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945, they found indisputable proof of the unimaginable. The Allies forced the citizens of neighboring Weimar to view the camp’s barracks, laboratories, torture chambers, and crematoria and revealed to the world the unrivaled horrors that Germans had carried out against the innocent. The Potsdam Agreement had determined that Germany would be divided into zones administered by the Allied powers, and it sketched out broadly conceived measures for denazification, democratization, demilitarization, and decartelization. The costs of the war and the revelations of the Holocaust only intensified the Allied quest for justice. The Nuremberg trials convicted the key perpetrators of this barbarity for their unprecedented crimes against humanity, but questions remained about how to handle the rest of the population. From 1945 to 1949, the Soviet, American, British, and French occupying powers constantly had to strike a balance between dismantling and rebuilding Germany’s administrative, economic, political, and cultural infrastructure while trying to find ways to ensure that the past would not be repeated. The ambitious mandates to denazify and reeducate the German population harbored an understandable drive to isolate and disempower not only the individuals but also the cultural and psychological forces that had played a part in bringing about the war’s atrocities. Yet the harsh 89

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realities of needing to provide the conquered population with shelter, stave off hunger and illness, and win over their hearts and minds in order to shape Germany into each Allied power’s version of a democratic society often compromised those vaguely defined goals. The physical destruction that left an otherworldly wasteland of rubble, ashes, and death suggested that Germany had also been reduced to a cultural wasteland, reinforcing the Allies’ assumptions that Hitler had completely eradicated from German life anything that could be considered culture. However, the Allies grossly miscalculated their ability to reform former Nazis, wipe the slate clean, and set the clock to zero. They entirely underestimated not only the conditions over the preceding twelve years in which arts and their creators worked in step with the campaign for German supremacy but also the widespread and more deeply ingrained commitment to a historical and cultural mission that had allowed so many Germans to become swept up in war and genocide. In the course of reconstructing German cultural life under the banner of reeducation and denazification, practical circumstances intervened, resulting in a widespread continuation of much of what had existed in Germany up to 1945. The notion of a Zero Hour may have enhanced the sense that there had been a break with the immediate past, but although German cultural life could be rebuilt, it could not be completely reformed. Looking first at the Allied programs of reeducation and denazification, the following overview will consider how practical circumstances seriously compromised the cultural goals of the Allied occupation. The rapid revitalization of entertainment venues made it necessary to expedite the denazification of the film, theater, and music industries, and the result of this rush was that there were only limited changes from pre-1945 conditions in the performing arts, both in personnel and in substance. The visual arts and architecture, by contrast, became an aesthetic and ideological battleground of the cultural Cold War. In the meantime, as evidence of Nazi atrocities accrued, the Zero Hour concept offered West Germans a necessary psychological and moral route to distance themselves from the Nazi past. Those in some cultural fields, such as writers, confronted the moral responsibilities of their professions head-on, while others chose instead to focus on the future, making a commitment to reverse the effects of Nazi totalitarian suppression of the arts and combat the new Soviet threats to artistic freedom. Yet just as the notion of Weimar modernism reinforced the diachronic isolation of Nazi culture on one end, the Zero Hour concept erected a barrier on the other and persisted as a given in histories of the arts in the Third Reich. R E E D U C AT IO N A N D D E NA Z I F IC AT IO N : P L A N N I N G , I M P L E M E N TAT IO N , A N D T H E R E C RU I T M E N T O F E X I L E S

At the Yalta conference in February 1945, the American, British, and Russian leaders set down their plans to punish war criminals; dissolve the Nazi Party and the

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Reich’s legal system, organizations, and institutions; and remove militarism and Nazism from public, cultural, and economic life. The first goal was accomplished with the war crimes trials held at Nuremberg, and the dissolution of the Nazi Party and other structures was carried out through directives of the military government, but the removal of all traces of Nazism from cultural life proved to be exceedingly difficult. How could Nazism be isolated as a self-contained behavior pattern or set of beliefs without underestimating the forces in German history that had made it possible for Hitler to come to power as well as the complex workings of German society from 1933 to 1945? Much time and labor was invested in planning for the eventual reform of Germany, and each occupying power enlisted the assistance of trusted German and Austrian refugees to carefully study and deploy the mechanisms of reform. But cracks in these programs’ foundations became evident when it came to actually implementing them, both in terms of the denazification of personnel and, more subtly, the attempts to denazify, democratize, and internationalize cultural life. Called upon for their knowledge, skills, and expertise, German émigrés played a prominent role in shaping the reeducation and denazification policies before the end of the war and in carrying them out after the war as consultants, cultural officers, and interrogators for the American and British denazification committees, despite facing anti-Jewish prejudice and suspicion both from the conquered Germans and from Allied superiors.1 But after years of living in exile, these émigrés from Nazi Germany had also become outsiders, lacking a full understanding of the complexity of Nazi hierarchies and loyalties. Long before the end of the war, American and British intelligence were already at work laying plans for dealing with Germany after it had been defeated, engaging leading scholars—many of them émigrés—to study the German character and psyche and to offer blueprints for a complete democratic restructuring of the country.2 The Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the forerunner of the CIA), an American civilian agency, was a bold experiment in exploring the largely uncharted terrain of psychological and guerrilla warfare.3 In 1943, it recruited refugee scholars (including Frankfurt School theorists Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer; historians Hajo Holborn and Felix Gilbert; and art historian Richard Krautheimer) to join its Research and Analysis Branch.4 The three scholars from the Frankfurt School—Neumann, Marcuse, and Kirchheimer— worked to develop a theory of Nazi totalitarianism and broadly outlined the implementation of denazification.5 Another civilian unit, the Washington-based Office of War Information (OWI), was the central clearinghouse for disseminating all wartime information at home and abroad. It issued German-language wartime broadcasts out of London to urge Germans to abandon the Nazi cause, employing German-speaking GIs and exiles who had not yet acquired U.S. citizenship.6 The military Psychological Warfare Division (PWD), which was established in February 1944 and absorbed most of the operations of the OWI in early 1945, worked

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alongside British intelligence agencies, some of which had served as models for the American organization.7 It devised a three-stage plan for the short-term occupation of Germany, which included issuing broadcasts to demoralize German troops and instruct civilians; reestablishing German media and entertainment; and, finally, handing over control of these operations to those Germans who had passed the vetting process of denazification. One of its two units administering control of the German press, the Publicity and Psychological Warfare Detachment, based in Luxembourg, was headed by émigré writer Hans Habe and employed émigrés— many of them Jewish—who had been trained in psychological warfare at Camp Sharpe (nicknamed “Camp Shapiro” because of the large number of Jews stationed there) and Camp Ritchie.8 The Military Intelligence Training Center at Camp Ritchie in Maryland, immortalized in the documentary film The Ritchie Boys (2004), recruited scores of young, educated German exiles for PWD deployment, including the writers Klaus Mann, Stefan Heym, Walter Hasenclever, and Hans Habe and filmmaker Hanuš Burger.9 At war’s end, two agencies of the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS) were assigned to carry out reeducation initiatives: the Education and Religious Affairs Branch and the peacetime replacement of PWD, the Information Control Division (ICD). The ICD was created in May 1945 and formally attached to OMGUS the following December. It was responsible for overseeing literature, theater, music, film, radio, print media, and political research, and it engaged an impressive number of émigrés in its arts administration and cultural affairs.10 In the fall of 1945, the ICD established a widely circulated and highly influential German-language newspaper, Die Neue Zeitung, and appointed three émigrés with PWD credentials—Habe, Ernst Cramer, and Hans Wallenberg—as the paper’s editors.11 The deputy chief of ICD’s Film, Theater, and Music Division (FTM), Benno D. Frank, was a native of Mannheim and had been the director of the Hamburg Opera until 1933; he also had many émigrés working under him.12 Other émigrés with military assignments included Nicholas Nabokov and Michael Josselson, two German-educated ICD officers who would later become key figures in the CIA’s cultural operations during the Cold War;13 the writer Carl Zuckmayer, who was appointed by the U.S. Army as an advisor for cultural affairs;14 Billy Wilder, who held the rank of colonel and served as director of PWD’s film division, offering input on denazification and on restoring the German film industry; and Erich Pommer, who returned to Germany immediately after the war to offer assistance in revitalizing the film industry in the American Zone of occupation.15 The British had engaged in cultural warfare against Germany even longer. The BBC German Service was established in 1939, and it gradually transformed into a wartime propaganda tool, such that by the end of the war, the British had substantial hands-on experience to apply to their postwar cultural policy.16 Like the Americans, the British occupying forces regarded German culture as key to the success

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of the Nazi dictatorship, but they were also concerned about not repeating the mistakes of 1918, as they had seen how German demoralization after World War I had turned to revanchism.17 The administration of culture in the British Zone evolved out of a complex configuration of military and civilian units, which in many cases were parallel to and collaborated with corresponding American units. In 1943–1944, the British Political Warfare Executive, which was responsible for psychological warfare, worked together with the Foreign Office and War Office to develop cultural policy under the rubric of “Information Services.” It then joined forces with the BBC and the Ministry of Information in 1944 to form the PWE/ MOI/BBC-Reoccupation Committee, which drafted press, radio, literature, and film policies to take effect during the occupation. After the end of the war, the administration of cultural policy was being directed from London at the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office and in the Control Office for Germany and Austria, with its Information Service Department responsible for several areas of culture.18 By 1941, the British had engaged sixty-one German exiles as announcers and translators, as well as in other capacities, and in 1942, the Society for German Education Reconstruction began to train German refugees to carry out reeducation in Germany and work with German prisoners of war.19 However, prior to that, the British had exercised extreme caution in enlisting the assistance of exiles and had even temporarily sent a large number of the German exiles who were living in the United Kingdom to internment camps at the outbreak of war. The few refugees allowed to serve in the military were initially restricted to the Pioneer Corps, a noncombat unit that performed mostly manual labor. From 1942 on, German refugees were recruited increasingly for high-risk special operations and commandos, where their language skills were put to use to interrogate POWs and gather intelligence, and from 1943, they were allowed into all branches of the military. The precise numbers of these refugees in British service are difficult to determine, however, because many of them Anglicized their names in order to avoid being treated as traitors if they were captured by German troops.20 As the war came to an end, the more prominent émigré figures called upon to assist in developing cultural policy included the writer Arthur Koestler, the composer Berthold Goldschmidt, and the stage director Carl Ebert. Koestler, a Hungarian-born writer and recent refugee from Paris, served in the Pioneer Corps and later worked with British intelligence.21 In late 1944 and early 1945, the BBC dispatched Goldschmidt to tour captured areas of Germany and devise a plan for postwar music programs. After the war, in 1946, Ebert returned to Germany to oversee the revival of opera houses in the British Zone.22 The Soviets were—at least ostensibly—the most committed to drawing upon the expertise of German exiles, partly because they were confident that carefully selected individuals (known collectively as the Ulbricht Group) had been

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dedicated communists in prewar Germany and had received what the Soviets considered to be proper ideological training while living in exile in the Soviet Union, but also because the Soviets had silenced any “unreliable” German exiles though imprisonment and purges.23 The Soviets arrived in Berlin in May 1945, months before the Western Allies, and established the Cultural League for the Democratic Renewal of Germany (Kulturbund zur Demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands) in July 1945, led by Johannes R. Becher, a prominent writer who had worked closely with the future founder of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), Walter Ulbricht, while in exile in Moscow.24 The Soviets had a considerable head start in establishing cultural policy in Berlin, using the few months before the other Allies arrived to oversee the feverish resurrection of the city’s theaters and concert venues. Berlin would also turn into a battleground for the fiercest competition for cultural prestige among the Allies.25 The Soviet Military Administration in Germany (Sowjetische Militäradministration in Deutschland, or SMAD) gave the task of reforming German cultural life a high priority and delegated cultural affairs to its Propaganda Administration (which was later renamed Information Administration to avoid association with Nazi precursors), headed by Major General Sergei Ivanovich Tiulpanov, with its Cultural Division headed by Alexander Dymshits. Regarded as the most powerful division of the SMAD, the Propaganda Administration controlled all media, labor unions, political parties, and government agencies. The Soviets also set up a parallel unit run by Germans, known as the German Administration for Public Education (Deutsche Verwaltung für Volksbildung, or DVV), staffed by members of the German communist party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD) and socialist party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD).26 The DVV’s division of art and literature was one of the smallest departments, yet it assumed the broadest responsibilities to engage German artists in building a “democratic Germany” and to oversee all existing cultural professions and institutions.27 Because they had been under German occupation since 1940, the French obviously had no such opportunities to plan in advance for dealing with a defeated Germany. When they did arrive as an occupying force, they focused on national security and destabilizing Germany to prevent its reemergence as an aggressor. The French also harbored a longstanding mistrust of German culture, and this led them to shape their policy around “deprussianization”—trying to restore values that predated Prussian militarism and the Germans’ anti-French geopolitical and cultural campaigns.28 Working on the premise that “Nazism is only an exacerbated form of Prussianism,” the French occupying forces aimed to orient Germans away from their overinflated respect for state and community and toward a greater appreciation of the Western ideals of freedom and individuality.29 They invested in reforming German education within and beyond the classroom, instilling the youth with democratic ideals, and they otherwise regarded Germany as a complete cultural waste-

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land, “sans pensée et sans ideal” (without intellect and without ideals), in need of sweeping reforms and new institutions.30 Cultural policy was administered in Paris under three agencies—the education ministry (Ministère de l’Education Nationale), the foreign ministry (Ministère des Affaires Étrangères), and the Commission on German and Austrian Affairs (Commissariat aux Affaires Allemandes et Autrichiennes)—and in the occupation headquarters in Baden-Baden by the division of public education (Direction de l’Education Publique, or DEP) and the division of information (Direction de l’Information, DI). Oversight of the visual and performing arts was assigned to the DEP’s fine arts division (Section Beaux Arts), which split up responsibilities among its various departments for archives and libraries, literature, museums and art exhibitions, restitution of seized artworks, architecture (historic preservation), and performing arts (Service des Spectacles, Musique et Théâtre, or SSMT). The DI oversaw the press, radio, film, and public opinion polls and administered the denazification of artistic personnel.31 When it came to drawing on the assistance of Germans who had spent the war years in France, the French had no clear parameters for identifying Germans and Austrians in France as refugees and exiles. Most Germans who had initially sought refuge in France in the 1930s had either fled France during the German invasion (most of them making their way to the United States) or ended up imprisoned or deported to concentration camps during the German occupation of France.32 The most famous among the small number of German refugees who came back after the war to assist in the occupation administration was Alfred Döblin, who had left Germany in 1933, become a French citizen in 1936, fled to California after the German invasion of France, and then returned to Germany after the war as a French cultural officer.33 But just as the French faced the challenge of keeping former Vichyites from assuming leading roles in governing occupied Germany, they were similarly challenged when it came to assessing the political reliability of Germans who had managed to survive the German occupation of France. Such was the case with the music critic Heinrich Strobel, who was generally regarded as a “returning exile” when the French military charged him to oversee the music division of the Südwestfunk radio station in Baden-Baden.34 However, his “exile” status was far from clear-cut. As editor of one of the prominent German journals dedicated to new music, he had left Germany and fled to Paris in 1938 to protect his Jewish wife. As German troops advanced, he was temporarily interned by the French because of his status as an enemy national but was released and soon found opportunities to work for the German occupation as a music journalist. His ability to nurture good relations with both the French and the Germans resulted in his wife’s rescue from deportation thanks to a German official who falsified her papers; his ability to escape German military service by hiding out in the home of Igor Stravinsky’s son, Soulima; and, after the war, his appointment to the Südwestfunk position by a French friend who had become head of broadcasting in the French Zone.35

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Over the course of time, the ambitious programs of reeducation and denazification proved so unwieldy that much of their implementation had to be handed over to Germans who had remained in Nazi Germany through the war. Already in 1946, the U.S. State Department, together with a committee of educators, issued a report that stated the intention to leave much of the needed educational reform in the hands of the Germans themselves, especially with regard to controlling cultural institutions beyond formal education: “The program of German reeducation will make maximum use of those German resources which offer promise of developing ideals and institutions in harmony with the above-stated universally valid principles of justice. The reconstruction of the cultural life of Germany must be in large measure the work of the Germans themselves and must be fostered not only on a regional but also on a national scale.”36 The denazification process was also handed over to German jurisdiction as early as 1945, simply because its goals proved unrealistic and its scope unmanageable, although this move seriously diluted the program’s original aims. Possibly the most far-reaching and protracted process in the Allied program to reform German society after the war, denazification was part of the process to punish war criminals, separate out lesser perpetrators, and reeducate the rest of the population, but the goal of removing all Nazis from positions of power inevitably failed because the Allies needed the expertise of many of these same individuals to rebuild Germany. Denazification has even been credited with allowing the basic doctrines of National Socialism (i.e., antisemitism, anti-communism, and militaristic nationalism) to persist and pave the way for a nearly immediate re-emergence of National Socialist sympathy in Germany in the 1950s and 1960s.37 German historian Lutz Niethammer described denazification as “an invention of the Americans, assisted by German émigré experts, often of Jewish origin or Socialist orientation,” with the other occupying powers simply adapting and modifying the principles established in Washington. The Americans were the only ones to have drafted guidelines for denazification (in the Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067 of April 1945), laying out policies that emphasized the purge of personnel and the “reeducation” of the German population toward establishing a democracy and a capitalist economy.38 As the trailblazer in the process, the American military took the most aggressive tack, only to end up making the most miscalculations. It set out to eradicate what it believed to be violent tendencies in German politics that had led to two world wars, beginning by dismantling Nazi organizations and disempowering military and industrial elites; conducting mass arrests and immediately releasing those individuals that were least suspect; and requiring all Germans over the age of eighteen to fill out a questionnaire (Fragebogen) of 131 questions designed to determine their degree of involvement in the Nazi Party and other organizations and activities. By the winter of 1945–1946, 120,000 Germans were imprisoned in the U.S. Zone and 1.2 million had submitted questionnaires, 25 percent of whom were removed

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from their positions. However, efforts to track down members of the Nazi elite were thwarted, as many of those who had held the most influential positions had fled Germany immediately after the war. Of those who did not manage to flee, almost half of all those who had been active in the public sector were dismissed, making it impossible to find enough qualified candidates who were free of any Nazi connections to fill the positions and hindering the process of effectively establishing a functioning democracy.39 It was clear that the initial approach to denazification was not achieving its goals and needed to be revisited. In March 1946, the new Law for the Liberation from National Socialism, or Liberation Law, turned much of the responsibility for denazification over to German tribunals (Spruchkammern). The new guidelines established a more sophisticated evaluation with a shortened questionnaire (which was renamed Meldebogen) and differentiated five categories of judgment: 1. major offenders (Hauptschuldige); 2. offenders (Belastete); 3. lesser offenders (Minderbelastete); 4. followers (Mitläufer); and 5. exonerated (Entlastete).40 After witnessing the fallout from the American policies, the French and British exercised more pragmatism. As colonial administrators, the British well understood the value of working with existing structures and exercising tolerance toward subjugated populations, and the French had learned much from the recent purges and trials of their own Vichyite compatriots.41 Both powers therefore took a more conservative approach from the outset, arresting Germans in much smaller numbers, refraining from releasing them as quickly, and emphasizing expediency. In October 1945, for example, the French were the first to turn over to Germans some of the responsibilities for carrying out denazification—even before the United States introduced its Liberation Law—and at the end of 1947, they sped up the process by granting amnesty to all “followers” and to party members who had held no office.42 The Soviets espoused a completely different conception of denazification, seeking not to reeducate but rather to purge all party members and fill important positions with communists who had fled or were imprisoned under the Nazis but had started returning to Germany in April 1945.43 They arrested smaller numbers of Germans than the Americans did, but they treated those they imprisoned no better than the prisoners of the gulags and, like the French, allowed themselves to use these prisoners of war as laborers back home. However, the Soviets showed more leniency toward those with credentials in industry, education, and the public sector. They facilitated a no-questions-asked reintegration of former Hitler Youth, Nazi Party members, and Wehrmacht officers by letting them join the newly formed Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend, or FDJ) and the National-Democratic Party of Germany (National-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands, or NDPD), which in 1950 accounted for over one hundred thousand former Nazi Party members and a quarter of a million former members of Nazi youth organizations.44

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For the Germans under investigation, it soon became clear that location and timing proved to be crucial factors in determining denazification verdicts.45 For example, the Spruchkammern in the American Zone became so overwhelmed by the volume of cases, the shortage of qualified non-Nazi judges, resentment and even threats toward tribunal members, and corruption that most cases ended up with defendants being granted amnesty or being categorized as followers. Thus, even though the Spruchkammern determined that roughly 27 percent of those who submitted questionnaires could be classified within the first three categories of guilt (major offenders, offenders, and lesser offenders), most cases were downgraded on appeal, and even those who did end up being convicted got off with fines, time served, or short-term probation.46 Yet because the least incriminating and therefore least complicated cases were processed first, the more problematic cases were put off for so long that a series of amnesties to accelerate the end of denazification resulted in the exoneration of those with more questionable pasts.47 Similarly, despite the alleged rigor of Soviet denazification, once the Soviet Zone’s denazification process was formally disbanded in March 1948, it was also possible for those with problematic political histories to be reinstated. As the process dragged on and pressures mounted after the Soviets announced an end to denazification in their zone, the Americans attempted to catch up, exonerating almost everyone from 1948 on, such that offenders who were tried in 1948 received lighter sentences than followers tried in 1946 and 1947.48 In the end, victors and conquered alike were disillusioned with the process, and it was regarded as an all-around failure. As the Americans gradually softened their position and the British and French exercised more moderation, not only did denazification come to be regarded as resulting overwhelmingly in rehabilitation (cynically referred to later as “renazification”), but those who had the misfortune to be subjected to the haphazard and protracted process acquired their own sense of victimhood.49 T H E P E R F O R M I N G A RT S : D E NA Z I F IC AT IO N O R R E NA Z I F IC AT IO N ?

Cultural activities rose like a phoenix from the ashes within days of the Allied victory on May 8, 1945, and in some cases even before Germany’s official surrender. Although Goebbels had suspended theater operations on September 1, 1944, and almost half of Germany’s 179 public theaters had been destroyed by war’s end, the Renaissance-Theater in Berlin reopened on May 17, 1945, and within a year, the Soviet Zone offered over 50 productions each month in over 100 theaters. By autumn of 1947, over 400 theaters were in operation throughout Germany.50 In U.S.-occupied Göttingen, a weekly series of cantata performances opened on April 28, 1945, and in Berlin, the first chamber concert was held on May 13, the first opera performance on May 18, and the first concert by the Berlin Philharmonic

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Orchestra on May 26.51 The Soviets and the British opened up movie theaters in July 1945 to help appease the restless population, and by the end of the year, over a thousand cinemas were open in the Western zones, with roughly a thousand more opening each year of the occupation.52 The first major art exhibition opened in July 1945 in Berlin, followed by twenty-three more by the end of 1945 (seventeen public and six private) and almost three times that number in 1946.53 In 1947, General Eisenhower concluded in his testimony to the U.S. Congress: “You can starve [the Germans] all week if you will give them a ballet or a chance to go into the art gallery on Sunday afternoon. Their appreciation for that sort of thing and their love for it is remarkable.”54 The Allies’ rapid revival of cultural outlets was partly a bread-and-circus strategy of keeping Germans subsisting on rations and diversion—while also allowing them to huddle together for warmth in minimally heated makeshift theaters, concert halls, and movie houses during the harsh winters that followed the end of the war—but they also figured that balancing education, propaganda, and exposure to Allied culture with a measured preservation of approved German content would give them direct access to German hearts and minds. But the cultural renaissance in each of the occupied zones also revealed early signs of the competition that would escalate among the four powers, as each of the countries vied not only for political and economic advantages but also for the loyalty and cooperation of the best German talents. The revitalization of entertainment was regarded as critical by all four occupation powers, and the first denazification cases to be vetted among the arts professions were those of performers.55 The Americans took the lead in outlining procedures: PWD officers worked with the OSS and U.S. Army intelligence to process the denazification of all artistic personnel,56 and the Intelligence Section of the ICD compiled a series of “black-gray-white” lists, a wartime practice first conceived by Neumann and Marcuse as part of their OSS tasks. Anyone whose name ended up on the black list or the gray “unacceptable” list would be allowed to work only in manual labor; those on the gray “acceptable” list could work in their professions but not in positions of authority; and those on the white list could accept any employment. The lists were long, the geographic coverage inconsistent, and the consequences for inclusion quite vague.57 Anyone hoping to continue working in the performing arts had to register with the local FTM office, fill out numerous questionnaires and applications that were then checked against captured records such as the Nazi Party membership lists and Reich Culture Chamber files (which revealed that many people falsified their questionnaires), and then be interviewed for political reliability. Those applying for licenses (conductors, agents, theater managers, and anyone in a supervisory capacity) underwent the closest scrutiny, and to obtain press licenses or employment as ICD staff, one could be sent to the Intelligence Section’s Screening Center in Bad Orb to undergo several days of psychological examination.58 The

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implementation of the vetting process soon proved unwieldy, however, owing to the sheer volume of applicants. The Intelligence Sections of each regional ICD office were so understaffed that, by September 1945, they started to leave the vetting of lower-level personnel to Germans who had received licenses.59 While OMGUS reserved the right to approve “applicants for key positions requiring a license, mostly creative or highly responsible in nature,” leaving the Spruchkammern to deal with “applicants for minor positions,” an ordinance issued on March 1, 1947, eliminated from inclusion on the black-gray-white lists any conductors, cinema owners, and entertainers (such as musicians and actors). Thus, the lists kept track only of producers, directors, journalists, authors, and all licensees, with an aim of identifying those who possessed not only technical skills but also “a political attitude characterized by devotion to democratic ideals.”60 Depending on the field, however, emphasizing political suitability over professional credentials posed significant problems. In the film industry, for example, which had worked in close collaboration with the Nazi propaganda ministry, it was virtually impossible to find any personnel with spotless records according to the ICD criteria.61 Since many film personnel were also active in theater, these complications spread into that realm as well. Benno Frank complained of the difficulty the FTM was having in finding qualified theater general managers (Intendanten) because the files of the Reich Culture Chambers yielded ample proof of Nazi connections among all the best talents he would have wanted to engage. As the volume of cases proved unmanageable, those who had received special permits while awaiting formal processing simply continued to work under provisional conditions, resulting in a significant degree of what one would consider renazification. In the end, roughly 65 percent of all Intendanten engaged in the American, British, and Soviet zones (the French Zone had far fewer operating theaters) had been active in the same or similar posts prior to 1945, and the Soviets exercised even more leniency in reinstating leading actors, artists, and musicians.62 In the field of music, the initial fallout from following the black-white-grey lists had serious ramifications for reviving concert activity. The implementation of preliminary measures banishing all party members would have gutted most orchestra personnel, so subsequent policies eased restrictions on certain types of party members, although many prominent conductors, composers, and performing artists were blacklisted.63 High-profile cases in Berlin illustrate the regional inconsistencies and bureaucratic turmoil that often seriously complicated the denazification process in the performing arts.64 The Soviets had not only placed a high priority on reviving theater and music activity as soon as possible but also delegated the denazification of artists to German communists months before the other Allies even arrived in Germany. On May 30, 1945, SMAD set up the Chamber of Creative Artists (Kammer der Kunstschaffenden) in the office space of the former Reich Culture Cham-

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bers to issue permits to anyone wishing to work in film, music, or theater as well as to approve repertoires and distribute food ration cards to artists (the more prominent and accomplished artists and writers were granted higher classification in the food ration system, indicating the importance the Soviets placed on talent over political involvement). Existing at first with the Nazi-inherited name of Reichskulturkammer, the Chamber of Creative Artists was ruled by a randomly assembled group of members from the Berlin resistance, communists who had gone into hiding, and various others who may have had past Nazi connections. Meanwhile, the members of the Ulbricht Group that had returned from Soviet exile formed the central government of Berlin (the Magistrat), which had an office for public education (Amt für Volksbildung) that included under its purview the administration of art, music, theater, and all other domains that had been controlled by the Chamber of Creative Artists up to that point. The four Allied powers recognized the Chamber of Creative Artists’ authority to process denazification, but the rival Amt für Volksbildung expressed concern that the chamber was becoming too powerful and, with the backing of SMAD, orchestrated the transfer of denazification authority to the Magistrat. Until the chamber was dissolved in April 1946, however, the other Allies insisted on recognizing it alone.65 A number of the most powerful and influential cultural figures overseeing Nazi Berlin’s showpiece institutions were thrown into this chaos. Theater director and actor Gustaf Gründgens had worked at Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater, appeared in Lang’s 1931 film, M, and rose to fame with his role as Mephistopheles at the Prussian State Theater. Despite his past leftist associations, Gründgens was invited by Goering to become the general manager of the theater in 1934, and he bore the accompanying title of Prussian State Councilor (Staatsrat). Gründgens was arrested immediately after the war—reportedly because the Russians thought the title Generalintendant was a high military rank—but was released after nine months at the entreaties of several fellow actors, including communist Ernst Busch. He was tried by the Chamber of Creative Artists in Berlin and exonerated in March 1946 as an anti-Fascist actor who had been arrested by the Gestapo, protected Jews, and refused to appear in Nazi propaganda films. He was allowed to continue his acting career but was barred from any directorial activities. The Americans objected to his exoneration, which had been pushed through by the Soviets largely on the strength of Busch’s testimony, but this did not hinder his successful denazification in the American and British zones, and he was eventually able to resume his activities as a director.66 The case that attracted even more attention worldwide was that of conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler.67 Like Gründgens, Furtwängler held the title of Staatsrat in his position as music director of the Prussian State Opera. He worked under Goebbels once the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra came under the supervision of the Propaganda Ministry, and he accepted the position of vice president of the Reich

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Music Chamber. Yet despite his public and private protests against the treatment of Jewish colleagues and his interventions on their behalf, as well as his famous objections to the treatment of Hindemith that led to a public showdown with Goebbels, his prominent position as an internationally known conductor who remained in Nazi Germany prompted condemnation from abroad even before the war.68 His wartime odyssey and denazification trial were the stuff of high drama. Having crossed the border into Switzerland in February 1945 on the advice of Albert Speer, he enjoyed a swift denazification trial in Vienna, where the proceedings focused mostly on his rebellious actions against the regime through 1934. Despite protests from the Intelligence Section, the Russians maneuvered to engage him to direct the orchestra of the Berlin State Opera. Furtwängler’s exoneration moved swiftly through the Amt für Volksbildung’s tribunal, prompting outrage from ICD director Robert McClure. Furtwängler was thus forced to return to Switzerland to await another trial by the Chamber of Creative Artists. In the meantime, the Liberation Law compelled the Allies to reconfigure the denazification process in Berlin, and a new Denazification Commission for Artists (Entnazifizierungskommission für Kunstschaffenden) was created to serve the function of a Spruchkammer, and it took up Furtwängler’s case in December 1946.69 In the end, Furtwängler’s trial was regarded as a circus that never addressed any central issues, and the commission decided to defer a verdict until more information could be gathered. Allied approval for Furtwängler’s exoneration finally came through in April 1947, and he was able to make his triumphant conducting debut in Berlin in May.70 The denazification of certain celebrities incited public outcries of indignation from both opponents and defenders, and in some instances Nazi sympathies were even revived. Such was the case with the denazification of filmmaker Veit Harlan, director of Jew Süss, a successful film that came to be regarded as the cinematic prototype for antisemitic propaganda. Immediately after the war, Harlan attracted attention in the foreign press, which billed him as the “No. 1 Nazi film director.” He was arrested and released repeatedly by the British military and both cheered and reviled by fellow Germans. Erich Kästner, an author whose work had been vilified in the Nazi book burning, offered the most scathing critique of Harlan, even though he himself had received special permission from Goebbels (supposedly with Harlan’s assistance) to continue writing successful screenplays under a pseudonym. While he waited for a decision on whether he could continue to work as a director, Harlan was taunted on the streets, driven away from public appearances, and even hounded with death threats. When the British denied him permission to work, he petitioned for a denazification hearing, which resulted in his exoneration in December 1947 on the grounds that he had never joined the Nazi Party. Victims’ groups charged him with crimes against humanity in 1948, resulting in a sevenweek trial punctuated by the suicide of a witness and ending in a two-hour monologue by Harlan, after which he suffered a heart attack. In April 1949, Harlan was

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acquitted due to a lack of evidence that Jew Süss had led directly to persecution of Jews. The verdict was met with jubilation from supporters, who carried Harlan out of the courtroom on their shoulders, but also with biting criticism from the press, which referred to him as a “murderer.” A new trial called by British officials devolved into chaos when a half-Jewish witness was taunted with cries of “Jewish sow” as she left the courtroom. That evening, a Jewish cemetery in Frankfurt was desecrated, prompting Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and the federal minister of the interior to express their indignation over the two events. Harlan was acquitted once again in 1950, but he continued to be at the center of bitter controversy, and the last films he produced were met with boycotts and demonstrations.71 In behavior typical of many denazification proceedings, these celebrities would frequently deny most of their actions during the preceding twelve years and exaggerate any events that could be construed as demonstrating their “resistance,” “persecution,” or “apolitical behavior.” Artists’ claims of political naiveté, disinterest, and total preoccupation with their art constituted the most common reasons for the widespread exoneration.72 Harlan used every explanation imaginable to assert his innocence: he claimed that he was apolitical (“my party is Art”), that he tried to refuse to make Jew Süss but was forced to do so, that he attempted to resist “artistically” by sabotaging the antisemitic thrust of the script, and that Goebbels was so enraged by Harlan’s dilution of the antisemitic message that he threatened to destroy his career (when, in fact, Goebbels noted in his diary that he was quite pleased with the film). Risking blatant self-contradiction, Harlan then claimed that Goebbels had interfered so much in the filmmaking process anyway that Harlan could hardly claim the end result as his own work.73 Although Furtwängler’s exoneration may have been regarded as a foregone conclusion, the concerns raised in his proceedings seemed to yield their own paradoxes: Furtwängler claimed he had been victimized by a member of the press who was championing the younger Herbert von Karajan, yet the journalist in question quickly lost his position after Furtwängler complained about him to Goebbels. Attempting to prove that he represented the “other Germany,” Furtwängler tried to show that the press conspired against him, even though his wide popularity among Nazi officials and the public alike could not be contested.74 Despite overwhelming approval of the denazification process among Germans in the first few months of the occupation, polls showed that these approval numbers quickly declined as inequities in the process fueled widespread frustration and resentment, and even organized sabotage. Germans reacted with rage against what they regarded as the ruthlessness of the military occupation government, comparing its tactics to Nazi atrocities.75 Former pro-Hitler and anti-Hitler factions found themselves united against the occupation, Spruchkammer facilities and personnel were attacked, and growing feelings of victimhood even gave vent to the opinion that, while German persecution of the Jews was reprehensible, denazification was

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“a thousand times worse” because it targeted “the best Germans.”76 In the end, Germans who lived through denazification looked back on the experience as having led to “as little success as the reeducation programs of the Allies,”77 while British and American eyewitnesses reflected on its failure in books bearing such inflammatory titles as Betrayal, The Pledge Betrayed, and Blind Eye to Murder.78 In East Germany, meanwhile, the belief persisted that denazification under the Soviet occupation was more stringent than in the Western zones, and that any renazification was happening only in the Federal Republic. Shortly after the Soviet Zone had become the German Democratic Republic (GDR), new laws allowed for former Nazi Party members not designated as war criminals to be appointed to public service positions, especially if they possessed the needed skills.79 A L L I E D C U LT U R E O R G E R M A N C U LT U R E ?

Just as the untenable scope of the denazification process left cultural operations increasingly in the hands of the same Germans that had run them before 1945, a number of practical considerations compromised the aims of the reeducation program to replace “Nazi culture” with international, “democratic” culture. Each of the four powers started out with a cultural policy intent upon exposing Germans primarily to the literature, theater, music, and art of the victors and secondarily to other international cultural trends from which the Germans were believed to have isolated themselves. Now in a position of authority, the Allies believed they could bolster their own cultural standing in Germany and command respect from a now captive German audience.80 The British already had a long tradition of cultural foreign policy that went back to 1934, when the British Council, its program Projection of Britain, and the British Centres were established to proliferate British culture around the world.81 The ICD similarly concentrated its efforts on operating libraries and information centers, some of which already existed as privately run Amerika-Häuser, which ultimately were the most successful venue for promoting German-American cultural exchange.82 The first reading room was established in 1946 by the PWD, and in the following years, 27 Amerika-Häuser and 135 reading rooms were founded throughout Germany. They were aimed at providing access not only to international cultural exchange but also to literature that had been banned in the Third Reich, and they also sponsored orchestras and theater troupes.83 In 1946, the Mission Culturelle was established in the French Sector of Berlin (it moved to Mainz in 1948), with the mandate to realize a cultural agenda that would emanate to the other regions of the French Zone. This would involve overseeing exhibitions, theater, concerts, and conferences that were intended to impress not only the Germans but also the other Allied powers with the high quality of French culture.84 Much of the cultural work was concentrated in the Institut Français en Allemagne in Freiburg and its satellites, the Centres d’Études Françaises

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in Mainz, Tübingen, and Trier, which were also under the auspices of the DEP and comparable to the Amerika-Häuser and British Centres.85 The Soviets established the House of Soviet Culture (Haus der Kultur der Sowjetunion) in Berlin in 1947 and various “friendship” organizations throughout the zone of occupation, supervised by leaders specially trained in anti-Fascist schools and mandated to “spread truth about the Soviet Union” and “fight every kind of slander and opposition.”86 At the same time that they wished to impress the Germans with their own culture, the Allies wished to keep their policies from coming across as invasive and dictatorial, which compelled all four powers to show tolerance for German culture. And despite the Allies’ commitment to preserving only the “best” of German culture, practical concessions left the field wide open for many operations to carry on virtually unchanged from their pre-1945 incarnations. As the Cold War took hold, priorities shifted, and the Western powers focused less on exposing the Germans to Allied culture and more on underlining the differences in cultural attitudes on either side of the Iron Curtain. As I will discuss in the next section, it was in the realm of the visual arts and architecture that the two German states served as a battleground for the cultural Cold War. In the performing arts, however, a more fluid process resulted largely in restoration rather than drastic reform. In the initial days of the occupation, all four powers conceded that to win over German hearts and minds, they needed to demonstrate their commitment to artistic freedom and openness to the arts of all nations, including Germany. Carefully avoiding heavy-handed measures, they strove to highlight the contrast between their methods and what they interpreted as the Nazis’ dictatorial control of the arts and to show the Germans that such practices were a thing of the past. Yet they also each brought to the table their own cultural ambitions and exercised varying degrees of tolerance toward Germany, its culture, and its history. The Americans believed they could proceed in a relatively objective, legalistic, and systematic manner. The French remembered the culture wars stretching back to the nineteenth century that had pitted German Kultur against French Zivilisation, and they recalled how the Treaty of Versailles had fueled a reactionary backlash in Germany. The position of the British was more ambivalent, influenced on the one hand by the fading glory of the disappearing British Empire, which provoked a desire to salvage any vestiges of international dominance, and on the other hand by a long-standing affinity with German culture, which had been nurtured well into the Nazi years and was still cherished by many British subjects. The Soviets held a similar position, committed to exposing Germans to the culture of the Soviet republics but also respectful of German achievements. At first, Soviet cultural officers adopted a “two Germanies” construct, unabashedly demonizing Nazi culture as “the incarnation of everything evil,” driven by “wild, uncontrolled animal instincts,” all of which could be traced back to capitalism,87 but also placing a high priority on preserving the German classics, regardless of whether the Nazis

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had also embraced them, quoting Stalin: “Hitlers come and go, but the German people, the German state remains.”88 Yet for the next few years, they had to wrestle with complications arising from restrictive cultural policies at home under Stalin and Andrei Zhdanov, secretary of the central committee. Zhdanov aggressively condemned as “formalist” any art that deviated from “socialist realism,” a vaguely defined style that all Soviet artists and writers had supposedly subscribed to since the 1930s. The first Soviet cultural decree, issued on August 14, 1946, targeted two literary journals; a second decree, on August 26, dealt with theaters; a third, published in September, was concerned with film; and a decree on music came out in 1948. Even though the first three decrees were not published in German, possibly because of their crass rhetoric, their measures were imposed on the Soviet Zone.89 Soviet hardliners would even condemn the Cultural League for the Democratic Renewal of Germany for promoting “bourgeois tendencies in art and literature: futurism, impressionism, etc.,” and the rising tensions almost led to Becher’s resignation, as the Cultural League was admonished to abandon its elitism and become a mass organization committed to the political struggle with Western imperialists and to give more attention to spreading Soviet culture.90 At the same time, however, ideology took a back seat to pragmatism. Despite the Allies’ best-laid plans to cure the Germans of their cultural ills, the hardships of daily existence in postwar Germany called attention to the pressing need for diversion, and film provided the easiest means of meeting that need. Movie houses could open swiftly, yield monetary profits for the film industries back home, and furnish “the main sources of cultural entertainment and relaxation for the population.”91 Film also held tremendous potential for reeducation; film dubbing was cheaper and quicker than translating and staging productions in German, and movies had the capacity to attract much larger audiences than stage or concert performances. For the time being, however, the need to offer diversion and quell unrest led to the fasttracking of approval and screening of popular German cinema. The Russians initially screened a steady stream of carefully selected Soviet cinema to promote positive images of the Soviet Union. Tiulpanov, head of SMAD’s Propaganda Administration, got heavily involved in setting standards for the selection, distribution, and packaging of Soviet cinema programs, ensuring adequate publicity and press coverage for each screening. The public, however, resisted the films as “too heavy,” and even the SED balked at the oversupply of Soviet cinema and channeled its resources into creating low-budget German films. In response, Soviet authorities conceded to the public’s stated need to “relax” and “enjoy oneself ” and switched to entertainment films, “mindless” operettas, and all other “light entertainment genres.”92 Rather than continuing to push Soviet cinema on the German public, they convened a committee (the Filmaktiv) to rebuild the German film industry. By the end of the first year of occupation, they were producing German newsreels and features and converting the UFA film studio in

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Potsdam into DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft). DEFA took the lead early on in producing films that directly confronted Nazi crimes, including Murderers are Among Us (Die Mörder sind unter uns, 1946), Marriage in the Shadows (Ehe im Schatten, 1947), The Blum Affair (Die Affäre Blum, 1948), The Beaverskin (Die Buntkarierten, 1949), and Council of the Gods (Rat der Götter, 1950).93 Although some of the members of the Filmaktiv had been exiles in the Soviet Union during the war (such as DVV leader Paul Wandel and writers Friedrich Wolf and Günther Weisenborn), there seemed to be no qualms about enlisting the expertise of filmmakers from the Third Reich: Wolfgang Staudte supervised the dubbing of Soviet films and wrote and directed Murderers are Among Us; Erich Engel produced The Blum Affair, a study of how antisemitism led to the murder of European Jews; and Wolfgang Zeller, who had worked on the notorious film Jew Süss, composed the score for Marriage in the Shadows.94 The Americans were no more vigilant in halting the careers of Nazi-era filmmakers, most notably turning a blind eye to Veit Harlan and Wolfgang Liebeneiner, director of the pro-euthanasia film I Accuse (Ich klage an, 1941), along with many others.95 The Americans also took the ideological task of using film for reeducation very literally, but they, too, gradually had to back down. The stated goals of their film policy were to “re-orient the German mind after twelve years of Nazism” and to “counteract the teaching and doctrines of National Socialism [and] enlighten the German people as to what went on in the world outside Germany” during those years.96 The ICD emphasized the screening of documentaries, allowing only short entertainment features and drawing from materials produced toward the end of the war by OWI. A joint American (OWI) and British (MOI) committee, comprised largely of German and Austrian exiles, made the selections.97 Yet these guidelines were beset with problems from the start. The joint American-British venture that produced approved newsreels, The World in Film (Welt im Film), often ran up against delays, such that filmmakers commissioned to convey the importance of collective guilt, reeducation, and nonfraternization found their efforts rendered obsolete by rapidly shifting policy changes.98 In the case of the full-length film The Death Mills (Die Todesmühlen, 1945) by Hanuš Burger, the OWI chief had vowed to “hammer to the German people the atrocities being disclosed,” and the PWD directed soldiers to capture as much evidence as possible on film. Burger, an avowed communist, used this footage to create a twohour documentary that left little to the imagination, especially in conveying the connections between Nazism and capitalism. Concerned about the potential of raising anti-American feelings, the intelligence division saw such confrontation as detrimental to the mission of diverting German loyalties away from the Soviets. Billy Wilder came in as a consultant on the film and insisted that it be cut down to twenty minutes. The final version played in cinemas, but German attendance was not mandatory. After much heated discussion among congressmen, market

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researchers, and top military brass about whether the film should be distributed to American civilians, the consensus was: “Many people consider [the film] the same sort of ‘hate propaganda’ fostered by the Nazis.”99 Film had the added advantage of potentially yielding profits for the occupying forces. The Soviet film distributor Soiuzintorgkino had a monopoly in the U.S.S.R. and made sure cinemas in the Soviet Zone screened more Soviet films than German films.100 But, whereas the Soviets had no problem granting a monopoly to their sole film distributor, the ICD faced a showdown with the Motion Picture Export Association (MPEA). Facing a severe shortage of American films available in Germany, the ICD tried to get American distributors to provide films free of cost. OMGUS even authorized the distribution of German entertainment films made in the Third Reich to American markets, without the knowledge or approval of the ICD. This resulted in a trade boycott by the MPEA, leaving the ICD with no option but to screen approved German films in Germany. Furthermore, whereas the Soviets wasted no time in assuming control of the film studio located in their zone, the ICD was insistent on allowing the German film industry to reestablish itself without competition from Hollywood. The Western Allies also had to move slowly to dismantle the Nazi government’s cartel of studios (known as the UFI group) before reinstating the studios as private enterprises in the new Federal Republic.101 The British actually violated an agreement with the other powers by reopening movie theaters in July 1945, one month earlier than the time frame the Allies had agreed upon. Their reason for doing so was that “the German people were getting so restless, virtually confined to their homes, that Marshall Montgomery became worried about keeping order.”102 They started out by vetting German films to assess their Nazi content, although they ended up allowing most films produced in the Third Reich to be shown, as well as British films, but they did not screen American productions, possibly to diminish the impact of Hollywood’s onslaught to dominate European markets and to give British cinema prioritized exposure.103 The French also took great pains to reopen a large number of movie houses; by 1947, five hundred cinemas were operating in the French Zone and twenty-eight in the French Sector of Berlin. These houses showed only French films through the end of 1945 and, at least in Berlin, accompanied all new French screenings with tremendous fanfare. Thereafter, the French officers eased censorship and allowed German as well as other foreign films to be shown. They also played a role in reviving the floundering German film industry, although on a relatively small scale. One of their innovations, later emulated in the other zones, was the introduction of informal “ciné clubs,” which showed French films free of charge; held informal discussions; invited French film directors, actors, and producers to lecture to German filmmakers and film enthusiasts; and raised funds to support film study and new German productions.104

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Theater was also high on everyone’s list as an effective vehicle for reeducation. Thus, despite the widespread destruction of theater buildings and minimal resources for costumes, sets, and lighting, Allied theater officers invested in mounting as many productions as possible, no matter how modest.105 But practicalities overran principles here as well, since it was clearly easier to revive a recent German production than to translate and produce a piece from the Allied repertoire. Reportedly, all theaters in the former Reich (except for those in Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia) were up and running by 1945–1946, and more theater personnel found employment in the 1947–1948 season than they had in 1938–1939.106 The repertoire consisted mainly of the German classics and translations of modern works from the four powers. Still, contemporary critics registered their dismay that production styles from the Third Reich persisted, even coining the descriptor “Reich Chancellery style.”107 The Soviets not only outspent the others in supporting theaters (much to the dismay of American theater officers108) but also closely managed the choice of repertoire and in some cases even the details of production. The Soviets limited German repertoire to “progressive” classics—such as Lessing’s Nathan the Wise (Nathan der Weise)—and anti-Fascist works alongside Russian classics and Soviet works. But Soviet involvement went far beyond repertoire guidelines and extended into the details of script-writing, production, and even stage direction, especially when it came to presenting overtly anti-capitalist works such as Simonov’s The Russian Question, which was produced in Berlin in 1947 despite American objections.109 Concerned that theater repertoire was becoming too esoteric and attracting only intellectuals, that too many theater directors in the zone were not SED members, and that theater needed to be better utilized to communicate ideology to the masses, the SED and SMAD covertly mobilized existing organizations (the Cultural League for the Democratic Renewal of Germany and the consolidated trade unions, the FDGB) to create a network of “people’s theaters” (Volksbühnen), reviving a movement that had developed in the 1920s, while also seeking ways to exert tighter controls on repertoire and personnel.110 Led by several German refugees, the American FTM’s mission was to use theater aggressively as a vehicle for reeducation: “Though it may be ‘dirty fighting’ to create a unit entirely devoted to control the moulding of public opinion, we must stop and think to what lengths the Nazis went in order to distort and poison men’s minds.”111 In practice, however, theater officers were so skittish about replicating the censorship and chauvinism they imagined had existed in Nazi Germany that they balked at enforcing any control lest they be accused of totalitarian tactics. As a result, the vetting process proved to be quite lax, with the FTM issuing licenses directly to theaters rather than licensing each production, and censorship consisted only of a blacklist with a few Nazi-era playwrights along with two classics that might incite resentment against occupying forces (Goethe’s Egmont and Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell). Even in the process of promoting American works, FTM

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left the final decisions on repertoire to German producers (resulting in the overwhelming popularity of Thornton Wilder and Eugene O’Neill).112 These attempts to reverse totalitarian practices also led to some chaos, especially since most theaters throughout Germany had been directly administered by local or state governments long before 1933 (and, prior to 1918, by aristocratic courts). In an effort to decentralize what they regarded as Nazi instruments of control, the FTM eliminated the titles of Generalintendant and Generalmusikdirektor for being “quasimilitaristic,” but questions of repertoire and censorship were left in the hands of local Germans, which often resulted in much confusion as these Germans tried to outguess the American authorities to determine what types of works would be acceptable to them. Furthermore, attempts to encourage the establishment of private theaters—an operational norm in the United States but a relative anomaly in Germany—failed due to general economic hardship in the immediate postwar years.113 By promoting openness to national as well as international repertoire, American authorities did relatively little to alter the existing balance between German and non-German offerings, which sometimes resulted in some controversial allowances. Thus the 1946–1947 season of the Stuttgart opera featured Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler and Carl Orff ’s Die Bernauerin, despite the arguably strong German nationalist messages of both works, not to mention Orff ’s spotted Nazi past. Sensitive to any accusations of heavy-handed control reminiscent of the Nazi measures, the FTM found itself compelled essentially to uphold such long-standing traditions as the famed Wagner festival in Bayreuth—despite the festival’s close ties to Hitler—although they bestowed it with international relevance in order to justify supporting it.114 Although the British actually proved to be more strict than the Americans in censoring publications, operating a censorship bureau after the Americans had terminated theirs in October 1945, they were just as concerned that heavy-handed controls could give the impression of continuing repressive Nazi tactics, inspire subversive literature and resistance to reeducation, and alienate a British public back home that had long respected and embraced German culture. Their policy on theater censorship targeted any material that might criticize the Allied powers or re-energize any remnants of militarism, Fascism, or National Socialism, either in content or in use of symbols or gestures. Precensorship of scripts and opera libretti remained in place until January 1947 to stop any subversive practices Germans may have learned under Nazi supervision, and a few works failed approval because they drew unwanted parallels between the Nazis and the occupying powers. The British also promoted British works that had won critical acclaim in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s, working on the assumption that German audiences would not be familiar with them. At the same time, however, they distanced themselves from the practice in other Western zones of compiling lists of acceptable personnel and balked at blacklisting classic German theater or musical works.115

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The French left much of the operation of theaters to local German personnel, who at first favored a steady run of the classics (such as Goethe and Schiller, but also Shakespeare and G. B. Shaw). The Section Beaux Arts did, however, arrange for the tours of several high-profile French theater and ballet troupes, despite the fact that most of the performance venues in the French Zone had been severely damaged during the war.116 Attempts to introduce modern French theater to German audiences sometimes met with failure, as was the case of the unpopular staging of Jean Anouilh’s Euridice in Tübingen in the 1945–1946 season.117 In Berlin, the first few years of the occupation witnessed a high concentration of plays by modern French playwrights (such as Cocteau, Anouilh, Giradoux, Sartre, and others), some of which suffered from rushed translations and haphazard productions. But Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir made a high-profile visit to Berlin for a performance of Sartre’s The Flies in 1948, and the play was not only an artistic success but also a Cold War coup, as the Soviets mistrusted Sartre’s politics and vowed to boycott the event.118 Western policies on music displayed, on the one hand, conscious restraint in regulating musical matters and, on the other, the sometimes timid yet pervasive desire to establish Western Allies as cultural equals with the Germans. In the American Zone, ICD officers conducted the most rigorous denazification proceedings, vowing to dismantle what they saw as the rigid infrastructure of Nazi control, which was represented not only by the Propaganda Ministry and the Reich Culture Chambers but also by the albeit longstanding tradition of state and municipal orchestras and opera houses. But Music Control officers faced the same dilemma as their theater counterparts when it came to trying unsuccessfully to privatize these entities. They settled instead for an arrangement of subvention without interference, taking what they felt to be a democratic approach of neither banning “Nazi music” nor giving it undue attention, exposing the German public to previously suppressed works, and leaving it to the public to decide what it liked. When it came to promoting American music, cultural officers clearly wished to project Americans as serious contenders in the music world as both performers and composers, but ICD music personnel—who were almost exclusively European-trained East Coast musicians— knew relatively little about contemporary American composers. They promoted the more accessible works of Aaron Copland, William Schuman, Walter Piston, Samuel Barber, and Roy Harris, along with their own compositions, but received only a lukewarm German reception. Meanwhile, conductors in uniform (such as Erich Leinsdorf, who found his way into Vienna during his military service) helped themselves to opportunities to perform and conduct major German and Austrian ensembles, sometimes in defiance of orders.119 The French were not shy in the areas of either censorship or promoting their own musical achievements. Their stated goal was to bring German culture closer to the ideals of Western civilization, and they saw music as the most effective

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means to expose Germans to French as well as international culture. The SSMT initially suggested a short-term ban on all German works composed since 1933; censorship of the music of Wagner, Strauss, and Bruckner; and broadcast guidelines to promote recent French works, American jazz, and the music of Hindemith and Mendelssohn.120 Noted French chamber musicians frequently toured throughout the zone and highlighted the works of contemporary French composers, and concerts organized by the French frequently travelled to the other zones as well. At one point, concert offerings in occupied Germany rivaled those in Paris, such that many French music lovers made pilgrimages to Baden-Baden to partake of the rich concert life.121 The British, by contrast, had long felt musically inferior to Germans. While U.S. classical music broadcasts featured American performers, the British chose to highlight the talents of German musicians who had fled to Britain. They also exercised extreme caution in making sure that only the best British performers be allowed to appear in occupied Germany. Officers even reprimanded any British personnel who performed without authorization, “partly to ensure that the Germans do not get the false impression of British . . . standards of musical life, should an amateur or poorly gifted professional musician perform under such circumstances.”122 Although their music policy focused first and foremost on eliminating what they deemed German military and Nazi music, they mostly singled out and banned the anti-English selections found in German songbooks and otherwise balked at imposing further censorship, preferring to leave it to the Germans to exercise discretion. They disagreed with American measures to ban military music and departed from the policy in the other zones by allowing the playing of the Deutschlandlied, the former German national anthem. Nevertheless, they also took full advantage of having captured one of the country’s best-functioning radio stations (located in Hamburg), which they renamed Nordwest Deutscher Rundfunk (NWDR). The station featured contemporary British works, airing Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time, performed with the NWDR orchestra in September 1946, and Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, performed in Hamburg in March 1947.123 Although there were no music experts among those German exiles groomed in Moscow to carry out cultural policy in the Soviet Zone,124 there was nevertheless a keen interest in classical music repertoire. Replicating the structures in place in the Soviet Union, cultural officers monitored musical activities by requiring all musical organizations to register with trade unions, all conductors to be licensed through the Education Ministry, and all plans for the season’s repertoire to get approval from local authorities. These bureaucratic structures allowed the officers to oversee all repertoire and to promote works of Russian and Eastern European composers (especially Chopin), which they believed had been subjected to years of neglect in Germany. But much of the Soviets’ success in rebuilding musical life in their zone lay in their laxity in reinstating German musicians, regardless of their standing in

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Nazi society, such as Furtwängler and Hermann Abendroth, whose engagement angered the local KPD but proceeded on direct orders from the Soviet cultural officer.125 The Soviets were initially open to exposing German audiences to a wide range of international contemporary art music. The Cultural League featured works of leading composers from all the Allied countries, and Schoenberg and Stravinsky were even praised in the Soviet Zone press.126 Things changed drastically with the release of Zhdanov’s edict on music, issued in early 1948, the only one of the four Soviet cultural edicts to appear in the German press. Its aggressive rhetoric documented the Soviets’ steps to identify and sometimes purge cultural “enemies of the state,” such as Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, and Aram Khachaturian, and the SED added its own invectives against the “decadent bourgeois” music of Benjamin Britten and Igor Stravinsky, as well as “expressionism” and “Schoenbergian contortions.”127 This rhetoric echoed the antisemitism that had been employed in the Degenerate Music exhibition, invoking the evils of cosmopolitanism, the lack of national rootedness, and the presence of pathological sexuality—and torturously comparing such “alien” experiments with the fatal “experiment” of Nazism.128 The only similarities among the occupying powers’ policies on theater, music, and film lay solely in the sometimes glaring gaps between their ideals and their practices. The four powers set out with preconceptions about the “two Germanies,” some of which they learned from their exile consultants and the rest of which they deduced from their first impressions of the devastated Reich. Their assumptions about the existence of totalitarian control of the arts under Hitler made them proceed cautiously so as not to replicate the imagined Nazi micromanagement of culture. As a result of this self-restraint, there was very little observable change in the performing arts before and after 1945, in terms of either programs or personnel. Very few Jews or communists were welcomed back to revitalize the fields they had been exiled from, and even in the Soviet Zone, where members of the Ulbricht Group had been entrusted with establishing a new democratic culture, the Cultural League for the Democratic Renewal of Germany had to retreat to a secondary position of authority. It was not until 1948 that more prominent leftist figures, including Jews, were invited to the Soviet Zone from other countries of refuge such as the United States and Great Britain, most notably the writers Brecht and Stefan Heym and the composers Eisler, Dessau, and Ernst Hermann Meyer, all of whom would become leading cultural figures in East Germany. A RT, A R C H I T E C T U R E , A N D C O L D WA R C O N F R O N TAT IO N

In 1948, in an attempt to reverse Germany’s steep decline into a black market economy, the U.S. government introduced the European Recovery Program (commonly known as the Marshall Plan). The currency reform that introduced the

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Deutschmark in the Western zones led to the Soviet blockade around Berlin, which lay entirely within the Soviet Zone even though it was administered by all four powers. The Berlin Airlift circumvented the blockade by transporting essential goods into the city with military planes from June 1948 to May 1949, galvanizing the alliance between the Western Allied powers and the Germans under their administration as they faced off against the communist East. With two separate currencies in place in two diverging economic systems, the division of Germany into two separate countries was inevitable: the western zones, with the exception of the western sectors of Berlin, formed the Federal Republic of Germany in May 1949, and the Soviet Zone became the German Democratic Republic in October, with the Soviet Sector of Berlin established as its capital. By the time of the blockade, the abandonment of denazification, the introduction of Zhdanov’s edicts, and the shift in American policy from reeducating Germans to reorienting them toward anti-communism129 had situated Germany to become a cultural staging ground for Cold War confrontation. Although the initial impetus to reeducate Germans by exposing them to democratic culture had given way to offering German audiences more of what they were already used to, the Cold War raised the stakes, with the Americans, French, and British all presenting their culture as the antidote to socialist realism. Each side of the conflict would increasingly highlight the ways in which it had liberated Germany from artistic tyranny while simultaneously accusing the other side of perpetuating Nazi barbarism. With the entertainment industries largely carrying on business as usual, these arguments had limited resonance in film, theater, and music. The remaining battlefield of the visual arts and architecture, by contrast, proved to be the springboard for the cultural Cold War, setting the agenda for histories of arts in the Third Reich written during the next several decades. As soon as the war ended, the four Western Allies had supported exhibitions of works that had been considered “degenerate” under the Nazis, seeing these shows as a positive move toward democratization. These included the 1945 exhibitions Contemporary Painters (Maler der Gegenwart) in Augsburg, After 12 Years: AntiFascist Painters and Sculptors on Display (Nach 12 Jahren: Antifaschistische Maler und Bildhauer stellen aus) in the American Sector of Berlin, and German Art of Our Time (Deutsche Kunst unserer Zeit) in Überlingen in the French Zone.130 The Soviets also set out to restore dignity to art that had been denigrated as “degenerate,” but with qualifications. They set up the 1946 General German Art Exhibition (Allgemeine Deutsche Kunstausstellung) in Dresden, which solicited entries from a wide range of German artists, enlisted the still broad-minded Cultural League, and dutifully selected and displayed the works of more than a dozen artists that had been vilified in the Degenerate Art exhibition.131 Art critics stressed the pedagogical value of displaying work that had been suppressed in the Third Reich but also found ways to attack those very works as evidence of the failed “formalist” experiments of the

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1920s. They admonished young artists to “divide the stylistic elements handed down to us into those pointing toward the future and those that proved unfruitful.” Karl Hofer, who had served on the selection panel for the exhibition, attempted to challenge the imposition of politics on art, pointing to the consequences of Hitler’s attempts to exert such control, but Dymshits quickly countered with a public defense of Soviet policy and an extensive attack on Picasso.132 Dymshits proclaimed unequivocally, “the new German art will develop as a humanistic art,” but he cautioned that one should be aware of the “contrast between a genuine realistic art with fine psychological features and a formalist abstraction, which is lacking in ideas and therefore has no future.”133 Initially, Western Allies had hardly concerned themselves with aesthetic questions in the visual arts and focused more on the preservation and restitution of stolen treasures. The U.S. Economics Division’s Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section (MFAA), immortalized in the 2014 Hollywood film Monuments Men, was established in 1944 and engaged art historians, curators, and practicing artists to move with the troops to determine the value of monuments and artifacts. After V-E Day, the MFAA concentrated on retrieving art stolen by the Nazi government and assumed some limited control over museums and libraries, while the ICD’s Theater and Music Section supervised galleries, art journals, dealers, and exhibits and carried out the denazification of artists. The British military government also set up an MFAA division focused on assessing damage to historic structures and returning artwork to its rightful owners. The British worked very closely with German experts to control rogue art dealers and suppress black market transactions and forgeries, but they left the organization of exhibitions to Germans, often to the dismay and frustration of the MFAA officers, who urged the British Council to take a more active role in reeducation.134 As the Soviets gravitated more toward an outright rejection of modernism, the Western Allies were not prepared to muster a full-fledged counterattack, generally promoting their own artists and showing tolerance for abstraction but discouraging political content, even when this meant targeting former “degenerate” artists. In 1946, the U.S. Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs sponsored an exhibition of modern art that included, among others, the work of Georgia O’Keeffe, Ben Shahn, and Georg Grosz, but the American press and conservative politicians attacked the show as communist, and the artists as well as the organizers were then called before the House Un-American Activities Committee.135 Similarly, in 1948, the British Foreign Office and the British Council discouraged shows organized by the anti-Fascist Artists’ International Association (founded in 1933) from touring in Germany, not only because of the works’ left-wing political content but also because of their realism and quasi-realism.136 The French, while far more outspoken on the question of modernist art, similarly ran into difficulties when a revival of “degenerate” art meant encouraging political art. Most of the art exhibitions in the French

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Zone organized by the Section Beaux Arts centered on introducing the German public to recent French works, such as post-impressionism and cubism, as well as to “degenerate” works by international artists such as Modigliani, Chagall, Braque, Utrillo, Max Ernst, and others.137 But when an exhibition featured the Dadaist Otto Dix, who had been a central target of the Degenerate Art exhibition, the authorities demanded the removal of his works because of their blatant political messages.138 The private sector in the French Zone had more success than the military government in reviving the careers of artists vilified in the Third Reich. The friends’ society of the Tübingen Kunstgebäude collected works by a pantheon of primarily German modernists and exhibited them in a brief but well-attended exhibition, Modern German Art, in 1947.139 The most successful exhibitions in the French Zone, however, were those that avoided modern art altogether, including retrospective exhibitions of French art of the past and French-German artistic collaborations, such as the exhibition France-Baden: Two Centuries of History, 1660–1860 (France–Pays de Bade: Deux siècles d’histoire 1660–1860), which celebrated the Duke of Baden and his relationship to Napoleon, and an exhibition on the revolutionary movements of 1848 in France and Germany.140 The German response to the initial onslaught of modernism pushed on them by the Western Allies was mixed at best. Allied observers feared that the Germans’ cool reception of modernism suggested the enduring success of Nazi propaganda, but it may instead have reflected a public disinterest in modern art that had been around since the 1920s. The press canvassed reactions to the Modern German Art exhibition and provided a forum for a lively debate that revealed sincere confusion among the German public about how to appreciate abstract art.141 In Augsburg in January 1946, visitors at an exhibition of South German art received evaluation forms to record their impressions, and the author Erich Kästner reported that mostly the younger visitors reacted with such responses as: “What filth,” “No more entartete Kunst,” and “These artists should be done away with! Concentration camp!”142 In August of the same year, when Picasso’s paintings were displayed in the window of a Berlin gallery, recorded public reactions included such comments as: “We were so proud, when we finally got rid of our ‘Entartete Kunst’ . . . and now they have the nerve to show us dirt again.”143 And while individual artists and dealers took it upon themselves to give as much exposure as possible to artists attacked in the Degenerate Art exhibition, their mission floundered when the Allies themselves failed to distinguish between those artists who had suffered during the Third Reich and those who had thrived. In 1946, for example, the Americans released Arno Breker and Josef Thorak from prison to sculpt busts of American generals. Art critics, for their part, openly debated the fate of expressionism in particular, with many asserting that—even though the style had been a target of National Socialism—it had not only run its course but had also arisen from the same cultural climate that produced Nazism.144 There was also a somewhat dis-

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turbing trend among German collectors and curators over the next several decades, with increased interest in the work of “inner emigrants”—who were regarded to have a higher degree of victim status because they had endured the hardships of isolation during the Third Reich, even when these hardships were exaggerated— suggesting resentment toward those “degenerate” artists who had left Germany.145 This Western ambivalence receded, however, as both sides in the Cold War started to accuse each other of continuing Nazi practices. Hellmut LehmannHaupt, a German-born and German-trained professor of library science at Columbia who worked for MFAA in Berlin, warned his OMGUS superiors that even if the Germans’ lukewarm reception of modern art could be explained by the Nazis’ total manipulation of art, it also revealed the failure of denazification and reorientation. As his arrival in Berlin in 1946 coincided with the SMAD’s offensives on surrealism and abstraction, Lehmann-Haupt seized the opportunity to draw the following crucial parallel: “the Soviet dictatorship is as vitally concerned with the arts as was the Nazi state.” The MFAA eventually was reassigned to oversee the German contemporary art scene and came to play a central role in Cold War activities covertly supported by the CIA. Prolog, an ostensibly nonpolitical group of Americans and Germans promoting modern art, was actually formed by Lehmann-Haupt and other OMGUS functionaries in November 1946 (a report would later praise Prolog as representing German artists’ “fight for democracy and freedom” during the Berlin Blockade). Another covert initiative came into being when the blockade prompted 1,600 artists to send a memo to Colonel Tom Hutton, the chief of the Information Service Division (formerly the ICD), threatening to accept a Soviet offer of financial support if OMGUS did not come up with a counteroffer. In response, Hutton crafted a policy of granting artists gallery and studio space at little or no cost in return for monthly confidential reports. Shortly after the founding of the Federal Republic, Hilla von Rebay, who had emigrated to the United States from Strasbourg in 1927, worked together with Franz Roh, an art critic fired from the University of Munich in 1933, to channel funds from the Guggenheim Foundation to support modern artists by forming the collective Zen 49. The MFAA chief in Bavaria further solicited private funds to establish the Blevins Davis Prize, a prestigious award intended to foster close ties between the German and American art worlds.146 The artistic struggles of both the OMGUS and the CIA against communism had to be carried out covertly, not only to draw a sharp contrast with the Soviet practice of political involvement in art (as well as with Nazi cultural control) but also to circumvent interference from the U.S. Congress. Members of Congress had been attacking modern art as a “communist plot,” cutting funding to touring exhibitions that featured American abstract expressionists and leaving it to private interests and the CIA to promote modernism abroad.147 German artists and art critics also started to play a more active role in drawing the Cold War battle lines, with each side claiming it was repairing the damage of

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Nazi barbarism. The Soviet Zone art journal bildende kunst, edited by Karl Hofer and Oskar Nerlinger, stressed the social function of the artist and contemporary art “following the inferno of the Third Reich,” while Das Kunstwerk, published in the French Zone, expressed the need to train the public to appreciate abstraction, describing modernism as having been silenced by the “intermezzo of the Nazi art dictatorship,” and warned against the emergence of another crisis in which art would be subservient to the public, a situation threatening to take hold in the Soviet Zone.148 Berlin took center stage in June 1950, when Nicholas Nabokov and others organized the Congress for Cultural Freedom to bring together leading personalities in arts and letters from the United States, Great Britain, Italy, and France to declare a cultural war on communism, all with the lavish but covert funding from the CIA.149 Nabokov then put together an exhibition of European modernist art as part of a month-long arts festival for the Congress in Paris in 1952, with the central theme of underscoring similarities between the Nazis and the Soviets, proclaiming: “On display will be masterpieces that could not have been created nor whose exhibition would be allowed by such totalitarian regimes as Nazi Germany or present-day Soviet Russia and her satellites, as has been evidenced by those governments’ labeling as ‘degenerate’ or ‘bourgeois’ of many of the paintings and sculptures included.”150 The Paris event also launched a network of “private foundations” that actually served as conduits for CIA funding to arts enterprises, picking up on the practice already established in Germany within the MFAA. The mutually beneficial relationship forged between German and American art communities led to a steady exchange of modernist art that, over the next decade, firmly established the “world language of abstraction” as the definitive medium for the social and artistic freedoms of the anti-communist West.151 Architecture also came to serve as a Cold War battleground. After the war, with 20 percent of all dwellings destroyed or damaged, thirteen million people left homeless, a crippling shortage of materials, and an unstable currency, no serious plans for construction commenced in earnest until the two German states had been founded in 1949.152 The need to delay construction did not silence aesthetic debates, however, and the Cold War dichotomy in architecture revolved around divergent interpretations of Nazi architecture. Hitler’s attraction to neoclassicism took shape in a number of key government and party commissions, yet he was all too aware that this had been the preferred style for official buildings prior to 1933 and as far away as Washington, D.C., and he viewed the adoption of the style as an outward sign of power to rival that of the great United States. Yet Nazi rhetoric had been so effective that—even though relatively few of these grand structures ever got beyond the drafting stages—the four powers took it upon themselves to destroy neoclassical Nazi architecture after the war had ended, even when structures such as the Reich Chancellery could have been restored and repurposed. As was the case with other art forms, Nazi architecture came to represent not only a specific

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style but also a crusade to stifle modernism, a view postwar commentators adhered to in spite of physical evidence to the contrary. A report on the Marshall Plan in 1951 thus claimed that “the Nazi regime systematically strangled any new ideas in architecture, thoroughly eradicated the earlier modern spirit and saw to it that German architectural schools produced nothing but obedient servants in the National Socialist conception of art.”153 The anti-Nazi language and the destruction of neoclassical structures meshed well with the promotion of a new Bauhaus-inspired architectural philosophy in the Western zones, and later in the Federal Republic, that would ultimately situate modernism as the polar opposite of communist architectural aesthetics. In the wake of the Modern German Art exhibition, architects who lectured from 1946 through 1948 on the merits of modernism included Gropius, Hans Scharoun, Hugo Häring, and Curt Leonhardt,154 and Gropius and Mies were eventually elevated to the position of influential leaders in West German architecture.155 The resurrection of the Bauhaus as an institution that was not only modernist but also anti-communist required a thorough rewriting of Bauhaus history, however, that suppressed the school’s outspoken advocacy of the collective over the individual and its leftist episode under director Hannes Meyer. It also required several historical sleights of hand in retelling the American chapter of the saga: the time Bauhaus architects had spent in the United States was recast as a period of exile; a long-standing American commitment to internationalism was contrived (despite the legendary protests from the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright) by citing the 1932 Bauhaus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art; and—with the help of Gropius, who advocated his position in CIA-funded publications—the “Americanization” of the Bauhaus was reimagined.156 Even though the Western occupation and, later, the Federal Republic could hardly have claimed modernist architecture as an official style, Cold War rhetoric from the East identified any new structures erected in the West as the perpetuation of a Nazi aesthetic. By this time, the Soviets were already developing their showpiece of official architecture, the grand boulevard in Berlin known as the Stalinallee, lined with buildings designed in a Soviet-inspired neoclassical style (fig. 8). They castigated the modernist directions architecture in the West was taking as not only formalist but also comparable to Nazi imperialism. In 1950, SED chair Walter Ulbricht equated Nazi government structures with those of the American and British occupying powers, referring to the “great boxes that dominate the landscape” as “perfect expressions of American interventionism and imperialism.”157 Ulbricht’s condemnation of the Bauhaus style as “bourgeois formalism” even extended to the communist architect Meyer, who was rejected in East Germany as a “reactionary constructionist.”158 The West countered charges against the “cosmopolitanism” of their international and “un-German” architectural direction by hosting the large-scale International Building Exposition in West Berlin in 1957

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figure 8. Stalinallee, East Berlin, 1954 (photo: Heinz Funck, Bundesarchiv).

and constructing starkly clean and simple government buildings in the late 1950s and 1960s.159 Film, theater, and music would eventually feel the effects of the cultural Cold War as well, although not always in such stark terms. The DEFA studios in East Germany produced a steady stream of anti-capitalist feature films under the watchful eye of the government, but in West Germany, most productions avoided anti-Soviet propaganda, focusing first on pure entertainment and then gradually on confronting the Nazi past (the German film industry was meant to blossom into its own private enterprise, but it struggled against the dominance of Hollywood well into the 1960s).160 Theater, by contrast, felt the impact of McCarthyism in both German states, a development that oddly disadvantaged the West and benefited the East. By 1947, works of Lillian Hellman and Clifford Odets could no longer be performed in the American Zone owing to their leftist content, and the War Department’s Civil Affairs Division rejected Arthur Miller’s prize-winning All My Sons as “communist propaganda.” Before leaving his FTM position in 1948, Benno Frank had made failed attempts to bring Bertolt Brecht to the American Zone. His colleague John Evarts observed in 1949 that the censorship of American stage works that “contain an element of criticism of life in America” or, “regardless

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of content, [are] written by authors who are considered to be either communist, or communist-sympathizers,” resulted “in the prohibition of a good portion of the best serious plays written in America.” Ironically, the Soviets could easily access these blacklisted works for their own propaganda purposes. All My Sons, with its anti-capitalist message, had its German premiere in Weimar and ended up having its longest run in the Soviet Zone and East Germany from 1949 to 1951.161 Music in postwar Germany remained somewhat peripheral to the Cold War cause, but for different reasons. For one thing, the musical Cold War had its hot spots outside of Germany and did not necessarily draw its battle lines along a definition of “formalism.” To be sure, Nabokov, a composer, staged the musical events of the 1952 Paris arts festival to underscore the similarities between Nazi and Soviet music policy. He assembled a star-studded roster of American and West European performers and ensembles to offer the best examples of instrumental music, opera, and ballet by composers vilified by both Hitler and Stalin,162 while the CIA covertly underwrote the 1954 International Conference of Twentieth-Century Music in Rome, which was dominated by atonal and twelve-tone works. But the CIA was not so myopic as to promote modernism exclusively. In the 1950s, it funded the Mozarteum in Salzburg, a European tour of the Metropolitan Opera, and composers fleeing the Eastern Bloc.163 In addition, the U.S. government financed tours of American artists and works, most notably the tours of Van Cliburn, Leonard Bernstein, major symphony orchestras, and a production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.164 In Germany, the covert role of the CIA in music affairs appears to have been far more limited than it was in the visual arts, arguably because Western cultural officers had already begun promoting modern music for other reasons.165 The emphasis on both Nachholbedarf (“catching up”) and promoting democratic culture served to reanimate “degenerate” music alongside recent international repertoire, but these initiatives focused more on anti-Nazi reeducation than on anti-communist reorientation. Composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann, singled out as the quintessential inner emigrant in postwar accounts, became an ICD consultant in Bavaria and started his modern music concert series Musica Viva in October 1945 with support from the Bavarian State Opera and the American-controlled Radio Bavaria. The Bavarian government described the “support of contemporary music” as being “of the greatest importance for our cultural politics,” as it was able to offer “an extraordinarily effective cultural propaganda for a progressive Bavarian cultural politics.”166 The French allowed the contemporary music festival in Donaueschingen to resume in 1946, although they left it in the hands of those who had run it during the Third Reich. They also sponsored a festival of contemporary music (Tag der neuen Musik) in Tübingen that same year.167 Most significantly, the establishment of the Summer Course for New Music (Ferienkurse für Neue Musik) in Darmstadt in 1946 by music critic Wolfgang Steinecke attracted the attention of the American

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military government and received regular subsidies into the 1950s, with the condition that the programs included American content.168 Music Officer Everett Helm, the main advocate for U.S. support of the venture, alluded to its anti-Nazi rather than anti-communist mission in his 1949 report, citing that “contemporary music only is performed and taught—and then only the more advanced. R. Strauss and J. Sibelius do not come into consideration.”169 With poor concert attendance and negative public response to the above-mentioned and other live-performance attempts at musical Nachholbedarf, the promotion of contemporary music would have more success on the military- and later state-run airwaves.170 Radio offered a lifeline for composers by giving them access to commissions, performances, recordings, and broadcasts of new music. The American-run RIAS (Radio im amerikanischen Sektor), which could also be heard in East Germany, eventually saw the possibility of utilizing modern music as a Cold War weapon “to obtain maximum listener audience for propaganda messages,” according to a 1947 OMGUS communication.171 But all stations saw it as their educational mission to expand public tastes and support new musical ventures. Radio Munich greatly enhanced the exposure of Musica Viva by broadcasting it live, and many stations used their own orchestras and choruses to perform new works, additionally employing critics and musicologists to provide enlightening commentary. In November 1947, British-run NWDR devoted Herbert Eimert’s late-night programming to contemporary music, a model that would be copied by other stations in West Germany, and Eimert went on to establish the NWDR electronic music studio in 1951, which Karlheinz Stockhausen joined two years later.172 In October 1948, Radio Stuttgart’s weekly program New Directions in Composition (Neue Wege in der Tonkunst) featured an OMGUS-sponsored program of contemporary American music interspersed with a contrived dialogue between two friends. In the show, one friend observed, “Music is an expression of our time, and our time is full of dissonance,” to which the other admits, “You win . . . from now on I’m going to give up my old-fashioned prejudices against modern music and try to enjoy it . . . it’s clear to me that I’m at fault and not the music I’ve been criticizing.”173 Young composers took what they were learning at Darmstadt and developed highly politicized stances on the role of music in society, but the commitment to fighting the Cold War remained secondary to their quest for a new musical identity that would liberate them from a tainted Nazi past. As the Soviets formulated a restrictive policy against any music that could not be comprehended by the proletariat, Schoenberg’s compositional approach, later expanded into what would be known as serialism, acquired anti-communist connotations. For the most part, however, Allied support of modern music targeted perceived Nazi musical agendas, despite the fact that many of the key players at places like Donaueschingen and Darmstadt had been successful under Hitler and merely reoriented their musical mission after the war to revive modernist compositional methods. This

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position on music seems to have prevailed well into the early years of the Cold War, as confirmed by Everett Helm in his 1952 report on American artists performing in the Amerika-Häuser.174 For German composers, the drive to seek out new forms of expression grew out of the challenges they faced in rethinking both their past and their future. That West Germany ultimately became a vibrant center for modern music was mostly due to a rejection of the Nazi (and even pre-Nazi) exploitation of music to serve German nationalism and a commitment to pursue “pure” music devoid of any external meaning in a new, unburdened era initiated by the Zero Hour. T H E Z E R O HOU R A N D T H E I S O L AT IO N O F NA Z I C U LT U R E

As early as 1937, writers in exile—including Richard Freund, Erika Mann, and Karl Becker—were the first to invoke the military term “Zero Hour” (Stunde Null) as a call to Germans back home to rise up against Hitler.175 At the end of the war, however, the term took on a completely different meaning, as portrayed in Roberto Rosselini’s 1948 film Germany, Year Zero (Germania, anno zero), which vividly portrayed the struggles of a German family to survive in the postwar poverty and the moral and generational conflicts that haunted the society.176 The term has since been associated with numerous aspects of postwar Germany: the landscape of ruins, the reforms to restart West German administration and industry, the deep moral introspection, and, more importantly, the cultural renaissance following the Nazi apocalypse. It also became a rallying cry for authors and journalists in Germany immediately after the war, only to be completely invalidated by the next generation of literature scholars, who dismissed the concept as a whitewashing of the careers of former Nazis. In other creative fields, however, West Germans embraced the spirit of the Zero Hour as an aesthetic mission to produce art that would never again be politically exploited. While these new directions served the cultural Cold War by countering socialist realism, the Zero Hour concept held a greater appeal in its potential for West German artists to distance themselves from the Nazi past. Arts scholars, observing the commitment these artists had to making a clean break and embracing radical new directions in their work, understandably interpreted what they saw to form an impression of how different cultural life must have been under Hitler. Allied powers, together with West German cultural communities, had reinforced the notion of the Zero Hour to show how all vestiges of Nazi culture had been swept away and the restart button had been pushed, when in fact much had simply been put back in place. But the need to differentiate between culture before and after 1945 led cultural historians either to overlook any obvious continuities—of both careers and artistic tendencies—that straddled the Zero Hour or to go to great lengths to argue that what might resemble pre-1945

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conditions actually represented something quite different. Yet just as the emphasis on exiles’ preservation of modernism had complicated the modernist discourse by lumping all varieties of individuals and their works into the same category, the Zero Hour concept similarly complicated the postwar cultural narrative by trying to downplay or deny outright any continuities between pre- and post-1945 artistic activity. After the war, massive shifts in demographics, the physical destruction of cities, food shortages, unemployment, and psychological retreat were very real indicators that Germany was starting off with a new, if not entirely clean, slate. Germany’s unconditional surrender led to the dismantling of the Third Reich administration and to the complex implementation of the four-power occupation, opening the way for a radical transformation of social and economic conditions.177 According to Robert Moeller, the material impact of the war so preoccupied many Germans that they came to see themselves first and foremost as victims, shaping a dominant narrative that prevailed throughout most of the 1950s and deflected attention away from the primary victims of Nazi terror.178 This sense of victimhood, however, was also part of a larger moral reckoning sensed even by those reluctant to articulate it. Writers who had gone into exile were the first to force the issue by trying to start a dialogue with those who had remained in Germany about the future of German culture and its moral responsibilities.179 After the war, West German writers heeded the call to politicize literature by publicly engaging in these moral debates, and some of the major literary players created the Gruppe 47, inspiring the socially engaged writing of the 1950s.180 Yet the publicist Hans Richter observed in 1946 that “rarely in the history of any country . . . has such a spiritual gap between two generations opened up as now in Germany.”181 A rift had developed between an older group of people who were determined to move on and not look back and a younger group molded by the Hitler Youth, ultimately compromising any clean break with the Nazi past and falling into what has been described as “a vicious circle of idealism and self-denial.”182 Scholars in the 1970s proposed that the literary Zero Hour had not occurred in 1945, if it had even occurred at all, and suggested that instead of a heroic departure from the evils of the past, Nazi-era careers continued to thrive in what could be more aptly labeled a period of “apolitical existentialism” that lasted from 1930 to 1960. The only true heroes they identified from the early postwar period were the members of Gruppe 47, and these scholars drew clear distinctions between the members of the group and any other writers who had either remained in Germany (as inner emigrants) or gone into exile.183 Yet the Zero Hour concept had also taken the form of a broader cultural mandate that extended beyond the community of writers and inspired the quest for resurrecting untainted forms of German cultural identity. In the months following the end of the war, Adenauer observed: “You can’t have failed to notice that the Nazis have laid German culture just as flat as the ruins of the Rhineland and the

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Ruhr. . . . Years of Nazi rule have left Germany a spiritual desert, and perhaps it is more necessary to draw attention to this than to the physical ruins.”184 This cultural mandate initially inspired many younger members of the arts professions to shed the shrill nationalism of the past and emphasize their internationalism. The glorification of abstraction, the suppression of meaning, and the rejection of formal structures allowed a generation of German artists to distance themselves from past abuses in which arts had been touted as the pride of the German nation but also exploited to justify the elimination of “alien races.” Yet while embracing the international, the Zero Hour culture also quietly marked out a path toward rediscovering a “new” German identity with its focus on reviving expressionism. According to Sabine Eckmann, although the focus on expressionism may have taken on the outward trappings of promoting internationalism, it also represented a search for a German artistic identity, sometimes even echoing the sentiments of Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg.185 The emphasis on internationalism in some ways camouflaged a deeper desire to recapture a lost German art form, and expressionism presented itself as one of the few truly German traditions that the Nazis had vilified rather than co-opted. The knowledge of Nazi rejection of some (but not all) expressionist artists resulted first in expressionism being celebrated in the United States during World War II. Subsequently, postwar German artists gravitated toward it, seeking to reject politicized art and retreat into subjective modes of self-reflection. No one had noticed—or had wanted to call attention to—the very same turn toward expressionism that artists in the Wehrmacht had embraced in large numbers in their depictions of scenes at the front (many of these wartime paintings had been seized by American troops and kept under wraps for several decades).186 Edwin Redslob included the works of Kirchner, Marc, Hofer, Schmidt-Rottluff, and Nolde in one of the first art exhibitions after the war, which opened in the summer of 1945.187 A private collector who had begun to purchase Nolde’s paintings in 1937 after the Degenerate Art exhibition displayed the rescued work in 1946, and an art dealer who traded in expressionist works up to September 1944 mounted a highly acclaimed show of expressionists at the Villa Stuck in Munich in 1946. The same venue featured exhibitions of Beckmann and Franz Marc in 1947, and the House of Art in Munich, occupying the iconic temple for German art built by Hitler’s architect Troost, featured an equally noteworthy Blaue Reiter exhibition in 1949.188 Herbert Volwahsen, who co-organized the 1946 General German Art Exhibition in Dresden, stressed the quest for internationalism but also continued to espouse a belief in the mystic qualities of the “German soul.”189 The transformation of expressionism into something abstract and “absolute” in the 1950s offered refuge as an art that was autonomous, free from politics, and supranational. The notion of a musical Zero Hour was suggested in a report by American music officers that stated that Hitler had “succeeded in transforming the lush field of

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musical creativity into a barren waste,” that Germany’s most talented musicians had gone abroad, and that composers in the Third Reich had produced only works deemed “psychologically effective to the Nazi cause.”190 However, while the notion of a clean break gave West German composers a clear direction toward shaping a new international musical identity, it also allowed those with pre-1945 careers to continue to flourish. Wolfgang Fortner, for example, had attracted negative attention during the Weimar years for his choral settings of controversial texts by leftist poets, but he managed to evade condemnation in the Nazi years, finding security by joining the faculty of the Institute for Church Music in Heidelberg, actively engaging in Hitler Youth musical programs, enjoying critical acclaim even from the most committed National Socialist music critics, and joining the Nazi Party in 1940. After the war, Fortner worked together with Steinecke to establish the Darmstadt summer course and withdrew half of the major works he had written during the Nazi years from public view, including one that premiered under the sponsorship of Rosenberg’s Fighting League. With the help of Heinrich Strobel, he managed to reinvent himself as an internationalist with ties to French compositional trends.191 Fortner became the director of Musica Viva upon Hartmann’s death in 1964, the same year that the Darmstadt course added the word “international” to its name.192 The resurrection of expressionism took hold in musical discourse as well, even though its parameters had been far more difficult to define than in the visual arts. Adorno had defended Schoenberg’s expressionism against critics from the left as early as 1931, and in Philosophy of New Music (Philosophie der neuen Musik, 1949), he invoked Clement Greenberg’s polarization of avant-garde and kitsch as a validation of Schoenberg’s expressionism.193 When young composers at Darmstadt rejected Schoenberg for not going far enough in his twelve-tone system and instead embraced Webern’s total serialism, Adorno shot back, persisting in his overstated defense of Schoenberg’s expressionism by exaggerating the composer’s commitment to the movement beyond his brief association with the Blaue Reiter group. Adorno also published some of these arguments in 1955 in Der Monat, a U.S. government–sponsored journal with CIA connections.194 Identifying with expressionism seems to have become popular among the postwar generation of composers, as evidenced by Bernd Alois Zimmerman (born in 1918), who described his early postwar compositions as “identified by an eruptive and at the same time ‘expressionist’ gesture in their style and expression.”195 Above all, the ideal of a pure, unadulterated, neutral musical language was adopted by a generation of German composers, who saw it as a way to establish a break with the past by creating music that would be immune to political manipulation and provide an escape into purely psychological realms. In the early 1960s, composer Hans Werner Henze recalled: “During these immediate post-war years no one believed how it could have been possible for a nation to have sunk so low into a disgrace that centuries could not wash clean. We were assured by senior composers that music is

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abstract, not to be connected with everyday life, and that immeasurable and inalienable values are lodged in it (which is precisely why the Nazis censored those modern works which strove to achieve absolute freedom).”196 The Zero Hour concept would exert a subtle but enduring influence on arts discourses with its implications that the radical new directions espoused by postwar artists must have represented a break with all that came before. It functioned as a tacit consensus, obscuring the fact that artistic activities, directions, and initiatives—as well as the careers of many artists—that had thrived under Hitler were allowed to persist beyond 1945 and offering a way of explaining Nazi barbarity as a historical aberration in German cultural history. Two brief examples, one in French and one in English, serve to illustrate how postwar perceptions of the break with the past and the emergence of West Germany’s new cultural image could be projected. In 1967, a special issue of the journal Documents: Revue des questions allemandes gathered essays by French and German artists and intellectuals to survey the past twenty years of West German literature and the arts. Accepting the Zero Hour (referred to as “l’an zero” or “l’heure zero”) as a given, the volume looked at developments in theater, ballet, and music, highlighting above all the new internationalism cultivated in West Germany. The essays on theater emphasized the break with the past, the preponderance on German stages of modern works by non-German playwrights, and the question of whether German playwrights successfully inherited the legacy of expressionism or, more positively, represented the emergence of a new “greater modernism.” Musical life in Nazi Germany was portrayed as having been repressed under a dictatorship, and the postwar period was described as being taken up primarily with reviving Schoenberg, Hindemith, and Stravinsky and cultivating musical modernism, while the report on opera highlighted the post-1945 creations of composers who had been active in Nazi Germany (such as Carl Orff, Werner Egk, Wolfgang Fortner, and Gottfried von Einem) with little or no acknowledgement of their pasts. With regard to the other media, essays on painting and architecture focused on the “rediscovery” of German expressionism and the Bauhaus, an essay on sculpture chronicled modernism from the pre–World War I years, and an essay on film expressed frustration over slow developments in West Germany.197 A similar kind of overview appeared in English in 1974, with translations of some of the same essays that appeared in the special issue of Documents. Here, too, the emphasis was on the trend toward internationalism after twelve years of total repression and isolation, the rediscovery of Weimar and exile creativity, and the Cold War schism, all of which arose after the “year zero.” Taking to heart Thomas Mann’s foreboding warnings in Doctor Faustus about Germany’s fatal ties to music, the editors identified Wagner and Strauss and a few other “third rate ‘composers’ ” as the only ones tolerated during the Third Reich; cited the “banning” of Schoenberg, Bartók, Stravinsky, and “the Swiss” Paul Hindemith; and similarly cited Orff,

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Egk, and Von Einem as the leading opera composers, with the essays focusing exclusively on serialism, electronic music, aleatory music, and Adorno’s views on the gap between contemporary art music and the public. As for East Germany, the editors wrote that its contempt for Western avant-garde innovation left it with only three successful composers, two of them “old timers” (Eisler and Dessau). A much shorter section devoted to the other arts noted the new directions in West German architecture, the impact of the Cold War on the visual arts (“abstract art has been as much anathema to the ruling SED as it was to the Nazis”), and the slow but encouraging emergence of “new German film” since 1962.198 The field of West German literature forged far beyond other cultural fields in thoroughly analyzing and systematically deconstructing the Zero Hour concept, but the histories of the visual and performing arts generally avoided a direct confrontation and instead internalized the concept to frame their views on the nature of cultural activities in the Third Reich. These fields tended toward presenting an exaggerated image of rigid cultural control under Hitler that could serve as a contrast with current, more stabilized conditions, accommodating the assumption that a radical break had to have occurred in 1945 in order for postwar cultural activity to thrive. The Zero Hour has thus remained at least an underlying presumption, if not an overt historical marker, regardless of its exact dates or its accuracy in describing cultural conditions at the end of the war. Signs of disruption in the art world arose as the public awareness of the cruelties of the Holocaust culminated in the Eichmann trial and the Auschwitz trials in the early 1960s. Artists coming of age in the 1950s and onward aggressively confronted the silence on the Nazi past, with Joseph Beuys exhibiting an amalgamation of objects collected from 1958 to 1964, titled Auschwitz Demonstration, and several others following suit with aggressive realism, photography, collage, and other media to boldly confront their viewers with the guilt of family members, the blind admiration of Hitler, and the horrors of genocide.199 In 1981, the Society for Music Research (Gesellschaft für Musikforschung) organized a session at its annual conference that touched on the Nazi topic—albeit with the somewhat evasive rubric of “Music of the 1930s,” which was not limited to Germany.200 Yet the Zero Hour concept still provided a refuge. Rudolf Stephan concluded his opening remarks with the following admonition: Whoever concerns himself with the music and the musical life of the Third Reich must ask himself: did National Socialism make any contribution to music history? Did it achieve anything more than the nameless suffering of countless innocents? More than the (premature) death of many people, including musicians? Maybe it prevented the creation of several masterpieces; [but] it played no role in those masterpieces that did arise. (It found them repulsive). It created nothing positive, it only destroyed. It only furthered the already long observed process of returning humanity to barbarism. Nothing more and nothing less.201

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The Zero Hour concept received renewed attention in 1995 among scholars from several fields, not only in the spirit of commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war but also in the wake of yet another “zero hour” that was still fresh in everyone’s mind: the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification. Those recent events had caused many to ponder the parallels and the differences between 1945 and 1989, and closer investigations brought to light just how complex and contradictory this concept had been from its very inception. In three published symposia dedicated to the subject,202 most scholars agreed the Zero Hour and its implications of a tabula rasa were to blame for distracting historians from uncovering the unpleasant evidence of continuities from the Third Reich into the Federal Republic. Nevertheless, the zeal with which a new generation sought to uncover continuities and unmask old Nazis had gone too far in completely invalidating the concept. Recent analyses show instead that a Zero Hour consciousness did, indeed, exist on many levels and in diverse discourses in the immediate postwar years. Thus, despite the baggage that the term acquired among literary scholars, Stephen Brockmann has advocated reassessing its meaning.203 The Zero Hour had different meanings for different individuals at the time, and it should be understood for its relevance at a time when Germany was dealing not only with the material but also moral meanings of turning the clock to zero.204 The Zero Hour also needs to be revisited as part of the intricate fabric of the postwar reception of Nazi arts and Nazi culture.205 Allied cultural policy’s unrealistic goals resulted in inconsistencies that spoke to Zero Hour ruptures in German cultural history but actually condoned and even supported continuities. Concurrent developments on the Cold War cultural front further distorted the Nazi past by compelling each side to highlight its own departures from Nazi cultural barbarism while accusing the other side of perpetuating it. For the duration of the Cold War and beyond, cultural histories of the Third Reich penned by West German and Anglophone scholars adhered to notions of the Nazis’ (and Soviets’) complete control of the arts, constantly returning to a totalitarian view of Nazi cultural life that would exonerate most artists from accusations of aiding and abetting the Third Reich and uphold Zero Hour notions of rupture in their careers. This adherence proved tenacious, even as other branches of historical scholarship rejected these premises and evidence emerged that weakened their foundations.

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Totalitarianism, Intentionalism, and Fascism in Cold War Cultural Histories

Throughout the Cold War, historians successively adopted, refined, rejected, and reassessed the strengths and weaknesses of various analytical models for coming to terms with Nazi history. In histories of the arts, however, two models in particular seem to withstand the criticism these historians’ debates directed at them: a totalitarian interpretation of Nazi culture that implies that the arts came under complete government control and an intentionalist interpretation that credits Hitler and Goebbels with executing preexisting blueprints for micromanaging all facets of artistic production. The totalitarian interpretation came through clearly in the very first histories of the visual arts, written by those on the front lines of the cultural Cold War, which drew direct comparisons between Nazi and Soviet tactics and served as resources for subsequent generations of historians. These earliest studies concerned themselves primarily with painting, sculpture, and architecture (the performing arts managed to stay under the radar for much longer). Laying the groundwork for future studies to build a consensus of structural nazification, their basic assumptions about the central control of artistic operations in Nazi Germany continued to influence even those authors who rejected the totalitarian model by name. The tenacity of these concepts can be best understood as an underlying wish to distance the arts from any demeaning engagements with politics, yet clinging on to them kept arts scholarship in something of a vacuum. As we will see, any challenges to these paradigms, which appeared particularly in unpublished dissertations, had limited resonance, possibly because the model of structural nazification served several useful functions for historians of the arts. It allowed those invested in studying the life and works of individual figures to shield their subjects from 130

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suspicion of Nazi collaboration and sustain interest in the creative work of those figures, as scholars could rely on the conviction that all artists had been forced to conform to the dictates of a central authority. More generally, for established fields of arts scholarship that focused on high culture and subscribed to a basic canon that art and politics do not mix, structural nazification made it possible to exonerate the arts as a whole by proposing that the forces working against all that was pure and beautiful proved too formidable to oppose. These models managed to hold sway for much of the postwar period, but in the 1980s, a flurry of publications, exhibits, and other events marking fifty years since the Nazi dictatorship produced new evidence and new perspectives and promised to incite stimulating debates. In the 1990s, there were further signs that disciplinary boundaries were slowly being dissolved as more historians working outside the arts disciplines took a greater interest in investigating cultural policies in the Third Reich. Yet these two decades also witnessed turbulent events that profoundly complicated Nazi historiography, first the Historikerstreit and related upheavals in the art world in the 1980s, and then the end of the Cold War, the full impact of which would become apparent in historical writings appearing from the late 1990s onward (discussed in chapter 6). T O TA L I TA R IA N I SM A N D I N T E N T IO NA L I SM

The term “totalitarianism” actually traces its origins to the anti-Fascist opposition in Italy, but it quickly became part of the pro-Fascist vocabulary when the philosopher Giovanni Gentile coopted it to encourage total commitment to the Fascist cause and to condone the use of violence. A few years later, pro-Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt adopted a totalitarian agenda similar to that of the Italian Fascists to oppose liberalism and credited the writer Ernst Jünger, author of Total Mobilization, for laying out a blueprint for the new militarized state. In 1933, the legal scholar Ernst Forsthoff pursued Schmitt’s agenda in his book The Total State, infusing the concept of authoritarian state control with violent metaphors, allusions to the primacy of the Volksgemeinschaft, and visions of a society organized by profession—a version of neocorporatism that resonated strongly among the German artistic community. Hitler and Goebbels continued to make references to totality until they were corrected by Rosenberg, who insisted on distinguishing between Italy’s “total state” and Germany’s “total movement” or “German state.”1 As the term retreated from the spotlight in Germany, it gained prominence as an object of criticism among the exile communities in the United States and England and then became universally accepted for highlighting the similarities between Nazism and communism. Refugees embraced the term as a way of understanding the Nazi movement—like Italian Fascism—as an outgrowth of bourgeois capitalism spurred by fears of a proletarian uprising. In 1934, Herbert Marcuse was one of

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the first to develop these ideas in his essay “The Struggle against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State,” while Hans Kohn and Paul Tillich took the comparative dimension one step further by actually classifying both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as consummate totalitarian systems. American academics such as Calvin Hoover and William Chamberlin applied the comparisons between Germany and Russia to investigating economic and social conditions, while journalists called attention to the two countries’ common tactic of violent purges. The use of “totalitarian” as a common descriptor for Nazi and Soviet societies gained momentum after the failure of the Comintern’s Popular Front against Fascism and the disillusionment among the left with Stalinist terror and the HitlerStalin Pact of 1939. Contributors to the Partisan Review were particularly consistent in employing the term,2 and in the 1940s, German refugees in both Britain and the United States produced some of the most influential writings on totalitarianism. Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon (published in Britain in 1940 and in the United States in 1941), a fictional account of Soviet purges, received praise for its effectiveness in revealing the horrors of Stalinism. Franz Neumann began theorizing on totalitarianism immediately upon his arrival in the United States in 1936, resulting in his famous analysis of Nazi Germany, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (1942). Ernst Fraenkel’s The Dual State, published in 1941, described Nazi Germany as a centralized totalitarian system that nevertheless allowed previously existing institutions to continue to function. Other émigrés also received widespread acclaim for their wartime observations on Nazism and their contributions to conceptualizing totalitarianism.3 As the war came to an end, The Road to Serfdom, by the Austrian émigré Friedrich Hayek, and The Open Society and Its Enemies, by Karl Popper, signaled the economic and philosophical dangers of totalitarianism, setting the stage for the anti-communist Truman Doctrine, announced in 1947, which set the Cold War in motion. By this time, Truman himself had used the term “totalitarianism” to refer to Nazi Germany, and after the war, he freely employed it to highlight the similarities between Nazis, communists, and Fascists. In 1948, the chairman of the National Security Resources Board drew up fifteen points outlining the similarities between communism and “Nazi-Fascist” systems, and in 1949, the justification for the creation of NATO cited the Soviet Union to be a “totalitarian menace similar in all ways to Hitler in 1939–1941.”4 One explanation for the widespread adoption of the Nazi-Soviet comparison was that the rage against Germany was so deep that throwing both Nazism and communism into the same camp allowed Western Allies to make an easy transition in transforming the Soviets from an ally into an enemy. With the term firmly planted in the public consciousness, earlier Marxist-oriented theories of Hitler’s rise, such as that outlined in Neumann’s Behemoth, could no longer stand up to the full force of a Cold War ideology that favored an alignment of Nazism with communism. With U.S.-Soviet relations strained as never before, the appearance of

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Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 offered a timely rationale for Cold War policy, despite contemporary criticisms of Arendt’s hyperbole, flawed argumentation, and unsubstantiated comparison between Germans and Soviets that overlooked their vast historical and economic differences. Arendt, a German Jew, was a student of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. She completed her doctoral dissertation under the latter in 1929 and engaged actively in the Zionist movement until fleeing to Paris in 1941. After the German invasion, she was interned briefly as an “enemy alien” in France before she was able to move to New York, where she worked as a journalist and a researcher for the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction. In Origins of Totalitarianism, which she began writing in 1944 and completed in 1951, Arendt proposed that the convergence of antisemitism, imperialism, and nationalism led populations to devolve into “the masses,” allowing demagogues to sway them. Significantly, however, Arendt took at face value Hitler’s and Stalin’s claims of supreme power,5 claims that also enabled those undergoing denazification to assert their impotence in standing up to such insurmountable forces. Furthermore, her contention that totalitarianism sought to transform human nature through terror and “radical evil” assisted in thoroughly demonizing both societies. Critics were simultaneously put off by Arendt’s methodological flaws and captivated by her passion, and Arendt’s work continued to fascinate readers even after the Cold War ended.6 In 1956, Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski presented a more systematic comparison of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, basing their analysis on six interdependent conditions common to both systems: the adherence to a central ideology, the supremacy of a single mass party, a monopoly of armed combat, a monopoly of communication, terroristic police control, and a centrally directed economy.7 As American political scientists focused their investigations of totalitarianism on communism, West German historians turned their attention to their own recent past, where totalitarianism offered much promise as a conceptual model. While East Germans adhered to a doctrine that labeled Nazism as a Fascist phenomenon fueled by capitalism and imperialism, in the West, Karl Dietrich Bracher and others developed and further differentiated the six totalitarian traits proposed by Friedrich and Brzezinski, which had proven too static and monolithic.8 Over the course of the 1960s, however, a new cohort of historians—inspired in part by the remigration of German social scientists—explored the new possibilities of social history, and the first of many bitter confrontations over how to approach the Nazi past erupted. The 1960s represented a watershed in testing the viability of totalitarianism as a historical concept on both sides of the Atlantic. American baby boomers came of age at a time when the geopolitical role of the United States revealed fissures in the good-versus-evil construction on which the concept of totalitarianism was based, and the moral dilemmas of the Vietnam War brought

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the generational conflict to a dizzying climax. American as well as German youth (referred to as the “68ers”) gravitated toward Marxist thought as they sought answers to the paradoxes posed by U.S. support of dictatorships in other parts of the world and by the revolutionary communist struggle in Cuba that contradicted the totalitarian top-down model. For German youth in particular, the Eichmann and Auschwitz trials brought to light how totalitarianism explanations that placed all responsibility for Nazi atrocities in the hands of a centralized dictatorship completely skirted the issue of moral responsibility of individuals.9 By the late 1970s, the totalitarian interpretation of Nazi history—although not rendered completely obsolete—had been so thoroughly questioned and qualified as to bear little resemblance to its earlier incarnations that equated Nazism with Stalinism. As archival evidence came to reveal the polycratic nature of Nazi administration, historians entertained approaches that could pick and choose the most useful features of both the totalitarian and the Fascist models to understand how Nazi Germany functioned. Hans Mommsen painstakingly demonstrated that any Nazi “system” was far more dynamic, diffuse, and decentralized than anything the totalitarian model could support. Others even considered totalitarianism to have been more of an aspiration among Nazi leaders than a reality—what William Allen called the “boast of a dictator” to gain legitimation and popular acceptance while recognizing the pragmatic need for flexibility—in a manner that paralleled Mussolini’s exploitation of the concept more as a goal than a descriptor for the status quo.10 Around the same time, historians also raised serious questions about elements of the totalitarian concept that magnified Hitler’s role in decision-making. In 1979, debates arising from a conference in the United Kingdom categorized as intentionalist those historians who regarded Hitler’s will as decisive and National Socialist policy as consistent, ideology-driven, and goal-oriented, as opposed to those in the functionalist or structuralist camp, who placed more importance on institutions and social structures in determining historical outcomes. The debates were infamously vitriolic, raising tempers over questions of accountability for the Nazi genocide.11 Fueled by a spate of widely read biographical and psychological studies of Hitler in the 1970s, intentionalist interpretations rested on the assumption that Hitler adhered to a consistent program throughout his career. In contrast, other studies emerging in the 1960s and 1970s, most notably Martin Broszat’s Der Staat Hitlers, published in 1969 (later released in English as The Hitler State in 1981), showed that the chaos reigning in Nazi bureaucracy was not part of Hitler’s master plan to “divide and conquer” but rather a manifestation of his weakness as a leader. Hans Mommsen attacked the intentionalist position in even more strident terms, reducing any proposed “program” of Hitler to vague and disconnected propagandist mantras.12 Instead, historians were concluding that Hitler functioned most effectively as a symbol of authority that filled the perceived Weimar-era power vacuum created by the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918. One could

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even argue that Hitler deliberately kept himself at arm’s length from actual policy making in order to uphold his popular appeal, as this allowed him to deflect any public dissatisfaction with measures onto the government and party agencies issuing them, prompting such expressions of disapproval as “If only the Führer knew!”13 Ian Kershaw successfully pursued this line of argument in Der HitlerMythos, published in 1980 (revised in English as The Hitler Myth in 1985), which analyzed the effectiveness of portraying Hitler as uniting the Volksgemeinschaft. Kershaw later developed his understanding of this dynamic to explain the complicity of so many Germans who committed themselves to “working toward the Führer,” a process which often involved sanctioning certain measures by attributing them to “the Führer’s will.”14 In histories of the arts, however, both intentionalism and the totalitarian paradigm held an appeal that was not easily rivaled. Intentionalism, while rarely named as a methodological point of departure in arts scholarship, took the form of attributing to Hitler, or in many cases to Goebbels, the complete micromanagement of cultural affairs. The appeal of the intentionalist position lay in its capacity to evade the sticky problem of explaining how such barbarism could emerge from a civilized society and to absolve of any responsibility all but those in the highest positions. Knowledge of Hitler’s artistic aspirations, close involvement in architectural projects, passion for Wagner, and patronage of the Bayreuth festival made it easy to arrive at these assumptions, even though evidence was spotty. Still, attributing all this power and influence to a few individuals allowed for the continued romanticization of the artistic persona. It was far more appealing to assume that one deranged tyrant forced all artists to bend to his will or face horrific consequences than to entertain the unimaginable: that artists willingly contributed to Nazi cultural life. The totalitarian paradigm was so compelling in arts scholarship that it could even be detected at the base of Marxist interpretations that outwardly adopted the Fascism concept but essentially upheld basic assumptions about totalitarian rule. E A R LY C O L D WA R P O SI T IO N S O N NA Z I A RT A N D A R C H I T E C T U R E

The arts offered fertile ground for pointing out similarities in Nazi and Soviet extremism, even though Nazi aesthetic policies were hardly as systematic as the controlling measures pursued by Zhdanov. The evidence of cultural repression coming out of the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s was far more voluminous and compelling than the picture of Nazi cultural life that was coming together only piecemeal, yet next to horrifying revelations of purges and genocide, nothing was more shocking to the sensibilities of the civilized world than the stifling of artistic freedom. Inspired by observations on Stalinist measures, an image emerged of

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Nazi Germany as a highly regimented, totalitarian society in which leaders, guided by their ideology, spelled out the criteria for unacceptable aesthetics and made sure the restrictions they laid out were enforced. Accordingly, Nazi arts policy was believed to have consisted of pervasive censorship, the harnessing of all creative activity for political purposes, and, above all, a vehement, ideology-driven campaign to eradicate modernism. And more often than not, Hitler himself was cited as the final arbiter of cultural policy, whether or not evidence could trace a paper trail back to his desk. When we look back to the earliest writings comparing Nazi and Soviet arts policies, it is impossible to ignore the passion and deep disillusionment of their authors, who were all eyewitnesses to the cultural abuses of both systems. The seeds for drawing comparisons between Nazism and Stalinism, as we have already noted, had been planted in the 1930s as leftists in the West struggled with mounting evidence of Stalinist terror and fell into crisis mode upon learning of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Drawing from accounts by those purged in the show trials, including none other than Leon Trotsky, contributors to the Partisan Review referred to Trotsky’s essay “Art and Politics,” published in the journal in 1938, in which he highlighted how the “totalitarian hand” had stifled artistic truth: “The official art of the Soviet Union—and there is no other over there—resembles totalitarian justice, that is to say, it is based on lies and deceit.”15 In 1939, intellectuals from across a wide political spectrum signed on to the manifesto of the Committee for Cultural Freedom, which would be revived in 1950 as the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom, while the Partisan Review group drew up their own manifesto in which they cited how “every progressive tendency in art is described by fascism as ‘degenerate,’ ” and “every free creation is called ‘fascist’ by the Stalinists.”16 Following the occupation and the division of Germany in 1949, the first eyewitness accounts of prewar and postwar cultural conditions started to flow from the pens of those involved in struggles during both the Third Reich and the early Cold War. Painting and sculpture received the most attention, followed by architecture, while other arts were virtually ignored until the 1970s and 1980s. There are compelling reasons for this sequence of engagement. The German art world was still feeling the effects of the massive seizure of artworks under the Degenerate Art Action, and Allied-appointed specialists were working assiduously to sort out the provenance of plundered objects immediately following the war. Adding insult to injury, the sudden shift of Soviet policy toward enforcing Zhdanovite directives gave those who had witnessed the Nazis’ operations a sinking feeling of déjà vu. In each of the early accounts on Nazi art policy, one is struck by their anger, frustration, and cynicism, as well as by their unrestrained calls to take action to prevent further abuse. The earliest published exposé of Nazi cultural policy was Paul Ortwin Rave’s Art Dictatorship in the Third Reich (Kunstdiktatur im Dritten Reich, 1949). This

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continued to serve as an authoritative source for a long time, cited extensively in virtually all subsequent accounts and reissued in 1987. Rave, however, had a rather complicated past. Working alongside the director of the Berlin Nationalgalerie, Rave had reportedly collaborated on an exhibition of modern painting that was shut down in 1934. He then became curator of the institution under the new director, Eberhard Hanfstaengl.17 Following Hanfstaengl’s reported refusals to cooperate with the Degenerate Art Action in 1937, Rave succeeded him as interim director and, according to his entry in the Neue Deutsche Biographie, “had to put up with” the confiscations. He is also credited with ordering the evacuation of artworks during the bombing raids in early 1945 in his capacity as deputy director of the Prussian State Museum.18 Following the war, he was thus well equipped to assist with retrieving art that had been hidden from the raids, and he continued as director of the Nationalgalerie until 1950, when he fled to West Berlin after experiencing difficulties with Soviet authorities.19 There are gaps in his personal history, due in no small part to the destruction of portions of his diary, according to the archival scrutiny of Jonathan Petropoulos, who characterized his managerial style during his uninterrupted directorship of the Nationalgalerie from 1937 to 1950 as one that avoided controversy.20 Given that Rave may have stood by and watched assaults on art unfold in the 1930s only to see history repeating itself during the Allied occupation, the exasperation interspersed throughout his narrative is understandable, yet since the book serves as the first full account of art policy in Nazi Germany, his tone left an indelible mark on future investigations. He can hardly temper his rage in recounting bureaucratic difficulties in the Third Reich, the successive firings of various museum personnel, and the few short-lived attempts to defend modern art. His totalitarian and intentionalist views come through in his references to Hitler’s “intentions to control art, like everything else, from above” and his portrayal of the Reich Culture Chambers as Goebbels’s “power maneuver to take all artists into his own hands.”21 Briefly sketching the Gleichschaltung of existing artists’ organizations into the Visual Arts Chamber and the rivalry between Rosenberg and Goebbels, Rave ultimately concludes that, “step by step, the singular direction set by Hitler for desirable art was secured, and one had the means to do so with the authorities in charge,” such that by 1934, the chamber had achieved “the complete seizure of power of the arts.”22 Notably, Rave provides a detailed accounting of the seizure of artworks all over the country, a phenomenon that was still very much on the minds of those active in the Nazi art world, many of whom had been directly or indirectly involved in the Degenerate Art Action and Rosenberg’s task force and were enlisted to sort out the provenance of seized items after the war. Rave may have harbored some ambivalence with regard to his own past, but he compensated for this by channeling his dismay toward Soviet tactics, comparing the two dictatorships and, in the process, exaggerating and even potentially

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fabricating accounts of Nazi acts of terror against artists and their works. Recent research has questioned the veracity of his reports of the Nazis’ more egregious acts of destruction, since his book serves as the only source for the allegation that thousands of seized artworks were deliberately destroyed by fire.23 More importantly, Uwe Schneede, who edited the reissue of Rave’s book in 1987, demonstrates convincingly how the work served as a critique of socialist realism and a direct response to the positions expressed in the Soviet Zone art magazine bildende kunst. Citing a letter Rave wrote in 1955, Schneede states that one should “read between the lines, that this polemic is directed just as much at the new art dictatorship arising in the east.”24 Rave was not the only one in the German postwar art scene to feel the déjà vu effect of Soviet cultural policy firsthand. Will Grohmann, one of the organizers of the General German Art Exhibition in the Soviet Zone in 1946, bitterly recalled a decade later that “only in the Russian Zone was there no resumption of artistic activity: the regulations regarding art that were laid down by the Russian authorities were like those of the Third Reich.”25 While Rave’s biography and correspondence give us the only clues to his between-the-lines critique of Soviet cultural policy in postwar Germany, Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, whose role in the cultural Cold War was discussed in chapter 3, exercised no such restraint in his account, which was one of the first direct comparisons of Nazi and Soviet arts policies. In Art under a Dictatorship, first published in 1954 (and reissued in 1972), he chose to focus on the “fine arts” and to include in his investigation not only Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union but also—significantly—Soviet-occupied East Germany. Stating in his introduction that art in Nazi Germany was “the only twentieth-century art that was subjected to the full measure of totalitarian direction over a sizable stretch of time and then suddenly delivered from it,”26 he asserted that the Soviet Union and its satellites still suffered under such oppression. The early Cold War rhetoric is pervasive, and he uses the critique of Nazi Germany first as a veiled and then as a direct criticism of the Soviet Union, but he then redirects his critique toward the McCarthyites, warning that their aggressive campaign against communism veered dangerously closely to that of ruthless dictators. Like Rave, Lehmann-Haupt may have been speaking only to his contemporaries, but as a pioneer in documenting the history of art in Nazi Germany, his work became a standard resource for historical accounts thereafter. Lehmann-Haupt establishes an intentionalist framework by dedicating an entire chapter to Hitler as an artist, concluding by contrasting Roosevelt’s love for planting trees with Hitler’s desire to cut them down.27 In a chapter titled “The Organization of Total Control,” he relies heavily on Rave, hoping to demonstrate— with few details on administrative operations—that the “organization created by Hitler and the men around him is a perfect model of total absorption of the entire art life of a great country into the fabric of the state.”28 Mentioning the Reich Cul-

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ture Chambers along with other organizations that had direct involvement with the arts (such as the Rosenberg Bureau, the DAF, and the Education Ministry), Lehmann-Haupt simply generalizes that “a detailed listing of all organizations concerned with art would include nearly every office of party and state.”29 His coverage of “operation ‘degenerate art’ ” compares the looting of galleries and museums and the resale of art with “the same cold-blooded calculation with which [the Nazis] utilized the gold fillings from the teeth and the ashes from the bones of their gas-chamber victims.”30 His immediate agenda, however, comes through clearly when he expresses his disillusionment with the failure of the Western occupying forces to challenge the totalitarian encroachments of the Soviets, an exposé based very much on his direct experiences with OMGUS. He expounds upon how much of the Nazi rhetoric and strategies could be emulated and intensified in the hands of Dymshits and his successors, concluding that “the art policies of Government and Party in the Republic of East Germany are significant not only because they show such striking similarities to the Nazi policies but also because they are a faithful reflection of the art policies of the U.S.S.R.”31 Around the same time, Werner Haftmann firmly established the totalitarian paradigm within the art history canon in his influential textbook Painting in the Twentieth Century (1960, originally published in 1954 as Malerei im 20. Jahrhundert). A section on “The Assault of Totalitarianism” equates the “official art” of Italian Fascism, Nazism, and Leninist-Stalinist Bolshevism with assaults on human freedom, concluding that neither Nazi Germany nor the Soviet Union ever produced an artist or artwork of any value.32 While he duly lambastes the Soviet assault on artistic freedom, he reserves the lion’s share of his rage for the more evil of these evil twins: “The most vicious and ignoble attack on the freedom of creative man was perpetrated in totalitarian Germany,” where racial arguments touted the elevation of “the Nordic superman, that monstrous emanation of Wagner,” and Hitler ably steered the campaign against modern art. Goebbels contributed by “regimenting all artists and placing them under direct party orders,” and “police were authorized to keep recalcitrants in line.”33 Haftmann’s position as an organizer of the modernist documenta exhibition of 1955, a direct response to the East German exhibits of the preceding years, explains his anti-Soviet stance, but his passionate repudiation of the Nazis may have arisen from more complex roots. Haftmann had contributed to Kunst der Nation, the short-lived journal produced by the advocates of modernism in the first two years of the Nazi regime,34 but he went on to secure a fellowship in the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence after it had been purged of non-Nazis and remained there until entering the German army in 1940, where he served as a translator and worked in art preservation.35 Paying homage to both Rave and Lehmann-Haupt, Franz Roh took on the task of further exposing the aggressive policies of seizure and suppression surrounding the Degenerate Art phenomenon in his 1962 book, “Degenerate” Art: Art Barbarism

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in the Third Reich (“Entartete” Kunst: Kunstbarbarei im Dritten Reich). Concerned with more global questions about the acceptance of modern art and the social function of artists, Roh nevertheless made it clear that he, too, was struck by the similarities between Nazi and Soviet treatment of art: “It is strange how—although they see themselves as arch-enemies—the National Socialists and Bolshevists were artistically led astray together, like brothers, arm in arm.”36 In demonstrating the totalitarian nature of Nazi control, Roh’s account sticks very closely to that of Rave, framing the establishment of the Reich Culture Chambers as Goebbels’s “decisive step to bring all artists under control” and describing the state’s ability to “determine whom it considered at all worthy to produce,” leaving “all others to go hungry.”37 In reiterating Rave’s account of the seizure and destruction of modern art, however, he draws new attention to the profitable operation of auctioning works, the plundering of treasures in the occupied territories, and the ban on art criticism.38 With regard to Hitler’s role in art policy, Roh simply takes at face value Goebbels’s claims of fulfilling the Führer’s will, concluding that, “once the Führer personally expressed his artistic wisdom, partly in [Mein Kampf] and partly in later speeches, every last contradiction disappeared among his entourage, and every insignificant writer aggressively rose to the order.”39 These early accounts cannot be fully understood without taking into consideration the authors’ agendas. Lehmann-Haupt was at the forefront of the Cold War in Germany’s art community, whereas Rave arguably struggled with dilemmas. He had been involved in the campaign against modernism and had at the very least an interest in contending that totalitarian aggression had hindered him from standing up for modern art and artists, yet he also panicked at the prospect of history repeating itself under Soviet influence. Roh found himself caught in other types of dilemmas, one involving his own dramatic encounters in the Third Reich and the other hinging upon his early position on modernism. Roh was considered after the war to have been an inner emigrant. He had been arrested by the SA in March 1933, detained at Dachau, and released after three months. He then became a target of the Fighting League for German Culture, most likely because he coedited a book on photography that featured a photomontage by the Soviet photographer El Lissitsky on the cover, which made him a “cultural Bolshevist” by association. Six years later, Roh applied for membership in the Reich Literature Chamber and was deemed politically unobjectionable. He accepted a commission to provide a screenplay for a documentary film, conducted research, and claimed to have worked on a book about the “misunderstood German genius,” for which “the Propaganda Ministry had already set aside the paper allotment” in 1943 (this was presumably the manuscript that became his well-known Der verkannte Künstler [The Misunderstood Artist], published in 1948 and assumed to have been written secretly during the Nazi years).40 He harbored an aesthetic dilemma as well, as I will discuss in the next chapter, and may have at the very least struggled with the

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fact that he rejected expressionism early on and then saw it become the target of an ideological witch hunt, not once but twice. This early preoccupation with the fate of “degenerate” painting and sculpture was understandable given the frantic seizure, sale, and relocation of works that so consumed Allied art experts and their German colleagues in the late 1940s and 1950s. A special exhibition in 1962 commemorating twenty-five years since the notorious Degenerate Art display revealed some still-festering wounds. Curated by a committee that included Hanfstaengl, Rave, and Roh, as well as an honorary committee that included Dix, Kokoschka, Schmidt-Rottluff, and many more, the exhibition used the very same site as the Great German Art Exhibition, the former House of German Art in Munich (renamed after the war as, simply, the House of Art), and reassembled representative defamed works, displaying them this time in a respectful fashion. In acquiring the works for loan, however, the curators found it “especially painful” to discover that many of the current owners had acquired them cheaply (and illegally) but now refused to transport them to Munich because of the high value the works had accrued.41 C HA L L E N G E S T O T O TA L I TA R IA N I SM A N D I N T E N T IO NA L I SM

In the early 1960s, the Cold War was reaching a fever pitch with the Cuban Missile Crisis and the building of the Berlin Wall, and at the same time the Eichmann trial was capturing the world’s attention. Concurrently, Joseph Wulf ’s pioneer archival work and multiple volumes of published documents began to reveal a far more complex picture of cultural operations in the Third Reich as well as unwelcome details about reinstated leaders in West German cultural life.42 Like many others already discussed, Wulf could hardly be considered an unbiased observer, but for very different reasons. He was a Polish Jew who escaped from the death marches and devoted the rest of his life to documenting Nazi atrocities, yet his contributions as a historian of the Holocaust remained grossly underacknowledged during his lifetime.43 In his three volumes of published documents devoted to the visual and performing arts in the Third Reich (one on visual arts, one on music, and one on theater and film), Wulf organizes his material in a way that underscores a totalitarian framework. The three volumes on the arts are organized almost identically, each consisting of a section showing how the medium in question was “steered” (gesteuert), a section on “acceptable” (arteigen) forms, and a section on “unacceptable” (artfremd) forms, deliberately employing the National Socialist terminology in the headings. Yet Wulf is understandably most concerned with highlighting the antisemitic foundations of Nazi culture. His introduction to the volume on music focuses exclusively on Wagner’s antisemitism and its continuous development. The theater and film volume opens with the assertion that the antisemitic films Jew

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Süss, The Rothschilds, and The Eternal Jew were timed to prepare the population for the Final Solution, and he could personally attest to their effectiveness.44 Wulf, like the other authors, made no attempt to temper his rage against the barbarity and insanity he had witnessed firsthand, nor did he shy away from linking Hitler with Stalin, attributing to both the ability to harness conservative art to praise the achievements of the “executioners.”45 In the brief introductions to these volumes, he focuses on Hitler’s artistic aspirations, arrogance, and inhumanity, postulating that “he must have derived the same enjoyment from the haphazard juxtaposition of painting in the Degenerate Art exhibition as from watching the film of humans [i.e., those convicted in the plot to assassinate him] hanging from meathooks in Plötzensee, which he viewed with great relish.” Wulf also drew comparisons between Nazi art and socialist realism, which he deems “twins that do not come from the same mother but thrive on the same breeding ground.”46 Foremost, Wulf warned his readers that his material would reveal contemporaries, many of them still alive and active, expressing themselves in terms one would find unpalatable. But he also hoped that the crassness of their statements was a result of their having had to succumb to totalitarian oppression that forced them to utter these sentiments against their will: “How could later historians otherwise reconstruct an accurate picture of the fear and coercion operating in a totalitarian state?”47 The organization of each of Wulf ’s volumes hardly serves to weave a cohesive narrative of Nazi policy or aesthetics, but the impact of gathering and publishing previously unknown evidence that offered the first glimpse into the inner workings of cultural policy and propaganda was profound and often shocking. An uncharitable review of the volumes acknowledged the importance of the overall undertaking but dwelled on pointing out minor factual errors in Wulf ’s headings, brief commentaries, and footnotes.48 Such a reaction showed how Wulf ’s publications proved to be tragically ill-timed. As a non-German, Wulf had free access to the American-run Berlin Document Center as well as to materials he had brought from Poland,49 placing him in an exclusive position to reveal early on—too early for some—how deeply the renazification of West Germany had taken root, and not only in the cultural sphere. Wulf ’s larger project—to repurpose the Wannsee Villa, the very site of the deliberations for the Final Solution, as a collection center for documenting the annihilation of European Jewry—came to naught. Frustrated by these defeats, penniless, mourning the recent death of his wife, and convinced that no one was interested in the Third Reich anymore, Wulf ended his life in 1974.50 At the same time that Wulf ’s volumes on culture appeared, George Mosse was poring over the Wiener Library collection and taking a very different approach to compiling and publishing documents on Nazi culture. Mosse’s Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich (1966) conceives of “culture” in a much broader anthropological sense, drawing on popular literature and journalism in order to capture the essence of everyday life in the Third Reich and

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encompassing such areas as religion, education, science, and citizenship. For Mosse, as for Wulf and others, the Third Reich was a totalitarian state where “the Nazi party, like the spider in its web, controlled all the lifelines of the nation”; “all domestic literary and artistic output was rigidly controlled”; and Hitler “dominated the Third Reich in every phase of its activities.”51 Yet, unlike the totalitarian state à la Stalin that stifled individuals with acts of terror, this totalitarian state thrived on a population—the same population that Mosse had known before fleeing—that longed for a sense of belonging and was positively inclined to sacrifice individualism and free will. Indeed, Mosse, a German Jewish heir to a publishing empire, who fled to England and then to the United States, attests to witnessing firsthand the powerful persuasiveness of the völkisch ideal when he observed Nazi gatherings.52 Mosse revealed more about the cultural aspirations of Nazi ideals than the far more complex realities, but at the same time his emphasis on the broad acceptance of National Socialism was very much ahead of its time. Not only did he embrace a holistic concept of culture that more readily conforms to more recently adopted frameworks for cultural history, but he also offered evidence for the ways in which ritual, respectability, and belonging could situate the Nazi phenomenon not as a historical aberration arising from power-hungry forces but rather as a logical outgrowth of tensions in the preceding decades felt by a population haunted by the desire for a unified Volksgemeinschaft.53 For historians of the arts, this notion would remain difficult to fathom, as most of them were still deeply committed to the belief that artists had been immune to such banalities and had suffered at the hands of Nazi aggression instead of acknowledging how artists, too, may have seen themselves as serving the “greater good” of the Volk. Nazi Culture continues to be reissued and consulted as an introduction to the subject, although its applicability to the history of the visual and performing arts proved to be limited, and its overall observations have in some ways not yet been fully appreciated. Wulf ’s work had a far more immediate impact by furnishing the next generation of European and American cultural historians with access to otherwise inaccessible documentation on cultural operations. Yet this access had its downside as well. Obviously, as with any edited collection, the selection of documents represents the collectors’ subjectivity and opens up a myriad of questions about those items that were not chosen for reproduction. Yet even more problematic is the very nature of the documents themselves and their penchant for hyperbole. Although it may seem reasonable in most circumstances to let the documents speak for themselves, the pronouncements of Nazi leaders and the statements of the Nazi press need to be filtered through the lens of their wish to display a level of power and control that in reality may have been more elusive than their words convey. Returning to Allen’s notion of the “boast of the dictator,” speeches and other forms of propaganda—just like the high-profile events that

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punctuated Nazi cultural history—cannot simply be taken at face value. They need to be considered as potentially articulating mere goals rather than documenting true achievements. Wulf ’s documents nevertheless had the potential to offer a wealth of new insights for anyone wishing to pursue a more careful synthesis and interpretation of their contents. The first thorough historical examination of Nazi cultural policy emanated from the pen of a younger West German literature scholar who carried none of the emotional baggage of earlier chroniclers. Hildegard Brenner, born in 1927, received her doctorate in 1952 with a thesis on Hölderlin and later was known for her work on GDR literature. Her thorough and carefully researched study Art Policy of National Socialism (Die Kunstpolitik des Nationalsozialismus, 1963) can still be regarded as a model for probing the genesis of Nazi cultural policy without succumbing to prevailing Cold War interpretations. Brenner’s most novel insights came from her analysis of documentary evidence, revealing the competitive nature of Nazi cultural administration and the gulf between rhetoric and reality. Perhaps her greatest contribution was her close investigation of the origins of the Reich Culture Chambers. Calling attention to economic motives, she laid bare the competition among Goebbels, Rosenberg, and Ley and opened the door for exploring the fundamental contradictions in Nazi cultural policy: contradictions “between practice and ideology, reality and program—a conflict reflected in a continuous rain of slogans, polemics, etc.”54 Her exposé on the debate over modernism (which I discuss in chapter 5) shed further light on inconsistencies and disclosed turf battles that persisted behind the scenes for the duration of the Third Reich. Beyond her thorough examination and explosive revelations about the visual arts, however, Brenner was unable to come to such well-informed judgments with regard to the other arts and media. Marking the Degenerate Art exhibition as the end of a long ordeal that began in Weimar in 1930, she postulated merely that the “cleansing” of other arts had been accomplished much earlier and with far less resistance.55 Brenner’s occasional nods to totalitarian interpretations are understandable given her dependence on Rave’s account and the deeply entrenched Cold War assumptions she was only beginning to challenge. Similarly, she is not entirely immune to the draw of an intentionalist interpretation, perhaps because Hitler’s final arbitration on the visual arts in 1934, although evasive, gave the impression that he operated on a divide-and-conquer strategy. His pronouncement, however, was the exception rather than the rule, arising as a result of the negative publicity the Goebbels-Rosenberg rivalry had attracted and the need to restore an image of solidarity and harmony. These quibbles aside, Brenner’s insights could have contributed to larger historical debates on the totalitarian model, but stronger forces were at play in the arts fields that derailed cultural history from such critical inquiries. Brenner’s work was widely cited, but these salient points were often downplayed.

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A similar fate awaited the work of American art historian Barbara Miller Lane. Like Brenner, she took steps early on to question assumptions about the uniqueness of the Nazi period, the single-minded promotion of neoclassical architecture and suppression of modernism, and the totalitarian nature of arts administration. Miller Lane’s message, however, proved to be as premature as Brenner’s, as historians of architecture continued to have difficulty abandoning the myth of Hitler’s micromanagerial imposition of neoclassical style. At first blush, it would seem that architecture was better suited as an ideal testing ground for totalitarian subjugation than any other art form, since building projects by their very nature are subject to various approval processes, and since Hitler had aspired to become an architect and was known to have paid close attention to the design of certain projects. Yet even though an architect cannot even begin to execute his ideas without the approval and financial backing of a patron, patronage can come from an individual, a private firm, a religious or other community-supported organization, or a branch of the government, and the existing multiplicity of sources for building commissions could not be fully harnessed, or gleichgeschaltet, even in a state such as the Third Reich, and surely not within its relatively limited life span. Additionally, building projects take time to execute, such that a project conceived in the Weimar Republic may not have been fully completed until the mid-1930s, and anyone would have been hard pressed to halt construction of a heavily financed undertaking merely on the basis of an ideological or aesthetic whim or to tear down functional structures because of an “offending” style. In Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918–1945 (1968), Miller Lane saw the need to reach back beyond 1933 to gain a full understanding of architectural activity under Hitler. In the book, she unfolds the complicated story of the Bauhaus during the Weimar years, showing that its defamation was largely the work of local right-wing radicals in its first location in Thuringia; that even Rosenberg and the Fighting League initially approved of its architectural innovations, changing course only after observing Schultze-Naumburg’s effectiveness as a persuasive speaker; and that the ultimate closure of the Bauhaus was as much the result of economics as politics. She also demonstrates that Bauhaus architects did not cease and desist by any means after 1933: architects of the new style—Gropius among them—pitched projects directly to Goebbels through 1934, emphasizing the “Germanness” and “nationalism” of their work. Goebbels pursued a moderate course, excluding the leadership of the Fighting League from occupying any influential positions and vaguely mandating “proper architectural views” without outlining specifics. This allowed any “Aryan” architects to join the Visual Arts Chamber regardless of their style, including Mies van der Rohe. The Nazi functionaries who commissioned the largest building projects each communicated their own personal preference. Goering, as head of the Air Ministry, authorized modern styles, while Hitler’s preference for neoclassicism made its mark in the

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limited number of projects he saw to fruition, which combined “modernity with neoclassicism.”56 Miller Lane’s final observations on Nazi architecture are perhaps her most important, and they echo Brenner’s conclusions that pointed to the gap between myth and reality. In architecture, this gap shows up in the tremendous fanfare and ceremony surrounding many building projects, both finished and unfinished, that gave the impression of a larger nation-building initiative than what really existed. Pointing to the similarity between Nazi architecture and other contemporary international trends, she concludes that while many radical architects were stopped in their tracks professionally, “the Nazi regime [did not] go very far along the road toward establishing ‘totalitarian’ control of architectural style”; instead, she contended that “what differentiates the development of Nazi architecture from the rest of European architectural history is the degree of ideological significance attached to it by the Nazi leaders and the intensity of the political propaganda which surrounded it.”57 A few works that appeared after Miller Lane’s book, such as Charles Jencks’s comparative study of modern architecture,58 took her observations to heart, but those focusing solely on Nazi architecture struggled to cast their view beyond Hitler’s monumental neoclassical structures and designs. In the meantime, other studies were chipping away at totalitarian and intentionalist assumptions with more careful assessments of the degree of influence of key figures, but these works remained under the radar. Brenner and Miller Lane certainly succeeded in stressing the importance of considering the rivalries among Goebbels, Rosenberg, and other key leaders (e.g., Ley and Rust) rather than assuming Hitler’s cultural omnipotence, but three significant studies by Herbert Rothfeder (1963), Reinhard Bollmus (1970), and Michael Kater (1974) shed even more light on these competing forces, additionally factoring in the cultural initiatives of the SS and providing more evidence of the decentralization of cultural administration. Above all, their assessments showed that prior assumptions had overestimated the influence of Alfred Rosenberg. While Rosenberg had succeeded in using his press outlets for slanderous diatribe that could seriously damage individual careers, his influence slackened after 1933. The Rosenberg Bureau had no clear mandate, was minimally staffed, and could count as its central agency only a short-lived theater subscription organization. Those who labored under Rosenberg mainly engaged in writing tedious ideological critiques of creative works that were then forwarded to party-sponsored educational and cultural programs. Even during the war, when Rosenberg amassed his greatest influence in organizing plundering actions, he had to compete with Himmler’s more firmly established operations.59 Lacking this kind of nuanced background, however, numerous cultural histories persisted in either regarding these power struggles as Hitler’s preconceived divide-and-conquer strategy or overestimating Rosenberg’s power, effectively giving more weight to the supposition that ideology was driving cultural policy.

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As general historians increasingly challenged and ultimately rejected totalitarian and intentionalist interpretations, arts scholars could have been ahead of the curve had they taken the insights of Brenner, Miller Lane, and the others to their next logical steps. They could have considered the research on auxiliary organizations that revealed the decentralization of cultural administration; taken Brenner’s path by acknowledging and analyzing the gap between rhetoric and practice; or pursued Miller Lane’s lead by looking at the type of rhetoric and pageantry surrounding architectural projects that were aimed at promoting the Volksgemeinschaft ideal. Awareness of these publicity tactics could have revealed parallels in other arts, where public relations were employed to bill any cultural achievements as “purely German” accomplishments nurtured by the new state. Instead, attention was diverted by two important developments in the late 1960s: Albert Speer’s release from prison and the activism of West German students who vehemently rejected the reticence of their parents’ generation with respect to the Nazi past. Released from Spandau prison in 1966, Speer published his memoirs in German in 1969 and in English shortly thereafter, offering an irresistible and unprecedented close-up view of the workings of Hitler’s inner circle as well as the Führer’s idiosyncrasies. Speer also made himself readily available to just about anyone who wished to interview him and even served as a close consultant for the next major study on Nazi architecture, Robert Taylor’s The Word in Stone (1974), reading through the entire manuscript before its publication.60 Thus, it is not surprising that Taylor portrays Speer as someone who “was himself not ‘Nazi’ in any narrow or doctrinaire sense” but instead harbored “a strong ambition, a deep nationalism, and a thorough (but not unusual) political naïveté.”61 Given the overall excitement generated by Speer’s capacity to offer details about Hitler, Taylor’s presentation took the not unexpected turn toward focusing on the Führer and other major figures to try to understand the nature of Nazi architecture, poring over contemporary writings and offering detailed descriptions of government-commissioned building projects. Claiming to pick up where Miller Lane left off (since she “does not, in fact, go very far into ‘Nazi’ architecture itself ”62), Taylor could find no consistent Nazi architectural program or preferred taste, but he searched nonetheless, concluding that Hitler was driven by an idea of “community architecture,” exemplified by the Olympic Stadium, the Nuremberg Party Rally Grounds, the Autobahn, the Thingspiel amphitheaters, and remodeled public spaces. However, instead of analyzing the gulf between theory and practice, Taylor seemed to get caught up in the vagueness and inconsistencies he observed. Subsequent studies would continue this tendency toward accepting an intentionalist interpretation, focusing increasingly on government commissions and Hitler’s role in their construction and seeming to validate neoclassicism as the architectural realization of the totalitarian ideal. The concentration on Hitler’s architectural aspirations increased with a spate of document-based publications on his involvement in city

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planning and the memoirs of another of Hitler’s architects, Hermann Giesler.63 This influenced broader areas of inquiry: for example, Jochen Thies built an entire thesis around linking Hitler’s plans for global domination with his architectural vision, casting the latter as “politics through a different medium” that paralleled his grandiose military objectives.64 Concurrently, a younger generation of arts scholars, caught up in the New Left challenges to theories of totalitarianism and gravitating toward Marxist-inspired theories of Fascism, were drawing their inspiration from what they understood to be Adorno and Horkheimer’s mandate to reform education by counteracting the authoritarian impulses that brought the Nazis to power and threatened to persist in the Federal Republic. But just as Marcuse fretted over American students’ gross misinterpretation of his findings, many young activists in Germany mastered only a superficial understanding of the Frankfurt School’s methodology and the full implications of Marxist theories of Fascism. Instead, their use of the term “Fascism” took on multiple and sometimes conflicting meanings, often devolving into a mere epithet that could be hurled at any conceivable opposing view and even against other activist groups.65 In 1974, a group of young West German art historians took the bold step of mounting an exhibition of Nazi art and architecture in Frankfurt, Kunst im 3. Reich: Dokumente der Unterwerfung (Art in the Third Reich: Documents of Repression). Adopting a Marxist orientation, they were the true pioneers in forcing a reckoning with art that had been largely ignored as an embarrassment and swept under the rug in the prevailing spirit of the Zero Hour. The exhibition sparked controversy even before it opened, however, with protests by victims of Nazism (who shouted down the organizers as “leftist Fascists”) and threats of boycotts. Some who attended—greeted at the entrance with Horkheimer’s admonition, “Whoever refuses to speak about capitalism must also remain silent about Fascism”—found the presentation overly dogmatic. Critics regarded the interspersed commentaries that stressed the Nazi exploitation of the masses to have little connection to the works on display and even compared the curators’ tactics to those found in the Degenerate Art exhibition. But the most common concern was that the curators blindly ignored similarities between Nazi art and the socialist realism of the Soviet Union and East Germany and instead assumed a reductionist, anti-totalitarian, anti-capitalist position.66 By explicitly limiting their presentation of architecture to government commissions (including the Autobahn), and painting and sculpture to works from the Great German Art exhibitions, the curators not only provided a narrow glimpse of the Nazi years but also set themselves up to take Nazi hyperbole literally. The text of the exhibition catalog, which also opened with Horkheimer’s dictum and was interspersed with quotes from Brecht and Engels,67 offered only limited analysis of capitalist exploitation, first in a brief assessment of how the private sector profited from massive building projects, and then in a study showing that the Nazi pro-

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grams Beauty of Work and Strength through Joy did little to improve workers’ pay and rights.68 Apart from this, most of the contributions on architecture focused on the style, scale, and function of official buildings. In the case of the Nuremberg Party Rally Grounds, for example, the curators asserted simply: “The entire complex in its construction exceeds the Fascist goal of mass hypnosis by making the mass experience a necessary component of the hegemonic control of the oppressed people.”69 The treatment of painting and sculpture essentially drew black-andwhite aesthetic distinctions between “degenerate” art and “official” art, in effect taking Nazi rhetoric at its word. Other analyses in the catalog quote extensively from contemporary critics who praised works for upholding the ideals of race and nation, but they rely on these pronouncements as tools for analyzing racist and nationalist content rather than seeing them as rhetorical strategies for endorsing existing artistic trends. Alluding to the temper of 1970s student protests by revealing that many Nazi-era sculptors were able to continue their careers in West Germany, one essay concludes that sculpture was part of a political force that “guaranteed the continuation of capitalism” but fails to pursue this argument toward any satisfying conclusions.70 Berthold Hinz, who collaborated on the exhibition and published full-scale works on Nazi art in German and English thereafter, made a more concerted effort to apply a Marxist analysis of Fascism but still could not completely avoid inconsistencies. Sharpening his focus during the five-year respite between the exhibition in 1974 and the appearance of his book in English in 1979, Hinz evolved from merely renouncing the totalitarian concept by name (in the form of a critique of Haftmann71) to explaining to his critics that he would not draw comparisons to Soviet painting because the similarities in manner of presentation and symbolism were outweighed by the differences in subject matter (Soviet paintings featured male truck drivers and female tractor drivers, whereas Nazi art depicted male farmers and female nudes).72 Furthermore, he contends, official Nazi undertakings such as the annual Great German Art exhibitions were aimed at selling the works on display to bourgeois patrons (rather than displaying them for their own sake, as, he asserts, had been the practice with modern art in the Weimar era), and the few token gestures to include workers among their targeted consumers paled in comparison to the more earnest efforts of the Soviet Proletkult and Italian Fascist Dopolavoro programs. Aside from this, he frames the Nazi attacks on modern art as a typical Fascist tactic of pitting rival artists and organizations against each other,73 but he essentially adopts a totalitarian model by designating the Reich Culture Chambers as “highly effective instruments of control and intimidation” that had “destroyed, both in fact and in the consciousness of their members, any trace and memory of union organizational methods and bargaining power.”74 The culmination of antimodernist attacks, the Degenerate Art exhibition, “like the war crimes, the concentration camps, and the murder of the Jews, still comes to people’s minds the world over

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when they think of German fascism.”75 But the injustices did not end there, Hinz asserts, making a point of distinguishing between the Western Allies’ failure to rescind the 1938 Law on Confiscation of Products of Degenerate Art, thus hindering the return of seized artworks to their rightful owners, in contrast to the Soviets’ policy of reconfiscation and return.76 Hinz was on shakier ground in proposing that the Nazis channeled all their assaults toward socialists, weakening this contention by giving evidence of similar attacks on capitalist support of modernist “trash” and consumerism77 but also minimizing the venomous attacks against “Jewish capital” that formed the basis of Nazi antisemitism. Only with regard to architecture does he suggest that the grand building plans and military investments exploited labor while ignoring workers’ basic needs for housing.78 Hinz remained a key player in later projects comparing National Socialist art policy to that of other Fascist regimes (e.g., those of Italy and Spain). These yielded important observations about the gulfs between theory and practice, the power of rhetoric, and the importance of pageantry, even if they conspicuously excluded the Soviet Union from any comparisons.79 However, weaknesses in Hinz’s logic did not go unnoticed, and they prompted responses both from those who questioned his analysis of the art and from those who opposed his politics. A shocking example of the latter came from one of the Third Reich’s most powerful art critics, Robert Scholz. Beyond his regular contributions to the Völkischer Beobachter, he organized exhibits in his capacity serving the Rosenberg Bureau, edited the journal Kunst im Deutschen Reich from 1937, and led the Special Staff Visual Arts (Sonderstab Bildende Kunst) within the Rosenberg Task Force during the war.80 In an expensively produced publication titled simply Architecture and Visual Arts 1933–1945 (Architektur und bildende Kunst 1933–1945, 1977), Scholz not only attacked the anti-Fascist position but also brazenly defended the art produced in the Third Reich. Responding to what he maligned as “pseudoscientific investigations” of “a new generation who had not experienced these times” that posed a “tendentious, distorted picture of the art of this epoch,” Scholz wished to rescue this art from the charge that it was merely serving political ends and, instead, place it within a longer trend toward conservatism and realism.81 Scholz’s language does not stray very far from that of the Degenerate Art curators, railing against “snobbism,” bourgeois elitism, modern decadence, mental and spiritual bankruptcy, Bolshevism, “oriental abstract art,” and art-for-art’s sake and citing the need for art that would “serve an idea of community.” Ironically, these familiar Nazi-tinged arguments called attention to an existing strain of socialist sentiment in National Socialist art criticism that campaigned to bring art back to the people. Scholz also cites the economic suffering of artists, art dealers, and architects that the Weimar government failed to address and that the Nazis at least made gestures to alleviate.82 Even more controversial was the series of articles Léon Krier published starting in the late 1970s. Known for his polemics against modern architecture, Krier took

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a two-pronged approach of renouncing modernism as a product of the militaryindustrial complex while making an ardent appeal to acknowledge Speer’s value as an artist.83 He expanded these articles into a controversial publication on Speer’s architectural projects from 1932 to 1942, the 2013 reissue of which shocked his critics once again.84 Turning the spotlight on what he deemed to be the destruction of German culture by the Marshall Plan, Krier attacked “the moral depravity of a profession which, on the one hand, claims against all odds that modernist architecture is better than it looks, and, on the other, that Nazi architecture is profoundly bad, however good it may look.”85 He further condemned the destruction of “beautiful” edifices built in the Third Reich as an indication “that industrial modernism, as the latest form of fanatical moralism, has turned culture itself into its own and most bitter enemy,” equating “ignorant anti-Nazism (and anti-fascism)” with Nazi antisemitism.86 However, because of his strident tone and provocative suggestions, some of his more useful observations went unnoticed. He pointed out that the condemnation of neoclassical architecture actually demonstrates the power of Nazi rhetoric to claim the style exclusively as its own: “Nazi propaganda was in fact so successful that our understanding of that period is coloured by its images and slogans to this day, whether positively or negatively, and whether we like it or not.”87 Scholz and Krier, despite their divergent agendas, dared to suggest that many of the fundamental features of Nazi cultural policy lived on in the postwar worlds created by the victors who crushed the regime. Scholz drew attention to the underlying socialist motives of populism and mass appeal common to both Third Reich and Soviet art, while Krier juxtaposed the collusion between industry and government in the Third Reich with that in postwar America, a collusion that was flourishing thanks to the Marshall Plan and the arms race. Even more controversial was their revisionist call for a qualitative reassessment of “Nazi art” and “Nazi architecture.” Not surprisingly, their messages fell on deaf ears, owing in no small part to the polemical tone they embraced and the taboos they violated. F I L M S T U D I E S : E C O N OM IC S O R I D E O L O G Y ?

For at least three decades following the war, considerations of Nazi cultural history focused almost exclusively on art and architecture, for reasons already suggested: the lasting effects of the seizure of artworks and the preoccupation with sorting out ownership issues engaged armies of art historians and curators, while the politics of preserving or destroying Nazi buildings and the emergence of Albert Speer kept the interest in architecture alive. Film, which had received only limited attention in the 1940s and 1950s by three émigrés (Siegfried Kracauer, H. H. Wollenberg, and Lotte Eisner), soon became the next field clamoring for attention. This was because popular films from the Third Reich were readily accessible on

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German television, and film studies were just starting to emerge as a recognized area of scholarship as the medium was slowly rising to the status of being worthy of serious cultural analysis. Yet with little else to fall back on, film scholars initially turned to Kracauer and inherited his presumptions that all films produced in the Third Reich were essentially propaganda. Beyond that, they tended to look to totalitarian and intentionalist models to maintain that the film industry was aggressively gleichgeschaltet and that it was Goebbels—rather than Hitler—who closely oversaw and micromanaged every aspect of film production. Erwin Leiser opened his 1968 study with the pronouncement, “the totalitarian system’s abuse of the mass media demonstrates just how necessary is the democratic social structure and the right to freedom of information which that system opposes.”88 His account placed control over the industry firmly in the hands of Goebbels, conceding that the Gleichschaltung was not complete until 1942 but also relying on questionable sources, such as Veit Harlan’s description of Goebbels as an “omnipresent, demonic dictator of film.”89 David Stewart Hull focused even more attention on Goebbels, crediting him with recognizing the power of film for political propaganda and carrying out a calculated plan to commandeer the medium toward advancing the Nazi worldview.90 Yet while portraying forceful government measures that led to the industry’s inevitable capitulation and detecting the hand of Goebbels in every aspect of the entire operation, Hull also hinted at weaknesses in the system, pointing to unanswered questions about “Jewish films” that won Goebbels’s admiration—such as A Song Goes Round the World (Ein Lied geht um die Welt, 1933) and a film based on a story by Stefan Zweig that was one of the greatest successes of 1933—as well as the fact that prohibitions on screening films with Jewish, and especially émigré, actors were brazenly ignored.91 He further conceded that the ban on criticism had little effect, as critics refused to limit themselves to mere descriptions of creative ventures. He similarly hinted at the failures of a film censorship law “such as had never been seen in any country outside Soviet Russia” that met with defiance as the industry generally ignored the “advice” of the censoring official, the Reichsfilmdramaturg, and took advantage of various loopholes.92 Gerd Albrecht took a much more scientific approach, outlining a systematic sociological methodology to “clarify the structural and functional interactions between the responsible political authorities and the major film creators, reveal how the resulting varieties of films—including their titles, ratings, and censoring—can be regarded as means for political leadership, and account for how the distribution of these films made them effective.”93 Albrecht’s summary of Nazi film policy, however, relies heavily on official documentation, such as Goebbels’s speeches and diary entries, thereby running the risk of taking Goebbels’s bravado of total control at face value without adequately considering the actual effectiveness of the measures.94 Albrecht also adhered to Kracauer’s conviction that all films were propaganda films, even when their content did not make it immediately obvious.95

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In these early studies, however, it was difficult to overlook that the relatively new film industry had promised to be a tremendous source of revenue in the 1930s and, because earlier mismanagement and economic strains had pushed it to the brink of ruin, that it had been in need of government aid. Wollenberg had already shown that, on many occasions in the 1920s, the government assumed large shares of the film industry in order to make it soluble. In 1972, M. S. Phillips produced a thorough examination of the economic history of German film, leading to very different conclusions with regard to Nazi totalitarian aims. Phillips asserted that the government of the Third Reich “did not aim at total state control of the German Film Industry. The industry was finally nationalized only in 1942 under the special circumstances of war. In 1933 state control was neither economically desirable nor politically feasible.”96 This was not for lack of trying, Phillips proposed, but since the industry was international and driven by public taste, the regime sought to develop a working relationship with it rather than pursuing aggressive means to control it. Phillips revealed some important pre-Nazi precedents, including the interest among the military (specifically Ludendorff ) in the persuasive powers of film, the financial role of Hugenberg in the early history of the industry, economic struggles prior to 1933, the blow to the export market after the introduction of sound film, the 1931 measures to censor any films that went against “state interests,” and the pre-Hitler establishment of Prädikate, a ratings system that assessed the educational merit of films and correspondingly rewarded them with tax subsidies.97 Phillips further suggested: “Apart from the fact that [nationalization of the film industry] was repudiated on principle by Nazi ideology, total state control was not expedient.”98 Thus, film companies welcomed the formation of the Film Credit Bank (Filmkreditbank) and the Film Chamber, as they hoped these institutions would help them overthrow economic exploitation at the hands of distribution firms, and the technicians’ union offered no resistance to being absorbed into the NSBO. It was also telling that, unlike some of the other chambers, which had celebrities at their helms, the Film Chamber’s leadership consisted of lawyers and economists, who functioned “purely as administrators” without any interest in using film for propaganda.99 As censorship guidelines were left intentionally vague, filmmakers chose to concentrate their efforts on innocent escapist themes—to avert censorship—and on musicals that could be easily exported. Phillips estimated that no more than 10 percent of films were commissioned by the Propaganda Ministry (Staatsaufträge), and not even all of those were necessarily propaganda films.100 The reorganization of UFA and Tobis studios—which most studies regarded as the nationalization of the industry—was nothing of the sort, according to Phillips, but rather was intended to offset the decline in export, the rise in production costs, and competition from American films showing in Germany. Financial wizard Max Winkler negotiated with UFA, Tobis, and several smaller

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companies to sell their shares to the state and create a trust company to administer their assets, designating the studios as “state administered” (staatsmittelbar) rather than “state owned.”101 The complete state takeover came in 1942, in the middle of the war, with the aim of increasing film production and dominating the European market. It consolidated authority in existing structures to increase productivity, primarily of entertainment films, but Phillips maintains that Goebbels exercised no influence in the operation, simply referring to himself as the “patron” (Schirmherr) of German film and abandoning any intentions of using feature films for propaganda purposes.102 Phillips concludes by noting the strong similarities between the use of the film industry for propaganda in both world wars.103 It would seem that film offered the greatest potential for Marxist historians to demonstrate the collusion of capitalists with Nazi cultural administrators, and a few studies in the 1970s did expose Goebbels’s collaboration with capitalist filmmakers and executives to solidify complete control of public opinion and entertainment, and the persistence of such dynamics in postwar West Germany.104 Yet the challenge to explain how authoritarian control could coexist with free enterprise led to ambivalent conclusions, such as: “The Fascist film leaders controlled what the capitalist film economy produced; the latter in turn produced what the ideology financed.”105 In attempting to show how selected films catered to the petty bourgeois and encouraged the suppression of the working class, however, these studies insisted on the totalitarian mechanisms of Gleichschaltung and of Goebbels invoking the Führerprinzip to subjugate films toward producing ideological propaganda. Despite Phillips’s more nuanced economic analyses, most studies in the 1970s and 1980s continued to favor the consensus that film in the Third Reich consisted of state-controlled propaganda. Historian David Welch’s thorough archival research for his 1983 book, Propaganda and the German Cinema 1933–1945 (based on his 1979 dissertation), led him to characterize the Film Chamber as “an excellent example of the process of co-ordination [Gleichschaltung] in that it allowed the RMVP [Propaganda Ministry] to exert its control over both film-makers and the film industry as a whole”106 and the Film Credit Bank as “creating dependence and establishing a state monopoly in order to destroy any form of independent initiative.”107 The assurances of securing artistic freedom that Goebbels made in his speech to the industry’s umbrella organization were merely “to lure them into a false sense of security by confidentially imparting his ‘true’ intentions which he could not afford to make public.”108 What Phillips had depicted as a financial bailout of a struggling industry, Welch portrayed as a hostile takeover, the aim of which was “to rationalize filmmaking so that it could respond quickly and efficiently to the demands of the RMVP; in practice this meant simplifying the financing of films and maintaining a strict control over the content of feature films.”109 With the full nationalization of the industry achieved during the war, “the Propaganda Ministry’s weaponry was now complete,” and “it would appear that the Nazi cinema was very much in a straight-

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jacket with few opportunities for either individual artistic expression or commercial expertise.”110 Other studies noted that only a very small number of films were ever actually banned, but they still reflected Kracauer’s contention that all films produced in the Third Reich were “ideological.”111 A thorough examination of the twenty-seven films censored in the Third Reich, however, failed to find support for any claim that the Nazis used censorship to enforce ideology, concluding instead that the effects of Nazi film bans were “qualitative” rather than “quantitative” and citing only the book burnings and the Degenerate Art exhibition as “the most reliable expression of the National Socialist aesthetic.”112 Drawing directly from Kracauer for its understanding of Weimar-era film, a study comparing Nazi and Soviet cinema acknowledged that only a small percentage of films produced in the Third Reich could be construed as political, yet it nevertheless noted, “this does not of course mean that the so-called non-political film was in fact apolitical.”113 Analyses of individual films focused on the handful of examples that stood out as the most blatant examples of propaganda (Triumph of the Will, The Eternal Jew, Uncle Krüger, and Kolberg) as well as some lesser known “propaganda films,”114 clearly (and sometimes explicitly) staying within the guidelines circumscribed by Kracauer. Yet even some of the studies that were focused on propaganda began to chip away at some widely held assumptions, acknowledging that the films thus far privileged for examination were by no means typical or successful and were not Naziera innovations. A 1982 dissertation looked at the 1910s and 1920s to reveal that there had been plans for a Propaganda Ministry as early as World War I and that the heavy-handed nationalist propaganda in educational films (Kulturfilm) emanated from a government agency, the Reichsfilmstelle, until 1922 and continued in private hands well into the 1920s.115 Another brief examination addressed the striking paucity of antisemitic films during the Third Reich, citing as the reason only loose government control over the industry and the utter failure of the handful of antisemitic films issued after Kristallnacht, and maintaining that Goebbels did little to promote the production of antisemitic cinema.116 Bogusław Drewniak’s comprehensive study of film from 1938 to 1945 shed important light on the distribution of German films to foreign and domestic markets, which included a wide range of genres and only a small number of “propaganda films.”117 By the time his work appeared in 1987, however, the effects of the Historikerstreit, detailed below, was fundamentally changing the landscape of cultural history. D E L AY E D E N C O U N T E R S I N T H E P E R F O R M I N G A RT S

Theater and music received the least attention in the three decades following World War II, and dance was almost entirely ignored until the 1980s.118 A handful of dissertations distinguished themselves for posing serious challenges to totalitarian and intentionalist assumptions, but as far as I have been able to determine, these

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findings were rarely disseminated in any widely accessible form, and their authors did not pursue further research in these areas. One can only speculate that their revelations, while fully in line with other historical debates, pushed too far beyond established comfort zones in arts scholarship. Especially in music and theater, where renowned personalities were able to continue their work after 1945 with little or no disruption, these fields were inclined to cling to the notion that professionals had no choice but to conform to aggressive Nazi demands to commandeer their crafts. Theater was the subject of one of Wulf ’s volumes (combined with film), and it also initially caught the attention of literature scholars, resulting in explorations into a specifically Nazi theory of dramaturgy and the development of heroic tragedy and biological racism in the works of specific playwrights.119 The mechanism of theater administration, if discussed at all in these works, regarded the Reich Theater Chamber primarily as a tool to exclude Jews and communists from participation in cultural life and to secure total control over all artistic production.120 Wolf-Eberhard August’s 1973 dissertation, by contrast, broke new ground by looking at the deleterious effects of the economic crisis on Weimar-era theater professions, the successes in Thuringia and elsewhere in purging local theater personnel, and the unionization carried out not only by the Nazis (in the form of the NSBO) but also by the communists, with both parties striving to protect their members from dismissal on political grounds. August framed the structure of the Reich Culture Chambers and the Theater Chamber as an outgrowth of the corporatist movement to organize cultural professions, an idea that predated the Nazis but came to fruition on their watch with the establishment of numerous programs to improve the economic, educational, and working conditions of theater personnel, who even welcomed Goebbels’s ban on criticism because it had the potential to protect them.121 Historian Konrad Dussel’s 1987 dissertation picked up on this theme, conducting a social history of Nazi theater in order to gauge not only the production but also the consumption of traditional theater. Dussel’s survey of preNazi theater policy and labor relations offered compelling evidence that the Reich Culture Chambers came into being after previous attempts to establish just such a body had failed. The Theater Chamber set out to deal with critical issues of unemployment, wages, and benefits by erecting a long-awaited “corporatist” (berufsständisch) infrastructure that would bring all members of the profession, regardless of class, together into one compulsory, self-governing union. More surprisingly, measures for excluding Jews and other “undesirables” from the chamber were not new but were adapted directly from language in the longstanding laws governing theater operations, and the purging of the leadership of existing organizations prior to their incorporation into the chamber was not as disruptive or unexpected as was usually assumed. Dussel concluded that mechanisms of censorship were never effectively enforced, and changes in repertoire from the Weimar years were negligible; the promised securities, however, were generally not delivered.122

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Drewniak’s impressive study of theater in the Third Reich showed tremendous potential to illuminate how administrative complexity undermined any possible attempts to centralize theater policy. Despite Drewniak’s stated adherence to a classic totalitarian interpretation (he opens with an enumeration of the parameters established by Friedrich and Brzezinski and places Nazi theater within their framework), his exhaustive research revealed that the Reichsdramaturg might have made the profession wary of pushing the ideological boundaries, yet measures of conformity varied widely, depending on local politics and taste, and virtually no blacklists were ever implemented. Even in the handful of theaters directly financed by the Propaganda Ministry, there was little interest in micromanaging their artistic operations. Instead, the fierce rivalry between Goering and Goebbels helped to maintain high-quality productions as the two men eagerly engaged talented personnel even if they possessed questionable political credentials. The barrage of attacks from Rosenberg had no effect in bringing down these and other celebrities, and theater personnel overall enjoyed a boost in their standard of living thanks to wage and benefits policies. Drewniak also documents the continued successes of those subject to racial laws, including “half-Jews” and those married to Jews, and even after Goebbels issued tighter restrictions on chamber membership in 1939, “quarter Jews” were given permission to remain, with only a few affected by the new guidelines.123 The notoriety of the Goebbels-Goering rivalry, which was manifesting itself in Berlin theaters, even gave occasion to consider that Goebbels’s “liberal” treatment of the theater in the early years of the Third Reich made him seem “more like a public relations executive than a cultural dictator.”124 At the same time, however, a fascination with Nazi theater in the form of mass outdoor spectacles known as Massenspiele or Thingspiele (the latter name derived from the Germanic designation for pre-Christian sites for assembly) was on the rise. These events deployed thousands of cast members in performances that brought together music, spoken and sung choruses, choreography, and processions. It has been distinguished as the hallmark of Nazi theater primarily because of a short-lived campaign in the Propaganda Ministry between 1933 and 1937 to increase the genre’s prominence. It funded the construction of open-air theaters and offered incentives to those who produced nationalistic works for the new venues, after which these government-sponsored programs were abandoned. While an early study from 1969 asserted that the only viable translation for “Thingspiel” was “play or theater of ideology”125 and cited a mandate by Goebbels to build huge open-air theaters all around Germany while he “summarily rejected using any of the commercial theater and showhouses of the cities due to their recent association with ‘dissident and foreign groups,’ ”126 subsequent investigations noted, on the one hand, how short-lived the phenomenon was and, on the other, how the genre was virtually indistinguishable from contemporary forms of communist and

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socialist theater in content, structure, and even personnel involved. The genre reached its apotheosis at the 1936 Olympic Games, but this represented a trend of Olympic pageantry that had been developing since the games were revived in the 1890s. And as Henning Eichberg astutely observed, the assessments of the Thingspiele that exaggerated its importance as a Nazi invention were themselves subscribing to totalitarian theories and, in their zeal, inadvertently taking at face value the Nazi-era rhetoric that exaggerated the genre’s ideological significance and the amount of government support it received.127 The fascination with the Thingspiel as Nazi theater still proved tenacious, however, even though Drewniak had minimized it as a fleeting phenomenon and Eichberg had contextualized it as a parallel to the theatrical and political gatherings of socialists and communists. Yet by directing attention away from high culture, studies of the genre actually opened the door to analyses of its mass appeal and significance for unifying the Volksgemeinschaft. The Thingspiel, like the party rallies, presented amateurs with an opportunity to fully experience the people’s community by allowing them to participate in ritualistic forms of movement and speech embellished with exhilarating music, lighting, and pyrotechnics. Questioning whether the Thingspiel should even be considered a form of theater at all, as literary and theater historians had done previously, Rainer Stommer’s thesis treated it instead as a movement that blurred boundaries between amateurs and professionals and between audience and performers, helped ritualize new national holidays and festivals, and spurred ambitious architectural projects to accommodate its growth, yielding more than forty open-air theaters (out of a total of four hundred planned structures). Seriously reduced after the hugely successful performance of the Frankenburg Dice Game (Frankenburger Würfelspiel) at the 1936 Olympics, the Thingspiel movement did not go away, despite the Propaganda Ministry’s withdrawal of official support owing to financial challenges, waning public enthusiasm, and a desire to quell the cultic orientations of rivals Rosenberg and Himmler.128 Dieter Bartetzko went one step further to link the Thingspiel with earlier modernist experiments, drawing on Siegfried Kracauer’s term “illusions in stone” to observe the integration of architecture, theater, and cinema for much of the twentieth century. Rather than pigeonholing Nazi architecture as neoclassical—a symptom of the restrictiveness of style identification in art history—Bartetzko wanted to show how architecture, theatricality, and cinema had a much longer tradition of cross-fertilization, resulting in a “mood architecture” (Stimmungsarchitektur) that reached its fullest realization in the Nazis’ holistic approach to pageantry and mass ritual.129 Until the 1980s, any investigations of music during the Nazi years were even sparser than those of theater. The earliest account, appearing in 1944, was The Baton and the Jackboot, the memoir of Furtwängler’s secretary, Berta Geissmar, who had gone into exile in London and become the assistant of conductor Thomas

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Beecham. Geissmar largely documented her own difficulties as a Jew but also ardently defended Furtwängler’s actions. She depicted an environment in which “musical life, like so much else in Nazi Germany, was annexed by the Party, made to serve political ends and propaganda, and was rife with nepotism.”130 Yet she also hinted at the Berlin Philharmonic’s financial vulnerabilities, which led to a government bailout, and vividly detailed the infighting of Nazi officials. Following Wulf ’s volume on music, Donald Wesley Ellis’s dissertation from 1970 framed a “biological aesthetic” as the basis for government policy but ended up concluding that no clear music policy was either developed or enforced, that Hitler played no role in regulating music, and that the understaffed bureaus of the Music Chamber exerted little control. Censorship was virtually nonexistent until the war, when restrictions on royalties and other payments prompted the introduction of targeted bans on music from enemy countries, and the ban on criticism was comparably vague and ineffectual.131 Ellis’s solid research and important observations went unnoticed, however, and any further investigations of music had to wait until the wave of fiftyyear commemorations in the 1980s renewed and expanded the interest in Nazi cultural policy. F I F T Y- Y E A R C OM M E M O R AT IO N S A N D T H E HISTORIKERSTREIT

The 1980s turned out to be one of the most complicated decades for the writing of cultural histories of the Third Reich. The rapid succession of fifty-year anniversaries—marking the closing of the Bauhaus in 1933 and the Degenerate Art and Degenerate Music exhibitions in 1937 and 1938—resulted in a flood of commemorative exhibits and publications, including a large number of local retrospectives reflecting on how the arts were denigrated and manipulated in various communities. While much of this served to reinforce existing trends in research, such as by accumulating more data on exiles and other victims and digging up more details to try to flesh out Hitler’s role in purportedly dictating cultural life, other inquiries started to pave completely new paths. Perhaps the most promising of these was the interest in looking at Nazi culture in an international context, a direction that started out by extending comparisons beyond just the Soviet Union and Fascist Italy. Yet the second half of the decade came to be dominated by larger questions, both geopolitical and historiographic, that raised serious concerns about the moral suitability of any such comparative analyses. The fifty-year commemorations preoccupied cultural historians, curators, and students all around West Germany, leading to a flurry of exhibits and publications on the national and local level; reissues of the earlier postwar accounts (including all of Wulf ’s volumes, Rave’s Kunstdiktatur im Dritten Reich, Geissmar’s memoirs, and Miller Lane’s Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918–1945); and an impressive

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exhibition and catalog of the Degenerate Music exhibition that reconstructed the event with documents and a wide range of commentaries.132 A significant outcome of the fifty-year commemorations of the Nazi seizure of power was the appearance in West Germany of comprehensive studies on music. Prior to the 1980s, the subject of music in Nazi Germany had been surprisingly overlooked in West German scholarship. In the 1970s, music students demanding a confrontation with the Nazi past organized the Forum of Democratic Musicology to address topics dealing with the Nazi years and went on to pursue investigations of the role of the Bayreuth festival in the Third Reich, the music of the youth movement, and exiled composers. That music had remained under the radar for so long, however, could be explained by the preponderance of careers and industries with a history of Nazi-era success that had international reputations to protect. Indeed, the scandalous details about the complicity of leading West German cultural figures revealed by Wulf prompted certain leading musicologists to brand him a liar.133 In preparing his ambitious 1983 survey, Music in the National Socialist State (Musik im NS-Staat), Fred K. Prieberg regarded himself to be continuing the unfinished work of Joseph Wulf and was intent upon ferreting out former Nazis who still held influential positions in West German musical life. Prieberg faced many obstacles in acquiring materials and gaining access to archives, but he eventually managed to discover mountains of evidence that challenged the claims of innocence of individuals he had interviewed. His discoveries also led him to question the extent to which “forbidden” music was actually suppressed, as well as the extent to which the government had terrorized practicing musicians.134 While he succeeded in eroding the totalitarian analysis in the same manner as Wulf—by revealing the conscious complicity rather than the dictatorial coercion of the music professions—his prose took on such an acerbic ad hominem tone that some critics questioned the veracity of his evidence. In music as well as in art, however, the grip of totalitarian and intentionalist thinking was so tenacious that it similarly led to confusion among the generation of music scholars aligning themselves with the New Left. Despite their attraction to the Frankfurt School and their desire to remove obstacles posed by the old guard of musicology, many of these 68ers adopted a curious fusion of both the totalitarian and Fascist interpretations. In the end, a shaky and ambivalent adherence to the totalitarian model continued to serve as their foundation, despite Wulf ’s and Prieberg’s ample evidence supporting the possibility of more widespread voluntary cooperation on the part of active musicians. This confusion permeated the 1984 collection Music and Music Politics in Fascist Germany (Musik und Musikpolitik im faschistischen Deutschland), in which the new generation of scholars wished to supplement Prieberg’s focus on classical music with investigations into other facets of musical life, guided—just like their art history colleagues—by the “dictum of Max Horkheimer that whoever refuses to speak about capitalism must also remain silent about Fascism.”135 Some contributors turned to social history and looked more

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(though not exclusively) at amateur activities than Prieberg had done, but much of their work betrayed a tension among a number of conflicting agendas: to view Nazi Germany as a totalitarian system, to pay homage to Marxist historians and the Fascism concept, and to rationalize all of this with evidence that often failed to support either interpretation. One essay, for example, spoke of “hidden ideology” and “veiled threats from Hitler and Goebbels” that led to the alleged capitulation of the Berlin opera houses, but it went on to show the ineffectiveness of any attempts to steer opera houses toward conformity and the far stronger influence of box office prospects on making decisions about planning opera seasons. Even Goebbels had to reverse his campaign to limit his opera house’s repertoire to German works, and there was a noticeable reduction of performances of Wagner throughout Germany.136 Another essay struggled to rationalize a “Nazi ideology” for new opera compositions with the observation that no clear “Nazi opera theory” ever existed.137 Others offered solid evidence challenging the totalitarian concept, demonstrating concessions made to the radio-listening public, failures to impose restrictions on the recording industry, and the brazenness of choral groups that not only performed the works of “forbidden” composers such as Mendelssohn but also publicized those performances.138 In an attempt to bolster the Fascism concept, investigations into amateur activities tried to present workers as resisting the regime, but they could not ignore the acts of conformity among workers’ music organizations, with some even harboring SA men among their memberships.139 The workers’ choral organization, the Deutscher Arbeiter Sängerbund, even openly supported the Nazis and intended to annex itself to the DAF.140 The new attention to Nazi culture provoked by commemorative events also initiated serious inquiries into dance. Owing to the small number of dance historians overall, these studies remained sparse but were nevertheless significant in recognizing the links between the staged mass gatherings of the Nazi Party and the principles of German modern dance. Initial inquiries revealed that modern dance innovator Mary Wigman, for example, had expressed her attraction to the ideas of the Volksgemeinschaft, the Führerprinzip, and other ideals she shared with Nazi ideologues, reflecting the overall excitement in the dance community over the government’s outspoken promises to generate stronger support for the arts.141 Despite counterclaims that the Nazis had appropriated Ausdruckstanz by renaming it “German dance,” further inquiries into Wigman dissected the arguments of her apologists and scrutinized the continued development of her innovations into the years of the Third Reich.142 A more comprehensive examination of dance in the Third Reich was attempted in a dissertation that relied largely on secondary sources, yet its author noted the priorities dance educators shared with the Nazis in emphasizing physical education and amateur participation (in the pageantry of movement choirs), proposing that the proponents of Ausdruckstanz “were in a better position to manipulate the new government, and therefore, in a better

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position to survive than most German modern artists.”143 Indeed, Rudolf Laban, who assumed prominent positions in the Berlin State Opera and in the Reich Theater Chamber, claimed in 1935 that “German dance had never before enjoyed such sympathetic and extensive support and help from official authorities.”144 In the visual arts, there was a noticeable uptick in exhibitions and catalogs on exile and inner emigration, most of them seeking to highlight the anti-Fascism of Weimar, exiles, and inner emigrant artists.145 The most prominent of these, sponsored by the federal chancellor’s office, was the 1984 exhibition Abstract Painters in Inner Emigration, which was followed two years later by a catalog on outer and inner emigration, put together by Werner Haftmann. The catalog, Banned and Persecuted: Dictatorship of Art under Hitler, with a preface by Chancellor Helmut Kohl, appeared in both German and English.146 Kohl’s opening remarks at the 1984 exhibition and in the introduction to the 1986 catalog reinforced the received wisdoms about Weimar modernism in exile: “Many artists who had not adapted to the regime and would not bow to the official party interpretation of art had been persecuted and many had been driven into exile, where they often became leaders of the avant-garde movement in modern art in the Western world.” Haftmann, for his part, reiterated the harsh critique he had crafted thirty years earlier of Soviet, Nazi, and East German totalitarianism and ascribed to Hitler “an embittered hatred of modern art from his pathetic efforts as a dilettante painter,” such that he was “pathologically obsessed with these malignant tumors in his psyche and his accomplices followed willingly.”147 It was significant that Miller Lane saw fit to reissue her 1968 book virtually unchanged in 1985 and to follow it up with an article reiterating the futility of seeking political meaning in architecture,148 implying that the field had not progressed as she had hoped. The impact of Speer’s “coming out” was still palpable, as he had offered the first insider glimpses of the otherwise frustratingly elusive figure of Hitler, and new studies on architecture still hoped to unveil the ideological meaning of the neoclassical projects he commissioned.149 The focus on Hitler’s role in the arts also expanded beyond architecture, prompting speculation that he was “no mere patron of the arts, no simple presiding officer, no bureaucratic expression of the ideas of others, but the incarnation of those deep aesthetic longings that characterized the Germans.”150 Further studies with an intentionalist bent looked to Hitler’s role as artist and art patron, his connections to the ideological foundations of Nazi attitudes toward art, and Goebbels’s vast control of the art world, which made him “the second most important man in the land.”151 At the same time, there were indications that the wealth of research coming out of the fifty-year commemorations was starting to raise important questions about the singularity of Nazi art, especially as the scope of inquiries looked beyond painting and architecture. One diverse volume on Fascist architecture opened with a direct challenge to the isolation of Nazi architecture, both chronologically and geographically. While stipulating that the Nazis did enforce strict separation of

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styles for specific types of structures, this new perspective conceded that Hitler expressed a great interest in architecture, although he left its operations to the professionals, and that architectural activity was no more regulated in the Third Reich than it was in other countries.152 A group studying sculpture initially identified Nazi-era sculptors’ penchant for nude subjects as upholding the Fascistcum-bourgeois ideals of the body, racial purity, athleticism, and war, as well as the subordination of women.153 However, the group came back two years later with a completely different take on the subject, aware of the ever more blatant contradictions arising from even its own prior attempts to isolate “ ‘Fascist aesthetics’ ” (scare quotes in original) by adhering to the dichotomy of “abstraction = progress” versus “figuration = conservatism.”154 Reassessments of the Bauhaus that began to regard the institution as more than just a school for architects revealed how some of its affiliates pursued successful careers as graphic designers in the Third Reich, even though these investigations also showed a reluctance to abandon certain totalitarian interpretations. An examination of the successful Nazi-era career of Bauhaus graphic designer Herbert Bayer framed his achievements as constrained by new laws that purportedly granted complete control of all advertising, public and private, to the Propaganda Ministry.155 And while posters of the period showed striking similarities with the art used in American 1940s advertising, initial inquiries hesitated to acknowledge these parallels, choosing instead to emphasize the ways in which poster art bolstered ideology.156 Nevertheless, the intense activity in the 1980s continued to offer up small but significant signs that West German art historians were ready to consider that the Nazi phenomenon in art was not unique. There were some initial attempts to question whether sculpture and architecture had ever been autonomous in the long history of “bourgeois institutions,” to trace the continuities rather than caesuras before and after 1933, and to look beyond Germany to find similar uses of sculpture in official commissions in the United States, the Soviet Union, and Western Europe before, during, and after the Third Reich, bringing to light the problems of assuming the singularity of Nazi or Fascist aesthetics, especially when dealing with monuments.157 These and other attempts to turn the gaze outward led to some revealing comparative studies, not only with other dictatorships but also with artistic trends internationally. These directions, however, were destined to be short-lived, as the politics of the late 1980s rendered such comparisons problematic at the least. In 1985, in the midst of strengthening ties between West Germany and NATO, U.S. president Ronald Reagan accompanied German chancellor Helmut Kohl to commemorate the end of World War II with a visit to the Bitburg cemetery, where some of the graves of fallen German soldiers were those of men from the ranks of the SS. Kohl had already distinguished himself by suggesting that his late birth date exonerated him from responsibility for Nazi atrocities (“die Gnade der späten Geburt” [“the mercy of a late birth”]). By implicitly honoring the buried SS along with all the other fallen

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soldiers at Bitburg, Kohl took one more audacious step to distance himself, as well as all of West Germany, from the odium of the Nazi past. The following year, an editorial by an esteemed West German historian, Ernst Nolte, unleashed a highly emotional response from his colleagues that lasted for several months and earned the deceptively bland moniker, “the historians’ debate” (Historikerstreit). Nolte had recommended a reassessment of Nazi atrocities in the context of the longer and more destructive murderous campaigns of the Soviets, suggesting that the Nazis essentially learned their techniques from the “Asiatic” model and that the Holocaust should be placed among countless other genocidal events of the twentieth century. Nolte was harshly criticized for “relativizing” the Holocaust and failing to acknowledge its unique form of barbarism.158 Following on the heels of Reagan’s and Kohl’s encroachments, which had threatened to minimize the historical significance of the Holocaust, Nolte’s further questioning of its uniqueness had the effect of galvanizing the community of historians to reaffirm their commitment to upholding the Nazi phenomenon as singular and beyond compare. Coincidentally, the art world was undergoing its own Historikerstreit as a result of another perfect storm of events. In 1986, the United States government decided to return over six thousand contemporary German artworks that had been seized during World War II because of their militaristic themes, leaving West Germany to decide what to do with this cache of “Nazi art” and prompting assurances from the German government that none of them would be taken seriously as artworks.159 Concurrently, Peter Ludwig, the head of a German chocolate empire and an art historian, stirred controversy by commissioning Arno Breker to sculpt portraits of him and his wife. He then issued the controversial statement that art of the Third Reich should once again be displayed in German museums, provoking a firestorm of criticism targeting Ludwig and others as “minimizers of the Nazi past.”160 In 1987, Krier’s polemical defense of Speer appeared in the German press, and in 1988, a Berlin exhibition documenting the most influential exhibits of the twentieth century included the Great German Art Exhibition, displaying a small selection of iconic examples of Nazi art.161 By the late 1980s, any attempts to situate aspects of Nazi society within a broader international context came under close scrutiny. Comparing Nazi cultural and aesthetic trends with contemporary trends elsewhere could be interpreted as relativizing and thereby mitigating the impact of Nazi atrocities. As film studies continued to focus on blatant examples of propaganda,162 one study in particular, that of Hilmar Hoffmann, expressly cited the moral imperative imposed by the Historikerstreit, vilifying Nolte by name as “an apologist for the Holocaust” and reminding readers of the risks involved in even considering any comparative analyses.163 An English-language essay collection with the title The Nazification of Art brought together work from several disciplines to explore how “art was used by National Socialism as an agent of social cohesions and simultaneously as an instrument of repression and social marginalization,” which lent “Nazi art its grim fasci-

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nation and its undoubted terror.”164 German art critic Walter Grasskamp, who had the last word in this collection, reflected on the Historikerstreit and the concurrent events in the art world: the return of seized artwork from the United States, the Peter Ludwig controversy, Krier’s “rehabilitation” of Speer, and the controversy over whether to destroy or maintain the remaining large edifices from the Nuremberg Party Rally Grounds. In mildly polemical terms, he surveyed the inviolable resurrection of modern art and architecture (what he referred to as the “enthronement of the modern”) as the outgrowth of a postwar “cultural policy of the guilty conscience,” the cluelessness of 1960s radicals who embraced the same antimodern and anti-capitalist tropes as the Nazis but failed to claim any alternative form of art as their own, and the skittish confrontation with Nazi art that focused more on its pernicious, seductive powers than on its inherent artistic value. With regard to the Ludwig flap, he derided the kitschy eroticism of Breker’s nudes; the sculptor’s penchant to flatter any and all of his patrons (from Hitler to Ludwig and his wife), which, Grasskamp asserted, made him better suited for a career in plastic surgery than in art; and of course the distasteful ideology that his work represented. He was even more merciless in his critique of Krier, charging him with ignorance and attributing his attraction to Speer’s “splendor” as sheer naiveté.165 The collection of essays as a whole, it should be noted, represented one of the first interdisciplinary scholarly presentations on art of the Third Reich to appear in English (earlier studies in English came predominantly from nonacademic British circles, and even The Nazification of Art consisted primarily of translated German contributions).166 With the Historikerstreit and its reverberations still weighing heavily, however, West German scholars, especially art historians and musicologists, focused much of their attention throughout the 1990s on the less controversial subject of victims, continuing the longer tradition of exile studies but also venturing out of this comfort zone to explore the experiences of those who had been in the Jewish Culture League and the concentration camps.167 Konrad Dussel’s 1990 report on the state of cultural history of the Third Reich highlighted the lack of systematic and synthetic histories of the culture and cultural policy of the Nazi period, pointing especially to the absence of a critical history of the Reich Culture Chambers and stating the need to focus more on the consumption and reception of culture than merely on its production.168 After a decade of fifty-year commemorations that produced a steady stream of retrospective exhibits and publications, it was time to step back and critically assess all the evidence on the inner workings of Nazi cultural life that was being unearthed and processed. N EW D I S C I P L I NA RY P E R SP E C T I V E S I N T H E 1 9 9 0 S

Some of Dussel’s wishes would be fulfilled in unlikely places as a result of an unprecedented interest in the arts emerging among general historians like

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himself—scholars who were working outside the cultural fields of art history, musicology, dance history, German literature, and film studies. North American historians in particular applied their familiarity with broader historical debates to interpret cultural policy and artistic trends. Their work would begin to fill significant gaps by further detailing the polycratic nature of Nazi cultural administration and posing the most compelling challenges to totalitarian assumptions. By conducting extensive archival research, interpreting data in light of more sweeping findings on the dynamics of the Nazi state, and incorporating social and economic considerations, this cohort was well equipped to offer far more sophisticated answers to the questions of cultural control and administration, even though they largely avoided aesthetic issues. The fact that much of this work came from North Americans also had to do with archival bureaucracy: a large cache of materials on cultural administration was housed in the Berlin Document Center, a repository for the American denazification proceedings that had remained under U.S. military control, which was easier for Americans and other non-German researchers to access than Germans. Up to that point, North Americans had not produced any full-scale studies of Nazi arts since the 1960s. The 1991 exhibition “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany at the Los Angeles County Museum and its impressive interdisciplinary catalog were important for turning American attention to the phenomenon of arts in Nazi Germany. In addition to providing a meticulous reconstruction of the 1937 exhibition and reflecting on the war waged on modern art, the project aimed to look beyond the visual arts to observe “the microscopic attention the Nazi hierarchy accorded the observation and regulation of all aspects of cultural life in the Reich.”169 This totalitarian inflection notwithstanding, some contributions in the catalog revealed numerous cracks in the totalitarian fortress, such as the important role of art dealers in the collection and sale of degenerate art, the minimal effectiveness of film censorship, and the virtual failure to enforce the ban on music criticism.170 Also at play, however, was a cautionary tale not unlike the one underlying Lehmann-Haupt’s critique of the McCarthyites four decades earlier.171 This time, the warning was prompted by conservatives’ steps initiated under the Reagan administration to defund the National Endowment of the Arts, culminating in 1989 in a furor over the “anti-Christian” themes of artist Andres Serrano and the “obscene” photography of Robert Mapplethorpe. In her introduction to the exhibition catalog, curator Stephanie Barron expressed the hope that “we may apply what we learn to our own predicament, in which for the first time in the post-war era the arts and freedom of artistic expression in America are facing a serious challenge.”172 Other interdisciplinary projects showed similar tensions between abandoning and clinging to totalitarian interpretations. An essay collection compiled by the literature scholar Glenn Cuomo, National Socialist Cultural Policy, offered a broad

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overview of cultural administration that made it possible to observe patterns of bureaucratic and aesthetic inconsistency. Yet several of the essays reveal a considerable degree of ambivalence with regard to questions about whether the Nazis exercised total control over the arts. Ehrhard Bahr attempted to address the intentionalist-functionalist debate, acknowledging the validity of the functionalist side in the controversy over modern art and the improvised manner of the book burning but still maintaining that Hitler monitored a divide-and-conquer strategy that led to radicalized policy. Focusing on the high-profile events of 1937 and 1938, Bahr concluded that modern art never could have survived in the Third Reich because of Hitler’s obsession with race.173 In his contribution to the volume, Jonathan Petropoulos, who would shortly thereafter publish his own nuanced and comprehensive study of arts administration, reflected a similar degree of ambivalence, duly noting administrative chaos and aesthetic inconsistencies but simultaneously presenting the Nazi bureaucracy as one that “provided the leaders with an effective tool to implement their totalitarian designs.”174 Drewniak’s ambivalence, exemplified in the following statement, was perhaps the most striking: “The Hitler regime demanded a ‘reconstruction of the German theater’ and, from a scholarly and distanced perspective, we can say in retrospect that of all the public cultural institutions, theater probably was the one shaken the most in the Nazi state. While we can speak of a far-reaching restructuring of the ideological (political and ‘racial’) foundations of this artistic institution, in the last analysis, characteristic structures of the German theater were affected little after the Nazi assumption of power.”175 Historian Alan Steinweis’s Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts, published in 1993, set out explicitly to challenge the assumptions about totalitarian control, showing continuities in structures and trends from the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, contextualizing the implications of Gleichschaltung, and treating the Culture Chambers phenomenon as part of the history of professionalization. Steinweis carefully reconstructed the complex genesis and decentralized nature of cultural bureaucracy within the Third Reich, the government’s strong appeal to disenfranchised arts professions, the limits to coercion and censorship, and the lack of consensus with regard to aesthetic standards. He also chose to zero in on an issue that had been mentioned only sporadically up to that point: that the Third Reich provided optimal conditions for those in the arts professions to gain social, professional, and economic concessions for which they had lobbied for decades, such as minimum wage, health and pension benefits, and uniform educational and certification credentials to protect professionals from competition with amateurs. In order to realize these goals, they had to embrace the “neocorporatist impulse,”176 overcoming political and social divisions within their own artistic communities and forming a professional solidarity with all those employed in their artistic medium. The economic crisis of the 1920s drew attention to the pressing need to

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put these securities into place. The Culture Chambers, the idea for which dated back to 1912 (in plans for a musicians’ chamber), provided a framework to implement these goals, and the large membership of arts professionals in the Fighting League for German Culture provided a party-based structural model for its configuration. Through a combination of coercion, collaboration, resignation, and opportunism, the arts communities came to terms with party members taking over the leadership of existing organizations, the organizations were consolidated into cartels, and these cartels were legally transformed into chambers. The chambers were to be self-governed, and their leaders were vested with the powers of the Führerprinzip, authorizing them to pursue their colleagues’ best interests. As in other unions, membership was mandatory, although the notorious Paragraph 10 allowed for the exclusion of members deemed “unreliable” or “unsuitable” and initiated the movement to exclude Jews and other “undesirables.” In practice, however, these utopian visions hit roadblocks again and again. Goebbels was continuously frustrated with the recalcitrant leaders he had appointed, the complexity of regional differences hindered national standardization, and the battles over jurisdiction of the trade unions, civil service, and other larger organizations led to endless confusion over where individuals belonged. Despite the chambers’ emphasis on job creation and its initiatives to set up programs similar to the WPA in the United States, looming economic pressures and the war made it difficult to demonstrate any significant long-term gains, even in the aggressive campaign to exclude non-“Aryans” from chamber membership. The chambers’ roles in aesthetic questions were even more tentative. The complexity of cultural production in all its forms would have thwarted any pretensions, real or imagined, to “total artistic control,” and censorship was never considered a priority or a realistic objective.177 Historians were also turning their attention to the individual arts and, like Steinweis, were bringing a critical apparatus from the general historiography of Nazism to their assessments of arts management and control. Music was the first area to benefit from the new approach, starting with Michael Meyer’s overview that aimed to “demonstrate that musicians were not only victims of totalitarian measures but also accomplices to it,” that no specific Nazi aesthetic ever existed, and that the favor or disfavor meted out to musicians had more to do with their personal and political connections than with their music.178 Michael Kater came to similar conclusions in what would comprise a trilogy of musical investigations, starting with a study of jazz (1992) and followed by a study of art music (1999) and a compilation of case studies of composers (2000). Kater’s jazz study offered compelling evidence of the widespread lack of control in cultural policy in the Third Reich and the constant infighting among Nazi leadership; the party’s failure, despite relentless propaganda, to devise clear aesthetic criteria; and a pragmatic policy of balancing suppression with toleration, bending ideological principles to appease popular tastes. Thus, jazz

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came through on German radio waves to keep Germans from tuning in to foreign broadcasts, international commerce allowed for the continued supply of jazz recordings into Germany, and night clubs were the frequent haunts of SS and SA officers who were jazz enthusiasts.179 These observations soon permeated the work of musicologists as well, who could apply them toward arriving at more sophisticated aesthetic conclusions, starting with opera. German musicologist Michael Walter challenged the totalitarian paradigm by pointing to the inability of the Nazis during their twelve years in power to arrive at any consistent music policy, operatic or otherwise. He further undermined the notion that Hitler had a central role in musical policy by showing that in the Führer’s longest and most public declarations on music, a speech at the 1938 Nuremberg Party Rally, he publicly declared that music was thoroughly incapable of expressing political values and that it was not expected to do so.180 Concurrently, Eckhard John’s investigation of the concept of “musical Bolshevism” similarly shot down several myths about prohibitions against music or musicians deemed to be degenerate.181 More and more evidence was uncovered suggesting that Nazi leaders, like their predecessors, valued the centrality of music in Germany’s culture so much that they were willing to grant composers and musicians a considerable degree of personal and political leeway. Kater’s subsequent volumes on classical music explicitly challenged the prevailing totalitarian view and pointed to the many music practices of the Third Reich that had been inherited from the Weimar Republic; further demonstrated the decentralization of cultural administration; and maintained that the Nazi regime never clearly devised guidelines for distinguishing between “good” and “bad” (i.e., “German” and “Jewish”) music. As with jazz, officials exercised a pragmatic policy of balancing suppression with toleration, in many cases opting to bend ideological principles rather than challenge popular tastes. Case studies of prominent individuals allowed Kater to reveal the system’s crass arbitrariness, which was so extreme that, in some cases, devout nationalists were hounded while a blind eye was turned to some non-“Aryans” who were able to continue their careers. He further deconstructed any notions of a consistent Nazi musical aesthetic, decoupling an individual’s compositional style from the degree of success or failure he or she had in the Third Reich. Adherence to Romanticism did not guarantee success for Pfitzner, for example, nor did experiments with serialism jeopardize the careers of Paul von Klenau and Winfried Zillig. Rather, as each case illustrates, a composer’s fate depended on a certain degree of talent, useful political connections, and sheer luck.182 Turning to the visual arts, historian Jonathan Petropoulos primarily researched the habits of Nazi leaders as art collectors, yet the opening chapters of his Art as Politics in the Third Reich (1996) provided many new insights into visual arts administration, with more three-dimensional portraits of Goebbels (revealing his attitudes toward modern art and his restraint in managing cultural policies) and of

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Rosenberg (exposing his poor organizational skills, lack of support from influential colleagues, shoestring budget for cultural ventures, and overall reduced influence). In addition to discussing the usual cast of characters competing for influence in the artistic domain, such as Ley and Rust, he traced the shifts in power, particularly during the war, among Speer, Bormann, Goering, and Himmler. He also pointed to economic and policy measures that may have motivated the largescale seizure of valuable works of art in order to profit from them, whether these works were considered degenerate or not, culminating in a “mixture of misguided idealism and self-enrichment—with the latter becoming an increasingly discernible source of motivation.”183 In 1995, Joan Clinefelter and Christoph Zuschlag both came out with studies that filled in details of the murky prehistory of the Degenerate Art exhibition by looking beyond Goebbels’s jurisdiction. Several exhibits of degenerate art actually took place in various locations before the idea was adapted for the largest and most widely publicized venture in Munich in 1937. Clinefelter and Zuschlag also revealed a strong antimodernist constituency in Germany that dated back to the turn of the century and had been gaining strength in the Weimar Republic, and they demonstrated the instability of any “official” Nazi position on art. They also shed new light on the campaigns to protect modern art, some of them coming from within the National Socialist ranks, and the waning public interest in subsequent showings of Degenerate Art after the highly touted Munich event. In the case of the German Art Society, which was the focus of Clinefelter’s study, the organization’s rallying cries became redundant when the war on modernism was ultimately won, and the society’s promotion of traditionalists ultimately proved too conservative to accommodate the desired directions for the future of German art.184 James van Dyke’s 1996 dissertation complicated the totalitarian paradigm even more. He used the drastic rise and fall of the career of painter Franz Radziwill, a war veteran and committed National Socialist, to reveal numerous cracks in Nazi Party and Third Reich bureaucracy. Radziwill achieved fame and influence within the first few years of the regime before becoming a target of the Rosenberg circle, and yet he saw numerous opportunities to seek rehabilitation by working a system that was in disarray, cautiously playing on the rivalries that were driving the highly politicized art community. Furthermore, countering the inordinate focus of prior scholarship on the Culture Chambers, Rosenberg, and even the DAF, Van Dyke called attention to the underacknowledged influence Rust’s Education Ministry had in artistic affairs, as well as to the military as a source of art patronage.185 Theater history also showed signs of embracing new perspectives, as historians continued to unearth new evidence of bold experimentation and artistic freedom, even in the theaters directly overseen by Goebbels and Goering. The fierce rivalry between the two to attract the best and the brightest stars for their respective ensembles compelled them to sanction the careers of several actors and directors known to be homosexuals

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or to have had close associations with communists and Jews, and they even tolerated productions that conveyed not-so-subtle criticisms of the Nazi regime, such as a scandalous production of Shakespeare’s Richard III in 1937 that obliquely skewered Goebbels and the SS.186 And rather than serving as a bastion for German nationalism and antisemitism, theater repertoire displayed such ideologically inexplicable tendencies as a tolerance for George Bernard Shaw and the overwhelming preference for Italian opera over German works.187 John London’s full examination of the complicated origins and limited effectiveness of the ban on theater criticism showed that it actually inspired enthusiasm among critics, who would now be invited to engage in a more nuanced dialogue. Yet complaints abounded about the negative criticism emanating from the Fighting League press and the inability to reign in these and other highly opinionated theater reviews, some of which even attacked works that upheld a National Socialist vision.188 Konrad Dussel had already questioned the overemphasis on the Thingspiel, which had attracted the attention of theater historians owing to some bizarre examples of productions that expressed extreme Nazi utopian visions. Yet early studies of the Thingspiel had shown it to be just one (ultimately unsuccessful) form of engaging the masses, and this drew theater historians, along with film scholars, to lead other fields into investigating the mass culture of the Third Reich. Subsequent studies revealed that Goebbels—drawing on successes from the Weimar Republic— strove to bring theater back to the people, unabashedly appropriating the populist mission of successful leftist initiatives such as the Volksbühne.189 He also oversaw, in collaboration with Strength through Joy, the repurposing of Max Reinhardt’s Großes Schauspielhaus as the Theater des Volkes, taking full advantage of the innovative, mass-oriented interior created for Reinhardt.190 Berlin Cabaret, by historian Peter Jelavich, started to explore other facets of popular theater. Jelavich’s observations on the nature of censorship dating back to the turn of the century showed that authorities had learned how censorship could backfire by drawing undue attention to its targets. He also noted that the Nazis recognized the potential of cabaret to sway the masses and that they showed relative restraint in reining in satire and “decadent” culture on the popular stage.191 By looking back even further, to the late nineteenth century, it was possible to detect a continuous development of mass spectacles and large-scale theater in the cultures of the workers and the bourgeoisie. These cultures both embraced and influenced the techniques of the Thingspiele, Ausdruckstanz, speaking and movement choirs, sports events, and political rallies, as well as the architectural structures built to house them.192 The focus on mass culture slowly sparked interest in other areas of cultural history, and scholars started to explore the marriage of the arts with technology, media, and consumerism, even though these investigations still tended to orient themselves toward supporting either the totalitarian parallels with Soviets193 or the Fascist parallels with Italy, Franco’s Spain, and Vichy France.194 Film scholarship, the

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field best situated to examine the impact of mass media within and beyond Germany, was showing signs of moving beyond the preoccupation with the few examples of pure propaganda films, even entertaining some cross-cultural comparison. Eric Rentschler gave an account of his epiphany upon realizing that entertainment films made during the Third Reich were readily available on German television, which opened his eyes to a shocking paradox: “Contemporary American media culture has more than a superficial or vicarious relationship with the Third Reich’s society of spectacle. . . . This discussion must account for a legacy that extends from the Third Reich into our own lives today.”195 Criticizing previous scholarship for depicting Goebbels as an omnipotent force micromanaging all film production, and reproving it for essentially buying into “a Nazi dream” and “a post-war myth,” Rentschler was careful to distinguish himself from “apologists” who “denazify” Nazi film by viewing it solely in aesthetic terms without regard to politics. In seeking a middle ground, he still showed a proclivity for teasing out how effective films had been in fulfilling Goebbels’s mission to control the masses and rationalize the Holocaust, but he did not shy away from highlighting how these techniques persisted in the postmodern world. Concluding that all of Nazi cinema was ideologically driven and “administered by a state apparatus that determined every aspect of production” and that “directors functioned above all as facilitators, not as distinctive auteurs,“ Rentschler noted that “Nazi films circulated within a vast complex of orchestrated and high-tech efforts to control thought and meaning,” making the Third Reich “the first full-blown media dictatorship.”196 Here as well as elsewhere in contemporary film scholarship, there was a palpable tension between, on the one hand, honoring Kracauer’s parameters of viewing all films of the Third Reich as propaganda and, on the other, struggling to pinpoint those propagandistic elements.197 But as scholars gradually widened the definition of what could be considered propaganda, starting with the thirty entertainment films that had earned certification (Prädikat) for having “special political value to the state” (“staatspolitisch besonders wertvoll”)198 and expanding to include comedies, melodramas, and musicals,199 it became increasingly challenging to gauge the effectiveness of a broad range of entertainment films as potential vehicles of ideology. Others, however, felt that it was time to seriously reassess the accepted premises. Klaus Kreimeier’s comprehensive and detailed history of UFA200 brought its Nazi episode out of isolation—although it tended to highlight the omnipotence of Goebbels and strove to support Benjamin’s “aestheticization of politics”—and Felix Moeller’s critical reading of Goebbels’s diaries noted that its inaccuracies and exaggerations pointed to “a yawning gap between claim and reality” and revealed his failure to fashion guidelines, plans, or initiatives.201 Marc Silberman pointed out the problems of dividing the history of German film by a series of caesuras, and his analyses of three Nazi-era entertainment films opened the door even wider to considering the ways in which these films often do not conform to presumed

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ideological constraints, although he indicated that they shouldn’t therefore necessarily be regarded as subversive.202 Linda Schulte-Sasse came to her own startling realization that Swing Kids, a 1993 Disney film about anti-Nazi resistance, used structures and themes identical to those of the best-known Nazi youth films.203 A quantitative investigation of 120 Nazi-era films then questioned whether entertainment films really upheld race and gender ideals, and a thorough study of the overwhelming presence of American films in Nazi Germany probed the primacy of international commerce over ideological isolation.204 The increasing concentration on examining the role of women in Nazi film in these years205 raised new questions about the uniqueness of Nazi film and its seductive powers of ideological manipulation. A trend that has continued into the present, the focus on women in film can be explained in part by the widespread influence of feminist theory in film studies since the 1980s. Yet the close investigation of the portrayal of women, the negotiation of gender roles, and the rise of stardom started to blur the differences between Nazi film and Weimar film, as well as between German and American film. Antje Ascheid’s study of Lilian Harvey, for example, showed how her film characters flew in the face of Nazi ideals of family and gender roles, and the star persona she cultivated revealed more similarities between Germany and Hollywood than differences.206 Dance research also started to make significant strides in the 1990s, further exploring the possibility that many dancers, especially the pioneers of modern dance and Ausdruckstanz, were enjoying new opportunities and perks in the Third Reich that rivaled or outdistanced those in any other cultural field. Although general surveys of German modern dance still avoided the Nazi period altogether,207 in 1996, the first comprehensive study of dance in the Third Reich appeared: Hitler’s Dancers: German Modern Dance in the Third Reich combined a memoir by a dancer who fled to Swedish exile with a historical overview by a dance historian from the former GDR.208 This study departed from hagiographical treatments of leading figures, shedding more light on the continuities in Ausdruckstanz from the Weimar period through the Third Reich.209 It was becoming clear that the dance profession in the Third Reich benefited from ambitious initiatives to alleviate unemployment and improve professional training for “Aryan” dancers, and memoirs of young dancers trained in Ausdruckstanz testified to the successes they enjoyed in those twelve years.210 Also, in some ways, Gleichschaltung generously fulfilled the wishes of professional groups that had been voiced in the preceding years, such as raising professional standards, opening large-scale education initiatives, and creating employment opportunities in public theaters, Thingspiele, youth organizations, and Strength through Joy projects.211 At the end of the 1990s, historians Peter Jelavich and Suzanne Marchand each published articles looking back on the decade’s amazing wealth of scholarship on arts and culture in the Third Reich but also noting the unmistakable hesitations

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and contradictions lying within. Hesitation manifested itself in the reluctance to push comparisons of Nazi Germany with other systems, including democracies; to build bridges between investigations of administrative structures and of artistic activity; and to come to terms with blatant contradictions between ideology and practice.212 At the same time, the isolation of the twelve years of the Third Reich as a historical aberration still held firm, resulting in only limited attempts to trace continuities before 1933 and after 1945 and an undervaluation of the profound and resonating impact of the First World War on German cultural life.213 Looking back, the years surrounding the end of the Cold War were punctuated by a flurry of commemorations that brought an abundance of evidence to light, followed by a series of rapid-fire events that constantly changed the rules of how to interpret all this evidence ethically and constructively and the emergence of questions about what the Nazi episode meant for the self-definition not only of Germans but also of citizens of the twentieth-century industrialized world.

5

Modernism and the Isolation of Nazi Culture

During the Cold War, modernism turned into a banner for the struggle of Western cultural freedoms against totalitarian repression and regression. This had ramifications not only for interpreting contemporary Soviet conditions but also for retrospectively interpreting Nazi culture. Western tolerance toward modernism served as proof of the successful eradication of Nazi prejudices, reassurance that these and other remnants of Nazi barbarity no longer threatened Germany’s democratic reconstruction, and warnings that any Soviet incursions on artistic freedom would not be tolerated. As John-Paul Stonard summarized, “ ‘modern art,’ as it was understood, became a test-case for democratic adjustment and awareness. The ability to answer the challenges of non-naturalistic art was seen as evidence of having internalised the spirit of tolerance necessary for the new freedoms of democracy.”1 That Stonard places “modern art” in quotation marks, however, alludes to the confusion reigning over what modernism was and how it would serve as a measure of democracy. By this time, a clear understanding of the meaning of modernism was elusive at best. For one thing, in the zeal to classify individuals and their work, cultural historians tended to seek out the modernist proclivities of victims of National Socialism and antimodernism among the perpetrators, spawning such broad categories as “Weimar modernists,” “exile modernists,” and “Zero Hour modernists” but overlooking the differing aesthetic orientations within this large and diverse group. Furthermore, although conceiving antimodernism as a common objective of both Hitler and Stalin served a useful function during the Cold War, this construction could barely conceal the complicating similarities that existed not only between Nazi and Stalinist turns toward realism but also global tendencies toward a populist aesthetic that had taken hold already in the 1920s 175

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throughout Europe and the United States. Yet any transnational comparisons would draw unwelcome attention not only to common traits democracies might share with dictatorships but also to the possibility that there had been much that was progressive and modern in National Socialism. If brought to light, this would jeopardize the by now “uncontestable” distinctions between the Nazi cultural worldview and that of the powers that had delivered the world from its menacing assaults. These considerations would pose difficulties for Marxist historians hoping to distinguish between Nazi arts and socialist realism as well as for the advocates of the totalitarian view, who highlighted any similarities they could observe between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, but who turned a blind eye to parallel developments in the United States and other Western powers. Having assessed the resilience of notions of structural nazification in arts scholarship, we now turn to its aesthetic counterparts, looking once again at historiographical trends from the 1940s to the 1990s. The models for aesthetic nazification have rested on the assumption that the Nazis’ single-minded campaign to wipe out all forms of modernism led to cultural conditions that could yield only propaganda and kitsch. As we will see, however, the focus on antimodernism drew its strength from adhering to very specific, if historically problematic, parameters for defining what was “modern.” We have already observed how the outward commitment of the West German artistic community to carve out a new aesthetic direction for itself had concentrated on reviving expressionism as a purely German artistic product untainted by Nazi exploitation. In interpreting the Nazi past, historians similarly foregrounded the party’s vilification of expressionism, with the Bauhaus and Neue Sachlichkeit (commonly translated as “New Objectivity” or “New Sobriety”) achieving a parallel status as homegrown modernist achievements that were silenced by Hitler. Yet just as maintaining the belief in a diachronic isolation of Nazi culture required scholars to put on blinders to the continuities before and after 1945, so, too, would a synchronic isolation require them to ignore traits common to Nazi culture and contemporary trends elsewhere, including in Western democracies. When these similarities gained notice, the tacit mandate to isolate Nazi culture often involved dismissing all products of the Third Reich as artistically inferior, but as scholarship started to venture into serious study of popular culture during the Third Reich, it became increasingly difficult to ignore how Nazi Germany followed global trends and how art interacted with politics in Germany and elsewhere. P R O B L E M S O F G E R M A N M O D E R N I SM

Confrontations with the Nazi past were not the sole source of ambiguity about the meaning of modernism; to be sure, questions about modernism have fueled debates in many national contexts and sparked discourses that could fill entire

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libraries. Unlike the medieval distinction between the ancients and the moderns or the Enlightenment usage of the word “modern” to highlight the superiority of the present over the past, the term “modernism” has taken on more specific but also more conflicting implications in the twentieth century. As a result of growing inconsistency and disagreement, some have chosen to jettison the problematic term “modernism” altogether and substitute it with alternative nomenclature that can account for the diversity of twentieth-century aesthetic movements. Art historian Bernard Smith coined the term “formalesque” to embrace most, if not all, trends emerging from the 1890s through 1960s,2 and musicologist Glenn Watkins proposed an overriding aesthetic of “collage” as dominant in arts of the twentieth century, which departed from the romantic primacy of organicism and experimented with traditional conceptions of space and time.3 Those who have ventured to confront the term head-on, however, have had to consider whether modernism designates an era, a stylistic approach, or an attitude. According to art historian Charles Harrison, although modernism can be used as a historical marker—even though this runs into problems when one tries to apply the term to multiple art forms (e.g., modernism in the visual arts is understood to extend from the mid– nineteenth century to the mid–twentieth century or beyond, musical modernism tends to fix its start around the turn of the century, and modern English literature is generally limited to the first two decades of the twentieth century)—there are other, equally valid uses of the term. He settles on three viable but differing definitions: the state of existence in modern society; a specific trend in twentieth-century high art, articulated by Clement Greenberg, that eschews conservatism, critiques modernity, and distinguishes itself from popular culture; and a critical tradition that privileges modernist tendencies in the arts and values their autonomy, aesthetic merit, and artistic quality.4 Several years later, film scholar Miriam Bratu Hansen similarly described modernism not as a “single-logic genealogy” (e.g., linking cubism to abstract expressionism or Schoenberg to Stockhausen) or “a repertory of artistic styles” but rather as encompassing “a whole range of cultural and artistic practices that register, respond to, and reflect upon processes of modernization and the experience of modernity.”5 These broader views would also tacitly require us to entertain the possibility that all twentieth-century industrial societies—including dictatorships—cultivated modernism. Yet even if Nazi cultural history is not the exclusive source of this confusion, the Germans’ peculiar relationship to modernism, modernization, and modernity warrants special attention. In this context, it is particularly useful to consider David Harvey’s concise formulation of modernism as “a troubled and fluctuating aesthetic response to conditions of modernity produced by a particular process of modernization.”6 The cumulative processes of modernization wrought radical transformations in all corners of German society, creating an unsettling and unpredictable state of modernity and generating “troubled and fluctuating”

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reactions. The German Empire’s accelerated industrialization reached a crisis point with the defeat in World War I and the economic collapse of the 1920s, leaving a shaky state of modernity that prompted reactions arguably more “troubled and fluctuating” in Germany than elsewhere in the industrialized world and generating a cacophony of responses from all across the political spectrum. Influential German thinkers had long exhibited ambivalence toward modernization, beginning with the warnings of nineteenth-century conservatives such as Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche. Walter Frisch identified an exceptionalism (Sonderweg) of German modernism characterized by a positive acceptance of rapid social, economic, and technological advances tinged with ironic nostalgia for the preindustrial world. This can explain why Wagner’s “conservative thought did not match with the modern style of his music”; why Nietzsche rejected Wagner yet kept returning to him as a point of reference to rationalize art with science; and why Thomas Mann employed irony in Buddenbrooks, Tristan, and Wälsungenblut to provide “both an escape hatch from German Romanticism and a lens through which to view it in sharp focus.”7 This ambivalence culminated in widespread pessimism during the Weimar Republic that was felt across the entire political spectrum—by the völkisch nationalists on the right; by communists and socialists on the left, mobilizing against capitalist industry and its deleterious social effects; and by the “republicans of reason” (Vernunftrepublikaner) in the center, Thomas Mann among them, who halfheartedly accepted the Weimar government but still respected the battle lines drawn between Kultur and Zivilisation. Yet the vocal disillusionment with modernization, urbanization, and globalization (above all “Americanization”) arguably served more as a rhetorical catharsis than a serious challenge to modernizing forces at work, and Nazi vitriol hurled at the Weimar Republic tended to mask the developments continuing under Hitler that aimed to build a modern society to rival all others.8 Utopian preoccupations with the occult and the pre-Christian Germanic past, “blood and soil” agrarian fantasies, and the preservation of folk culture coexisted with other utopian visions of technocracy, geopolitical dominance, and social mobility. And despite the antimodernist rhetoric and the pageantry with which it was displayed in the arts, there was substantial evidence of tolerance during the Third Reich toward much of the same modernism that the Nazi leaders were reputed to have silenced.9 Yet with democracy firmly positioned during the Cold War as a precondition for progress, historians considered the case of Germany as a tragic series of missteps, working backward from the failure of Weimar democracy to Bismarck’s break with liberalism and even looking back as far as Martin Luther to probe the depths of authoritarian traditions. Postwar historiography took a once positively conceived concept of Germany’s Sonderweg and turned it into something negative. The positive Sonderweg concept had applauded Germany’s singular constitu-

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tional monarchy, powerful civil service, and resistance to Western Enlightenment and Zivilisation in favor of unique German modes of Bildung and Kultur. After 1945, historians under pressure to make sense of Nazi atrocities reshaped the Sonderweg concept as a path to disaster, highlighting the failures of liberalism, parliamentary government, and political, economic, and cultural modernization. Despite the tendencies of such investigations to overlook elements of German history that brought it more in line with other European modernizing trends, the Sonderweg idea persisted as an explicit and implicit foundation for much historical writing of the postwar period.10 Only toward the end of the Cold War was it possible to take a fresh look at modern trends in Nazi society and even to entertain the possibility that the National Socialists tolerated modernist aesthetics in spite of their vitriol against degeneracy. Jeffrey Herf, in his 1984 book, Reactionary Modernism, was one of the first to explore the German symbiosis of technology and romanticism, following Ralf Dahrendorf ’s and David Schoenbaum’s observations that the National Socialists had deployed modern means to further antimodern agendas. Citing Thomas Mann’s observation of Nazism’s “technological romanticism” and Joseph Goebbels’s description of “steellike romanticism,” Herf demonstrated how leading intellectuals of the time managed to reconcile technology with irrationalism, upholding a union of Technik and Kultur and affirming a commitment to preserving the German Kulturnation. Continuing into the Third Reich, the argument proliferated that technology, “national capital” (as opposed to international, or “Jewish,” capital), and “creative labor” needed to be liberated from global Jewish domination. As summarized by Goebbels, “National Socialism understood how to take the soulless framework of technology and fill it with the rhythm and hot impulses of our time.”11 Further explorations in the late 1980s and early 1990s into the modern aspects of Nazism and Fascism looked beyond science and technology.12 German historians from several specializations detected modernist impulses in many developments in the Third Reich, such as growing secularization, capitalism, urbanization, social mobility, literacy, working and middle class consciousness, bureaucratization, colonial expansion, communications, transportation, professionalization, standardization in industry, mass production, and consumerism.13 Art historians Mark Antliff and Emily Braun examined the complex interactions of modernism and political factionalism in the early twentieth century to illustrate how modernist art in France and Italy could boldly reflect the core beliefs of Fascism.14 For historians of German culture, these new insights shed light on the Nazis’ investment in a wide range of initiatives to expand radio and film, provide broader access to cultural events with programs such as Strength through Joy, and elevate the social and economic standing of undervalued arts professions. Some historians expressed concerns that this new focus might cause us to lose sight of the fact that the utopia the Nazis pursued was meant exclusively for a thriving, purified race and to overlook the dark side of

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progress that facilitated the highly efficient killing systems of the Holocaust.15 Peter Fritzsche, for one, sternly warned against forgetting that the society targeted for improved living standards was the German Volksgemeinschaft, a racially defined community that would seize territory for its own growth and would rid itself of “unhealthy” and “foreign” elements through isolation, expulsion, sterilization, and extermination.16 E X P R E S SIO N I SM A N D N E U E S AC H L IC H K E I T

As we have already seen, the revival of expressionism became a centerpiece of the Zero Hour cultural mission. First and foremost, expressionism proved especially useful in comparing the totalitarian antimodernism of Nazism and Stalinism, having figured prominently in the massive seizure of “degenerate” paintings and coming under increasing attack in East Germany.17 Once adopted as an antitotalitarian shibboleth, the term “expressionism” could be adapted to realms beyond painting, such as film, literature, theater, dance, and music, since its earliest advocates consciously encouraged interdisciplinarity (especially evident in the Blaue Reiter group’s deliberate integration of arts and literature). This allowed for a postwar application of the moniker to a wide range of aesthetic directions, even when such application seemed forced and inconsistent. Peter Gay used the term as a general epithet for all artistic trends of the 1920s,18 and fellow exile Nikolaus Pevsner revised his earlier take on it. After eschewing expressionism as an architectural term in the original 1936 edition of Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius, Pevsner retroactively applied it to architecture in later versions of this widely consulted survey of modern design, inserting new references to “that peculiar and short-lived Expressionism in Continental and especially Dutch architecture” and adding a closing paragraph to the book that firmly but also abruptly established expressionism as an architectural style.19 It was also a widely accepted designation for Weimar theater, film, and dance, and, as was noted earlier, Adorno played a central role in forcing the term onto all of Schoenberg’s oeuvre.20 In the case of dance, there actually were demonstrable links between the members of expressionist groups and leading figures in the dance world. Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner were close to Mary Wigman, depicting her in their paintings to convey a specifically Germanic manifestation of dance, and Kandinsky drew parallels in his writing between expressionist painting and “expressive dance” (Ausdruckstanz).21 The primacy of expressionism among postwar cultural historians, as noted earlier, also grew out of a less articulated desire to recapture a quintessentially German art form. Expressionism could provide a safe outlet for rebuilding national pride because it had been attacked by totalitarian dictators past and present. As early as 1914, critics, curators, and historians had identified expressionism as a movement that was explicitly German, distinct from the Frenchness of cubism

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and Italianness of futurism. In 1925, they described it as “German in its innermost essence” and able to strengthen “the national element in art,” and they even derisively depicted it as “mystic German beefsteak” concocted from the chopping up of cubism and futurism.22 In 1931, New York’s Museum of Modern Art focused overwhelmingly on expressionist works in the exhibition German Painting and Sculpture, and associations of the term with German art still hold, as Smith conceded that “Expressionists” is “a vague term that is used in a number of ways” but includes among its meanings “the peculiar characteristics of Germanic art since the Middle Ages” as well as “the general character of Germanic and Nordic modernism.”23 Yet the broad application of the expressionist label was also possible because the term had lost any precise meaning decades before. Any specific associations that might have been assigned to expressionism during the heyday of the Blaue Reiter and Brücke groups had rapidly dissipated in the period following World War I. Some art critics were boldly asserting that expressionism had become passé as early as the end of the war, claiming that it had been reduced to a decorative “empty shell” and was linked with the failures of the new Weimar Republic.24 Dadaists articulated their critique of the style in their manifesto: “Has expressionism fulfilled our expectations for such an art which is a public vote on our most vital concerns? No! No! No!”25 By 1925, Gustav Hartlaub celebrated new realist directions with an exhibit conspicuously titled New Objectivity: German Painting after Expressionism (Neue Sachlichkeit: Deutsche Malerei nach dem Expressionismus) the same year that Franz Roh wrote about magical realism as “postexpressionist.” Shearer West has problematized the entire category of expressionism by looking at its exploitation by art dealers and critics who artificially corralled artists with little in common politically or aesthetically by identifying them as expressionists and then extended the moniker to other arts. Thus, by the time Hartlaub and others disassociated art’s new directions from expressionism, no one really had a clear sense of what the term even meant. West presented the category of Neue Sachlichkeit as even more contrived and diffuse than expressionism, despite the efforts of Hartlaub and Roh to delineate it, noting that it lacked a geographic center; embraced diverse styles and techniques of constructivism, verism, and other styles; and focused on a wide range of subjects.26 James van Dyke shed further light on the blurred lines separating all of these designations, showing how art dealers additionally coined the term “Neoromantic” to capture elements that might have otherwise been described as Neue Sachlichkeit or expressionism. These terms would soon acquire political baggage in the 1920s and 1930s, as liberal artists were often associated with the objective Neue Sachlichkeit and conservatives were labeled as subjective and “Neoromantic,” but even this distinction was anything but firm. Radziwill, for example, was praised in the Nazi press in 1933 for

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his combination of “technical objectivity” and “romantic subjectivity.”27 Expressionism was championed by some National Socialist factions in the first years of the regime, as we have seen, and its influence was especially evident in some of the thousands of paintings made by German soldiers in World War II that were seized by American forces.28 Nevertheless, some of the first reports after 1945 fixate on the Nazi suppression and postwar revival of expressionism, even though many of these reports come from expressionism’s earlier detractors. Adolf Behne was one such detractorturned-defender of expressionism. He gave a lecture just days after the end of the war, titled “Degenerate Art: Hitler’s Lie,” and published one of the first postwar exposés on Nazi art in 1947, Entartete Kunst. Behne had had close ties to Social Democrats during the Weimar Republic, but he remained in the Third Reich throughout the war despite difficulties he encountered for being a member of the international PEN club. After the war, he became a leading figure in the Soviet Zone art scene before his untimely death in 1948. Yet despite the fact that he had been a vocal critic of expressionism after World War I, his postwar defense of modern art focused primarily on its revitalization.29 He insisted that expressionism had been the sole target of a propaganda campaign by Goebbels to amass support among the ignorant bourgeoisie for a full-scale attack on all artistic freedom. Behne implored the next generation to resume what the expressionists began in their “universal-unbourgeois, artistic-revolutionary” mission while also acknowledging the inherent German spirit of these artists: “I can think of no one with a more German nature than Franz Marc, August Macke, Paul Klee, Schlemmer, Morgner.”30 Rave’s 1949 book, Kunstdiktatur, was also intent on showing how this very German art form was, indeed, killed off by the Nazis. Mentioning only briefly the meager efforts of Goebbels and the Nazi Students’ League to uphold expressionism as a Nordic art, Rave’s account gives the impression that expressionism was the primary if not the sole target of Nazi cultural policy.31 Pevsner saw no reason even to acknowledge expressionism by name in his 1936 survey of modern design, merely discussing Gauguin’s painting Yellow Christ of 1889 as an example of raw primitivism that had “hardly been surpassed by the painters of the war decade,” whom he distinguished with a “sign of decadence.”32 But the 1960 edition attributes to the same painting “the deliberate primitiveness with which the Expressionists of 1920 endowed their figures,” and the earlier suggestion of its decadence was deleted.33 With a general consensus emerging that expressionism had been silenced by the National Socialists, any signs of its resurrection after the war were to be celebrated. Lehmann-Haupt observed that “expressionism witnessed a distinct revival,” comparing it to “the return to consciousness after a long stupor,”34 and a 1951 report by Bernard Myers observed that “considering the fact that for thirteen years modern art was under an interdict, the quality of work now being done is

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exceptionally high.” He cataloged the whereabouts and activities of the “veterans of the twenties” (Hofer, Schmidt-Rottluff, Dix, Nolde, Baumeister, and others) and noted that of the former Brücke artists, only Schmidt-Rottluff carried on. While others such as Pechstein and Heckel became “more conventional,” Schmidt-Rottluff ’s continued career affirmed that expressionism was alive and well. Myers believed to have discovered the continuation of “expressionism in the Brücke sense” in the work of younger artists as well as in a turn toward the abstraction of Kandinsky, toward “mystic religiosity” in the case of Dix, or to abstract surrealism in the case of “former expressionist” Werner Gilles. Myers also credited the exiles Feininger, Kokoschka, and Beckmann with spreading “the message of expressionism to a younger generation.”35 From that point on, the eradication of expressionism at the hands of the National Socialists became such a well-established truism that the influential history of expressionism by John Willett could situate it as “a product of the German revolution of November 1918” that managed to “permeate the whole cultural life of the Weimar Republic in a way for which there was no parallel elsewhere.” Thus, its decline “did not come, as most of its historians imply, with the slackening of the German movement proper in the early 1920’s. . . . What killed it rather was the all-out attack launched by the (democratically elected) Nazis . . . paralleled by the reactionary art policies simultaneously instituted in Russia,” only to be revived after World War II.36 The only postwar attack on expressionism came from Robert Scholz, who was still so firmly entrenched in the mindset of Degenerate Art that he unequivocally rejected expressionism as primitive, decadent, and “un-German,” despite the ardent support of its erstwhile Nazi advocates (Gottfried Benn, Emil Nolde, and the National Socialist Student League). He pointed to the fact that art critics had repudiated expressionism after World War I, and he also cited a string of earlier detractors: Lovis Corinth (who described the Brücke’s “Hottentot naiveté”), Oswald Spengler, museum director Wilhelm Bode, and even the Jewish impressionist Max Liebermann, himself a victim of Nazi purges and property seizure (he supposedly compared expressionism to “Negro or Fiji Island art” and threatened to resign as the Berlin Secession president if Nolde’s paintings were exhibited). Scholz asserted that, despite these earlier rejections, both “the modernist directions, especially expressionism, dominated the art public until 1933 in Germany and were determined to continue to claim this dictatorial position.” But he also launched a two-pronged assault on those he regarded as hypocrites: first, on art critics racing to repossess the expressionism they had rejected long ago, and second, on former Nazis who, after 1945, exploited their past advocacy of expressionism in order to be rehabilitated. The latter included Bruno Werner, who had touted expressionism as a truly “Nordic” art form during the Third Reich, only to be elevated after the war to the position of editor of the Soviet Zone newspaper, Neues Deutschland, becoming “one of the most eager reeducators of the Germans away from the evils of National Socialism.”37 Werner was not

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alone. Others who had promoted expressionism from within the National Socialist camp in the short-lived journal Kunst der Nation, such as Werner Haftmann and Will Grohmann,38 resurrected arguments from the 1930s and 1940s to advocate for expressionism as a German and even “Nordic” manifestation. Even the postwar sentiments of Behne are almost identical to those earlier claims about the Germanic (or “Nordic” or “Viking”) racial characteristics of expressionism that distinguished it from “international” and “art-for-art’s-sake” movements such as impressionism, and he named Nolde, Beckmann, Barlach, and even Dix for upholding purely German artistic traditions.39 As an outsider with less at stake, Lehmann-Haupt dared to make more direct reference to the Nazis’ initial tolerance toward eclecticism, acknowledging their “flirtation” with modern art, above all expressionism.40 And despite his overt antiSoviet stance, he also acknowledged the Soviets’ initial openness to modern art, the same “ ‘flirtation’ between progressive art and the early phases of a new regime” that he had noted in the first years of the Third Reich.41 Nevertheless, he described the works featured in the 1937 Great German Art Exhibition as “exactly the kind of paintings my parents would have looked at in the Glaspalast exhibitions thirty or forty years earlier,” and he offered the grim prognosis that “there was going to be no change. . . . Nazi painting . . . stayed fixed at a point of evolution that had been reached in the second half of the nineteenth century.”42 The “retrogression of Nazi painting,” of course, prompted him to observe: “We are to hear exactly the same tune ten years later from the mouths of the communist propagators of social realism in the Soviet orbit.”43 Ultimately, however, Lehmann-Haupt was most interested in directing a cautionary tale toward his own lawmakers back home: “The Nazis called modern art Bolshevistic, degenerate, Jewish. The Soviets call it capitalistic, bourgeois, degenerate. The critics in the United States call it communistic, subversive, abnormal. Obviously, these things are mutually exclusive. Modern art cannot possibly be all these things at the same time. There is only one conclusion from this absurd dilemma, and it is a matter of the greatest importance: modern art is a powerful symbol of anti-totalitarian belief.”44 While Brenner’s predecessors only alluded to the Nazi students’ defense of expressionism, she not only documented their activities in detail but also indicated how higher functionaries showed signs of conceding to their wishes.45 Few thereafter could overlook Brenner’s revelations, yet any notions of Nazi tolerance for modernism remained a difficult pill to swallow and instead had to be recast as an act of resistance. In 1977, a Munich exhibition documented the continuation of expressionism after 1933 only among inner emigrants.46 Included in its catalog was a brief essay by Otto Andreas Schreiber, a founding editor of Kunst der Nation and the leader of the Nazi students’ pro-expressionism movement (although he was obviously not identified in the catalog as such), describing the DAF-sponsored factory exhibitions that featured an overwhelming number of artists included in

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the Degenerate Art exhibition. According to Schreiber, the roughly four thousand exhibitions of modern art, much to the chagrin of Nazi leadership, managed to persist because the shows were closed to the public and the press, supposedly out of concern for industrial espionage.47 In 1994, an exhibition on the history of the Klosterstrasse Studio Collective in Berlin, which supplied many of the works to Schreiber’s DAF exhibitions, portrayed the collective as “an island in Nazi Berlin” operating in constant fear of persecution, and claimed that its members were mostly apolitical, but also acknowledged the numerous Nazi government commissions granted even to artists whose works had been seized from museum collections.48 Only later, in 1999, would further research reveal that these factory exhibitions were, in fact, not closed to the public. The most compelling case of an early critic of expressionism who went on to celebrate its renaissance after 1945 is that of Franz Roh. In 1925, Roh agreed with his contemporaries that expressionism was dead, and he rejoiced in the direction toward what he referred to as “magical realism” in his influential book Post-Expressionism: Magical Realism; Problems of Contemporary European Painting (Nach-Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus; Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei).49 He observed this trend in the same works that Hartlaub had labeled with the more widely accepted designation Neue Sachlichkeit in his exhibition of the same year. Both terms were often subsumed under the even broader rubric of realism alongside international directions in new naturalism, ideal realism, verism, neoclassicism, constructivism (in Russia), metaphysical painting (Italy’s Pittura Metafisica), post-expressionism, and even Americanism (identified in 1927). All unequivocally marked what was believed to be the death of expressionism, whose utopian, apocalyptic, and mystical emotionalism had become obsolete once the shock and disillusionment of the war had set in. Yet many of the artists associated with Neue Sachlichkeit went on to enjoy successful careers in Nazi Germany, especially Adolf Ziegler (fig. 9). Roh had even listed Ziegler as one of the promising young representatives of magical realism in his 1925 book.50 Magical realism could be perceived after the war as having dangerous ties to Nazi art, as the blurry boundaries between realism, surrealism, magical realism, Neue Sachlichkeit, and Nazi art posed difficulties in promoting any remotely realistic styles during the Cold War, given the Soviets’ heightened campaign for socialist realism and the Western impulse to counter it with the promotion of abstraction. This seems to have pushed Roh, like other chroniclers of art in the Third Reich, toward promoting the very expressionism and abstraction he had long ago rejected.51 As the main protagonist of magical realism, Roh must have felt himself in a particularly awkward position. His ardent promotion of expressionism after the war can therefore be read as a possible overcompensation for his earlier advocacy of styles and artists that went on to thrive under the Third Reich. In Roh’s “Entartete” Kunst of 1962, he saved his most stinging barbs for the artist he had

figure 9. Adolf Ziegler, The Four Elements (triptych), ca. 1937 (bpk, Berlin/Art Resource, New York).

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once promoted, Adolf Ziegler (whom he now regarded as a “slippery eel”), and for the Great German Art exhibits, which he described as replete with “half- and fullkitsch.”52 To his credit, Roh accurately presented the Degenerate Art Action as far more eclectic than a single-minded attack on expressionism, highlighting the inconsistency of the confiscation of works by any Jewish artists, regardless of style; of works with pacifist, communist, or Jewish subject matter; of abstract works; of anything regarded as “ugly”; and of “all expressionism, even by the ‘Nordic’ Nolde.”53 As for Neue Sachlichkeit, Alfred Rosenberg’s various accusations against the movement (he called it “impotent,” “lacking creativity,” and a “feeble petrification of the soul”54) aided in identifying it after the war as a target of Nazi attacks, rivaled only by expressionism and the Bauhaus, and the term was not limited to painting. In fact, exile scholar Anthony Heilbut used the term to describe a group of artists who would eventually be drawn to America—Stravinsky, Brecht, Grosz, Piscator, Hindemith, and the Bauhaus architects55—but he curiously listed no painters, possibly because so many of them remained in Germany and continued their careers past 1933. West German art historians such as Wieland Schmied denied any similarities between Nazi art and Neue Sachlichkeit or magical realism, insisting that those movements lived on only in exile or inner emigration, and—while noting Roh’s early endorsement of Ziegler—asserted that none of the latter’s work could be considered magical realism.56 Hinz equivocated that “if we disregard the controversy over Expressionism and some conflicts involving the painters of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), there were hardly any differences of opinion on what was still acceptable and what was no longer acceptable.”57 A 1977 exhibit on the art and architecture of 1930s Germany (rather than the Third Reich) cautiously broached the continuity of realism from the 1920s into the 1930s, yet it downplayed the seamless careers of artists such as Radziwill. It also seemed to want to preserve the notion that Neue Sachlichkeit was a victim of National Socialism, carefully avoiding any suggestions of the style’s persistence in the Third Reich and instead outlining any apparent similarities to a longer tradition of “trivial” art.58 Scholz took a completely different tack. He could not entertain the notion of any continuities between Neue Sachlichkeit and Nazi-era painting, but this was because he was associating the designation only with those artists stigmatized as degenerate, insisting that the Neue Sachlichkeit of Grosz, Beckmann, and Dix was vapid and soulless “anti-art.”59 When John Willett took on the yeoman’s task in 1978 to conceptualize Neue Sachlichkeit in his book The New Sobriety 1917–1933: Art and Politics in the Weimar Period, he shed important light on the traits it shared with futurism, verism, magical realism, Russian constructivism, Americanism, and the embrace of technology and urban development in architecture, design, literature, and the performing arts, but he notably concluded that all of these fell victim to Nazi antimodernism and

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socialist realism.60 This supposition would continue to baffle those who could clearly see realism bridging Weimar and Nazi works but honored the taboo on conflating Neue Sachlichkeit with Nazi realism. Peter Adam’s Art of the Third Reich (1992), for example, named several realists of the 1920s displayed in the Great German Art Exhibition yet claimed they altered their styles to conform to the new official criteria, concluding that there was no original or distinctive form of Nazi art, only a lack of creativity in a soulless cultural wasteland.61 In his richly illustrated history of Neue Sachlichkeit, originally published in 1992, Sergiusz Michalski emphatically rejected any connections the style had to Nazi painting: “Does Neue Sachlichkeit in fact belong indirectly to the precursors of a fascist style of painting which in 1933 was as yet present only in barest outline, as is often maintained? The answer to this question can only be a clear, flat negative.” Yet Michalski also conceded that some “second-rate artists” constituted a “personal union of Neue Sachlichkeit and Nazism” when they employed “Neue Sachlichkeit elements.”62 By the late 1970s, Jost Hermand had already pointed to the continuity of Neue Sachlichkeit into what would later be identified as Nazi art,63 but it was Adam Oellers who pulled back the curtain to reveal the taboo that precluded any reference to the similarities between Neue Sachlichkeit and Nazi art. He attributed this taboo to the insistence of Hinz and others that Nazi painting consisted exclusively of idealized genre painting, which they distinguished from the Soviets’ more realistic depictions of contemporary industrial life. Oellers, however, countered with numerous examples to illustrate the development and fruition in Germany of industrial landscapes from the 1920s through the 1930s on canvas and in murals, as well as the continuities in technique and in subjects depicting families, women, and petit bourgeois ideals over this longer time period.64 Oellers also cited the slight inaccuracy in Richard Grunberger’s widely read 12-Year Reich, where it was asserted that, in the Great German Art Exhibition, “there was one glaringly obvious omission: not a single canvas depicted urban or industrial life.”65 This honest and seemingly harmless oversight on the part of Grunberger led to enduring generalizations about aesthetic parameters of the Third Reich. Although Oellers pointed to this as misleading in 1978,66 it has only recently been shown that, although urban and industrial subjects may have remained in the minority (no more than 10 percent), each of the successive Great German Art shows devoted space to depictions of the defense system, the SS, soldiers, and glorification of technological achievements such as the Autobahn, new architecture, and ultramodern industrial plants.67 In the 1990s, new studies removed these longstanding barriers dividing Nazi art and Weimar art. At first, a sudden interest in individual painters active under Hitler generated a handful of exhibits and publications, in many cases simply to call attention to forgotten artists and to try to display them in a neutral or sometimes apologetic light. These had the perhaps unintended effect of calling attention to the strong elements of Neue Sachlichkeit, surrealism, and even expressionism in

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the works of these “Nazi artists.” Most famously, the painting Camaraderie or Workers’ Community (later renamed Builder’s Workshop) by Rudolf Hengstenberg won the grand prize at the Paris World Exposition, and another of his works commissioned for the same event, May Day Celebration in the Berlin Lustgarten, was celebrated in the Third Reich despite concerns that it was “too expressionistic” (Hengstenberg also received recognition in 1938 from the German-American Harry Kreismann Society).68 In short succession, a number of historians used their subjects to explore more deeply the relationship of Neue Sachlichkeit with National Socialism—Ingeborg Bloth wrote about Adolf Wissel, Anja Hesse about Werner Peiner, James van Dyke about Franz Radziwill, and Olaf Peters about Radziwill, Dix, Georg Scholz, and Rudolf Schlichter.69 Challenging the prevailing contention that Neue Sachlichkeit had been obliterated in 1933, these studies began to show that artists active in the 1920s continued successful careers in the Third Reich without changing their styles, even continuing to use their work as a vehicle for criticizing contemporary conditions. Peters explained the seamless transition of these artists to the Third Reich as a byproduct of the Nazi failure to define, let alone realize, a unique National Socialist art form. Bloth, like Oellers, was even more outspoken in challenging the difficulties posed by Hinz’s methods and by the recent Historikerstreit, both of which had hindered an objective assessment of Wissel’s career in the Third Reich. These inquiries made huge strides in bringing this work out of the shadows, allowing it to shed the mantle of kitsch and creating an opportunity to evaluate it on its artistic merits.70 Most of the artworks analyzed in these new studies tended to be limited to landscapes, portraits, and allegorical subjects, with only fleeting acknowledgement of how painters celebrated industrial labor and the expansion of infrastructure. Yet more attention to the popular depictions of industry and technology that Oellers had cited might also clue us in to the much broader meanings the term “Neue Sachlichkeit” would have had in the 1920s and 1930s. Regardless of the connotations it has acquired in arts scholarship, the term was not coined to describe a painting technique or other artistic trend but instead embraced a more comprehensive philosophy of modernization. While World War I and hyperinflation fostered a mistrust of technology, the stabilization of the mark and the breakneck speed with which American-style standardization was implemented in industries softened some of the critiques of industrialization that followed the war. Philosophers, economists, and social scientists engaged in prolonged debates over the cultural and social ramifications of Americanism, and the arts got drawn into the fray as well. Some artists, gravitating toward Neue Sachlichkeit and figurative constructivism, embraced the promises of progress, while the more politically engaged among them (such as the Dadaists) fostered a far more ambivalent if not harshly critical attitude toward its negative implications for the working class.71 The Bauhaus, for example, came to grips with Neue Sachlichkeit when it made the integration of art

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figure 10. Otto Dix, To Beauty (An die Schönheit), 1922, Von-der-Heydt-Museum (photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York; © 2015 Artists Rights Society, NY/VG Bildkunst, Bonn).

and technology its central mission.72 The fundamental principles of Neue Sachlichkeit would later feed directly into the Beauty of Work program of the DAF, the goals of which had begun to take shape in the 1920s and continued to promote constructivism, Neue Sachlichkeit, and modernist industrial architecture and design well into the years of the Third Reich.73 The ambivalence and even antagonism toward modernization and Americanization among segments of the artistic community, however, can be detected even

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figure 11. Closing scene of the Leipzig premiere of Ernst Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf!, February 1927 (Archive, Universal Edition).

in some of the icons of Weimar progressivism. Otto Dix’s To Beauty (An die Schönheit, 1922, fig. 10) and his triptych Metropolis (Großstadt, 1927–1928) graphically depict the misery of postwar Germany, showing caricatures of black jazz musicians (one of them playing a drum emblazoned with an Indian Head penny, a symbol of American exploitation of Germany’s poor economy), the growing rift between rich and poor, and the degradation of German women forced into prostitution. A more vivid example is the opera Jonny spielt auf! (1927) by Ernst Krenek. Often

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canonized as a piece of anti-Nazi resistance by an exiled composer, its plot, characters, and musical devices tell a different story, one in which the central character, himself an avant-garde composer carrying on the noble legacy of German music, has an existential crisis when he has to confront American competition, personified by Jonny, a stealing and womanizing black jazz musician. In the final scene, Jonny—having duped the police—stands on top of a globe triumphantly playing his violin, suggesting the international domination of American greed and kitsch over German integrity and beauty (fig. 11). The opera was hugely popular in its day, and critics often praised its very timely social critique. Furthermore, some of the most highly acclaimed films of the recovery period following the hyperinflation mirrored the simultaneous celebration, hostility, and ambivalence with regard to American-style industrialization: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926), G. W. Pabst’s Unhappy Alley (Die freudlose Gasse, 1925), and Carl Mayer and Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, 1927).74 T H E BAU HAU S A S A N A N T I - NA Z I F O RT R E S S

The architectural counterpart to expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit functioning as the symbolic victim of the Nazis’ aesthetic warfare was the Bauhaus. Its final closure in 1933 and the subsequent departure from Germany of its masters, who went on to become important figures abroad, provided the ingredients for a wellcrafted narrative about the Nazis abruptly silencing the successful modernist enterprise as soon as they assumed power and immediately expelling the school’s most talented representatives. The 2005 edition of Pevsner’s textbook still adhered to this notion; it had a separate new section on the Bauhaus, and it attributed the school’s closure to “Hitler’s National Socialist government.”75 However, as we have already observed, the closure of the Bauhaus had a much more complicated prehistory of right-wing attacks that went back to the Weimar years.76 More importantly, the persistence into the Third Reich not only of new architecture but also of the careers of many of the Bauhaus affiliates was inescapably evident. However, the seeds had been planted in the earliest postwar accounts for proliferating the idea that the Nazi seizure of power caused the shutdown of the Bauhaus, both materially and intellectually, and ended the careers of its associates in Germany. Franz Roh first asserted that, under the Nazis, “new architecture (Baukunst) was both misunderstood and prohibited,” leaving decision-making to backward-looking, petit bourgeois functionaries who were “harder to educate than children or peasants” and resulting in “the most tragic episode in recent architectural history.”77 Nazi architecture, he continued, favored “bombastic fortresses” and “rigid classicism,” completely rejected as “Bolshevist” all of the progressive streamlining that had even come to be known in Italy as “German style,” and mandated the “forced emigration” of Bauhaus innovators Gropius, Mies, Breuer, Albers, and others.78

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Brenner, although noting that the Bauhaus had actually closed down in Weimar in 1925 before Frick took over in Thuringia, similarly speculated that architecture was the one area where Goebbels could claim success in fostering a new National Socialist creative spirit, even interpreting city planning and blueprints for official buildings as manifestations of “totalitarian construction.”79 Anna Teut’s 1967 document collection, Architektur im Dritten Reich 1933–1945, had cautiously looked back to 1928 to trace the growing conservatism that had resulted from the economic crisis and also made an ambivalent attempt to explain the continuation of modernist styles beyond 1933. But this was, in her view, because the progressive Neue Sachlichkeit from the Weimar years could quietly persist in the private sphere, resisting the aggressive assaults of Nazi ideologues.80 In an attempt to align the downfall of the Bauhaus with the “rise of political dictatorships that saw the dissolution of that democratic socialism which had especially informed the most creative aspects of German culture,” architecture historian William Jordy conceded that some of the Bauhaus architects were tendering their resignations from the school already in 1928, yet he still upheld that Nazi suppression drove modernism to thrive in the “diaspora.”81 By 1977, only Hans Scharoun had been acknowledged as a modernist who managed to resurrect a successful career under Hitler,82 but in the mid-1980s, concurrent with the reissue of Miller Lane’s book, a group of West German art historians pursued new lines of inquiry, leading them to observe that Hitler expressly distanced himself from mandating an architectural style, that considerations of function were tantamount to style even in commissions from party and state organizations, and that an eclecticism of styles prevailed and developed continually from the Weimar years through the 1950s and beyond.83 Miller Lane had already highlighted the importance of function and suggested that Nazi leaders each pursued their own tastes when it came to the large building projects they commissioned (e.g., Goering approved a modern style for the Air Ministry commissions, Hitler preferred neoclassicism, and Robert Ley had a penchant for medieval revivals).84 Hartmut Frank further noted that the military and industrial buildup almost exclusively favored modern styles, as did the Todt Organization (Organisation Todt, which oversaw the large infrastructure-building projects that included the Autobahn), the DAF, and the air force, employing many younger architects who, after the war, tried to portray themselves as victims of the Nazi system.85 At a 1991 colloquium that directly confronted Bauhaus continuities into the Third Reich, Winfried Nerdinger took the decisive step of rejecting any category of Nazi architecture, putting to rest any misperceptions about the flight into exile of Gropius and Mies and documenting the successful careers of their former students and associates in the Third Reich. He also demonstrated that modern directions in design could be pursued most freely in industry and other private and public realms (e.g., the military and the Reichswerke Hermann Göring) where forward-looking

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styles could “express technical values in a National Socialist sense.”86 This same colloquium further pursued a broader inquiry into the Bauhaus that looked beyond architecture. We have already seen how investigations into Bauhaus sculpture and graphic design had begun to erode contentions of totalitarian control, and an examination of the school’s decorative and industrial arts went even further in problematizing the antimodernist thesis. Up to that point, only Lehmann-Haupt had shown a peculiar interest in these artifacts, and he had run into considerable difficulties in trying to classify objects in a DAF catalog, ending up describing most of them as “modern” or “neutral contemporary” despite “ideological pressure.”87 As historians in the 1970s began to consider whether Nazi-era design had produced more than just kitsch, they chose to explain this persistence of Bauhaus functionality as an act of resistance, by which “Neue Sachlichkeit outwitted the dictatorship.”88 Participants in the 1991 colloquium, by contrast, were ready to acknowledge how the spirit of the Bauhaus lived on beyond 1933—through its pedagogical principles, holistic approach to design, and embrace of technology—even if the explicit mention of its name, which had acquired associations with cultural Bolshevism and Jewish internationalism, was avoided. Having past associations with the school posed no obstacles for those who assumed leading positions in graphic design, advertising, sculpture, and photography, or even those who mounted important exhibitions showcasing German technological advances. As a prime example, the landmark exposition Deutsches Volk: Deutsche Arbeit (German People: German Work) of 1934 was conceived and executed by Gropius, Mies, Bayer, and other Bauhaus veterans, who dedicated much of its space to showcasing the accomplishments of the German race in the modern world.89 The new focus on design called even more attention to continuities from the Weimar Republic, especially in the case of the German Association of Craftsmen (Deutscher Werkbund). Art historians had previously dismissed the Werkbund, which was completely absorbed into the Reich Culture Chambers by 1938, as a conservative faction that let itself be overtaken by Nazi powers, but closer investigations disclosed a more complicated path toward this Gleichschaltung. Founded in 1907 with state support to develop the fusion of art with industry, the Werkbund was an important force in developing functional design and architecture that would position Germany as a competitor in the world market. The financial crash of 1929, however, jeopardized not only its public subsidies but also public confidence in its mission, as the Depression undermined faith in industrial capitalism worldwide. The organization made the fateful move in 1933 to forge an alliance with the Fighting League for German Culture. The leadership of the Werkbund— which included Gropius and Mies—accompanied by members of the Fighting League, made overtures to the Nazi Party to stake its claim in the new state, even at one point holding meetings with Hitler.90 The Werkbund further collaborated with the DAF Beauty of Work operation, which was geared toward promoting

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health and safety in workplaces to make them functional as well as aesthetically pleasing. DAF programs not only beautified workers’ physical surroundings but also brought high culture (e.g., art exhibits and classical music concerts) to the workplace and created means affordable to workers to travel, attend cultural events, engage in leisure activities, and enjoy goods and services previously available only to the wealthier classes. In this way, the DAF invested in ensuring that any workers’ agitation in the 1920s would dissolve into a deeper sense of sharing in the total culture of the Volksgemeinschaft.91 The outward appearance of the seamless transition of the Werkbund into the Third Reich led many to represent the organization as aesthetically reactionary and to contrast it with the Bauhaus, yet it had inextricable ties with Bauhaus personnel and principles, and both the Werkbund and the Bauhaus worked toward the symbiosis of materials, mass production, and function.92 Some designers continued to incorporate traditional stylings in furniture and other products, according to John Heskett, as a superficial concession to the crafts professions that had to abandon their struggle against rationalization and modernization, but on the whole, styles remained eclectic, with no perceptible aesthetic guidelines for acceptable Nazi design.93 And it was not just the Werkbund that prospered in the new system: several Bauhaus affiliates rose to prominence in the Third Reich to execute an expressly “German” fusion of craft and industry, most notably Wilhelm Wagenfeld, who headed up the Lausitz United Glassworks in 1935, and Georg Muche, who conducted a master class in textile and industry beginning in 1939.94 Architect Paul Bonatz, credited with trying to find a “third way” to fuse industrial and traditional directions, joined the Fighting League after parting ways with both Werkbund and Bauhaus colleagues. Even though he still adhered to their principles while serving as artistic consultant for the Todt Organization, he continued to rail against Neue Sachlichkeit and the Bauhaus on purely political and personal grounds.95 In addition to highlighting the continuity of Bauhaus principles, design studies started to show the striking similarities among international trends. From a 1995 exhibit catalog showcasing the Wolfsonian collection, which holds numerous artifacts from Nazi Germany and elsewhere, common patterns can be observed among works from several countries in the use of design techniques to shape national identity and to respond to industrial, economic, and social pressures. In a compelling essay titled “Domesticating Modernity: Ambivalence and Appropriation, 1920–40,” Jeffrey Meikle clearly showed that the ambivalence and suspicion greeting industrialization was not exclusive to German “reactionary modernism” but rather could also be observed in strikingly similar responses in German, Italian, and American design. Marketing strategies in all three countries used imagery that linked the past with the present, promoting new modes of transportation as a link with historic and “primitive” sites, and “domesticating” technology and industry by placing it within an individual’s immediate domain, for example by featur-

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figure 12. Image of a German poster by Hermann Grah, Work Triumphs (Arbeit siegt), designed 1933–1945 (bpk, Berlin/ Kunstbibliothek/Art Resource, NY).

ing images of elegant women alongside machines to negate the technology’s perceived threats to humanity.96 Furthermore, Germany, Italy, and the United States all faced the common challenge of having to appease workers—whose lives were being disrupted by rapid industrialization, deteriorating working conditions, and unemployment caused by the Great Depression—and their similar tactics for reaching out to workers influenced the design motifs in all three countries (figs. 12 and 13). To lead workers away from the lure of communism while simultaneously promoting production, the three systems employed various art forms—such as posters, murals,

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figure 13. Image of an American poster, Work to Keep Free, 1943 (Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley).

sculpture, books, and ceramics—to glorify labor, both industrial and agricultural, and its collective contribution to a higher standard of living for all classes, while acknowledging the role of the government in making opportunities for advancement possible.97 If the ambivalence between the old and the new, between craftsmanship and industry, and between nostalgia and progress was a conundrum not exclusive to Germany, the German response was noteworthy for its manner of articulation. In Arthur Moeller van den Bruck’s prophetically titled book The Third Reich (1922) as well as in the pronouncements of the Bauhaus and the Werkbund, Germans

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grappled publically and vocally with the aesthetic and practical challenges of fusing past and present modes of production. Starting in 1916, as rationalization began to impose standards on virtually all branches of production, the community of artists, craftsmen, and architects hoped to put their artistic stamp on massproduced items, many of which were meant to improve living standards of the working class, a project further pursued in the DAF cultural programs.98 Yet the suspicion that progress posed a threat to the artistic, intellectual, and spiritual pursuits so intrinsically bound to German national pride—the elements of Bildung, Geist, and Kultur—had consumed German artists and intellectuals throughout the rapid industrialization of the late nineteenth century and had only intensified after World War I. That modernization could be “domesticated” as a national project was the outcome of effective rhetoric and packaging rather than the imposition of aesthetic constraints that would stifle modernism. The marketing of industrial commodities as “cultural goods,” “life expressions of the volk,” or “German work of value” effected what Paul Betts called the ability “to ‘baptize’ International Style design in the mysteries of Kultur and Geist.”99 But this broader perspective also made it increasingly difficult to ignore how Nazi Germany shared in global trends as well as how other cultures allowed art and politics to form alliances. Not only was it becoming more difficult to draw clear distinctions between Nazi art and socialist realism as the mass appeal and visuals common to both could no longer be swept under the rug, but it was becoming even more challenging to ignore how both systems shared traits with populist aesthetics that had spread beyond the dictatorships, even to the United States. Even the earliest Cold War cultural historians had to concede that both Hitler’s and Stalin’s sentiments may have found some sympathy among the masses. Lehmann-Haupt, for example, noted that Hitler’s supposed power to influence artistic taste “could not have been so widely accepted if it had not met the wishes of broad masses of the people, who felt exactly the same secret longing for the good old days in the threatening hostility of the post-war world.”100 Robert Scholz, too, placed the art produced in the Nazi years within the context of a growing popular tendency toward conservatism and realism worldwide.101 Only Hinz had attempted to distinguish Nazi genre paintings for distorting reality with their idealized titles, and “elitist” allegorical paintings for idealizing leaders and warriors, yet it was difficult to differentiate them from countless comparable examples of socialist realist works, and his critics chose instead to highlight these similarities.102 With few exceptions, however, comparisons continued to concentrate exclusively on the Nazi-Soviet pairing. It was mentioned only in passing that populist art played an important role in Western systems, but it was also stated that these societies did not regard these realistic renderings as true art.103 The Cold War still made it possible, if not imperative, for scholars to lump together Nazi and communist art as totalitarian, and they essentially had to put on blinders to avoid

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catching any glimpses of similar trends in other parts of the world. A 1987 exhibition on international artistic trends in the year 1937 broadened the scope somewhat by comparing the artistic positions of Germany, Russia, Spain, France, and Italy and drawing attention to debates about realism going on concurrently in all these countries and climaxing in 1936 and 1937: the expressionism debate in Germany, the formulation of socialist realism theory in the Soviet Union, the realism conflict (Querelle du réalisme) in France, the debates surrounding the Spanish Civil War, and the Italian opposition to Fascism. As Marie Luise Syring observed, the push for realism was just as strong in the art worlds of Spain, France, and Italy as it was in Soviet and Nazi art. However, she also tellingly observed that the structure of the art market during the Cold War essentially stifled this initiative.104 Another important exhibition, Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators 1930–45, held in 1995, also zeroed in on the year 1937, using the Paris World Exposition as its focal point. While it still restricted its scope to the totalitarian triumvirate of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, it probed not only the primacy of populism but also the engagement with modernization that took center stage in all three systems: the harnessing of technology, ideals of totality and social unity, and the prevalence of monumentality and populism.105 Eric Michaud further postulated that Hitler and others tended toward a “measured modernity” that prevailed well before World War I and not only in Germany.106 Perhaps the most glaring and enduring reminders that “Nazi” style might not have been exclusive to Nazi Germany, however, were the numerous examples of neoclassical buildings erected worldwide in the 1930s and 1940s, a phenomenon that even Lehmann-Haupt had to acknowledge. On the one hand, he asserted Hitler’s approach to classical architecture as a gesture that “fiercely stamped out every genuinely contemporary and progressive expression” and condemned German architecture as “so bare of artistic originality and real intellectual content, so naïvely dilettantic [sic] for the most part, that it is difficult to understand how so little could . . . go so far.”107 Yet, on the other hand, when commenting on specific styles, he noted the indebtedness to 1920s modernism and the numerous examples of high-quality structures, especially for industry and the military.108 He also had to acknowledge the obvious similarities between neoclassic monumentality in Washington and Berlin: Architecture-conscious residents of Washington, D.C., will point with unholy glee to certain buildings that they feel are plainly influenced by Speer. But while such structures no doubt exhibit a similar traditional classicism, mechanically stretched out to proportions demanded by their purpose, they lack the peculiar flavor that Speer imparted to the Hitler Chancery in Berlin: a mixture of ancient Hellas with the sober, severe Prussian classicism of Schinkel, and, on top of that, the gaudy, lavish incrustation of Nazi symbolism. The effect is dull and rather oppressive. It is also a little sinister. There is always the hint of a barbaric cult, the scent of the Minotaur.109

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figure 14. The Eiffel Tower and the German (left) and Russian (right) pavilions during the International Exhibition of Arts and Techniques (Exposition internationale des arts et techniques), Paris, 1937 (photo: Henri Baranger, © Ministère de la Culture/Médiathèque de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY).

Disregarding the Washington, D.C., examples that concerned Lehmann-Haupt, Roh identified classicism as a multinational display of power going back to the eighteenth century and cited the contemporary examples of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Fascist Italy. He also called special attention to how the Nazi and Soviet pavilions in the 1937 Paris World Exposition “resembled each other like siblings and stuck completely to an antiquated common scheme (fig. 14),”110 echoing the prevailing Cold War impetus to draw as many parallels as possible between the two systems. It was also difficult to ignore the modern features of this very same neoclassical architecture with its clean lines, verticality, and absence of ornamentation.111 Although earlier interpretations of Nazi art saw this as an insidious tactic to ensure the preservation of structures built for the “thousand-year Reich,” avoiding any surface embellishments that might deteriorate more quickly, others noted that even the Bauhaus disciples could be drawn to neoclassicism, conceding that, “ironically,” both Mies and Mendelsohn (in his work in Israel) were drawn to this style.112 Speer

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himself acknowledged its international appeal at the Paris World Exposition in 1937, when he reportedly was surprised to see that France chose neoclassicism as its representative style, commenting: it is “characteristic of the era and influences Washington, London and Paris as much as Rome, Moscow, and our plans for Berlin.”113 Closer scrutiny revealed the nationalist penchant of neoclassicism in all these countries, where architecture drew its inspiration not simply from antiquity but rather from the homegrown classical revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with St. Petersburg serving as a model for the Soviets, Schinkel for the Germans, Napoleon’s plans for the French, and L’Enfant for the Americans.114 These parallels and common origins notwithstanding, a moral imperative to single out the more nefarious origins of the German examples prevailed. Appearing shortly after the Historikerstreit, Alexander Scobie’s 1990 study stressed the uniqueness of Nazi neoclassicism, asserting that it stood out from other contemporary examples as “but one facet of a severely authoritarian state” that “signaled a far more sinister intention on the part of the autocrat who commissioned them: a return to ‘Roman’ ethics, which recognized the natural right of a conqueror to enslave conquered peoples in the most literal sense of the word, a right already made manifest even within the sphere of architecture by the creation of concentration camps, whose inmates were forced to quarry the stone for the Reich’s buildings.”115 At that point in time, any suggestions of the similarities between Nazi architecture and other neoclassical construction might be seen as mitigating or “relativizing” Nazi atrocities. Some studies of Nazi architecture appearing after the Historikerstreit turned the discussion to a consideration of the functions, purposes, and intended effects of these structures rather than a simple consideration of style, and historians also looked beyond government buildings to include analyses of concentration camp architecture.116 F I L M , T H E AT E R , A N D DA N C E : A RT, P R O PAG A N DA , O R K I T S C H ?

The study of design was one of several initiatives in arts scholarship to look beyond high culture. Theater scholarship, thanks to its initial fascination with the Thingspiel, was on track to consider performance venues outside traditional elite establishments, and dance scholars could not overlook Ausdruckstanz as a movement in line with the populist emphasis on amateur participation in Nazi educational programs. Only musicology proved more resistant to the trend, as it was still concerned primarily with individual composers and secondarily with the social and economic conditions of musical institutions and industries (but mainly the elite venues of symphony orchestras, opera, and the publishers of art music), only sporadically considering amateur and popular musical activities. It was in the area of film studies, however, that popular culture was fully embraced, as scholars were

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compelled early on to acknowledge the overwhelming volume and popularity of entertainment film coming out of the Nazi period and regularly broadcast on German television. Since a dichotomy between modernism and antimodernism would not have been appropriate for a medium so new as film, examinations of cinema in the Third Reich drew aesthetic distinctions more along the lines of art-versuspropaganda. Kracauer had maintained that all films in Nazi Germany were vehicles of political propaganda, even those that seemed purely to fulfill entertainment purposes, and most of the first surveys of Nazi film followed his lead. Leiser focused almost exclusively on films intended for mass indoctrination (i.e., newsreels, war films, the pro-euthanasia film I Accuse, biopics about German heroes, and films with overt antisemitic content) and further subscribed to the precept that all Nazi-era films served political propaganda even when it was not obvious, recognizing artistic merit in only a few examples of films made by those working in “interior emigration” that subverted the “official formula.”117 Throughout the 1970s and much of the 1980s, film scholarship focused almost exclusively on analyzing those films that were unquestionably conceived as party propaganda, including those explicitly restricted to screenings attended by party members, and almost invariably concluded that Nazi film left behind little of artistic value.118 Hilmar Hoffmann, focusing solely on documentary films and newsreels, drew on both Kracauer and Benjamin’s “aestheticization of politics” to establish propaganda as the Nazis’ “totalist or totalitarian aesthetic” and identified the appearance of the swastika-emblazoned Nazi flag in films as one measure of propagandistic content.119 Concerned primarily with economics, Phillips concurred with the low estimation of the quality of Nazi-era films, but for very different reasons: he argued that, with so much emphasis on fiscal viability, Goebbels failed in his goals to raise the standards of German film, especially during the war, when quantity trumped quality.120 Any gestures toward acknowledging the artistic value of films produced in the Third Reich were met with resistance at best. Wollenberg had focused his attention primarily on the most reprehensible examples of propaganda, including the notorious antisemitic pseudo-documentary The Eternal Jew and the unfinished attempt to exhibit the “humane” treatment of inmates in Theresienstadt, The Führer Presents a Town to the Jews (Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt). At the same time, however, he was willing to acknowledge the artistic achievements of Weimar mythological fantasies (e.g., Fritz Lang’s The Nibelungs [Die Nibelungen], heroic biopics such as Fredericus Rex, and the mountain film genre, where Riefenstahl got her start and which Kracauer and other critics summarily reviled as protofascist) and even the 1943 entertainment film Münchhausen.121 Hull showed more openness to considering the artistic merit of Nazi films, praising, for example, The Prodigal Son (Der verlorene Sohn) of 1934, which won the Grand Prize at the Venice

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Film Festival in 1935.122 He also pointed out that there were only four overtly antisemitic films produced in the Third Reich, and the only success among them, Jew Süss, had little impact on fueling antisemitism, although he based his account of its genesis on the questionable version offered by Veit Harlan. And although he acknowledged the profusion of anti-British propaganda and documented Goebbels’s rage over the increase in anti-Nazi content in American films, Hull found no evidence of anti-American propaganda films. He even pointed to a 1943 proAmerican film, The Endless Road (Der unendliche Weg), which told of Friedrich List’s contributions to building the Pennsylvania railway and sang the praises of German-American cooperation.123 These remarks, however, made him the target of scathing criticism from East Germany that called him a dilettante and completely rejected any of his positive assessments of Nazi film as part of a larger West German project to rehabilitate former Nazis.124 Rentschler took some of the first steps toward understanding the aesthetic of Nazi film more broadly, and his analysis of films such as Lucky Kids, described as a German version of It Happened One Night, opened up an opportunity to compare the techniques of American and German cinema. Still, keeping the Historikerstreit in mind, he was cautious to avoid relativizing German history.125 Yet it was precisely in the non-entertainment genres that Nazi-era film had arguably shown the most innovation, carrying on experiments begun in the 1920s, and by analyzing the form rather than the content of these examples, film studies could first provide evidence that a unique brand of modernism had been cultivated in the Third Reich. Hull marveled at the artistry of Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and Olympia and praised the high quality of films by another “chief propagandist,” Karl Ritter, even while wincing at their overt militaristic messages.126 And while Rentschler believed that “the film culture of the Third Reich allowed at best a limited space for experiments” and “trade papers and film journals spoke only rarely about avant-garde initiatives,” he, too, recognized that “modernism persisted in Nazi cinema, to be sure, not in features, but rather in short subjects and nonfiction films (for instance, in the documentaries of Leni Riefenstahl, Willy Zielke, and Walter Ruttmann).”127 It was, however, Barry Fulks’s unpublished 1982 dissertation on the career of Ruttmann that most thoroughly explored the modernism of Nazi film, relating such experiments to a broader understanding of Neue Sachlichkeit. Best known for his 1927 collaboration with Carl Mayer on Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis, Ruttmann centered his work on the celebration of technology and enjoyed success throughout the Third Reich. Fulks noted that, with the exception of Ruttman’s participation in filming Triumph of the Will, much of the filmmaker’s work after 1933 had been overlooked. Fulks called attention not only to Ruttman’s continued productivity but also to the fusion of his 1920s avant-garde techniques with subject matter that glorified modernization and progress in the Third Reich.

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Furthermore, Fulks identified Ruttmann’s 1927 masterpiece as a prototype for the newly established category of “cultural film” (Kulturfilm), a 1920s innovation protected through a 1934 ordinance. Ruttmann’s sumptuous depictions of the beauty of technology, production, the arms industry, and the war effort won him international acclaim, provided him with steady work through the war, and earned him contemporary praise for raising the quality of newsreels to the level of “works of art.” Fulks concludes: “The career of Walter Ruttmann reveals the connections among the avant-garde, the Kulturfilm and its cognate genres, the ‘Neue Sachlichkeit,’ and National Socialism. Far from being outside the trajectory of technological and artistic modernity, National Socialism represented the consummation, however debased, of some of its most important aspects.”128 Ruttmann’s work in particular, above all his early contributions to advertising (Werbefilme), became part of a larger project to marry technology and capitalism with art for the masses and to foster a new appreciation of the cool rationalism of the modern world, the sachlich of Neue Sachlichkeit. When Hartlaub used the term in the title of his 1925 exhibition, he was proposing that advertising (Werbekunst) “is truly social, collective, true mass art, the only one which still exists,” and that it must become totally sachlich. These principles also took center stage in the philosophy of the Bauhaus.129 Martin Jay, in fact, maintained that Americans were far more receptive to the purveyors of Neue Sachlichkeit, which included the Bauhaus architects, because the movement had exhibited its admiration for Henry Ford and American technology and pragmatism.130 These and other observations had the potential to consider German film innovation—even in those examples condemned as hateful propaganda—in a broader international context. Fulks provided solid evidence of Ruttmann’s connections with Russian constructivism, and the filmmaker’s masterful interpretation of technology as art also appealed to Fascist Italy, leading to a commissioned film based on the work of Luigi Pirandello, Acciaio of 1933, which won high acclaim for portraying the complex relationship between man and machine. From this point on, Ruttmann received numerous commissions from the Third Reich government and private firms to glorify industry, the war effort, and the new breed of warrior-laborers. And although Fulks conceded to the prevailing notion crediting Nazi authorities with an “intended suppression of the formal devices and experimental techniques of the 1920s,” he asserted that, “in other genres, such as the newsreel, the documentary, and the Kultur- and Werbefilm, the cinematic innovations of the 1920s were continued and perfected,” and he even quoted a party journal that identified the Kulturfilm as central to the National Socialist program and as perpetuating the avant-garde.131 Beyond Fulks’s dissertation, however, the connections among Americanism, constructivism, futurism, and Neue Sachlichkeit largely went unnoticed.132

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In theater studies, the earliest attempts to define what was Nazi were pursued not by theater historians but by literature scholars. The iconic example of a Nazi play was Schlageter by Hanns Johst, a hugely successful depiction of the martyrdom of Albert Leo Schlageter, who had defied the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 and was executed by the French. The play premiered in 1933 on Hitler’s birthday, enjoyed huge success thereafter, garnered Johst high honors from all branches of the state and party, and led to him becoming president of the Reich Literature Chamber. Uwe Ketelsen, in his study of this and other examples of what he classified as Nazi heroic drama, postulated that “what was implied for literature was just as valid for other arts: all that was circumscribed, self-restrictive, bound to the homely and narrow-minded was declared outright as art. Thus the painting of the 19th century, especially Spitzweg and Grützner, was regarded as the only possible artistic expression. Modernism was opposed to these ‘artists of a divine type.’”133 Günter Rühle’s edition of selected plays from the Third Reich regarded the output of dramatic literature under Hitler as part of a mission to suppress the progressive socio-critical theater of the Weimar Republic, pinpointing the political schism between “left” and “right” theater to around 1930, when the struggling economy gave rise to the closure of progressive theaters, coinciding with the political ascendancy of the National Socialists.134 Only Peter Bumm’s 1969 dissertation viewed the conservative tendencies among playwrights as part of a longer “conservative revolution” that stretched back to the turn of the century.135 But even within the narrow focus on professional theater, the question of Nazi antimodernism was complicated by the detection of expressionist traits in some of these heroic works and even more so in the continuation of staging innovations launched in the 1920s. The Fighting League for German Culture had directed its earliest attacks against Max Reinhardt,136 yet, as late as 1943, the Rosenberg Bureau was still complaining about the continued influence of Reinhardt’s 1920s experiments,137 the boldest of which appeared on stage with the blessings of Goebbels, Goering, and even Hitler. The star-struck Goering reportedly stated that it was “always easier to make an artist into a National Socialist than the other way around,” while Goebbels compared his own stable of renegade artists to “a concentration camp on leave.” These renegades included Erich Engel, Gustaf Gründgens, KarlHeinz Martin, Heinz Hilpert, Caspar Neher, Ernst Schütte, and Jürgen Fehling, whose controversial staging of Richard III enjoyed a long run on the insistence of Gründgens, despite the fact that it critiqued Nazi leadership.138 As chief patron of the Bayreuth Wagner festival, Hitler directly advocated for the Berlin Secessionist stage designer Alfred Roller to design a new Bayreuth production of Parsifal in 1934139 and condoned the engagement of those with modernist and even Marxist backgrounds (such as Heinz Tietjen and Emil Preetorius), who proceeded to mount productions that were just as controversial as the postwar experiments under Wieland Wagner.140

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Even more challenging to antimodernist presumptions was the Thingspiel. Not only did the authors of Thingspiel dramas acknowledge that the form had roots in pre-Nazi experiments described as “late-expressionist” (even if they would not concede that it had also been influenced by communist theater),141 but it also was easy to trace a direct lineage to Reinhardt’s large-scale productions that featured “casts of thousands,” a style that continued with his disciples Piscator and Jessner and inspired the entire Thing movement. The architecture built to accommodate the Thingspiel also had direct links to Reinhardt, beginning with the Großes Schauspielhaus in Berlin, scaled to his requirements, and carrying on with the outdoor Thing theater complexes.142 An even more striking continuation of modernist performance was Ausdruckstanz, which was closely tied to the Thingspiele in the form of the “movement choirs” of the 1920s that carried over into the iconic mass dances at the 1936 Olympic games. With dance scholarship on the Third Reich off to a slow start, the lines between modernism and antimodernism were mired in conflicting judgments scholars made about prominent individuals. The earliest investigations into dance did not try to obscure Mary Wigman’s intellectual bonds with Nazi ideologues or the Nazi “appropriation” of Ausdruckstanz as “German Dance,” but they did try to argue for Wigman’s early disillusionment and ultimate victimization by the system.143 They overlooked significant details, however, such as Wigman’s outspoken praise for Hitler in her 1935 publication, Deutsche Tanzkunst, which prompted harsh criticisms from the American dance community.144 Later critics went to the opposite pole, regarding her late-Weimar experiments in Ausdruckstanz, such as her Totenmal of 1930, as protofascist.145 Although some dance scholars clung to the conviction that the Nazis’ mission was to suppress individualism and tried to overlook the uninterrupted practice of Ausdruckstanz in the Third Reich,146 Susan Manning insisted that the field abandon the presumptions about Nazi antimodernism it had inherited from art historians. It was time, she argued, to recognize the ideals common to Ausdruckstanz and National Socialism: “neo-romanticism, life reformism, and cultural pessimism of turn-of-the-century Germany, . . . the desire to escape urban industrialization and find a life more attuned to nature, the valuing of emotion and intuition over intellect and rationality, utopianism mixed with a sense of approaching apocalypse,” and, above all, the belief in “dance as a way of creating community,” which made it easy to make the leap from Gemeinschaft to Volksgemeinschaft. This congenial relationship was celebrated in 1934 and 1935 with the German Dance Festivals in Berlin, with the publication of Wigman’s Deutsche Tanzkunst, and with the showcasing of mass Ausdruckstanz at the 1936 Olympic Games.147 It was also revealed that Laban touted the German essence of Ausdruckstanz in a book he published under the auspices of the Reich Theater Chamber. Laban choreographed Tannhäuser at the Berlin State Opera in 1933, was appointed as ballet master there, and was then named artistic director of the first German Dance Festival in Berlin

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in 1934. And even after the highly publicized hounding of Laban and Wigman, Ausdruckstanz continued to thrive in Germany in the hands of other practitioners, such as Yvonne Georgi, Hans Niedecken-Gebhard, Jutta Klamt, and Gustav Fischer-Klamt.148 NA Z I M U SIC : W HAT I T WA S N O T

The aesthetic assessment of music in the Third Reich followed its own path, owing in large part to the very nature of music’s dissemination. Distinct from other arts and media, musical evidence from the Nazi period could remain inaccessible and easily suppressed. Films from the Third Reich were being screened after the war in cinemas and on television, buildings still stood, visual artifacts were accessible (at the very least in published catalogs), dramatic works remained on library shelves, and even evidence of dance performances was preserved in photos and films. By contrast, musical performances, whether live or broadcast on the radio, were more ephemeral, and even the most stable artifacts—published musical scores—could be read and understood by only a small segment of the population. And while other arts scholars made a point of bringing to light the creations of artists, architects, filmmakers, and choreographers who had been active in the Third Reich, musicology was much more focused on following the careers of exiled composers. At best, Carl Orff merited some mention in scholarly literature as the lone representative of those who had stayed in Germany, mainly because his disciples succeeded in portraying him as a victim of the system, and Werner Egk and Josef Matthias Hauer also got brief coverage, the latter for pioneering the same compositional techniques made famous by Schoenberg.149 Otherwise, well into the 1990s, most investigations into the nature and substance of Nazi music essentially defined it by what it was not, as any who attempted to identify its unique characteristics simply came up empty-handed. Clues to the type of music produced and consumed in the Third Reich emerged only sporadically, and only very recently has the field of musicology thought seriously about focusing attention on composers who rose to prominence thanks to the patronage of state and private initiatives.150 There were, to be sure, isolated attempts to discover what might constitute music with National Socialist content, but musicology was still very much focused on art music and especially on purely instrumental, “absolute” music. In the early 1980s, musicologists started to look at opera, apparently hoping to disclose political content at least in the texts, if not in the music, but they arrived at no definitive conclusions.151 Hans-Günter Klein surmised that the criteria for acceptable opera during the Third Reich were opaque, that the official call for popular accessibility (Volkstümlichkeit) in opera composition was never clearly outlined, and that any attempt to find a discrete Nazi opera theory revealed only inconsistencies.152 Erik Levi mined libretti as well as musical scores but similarly failed to

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find any hard evidence of a Nazi musical aesthetic, revealing only that a revival of Volksoper and neo-Wagnerian works had been encouraged but never gained public acceptance, and that the presence of modernist musical gestures—ranging from percussive ostinati and dissonance to outright atonality—reflected “the regime’s uncertainty with regard to musical aesthetics.”153 In the meantime, Walter’s more extensive study had revealed inconsistencies between pronouncements against degeneracy and the new operatic works that thrived in the Third Reich—and even won Hitler’s praise—despite their atonal and jazz-inspired scores that were noticeably reminiscent of works by Schoenberg, Krenek, and Weill.154 As stylistic and textual analyses of opera seemed to offer more problems than solutions, those in search of Nazi music turned instead to conceiving of a discrete Nazi musical ideology, branching out beyond the analysis of scores and delving into philosophy and rhetoric. In a 1999 collection of essays entitled Die dunkle Last (The Dark Burden), contributors contrasted the philosophical tracts of Theodor Adorno and Alfred Rosenberg (although without necessarily drawing on their writings about music), scrutinized antirationalist thinking in search of the roots of Nazi music aesthetics (once again focusing mainly on non–music related texts), attempted to tease out “specific Fascist syntax” in the writings of the church composer Hugo Distler,155 and considered such obscure musical artifacts as the harmonica for evidence of their ideological significance.156 For the most part, however, basic assumptions maintained that the Nazis suppressed musical modernism, that the victims of National Socialism upheld progressive aesthetic principles (primarily in exile), and that most, if not all, music produced in the Third Reich was artistically inferior and simply not worthy of serious attention. The canon of musicology focused on exile modernist composers, and scholars invested in seeking out and identifying the modernist traits of these composers’ creations, their vastly eclectic styles notwithstanding, as well as in borrowing and superimposing the terminology of expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit, and other artistic movements associated with modernism onto their works. As was noted earlier, much of the impetus to associate exiles’ compositions with expressionism came from Adorno’s admiration for Schoenberg’s works arising from the period the composer moved in expressionist circles, but Adorno ended up exaggerating Schoenberg’s commitment to expressionism beyond the composer’s brief association with the Blaue Reiter.157 Some discussions of musical expressionism thereafter concentrated on the works of Schoenberg and his disciples Berg and Webern, focusing on their capacity to delve into the psyche and tying those works to the movement if they had a connection to expressionist texts or staging.158 A more comprehensive attempt to understand musical expressionism, however, extended the inquiry beyond Schoenberg and beyond Germany, choosing to pinpoint the musical traits of expressionism in the use of atonal and twelve-tone com-

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position, rejection of traditional form and rhythm, interest in new timbres and registers, and synthesis with other arts, yet also situating the German roots of the movement within a leftist group that went into exile.159 The application of the label Neue Sachlichkeit to music proved to be even more slippery. Willett was the first to throw together a mixed bag of musical styles, techniques, and genres that included jazz, atonality, neoclassicism, “pro- and antiexpressives,” Gebrauchsmusik (“applied music” generally intended for pedagogical use), Zeitoper (opera with subjects based on contemporary, real-life situations), mechanical music, and even works based on expressionist texts; he also mentioned music publishing, socialist education reforms, and styles of conducting and opera staging. If there was one consistent thread in this long and varied compilation, it was that all the names he linked with this musical Neue Sachlichkeit were those of exiles.160 In a more thorough exploration, Nils Grosch studied the contexts and meanings of contemporary composers’ and music critics’ invocation of the term in their own writings of the 1920s, ultimately understanding musical Neue Sachlichkeit not as a style but as an approach to bridging music with modern society, exhibited in mechanical music, Gebrauchsmusik, Zeitoper, music composed for radio, and all art music intended to reach a wider public. Grosch perceptively concluded that one of the prior obstacles to understanding the effects of Neue Sachlichkeit on musical composition had been the privileging of esoteric, art-for-art’ssake aesthetics in postwar musical scholarship. It is noteworthy, however, that Grosch’s examination also deals primarily with exiles.161 The Cold War and the Zero Hour provided further motivation for drawing sharp distinctions between what Nazi music was and what it was not, as scholars sought to differentiate the politically degraded music of the Third Reich from postwar Western music that was committed to being autonomous, devoid of any extramusical meaning, and impossible to exploit for political purposes.162 Associations of modernism with the political left and musical conservatism with the right held sway in music historiography, reinforced in the 1960s in Gay’s Weimar Culture and persisting into the 1990s in Kater’s first essays on the music history of the Third Reich (although Kater corrected his stance in his more extensive studies).163 Another interpretation proposed that Nazi music was the antithesis of German music. Giselher Schubert, for example, used Hindemith’s opera Mathis der Maler to show how non-Germans immediately recognized its German features, thereby bestowing the work with “the sense of an antifascist confession.”164 He defends the opera against the charge that Hindemith composed it as a purely German masterpiece to win favor with Nazi leaders, asserting that the opera’s subject, German renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald, had been favored by Weimar-era artists and literati but shunned by Rosenberg as an example of “Semitic infiltration,” even though Grünewald’s art was hardly reviled or ignored during the Third Reich.165

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Yet evidence also accumulated over the years that, on the one hand, challenged the notion of Nazi musical antimodernism and, on the other, provided clues to widespread international acceptance of many trends and attitudes typically labeled as retrogressive, Fascist, or totalitarian. To begin with, many of the composers presumably brought out of silence in Darmstadt in 1946 had never been banned in the Third Reich. Stravinsky was far from absent in Germany in the 1930s,166 and any Nazi campaigns against musical modernism seem to have abated after the first few years of the regime. Even though the Degenerate Music exhibition of 1938 attacked Schoenberg, Webern, Krenek, and Weill and singled out Schoenberg’s atonal music as a plot to undo the victorious “German invention” of the triad, there were no concerted efforts to eliminate atonal or twelve-tone composition in Nazi Germany. In a 1934 “tribute” marking Schoenberg’s sixtieth birthday, Herbert Gerigk, a music critic and employee of Rosenberg, even claimed that in the right hands (i.e., in the hands of a composer of pure blood and pure character) atonality could be an effective means of expression,167 and the continued use of the technique by Klenau and Zillig attests to this flexibility.168 This is not to say that atonal and twelve-tone composition enjoyed widespread appeal in the Third Reich, but rather to show that modernism in a broader sense was not summarily rejected—nor was it universally embraced outside Nazi Germany. At the 1981 symposium “Music in the 1930s,” the assemblage of wellestablished international scholars generally agreed that the 1930s marked an artistic low point around the globe. Esteemed musicologist Carl Dahlhaus spoke of a compositional “regression” and a turn toward “populism” not only in the Third Reich and Stalinist Russia but also under democracies, while József Ujfalussy, in a discussion of Eastern Europe, observed overall widespread attraction to folk culture (taking care, however, to distinguish the Eastern European varieties from parallel trends serving German nationalism).169 Marius Flothuis, in discussing the music of England, France, and Holland, associated the period with a climate of exhaustion in the wake of the Great Depression, or at least a point of no return in relation to the experiments of the 1920s, in some cases because many of those experiments had been “tamed” and normalized by 1930.170 In the closing summary, Albrecht Riethmüller highlighted other common trends—such as turns to neoclassicism, to ethical or religious subjects (juxtaposing Krenek’s Karl V and Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler with Schoenberg’s Moses and Aron), toward accessibility, and to the monumentality of the symphony—that were popular not only in Germany but also in the United States.171 Joan Evans later examined the programs of the International Festival of Contemporary Music in Baden-Baden from 1933 until the outbreak of the war, finding that many modern composers, even those who had flourished in the Weimar Republic, shared the spotlight with younger, less conservative German composers as well as non-Germans. Furthermore, the music performed at BadenBaden was not predominantly of a late-Romantic style but rather tended toward

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the neoclassicism of the 1920s, with strong echoes of Hindemith and Stravinsky. Hindemith, meanwhile, continued to hope for his rehabilitation in Germany, and his music played to rave reviews at Baden-Baden and was widely praised in the German press. Bartók was equally well received in Baden-Baden, even after his well-publicized statements against the Nazi government. With regard to the fate of twelve-tone composition, Zillig and others had shifted their style away from Schoenberg’s teachings in their works that were performed at Baden-Baden; still, according to Joan Evans, “one should not assume . . . that the changes heard in post1933 music of German composers at Baden-Baden and elsewhere were due entirely to the necessity of adjusting to new cultural-political realities. In music, as in the other arts, the economic and political upheavals of the 1930s triggered a widespread stylistic simplification.” She goes on to say that, “despite the ideological differences that separated Nazi Germany from her neighbors, the tonally oriented, nationally tinged styles adopted by a broad range of composers in the 1930s made feasible Germany’s attempt, after the isolation of the early Nazi years, to reenter the wider world of modern music.”172 Erik Levi later alluded to this as well, noting that operas premiering in France, Switzerland, and the United States rarely “adhere[d] to the modernist styles embraced during the 1920s,” instead “placing greater emphasis on utilizing folk idioms, or making a conscious effort to effect a directness of expression.” For Levi, however, this revelation posed the “uncomfortable conclusion . . . that opera in Nazi Germany actually retains much closer links to its non-German counterparts than one might like to think.”173 The discomfort articulated by Levi was felt in all fields of arts scholarship. In the storm of the Historikerstreit, the controversies over returned Nazi art, and Peter Ludwig’s promotion of Breker, scattered assertions that the notion of a distinct Nazi art was an absurdity could not be easily digested. In a voluminous collection of illustrations of art in the Third Reich, published in 1988, Mortimer Davidson intended to let the viewers judge for themselves whether there was anything inherently ideological, kitschy, or amateurish in the art produced under Hitler. His brief introduction laid bare the continuation into the Third Reich of typically modernist directions (expressionism, Bauhaus, Neue Sachlichkeit) and other styles and subjects initiated prior to 1933. He also discussed the universality of such themes as motherhood, labor, war, sports, and classical themes, citing such structures as the Baltimore post office, the Federal Trade Commission, and Arlington National Cemetery, as well as the American artists Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton174 (figs. 15-19). Davidson’s assertions met with vociferous condemnation and were decried as “radical” and “incomprehensible.”175 Clearly the time was not right in the late 1980s to entertain the possibility of a Nazi tolerance for modernism as well as an international proclivity for antimodernism, but these were still risky propositions to make even at the end of the century. The 1999 dissertation of Lynn Kellmanson Matheny raised provocative questions

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figure 15 (left). Adolf Wissel, Peasant Woman, 1938 (akg-images). figure 16. Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930 (Art Institute of Chicago; Art © Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY).

about Nazi antimodernism and its implications for the entire field of art history. Matheny was struck by the contradiction between the public face of Nazi antimodernism and the promotion of modernist techniques in state-sponsored architecture, film, photography, and painting. Her explanation tried to accommodate the existence of an antimodernist “art policy” (Kunstpolitik) that was aggressively enforced: she reiterated the victimization of the Bauhaus, even presuming that affiliates whose later careers could not be documented had been murdered by the Nazis. She also expressed astonishment at any evidence of modernist directions in the Third Reich: “The Munich train station is so ‘modern’ that one marvels that such a building could have met with Hitler’s approval.” Yet she also had to acknowledge the existence of a “frequently overlooked modernist aesthetic.”176 She detected this aesthetic in the simplicity of neoclassical architecture (despite what she deemed its inflated Fascist proportions), the modern techniques used to depict Hitler in Hoffmann’s photography and Riefenstahl’s films, and—most importantly—the “seldom reproduced” pictorial representations of industrial capitalism: “steaming factories, roaring automobiles, iron bridges, and freshly paved Autobahnen.”177 Echoing Oellers’s frustrations, she noted that many of these images filled the walls of the Great German Art Exhibitions but seldom appeared in any historical accounts of the events. To be sure, Matheny was still operating under the influence of certain traditions in Nazi cultural history that presumed an aggressive antimodern policy spearheaded by Hitler, the manipulation of the masses, the qualitative inferiority of Nazi

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figure 17 (left). Arno Breker, Readiness (Bereitschaft), 1939 (akg-images/MARCO; © 2015 Artists Rights Society, New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn). figure 18. Arlington Memorial Bridge statuary, Washington, D.C., designed by Leo Friedlander, 1939 (photo: Jet Lowe, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington D.C.).

art, and the vulgarity of exploiting the arts toward the implementation of mass murder, and she adhered in her study to a faithful application of long-standing interpretations of Benjamin and especially Kracauer. But she also acknowledged the problems these traditions caused: “While Greenberg and Horkheimer and Adorno unequivocally positioned fascist art in opposition to modern art, none of the theorists bothered to closely analyze specific Nazi artifacts. Had they done so, perhaps it would have been clear that their rigid dichotomous structures were inappropriate for the designation of Nazi culture. Nazi visual culture unmistakably references modernism, while at the same time it brutally reacts against it.”178 Like so many other examples of scholarship that went against the grain, Matheny’s dissertation was never published, and it did not lead to further work for her either, possibly for purely personal or professional reasons, but also possibly because even at this late date the cultural fields were still not ready to grapple with the questions she raised. Her bold and timely objective was to reassess art history’s canonical insistence on the moral rectitude of art, which not only excluded any consideration of products of the Third Reich but also overlooked its placement in the history of the Enlightenment and the avant-garde. Yet, situating her project within the context of the Historikerstreit, she seemed keenly aware that certain implications might push the envelope too far. Proposing that the discipline should be “not merely about greatness and genius, but also about power and control,” she

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figure 19. Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building, 1937, Washington, D.C.

nevertheless felt compelled to offer the disclaimer: “What I am suggesting, therefore, is not simply that Nazi art be added to the existing canon of art history. To do so one would risk appearing as an apologist for Nazi art.”179 But to fail to do so left many scratching their heads when they thought they saw similarities between the style and subjects of Nazi painters and those of Norman Rockwell and others; between the Nazi structures of Berlin and Nuremberg and the large-scale neoclassical architecture of 1930s Washington, D.C.; and between Nazi cinema and Wochenschauen and Hollywood feature films and wartime newsreels. It also would have posed a challenge for anyone wishing to explore, for instance, why Hitler’s prized painting, Adolf Ziegler’s The Four Elements, won the Grand Prix at the 1937 Paris World Exposition, why Riefenstahl’s Olympia won comparable acclaim at the 1938 International Film Festival in Venice, why international music festivals of the 1930s featured nationally tinged and harmonically conservative styles among the works of all participants, not only the Germans, and why Major Frank Capra drew on Triumph of the Will for inspiration in making the World War II training film Why We Fight.

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The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the subsequent dismantling of the Soviet bloc had a tremendous impact on Third Reich research. Over the course of the 1990s, Western scholars got their first glimpses of German archival material that had been seized by the Soviets at the end of World War II and remained off limits for the duration of the Cold War. Yet the fall of communism also provided unprecedented access to materials that yielded shocking revelations about operations behind the Iron Curtain. While Nazi historiography had moved away from Cold War stereotypes and tended toward more balanced interpretations of the functions of bureaucracy and everyday life in the Third Reich, new evidence of terror tactics evolving over four decades of communist rule in both the Soviet Union and East Germany begged for renewed comparisons to the Nazi dystopia, urging historians to revisit the models of Nazi totalitarianism and intentionalism. With new insights into communist leadership cults, censorship, purges, espionage, and mechanisms of denunciation, there was the risk that the same tactics would be projected back onto Nazi Germany, despite the many ways in which such direct parallels had already been called into question in research on the Third Reich. Arts scholars were not immune to these risks; many revitalized Nazi-Soviet comparisons and expanded them to include the “other German dictatorship” (and purported heir to the Nazi state): the German Democratic Republic. Additionally, new findings on Stalin’s attitudes and methods inspired direct comparisons with Hitler, further sustaining an intentionalist tendency in arts scholarship that had never really lost its appeal. At the same time, all arts fields had been undergoing their own transformations in the intervening decades, due in large part to the increased attention they paid to 215

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popular culture. These new directions (including drawing on methodologies introduced from women’s studies, Alltagsgeschichte, institutional history, economics, and media studies) allowed disciplines to make significant progress toward bringing Nazi culture out of its synchronic and diachronic isolation. In this final chapter, we will consider how the similarities between the Third Reich and the rest of the world may put us on alert to recognize the potential of culture and mass media to indoctrinate in modern societies past and present. At the same time, the parallels cannot overshadow the crucial differences. Carefully considering the special conditions of German history just might bring us closer to resolving the nagging paradox that has plagued cultural historians since the end of World War II, namely how German culture could accommodate Nazi barbarity. T H E R EV I VA L O F T H E T O TA L I TA R IA N F O C U S

As revelations about the inner workings of the East German and Soviet systems made their way into historical scholarship, it was hardly surprising that the totalitarianism question received renewed attention. Moving cautiously, the first post– Cold War inquiries looked at the Nazi and Soviet systems independently, without drawing parallels. Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick hoped to stimulate more comparative studies in their collection of essays, Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, published in 2009. In this work, they actually singled out architecture and film as promising starting points for productive comparisons, perhaps because, as they noted, cultural historians had never ceased to favor the totalitarian concept.1 More accurately, however, much of the progress cultural historians had made in slowly liberating themselves from the concept seemed to be ignored, if not undone, in the excitement of the historic turn of events. Much of the interest in reviving the Nazism-Stalinism comparison arose from the Russian side, where the totalitarian concept was attracting interest for the first time with the 1989 Russian translation of George Orwell’s 1984.2 Igor Golomshtok, who had left the Soviet Union in 1972, was one of the first to renew the totalitarian analogy in art by looking at the Third Reich, Fascist Italy, Stalinist Russia, and communist China to argue that all of these countries rejected modernism and enforced a return to conservative styles. In his view, early tolerance for the avant-garde under Lenin and Mussolini represented little more than growing pains, while Hitler and Mao simply learned from their totalitarian forebears how to suppress modernist impulses and enforce “total realism.”3 Although Golomshtok included Italy and China, the overwhelming bulk of his analysis is devoted to comparing the Soviet and German cases. The same tone can be detected in the Russian contributions to a 1995 exhibition and catalog on the culture of Berlin and Moscow (Berlin–Moscow, Moscow–Berlin, 1900–1950: Art, Photography, Architecture, Theater, Literature, Music, and Film,

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held in Berlin). An opening statement by Berlin’s mayor noted how the Golden Twenties in Berlin (with the flourishing of expressionism, Dada, and the Bauhaus) and Moscow (with constructivism and avant-garde) came to an end with the “violence and misery” of the 1930s and 1940s.4 Cultural comparisons of the two systems pointed to aggressive controls both countries exerted over the arts; their successes in quashing artistic freedom and steering public opinion; the resulting decline in the quality of art produced;5 the complete state control of the film industry in the production of propaganda; and the scapegoating of operas such as Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler and Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, both of which, ironically, might have actually been written with the goal of representing the ideals the German and Soviet states, respectively.6 The only deviation from these totalitarian viewpoints was a Marxist-inspired historiographic retrospective that looked back favorably on the totalitarianism versus Fascism debates of the 1960s and 1970s, in effect trying to revive Hinz’s line of reasoning by highlighting the Nazi efforts to win over both the masses and the elite while preserving the capitalist marketplace of popular entertainment. The Soviets, according to this view, struggled to emerge from a more backward, military economy that led them to adopt Fascist techniques to stifle the avant-garde in the name of patriotism, yet they were still able to produce work of high quality that fused the modern with the accessible, such as could not be found in Nazi Germany, and could maintain high artistic standards to inspire Soviet troops to victory.7 Other revivals of totalitarian frameworks arising from the first wave of excitement after the fall of the wall could be found in similarly ambitious projects spread out over the next two decades. In 1994, the exhibition Art and Dictatorship (Kunst und Diktatur: Architektur, Bildhauerei und Malerei in Österreich, Deutschland, Italien und der Sowjetunion 1922–1956) looked at architecture, sculpture, and painting in Austria, Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union from Mussolini’s rise in 1922 to Stalin’s death in 1956. Most of the essays in the exhibition catalog expounded on the parallels between Nazi, Stalinist, and occasionally Italian Fascist cultural administration and aesthetics, by and large adhering to classic totalitarian and intentionalist interpretations.8 The examinations of art in the Third Reich focused on the most blatant displays of power: the ban on art criticism, the zealous collection of art treasures by Nazi elites, and the use of concentration camp labor in a porcelain factory.9 Yet they also complicated the picture—for example, by showcasing artwork produced in the Theresienstadt concentration camp to reinforce the belief that “Nazi art itself was destructive and glorified the most immense act of destruction” and to conclude that “almost the entire Nazi production [of art] is trash.”10 In 2008, another comparative survey of art in totalitarian states categorized Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the Soviet Union, and communist China as decidedly antimodern in artistic terms, even while it demonstrated the brilliant adoption of contemporary marketing strategies in these countries.11

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Comparative music studies turned primarily to the treatment of victims, with one examination of “composers in the dictatorships of our century” focusing primarily on Jewish composers in Nazi Germany, Nazi-occupied Europe, and the Soviet sphere.12 In his 2004 analysis of Nazi and Soviet practices, Friedrich Geiger recommended that we replace the at that point loaded concept of “totalitarianism” with comparisons of “dictatorships.” He still restricted his scope to the persecution of art music composers but concluded that the Soviets were more interested in establishing aesthetic guidelines (and launching their attacks “on the music itself ”), while the Nazis targeted individuals (with far more regard for their ethnic or political pedigrees than for their creations).13 Another music project looked at a wider range of dictatorships (including Spain under Franco and China during the cultural revolution) and alluded to the common features of nationalism and ritual and to the ultimate failure of these systems to completely control creativity, but it also warned that much more work needed to be done before any real comparative analysis could be undertaken.14 A more problematic aspect of the revival of the totalitarian paradigm was the inevitable comparison of Germany’s “two dictatorships”: the Third Reich and East Germany. Political scientist Eckhard Jesse saw this not as a “revival” of the totalitarian concept in Nazi-GDR studies so much as a reawakening of the concept from its “wallflower existence.” Initial engagements cautiously pointed to subtle differences between the two systems: that the GDR was imposed by external forces and brought down by internal ones, that it represented an authoritarian (rather than totalitarian) dictatorship that tolerated a very limited degree of political opposition, and that it had not led to global war and genocide. At the same time, as with the Soviet Union, information was pouring out about the unrelenting terror in the GDR’s four decades of existence, and the understandable bitterness of eyewitnesses and victims became a central preoccupation after the Stasi archives opened in 1992.15 Arts disciplines were by no means slow to respond to this new opportunity to compare the “two German dictatorships.” In 1997, an exhibition in Bielefeld titled Totalitarian Art, Art under Totalitarianism?: Examples from the Nazi State and the GDR (Totalitäre Kunst, Kunst im Totalitarismus?: Beispiele aus dem NS-Staat und der DDR) resorted to earlier conceptions of typical Nazi art and the suppression of artistic freedom, focusing on nostalgic genre paintings with subjects of agricultural labor, military heroes, and traditional family roles and on the romanticized portraits of Hitler in paintings and sculptures.16 Even before that, the Bach Society embraced the theme “Bach under Dictatorships 1933–1945 and 1945–1989” (“Bach unter den Diktaturen 1933–1945 und 1945–1989”) for its 1994 conference. One of the organizers contrasted what he perceived as Hitler’s supreme authority with the “far reaching but not unlimited power of any one individual” in the GDR but drew strong parallels between the antimodernism of both systems and the

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resulting promotion of second-rate composers.17 As details of Stasi involvement were simultaneously trickling out, the tensions were palpable, and as a participant in the Bach conference, I witnessed these tensions firsthand. The gathering took place in the midst of feelings that “victorious” Western scholars had colonized the musical and academic institutions of East Germany after driving out those with tainted Stasi pasts. Among the participants at the conference, however, were respected scholars who had cultivated a sincere commitment to Marxist-Leninist scholarship and could not fathom why their convictions were now deemed so criminal as to be compared with Nazi atrocities. The situation gave me an idea of what it may have been like immediately after the war, when denazification and denunciation threatened to destroy personal relationships. Of course, there were critical differences between the two experiences. In the brief existence of the Third Reich, half of which was consumed with war, the willingness of adults to work within the system was often motivated by opportunity more than by ideology. The forty years of the GDR, by contrast, was a long enough period of time for more than one generation to be born, raised, and educated in the midst of ideological campaigns that were much more sophisticated than anything pursued by the National Socialists. The tense dialogue among musicians and musicologists continued at the conference “Proscribed Music” (“Verfemte Musik”) and drew further attention to the complexities of comparing the two systems. Those from the former GDR highlighted the problems with conceiving of Marxism and socialist realism as static, monolithic concepts and noted the difficulties in assessing the communist system only four years after it ceased to exist.18 Nevertheless, these comparisons have quietly persisted in recent examinations of Nazi and East German festivals celebrating the music of Bach and Handel, sometimes embracing a polemical tone.19 In the years that followed, theorizing over the “two German dictatorships” moved in a number of directions. There were close analytical assessments that placed at least as much weight on the substantive differences between the two as on the similarities, as well as more ambitious proposals that we view most of twentieth-century Germany as the “epoch of totalitarianism,” starting in 1918 with the “emergence of communism and Fascism” and ending in 1989 with the fall of the wall.20 There were also forays into trying to explain the two systems and their propaganda mechanisms as substitutes for religion and all of its trappings—doctrines and rituals, evangelists and infallible leaders—focusing mainly on the Nazis’ most blatant manifestations of propaganda (Degenerate Art, the Thingspiel, propaganda films, and the ban on criticism) and Hitler’s personal tastes and architectural plans and comparing these with the SED’s grandiose building plans, propaganda films, and the constraints imposed on humor and satire.21 In a similar vein, a 2013 study looking at film relied on a classic theory of totalitarianism to demonstrate that both states exercised close control of film production, emphasized political

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content over entertainment, created larger-than-life portrayals of leaders (Hitler and Ulbricht), and promoted stereotypes of ideological heroes and villains.22 The revival of totalitarian comparisons has also turned attention to the role of ideology,23 even though a number of historians had previously questioned the usefulness of conceiving of a uniform ideology in Nazi Germany. Even basic introductory textbooks on modern German history had by this time rejected the notion of a central ideology. As one widely used survey published in 1991 concluded: “The Nazis propagated, not a coherent doctrine or body of systematically interrelated ideas, but rather a vaguer world-view made up of a number of prejudices with varied appeals to different audiences which could scarcely be dignified with the term ‘ideology.’ ”24 Historians had largely agreed that the key to the Nazi Party’s success was not a coherent ideology but its ability to appeal to as many sectors of the German population as possible, even when it meant making conflicting promises to win over, for example, workers and big business simultaneously. Unlike the less successful, single-issue parties, the Nazi Party promoted an idea of community that would unite all (non-Jewish) Germans, downplay their conflicts, and promise a bright future. This vision enabled the Nazi Party to appeal to the multitudes of Germans who were disillusioned with alternatives across the political spectrum, and to attract voters from all economic classes.25 Nevertheless, an elusive concept of totalitarian ideology was still informing comparative studies in the arts. A British exhibition of 1995, Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators 1930–45, singled out these non-democracies to shed a new light on the modern aspects of these systems but still adhered to the notion of art’s subjugation to totalitarian ideology.26 Similarly, a 2010 study of the uses of art and architecture in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, and the GDR maintained the primacy of totalitarian ideology, Hitler’s artistic persona, and Nazi elimination of the avant-garde.27 In research concerned exclusively with Nazi culture, views on the usefulness of the totalitarian concept and other contested paradigms remained as varied and conflicted as ever. Two interdisciplinary investigations appearing in these years indicated that a multitude of voices could still be heard in the community of arts scholars, even within a single publication. Art, Culture and Media under the Third Reich (2002) accommodated widely divergent conclusions on the state of arts in Nazi Germany. It featured accounts of unredeemable Nazis pursuing “the embodiment of the National Socialist ideology” in their work, anti-Fascist exiles supposedly fleeing Nazi antimodernist laws and totalitarian structures, the central role of Hitler in establishing aesthetic guidelines, and the propaganda function of entertainment film. Yet very different approaches were also well represented, including a study that drew fine distinctions among the various types of antisemitic films and their effectiveness, one that considered the economics of architecture and design, one that looked at the continuity of mass spectacle and expressionist production techniques carried over from the Weimar Republic, and one that examined the

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critical role of exiles in laying the groundwork for how we view Nazi cultural life (this particular approach, by Keith Holz, prompted me to pay closer attention to the exile phenomenon in this book).28 The publication of papers from a 2004 symposium at the University of Vermont in which I participated (the same event that inspired me to write this book) revealed similar tensions. The proceedings opened with an overview by editors Jonathan Huener and Frank Nicosia that unequivocally confirmed the state of scholarship as having moved beyond obsolete notions of totalitarian control, aesthetic consistency, the inferiority of all cultural production in the Third Reich, and the ruptures between Weimar culture, Nazi culture, and the Zero Hour. To be sure, contributors showed how antisemitic policies did not necessarily result in the eradication of “Jewish aesthetics,” how American culture persisted despite the propaganda denouncing it, and how economics affected the production and consumption of literary works. Nevertheless, there were also contributions that still tended to regard propaganda and Nazi culture as carefully planned and executed programs steered by a cohort of Nazi leaders.29 I N T E N T IO NA L I SM , O L D A N D N EW

The fall of communism may have resulted in a “reawakening” of the totalitarian paradigm, but the intentionalist paradigm needed no such reawakening in arts scholarship, as it had never been entirely dormant. Outside the arts fields, the intentionalism versus functionalism debate’s original preoccupation with administrative, political, and economic questions had been redirected and even overshadowed by broader investigations into eugenics, racism, utopianism, and wartime atrocities.30 Historians who had adopted the intentionalist view in the 1970s had done so in order to offer an explanation for genocide, but by the end of the Cold War, it was determined that neither the intentionalist nor the functionalist model sufficed to support theories of Hitler’s direct and indirect involvement with plans for the expulsion of the Jews. Instead, evidence was revealing the utter failure of large-scale relocation plans as a result of overcrowded ghettos and unanticipated military developments, and that the intensifying crusade to eliminate Bolshevism and execute its elites was a prelude to the extermination of Jews, who were collectively referred to as “Judeobolshevists,” racial inferiors, and the consummate enemy of the German Volk.31 The renewal of totalitarian questions did, however, refine the intentionalist approach by generating detailed comparisons between Hitler and Stalin that highlighted the similarities and, more importantly, the differences in their roles and their tactics. Alan Bullock produced an extensive “parallel” biography of Hitler and Stalin, with the primary goal of assessing their degrees of power and offering nuance to old intentionalist portrayals of Hitler.32 Ian Kershaw weighed in to dismiss similarities between Stalin and Hitler, showing that Stalin was quite enmeshed in a tight bureaucracy and involved in the micromanagement of daily

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affairs (including cultural administration), whereas Hitler remained aloof from the administrative matters of the state.33 Richard Overy’s study of Hitler and Stalin was one of the few comparisons to include a close examination of cultural life,34 teasing out as many similarities between the two systems as possible, but not without some obvious strains of ambivalence. Looking at both high and popular culture, Overy had to acknowledge the vagueness of Hitler’s statements on art and his inconsistent approval or disapproval of works in the Great German Art Exhibition, the existence of widespread aversion to various modernist trends in art prior to 1933, and the inconsistencies in determining and enforcing guidelines for acceptable art. These observations left Overy to negotiate between asserting the complete control of all arts and media while simultaneously conceding the limits on implementing such controls and the persistence of artistic freedoms.35 For scholars in arts disciplines, the scenario of Hitler dictating and micromanaging all aspects of cultural life was still difficult to abandon, given the Führer’s own artistic aspirations, his passion for Wagner and close ties to the composer’s family, and his personal involvement in architectural design and urban planning. His preoccupation with architecture in particular continued to generate a stream of publications, including the 2009 English translation of Jochen Thies’s doctoral dissertation, originally published in 1975, which tied the dictator’s obsession with architecture to his long-standing plans for global domination.36 Intentionalism persisted in other forms as well, leading to further investigations into Hitler’s personal tastes in art and especially in music.37 The texts of Mein Kampf, Hitler’s earlier speeches, and the writings of Alfred Rosenberg were even mined for clues to determine how, for example, the “symphonic genres could so easily be used for the purpose of ideology.”38 Yet such scrutiny of speeches and writings also yielded contradictory findings: Hitler had declared at the Nuremberg Party Rally in 1938 that “it would be terrible if National Socialism on the one hand were to dominate the spirit of the time and cause the dilution of our musical creative strength, [and] on the other hand, by setting false goals, were to contribute to allowing or even leading music in the wrong direction, [a situation] which is just as bad as the general confusion we have left behind.”39 Challenges to assumptions about Hitler’s intervention in Richard Strauss’s fall from grace started to raise questions about whether Hitler could be expected to have paid attention to the entreaties of a musical subordinate, even such a prominent figure as Strauss, let alone the minutiae of musical aesthetics.40 Rosenberg and Goebbels, for their part, displayed relatively little knowledge of music and showed far less interest in engaging in the aesthetic debates surrounding it,41 and even Goebbels’s keynote speech for the opening of the Reich Music Days in 1938, where he outlined the “ten commandments” for German music, was strikingly vague.42 At the same time, however, some scholars chose to cherry-pick these sources to highlight passages that might illustrate the “clear” consistency of Nazi musical aesthetics.43

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Frederic Spotts’s 2003 study started to show some of the problems involved in clinging to an intentionalist perception as he looked at several of the arts in which Hitler was known to have an interest. Spotts brought together a wide array of revealing insights into Hitler’s underexplored preoccupation with Germany’s cultural life, his fairly sophisticated understanding of music and architecture, and his surprisingly open-minded attitude toward current artistic trends, concluding that “Hitler had neither a programme for the arts nor any interest in directing them day-to-day.” However, he also asserted, for example, that “Hitler made the dramatic arts a technique of mental manipulation and mind control.”44 At the same time, the interest in “Hitler the artist” offers yet another instance of scholarship taking Nazi rhetoric at face value, especially the rhetoric and public relations techniques employed in cultivating an image of Hitler as artist.45 Eric Michaud traced the prototype for the artist-dictator persona through German and non-German sources all the way back to antiquity and demonstrated how Nazi strategists and earlier political theorists alike appreciated its value for attacking democracy from both the left and the right.46 Stephen Heller analyzed the graphic realization of this artistdictator persona in advertising, insisting, however, that “Hitler either designed himself or had a hand in designing” much of his image and that “once the apparatus that combined propaganda and coercion was finely tuned, the masses succumbed to Hitler’s will—and to his aesthetic precepts as well.”47 As before, intentionalism proved to be a particularly compelling paradigm for the history of high culture, since it shifted moral responsibility away from the artists themselves and onto the shoulders of Hitler, Goebbels, Rosenberg, and Goering, all of whom conveniently had a passion for the arts. By crediting them with forcing the arts community to conform to arbitrary and counterproductive aesthetic constraints, it was possible to sustain the idealized image of the oppressed artist forced to do things against his will. This idealization had been firmly entrenched in the nineteenth-century cult of genius and nurtured by disciplinary practices, particularly in art history, musicology, and literature, where traditional scholarship laid a heavy emphasis on specializing in the life and works of individuals. Those invested in studying artists who lived through the Third Reich naturally opted to defend their subjects by situating them as helpless victims of a self-fashioned artist-dictator who forced his idiosyncratic tastes on them rather than to consider that most of these artists at the very least had to navigate a dicey political existence and that some of them found common ground with their Nazi patrons. These figures were also benefiting from being presented in stark contrast to another group coming out of the shadows in greater numbers, namely those “who, for whatever reasons, placed their art in service of a dictatorship that loathed humanity.”48 All things considered, however, we might actually be able to glean a more contextualized understanding of Hitler’s role in cultural affairs from those more recent comparisons with Stalin, especially if we take note of the differences they have

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highlighted.49 In the 1930s, Russia was still largely agrarian, suffered from extreme economic inequities, and had a very low literacy rate. One can easily imagine the desires of Zhdanov and especially of Stalin—given his modest beginnings and minimal education—to stifle elitism and encourage the cultural participation of peasants and workers. Hitler and Goebbels, by contrast, came to the task with very different backgrounds and goals: Hitler, a one-time artist and Wagner enthusiast, and Goebbels, a published author holding a doctorate in literature, both placed a high priority on styling themselves as connoisseurs and patrons of high culture. Unlike their Soviet counterparts, they harbored their own personal artistic and literary aspirations as well as romantic perceptions of the artist. Toward these ends, they arguably sympathized with the plight of artists and shepherded such projects as the Reich Culture Chambers to fulfill the artistic community’s desire to raise its standing in society and acquire professional recognition. In other words, it is difficult to fathom that these two self-styled artists/connoisseurs/patrons would have set out to stifle creativity by implementing far-reaching restrictive and intrusive measures, especially during a time when they depended on the cooperation and support of Germany’s leading cultural spokesmen. The most compelling similarities between Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, however, lie not in their leadership but elsewhere: in the attention to spectacle and fanfare and in the arbitrary victimization of individual artists and intellectuals that spread uncertainty about how one should conduct oneself to avoid a similar fate. Soviet practices of terror and aggression showed complete disregard for popular approval, whereas Nazi brutality was more systematic and directed toward the perceived Jewish-Bolshevist enemy of the Volksgemeinschaft.50 Yet the comparisons between Hitlerism and Stalinism also unveil the crucial imbalance that comes out of comparing the years Hitler was in power, from 1933 to 1945, with the longer span of Stalin’s rule, from 1927 to 1953. To be sure, there is much overlap between the two systems when one considers artistic tastes of the times, the effects of the depressed economy on the arts, and the heightened interest in promoting amateur participation, but these were arguably part of much larger global concerns in the 1930s and 1940s. Stalin’s consolidation of power was coming in a sweep of radicalizing measures in the second decade of communist rule that encompassed a zeal to control cultural production on a much larger scale. By the time Hitler came to power, the Russians were already in the midst of their cultural revolution, launched in 1928, which authorized the purges of the intelligentsia and aggressively pursued revivals of the “classics” and the suppression of the avant-garde. Prior to Stalin, however, Russian artists and intellectuals enjoyed a period of relative open-mindedness in the first fifteen years of communist rule. This span of time, during which Lenin sought to win over artists and intellectuals to the communist cause, may offer more parallels to the twelve years of Nazi domination than the years of Stalin’s control. Even Lehmann-Haupt, despite his Cold War convictions, made

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special mention of the difference between Leninist and Stalinist cultural approaches, acknowledging that Soviet openness to art was “revolutionary, experimental, and highly original” from 1917 to the early 1930s and mentioning the very gradual imposition of more stringent controls, a process that took more than fifteen years in Russia.51 In 1960, political scientist Robert Tucker had faulted Arendt, Friedrich, and Brzezinski for their undifferentiated historical treatment of the Soviet Union that overlooked the differences between the first decade of communist rule and the reign of terror begun by Stalin.52 In the 1970s, Stephen Cohen pursued these questions further, drawing sharper distinctions between Stalinism and Lenin’s Bolshevism and imagining a much more moderate course of Soviet history had Trotsky or Bukharin succeeded Lenin. Cohen also proposed directing more attention to cultural figures who benefited under Stalin with new job opportunities and thus looked away from the terror inflicted on others.53 If anything, a more fruitful comparison with the Hitler years might be drawn from looking at the collaborations between the bureaucracy and the intelligentsia prior to Stalin, referred to derisively during the cultural revolution as the “soft line,”54 and from looking at how some of these relationships continued under Stalin. A N T I M O D E R N I SM A N D E C O N OM IC S

The persistence of intentionalism in arts scholarship has gone hand-in-hand with the persistence of antimodernism. It is telling, for example, that in 2001, a thorough documentation of the fates of oppressed artists and the seizure of artworks in Hamburg could still propose that “Hitler’s authoritarian verdict” sealed the fate of modern art.55 It is perhaps even more telling that a full fifty years after Hildegard Brenner called attention to the cause of expressionism being taken up within Nazi ranks, the phenomenon was still unknown enough that Jonathan Petropoulos could revisit and expound upon it in 2014.56 In music, limited attention had been focused on the persistence in the Nazi years of the styles and techniques developed by Schoenberg and Weill in the works of a handful of moderately successful composers,57 but these could be regarded as curiosities rather than standardsetting examples. Instead, the notion of Nazi antimodernism has persisted in several different areas. The trend noted earlier of looking beyond artworks and policies and focusing instead on ideological writings to find the source of antimodernism has broadened, embracing larger issues in philosophy, morals, and ethics and basing methodology on the Benjaminian aestheticization of politics.58 Other approaches have concentrated on the backwardness of Nazi art in its preservation of classicism and resurrection of Romanticism, even though this was a direction that Hitler had explicitly warned against in his pronouncements in Nuremberg in 1934. Upholding the distinction between Nazi painting and Neue Sachlichkeit, Stephen Plumb maintained that the constraints placed on artists out-

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weighed any stylistic similarities and continued successes of the (“apolitical”) Neue Sachlichkeit painters and that the far more prominent tendency was a return to Romanticism. Plumb also revived the perception that the Great German Art Exhibition predominantly favored “blood-and-soil” themes of nature, agriculture, and motherhood.59 Other views assert that the “decidedly anti-Romantic and antinationalistic younger generation” of the Weimar Republic gave way to “the Romanticism that acquired new prominence in the musical life of the Nazi era,”60 and that “the National Socialists ended all experiments” and “banned all modernism from the stage,” insisting instead on “a streamlined classicism” that served as the “showpiece of a functionalized dictatorial system.”61 Presumptions about the inferiority of Nazi arts also persist, with assertions that the “mediocrity” that took hold in musical life in 1933 could not stand up to the avant-garde productions of the 1920s, allegedly because composers gave in to pressures to create “more conventional works that would conform to the system”; they employed a “toned down adaptation of Neue Sachlichkeit, simplified it, and made it accessible.”62 A sweeping scan of musical scores and writings on music has brought some Third Reich creations out of the shadows, but this recent exercise similarly worked on the premise that most of these compositions were inferior and rejected modernism.63 An emphasis on Nazism’s victims and on exile modernism still persists as well,64 yet there are signs of progress toward more differentiated—if still somewhat ambivalent—interpretations of the work of exiles that move away from regarding all exiles as the anti-Fascist guardians of the avant-garde. Jost Hermand’s broad survey of artists and intellectuals has integrated exiles into a three-way construction, showing how Nazis, inner emigrants, and exiles all claimed to be preserving the true German cultural legacy; nevertheless, he attributes to the last group the sole capacity to pursue an anti-Fascist agenda.65 A recent assessment of the musical compositions of victims of National Socialism, including exiles and inner emigrants, recognizes the “conservative” style of much of their work, stressing that their vilification had little, if anything, to do with their compositional tastes and exploring a more useful definition of musical expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit that centers on subject matter and text rather than musical style.66 There has also been the attempt to compare (but mainly to contrast) the modernism of Nazi film and exile film, explaining Goebbels’s exploitation of American techniques to manipulate the German public, such that “Nazi cinema redefined modern life as nature,” while exile filmmakers “were able not only to express a peculiarly modern sense of multiplicity and contingency but also to encode the promise of a different and better life in modernity.”67 To be sure, the most blatant examples of film propaganda have continued to garner attention,68 and Kracauer still holds sway over those who persist in classifying all Nazi-era filmmaking as propaganda.69 Yet at the same time, close examinations of these examples of heinous propaganda have started to raise awareness of the very

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modern, even “modernist,” techniques these films employed. In the 1980s, Fulks showed how a modernist aesthetic influenced the Weimar and Nazi-era documentaries and educational films of Walter Ruttmann. Twenty years later, the field was prepared to analyze all subgenres of documentaries as successful forms of propaganda, including those dating back to World War I, those made after 1945, and those produced outside of Germany. Such analysis has made it possible to acknowledge filmic innovations where “avant garde and propaganda found each other,” even in Leni Riefenstahl’s work and Fritz Hippler’s The Eternal Jew.70 This recognition of the successful pairing of propaganda with the avant-garde has shown how the most radical experiments, while not appropriate for mass-consumed entertainment films, could be fully explored in non-narrative documentary formats.71 Meanwhile, the whole question of Nazi antimodernism has begun to demand more consideration of economics. Robert Scholz had made the unpalatable claim that the seizure of modernist works could be traced back to a band of unscrupulous art dealers specializing in modern art,72 but there is evidence that, after expressionism had been pronounced dead in the art community by the mid-1920s, it was sustained and even highly valued by a handful of government officials, museum curators (such as Redslob, Justi, and Sauerlandt), art dealers, and private collectors, many of them Jews. The fatal combination of waning public acceptance and Jewish patronage made expressionism a prime target in the Degenerate Art exhibition73 and paved the way for publicly humiliating Jewish art dealers, driving them out of Germany, and liquidating, transferring, and in some cases subjecting their galleries and auction houses to “Aryanization” (the term used for the forced seizure of Jewish-owned businesses).74 Modern art thus became a convenient symbol in Nazi Germany for the forces supposedly destroying German culture, but its vilification and subsequent seizure also created opportunities for financial gain. Art historian Uwe Fleckner has organized colleagues and students to closely investigate the entire seizure operation, including the role of art dealers in steering the market for degenerate art. The findings have been revealing, if not completely unanticipated, as scandalous campaigns like the Degenerate Art Action typically have the effect of spiking interest in their targets. The art seized from public museums and the subsequent sale of these items in the international marketplace attracted revenue but also heightened appreciation for German art, especially in the United States, due in no small part to the initiatives of artists and dealers living in exile.75 Contrary to prior assumptions, despite explicit restrictions on displaying or selling seized artworks within Nazi Germany (which were often violated without any consequences), the sale of seized “degenerate” art continued during the Third Reich, and Goering himself has been credited with facilitating the transactions in order to accrue much-needed hard currency. Furthermore, no such barriers were imposed on other work by the same artists, nor were these artists subsequently barred from membership in the Reich Visual Arts Chamber. Some even

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saw a significant increase in the demand for their work after being branded as degenerate. If some of these works fetched surprisingly low prices at the time, it was not because Nazi dealers devalued them on ideological grounds but rather because the market became oversaturated. Several dealers simply chose to hoard seized art for their own private collections,76 a practice that explains the trove discovered in the possession of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of one such dealer, in 2013. The economics of cultural production has also deepened our understanding of Nazi architecture and design. Rather than struggling to demonstrate the demise of modernism, architectural historians have been showing how modernist tendencies actually flourished from synergies with industrialization, city planning, public works, and military projects. Hsiu-Ling Kuo looked at the symbiosis—rather than mutual exclusion—of modernism with monumentality, neoclassicism, and industrialization and at the manifestation of this symbiosis in the planning of the NorthSouth axis in Berlin by prominent architects known for their modernist designs.77 We are now aware of a larger number of Bauhaus-trained architects known to have succeeded in Nazi Germany than what was first revealed by Nerdinger, and some of them even held high-ranking positions. And while it could have been argued that Miller Lane overstated the persistence of modern architecture by underplaying the demise of the flat roof in residential construction, Nerdinger showed that the denial of building permits for flat-roof designs actually prompted Bauhaus architects to start emulating the hipped-roof designs of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie style and to continue pursuing the best of Bauhaus design “under the roof.”78 Paul Jaskot opened up a new field of inquiry by closely examining the economic relationship between state architecture and the SS-run concentration camps to reveal a highly profitable arrangement between the SS and building industries. Quarries and brick factories employed the brutal practice of forced labor to supply materials for the large-scale neoclassical building projects in Nuremberg and Berlin as well as for the elaborate construction of SS complexes and concentration camps.79 As we saw in earlier chapters, film and theater studies lent themselves well to economic considerations early on, perhaps simply because of the very nature of their operations. The film industry consisted mainly of studios and distributors, and theaters (and perhaps also dance companies) depended on an economic relationship between theater personnel and audiences, with public subsidies also thrown into the mix. The economics of music, by contrast, is far more complex, as it must take into account not only performance ensembles that functioned like theaters but also Germany’s world-renowned music publishing and recording industries and a mixed bag of amateur, professional, and freelance activities. Isolated investigations of orchestras, record companies, and publishers have slowly started to flesh out our understanding of their operations and their interactions with the state. In my own research, I have explored how high-profile institutions such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the State Opera, and the Prussian State Orchestra

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enjoyed special privileges and artistic freedoms under the protective, aristocraticstyle patronage of Goebbels and Goering.80 More detailed studies of the Berlin Philharmonic and Vienna Philharmonic have additionally offered insights into the status of these elite, state-protected organizations; their negotiations with subscription organizations, outside agencies, and charitable causes; their exploitation by the state as cultural ambassadors even prior to 1933; and the effects of all of these relationships on their repertoire.81 Scholars have also gradually been paying closer attention to radio, music publishing, and the recording industry, gaining insights into the impact of politics and economics on musical consumption.82 Extending economic considerations further into music, theater, and dance holds much promise for further assessing the acceptance of or resistance against new repertoire. One has to consider, for example, that a preponderance of traditional repertoire need not necessarily be interpreted as a neglect of modernism, because, as in the case of theaters and orchestras, the production, rehearsal, and box office projections involved in launching any new repertoire, whether modernist or not, always pose significant financial risks. T H E I S O L AT IO N O F NA Z I C U LT U R E

The question of Nazi antimodernism may not be resolved for a very long time, mainly because arts disciplines are far from arriving at a consensus on the meaning (or meanings) of modernism. At the same time, a question that still deserves attention is whether any such aversion to modernism was unique to Nazi Germany. On one hand, as we have seen repeatedly, the diachronic isolation of Nazi culture both romanticizes the Weimar period and sanitizes the postwar era. On the other hand, the synchronic isolation of Nazi Germany and other dictatorships from Western democracies has encouraged historians to avert their eyes from the similarities in international cultural trends of the 1930s and 1940s. The Cold War practice of restricting comparisons to dictatorships had the downside of exaggerating their similarities, while any inclusion of Western democracies—above all the United States—remained strictly off limits. New investigations have had the most success in recognizing the shortcomings of diachronic isolation and are opening the door to placing Nazi culture within a larger context of German twentieth-century cultural history. The 1999 symposium Bridged: Aesthetic Modernism and National Socialism (Überbrückt: Ästhetische Moderne und Nationalsozialismus) made a point of challenging the chronological boundaries of Nazi art, shedding light on the experiences of individual artists such as Schlemmer, Beckmann, Radziwill, and Schlichter as well as investigating the activities of art critics, historians, dealers, and curators. It revealed that, even before 1933, museum directors and curators were promoting modern art as fulfilling the mission of Adolf Hitler, and the founder of the Kronprinzenpalais, Ludwig

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Justi, conceived of a German art for the Volksgemeinschaft that explicitly excluded the work of Grosz and Dix (except for the latter’s portraits). New revelations also came with regard to Otto Andreas Schreiber: even though one of his works actually appeared in the Degenerate Art exhibition, he mounted thousands of factory exhibitions featuring modernist works that were—despite Schreiber’s postwar claims to the contrary—open to the public.83 In theater studies, questioning the “rupture” in 1933 has led to some important insights, revealing the pre-Nazi roots of “Nazi theater” as well as the dismal failure of theater that was heavily laden with ideology.84 Studies of staging and production techniques have been especially effective in unearthing continuities, showing, for example, how Weimar-era theater architecture and lighting inspired Albert Speer’s famous Lichtdom, where spotlights lining the periphery of the party rally grounds were aimed skyward.85 Furthermore, a close analysis of Jewish caricatures on the Nazi stage has placed the practice within a long tradition dating back to the nineteenth century and shows that, generally, “German theatres were under little or no pressure to perform antisemitic works during the Nazi period,” and cultural authorities “regarded the stage as an inappropriate venue for blatant antisemitic propaganda.”86 In many instances, antisemitic interpretations of Jewish characters during the Third Reich, such as Shakespeare’s Shylock, were not as obvious as one would expect, and in some cases productions even downplayed antisemitic interpretations, to the dismay of Nazi functionaries in the audience.87 Even more striking was the virtual absence of antisemitic characterizations in productions of Wagner’s music dramas, especially in Die Meistersinger, the work that was most widely exploited for Nazi ceremonies and which has been subsequently cited by postwar commentators as revealing Wagner’s antisemitism in the characterization of the antihero, Beckmesser. Yet no one has been able to find any evidence that Nazi-era audiences or music critics ever picked up on any Jewish traits in the character of Beckmesser.88 Focusing on successes rather than failures, William Grange’s study of comedy in the Third Reich opened up possibilities for a diachronic as well as a synchronic comparison, and also gave a nod to mass consumption. Comedies were far more popular than all other forms of theatrical entertainment, similar to the situation in cinema. Departing from the inordinate attention previously given to heroic dramas and Thingspiele to show how playwrights responded to Nazi rule, Grange showed that the success rate of new comedies by playwrights August Hinrichs, Maximillian Böttcher, Leo Lenz, and Curt Goetz (“Germany’s Noel Coward”) far outdistanced that of all other repertoire.89 The assessment of film has experienced perhaps the most significant transformation in the last years. David Bathrick acknowledged this progress, pointing out that there had been an early overemphasis on propaganda films followed by a gradual recognition of the similarities between the German and American film industries.90 Film studies were showing signs of leaving behind the quest for

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ideological content and manipulative tactics thought to be specific to Nazi film and looked instead to bring the medium out of isolation. New (and old) observations about the seamless continuities from Weimar-era filmmaking into the Third Reich were coming to the fore: the Neue Sachlichkeit of Ruttmann, the existence of right-wing cinema prior to 1933, the modeling of the three Nazi martyr films (Hitlerjunge Quex, Hans Westmar, and SA-Mann Brand) on iconic leftist films of the Weimar era, and the successful transition of actors such as Hans George from one politicized genre to the other.91 Even the 1931 film of Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera has been shown to have influenced some of the most successful musicals by Douglas Sirk (Detlef Sierck) featuring Zarah Leander, which, despite earlier interpretations, have now begun to be regarded as purely escapist entertainment.92 An even more challenging project, however, has been to liberate Nazi culture from its synchronic isolation. Michael Kater took on the dual task of dissolving both synchronic and diachronic boundaries by showing that German admiration for American culture not only existed years before the Third Reich (especially with the adoption of Taylorism and Fordism) but also extended into film, art music, dance, literature, sexual mores, and the entire consumer culture.93 Sergiusz Michalski similarly traversed both synchronic and diachronic limits in his sweeping study of public monuments from 1870 to the present, looking to pre- and postNazi periods of German history, democracies, and the newer regimes of Iraq and North Korea, determining that the limited number of monuments erected in the Third Reich seems insignificant when compared to other efforts in the modern age.94 Yet even if we acknowledge the synchronic and diachronic similarities between the “stripped classicism” of official architecture in the Third Reich and that of other contemporary environments, there has still been a tendency to single out the Nazis’ appropriation of Greek and Roman prototypes and their insistence that the aesthetics passed down from antiquity were indigenous to Germany through racial blood lines.95 And although the door had been opened to further contextualize Nazi film, Bathrick—clearly cognizant of the Historikerstreit—still felt it necessary in 2000 to qualify his call for “normalization” of Third Reich cinema so that it would not be construed as “exculpation.”96 In stark contrast, Sabine Hake’s call for less constrained normalization, just a year later, would aim to stop treating Nazi film as “the ultimate Other” and an “aberration.” Wishing to liberate Nazi cinema from its diachronic and synchronic boundaries and view it as an “integral part of the aesthetic and ideological legacies of the twentieth century, including its traumas and burdens,”97 Hake rolled out a series of challenges to prevailing assumptions in film scholarship about Nazi propaganda, antimodernism, audience manipulation, ideology, and gender stereotypes. She drew special attention to the continuities in filmmaking and film theory before and after the Nazi years and the popularity of American films in Nazi Germany. In film studies, more than in other cultural fields, it was becoming not only possible

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but even necessary to cross the invisible boundary separating dictatorships from democracies. The increased interest in women’s roles in German film inevitably led scholars to observe the traits it shared with the Hollywood star system. It then led them to recognize the disconnect between the female stereotypes promoted by Nazi ideology and the diversity of female identities on the German screen, some of which were virtually indistinguishable from their Hollywood counterparts.98 Edward Dimendberg pointed to the similarities between representations of the highway in photography and films made in Nazi Germany (where the Autobahn may well have been “the most heavily filmed construction project of the twentieth century”) and those of Depression-era America and America of the 1950s.99 Numerous investigations started to compare the propaganda of war films internationally. A provocative comparison of Nazi films with films of the early Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, and Britain during the two world wars revealed their common agendas but also their limited effectiveness;100 a comparison of German and British war films observed the influence each had on the other;101 and another widened the circle to include the official news bureaus in Germany, Britain, and the United States, beginning in World War I, examining the way they all carefully monitored the dissemination of information and employed common strategies in depicting the enemy during World War II.102 There was also room for studies considering international attitudes toward German film, which often produced surprising results. It had long been known that Frank Capra, summoned by General George Marshall to film documentaries for U.S. soldiers, reportedly cited Triumph of the Will as his inspiration for the documentary series Why We Fight103 and that Riefenstahl’s Olympia won the grand prize at the 1938 International Film Festival in Venice, even though these facts rarely came up in treatments of Nazi cinema. Scholarship was beginning to acknowledge the reciprocity between Germany and the United States, which had existed despite censorship policies operating on both sides. The international successes of Luis Trenker, one of Goebbels’s early favorites, included films set in America that reflected, if anything, a noncommittal German attitude toward American society and culture.104 And, as Hake detailed for the first time, a small but enthusiastic audience in the United States remained receptive to films made in the Third Reich, helping Germany to maintain its status as the largest exporter of films to the American market.105 With the publication of Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939 (in German in 2005 and in English in 2006), the prospects for bringing Nazi culture out of isolation in other areas of the arts seemed within reach. Schivelbusch was initially inspired to write his book after noting how state architectural projects in Washington, Berlin, and Rome were strikingly similar in their style, scope, and function. He showed how the historical circumstances of the 1930s allow us to observe more general common traits among the German, Italian, and American responses to the Great Depression.

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Even contemporary commentators in the 1930s called attention to the features, present in all three countries, of centralized control, charismatic leadership, and promises of equality following the devastating failure of capitalism. Although they adopted different modes of implementation, all three systems navigated a course between capitalism and socialism, taking aggressive steps to control the economy without seizing and monopolizing all private property, and adopting a form of corporatism to mitigate class inequality. Schivelbusch also drew cultural and social parallels among the three countries, such as the communication skills of Hitler, Mussolini, and Roosevelt; the governments’ close monitoring of public opinion, the steering of the media, and the crafting of propaganda (referred to as “education” or “information” in the United States); the effective use of visual symbols and logos; the populations’ disillusionment with liberal democracy following the Depression; the harmonizing of nostalgia with progress; the acceleration of public works projects; and an overall increase in government control of the economy, concluding that “it was World War II that decided which system of statism would triumph in the global arena.”106 There had been only isolated attempts prior to Schivelbusch to extend comparisons of Nazi art to the art of Western democracies, including the 1987 retrospective on the condition of the avant-garde in 1937 and the 1995 exhibition showcasing the Wolfsonian collection and comparing the common design strategies used in the 1930s in Germany, Italy, and the United States.107 By breaking a number of taboos, Schivelbusch’s reflections opened the door not only to deeper investigations of the architectural parallels that first inspired him but also to the acknowledgement that there were similarities in subjects and styles in painting, sculpture, film, advertising, media, and public speaking in the three countries, as well as in the economic and administrative measures they implemented to create work and stem the tide of unemployment in arts professions. Yet even in the decade since the appearance of Schivelbusch’s Three New Deals, there was still an unmistakable resistance to pursuing similar comparisons. The 2007 exhibition Art and Propaganda (Kunst und Propaganda), co-organized by the Wolfsonian Museum and the German Historical Museum, brought together art from Germany, Italy, Russia, and the United States produced between 1930 and 1945. It specifically noted the common aspirations of these countries to display power through monumental architecture, technology, and militarism from the late nineteenth century through the two World Wars. It also pointed out the traits America shared with totalitarian regimes, such as using media to convey powerful messages with symbols and slogans. Yet the curators were careful to distinguish between Nazi art and what they classified as American “political art” and to specify that the exhibition’s purpose was “not to relativize or mitigate the terror of National Socialist rule,”108 and the catalog largely avoided drawing the United States into comparative analyses.109 Still, the mere inclusion of American images seemed to have gone too far for many. A review of the exhibition described the

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inclusion of the United States as “breathtaking” (atemberaubend) and criticized it for failing to address the ways in which “all totalitarian regimes faced the challenge that a total instrumentalization of art led almost immediately to a decline in quality of artistic production, because the more talented artists could not accept the primacy of political control.” This critic further reiterated the familiar trope that “all totalitarian dictators of the period had a specific artistic taste and used their full power to incite production of the art that pleased them.” By failing to consider these “conditions,” the review continued, the exhibition could be regarded as little more than an “experiment.”110 Another review insisted that the Nazi art was by far the most reprehensible in the exhibition, as it abused the truth by representing farm families at a time when few Germans were engaged in agriculture.111 Subsequent attempts to make comparisons beyond uncontested dictatorships have only cautiously broached the subject. A 2010 interdisciplinary study edited by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jacob Wamberg, Totalitarian Art and Modernity, followed the convention of drawing comparisons only among dictatorships, even though the editors expressed the wish to ultimately “(re)insert totalitarian art in a theoretical space in which it can be analysed together with the artistic movements in the less totalitarian states” and asked: “Did capitalist societies of this period have a quasi-totalitarian structure, or, rather, do totalitarian states form a more significant part of modern ‘progressive’ culture than is generally admitted?”112 Citing Slavoj Žižek’s observation that the polarity of totalitarianism and democracy had “returned with ever greater force after the fall of the Berlin Wall,” Rasmussen stood alone in further probing this historiographical problem.113 The boundaries have slowly been stretched in other ways, such as in Karen Fiss’s look at the French reception of Nazi culture, in which she observes the international acclaim of German cultural displays and shows how the French hosts gave Germany pride of place in the 1937 Paris World Exposition. The German pavilion impressed French visitors with its grandeur, its masterful fusions of the traditional with the modern and of art with technology, its glorification of labor and patriotism, and its overall universal appeal. These positive impressions even evoked some sympathy among visitors for the Degenerate Art exhibition and Great German Art Exhibition.114 Furthermore, Monica Bohm-Duchen’s study comparing the official as well as unofficial art made during World War II by the Allies, the Axis, and Asia identified an equivalent to socialist realism in American wartime art but attributed the long refusal to recognize it to the Cold War campaign to promote abstract expressionism. She also alluded to examples of expressionist painting produced during the war, but stopped short of directly pointing out similarities between American regionalist and Nazi genre painting.115 In music studies, the impetus for clinging to notions of Nazi totalitarianism and antimodernism and the particularism of Nazi aesthetics came from the field’s traditional preoccupation with art music and, by association, positive assumptions about the moral integrity of its creators.116 Appearing in 2000, the entry on

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Germany in the latest edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians asserted: “Those composers who did not participate in the obligatory composition of marches, choruses and songs and cantatas propounding Nazi ideology, were either forced into isolation . . . or withdrew into a kind of internal exile.”117 However, the impressive advances in film studies seems to have spilled over into music scholarship, as research on film music has begun to break down the barriers between art music and popular music and, in the process, bring Nazi film and its music out of isolation. In a recent conversation, Jost Hermand pointed out that the only art music composers of the 1930s and 1940s who have achieved a degree of “household name” status are Shostakovich and Prokofiev. While he suggested that this was due to a qualitative difference between the experiences in a socialist society and in a Fascist society, one that inspired and the other that demoralized, I would propose instead that it was their activity as film composers that moved them in the direction of creating accessible music for the concert hall, much like Aaron Copland. Some of the most successful art music composers in Germany and elsewhere earned their living composing film scores, and Hollywood populated its composers’ workshops with Europeans trained in the traditions of German and Central European symphonic techniques. While film music scholars have long known of the connections between Wagnerian compositional devices and the basic principles of film scoring,118 it was long presumed that Nazi film composers simply co-opted Wagner and Bruckner, but closer investigations have recently revealed their original approaches to film music and the inherent modernism of their techniques.119 By breaking down existing classifications of “Nazi film” and “Nazi music,” it has been possible to assess the successes of art music composers working in film who exhibited modernist tendencies (such as Werner Egk and Winfried Zillig).120 This broader understanding of film music has even led to an analysis of Triumph of the Will that reveals its effective use of musical techniques common to pre-1933 German film as well as to non-German film.121 M A S S C O N SUM P T IO N A N D T H E VO L K S G E M E I N S C HA F T

For some time, the traditional scholarly emphasis on painting, sculpture, art music, and other manifestations of “high culture” or “art-for-art’s-sake” made it difficult to dispense with using modernism as the yardstick for evaluating artistic value, and this limited the dialogue to exploring how the Nazis suppressed experimentation. Yet advances in class and gender studies led to radical transformations in understanding daily life in the Third Reich. These approaches offer promising avenues to studies of the arts by allowing historians to branch out into explorations of popular culture. For one thing, looking outside the confines of high art forces us to acknowledge that public resistance to artistic experimentation had a

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long and diverse history, not least in European culture. If we look back to the violent reactions against Monet at the 1867 World’s Fair, we can regard the Stalinist and Nazi attacks, especially on post–World War I politicized art, as capitalizing on a resurgence of such public resistance.122 Furthermore, in the cases of both art and music, by eluding popular taste and even deliberately shunning mass consumption, expressionism and dodecaphony proved to be easy targets for attack in the Degenerate Art and Degenerate Music exhibitions, especially since many younger artists and composers had already abandoned these styles and techniques years before 1933, owing to their inaccessibility. But there were also broader attacks on so-called degeneracy that rejected not only the perceived elitism of Weimar culture but also its negativity: the satire, bitterness, cynicism, demoralization, and angst that characterized so many of the cultural creations in the 1920s, a time plagued by violence, lawlessness, economic insecurity, moral degradation, and national shame. Newer avenues of research scour diverse forms of popular media to examine the ways in which Nazi culture concentrated on issuing positive messages as antidotes to these negative emotions, highlighting “the necessity of even as repressive a regime as that of the Nazis to cater to popular cultural expectations” that “generally revolve around some sense of pleasure.” Despite the seemingly counterintuitive acknowledgment of pleasure in a society notorious for inflicting pain, this approach emphasizes that it is crucial to consider that “the Nazis understood better than most political movements of the day how to channel emotions for the purpose of mobilization, largely through the accumulation of small pleasures and satisfactions that created a diffuse sense of well-being and group cohesion.”123 Most striking among these investigations is the discovery of the Nazis’ highly coordinated efforts to monitor public reaction and, in response, to downplay negativity and reinforce feelings of well-being. Editors of widely read illustrated magazines, for example, in sharp contrast to those of daily newspapers, never received clear instructions on what to publish but chose to emphasize Germany’s victories. They avoided ridiculing enemies of any sort, and they even completely ignored the calls for Jewish boycotts and the wartime propaganda decrying “international Jewry.” This positive focus proved far more effective in reinforcing a sense of belonging to the Volksgemeinschaft than any attempts to rally hatred toward a common enemy. Even at the height of war fatigue, a firm belief in the unity of the Volksgemeinschaft and in the leadership of the iconic Führer outweighed any criticism toward deteriorating conditions at home and on the front. Similarly, as the war progressed, radio programming moved away from its mandate to mobilize for war, increasingly yielding to popular demands for light entertainment.124 Popular songs (Schlager) affected the public in subtle ways, ironically cultivating romanticized and nostalgic images of the “Gypsy musician” even as anti-Gypsy policies of persecution (which predated the Third Reich) intensified. The complex history of

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regulating radio also reveals that listening to foreign broadcasts in Nazi Germany, while illegal, was treated as little more than a petty crime.125 Taken together, this new research points to the need to understand the potent appeal of the notion of the Volksgemeinschaft and its role in cultural activities in public spaces and private venues, both professional and amateur. The perpetual problem of gauging public response to cultural offerings has always challenged histories of the visual and performing arts, but the twentieth century offers unique opportunities to capture such data, both by analyzing the multiple means of consuming culture—through direct, live, communal experiences and through the mediated experiences of film, radio, or print—and by measuring more quantitative resources such as box office receipts, press reviews, recording and publishing sales, press circulation statistics, and public opinion polls. Social history has yielded results that can have important applications for arts scholarship, revealing the attraction as well as the complexity of the Volksgemeinschaft ideal, showing how workers who might otherwise have felt no strong feelings of solidarity found a common cause as soldiers in eradicating “racial inferiors,”126 and questioning the successes of DAF programs to influence the working class while acknowledging their intensity and ubiquity.127 Among workers and youth, where a certain degree of “consent and coercion went hand in hand,” David Welch has concluded that “the concept of Volksgemeinschaft represents an abhorrent, utopian vision, yet the reality is that during the Third Reich ‘belonging’ to such a community remained a powerful integratory force for many Germans.”128 We can also extend these observations beyond the working class to gain more insights into the actions of arts professionals and even to show how inciting fear and suspicion against the growing workers’ movement could instill a strong sense of solidarity and faith in the promises of order offered by the new system. Heinrich August Winkler summarized the successes of National Socialism among the German middle class as the bringing together of the intermediate classes, which the liberal, conservative and so-called interest parties had failed to achieve—because they were either half-hearted about taking up the demands of individual groups, or because they had no chance, due to the limitations imposed by narrow interests, of ever mobilizing all sections of the bourgeoisie. Only the National Socialists showed themselves determined to grab the evil by its root. They promised the radical liquidation of all factors which they held responsible for the dissolutions of the natural harmony of interests: namely, the organizations and ideologies involved in the class struggle, and all institutions which sanctioned the political resolution of social conflicts. The destruction of the “Marxist” labour movement, of the parliamentary system of government, and of political pluralism was the undisguised expression of everything that National Socialism promised to contribute towards the reconstruction of the German Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community).129

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Much of what Winkler and others have observed suggests that the same combination of promises and threats may have succeeded in enlisting the cooperation of middle-class amateurs as well as professionals in serving the Volksgemeinschaft. Looking at the varieties of musical participation, for example, isolated studies on amateur music appearing in the 1980s had indicated that the draw of the Volksgemeinschaft principle and its antisemitic undertones succeeded in attracting not only the workers’ choral organizations—which voluntarily changed their names, employed politically acceptable conductors, and merged with the DAF—but also the musical branches of the youth movement and amateur music groups largely populated by middle-class participants.130 Renewed attention to music in the Hitler Youth, military music, and songs of the SS have picked up where some of this work had left off and called attention to the overt pageantry and official importance lent to amateur music, even if some of this work still largely emphasizes music’s role in ideological manipulation.131 Celia Applegate investigated the exploitation of private music-making (Hausmusik) toward constructing an illusion of a unified middle class, further suggesting that amateur musicians, flattered by the invitation to be incorporated into such an important-sounding organization as the newly created Reich Music Chamber, believed that they had finally achieved recognition and status for their long-standing commitment to serving the Volksgemeinschaft.132 The same goes for the professional classes. Research on the field of art history during the Third Reich has provided numerous examples of how the National Socialist agenda drew in scholars and their institutions,133 and my own investigations into the musicology profession provided an example of how the profession’s central scholarly organization carried out its own internal Gleichschaltung by changing the names of the society and its journal, dismissing the journal’s Jewish editor, adopting a charter based on the Führerprinzip, and offering itself to the Propaganda Ministry in its capacity to serve the Volksgemeinschaft.134 Implicit in belonging to the Volksgemeinschaft was, of course, the willingness to make sacrifices for the community, a feature obviously not unique to Nazi Germany. In its more public manifestations, the element of sacrifice has been singled out as a component of twentieth-century theater and mass gatherings in Germany and elsewhere. Community, sacrifice, and ritual could be observed in massspectacle, open-air productions of Greek dramas; the revival of the Olympic Games, enhanced with dance, lighting, parades, and torch-lit ceremonies; and the architecture built to accommodate these mass gatherings—all elements central to the practices and aesthetics of the Thingspiele and the Nazi Party rallies but also to the American Zionist pageants.135 Yet sacrifice could also demand relinquishing personal independence and compromising morals. Whether studying an individual or a sector of the population, future endeavors need to adopt a model that takes into account the complex balance of coercion and compliance with the essential pull of the idea of solidarity when it came to individuals making these concessions.

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The proposed notion of “Herrschaft [dominance] as social practice” explained the Germans’ compliance with Nazi extremism as a result of any or all of the following: true conviction, opportunism, improved sense of well-being, economic benefits, or fear inspired by the arbitrary victimization of those around them.136 Robert Gellately showed that Germans welcomed the promises of employment and government stability as antidotes for the chaos and disunity of the Weimar Republic, that any lingering doubts about the party were soon supplanted by fierce nationalism once the war began, and that radical policies, including those that led to genocide, could move forward because they were enacted as measures dictated by a state of emergency. Much care was taken throughout the years of the Third Reich to mold propaganda to appeal to German citizens, and the relentless promotion of the Volksgemeinschaft ideal actually encouraged many individuals to denounce others.137 Members of the artistic community, for their part, may have had much to celebrate in hearing promises of new opportunities and in finding their purpose in contributing to the Volksgemeinschaft ideal, yet they may have also carefully considered the potential risks inherent in challenging authority. They had witnessed early acts of terror and intimidation in the “revolutionary” period of the Third Reich and wished to avoid the victimization meted out to their colleagues, whose careers and reputations were severely compromised as a result of arbitrary political campaigns unleashed against them. Furthermore, the Volksgemeinschaft ideal might offer the most promising tools in approaching a consensus about a generic “totalitarian aesthetic.” In the 1990s, scholars from several disciplines derived a conceptualization of “totalitarianism as political religion” from observations of cultural phenomena. This concept, while sparking much controversy at the time, can at least provide arts scholarship with much food for thought by paying special attention to the effectiveness of mass spectacle in mobilizing fanaticism in National Socialism, Italian Fascism, and Soviet communism.138 If there was a totalitarian aesthetic, it was most likely to be found in the parareligious, paramilitaristic communal rituals carried out in the multitude of orchestrated mass gatherings, an aesthetic (if we want to designate it as such) shaped by the Third Reich’s newly established holidays, the daily rituals, the party rallies, the Thingspiele, Ausdruckstanz, the structures designed and built for their purposes, and the films that immortalized their grandeur. To be sure, the Nuremberg Party Rally was enhanced by architecture designed specifically for its needs, and the filming of the 1934 rally (the footage of which was used to make Triumph of the Will) allowed even those unable to attend the event to participate vicariously in its “political liturgy,” and be counted among the Volksgemeinschaft.139 While such mass political assemblies were not new, there was something new and unique about these twentieth-century events that could take full advantage of modern technology and that demanded an intense preoccupation with the details of coordination.

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In a 1978 interview with Bernhard Leitner, Albert Speer indulged in detailing all the considerations that went into designing every corner of the Nuremberg Party Rally Grounds and choreographing every second of the carefully orchestrated events. It is very revealing to learn that even the building materials themselves had to be crafted to accommodate the staging requirements: Leitner: The parade route is covered with large slabs of granite. How big are they? About one square meter apiece? Speer: Bigger than that—they’re still in place—almost two square meters apiece, or one and one-half by one and one-half at least. I saw them not too long ago. They’re quite impressively big. Leitner: How did they come to be that size? Speer: Well, we were going to have a parade [there]. It would have been really rough on the soldiers; they’d have had to drill for such a long time, marching by in lines that went the whole width of the parade route, you know—the Russians do it that way, I think, not in rows of six, but twenty men side by side—and so, to make it easier for them, I put those inserts of dark granite into the granite pavement, to give them straight lines to follow, and also across, to give them some control— Leitner: So you laid out a pattern for the soldiers, as it were. Speer: Yes, to make it easier for them. Incidentally, I did the same thing for poor Hitler with his two—Himmler and Röhm—on that well-known occasion when they had to walk back from the memorial, because there’s nothing harder than walking a straight line (amused); looking at it from above, it’s as if they were tipsy. Leitner: What did you do about it? Speer: Again I drew straight lines using dark granite that they could easily follow. Leitner: Specifically for that purpose? Speer: Right, right, that’s what it was for.140

The Nuremberg Party Rally was just one example of the extreme care invested in perfectly staging mass gatherings. The Thingspiele and a wide range of local and national celebrations abounded during the Third Reich, in which architecture, choreography, drama, music, and sound effects were all carefully coordinated so that the largest possible number of those counted among the Volksgemeinschaft could engage in these solemn and festive rituals. Indeed, architectural journals were replete with accounts of decorating for the multitude of events, the number of which had increased dramatically between 1933 and 1939. Advances in travel and the technology of sound amplification both widened the circle and enhanced the experience of those who could physically attend, while radio broadcasts and film enabled even more members of the Volksgemeinschaft to participate.141

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It has also been noted, however, that what distinguished the Nazis was not their penchant for mass spectacle per se but the scale and frequency of their events.142 A 1990 collection titled Art on Demand? (Kunst auf Befehl?) completely rejected the idea that there had been anything distinctively Nazi in the cultural or intellectual life of the Third Reich, ascribing to the National Socialists only extreme commitment to their utopian ideals and the use of violent means in pursuing them. In the arts, this translated into the affirmation of the Volksgemeinschaft by asserting the Germanic past and investing in communal music and architectural projects that would accommodate mass participation and strengthen the sense of belonging.143 If we accept that the Nazis distinguished themselves by the frequency, intensity, and even the violent tone of their mass gatherings, but did not hold an exclusive claim on this type of gathering itself, we should perhaps consider whether all technologically enhanced mass gatherings of the twentieth century have at least explored if not exploited the potential to offer a similar type of emotionally powerful, community-building experience. W HAT M A K E S I T “NA Z I” ?

Before we can attempt to answer this question, we need to carefully consider the terms that have dominated the discourse in arts scholarship but—much like modernism—have eluded any consensus as to their meaning. These include terms thought to have been coined and widely used in the Third Reich but also terms that would never have been employed at the time, including the very term “Nazi.” Throughout this investigation, although it would have been tedious, it would perhaps not have been inappropriate to mark the term “Nazi” with scare quotes. The term has served as a convenient shorthand loaded with implications, upholding the chronological divide that separates Germans and Germany from what existed between 1933 and 1945 and making it difficult to acknowledge that any other contemporary society could have shared traits with those steering this barbaric episode in the history of an otherwise cultivated leader of Western civilization. Although I have focused here more on the historical treatment of the arts than on the treatment of the artists, it is also important to note that the incessant drive to label individuals as Nazis or non-Nazis is a stubborn holdover from the denazification program: judgments of guilt or innocence are still deliberated in the court of public (and scholarly) opinion, which has devised classifications that parallel the denazification program’s original six categories but also include such new classifications such as “inner emigrant,” “apolitical artist,” and “resistance fighter.” This compulsion may have arisen from the perceived moral obligation in arts scholarship to mete out justice to the perceived perpetrators, but the preoccupation has too often diverted the discussion away from larger concerns. The term “Nazi,” first of all, unfortunately oversimplifies the complexity of political engagement: for

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example, did an individual earn the designation of “Nazi” simply by joining the National Socialist Party? On the consideration of party membership alone, the White Rose martyr Kurt Huber would be branded as a Nazi, as would Nolde, who joined the party but was humiliated as a degenerate, whereas Strauss never joined but is believed by many to qualify for condemnation as a Nazi because of his actions and positions.144 Furthermore, the assignment of responsibility for any of the heinous acts committed during the Third Reich to an amorphous group of Nazis confounds the question of agency by failing to situate the actions of specific individuals, government bodies, party organizations, or private interests. Given the long tradition of writing life-and-works studies of cultural figures, the intense scrutiny of individuals will not cease, but further inquiries should focus less on arriving at verdicts and more on the volatility of success in the arbitrary political climate of the Third Reich, the privileged position of artists, and the leeway allowed to celebrities and creative individuals. Despite their countless claims after the war of having been discriminated against and victimized in the Third Reich, many artists, especially those who had acquired fame prior to 1933, were able to continue their successes even if they did not publicly commit themselves to the state’s causes and even if they could have been considered politically or racially suspect by the leadership. One also has to consider the generation to which an individual belonged: Richard Strauss, having worked under several different types of systems, arguably underestimated Hitler by thinking he could simply show respect to the Führer in return for artistic privilege, but he also detected a degree of progressivism in the promises the new government made to musicians about new professional and economic securities and the unprecedented attention the National Socialists paid to Strauss’s own pet project, copyright laws. A younger generation of artists who started their careers in the severe economic turmoil of the Weimar Republic, Franz Radziwill among them, may have jumped at any opportunities that came their way in the Third Reich, ingratiating themselves with party and government benefactors after experiencing extreme financial insecurity firsthand during the 1920s. The generation that followed, a group educated in the Nazi system, similarly has to be seen in light of the intense efforts during the Third Reich to reform education and indoctrinate young Germans. Members of this generation may come across as the most ardent and convinced National Socialists, many of whom lost their faith only after the final phases of World War II and found themselves at a loss to rationalize their early convictions with the new rules implicitly set down at the Zero Hour. As noted earlier, an epithet such as “Nazi” would have rarely been invoked during the Third Reich; rather, every artistic accomplishment worthy of praise would have been held up as proof of the National Socialist successes in restoring all things German to their former glory. The blurred lines between German nationalism and National Socialism, however, has challenged arts scholars who have themselves

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been trained to cultivate a deep appreciation for German cultural achievements but strive to disassociate their own, inherited values from those of the Nazis. One creative solution for this dilemma has been to insist upon a distinction between “German” and “Nazi,” or even between “German-National” and “National Socialist.”145 Such insistence only thinly disguises an ambivalence toward problematic assumptions about German superiority that have been central to the canon of arts scholarship. These assumptions have been particularly prominent in music scholarship, influencing generations of musicologists, and not just in Germany.146 Yet in 1949, the music scholar Curt Sachs, himself a victim of National Socialism, had no qualms about making the connection between a belief in German superiority and the Holocaust. Sachs showed little restraint in rebuking a colleague who had remained in Germany during the war for refusing to see that there is a straight line between the ardent nationalist and the executioner in Auschwitz, even when a few posts stand in between. . . . Those who are to be the intellectual leaders of Germany must be confronted with the fact that the horrible misfortune that overcame the world and also caused you so much personal sacrifice was not the act of a few fanatics but the explosion of the incendiary material set down by the generation of deceitful pseudo-scholars like Chamberlain, Woltman or Günther (foreign scholars find them laughable) and nourished by generations of teachers and professors. Only when the German learns to love his homeland without screaming in everyone’s ears about the German soul and the German man, only when he perceives that national exhibitionism is not a virtue but a depravity, only then can there be peace—for Germany and for the others.147

As a direct target of Nazi antisemitism, Sachs was ready not only to condemn his contemporaries for their complicity but also to make that fatal link between German cultural nationalism and the gas chambers. Sachs and other exiles believed they saw the ties between Germany’s cultural obsessions and mass murder, while Richard Etlin suggests that those who remained in Germany might have had a more pressing need to remind themselves that they were a cultured nation, even in the midst of carrying out genocide.148 Even if historical distance has allowed us to take a more reasoned approach to contextualizing the history of the Third Reich, it is still by no means clear any of us are ready to replace the term “Nazi” with “German,” insisting on using the former even when we speak of military maneuvers (e.g., the “Nazi invasion” instead of “German invasion” of Poland). Removing the term “Nazi” from our vocabulary would recognize the characteristics of caricature the term has acquired, but it would also force us to consider that Germans—not just Nazis—embraced Hitler’s leadership and followed orders to engage in denunciation, murder, destruction, and ultimately self-destruction. Even more so, it would force us to acknowledge that much of the foundation of German culture—which was exploited during the Third Reich as something that needed to be defended from Jews, Bolshevists, and

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all of Germany’s real and perceived enemies—was also part of a cultural legacy that had spread throughout much of the West. Invoked almost as frequently as the “Nazi” label, the term “Nazi ideology” has similarly served as a vessel to capture all the diverse and often contradictory components of cultural life in the Third Reich. Yet it also glosses over inconsistencies in the policies and attitudes toward the arts in the Third Reich and dismisses any potential parallels that could be made between them and Western democracies. In his recent survey of Nazi culture, Jost Hermand acknowledges that any ideology of the arts was impossible to pin down and that what prevailed instead was a careful pragmatism exercised to placate the broadest cross section of the public.149 While some historians of the Third Reich have advocated for the virtual eradication of the far-too-loosely applied notion of “Nazi ideology,” others suggest that the nature of the ideology is perhaps not as important as the mechanism of propaganda that gave the impression of a consensus.150 More recently, Alon Confino has implored historians not to dismiss ideology outright but instead to cultivate a more discriminating understanding of what it does and does not include. He goes one step further to suggest that ideology be subsumed under a new concept of “Nazi culture”—one that encompasses “the shared values and expectations, the ways of life and thought, historical memory and representations, that gave meaning and coherence to the Nazi experience and informed collective action.”151 In Confino’s restructuring, however, he also outlines a conflict between ideals and realities that parallels what I have identified in this book as the gulf in the arts between rhetoric and practice. The common references to “Nazis,” “nazification,” and “Nazi ideology” in arts scholarship have been problematic for basing their reconstruction of cultural life in the Third Reich on the bombastic rhetoric of the time, taking the government and party’s claims at face value without tracking the extent of their implementation. The impressions of totalitarian and intentionalist rule and antimodernism that seemed so plausible immediately after the war were in many ways the effects of a highly sophisticated and successful propaganda campaign carried out over the preceding twelve years of the Third Reich. Co-opting Allen’s conception of the “boast of the dictator” and Kershaw’s “working towards the Führer,” we can more clearly observe how the spectacle of order, control, and authority erected a façade of a cohesive Volksgemeinschaft behind which chaos and ultimately selfdestruction were at work.152 We have already seen repeatedly how conceptions of Nazi art, architecture, music, film, and theater arising out of postwar historical accounts have camouflaged a multitude of contradictions, largely because these accounts chose to treat Nazi rhetoric as accurate accounts of the state of affairs. Starting with the first investigations of Nazi art and architecture in the 1940s and continuing with Wulf ’s published collections of documents in the 1960s, historical interpretations tended to take much of what was written during the Third Reich at its word rather than

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situating the stated objectives and claims of success within the realities of cultural life, which would have called attention to the gaps between theory and practice. This was particularly evident in the case of architecture: in 1985, Hartmut Frank directly challenged the isolation of “Nazi architecture,” both chronologically and geographically, insisting that, despite the widely held belief that there was a specific brand of Nazi architecture, there had been no break in continuity before and after the National Socialists came to power, and no “new” styles had been established. However, the Nazi propaganda machine did fully exploit the public’s perception that a new era had dawned, tapping into what was popular and pitching it as “of the Volk” and investing more in the rhetoric than the aesthetic.153 In 1991, Winfried Nerdinger took the decisive step of rejecting any category of “Nazi architecture” outright, but he further noted that modernist tendencies prevailed for their functional value and could be rationalized for their ability to “express technical values in a National Socialist sense.”154 Such observations lead back to Miller Lane’s much earlier recognition, in 1968, of the importance of rhetoric in giving arts created in the Third Reich the distinctive “Nazi” stamp. It was not so much the inherent meanings or external features of the creations that made them “Nazi” but rather the packaging in which they were presented. Joan Clinefelter also examined this angle, suggesting that any art peddled as National Socialist is defined less by content and style and more by interpretive gloss and that “art supportive of the Third Reich was less an aesthetic and more a rhetorical practice,” illustrated in the persistent promotion of “true German” art in the conservative journal Das Bild that rarely engaged in aesthetic discourse, instead defining its parameters around the genealogy, biography, and character of the artists it featured.155 Karen Painter’s analysis of music criticism has further revealed the gap between rhetoric and practice, showing, for example, how the symphony served as a political and nationalistic metaphor and a central theme in Nazi musical discourse, but not as an actual compositional preoccupation.156 This brings us to what is perhaps the key component to answering the question “what makes it ‘Nazi’,” and that is the manner, intensity, and ubiquity of rhetorical and ceremonial practices that aimed to instill a sense of belonging and to restore pride in being German, as well as to identify and malign imagined adversaries. The goals of the jingoistic rhetoric employed by cultural administrators, practitioners, and commentators was to promote what was German and protect it from those allegedly intent on destroying it. Following the uphill battles to create a sense of German nationhood under the first unification, World War I posed severe setbacks to instilling a positive sense of Germanness but also strengthened the resolve to regain national pride. The Treaty of Versailles put Germans internationally on the defensive, making them feel like pariahs but also like victims, and much energy was invested in blaming those who had supposedly caused their suffering. The Nazi Party was effective in fueling the animosities of the general population toward

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the signatories of the Versailles treaty, toward imagined enemies in their midst, and toward all who, many believed, had in one way or another victimized Germany and eroded German identity and self-worth. For many in the arts professions, these feelings translated into animosities toward foreigners who profited during the height of hyperinflation, toward wealthy outsiders who had bought treasures from impoverished German collections, and toward a handful of Jewish critics who supposedly perverted taste away from “true German” art and monopolized jobs that could have been filled by the armies of overqualified and underemployed “true German” critics. Indicting Jews and Bolshevists as the destroyers of German arts encouraged feelings of solidarity while tapping into simmering frustrations and fears. That so much of the language used to attack Germany’s cultural enemies focused on Jews had deep roots in the cultural antisemitism and pan-Germanism of the late nineteenth century and could be invoked as powerfully as ever as long as there were even a few Jews achieving a degree of fame in the arts. As was noted earlier, the Culture Chambers had set on a course in 1935 to exclude Jews from participation in the arts, but the suggestion that this would yield an artistic product more German than before was little more than a rhetorical ruse. The attack on Bolshevism in the arts was more complex and, in some ways, even more contrived and duplicitous, and those under assault as Bolshevists and Jews were usually the same individuals. The invocation of Bolshevism may have been part of a broader campaign to sway workers away from replicating the violent uprising in the Soviet Union, a specter that haunted Germany as well as other industrial nations, including the United States. It may also have been an allusion to Lenin’s Bolshevism, with the aim of making a fine distinction between Lenin, who ushered in an era of bloody revolution, and Stalin, whose Soviet Union could be seen as Germany’s ally during the negotiations leading to the Non-Aggression Pact in 1939. The attack on “cultural Bolshevism” had little more than a rhetorical function in the arts, however; once the chief representatives of leftist culture had been ceremoniously ostracized, many of their former associates were able to carry on successfully. Just as there was limited investment in defining Jewish or Bolshevik culture in any detail, other “un-German” artistic movements were only rarely singled out by name. It is noteworthy that in his speech at the opening of the Great German Art Exhibition in 1937, Hitler made no specific reference to expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit, or the Bauhaus, although he did mention impressionism, futurism, Dada, cubism, and “modernity.”157 Others, such as Rosenberg, were far more explicit, but they also showed signs of ambivalence and inconsistency. In 1938, Gerdy Troost accused Neue Sachlichkeit architects of spreading Jewish Bolshevism while contradictorily singing the praises of the “economical and clean cut lines” of “technological buildings.”158 The Bauhaus had been a direct target of Nazi ideologues and local cultural administrators starting in the mid-1920s, but past affiliations with

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the school, as we have seen, did not necessarily condemn architects and designers to unemployment, exile, or worse. Followers of these artistic movements who carried on with their work in the Third Reich just wisely chose not to draw attention to their past affiliations. What is distinctive to the cultural operations of the Third Reich, then, is not the promotion of certain Nazi individuals, ideology, or aesthetics but the extreme care taken in presenting the arts to the public as proof of German greatness. The first steps in acknowledging the importance of such modes of presentation have been taken in a recent but growing interest in analyzing not only what was exhibited during the Third Reich but also how it was exhibited. The odd presentation of items in the Degenerate Art and Degenerate Music exhibitions attracted immediate attention because of the blatant disrespect in chaotically arranging the works in cramped and poorly lit spaces (the style of which actually took its cue from the Berlin Dada exhibition of 1920, see fig. 20). This stood in direct contrast to the airy and dignified exhibition style of the Great German Art Exhibition, where advanced technology and modern design principles were used to set the lighting and physical layout of the displays.159 Marketing was also a key component in securing the success of artists featured in the Great German Art exhibitions, where all of the items on display were available for purchase. Hitler’s own contribution of jacking up the prices of the works and creating a circle of “court artists” was one of many initiatives to alleviate the poor financial conditions that had been plaguing artists since the economic crises of the 1920s.160 Further scholarly work has branched out beyond art exhibitions to look at industrial expos and world’s fairs, which applied modern exhibition techniques but also maintained a careful balance between the homey, völkisch, and nostalgic design elements and the forward-looking, modern, and global features, sending the message that the German Volksgemeinschaft could assume a leading role in the modern world and assume its “place in the sun.”161 As part of this “crusade to remake the industrial world as an extension of German Kultur,” the very artifacts in department store windows that had previously been designed and displayed in futuristic settings could take on a whole new meaning when surrounded by homey, rustic, and otherwise nostalgic trappings.162 We should also consider the positive rhetorical power that contemporary terms would have held for citizens of the Third Reich, especially those terms we have generally chosen to interpret negatively. “Propaganda,” despite its negative connotations in our contemporary Western parlance, would not have seemed offensive in the 1930s, and actually, in the Eastern Bloc, it continued throughout the Cold War to have positive connotations of providing access to information. The fact that Goebbels unabashedly assumed the title of Propaganda Minister and at one point tried to claim the term as a purely National Socialist concept did not alter the fact that it had been more widely accepted in Europe in connection with advertising and promotion.163 It has been common to translate Volksgemeinschaft

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figure 20. Gallery in the Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) exhibition, 1937; at center right, Rudolf Belling, Chord (Dreiklang), 1924 (bpk, Berlin/Art Resource, NY).

loosely as a “racial community” in order not to mitigate the effects of genocide carried out in its name, but the term might have had as much appeal to ardent racists as to those with more neutral attitudes toward Jews (we can raise the question of whether Jews in the early years of National Socialism also responded favorably to its emotional appeal). Similarly, given the chaos of Weimar administration and the power vacuum left by the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the concept of the Führerprinzip might very well have conjured up feelings of relief and security by giving people hope that order and hierarchy would be restored. Indeed, when the Propaganda Ministry came forward in 1933 to take the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under its wing following years of the organization’s numerous failed attempts to gain such government securities, Furtwängler reassured the orchestra’s members in an open letter: “Reichsminister Goebbels has added to this assurance the condition that absolute leadership of the orchestra in artistic and personal matters is bestowed upon me.” The Vossische Zeitung later reported: “With praise for Furtwängler, who is the greatest artistic and economic support of the orchestra, [orchestra manager Lorenz Höber] concluded that in the future he will be more a ‘Führer’ than ever before.” The orchestra’s other manager, Rudolf von Schmidtseck, proclaimed his support “that German art is to be set on a national foundation and that the Führerprinzip must also be introduced in the arts.”164 The term most

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suggestive of totalitarian control of the arts, however, was Gleichschaltung, the translation of which has remained elusive but always implies forced conformity. Yet this term had early associations with the positively received industrial reforms of the 1920s that emulated Taylorism and Fordism and greatly advanced Germany’s competitive edge in the global markets with the introduction of rationalization.165 The term has been traced back to 1919, when it appeared in the writings of Wichard von Moellendorff, who was serving in the Reich economic ministry and coordinated industrialists to reform the German economy. It was here that he employed, according to Judith Merkle Riley, “a concept later considered by nonGermans to be a typically Nazi management term, ‘Gleichschaltung,’ the streamlining of, or bringing into line the various parts of economic and political life . . . in the same way that electric currents are coordinated through a switchboard.”166 Rhetoric and spectacle served crucial functions: if the Nazis ultimately had little interest in dictating aesthetics, they placed much value in celebrating all that was happening in the arts as a manifestation of the German soul and a validation that German culture could thrive despite threats to its existence, including—if not primarily—economic threats. The high-profile events outlined in chapter 1 shaped our initial perceptions of Nazi culture, yet they are perhaps the most compelling evidence of the effectiveness of Nazi rhetoric, even on us. Cultural historians started to deepen their understanding of these events by looking to supporting documentation, focusing overwhelmingly on the speeches of Hitler and Goebbels, but they initially had no resources for assessing the success with which these pronouncements became policy. Yet, as perceptive observers have noted at various junctures, taking these pronouncements at face value puts us in the position of believing the Nazis’ inflated claims of single-handedly establishing a new German culture, while most evidence shows that they did not exert as much control as they would have us think, nor did they deliver anything that was all that new or even distinctively German. C O N C LU SIO N S : T O O C L O SE T O HOM E ?

Close investigations of the rhetoric show, on the one hand, that the “Nazi” terms that informed Cold War theories of totalitarianism—especially Volksgemeinschaft, Gleichschaltung, and Führerprinzip—were not so far removed from parallel principles in Roosevelt’s United States that emphasized building community by eliminating class division, restoring order from chaos, and even creating a leadership cult. When we look more closely at what was actually produced in the two countries under these circumstances, we may see—even if we have not wanted to see—that there are more similarities than differences. Those who have done crosscultural comparisons of advertising materials have noted the common strategies of invoking agrarian nostalgia and glorifying labor and domesticity to soft-peddle

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the inevitable submission to industrialization and technology, to win back the working class, to ward off the threats of a Bolshevik-type revolution, and to glamorize leadership. We can also observe a global decline in both the production and the consumption of the fine arts, countered by organized attempts to create work for struggling artists and provide more access to their work (through museums, subscription programs, and educational films and broadcasts). Struggling to emerge from the Depression, both Germany and the United States introduced government-sponsored programs in the 1930s and 1940s to employ artists and organized lobbying groups to improve the standard of living in the arts professions, what Steinweis identified as “neocorporatism.” When we expand our scope beyond the fine arts, we observe that visual artists were finding more opportunities in advertising, museums were taking a back seat to expositions, musical entertainment was moving from concert halls to the radio, and the traditional function of theater was transitioning to the film screen. Overall, however, the crippled global economy had already taken its toll on all arts professions and on the quantity as well as the quality of artistic production. Looking beyond the 1930s and 1940s, however, we may want to recall Eric Rentschler’s proposition: “Contemporary American media culture has more than a superficial or vicarious relationship with the Third Reich’s society of spectacle. . . . This discussion must account for a legacy that extends from the Third Reich into our own lives today.”167 As performing arts became subjected to technological transformations, the lost communal experience that had once been provided in theaters and the concert halls was partially restored by mass gatherings that could extend participation to larger numbers through the microphone, the airwaves, and the screen, both large and small. We see further similarities between National Socialist Germany and the United States in the increasingly advanced techniques of harnessing media and monitoring public opinion, legacies that we are still in the process of utilizing and perfecting. The totalitarian aesthetic of mass ritual discussed above resonates with current times, revealing the common traits of the Thingplätze and the Nuremberg Party Rally grounds with—albeit less politicized—megachurches, sports arenas, and rock concert venues; and the Olympics’ enduring legacy of celebrating amateurs. On revisiting Triumph of the Will, Rentschler identified the influence of Riefenstahl’s aesthetics in the modern-day Olympics and the Super Bowl. More specifically, he points out Michael Jackson’s oblique mimicry of the film (and, more directly, of Soviet military pageantry) in the teaser to his album HIStory and David Bowie’s even more shocking identification of Hitler as a “media artist”: “The way he worked his audiences! The girls got all hot and sweaty and the guys wished they were up there where he was. The world won’t ever see his like again. He made the whole country into his own stage show.”168 Even after the fall of communism in Europe, we were reminded of these practices and their underlying ideology at the Olympic Games in Sochi, where the

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mass ceremonies displayed nationalist sentiment and engaged multitudes of youth and amateurs, reminiscent of the Berlin Olympics in 1936. This phenomenon of ritualistic mass gatherings to share in a communal experience on a vast scale can arguably exist only in an age when technology can meet the grand architectural needs of the required spaces and can extend participation—through radio, film, television, and the internet—to those who cannot be physically present. We should also consider the power of propaganda, rhetoric, and mass spectacle in the effective construction of an image of the enemy—a Feindbild—in several historical moments of disillusionment and fear. David Culbert observed how the feature film Jew Süss succeeded not merely because of its racist message but also because of the high quality of the production, comparing it to D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, which is recognized for its cinematic innovation in spite of its racist content. Rentschler updated this parallel to include Braveheart, Rob Roy, and The Passion of the Christ, pointing out the capacity of these films to rewrite history.169 And rather than fading with the end of the Cold War, the totalitarian paradigm has generated its own set of Feindbilder by gathering notorious leaders old and new into a gallery of dictators so heinous as to trample art under their boots. In 2013, Albert Speer: Architecture 1932–1942 was reissued, and Krier’s spirited defense of Speer’s art and his attack on militant industrialization elicited a revulsion that could draw its inspiration from the revival of a totalitarian interpretation of Nazi arts policy. The scathing criticism of the book by Michael Sorkin in The Nation echoed intentionalist traditions by alerting readers to Hitler’s obsession with architecture and refusing to consider that any of Speer’s projects might have any artistic merit.170 Alongside Hitler and Speer, new members have been added to the gallery of dictators believed to have single-handedly crushed artistic freedom. The real wars as well as the culture wars waged in the Bush era inspired the addition of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il in the 2011 reissue of Golomshtock’s Totalitarian Art.171 Matheny’s suggestions that we reassess art history’s canonical insistence on the moral rectitude of art are still relevant, and if we open our eyes to seeing and analyzing these parallels, we may just find that core elements of our own arts and entertainment industries can trace their sources back to those also cultivated in the dictatorships of the twentieth century. However, this close analysis will yield an even more sophisticated understanding of the key differences in the intensity with which these techniques were applied in Germany and the path they paved for the population to actually act on the prejudices they incited on a massive scale. Beyond the showcased events of the book burning, the Degenerate Art and Degenerate Music exhibitions, the handful of antisemitic films, and the few antisemitic reinterpretations of classics, anti-Jewish rhetoric did not steer artistic themes or productions in the Third Reich. However, the establishment of the Reich Culture Chambers jumpstarted the process of expelling Jews from arts professions, a process that had begun months earlier in 1933 with the hounding of high-profile individuals,

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and the officially sanctioned formation of the Jewish Culture League moved it forward toward segregating their participation from cultural life entirely. As other Germans witnessed and abided by this ghettoization in their midst, the course was established for gradually introducing further exclusionary measures and fostering a mentality that could sanction the murderous acts that ensued. The street violence, assassinations, and mayhem of the Weimar years had already hardened many to tolerate what they believed were more targeted acts of violence carried out to ensure the ultimate restoration of order. With artistic operations “cleansed” of Jewish participation, the works of art created in the Third Reich may not themselves have revealed any effects of the antisemitism and xenophobia that would ultimately lead to widespread participation in violence and genocide. Artistic products of the Third Reich had not become significantly more German or “Aryan,” but the rhetoric in which they were framed—as German art free of Jewish influence and accessible to the Volksgemeinschaft—served as yet one more rationale for eliminating the perceived enemy. Continued work on mass culture in arts scholarship has been extremely fruitful in showing us the common cultural tendencies in Germany and the rest of the world, but it does not fully prepare these fields for coming to terms with the unique conditions of the Third Reich. To equip themselves for the challenges that beset this terrain, arts scholars also need to consider the peculiarities of German history. In closing their introduction to Shattered Past, Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer cited A. J. P. Taylor’s recognition that German history is an excess of contradictions, one that historians tend to gloss over. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these contradictions included ruptures versus continuities, wealth versus destitution, the horror of the Third Reich versus the miracle of the Federal Republic, memory versus amnesia, and a cycle of de- and re-civilizing. To this list we can add the counterintuitive contradictions between German culture and Nazi barbarity. The remedy Jarausch and Geyer offer for fully confronting the stark paradoxes and ruptures in German history is to adopt a cultural approach that conceives of “culture” as broadly as possible and, rather than isolating high or even high and low culture, investigates the complex negotiations “by which individual and social bodies constitute themselves, how they interact with each other, and how they rip themselves apart.”172 By acknowledging the similarities between Germany and other societies as well as the crucial differences in scale, degree, and effectiveness, cultural historians will be in a better position to resolve the nagging paradox of German culture coexisting with Nazi barbarity. Analyzing these crucial differences will bring to light the intensity with which German arts professionals in the 1930s and 1940s participated in a rhetoric, ritual, and ceremony that inspired a sense of belonging, but a belonging that depended on and condoned the exclusion of the Other and paved the way for the xenophobia and bloodshed implemented on an unimaginable scale.

notes

1 . V I SUA L A N D P E R F O R M I N G A RT S

1. “Art of the Third Reich,” Wikipedia, accessed November 15, 2014, http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/Art_of_the_Third_Reich. 2. “Music in Nazi Germany,” History Learning Site, accessed November 15, 2014, www .historylearningsite.co.uk/music_nazi_germany.htm. 3. “Culture in the Third Reich: Overview,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed November 15, 2014, www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005207. 4. Hildegard Brenner, Die Kunstpolitik des Nationalsozialismus (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1963); and Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968, 1985). 5. Donald Wesley Ellis, “Music in the Third Reich: National Socialist Aesthetic Theory as Governmental Policy” (PhD diss., University of Kansas, 1970); M. S. Phillips, “The Nazi Control of the German Film Industry,” Journal of European Studies 1 (1971): 37–68; and Wolf-Eberhard August, “Die Stellung der Schauspieler im Dritten Reich: Versuch einer Darstellung der Kunst- und Gesellschaftspolitik in einem totalitären Staat am Beispiel des ‘Berufsschauspielers,’ ” (PhD diss., University of Cologne, 1973). 6. August, “Die Stellung der Schauspieler”; Konrad Dussel, Ein neues, ein heroisches Theater?: Nationalsozialistische Theaterpolitik und ihre Auswirkungen in der Provinz, Literatur und Wirklichkeit (Bonn: Bouvier, 1988); Alan E. Steinweis, “The Reich Chamber of Culture and the Regulation of the Culture Professions in Nazi Germany” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1988); and Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). 7. Catherine Epstein, Nazi Germany: Confronting the Myths (Chichester, UK: WileyBlackwell, 2015), 51, 86–91. 253

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8. Olaf Peters, “From Nordau to Hitler: ‘Degeneration’ and Anti-Modernism between the Fin-de-Siècle and the National Socialist Takeover of Power,” in Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany 1937, ed. Olaf Peters (Munich: Prestel, 2014), 33. 9. “Nazification,” Time 21, no. 20 (1933): 18. 10. Kurt Düwell, “Kultur und Kulturpolitik in der Weimarer Republik,” in Weimarer Republik: Eine Nation im Umbruch, ed. Gerhard Schulz (Freiburg: Verlag Ploetz, 1987), 78–79. 11. Figures calculated from data in Leo Kestenberg, Jahrbuch der deutschen Musikorganisationen 1931 (Berlin: Max Hesse, 1931), 58–86; cited in Pamela M. Potter, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 10. 12. See Alan E. Steinweis, “Weimar Culture and the Rise of National Socialism: The Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur,” Central European History 24, no. 4 (1991): 402–423. 13. Brenner, Kunstpolitik, 18, 20. 14. Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics, 45–49. 15. Hans Hinkel, ed., Handbuch der Reichskulturkammer (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Politik und Wirtschaft, 1937), 95–123. 16. Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics, 80–88, 94, 98–102. 17. Herbert P. Rothfeder, “A Study of Alfred Rosenberg’s Organization for National Socialist Ideology” (PhD. diss., University of Michigan, 1963), 55–77; and Reinhard Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg und seine Gegner: Studien zum Machtkampf im nationalsozialistischen Herrschaftssystem, Studien zur Zeitgeschichte herausgegeben vom Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1970), 45–60. 18. Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg, 71–85. 19. Brenner, Kunstpolitik, 18; John London, ed., Theatre under the Nazis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 30; and Bogusław Drewniak, Das Theater im NS-Staat: Szenarium deutscher Zeitgeschichte 1933–1945 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1983). 20. Rothfeder, “Alfred Rosenberg’s Organization,” 96–107. 21. Reinhard Bollmus, “Zum Projekt einer nationalsozialistischen Alternativ-Universität: Alfred Rosenbergs ‘Hohe Schule,’ ” in Erziehung und Schulung im Dritten Reich, Part 2, Hochschule, Erwachsenenbildung, ed. Manfred Heinemann (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980), 125–152; and Rothfeder, “Alfred Rosenberg’s Organization,” 327–356. 22. Rothfeder, “Alfred Rosenberg’s Organization,” 357–361. 23. Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg, 145–151; Willem De Vries, Sonderstab Musik: Music Confiscations by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg under the Nazi Occupation of Western Europe, trans. UvA Vertalers and Lee K. Mitzman (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 91–93, 103–106; and Jonathan Petropoulos, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 24. Ian Kershaw, “ ‘Working towards the Führer’: Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship,” in Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, ed. Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 88–106. 25. Phillips, “Nazi Control,” 37–68. 26. Pamela M. Potter, “The Nazi ‘Seizure’ of the Berlin Philharmonic, or the Decline of a Bourgeois Musical Institution,” in National Socialist Cultural Policy, ed. Glenn R. Cuomo (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 39–65.

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27. Hubert Kolland, “Wagner-Rezeption im deutschen Faschismus,” in Bericht über den internationalen musikwissenschaftlichen Kongreß Bayreuth 1981, ed. Christoph-Hellmut Mahling and Sigrid Wiesmann (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1984), 498–502; Henry Bair, “National Socialism and the Opera: The Berlin Opera Houses, 1933–1939,” Opera 35 (1984): 130; Michael H. Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 35–39; Richard Wilhelm Stock, Richard Wagner und seine Meistersinger: Eine Erinnerungsgabe zu den Bayreuther Kriegsfestspielen 1943 (Nuremberg: Ulrich, [1938?]); and Michael Karbaum, Studien zur Geschichte der Bayreuther Festspiele (1876–1976) (Regensburg: Bosse, 1976), 91–93. 28. Dieter E. Zimmer, “Max Reinhardts Nachlaß: Ein Drama um Kunst und Kommerz,” Die Zeit, July 15, 1994. 29. August, “Die Stellung der Schauspieler”; and Drewniak, Theater im NS-Staat. 30. Susan Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon: Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 171–173. 31. Gesa Jeuthe, “Die Moderne unter dem Hammer: Zur ‘Verwertung’ der ‘entarteten’ Kunst durch die Luzerne Galerie Fischer 1939,” in Angriff auf die Avantgarde: Kunst und Kunstpolitik im Nationalsozialismus, Schriften der Forschungsstelle “Entartete Kunst” 1, ed. Uwe Fleckner (Berlin: Akadamie Verlag Berlin, 2007), 189–305; and Anja Tiedemann, Die “entartete” Moderne und ihr amerikanischer Markt: Karl Buchholz und Curt Valentin als Händler verfemter Kunst (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013). 32. Phillips, “Nazi Control,” 38–42. 33. Ibid., 50–52. 34. Sabine Hake, Popular Cinema of the Third Reich (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001). 35. Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret, Studies in Cultural History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 36. Dussel, Ein heroisches Theater?; and Drewniak, Theater im NS-Staat. 37. Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics, 132, 134–138. 38. Ellis, “Music in the Third Reich, 142–143. 39. Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics, 138–141; and Ellis, “Music in the Third Reich,” 129–130. 40. Ellis, “Music in the Third Reich”; see also Ellis, “The Propaganda Ministry and Centralized Regulation of Music in the Third Reich: The ‘Biological Aesthetic’ as Policy,” Journal of European Studies 5 (1975): 223–238. 41. Nanny Drechsler, Die Funktion der Musik im deutschen Rundfunk, 1933–1945 (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1988), 24, 33, 42, 131. This and all other translations from German sources are my own. 42. Martin Elste, “Zwischen Privatheit und Politik: Die Schallplatten-Industrie im NSStaat,” in Musik und Musikpolitik im faschistischen Deutschland, ed. Hanns-Werner Heister and Hans-Günter Klein (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984), 107–111. 43. August, “Die Stellung der Schauspieler.” 44. Fred K. Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1982), 284–285; Fabian R. Lovisa, Musikkritik im Nationalsozialismus: Die Rolle deutschsprachiger Musikzeitschriften, 1920–1945, Neue Heidelberger Studien zur Musikwissenschaft 22 (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1993), 197–207; and Bryan Gilliam, “The Annexation of Anton Bruckner: Nazi Revisionism and the Politics of Appropriation,” The Musical Quarterly 78 (1994): 592–593, 607.

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45. David Stewart Hull, Film in the Third Reich: A Study of the German Cinema, 1933–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 95ff; and Herbert Gerigk, “Die Musik im Jahre 1938,” Bundesarchiv Koblenz, NS 15/99. 46. The authors named were Karl Marx, Karl Kautsky, Heinrich Mann, Ernst Glaeser, Erich Kästner, Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster, Sigmund Freud, Emil Ludwig, Werner Hegemann, Theodor Wolff, Georg Bernhard, Erich Maria Remarque, Alfred Kerr, Kurt Tucholsky, and Carl von Ossietsky. 47. O. K. Werckmeister, “Hitler the Artist,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 2 (Winter 1997): 270– 297; and Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998). 48. Brenner, Kunstpolitik, 13–14. 49. Joan L. Clinefelter, Artists for the Reich: Culture and Race from Weimar to Nazi Germany (Oxford: Berg, 2005). 50. Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics. 51. Brenner, Kunstpolitik, 22–35; and Michael H. Kater, Weimar: From Enlightenment to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), chapters 5 and 6. 52. Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics, 152. 53. Ibid., 180. 54. Potter, Most German of the Arts, 208–209. For a summary of the Pfitzner-BusoniBekker debates, see chapter 1 of Marc A. Weiner, Undertones of Insurrection: Music, Politics and the Social Sphere in the Modern German Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). 55. Dennis Showalter, “ ‘A Tidal Wave of Degeneracy’: National Socialism and Cultural Politics in Nürnberg, 1923–33,” South Atlantic Quarterly 83 (1984): 283–296. 56. Quoted in Hildegard Brenner, “Art in the Political Power Struggle, 1933–34,” in Republic to Reich: The Making of the Nazi Revolution: Ten Essays, ed. Hajo Holborn, trans., Ralph Manheim (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 422. 57. Brenner, “Art in the Political Power Struggle,” 400–424; and Jonathan Petropoulos, Artists Under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), chapters 2 and 3. 58. Ines Schlenker, “Defining National Socialist Art: The First ‘Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung’ in 1937,” in Peters, Degenerate Art, 93. 59. Uwe Fleckner, “In the Twilight of Power: The Contradictions of Art Politics in National Socialist Germany,” in The Mad Square: Modernity in German Art, 1910–1937, ed. Jacqueline Strecker (New York: Prestel, 2011), 255–259; Katrin Engelhardt, “Die Ausstellung ‘Entartete Kunst’ in Berlin 1938: Rekonstruktion und Analyse,” in Fleckner, Angriff auf die Avantgarde, 148–149; Isgard Kracht, “Verehrt und verfemt: Franz Marc im Nationalsozialismus,” in Fleckner, Angriff auf die Avantgarde, 307–377; Ines Schlenker, Hitler’s Salon: The Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich 1937–1944 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 159–173; and Schlenker, “National Socialist Art,” 100. 60. Paul Vogt, “Nachexpressionismus,” in Die Dreissiger Jahre: Schauplatz Deutschland, ed. Paul Vogt, Erika Billeter, Günter Aust, and Dieter Honisch (Munich: Haus der Kunst, 1977), 11–15; Otto Andreas Schreiber, “Die ‘Fabrikausstellungen’ der dreißiger Jahre,” in Vogt et al., Die Dreissiger Jahre, 96–97; Clinefelter, Artists for the Reich; Christoph Zuschlag, “Entartete Kunst”: Ausstellungsstrategien im Nazi-Deutschland (Worms: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1995); Christoph Zuschlag, “An ‘Educational Exhibition’: The Precursors of

Notes to Pages 26–29

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Entartete Kunst and Its Individual Venues,” in “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, ed. Stephanie Barron (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum, in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1991), 83–103; Ateliergemeinschaft Klosterstraße Berlin 1933–1945: Künstler in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, in association with the Akademie der Künste, 1994); and Petropoulos, Artists Under Hitler. 61. Hans Severus Ziegler, Entartete Musik: Eine Abrechnung (Düsseldorf: Völkischer Verlag, 1939), 25. 62. Michael Walter, Hitler in der Oper: Deutsches Musikleben 1919–1945 (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1995). 63. Joan Evans, “Stravinsky’s Music in Hitler’s Germany,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 56, no. 3 (2003): 525–594; Michael H. Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 122–128; and Kater, Twisted Muse, 183. 64. Joan Evans, “ ‘International with National Emphasis’: The Internationales Zeitgenössisches Musikfest in Baden-Baden, 1936–1939,” in Music and Nazism: Art under Tyranny, 1933–1945, ed. Michael H. Kater and Albrecht Riethmüller (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2004), 108. 65. Michael H. Kater, Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Hans Dieter Schäfer, Das gespaltene Bewußtsein: Deutsche Kultur und Lebenswirklichkeit 1933–1945, 2nd ed. (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1981), 133–138; and Lilian Karina and Marion Kant, Hitler’s Dancers: German Modern Dance and the Third Reich, trans. Jonathan Steinberg (New York: Berghahn, 2003), 167–189. 66. The Swing Kids (Swing-Jugend) in Hamburg were closely watched by the Gestapo, raided, arrested, and ultimately tortured, not because of their penchant for jazz but for their open rivalry with the Hitler Youth, their brazen defiance toward authority, their blatant promiscuity and sexual alliances with Jews, and their outspoken mockery of Hitler and the Nazi Party. See Kater, Different Drummers, 152–162. 67. Kater, Different Drummers, 122–135; see also Horst Bergmeier and Rainer E. Lotz, Hitler’s Airwaves: The Inside Story of Nazi Radio Broadcasting and Propaganda Swing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), chapter 5. Appendix II of Hitler’s Airwaves (293–342) includes lyrics for more than eighty parodies of American and British songs. 68. Kater, Different Drummers, 64, 101. 69. Michael H. Kater, “The Impact of American Popular Culture on German Youth,” in The Arts in Nazi Germany: Continuity, Conformity, Change, ed. Jonathan Huener and Francis R. Nicosia (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 31–62. 70. Sabine Weißler, “Worum es geht,” in Design in Deutschland, 1933–1934: Ästhetik und Organisation des Deutschen Werkbundes im “Dritten Reich,” ed. Sabine Weißler (Giessen: Anabas-Verlag, 1990), 8–9; Weißler, “Geschenkte Traditionen,” in Weißler, Design in Deutschland, 10–29; and Petropoulos, Artists Under Hitler. 71. Winfried Nerdinger, “Versuchung und Dilemma der Avantgarden im Spiegel der Architekturwettbewerbe 1933–35,” in Faschistische Architekturen: Planen und Bauen in Europa 1930 bis 1945, ed. Hartmut Frank, Stadt, Planung, Geschichte 3 (Hamburg: Christians, 1985), 65–87; Gerhard Fehl, “Die Moderne unterm Hakenkreuz: Ein Versuch, die Rolle funktionalistischer Architektur im Dritten Reich zu klären,” in Frank, Faschistische Architekturen, 88–122; and Sabine Weißler, “Bauhaus-Gestaltung in NS-Propaganda-Ausstellungen,” in

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Bauhaus-Moderne im Nationalsozialismus: Zwischen Anbiederung und Verfolgung, ed. Winfried Nerdinger and Bauhaus-Archiv (Munich: Prestel, 1993), 48–63. 72. William Grange, “Ordained Hands on the Altar of Art: Gründgens, Hilpert, and Fehling in Berlin,” in Theatre in the Third Reich, the Prewar Years: Essays on Theatre in Nazi Germany, ed. Glen W. Gadberry (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 79–87; and London, Theatre under the Nazis, 247–250. 73. Jens Malte Fischer, “Wagner-Interpretation im Dritten Reich: Musik und Szene zwischen Politisierung und Kunstanspruch,” in Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich: Ein Schloss Elmau-Symposium, ed. Saul Friedländer and Jörn Rüsen (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000), 148–156. 74. Henning Eichberg, “Thing-, Fest- und Weihespiele in Nationalsozialismus, Arbeiterkultur und Olympismus,” in Massenspiele: NS-Thingspiele, Arbeiterweihespiel und olympisches Zeremoniell, ed. Henning Eichberg, Michael Dultz, Glen Gadberry, and Günther Rühle (Stuttgart: Fromann-Holzboog, 1977), 47, 53, chapter 3; and Dieter Bartetzko, “Stimmungsarchitektur: Zur Theatralik von NS-Baukunst,” in “Die Axt hat geblüht . . .”: Europäische Konflikte der 30er Jahre in Erinnerung an die frühe Avantgarde, ed. Jürgen Harten, HansWerner Schmidt, and Marie Luise Syring (Düsseldorf: Städtische Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, 1987), 82–90. 75. Kathleen James-Chakraborty, “The Drama of Illumination: Visions of Community from Wilhelmine to Nazi Germany,” in Art, Culture and Media under the Third Reich, ed. Richard A. Etlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 181–201; Hedwig Müller, “Wigman and National Socialism,” Ballet Review 15, no. 1 (1987): 65–73; and Susan Manning and Melissa Benson, “Interrupted Continuities: Modern Dance in Germany,” The Drama Review 30, no. 2 (1986): 30–45. 76. Gerwin Strobl, The Swastika and the Stage: German Theatre and Society, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Andrew G. Bonnell, Shylock in Germany: Antisemitism and the German Theatre from the Enlightenment to the Nazis (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2009), chapter 3, conclusion. 77. Karl-Heinz Schoeps, Literature and Film in the Third Reich, trans. Kathleen M. Dell’Orto, Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), chapter 5; and William Grange, Hitler Laughing: Comedy in the Third Reich (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2006). 78. Hans Strömsdörfer, Watching the Enemy: Propagandafilme im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Marburg: Tectum Verlag, 2013). 79. Heidi Faletti, “Reflections of Weimar Cinema in the Nazi Propaganda Films SAMann Brand, Hitlerjunge Quex, and Hans Westmar,” in Cultural History through a National Socialist Lens: Essays on the Cinema of the Third Reich, ed. Robert C. Reimer (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000), 11–36; and Thomas R. Nadar, “The Director and the Diva: The Film Musicals of Detlef Sierck and Zarah Leander; Zu neuen Ufern and La Habanera,” in Reimer, Cultural History, 65–83. 80. Kay Hoffmann, “Zwischen Bildung, Propaganda und filmischer Avantgarde: Der Kulturfilm im internationalen Vergleich,” in Kulturfilm im “Dritten Reich,” ed. Ramón Reichert (Vienna: Synema, 2006), 24; Rainer Rother, “What Is a National Socialist Film?” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 27, no. 4 (October 2007): 455–469; and Jeanpaul Goergen, “Der giftige, giftige Apfel: Kulturfilm im Nationalsozialismus,” in Reichert,

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Kulturfilm im “Dritten Reich.” See also other essays in Reichert, Kulturfilm im “Dritten Reich.” 81. The complete original text of the Goebbels’s quote is as follows: “Wir haben ein deutsches Theater, einen deutschen Film, eine deutsche Presse, ein deutsches Schrifttum, eine deutsche bildende Kunst, eine deutsche Musik und einen deutschen Rundfunk. Der früher oft gegen uns vorgebrachte Einwand, es gäbe keine Möglichkeit, die Juden aus dem Kunstund Kulturleben zu beseitigen, weil deren zu viele seien und wir die leeren Plätze nicht neu besetzen könnten, ist glänzend widerlegt worden. (Beifall) Ohne jede Reibung und Stockung wurde dieser Personal-, System- und Richtungswechsel durchgeführt. Und niemals waren in Deutschland die deutschen Künstler so geehrt, die Künste so begehrt und geachtet wie heute.” “Deulig-Tonwoche nr. 257,” newsreel, 12:04, originally aired December 2, 1936, available from www.cine-holocaust.de. 82. Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics, 103–120. 83. Hildegard Brenner, Ende einer bürgerlichen Kunst-Institution: Die politische Formierung der Preußischen Akademie der Künste ab 1933 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1972). 84. Alan Steinweis, “Anti-Semitism in the Arts in Nazi Ideology and Policy,” in Huener and Nicosia, The Arts in Nazi Germany, 15–30. 85. Pamela M. Potter, “Musical Life in Berlin from Weimar to Hitler,” in Kater and Riethmüller, Music and Nazism, 90–101. 86. Henry Bair, “Die Lenkung der Berliner Opernhäuser,” in Heister and Klein, Musik und Musikpolitik, 83–84. 87. Steinweis, “Anti-Semitism in the Arts,” 15–30. 88. Alan Beyerchen, “Anti-Intellectualism and the Cultural Decapitation of Germany under the Nazis,” in The Muses Flee Hitler: Cultural Transfer and Adaptation 1930–1945, ed. Jarrell C. Jackman and Carla M. Borden (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983), 29. 89. Konrad H. Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 9–10. 90. See, for example, the essays by Alon Confino, Dan Stone, and Amos Goldberg in Dan Stone, ed., The Holocaust and Historical Methodology (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012). 91. Penelope Davies, Walter B. Denny, Frima Fox Hofrichter, Joseph F. Jacobs, Ann S. Roberts, and David L. Simon, eds., Janson’s History of Art: The Western Tradition, 8th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2011); Laurie Schneider Adams, Art Across Time, 3rd ed. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2007); Fred S. Kleiner and Christin J. Mamiya, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, 12th ed. (Belmont, CA: Thomson-Wadsworth, 2005); and H. H. Arnason and Elizabeth Mansfield, History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Photography, 7th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2013). 92. Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, eds., Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, vol. 1, 1900–1944, 2nd ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2011), 305–308. 93. See Donald Jay Grout and Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western Music, 6th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001); Barbara Hanning, Concise History of Western Music (New York: Norton, 1998); Robert P. Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern

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Europe and America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); Eric Salzman, Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction, 4th ed., Prentice Hall History of Music Series (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002); Glenn Watkins, Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century (New York: Schirmer, 1988); and Bryan Simms, Music of the Twentieth Century: Style and Structure, 2nd ed. (New York: Schirmer, 1996). A recent textbook by Richard Taruskin and Christopher Gibbs similarly privileges émigrés but also includes discussion of those who fall within a so-called gray area (e.g., Anton Webern, Richard Strauss, and Karl Amadeus Hartmann); see Taruskin and Gibbs, The Oxford History of Western Music: College Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 974–979. Journalist Alex Ross’s recent book, which some instructors have adopted for classroom use, strikes a more updated and even-handed balance in challenging the antimodernist and totalitarian assumptions of most textbook surveys; see Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). 94. Glynne Wickham, A History of the Theatre, 2nd ed. (London: Phaidon, 1992); Edwin Wilson and Alvin Goldfarb, Living Theatre: A History, 4th ed. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2004); Edward Braun, The Director and the Stage: From Naturalism to Grotowski (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982); Oscar G. Brockett and Franklin J. Hildy, History of the Theatre, 10th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2008); and Phillip B. Zarrilli, Bruce McConachie, Gary Jay Williams, and Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, Theatre Histories: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2010). 95. Susan Au, Ballet & Modern Dance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988); Joan Cass, Dancing through History (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993); and Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick, No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). 96. Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 4th ed. (London: Edward Arnold, 2000), chapter 2. 97. Kershaw, Nazi Dictatorship, chapter 4. 98. See, for example, Alf Lüdtke, “Working Class and Volksgemeinschaft: The Appeal of Exterminating ‘Others’; German Workers and the Limits of Resistance,” in The Third Reich, ed. Christian Leitz, Blackwell Essential Readings in History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 155–177; Shelley Baranowski, Strength through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 99. Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987); and Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Germany (Harlow, UK: Longman, 1987). 100. Hilmar Hoffmann, The Triumph of Propaganda: Film and National Socialism 1933–1945, trans. John A. Broadwin and V. R. Berghahn (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1996), 90; Berthold Hinz, Art in the Third Reich, trans. Robert Kimber and Rita Kimber (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), 38; Schneider Adams, Art Across Time, 906; and Zarrilli et al., Theatre Histories, 291. 101. For an illuminating discussion of what it meant for artists to be considered “perpetrators” after World War II, see Paul Jaskot, The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 102. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1, The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: Harper Collins, 1997); Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936; and Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).

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103. Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936, chapter 13; Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998); and Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 104. Konrad Jarausch, “1945 and the Continuities of German History: Reflections on Memory, Historiography, and Politics,” in Stunde Null: The End and the Beginning Fifty Years Ago, ed. Geoffrey Giles, Occasional Papers 20 (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 1997), 17. 105. David B. Dennis, Inhumanities: Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 106. See, for example, Pamela M. Potter, “The Politicization of Handel and His Oratorios in the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the Early Years of the German Democratic Republic,” The Musical Quarterly 85 (2001): 311–341; Potter, Most German of the Arts, chapter 7; and Potter, review of Mozart and the Nazis: How the Third Reich Abused a Cultural Icon, by Erik Levi, H-Judaic, October 2011, www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=33549. 107. Quoted in Stephen McClatchie, “Wagner Research as ‘Service to the People’: The Richard-Wagner Forschungsstätte, 1938–1945,” in Kater and Riethmüller, Music and Nazism, 160. 2. THE EXILE EXPERIENCE

1. Tom Ambrose, Hitler’s Loss: What Britain and America Gained from Europe’s Cultural Exiles (London: Peter Owen Publishers, 2001), 9, 10. 2. For a brief overview of the difficulties faced by German and Austrian artists and intellectuals in exile, see Michael H. Kater, “Die vertriebenen Musen: Von den Schwierigkeiten deutschsprachiger Künstler und Intellektueller im Exil,” in Hartmut Lehmann and Otto Gerhard Oexle, eds., Nationalsozialismus in den Kulturwissenschaften, vol. 2, Leitbegriffe— Deutungsmuster—Paradigmenkämpfe: Erfahrungen und Transformationen im Exil (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2004), 489–511. 3. For example, Adorno’s most quotable—and misquoted—declaration, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” has not only been taken out of context and perverted in its meaning by most people who cite it but was also written decades before Auschwitz came to symbolize the full extent of Holocaust atrocities. For a discussion of the misinterpretation and decontextualization of Adorno’s statement, see Michael Rothberg, “After Adorno: Culture in the Wake of Catastrophe,” New German Critique 72 (Fall 1997): 46, 55. 4. Norman Bentwich, The Rescue and Achievement of Refugee Scholars: The Story of Displaced Scholars and Scientists 1933–1952 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1953), v. 5. To describe those who left Hitler’s Germany, I have chosen primarily to employ the term “exile” throughout most of the following discussion, along with the terms “refugee” and “émigré,” mainly because most of the individuals in question chose these terms to describe themselves (see, for example, Franz Neumann et al., The Cultural Migration: The European Scholar in America [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953], a collection of lectures by Neumann, Henri Peyre, Erwin Panofsky, Wolfgang Köhler, and Paul Tillich) but also because I am drawing on the vast literature generally grouped under the

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category of exile studies. For a useful typology for the more accurate application of the terms “exile,” “refugee,” “immigrant,” and “cosmopolitan nomad,” see Anna Wessely, “An Exile’s Career from Budapest through Weimar to Chicago: László Moholy-Nagy,” in Exile, Science, and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of German Emigre Intellectuals, Studies in European Culture and History, ed. David Kettler and Gerhard Lauer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 75–76. 6. While West German exile scholarship started out with an emphasis on literature with Hans-Albert Walter’s multi-volume study, Deutsche Exilliteratur 1933–1950 (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1978–2003), the East German Akademie der Wissenschaften and Akademie der Künste started collaborating in 1975, issuing seven volumes dedicated to arts and literature in exile in the series Kunst und Literatur im antifaschistischen Exil 1933–1945: Klaus Jarmatz, Simone Barck, and Peter Diezel, Exil in der UdSSR (Leipzig: Reclam, 1979); Werner Mittenzwei, Exil in der Schweiz (Leipzig: Reclam, 1978); Eike Middell, ed., Exil in den USA: Mit einem Bericht “Schanghai—Eine Emigration am Rande” (Leipzig: Reclam, 1979); Wolfgang Kiessling, Exil in Lateinamerika (Frankfurt: Röderberg-Verlag, 1981); Ludwig Hoffmann, Exil in der Tschechoslowakei, in Grossbritannien, Skandinavien und in Palästina (Frankfurt: RöderbergVerlag, 1981); Klaus Hermsdorf, Exil in den Niederlanden und in Spanien (Frankfurt: Röderberg-Verlag, 1981); Dieter Schiller, Exil in Frankreich (Frankfurt: Röderberg-Verlag, 1981). 7. Keith Holz, Modern German Art for Thirties Paris, Prague, and London: Resistance and Acquiescence in a Democratic Public Sphere, Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 4–5; Sabine Eckmann, “Considering (and Reconsidering) Art and Exile,” in Exiles and Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, ed. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum, in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 31–33. 8. These studies include Bentwich, Rescue and Achievement; Donald Peterson Kent, The Refugee Intellectual: The Americanization of the Immigrants of 1933–1941 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953); Franz Neumann et al., Cultural Migration; Laura Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants: The Intellectual Migration from Europe 1930–1941 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); and Robert Boyers, ed., “The Legacy of the German Refugee Intellectuals,” special issue, Salmagundi, no. 10–11 (Fall 1969/Winter 1970). 9. Jean-Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2006), 7–11; and Florian Scheding, “ ‘The Splinter in Your Eye’: Uncomfortable Legacies and German Exile Studies,” in Music and Displacement: Diasporas, Mobilities, and Dislocations in Europe and Beyond, Europea: Ethnomusicologies and Modernities, ed. Erik Levi and Florian Scheding (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 123–124. 10. Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present (New York: Viking Press, 1983); Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph Wolff, eds., Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration from Nazi Germany to the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Jackman and Borden, Muses Flee Hitler; Ambrose, Hitler’s Loss; Palmier, Weimar in Exile; and Ehrhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 11. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, eds., The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969); H. Stuart Hughes,

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The Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought, 1930–1965 (New York: Harper and Rowe, 1975). 12. For more information on the internment policies for artists and intellectuals in the United Kingdom, see Bentwich, Rescue and Achievement, 28–34. 13. Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 31; Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 181–184. 14. Egbert Krispyn, Anti-Nazi Writers in Exile (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978), 40. 15. Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 428–429. 16. Krispyn, Anti-Nazi Writers, 106–113. 17. H. Stuart Hughes, “Social Theory in a New Context,” in Jackman and Borden, Muses Flee Hitler, 116. 18. Holz, Modern German Art. 19. See, for example, Herbert A. Straus, “The Movement of People in a Time of Crisis,” in Jackman and Borden, Muses Flee Hitler, 45–59; Roger Daniels, “American Refugee Policy in Historical Perspective,” in Jackman and Borden, Muses Flee Hitler, 61–77; and Cynthia Jaffee McCabe, “ ‘Wanted by the Gestapo: Saved by America’: Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee,” in Jackman and Borden, Muses Flee Hitler, 79–91; Helmut F. Pfanner, “Cultural Adaptation in Worldwide Perspective: The Role of Switzerland for the Refugees,” in Jackman and Borden, Muses Flee Hitler, 235–248; Bernard Wasserstein, “Intellectual Émigrés in Britain, 1933–1939,” in Jackman and Borden, Muses Flee Hitler, 249–265; Irving Abella and Harold Troper, “Canada and the Refugee Intellectual, 1933–1939,” in Jackman and Borden, Muses Flee Hitler, 257–269; Paula Jean Draper, “Muses behind Barbed Wire: Canada and the Interned Refugees,” in Jackman and Borden, Muses Flee Hitler, 271–281; Renata Berg-Pan, “Shanghai Chronicle: Nazi Refugees in China,” in Jackman and Borden, Muses Flee Hitler, 283–302; Judith Laikin Elkin, “The Reception of the Muses in the CircumCaribbean,” in Jackman and Borden, Muses Flee Hitler, 291–302; Ronald C. Newton, “Das andere Deutschland: The Anti-Fascist Exile Network in Southern South America,” in Jackman and Borden, Muses Flee Hitler, 303–313; see also Palmier, Weimar in Exile, chapters 4, 11, and 12. 20. This theme prevails in Jackman and Borden, Muses Flee Hitler; and Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise. The Adorno-inspired negative perspective and the notion of a “second modernism” are outlined in Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Koepnick’s introduction to their edited volume, Caught by Politics: Hitler Exiles and American Visual Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 21. Jean-Michel Palmier states that the First World War “decimated the expressionist generation,” arguing that “the Weimar Germany we have mythologized was extremely repressive towards its intellectuals, and the artistic upsurge which immortalized the period developed despite the state and often against its laws. . . . The struggle against ‘left-wing art’ and ‘cultural Bolshevism’ started well before Hitler.” Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 3. 22. Holz, Modern German Art, 13. 23. Ibid., 84–97. 24. Ibid., 55, 73. 25. Ibid., 226–228, 265–264. 26. Ibid., 171–193. 27. Ibid., 223–240, 254–262.

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28. Ibid., 241–253. 29. Gregor Langfeld, Deutsche Kunst in New York: Vermittler, Kunstsammler, Ausstellungsmacher, 1904–1957 (Berlin: D. Reimer, 2011), 118–120. 30. Ambrose, Hitler’s Loss, 39–40, 67. 31. Holz, Modern German Art, chapter 4. 32. The exhibition was originally planned to foreground expressionism and also include the work of French impressionists, J. M. W. Turner, Russian constructivists, and two Italian artists (Boccioni and de Chirico). The project attracted the support of the artists Wassily Kandinsky, Jean Arp, Fernand Léger, and Max Ernst, and Mann, Picasso, Albert Einstein, and Aldous Huxley agreed to serve as honorary patrons. See Holz, Modern German Art, 175–176. 33. Daily Telegraph and Morning Post, July 8, 1938, cited in Holz, Modern German Art, 322. 34. Holz, Modern German Art, 199, 203–222. 35. Ibid., 262–272. 36. Vivian Endicott Barnett, “Banned German Art: Reception and Institutional Support of Modern German Art in the United States, 1933–45,” in Barron and Eckmann, Exiles and Emigrés, 273–274. 37. Langfeld, Deutsche Kunst, 69–102; and Sabine Eckmann, “German Exile, Modern Art, and National Identity,” in Eckmann and Koepnick, Caught by Politics, 105–106. 38. Langfeld, Deutsche Kunst, 104–108; and Barnett, “Banned German Art,” 274. 39. Langfeld, Deutsche Kunst, 108–110. 40. Colin Eisler, “Kunstgeschichte American Style: A Study in Migration,” in Fleming and Bailyn, Intellectual Migration, 594; and Ulrike Wendland, “Überbrückungsversuche in der Provinz: Alexander Dörner in Hannover,” in Überbrückt: Ästhetische Moderne und Nationalsozialismus; Kunsthistoriker und Künstler 1925–1937, ed. Eugen Blume and Dieter Scholz (Cologne: Walther König, 1999), 80–90. 41. Stephanie Barron, “European Artists in Exile: A Reading between the Lines,” in Barron and Eckmann, Exiles and Emigrés, 23. 42. Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 136–137. 43. Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants, 97–99, 238–239. 44. Ambrose, Hitler’s Loss, 78. 45. Barnett, “Banned German Art,” 274–275. 46. These dealers included Pierre Matisse, Karl Nierendorf, Samuel Kootz, Kurt Valentin, Hugo Perls, Otto Kallir, Georges Wildenstein, Valentine Dudensing, Julien Levin, Leopold Blumka, Rudolph Heinemann, Paul Rosenberg, Saemy Rosenberg, Germain Seligman, Erich Stiebel, and Otto Gerson. See Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 218–219; Eisler, “Kunstgeschichte,” 598–599; and Barron, “European Artists in Exile,” 20. 47. Megan M. Fontanella, “ ‘Unity in Diversity’: Karl Nierendorf and America, 1937–47,” American Art 24, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 114–118; see also section 3.1 on Nierendorf in VanessaMaria Voigt and Sprengel Museum Hannover, Kunsthändler und Sammler der Moderne im Nationalsozialismus: Die Sammlung Sprengel 1934 bis 1945, Materialien zur Kunstgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Reimer, 2007). 48. Langfeld, Deutsche Kunst, 127; see also Andres Hüneke, “On the Trail of Missing Masterpieces: Modern Art from German Galleries,” in Barron, “Degenerate Art”, 127–131.

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49. Quoted in Barnett, “Banned German Art,” 274. 50. Ibid., 275–283. 51. Barron, “European Artists in Exile,” 26, 29n; Barnett, “Banned German Art,” 276–282; and Barron, “The Galerie Fischer Auction,” in Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 137–139. For a full account of Buchholz’s and Valentin’s activities, see Tiedemann, Die “entartete” Moderne; and Jonathan Petropoulos, “From Lucerne to Washington, DC: ‘Degenerate Art’ and the Question of Restitution,” in Peters, Degenerate Art, 282–301. 52. Eisler, “Kunstgeschichte,” 598–602. 53. See, for example, Esra Akcan, Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey, and the Modern House (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 54. Elaine S. Hochman, Architects of Fortune: Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich (New York: Fromm International Pub. Corp., 1990), chapter 6; Holz, Modern German Art, 134; Franz Schulze, “The Bauhaus Architects and the Rise of Modernism in the United States,” in Barron and Eckmann, Exiles and Emigrés, 225–228; and Peter Hahn, “Bauhaus and Exile: Bauhaus Architects and Designers Between the Old World and the New,” in Barron and Eckmann, Exiles and Emigrés, 211–223. 55. William H. Jordy, “The Aftermath of the Bauhaus in America: Gropius, Mies, and Breuer,” in Fleming and Bailyn, Intellectual Migration, 502–505; and Christian F. Otto, “American Skyscrapers and Weimar Modern: Transactions between Fact and Idea,” in Jackman and Borden, Muses Flee Hitler, 158–159. 56. Ambrose, Hitler’s Loss, 165–166. 57. Langfeld, Deutsche Kunst, 111–115; and Barnett, “Banned German Art,” 276. 58. Palmier, 416–419; and Günter Berghaus, “Editor’s Foreword,” in Theatre and Film in Exile: German Artists in Britain, 1933–1945, ed. Berghaus (Oxford: Berg, 1989), xv. 59. Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 416–418; and Holz, Modern German Art, 55. 60. Holz, Modern German Art, 101, 106. 61. Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 419–420. 62. Günter Berghaus, “Producing Art in Exile: Perspectives on the German Refugees’ Creative Activities in Great Britain,” in Berghaus, Theatre and Film in Exile, 26–29. 63. Berghaus, “Editor’s Foreword,” xvi. 64. N. A. Furness, “Ernst Toller and the English Theatre,” in Berghaus, Theatre and Film in Exile, 121–134 65. Ambrose, Hitler’s Loss, 103. 66. Gudrun Brokoph-Mauch, “Fighting Windmills on Broadway: Max Reinhardt’s Exile in the United States,” in Fruits of Exile: Central European Intellectual Immigration to America in the Age of Fascism, ed. Richard Bodek and Simon Lewis (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010), 91–101. 67. Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 224–228; and Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 420–421. 68. Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 229–236; and Kevin Gough-Yates, “Britain and the Émigré Film Maker,” in Berghaus, Theatre and Film in Exile, 137. 69. Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific, 132–133. 70. Ibid., 129–140. 71. Ibid., 133. 72. Otto Friedrich, City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s (London: Headline, 1987), 27–28, 46–50.

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73. Thomas Patrick Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler 1933–1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); and Ben Urwand, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013). 74. Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 240–241. 75. Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 593; Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific, 17–18. 76. Gerhard Scheit, “Das sinkende Rettungsboot: Musik im Exilland Österreich,” in Musik im Exil: Folgen des Nazismus für die internationale Musikkultur, ed. Hanns-Werner Heister, Claudia Maurer Zenck, and Peter Petersen (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1993), 215–234; Rainer Locht, “Warten—Widerstehen—Untertauchen: Musiker-Exil in den Niederlanden,” in Heister, Zenck, and Petersen, Musik im Exil, 235–254; and Eckhard John, “Vom Traum zum Trauma: Musiker-Exil in der Sowjetunion,” in Heister, Zenck, and Petersen, Musik im Exil, 255–278. 77. Jaromír Paclt, “Prague als Asylstadt 1918–1938,” in Musik in der Emigration 1933– 1945: Verfolgung—Vertreibung—Rückwirkung; Symposium Essen, 10. bis 13. Juni 1992, ed. Horst Weber (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994), 153–174. 78. Matthias Brzoska, “Exilstation Paris,” in Weber, Musik in der Emigration, 183–191. 79. Erik Levi, “Musik und Musiker im englischen Exil,” in Weber, Musik in der Emigration, 192–212. 80. Jutta Raab, “Internierung—Bombadierung—Rekrutierung: Musiker-Exil in Großbritannien,” in Heister, Zenck, and Petersen, Musik im Exil, 279–296; Erik Levi, “Carl Ebert, Glyndebourne, and the Regeneration of British Opera,” in Berghaus, Theatre and Film in Exile, 179–188; and Levi, Mozart and the Nazis: How the Third Reich Abused a Cultural Icon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 96–104; Ambrose, Hitler’s Loss, 131–141; and Berta Geissmar, The Baton and the Jackboot: Recollections of Musical Life (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1944). 81. Valerie Preston-Dunlop, “Rudolf Laban and Kurt Jooss in Exile: Their Relationship and Diverse Influence on Dance in Britain,” in Berghaus, Theatre and Film in Exile, 167–178. 82. Stacey Prickett, “From Workers’ Dance to New Dance,” Dance Research 7, no. 1 (1989): 57–59; quote on p. 57. 83. Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants, 215–217; and Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 146. 84. Oscar Sonneck, “German Influence on the Musical Life of America,” in Oscar Sonneck and American Music, ed. William Lichtenwanger (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 60–75; Nicholas Tawa, The Coming of Age of American Art Music: New England’s Classical Romanticists, Contributions to the Study of Music and Dance (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), 31–33, 35; Alan Levy, Musical Nationalism: American Composers’ Search for Identity, Contributions in American Studies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 4, 8–10; and New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 6th ed., s.v. “Thomas, Theodore,” “Philadelphia,” “Boston,” “New York,” and “Cincinnati.” 85. Elie Siegmeister, ed., The Music Lover’s Handbook (New York: W. Morrow and Co., 1943). 86. Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, “Deutsche Musik und deutsche Musiker in den USA,” Musica 30 (1976): 381–382. 87. Pamela M. Potter, “Die Lage der jüdischen Musikwissenschaftler an den Universitäten der Weimarer Zeit,” in Weber, Musik in der Emigration, 56–68; and David Josephson,

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“The German Musicological Exile and the Course of American Musicology,” Current Musicology 79–80 (2005): 9–53. 88. Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 147. 89. Sabine Feisst, “Schoenberg in the United States Reconsidered: A Historiographic Investigation,” in Bodek and Lewis, Fruits of Exile, 108–110. 90. Habakuk Traber, “Dauernd da doch meist vergessen: Notizen über Filmmusik und Filmkomponisten,” in Verdrängte Musik: Berliner Komponisten im Exil, ed. Habakuk Traber and Elmar Weingarten (Berlin: Berliner Festspiele und Argon, 1987), 195–204. 91. Werner Grünzweig, “Vom ‘Schenkerismus’ zum ‘Dahlhaus-Projekt,’ ” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 48 (1993): 165–167; and David Raksin, “Schönberg als Lehrer in Los Angeles,” in Traber and Weingarten, Verdrängte Musik, 129–139. 92. Alban Berg, “Statement of Aims, Society for Private Musical Performance,” trans. Stephen Somervelle, in Music Since 1900, ed. Nicholas Slonimsky (New York: Scribner, 1971), 1307–1308. 93. Milton Babbitt, “Who Cares If You Listen?” High Fidelity 7, no. 2 (February 1958): 38–40, 126–127. 94. Information gathered from preliminary research by Patric Cohen for his doctoral dissertation, provisionally entitled “The American Composer and the Doctoral Degree: Case Histories of Doctoral Programs in Composition” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in progress). 95. Richard Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 5, The Late Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 14–18. 96. Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants, 62–66; and Bentwich, Rescue and Achievement, chapter 2. 97. Kent, Refugee Intellectual, 114–118; and Bentwich, Rescue and Achievement, 35. 98. Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 80–84; and Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants, 72–74. 99. Kent, Refugee Intellectual, 117; and Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants, 74–76. 100. Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants, 321–322; and Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 131–133. 101. Bentwich, Rescue and Achievement, 50–51. 102. Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 469; McCabe, “Wanted by the Gestapo,” 81; and Volkmar Zühlsdorff, Hitler’s Exiles: The German Cultural Resistance in America and Europe, trans. Martin H. Bott (London: Continuum, 2004), 41–42, 162–167. 103. Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants, 84–92; and Elizabeth Kessin Berman, “Moral Triage or Cultural Salvage?: The Agendas of Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee,” in Barron and Eckmann, Exiles and Emigrés, 99–109. 104. Krispyn, Anti-Nazi Writers, 18–27, 48–53; and Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 115–119. 105. Zühlsdorff, Hitler’s Exiles, 126–127; and Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 298–300. 106. Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 199–120. 107. Thomas Mann, “Seeking to Preserve German Cultural Freedom,” New York Times, December 12, 1936, quoted in Zühlsdorff, Hitler’s Exiles, 66. 108. Quoted in Zülsdorff, Hitler’s Exiles, 69–70. 109. Quoted in ibid., 128–129. 110. Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 306; see also Barbara McCloskey, The Exile of George Grosz: Modernism, America, and the One World Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 26–29, 36–38.

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111. Quoted in Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 305. 112. Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 470–471; and Zühlsdorff, Hitler’s Exiles, 43. 113. Dorothy Thompson, “Culture Under the Nazis,” Foreign Affairs 14, no. 3 (1936): 412. 114. Ibid., 420. 115. Ibid., 418. 116. Bentwich, Rescue and Achievement, 42–48; and Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 150. 117. Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), introduction. 118. Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 41–43; and Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 556–558. 119. Wheatland, Frankfurt School, 82–94, 214–218. 120. Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 85–90; Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 556–558; and Wheatland, Frankfurt School, 206–208. 121. Wheatland, Frankfurt School, 72–77 passim. 122. Jay, Permanent Exiles, 44–45; and Wheatland, Frankfurt School, 88, 219–226. 123. Wheatland, Frankfurt School, 219–223. 124. Eugene Anderson and Max Horkheimer, “Cultural Aspects of National Socialism: A Research Project,” unpublished proposal, February 24, 1941, typescript. 125. Ibid., 36. 126. Ibid., 29. 127. Ibid., 29, 33. 128. Ibid., 30–32, 34–35. 129. Roderick Stackelberg, “ ‘Cultural Aspects of National Socialism’: An Unfinished Project of the Frankfurt School,” Dialectical Anthropology 12 (1988): 253–260. 130. Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific, 58. 131. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 101–103. 132. Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific, 56–59. 133. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 119, 129, 132, 134–135. 134. Theodor W. Adorno, “What National Socialism Has Done to the Arts,” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 374. 135. McCabe, “Wanted by the Gestapo,” 81. 136. Jay, Permanent Exiles, 158–171. 137. Siegfried Kracauer, Propaganda and the Nazi War Film (New York: Museum of Modern Art Film Library, 1942), vi. 138. Ibid., 3, 5. 139. Ibid., 3, 23–24, 27. 140. Ibid., v. 141. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 275. 142. Many of these leftists would reject communism so completely that they became CIA operatives during the Cold War; see, for example, Frances Stonor Saunders, The

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Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 2000), chapter 4 passim. 143. Wheatland, Frankfurt School, 159–176; and Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6, no. 5 (Fall 1939): 34–49. Other essays published in the Partisan Review in 1939 graphically outline the increasingly critical position these intellectuals took against Stalinist cultural policy and their willingness to align this policy with similar tendencies in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. See, for example, André Breton and Diego Rivera, “Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art,” Partisan Review 6, no. 1 (Fall 1938): 49–53; Dwight Macdonald, “Soviet Society and its Cinema,” Partisan Review 6, no. 2 (Winter 1939): Dwight Macdonald, 80–95; and “Statement of the LCFS [League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism],” Partisan Review 6, no. 4 (Summer 1939): 125–127. 144. Theodor W. Adorno, “On Popular Music,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941): 17–48. 145. Max Horkheimer, “Art and Mass Culture,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941): 296. 146. Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 46. 147. Ibid., 38. 148. Ibid., 47. 149. The full passage reads as follows: Nevertheless, if the masses were conceivably to ask for avant-garde art and literature, Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin would not hesitate long in attempting to satisfy such a demand. Hitler is a bitter enemy of the avant-garde, both on doctrinal and personal grounds, yet this did not prevent Goebbels in 1932– 1933 from strenuously courting avant-garde artists and writers. When Gottfried Benn, an Expressionist poet, came over to the Nazis he was welcomed with a great fanfare, although at that very moment Hitler was denouncing Expressionism as Kulturbolschewismus. This was at a time when the Nazis felt that the prestige which the avant-garde enjoyed among the cultivated German public could be of advantage to them, and practical considerations of this nature, the Nazis being skillful politicians, have always taken precedence over Hitler’s personal inclinations. Later the Nazis realized that it was more practical to accede to the wishes of the masses in matters of culture than to those of their paymasters; the latter, when it came to a question of preserving power, were as willing to sacrifice their culture as they were their moral principles; while the former, precisely because power was being withheld from them, had to be cozened in every other way possible. It was necessary to promote on a much more grandiose style than in the democracies the illusion that the masses actually rule. The literature and art they enjoy and understand were to be proclaimed the only true art and literature and any other kind was to be suppressed. Under these circumstances people like Gottfried Benn, no matter how ardently they support Hitler, become a liability; and we hear no more of them in Nazi Germany. (Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 47–48) 150. Ibid., 48. 151. Jay, Permanent Exiles, 46–53, 131–132.

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152. Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 75–80; and Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 242. 153. Benjamin, “Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 217–251. 154. Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 77–79, 91. 155. Hughes, Sea Change, 150–153; and Hughes, “Social Theory in a New Context,” 116. 156. Konrad Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 167. 157. See Wheatland, Frankfurt School, chapter 8. 158. Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 332–333. 159. Ibid., 464–466. 160. Ibid., 463. 161. Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 75–76. 162. Udi E. Greenberg, “The Politics of the Walter Benjamin Industry,” Theory, Culture & Society 25 (2008): 53–70. 163. Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific, 74–78. 164. See, for example, Gene Ray, “Conditioning Adorno,” Third Text 18 (2004): 223–230; and Hilde Heynen, “Architecture between Modernity and Dwelling: Reflections on Adorno’s ‘Aesthetic Theory,’ ” Assemblage, no. 17 (April 1992): 78–91. 165. Barbara Jaffee, “Reconstructive Criticism,” Chicago Art Journal 3 (1993): 39–48. 166. Richard Leppert, “Introduction,” in Adorno, Essays on Music, ed. Leppert, 73–77; Albrecht Riethmüller, “Adorno musicus,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 47 (1990): 1–26; James Hepokoski, “The Dahlhaus Project and Its Extra-Musicological Sources,” 19th-Century Music 14, no. 3 (Spring 1991): 221–246; Stephen Hinton, review of Adorno on Music, by Robert W. Witkin, Sound Figures, by Theodor W. Adorno, and Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture: Essays on Critical Theory and Music, by Max Paddison, Journal of the American Musicological Society 56, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 198–213; and Kofi Agawu, “What Adorno Makes Possible for Music Analysis,” 19th-Century Music 29 (2005): 49–55. 167. Jay, Permanent Exiles, 170. 168. Tassilo Schneider, “Reading Against the Grain: German Cinema and Film Historioraphy,” in Perspectives on German Cinema, Perspectives on Film, ed. Terri Ginsberg and Kirsten Moana Thompson (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996), 31–32. 169. Anton Kaes, “German Cultural History and the Study of Film: Ten Theses and a Postscript,” New German Critique 65 (Spring/Summer 1995): 47–58; and Stephen Brockmann, A Critical History of German Film, Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), 2–6. 170. Cora Sol Goldstein, Capturing the German Eye: American Visual Propaganda in Occupied Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 47. 171. Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, trans. Robert Greaves (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). 172. Hans H. Wollenberg, Fifty Years of German Film (London: Falcon Press, 1948).

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173. Mann’s harsh criticisms of the situation in Germany resonated back home and prompted highly charged emotional responses after the war, but Mann also ruffled the feathers of his fellow émigrés, some of whom even labeled him a traitor. Bertolt Brecht countered Mann, asserting that communist insurgents were actively undermining the bourgeois forces that had brought the Nazi tragedy about. Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 326–327; Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 606–610; and Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific, 226–235. 174. Helmut Koopmann, “Der Mythos von der ‘Stunde Null’ in der deutschen Literatur,” in Nachkriegszeiten: Die Stunde Null als Realität und Mythos in der deutschen Geschichte; Acta Hohenschwangau 1995, ed. Stefan Krimm and Wieland Zirbs (Munich: Bayerische Schulbuch-Verlag, 1996), 178–183; and Krispyn, Anti-Nazi Writers, 151–157. 175. Thomas Mann, “Leiden an Deutschland” (1934) and Order of the Day (1938), quoted in Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 126. 176. Krispyn, Anti-Nazi Writers, 157–158. 177. See Brigid Cohen, Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora, New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 178. The term “anti-Fascist” was used comprehensively in Anglophone literature as early as the 1930s, when Italian Fascism and Nazism were commonly lumped together (see issues of the Partisan Review, for example). It reappeared in the 1960s and 1970s, and it persists today as an umbrella term used to describe all exile activities. Egbert Krispyn used it consistently throughout his 1978 study of exile writers, Anti-Nazi Writers in Exile, as did Jean-Michel Palmier in Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America, originally published in 1987. A little over a decade later, Reinhold Brinkmann referred generically to “émigré anti-Fascist German musicologists” in his article “Vom ‘völkischen Lebensraum’ der Musik: Pamela Potters Buch ‘Die “deutscheste” der Künste,’ ” Merkur 55, no. 2 (2001): 158; and even more recently, Ehrhard Bahr, in his 2007 book, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism, used the term loosely to refer to all intellectuals who left Germany (see, for example, page 17). 179. Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 416; see also Ambrose, Hitler’s Loss, 104. 180. Brecht noted that the Frankfurt School was supplying much inspiration and material for the novel he was writing at the time on pseudo-intellectuals (whom he referred to as “Tuis”). He considered adding Eisler to the novel upon hearing that he had received a “grant from the Rockefeller Foundation (film music) to describe fifteen kinds of rain.” See Iring Fetscher, “Bertolt Brecht and America,” Salmagundi 10–11 (Fall 1969/Winter 1970): 263–265. 181. Theodor W. Adorno, “Die Geschichte der deutschen Musik von 1908 bis 1933,” in Musikalische Schriften VI, Gesammelte Schriften 19, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Klaus Schultz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), 622. 182. Werner Schmidt-Faber, “Atonalität im Dritten Reich,” in Herausforderung Schönberg: Was die Musik des Jahrhunderts veränderte, Reihe Hanser 166, ed. Ulrich Dibelius (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1974), 122–124. 183. Adorno, “Geschichte der deutschen Musik,” 628. 184. See, for example, Verband Deutscher Komponisten und Musikwissenschaftler, ed., Komponisten und Musikwissenschaftler der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (Berlin: Verlag Neue Musik, 1959), 191.

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185. Fred K. Prieberg, “Nach dem ‘Endsieg’ oder Musiker-Mimikry,” in Heister and Klein, Musik und Musikpolitik, 300. 186. Claudia Maurer Zenck, “Zwischen Boykott und Anpassung an den Charakter der Zeit: Über die Schwierigkeiten eines deutschen Komponisten mit dem Dritten Reich,” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 9 (1980): 65–129. 187. Giselher Schubert, “The Aesthetic Premises of a Nazi Conception of Music,” in Kater and Riethmüller, Music and Nazism, 70. 188. Barbara McCloskey, “Exile for Hire: George Grosz in Dallas,” in Eckmann and Koepnick, Caught by Politics, 33–39; and McCloskey, Exile of George Grosz, chapter 1. 189. Kenneth D. Barkin, “German Émigré Historians in America: The Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies,” in An Interrupted Past: German Speaking Refugee Historians in the United States after 1933, ed. Hartmut Lehmann and James J. Sheehan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 158–160. 190. Jarausch, “Continuities of German History,” 15, 17. 191. See Steven E. Aschheim, Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), chapter 2. 192. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), xiii, xiv, 1. 193. Gay, Weimar Culture, 105–108. 194. Jerry Zaslove, “ ‘The Reparation of Dead Souls’: Siegfried Kracauer’s Archimedean Exile; The Prophetic Journey from Death to Bildung,” in Kettler and Lauer, Exile, Science, and Bildung, 139–155. 195. Leppert, “Introduction,” 7, 10–12; Max Paddison, “Adorno and Exile: Some Thoughts on Displacement and What It Means to be German,” in Levi and Scheding, Music and Displacement, 137. 196. One of the most comprehensive studies to confront the phenomenon of remigrants and their central role in rebuilding postwar Germany is Noah Strote’s dissertation, in which he argues that former émigrés from rival camps in the Weimar Republic found common ground in their opposition to Nazism and were able to develop blueprints for postwar Germany while in exile, rescuing some positive objectives from Weimar democracy while also correcting its fatal flaws. By establishing themselves in influential academic positions in law, sociology, political science, psychology, and philosophy, they not only served as important consultants but also influenced the next generation of intellectuals. See Noah Strote, “Emigration and the Foundation of West Germany, 1933–1963,” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2011. 3 . O C C U PAT IO N , C O L D WA R , A N D T H E Z E R O HO U R

1. Frederick Taylor, Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2011), 271–276; Helen Fry, Denazification: Britain’s Enemy Aliens, Nazi War Criminals and the Reconstruction of Post-War Europe (Stroud, UK: History Press, 2010); Frank Trommler, “A New Start and Old Prejudices: The Cold War and German-American Cultural Relations, 1945–1968,” in The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, 1945–1990: A Handbook, Publications of the German Historical Institute, ed. Detlef Junker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 376–377; and Claus-

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Dieter Krohn, “Remigrants and Reconstruction,” in Junker, United States and Germany, 532–533. 2. Hermann Glaser, Deutsche Kultur 1945–2000 (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1997), 32. 3. President Truman’s orders to close the OSS came after years of rivalry and suspicion on the part of the military and the FBI, and it was only by virtue of Roosevelt’s championing that the OSS had been sustained at all; see Alfred H. Paddock, US Army Special Warfare: Its Origins; Psychological and Unconventional Warfare 1941–1952 (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1982), 30–37. 4. Neumann had also recommended a roster of recruits in the arts that included the names of Brecht, Kracauer, and Gropius. 5. H. Stuart Hughes, “Social Theory in a New Context,” in Jackman and Borden, Muses Flee Hitler, 117–119; Hughes, “Franz Neumann Between Marxism and Liberal Democracy,” in Fleming and Bailyn, Intellectual Migration, 448–449; Barry Katz, Foreign Intelligence: Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic Services, 1942–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Katz, “German Historians in the Office of Strategic Services,” in Lehmann and Sheehan, Interrupted Past, 137–138. For information about Felix Gilbert, see Lehmann and Sheehan, Interrupted Past, 1; and Felix Gilbert, A European Past: Memoirs, 1905–1945 (New York: Norton, 1988). 6. Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants. 7. Daniel Lerner, Psychological Warfare Against Nazi Germany: The Sykewar Campaign, D-Day to VE-Day, 2d ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 47–58. Lerner also notes that German and Austrian refugees were indispensable to POW interrogation, broadcasting, leaflet writing, and document analysis (72) and lists Hans Wallenberg, Benno D. Frank, Jacob Tenenbaum, Gerard Speyer, and Hans Deppich among the most successful writers and broadcasters (75–76). 8. Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany 1945–1955 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), 15–21; and Lerner, Psychological Warfare, 71–72, 75–78. Habe was an exceptional case. Although the PWD enlisted hundreds of émigré experts, despite the numerous internal reports questioning the reliability of these “foreigners,” the organization generally did not allow them to assume leadership positions. 9. Christian Bauer and Rebekka Göpfert, Die Ritchie Boys: Deutsche Emigranten beim US-Geheimdienst (Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe, 2005); and Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 331. 10. Gienow-Hecht, Transmission Impossible, 22. 11. Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, “Art Is Democracy and Democracy Is Art: Culture, Propaganda, and the Neue Zeitung in Germany, 1944–1947,” Diplomatic History 23, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 21–43. 12. Wigand Lange, Theater in Deutschland nach 1945: Zur Theaterpolitik der amerikanischen Besatzungsbehörden, Europaische Hochschulschriften, Deutsche Sprache und Literatur (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1980), 105–106. Frank came to the United States in 1938, after serving as general manager and director of the Palestine Opera Company. He served in the U.S. Army from 1943 until receiving his ICD appointment in 1945. Other émigrés working under him included theater officers Gerard Willem van Loon, born in Munich, who had studied with Max Reinhardt and worked on Broadway before joining the British

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War Office and then the PWD; Frederic Mellinger, who had been an actor in Berlin before he emigrated and found work in Hollywood; and Walter Behr, formerly a cabaret performer. 13. Nabokov, a Russian-born composer who fled Berlin in 1933, joined the Morale Division of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey Unit in 1945 and was later assigned to ICD. Michael Josselson, an Estonian-born, German-educated refugee who fled in 1935, joined the PWD as an interrogator in 1943 and stayed on in Berlin as an ICD officer engaged in denazification procedures after his discharge in 1946. Saunders, Cultural Cold War, 11–14; see also Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 14. Krispyn, Anti-Nazi Writers in Exile. 15. Brockmann, Critical History, 185–186; Johannes Hauser, Neuaufbau der westdeutschen Filmwirtschaft 1945–1955, Reihe Medienwissenschaft (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1989), 189; Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 243, 335; and Goldstein, German Eye, 53. For a full account of Pommer’s controversial tenure, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945–1948, trans. Kelly Barry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 140–153. 16. Toby Thacker, Music after Hitler, 1945–1955 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 19–20. 17. See Alan Bance, ed., The Cultural Legacy of the British Occupation in Germany: The London Symposium (Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag, 1997), 7–36; and Pauline Elkes, “Wartime Images of Germany and the Genesis of British Occupation Policy: The Reports of the Political Warfare Executive,” in Bance, British Occupation in Germany, 37–40. 18. Gabriele B. Clemens, “Die britische Kulturpolitik in Deutschland: Musik, Theater, Film, und Literatur,” in Kulturpolitik im besetzten Deutschland, 1945–1949, ed. Clemens (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1994), 201–202. 19. Bentwich, Rescue and Achievement, 36–38, 90–91; Glaser, Deutsche Kultur, 72–73; and Gerhard Hirschfeld, “Great Britain and the Emigration from Nazi Germany: An Historical Overview,” in Berghaus, Theatre and Film in Exile, 9–13. 20. Fry, Denazification. Walter Wallich controlled the postwar incarnation of the Reich Culture Chambers in Berlin and oversaw broadcasting in the British Zone, and Peter Schnabel was the Theatre and Music officer in Austria. Those working in the cultural sphere who Anglicized their names included Rudy Karrell (Rudi Katz), who oversaw cinema operations in Stade; David Brett (Dagobert David Bratt), who organized screenings of films about German atrocities for German viewers; and Major Kaye Sely (Kurt Seltz), the commanding officer of the Information Services Intelligence Control Section in Hamburg, who oversaw the denazification of actors, musicians, artists, and writers. Major Sely’s staff included George Clare (Georg Klaar); Leonard Field (Leo Felix), founder of the Neue RheinZeitung; as well as Wallich and Schnabel. 21. For more about Koestler, see Saunders, Cultural Cold War, 60ff., chapter 4. 22. Thacker, Music after Hitler, 19–21, 91. 23. For a detailed account of the imprisonment and murder of German exiles, see David Pike, German Writers in Soviet Exile 1933–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), chapter 11. 24. Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995),

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398–401. The SED was formed in April 1946 out of a forced union of the preexisting German Social Democrats and German Communists. 25. Glaser, Deutsche Kultur, 109–112. 26. Initially, Soviet-run arts administration was shared between the Propaganda Administration and the Education Department (Abteilung Volksbildung), headed by P. V. Solotuchin, with art and museums under the supervision of the Education Department, but eventually, it all became the responsibility of the Propaganda Administration’s Cultural Division. Gerd Dietrich, “ ‘ . . . Wie eine kleine Oktoberrevolution . . .’: Kulturpolitik der SMAD 1945–1949,” in Clemens, Kulturpolitik, 219–221. 27. In addition, the DVV had a separate and much larger division for adult education, amateur arts, youth, women’s issues, and media. See David Pike, The Politics of Culture in Soviet-Occupied Germany, 1945–1949 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 88–135. 28. Jérôme Vaillant, “Einführung in die kulturellen Aspekte der französischen Deutschlandpolitik zwischen 1945 und 1949,” in Die französische Deutschlandpolitik zwischen 1945 und 1949: Ergebnisse eines Kolloquiums des Institut français de Stuttgart und des DeutschFranzösischen Instituts, Ludwigsburg, das am 16.–17. Januar 1986 im Institut français de Stuttgart stattgefunden hat, ed. Institut français de Stuttgart (Tübingen: ATTEMPTO Verlag, 1987), 61–67; and Richard Gilmore, “France’s Postwar Cultural Policies and Activities in Germany: 1945–1956” (PhD diss., University of Geneva, 1971), 26–32. 29. Rainer Hudemann, “Kulturpolitik im Spannungsfeld der Deutschlandpolitik: Frühe Direktiven für die französische Besatzung in Deutschland,” in Frankreichs Kulturpolitik in Deutschland, 1945–1950: Ein Tübinger Symposium, 19. und 20. September 1985, ed. Franz Knipping and Jacques Le Rider (Tübingen: ATTEMPTO, 1987), 20–21. 30. Gilmore, “France’s Postwar Cultural Policies,” 77–78, 84. 31. Angelika Ruge-Schatz, “Grundprobleme der Kulturpolitik in der Französischen Besatzungszone,” in Die Deutschlandpolitik Frankreichs und die Französische Zone 1945– 1949, ed. Claus Scharf and Hans-Jürgen Schröder (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1983), 94–95, 107– 108; Alexandra Birkert, “Alfred Döblin im Dienst französischer Kulturpolitik in Deutschland,” in Knipping and Le Rider, Frankreichs Kulturpolitik, 187, 38n; and Gilmore, “France’s Postwar Cultural Policies,” 47. 32. Gilmore, “France’s Postwar Cultural Policies,” 56. 33. Birkert, “Alfred Döblin,” 183–190. 34. Glaser, Deutsche Kultur, 122. 35. Manuela Schwartz, “ ‘Eine versunkene Welt’: Heinrich Strobel in Frankreich (1939– 1944),” in Musikforschung—Faschismus—Nationalsozialismus: Referate der Tagung Schloss Engers (8. bis 11. März 2000), ed. Isolde V. Foerster, Christoph Hust, and Christoph-Hellmut Mahling (Mainz: Are-Edition, 2001), 300–306. 36. “Long-Range Policy Statement for German Reeducation, Prepared for the Department of State by a Committee of American Educators,” October 24, 1946, in Germany 1947– 1949: The Story in Documents, by United States Department of State, publication 3556 (Washington, DC: Department of State, 1950), 611, quoted in Gilmore, “France’s Postwar Cultural Policies,” 80. 37. Wolfgang Benz, “Postwar Society and National Socialism: Remembrance, Amnesia, Rejection,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 19 (1990): 1–12; see also Michael H.

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Kater, “Problems of Political Reeducation in West Germany, 1945–1960,” Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 4 (1987): 101. 38. Lutz Niethammer, Deutschland danach: Postfaschistische Gesellschaft und nationales Gedächtnis (Bonn: Dietz, 1999), 53; and Cornelia Rauh-Kühne, “Life Rewarded the Latecomers: Denazification during the Cold War,” in Junker, United States and Germany, 65. 39. Niethammer, Deutschland danach, 54. 40. These categories translated into different punishments, including imprisonment, forced labor, loss of employment, loss of property, and fines. David Monod, Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification, and the Americans, 1945–1953 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 5–6, 47, 139–143; Karl Dietrich Erdmann, Das Ende des Reiches und die Neubildung deutscher Staaten, 9th ed., Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte 22 (Munich: DAV, 1980), 112–122; Clemens Vollnhals, ed., Entnazifizierung: Politische Säuberung und Rehabilitierung in den vier Besatzungszonen 1945–1949 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1991), 9–20; Taylor, Exorcising Hitler, 277–285; Alexander Perry Biddiscombe, The Denazification of Germany: A History 1945–1950 (Stroud, UK: Tempus, 2007), chapters 1 and 2. 41. Biddiscombe, Denazification of Germany, 83–85, 159. 42. The British also processed questionnaires, although they targeted public employees rather than the entire population. Nevertheless, their inconsistencies in dismissing suspected Nazis often had crippling effects on local populations, and the harsh conditions in their internment camps and interrogation centers achieved notoriety. Niethammer, Deutschland danach, 55; Taylor, Exorcising Hitler, 303–312, 317–323; Biddiscombe, Denazification of Germany, chapter 3; Vollnhals, Entnazifizierung, 24–43; and Frank Roy Willis, The French in Germany, 1945–1949 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), 147–163. 43. Ian Connor, “Denazification in Post-War Germany,” European History Quarterly 21 (1991): 398; and Volker R. Berghahn, Modern Germany: Society, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 192–193. 44. Niethammer, Deutschland danach, 55–57. 45. Statistics show that about 10 percent of all cases tried in the British Zone were relegated to category 4 (followers) and almost 60 percent to category 5 (exonerated). In the American and French zones, by contrast, approximately 50 percent ended up in category 4 and no more than 2 percent in category 5. Berghahn, Modern Germany, table 47, p. 307. 46. Taylor, Exorcising Hitler, 282–292; and Niethammer, Deutschland danach, 54–55. 47. John H. Herz, “Denazification and Related Policies,” in From Dictatorship to Democracy: Coping with the Legacies of Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism, Contributions in Political Science 92, ed. J. Herz (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 28. 48. James F. Tent, Mission on the Rhine: Reeducation and Denazification in AmericanOccupied Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 107. Of the 3.5 million processed by Spruchkammern, almost 2.5 million were granted amnesty, 37 percent of the remaining one million were classified as followers, 10.7 percent as lesser offenders, 2.1 percent offenders, and 0.1 percent as major offenders. Herz, “Denazification,” 29. 49. Niethammer, Deutschland danach, 55; Herz, “Denazification,” 29–30; Vollnhals, Entnazifizierung, 21–24; and Rauh-Kühne, “Life Rewarded,” 70. 50. Glaser, Deutsche Kultur, 114–115; and Naimark, Russians in Germany, 424. 51. Thacker, Music after Hitler, 30, 34.

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52. Goldstein, German Eye, 47–48; and Glaser, Deutsche Kultur, 159. 53. Sabine Eckmann, “Ruptures and Continuities: Modern German Art in between the Third Reich and the Cold War,” in Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures, ed. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (New York: Abrams, in association with the Los Angeles County Museum, 2009), 50. 54. Gienow-Hecht, “Art is Democracy,” 42. 55. Monod, Settling Scores, 57–59. 56. Monod, Settling Scores, 17–20, 43; and Goldstein, German Eye, 74. 57. Biddiscombe, Denazification of Germany, 23–24; Toby Thacker, The End of the Third Reich: Defeat, Denazification and Nuremberg, January 1944–November 1946 (Stroud, UK: Tempus, 2006), 198–200; Hauser, Neuaufbau der westdeutschen Filmwirtschaft, 245–246; and Monod, Settling Scores, 47. 58. Monod, Settling Scores, 51–53, 65–67; and Lange, Theater in Deutschland, 205–210. 59. Monod, Settling Scores, 52. 60. Hauser, Neuaufbau der westdeutschen Filmwirtschaft, 245–249, 256–257. 61. Ibid., 250–253. 62. Lange, Theater in Deutschland, 181–202. 63. Monod, Settling Scores, chapter 4; and Thacker, Music after Hitler, 42–53, 57. 64. For a discussion of a comparable case involving the music educator and journalist Hans Joachim Moser, see Potter, Most German of the Arts, 249–250. 65. Monod, Settling Scores, 68–79; and Schivelbusch, Cold Crater, chapter 2. 66. Eberhard Spangenberg, Karriere eines Romans: Mephisto, Klaus Mann und Gustaf Gründgens (Munich: Ellermann, 1982), 115; Thomas Blubacher, Gustaf Gründgens, Köpfe des 20. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Spiess, 1999), 68–71; Lange, Theater in Deutschland, 133–135; and Petropoulos, Artists Under Hitler, chapter 10. 67. Furtwängler’s experience has been recounted in several books, Ronald Harwood’s stage play Taking Sides, and István Szabó’s 2001 film adaptation of the play. For an analysis of the film’s adherence to historical facts, see John Gardiner, “István Szabó’s Taking Sides (2001) and the Denazification of Wilhelm Furtwängler,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 30, no. 1 (March 2010): 95–109. Other popular examinations of Furtwängler include Sam H. Shirakawa, The Devil’s Music Master: The Controversial Life and Career of Wilhelm Furtwängler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Bernd W. Wessling, Furtwängler: Eine kritische Biographie (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1985); Fred K. Prieberg, Kraftprobe: Wilhelm Furtwängler im Dritten Reich (Wiesbaden: F. A. Brockhaus, 1986), translated into English by Christopher Dolan as Trial of Strength: Wilhelm Furtwängler in the Third Reich (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994); and Herbert Haffner, Furtwängler (Berlin: Parthas, 2003). 68. In 1933 and 1934, several prominent foreign artists turned down Furtwängler’s invitations to perform in Berlin, and the Berlin Philharmonic, under his leadership, was protested and boycotted in Holland and Belgium during its 1934 European tour. In 1936, Furtwängler received an offer to direct the New York Philharmonic, but objections led by University in Exile faculty members I. A. Hirschmann and Rabbi Stephen Wise compelled him to turn it down. See Berta Geissmar, Musik im Schatten der Politik, 3d ed. (Zurich: Atlantis Verlag, 1951), 103–105; “Musicians Rebuff Reich: Furtwaengler Gets Refusals by Artists to Perform in Germany,” New York Times, August 2, 1933, 6; “To Fight Furtwaengler:

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Group Formed Here to Oppose Choice as Philharmonic Leader,” New York Times, March 9, 1936, 21; and “Furtwaengler Declines Post Here, Will Not Mix Music and Politics: Dr. Furtwaengler Quits Music Post,” New York Times, March 15, 1936, 1. 69. Monod, Settling Scores, 128–137, 145–150. 70. Ibid., 150–151, 165; Kathleen McLaughlin, “Germans Absolve Dr. Furtwaengler: Berlin Philharmonic Leader Awaits Only Official Notice to Resume Activities,” New York Times, April 20, 1947, 54; and “Furtwaengler Cleared,” New York Times, April 30, 1947. 71. Benz, “Postwar Society,” 2–5; and Ingrid Buchloh, Veit Harlan: Goebbels’ Starregisseur (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2010), 179–214. 72. In addition to the numerous cases of “apolitical” musicians cited by Monod (in Settling Scores) were the claims by all of the personnel associated with the Kammerspiele theater in Munich; Lange, Theater in Deutschland, 151–164. For example, one theater director tried in the British Zone, who had entered the Nazi Party in 1933 and the SA in 1940, was initially classified in category IV, but his assertions that he was “first and foremost an artist and not particularly interested in politics, especially party politics,” led to his complete exoneration. Jarausch, After Hitler, 51. 73. Buchloh, Veit Harlan, 194–201. 74. Monod, Settling Scores, 148–150. 75. Jarausch, After Hitler, 52. 76. Biddiscombe, Denazification of Germany, 191–215, quote on p. 198. 77. Jarausch, After Hitler, 48. 78. Arthur D. Kahn, Betrayal: Our Occupation of Germany, 2nd ed. (New York: Beacon Service, 1950); Tom Bower, Blind Eye to Murder: Britain, America and the Purging of Nazi Germany; A Pledge Betrayed (London: Andre Deutsch, 1981); and Bower, The Pledge Betrayed: America and Britain and the Denazification of Post-War Germany (New York: Doubleday, 1982). 79. Helga A. Welsh, Revolutionärer Wandel auf Befehl?: Entnazifizierungs- und Personalpolitik in Thüringen und Sachsen, 1945–1948 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1989), 84–85; RauhKühne, “Life Rewarded,” 70; and Naimark, Russians in Germany, 353, 456–457. 80. As Jessica Gienow-Hecht has observed, this opportunity was particularly critical for the Americans, who had long been regarded as culturally backward not only by the Germans but also by their own allies. From the occupation through the Cold War, high culture remained a central commodity in both government- and privately-supported programs of cultural export and exchange. See Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, “How Good Are We?: Culture and the Cold War,” in The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe 1945–1960, ed. Giles Scott-Smith and Hans Krabbendam (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 269–282. 81. Clemens, “Britische Kulturpolitik,” 211–213. 82. Rebecca Boehling, “U.S. Cultural Policy and German Culture During the Allied Occupation,” in Junker, United States and Germany, 388–393; and Boehling, “Commentary: The Role of Culture in American Relations with Europe; The Case of the United States’s Occupation of Germany,” Diplomatic History 23, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 57–69. 83. Jessica Gienow-Hecht, “American Cultural Policy in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1949–1968,” in Junker, United States and Germany, 404–406. 84. Dorothea Führe, Die französische Besatzungspolitik in Berlin von 1945 bis 1949: Déprussianisation und Décentralisation (Berlin: Weißensee Verlag, 2001), 195–196, 201.

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85. Stefan Zauner, “Gründung und Anfänge des französischen Kulturinstituts in Tübingen (1946–1951),” in Knipping and Le Rider, Frankreichs Kulturpolitik, 265–274. 86. Naimark, Russians in Germany, 408–411, 416. 87. Pike, Politics of Culture, 158–166. 88. Dietrich, “Oktoberrevolution,” 221–222, 227–228. 89. Pike, Politics of Culture, 223–230. 90. Naimark, Russians in Germany, 398–408, quote on p. 402. 91. Ibid., 421. 92. Ibid., 419–423, 429. 93. Glaser, Deutsche Kultur, 159–162. 94. Brockmann, Critical History, 184–191, 193. 95. Ibid., 193–195. 96. Goldstein, German Eye, 49. 97. Hauser, Neuaufbau der westdeutschen Filmwirtschaft, 181–188. 98. David Culbert, “American Film Policy in the Reeducation of Germany after 1945,” in The Political Reeducation of Germany and Her Allies After World War II, ed. Nicholas Pronay and Keith Wilson (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 180–191. 99. Hauser, Neuaufbau der westdeutschen Filmwirtschaft, 181–191; and Goldstein, German Eye, 51–57. 100. Naimark, Russians in Germany, 421–423. 101. Hauser, Neuaufbau der westdeutschen Filmwirtschaft, 148–155, 304–352, 478ff; and Schivelbusch, Cold Crater, 136–153. 102. Goldstein, German Eye, 48. 103. Clemens, “Britische Kulturpolitik,” 209–210, 214. 104. Führe, Französische Besatzungspolitik in Berlin, 198–201; and Gilmore, “France’s Postwar Cultural Policies,” 146–148. 105. Glaser, Deutsche Kultur, 114. 106. Andreas Höfele, “From Reeducation to Alternative Theater: German-American Theater Relations,” in Junker, United States and Germany, 465. 107. Glaser, Deutsche Kultur, 114–122. 108. Lange, Theater in Deutschland, 115. 109. Naimark, Russians in Germany, 424–429. 110. Pike, Politics of Culture, 333–356, 643–647. 111. Gerard Willem van Loon quote from 1946 in Lange, Theater in Deutschland, 105. 112. Höfele, “Reeducation,” 465–468. 113. Lange, Theater in Deutschland, 218–241. 114. Sabine Henze-Döhring, “Kulturelle Zentren in der amerikanischen Besaztungszone: Der Fall Bayreuth,” in Clemens, Kulturpolitik, 39–54; and Thomas Steiert, “Zur Musik- und Theaterpolitik in Stuttgart während der Besatzungszeit,” in Clemens, Kulturpolitik, 55–68. 115. Gabriele B. Clemens, Britische Kulturpolitik in Deutschland 1945–1949: Literatur, Film, Musik und Theater, Historische Mitteilungen 24 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1997), 192–199, 203–209, 256–259. 116. Robert Marquant, “La politique culturelle française en Allemagne de 1945 aux années cinquante: La césure de 1949,” in Knipping and Le Rider, Frankreichs Kulturpolitik, 125–126.

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117. Edgar Lersch, “Rückbesinnung auf Bewährtes: Auseinandersetzung mit der Moderne; Das Kulturleben in Tübingen 1945–48,” in Knipping and Le Rider, Frankreichs Kulturpolitik, 282. 118. Führe, Französische Besatzungspolitik in Berlin, 197; Félix Lusset, “Sartre in Berlin (Januar 1948): Zur Arbeit der französischen Kulturmission in Berlin,” in Französische Kulturpolitik in Deutschland 1945–1949: Berichte und Dokumente, ed. Jérôme Vaillant (Constance: Universitätsverlag, 1984), 107–119. 119. Monod, Settling Scores, chapters 1 and 3, 210ff.; and Amy Beal, New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 12–23. 120. Thacker, Music after Hitler, 27–29. 121. Marquant, “La politique culturelle,” 125–126; Gilmore, “France’s Postwar Cultural Policies,” 135–142; and Thacker, Music after Hitler, 80–85. 122. Clemens, “Britischer Kulturpolitik,” quote on p. 215; and Thacker, Music after Hitler, 19. 123. Clemens, “Britischer Kulturpolitik,” 207–209; and Thacker, Music after Hitler, 20–24, 89–92. 124. Thacker, Music after Hitler, 25. 125. Naimark, Russians in Germany, 429–432. 126. Thacker, Music after Hitler, 88–89. 127. Victor Gorodinskij, “Jenseits des Schönen: Die Musik der dekandenten Bourgeoisie,” Tägliche Rundschau, January 17, 1948, cited in Pike, Politics of Culture, 466. 128. Pike, Politics of Culture, 460–468. 129. Boehling, “U.S. Cultural Policy,” 389. 130. Ruth Heftrig, “Narrowed Modernism: On the Rehabilitation of ‘Degenerate Art’ in Postwar Germany,” in Peters, Degenerate Art, 268–269. 131. Judges on the selection panel for the exhibition included Karl Hofer and Max Pechstein, and the exhibition included works by Pechstein, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmitt-Rottluff, Ernst Ludwig Kircher, Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, Lyonel Feininger, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Otto Dix, Paul Klee, Conrad Felixmüller, and Käthe Kollwitz. See Pike, Politics of Culture, 238. 132. Pike, Politics of Culture, 235–245, 531–536, quote on p. 239. 133. Dietrich, “Oktoberrevolution,” 228. 134. Veronica Davies, “German Initiatives and British Interventions 1945–1951,” in Kunstgeschichte nach 1945: Kontinuität und Neubeginn in Deutschland, ed. Nikola Doll, Ruth Heftrig, Olaf Peters, and Ulrich Rehm (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006), 13–20. 135. Goldstein, German Eye, 74–81. 136. Davies, “German Initiatives and British Interventions,” 13–20. 137. Marquant, “La politique culturelle,” 125–126; and Maike Steinkamp, “The Propagandistic Role of Modern Art in Postwar Berlin,” in Berlin Divided City, 1945–1989, ed. Philip Broadbent and Sabine Hake (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 24–25, 28. 138. Edgar Lersch, “Rückbesinnung auf Bewährtes,” 278–279, 284–285. 139. Artists featured in the exhibition included Willy Baumeister, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Lyonel Feininger, HAP Grieshaber, Erich Heckel, Karl Hofer, Adolf Hölzel, Alexei Jawlensky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, August Macke, Franz Marc, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Otto Müller, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Oskar Schlemmer,

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Rudolf Schlichter, Ernst Barlach, Käthe Kollwitz, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Gerhard Marcks, Ewald Mataré, and René Sitenis. Edgar Lersch, “Rückbesinnung auf Bewährtes,” 286. 140. Marquant, “La politique culturelle,” 125–126; and Gilmore, “France’s Postwar Cultural Policies,” 137–138. 141. Edgar Lersch, “Rückbesinnung auf Bewährtes,” 286–287. 142. Gienow-Hecht, “Art Is Democracy,” 31. 143. Quoted in John-Paul Stonard, Fault Lines: Art in Germany 1945–1955 (London: Ridinghouse, 2007), 98. 144. Glaser, Deutsche Kultur, 162–168. 145. Heftrig, “Narrowed Modernism,” 261–262. 146. Goldstein, German Eye, 80–100. 147. Saunders, Cultural Cold War, chapter 16. 148. Dorothee Wimmer, “Die ‘Freiheit’ der Kunst im westlichen Nachkriegsdeutschland: ‘Das Kunstwerk’ als Forum der Kunstgeschichte,” in Doll et al., Kunstgeschichte, 137–147, quotes on pp. 139 and 142. 149. Saunders, Cultural Cold War, chapter 5. 150. Ibid., 115–119. 151. New York art dealers exported American abstract expressionism for exhibitions in Germany in 1947 and 1951. In 1948, German abstract art exhibitions in Munich received support from the Guggenheims. In 1952, German art dealers started to promote the neoExpressionism style of younger German artists. They also embraced American abstract expressionism as well as the French Informel movement, and they were enthusiastic about the West German tours of the Museum of Modern Art exhibitions New American Painting in 1958 and Jackson Pollock: 1912–1956 in 1959. See Sigrid Ruby, “Fascination, Ignorance, and Rejection: Changing Perspectives in the Visual Arts, 1945–1968,” in Junker, United States and Germany, 474–476; and Glaser, Deutsche Kultur, 170. 152. Werner Durth, “Architecture as a Political Medium,” in Junker, United States and Germany, 480–482; and Durth, Deutsche Architekten: Biographische Verflechtungen 1900– 1970 (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1986). 153. Jeffry Diefendorf, In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 50–55. 154. Edgar Lersch, “Rückbesinnung auf Bewährtes,” 287. 155. Durth, “Architecture as a Political Medium,” 481–485. 156. Jordy, “Bauhaus in America”; and Paul Betts, “The Bauhaus as a Cold War Weapon: An American-German Joint Venture,” in Bauhaus Conflicts, 1919–2009: Controversies and Counterparts, ed. Philip Oswalt (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009), 190–208. 157. Quoted in Durth, “Architecture as a Political Medium,” 485. 158. Jordy, “Bauhaus in America”; and Betts, “Bauhaus as a Cold War Weapon,” 190–208. 159. Durth, “Architecture as a Political Medium,” 486; and Gregory A. Castillo, “Constructing the Cold War: Architecture, Urbanism and the Cultural Division of Germany, 1945–1957,” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000. 160. Daniel Leab, “Side by Side: Hollywood and German Film Culture,” in Junker, United States and Germany, 457–463. 161. Lange, Theater in Deutschland, 516–548, 583–586, quote on p. 516; and Höfele, “Reeducation,” 468.

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162. Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, 115–119. 163. Ibid., 220–227. 164. Gienow-Hecht, “How Good Are We?” 276–279; David Monod, “ ‘He is a Cripple an’ Needs My Love’: Porgy and Bess as Cold War Propaganda,” in Scott-Smith and Krabbendam, Cultural Cold War, 300–312; and Wilford, Mighty Wurlitzer, chapter 5. 165. Thacker, Music after Hitler, 228. 166. Monod, Settling Scores, 199–200; and Thacker, Music after Hitler, 76–77. 167. Thacker, Music after Hitler, 77; and Edgar Lersch, “Rückbesinnung auf Bewährtes,” 284. 168. Beal, New Music, 36–41; and Monod, Settling Scores, 198–199. 169. Beal, New Music, 39. 170. The British seized the Hamburg radio station on May 4, 1945, and reestablished it as NWDR, with BBC personnel directing its music programming and highlighting British, Jewish, and modern music. The Americans assumed operation of the Munich station and began broadcasting on May 12, 1945, and the Soviets followed a day later with the Berliner Rundfunk. The Americans took control of wire broadcasting in Berlin in November 1945, and in 1946 they transformed it into RIAS (Radio im amerikanischen Sektor). In September 1945, the British restored another transmitter in Cologne that would later become Westdeutscher Rundfunk, or WDR, and in the same month the French started building a radio station in Baden-Baden and commenced broadcasts the following March with Südwestfunk. See Thacker, Music after Hitler, 81, 90; and Beal, New Music, 24. 171. Thacker, Music after Hitler, 166–169. 172. Beal, New Music, 52–55. 173. Ibid., 26–27. 174. Thacker, Music after Hitler, 78–70, 177, 228–229. 175. Stephen Brockmann, “German Culture at the ‘Zero Hour,’ ” in Revisiting Zero Hour 1945: The Emergence of Postwar German Culture, Humanities Program Series 1, ed. Stephen Brockmann and Frank Trommler (Washington, DC: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, 1996), 12–14. 176. Ibid., 12–13. 177. See Hans Günter Hockerts, “Gab es eine Stunde Null?: Die politische, gesellschaftliche und wirtschaftliche Situation in Deutschland nach der bedingungslosen Kapitulation,” in Krimm and Zirbs, Nachkriegszeiten, 119–156. 178. Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). In the Soviet Zone, those who had returned after fleeing the Third Reich after being persecuted for being communists initially called for acknowledging the fate of European Jewry, only to be silenced later on when the Soviet Union imposed draconian antisemitic measures to root out capitalism and “cosmopolitanism” and forced the formative East German state to follow suit, leading to the purges of anyone advocating for reparations or for full recognition of Jewish victimhood. East Germany ultimately adopted the belief that the Soviets had eradicated all traces of Nazism in the Soviet Zone, and all those responsible for Nazi atrocities were to be found residing in the West. As early as 1946, in the midst of negotiating the terms of reparations for the victims of National Socialism, West Germany’s conservative politicians advocated for curtailing the verdicts of “followers” rather than risking a resurgence of Nazi sympathies and jeopardizing public

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support for a democratic system of government. See Jeffrey Herf, “Divided Memory, Multiple Restorations: West German Political Reflection on the Nazi Past, 1945–1953,” in Brockmann and Trommler, Revisiting Zero Hour, 89–102; and Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 179. Brockmann, “German Culture,” 11–12. 180. Koopmann, “Der Mythos von der ‘Stunde Null,’ ” 157–173. 181. Hans Richter, quoted in Brockmann, “German Culture,” 17. 182. Brockmann, “German Culture,” 16–23. 183. Stephen Brockmann, German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004): 3–12. 184. Brockmann, “German Culture,” 12–14. 185. Sabine Eckmann, “Historicizing Postwar German Art,” in Barron and Eckmann, Art of Two Germanys, 35; Eckmann, “German Exile, Modern Art, and National Identity,” in Eckmann and Koepnick, Caught by Politics, 98–100, 106–108; and Eckmann “Ruptures and Continuities,” in Barron and Eckmann, Art of Two Germanys, 49–64. 186. Gregory Maertz, “The Invisible Museum: Unearthing the Lost Modernist Art of the Third Reich,” Modernism/Modernity 15, no. 1 (2008): 63–85. 187. Eckmann, “Ruptures and Continuities,” 51. 188. Stonard, Fault Lines, 185–189. See also Susanne Leeb, “Abstraction as International Language,” in Barron and Eckmann, Art of Two Germanys, 119–133. 189. Eckmann, “Ruptures and Continuities,” 50–51. As late as 1955, the resurrection of “degenerate art” still served as the basis for the first of the documenta exhibitions of modern German art, and subsequent exhibitions continued to support the premise that postwar German art came directly out of prewar modernism while still belonging to the international world of abstraction. This belief continued to have an unmistakable influence on such postwar artists as A. R. Penck, Georg Baselitz, and Markus Lüperts, and it persisted well into the 1960s and 1970s. See Stephanie Barron, “Blurred Boundaries: The Art of Two Germanys between Myth and History,” in Barron and Eckmann, Art of Two Germanys, 17; Heftrig, “Narrowed Modernism,” 271–274; and Karen Lang, “Expressionism and the Two Germanys,” in Barron and Eckmann, Art of Two Germanys, 84–100. 190. Monod, Settling Scores, 116. 191. J. Alexander Colpa, “Germany’s ‘Zero-Hour Myth’ as a Context for the Stylistic Evolution in the Orchestral Music of Wolfgang Fortner (1907–1987),” PhD diss., New York University, 2002. 192. Gesa Kordes, “Darmstadt, Postwar Experimentation, and the West German Search for a New Musical Identity,” in Music and German National Identity, ed. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 205–217. 193. Mark Carroll, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe, Music in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 157; and Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 13, 29–30, 35–43. 194. Carroll, Music and Ideology, 99–101, 151–153, 157–164. 195. Quoted in Dörte Schmidt, “ ‘Musikalische Aufräumarbeiten’: Bernd Alois Zimmermanns Weg vom ‘Konzert für Orchester’ (1946/48) bis zur ‘Sinfonie in einem Satz’ (1951/53),” in “Stunde Null”: Zur Musik um 1945; Bericht über das Symposion der Gesellschaft für

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Musikforschung an der Musikhochschule Lübeck 24.–27. September 2003, ed. Volker Scherliess (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2014), 88. 196. Hans Werner Henze, Music and Politics: Collected Writings 1953–61, trans. Peter Labanyi (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), 40. 197. Allemagne 1945–1965: Arts, lettres, spectacles, special issue, Documents: Revue des questions allemandes (Paris: Edition “Documents,” 1967). See the essays by Paul Schallück (“L’Allemagne en absence?”), Christian Ferber (“Un théâtre sans auteur?”), René Wintzen (“Un théâtre qui en vaut bien d’autres”), Alphons Silbermann (“La musique moderne”), Antoine Goléa (“Le théâtre lyrique”), Horst Kögler (“Le ballet”), Albert Schulze-Vellinghausen (“La peinture”), Hans Eckstein (“L’architecture moderne”), Eduard Trier (“La sculpture”), and Dieter Krusche (“Un cinéma sans invention”). 198. Charles E. McClelland and Steven P. Scher, eds., Postwar German Culture: An Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974). See especially the introduction to the volume and the introductions to the sections “Music” and “Architecture, Fine Arts, and Film”; the essays by Schulze-Vellinghausen (“La peinture”) and Trier (“La sculpture”), originally published in French in Documents, appear here in English translation. 199. Barron, “Blurred Boundaries,” 21–23; and Jaskot, Nazi Perpetrator. 200. “Die Musik der 1930er Jahre,” Bericht über den Internationalen Musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress Bayreuth 1981, ed. Christoph-Hellmut Mahling and Sigrid Wiesmann (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1984), 142–182, 471–503. An expanded version of Albrecht Riethmüller’s paper appeared as “Komposition im Deutschen Reich um 1936,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 38 (1981): 241–278. 201. Rudolf Stephan, “Zur Musik der Dreißigerjahre,” in Mahling and Wiesmann, Bericht, 147. 202. Krimm and Zirbs, Nachkriegszeiten; Giles, Stunde Null; and Brockmann and Trommler, Revisiting Zero Hour. 203. See “German Cinema at the Zero Hour 1945–1949: Historical Overview,” in Brockmann, Critical History, 183–196. 204. Volker Scherliess, “Vorwort,” in Scherliess, Stunde Null, 7–12. 205. Alexander J. Colpa did an excellent job of analyzing the “Zero Hour Myth” in his 2002 dissertation on Wolfgang Fortner, which traces the composer’s entire career and reveals in detail how he managed to build a new career out of reconfiguring his own past. Most studies of music, however, treat the concept almost exclusively as a historical marker. Colpa accuses various surveys of the Third Reich and postwar music history of unwittingly perpetuating the myth of the Zero Hour by ending or beginning their investigations with the year 1945. See Colpa, “Germany’s ‘Zero-Hour Myth,’ ” chapter 4. Furthermore, despite its subtitle, Amy Beal’s New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification makes only brief mention of the shaky foundations of the Zero Hour concept in postwar German musical life. See Beal, New Music, 11–12. 4 . T O TA L I TA R IA N I SM , I N T E N T IO NA L I SM , A N D FA S C I SM

1. Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 13–30. Goebbels stated explicitly in a press conference: “National

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Socialism stands like any truly political vision upon a totalitarian basis” (“Der Nationalsozialismus steht wie jede echt politische Willensbildung auf einem totalitären Standpunkt”). Quoted in Brenner, Kunstpolitik, 36. 2. Gleason, Totalitarianism, 31–50. 3. Other books by émigrés include Hermann Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West (New York: Arno Press, 1972); Peter F. Drucker, The End of Economic Man: A Study of the New Totalitarianism (New York: The John Day Co., 1939); Franz Borkenau, The Totalitarian Enemy (London: Faber and Faber, 1940); Emil Lederer, The State of the Masses: The Threat of the Classless Society (New York: W. W. Norton, 1940); and Sigmund Neumann, Permanent Revolution: The Total State in a World at War (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942). Gleason, Totalitarianism, 55–57; and Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 610. 4. Gleason, Totalitarianism, 81. See also 64–67, 70, 76, 80–81. 5. Hughes, Sea Change, 119–125. 6. Gleason, Totalitarianism, 5, 108–113; and Aschheim, Beyond the Border, 82–83, 114. 7. Gleason, Totalitarianism, 123–126. 8. Kershaw, Nazi Dictatorship, 1–16; and Hans Mommsen, “Accomplishments and Limitations of the Totalitarian Theory: Applicability to the National Socialism Dictatorship,” in Totalitarianism and Political Religions, vol. 1, Concepts for the Comparison of Dictatorships, ed. Hans Maier, trans. Jodi Bruhn (London: Routledge, 1996), 253–261. 9. Gleason, Totalitarianism, 127–131, 156–166; and Kershaw, Nazi Dictatorship, chapters 2 and 3. 10. Ernst Menze, ed., Totalitarianism Reconsidered (Port Washington, NY: National University Publications, 1981); see especially the introduction by Menze and the essays by Karl Dietrich Bracher, “The Disputed Concept of Totalitarianism: Experience and Actuality,” 12–33; William S. Allen, “Totalitarianism: The Concept and the Reality,” 98–106; and Hans Mommsen, “The Concept of Totalitarian Dictatorship versus the Comparative Theory of Fascism: The Case of National Socialism,” 146–166. See also Mommsen, “Accomplishments and Limitations”; and Hughes, Sea Change, 125. 11. Richard Bessel, “Functionalists vs. Intentionalists: The Debate Twenty Years On or Whatever Happened to Functionalism and Intentionalism?,” German Studies Review 26, no. 1 (2003): 15–20. 12. Kershaw, Nazi Dictatorship, chapter 4. 13. Mary Fulbrook, The Divided Nation: A History of Germany 1918–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 69; see also Kershaw, Nazi Dictatorship, chapter 4; and Gellately, Backing Hitler, 257. 14. Kershaw, “Working towards the Führer,” 88–106. See also Anthony McElligot and Tim Kirk, eds., Working towards the Führer: Essays in Honour of Sir Ian Kershaw (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 15. Quoted in Gleason, Totalitarianism, 45. 16. Quoted in ibid., 46. For a general discussion of the use of the terms “Fascism” and “totalitarianism” in early comparisons of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, see pages 31–50. 17. Franz Roh, “Entartete” Kunst: Kunstbarbarei im Dritten Reich (Hannover: Fackelträger Verlag, 1962), 91.

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18. Ulrike Wendland, “Rave, Paul Ortwin,” in Neue Deutsche Biographie 21 (2003): 218–219, www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd118749374.html; and Mortimer G. Davidson, Kunst in Deutschland, 1933–1945: Eine wissenschaftliche Enzyklopädie der Kunst im Dritten Reich, vol. 1, Skulpturen (Tübingen: Grabert, 1988), 52. 19. Wendland, “Rave, Paul Ortwin.” 20. Petropoulos, Artists Under Hitler, 326. 21. Paul Ortwin Rave, Kunstdiktatur im Dritten Reich, 2nd ed., Uwe Schneede, ed. (Berlin: Argon, 1987), 66, 68. 22. Ibid., 86, 87. 23. Angelika Königseder and Juliane Wetzel, “Die ‘Bilderverbrennung’ 1939: Ein Pendant?,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 51 (2003): 439–446. 24. Uwe Schneede, “Nachwort,” in Rave, Kunstdiktatur, 152. 25. Quoted in Stonard, Fault Lines, 151. 26. Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, Art under a Dictatorship (repr., New York: Octagon Press, 1973), xxi. 27. Ibid., chapter 4. 28. Ibid., 62. 29. Ibid., 70. 30. Ibid., 82. 31. Ibid., 215. 32. Gleason, Totalitarianism, 126–127; Werner Haftmann, Malerei im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1954), 426; and Haftmann, Painting in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1 (New York: Praeger, 1960), 306. 33. Haftmann, Malerei, 421–425; and Haftmann, Painting, 303–305. 34. Brenner, “Art in the Political Power Struggle,” 410. 35. I am grateful to Christian Fuhrmeister and Barbara Buenger for furnishing me with this information. 36. Roh, “Entartete” Kunst, 16. 37. Ibid., 49. 38. Ibid., 56–60. 39. Ibid., 41. 40. See Thomas Lersch, “Schreibverbot?: Erkundungen zu Franz Roh,” in Kunstgeschichte im Nationalsozialismus: Beiträge zur Geschichte einer Wissenschaft zwischen 1930 und 1950, ed. Nikola Doll, Christian Fuhrmeister, and Michael H. Sprenger (Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 2005), 161–181. 41. Claus Jürgen, ed., Entartete Kunst: Bildersturm vor 25 Jahren. Haus der Kunst München, 25. Oktober bis 16. Dezember 1962 (Munich: Ausstellungsleitung München e.V. Haus der Kunst, 1962), vii. 42. Wulf ’s collection appeared in the series Kunst und Kultur im Dritten Reich, published by Sigbert Mohn Verlag in Gütersloh: vol. 1, Die bildenden Künste im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation (1966); vol. 2, Musik im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation (1963); vol. 3, Literatur und Dichtung im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation (1963); vol. 4, Theater und Film im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation (1964); and vol. 5, Presse und Funk im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation (1964). They were reissued by Ullstein Verlag in 1982–1983.

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43. See Nicolas Berg, “Ein Außenseiter der Holocaustforschung: Joseph Wulf (1912– 1974) im Historikerdiskurs der Bundesrepublik,” in Leipziger Beiträge zur jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur, vol. 1, ed. Dan Diner (Munich: De Gruyter Saur, 2003): 311–346. 44. Wulf, Musik, 9–12; and Wulf, Theater und Film, 6. 45. Wulf, Musik, 10. 46. Wulf, Die bildenden Künste, 10. 47. Ibid., 11. 48. Gerd Haedecke, “Die manipulierte Kultur,” Neue Politische Literatur 10 (1965): 91–96. 49. Henryk Broder, “ ‘ . . . In den Wind gesprochen’: Das Leben und Sterben des jüdischen Historikers Joseph Wulf,” Journal für Geschichte, no. 6 (1981): 46. 50. Berg, “Ein Außenseiter der Holocaustforschung,” 343; and Broder, “ . . . In den Wind gesprochen,” 47. 51. George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), xx, xxi, 1. 52. George L. Mosse, Confronting History: A Memoir (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 42, 44. 53. See Emilio Gentile, “A Provisional Dwelling: The Origin and Development of the Concept of Fascism in Mosse’s Historiography,” in What History Tells: George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe, ed. Stanley Payne, David Sorkin, and John Tortorice (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 41–109. 54. Brenner, “Art in the Political Power Struggle,” 398. See also Brenner, Kunstpolitik, 61–64, 107. 55. Brenner, Kunstpolitik, 110–111. 56. Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics, 193. 57. Ibid., 216. 58. Charles Jencks, Modern Movements in Architecture, 2nd. ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973). 59. Rothfeder, “Alfred Rosenberg’s Organization”; Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg; and Michael H. Kater, Das “Ahnenerbe” der SS 1935–1945: Ein Beitrag zur Kulturpolitik des Dritten Reiches, Studien zur Zeitgeschichte (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1974). 60. Robert R. Taylor, The Word in Stone: The Role of Architecture in the National Socialist Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), x. 61. Ibid., 69. 62. Ibid., x. 63. Jost Dülffer, Jochen Thies, and Josef Henke, eds., Hitlers Städte: Baupolitik im Dritten Reich; Eine Dokumentation (Cologne: Böhlau, 1978); and Hermann Giesler, Ein anderer Hitler: Bericht seines Architekten; Erlebnisse, Gespräche, Reflexionen (Leoni am Starnberger See: Druffel, 1978). 64. Jochen Thies, Hitler’s Plans for Global Domination: Nazi Architecture and Ultimate War Aims, trans. Ian Cooke and Mary-Beth Friedrich (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 197. 65. See the essays by Konrad Jarausch, Michael Schmidtke, and Belinda Davis in Coping with the Nazi Past: West German Debates on Nazism and Generational Conflict, 1955–1975, Studies in German History, ed. Philipp Gassert and Alan E. Steinweis, (New York: Berghahn, 2007).

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Notes to Pages 148–151

66. John Heskett, “Art and Design in Nazi Germany,” History Workshop 6 (1978): 139–153. 67. Georg Bussmann, ed., Kunst im 3. Reich: Dokumente der Unterwerfung, 4th ed. (Frankfurt: Zweitausendeins, 1980), 6. 68. Gisela Kraut, Roswitha Mattausch, and Brigitte Wiederspahn, “Architektur und Plastik im deutschen Faschismus,” in Bussmann, Kunst im 3. Reich, 97–105; and Roswitha Mattausch and Brigitte Wiederspahn, “Das Bauprogramm der Deutschen Arbeitsfront: Die Umwelt der Arbeiter,” in Bussmann, Kunst im 3. Reich, 183–216. 69. Regina Kießling, Gisela Kraut, and Ulrich Wanitzek, “Großbauten des Staates und der Partei (München, Nürnberg, Berlin),” in Bussmann, Kunst im 3. Reich, 129. 70. Georg Bussmann, “Plastik,” in Bussmann, Kunst im 3. Reich, 256. 71. Hinz, after citing a quote from Haftmann’s Malerei im 20. Jahrhundert, states: “This type of argument in art history represents the totalitarianism thesis and subscribes to the ‘theory’ of international anticommunism. To the contrary, it is not significant that art is subservient, rather [it is significant] to whom it is subservient; similarly, it is not significant that painters – consciously or unconsciously – fulfill a mission [of the state], rather [it is significant] that they fulfill this fascist mission.” (“Derart argumentierende Kunstgeschichte vertritt der Totalitarismusthese, dient der ‘Theorie’ des internationalen Antikommunismus. Dagegen ist festzustellen: Nicht entscheidend ist es, daß Kunst überhaupt zu Diensten verfügt ist, sondern zu welchen Diensten sie verfügt wurde; ebensowenig, daß die Maler— bewußt oder unbewußt—auf Zwecke eingehen, sondern daß sie auf diese faschistischen Zwecke eingingen.”) Berthold Hinz, “Malerei des deutschen Faschismus,” in Bussmann, Kunst im 3. Reich, 262. 72. Hinz, Art in the Third Reich, foreword. 73. Ibid., 29. 74. Ibid., 33–34. 75. Ibid., 38. 76. Ibid., 44. 77. Ibid., chapter 3. 78. Ibid., chapter 7. 79. See, e.g., Berthold Hinz, Hans-Ernst Mittig, Wolfgang Schäche, and Angela Schönberger, eds., Die Dekoration der Gewalt: Kunst und Medien im Faschismus (Göttingen: Anabas, 1979), reviewed in Heskett, “Art and Design in Nazi Germany,” 146–150. 80. Jonathan Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 113–153; and Andreas Hüneke, Der Fall Robert Scholz: Kunstberichte unterm Hakenkreuz (Cologne: AICA, 2001). 81. Robert Scholz, Architektur und bildende Kunst 1933–1945 (Preussisch Oldendorf: Schütz, 1977), 9, 11. 82. Ibid., 20–22, 37–40, 45–47. 83. See Maurice Culot and Léon Krier, “The Only Path for Architecture,” Oppositions 14 (1978): 40–43; Léon Krier, “Vorwärts, Kameraden, Wir Müssen Zurück (Forward, Comrades, We Must Go Back),” Oppositions 24 (Spring 1981): 27–37; and Léon Krier, “The Suppression of Classical Architecture in Postwar Germany,” Architectural Review 173 (1983): 33–38. 84. See Michael Sorkin, “Hitler’s Classical Architect,” Nation, May 21, 2013, www .thenation.com/article/hitlers-classical-architect/.

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85. Léon Krier, “An Architecture of Desire,” in Albert Speer: Architecture 1932–1942, trans. Wilfried Wang (Brussels: Archives d’architecture moderne, 1985), 217. 86. Ibid., 218. 87. Ibid., 223. 88. Erwin Leiser, Nazi Cinema, trans. Gertrud Mander and David Wilson (London: Secker and Warburg, 1974), 7. 89. Leiser, Nazi Cinema, 15. 90. Hull, Film in the Third Reich, 10–11. 91. Ibid., 24, 40, 68–69, 77ff. 92. Ibid., 43–45, 95ff. 93. Gerd Albrecht, Nationalsozialistische Filmpolitik: Eine soziologische Untersuchung über die Spielfilme des Dritten Reichs (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1969), 4. 94. Ibid., chapters 2 and 3. 95. See “Vorwort des Herausgebers” and “Filmpolitik im Dritten Reich (Vortrag)” in Gerd Albrecht, ed., Der Film im 3. Reich (Karlsruhe: DOKU Verlag, 1979). 96. Phillips, “Nazi Control,” 37. 97. Ibid., 38–42. 98. Ibid., 45. 99. Ibid., 48. 100. Ibid., 50–52. 101. Ibid., 53–57. 102. Ibid., 64–65. 103. Ibid., 67. 104. Wolfgang Becker, Film und Herrschaft: Organisationsprinzipien und Organisationsstrukturen der nationalsozialistischen Filmpropaganda, Zur politischen Ökonomie des NSFilms, vol. 1 (Berlin: Verlag Volker Spiess, 1973), 7. 105. Ibid., 42, 63–67; and Julian Petley, Capital and Culture: German Cinema 1933–1945 (Colchester: British Film Institute, 1979). 106. David Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema 1933–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 12–13. 107. Ibid., 15. 108. Ibid., 17. 109. Ibid., 34. 110. Ibid., 38. 111. See, e.g., Petley, Capital and Culture. To arrive at his conclusions, Petley also drew on Louis Althusser’s readings of Marx, Lacan, and others. See Althusser, For Marx (London: Allen Lane, 1969); Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London: New Left Books, 1971); and Althusser, Essays in Self Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1976). 112. Kraft Wetzel and Peter A. Hagemann, eds., Zensur: Verbotene deutsche Filme 1933–1945, Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (Berlin: Verlag Volker Speiss, 1978), 14–15. 113. Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 161. Taylor claimed to distance himself from the totalitarian model but justified his comparison of the two systems with the contention that “Soviet Russia and Nazi

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Germany are the two best documented examples of highly—and overtly—politicised societies the world has ever seen,” 3. 114. Jay W. Baird, “Nazi Film Propaganda and the Soviet Union.” Film & History 11, no. 2 (May 1981): 34–41; and Peter Bucher, “Die Bedeutung des Films als historische Quelle: Der ewige Jude,” in Festschrift für Eberhard Kessel zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. Heinz Durchhardt and Manfred Schlenke (Munich: Wilhelm Funk, 1982), 300–329. 115. Barry Fulks, “Film Culture and Kulturfilm: Walter Ruttmann, the Avant-Garde Film, and the Kulturfilm in Weimar Germany and the Third Reich” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1982), 45–50. 116. Richard Geehr, John Heineman, and Gerald Herman, “Wien 1910: An Example of Nazi Anti-Semitism,” Film & History 15, no. 3 (1985): 50–64; see also the somewhat perplexing response to this piece, Richard Levy, “Wien 1910: A Comment,” Film & History 15, no. 3 (1985): 65–68. 117. Bogusław Drewniak, Der deutsche Film 1938–1945 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1987). 118. For a brief overview that includes the first three years of the Third Reich, see Horst Koegler, “In the Shadow of the Swastika: Dance in Germany 1927–1936,” Dance Perspective 57 (Spring 1974): 1–48. 119. Uwe-Karsten Ketelsen, for example, singled out a category of “heroic theater” serving the “ideology of totality” of National Socialism. See Uwe-Karsten Ketelsen, Heroisches Theater: Untersuchungen zur Dramentheorie des Dritten Reichs (Bonn: Bouvier, 1968); and Ketelsen, Von heroischem Sein und völkischem Tod: Zur Dramatik des Dritten Reiches (Bonn: Bouvier, 1970). See also Günther Rühle, ed., Zeit und Theater, vol. 3, Diktatur und Exil 1933– 1945 (Berlin: Propyläen, 1974). 120. See, e.g., Rühle, Diktatur und Exil, 27–30. 121. August, “Die Stellung der Schauspieler.” 122. Dussel, Ein heroisches Theater? 123. Drewniak, Theater im NS-Staat. 124. Wayne Kvam, “The Nazification of Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater Berlin,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 3 (October 1988), 373. 125. Bruce Zortman, “The Theater of Ideology in Nazi Germany” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1969), 4. 126. Ibid., 59; see also Zortman, Hitler’s Theater: Ideological Drama in Nazi Germany (El Paso, TX: Firestein Books, 1984), 30–31. 127. Eichberg, “Thing-, Fest- und Weihespiele,” in Eichberg et al., Massenspiele, 21, 53; see also Eichberg, “The Nazi Thingspiel: Theater for the Masses in Fascism and Proletarian Culture,” trans. Robert A. Jones, New German Critique 11 (Spring 1977): 133–150. 128. Rainer Stommer, Die inszenierte Volksgemeinschaft: Die “Thing-Bewegung” im Dritten Reich (Marburg: Jonas-Verlag, 1985). 129. Dieter Bartetzko, Illusionen im Stein: Stimmungsarchitektur im deutschen Faschismus; Ihre Vorgeschichte in Theater- und Filmbauten (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1985). 130. Geissmar, Baton and the Jackboot, 77. 131. Ellis, “Music in the Third Reich”; see also Ellis, “Propaganda Ministry,” 223–238. 132. Albrecht Dümling and Peter Girth, eds., Entartete Musik: Zur Düsseldorfer Ausstellung von 1938; Eine kommentierte Rekonstruktion (Düsseldorf: Der Kleine Verlag, 1988).

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133. Hans-Günter Klein, “Vorwort,” in Heister and Klein, Musik und Musikpolitik, 9–10. 134. Prieberg, “Nach dem ‘Endsieg,’ ” 297–305. In a conversation I had with Prieberg in 1984, I learned that, in addition to these difficulties, he struggled to find a publisher. Fischer Verlag finally agreed to bring the book out in 1982, in anticipation of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1933 Nazi seizure of power (Machtergreifung). 135. Klein, “Vorwort,” 10. 136. Bair, “Die Lenkung,” 83–90. 137. Hans-Günter Klein, “Viel Konformität und wenig Verweigerung: Zur Komposition neuer Opern 1933–1944,” in Heister and Klein, Musik und Musikpolitik, 145–162. 138. See Rita von der Grün, “Funktionen und Formen von Musiksendungen in Rundfunk,” in Heister and Klein, Musik und Musikpolitik, 98–106; Elste, “Zwischen Privatheit,” 107–114; and Antoinette Hellkuhl, “ ‘Hier sind wir versammelt zu löblichem Tun’: Der Deutsche Sängerbund in faschistischer Zeit,” in Heister and Klein, Musik und Musikpolitik, 193–203. 139. Dorothea Kolland, “ ‘. . . In keiner Not uns trennen . . .’: Arbeitermusikbewegung im Widerstand,” in Heister and Klein, Musik und Musikpolitik, 204–212. 140. Hellkuhl, “Hier sind wir versammelt,” 196. 141. Müller, “Wigman and National Socialism.” 142. Manning and Benson, “Interrupted Continuities”; and Susan Manning, “Ideology and Performance between Weimar and the Third Reich: The Case of Totenmal,” Theatre Journal 41, no. 2 (1989): 211–223. 143. Suzan F. Moss, “Some Effects of the Nazi Regime on the German Modern Dance: Spinning through the Weltanschauung” (PhD diss., New York University, 1988), 215; see also 113–135, 254–255. 144. Quoted in Moss, “German Modern Dance,” 264. 145. The first of these was the exhibition Between Resistance and Conformity (Zwischen Widerstand und Anpassung) in 1978, which focused on how inner emigration verged on conformity with Nazism. In response came an exhibition that was more politically charged in its focus on anti-Fascism: Resistance Instead of Conformity: German Art Resisting Fascism 1933–1945 (Widerstand statt Anpassung: Deutsche Kunst im Widerstand gegen den Faschismus, 1933–1945). This was followed by a wave of similar exhibitions featuring victimized artists, including Persecuted—Misled (Verfolgt—Verführt) in Hamburg in 1983, Forbidden— Persecuted (Verboten—Verfolgt) in Duisburg in 1983, Emigrated from Berlin (Aus Berlin emigriert) in Berlin in 1983, Art in Exile in Great Britain (Kunst im Exil in Großbritannien, 1933–1945) in Berlin in 1986, and many more. See the catalogs of these exhibitions: Janos Frecot, Elisabeth Moortgat, Barbara Volkmann, and Lorenz Dombois, Zwischen Widerstand und Anpassung: Kunst in Deutschland 1933–1945; Ausstellung in der Akademie der Künste vom 17. September bis 29. Oktober 1978 (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1978); Richard Hiepe and Michael Schwarz, Widerstand statt Anpassung: Deutsche Kunst im Widerstand gegen den Faschismus, 1933–1945 (West Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1980); Sigrun Paas and Hans-Werner Schmidt, Verfolgt und verführt: Kunst unterm Hakenkreuz in Hamburg 1933– 1945; Hamburger Kunsthalle, 12. Mai bis 3. Juli 1983 (Marburg: Jonas Verlag für Kunst und Literatur, 1983); Siegfried Salzmann, Verboten—Verfolgt: Kunstdiktatur im 3. Reich; Eine Ausstellung des Wilhelm-Lehmbruck-Museums der Stadt Duisburg im Rahmen der 7.

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Duisburger Akzente, 10. April–23. Mai 1983; Kunstverein Hannover, 5. Juni–14. August 1983; Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, 24. September—31. Oktober 1983 (Duisburg: Wilhelm-Lehmbruck-Museum, 1983); Eberhard Roters and Gisela-Ingeborg Bolduan, Aus Berlin emigriert: Werke Berliner Künstler, die nach 1933 Deutschland verlassen mussten (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1983); and Hartmut Krug and Michael Nungesser, Kunst im Exil in Grossbritannien, 1933–1945 (Berlin: Frölich und Kaufmann, 1986). 146. Werner Haftmann, Verfemte Kunst: Bildende Künstler der inneren und äußeren Emigration in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Cologne: DuMont, 1986); the English edition was translated by Eileen Martin as Banned and Persecuted: Dictatorship of Art under Hitler (Cologne: DuMont, 1986). 147. Haftmann, Banned and Persecuted, 22. 148. Barbara Miller Lane, “Architects in Power: Politics and Ideology in the Work of Ernst May and Albert Speer,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17, no. 1 (Summer 1986): 283–310. 149. These new studies included Angela Schönberger’s detailed examination of the Reichskanzlei that used an impressive documentary apparatus to underline the marriage of ideology and architecture at the heart of the project, and Alex Scobie’s attempt to align the aims of Mussolini and Hitler in emulating the architectural projects of Roman emperors, using Speer and Giesler as the main sources for gaining insights into Hitler’s intentions. See Angela Schönberger, Die Neue Reichskanzlei von Albert Speer: Zum Zusammenhang von nationalsozialistischer Ideologie und Architektur (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1981); and Alex Scobie, Hitler’s State Architecture: The Impact of Classical Antiquity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990). 150. Henry Grosshans, Hitler and the Artists (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983), 10. 151. Peter Adam, Art of the Third Reich (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 52. Other studies struggled with the ambiguity in Hitler’s two-pronged attack on both Goebbels and Rosenberg in his Nuremberg speech in 1934, resorting to representing the Degenerate Art exhibition as the moment when “Hitler finally condemned modernism” but unable to present any evidence that linked him directly to the exhibition. See Klaus Backes, Hitler und die bildenden Künste: Kulturverständnis und Kunstpolitik im Dritten Reich (Cologne: DuMont, 1988), 62–63, 73–76. Grosshans described the Nuremberg speech as the moment when “the official policy had now been defined, and subsequent events were to show that there was no significant deviation from the direction pointed by Hitler.” Grosshans, Hitler and the Artists, 75. 152. Hartmut Frank, “Welche Sprache sprechen Steine?: Zur Einführung in den Sammelband ‘Faschistische Architekturen,’ ” in Frank, Faschistische Architekturen, 14. 153. See Klaus Wolbert, Die Nackten und die Toten des Dritten Reiches: Folgen einer politischen Geschichte des Körpers in der Plastik des deutschen Faschismus (Rossdorf: Anabas, 1982); and Magdalena Bushart, ed., Skulptur und Macht: Figurative Plastik im Deutschland der 30er und 40er Jahre; Eine Ausstellung im Rahmen des Gesamtprojekts der Akademie der Künste vom 8. Mai–3. Juli 1983. (Berlin: Fröhloch und Kaufmann, 1983). 154. Magdalena Bushart, Bernd Nicolai, and Wolfgang Schuster, eds., Entmachtung der Kunst: Architektur, Bildhauerei und ihre Institutionalisierung 1920 bis 1960 (Berlin: Fröhlich und Kaufmann, 1985), 9.

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155. Ute Brüning, “Bauhäusler zwischen Propaganda und Wirtschaftwerbung,” in Nerdinger, Bauhaus-Moderne, 24–47. 156. Andreas Fleischer and Frank Kämpfer, “The Political Poster in the Third Reich,” in The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture and Film in the Third Reich, ed. Brandon Taylor and Wilfried van der Will (Winchester, UK: Winchester Press, in association with the Winchester School of Art, 1990), 183–203. 157. Martin Damus, “Plastik vor und nach 1945: Kontinuität oder Bruch in der skulpturalen Auffassung,” in Bushart, Nicolai, and Schuster, Entmachtung der Kunst, 119–140. 158. For a compelling analysis of the Historikerstreit see Geoff Eley, “Nazism, Politics, and the Image of the Past: Thoughts on the West German Historikerstreit 1986–1987,” Past & Present 121 (November 1988): 171–208. 159. Andrew Decker, “Nazi Art Returns to Germany,” ARTnews 83, no. 9 (November 1984): 143–144. 160. Klaus Staeck, ed., Nazi-Kunst ins Museum? (Göttingen: Steidl, 1988); John Dornberg, “Munich: Mounting Embarrassment,” ARTnews 87, no. 4 (April 1988): 39–42; and Joachim Petsch, Kunst im Dritten Reich (Cologne: Vista Point Verlag, 1987). Kunst im Dritten Reich was originally published in 1983 as an introduction to Nazi art, but Petsch revised and reissued it in response to the Ludwig controversy, adding a chapter on “every-day aesthetics.” 161. Michael Bollé and Eva Züchner, eds., Stationen der Moderne: Die bedeutenden Kunstausstellungen des 20. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Photographie, und Architektur, 1988). 162. Cooper C. Graham, “ ‘Sieg im Westen’ (1941): Interservice and Bureaucratic Propaganda Rivalries in Nazi Germany,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 9, no. 1 (1989): 19–45; Martin Loiperdinger, Der Parteitagsfilm “Triumph des Willens” von Leni Riefenstahl: Rituale der Mobilmachung. Forschungstexte Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften 22 (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1987); and Martin Loiperdinger and David Culbert, “Leni Riefenstahl, the SA, and the Nazi Party Rally Films, Nuremberg 1933–1934: ‘Sieg des Glaubens’ and ‘Triumph des Willens,’ ” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 8, no. 1 (1988): 3–38. 163. Hoffmann, Triumph of Propaganda, 61–63. 164. Taylor and Van der Will, Nazification of Art, vi. 165. Walter Grasskamp, “The De-Nazification of Nazi Art: Arno Breker and Albert Speer Today,” in Taylor and Van der Will, Nazification of Art, 231–248. 166. English contributions to the collection included reprints of Robert Brady’s 1937 essay “The National Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer)” and Susan Sonntag’s provocative 1974 essay on Leni Riefensthal, “Fascinating Fascism.” The volume also included new studies on the long history of the body culture in both left and right political traditions (Wilfried van der Will), the meaning of female representations in Nazi art (Annie Richardson) and film (Eva-Maria Warth), and the problems in ascertaining a distinct Nazi aesthetic (Brandon Taylor), although these all fell short of blazing new trails. Even the contribution on music, although it noted the richness of musical activity during the Third Reich and the aesthetic inconsistencies in musical offerings at the time, accepted that “for the Nazis, the only solution to national recovery lay in crude direct intervention” and that the music had

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to be “harnessed” by “nothing less than total control,” viewing the Reich Music Chamber as “a smokescreen for the realization of Goebbels’ own cherished goals” to delegitimize “elitist music.” Erik Levi, “Music and National Socialism: The Politicisation of Criticism, Composition, and Performance,” in Taylor and Van der Will, Nazification of Art, 161, 164–165. 167. Studies exploring the experiences of those who had been in the Jewish Culture League and the concentration camps include: Akademie der Künste, ed., Geschlossene Vorstellung: Der jüdische Kulturbund in Deutschland 1933–1941 (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1992); Eike Geisel and Henryk M. Broder, Premiere und Pogrom: Der Jüdische Kulturbund 1933–1941: Texte und Bilder (Berlin: Siedler, 1992); and Gabriele Knapp, Das Frauenorchester in Auschwitz: Musikalische Zwangsarbeit und ihre Bewältigung, Musik im “Dritten Reich” und im Exil 2 (Hamburg: Von Bockel, 1996). Major works that appeared in the 1990s on the subject of exiles include: Barron, Exiles and Émigrés; Brinkmann and Wolff, Driven into Paradise; Friedrich Geiger and Thomas Schäfer, eds., Exilmusik: Komposition während der NS-Zeit, Musik im “Dritten Reich” und im Exil 3 (Hamburg: Von Bockel, 1999); Jutta Raab Hansen, NS-verfolgte Musiker in England: Spuren deutscher und österreichischer Flüchtlinge in der britischen Musikkutltur, Musik im “Dritten Reich” und im Exil 1 (Hamburg: Von Bockel, 1996); Heister, Zenck, and Petersen, eds., Musik im Exil; Margret Kentgens-Craig, Bauhaus-Architektur: Die Rezeption in Amerika, 1919–1936 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1993); Claus-Dieter Krohn and Society for Exile Studies, eds., Künste im Exil, Exilforschung 10 (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1992); Claus-Dieter Krohn, Elisabeth Kohlhaas, and Society for Exile Studies, eds., Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration 1933–1945 (Darmstadt: Primus, 1998); Weber, Musik in der Emigration; and Monica Wildauer, ed., Österreichische Musiker im Exil, Beiträge der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Musik 8 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1990). 168. Konrad Dussel, “Kunst und Kultur im NS-Staat: Zur Geschichte ihrer Geschichtsschreibung und deren Ergebnisse,” Neue Politische Literatur 35 (1990): 390–406. 169. Stephanie Barron, “1937: Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany,” in “Degenerate Art,” 10. 170. William Moritz, “Film Censorship during the Nazi Era,” in Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 185–191; and Michael Meyer, “A Musical Façade for the Third Reich,” in Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 171–183. 171. Lehmann-Haupt had stood up to McCarthyites for “the right of the artist to enjoy the same public support and recognition granted any other profession. But taken as a whole, the attitude of the government has been more often on the conservative, retarding, and sometimes reactionary side than on the side of the forward-looking forces.” LehmannHaupt, Art under a Dictatorship, 246. 172. Barron, “Modern Art and Politics,” 22. George Mosse drew parallels between the current controversy (especially the furor over Robert Mapplethorpe) and the German obsession with respectability and morality; see Mosse, “Beauty without Sensuality: The Exhibition Entartete Kunst,” in Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 25–31. This not-so-subtle comparison to U.S. policies was more widespread; see, e.g., Mary-Margaret Goggin, “Decent vs. Degenerate Art: The National Socialist Case,” Art Journal 50, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 84–92; and Barbara Fischer and Luis Madureira, “ ‘The Barbarism of Representation’: The Nazi Critique of Modern Art and the American New Right’s Kulturkampf,” Patterns of Prejudice 28, no. 3–4 (1994): 37–56.

Notes to Pages 167–171

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173. Ehrhard Bahr, “Nazi Cultural Politics: Intentionalism vs. Functionalism,” in Glenn Cuomo, National Socialist Cultural Policy, 5–22. Despite the volume’s 1995 imprint, it was actually compiled in the late 1980s and early 1990s. 174. Jonathan Petropoulos, “A Guide through the Visual Arts Administration of the Third Reich,” in Cuomo, National Socialist Cultural Policy, 122. 175. Bogusław Drewniak, “The Foundations of Theater Policy in Nazi Germany,” in Cuomo, National Socialist Cultural Policy, 68. Throughout this essay, Drewniak continually vacillates between asserting government control and conceding laxity of control. On the one hand, he states that “politicizing of the programs, especially in the area of legitimate theater, proceeded very rapidly” (81) and that Jewish and leftist theater “disappeared entirely” (82). On the other hand, he notes that there was a continuation of pre-Nazi theater programming (69), that Hitler “was against the all-encompassing politicization of the traditional theater” (83), that “the Reich dramaturgist sought to be flexible” (83) and “each theater management . . . could draft programs freely according to their own artistic sense” (83), that the quality of new works was “pitiful” (85), and that even at the height of the war “Germany still had an astonishingly multifaceted theater” (89). 176. Another work exploring the notion of a “neocorporatist impulse” was Uwe Julius Faustmann’s 1990 dissertation on the Reich Culture Chambers, which also referred to a corporatist impulse (“berufsständische Gedanke”) but regarded it as only one factor among the much stronger ideological impulses that fulfilled a totalitarian mission. Uwe Julius Faustmann, “Die Reichskulturkammer: Aufbau, Funktion und Grundlagen einer Körperschaft des öffentilichen Rechts im nationalsozialistischen Regime” (JD diss., University of Bonn, 1990). 177. Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics. 178. See Michael Meyer, The Politics of Music in the Third Reich (New York: Peter Lang, 1991). 179. Kater, Different Drummers. 180. See Walter, Hitler in der Oper, 195–198, 213–262. 181. Eckhard John, Musikbolschewismus: Die Politisierung der Musik in Deutschland 1918–1938 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993). 182. Kater, Twisted Muse; and Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era. 183. Petropoulos, Art as Politics, 75, see also chapters 1–6. 184. Joan L. Clinefelter, “The German Art Society and the Battle for ‘Pure German’ Art, 1920–1945” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1995). See also Clinefelter, Artists for the Reich; Zuschlag, “Entartete Kunst”; and Zuschlag, “Educational Exhibition.” 185. James van Dyke, “Franz Radziwill, the Art Politics of the National Socialist Regime, and the Question of Resistance in Germany, 1930–1939” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1996). 186. Grange, “Ordained Hands on the Altar of Art,” in Gadberry, Theatre in the Third Reich, 75–89. 187. London, Theatre under the Nazis, 222–226; and Kolland, “Wagner-Rezeption im deutschen Faschismus,” 494–503. 188. London, Theatre under the Nazis, 20–22, 25. 189. Ibid., 16–18. 190. Yvonne Shafer, “Nazi Berlin and the Grosses Schauspielhaus,” in Gadberry, Theatre in the Third Reich, 103–120.

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191. Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret. 192. Rainer Stommer and Marina Dalügge, “Masse-Kollektiv-Volksgemeinschaft: Massenästhetische Inszenierungen der zwanziger und dreißiger Jahren,” in Berlin–Moskau, 1900–1950, eds. Irina Antonowa and Jörn Merkert (Munich: Prestel, 1995), 349–355. 193. Robert Wistrich, Weekend in Munich: Art, Propaganda and Terror in the Third Reich (London: Pavilion Books, 1995). 194. Günter Berghaus, ed., Fascism and Theatre: Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925–1945 (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1996); Andrea Hoffend, Zwischen Kultur-Achse und Kulturkampf: Die Beziehungen zwischen “Drittem Reich” und faschistischem Italien in den Bereichen Medien, Kunst, Wissenschaft und Rassenfragen (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1998); Petsch, Kunst im Dritten Reich; Petsch, Alltag im Dritten Reich: Zur Alltagsästhetik im faschistischen Deutschland (Cologne: Vista Point Verlag, 1994); Britta Lammers, Werbung im Nationalsozialismus: Die Kataloge der “Grossen Deutschen Kunstausstellung” 1937–1944, Schriften der Guernica-Gesellschaft 7 (Weimar: VDG, 1999); and Franz Dröge and Michael Müller, Die Macht der Schönheit: Avantgarde und Faschismus oder die Geburt der Massenkultur (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1995). 195. Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 6–7. 196. Ibid, 216–217. 197. Linda Deutschmann, Triumph of the Will: The Image of the Third Reich (Wakefield, NH: Longwood Academic, 1991); David Culbert, “Leni Riefenstahl’s ‘Tag der Freiheit’: The 1935 Nazi Party Rally Film,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 12, no. 3 (August 1992): 3–40; Stig Hornshøj-Møller and David Culbert, “Der Ewige Jude (1940): Joseph Goebbels’ Unequalled Monument to Anti-Semitism,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 12, no. 1 (1992): 41–67; Stig Hornshøj-Møller, Der Ewige Jude: Quellen-kritische Analyse eines antisemitischen Propagandafilms (Göttingen: Institut für den wissenschaftlichen Film, 1995); Thomas Sakmyster, “Nazi Documentaries of Intimidation: ‘Feldzug in Polen’ (1940), ‘Feuertaufe’ (1940) and ‘Sieg im Westen’ (1941),” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 16, no. 4 (October 1996): 485–512; Susan Tegel, Jew Süss = Jud Süss (Trowbridge, UK: Flicks Books, 1996); Susan Tegel, “Veit Harlan and the Origins of Jew Süss, 1938–1939: Opportunism in the Creation of Nazi Anti-Semitic Film Propaganda,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 16, no. 4 (October 1996): 515–532; R. C. Lutz, “False History, Fake Africa, and the Transcription of Nazi Reality in Hans Steinhoff ’s Ohm Krueger,” Literature/Film Quarterly 25, no. 3 (1997): 188–192; Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien, “Aestheticizing War: Eduard von Borsody’s Wunschkonzert (1940),” Seminar 33, no. 1 (1997): 36–49; and Marcia Klotz, “Epistemological Ambiguity and the Fascist Text: Jew Süss, Carl Peters, and Ohm Krüger,” New German Critique 74 (Spring/Summer 1998): 91–124. 198. Klaus Kanzog, “Staatspolitisch besonders wertvoll”: Ein Handbuch zu 30 deutschen Spielfilmen der Jahre 1934 bis 1945, Diskurs Film 6 (Munich: Schaudig und Ledig, 1994); and Ulrich von der Osten, NS-Filme im Kontext sehen!: “Staatspolitisch besonders wertvolle” Filme der Jahre 1934–1938, Diskurs Film 13 (Munich: Diskurs Film Verlag, 1998). 199. Karsten Witte, “Filmkomödie im Faschismus” (PhD diss., Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, 1986); Karsten Witte, Lachende Erben, toller Tag: Filmkomödie im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 1995); Karsten Witte, “How Fascist is the Punch Bowl?,” trans. Michael Richardson, New German Critique 74 (Spring/Summer 1998): 31–36; Stephan

Notes to Pages 172–174

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Lowry, Pathos und Politik: Ideologie in Spielfilmen des Nationalsozialismus (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991); and Stephen Lowry, “Ideology and Excess in Nazi Melodrama: The Golden City,” New German Critique 74 (Spring/Summer 1998): 125–149. 200. Klaus Kreimeier, Die Ufa-Story: Geschichte eines Filmkonzerns (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1992). 201. Felix Moeller, The Film Minister: Goebbels and the Cinema in the Third Reich, trans. Michael Robinson (Stuttgart: Edition Axel Menges, 2000), quote on p. 10. 202. Marc Silberman, German Cinema: Texts in Context (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995). 203. Linda Schulte-Sasse, Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema, Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). 204. Birgitta Welzel, Die Beliebigkeit der filmischen Botschaft: Aufgewiesen am “ideologischen” Gehalt von 120 NS-Spielfilmen, Theater unserer Zeit 28 (Rheinfelden: Schäuble, 1994); and Markus Spieker, Hollywood unterm Hakenkreuz: Der amerikanische Spielfilm im Dritten Reich, Filmgeschichte international 6 (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1999). 205. Cinzia Romani, Tainted Goddesses: Female Film Stars of the Third Reich, trans. Robert Connelly (New York: Sarpedon, 1992; original published in Italian in 1981); Dora Traudisch, Mutterschaft mit Zuckerguss?: Frauenfeindliche Propaganda im NS-Spielfilm, Frauen in Geschichte und Gesellschaft 23 (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1993); Manuela Von Papen, “Keeping the Home Fires Burning?: Women and the German Homefront Film 1940–1943,” Film History 8, no. 1 (1996): 44–63; and Karsten Witte, “Too Beautiful to Be True: Lilian Harvey,” trans. Eric Rentschler, New German Critique 74 (Spring/Summer 1998): 37–39. 206. Antje Ascheid, “Nazi Stardom and the ‘Modern Girl’: The Case of Lilian Harvey,” New German Critique 74 (Spring/Summer 1998): 57–89. 207. See Jack Anderson, review of Individuality and Expression: The Aesthetics of the New German Dance, 1908–1936, by Diane S. Howe, Dance Chronicle: Studies in Dance and the Related Arts 22, no. 2 (1999): 301–305; and Karl Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 208. Lilian Karina and Marion Kant, Tanz unterm Hakenkreuz: Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 1996); see also Pamela M. Potter, review of Hitler’s Dancers: German Modern Dance in the Third Reich, by Lilian Karina and Marion Kant, trans. Jonathan Steinberg, Journal of Modern History 77, no. 3 (2005): 849–851; and Richard Merz, “Tanzschaffende in Diktaturen,” Tanz und Gymnastik 1 (1997): 23–26. 209. See also Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon; Claudia Jeschke, review of Ecstasy and the Demon: Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman, by Susan Manning, Dance Research Journal 27, no. 2 (Autumn, 1995): 34–36; and John Rouse, review of Ecstasy and the Demon: Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman, by Susan Manning, Dance Research Journal 27, no. 2 (Autumn, 1995): 36–38. 210. Hedwig Müller, “Tänzerinnen im Nationalsozialismus,” Tanzforschung Jahrbuch 3 (1992): 134–145. 211. Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon, 171–173. 212. Peter Jelavich, “Review Article: National Socialism, Art and Power in the 1930s,” Past and Present 164, no. 1 (August 1999), 244–265.

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213. Suzanne Marchand, “Nazi Culture: Banality or Barbarism?” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 1 (March 1998): 108–118. 5 . M O D E R N I SM A N D T H E I S O L AT IO N O F NA Z I C U LT U R E

1. Stonard, Fault Lines, 101. 2. Bernard Smith, Modernism’s History: A Study in Twentieth-Century Art and Ideas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 3. Glenn Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 4. Charles Harrison, “Modernism,” in Critical Terms for Art History, 2d ed., ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 188–201. 5. Miriam Bratu Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 60. 6. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 98, quoted in Roger Griffin, ed., Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 52. 7. Walter Frisch, German Modernism: Music and the Arts, California Studies in 20th-Century Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), quotes on pp. 14 and 203. 8. Jarausch and Geyer, Shattered Past, 85–90. 9. Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, 249–256, 279–309. 10. Jürgen Kocka, “German History before Hitler: The Debate about the German Sonderweg,” Journal of Contemporary History 23, no. 1 (1988): 3–16. 11. Quoted in Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 196. 12. Paul Betts, “The New Fascination with Fascism: The Case of Nazi Modernism,” Journal of Contemporary History 37, no. 4 (2002): 541–558. See also “The Aesthetics of Fascism,” special issue, Journal of Contemporary History 31, no. 2 (April 1996). 13. Michael Prinz and Rainer Zitelmann, eds., Nationalsozialismus und Modernisierung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1991); and Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, 45–46. 14. Mark Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); and Emily Braun, “Mario Sironi’s Urban Landscapes: The Futurist/Fascist Nexus,” in Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy, ed. Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 101–133. 15. Jarausch and Geyer, Shattered Past, chapter 3. 16. Peter Fritzsche, “Nazi Modern,” Modernism/Modernity 3, no. 1 (1996): 1–22. 17. Stonard, Fault Lines, 206–210. 18. Gay, Weimar Culture, 3ff. 19. Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965), 171, 217. The editors of the fourth and most recent edition, which appeared in 2005, saw fit to add four new sections, including one titled

Notes to Pages 180–184

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“Expressionism,” which named Erich Mendelssohn’s Einstein Tower as the characteristic German example of the style. See Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 165. 20. See, for example, Michael Patterson and Michael Huxley, “German Drama, Theatre and Dance,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern German Culture, ed. Eva Kolinsky and Wilfred van der Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 218–219; Martin Brady and Helen Hughes, “German Cinema,” in Kolinsky and Van der Will, Modern German Culture, 303–304; John Willett, Expressionism (London: World University Library, 1970), 158–160. Klaus Kreimeier, however, explicitly dismissed the applicability of the term “expressionism” to film. See Kreimeier, Ufa Story, 87. 21. Susan Laikin Funkenstein, “There’s Something about Mary Wigman: The Woman Dancer as Subject in German Expressionist Art,” Gender & History 17, no. 3 (November 2005): 826–859; and Moss, “Spinning through the Weltanschauung,” 22–25. 22. Stonard, Fault Lines, 205–206. 23. Smith, Modernism’s History, 112. 24. Rose-Carol Washton Long, “Brücke, German Expressionism and the Issue of Modernism,” in New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism: Bridging Histories, ed. Christian Weikop (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), 12–17. 25. Joan Weinstein, The End of Expressionism: Art and the November Revolution in Germany, 1918–19 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), quote on p. 233. 26. Shearer West, The Visual Arts in Germany, 1890–1937: Utopia and Despair (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000). 27. James van Dyke, “Franz Radziwill,” chapters 1 and 2, quote on p. 111; and Van Dyke Franz Radziwill and the Contradictions of German Art History, 1919–45 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011). 28. Maertz, “Invisible Museum.” 29. Stonard, Fault Lines, 177–181. 30. Adolf Behne, Entartete Kunst (Berlin: Carl Habel, 1947), quote on p. 48. 31. Rave, Kunstdiktatur, 10–13, 59–60, 77–79. 32. Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movement: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 78, 80. 33. Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design, 1960 ed., 74. 34. Lehmann-Haupt, Art under a Dictatorship, 189. 35. Bernard Myers, “Postwar Art in Germany,” College Art Journal 10, no. 3 (Spring 1951): 251–256, 260. 36. Willett, Expressionism, 9–10. Almost twenty years after the appearance of Willett’s book, an exhibit on German expressionism traced the style’s origin to 1925 and categorized the artists pursuing it after World War I as “for the most part outspoken political activists,” although some of the works included, especially those of Dix, Grosz, and Gert Wollheim, would seem better situated in a display of Neue Sachlichkeit. See Stephanie Barron, ed., German Expressionism 1915–1925: The Second Generation (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1988), 11. 37. Scholz, Architektur und bildende Kunst, 17, 24–26, 29, 30–32. 38. See the essays by Gillen and Wucher in Blume and Scholz, Überbrückt: Ästhetische Moderne und Nationalsozialismus.

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39. Stefan Germer, “Kunst der Nation: Zu einem Versuch, die Avantgarde zu nationalisieren,” in Kunst auf Befehl?: Dreiunddreißig bis Fünfundvierzig, ed. Bazon Brock and Achim Preiß (Munich: Klinkhardt und Biermann, 1990) 21–40. See also Stonard, Fault Lines, 192–193. 40. Lehmann-Haupt, Art under a Dictatorship, 72. 41. Ibid., 202, chapter 14. 42. Ibid., 89. 43. Ibid., 88. 44. Ibid., 243. 45. Brenner, “Art in the Political Power Struggle,“ 400–424. 46. Vogt, “Nachexpressionismus,” 11–15. 47. Otto Andreas Schreiber, “Die ‘Fabrikausstellung’ der dreißiger Jahre,” in Vogt et al., Die Dreissiger Jahre, 96–97. 48. Ateliergemeinschaft Klosterstrasse. 49. An English translation of Roh’s essay by Wendy B. Faris was published as “Magical Realism: Post-Expressionism (1925),” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 15–31. 50. Irene Guenther, “Magic Realism, New Objectivity, and the Arts during the Weimar Republic,” in Parkinson, Zamora, and Faris, Magical Realism, 33–73. 51. Stonard, Fault Lines, 48. 52. Roh, “Entartete” Kunst, 44. 53. Ibid., 51. 54. Quoted in Ingeborg Bloth, Adolf Wissel: Malerei und Kunstpolitik im Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1994), 53. 55. Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 19. 56. Wieland Schmied, Neue Sachlichkeit und Magischer Realismus in Deutschland 1918– 1933 (Hannover: Fackelträger-Verlag, 1969), 69–71; see also Schmied, Neue Sachlichkeit and German Realism of the Twenties (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979), 7. 57. Hinz, Art in the Third Reich, 23. 58. Günter Aust, “Traditionalismus und Trivialität,” in Vogt et al., Die Dreissiger Jahre, 65–93. 59. Scholz, Architektur und bildende Kunst, 17, 28. 60. John Willett, The New Sobriety 1917–1933: Art and Politics in the Weimar Period (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978). 61. Adam, Art of the Third Reich, 97–109, 302–305. 62. Sergiusz Michalski, New Objectivity: Painting, Graphic Art and Photography in Weimar Germany 1919–1933, trans. Michael Claridge (Cologne: Taschen, 2003), 195. 63. Jost Hermand, “Unity within Diversity?: The History of the Concept ‘Neue Sachlichkeit,’ ” in Culture and Society in the Weimar Republic, ed. Keith Bullivant (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), 166–182. 64. Adam C. Oellers, “Zur Frage der Kontinuität von Neuer Sachlichkeit und Nationalsozialistischer Kunst,” Kritische Berichte 6, no. 6 (1978): 42–54; see also Oellers, “Tradition und Ideologie in der Industriedarstellung des Nationalsozialismus,” in Kunst und Technik in den 20er Jahren: Neue Sachlichkeit und Gegenständlicher Konstruktivismus, ed. Helmut Friedel (Munich: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 1980), 148–155.

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65. Richard Grunberger, The 12-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany 1933–1945 (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971), 471. 66. Oellers, “Zur Frage der Kontinuität.” 67. Ines Schlenker, Hitler’s Salon: The Große Deutsche Kuntstausstellung at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich 1937–1944, German Linguistic and Cultural Studies 20 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 144. 68. Klaus P. Lücke, Rudolf Hengstenberg: Maler im Nationalsozialismus (Eschborn: Verlag microPLAN, 1996), 28–36; see also Hans Heinrich Maaß-Radziwill, Franz Radziwill im “Dritten Reich”: Der andere Widerstand (Bremen: Hauschild, 1995); and Iain Boyd White, “Berlin, 1 May 1936,” in Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators 1930–45; The XXIII Council of Europe Exhibition, ed. Dawn Ades (London: Hayward Gallery, 1995), 43–49. 69. Bloth, Adolf Wissel; Olaf Peters, Neue Sachlichkeit und Nationalsozialismus: Affirmation und Kritik 1931–1947 (Berlin: Reimer, 1998); Anja Hesse, Malerei des Nationalsozialismus: Der Maler Werner Peiner (1897–1984), Studien zur Kunstgeschichte (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1995); Van Dyke, “Franz Radziwill, the Art Politics of the National Socialist Regime”; and Van Dyke, Franz Radziwill and the Contradictions of German Art History. 70. See, for example, Ingeborg Bloth, Deutsche Kunst 1933–1945 in Braunschweig: Kunst im Nationalsozialismus (Hildesheim: Olms, 2000). 71. Ingeborg Güssow, “Kunst und Technik in den 20er Jahren: Einführung,” in Friedel, Kunst und Technik, 30–45; Güssow, “Malerei der Neuen Sachlichkeit,” in Friedel, Kunst und Technik, 46–73; and Güssow, “Die Malerei des Gegenständlichen Konstruktivismus,” in Friedel, Kunst und Technik, 74–93. 72. Ron Manheim, “Die Welt der Technik in der deutschen expressionistischen Malerie,” in Friedel, Kunst und Technik, 112–123; Hanne Bergius, “dada machinel,” in Friedel, Kunst und Technik, 124–137; and Peter Hahn, “Kunst und Technik in der Konzeption des Bauhauses,” in Friedel, Kunst und Technik, 138–147. 73. Anson G. Rabinbach, “The Aesthetics of Production in the Third Reich,” “Theories of Fascism,” special issue, Journal of Contemporary History 11, no. 4 (October 1976): 43–74. 74. Helmut Friedel, “Film und Technik,” in Friedel, Kunst und Technik, 108–111; see also Kreimeier, Ufa Story, 113, 174–175, 253, 272. 75. Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design, 4th ed., 168. 76. Hahn, “Bauhaus and Exile,” 211–221. 77. Roh, “Entartete” Kunst, 44. 78. Ibid., 62–63. 79. Brenner, Kunstpolitik, 24–25, 118–130. 80. Anna Teut, ed., Architektur im Dritten Reich 1933–1945 (Berlin: Ullstein, 1967), 7–14. 81. Jordy, “Bauhaus in America,” 500. 82. Peter Pfankuch, “Planen und Bauen 1930–1940,” in Vogt et al., Die Dreissiger Jahre, 164. 83. Winfried Nerdinger, “Versuchung und Dilemma der Avantgarden im Spiegel der Architekturwettbewerbe 1933–35,” in Frank, Faschistische Architekturen, 65–87; and

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Gerhard Fehl, “Die Moderne unterm Hakenkreuz: Ein Versuch, die Rolle funktionalistischer Architektur im Dritten Reich zu klären,” in Frank, Faschistische Architekturen, 88–122. 84. Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics, 193–204. 85. Frank, “Welche Sprache sprechen Steine?” in Frank, Faschistische Architekturen. 86. Winfried Nerdinger, “Bauhaus-Architekten im ‘Dritten Reich,’ ” in Nerdinger and Bauhaus-Archiv, Bauhaus-Moderne, 153–178, quote on p. 170; and Nerdinger, “Bauen im Nationalsozialismus: Vortrag im Nürnberger Kommunikationszentrum am 4. November 1994,” in Bauen in Nürnberg, 1933–1945: Architektur und Bauformen im Nationalsozialismus, ed. Helmut Beer (Nuremberg: W. Tümmels Buchdruckerei und Verlag, 1995), 10–13. 87. Lehmann-Haupt even put together a table that ranked the different art forms according to their “immunity . . . to ideological corruption,” showing arts and crafts as the most resistant (20–30 percent susceptible), followed by architecture (40–60 percent), sculpture (70–80 percent) and painting (80–90 percent). Lehmann-Haupt, Art under a Dictatorship, 136. 88. Quoted in John Heskett, “Modernism and Archaism in Design in the Third Reich,” in Taylor and Van der Will, Nazification of Art, 111. 89. Sabine Weißler, “Bauhaus-Gestaltung in NS-Propaganda-Ausstellungen,” in Nerdinger and Bauhaus-Archiv, Bauhaus-Moderne, 48–63. 90. See Heskett, “Modernism and Archaism,” 110–127; and Sabine Weißler, “Worum es geht,” in Design in Deutschland, 8–9; and Weißler, “Geschenkte Traditionen,” in Weißler, Design in Deutschland, 10–29. 91. Paul Betts, The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design, Weimar and Now (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 23–45. 92. See Weißler, Design in Deutschland 1933–45, 10–11, 34–38, 64–68. 93. Heskett, “Modernism and Archaism,” 120–127. 94. Magdalena Droste, “Bauhaus-Designer zwischen Handwerk und Moderne,” in Nerdinger and Bauhaus-Archiv, Bauhaus-Moderne, 85–101. 95. Hartmut Frank, “Bridges: Paul Bonatz’s Search for a Contemporary Monumental Style,” in Taylor and Van der Will, Nazification of Art, 144–157. 96. Jeffrey L. Meikle, “Domesticating Modernity: Ambivalence and Appropriation, 1920–1940,” in Designing Modernity: The Arts of Reform and Persuasion 1885–1945; Selections from the Wolfsonian, ed. Wendy Kaplan (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 143–168. 97. Bernard F. Reilly Jr., “Emblems of Production: Workers in German, Italian, and American Art during the 1930s,” in Kaplan, Designing Modernity, 287–313. 98. John Heskett, “Design in Inter-War Germany,” in Kaplan, Designing Modernity, 257–285. 99. Betts, Authority, 46–51. 100. Lehmann-Haupt, Art under a Dictatorship, 91. 101. Scholz, Architektur und bildende Kunst, 9, 11, 20–22, 39–40, 45–46. 102. Eckhart Gillen, “Ist Sozialistischer Realismus mit nationalsozialistischer Kunst vergleichbar?: Eine Antwort auf Berthold Hinz,” Ästhetik und Kommunkation 26 (1976): 88–95; Igor Golomshtok, Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People’s Republic of China, trans. Robert Chandler (New York: Harper Collins, 1990), 216–

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217; and Martin Damus, Sozialistischer Realismus und Kunst im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1981). 103. Damus, Sozialistischer Realismus, 11. 104. Marie Luise Syring, “ . . . Sie bedroht, trommelt, bricht durch—Kunst als Kampf . . . Geschichte der Realismusdebatte in der Sowjetunion, Deutschland, Frankreich, Spanien und Italien,” in Harten, Schmidt, and Syring, “Die Axt hat geblüht,” 103–114. 105. Ades, Art and Power. 106. Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, Cultural Memory in the Present, trans. Janet Lloyd, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 107. Michaud further notes that the similarities between German taste and artistic penchants throughout Europe even prompted French historian Pierre Ayçoberry to paraphrase an English socialist’s 1943 observation: “Is not that country simply a caricature of our own countries?” 107. Lehmann-Haupt, Art under a Dictatorship, 55, 106. 108. Ibid., 123–126. 109. Ibid., 117. 110. Roh, “Entartete” Kunst, 47–48. 111. Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics, 38. 112. Kießling, Kraut, and Wanitzek, “Großbauten des Staates,” in Bussmann, Kunst im 3. Reich, 110–111; Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics, 44; Taylor, Word in Stone, 113; and Jordy, “Bauhaus in America,” 500. The essay “Grossbauten des Staates,” which was prepared for the 1974 Frankfurt exhibit on Nazi art curated by Hinz and others, named the 1912 German embassy building in Leningrad as an inspiration for Nazi neoclassical architecture. The embassy, however, was built by Peter Behrens, the mentor of Gropius, Mies, and Le Corbusier, who was reviled by Nazi critics. This particular structure seemed to illustrate an embarrassing continuity: before neoclassicism was tainted by its associations with Nazism, Pevsner praised the Behrens structure as “one of the best buildings erected in the years before the war for the purpose of representing national grandeur” in the first edition of his textbook that appeared in 1936 (Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movement, 196–197), but he completely excised this observation from the 1960 edition of the work (Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design, 1960 ed., 204). This may partly be due to the fact that Behrens, while “out of favor with the Nazis,” had designed structures around this time that even more closely resembled Nazi neoclassical architecture, such as the Wiegand house in Berlin, and received a commission from Speer to design an office block for AEG on the important North-South axis of Berlin. See Sabine Weißler, “‘Posener, geben Sie mir den härtesten Gropius!’: Gespräch mit Julius Posener, augezeichnet und bearbeitet von Eckhard Siepmann und Sabine Weißler, Werkbund-Archiv Berlin, am 23.11.1988,” in Design in Deutschland 1933–45, 32–33; and Scobie, Hitler’s State Architecture, 60. 113. Quoted in Richard Hüttel, “Neo-Klassizismus oder Aneignung der nationalen Baugeschichte: Zur Architektur im Jahre 1937,” in Harten, Schmidt, and Syring, “Die Axt hat geblüht,” 75. 114. Hüttel, “Neo-Klassizismus.” 115. Scobie, Hitler’s State Architecture, 137. 116. Hans-Ernst Mittig, “NS-Stil als Machtmittel,” in Moderne Architektur in Deutschland 1900 bis 2000: Macht und Monument, ed. Romana Schneider and Wilfried Wang (Ostfildern-Ruit: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1998), 101–115.

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117. Leiser, Nazi Cinema, 12, 16. 118. Baird, “Nazi Film Propaganda,” 34–41; William G. Chrystal, “Nazi Party Election Films, 1927–1938,” Cinema Journal 15, no. 1 (Fall 1975): 29–47; Francis Courtade and Pierre Cadars, Geschichte des Films im Dritten Reich (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1975); David B. Hinton, “ ‘Triumph of the Will’: Document or Artifice?” Cinema Journal 15, no. 1 (Fall 1975): 48–57; and Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema. 119. Hoffmann, Triumph of Propaganda, x, 1–60, 66, 69. 120. Phillips, “Nazi Control of the German Film Industry,” 67. 121. Wollenberg, Fifty Years of German Film, 19–23, 29–30, 41. 122. Hull, Film in the Third Reich, 64–66. 123. Ibid., 130–131, 157–177, 179–184, 260 124. Günter Netzeband, “D. St. Hull und die Folgen: Korrekturen zur NazifilmGeschichtsschreibung,” Film und Fernsehen 1 (1979): 33–38. 125. Rentschler, Ministry of Illusion, 168–169. 126. Hull, Film in the Third Reich, 75ff., 117–120, 132–136, 139–140. 127. Rentschler, Ministry of Illusion, 216. 128. Barry A. Fulks, “Walter Ruttmann, the Avant-Garde Film, and Nazi Modernism,” Film & History 14, no. 2 (May 1984): 26–46, quote on p. 34. 129. Fulks, “Film Culture and Kulturfilm,” 123, 126. 130. Jay, Permanent Exiles, 60–61. 131. Fulks, “Film Culture and Kulturfilm,” chapter 5, 181, quote on p. 171. 132. The 1980 collection Kunst und Technik in den 20er Jahren: Neue Sachlichkeit und Gegenständlicher Konstruktivismus is one of the few studies to deal extensively with these international links. Igor Golomshtok’s Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People’s Republic of China also considers the topic, albeit obliquely. While Golomshtok’s definition of “total realism” rests squarely on a rejection of modernism and a return to conservative style, he did indirectly acknowledge the international links in pointing to the socialist impulses among Soviet, Fascist, and National Socialist leadership and their common mandate to embrace art that would be easily comprehensible. Although it was not part of his mission, Golomshtok essentially showed the common paths of Italian Futurism and its Russian adaptations, resulting in a “conglomeration” of futurism, constructivism, and productionism, the principles of which sound remarkably similar to those of the Bauhaus and Neue Sachlichkeit. See Igor Golomshtok, Totalitarian Art, chapter 1. 133. Ketelsen, Heroisches Theater, 35. 134. Rühle, Zeit und Theater. 135. Peter H. Bumm, “Drama und Theater der konservativen Revolution,” PhD diss., University of Munich, 1969. 136. Brenner, Kunstpolitik, 18. 137. London, Theatre under the Nazis, 30. 138. Quotes in Grange, “Ordained Hands,” 80, 81; see also London, Theatre under the Nazis, 247–250. 139. Frederic Spotts, Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 184–185. 140. Fischer, “Wagner-Interpretation im Dritten Reich.” The most comprehensive account of Hitler’s involvement in the Bayreuth Festival is Brigitte Hamann, Winifred

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Wagner oder Hitlers Bayreuth (Munich: Piper, 2002); translated by Alan Bance as Winifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler’s Bayreuth (London: Granta Books, 2005). 141. Eichberg, “Thing-, Fest- und Weihespiele,” 47, 53, chapter 3. 142. Dieter Bartetzko, “Stimmungsarchitektur: Zur Theatralik von NS-Baukunst,” in Harten, Schmidt, and Syring, “Die Axt hat geblüht,” 82–90. 143. Müller, “Wigman and National Socialism,” 65–73; and Manning and Benson, “Interrupted Continuities,” 30–45. 144. Prickett, “From Workers’ Dance to New Dance,” 57–59. 145. Susan Manning makes the connection when she states that Totenmal “can be termed protofascist . . . The protofascism of Totenmal cannot be understood simply as a matter of Wigman and Talhoff ’s intentionality, but rather as an illustration of how theatrical production models cultural transformation, in this case the transformation from Weimar to the Third Reich.” Manning, “Ideology and Performance,” 212. 146. Müller, “Tänzerinnen im Nationalsozialismus,” 134–145. 147. Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon, 172–202, quote on pp. 172–173. 148. Moss, “Spinning through the Weltanschauung,” 251–253, 258–259, 309–311. 149. Orff, Egk, and Hauer are discussed in Morgan, Twentieth-Century Music, 258, 262; Salzman writes that Orff and Egk submitted to the Nazis’ demand for “a simple art with a popular base of support” that constituted a “powerful anti-twelve-tone force in Germanspeaking countries” (Salzman, Twentieth-Century Music, 123); and Watkins describes Orff being silenced by Hitler and discusses him alongside Hindemith and Krenek (Watkins, Soundings, 294–295). 150. See, for example, Ulrich Drüner and Georg Günther, Musik und “Drittes Reich”: Fallbeispiele 1910 bis 1960 zu Herkunft, Höhepunkt und Nachwirkungen des Nationalsozialismus in der Musik (Vienna: Böhlau, 2012). 151. See Carl Dahlhaus, “Politische Implikationen der Operndramaturgie: Zu einigen deutschen Opern der Dreißiger Jahre,” in Mahling and Wiesmann, Bericht, 148–153; and Hans-Günter Klein, “Atonalität in den Opern von Paul von Klenau und Winfried Zillig: Zur Duldung einer im Nationalsozialismus verfemten Kompositionstechnik,” in Mahling and Wiesmann, Bericht, 490–494. 152. Klein, “Viel Konformität und wenig Verweigerung: Zur Komposition neuer Opern 1933–1944,” in Heister and Klein, Musik und Musikpolitik, 145–148. 153. Erik Levi, “Towards an Aesthetic of Fascist Opera,” in Berghaus, Fascism and Theatre, 264. 154. Walter, Hitler in der Oper, 175–213. 155. Lucia Sziborsky, “Adornos Musikphilosophie und die Nazi-Ästhetik,” in Die dunkle Last: Musik und Nationalsozialismus, ed. Brunhilde Sonntag, Hans-Werner Boresch, and Detlef Gojowy (Cologne: Bela Verlag, 1999), 23–41; Hans-Werner Boresch, “ ‘Zersetzender Intellektualismus’ und ‘apodiktischer Glaube’: Die Nationalsozialisten in der Tradition des Antirationalismus,” in Sonntag, Boresch, and Gojowy, Die dunkle Last, 64–91; and Bettina Schlüter, “Paradoxie und Ritualisierung: Die ‘Kirchenmusikalische Erneuerungsbewegung’ und der Nationalsozialismus,” in Sonntag, Boresch, and Gojowy, Die dunkle Last, 130–145. 156. Thomas Eickhoff, “‘Harmonika-Heil’: Über ein Musikinstrument und seine Ideologisierung im Nationalsozialismus,” in Sonntag, Boresch, and Gojowy, Die dunkle Last, 146–183. 157. Carroll, Music and Ideology, 157–158.

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Notes to Pages 208–216

158. Willett, Expressionism, 85–86, 151–152. Musicologist Glenn Watkins similarly limited his discussion of expressionism to the works of Schoenberg that most effectively explore the psyche: the song cycle Pierrot lunaire (set to the text of Albert Giraud) and the one-woman opera Erwartung (a psychological monologue based on a text by a medical student and relative of Freud’s Anna O.), the very same expressionist works that first attracted Adorno (Watkins, Soundings, 170–195). 159. John Crawford and Dorothy Crawford, Expressionism in Twentieth-Century Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 160. Willett, New Sobriety, 158–162. 161. Nils Grosch, Die Musik der Neuen Sachlichkeit (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler Verlag, 1999). 162. Kordes, “Darmstadt, Post-war Experimentation,” 205–217. 163. Gay, Weimar Culture; and Michael H. Kater, “The Revenge of the Fathers: The Demise of Modern Music at the End of the Weimar Republic,” German Studies Review 15, no. 2 (1992): 295–315. 164. Schubert, “Aesthetic Premises,” 70. 165. Much to the contrary, a search of Nazi-era literature reveals a wealth of Grünewald scholarship and lore totaling at least twenty titles. 166. Evans, “Stravinsky’s Music in Hitler’s Germany,” 525–594. 167. Herbert Gerigk, “Eine Lanze für Schönberg,” Die Musik 27 (1934): 89. 168. Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat, 303–306. 169. Carl Dahlhaus, “Politische Implikationen,” in Mahling and Wiesmann, Bericht, 148–149; and József Ujfalussy, “Musikpolitische Lehren der Dreißiger Jahre in Ost-Europa,” in Mahling and Wiesmann, Bericht, 168–169. 170. Marius Flothuis, “Elan und Ermüdung: Musik um 1930 in England, Frankreich und den Niederlanden,” in Mahling and Wiesmann, Bericht, 154–155, 157. 171. Albrecht Riethmüller, “Die Dreißiger Jahre: Eine Dekade kompositorischer Ermüdung oder Konsolidierung?; Zusammenfassung der Diskussion,” in Mahling and Wiesmann, Bericht, 176–177, 179. 172. Evans, “International with National Emphasis,” 108. 173. Erik Levi, “Opera in the Nazi Period,” in London, Theatre under the Nazis, 169. 174. Davidson, Kunst in Deutschland, 47–50, 55–56. 175. Dussel, “Kunst und Kultur,” 393–394. 176. Lynn Kellmanson Matheny, “Reactionary Modernism and Fascist Aesthetics: National Socialist Visual Culture and the Appropriation of Modernism” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1999), 10–11, 77–80, 92. 177. Ibid., 157. 178. Ibid., 50–51. 179. Ibid., 65. 6 . C U LT U R A L H I S T O R I E S A F T E R T H E C O L D WA R

1. Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 19–24, 27. 2. Ibid., 12–13. 3. Golomshtok, Totalitarian Art, 82.

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4. Eberhard Diepgen, “Zum Geleit,” in Antonowa and Merkert, Berlin–Moskau, 9. 5. Jörn Merkert, “Die Büchse der Pandora?: Anmerkungen zum Umgang mit der Ästhetik der Macht im 20. Jahrhundert,” in Antonowa and Merkert, Berlin–Moskau, 357–359; and Igor Golomstock, “Kunst und Propaganda in den kriegsführenden Ländern,” in Antonowa and Merkert, Berlin–Moskau, 453–457. 6. Oksana Bulgakowa, “Film-Phantasien im Wettbewerb,” in Antonowa and Merkert, Berlin–Moskau, 361–365. 7. Jost Hermand, “Künstler, Staat und Gesellschaft: Kulturpolitik in der UdSSR und in Nazi-Deutschland,” in Antonowa and Merkert, Berlin–Moskau, 343–347. 8. See essays by Igor Golomschtok, Claus-Dieter Rath, Monika Faber, Wolfgang Drechsler, Hans Bisanz, Thomas Weyr, Ivan Klima, and Sokratis Dimitriou, in Kunst und Diktatur: Architektur, Bildhauerei und Malerei in Österreich, Deutschland, Italien und der Sowjetunion 1922–1956, vol. 1, ed. Jan Tabor (Baden: Verlag Grasl, 1994). 9. See essays by Catherine Milian, Jonathan Petropoulos, Eva von Seckendorff, and Hans Landauer in Tabor, Kunst und Diktatur, vol. 2. 10. Peter Huemer, “Das Böse in der Kunst,” in Tabor, Kunst und Diktatur, vol. 1, 14–16. 11. Steven Heller, Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State (London: Phaidon Press, 2008), 10. 12. Joachim Braun, Heidi Tamar Hoffmann, and Vladimír Karbusický, eds., Verfemte Musik: Komponisten in den Diktaturen unseres Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt: P. Lang, 1997). 13. Friedrich Geiger, Musik in zwei Diktaturen: Verfolgung von Komponisten unter Hitler und Stalin (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2004). 14. Michaela G. Grochulski, Oliver Kautny, and Helmke Jan Keden, eds., Musik in Diktaturen des 20. Jahrhunderts, Musik im Metrum der Macht 3 (Mainz: Are Edition, 2006). 15. Eckhard Jesse, “ ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ nach totalitärer Herrschaft in Deutschland,” German Studies Review 17 (Fall 1994): 157–171. 16. Andreas Beaugrand, “ ‘ . . . Und sie werden nicht mehr frei ihr ganzes Leben’ (Adolf Hitler): Stil-Blüten; Zeichen affirmativer Kunst aus dem ‘Dritten Reich,’ ” in Totalitäre Kunst—Kunst im Totalitarismus?: Beispiele aus dem NS-Staat und der DDR, ed. Andreas Beaugrand, Ilse Lindau, and Manfred Strecker (Bielefeld: Pendragon, 1997), 8–33. In this volume, Hans Günther summarized the common trends of Stalinist and Nazi art as follows: Gemeinsame Züge der Kunst totalitärer Staaten sind Monumentalität, der Kult des Heroischen (samt seinem obligaten Gegenstück, dem Feindbild), der Hang zur Klassik, die Berufung auf das ‘Volk’ (vgl. das ‘Volkhafte’ im Nationalsozialismus bzw. das ‘Volkstümliche’ im sozialistischen Realismus) und ein idealisierender ‘Realismus.’ Gemeinsam ist auch die Tendenz zur Ästhetisierung aller Lebensbereiche, zur Umformung der Gesellschaft in ein staatliches Gesamtkunstwerk. Im Nationalsozialismus wirken hier Ideen Richard Wagners, in Rußland das avantgardistische Projekt der Verschmelzung von Kunst und Leben nach. In beiden Systemen setzt sich jedoch ein militanter Antimodernismus durch, von dem die sowjetische Kampagne gegen ‘Formalismus’ des Jahres 1936 oder die Münchner Ausstellung ‘Entartete Kunst’ von 1937 zeugen. (Hans Günther, “Gibt es eine totalitäre Kunst?: Nationalsozialismus und Stalinismus im Vergleich,” in Beaugrand, Lindau, and Strecker, Totalitäre Kunst, 56)

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See also the essays by Thomas Pulle, Catherine Milian, Andrea Theresia Schwaiger, Waltraut Sertl, Mella Waldstein, Eva von Seckendorff, and Oliver Rathkolb in Tabor, Kunst und Diktatur, vol. 2. 17. Rudolf Eller, “Bach-Pflege und Bach-Verständnis in zwei deutschen Diktaturen,” in Bericht über die wissenschaftliche Konferenz anlässlich des 69. Bachfestes der neuen Bachgesellschaft, Leipzig, 29. und 30. März 1994, Leipziger Beiträge zur Bach-Forschung 1, ed. Bachfest and Hans-Joachim Schulze (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1995), 111–117. 18. Braun, Hoffmann, and Karbusický, Verfemte Musik, 1–18, 284. 19. Eduard Mutschelknauss, Wege und Grenzen der Politisierung: Zum Kontext der Bachjahre 1935 und 1950 (Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2003); and Katrin Gerlach, Lars Klingberg, Juliane Riepe, and Susanne Spiegler, eds., Zur Rezeption G. F. Händels in den deutschen Diktaturen: Quellen im Kontext, 2 vols., Studien der Stiftung Händel-Haus (Beeskow: Ortus Musikverlag, 2015). 20. Günther Heydemann and Heinrich Oberreuter, eds., Diktaturen in Deutschland, Vergleichsaspekte: Strukturen, Institutionen und Verhaltensweisen, Schriftenreihe der Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung 398 (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 2003); and Friedrich Pohlmann, Deutschland im Zeitalter des Totalitarismus: Politische Identitäten in Deutschland zwischen 1918 und 1989 (Munich: Olzog, 2001). 21. Randall Bytwerk, Bending Spines: The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic, Rhetoric and Public Affairs (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2004). 22. Marcus Lange, Das politisierte Kino: Ideologische Selbstinszenierung im “Dritten Reich” und der DDR (Marburg: Tectum, 2013). 23. Frank-Lothar Kroll and Barbara Zehnpfennig, eds., Ideologie und Verbrechen: Kommunismus und Nationalsozialismus im Vergleich (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2014). 24. Fulbrook, Divided Nation, 51. 25. According to Peter Fritzsche: “The National Socialists embodied a broad but extremely vague desire for national renewal and social reform that neither Wilhelmine nor Weimar Germany had been able to satisfy. . . . [They] thus twisted together strands from the political Left and the political Right without being loyal to the precepts of either camp.” Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 212–214, also see especially 197–214. 26. Ades, Art and Power, 16. 27. Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jacob Wamberg, eds., Totalitarian Art and Modernity (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2010), 9. 28. Etlin, Art, Culture and Media; see also Pamela M. Potter, “The Arts in Nazi Germany: A Silent Debate,” Contemporary European History 15, no. 4 (2006): 585–599. 29. Huener and Nicosia, Arts in Nazi Germany. 30. Bessel, “Functionalists vs. Intentionalists,” 19–20. 31. Christopher Browning, “Beyond ‘Intentionalism’ and ‘Functionalism’: A Reassessment of Nazi Jewish Policy from 1939 to 1941,” in Reevaluating the Third Reich, ed. Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1993), 211–233. 32. Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (New York: Knopf, 1992). 33. Kershaw, “Working towards the Führer.” Recent access to Soviet archives has shown that the Politburo was much more involved in cultural administration than had been previously

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assumed and that Stalin chose to assume stewardship of the cultural branch of government when the Politburo delegated areas of responsibility. See Katerina Clark and Karl Schlögel, “Mutual Perceptions and Projections: Stalin’s Russia in Nazi Germany; Nazi Germany in the Soviet Union,” in Geyer and Fitzpatrick, Beyond Totalitarianism, 427–428. 34. Mark von Hagen, “Review Article: Pairing off Dictatorships,” International History Review 28, no. 3 (September 2006): 567–571. 35. Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (London: Allen Lane, 2004), chapter 9. 36. See, for example, Ronald Pawly, Hitler’s Chancellery: A Palace to Last a Thousand Years (Ramsbury: Crowood, 2009); and Thies, Hitler’s Plans. 37. Birgit Schwarz, Geniewahn: Hitler und die Kunst (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2009); Sebastian Werr, Heroische Weltsicht: Hitler und die Musik (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2014); and Gerhard Splitt, “Hitler und die Musik,” in Das “Dritte Reich” und die Musik, ed. Huynh (Berlin: Nicolai, 2006), 27–38. 38. Reinhold Brinkmann, “The Distorted Sublime: Music and National Socialist Ideology; A Sketch,” in Kater and Riethmüller, Music and Nazism, 45, 50–51. 39. The full passage from Hitler’s speech reads as follows: “Es würde nun aber schlimm sein, wenn der Nationalsozialismus auf der einen Seite den Geist einer Zeit besiegt, der zur Ursache für das Verblassen unserer musikalischen Schöpferkraft wurde, auf der anderen aber durch eine falsche Zielsetzung selbst mithilft, die Musik auf einem Irrweg zu belassen oder gar zu führen, der genauso schlimm ist wie die hinter uns liegende allgemeine Verwirrung.” Quoted in Walter, Hitler in der Oper, 196. 40. Albrecht Riethmüller, “Stefan Zweig and the Fall of the Reich Music Chamber President, Richard Strauss,” in Kater and Riethmüller, Music and Nazism, 270. 41. Kater, Twisted Muse, 188–190. 42. Goebbels could only offer such hazy notions as: “the nature of music lies in melody” rather than in theoretical constructs; “not all music is suited to everyone”; music is rooted in the folk, requires empathy rather than reason, deeply affects the spirit of man, and is the most glorious art of the German heritage; and musicians of the past must be respected. Joseph Goebbels, “Zehn Grundsätze deutschen Musikschaffens,” Amtliche Mitteilungen der Reichsmusikkammer 5 (1938), facsimile in Dümling and Girth, eds., Entartete Musik, 123. Portions of Goebbels’s speech and his “ten commandments” are translated in Ellis, “Music in the Third Reich,” 126–127. 43. Albrecht Dümling, “The Target of Racial Purity: The ‘Degenerate Music’ Exhibition in Düsseldorf, 1938,” in Art, Culture, and Media, ed. Etlin, 53–54; and Brinkmann, “Distorted Sublime.” 44. Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (London: Hutchinson, 2002), 69, 74. 45. See Brigitte Schütz, “Hitler—Kult—Visualisierung,” in Czech and Doll, Kunst und Propaganda, 268–283. 46. Michaud, Cult of Art, 187–190. 47. Heller, Iron Fists, 14. 48. Hans Sarkowicz, ed., Hitlers Künstler: Die Kultur im Dienst des Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt: Insel, 2004), 12. 49. Yoram Gorlizki and Hans Mommsen, “Political (Dis)Orders of Stalinism and National Socialism,” in Geyer and Fitzpatrick, Beyond Totalitarianism, 41–86.

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50. Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (New York: Vintage, 2007), 3–18. 51. Lehmann-Haupt, Art under a Dictatorship, 229. 52. Gleason, Totalitarianism, 127–128. 53. Ibid., 138–140; and Stephen F. Cohen, “Bolshevism and Stalinism,” in Menze, Totalitarianism Reconsidered, 58–80. 54. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), chapter 5. 55. Maike Bruhns, Kunst in der Krise, vol. 1 (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 2001), 174, chapter 3. 56. Petropoulos, Artists Under Hitler. 57. See, for example, the essays by Friedrich Geiger, Thomas Phleps (on twelve-tone theater music), and Claudia Maurer Zenck in Hanns-Werner Heister, ed., “Entartete Musik” 1938: Weimar und die Ambivalenz; Ein Projekt der Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt Weimar zum Kulturstadtjahr 1999 (Saarbrücken: PFAU-Verlag, 2001). 58. Hanns-Werner Heister, ed., Die Ambivalenz der Moderne (Berlin: Weidler, 2005); and Volker Böhnigk and Joachim Stamp, eds., Die Moderne im Nationalsozialismus (Bonn: University Press, 2006). 59. Steve Plumb, Neue Sachlichkeit, 1918–33: Unity and Diversity of an Art Movement, Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 104 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 140–150. 60. Dümling, “Target of Racial Purity,” in Etlin, Art, Culture, and Media, 50. Dümling also notes that Nazi Kampflieder “were predominantly diatonic in character,” even though a large number of these were mere adaptations of songs from the Weimar-era leftist repertoire. See Jürgen Schebera, “ ‘Die Rote Front, schlagt sie zu Brei’: Nationalsozialistische Kampflieder; Ein kurzer Überblick,” in Huynh, Das “Dritte Reich” und die Musik, 156–157. 61. Gerald Köhler, “Moderne und Tradition in der Operninszenierung zwischen 1920 und 1945,” in Huynh, Das “Dritte Reich” und die Musik, 81. 62. Ibid., 81. 63. Drüner and Günther, Musik und “Drittes Reich.” 64. Karen Koehler, “The Bauhaus, 1919–1928: Gropius in Exile and the Museum of Modern Art, N.Y., 1938,” in Etlin, Art, Culture and Media, 292. The most recent additions in musicology include Michael Haas, Forbidden Music: Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Erik Levi, ed., The Impact of Nazism on Twentieth-Century Music (Cologne: Böhlau, 2014); Chris Walton and Antonio Baldassarre, eds., Musik im Exil: Die Schweiz und das Ausland 1918–1945 (Bern: P. Lang, 2005); Peter Csobádi, ed., Das (Musik-)Theater in Exil und Diktatur: Vorträge und Gespräche des Salzburger Symposions 2003 (Anif, Salzburg: Mueller-Speiser, 2005); Maren Köster und Dörte Schmidt, eds., “Man kehrt nie zurück, man geht immer nur fort”: Remigration und Musikkultur (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2005); and Wulf Koepke, Claus D. Krohn, Erwin Rotermund, Dörte Schmidt, and Lutz Winckler, eds., Kulturelle Räume und ästhetische Universalität: Musik und Musiker im Exil, Exilforschung 26 (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2008). 65. Jost Hermand, Culture in Dark Times: Nazi Fascism, Inner Emigration, and Exile, trans. Victoria Hill (New York: Berghahn, 2013).

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66. Amaury du Closel, Ersticke Stimmen: “Entartete Musik” im Dritten Reich, trans. Ulrike Kolb (Vienna: Böhlau, 2010). 67. Lutz Koepnick, The Dark Mirror: German Cinema Between Hitler and Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 12. 68. Daniel Knopp, NS-Filmpropaganda: Wunschbild und Feindbild in Leni Riefenstahls “Triumph des Willens” und Veit Harlans “Jud Süss” (Marburg: Tectum, 2004); Susan Tegel, Nazis and the Cinema (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007); Manuel Köppen and Erhard Schütz, eds., Kunst der Propaganda: Der Film im Dritten Reich, Publikationen zur Zeitschrift für Germanistik 15 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007); and Ian Garden, The Third Reich’s Celluloid War: Propaganda in Nazi Feature Films, Documentaries, and Television (Stroud, UK: The History Press, 2012). 69. In her important 2009 study of visual culture in postwar occupied Germany, Capturing the German Eye: American Visual Propaganda in Occupied Germany, Cora Sol Goldstein attested that all Nazi feature films “corresponded to the Völkische Weltanschauung the regime was trying to create. Ufa productions ranged from light escapist comedies and musicals to virulent antisemitic propaganda films and ‘euthanasia’ films. Even so, Siegfried Kracauer has argued, ‘All Nazi films were more or less propaganda films—even the mere entertainment pictures which seem to be so remote from politics.’ All films, fiction or nonfiction, were laced with ideological subtexts. Ufa films depicted German citizens as racially homogeneous, hard working, and loyal, always ready for supreme sacrifice in the service of the Führer and the Fatherland. In late 1938, simultaneous with Kristallnacht, German film directors were given explicit orders to produce antisemitic films. In 1940 Die Rothschilds, Jud Süss, and Der ewige Jude, three major antisemitic propaganda films, were released.” Goldstein, Capturing the German Eye, 46–47. 70. Hoffmann, “Zwischen Bildung, Propaganda und filmischer Avantgarde,” 24. 71. Rother, “What Is a National Socialist Film?,” 455–469; and Goergen, “Der giftige, giftige Apfel”; see also other essays in Reichert, Kulturfilm im “Dritten Reich”. 72. Scholz, Architektur und bildende Kunst, 45. 73. Christian Weikop. “Part III: Defamation and Rehabilitation,” in Weikop, New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism, 197–198. 74. Gesa Jeuthe, Kunstwerte im Wandel: Die Preisentwicklung der deutschen Moderne im nationalen und internationalen Kunstmarkt 1925 bis 1955, Schriften der Forschungsstelle “Entartete Kunst” (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), 52–54. 75. Jeuthe, “Die Moderne unter dem Hammer,” 189–305; and Tiedemann, Die “entartete” Moderne. 76. Jeuthe, Kunstwerte im Wandel, 62–75. 77. Hsiu-Ling Kuo, Monumentality and Modernity in Hitler’s Berlin: The North-South Axis of the Greater Berlin Plan, German Linguistic and Cultural Studies 28 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013). 78. Winfried Nerdinger, “Bauhaus Architecture in the Third Reich,” in Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to the Cold War, ed. Kathleen James-Chakraborty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 139–152. 79. Paul B. Jaskot, Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy (London: Routledge, 2000); see also Jaskot, “Heinrich Himmler and the Nuremberg Party Rally Grounds: The Interest of the SS in the German Building Economy,” in Etlin, Art, Culture, and Media, 230–256.

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80. Potter, “Nazi ‘Seizure,’ ” 39–65; and Potter, “Musical Life in Berlin from Weimar to Hitler,” in Kater and Riethmüller, Music and Nazism, 90–101. 81. Misha Aster, “Das Reichsorchester”: Die Berliner Philharmoniker und der Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Siedler, 2007); and Fritz Trümpi, Politisierte Orchester: Die Wiener Philharmoniker und das Berliner Philharmonisches Orchester im Nationalsozialismus (Vienna: Böhlau, 2011). 82. Drechsler, Die Funktion der Musik; Kim H. Kowalke, “Music Publishing and the Nazis: Schott, Universal Edition, and Their Composers,” in Kater and Riethmüller, Music and Nazism, 170–218; Sophie Fetthauer, Deutsche Grammophon: Geschichte eines Schallplattenunternehmens im “Dritten Reich,” Musik im “Dritten Reich” und im Exil 9 (Hamburg: Von Bockel, 2000); and Fetthauer, Musikverlage im “Dritten Reich” und im Exil, Musik im “Dritten Reich” und im Exil 10 (Hamburg: Von Bockel, 2004). 83. Blume and Scholz, Überbrückt. 84. Strobl, Swastika and the Stage; and Schoeps, Literature and Film, chapter 5. 85. James-Chakraborty, “Drama of Illumination,” 181–201. 86. Bonnell, Shylock in Germany, 136. 87. See ibid., chapter 3 and conclusion. 88. David B. Dennis, “ ‘The Most German of All German Operas’: Die Meistersinger through the Lens of the Third Reich,” in Wagner’s Meistersinger: Performance, History, Representation, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 100– 106; Thomas Grey, “Bodies of Evidence,” Cambridge Opera Journal 8 (1996): 191; and Grey, “Wagner’s Die Meistersinger as National Opera (1868–1945),” in Applegate and Potter, Music and German National Identity, 97–99. 89. Grange, Hitler Laughing. 90. David Bathrick, “Modernity Writ German: State of the Art as Art of the Nazi State,” in Reimer, Cultural History, 1–10. 91. Faletti, “Reflections of Weimar Cinema,” 11–36. 92. Nadar, “The Director and the Diva.” 93. Kater, “Impact of American Popular Culture,” 31–62. 94. Sergiusz Michalski, Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage 1870–1997 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998). 95. Dietmar Schirmer, “State, Volk, and Monumental Architecture in Nazi-Era Berlin,” in Berlin–Washington, 1800–2000: Capital Cities, Cultural Representation, and National Identities, Publications of the German Historical Institute, ed. Andreas W. Daum and Christof Mauch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 127–153. 96. Bathrick, “Modernity Writ German,” 2. 97. Hake, Popular Cinema of the Third Reich, viii. 98. Jo Fox, Filming Women in the Third Reich (Oxford: Berg, 2000); Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien, Nazi Cinema as Enchantment: The Politics of Entertainment in the Third Reich (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004); Antje Ascheid, Hitler’s Heroines: Stardom and Womanhood in Nazi Cinema, Culture and the Moving Image Series (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003); and Jana F. Bruns, Nazi Cinema’s New Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 99. Edward Dimendberg, “The Will to Motorization: Cinema, Highways, and Modernity,” October 73 (Summer 1995): 90–137.

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100. Nicolas Reeves, The Power of Film Propaganda: Myth or Reality? (London: Cassell, 1999). 101. Jo Fox, Film Propaganda in Britain and Nazi Germany: World War II Cinema (Oxford: Berg, 2007). 102. Strömsdörfer, Watching the Enemy. 103. Friedrich, City of Nets, 153–154. 104. Franz A. Birgel, “Luis Trenker: A Rebel in the Third Reich?; Der Rebell, Der verlorene Sohn, Der Kaiser von Kalifornien, Condottieri, and Der Feuerteufel, ” in Reimer, Cultural History, 37–64. 105. Hake, Popular Cinema of the Third Reich, 138–148. 106. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 189. 107. Harten et al., “Die Axt hat geblüht”; and Kaplan, Designing Modernity. 108. The curator of the exhibition emphasizes in the introduction to the catalog that the inclusion of American art does not in any way attempt to relativize the Holocaust: “Nachdrücklich zu betonen ist im Zusammenhang mit der Einbeziehung der USA in die Darstellung von Kunst und Propaganda die Gültigkeit der Sentenz ‘Vergleichen heißt nicht Gleichsetzen.’ Es liegt selbstverständlich weder im Interesse der Ausstellung, die USA der 1930/40er Jahre in die Nähe diktatorischer Staaten zu rücken, noch durch den Vergleich der amerikanischen politischen Bildkunst mit Werken der agitatorischen NS-Kunst einer Relativierung oder gar Verharmlosung der nationalsozialistischen Terrorherrschaft in den Weg zu bereiten.” Hans-Jörg Czech and Nikola Doll, eds., Kunst und Propaganda im Streit der Nationen 1930–1945 (Dresden: Sandstein, 2007), 17. 109. The one exception is Sergio Cortesini’s fascinating comparison of Italian and American murals, “Depicting National Identities in New Deal America and Fascist Italy: Government Sponsored Murals,” in Czech and Doll, Kunst und Propaganda, 36–47. 110. The reviewer emphatically reiterates the notions of structural and aesthetic nazification in the following passage: Denn erstens haben alle totalitären Regime die Schwierigkeit gehabt, dass eine Total-Instrumentalisierung der Kunst einen beinahe sofortigen Qualitätsverfall der künstlerischen Produktion zur Folge hatte, weil die begabteren unter den Künstlern das Primat des politischen Zugriffs nicht akzeptierten. Selbst offen nationalsozialistische Künstler wünschten keine offiziöse NSDAPKunst, sondern Kunstrichtungen, die ihrer Meinung nach in subtilerer Form als künstlerische Pendants zur geltenden politischen Ideologie bestehen sollten—was vielfach bedeutete, dass sie eine offene Politisierung ihrer Kunst im Sinne einer klaren Parteinahme verweigerten. Zweitens hatten auch die totalitären Herrscher der Epoche einen spezifischen Kunstgeschmack und nutzten ihre Machtfülle, um die Herstellung ihnen gefallender Kunst anzuregen. Hierfür waren nicht politische Instrumentalisierungs-, sondern ästhetische Geschmacksüberlegungen ausschlaggebend. (Thymian Bussemer, review of the exhibition Kunst und Propaganda im Streit der Nationen 1930–1945, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Unter den Linden 2, Berlin, January 26–April 29,

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Notes to Pages 234–236 2007, H-Soz-Kult, April 4, 2007, www.hsozkult.de/exhibitionreview/id /rezausstellungen-48)

111. The reviewer insists that the Nazi examples are by far the most reprehensible in the entire exhibition: “Eines freilich macht die Schau sehr eindrucksvoll deutlich: Die Nazikunst brachte mit Abstand die übelsten Machwerke hervor. Selbst noch die Werke des sozialistischen Realismus, die hier hängen, sind um vieles besser als die schwülstig-verlogene NSKunst, die sich mit der Darstellung glücklicher Bauernfamilien nicht genug tun konnte in einer Zeit, da die meisten Deutschen nicht mehr in der Landwirtschaft arbeiteten.” Franziska Augstein, “Prost Propaganda!: Propeller rotieren für den Sieg; Das Deutsche Historische Museum zeigt Kunst und Agitprop von 1930 bis 1945 aus Italien, Deutschland, der Sowjetunion und den USA,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 17, 2010, www.sueddeutsche.de /kultur/kriegsverherrlichung-in-der-kunst-prost-propaganda-1.437052. 112. Rasmussen and Wamberg, Totalitarian Art and Modernity, 9. 113. Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, “Approaching Totalitarianism and Totalitarian Art,” in Rasmussen and Wamberg, Totalitarian Art and Modernity, 113–114. 114. Karen Fiss, Grand Illusion: The Third Reich, the Paris Exposition, and the Cultural Seduction of France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 115. Monica Bohm-Duchen, Art and the Second World War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 102–103. 116. See, for example, Wolfgang Ruppert, “Nationalsozialistische Kulturpolitik,” in Huynh, Das “Dritte Reich” und die Musik, 87–92; Gilbert Merlio, “Politisierung der Ästhetik: Ästhetisierung der Politik,” in Huynh Das “Dritte Reich” und die Musik, 161–167; Lisa Pine, “Hitler’s National Community”: Society and Culture in Nazi Germany (London: Hodder Arnold, 2007); and Hermand, Culture in Dark Times, 40–45. 117. Giselher Schubert, “Germany,” I:5, Grove Music Online, www.grovemusic.com /shared/views/article.html?section=music.40055.1.5#music.40055.1.5. 118. In The Dark Mirror, Lutz Koepnick also considers Wagner’s aesthetic influence on film. 119. Reimar Volker, “Herbert Windt’s Film Music to Triumph of the Will: Ersatz-Wagner or Incidental Music to the Ultimate Nazi-Gesamtkunstwerk?,” in Composing for the Screen in Germany and the USSR: Cultural Politics and Propaganda, ed. Robynn J. Stilwell and Phil Powrie (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 39–53; and Christopher Morris, “From Revolution to Mystic Mountains: Edmund Meisel and the Politics of Modernism,” in Stilwell and Powrie, Composing for the Screen, 75–92. 120. Robert E. Peck, “Film Music in the Third Reich,” in Stilwell and Powrie, Composing for the Screen, 19–38. 121. Ben Morgan, “Music in Nazi Film: How Different Is Triumph of the Will?,” Studies in European Cinema 3, no. 1 (2006): 37–53. 122. Stonard, Fault Lines, 100. 123. Pamela E. Swett, Corey Ross, and Fabrice d’Almeida, eds., Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 3, 6–7. 124. Karl Christian Führer, “Pleasure, Practicality and Propaganda: Popular Magazines in Nazi Germany, 1933–1939,” in Swett, Ross, and d’Almeida, Pleasure and Power, 132–153; Corey Ross, “Radio, Film and Morale: Wartime Entertainment between Mobilization and Distraction,” in Swett, Ross, and d’Almeida, Pleasure and Power, 154–174; and Daniel

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Mühlenfeld, “The Pleasures of being a ‘Political Soldier’: Nazi Functionaries and their Service to the ‘Movement,’ ” in Swett, Ross, and d’Almeida, Pleasure and Power, 205–233. 125. Brian Currid, A National Acoustics: Music and Mass Publicity in Weimar and Nazi Germany (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 126. See, for example, Lüdtke, “Appeal of Exterminating ‘Others,’ ” 155–177. 127. Baranowski, Strength through Joy; and Sascha Howind, Die Illusion eines guten Lebens: Kraft durch Freude und nationalsozialistische Sozialpropaganda, Politische Kulturforschung (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2013). 128. David Welch, “Nazi Propaganda and the Volksgemeinschaft: Constructing a People’s Community,” Journal of Contemporary History 39, no. 2 (April 2004): 213–238, quote on p. 238. 129. Heinrich August Winkler, “German Society, Hitler and the Illusion of Restoration 1930–33,” in “Theories of Fascism,” special issue, Journal of Contemporary History 11, no. 4 (October 1976): 1–16, quote on p. 11. 130. Kolland, “In keiner Not uns trennen,” 204–212; and Hellkuhl, “Hier sind wir versammelt zu löblichem Tun,” 196ff. Wulf Konold further highlights how certain principles of the Jugendmusikbewegung, such as the emphasis on “community” (Gemeinschaft) and the expressions of antisemitism in the writings of its Weimar-era leader Fritz Jöde, carried over from the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich. See Konold, “Kantaten, Fest- und Feiermusik,” in Heister and Klein, Musik und Musikpolitik, 163–171. 131. See contributions by Thomas Phleps (on music in the Hitler Youth), Zenon Mojzysz, Dorothea Kolland, Sonja Neumann, and Elisabeth Brinkmann (on the SS) in Heister, “Entartete Musik” 1938; see also Helmke Jan Keden, “ ‘Jeder Sänger ist ein SA-Mann für das deutsche Lied’: Ein Beitrag zur Ideologisierung des deutschen Männergesangs im ‘Dritten Reich,’ ” in Grochulski, Kautny, and Keden, Musik in Diktaturen des 20. Jahrhunderts, 43–56. 132. Celia Applegate, “Saving Music: Enduring Experiences of Culture,” History & Memory 17 (2005): 221; and Applegate, “The Past and Present of Hausmusik in the Third Reich,” in Kater and Riethmüller, Music and Nazism, 136–49. 133. See, for example, Nikola Doll, Christian Fuhrmeister, and Michael Sprenger, Kunstgeschichte im Nationalsozialismus: Beiträge zur Geschichte einer Wissenschaft zwischen 1930 und 1950 (Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 2005). 134. Pamela M. Potter, “The Deutsche Musikgesellschaft, 1918–1938,” Journal of Musicological Research 11, no. 3 (1991): 159–162. 135. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (London: Routledge, 2005). 136. Alf Lüdtke, ed., Herrschaft als sozialer Praxis: Historische und sozial-anthropologische Studien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1991); also discussed in Jarausch and Geyer, Shattered Past, 149–166. 137. Gellately, Backing Hitler, 261–262. 138. Maier and Schäfer, Totalitarianism and Political Religion. For a summary of the concept of totalitarianism as political religion, its historiography, and its potential applications, see Ulrike Ehret, “Understanding the Popular Appeal of Fascism, National Socialism and Soviet Communism: The Revival of Totalitarianism Theory and Political Religion,” History Compass 5, no. 4 (2007): 1236–1267. 139. Hans-Ulrich Thamer, “The Orchestration of the National Community: The Nuremberg Party Rallies of the NSDAP,” in Berghaus, Fascism and Theatre, 172–190.

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140. Bernhard Leitner and Sophie Wilkins, “Albert Speer, the Architect from a Conversation of July 21, 1978,” October 20 (Spring 1982): 28–29. 141. Sabine Behrenbeck, “Festarchitektur im Dritten Reich,” in Brock and Preiß, Kunst auf Befehl, 201–252; Carolyn Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space in Germany, 1933–1945 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012); Stefan Schweizer, “Unserer Weltanschauung sichtbaren Ausdruck geben”: Nationalsozialistische Geschichtsbilder in historischen Festzügen zum “Tag der Deutschen Kunst” (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007). 142. Wistrich, Weekend in Munich, 46. 143. Bazon Brock, “Kunst auf Befehl?: Eine kontrafaktische Behauptung; War Hitler ein Gott?” in Brock and Preiß, Kunst auf Befehl, 9–20. See also Sabine Behrenbeck’s chapter on “festival architecture”: “Festarchitektur im Dritten Reich,” in Brock and Preiß, Kunst auf Befehl, 201–252. 144. Potter, Most German of the Arts, 120–124; Peter Petersen, “Wissenschaft und Widerstand: Über Kurt Huber (1893–1943),” in Sonntag, Boresch, and Gojowy, Die dunkle Last, 111–129; and Pamela M. Potter, “Strauss and the National Socialists: The Debate and its Relevance,” in Richard Strauss: New Perspectives on the Composer and His Work, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 93–113. 145. Brinkmann, “Vom ‘völkischen Lebensraum’ der Musik,” 158. 146. See Albrecht Riethmüller, Die Walhalla und ihre Musiker (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1993); and Riethmüller, “ ‘Is That Not Something for Simplicissimus?!’: The Belief in Musical Superiority,” in Applegate and Potter, Music and German National Identity, 288–304. 147. Curt Sachs to Hans Joachim Moser, April 9, 1949 (copy to Alfred Einstein), Alfred Einstein Papers, fol. 851, Music Library of the University of California at Berkeley, cited in Potter, Most German of the Arts, 259. 148. Richard Etlin, “The Perverse Logic of Nazi Thought,” in Etlin, Art, Culture and Media, 26–27. 149. Hermand, Culture in Dark Times. 150. Jarausch and Geyer, Shattered Past, 163. 151. Alon Confino, “Fantasies about the Jews: Cultural Reflections on the Holocaust,” History & Memory 17 (2005): 303–304; see also Confino, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chapter 7. 152. Hans Mommsen, “Cumulative Radicalisation and Progressive Self-Destruction as Structural Determinants of the Nazi Dictatorship,” in Kershaw and Lewin, Stalinism and Nazism, 75–87. 153. Frank, “Welche Sprache sprechen Steine?,” 7–21. 154. Nerdinger, “Bauhaus-Architekten im ‘Dritten Reich,’ ” 153–178, quote on p. 170; and Nerdinger, “Bauen im Nationalsozialismus: Vortrag im Nürnberger Kommunikationszentrum am 4. November 1994,” in Beer, Bauen in Nürnberg, 10–13. 155. Clinefelter, Artists for the Reich, 118. 156. Karen Painter, Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 157. Adolf Hitler, “Hitlers Rede zur Eröffnung der ‘Großen Deutschen Kunstausstellung’ 1937,” in Nationalsozialismus und “Entartete Kunst”: Die “Kunststadt” München 1937, ed. Peter-Klaus Schuster (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1988), 242–253; also available at www

Notes to Pages 246–252

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index

68ers (West German student movement), 134, 148–49, 160 Abendroth, Hermann, 113 Abraham, Paul, 65 Academic Assistance Council, 68 Adam, Peter, 188 Adenauer, Konrad, 103, 124, 128 Adorno, Theodor: advocacy of Schoenberg, 68, 73, 80, 84, 126, 180, 208; exile of, 72, 86–87; influence in West Germany, 80–81; influence on cultural history, 80–81, 148; on art, 73–75, 213; on music, 73, 75, 78, 84–85, 128; on Nazi culture, 73, 75; on poetry after Auschwitz, 42, 49, 261n3; on Weimar Republic, 73, 75 advertising, 29, 75, 163, 194, 204, 223, 247, 249–50 Affäre Blum, Die, 107 Air Ministry, 145, 193 Albers, Josef, 57, 192 Albrecht, Gerd, 152 Allen, William, 134, 143, 244 Allgemeine Deutsche Kunstausstellung, 114, 125, 138 Allies: art policy in occupied Germany, 136–38, 141; initial impressions of Nazi culture, 8–9, 48, 90, 105, 109–11, 113, 123, 125; liberation of concentration camps, 8; recruitment of exiles, 87–88, 91–96. See also individual countries

All My Sons (Miller), 120–21 Alltagsgechichte. See social history Ambrose, Tom, 48 American Gothic (Wood), 212 fig. American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, 69, 71 Americanism, 185, 187, 204; attacks on, 26; attacks on, pre-1933, 22–23, 178, 190–92; influence of, 28, 189, 231. See also Fordism; Taylorism; United States: German attitudes toward American Jewish Council, 84 Amerika-Häuser, 104–5, 123 Amt Rosenberg. See Rosenberg Bureau An die Schönheit (Dix), 190 fig., 191 Anouilh, Jean, 111; Euridice, 111 anti-Fascism, 66, 101, 115, 131, 150, 209, 271n178; and exiles, 49–50, 52, 53, 84–85, 162, 220, 226; in Britain, 115; in France, 79–80; in Soviet Zone, 105, 109 antisemitism, 2, 29, 69, 113, 150–51, 315n130; and denazification, 96, 103; and totalitarianism concept, 133; exemptions from Nazi policies, 32, 157; German reactions to, 40–41, 236; in film, 17, 62, 102–3, 107, 141–42, 155, 202–3, 220; in theater, 30, 171, 230; of military, 35; policies in Third Reich, 31–34, 40, 51, 86–87, 164, 221, 238, 243, 251–52; pre-1933, 20, 22–23, 141, 246

369

370

index

Antliff, Mark, 179 Applegate, Celia, 238 architects, 198; Bauhaus, 163, 187, 193, 204, 228, 246–47; in exile, 59–60; in Third Reich, 12, 21–22, 145, 150, 163; Neue Sachlichkeit, 246; postwar, 81, 119 architecture: as Cold War battleground, 118–120; control of, 145; cross-cultural comparisons, 163, 211; economics of, 220, 228; economics of, pre-1933, 194; in early cultural histories of Third Reich, 136, 145–48; in Nazi Germany, generalizations about, 1; Nazi views on, 21–22; styles, pre-1933, 171; styles in Nazi Germany, 2, 28–29, 145–49, 158, 162–3, 171, 193, 199, 228, 245. See also architecture, neoclassical architecture, neoclassical, 5, 28, 145–46, 151, 158; as Nazi art, 118–19; cross-cultural comparisons, 199–201, 214, 231–32; in Nazi Germany, 199; in United States, 199, 214, 214 fig.; modernism of, 199–201; pre-1933, 199, 303n112 Arendt, Hannah, 133, 225 Arlington Memorial Bridge, 213 fig. Arlington National Cemetery, 211 Armour Institute of Technology, 59 Armstrong, Louis, 18 art: as Cold War battleground, 114–18, 184–85; comparisons of dictatorships, 234, 251, 304n132; cross-cultural comparisons, 211, 213–14, 233–34, 313n108, 313–14n110; economics of, pre-1933, 10; exhibitions in Third Reich, 6–7, 8 fig., 19, 24–26; exhibitions under occupation, 99, 114–16, 125, 141; Hitler’s pronouncements on, 24, 144; in American Zone, 115; in early cultural histories of Third Reich, 136–41; in Nazi Germany, generalizations about, 1; in Soviet Zone, 114–15; in the Cold War, 90; Nazi administration of, 169–70; periodicals in postwar Germany, 138–39; periodicals in Third Reich, 150, 184; plundering of, 14, 45, 170; styles in Nazi Germany, 245. See also art dealers; “degenerate” art; Degenerate Art Action; Degenerate Art exhibition; Great German Art Exhibition; Hitler, Adolf: policy statements; House of German Art (Munich); modernism art dealers, 16, 125, 166, 181n151; in exile, 264n46; in exile, United States, 58–59 art history: comparisons of dictatorships, 137–44, 148–51, 162–65, 175–76, 199, 215–18, 220, 251; in the Third Reich, 238; life-and-works studies, 223; treatment of Nazi period, 37, 167

Art Institute of Chicago, 59 artists: challenges in exile, 49; inconsistencies of Nazi policy toward, 227; in exile, 162; in exile, Czechoslovakia, 52–54; in exile, France, 54–55; in exile, United Kingdom, 55–56; in exile, United States, 57–58; rescue efforts for, 56 Artists’ International Association (U.K.), 115 Artists’ Refugee Committee (U.K.), 56 arts professions: and the Volksgemeinschaft, 35, 41, 46, 143, 238–9; attitude towards Nazi cultural policies, 14–15, 156, 161–62, 167–68, 173, 237–38, 242, 246; cross-cultural comparisons, 233, 250; economic challenges in exile, 50–51; economics of, 15, 150, 156, 173, 246, 250; economics of, pre-1933, 10, 15, 156, 167; Jews in, 31–34; political challenges in exile, 51; reactions to Nazi antisemitism, 31, 47, 156, 239 arts scholarship: and intentionalism, 38–39; and Nazi antimodernism, 180–201, 204–214, 226–29; and social history, 39; and totalitarianism concept, 38; and women’s studies, 39; approaches to the Holocaust, 40; comparisons of dictatorships, 171, 216–18; crosscultural comparisons, 174; in Nazi Germany, 45; life-and-works studies, 36–37, 40, 130–31, 223, 242; treatment of Nazi period, 37–38. See also art history; dance history; film studies; musicology; theater history Art Students League, 57, 85 Ascheid, Antje, 173 Asriel, Andre, 65 atonal music, 67, 73, 121; attacks on, 6, 22, 26; persistence in Third Reich, 26, 208–10 August, Wolf-Eberhard, 156 Auschwitz, 42, 49, 134, 243 Auschwitz Trials, 128, 134 Ausdruckstanz, 30, 66, 171, 239; as German art form, 161, 206–7; as popular medium, 201; pre-1933, 173, 180, 206–7 Autobahn, 148, 188, 193, 212, 232 Bach, J. S., 218–19 Bahr, Ehrhard, 167 Baltimore Post Office, 211 Barber, Samuel, 111 Barlach, Ernst, 24–25, 36, 184 Barr, Alfred, 56–58, 60, 69 Barron, Stephanie, 166 Bartetzko, Dieter, 158 Bartók, Béla, 27, 127, 211 Bathrick, David, 230–1

index Bauhaus, 43, 159, 176, 187, 189, 200; affiliates in Nazi Germany, 59, 145, 163, 193–95, 228, 246–46; and architecture in Third Reich, 193–95, 204, 211, 228; and design in Third Reich, 194–95, 229; and industrialization, 197–98; and Neue Sachlichkeit, 204, attacks on, 192–93, 212, 217, 246; closing of, 5, 145, 192; historical accounts of, 28, 145, 192–94, 212, 246; Hitler on, 246; in art history textbooks, 37; origins and early struggles, 20–22; revival after World War II, 119, 127–28 Baumeister, Willi, 183 Bavarian State Opera, 121 Bayer, Herbert, 163, 194; Deutsches Volk: Deutsche Arbeit, 194 Bayreuth Festival, 15, 30, 110, 135, 160, 205 BBC, 65, 92–93 Beauty of Work, 149, 190, 194–95 Beaverskin, The, 107 Becher, Johannes R., 94, 106 Becker, Karl, 123 Beckmann, Max, 37, 125, 183–84, 187, 229 Beecham, Thomas, 65, 158–59 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 3, 45, 66 Behne, Adolf, 182, 184 Behrens, Peter, 303n112 Belling, Rudolf, 25; Triad 25, 248 fig. Benatzky, Ralph, 65 Benjamin, Walter, 42, 49, 61, 72, 75; influence on cultural history, 79–81, 172, 202, 213, 225 Benn, Gottfried, 32, 78, 183 Benton, Thomas Hart, 211 Bereitschaft (Breker), 213 fig. Berg, Alban, 18, 68, 208 Berlin, 32–33; and cultural Cold War, 118; and Goebbels-Goering rivalry, 32, 157; architectural plans for, 28, 228; blockade, 114, 117; cultural policy under Allied occupation, 94, 98, 109, 111; dance, 206; denazification of performing artists, 100–102; opera houses, 161 Berlin Document Center, 142, 166–67 Berlin Opposition, 24, 26 Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, 15, 32, 98–99, 101, 159, 228–29, 248 Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, 86 Berlin Secession, 183, 205 Berlin State Opera, 162, 206, 228 Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt), 192, 203 Berlin Wall, 129, 141, 215, 234 Bernauerin, Die, 110 Bernstein, Leonard, 121

371

Berufsverbände, 11 Betts, Paul, 198 Beuys, Joseph, 128 Bild, Das, 20, 245 bildende kunst, 118, 138 Bildung, 23, 179, 198 Bing, Rudolf, 65 Birkle, Albert, 25 Birth of a Nation, 251 Bismarck, Otto von, 178 Bitburg cemetery, 163–63 Black Mountain College, 57–58, 67 Blaue Reiter, 58, 125–26, 180–81, 208–9 Blech, Leo, 32 Blevins Davis Prize, 117 blood-and-soil, 20, 22, 178, 226 Bloth, Ingeborg, 189 Bluebeard, 67 Blum, Léon, 54 Blum Affair, The, 107 Blut und Boden, 20, 22, 178, 226 Bode, Wilhelm, 183 Bohm-Duchen, Monica, 234 Bollmus, Reinhard, 146 Bolshevism, 1, 139, 150, 221, 225, 243, 250; and exiles, 49, 51; and German culture, 6; attacks on, 20, 29, 57, 140, 169, 224, 246; attacks on, outside Germany, 54; attacks on, pre-1933, 22–23, 263n21; in architecture, 22; influence of, in Third Reich, 31. See also communism Bonatz, Paul, 195 book burning, 5, 19, 24, 35, 54, 102, 155, 167, 251 Bormann, Martin, 170 Böttcher, Maximillian, 230 Bowie, David, 250 Bracher, Karl Dietrich, 133 Brahms, Johannes, 66 Brandenburg Gate, 29 fig. Braque, Georges, 116 Braun, Emily, 179 Braveheart, 251 Brecht, Bertolt, 67, 148, 187, 271n173, 271n189; Fear and Misery in the Third Reich, 61; in exile, 32, 38, 60–62, 84, 113, 187; influences of, in Third Reich, 29–30; in occupied Germany, 120; Threepenny Opera, 21, 26, 30, 231 Breker, Arno, 25, 116, 164–64, 211, 213; Readiness, 213 fig. Brenner, Hildegard, 24, 144–47, 184, 193, 225 Breuer, Marcel, 59, 192 Britain. See United Kingdom British Council, 104, 115

372

index

British Foreign Office, 61, 115 Britten, Benjamin, 112–13; Peter Grimes, 112 Brockmann, Stephen, 82, 129 Broszat, Martin, 134 Brücke, Die, 181, 183 Bruckner, Anton, 112, 235 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 133, 157, 225 Buchenwald, 89 Buchholz, Karl, 58 Buddenbrooks (Mann), 178 Builder’s Workshop (Workers’ Community, Cameraderie) (Hengstenberg), 189 Bukharin, Nikolai, 225 Bullock, Alan, 221 Bumm, Peter, 205 Buntkarierten, Die, 107 Burger, Hanuš, 92, 107 Busch, Adolf, 64–65 Busch, Ernst, 101 Busch, Fritz, 65 Busch-Reisinger Germanic Museum, 56–57 Busoni, Ferruccio, 22 cabaret, 17, 23, 29, 33, 60, 171 Camaraderie (Workers’ Community, Builder’s Workshop) (Hengstenberg), 189 Cambridge University, 59, 72 Camp Ritchie, 92 Camp Sharpe, 92 Capra, Frank, 124, 232 Carmina Burana (Orff ), 26 Carnegie Foundation, 68 censorship, 152, 171, 215; feasibility of, 10, 152, 167–68; in American Zone, 109–10; in British Zone, 110, 112; in French Zone, 108, 111–12; of art, 54–55, 58, 136, 166–67; of film, 16–17, 82, 153, 155, 166, 232; of film, outside Germany, 62–63, 152, 232; of music, 2, 17–18, 29, 127, 159–60; of theater, 17, 60, 120, 156–57; wartime, 45, 159 Centres d’Études Françaises, 104 Chagall, Marc, 69, 116 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 243 Chamberlin, William, 132 Chaplin, Charlie, 62, 75 Charlie and His Orchestra, 28 Child of Our Time, A (Tippett), 112 Chopin, Frédéric, 112 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 91–92, 117–119, 121, 126, 136 ciné clubs, 108 Civil Service Law, 32

classicism, 71, 192, 199–201, 225–26, 231 Cliburn, Van, 121 Clinefelter, Joan, 170, 245 Cocteau, Jean, 111 Cohen, Stephen, 225 Cold War, 42–43, 132–33; and art, 90; and film, 120; and music, 121–23; and theater, 120–21; art policies during, 105; effects on cultural history, 3, 114, 127–29, 209; rhetoric in cultural histories, 38, 126–41 Collective of German Artists, 54 Columbia University, 72, 74–75, 117 comedies, 30, 172, 230 Comité International pour le Placement des Intellectuels Réfugiés, 68 Commissariat aux Affaires Allemandes et Autrichiennes, 95 Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, 133 Commission on German and Austrian Affairs, 95 Committee for Cultural Freedom, 136 communism, 131, 217–219, 221, 224–25, 239, 250; art and, 80; attacks on, 2, 22, 60, 66, 96, 196; attacks on, in military, 35; attacks on, outside Germany, 54, 61–62, 84, 117, 184; attacks on, postwar, 42, 44, 117–22, 131–34, 138; in Soviet Zone, 93–94; theater and, 17, 23, 157–58, 206. See also Bolshevism; communists Communist Party, German (KPD), 94, 113 communists, 16, 21, 178; attacks on, 4, 32–33, 49–51, 156; attacks on, outside Germany, 69, 115, 132; exemptions to exclusionary policies, 101, 170–71, 187, 205; return to Germany, 93–94, 97, 100–101, 113–14 concentration camps, 8, 40, 66, 95, 116, 149, 165; architecture of, 201, 228; art in, 217; as metaphor, 205 Confessions of a Nazi Spy, 63 Confino, Alon, 244 Congress for Cultural Freedom, 118, 136 constructivism, 181, 185, 187, 189–90, 204, 217 Copland, Aaron, 18, 111, 235 Corinth, Lovis, 183 corporatism. See neocorporatism Council of the Gods, 107 Covent Garden, 65 Cramer, Ernst, 92 criticism, ban on, 18–19, 166, 171, 217; Jews and, 246 Cuban Missile Crisis, 141 cubism, 24, 116, 177, 180–81, 246

index cultural history: definitions of, 37, 142–3, 252 Cultural League for the Democratic Renewal of Germany, 94, 106, 109, 113–14 Czechoslovakia: and exile, 51, 56, 60, 64; annexation of, 54; appeasement policies of, 52–54 Dachau, 140 Dada: Adorno on, 75; as modernist art, 57, 181, 217; as political art, 23, 54, 85, 116, 189; attacks on, 24, 217, 246; Benjamin on, 79; Berlin exhibition (1920), 24, 247 Dahlhaus, Carl, 81, 210 Dahrendorf, Ralf, 179 Daladier government, 54 dance, 16, 30, 33, 228–29, 238; American, 23, 28; anti-German sentiments, United States, 66; festivals in Third Reich, 206; in exile, 65–66. See also Ausdruckstanz; dance history dance history: treatment of Nazi period, 2–3, 37–39, 43–44, 155, 161–62, 166, 173, 201, 206–7, 231 Darmstadt Summer Course for New Music, 81, 121–22, 126, 210 Darré, Richard Walter, 20, 25 Dartington Hall, 65 Davidson, Mortimer, 211 Death Mills, The, 107 de Beauvoir, Simone, 111 DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft), 107, 120 “degenerate” art, 1, 149, 242; and exiles, 49–50, 85; as metaphor, 40; contemporary reactions to, 56, 58, 170, 236; cross-cultural comparison, 184; inconsistencies of, 187; responses after World War II, 114, 116–118, 136, 141, 179, 182; revival after World War II, 115, 283n198; sale of, 44, 58–59, 139, 141, 170, 227–28 Degenerate Art Action, 6, 15–16, 136–40, 180; after World War II, 150; economics of, 170, 227–28; inconsistencies of, 187 Degenerate Art exhibition, 6, 8, 28, 219, 236; and antisemitism, 31, 35, 40, 227; as metaphor, 40, 142, 144, 149, 155; catalog, 8 fig.; in art history textbooks, 37; inconsistencies of, 19–21, 25, 230; installation of, 24, 26, 148, 247, 248 fig.; precursors to, 23–24, 170; reactions outside Germany to, 53–59, 85, 234; reconstruction of, 3, 141, 166; responses after World War II, 114, 116–117, 141, 159, 185; rhetoric of, postwar, 150, 155, 183, 251; sale of, 58–59, 125 “degenerate” music, 6, 28, 31, 35, 159–60, 169, 236, 251; catalog, 26, 27 fig.; exhibition, 19;

373

exhibition installation, 26, 247; inconsistencies of, 26–28, 208, 210; reconstruction of exhibition, 160; rhetoric of, postwar, 113 de Kooning, Willem, 58 denazification, 89–104, 133, 219, 276n50, 276n45, 276n48, 278n72, 282–83n178; Allied reactions to, 89, 104, 117; as corrective to nazification, 9; failure of, 141–42, 149, 160; German reaction to, 42, 47, 98, 103–4; goals of, 96; in American Zone, 92, 96–99, 111, 114–15, 117, 166; in British Zone, 97; in French Zone, 97; in Soviet Zone, 97–98, 112–13; of performing artists, 99–104; reverberations in arts scholarship, 37, 172, 241–42 Denazification Commission for Artists, 102 Dennis, David, 45 design, 29, 187, 190–95, 201, 220, 223; cross-cultural comparisons, 55, 163, 180, 182, 195–96, 233; economics of, pre-1933, 194 Dessau, Paul, 32, 65, 113, 128 Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF), 6–7, 12, 161, 190, 193–95, 198, 237–38; and Rosenberg Bureau, 13–14, 139, 170; factory exhibits of, 184–85, 195, 230 Deutsche Kunstgesellschaft (GAS), 20, 24–26, 170 Deutsche Verwaltung für Volksbildung (DVV), 94, 107 Deutscher Künstlerbund (France), 54 Deutscher Werkbund, 194–95, 197 Deutsches Theater, 101 Deutsches Volk: Deutsche Arbeit, 194 Dimendberg, Edward, 232 Distler, Hugo, 208 Dix, Otto, 116, 141, 183–84, 187, 189–91, 230; Metropolis, 191; To Beauty, 190 fig., 191 Döblin, Alfred, 95 Doctor Faustus (Mann), 127 documenta exhibition, 139 Donaueschingen contemporary music festival, 121–22 Dopolavoro, 149 Dreigroschenoper (Brecht), 21, 26, 30, 231 Dreiklang (Belling), 25, 248 fig. Drewniak, Bogusław, 155, 157–58, 167 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 67 Dussel, Konrad, 156, 165, 171 Dymshits, Alexander, 94, 115, 139 East Germany. See German Democratic Republic (GDR) Ebert, Carl, 65, 93 Eckmann, Sabine, 125

374

index

École Libre des Hautes Études, 69 economics: and the film industry, 153; in arts scholarship, 44, 145 Education and Religious Affairs Branch (U.S.), 92 Education Ministry (French), 95 Education Ministry (Nazi), 7, 12, 139, 170 Education Ministry (Soviet), 112 Egk, Werner, 127–28, 207, 235 Egmont (Goethe), 109 Ehe im Schatten, 107 Eichberg, Henning, 158 Eichenauer, Richard, 20 Eichmann trial, 128, 134, 141 Eimert, Herbert, 122 Einem, Gottfried von, 127–28 Einheitsfront-Truppe, 60 Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, 14, 137, 146, 150 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 99 Eisler, Hanns, 32, 62, 65, 67, 84, 113, 128 Eisner, Lotte, 82, 151 Ellington, Duke, 18 Ellis, Donald Wesley, 159 Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, 68–69 Emergency Rescue Committee, 69 Endless Road, The, 203 Engel, Erich, 107, 205 Engels, Friedrich, 148 Entjudung. See Jews, exclusion from German cultural life Entnazifizierungskommission für Kunstschaffenden, 102 Ernst, Max, 69, 116 Eternal Jew, The, 24, 35, 142, 155, 202, 227 eugenics, 221 Euridice (Anouilh), 111 European Recovery Program (the Marshall Plan), 113, 119, 151 euthanasia program, 2, 107, 202 Evans, Joan, 210–11 Evarts, John, 120 Ewige Jude, Der, 24, 35, 142, 155, 202, 227 exhibition style, 24, 26, 247 exile, 2–3, 226; terminology, 261–62n5. See under artists; dance; exile of intellectuals; film; musicians; theater; and individual countries exile modernism. See modernism, Weimar exile of intellectuals, 68–77, 131–32; and arts scholarship, 49; and “brain gain,” 50; financial support for, 49; influence on cultural history, 74–75, 77–82; rescue efforts for, 68–69; return to Germany, 133, 272

exile studies (Exilforschung), 50–52, 162, 165, 262n6; in East Germany, 44; in music, 160 exiles, 5, 8, 47, 221; and totalitarianism concept, 131–33; as historians of the Third Reich, 44, 131–32, 143; privileging of, in cultural histories, 37–38 Exposition internationale des arts et techniques, 189, 199–200, 200 fig., 214, 234 fig. expressionism, 24, 43; and architecture, 180; and dance, 180; and film, 76, 82, 220; and music, 68, 113, 126–27, 208–9, 226, 306n158; and theater, 30, 127, 205–6, 220; as German art, 24–25, 57–58, 125, 176, 180–84, 198; attacks on, Nazi, 24, 78, 116, 125, 141, 176, 182–85, 187, 217, 227; attacks on, Stalinist, 113, 141, 180; history of, 73–74, 116, 183–85, 227; Hitler on, 246; promotion in Third Reich, 24–25; revival after World War II, 24–25, 116–17, 125–28, 176, 182–83, 185 Fachgruppen, 12 Fachverbände, 11–12 Fascism, 40, 42, 72, 74–75, 110; comparisons with, 131–36, 219; opposition to, 101, 105, 109, 132; opposition to, exiles, 49–50, 52, 162, 220, 226; use of term, 42, 79–80, 84–85, 148–50 Fascism concept, 38, 43; after the Cold War, 217; challenges to, 155–56, 163; critique of, 148, 150–51; in art history, 148–51, 162–63, 188, 213; in arts scholarship, 148, 206, 208, 212; in film history, 154, 202; in music history, 160–61, 210, 235; origins of, 133–34 Fascism (Italy), 78, 131, 139, 149, 159, 179, 199–200, 204, 216–17, 220, 232, 239 Fear and Misery in the Third Reich (Brecht), 61 Federal Republic of Germany. See West Germany Federal Reserve Board building, 214 fig. Federal Trade Commission, 211 Fehling, Jürgen, 205 Feigl, Hugo, 53 Feindbild, 35, 251–52 Feininger, Lyonel, 56, 183 Feistel-Rohmeder, Bettina, 20 Ferdinand Moeller Gallery, 24–25 Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, 81, 121–22, 126, 21 Fighting League for German Culture, 28, 85, 126; and Reich Culture Chambers, 11; artistic taste of, 20, 22, 24, 145, 205; influence of, 11, 13, 57, 140, 145, 171; origins of, 11, 194–95; structure of, 11, 168

index film: and ban on criticism, 19; antisemitism in, 220; as entertainment, 30, 172–73, 203; as popular medium, 201–202; as propaganda, 30, 172, 201–3, 230–33, 251; British, 30; censorship of, 16, 152–53, 155, 166; censorship of, outside Germany, 62; cross-cultural comparisons, 172–73, 214, 231–32, 250–51; denazification policy, 102–3; economics of, 15, 153–54, 232; educational (Kulturfilm), 155, 204, 227, 250; Eisner on, 83; experimental, in Third Reich, 30, 203–4, 212, 226–27, 231; experimental, pre-1933, 227, 231; in Nazi Germany, generalizations about, 1; in Nazi Germany, positive assessments of, 202–3, 214; in occupied Germany, 106–8; in West Germany, 120; in World War I, 30, 232; in World War II, 30, 232, 235; music of, 235; newsreels, 30, 45, 76, 106–7, 202, 204, 214, 232; pre-1933, 75–77, 202–4; revival after World War II, 99 Filmaktiv, 106–7 Film Credit Bank, 15, 153–54 film industry, 155; Adorno on, 74–75; and exiles, United States, 49, 62; anti-German sentiment, United States., 49, 62; Benjamin on, 79; competition from United States, 15, 153; economics of, 173; Horkheimer on, 74–75; in occupied Germany, 106–8; in West Germany, 154; pre-1933, 16, 153, 155; United States, 30, 62–63, 67, 75, 108, 120, 173, 214, 232, 235; Wollenberg on, 82–83 Filmkreditbank, 15, 153–54 film music, 67, 235 film studies: analyses of entertainment films, 172; and social history, 39, 171–72; and women’s studies, 39, 173; comparisons of dictatorships, 152–55, 216; comparisons of two German dictatorships, 219–220; cross-cultural comparisons, 172; treatment of Nazi period, 37, 230–31 Film, Theater, and Music Division (FTM), 92, 99–100, 109–110, 115, 120 Final Solution, 8, 40, 142 Fischer-Klamt, Gustav, 207 Fiss, Karen, 234 Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 216 Fleckner, Uwe, 227 Flexner, Abraham, 69 Flies, The (Sartre), 111 Flothuis, Marius, 210 Ford, Henry, 204 Fordism, 231, 249 Forsthoff, Ernst, 131

375

Fortner, Wolfgang, 126–27 Forum of Democratic Musicology, 160 Four Elements, The (Ziegler), 186 fig., 214 Fraenkel, Ernst, 132 France: admiration for Nazi culture, 234; and exile, 54, 61, 64–65, 69; appeasement policies of, 51, 55, 61; art policy in occupied Germany, 115–16; cultural aims in occupied Germany, 104–5; denazification policy, 97; film policy in occupied Germany, 108; initial postwar impressions of Nazi culture, 94–95, 118; music policy in occupied Germany, 108; neoclassical architecture in, 201; occupation of Germany, 94–95; recruitment of exiles, 95 Franco, Francisco, 171, 218 Frank, Benno D., 92, 100, 120 Frank, Hartmut, 193, 245 Frankenburg Dice Game (Frankenburger Würfelspiel, Moeller), 158 Frankfurt School, 91; “Cultural Aspects of National Socialism,” 73–74; financial security of, 71–73, 76; history of, 72–75, 86; influence on cultural history, 74–82, 148, 160; leftist leanings of, 51, 84; political challenges in exile, 51 Fredericus Rex, 202 Free German Culture League, 61, 65, 69 Free German Trade Union Federation (FDGB), 109 Free German Youth (FDJ), 97 Freie Deutsche Jugend, 97 Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (FDGB), 109 Freier Deutscher Kulturbund, 61, 65, 69 freudlose Gasse, Die, 192 Freund, Richard, 123 Frick, Wilhelm, 21, 23, 26, 193 Friedrich, Carl, 133, 157, 225 Fritzsche, Peter, 180 Fry, Varian, 69, 76 Führerprinzip, 12, 154, 161, 168, 238, 248–49 Fulks, Barry, 203–4, 227 Fuller, Buckminster, 57 functionalism. See intentionalism Furtwängler, Wilhelm, 46, 65, 113, 158–59, 248; as vice-president of Reich Music Chamber, 12–13, 101–3; attacks from Rosenberg Bureau, 13; defense of Paul Hindemith, 13 futurism, 24, 79, 106, 181, 187, 204, 246 Gal, Hans, 65 Gauguin, Paul, 182; Yellow Christ, 182 Gay, Peter, 86, 180, 209

376

index

GDR. See German Democratic Republic (GDR) Gebrauchsmusik, 209 Geiger, Friedrich, 218 Geissmar, Berta, 65, 158–59 Gellately, Robert, 239 General German Art Exhibition, 114, 125, 138 Gentile, Giovanni, 131 George, Hans, 231 Georgi, Yvonne, 207 Gerigk, Herbert, 210 German Administration for Public Education (DVV), 94, 107 German-American Harry Kreismann Society, 189 German Artists’ League, 54 German Art Society (GAS), 20, 24–26, 170 German Association of Craftsmen, 194–95, 197 German culture, international recognition of, 3, 9, 105–6, 189, 202, 214, 232–4, 243–44; in architecture, 59; in film, 232; in music, 64, 112–13 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 104, 119–22, 144, 173, 180; and exiles, 44, 50, 65, 84–85, 113; and Fascism concept, 133; compared to Third Reich, 138–39, 148, 162, 215–16, 218–220; critique of Western scholarship, 128, 203; founding of, 114 German Historical Museum, 233 Germania, anno zero, 123 German Painting and Sculpture exhibition, 57, 181 German People: German Work, 194 German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, 77, 132, 136, 246 German tribunals (Spruchkammern), 97–98, 100, 102–3 German Workers Front. See Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF); see also Beauty of Work; Ley, Robert; Strength through Joy Germany of Yesterday—Germany of Today, 55 Germany, Year Zero, 123 Gershwin, George, 121; Porgy and Bess, 121 Gestapo, 33, 101 Geyer, Michael, 35–36, 216, 252 GI Bill, 68 Giedion, Sigfried, 59 Giesler, Hermann, 148 Gilbert, Felix, 91 Gilbert, Jean, 65 Gilles, Werner, 183 Gilles, William, 61 Giradoux, Jean, 111 Gleichschaltung, 1–2, 137, 167, 194; feasibility of, 10, 145; meaning of, 7, 10, 14–15, 40, 249; of

dance, 173; of film, 82–83, 152–54; of music, 238; of visual arts, 154 Glyndebourne opera festival, 65 Goebbels, Joseph: and architecture, 145, 193; and ban on criticism, 18; and film, 83, 102–3, 152, 154–55, 172, 202–3, 226, 232; and Gleichschaltung, 1, 7, 130, 139; and media, 17; and music, 5, 27, 101–2, 161, 309n42; and Reich Culture Chambers, 11–12, 45, 140, 168, 223–24; and theater, 16–17, 29, 98, 157, 170–71; and visual arts, 169–71; antisemitism of, 31, 33–34; artistic taste of, 27, 36, 169, 179, 229; as Gauleiter of Berlin, 32; as propaganda minister, 1, 6, 182, 247–48; Clement Greenberg on, 78; competition and, 12–13, 24, 32, 131, 144–46, 157, 170, 205; influence of, 14, 162; populism of, 171; rhetoric of, 33–34, 172; role in cultural affairs, 5, 10, 39, 135, 137, 140, 162, 172, 224; speeches, 5, 31, 46, 152, 222, 249 Goehr, Walter, 65 Goering, Hermann: and art market, 16, 227; and plundering, 14; and theater, 29, 101, 157; as airforce minister, 145, 193; as patron of the arts, 223, 229; as Prussian prime minister, 12, 32–33; competition and, 32–33, 157, 170, 205 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 3, 109, 111; Egmont, 109 Goetz, Curt, 230 Golden Twenties, 52, 217 Goldhagen, Daniel, 35–36 Goldschmidt, Berthold, 65, 93 Golomshtock, Igor, 216, 251 Gombrich, E. H., 56 Goodman, Benny, 18 Grange, William, 230 Grasskamp, Walter, 165 Great Britain. See United Kingdom Great Depression, 18, 27, 68, 72, 194, 196, 210, 232–33, 250 Great Dictator, The, 62, 75 Great German Art Exhibition, 5–6, 56, 141, 149–50, 226, 246–47; inconsistencies of, 25, 222; industrial art in, 187–88, 212; postwar reconstructions of, 148, 164; reactions outside of Germany to, 184, 234 Great Hall (Berlin), 29 fig. Greenberg, Clement, 77–79, 81, 126, 177, 213, 269n149 Griffith, D.W., 251 Grohmann, Will, 138, 184 Gropius, Walter, 20–22, 28, 37, 58–59, 119, 145, 192–94

index Grosch, Nils, 209 Grosse deutsche Kunstausstellung. See Great German Art Exhibition Grosse Halle (Berlin), 29 fig. Großes Schauspielhaus, 16, 60, 171, 206 Großstadt (Dix), 191 Grosz, Georg, 57, 85, 115, 187, 230 Grunberger, Richard, 168 Gründgens, Gustaf, 32–33, 101, 205 Grünewald, Matthias, 209 Gruppe 47, 124 Grützner, Eduard von, 205 Grynszpan, Herschel, 54 Guggenheim, Solomon 59 Guggenheim Foundation, 85, 117 Gulbransson, Olaf, 25 Günther, Hans F. K., 20–21, 243 Gurlitt, Cornelius, 16, 228 Habe, Hans, 92 Haftmann, Werner, 139, 149, 162, 184 Hake, Sabine, 39, 231–32 Hamburg: jazz policy, 28 Hamburg Opera, 92 Hamline University, 67 Handel, George Frideric, 45, 219 Hanfstaengl, Eberhard, 137, 141 Hangmen Also Die, 62 Hansen, Miriam Bratu, 80, 177 Hans Westmar, 30, 231 Häring, Hugo, 119 Harlan, Veit, 17, 102–3, 107, 152, 203 Harris, Roy, 111 Harrison, Charles, 177 Hartlaub, Gustav, 181, 185, 204 Hartmann, Karl Amadeus, 121, 126 Harvard University, 56, 59, 70 Harvey, David, 177 Harvey, Lilian, 173 Hasenclever, Walter, 92 Hauer, Josef Matthias, 207 Haus der Kultur der Sowjetunion, 105 Haus der Kunst. See House of German Art (Munich) Hausmusik, 238 Haydn, Joseph, 66 Hayek, Friedrich, 132 Hays Office, 62–63 Heartfield, John, 53; Adolf, the Superman: Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk, 53 fig. Heckel, Erich, 24, 183 Heidegger, Martin, 133

377

Heilbut, Anthony, 187 Heller, Stephen, 223 Hellman, Lillian, 120 Helm, Everett, 122–23 Hengstenberg, Rudolf, 189; Camaraderie or Workers’ Community (Builder’s Workshop), 189; May Day Celebration in the Berlin Lustgarten, 189 Henze, Hans Werner, 126 Herf, Jeffrey, 179 Hermand, Jost, 188, 226, 235, 244 Heskett, John, 195 Hess, Rudolf, 25 Hesse, Anja, 189 Heuss, Alfred, 22 Heydrich, Reinhard, 62 Heym, Stefan, 92, 113 Heymann, Werner Richard, 65, 67 Hilpert, Heinz, 205 Himmler, Heinrich, 146, 158, 170, 240 Hindemith, Paul: Adorno on, 73; attacks from Rosenberg Bureau, 24; banning of works, 21; exile of, 13, 27, 37, 64, 67, 187; Mathis der Maler, 85, 110, 209–10, 217; promotion of, 102, 112, 127, 211 Hinrichs, August, 230 Hinz, Berthold, 149–50, 187–89, 198, 217 Hippler, Fritz, 24–25, 30, 227 Hirsch, Hugo, 65 Hirsch, Paul, 72 historians’ debate. See Historikerstreit Historikerstreit, 40, 43, 164–65, 313n108, 313–14n110; effects of cultural history, 131, 155, 173, 189, 201, 203, 211, 213, 231 historiography, 3; challenges in arts scholarship, 34–41 HIStory (Jackson), 250 Hitler, Adolf, 91, 130–31; Adorno on, 75; and architecture, 28, 145–48, 163, 193–94, 199, 219, 223, 251; and Great German Art Exhibition, 247; and media, 17, 250; and modernism, 24, 212; and music, 159, 161, 223, 242; and Rosenberg Bureau, 7, 13, 14; and theater, 29, 223; and Wagner Bayreuth Festival, 15, 205; artistic taste of, 1–2, 5, 19, 28, 37, 135, 145, 162, 167, 199, 222–23; as artist, 142, 223–24; attitude toward Goebbels, 11; attitude toward Rosenberg, 11, 131; Clement Greenberg on, 78; compared to Lenin, 216, 224–25; compared to Stalin, 38, 175–76, 221–22, 223–25; foreign policy, 54; Horkheimer on, 78; Mein Kampf, 20, 140, 222; policy statements on

378

index

Hitler, Adolf (continued) arts, 22, 24, 144, 169, 222, 225, 229, 246, 292n151; populism of, 198; role in cultural affairs, 2, 10, 39, 137, 140, 163, 218, 222–24; role of, in Third Reich, 14, 23, 38, 48, 133–36, 143, 146, 233, 236, 244; speeches, 222, 249 Hitlerjunge Quex, 20, 231 Hitler-Stalin Pact, 77, 132, 136, 246 Hitler Youth, 97, 124; films for, 30, 173; music of, 75, 126, 238 Höber, Lorenz, 248 Hofer, Karl, 26, 115, 118, 125, 183 Hoffmann, Heinrich, 212 Hoffmann, Hilmar, 164, 202 Hofmann, Hans, 58 Holborn, Hajo, 91 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 144 Hollywood. See film industry, United States Hollywood League Against Nazism (Hollywood Anti-Nazi League), 64 Holocaust, 43, 89, 128, 172; and German nationalism, 3, 243; as metaphor, 40, 42, 49, 139, 142, 149–50, 201, 217; scholarship on, 40, 141–42, 164, 180. See also Jews, extermination of European Holz, Keith, 51–52, 221 Hoover, Calvin, 132 Horkheimer, Max, 72–75, 78–80, 148, 160, 213 House of German Art (Munich), 6 fig., 25, 105, 125; opening of, 5; renamed House of Art, 5, 141 House of Soviet Culture, 105 House Un-American Activities Committee. See McCarthyism Huber, Kurt, 242 Hubertus zu Löwenstein, Prince, 55, 69 Huener, Jonathan, 221 Hugenberg, Alfred, 82, 153 Hull, David Stewart, 152, 202–3 Hussein, Saddam, 251 Hutton, Tom, 117 hyperinflation, 20, 22, 189, 192, 246 I Accuse (Ich klage an), 107, 202 impressionism, 20, 106, 183–4, 246 industrialization: and architecture in the Third Reich, 193, 228; and film, 203–4; and the arts, 3, 4, 189–92, 203–4, 212, 232; cross-cultural comparisons, 233, 250–51; German ambivalence toward, 206; in Italy, 195–97; in United States, 195–97; Nazi attitudes toward, 179, 247; pre-World War I, 178, 198

Information Control Division (ICD), 92–93, 99–102, 104, 107–8, 111, 115, 117, 121 inner emigration, 140, 226, 241; of artists, 117, 162, 184, 187; of filmmakers, 202; of musicians, 121; in German literature, 44, 83, 124; origins of term, 83 Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), 69 Institute for Church Music, 126 Institute for Social Research. See Frankfurt School Institut Français en Allemagne, 104 Institut für Sozialforschung. See Frankfurt School institutional history, 216 Intendanten, 100–101, 110 intentionalism, 43, 79, 130–31, 146–48, 167, 244; after the Cold War, 215, 217, 221–23; challenges to, 222–23; in art history, 137–38, 144, 162, 225, 251; in film history, 152–55; in music history, 160; in two German dictatorships, 218–19; versus functionalism/structuralism, 38–39, 134–35 Interessengemeinschaften, 10–11 International Building Exposition, 119 International Contemporary Music Festival, Baden-Baden, 27, 210 internment camps, 51, 56, 82, 93, 276n42 Iron Curtain, 105, 215 Italy, compared to Third Reich, 232–33; design in, 195–97 It Happened One Night, 203 Jackson, Michael, 250; HIStory, 250 Jarausch, Konrad, 35–36, 252 Jawlensky, Alexei, 56 Jay, Martin, 79, 204 jazz, 67, 112; Adorno on, 74–75, 78; and youth rebellion, 28, 257n66; attacks on, 6, 18; attacks on, pre-1933, 22–23, 27–28, 190–91; persistence in Third Reich, 18, 26–28, 168–69, 192, 208–9 Jelavich, Peter, 171, 173 Jencks, Charles, 146 Jesse, Eckhard, 218 Jessner, Leopold, 206 Jewish Culture League, 33, 165, 252 Jews: and German culture, 6; as art critics, 246; as exiles, 62, 87–88; attacks on, 4, 29, 31–32, 62, 150, 246, 251–52; deportation of, 33; exemptions from antisemitic policies, 32, 152, 157, 170; exclusion from German cultural life, 31–44, 156, 252; exclusion from Reich Culture

index Chambers, 12, 167, 246; extermination of European, 8, 40, 103, 134, 142; flight from Nazi Germany, 31–33; influence of, in Third Reich, 31; in music, 26, 28, 218; postwar German policies toward, 282–83n178; rescue efforts for, 56; return to Germany, 87–88, 92, 113 Jew Süss, 17, 35, 102–3, 107, 141–42, 203, 251 John, Eckhard, 169 Johnson, Alvin, 55, 68–69 Johst, Hanns, 205; Schlageter, 205 Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067, 96 Jonny spielt auf! (Krenek), 26, 191 fig., 191–92 Jooss, Kurt, 30, 38, 65–66 Jordy, William, 193 Josselson, Michael, 92 Jud Süss. See Jew Süss Jünger, Ernst, 131 Justi, Ludwig, 227, 229–30 Kaes, Anton, 81 Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur. See Fighting League for German Culture Kampflieder (fight songs): as Nazi music, 310n60 Kandinsky, Wassily, 56, 180, 183 Karajan, Herbert von, 103 Karl V (Krenek), 210 Kästner, Erich, 102, 116 Kater, Michael, 146, 168–69, 209, 231 Kershaw, Ian, 135, 221, 244 Ketelsen, Uwe, 204 Khachaturian, Aram, 113 Kim Jong Il, 251 Kingdon, Frank, 55, 69 Kipnis, Alexander, 32 Kirchheimer, Otto, 91 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 24, 125, 180 kitsch: and Americanism, 192; and avant-garde, 78, 126; and mass culture, 79; and Nazi art, 35, 165, 187, 189, 194, 211; and propaganda, 43, 176 Klamt, Jutta, 207 Klee, Paul, 26, 56, 182 Klein, Hans-Günter, 207 Klemperer, Otto, 64, 66 Klenau, Paul von, 26, 169, 210 Klosterstrasse Studio Collective, 185 Knepler, Georg, 65 Koelle, Fritz, 25 Koestler, Arthur, 93, 132 Kohl, Helmut, 162–64 Kohn, Hans, 132 Kokoschka, Oskar, 8 fig., 53–54, 56, 141, 183

379

Kolbe, Georg, 56 Kolberg, 155 Kolisch, Rudolf, 66 Kollektiv deutscher Künstler, 54 Kollwitz, Käthe, 25, 32 Korngold, Erich, 67 Koussevitsky, Serge, 18 Kracauer, Siegfried: exile of, 75–76, 86; influence on cultural history, 42, 77, 81–83, 151–52, 155, 158, 213; on film as propaganda, 76–77, 152, 172, 202, 226, 311n69 Kraft durch Freude. See Strength through Joy Krautheimer, Richard, 91 Kreimeier, Klaus, 172 Krenek, Ernst, 26, 64, 67, 85, 191, 208, 210; Jonny spielt auf! (Krenek), 26, 191–92, 191 fig.; Karl V, 210 Krier, Léon, 150–51, 164–65, 251 Krispyn, Egbert, 51 Kristallnacht, 33, 40, 54, 155 Kritikverbot, 18–19, 166, 171, 217 Kronprinzenpalais. See under National Gallery Kultur and Zivilisation, 23–24, 105, 111–12, 178–79, 198, 247 Kulturbund deutscher Juden, 33, 165, 252 Kulturfilm, 155, 204, 227, 250 Kunst der Nation, 25, 139, 184 Kunsthistorisches Institut, 139 Kunst im Deutschen Reich (Kunst im Dritten Reich), 20, 150 Kunstwerk, Das, 118 Kuo, Hsiu-Ling, 228 Laban, Rudolf, 30, 38, 65–66, 162, 206–7 Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Shostakovich), 217 Lang, Fritz, 36–37, 62, 101, 192, 202 Laqueur, Walter, 86 Lausitz United Glassworks, 195 Law for the Liberation from National Socialism (Liberation Law), 97, 102 Law on Confiscation of Products of Degenerate Art. See Degenerate Art Action leadership principle. See Führerprinzip Leander, Zarah, 231 Lehmann-Haupt, Hellmut, 117, 138–40, 182, 184, 194, 198–200, 224; on McCarthyism, 166, 294n171 Lehmbruck, Wilhelm, 25 Leibowitz, René, 68 Leider, Frieda, 32 Leinsdorf, Erich, 66, 111 Leiser, Erwin, 152, 202

380

index

Leitner, Bernhard, 240 L’Enfant, Pierre Charles, 201 Lenin, Vladimir, 216, 219, 224–25, 246 Lenz, Leo, 230 Leonhardt, Curt, 119 Lesser, Wolfgang, 65 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 109; Nathan the Wise, 109 Levi, Erik, 207, 211 Ley, Robert, 12, 144, 146, 170, 193 L’histoire du soldat (Stravinsky), 26 Lichtdom, 230 Liebeneiner, Wolfgang, 107 Liebermann, Max, 20, 183 Lipschitz, Jacques, 69 Lissitsky, El, 140 List, Friedrich, 203 literature, German, 3, 90, 144; and Zero Hour, 123–24, 128; scholarship on, 44, 156, 205 London, John, 171 Lorenz, Max, 32 Los Angeles County Museum, 57, 166 Löwenthal, Leo, 73–74 Lubitsch, Ernst, 62 Lucky Kids, 203 Ludendorff, Erich, 153 Ludwig, Peter, 164–65, 211 Ludwig II of Bavaria, 15 M, 101 Macke, August, 182 magical realism, 181, 185, 187. See also Neue Sachlichkeit Mánes Gallery, 53 Mann, Erika, 123 Mann, Golo, 69 Mann, Heinrich, 32, 69 Mann, Katia, 70 Mann, Klaus, 33, 92; Mephisto, 33 Mann, Thomas: and McCarthyism, 84; and postwar German writers, 83, 271n173; Buddenbrooks, 178; Doctor Faustus, 127; exile of, 55–56, 69–71, 76–77; influence on cultural history, 70–71, 77, 179; Tristan, 178; Wälsungenblut, 178 Manning, Susan, 206 Mao Zedong, 216 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 166 Marc, Franz, 25, 125, 182 Marchand, Suzanne, 173 Marcks, Gerhard, 25 Marcuse, Herbert, 72–74, 80, 91, 99, 131, 148

Marriage in the Shadows, 107 Marshall, George, 232 Marshall Plan (European Recovery Program), 113–14, 119, 151 Martin, Karl-Heinz, 205 Marxist scholarship, 132, 154, 176, 217, 219; and Fascism concept, 38, 135, 149, 161; and Frankfurt School, 51, 84, 148 Massenspiele, 157 mass gatherings, 219, 238–41; and technology, 239–41; role of, in Third Reich, 34, 44 mass media, 4, 17, 171, 239–41; and technology, 239–41; cross-cultural comparisons, 233, 249–250; in arts scholarship, 171–72 Matheny, Lynn Kellmanson, 211–13, 251 Mathis der Maler (Hindemith), 85, 110, 209–10, 217 May Day Celebration in the Berlin Lustgarten (Hengstenberg), 189 Mayer, Carl, 192, 203 Mayer, Louis B., 62 McCarthy, Joseph. See McCarthyism McCarthyism, 62, 84, 115, 120, 138, 166, 184, 294n171 McCloskey, Barbara, 85 McClure, Robert, 102 Meikle, Jeffrey, 195 Mein Kampf (Hitler), 20, 140, 222 Meistersinger, Die (Wagner), 15, 230 Mendelsohn, Erich, 200 Mendelssohn, Felix, 18, 112, 161 Mephisto (Mann), 33 Metropolis (film), 192 Metropolis (painting, Dix), 191 Metropolitan Opera, 121 Meyer, Ernst Hermann, 65, 113 Meyer, Hannes, 21, 119 Meyer, Michael, 168 Michalski, Sergiusz, 188, 231 Michaud, Eric, 199, 223 Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare), 61–62 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 21, 59, 119, 145, 192–94, 200; exile status of, 28, 36–37 Miller, Arthur, 120; All My Sons, 120–21 Miller Lane, Barbara, 145–47, 159, 162, 193, 228, 245 Ministry of Information (U.K.), 93, 107 Mission Culturelle, 104 Modern Gallery (Prague), 54 Modern German Art exhibition, 116, 119 modernism: Adorno on, 74–75, 78, 84–85; and industrialization, 178; attacks on, 10, 25, 43, 57, 60, 114–15, 149, 170, 175, 199, 217–18, 220,

index 225, 236; attacks on, outside Germany, 115; attacks on, postwar, 116, 128, 150–51; attacks on, pre-1933, 144, 170, 235–36; Benjamin on, 79–80; Clement Greenberg on, 78–79; comparisons of dictatorships, 234; crosscultural comparisons, 233; definitions of, 3, 176–77; German ambivalence toward, 177–80, 190–92; Horkheimer on, 74–75, 78; in American Zone, 115; in dance, 161; in film, 203; in French Zone, 115–116; in Soviet Zone, 114–115; perceptions of suppression in Third Reich, 180–201, 204–214, 226–29; persistence in Third Reich, 2, 14, 24–27, 144, 146, 167; persistence in Third Reich (architecture), 199, 212; persistence in Third Reich (art), 182, 184–85, 188–89, 211–12, 229–30; persistence in Third Reich (music), 169, 208, 210–11, 235; persistence in Third Reich (theater), 230; revival after World War II, 175–76, 182–83; revival after World War II (architecture), 119; revival after World War II (art), 115–16; revival after World War II (music), 121–23; Weimar, 42, 52, 84–86, 90, 124, 162, 175, 187, 208–9, 220, 226. See also atonal music; Ausdruckstanz; Bauhaus; Berlin Opposition; expressionism; film: experimental; Neue Sachlichkeit; twelve-tone music Modigliani, Amadeo, 116 Moellendorff, Wichard von, 249 Moeller, Eberhard Wolfgang: Frankenburg Dice Game, 158 Moeller, Felix, 172 Moeller, Robert, 124 Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur, 197 Moholy-Nagy, Lázló, 58 Molo, Walther von, 83 Mommsen, Hans, 134 Mondrian, Piet, 25 Monet, Claude, 236 Montgomery, Marshall, 108 Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section (MFAA), 115, 117–18 Monuments Men, 115 mood architecture, 158 Mörder sind unter uns, Die, 107 Morgner, Wilhelm, 182 Moses and Aron (Schoenberg), 210 Mosse, George, 85, 142–43 Motion Picture Export Association (MPEA), 108 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 45, 65–66 Mozarteum, 121 Muche, George, 195

381

Münchhausen, 202 Munich Agreement, 54–56, 60 Murderers are Among Us, 107 Murnau, F. W., 62 Museum of Modern Art, 55–59, 76, 119, 181 music: Adorno on, 84–85; amateur organizations, 161, 208, 238; and anti-Fascism, 84–85; and ban on criticism, 19; and film, 235; and Nazi ideology, 208; and the Cold War, 121; and Zero Hour, 125, 284n205; as expressionism, 306n158; as popular medium, 201, 236–37; censorship of, 2, 17–18, 28, 159–60; conservative views on, pre-1933, 22–23; cross-cultural comparisons, 210–11, 214; economics of, 210–11, 228–29; economics of, pre-1933, 10; inconsistencies of Nazi policy toward, 169; in Nazi Germany, generalizations about, 1, 207–8; in West Germany, 121–23; Nazi control of, 168–69; “Nazi” versus “German,” 209; policy in occupied Germany, 93, 111–12; private instruction, 10; publishing, 18, 228–29; revival after World War II, 98–99. See also “degenerate” music Musica Viva, 121–22, 126 music history: treatment of Nazi period, 37, 155, 158–61 musicians: and exile, 64–68, 208–9; and film industry, 67; attacks on Jews in dictatorships, 218; challenges in exile, 49; denazification policy, 101; inconsistencies of Nazi policy toward, 168–69; in exile, Czechoslovakia, 64; in exile, France, 64–65; in exile, United Kingdom, 65; in exile, United States, 66–68 musicology: comparisons of dictatorships, 217–19; in exile, United States, 66; in the Third Reich, 46, 238; life-and-works studies, 223, 234–35; treatment of Nazi period, 160–61, 169, 207–8, 259–60n93 Mussolini, Benito, 37, 64, 79, 134, 199, 216–17, 233 Mussolini, Vittorio, 64 Myers, Bernard, 182–83 Myth of the Twentieth Century (Rosenberg), 11 Nabokov, Nicholas, 92, 118, 121 Napoleon, 116, 201 Nathan the Wise (Nathan der Weise) (Lessing), 109 National-Democratic Party of Germany (NDPD), 97 National Endowment of the Arts, 166 National Gallery (Berlin), 137; Kronprinzenpalais, 24, 229–30

382

index

National Security Resources Board, 132 National Socialist Cultural Community (NSKG), 13, 26 National Socialist Factory Cell Organization (NSBO), 12, 16, 153, 156 National Socialist Student League, 182–83; defense of modernism, 24. See also Berlin Opposition Nationalsozialistische Betriebszellenorganisation (NSBO), 12, 16, 153, 156 Nationalsozialistische Kulturgemeinde (NSKG), 13, 26 NATO, 132, 163 nazification, 45–46; aesthetic, 4, 9, 19–30, 37, 43, 176, 313–14n110; aesthetic, challenges to, 169; as historiographic term, 9; structural, 4, 9–19, 37, 130–31, 244; terminology, 9, 244 Nazi ideology: and design, 163; and film, 30, 153–55, 172, 231–32; and German nationalism, 242–43; and intentionalism, 134; and music, 161, 208, 222, 235; and Rosenberg, 13; and socialism, 30; and the arts, 30, 136, 146, 220; and theater, 30, 157, 230; comparisons of dictatorships, 220; historians’ treatment of, 220, 244; inconsistencies of, 144, 174, 220, 244 Nazi Party, 22, 194, 245–46; films for, 30, 202; in Thuringia, 21; promises of, 34–35; rallies, 5, 22, 24, 30, 169, 222, 238, 239–40, 250; twentyfive points, 20 Nazi term, 9, 241–44 Neher, Caspar, 205 neoclassical architecture. See architecture, neoclassical neoclassicism: in music, 185, 209–11 neocorporatism, 131, 156, 167, 233, 250 Nerdinger, Winfried, 193, 228, 245 Nerlinger, Oskar, 118 Neue Sachlichkeit, 43; and architecture, 193, 195; and Bauhaus, 204; and film, 203–4, 231; and industrialization, 187–192, 203–4; and music, 208–9, 226; and Nazi art, 185–189, 211, 225–26; as German art, 176, 209; attacks on, 187–88, 193, 195, 246; history of, 181–82, 185, 187–88; Hitler on, 246 Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 22 Neues Deutsches Theater, 64 Neumann, Franz, 73, 91, 99, 132 New German Dance. See Ausdruckstanz New German Theater, 64 New Objectivity. See Neue Sachlichkeit New School for Social Research, 67–69 New Sobriety. See Neue Sachlichkeit

newsreels. See under film Nibelungs, The (Die Nibelungen), 202 Nicosia, Frank, 221 Niedecken-Gebhard, Hans, 207 Nierendorf, Karl, 58 Niethammer, Lutz, 96 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 73, 178 Night of Broken Glass, 33, 40, 54, 155 Night of the Long Knives, 12 Ninotchka, 67 Nolde, Emil, 24–25, 125, 180, 183–84, 187, 242 Nolte, Ernst, 164 No More Peace (Toller), 61 Nordwest Deutscher Rundfunk (NWDR), 112, 122 Norton, Lady Noel E., 55 Notgemeinschaft deutscher Wissenschaftler, 68 Nuremberg Laws, 12 Nuremberg Party Rally Grounds, 5, 147, 149, 165, 214, 228–230, 239–240, 250 Nuremberg Trials, 89, 91 Oberlaender Trust, 68 Odets, Clifford, 60, 120 Oellers, Adam, 188–89, 212 Offenbach, Jacques, 18 Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs (U.S.), 115 Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS), 92, 100, 108, 117, 122, 139 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 74, 91, 99, 273n3 Office of War Information (OWI), 74, 76, 83, 91, 107 Ohm Krüger, 155 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 115 Olympia, 82, 203, 214, 232 Olympic Games, 250–1; in Berlin (1936), 5, 30, 38, 66, 158, 206, 251 Olympic Stadium (Berlin), 5, 147 O’Neill, Eugene, 110 opera, 13, 18, 23, 26, 121, 127–28, 161, 169, 171, 201, 207–9, 211 Ophuls, Max, 62 Orff, Carl, 26, 110, 127, 207; Carmina Burana, 26 Organisation Todt, 193, 195 Orwell, George, 71, 216 Oud, J.J.P., 59 Overy, Richard, 222 Pabst, G. W., 36, 192 Paddison, Max, 87

index Painter, Karen, 245 painting, 46, 139, 149, 182. See also art Palmier, Jean-Michel, 84 Papen, Franz von, 18 Parsifal, 205 Partisan Review, 77, 132, 136 Passion of the Christ, The, 251 Peasant Woman (Wissel), 212 fig. Pechstein, Max, 183 Peiner, Werner, 25, 189 PEN club, 182 people’s community. See Volksgemeinschaft Peter Grimes (Britten), 112 Peters, Olaf, 189 Petropoulos, Jonathan, 24, 137, 167, 169, 189, 225 Pevsner, Nikolaus, 59–60, 180, 182, 192 Pfitzner, Hans, 22, 169 Phillips, M. S., 153–54, 202 Picasso, Pablo, 75, 78, 115–16 Pioneer Corps, 93 Pirandello, Luigi, 204 Piscator, Erwin, 21, 38, 61, 84, 187, 206; influence of, in Third Reich, 29–30 Piston, Walter, 111 Plumb, Stephen, 225–26 Political Warfare Executive (U.K.), 93 Pollock, Friedrich, 73–74 Pollock, Jackson, 58 Pommer, Erich, 62, 92 Popper, Karl, 132 popular culture: cross-cultural comparisons, 250; in arts scholarship, 201, 237; in film studies, 201 Popular Front, 54, 79–80, 132 populism, 150–51, 158; cross-cultural comparisons, 198–99, 210–11; in dance, 161–62; in music, 209–10; in theater, 171; in the Third Reich, 235–41; pre-1933, 171 Porgy and Bess (Gershwin), 121 Potsdam Agreement, 89 Prädikate, 17, 153, 172 Preetorius, Emil, 205 Preminger, Otto, 62 Prieberg, Fred K., 160–61 Prodigal Son, The, 202 Projection of Britain (British Council), 104 Prokofiev, Sergei, 113, 235 Proletkult, 149 Prolog, 117 propaganda, 176, 226; cross-cultural comparisons, 233; in Nazi film, 76–77, 82, 152–54, 172; terminology, 247

383

Propaganda Ministry, 6, 29, 58, 101, 111, 140, 163, 238, 247–48; and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, 15; and film, 153–55; and theater, 29, 157–58; competition and, 12; pre-1933 plans for, 155; theater policy of, 17 Prussian Academy of Arts, 32, 67, 69 Prussian State Museum, 137 Prussian State Orchestra, 228 Prussian State Theater, 101 Psychological Warfare Division (PWD), 91–92, 99, 104, 107 public opinion, monitoring of, 2, 233, 236–37, 250 Raabe, Peter, 22–23, 27 race, 149, 156, 167, 179–80; theorists of, 20, 139 radicalization, 31, 40, 45, 167, 224 radio, 161, 209, 229, 240; and jazz, 168; and the Cold War, 122; censorship of, 18; in French Zone, 95; in occupied Germany, 122, 282n170; policies, 236–37 Radio Bavaria, 121 Radio Munich, 122 Radio Stuttgart, 122 Radziwill, Franz, 170, 181, 187, 189, 229, 242 Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt, 234 Rat der Götter, 107 Rath, Ernst vom, 54 Rathaus, Karol, 65, 67 rationalization (industry), 161, 172, 195, 197–98, 242, 245, 249 Rauschenberg, Robert, 57 Rave, Paul Ortwin, 136–41, 144, 159, 182 Readiness (Breker), 213 fig. Reagan, Ronald, 163–64, 166 Rear Window, 67 Rebay, Hilla von, 117 Rebecca (film), 67 recording industry, 18, 28, 161, 228–29, 237 Redslob, Edwin, 125, 227 reeducation, 90, 96; and promotion of Allied culture, 104–5; as corrective to nazification, 9; German reactions to, 116; in American Zone, 92; in French Zone, 94–95 Reich Chancellery, 109, 118, 199 Reich Culture Chambers, 99–102, 111, 165, 170, 224; and Fighting League for German Culture, 11; as example of Gleichschaltung, 10, 14, 137–40, 149, 167–68, 194; competition and, 13; Goebbels’s speech to, 31–32, 36; origin and function of, 2, 6, 10–11, 45, 144; policies of exclusion, 10, 32, 246, 251; structure of, 11–12, 156

384

index

Reich Dramaturgist, 17, 157 Reich Film Chamber, 15, 82, 153–54 Reich Film Dramaturgist, 152 Reich Literature Chamber, 140, 205 Reich Ministry of Education, 7, 12, 139, 170 Reich Ministry of People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda. See Propaganda Ministry Reich Music Chamber, 22, 26, 36, 159; accomplishments of, 12; amateur organizations and, 238; pre-1933 plans for, 168; structure of, 12 Reich Music Days, 5–6, 222 Reich Music Examination Office, 18 Reichsdramaturg, 17, 157 Reichsfilmdramaturg, 152 Reichskristallnacht. See Kristallnacht Reichskulturkammer. See Reich Culture Chambers Reichsmusikprüfstelle, 18 Reichstag, 29 fig., 31, 34, 73 Reichswerke Hermann Göring, 193 Reich Theater Chamber, 29, 156–57, 162, 206; accomplishments of, 156; origins and function of, 16 Reich Visual Arts Chamber, 16, 24, 137, 145, 227 Reinhardt, Max, 16, 38, 61–62, 101, 171, 205–6; attacks from Rosenberg Bureau, 13, 205; influences of, in Third Reich, 29–30 Renaissance-Theater, 98 Rentschler, Eric, 172, 203, 250–51 Research and Analysis Branch (OSS), 91 rhetoric, 152, 172; in Cold War, 139; role of, in Soviet Union, 139; role of, in Third Reich, 4, 34, 44, 139–41, 143–44, 146–50, 158, 244–45, 249 Rhode Island School of Design, 57, 59 RIAS (Radio im amerikanischen Sektor), 122 Richard III (Shakespeare), 171, 205 Richter, Hans, 124 Riefenstahl, Leni, 30, 64, 202, 212, 227; Olympia, 82, 203, 214, 232; Triumph of the Will, 5, 16–17, 76, 82, 203, 250 Rieser, Ferdinand, 60 Riethmüller, Albrecht, 210 Riley, Judith Merkle, 249 Ritchie Boys, The, 92 Ritter, Karl, 203 Rob Roy, 251 Rockefeller Foundation, 68, 74–75 Rockwell, Norman, 46, 214 Roh, Franz, 117, 139–41, 181, 185, 187, 192, 200 Roller, Alfred, 205 Romanticism, 23, 169, 178–79, 181–82, 206, 210, 225–26

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 69 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 39, 55, 70, 138, 233, 249 Rosenberg, Alfred, 20; and creation of Rosenberg Bureau, 7, 13; and music, 208, 210, 222; and Nazi Party, 11, 13; and theater, 157–58; as head of Fighting League for German Culture, 11, 126, 145; as leader, 11, 14, 170; competition and, 12–14, 24, 131, 137, 144, 146, 209; on art, 22, 25, 59, 125, 187, 209, 223, 246; Myth of the Twentieth Century, 11; writings of, 222. See also Rosenberg Bureau; Rosenberg Taskforce Rosenberg Bureau, 7, 139, 150, 205; and Nazi Party, 14; influence of, 14, 146, 157, 170; origins and functions of, 13 Rosenberg Taskforce, 14, 137, 146, 150 Rosselini, Roberto, 123 Rothfeder, Herbert, 146 Rothschilds, The, 142 Rühle, Günter, 205 Russian Question, The (Simonov), 109 Rust, Bernhard, 12, 146, 170 Ruttmann, Walter, 192, 203–4, 227, 231 SA, 12, 140, 161, 169 SA-Mann Brand, 30, 231 Sachs, Curt, 243 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 111; The Flies, 111 Sauerlandt, Max, 227 Saxl, Fritz, 72 Scharoun, Hans, 119, 193 Scheibe, Richard, 25 Scheyer, Galka, 56 Schiller, Friedrich, 40, 109, 111; Wilhelm Tell, 109 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 199, 201 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 232–33 Schlageter, Albert Leo, 205 Schlageter (Johst), 205 Schlemmer, Oskar, 182, 229 Schlichter, Rudolf, 189, 229 Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl, 24, 125, 141, 183 Schmidtseck, Rudolf von, 248 Schmied, Wieland, 187 Schmitt, Carl, 131 Schnabel, Artur, 64, 66 Schneede, Uwe, 138 Schoenbaum, David, 179 Schoenberg, Arnold, 37, 177, 207–8; Adorno on, 73, 75, 81, 84–85, 126–27, 180, 208; attacks on, in Third Reich, 26, 32, 64, 85, 210; attacks

index on, Soviet, 113, 122; in exile, 67; influence of, 67–68, 122, 208, 210, 225; Moses and Aron, 210; postwar recognition of, 127 Scholz, Georg, 189 Scholz, Robert, 150–51, 183, 187, 198, 227 Schönheit der Arbeit, 149, 190, 194–95 Schreiber, Otto Andreas, 25, 184–85, 230 Schreker, Franz, 26 Schrimpf, Georg, 25 Schubert, Franz, 66 Schubert, Giselher, 209 Schulte-Sasse, Linda, 173 Schultze-Naumburg, Paul, 20–22, 145 Schuman, William, 111 Schütte, Ernst, 205 Schwalbach, Carl, 25 schweigsame Frau, Die (Strauss), 13 Scobie, Alexander, 201 sculpture, 5, 29, 116, 118, 127, 141, 194, 235; crosscultural comparisons, 130, 163, 233; styles in Nazi Germany, 58–59, 136, 148–49, 164–65, 197, 217–18. See also art second modernism. See modernism, Weimar Second Viennese School, 81 Section Beaux Arts (DEP), 95, 111, 116 Security Service (SD), 14 serialism, 122, 126, 128, 169 Serkin, Rudolf, 64 Serrano, Andres, 166 Service des Spectacles, Musique et Théâtre (SSMT), 95, 112 Sessions, Roger, 67 Shahn, Ben, 115 Shakespeare, William, 111, 171, 230; Midsummer Night’s Dream, 61–62; Richard III, 171, 205 Shaw, George Bernard, 111, 171 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 113, 217, 235; Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, 217 Sibelius, Jean, 122 Sicherheitsdient (SD), 14 Sierck, Detlef, 30, 62, 231 Silberman, Marc, 172 Simonov, Konstantin, 109; The Russian Question, 109 Sirk, Douglas, 30, 62, 231 Smith, Bernard, 177, 181 social history, 39, 142–43, 216; in arts scholarship, 171–72, 237; in film studies, 171–72; in musicology, 160–61; in theater history, 171 socialist realism, 1, 43, 219; and American art, 234; and architecture, 119; and music, 122; comparisons with Nazi art, 142, 148, 176,

385

184–85, 188, 198–99; edicts, 106, 113; opposition to, 114, 123, 138 Socialist Unity Party (SED), 94, 106, 109, 113, 119, 128, 219 Society for German Education Reconstruction, 93 Society for Private Musical Performance (Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen), 67 Soiuzintorgkino, 108 Sonderweg, 178–79 Sorkin, Michael, 251 Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD), 93, 100–102, 117; Cultural Division of, 94; Information Administration of, 94; Propaganda Administration, 94, 106, 109 Soviet Union: and exiles, 51, 93–94; art policy in occupied Germany, 114–15, 138; compared to Third Reich, 38, 117–18, 130, 132–34, 136–44, 148–52, 155, 184, 198, 216–218, 224–25; cultural aims in occupied Germany, 105–6; cultural policies in, 106, 113–14, 122, 135–41; denazification policy, 97, 100–101, 112–13; film policy in occupied Germany, 106–8; initial impression of Nazi culture, 106, 118; music policy in occupied Germany, 93–94; recruitment of exiles, 93–94, 100–101; show trials, 136; theater policy in occupied Germany, 109. See also Hitler-Stalin Pact; Lenin, Vladimir; Stalin, Joseph; Zhdanov, Andrei spectacle, 158, 219; cross-cultural comparisons, 224, 239, 250–51; pre-1933, 171, 220; role of, in Third Reich, 30, 34, 146–47, 157–58, 172, 238, 241, 249–51 Speer, Albert, 102, 170; artistic rehabilitation of, 147, 151, 162, 164–65, 251; interview, 240; Paris World Exposition pavilion, 200 fig., 200–201; party rally grounds at Nuremberg, 5, 30, 230, 240; plans for Berlin, 28, 29 fig., 199 Spengler, Oswald, 183 Spitzweg, Carl, 205 Spotts, Frederic, 223 Spruchkammern, 97–98, 100, 102–3 SS (Schutzstaffel), 35, 146, 163–64, 169, 171, 188, 228, 238 Stackelberg, Roderick, 74 Stalin, Joseph: artistic taste of, 37; as leader, 133, 308–9n33; compared to Hitler, 1, 38, 121, 142–43, 175–76, 199, 217, 221–22, 223–25, 236; populism of, 198; role in cultural affairs, 106, 222, 224 Stalinallee, 119, 120 fig. Stasi, 218–19

386

index

State Department (U.S.), 69, 96 Staudte, Wolfgang, 107 Steinberg, Wilhelm (William), 66 Steinecke, Wolfgang, 121, 126 Steinweis, Alan, 167–68, 250 Stephan, Rudolf, 128 Stern, Fritz, 85 Steuermann, Eduard, 66 Steunfonds, 68 Stiedry, Fritz, 66 Stimmungsarchitektur, 158 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 122, 177 Stommer, Rainer, 158 Stonard, John-Paul, 175 Straus, Oskar, 65 Strauss, Richard, 22, 36, 66, 112, 122, 222, 242; as president of Reich Music Chamber, 12–13; attacks from Rosenberg Bureau, 13; Die schweigsame Frau, 13 Stravinsky, Igor, 21, 64, 95, 113, 127, 187, 210–11; L’histoire du soldat, 26 Stravinsky, Soulima, 95 Strength through Joy, 13, 149, 171, 173, 179; factory exhibitions, 25–26 Strobel, Heinrich, 95, 126 structuralism. See intentionalism Stunde Null. See Zero Hour Sturmabteilung, 2, 140, 161, 169 Stuttgart Opera, 110 Südwestfunk, 95 surrealism, 58, 85, 117, 183, 185, 188 Swing Kids (film), 173 Swing Kids (Hamburg), 28, 257n66 Switzerland: exile in, 58, 60, 68, 72, 102, 127, 211 Syring, Marie Luise, 199 Tag der neuen Musik, 121 Tannhäuser (Wagner), 206 Taylor, A. J. P., 252 Taylor, Robert, 147 Taylorism, 231, 249 technology: ambivalence toward, pre-1933, 23; and film, 203–4; and mass gatherings, 239–41; and music, 209; and the arts, 189–92, 203–4, 212, 250; in arts scholarship, 171; Nazi attitudes toward, 179, 194 Teut, Anna, 193 theater, 29–30, 98; and anti-Fascism, 82; and Goebbels-Goering rivalry, 170; antisemitism in, 230; censorship of, 17, 157; censorship of, outside of Germany, 60; competition from film industry, 10; conservatism, pre-1933,

205; denazification policy, 101; economics of, 156; economics of, pre-1933, 10, 16; experimental, in Third Reich, 171, 205–6, 220, 230; in East Germany, 120–21; in exile, 49, 60–2; in exile, Czechoslovakia, 60; in exile, France, 61; in exile, Switzerland, 60; in exile, United Kingdom, 61; in exile, United States, 61–62; in occupied Germany, 109–111, 273–74n12; in West Germany, 120–1; repertoire in Third Reich, 17, 171; revival after World War II, 98. See also Massenspiele; Thingplätze (open-air theaters); Thingspiel Theater des Volkes, 171 theater general managers (Intendanten), 100–101, 110 theater history: and social history, 171; comparisons of dictatorships, 217; treatment of Nazi period, 37–38, 155–58, 167 Theresienstadt, 202, 217 Thies, Jochen, 148, 222 Thiess, Frank, 83 Thingplätze (open-air theaters), 5, 29, 147, 157–58, 171, 206, 236, 239–40, 250 Thingspiel, 5, 29–30, 147, 157–58, 173, 219, 230, 238–40, 150; as expressionist theater, 30, 206; as popular medium, 210; precursors of, 30, 171 Third Reich: compared to East Germany, 218–220; compared to Fascist Italy, 232–233; compared to Soviet Union, 117–18, 130, 132–34, 136–44, 148–52, 155, 184, 198, 216–218, 224–25; compared to United States, 232–33, 249–250; comparisons of dictatorships, 162, 229, 251; cross-cultural comparisons, 163–64, 174, 232–235; diachronic isolation of, 3–4, 37–38, 32, 55, 70, 90, 123–24, 162–63, 172–74, 188–89, 229–31, 241; fifty-year commemorations, 159–163; synchronic isolation of, 4, 162–63, 176, 229, 231–35 Thompson, Dorothy, 69, 71, 77 Thorak, Josef, 116 Threepenny Opera (Brecht), 21, 26, 30, 231 Thuringia: Nazi cultural policies in, pre-1933, 20–21, 145, 156, 193 Tietjen, Heinz, 205 Tillich, Paul, 132 Tippett, Michael, 112; A Child of Our Time, 112 Tiulpanov, Sergei Ivanovich, 94, 106 To Beauty (Dix), 190 fig., 191 To Be or Not To Be, 67 Tobis studio, 153 Toch, Ernst, 65, 67

index Todesmühlen, Die, 107 Todt Organization, 193, 195 Toller, Ernst, 61; No More Peace, 61 totalitarian aesthetic, 239–41; cross-cultural comparisons, 250 totalitarianism concept, 38, 43, 130–31, 166, 193; after the Cold War, 215–221, 234; and political religion, 219, 239; challenges to, 134, 141–47, 155–56, 159–61, 167–72; in art history, 163; in arts scholarship, 135–41, 143, 144, 156, 201; in dance history, 206; in film history, 152, 154–55, 202; in music history, 160–61; in theater history, 156–157; origins of, 91, 131–233 Totenmal (Wigman), 206 Treaty of Versailles, 34–35, 105, 245–46 Trenker, Luis, 232 Treptow, Günther, 32 Triad (Belling), 25, 248 fig. Tristan (Mann), 178 Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens), 5, 17, 76, 82, 155, 203, 214, 232, 235, 239 Troost, Gerdy, 246 Troost, Paul Ludwig, 5, 6 fig., 125 Trotsky, Leon, 136, 225 Truman Doctrine, 132 Tucker, Robert, 225 twelve-tone music, 68, 85, 121, 126, 208–11; attacks on, 26, 236; persistence in Third Reich, 26 UFA, 67, 82, 106, 153, 172 UFI group, 108 Ujfalussy, József, 210 Ulbricht, Walter, 94, 119, 220 Ulbricht Group, 93, 101, 113 Uncle Krüger, 155 unendliche Weg, Der, 203 Unger, Hermann, 23 Unhappy Alley, 192 unification, German: in 1871, 34, 177, 245; in 1990, 35, 44, 129 United Kingdom: and exile, 55–56, 61, 65; artistic taste of, 55, 59, 61; art policy in occupied Germany, 115; attitudes toward Germany, 51, 61; cultural aims in occupied Germany, 104–5; denazification policy, 97, 100; film policy in occupied Germany, 108; music policy in occupied Germany, 112, 122; occupation of Germany, 92–93; recruitment of exiles in occupied Germany, 92–93, 274n20; theater policy in occupied Germany, 110

387

United States: and exile, 56–60, 68–69; appeasement policies of, 51, 55–57, 62; artistic taste of, 55–58; art policy in occupied Germany, 115; compared to Third Reich, 232–33, 249–50; cultural aims in occupied Germany, 104–5, 278n80; denazification policy, 96–97, 99–100, 111, 115; design in, 195–97; film industry, 30, 62–63, 67, 75, 108, 120, 173, 214, 232, 235; film policy in occupied Germany, 107–8; German attitudes toward, 22–23, 28, 178, 189–92, 203, 204, 231; initial impressions of Nazi culture, 119, 122; music policy in occupied Germany, 111, 121–22; neoclassical architecture in, 201; occupation of Germany, 91–92; recruitment of exiles in occupied Germany, 91–92, 107, 109, 273n7, 273n8, 273–274n12, 274n13; seizure of German war art, 125, 164–65, 182; student rebellion, 133–34; theater policy in occupied Germany, 109–110. See also Americanism; Fordism; Taylorism Unity Front Troupe, 60 University in Exile, 69 University of London, 72 University of Munich, 117 U.S. Congress, 99, 107, 117 U.S.S.R. See Soviet Union Utrillo, Maurice, 116 Valentin, Curt, 58 Van Dyke, James, 170, 181, 189 Vassar College, 67 V-E Day, 115 Venice International Film Festival: in 1935, 214, 232; in 1938, 202–3 verism, 181, 185, 187 verlorene Sohn, Der, 202 Vichy regime, 68, 95, 97, 171 Vienna Philharmonic, 229 Vienna State Opera, 102 Vietnam War, 133 Villa Stuck, 125 Völkischer Beobachter, 22, 45, 150 Volksbühne, 109, 171 Volksgemeinschaft, 19, 131, 135, 244; and architecture, 147, 240, 241; and art, 230; and dance, 161, 206; and mass culture, 39, 44, 198, 235–41, 245; and music, 238, 241, 315n130; and theater, 158, 240; arts professions and, 35, 41, 46, 143, 238–9; middle class and, 237–8; racist implications of, 35, 39, 180, 224, 238, 247–8, 252; terminology, 247–49; workers and, 39, 195, 237, 238

388

index

Volksoper, 208 Volwahsen, Herbert, 125 Wagenfeld, Wilhelm, 195 Wagner, Martin, 59 Wagner, Richard, 66, 208; and film music, 235; Hitler’s admiration of, 5, 135, 222, 224; Horkheimer on, 73; Mann on, 69; Die Meistersinger, 15, 230; Nietzsche on, 178; Parsifal, 205; performances in Third Reich, 15, 161, 230; postwar attitudes toward, 112, 127, 139, 141; Tannhäuser, 206. See also Bayreuth Festival Wagner, Wieland, 205 Wagner-Régeny, Rudolf, 84 Wallenberg, Hans, 92 Wälsungenblut (Mann), 178 Walter, Bruno, 31, 64, 66 Walter, Michael, 169, 208 Wamberg, Jacob, 234 Wandel, Paul, 107 Wannsee Conference, 142 Warburg, Aby, 71 Warburg, Ingrid, 69 Warburg Institute, 71, 86 Warner Brothers, 62 Watkins, Glenn, 177 Waxmann, Franz, 65, 67 Webern, Anton von, 26, 68, 126, 208, 210 Wehrmacht exhibition, 35–36 Weidemann, Hans, 25 Weill, Kurt, 37, 65, 73, 85, 208, 210, 225; and Bertolt Brecht, 32, 67; Threepenny Opera, 21, 26, 30, 231 Weimar modernism. See modernism, Weimar Weimar Republic, 6, 167; anticommunism, 23; antisemitism, 23; architecture of, 20–22; arts administration, 10–11; cultural conservatism and xenophobia, 20–23; disorder in, 23, 35, 41, 236; economy of, 10–11, 35; film industry during, 15; nationalism, 23; radio in, 10 Weisenborn, Günther, 107 Welch, David, 154–55, 237 Welt im Film, 107 Werbefilm. See advertising Werbekunst. See advertising Werkbund, 194–95, 197 Werner, Bruno, 183 West Germany, 38; and totalitarian concept, 133; film industry, 154; founding of, 114; initial impressions of Nazi culture, 116, 124–25;

leftist critiques of, 148, 149, 154; scholarship of, 44, 164; student rebellion (“68ers”), 134, 148–49, 160 Wheatland, Thomas, 77–79 White Rose, 242 Why We Fight, 214, 232 Wiener, Alfred, 72 Wiener Library, 71–72, 142 Wigman, Mary, 30, 38, 66, 161, 180, 206–7 Wilder, Billy, 62, 92, 107 Wilder, Thornton, 110 Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 14, 134, 248 Wilhelm Tell (Schiller), 109 Willett, John, 183, 187, 209 Winkler, Heinrich August, 237–38 Winkler, Max, 153 Wissel, Adolf, 189; Peasant Woman, 212 fig. Wochenschau, 214 Wolf, Friedrich, 107 Wolfsonian Museum, 195, 233 Wollenberg, H. H., 82–83, 151–53, 202 Wolpe, Stefan, 67 Woltman, Ludwig, 243 women’s studies, 39, 173, 216, 232 Wood, Grant, 211; American Gothic, 212 fig. workers, 237, 246; cross-cultural comparisons, 250; cultural outlets for, 13, 149, 161, 171, 173, 179, 238; in the Third Reich, 150 Workers’ Community or Builder’s Workshop (Cameraderie) (Hengstenberg), 189 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 168 World Exposition (Paris, 1937), 189, 199–200, 214, 234 World in Film, The, 107 World War I, 4, 10; disorder following, 4, 34, 189, 245; perceived injustices of, 5, 245–46 World War II: censorship during, 45, 159; commemoration at Bitburg, 163–64; conditions in Germany after, 89–90, 118, 124; cultural revival following, 98–99; film industry during, 153; impressions of Nazi culture following, 7–8, 127–28 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 119, 228 Wulf, Joseph, 141–44, 156, 159–61, 244 Yale University, 67 Yalta conference, 90–91 Yellow Christ (Gauguin), 182 Zeitoper, 209 Zeller, Wolfgang, 107 Zen 49 collective, 117

index Zenck, Claudia Maurer, 85 Zero Hour, 35, 42, 44, 90; and art, 125–26, 242; and music, 125–26, 209, 284n205; effects on cultural history, 123–29, 148, 175, 180, 221 Zhdanov, Andrei, 106, 113–14, 135–36, 224 Ziegler, Adolf, 24, 185–87, 186 fig., 214; The Four Elements, 186 fig., 214 Zielke, Willy, 203

Zillig, Winfried, 26, 85, 169, 210–11, 235 Zimmerman, Bernd Alois, 126 Zionism, 133, 238 Zivilisation. See Kultur and Zivilisation Žižek, Slavoj, 234 Zuckmayer, Carl, 92 Zuschlag, Christoph, 170 Zweig, Stefan, 13, 36, 152

389

WEIMAR AND NOW: GERMAN CULTURAL CRITICISM Edward Dimendberg, Martin Jay, and Anton Kaes, General Editors 1. Heritage of Our Times, by Ernst Bloch 2. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990, by Steven E. Aschheim 3. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg 4. Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity, by Christoph Asendorf 5. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, by Margaret Cohen 6. Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany, by Thomas J. Saunders 7. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, by Richard Wolin 8. The New Typography, by Jan Tschichold, translated by Ruari McLean 9. The Rule of Law under Siege: Selected Essays of Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, edited by William E. Scheuerman 10. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950, by Martin Jay 11. Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, edited by Katharina von Ankum 12. Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1900–1949, edited by Hans Wysling, translated by Don Reneau 13. Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935, by Karl Toepfer 14. In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment, by Anson Rabinbach 15. Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels, by Beatrice Hanssen 16. Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present, by Anthony Heilbut 17. Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, by Helmut Lethen, translated by Don Reneau 18. In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945–1948, by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, translated by Kelly Barry 19. A Dubious Past: Ernst Jünger and the Politics of Literature after Nazism, by Elliot Y. Neaman 20. Beyond the Conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust, by Dan Diner 21. Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle, by Scott Spector 22. Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich, by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld 23. The Ufa Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918–1945, by Klaus Kreimeier, translated by Robert and Rita Kimber

24. From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870–1990, by Rudy Koshar 25. We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism, by Marsha Meskimmon 26. Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany, by Bernd Widdig 27. Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany, by Janet Ward 28. Graphic Design in Germany: 1890–1945, by Jeremy Aynsley 29. Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy, by Timothy O. Benson, with contributions by Edward Dimendberg, David Frisby, Reinhold Heller, Anton Kaes, and Iain Boyd Whyte 30. The Red Count: The Life and Times of Harry Kessler, by Laird M. Easton 32. The Dark Mirror: German Cinema between Hitler and Hollywood, by Lutz Koepnick 33. Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy, by Peter Eli Gordon 34. The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design, by Paul Betts 35. The Face of East European Jewry, by Arnold Zweig, with fifty-two drawings by Hermann Struck. Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Noah Isenberg 36. No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema, by Johannes von Moltke 37. Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture, by Peter Jelavich 38. Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity, by Andreas Killen 39. A Concise History of the Third Reich, by Wolfgang Benz, translated by Thomas Dunlap 40. Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration, 1955–2005, edited by Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling, and Anton Kaes 41. Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism, by Ehrhard Bahr 42. The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany, by Kay Schiller and ChristopherYoung 43. Berlin Psychoanalytic: Psychoanalysis and Culture in Weimar Republic Germany and Beyond, by Veronika Fuechtner 44. Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, by Miriam Bratu Hansen 45. Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings: Essays on Film and Popular Culture, edited by Johannes von Moltke and Kristy Rawson 46. Metropolis Berlin, 1880–1940, edited by Iain Boyd Whyte and David Frisby 47. The Third Reich Sourcebook, edited by Anson Rabinbach and Sander L. Gilman 48. Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins, by Noah Isenberg 49. The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933, edited by Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer, and Michael Cowan 50. Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts, by Pamela M. Potter