Stephanie Barron, “Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany,”

in Barron (ed.), Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany
(Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991): 9-23.

In 1937 the National Socialists staged the most virulent attack ever mounted against modern art
with the opening on July 19 in Munich of the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate art) exhibition, in
which were brought together more than 650 important paintings, sculptures, prints, and books
that had until a few weeks earlier been in the possession of thirty-two German public museum
collections. The works were assembled for the purpose of clarifying for the German public by
defamation and derision exactly what type of modern art was unacceptable to the Reich, and thus
“un-German.” During the four months Entartete Kunst was on view in Munich it attracted more
than two million visitors, over the next three years it traveled throughout Germany and Austria
and was seen by nearly one million more On most days twenty thousand visitors passed through
the exhibition, which was free of charge; records state that on one SundayAugust 2, 1937-thirty-
six thousand people saw it. 1 The popularity of Entartete Kunst has never been matched by any
other exhibition of modern art. According to newspaper accounts, five times as many people
visited Entartete Kunst as saw the Grosse Deutsche Kunstaussiellung (Great German art
exhibition), an equally large presentation of Nazi-approved art that had opened on the preceding
day to inaugurate Munich's Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German art), the first official
building erected by the National Socialists.
The thoroughness of the National Socialists' politicization of aesthetic issues remains
unparalleled in modern history, as does the remarkable set of circumstances that led to the
complete revocation of Germany's previous identification of its cultural heroes, not only in the
visual arts but also in literature, music, and film. When the National Socialists assumed power in
1933, one of their first acts was an attack on contemporary authors; widespread book-burnings in
which thousands of volumes were destroyed in public view announced the new policy toward the
arts The Entartete Kunst exhibition was only the tip of the iceberg: in 1937 more than sixteen
thousand examples of modern art were confiscated as “degenerate” by a committee empowered
by Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler's second-in-command and since March of 1933 Reichsminister
für Volksaufklarung und Propaganda (Reich minister for public enlightenment and propaganda)
While some of the impounded art was earmarked for Entartete Kunst in Munich, hundreds of
works were sold for hard currency to foreign buyers. Many of the “dregs,” as Goebbels called
them, were probably destroyed in a spectacular blaze in front of the central fire department in
Berlin in 1939.2
The National Socialists rejected and censured virtually everything that had existed on the
German modern art scene prior to 1933. Whether abstract or representational, the innocuously
beautiful landscapes and portraits by August Macke, the expressionistically colored paintings by
the popular Brücke artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, the
biting social criticism of Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and George Grosz, or the efforts of the
Bauhaus artists to forge a new link between art and industry—all were equally condemned. The
Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums (Professional civil servic restoration act)
of April 7, 1933, enabled Nazi officials to dismiss non-Aryan government employees from their
jobs. In that year alone more than twenty museum directors and curators, all of whom worked for
state institutions, were fired.
 Barron, “Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany”

Artists were forced to join official groups, and any “undesirables” were dismissed from
teaching posts in the academies and artistic organizations. No matter what their political
attitudes, artist who worked in abstract, Cubist, Expressionist, Surrealist, or other modern styles
came under attack. Nolde, who was actually an early member of the National Socialist party, saw
his own work declared “degenerate.” Willi Baumeister and Beckmann were dismissed from their
positions at the Frankfurt Stadelschule (Municipal school); Dix, Paul Klee, and Max Pechstein
were fired from the academies in Dresden, Düsseldorf, and Berlin, respectively The Preussische
Akademie (Prussian academy) in Berlin lost many important artists, including Ernst Barlach,
Rudolf Belling, Dix, Ludwig Gies, Karl Hofer, Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka, Kathe Kollwitz,
Max Liebermann, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Pechstein, and Bruno Taut. Most of the artists
who were persecuted were not Jewish; on the contrary—of those mentioned above only
Liebermann was Jewish, and of the 112 artists included in Entartete Kunst only 6 were Jews.
Any artists who were mentioned or whose work was illustrated in any of the well-publicized
books on contemporary art by Ludwig Justi or Carl Einstein or in avant-garde periodicals such as
Das Kunstblatt (The art paper), Die Aktion (Action), or Der Sturm (The storm) were easy
targets for the National Socialists. In 1979 Berthold Hinz produced evidence that Einstein's Die
Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (The art of the twentieth century) was in fact used as a guide by
many of the National Socialists in defining who and what was modern, and conscquently “un-
German” and to be vilified.3 With the swift mprint of the censors stamp they outlawed an entire
generation of modernism.
While the focus of “Degenerate Art:” The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany is
on events in the visual arts, these can be seen as indicative of prohibitions in the wider spectrum
of the cultural arena. It is worthwhile to look at the various areas that came under the jurisdiction
of the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklarung und Propaganda. In November 1933 Goebbels
established Reichskammern (Reich chambers) of film, music, radio broadcasting, press, theater,
and writers, in addition to the fine arts. Each of the heads of these chambers had under him (there
were no women) seven departments incorporating further subdivisions. The Reichskammer der
bildenden Kiinste (Reich chamber of visual arts), for example, was divided into departments of
1) administration; 2) press and propaganda; 3) architecture, landscape architecture, and interior
design; 4) painting, sculpture, and graphic arts; 5) commercial illustration and design; 6) art
promotion, artists' associations, and craft associations; and 7) art publishing, sales, and
auctioneering.
What becomes apparent is the microscopic attention the Nazi hierarchy accorded the
observation and regulation of all aspects of cultural life in the Reich. The government established
procedures whereby it decided what and who was acceptable or undesirable. Exclusion was
tantamount to permanent disbarment. One can only wonder at the disproportionate amount of
bureaucratic organization, paperwork, rules, and regulations that was aimed at an area of society
that was economically, politically, and militaristically unthreatening. Obviously the National
Socialists perceived the cultural life of the citizens of the Reich to be extremely important and
worthy of such intensive concern. This elevation of art to such a major role in a totalitarian
society was without historical precedent, other than in the Soviet Union. Hellmut Lehmann-
Haupt wrote in the early 1950s, “Such complete monopolization of the entire creative potential
of a people, of every aesthetic instinct, such subjugation of every current of its productivity and
its capacity for artistic experience to the purposes of the leaders of collective society does not
exist before the present century.”4 Although Hitler had a personal interest and involvement with
art, due to his unsuccessful career as a painter in Vienna, Lehmann-Haupt argues convincingly

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 Barron, “Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany”

that the preoccupation of the National Socialists with culture far transcended Hitler's own
frustrated flirtation with art. 5

Degeneracy and Nazi ideology in the 1920s and 1930s

The Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung and Entartete Kunst did not occur as isolated incidents.
The issues raised, the fusion of political and aesthetic themes, and the use of the term entartet to
designate supposedly inferior racial, sexual, and moral types had been in the air for several years.
(Entartet, which has traditionally been translated as “degenerate” or “decadent,” is essentially a
biological term, defining a plant or animal that has so changed that it no longer belongs to its
species. By extension it refers to art that is unclassifiable or so far beyond the confines of what is
accepted that it is in essence “non-art.”)
The events leading up to 1937 had their roots in German cultural history long before the
National Socialist party was formed. The year 1871 marked both the emergence of the German
empire and the publication of Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man, a book later used to justify
German racism. As a unified country Germany became prone to an intense nationalism that
manifested itself quite often as a belief in the natural superiority of the Aryan people. The myth
of the blond, blue-eyed Nordic hero as the embodiment of the future of Western civilization was
promoted in the writings of several European authors of the early twentieth century, including
Count Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Hans Günther, and Alfred Rosenberg. In the
decade between 1910 and 1920 the concept of racism had achieved popularity in the middle
class. By the 1920s certain authors argued that racial characteristics and art were linked and
attempted to “prove” that the style of a work of art was determined by the race of the artist. 6
This period in German history also saw the efflorescence of modern art, literature, film, and
music created by individuals who would be labeled “degenerate” in the 1930s. German art
virtually exploded in a series of events in Berlin, Dresden, and Munich The emergence of the
artists' groups Die Brücke (The bridge) and Der Blaue Reiter (The blue rider), the publication of
important radical periodicals to which artists contributed, and the intense response by artists and
writers to the cataclysmic events of the First World War characterized the first phase of German
Expressionism. These artists and writers were also drawn to the exotic: the carvings and wall
hangings of African and Oceanic peoples that the Brücke artists saw in the Dresden
Volkerkunde-Museum (Ethnographic museum), for example, or the art of the insane that served
as inspiration for the poetry and prose of such esteemed authors as Hugo Ball, Alfred Döblin,
and Wieland Herzfelde. In the wake of the war avant-garde German art came increasingly into
conflict with the nationalistic realism that was more easily understood by the average German.
The country had experienced a humiliating defeat and had been assessed for huge war
reparations that grievously taxed its already shaky economy. Movements such as Expressionism,
Cubism, and Dada were often viewed as intellectual, elitist, and foreign by the demoralized
nation and linked to the economic collapse, which was blamed on a supposed international
conspiracy of Communists and Jews. Many avant-garde artists continued their involvement in
Socialism during the turbulent Weimar era and made their sentiments known through their art.
This identification of the more abstract art movements with internationalism and progressive
politics created highly visible targets for the aggressive nationalism that gave birth to the
National Socialist party, even as institutions such as the Bauhaus school moved into the cultural
mainstream and German museums exhibited more and more avant-garde work.
Concurrent with important artistic developments, pseudoscientific treatises such as Max
Nordau's Entartung (Degeneration) of 1892 were enjoying renewed popularity.7 Nordau, himself

3
 Barron, “Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany”

a Jew, wrote a ponderous text vilifying the Pre-Raphaelites, Symbolism, Henrik Ibsen, and Emile
Zola, among others, as he sought to prove the superiority of traditional German culture. In 1895
George Bernard Shaw had written a brilliant and scathing review of Nordau's book,8 one of
several responses provoked internationally. Unfortunately, the criticism had little impact on the
architects of Nazi ideology. Entartung and other racist works took the widely accepted view that
nineteenth-century realistic genre painting represented the culmination of a long tradition of true
Aryan art. Even before they obtained a majority in the Reichstag (Parliament), disgruntled
theorists and polemicists had written and spoken of how “good German art” was being overrun
by “degenerates, Jews, and other insidious influences.” The avant-garde artist was equated to the
insane, who in turn was synonymous with the Jew: the nineteenth-century founders of German
psychiatry felt that the Jew was inherently degenerate and more susceptible than the non-Jew to
insanity. 9 As Sander Gilman has pointed out, the classifications of “degenerate” and “healthy”
appeared for the first time in the late nineteenth centuryi by the late 1930s they were fairly
standard in discussions about the avant-garde and the traditional. 10
Opposition to the wave of avant-garde activities in German museums had begun in the
1920s; with the founding of the Deutsche Kunstgesellschaft (German art association), which had
as its goals a “common action against the corruption of art” and the promotion of an “art that was
pure German, with the German soul reflecting art.” They attacked exhibitions of the works of
Beckmann, Grosz, and other proponents of “Kulturbolschewismus” (art-Bolshevism). In 1927
Rosenberg, the chief architect of Nazi cultural policy, founded the Kampfbund für deutsche
Kultur (Combat league for German culture), which had the same goals as the Deutsche
Kunstgesellschaft. It was at first an underground organization, but with the rise of National
Socialism it worked openly with the party leadership. In 1930 Rosenberg wrote Der Mytbus des
20. Jahrhunderts: Eine Wertung der seelisch -geistigen Gestaltenkämpfe (The myth of the
twentieth century: an evaluation of the spiritual-intellectual confrontations of our age), in which
he denounced Expressionism and other modern art forms: “Creativity was broken because it had
oriented itself, ideologically and artistically, toward a foreign standard and thus was no longer
attuned to the demands of life.” 11
In 1929 the state of Thuringia elected Wilhelm Frick, a member of the Nazi party, as
representative to the Reichstag. Frick was named Innenminister (Minister of the interior) for
Thuringia. His actions gave a foretaste of what the Nazi seizure of power would mean: he began
by replacing most department heads, issuing new cultural policies, and even encouraging the
dismissal of Walter Gropius and the entire twenty-nine-member faculty of the Bauhaus in
Weimar, which was located within his jurisdiction.
Frick appointed Paul Schultze-Naumburg, an architect and racial theorist, to replace
Gropius. In 1925 Schultze-Naumburg had published an attack on the Bauhaus, Das ABC des
Bauens (The ABCs of building), and in 1928 he wrote Kunst and Rasse (Art and race), which
would have a far-reaching influence in the Nazi scheme against modernism Exploiting the
popularity of Nordau's treatise, Schultze-Naumburg attacked modern art as “entartet.” He
juxtaposed examples of modern art and photographs of deformed or diseased people to suggest
that they were the models for the elongated faces of Amedeo Modigliani, the angular
physiognomies of Schmidt-Rottluff, and the florid faces of Dix. He railed particularly against the
Expressionists, who he felt represented the inferior aspect of modern German culture.
Heidelberg had become a center for the study of art produced by schizophrenics as a
means of access to the central problems of mental illness. In 1922 psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn
had published his study Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (image-making by the mentally ill), which

4
 Barron, “Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany”

was based on material he had assembled: he examined more than 5,000 works by 450 patients to
demonstrate that the art of the insane exhibited certain specific qualities.12 The study received
serious attention far beyond the medical profession. Although we have no evidence that Hitler,
the failed artist, read or even knew of Prinzhorn's book, the attention devoted to it was so
widespread that it is more likely than not to have reached him. Thus, it is not surprising that
Schultze-Naumburg's methodology of comparing the works of insane artists to avant-garde art
was seized upon as a further way to “prove” the “degeneracy” of modern art. The technique of
comparison for the purpose of denigration and condemnation thus became a basic tool of the
Nazi campaign. In 1933 in Erlangen one of the many precursors of Entartete Kunst included
thirty-two paintings by contemporary artists shown with works by children and the mentally ill. 13
The same technique was used on several pages in
the illustrated brochure published to accompany Entartete Kunst as it traveled around Germany.
There emerged in 1934 some confusion about the “official” attitude toward the
Expressionists, artists such as Barlach and Nolde in particular. Some factions saw this art as truly
German and Nordic, with roots in the Gothic era. Goebbels initially sided with these proponents,
in fact, he surrounded himself with examples of Barlach's sculpture and Nolde's painting; he saw
the spirit and chaos of Expressionism as analogous to the spirit of Nazi youth. At extreme odds
with him was Rosenberg, who sought to promote völkisch art (art of and for the German people)
over any type of modern aesthetic. Goebbels and Rosenberg took opposing sides in their
speeches and writings, neither yet sure of the Führer's opinion.14 When Hitler appointed
Rosenberg early in 1934 to supervise all “intellectual and ideological training,” he gave him a
rank equal to Goebbels's in his role as president of the Reichskulturkammer (Reich chamber of
culture). The ideological tug-of-war continued well into the year, until the controversy required
Hitler's intervention. In September, at the party rally in Nuremberg, Hitler spoke of the dangers
of artistic sabotage by the Cubists, Futurists, Dadaists, and others who were threatening artistic
growth, but he also cautioned against excessively retrograde German art. Thus, neither
Expressionism nor the conservative völkisch art received his blessing. Nazi-approved art would
be based exclusively on German racial tradition. Henceforth, all forms of modernism, including
art criticism, were outlawed.
The unusual methodology employed by the Nazis in the Entartete Kunst exhibition
entailed the gathering of works of art for the specific purpose of defamation. Never before had
there been such an effort; perhaps only Soviet Russia in the years following the revolution of
1917 offers a parallel for the efflorescence of modernism and its immediate repudiation by the
government in power The late-nineteenth-century French Salons des Refuses, in which art
outside the academic tradition could be seen, were state-sanctioned opportunities for the avant-
garde to emerge. By contrast, the Nazis exhibited works contrary to their “approved” art in order
to condemn them. There was no chance for an alternative voice to be heard.
As early as 1933 the seeds had been sown for the approach used in the Munich exhibition
four years later. In that year the Deutscber Kunstbericbt (German art report), under Goebbels's
jurisdiction, published a five-point manifesto stating “what German artists expect from the new
government.” Much of the content of the manifesto was generated by artists outside the
mainstream avant-garde who felt that the art world had passed them by They sought revenge on a
modern art that was becoming increasingly identified with Germany in the international art
world. The manifesto laid the groundwork for the events in 1937:

5
 Barron, “Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany”

• All works of a cosmopolitan or Bolshevist nature should be removed from German

museums and collections, but first they should be exhibited to the public, who should be
informed of the details of their acquisition, and then burned.
• All museum directors who “wasted” public monies by purchasing “un-German” art
should be fired immediately.
• No artist with Marxist or Bolshevist connections should be mentioned henceforth
• No boxlike buildings should be built [an assault on Bauhaus architecture].
• All public sculptures not “approved” by the German public should be immediately
removed [this applied especially to Barlach and Wilhelm Lehmbruck].

The attack on the museums

Prior to the outbreak of the First World War, museums, art dealers, and periodicals in Germany
were greatly attuned to avant-garde activities in Europe and were avid advocates for the most
recent developments. Museum curators and directors had responded eagerly to Impressionism
and Post-Impressionism In 1897 the Nationalgalerie in Berlin became the first museum in the
world to acquire a painting by Paul Cezanne, and the Museum Folkwang in Essen was among
the earliest public supporters of the work of Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh. Herwarth
Walden, with his gallery and publication Der Sturm, was a staunch supporter of Expressionism,
Cubism, Futurism, and the Russian avant-garde.
In 1949 Paul Ortwin Rave, who had become a curator at the Berlin Nationalgalerie in the
1930s, wrote the first book describing the artistic situation under the Nazi regime, Kunstdiktatur
im Dritten Reich (Art dictatorship in the Third Reich), which contained his eyewitness account
of the Entartete Kunst exhibition.15 What emerges from his description of the activities of
German museums from 1919 through 1939 is a picture of a country filled with museums actively
committed to modern art, to its acquisition and display. Alexander Doerner in Hannover, Gustav
Hartlaub and Fritz Wichert in Mannheim, Carl Georg Heise in Lübeck, Ludwig Justi in Berlin,
Alfred Lichtwark in Hamburg, Karl Ernst Osthaus in Hagen, Max Sauerlandt in Halle and later
in Hamburg, Alois Schardt in Halle, Georg Swarzenski in Frankfurt, and Hugo von Tschudi in
Berlin and later in Munich were among the museum directors who proselytized for contemporary
art. They were responsible for acquiring, often directly from the artists, major works by Barlach,
Beckmann, Lyonel Feininger, Erich Heckel, Kirchner, Lehmbruck, Macke, Franz Marc, Nolde,
Pechstein, Christian Rohlfs, and Schmidt-Rottluff, as well as artists of the earlier generation,
Lovis Corinth, Liebermann, and Max Slevogt. They were not only committed to contemporary
German art but also acquired in significant quantity important works by foreign Impressionists
and Post-Impressionists Cezanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Auguste
Renoir, and Paul Signac and the art of contemporary foreigners such as James Ensor, Wassily
Kandinsky El Lissitsky Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso.
The exhibitions they organized, which frequently traveled, helped to define artistic trends
and were important signs to foreign museums and dealers of the healthy state of contemporary
art in Germany. Important international exhibitions in Cologne in 1912, Dresden in 1919, and
Dusseldorf and Hannover m 1928 exposed new German art to a wider public. Contemporary
German art was shown in Florence, London, New York, Paris, Pittsburgh, and Stockholm. In
1931 Alfred Barr, Jr, traveled in Germany to prepare his Modern German Painting and Sculpture
for the fledgling Museum of Modern Art in New York. He was so impressed by what he saw in
the museums that he made a point in his catalogue of citing the contemporary collecting policies
of German public institutions.

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 Barron, “Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany”

However much modern German art is admired or misunderstood abroad, it

is certainly supported publicly and privately in Germany with extraordinary
generosity. Museum directors have the courage, foresight and knowledge to buy
works by the most advanced artists long before public opinion forces them to do
so. Some fifty German Museums, as the lists in this catalogue suggest, are a most
positive factor both in supporting artists and in educating the public to an
understanding of their work.16

After visiting a New York gallery showing of works of modern German art in 1939 the
reviewer for the New York World-Telegram wrote “One's first reaction on seeing them is of
amazement that such early examples of work by men who were later to become world famous
should have been purchased by museums in Germany so many years ago.”17
The Nationalgalerie in Berlin housed the most representative collection of contemporary
German art On October 30, 1936, immediately following the close of the Summer Olympics,
Goebbels ordered the gallery's contemporary rooms to be closed to the public. From Annegret
Janda's essay in this volume we learn how this most visible forum for modern art was a
battleground in which a succession of museum directors engaged in a struggle to reorganize and
protect the collection, to preserve some aesthetic dignity, and even to continue to acquire
contemporary art with dwindling funds. After coming to power the National Socialists began a
systematic campaign to confiscate modernist works from public museum collections. Hitler saw
an attack on modernism as an opportunity to use the average German's distrust of avant-garde art
to further his political objectives against Jews, Communists, and non-Aryans. The charge of
“degeneracy” was leveled at avant-garde practitioners of music, literature, film, and visual art,
and their works were confiscated to “purify” German culture. In 1933 the earliest exhibitions of
“degenerate” art were organized to show the German people the products of the “cultural
collapse” of Germany that would be purged from the Third Reich. Confiscated works were
assembled into Schreckenskammern den Kunst (chambers of horror of art) whose organizers
decried the fact that public monies had been wasted on these modern “horrors” and implied that
many of the works had been foisted on the museums by a cabal of Jewish art dealers. These
precursors to the Entartete Kunst exhibition in Munich in 1937 sprang up throughout Germany,
often featuring works from the local museums (see Christoph Zuschlag's essay in this catalogue).
Entartete Kunst was not the only anti-modernist exhibition to occur in 1937 The Institut fur
Deutsche Kultur- and Wirtschaftspropaganda (Institute for German cultural and economic
propaganda), a section of Goebbels's ministry, organized the Grosse antibolschewistische
Ausstellung (Great anti-Bolshevist exhibition), which ran in Nuremberg from September 5 to
September 29 and then traveled to several other venues, and orchestrated the tour of the
NSDAP's exhibition Der ewige Jude (The eternal Jew) from Munich to Vienna, Berlin, Bremen,
Dresden, and Magdeburg from late 1937 to mid-1939.

The Kunsthalle Mannheim: An example

The situation in Mannheim was typical of that of many other German museums out of the
spotlight of Berlin; one could just as easily have chosen the Landesmuseum in Hannover, the
Kunstsammlungen in Dresden the Museum Folkwang in Essen, or the Staatliche Galerie
Moritzburg in Halle. 18
Between 1909 and 1923 Fritz Wichert, the director of the Kunsthalle Mannheim,
purchased several key examples of French and German Impressionism and German

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 Barron, “Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany”

Expressionism, including paintings by Alexander Archipenko, Beckmann, Corinth, Kirchner,

and Liebermann Sally Falk's donations of works by Lehmbruck and Ernesto de Fiori provided
the nucleus for a growing collection of sculpture. 19
Wichert's successor was Gustav Hartlaub, whose tenure extended from 1923 until 1934,
when he was forced to resign. He was responsible for most of the exhibitions and major
acquisitions of Expressionist and modern art that made Mannheim a center for those who wanted
to see current art in Germany. The files of the Kunsthalle yield an interesting picture of the
volume and velocity of these purchases and exhibitions and of Hartlaub's voracious interest in
contemporary art, including the Fauves, Die Brücke, Der Blaue Reiter, Neue Sachlichkeit (New
objectivity), and other examples of German and non-German avant-garde art:

1924-25 Exhibition: Deutscber Werkbund 'Die Form”

Acquisition: Grosz, Grosstadt
1925-26 Exhibitions: Edvard Munch; Neue Sachlichkeit
Acquisitions: Marc Chagall, Blaues Haus; Dix, Die Witwe; Grosz, Max
Hermann-Neisse; Kirchner, Stilleben
1927-28 Exhibitions James Ensor; Wege and Richtungen den Abstraktion
Acquisitions: Baumeister, Tischgesellschaft; Robert Delaunay; St. Severin; Ensor,
Masks and Death; Oskar Schlemmer, Frauentreppe
1928-29 Exhibition: Max Beckmann
Acquisitions: Beckmann, Pierrette and Clown, Das Liebespaar, Chagall,
Rabbiner; Andre Derain, Landscape
1929-30 Acquisition: Heinrich Hoerle, Melancholie
1930-31 Exhibitions: Bauhaus; Neues von Gestern
Acquisition: Jankel Adler, Zwei Mädchen
1931-32 Exhibitions: Oskar Kokoschka; Georg Minne
1932-33 only graphics
1933-34 nothing major
1934-35 only graphics

As early as the mid-1920s museums had felt the cold wind of censorship. In 1925
Hartlaub's Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition traveled to the Chemnitz Kunsthütte, where the director,
Dr Schreiber Wiegand, asked Hartlaub to make some changes in the catalogue.

We are most grateful to you for your permission to use your introduction to the
catalogue, but with regard to our special art-political conditions, I have one
request. Since in the attacks on our collecting activities these [works] are regarded
as “Bolshevism in art,” might we change a few words in three paragraphs? On
page t could we simply leave out the word “Katastrophenzeit” [catastrophic time],
and maybe on the next page express the sentence a little less controversially) I
would like to avoid any problems.... [I] ask for your friendly understanding of our
local situation. You yourself know how everything now is affected by political
conditions and [those who] want to kill everything that does not please them. This
includes Expressionism, of course, especially my purchases of pictures by
Schmidt-Rottluff, Kircbner, and Heckel. 20

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 Barron, “Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany”

Hartlaub obliged so that the exhibition and catalogue could proceed as planned. By the
early 1930s, however, his own freedom was increasingly hampered. During the last year of his
directorship Mannheim was the scene of public protests against some of his acquisitions,
including Chagall's Rabbiner (Rabbi), which was the subject of a window display in the town
incorporating the sign, “Taxpayer, you should know how your money was spent.” In 1934
Hartlaub became the first museum director to be fired by the National Socialists. Other directors
who soon joined the ranks of those dismissed by the Nazis included Heise in Ldbecki Justi in
Berlini Sauerlandt, then director of the Hamburg Museum für Kunst and Gewerbei Schreiber-
Wiegand in Chemnitzi and Swarzenski in Frankfurt.
On two separate occasions, July 8 and August 28, 1937, the Kunsthalle Mannheim was
visited by the special committee empowered by Goebbels to confiscate examples of “degenerate”
art from German museums. Mannheim was one of their most successful stops: they seized over
six hundred works by artists such as non-Germans Chagall, Delaunay, Derain, Ensor, and Edvard
Munch and Germans Beckmann, Corinth, Grosz, Lehmbruck, Nolde, and Schlemmer. Most of
these masterworks are lost; a few fortunately, have been reacquired by the Kunsthalle, and others
are dispersed in public and private collections.

The “Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung,” 1937

On October 15, 1933, at the ground-breaking ceremony for the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, Hitler
said he was laying the “foundations for this new temple in honor of the goddess of art.” The
architect, Paul Troost, insisted from the beginning that the building was to be a representative
structure for the new German art. Due to the expensive materials used and the monumental scale
of the rooms the building attracted enormous attention. Hitler announced that it was the first new
building worthy to take its place among the immortal achievements of the German artistic
heritage. 21 (It was also in this speech that he delivered the ultimatum that the National Socialists
would give the people four years time to adjust to the cultural policies of the new government.)
The year 1937 represents both a nadir and zenith for the National Socialists in terms of
their campaign against modern art. Hitler evidently concurred with Troost that the Haus der
Deutschen Kunst should display contemporary art; in fact, he planned to use an exhibition of
approved German art as a chance to further shape cultural policy.22 To find the art to fill the
spacious new halls the National Socialists staged an open competition chaired by Adolf Ziegler,
president of the Reichskammer der bildenden Kunste The competition was open to all German
artists, and approximately fifteen thousand works were submitted. Much to the frustration of the
organizers they were provided with no clear guidelines for the selection of works to be included
in the exhibition. Goebbels and Hitler himself participated in the selection, and Goebbels noted
in his diary, “The sculpture is going well, but the painting is a real catastrophe at the moment.
They have hung works that make us shudder. The Fuhrer is in a rage.” 23 Hitler added some
artists who had previously been rejected and threw out the work of several who had been judged
acceptable. He abhorred “unfinished work,” which subsequently became a criterion in the
selection process. Eventually, nine hundred works were chosen from which the final selection
would be made
On July 18 in Munich, Hitler presided over the opening, held with great pomp and
ceremony, of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst and its inaugural exhibition of approved art. The
Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung brought together over six hundred paintings and sculptures
that were intended to demonstrate the triumph of German art in the Third Reich Hitler
announced:

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 Barron, “Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany”

From now on we are going to wage a merciless war of destruction against the last
remaining elements of cultural disintegration.... Should there he someone among
[the artists] who still believes in his higher destiny-well now, he has had four
years' time to prove himself. These Jour years are sufficient for us, too, to reach a
definite judgment. From now on-of that you can be certain-all those mutually
supporting and thereby sustaining cliques of chatterers, dilettantes, and art forgers
will he picked up and liquidated. For all we care, those prehistoric Stone-Age
culture-barbarians and art-stutterers can return to the caves of their ancestors and
there can apply their primitive international scratchings. 24

The Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung was the first of eight annual exhibitions, from 1937 to
1944, mounted in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst in the Nazis' attempt to present the best of
German artistic creation, a continuation of the exhibitions that had formerly taken place in the
Munich Glaspalast (Glass palace), which had burned to the ground in 1931. There was a tradition
in several German cities of staging annual open competitive exhibitions for local artists in which
all the works of art were for sale; they were characterized by the display of distinctly
conservative and traditional art, which entertained a consistently loyal public. In this respect the
Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellungen were no different, except that they were larger, less
parochial, and actively sponsored by the government. Installation photos and film footage
indicate that the art was arranged by category—landscapes, portraits, nudes, military subjects—
in the way commodities would be sold in separate areas in a market. The sales opportunities
were fairly promising, and this alone may have convinced some artists to embrace National
Socialist policies, since without their approval it was virtually impossible to sell contemporary
art in Germany Many of the purchases were used to decorate public buildings and offices Several
of the buyers were among the Nazi elite, who purchased the works for their official residences.25
At the time of each opening there occurred an elaborate pageant on the “Tag der
Deutschen Kunst” (German art day). Participants wore historical costumes and created floats
featuring models of well-known works of art that were driven through the streets of Munich. The
opening ceremonies attracted anywhere from 400,000 to 800,000 visitors. In his inaugural
speech in 1937 Hitler announced that, “When we celebrated the laying of the cornerstone for this
building four years ago, we were all aware that we had to lay not only the cornerstone for a new
home but also the foundations for a new and genuine German art. We had to bring about a
turning point in the evolution of all our German cultural activities.” The 1937 pageant was
centered around the theme, “Zweitausend Jahre Deutsche Kultur” (Two thousand years of
German culture). Hundreds of thousands of spectators watched the spectacle of a parade of more
than three thousand costumed participants and four hundred animals. Immediately following this
overblown performance thousands of uniformed soldiers marched through the streets, as if to
provide the ultimate marvel. The official National Socialist newspaper, the Volkischer
Beobachter, described the events in glowing words: “Today we sat as spectators in the theater of
our own time and saw greatness” (July 19, 1937).
In the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung the Nazis sought to promote mediocre genre
painting as mainstream art, the most recent achievement in a continuum of centuries of German
art. It was meant to wipe out any hint of the modernism, Expressionism, Dada, New Objectivity,
Futurism, and Cubism that had permeated the museums, galleries, journals, and press since 1910.

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The National Socialists sought to rewrite art history, to omit what we know as the avant-garde
from the history of modern art.
The situation was slightly different for sculpture. Guidelines were more difficult to
observe, artists' motives more difficult to judge. Sculptors were apt to discover that some
examples of their work were championed by the National Socialists and others lumped with
“degenerate” art. One artists work was inadvertently included in both the Grosse Deutsche
Kunstausstellung and Entartete Kunst: Belling's Boxer Max Schmeling was on view in the Haus
der Deutschen Kunst, while his Dreiklang (Triad) and Kopf (Head) were branded “degenerate”
next door. Georg Kolbe and Gerhard Marcks had some of their earlier Expressionist works
confiscated from German museums, yet their contemporary images found favor with the Nazi
elite, and they continued to work openly (although two of Marcks's works were in Entartete
Kunst). Even Arno Breker, the Nazis' sculptor of choice, saw one of his early sculptures
confiscated. More conservative sculpture in the tradition of Aristide Maillol and Auguste Rodin
had a significant following before the Nazis came to power and continued to be appreciated
under Hitler's regime.

The campaign against modern art museums

Goebbels issued a decree on June 30, 1937, giving Ziegler and a five-man commission the
authority to visit all major German museums and select works for an exhibition of “degenerate”
that was to open in Munich at the same time as the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung:

On the express authority of the Führer I hereby empower the president of the
Reicbskammer der bildenden Kunste, Professor Ziegler of Munich, to select and
secure for an exhibition works of German degenerate art since 1910, both painting
and sculpture, which are now in collections owned by the German Reich,
individual regions, or local communities. You are requested to give Prof. Ziegler
your full support during his examination and selection of these works.26

The directive went on to define works of “degenerate” art as those that either “insult
German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form, or simply reveal an absence of adequate
manual and artistic skill.” To have the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung and Entartete Kunst on
view simultaneously would underscore the triumph of official art over “degenerate” art This was
to be a far more ambitious action than any of the small exhibitions mounted since 1933.
Ziegler’s commission was made up of individuals who, as critics of modernism, were well suited
to their task; among them were Count Klaus von Baudissin, an SS officer who during his brief
tenure as director of the Museum Folkwang in Essen had already cleared the museum of
“offensive” examples of modern art, and Wolfgang Willrich, author of Säuberung des
Kunsttempels (Cleansing of the temple of art), a racist pamphlet whose methods of excoriation of
modern art played an important role in the concept and content of the Entartete Kunst exhibition.
The other members were commissioner for artistic design Hans Schweitzer, art theoretician
Robert Scholz, and art teacher and polemicist Walter Hansen.
According to Rave, in the first two weeks of July about seven hundred works were
shipped to Munich from thirty-two museums in twenty-eight cities. Museums in Berlin,
Bielefeld, Bremen, Breslau, Chemnitz, Cologne, Dresden, Ddsseldorf, Erfurt, Essen, Frankfurt,
Hamburg, Hannover, Jena, Karlsruhe, Kiel, Königsberg, Leipzig, Lübeck, Mannheim, Munich,
Saarbrücken, Stettin, Stuttgart, Ulm, Weimar, Wiesbaden, and Wuppertal were purged of their

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holdings of Expressionism, Futurism, Constructivism, Dada, and New Objectivity. At the

Kunsthalle Mannheim, for example, the commission selected eighteen paintings, five sculptures,
and thirty-five graphic works, which were shipped immediately to Munich.
The commission revisited most of the museums later in the summer and selected
additional works, so that a total of approximately sixteen thousand paintings, sculptures,
drawings, and prints by fourteen hundred artists were confiscated and shipped to Berlin to await
final disposal The commission overstepped its authority and seized works created prior to 1910,
as well as those by non-German artists. The plundering continued until 1938 and was finally
“legalized” retroactively under a law of May 31, 1938, that stated that “products of degenerate
art that have been secured in museums or in collections open to the public before this law went in
to effect . . . may be appropriated by the Reich without compensation.”
The works not included in Entartete Kunst and those from the second round of
confiscations were sent to Berlin and stored in a warehouse on Köpenicker Strasse where they
were inventoried. Those of “international value” that could be sold outside Germany for
substantial sums were later weeded out and sent to another storage facility at Schloss
Niederschönhausen. Goebbels created another commission, for the “disposal of confiscated
works of degenerate art,” which was to decide which works were to be sold for foreign currency
and at what prices This group included Ziegler, Schweitzer, and Scholz, with the addition of
Franz Hofmann, Carl Meder, Karl Haberstock, and Max Taeuber The work of this commission
and its effect are discussed later in this volume in essays by Andreas Hüneke and myself.

“Entartete Kunst”
On July 19, 1937, Ziegler opened the Entartete Kunst exhibition across the park from the Grosse
Deutsche Kunstausstellung, in a building formerly occupied by the Institute of Archeology. The
exhibition rooms had been cleared, and temporary partitions were erected on which the objects
were crowded together in a chaotic arrangement, which is not surprising when one considers that
the art was confiscated, shipped to Munich, and installed in less than two weeks. The paintings,
some of which had had their frames removed, were vaguely organized into thematic groupings,
the first time Expressionist works were presented in this way. While the first rooms were tightly
grouped according to themes—religion, Jewish artists, the vilification of women—the rest of the
exhibition was a composite of subjects and styles that were anathema to the National Socialists,
including abstraction, antimilitarism, and art that seemed to be (or at least to be related to) the
work of the mentally ill. (The specific organization of the works in Munich is discussed in this
volume by Mario-Andreas von Lüttichau, who has painstakingly recreated the installation and
inventory of the exhibition.) Directly on the wall under many of the works were hand-lettered
labels indicating how much money had been spent by each museum to acquire this “art.” The
fact that the radical postwar inflation of the 1920s had led to grossly exaggerated figures—in
November 1920 a dollar was worth 4.2 billion marks!—was conveniently not mentioned.
Quotations and slogans by proscribed critics and museum directors and condemnatory
statements by Hitler and other party members were scrawled across the walls. Since every work
of art included in Entartete Kunst had been taken from a public collection, the event was meant
not only to denigrate the artists but also to condemn the actions of the institutions, directors,
curators, and dealers involved with the acquisition of modern art.
Entartete Kunst was to have been on view through the end of September, but the
astonishing attendance prompted the organizers to extend the run until the end of November.
Plans were also made to circulate the exhibition to other German cities, with Berlin as the first

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stop. The leaders of the various Gaus (regions into which Germany had been divided by the
National Socialists for administrative reasons) vied for the opportunity to present the exhibition,
but only the most important were accorded the chance Entartete Kunst in varying configurations
ultimately traveled to thirteen German and Austrian cities through April of 1941. (The tour is
discussed and documented in Zuschlag's essay.) Shortly before the show closed in Munich,
Zieglers office appointed Hartmut Pistauer as the exhibition coordinator It was his job to make
the arrangements for each venue, supervise the installation, and greet any important party visitors
at the opening on behalf of the Propagandaministerium (Ministry of propaganda).27
When Entartete Kunst opened in Munich, no catalogue was available. Shortly before the
exhibition closed in November, a thirty-two page booklet was published to accompany the
touring presentation. This Austellungsführer (exhibition guide) stated the aims of the exhibition
and reproduced excerpts from Hitler's speeches condemning the art and the artists that produced
it (a facsimile and translation by David Britt are presented in this volume). Some of the same
quotations that were used on the walls in Munich found their way into the booklet, and Schultze-
Naumburg's technique of juxtaposition was prominently featured: images of art by the mentally
ill from the Prinzhorn Collection were placed next to photographs of works by Rudolf
Haizmann, Eugen Hoffmann, Klee, and Kokoschka, with captions such as, “Which of these three
drawings is the work of…an inmate of a lunatic asylum?” Although not all the works illustrated
in the booklet were included in Entartete Kunst, all were by artists who were represented in the
exhibition. The cover featured Der neue Mensch (The new man), a famous sculpture (later
destroyed) by the Jewish artist Otto Freundlich, with the words Entartete “Kunst” partly
obscuring the image. By printing “Kunst” to look as if it had been rudely scrawled in red crayon
and by enclosing it in quotation marks, the National Socialists clearly made the point that
although they considered this material degenerate, they certainly did not consider it art.
One of the inevitable questions about the Entartete Kunst exhibition concerns its purpose.
Why did the National Socialists go to such an effort to mount, publicize, and circulate it? What
did they hope to gain? One explanation at least offers itself. If the Nazis had merely confiscated
and destroyed the art, it would have been the cultural equivalent of creating a martyr. By staging
Entartete Kunst they were able to appeal to the majority of the German people who must have
considered most modern art incomprehensible and elitist To all modernists, not just those
represented in Entartete Kunst, the Nazis sent the message that such art would no longer be
tolerated in Germany, an official position that, thanks to the cleverly manipulated complicity of
the German people, had the force of a popular mandate.
One thing that emerges from any examination of the cultural activities in Germany under
the National Socialists is that, despite every attempt to provide rigorous definitions of “healthy”
and “degenerate” art and to remove all traces of the latter from public view, the actions against
modern visual arts (as well as those against literature, music, and film) were enormously
problematic and contradictory. Ultimately, however, the brilliant flowering of modernism in
Germany that had begun in the early years of the century came to a halt in 1937 with the opening
of Entartete Kunst and the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung. Artists, writers, filmmakers,
poets, musicians, critics, and intellectuals of all disciplines were forced to take drastic action,
either to emigrate or to resort to a deadening “inner immigration.” Much of the confiscated art
was destroyed or has vanished, and many of the most powerfully creative artists of Germany's
golden era were broken in spirit, forced to flee, or killed. But the art, the documents, and the
memories that have survived enable us to reconstruct the era and ensure that, in the end, the
National Socialists failed-the modern art of Germany was not and will never be eradicated.

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 Barron, “Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany”

Collectively, the works of art and the pieced-together fragments of history remind us that art may
be enjoyed or abhorred but it is a force whose potency should never be underestimated.
It is ironic that some of the issues raised by an examination of these events should have
such resonance today in America. Newspaper articles on public support for the arts and the
situation facing the National Endowment for the Arts emphasize an uncomfortable parallel
between these issues and those raised by the 1937 exhibition, between the enemies of artistic
freedom today and those responsible for organizing the Entartete Kunst exhibition. Perhaps after
a serious look at events that unfolded over half a century ago in Germany, we may apply what
we learn to our own predicament, in which for the first time in the postwar era the arts and
freedom of artistic expression in America are facing a serious challenge.

NOTES:
1
Hildegard Brenner, Die Kunstpolitik des Nationalsozialismus (Reinbek Rowohlt, 1963), 109.
2
While all accounts from the immediate postwar era confirm this event, first reported by Paul Ortwin Rave in 1949
(Kunstdikiatur em Dritten Reich [Hamburg Gebruder Mann]), more recent works by authors including Georg
Bussmann and Eckhardt Klessman have questioned whether there was in fact such a wholesale destruction of works
of art, see Bussmann, “'Degenerate Art A Look at a Useful Myth,” in German Art in the 20th Century Painting and
Sculpture 1905-1985 (exh cat, London Royal Academy 0f Arts, 1985), 113-24, and Klessmann, “Barlach in der
Barbarei,” Frankfurter Allegmeine Zeitung, December 13, 1983, literary supplement. In Sofie Fohn's recently
published account of her and her husband's art exchanges with Berlin in the late 1930s she challenged the Nazis'
contention that approximately five thousand works were burned on March 20, 1939, and suggested that only the
frames may have been destroyed in the fire, see Carla Schultz-Hoffmann, ed., Die Sammlung Sofie and Emanuel
Fohm Eine Dokumentation (Munich Hirmer, 1990), 27
3
Carl Einstein, Die Kunst des 20 Jabrhunderts (Berlin Propyläen, 1926, 2d eel 1928, 3d reel 1931, Leipzig Reclam,
1988), Berthold Hinz, Art in the Third Reich (New York Random House, 1979), 24.
4
Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, Art under a Dictatorship (New York Oxford University Press, 1954), 3.
5
Ibid, 45-46.
6
In 1909 Julius Langbehn published Rembrandt als Erzieher (Rembrandt as teacher) and in 1928 his Dürer als
Fibrer (Dürer as leader), completed by Momme Nissen, was issued posthumously; these two immensely popular
books made strong appeals to German nationalism in art.
7
For a particularly helpful analysis of Nordau's book see George L Mosse's introduction to the 1968 English edition
(Max Nordau, Degeneration [New York. Howard Fertig, 1968]).
8
George Bernard Shaw, “The Sanity of Art: An Exposure of the Current Nonsense about Artists Being Degenerate,”
in Major Critical Essays (London Constable and Company, 1932: St Clair Shores, Mich. Scholarly Press, 1976),
281-332.
9
See Theodor Kirchhoff, Handbook of Insanity for Practitioners and Students (New York. William Wood, 1893),
and Richard M Goodman, Genetic Disorders among the Jewish People (Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press,
1979), 421-31. The term corruzione (corruption) had been used by the seventeenth-century Italian critic Giovanni
Pietro Bellori in an attack on Vasari and Michelangelo.
10
Sander Gilman, “Madness and Representation Hans Prinzhorn's Study of Madness and Art in Its Historical
Context,” in The Prinzhorn Collection (exh cat., Champaigne, Ill.. Krannert Art Museum, 1984), 7-14, idem, “The
Mad Man as Artist: Medicine, History, and Degenerate Art,” Journal of Contemporary History 20 (1985) 575-97.
11
Alfred Rosenberg, “Race and Race History” and Other Essays, ed. Robert Pois (New York: Harper and Row,
1970), 154.
12
Hans Prinzhorn, Beldnerei der Geisteskranken Ein Beitrag zur Psychologie and Psycbopatbologie der Grstaltung
(Berlin Julius Springer, 1922), published in English as Artistry of the Mentally Ill A Contribution to the Psychology
and Psychopathology of Configuration, trams Eric von Brockdorff (New York Springer, 1972)
13
See Table 1 in Christoph Zuschlag's essay in this volume.
14
Hildegard Brenner, Barbara Miller Lane, and George L Mosse have described the conflict and power struggle
between Rosenberg and Goebbels over modern are, particularly German Expressionism and Italian Futurism, see
Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918-15 (Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1968), Brenner, “Art in

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 Barron, “Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany”

the Political Struggle of 1933-34,” in Hajo Holborn, ed., From Republic to Reich The Making of the Nazi Revolution
(New York Pantheon, 1972), 395-434, and Mosse, Nazi Culture Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third
Reich (New York Schocken Books, 1981).
15
Paul Ortwin Rave, Kunstdiktatur im Dritten Reich, rev ed., ed. Uwe M Schneede (Berlin Argon, 1987), 103-4.
16
Alfred Barr, Jr, Modern German Painting and Sculpture (exh cat, New York Museum of Modern Art, 1933), 7-8.
Barr also indicated which German museums collected examples by each artist.
17
“European Works at Buchholz,” New York World-Telegram, September 30, 1939.
18
Hans-Jürgen Buderer, “Entartete Kunst” Bescblagnahme-Aktionen in do Sladtiscbe Kunstballe Mannheim 1937,
Kunst Documentation, n0 10 (exh cat, Mannheim Stadtische Kunsthalle Mannheim, 1987). I am grateful to Dr
Manfred Fath, director 0f the Kunsthalle Mannheim, for permission to examine museum files related to the
“degenerate” art action.
For recent publication on the special situation in other museums mentioned see the following Essen Paul
Vogt, ed., Dokumente zur Gescbicbte des Museum Folkwang 1917-1915 (Essen Museum Folkwang, 1983); Halle.
Andreas Huncke, Die faschistische Aktion “Entartete Kunst” 1937 in Halle (Halle- Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg,
1987); Hannover Beschlagnahme-Aktion em Landrsmuseum Hannover 1937 (exh cat, Hannover Landesmuseum
Hannover, 1983)
In addition to the acknowledgments I have made elsewhere in these notes, I would like to thank Markus
Kersting of the Stadtische Galerie in Frankfurt foe providing data on the purchases of Georg Swarzenski and to
Hans Göpfert of the Staatliche Kunstsammlung Dresden for details on the collecting and exhibitions there in the
1920s and 1930s Contemporary articles in the journals Museum der Gegenwart and Die Kunst fur Alle also provided
much background information.
19
Buderer, “Entartete Kunst,” 8.
20
Ibid., II.
21
Hinz, Art of the Third Reich, 163
22
Rave, Kunstdiktatur, 54
23
Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Samtlicbr Fragmente, ed. Elke Fröhlich (Munich G K Saur, 1987), pt 1,
vol 3, 166.
24
Adolf Hitler, speech at the opening of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, Munich, July 18, 1937; cited and translated
in Lehmann-Haupt, Art under a Dictatorship, 76-77.
25
Jonathan Petropoulos, “Art as Politics The Nazi Elite's Quest for the Political and Material Control of Art” (Ph D
diss., Harvard University, 1990).
26
Joseph Goebbels, decree sent to all major museums, June 30, 1937; a copy is preserved in the archives of the
Bayerische Staatsgemildesammlungen, Munich, Akt 712a, 12.71937, Nr 1983, cited in Mario-Andreas von
Lüttichau, “'Deutsche Kunst and 'Entartete Kunst’ Die Münchner Aussiellungen 1937,” in Peter-Klaus Schuster, ed.,
Die “Kunststadt” München 1937 Nationalsozialismus and “Entartete Kunst” (Munich Prestel, 1987), 92.
27
I am indebted to Christoph Zuschlag who first brought Pistauer and his role in Entartete Kunst to my attention.

15