Inferior Quotations

Narrator: Here in Berlin in nineteen thirty-three the nazi party came t’power. At once, they began burning books, and attacking writers and artists, waging a full-scale war on the modern imagination. In nineteen thirty-seven the nazis held up for ridicule the works of art they most despised, in the most infamous art show of all time.

Robert Hughes: Three million people went to it. It was the most successful goddamn blockbuster practic’ly in the history of modern exhibition techniques. And ninety-five percent of ’em just laughed at it.

Peter Guenther: Here were outstanding artists, wh’were highly honored, and then suddenly they were criminals, and they were Jews, and they were bolsheviks, and they were all kinds of things.

Narrator: In the end many artists and writers would flee. Others remained to face ruined careers, suicide, and death. The nazis called the exhibition Entartate Kunst: degenerate art.

Narrator: Today, for most of us, these works of art are no longer threat’ning. But there was a time when they outraged most people, shocked and bewildered them. In the nineteen thirties the nazis said they were dangerous, and were bent on their destruction.

Narrator: Nazi Germany was dominated by a single man: Adolf Hitler. He called him self the führer, and promised a new Germany peopled by a master race, cleansed of degenerates. Modern artists, Hitler said, were degenerate. He vowed to eliminate them. The show he called Degenerate Art was more than an exhibition; it was to be their funeral.

Narrator: The graffiti ridiculed the works of art: Nature as seen by sick minds. An insult to German womanhood. Crazy at any price.

Sander Gilman: The common person walked in to the Degenerate Art show in a sense as a horror show, a side show. This stuff! on the wall was the work of mad men, this was the work of outsiders, this was the work of people who were out to destroy German culture.

Sander Gilman: The nazis took this art seeriously. It scaared them. And they wanted to control it. It’s very hard today, in the in the United States at least, to imagine art having that power.

Narrator: To understand why the nazis attacked modern art you have to go back to the turn of the century, and look at the work of a young Austrian struggling to paint in the popular style of the day. His name was Adolf Hitler. He was rejected by the Academy of Visual Arts in Vienna, and never did become a recognized artist. But all his life he would insist that the only true art was art that tried to imitate the natural world.

IQ: Boring. No imagination.

Sander Gilman: He painted basically post cards, and you can’t fault him for that that’s what sold. He wants to represent the world the way it quote-unquote really is. Some times it’s called academic art, but it looks.. kind of real.

Sander Gilman: Now what modernism does is to say What we’re gonna do is paint the world underneath that external image. We’re not gonna paint the skin; we’re gonna paint the bones and the sinews.

Narrator: Hitler and Germany’s modern artists were shaped by the same forces of hist’ry. But they were set on a collision course. The smash-up would come when Hitler came to power.

Bernard Schultze: [Subtitles.] It was packed, and most people found the art awful. But there were many students from the art academy. We examined the works closely, knowing it could be the last time. They’d be burned, or God knows what. The Expressionists in that exhibit were our idols. Our gods!

Narrator: In the early nineteen hundreds a band of brash and confident young artists were working at the same time as Hitler. One of them was Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. He was an early modernist hero, rallying young painters to forge a new way of looking at the world that came to be called expressionism.

Peter Selz: Kirchner started out as sort of the leader o’the first expressionist group. An’ these people really tried to renew art they wanted to go beyond impressionism, that’s why they were called expressionists. They distorted th-the figure; they used uh rather violent color.

Narrator: Oscar Kokoschka was an other young controversial expressionist. Academic critics wrote that his paintings were repulsive plague sores, and phantoms of a morbid youth.

But his passionate distortions were never meant to depict the natural world. He painted the inner world: psychological landscapes.

Olda Kokoschka: Viennese society didn’t understand at all. Th-The reaction in Vienna to his first works was very violent because I think the society uh expected from artists some thing entirely different. You see it was some thing which was not normal to them, it was it was uh mad.

Peter Selz: W’no body had ever painted portraits like Kokoschka did. B’they call h’the mad Kokoschka. He had unbelievable psychological insight I mean he was very very young s-coming out of no where he painted these incredible portraits. Like there was a sort of an old man; I remember the individuallwas very angry when he saw the painting and tha’ it didn’ look like him, an’ Kokoschka said Well twenty years from now it will. An’ it did!.

Narrator: The expressionists were young and passionate idealists at the start of promising careers. Adolf Hitler was unknown, painting sentimental pictures, and struggling just to survive. Gradu’ly he would rise to power, and cut off the great German modernists in their prime.

World War One was the turning point, for Hitler and for the expressionists. In nineteen fourteen fired by visions of glory they joined millions of young Germans in an outburst of patriotic fervor. In the Great War Hitler would discover his destiny, an’ the expressionists the shock and squalor of trench warfare.

Robert Hughes: The main effect of trench warfare on-on-on these painters was to drive them crazy. I mean if you spent the best part of a year sitting in this filthy mud hole with a couple of corpses as your companions listening to how explosive going off all the time and uh and what you know and looking at people on the barbed wire slowly falling to pieces, um, you went crazy. And the more sensitive you were, the crazier you went.

Narrator: The war shattered Oscar Kokoschka’s mind and spirit. Even before it began he sketched him self with a wound he predicted he would receive, a wound that eventually he did suffer. And Kirchner too suffered a profound nervous collapse from which he never fully recovered.

Robert Hughes: Kirchner for instance paints the famous portrait of him self as an inductee with that hand lopped off, you know that-that startling piercing image of self-ca-uhh.. of castration, really. There he is in his military uniform rendered impotent, crippled already. Although he never was.

People think that pictures like Dix’s are — renderings of the trenches — are kind of distorted, exaggerated, but they are really practic’ly photography.

Narrator: Twenty-three-year-old Otto Dix had imagined the war as a kind of poetic initiation. Until he manned a machine gun in the trenches. But Adolf Hitler found in war a satisfaction that redeemed the bitter years of frustration and failure as an artist. He was a twice-decorated dispatch runner recovering from a gas attack when Germany surrendered. Hatred grew in me, he later wrote, hatred for those responsible for this deed, miserable and degenerate criminals. In the days that followed my own fate became known to me; I resolved to go in to politics.

Robert Hughes: Hitler was a nobody he was a nothing he wasn’t even a gofer. He was you know he was just one of a hundred thousand.. soldiers without a war.

Narrator: The war left Germany in chaos. The fragile democracy reeled with turmoil an’ a ruinous inflation. Hitler abandoned his dream of becoming an artist and formed a new political party: the national socialist party. He even sketched the party’s symbols. He promised a rebirth of the fatherland, peopled by a race of pure aryans.

IQ: Yuck. To be Hitler.

Narrator: The vision appealed to one of the expressionist painters. Emil Nolde joined the nazi party in nineteen twenty. Nolde was a loner, bound only to Germany and his art.

Peter Selz: In a way those religious paintings are the very essence of expressionism. But he was not really a church-going religious person. It went-went-ment-men very much deeper he had these mystical spiritual experiences which really shook his whole being.

I really think that in the long run he painted the most powerful religious painting of the century. What Nolde was dreaming of was kind of a new Germany where th- his kind of paintings would go in to the churches, and exac’ly the opposite happened.

Narrator: In nineteen twen’y-four Adolf Hitler emerged from a Bavarian prison where he had been held for trying to overthrow the German democracy. He was thirty-five years old. At once he lashed out at those who had lost the war, who ’ad stabbed the fatherland in the back. He called them Jews, communists, and bolsheviks, and borrowing an idea popularized by nineteenth-century science, he called them degenerates.

Sander Gilman: The idea of the degenerate was ubiquitous. By the end o’the nineteenth century any body could use the term an’ they did — degenerate — as a sort of general term of opprobrium: You degenerate you.! Well y’can say that today without any problem. But what was understood under it was a very specific form of deviance from the norm. In the nineteenth century being degenerate, and knowing who was degenerate, was a central aspect of medical science, biological science, an’ anthropological science. If you were a physician you had all sorts of signs an’ symptoms that you looked for, the shape of their ears, th’size of their nose, whether they gazed at you in a certain way. So it meant ’f you didn’t look the right way, you were obviously a deviant from the norm, and therefore you’re also obviously mad; you’re crazy. What also happened of course at the same time was the avant garde saw its self as mad, saw its self as outside of the norms of accepted action, statement, an’ belief.

The expressionists for example, without any problem, thought of them selves as the mentally ill of the world of art. They evoked that; they said We are artists who are just like the mentally ill. We stand outside of all institutions We use our own language. They meant it of course metaphoric’ly

Narrator: But in the nineteen twen’ies the expressionists had no reason to fear the nazis, a tiny faction of misfits, marginal at best. There were fewer than twen’y-seven thousand nazis in all of Germany. In Berlin modern artists flourished. An’ their work sold. A new freedom stirred the air. Few people cared about Hitler an’ his fanatic ideas. Berlin became the capital of the international art world. Museum directors spent public funds on contemporary art proclaiming We can not have museums that sit and wait. Perhaps the most celebrated of all the artists was Max Beckmann. Beckmann had known success early, before the Great War. At twen’y-nine years old he was already praised as a genuine an’ noble artist, a true German. Then, his work had little in common wi’th’expressionists. But he was transformed by the war. He had volunteered for the ambulance service. After months in the thick of the fighting he was discharged, mentally exhausted.

His self-portrait in nineteen seventeen, twisted and defiant, bears witness to’is experience. My pictures reproach God for his errors, he wrote.

Now in the nineteen twen’ies Beckmann at the height of his career continued to be haunted by the war: We have to lay our hearts bare to the cries of people who have been lied to.

Narrator: In nineteen twenty-nine, Hitler got the chance he was waiting for. The Great Depression broke the German democracy’s back. Over five million people were out of work. Hitler rejoiced: Never in my life have I been so well disposed an’ inwardly contented as in these days.

Robert Hughes: People just felt the bottom had dropped out of their world. The impotent rage that was generated by this, the feeling that you had been betrayed, all this was extremely ripe ground for the for the direction of indignation against certain targets.

Sander Gilman: They were the Jewws. They were the politicals who were not acceptable. They were the ones who were infecting the bloodstream of the puure race. But he also sees the idea of culture being infected by degenerates. Modernism in art was a symptom!. There is a signnn of what’s going wrong with the society. That’s why you don’t have a job!, that’s why you’re sta’ing in a bread line!, that’s why you’re paying a million marks for a loaf of bread. It’s because of that kind of sickness within society, which is symbolized by this kind of art. That became a very powerful argument.

Narrator: Casting them selves as defenders of the middle classes, the nazis exploited public anxiety and fear, an’ harvested the protest vote. They had no real program. A Hitler lieutenant declared National socialism is the opposite of what we have now. With the elections of nineteen thirty and nineteen thirty-two, the nazis emerged as the country’s largest political party.

January, nineteen thirty-three. German parliament deadlocks. Hitler is appointed chancellor of the very republic he had promised to crush. The German democracy was near death. The fires of the nazi torch-light parades would soon become the fires of the Berlin book burnings.

IQ: Why do people wanna go backwards, dumber.

Narrator: In power less than five months, the nazis fueled a bonfire in Berlin with books by some of the greatest modern authors an’ thinkers: Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud. The war on the modern imagination had begun.

Titus Felixmüller: [Subtitles.] Of course we were afraid. We saw what was going on in the streets in 1933. So we weren’t surprised when the police came one morning. They were searching for anything that could incriminate my father. We had expected them. My father had been burning things for days. We children had to go outside, to see that the chimneys weren’t smoking too much. We didn’t want it to look like he was burning paper. He burned his correspondence, his letters. Anything that might reveal his political views. He also burned his paintings. One was very large. Only the head was left. I still have it in my home. He knew what happened to people taken to concentration camps. He knew about the camps, and he did everything to avoid them. He had two sons, a family. He didn’t want to die. You love your paintings like children. But “security first!”

Narrator: The nazis swept through German museums, firing directors. The official term was Vacationing. Confiscating works of art, shutting down the modern wing of the Berlin Nationalgallerie. And the Bauhaus, famed symbol of modernism’s commitment to social change, was summarily closed for ever. Through it all Emil Nolde remained a loyal party member, attacking other artists, calling them half-breeds, bastards, and mulattos, and extolling the natural superiority of Nordic peoples.

Robert Hughes: There’s no contradiction between being a fascist and being an artist. The-eh-ha-hah I’m sorry but there isn’t; i-it happens that not very many good artists have been nazis. It’s not surprising actually that Nolde was such an early party member, because the nazis, too, believed in blood and race and soil and the primitive and the truth of the peasant and all the rest of it. What is slightly mooore surprising is the vehemence with which the party later turned on ’im.

Joseph Goebbels: [Subtitles.] The führer loves art.

IQ: God what a joke.

Joseph Goebbels: [Subtitles.] Because he himself is an artist.

Narrator: Joseph Goebbels was Hitler’s cultural deputy. He headed the nazi ministry of enlightenment and propaganda.

Goebbels gained total power over public exhibitions, films, radio, theater, music, literature, artists, and the press.

IQ: Moiré patterns in the nazi graffiti on my TV.

Narrator: All the arts were affected. Films like this one by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy were banned.

IQ: Gorgeous. It looks dare I say even better when you rewind the tape an’ get curved cones tabbed across each row. (Some Sony® Video DVD Combo I dunno the model number sorry.)

Narrator: Abstraction was stric’ly forbidden. In music, atonality, dissonance, any deviation from classical tradition, was not permitted.

IQ: God, bore your selves to death.

Narrator: Paul Hindemith, Alban Berg, and this piece by Arnold Schoenberg were labeled degenerate. All forms of modern music were ridiculed. Jazz was attacked, and viciously parodied in so-called degenerate music exhibitions. One former jazz musician remembers that the nazis prohibited all mutes, which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments in to a Jewish freemasonic howl.

IQ: Is that a quotation I dunno if that’s right.

Narrator: Hitler resolved to create a new culture for the new reich. There was no place for the sensitive or troubled soul.

IQ: Cult of fake people.

Narrator: The steady stream of propaganda infiltrated daily life.

Narrator: The very first nazi public building project was to be a museum in Munich. Hitler called it The House Of German art, an’ spent hours poring over the most minute details of its design. To honor its completion, in nineteen thirty-seven, thousands of marchers celebrated in a pageant called Two Thousand Years Of German Culture. It was a vision of history based on a link with an archaic past that had never existed.

IQ: Eighty-three years later an’ these turds are freshly tiresome.

Narrator: On July eighteenth nineteen thirty-seven The House Of German Art opened its doors with an exhibition selected by the führer him self. Here was Hitler’s pantheon, honoring what he called a new and genuine German art. Annd it was all for sale. People gathered especially around those paintings and sculptures that Hitler had bought him self. Hitler knew what he liked. It was a celebration of aryan ideals, of racially pure women an’ men.

IQ: Losers.

Robert Hughes: The art must be elevated. It must be classical. Uh I suppose you could say uh it’s bulls and Greeks and naked broads. Uh it’s the uh vocabulary of classicism. It has to have this character of permanence an’ nobility. Now what they got out of it of course was the most extr’ordinary kind of art-deco kitsch. An’ any body can understand a a whacking Greek surfer with giant pecks holding up a sword.

Peter Geunther: As far as women were concerned if you look at the nazi depiction there were really wer’only two roles: either they were nudes or they were mothers. An’ then the other thing if you really want to look at the two sides of the coin of what is war, look at the nazis an’ look at the expressionists and you find out who is who. The German expressionists were alll agains’the war; there was not an expressionist who was not agains’the war. Now the nazis could see that war is the greatest accomplishment of mankind. They honored victory under all circumstances, an’ even if you died you died in victory an’ therefore you were a martyr.

Robert Hughes: It is perfect hypocritical art. It’s hypocritical about the body it’s hypocritical about politics it’s hypocritical about every damn thing you can imagine. What it has on its side is a certain kind of technical virtuosity which is.. undeniably there, and which people certainly found attractive, and y’know I dare say people still do. One of the things that made the propaganda work was the spectacle of the other. It was.. the ability.. to hold up a painting of a distorted head with its mouth going like that, and its eyes goggling at ya, all in weird colors, and say If you don’t believe in our kind of culture this is what you’re going t’get.

Narrator: Just across the park, the very day after the opening of The House Of German Art, the nazi war against modernism came to a climax. Sixteen thousand works of art had been snatched from the great public museums of Germany. Now six hundred an’ fifty were put on exhibition in the Degenerate Art show. Along with German artists, modern masters like VVassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Paul Klee were put up for ridicule.

Robert Hughes: It had the character of a show trial. Very different matter just to say Well this is a bunch of rubbish done by Jews and gypsies, and it’s culturally hideous, and let’s get rid of it. The important thing is that people should agree with you, that they should see it for them selves with their own eyes, and then conclude that it’s rubbish.

German expressionism was an art which above all celebrated inwardness: einfuhr.—

IQ: ?

Robert Hughes: —And that which was inward must be outlawed. This is the essence of totalitarianism, so therefore the project was to sweep all these little inward thoughts out of their secret chambers, and expose ’em to the light of ridicule, y’know like spraying Raid® on a bunch of cockroaches.

Josephine Knapp: I was asking at each picture Why? Because some it seemed difficult to understand why that particular picture had been taken. And they had an answer for every one. Either it was a sick mind, it was bolshevik, it was Jewish; there were about ten reasons. The cowws, I couldn’t understand that one.

Peter Geunther: Franz Marc had once painted a happy cow. Now that was unacceptable. And so the nazis very typically said Bring any farmer up, an’ let him look at that, and he will say That’s not a cow.

IQ: Did I already say no imagination. God these empty skulls.

Peter Geunther: Th-The number of Jewish painters was relatively small. Now Chagall was exhibited although he was ā a Russian and bee a Frenchman, but nevertheless he was quote a Jew.

Narrator: One hundred and twelve artists had been singled out as degenerate. Only six in the show were Jewish.

Sander Gilman: The interesting thing is that Jewish, degenerate, bolshevik, insane, become interchangeable categories. Therefore every body who paints paintings that are hung in the Degenerate Art exhibit are Jewish, they’re also insane, and they’re also bolshevik, no matter what their religious, or political identification really was.

Narrator: The great altarpiece The Life Of Christ was flanked by commentary that read Insolent mockery of the divine.

IQ: Nazi irony’s the worst.

Olda Kokoschka: What happened was that he got ill. He had a sort of nervous breakdown which suddenly produced a physical weak-ness. And then he decided that painting was the one thing which he really had to — had to — do. At that time he was working on a self-pfortrait. Eh he suddenly pulled him self together, and it became a one of the most important eh of his works, and it’s called The Portrait Of The Degenerate Artist.

Narrator: The exhibition called Degenerate Art toured Germany and Austria for more than four years. It became the most popular exhibition of art ever assembled. More than three million people came to see it.

Josephine Knapp: Here was the death the absolute death of art in Germany. The wonderful things that’d been taking place there the great artists, the Bauhaus, all of these things, were being killed.

Narrator: The nazis had hung Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s self-portrait in the Degenerate Art exhibit. They renamed it Soldier With Whore. Kirchner had been a popular leader of the expressionist movement. Now his work was outlawed. Deeply agitated, he began to destroy the pieces he him self owned. He shattered his wood blocks and burned his paintings. On June eleventh nineteen thirty-eight—

IQ: Duh..

Narrator: —he committed suicide.

Narrator: Only to you my little pictures, Nolde wrote, do I some times confide my grief, my torment, my contempt.

Narrator: In nineteen thirty-eight the nazis decided to turn the most valuable of their plundered art in to hard currency, and put them up for auction.

[…]

The auction was held in Switzerland in June, nineteen thirty-nine. Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Gaugin, along wi’the German artists, were all put on the block. Profits went direc’ly in to nazi party coffers. But the loss to Germany was irrep’rable. The nazis were selling off the cultural heritage of the nation.

Narrator: The war would leave Germany in ruins. Millions dead. Millions more murdered in the concentration camps. Years before, the writer Heinrich Heine had warned Where books are burned, people will be burned.

Robert Hughes: Y’know one of the most grotesque kind of unintended results of this: I remember when I was a kid seeing the uh news reels of the liberation of the camps. I never forgot that shot of the bulldozer.. rolling the mass of slabbed corpses the typhoid dead the murdered in to this enormous mass grave. And it always comes back to me strangely enough when I look at the distortion and elongation in German exp— certain German expressionist pictures, as though the uh the aesthetic distortions of expressionism had been made real and concrete and absolute on the real suffering human body by the nazis, you know as though this was some kind of climactic work of art which ended up mimicking what they had attempted to repress. This is a very superficial way of looking at it I know because it leaves out the actual content of the suffering. But for a a gentile boy seeing that in Australia forty some years ago uhh on a grainy movie, I compare the two images and I can’t help thinking of it.

Narrator: The Degenerate Art exhibit evokes an ēra that continues to haunt us. Look carefully at these paintings. In their story lies the best and the worst of the human spirit.

Peter Selz: I think in order to continue any kind of free expression you have to know what happens when free expression gets stifled. And that great art can be vilified like this. It makes you think; it makes you question authority. I think that is why art is dangerous.

Sander Gilman: It’s terribly frightening to look in to a work of art and see those secret parts of your self, those parts that you don’ever wanna talk about, or see, revealed to the world. And I think that’s what scared the nazis.

Robert Hughes: The avant garde had always hoped to be dangerous. That is the thing the guys with the arm bands were paying a kind of supreme compliment even in the act of repressing it. They were saying This really matters. This really counts in the way that people react to one an other in the way in which states are formed. This is language, y’ow, and it affects daily life.

Thomas Mann: This story should convince us of one thing: that there are not two Germanys, a good one and a bad one, but only one. It is quite impossible for one born there simply to renounce the wicked, guilty Germany, and to declare I am the good, the noble, the just Germany. It is all within me. I have been through it all.

IQ: Substitute the word Germany for any thing we’re pledging allegiance to.