Degenerate Art - Reaction Against Modernism

Reaction Against Modernism

The early twentieth century was a period of wrenching changes in the arts. In the visual arts, such innovations as cubism, Dada and surrealism—following hot on the heels of symbolism, post-Impressionism and Fauvism—were not universally appreciated. The majority of people in Germany, as elsewhere, did not care for the new art which many resented as elitist, morally suspect, and too often incomprehensible.

Under the Weimar government of the 1920s, Germany emerged as a leading center of the avant-garde—the birthplace of Expressionism in painting and sculpture, of the atonal musical compositions of Arnold Schoenberg, and the jazz-influenced work of Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill. Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), and F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), brought Expressionism to cinema.

The Nazis viewed the culture of the Weimar period with disgust. Their response stemmed partly from a conservative aesthetic taste, and partly from their determination to use culture as a propaganda tool. On both counts, a painting such as Otto Dix's War Cripples (1920) was anathema to them. It unsparingly depicts four badly disfigured veterans of the First World War, then a familiar sight on Berlin's streets, rendered in caricatured style. Featured in the Degenerate Art exhibition, it would hang next to a label accusing Dix — himself a volunteer in World War I — of "an insult to the German heroes of the Great War".

As dictator, Hitler gave his personal taste in art the force of law to a degree never before seen. Only in Stalin's Soviet Union, where Socialist Realism was the mandatory style, had a state shown such concern with regulation of the arts. In the case of Germany, the model was to be classical Greek and Roman art, seen by Hitler as an art whose exterior form embodied an inner racial ideal.

The reason for this, as Henry Grosshans points out, is that Hitler "saw Greek and Roman art as uncontaminated by Jewish influences. Modern art was an act of aesthetic violence by the Jews against the German spirit. Such was true to Hitler even though only Liebermann, Meidner, Freundlich, and Marc Chagall, among those who made significant contributions to the German modernist movement, were Jewish. But Hitler took upon himself the responsibility of deciding who, in matters of culture, thought and acted like a Jew."

The supposedly "Jewish" nature of all art that was indecipherable, distorted, or that represented "depraved" subject matter was explained through the concept of degeneracy, which held that distorted and corrupted art was a symptom of an inferior race. By propagating the theory of degeneracy, the Nazis combined their anti-Semitism with their drive to control the culture, thus consolidating public support for both campaigns.