Art and Design in Nazi GermanyAuthor(s): John HeskettSource: History Workshop, No. 6 (Autumn, 1978), pp. 139-153Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4288196Accessed: 27/12/2008 22:46

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An apotheosis of the Volkswagen. Drawing in a technical journal, RTA Nachrichten 1938

Art and Design in Nazi Germany by John Heskett

Compared with the range of work available on the political and economic history of the Third Reich, there has been, until recently, very little study of Nazi aesthetics. Publications in the early post-war years -such as Rave's Kunst Diktatur im Dritten Reich (1949)[1J tended to concentrate on dramatic events, such as the notorious 'Degenerate Art' exhibition held at Munich in 1937, where avante-garde paintings, sculptures and graphic prints were displayed with such derogatory captions as 'German farmers as seen by Jews' and 'Thus sick minds see nature'. Nazism was identified quite simply as an 'anti-modern' movement, and little or no attention was paid either to the ambiguities of the modern movement, or the contradictions in the

140 History Workshop

Nazis' relationship to it. In the last few years, however, a growing body of work has begun to emerge on the subject, and in this short article I want to discuss soihe of the problems and issues it raises.

The first substantial step forward was Hildegard Brenner's book on the art- policies of the Third Reich published in 1961.[2] This studied the arts in general from a sociological viewpoint and for the first time placed them firmly in the context of the political system. The policies and organizations relating to art were analysed as a problem of political rule, and although it did not make an in-depth analysis of individual works and their themes, forms and techniques, the book remains valuable for its historically-specific account of Nazi art.

It was not until the present decade that there was any further progress. A key event was the exhibition 'Art in the Third Reich: Documents of Oppression' (Kunst im Dritten Reich: Dokumente der Unterwerfung) presented by the Frankfurter Kunstverein in late 1974, which was subsequently shown in other cities in Germany. The organizers were motivated by alarm at the development in Germany of an apparent wave of nostalgia for the past, the so-called 'Hitler-wave' (Hitler Welle), manifested in a flood of publications, films and documentaries that used imagery and material produced in the Third Reich for illustrative purposes, without questioning the nature of the material used. Thus, the Nazis' propagandistic image of themselves could be perpetuated in the minds of a generation unfamiliar with the realities of the Third Reich. To counter this uncritical acceptance, the organizing group hoped that the whole subject could be brought out of the shadows and be seen and discussed on a wide scale.

The exhibition was controversial even before it opened. The Association of Victims of the Nazi-Regime (Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Nazi-Regimes) moun- ted a protest campaign on the grounds that there was no social necessity for such an exhibition, that it was an affront to victims of the regime and an encouragement to fascist sympathizers. When it became clear that the exhibition would take place, the Association demanded among other things that visitors should be required to give their reasons for going, and their visit should only be permitted with a guide who would ensure they were fully informed of the consequences of the Nazi regime. After the failure of this demand the group campaigned for a boycott of the exhibition on the grounds that it was 'a mockery of the victims of fascism and all of those who, at the present time, attempt to combat it'. [3]

The organizing committee of the exhibition disagreed: to remove any misunder- standing of art in the Third Reich, it was necessary to strip away the taboos surrounding it and 'clearly show the role and function of art in national-socialism'. For this reason the exhibition was not conceived in terms of a 'pure art exhibition, but as a documentation that shows which policies art served, and in what measure'. [4]

Contrary to the judicious tone of that statement, however, the exhibition was polemical in terms of subject matter and presentation. The theme was established in the entrance hall by a quotation from Max Horkheimer displayed in large type: 'Who speaks of fascism, may not be silent about capitalism'. The material of the exhibition was grouped into three main areas, architecture and sculpture, painting and graphics. Each of these displayed particular themes, among those in architec- ture and sculpture, for example, were the role of the party buildings programme, the autobahns, and memorials; in painting, the depiction of work, women and war. Under these thematic headings, objects, illustrations, plans and models from the

Art and Design in Nazi Germany 141

Nazi period were juxtaposed with comment, texts, statistics and photographs intended to provide a link between the values of the art and the realities of life in the Third Reich. The section on work contrasted heroic memorials to labour with photographs of the living and working conditions that prevailed, tables showing how wages fell in real terms, and statements about the destruction of the trade unions and the imprisonment of their leaders.

Over 36,000 people visited the exhibition in the eight weeks that it was open in Frankfurt, including a large number of school groups. In the public debates that were organized in conjunction with it, on 'wall newspapers' provided for visitors' comments, and in the huge number of press and media reports, it stimulated widespread and vehement discussion. Reactions to the exhibition were many and varied, coming from all parts of the political spectrum, and directed at both the form and the content of the exhibition.

Suggestions that similar ways of commenting on art had been used by the Nazis themselves in the 'Degenerate Art' exhibition of 1937 were part of a tendency that sought to brand the organizers as 'left-fascists'. This concentration on the method used, while ignoring the totally different context, was to be a recurring element. On a loftier note, other critics questioned whether the exhibition had anything to do with art at all, the exhibits being so uniformly bad that it was only necessary for the public to see them to realize that 'art' and the 'Third Reich' were contradictions in terms. From the left there was criticism that the commentary had not gone far enough. The newspaper of the German Communist Party (DKP) commented that it did 'not indicate the links with the reality of Fascism in Chile or Spain', and that 'they correctly depicted Fascism as the open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary section of monopoly capital, but did not refer to the continuity of monopoly-rule in the Federal Republic'. [5] Such a comparison was not made explicit, though it could be inferred from the rather circumspect statement by Georg Bussman, Director. of the Frankfurter Kunstverein, in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue:

If in the present there does not exist a continuity worth mentioning of National Socialist art, there remains, however, a continuity of actual function. If art in the Third Reich had the task of disguising reality and destroying all consciousness of it, so it can be asked: what kind of relationship to reality has art today. [6]

Much of the left and DKP criticism focussed on the exhibition as a means of commenting on contemporary political issues.

There was, however, a further problem revealed by the method of display that has a wider relevance. 'If art, as verified by the example of that of the National Socialists, is to be identified as a matter of principle with its epoch and social structure, a working method of that kind is valid for other epochs'.[7]

It is a weakness of most art exhibitions that little attempt is made to place the works in their social context. That the organizers of 'Art in the Third Reich' did so was an important step forward and necessary under the circumstances. But doubts were raised by the precise method used and therefore its wider validity, particularly the technique of simply juxtaposing art objects with information on the social context, and interpreting them solely in terms of that information. This may be useful in identifying ideological content, but there is a danger that a work may have an ideological interpretation imposed upon it that strains a viewer's credulity. One

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of the problems that I found visiting the exhibition was the difficulty of relating much of the imagery to the comment accompanying them. For example a simple realistic portrait, 'The Entailed Farmer', was accompanied by two pages of catalogue text describing the laws of entail, of inalienable inheritance, enacted by the Nazis which 'served to carry fascist rule on to the land',[8] and the history and role of this section of the farming population in the Third Reich. In all this the painting was mentioned once, in the opening sentence, and there was no clarification of exactly how in artistic terms it expressed the extensive social interpretation attached to it. Another example was Ivo Saliger's painting 'The Judgement of Paris', a traditional academic theme based on the Greek myth in which the young Paris - depicted by Saliger in lederhosen -was required to award a golden apple to the loveliest of three goddesses. In the catalogue the picture was linked to a statement by Alfred Rosenberg advocating polygamy, with the comment, 'That would be therefore a German Paris who in future would be able to choose daily'. [9] In neither case was there an analysis of the painting that acknowledged any other kind of possible interpretation. The depiction of the reality itself at times also left much to be desired. A painting by Julius Paul Junghans, 'Ploughing', showing a scene of a farmer guiding a plough pulled by three horses across a sunlit landscape, was placed next to a photograph of a woman and two men pulling a plough on a Bavarian farm in 1936. The painting was an obvious piece of idealization that bore little relationship to the practical realities of everyday rural life, but the photograph also aroused scepticism as to the extent that it represented the general reality of agricultural work in the Third Reich. This technique of juxtaposition was, it seemed to me, an imprecise tool that could all too easily be challenged and thus cast doubt on the validity of more fundamental and serious purposes of the exhibition.

The attitudes of visitors and commentators to the Frankfurt exhibition were undoubtedly influenced by their awareness of its didactic nature and much of the reaction was conditioned by political opposition to, or support of, the basic concept presented. The lack of a detailed analysis of the works exhibited as works of art was an important contributing reason. It meant that the exhibition could be viewed in a manner contrary to the didactic intention of the organizers. The visual exhibits had a scale and immediacy of impact that made it easily possible to ignore the texts. Similarly, the absence of an analysis connecting the paintings with the illustrative material on the social background resulted in some disjunction between the two because of their different character; art, however realistic in style, is not the same as photographic reportage. The art could therefore quite easily be perceived as an isolated element. In aesthetic terms much of it was poor and banal: contorted over- muscled heroes in static poses; lifeless nudes painted in meticulous detail, 'down to the last pubic hair' was one sardonic comment; and monumental architecture on a brutally oppressive scale. An in-depth analysis of such characteristics could power- fully have complemented the ideological analysis and thus perhaps combatted the immediate visual appeal of the objects. In addition, some of the comment could have taken the form of alternative artistic imagery equally effective in its imme- diacy. Such possibilities were evident in the section on the role of women, where a series of nude paintings, some academic and formal, some attempting a lush eroticism, and of cloying mother and children scenes, were set in context by a marvellous photo-collage by W. Bermann. Under a quotation from a speech by Hitler, 'A wife must be a serving-maid of her husband, a child-bearing machine, whose duty is to bear children, soldiers for Germany', Bermann composed an image

Art and Design in Nazi Germany 143

in profile of a careworn, middle-aged woman in an advanced stage of pregnancy, with heavy, muscular arms that indicated a life of hard work rather than languid ease. Her distended abdomen was covered with a white apron, on which was superimposed the image of an inverted foetus wearing a steel helmet. The technical mastery and savage wit of Bermann resulted in an image of enormous force that bears comparison with the work of John Heartfield; it was direct and haunting, and totally superior in terms of political comment and imaginative power to the texts and images that surrounded it, its confident exploitation of the possibilities of a modern technological medium in itself a biting comment on their traditional academic forms.

Nevertheless, not all the objects displayed were so poor as to deserve the blanket derision heaped on them by critics who, on grounds of taste or the political connotations of the works, refused to countenance them as art. The officially approved realistic style of the paintings and sculpture of the Third Reich was still capable of arousing numerous reported comments along the lines of, 'But they really knew how to paint'. The problem is that realistic forms and treatment in art did without doubt correspond to the taste of a majority of Germans in the 1930s, and one has only to visit the art sections of large department stores or consider lists of the most popular prints purchased to see that it still does. And not only in Germany, a similar investigation might reveal a comparable pattern in Britain. Again, there was a gap in the exhibition's coverage and commentary: the characteristics of realism and its popular appeal, the notion of the nature and social role of art that it represents, and why it was officially approved in the Third Reich were not examined.

This problem of realistic style was to be the centre of what was probably the greatest element of controversy surrounding the exhibition. It was pointed out in numerous newspaper reports that no comparison had been made in the exhibition with Socialist Realist art, with which there was a marked similarity in style. The inevitable conclusion was that this similarity of form reflected the totalitarian nature of both the Nazi regime and of contemporary Socialist states. Typical of this vein of comment was an article in the 'Rheinische Merkur', which gleefully wrote of the exhibition,

The left-tainted intellectuals must in any case be very naive, otherwise they would have noticed in time the boomerang of this exhibition. Everywhere one heard young men telling their wives that the art of the Soviet Union was exactly the same. Also on the sheets of a wall-newspaper on which visitors could set their opinion, one found nothing more frequent than references to the art of the com- munist dictatorships. (10]

There were indeed such references on the wall-newspapers, for example, 'Who speaks of fascism, cannot remain silent about socialism', and 'Just take away the Nazi emblems, and you will find yourself in the present-day German Democratic Republic'.

Linked to such comments was the tendency already noted to dismiss the art of the Nazi period as 'Non-art';

... in totalitarian repressive systems the 'decreed' art cannot indeed be art and

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... no great artist has either served the Nazis or serves the Soviets today... I have therefore unwittingly made the great mistake of bringing in the idea of Quality, which does not matter to people who judge art only according to its political tendency, indifferent to whether it is turgid rubbish. [11]

Arguments of this kind, based on theories of the autonomy of art had, in fact, been one of the main targets of the exhibition. In his catalogue article, Berthold Hinz, a member of the organizing committee, quoted a statement in Werner Haftmann's book, Painting in the Twentieth Century, on the close relationship of 'such apparently opposed movements as the Bolshevism of the Leninist-Stalinist phase, the Fascism of Mussolini and the National Socialism of Hitler', concluding that, 'The official style of art in totalitarian lands is everywhere the same'.[12] To which Hinz replied,

That kind of arguable art history represents the thesis of political totalitarianism, serves the 'theory' of international anti-communism. Against that is to be stated: what is conclusive is not that art is generally placed in service, but in what service it is placed; nor is it conclusive that painters, consciously or unconsciously, submit to purposes, but that they submitted to fascist purposes.[13]

This statement was quoted more frequently than any other in newspaper reports. Hinz's argument was widely interpreted, and accurately I believe, when set against its full elaboration, as meaning that the central criterion in evaluating art is its political context. He wrote of 'the real determinants of German fascism' finding 'their limits in form'[14], arguing that painting in the Third Reich was 'as little revolutionary as the system that bore it, and exactly as counter-revolutionary as it'. [15] The forms of art produced in the Third Reich are thus seen as expressive of fascist rule and ideology, art having no identity other than that of the system in which it is produced.

This is essentially a reductionist approach which in denying the autonomy of art, also denies the possibility of art having distinctive characteristics as a mode of expression and bearer of meaning. The relationship between art and society is not discussed, because there is no relationship, everything being part of an expressive totality, which by imposing a dominant interpretation fails to come to terms with the dialectical nature of a work of art in relation to its specific context and to the possible perceptions of it. Art is regarded as objective, a fixed entity. The ambiguity of its possible interpretations is denied.

The limitations of this theory have more serious implications when the tenden- tious interpretation of fascism that it applies, and the extension of this interpretation in time, are taken into consideration. Fascism is regarded as a crisis of capitalist, bourgeois society, even the inevitable outcome of it: a counter-revolutionary stage of capitalist development that in aesthetic terms uses the 'mundane' taste and forms of early bourgeois society and overthrows the innovatory bourgeois modern art. The extension of this results in a teleology of the artistic forms of the Third Reich, reaching back in time to interpret the origins of those forms in terms of their outcomes, relating their development in nineteenth-twentieth-century Germany to the rise of capitalism, and suggesting a direct continuity of aesthetic form as an expression of bourgeois capitalist institutions and relationships.

In aesthetic terms it can result in absurdities, with nineteenth-century artists such

Art and Design in Nazi Germany 145

as Hans Makart being evaluated in terms of the fact that he was Hitler's favourite painter, with the implication that he is in some sense proto-fascist. Carried forward into the present this view posits a further continuity of aesthetic forms and functions related to the institutions of monopoly capital and suggesting a further continuity of fascism. A revival of interest in Hans Makart can thereby be seen as evidence of a 'neo-fascist' revival. Differences of political structure and institutions are regarded across this span of time as being peripheral and marginally relevant. The contem- porary political consequences of this theory are, however, profound, especially when employed as justification for the actions of groups such as the Red Army Fraction, which regards the present-day Federal German Republic as fascism in another guise.

Against this theory was placed a counter-interpretation that denied the validity of the aesthetic forms produced in the Third Reich as 'art' because they were politically influenced, and drew a lateral formal comparison to establish a relation- ship between fascism and socialism. The lines of the main arguments were thus drawn on the basis of two antithetical concepts of art and its role in society, both of which were clearly related to contemporary political attitudes in Germany. Both points of view, however, insofar as they considered art, depended upon a characteri- zation of a particular form of art, and the drawing of comparisons with similar forms elsewhere, and neither expounded a concept of the relationship of art and society that went beyond such coincidental characterization, nor presented a possible alternative interpretation. As already pointed out, the Frankfurt organizers failed to establish how the art of the Third Reich was specifically 'fascist', but the same kind of criticism can be directed at the proponents of the totalitarian thesis. They similarly failed to explain in what sense the official art of, for example, the Soviet Union and German Democratic Republic was 'socialist'. If that indeed was the case the use and acceptance of non-figurative art in Poland and Hungary would have to be considered non-socialist. And if one looks a little farther afield this interpretation of the role of form becomes even more questionable. Realistic art was the prevailing form in Scandinavia in the 1930s which does not imply that those countries were politically fascist; Mussolini's Italy tolerated modern art but that does not necessarily mean that modern art is fascist, or conversely, that Italy at that time was democratic.

The relationship of art to society was therefore one of the most fundamental issues raised by the Frankfurt exhibition. The nature of these issues were not explored in depth. Nevertheless, the clarification of opposing views, and the scale on which the conflicting arguments were publicized were, in themselves, a tribute to the success of the project, and an important stimulus to the further discussion called for by its organizers.

Whether intended deliberately or not as a counter to the Frankfurt exhibition, a second exhibition, 'The Thirties: Showplace Germany' (Die Dreissiger Jahre: Schauplatz Deutschland) opened in Munich in February 1977, presenting a diamet- rically different approach, the essence of which was that 'modern' German art and design survived throughout the 1930s (which in some sense it indeed did). The overwhelming majority of works, however, were by artists who were exiled or suppressed by the Nazi regime. This exhibition was concerned above all with individual artists and artistic movements, and references to the Nazi regime once again concentrated on its anti-modernist aesthetic policies. By selecting the period 1930-39 a much broader range of work was exhibited, and a continuity of German

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achievement in modern art suggested, against which the Nazi period was reduced to the level of a philistine interruption. The section on applied art and industrial design, for example, was headed 'Practicality despite Dictatorship' (Sachlichkeit trotz Diktatur), with items such as a prototype Volkswagen and a Siemens telephone being exhibited in isolation against white-painted museum walls as objects of pure form. Such objects can be considered as pure form, it is true, and an analysis on that basis is essential if the object is to be fully understood. But there is a distortion involved when objects for functional use, for application under particular circum- stances at a specific time, are exhibited simply as contemplative art-objects. The catalogue article on this section concluded:

Thanks to artists like Wolfgang Tumpel, Wilhelm Wagenfeld, Marguerite Fried- lander, Hermann Gretsch etc., 'Good Form' survived in Germany and could be taken over without a break after the war into the art of the present.[16]

There is more than a touch of unreality about the way in which the survival of particular aesthetic standards is emphasized as something of unquestioned signifi- cance, together with an assumption that designers such as those mentioned, because of their artistic achievement, were untainted by any involvement in the political events of the period. Yet Wilhelm Wagenfeld was a member of the organizing committee for the German pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition, which with large-scale government funding was a monumental piece of propaganda for the Third Reich, and Hermann Gretsch designed for the German Labour Front, the party organization for workers. Both were outstanding designers in terms of technical and aesthetic achievement, but both worked on projects that were important components of the economic provisions of the Four Year Plan begun in 1936, the object of which was to prepare Germany for war. This is not to suggest that Wagenfeld or Gretsch were in fact fascist, in terms of guilt by association; I do not yet know the extent of their political involvement. I would argue, however, that their achievement cannot be considered as having taken place in some aesthetic state of limbo, but was often directly related to the dictatorship and its programme (rather than despite it). Their work must therefore be subject to standards of judgement other than complacent hallelujahs celebrating the survival of 'Good Form'.

The last two years have also seen important developments in contacts between research workers in this field. The Frankfurt exhibition inspired two German-born artists living in London, Gustav Metzger and Cordula Frohwein, to organize a symposium, 'Art in Germany under the National Socialists' (AGUN), in London in September 1976. This event was a remarkable achivement. Its organizers, without any outside financial support, brought together some 25 hitherto unconnected researchers from Germany, Britain and the U.S.A. for four days of discussions.

It was out of the AGUN discussion that the idea of a larger conference was developed by a working-party of the 'Ulmer Verein: Verbande fur Kunst und Kulturwissenschaften', an organization founded in 1968 in an attempt to counter- balance the restricted academicism of older-established art-historical organizations in Germany. The conference, entitled 'Fascism - Art and Visual Media' (Faschis- mus -Kunst und visuelle Medien), took place in October 1977 in Frankfurt. An important innovation of this conference was that the range of subject matter was extended to give as wide a coverage as possible to all forms of visual media. The

Art and Design in Nazi Germany 147

value of this approach became apparent during the conference, with over thirty papers being given in four days, a very heavy programme, but covering a wide range of means and media.

The limitations of conventional academic categories in studying visual commu- nication in the Third Reich were demonstrated in a paper by Berthold Hinz. He showed that film and photography could not be regarded solely as separate media, but were often used as the means of communicating other forms. The imagery of paintings or architectural models were photographed and widely reproduced thereby obscuring the boundaries between the idealized forms of paintings and everyday reality, between what was projected and what had been realized, in an attempt to aestheticize Nazi policies and ideology. A detailed example of this relationship between different media was given in Angela ..... iberger's paper on 'The New Reich Chancellory in Berlin 1937-9', which described not only architectural plans, building procedure and structure, but the methods and means by which the building was publicised and presented. Film and photography were widely used to impress the imagery of the building on the mind of the public, and although little used, the multiple reproduction of images of the building created a reality of its own. The cabinet-room furnished with expensive materials and repeating Nazi symbols created an impression of a solemn setting for meetings concerned with matters of high state-meetings that, in fact, never took place since Hitler had no cabinet. His vast personal study was rarely used and only then to impress occasional visitors, he generally worked in more practical accommodation that housed the secretarial and supporting staff. The building was not in fact related to any of the normal functional needs of government and administration, but was conceived as a piece of representative architecture, as a memorial, 'the present depicted as the past'. This monumental quality was emphasized by the lack of human figures in the illustra- tions of the building, even of Hitler himself.

Another example of the gulf between image and reality was shown by Karl Stamm in 'The "Experience" of War in the "Deutschen Wochenschau"', in which technique and imagery in the weekly German wartime newsreel were analysed. The cumulative power of highly selective, and sometimes specially staged, visual imagery, together with words and music, was used to create a monumental and grandiose impression of the irresistible force of German arms and technology that bore little relationship to the realities of the struggle. One such example was a newsreel purporting to show the attack on Sevastopol in the Crimea, which linked shots of huge rail-borne siege artillery with enormously long barrels dramatically pointing upwards, firing to the pounding insistent rhythms of Liszt's 'Les Preludes', and interspersed with sequences of an ever onward-thrusting infantry attack. In actual fact, the guns required several minutes to reload and adjust for each firing; they were simply incapable of the rate of fire that was suggested by the film, and the infantry 'attack' was staged some days after the capture of Sevastopol.

The need to reconcile the 'blood and soil' element of Nazi ideology with the technological demands of a modern state embarking on a rearmament programme presented continual problems. Archaic, traditional, rural forms were widely used to obscure modern developments and satisfy the anti-modernist wing of the party without endangering essential policies. Roswitha Mattausch's paper on the new towns built to house workers in the Volkswagen plant and the Hermann Goering steelworks showed traditional forms being used and layouts derived from garden city designs that were anti-urban and anti-industrial in appearance and original

above: Herbert Rimpl Heinkel factory, main entrance, 1936-7. below: Herbert Rimpl Heinkel factory, the Leegebuch estate

Art and Design in Nazi Germany 149

intention. Descriptions of them as 'rooted in the soil, "natural", and "organic"' obscured their purpose and the economic reality that lay behind it. The planning of such settlements was the responsibility of the Labour and Social Ministry and the German Labour Front, and their policy was to use garden-city ideals to create worker communities that were tied by home-ownership to a particular place and employment, and therefore more easily subject to control than the 'rootless' urban masses. The conservative ideology of the garden-city movement in Germany could thus be used as a means of creating a docile labour force which was politically stable and pliable.

A further problem that is a repeated feature of contemporary German academic controversy concerns the relationship between economic and political factors. Wolfgang Schache's study of -the plans to rebuild Berlin as the capital of an enlarged Reich argued that it was necessary to go beyond describing external forms and relating them to prevailing political conditions; an examination of the economic basis of the building industry and its technical and organizational structure was also necessary. The plans for Berlin were thus described as the expression of a complex network of political, economic and aesthetic factors that were comprehensible only in the context of the plans for a calculated policy of territorial expansion.

Chup Friemert's paper 'Fascist Production Aesthetics: the organization "Beauty of Labour"', placed the emphasis firmly on the economic. The 'Beauty of Labour' organization was the section of the German Labour Front concerned with the working environment and standards of design in industry. The development of a 'production-aesthetic' in these two areas, it was argued, was an expression of the concentration of capital and the social policies of manufacturing organizations, which sought to emphasize aesthetic values as a means of increasing productivity and diverting attention from the increased profit resulting from this higher productivity. The state 'Beauty of Labour' organization formulated the propagation of aesthetic values in ideological terms, of the 'factory community' expressing the 'new power of a renewed Germany', and not in terms of the benefits that accrued to individual concerns. This has led, it was argued, to erroneous interpretations of these aesthetic measures as manifestations of the Fascist political system, which neglected the role of capital, particularly the large cartels, that successfully utilized the apparatus of the state for their own ends. Aesthetic factors were thus determined by the interests of private capital it was concluded, 'not the primacy of politics', and this implied that the role of production-aesthetics in the Federal Republic required investigation in order to determine the equivalences and differences to Fascist production-aesthetics.

The inclusion of work on fascism in other countries was another feature of this conference. There was an impressive paper on the memorial to the dead of the Spanish Civil War, 'Santa Cruz del Valle de los Caidos', by Peter K. Klein, the history of which reveals the links between fascism and catholic-traditional elements in Spanish society. The basic ideal of this monumental structure was suggested by Franco himself, and represents in its scale and sepulchral atmosphere, an attempt - similar to those of the Nazi regime - to provide an architectural manifestation of the stability of its rule. It differed, however, in using in its iconography elements from Spain's imperial past and traditional religious forms. In this, it typified the distinct character of the Franco regime, in which the Falange and fascist ideology was less dominant than in Italy or Germany, and was but one element in the political support of the regime, together with traditionalists, monarchists and right wing catholics.

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Fascist Italy represented another important point of comparison. In conven- tional art-history the early development of the Futurist movement before.the First World War is well documented, but the relationsliip of the Futurist movement in Italy with Fascism is too often avoided or skirted over. Ingo Bartsch's paper 'Modifications of Futurist Painting in Italian Fascism' questioned the art-historical interpretation of the post-1918 decline of Futurism, which maintained 'the myth of the "revolutionary pre-war avant-garde" in its untroubled purity'. Instead of post-war decline, Bartsch argued that Futurism underwent a modification from pre-war initial experiment to a post-war stabilization, a 'classical phase' of Futurism, with a continuing basis of Futurist ideas that constantly sought to serve the regime as its state art. This paper therefore suggested the need to reassess prevalent and erroneous interpretations of the social character of bourgeois avant- garde movements.

Another contribution in this section demolished a common apology for the art of the Third Reich, which attempts to justify it by comparing its realistic style with that prevalent in the artistic programme of the New Deal administration in the United States, once again using a comparison of forms! Frank Steele, in comparing them, went beyond similarities in stylistic repertoires to analyse the motives and purposes of the two governments as revealed in the structure and administration of the arts. At this level fundamental differences emerge, art in the Third Reich being a closely controlled instrument of propaganda, that in the U.S.A. being more flexible and less deterministic. While Hitler maintained a strong interest in artistic matters and played an important part in policy formation, Roosevelt was, in contrast, barely interested beyond not wanting artists 'painting bearded Lenins on government property'. The movement for a generally comprehensible popular art in the U.S.A. was therefore less a matter of government policy than an expression of artists' social commitment and concern.

In retrospect the conference represented a considerable progress in the study of the relationship of visual form in fascist regimes. It brought together a range of research that, at best, is characterized by an attempt to move beyond the stage of simply negating the work and policies prevalent in the Third Reich and other systems, towards a detailed analysis of the use of visual forms and media in relation to the purposes of fascist regimes: a standpoint that seeks to understand how and why aesthetic means and values can be used as a calculated political weapon.

In the English speaking world, apart from the AGUN initiative, our knowledge of German art between the Wars is confined to a small number of avant-garde movements, such as Expressionism, the New Objectivity (die neue Sachlichkeit) and the Bauhaus. With the branding of most modern art as 'degenerate' after the Nazi takeover, and the closure of the Bauhaus in May 1933, art and design in any meaningful sense is depicted as having come to an end. For understandable political reasons, this was the view of the victims of Nazi persecution. But the same cannot be said for art-historians. Their neglect stems from an unsatisfactory view of what art-history is: the extrapolation of great works of art from their surrounding social context, and the uncritical acceptance of the self-conceptions of the twentieth- century avant-garde. Such a view blocks out important historical questions and is incapable of providing a coherent explanation of the succession of aesthetic forms. In the case of Germany, it fails to provide any specific explanation of why the avant-garde of the 20s aroused such widespread opposition and ignores the aesthetic ambitions of the Nazi leaders, the way in which they were able to draw on these

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discontents and finally the way in which they were also able to incorporate some elements of 'modern' design in their building and industrial programmes.[17]

Perhaps one reason for the indiscriminate acceptance of the avant-garde's point of view lay in its retrospectively successful claim to legitimacy and supremacy, regardless of other developments past and present. There were other movements, however, particularly in architecture and design, that w.ere at the time considered 'modern' but which emphasized a continuity with the past rather than its rejection. For example, the work of Peter Behrens and Heinrich Tessenow drew on the neo- classical tradition that was particularly strong in nineteenth-century Germany. The interior designs in the same tradition of Fritz Breuhaus, Paul Ludwig Troost and Bruno Paul for the new North German Lloyd transatlantic liners 'Bremen' and 'Europa' at the end of the twenties were hailed both in Germany and America as outstanding examples of modernism. The concept of modernism in Weimar Germany was, in fact, more complex and multi-faceted than has been generally depicted. What came to an end in 1933 was only one strand of modernism, and one that it could _be suggested was something of an aberration in the overall pattern of development in Germany. In other areas there was an essential continuity of forms, though this does not necessarily imply a continuity in the significance of those forms. Paul Ludwig Troost became Hitler's official architect and designed the House of German Art in Munich. Troost was succeeded after his death by Albert Speer, a pupil of Tessenow.

In general, the art-historical schema of Weimar Germany as a period of democratic creativity and the Third Reich as one of dictatorial negation is a gross oversimplification and has to be revised, particularly when, as indicated at the beginning of this article, related historical disciplines provide an extensive and much more penetrating body of work on the period. It is, in general, obvious that there was a strong element of continuity in art and design between the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, but the nature of this continuity is complex, riddled with paradoxes and ambivalences. There were groups in the Weimar Republic who supported the system of parliamentary democracy but emphasized traditional forms and methods in art and design that were later to be officially recognized by the Nazis, and they certainly cannot be considered as proto-Nazi. There were industrial- ists and military leaders whose political ideas were ultra right-wing but who advocated and developed a sophisticated technical modernity in many aspects of design: an aspect of modernity that was to be absolutely essential to the rearmament programme of the Third Reich. In 1937, for example, a major exhibition was organized in Dusseldorf under the title 'A Working Nation' (Schaffendes Volk). It was specifically intended as an instrument to publicize and mobilize support for the programmes of the Four Year Plan. It concentrated on showing the potential of modern industrial technology and much of the architecture and design were modern in both technique and form, even to the extent of exhibiting a key artefact of the 'modern movement' in design of the 1920s: a tubular steel cantilever chair.

The pattern is therefore complicated and to understand it visual forms need to be evaluated in relation to the processes that produced them and the purposes for which they were applied. It is clear, however, that there is no simple equivalence between formalistic standards of 'good' art or design and ethical values in social and political life, nor between 'progressive' avant-garde art and design and political progress. Looked at from another point of view ideological values that are predominant in political life may well also be discernible in contemporaneous art and design,

152 History Workshop

but it is unlikely that they will be manifested in precisely the same way. What is emerging, however, is a critical approach that rejects such simple

equations and seeks to clarify the nature of the relationship of art in society, which goes beyond finished artefacts, a static concept of art as object, to focus also on the methods and means by which those artefacts are produced, utilized and evaluated: a concept of art as process, which opens up for investigation the dynamics of the interrelationship between art and a range of social institutions and forces. This could be a very positive contribution to the development of critical theory in art and design which at present is divided into two broad and seemingly antipathetic groupings: one emphasizing the formal identity of art, the individual role of the artist and the autonomy of values; the other concerned with the social significance of art, the artist as an instrument of, and values an expression of, social and political relationships. Both are deficient in important respects. What is needed is the extension of the marxist critique in a manner that is capable of encompassing artistic processes and concepts, in their own terms, in a dialectical relationship with the social context.

1 Paul Ortwin Rave, Kunst Diktatur im Dritten Reich, Hamburg 1949. See also Josef Wulf, Die Bildenden Kunste im Dritten Reich, Gutersloh 1963.

2 Hildegard Brenner, Die Kunstpolitik des Nationalsozialismus, Reinbek 1963. 3 Press release of the Initiative against the Diffusion of NS Art, October 1974, in Georg

Bussman (ed.) Betrifft: Reaktionen. Anlass: Kunst im 3. Reich - Dokumente der Unterwer- fung. Ort Frankfurt. Frankfurt 1975, p.169. This latter title is of a volume of documents published by the exhibition organizers after it had closed in Frankfurt, which includes amongst other material, interviews, protest documents, photographs of the exhibition layout, and a full selection of press reviews and comment.

4 Georg Bussman, Introduction, in Georg Bussman (ed.) Kunst im Dritten Reich. Doku- mente der Unterwerfung. Frankfurt 1974, p.3. Not just an exhibition catalogue, but a series of essays, extensively illustrated on all aspects of the exhibition's themes.

5 Unsere Zeit, 26.10.1974, in Betrifft: Reaktionen, p.224. 6 Georg Bussman, Introduction in Kunst im Dritten Reich, p.3. 7 Georg Bussman, Introduction in Kunst im Dritten Reich, p.3. 8 Dieter Bartetzko, Stephan Glossman and Gabriele Voigtl1nder-Tetzner, Die Darstel-

lung des Bauern in Kunst im Dritten Reich, p. 152. 9 Christian Gross and Uwe Grossman, Die Darstellung der Frau in Kunst im Dritten

Riche, p.182. 10 Rheinischer Merkur, 8.11.1974, in Betrifft: Reaktionen, p.238. 11 Die Welt, 29.9.1974, in Betrifft: Reaktionen, p.226. 12 Werner Haftmann, Malerei im 20 Jahrhundert, Munich 1954, p.421. 13 Berthold Hinz, Malerei, in Kunst im Dritten Reich, p. 122. An extended version of the

arguments in this article can be, found in Berthold Hinz, Die Malerei im deutschen Faschismus -Kunst und Konterrevolution, Munich 1974.

14 Berthold Hinz, Malerei in Kunst im Dritten Reich, p.123. 15 Berthold Hinz, Malerei in Kunst im Dritten Reich, p.122. 16 Erika Gysling-Billeter, Die Angewandte Kunst: Sachlichkeit trotz Diktatur in Exhibi-

tion Catalogue, Die Dreissiger Jahre: Schauplatz Deutschland, Munich 1977. 17 The only work in English to give a general account of the visual arts is Helmut

Lehmann-Haupt, Art under a Dictatorship, New York 1954, long out of print but still useful. It is based on an extensive official investigation of the subject by the author while an officer of the U.S. occupation forces after the war. Barbara Miller-Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918-1939, Cambridge, Mass., 1968, is stronger on the period of the Weimar Republic but is an excellent study of the political background to architectural developments and explains why architecture became such a powerful political symbol in this period. Robert Taylor, The Word in Stone, Berkeley 1974, discusses architecture in the Third Reich but relies

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too heavily on contemporary documentary sources and accounts. What the Nazis said and what they did were often very different. In addition two books by Albert Speer are widely available, Inside the Third Reich, London 1971, and Spandau: The Secret Diaries, London 1976. Speer was Hitler's chief architect and head of the 'Beauty of Labour (Schonheit der Arbeit) section of the German Labour Front. The books give useful information into many developments from the point of view of someone deeply involved in the formulation and execution of policy and practice. But his account is a personal one, is in no way complete, even of the extent of his own work, and has been accepted somewhat uncritically.