The German Genius

that, upon his death, his body was to be taken to Munich—to lie in state at the Feldherrnhalle and to be buried nearby. * Even more than Linz, where he had been at school and grown up, Munich was home to him. 4 In Mein Kampf , Hitler described the city as “this metropolis of German art,” adding that “one does not know German art if one has not seen Munich.” Here the climax of his quarrel with the artists took place in 1937.
    On July 18 that year, Hitler opened the Haus der deutschen Kunst, the House of German Art, in Munich, with nearly 900 paintings and pieces of sculpture by such Nazi favorites as Arno Breker, Josef Thorak, and Adolf Ziegler. 5 There were portraits of Hitler as well as Hermann Hoyer’s In the Beginning Was the Word , a nostalgic view of the Führer “consulting his colleagues” during the early days of the Nazi Party. One critic, mindful that speculative criticism was now outlawed and only reporting allowed, disguised his criticism in reportage: “Every single painting on display projected…the impression of an intact life from which the stresses and problems of modern existence were entirely absent—and there was one glaringly obvious omission—not a single canvas depicted urban and industrial life.”
    On the day the exhibition opened, Hitler delivered a ninety-minute speech in which he reassured Germany that “cultural collapse” had been arrested and the vigorous classical-Teutonic tradition revived. Art was very different from fashion, he insisted. “Every year, something new. One day Impressionism, then Futurism, Cubism, and maybe even Dadaism.” No, he insisted, art “is not founded on time, but only on peoples.” Race—the blood—was all. What did it mean to be German? It meant, he said, “to be clear.” Art is for the people, and the artist must present what the people see—“not blue meadows, green skies, sulphur-yellow clouds and so on.” There can be no place for “pitiful unfortunates, who obviously suffer from some eye disease.” 6
    This time there was criticism of a sort, albeit in a disguised way. The very next day, July 19, in the Municipal Archaeological Institute, across town in Munich, the notorious exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) opened. This displayed work by 112 German and non-German artists, 27 Noldes, 8 Dixes, 61 Schmidt-Rottluffs, 17 Klees, plus works by Gauguin, Picasso, and others. The paintings and sculptures had been plundered from museums all over Germany, and this exhibition surely ranks as one of the most infamous ever held. Even the Führer was taken aback by the way some of the exhibits were presented. Kirchner’s Peasants at Midday was labeled “German Peasants as Seen by the Yids” Ernst Barlach’s statue The Reunion , which showed the recognition of Christ by Saint Thomas, was labeled, “Two Monkeys in Nightshirts.”
    If Hitler thought that he had killed off modern art, he was mistaken. Over the four months that Entarte Kunst remained in Munich, more than 2 million people visited the show, far more than the thin crowds that drifted through the House of German Art. This was small consolation for the artists, many of whom found the exhibition heartbreaking. Nolde wrote yet again to Goebbels, demanding that “the defamation against me cease.” Beckmann was more realistic; on the day the show opened he took himself off into exile.
    Yet another retroactive law, the degenerate art law of May 1938, was passed, enabling the government to seize “degenerate” art in museums without compensation. Some of the pictures were sold for derisory sums at a special auction held at the Fischer Gallery in Lucerne; there were even some that the Nazis deemed too offensive to sell and these were burned at a great bonfire in Berlin in March 1938. 7
    A different meaning of degeneration was fixed by Victor Klemperer (1881–1960), a Jewish professor of French literature at Dresden, who lived in Germany throughout the Third Reich, protected by friends. He kept a detailed account of the Nazis’ use of language and showed, inter alia, how the word Sturm (storm), which had been the name of a (now banned) Expressionist art magazine, was appropriated as a hierarchical military term. Schutzstaffel (Protection Echelon) was soon reduced to abbreviations, SS and SA, “which became so satisfied with themselves that they were no longer really abbreviations at all,” with official typewriters being fitted with special keys showing the angular