Why the Nazis Launched a Bizarre, Racist War on Modern Art

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These were lean years for National Socialism. The party would poll just 2.6 percent of the vote in the elections of May 1928. Hitler spent much of his time reorganizing the movement, growing the membership, expanding the ranks of the paramilitaries, and establishing absolute control. Under the Führerprinzip (leadership principle), he was the physical embodiment of National Socialism, its demigod and supreme commander. His personality hadn’t much changed since the Vienna days—Kubizek would have recognized the “coffee-house tirades,” “distaste for systematic work,” and “paranoid outbursts of hatred” Putzi Hanfstaengl described in these years—but his following had. His word within the party was law. No dissent was tolerated.

The Weimar Republic in that time was host to a vibrant, anything-goes cultural scene, in which the generation of war survivors shrugged off convention and gender stereotypes and went exploring. In the theaters, nightclubs, and galleries of 1920s Berlin, burlesque dancers titillated men and women alike, bands played Black American jazz music, and the unflinching artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) captured the depraved realities of prostitution, war trauma, and sexual violence. The metropolitan cognoscenti found this uninhibited, hard-partying world liberating, but to the uninitiated and the conservative—to most Germans, in fact—it was alarming, alien, another threat to the fragile fabric of the defeated nation. Hitler seized it as an opportunity and, holding up Weimar decadence as further evidence of degeneracy, used it to try to bring people over to his extreme politics.

From every platform, he stoked a culture war, exploiting the widespread antipathy Germans felt for modernity and modernism. In speech after speech, he railed against the Jewish-Bolshevik art and music of the present, decrying internationalism and racial dilution, while connecting himself with the Teutonic talents of the past, exalting the anti-Semite Wagner as the peak of Aryan genius. Without the influence of the Teutons, he pronounced, there would be no high art, poetry, or modern technology: “Take away the Nordic Germanic, and all that’s left are the monkey dances.” The avant-garde’s enthusiasm for madness remained a central pillar of his politics. In January 1928, he poured scorn on “the gall of people who belong in a sanatorium, who are sent as ‘artists to humanity.’ ” His party would take on the role of “clearing up this garbage,” he announced:

“We will make sure that when fate gives us power in our fists we will use it . . . for the internal education of man. The time will then come to overcome the misery of today and the German people will once again receive German art.”

That month, Hitler gave tangible form to his rhetoric of cleansing by creating the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (Combat League for German Culture), founded on his behalf by the party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg. As Rosenberg stated, the Kampfbund’s mission was “to arouse the conscience of creators and supporters of art against the flood of degeneracy spreading from Berlin” and to “defend natural German values in the midst of today’s cultural decline.” Its political purpose was to push the narrative that all areas of society, science, and the arts were in a deep crisis, and only an authoritarian state could avert the danger of complete degeneration. The Kampfbund would declare war against the “swamp culture” of the Weimar Republic, whose secret mastermind was the Jewish-Bolshevik nexus.

Local branches were established across the country, tasked with attacking museums and galleries that supported modern artists and naming and shaming their directors. Founding members of the Kampfbund included Hugo Bruckmann and Wagner’s daughter-in-law, Winifred, a long-standing Hitler supporter who had sent him food parcels in Landsberg, as well as high-ranking Nazis such as Philipp Bouhler and Heinrich Himmler. The organization’s star attraction, however, was the nationalist architect whom Hitler had astonished with his cultural rant over the Bruckmanns’ dinner table, Paul Schultze-Naumburg.

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Schultze-Naumburg had spent the years since that meeting working up his racial theories in a number of pamphlets and essays, including Kunst und Rasse (Art and race), published in 1928. Like Hitler, he drew his ideas from nineteenth-century degeneration theory, portraying the Weimar era as an Aryan end time, in which “Nordic” art was drowning in a sea of inferior immigrant genes. Art, Schultze-Naumburg wrote, was a direct expression of the race of its creator: As Egyptian artists had depicted Egyptians, and Greek sculpture showed Greeks, truly German art could only portray Germans. It was impossible, in fact, for artists to deviate far from their racial type: their genetic makeup was expressed in their work, which could also be used to examine their ethnic identity and racial “health.” The creative agent in art was therefore not the author’s personality, but the hereditary body of his or her race. It was a key tenet of Nazi art theory that the uniqueness of the artist faded away in the face of the German racial community.

What was more, a collection of paintings or sculpture did not just express the racial state of the time when it was made, but showed the “spiritual direction” in which a culture was headed, the world to which its creators aspired. The architect had examined medieval European statuary and discovered heroic and beautiful designs that revealed the Nordic genes of the people of the times. Contemporary art, by contrast, showed its creators to be either diseased and degenerate Germans or members of other races entirely. Modern art could thereby be read as evidence that Nordic blood was being tainted by “inferior components,” such as the Jews. Racial mixing was producing a “colorless porridge of characterless ugliness,” and modernism was a race to the bottom, where beauty was determined by the “mentally lowest.”

As arresting as these theories were, they were nothing compared with Schultze-Naumburg’s most attention-grabbing ploy in Kunst und Rasse. To illustrate his thesis, he published jaw-dropping photographs of mentally and physically disabled patients alongside works by leading avant-garde artists. Portraits by Kirchner, Modigliani, Nolde, and Heckel were juxtaposed with unflattering shots of medical case studies to illustrate the “tormenting, loathsome, and disgusting feelings” such art evoked in “every healthy person.” Schultze-Naumburg had had to search high and low to find real humans sick enough to correspond to these artists’ works, he wrote:

“It is not possible to find them in healthy people or in places that attract healthy people. One must descend into the deepest depths of human misery and human scum; into the institutions for idiots, psychiatric clinics, cripple homes, leprosy wards, or in places where the most depraved are hidden.”

The medical “horrors” he had discovered were so unspeakable that photography was barely able to reproduce them, yet they were still able only to approximate the awfulness of this type of art.

The disturbing images in Schultze-Naumburg’s parade of disability had been supplied by none other than Wilhelm Weygandt, the “anti- Prinzhorn” who had been so infuriated by his visit to the Heidelberg collection in May 1921. Weygandt had ignored Prinzhorn’s 1922 conclusions that psychiatry had no cultural standing and devoted himself to scouring paintings for disease, claiming in 1925 to have found evidence of Gustave Courbet’s depression, Édouard Manet’s paralysis, and Adolph Menzel’s hydrocephalus in each artist’s work. He had also examined Prinzhorn’s material and spotted signs of schizophrenia in three aspects of Bühler’s Der Würgengel: the “violent” notches of the angel’s halo, the “indifference” on the victim’s face, and the twisting of his legs. This led him to dismiss Bühler’s drawing, which others had held up as a masterpiece, as confused, ugly, and not worth trying to interpret. Furthermore, its pathology meant it would easily fit into a modern art exhibition.

Weygandt—who remained an enthusiastic supporter of Nazi cultural policies long into Hitler’s reign, touring the world to give almost ninety “cultural propaganda” lectures on behalf of the regime—supplied medical opinions along with his photographs, captioning them with such diagnoses as “mongoloid idiotypy,” “idiocy,” “obesity,” and “high-grade harelip.” He and Schultze-Naumburg together gave the impression that a growing mass of degenerate goblins was filling German asylums, and that this was reflected in German art. In fact many of the images were decades old. One, showing a young disabled man, had been first used by Weygandt in 1902: at that time, the psychiatrist described the subject as a twenty-four-year-old “cretin” with “characteristic pale yellow skin color,” and noted that “while eating, he cradles his head and grunts with satisfaction.” Despite their age, the photographs retained their ability to shock. Schultze-Naumburg cropped them and the portraits to make them appear more alike, and accused the artists of deliberately emulating these specimens of degeneracy. It was part of the avant-garde’s “subhuman yearning” to be comfortable in a greasy world of “grimaces and bent bodies,” he wrote. If it was left to such artists to envision the future, the world would soon come to resemble that of the images they had produced.

Two years later, in Gestaltung der Landschaft (Configuring the landscape), the architect would extend this thesis to embrace eugenics, using the analogy of blood sports. Every hunter was indebted to the foxes for a population of strong and healthy rabbits, he wrote, as “Reynard” caught and killed the weakest individuals. This logic was equally applicable to human society, where the weak included not just poor physical specimens, but those who were “intellectually and socially unfit.” Of course, this appeared cruel in the moment, but in the long run it would be extremely beneficial for humanity:

“Life necessitates constant extermination. The cruel, yet necessary and philanthropic law that is in effect is called selection, and its result may be discerned by the unfit soon sinking, and the worthy asserting themselves.”

Schultze-Naumburg’s theory of art was a tapestry of misrepresentations, lies, and half-baked ideas. He made no attempt to engage with the art he criticized, or to explain the artists’ intentions in trying to reach beyond academic aspirations. His fury stemmed from the works’ lack of realism and classical beauty, and he constructed a tottering polemic of perverted Darwinism and degeneracy theory to reach a predetermined political position. The idea that a work was entirely an expression of its author’s racial type, rather than of the individual’s personality or environment, was preposterous, as was the whole Nazi concept of a German race. Six years earlier, Prinzhorn had pointed out that attempts to diagnose artists by their work were foolish, but Schultze-Naumburg had taken this tendency to absurd lengths, arguing that the extent of disease in a society could be read by its art’s resemblance to the disabled. From there, he had conjured a conspiracy of modern art and racially inferior Untermensch, which was degrading the Germans culturally and biologically. He proposed that this alleged degeneracy should be rooted out by killing the genetically “unhealthy,” in which category he grouped together the disabled and the avant-garde, just as a fox kills weak rabbits.

As implausible as his arguments were, they were persuasive for some, as he succeeded in synthesizing Nazi preconceptions and so-called Rassengefühl (racial feeling)—toward foreigners, Jews, the avant- garde, and psychiatric patients—into an ethno-nationalist aesthetic theory. In proposing this theory, he was supporting Hitler’s eugenic stance in Mein Kampf, and retooling art into a political weapon for the far right, as he would assert in 1932:

“The essential element of art, as we understand it, is [. . .] to always show a “spiritual direction.” The idea of National Socialism is based on “giving direction” to the German people and leading it to salvation. And since that task is substantially conducted with spiritual tools, National Socialism cannot ignore the instrument of art.”

Most mainstream reviewers reacted to Kunst und Rasse with horror or laughter, but those in the nationalist movement applauded. The völkisch writer Manfred Hausmann compared Schultze-Naumburg with Leonardo, praising his “excellent illustrations” and noting the immutable proof that the “moderns . . . aren’t of our blood.” Another wrote that by showing the connection between contemporary painting and the “physical deformities and cretins,” he had identified the “explicitly pathological, more than just decadent,” in art. Hitler, too, is said to have responded well, appreciating the architect as “highly cultivated” and an “ideal art conservator for the German Reich.”

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At the end of October 1929, the worsening German economic outlook was pitched into full-blown crisis by the crash on Wall Street. The country’s dependence on American loans left it heavily exposed, and the result was a return to the chaos of the immediate postwar years. Before the crash, unemployment stood at 1.3 million; in 1932 it would hit 6 million, with one in four in the German labor force out of work. Voters flocked to the political extremes, and in regional elections on December 8, 1929, the Nazi Party won more than 10 percent of the vote for the first time, in Thuringia. This central state was an important symbol for the nationalists, as its capital, Weimar, had been a focal point of the German Enlightenment, and now represented the entire hated democratic republic. Hitler demanded control of two key ministries in the new regional government: those of education and the interior. The Nazi “old fighter” Wilhelm Frick would occupy both positions, with Schultze-Naumburg as his cultural tsar. For a little over a year, Thuringia became a test bed for National Socialist policies.

On April 5, 1930, four days after Schultze-Naumburg’s appointment, Frick signed the first piece of National Socialist cultural legislation, the decree “Wider die Negerkultur für das deutsche Volkstum” (Against Negro culture—for German tradition), vowing that the public authorities would “do their utmost to preserve, promote, and strengthen German art.” Certain types of music were banned, including jazz, along with books by Erich Maria Remarque and the films of Eisenstein, Pabst, and Pudowkin. The Bauhaus had been forced out of Weimar by right-wing politicians in 1925, and Frick appointed Schultze-Naumburg to lead the United Art School, which now occupied the same building. The architect fired most of the school’s staff before ordering the destruction of paintings, wall reliefs, and frescoes by the Bauhaus artists Oskar Schlemmer, Joost Schmidt, and Herbert Bayer.

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Excerpted from THE GALLERY OF MIRACLES AND MADNESS by Charlie English. Copyright © 2021 by Charlie English. Excerpted by permission of Random House, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

—Featured image: “Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the
Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919. Collage.

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