NAZI ART

Wehrmacht artist Gottfried Meyer’s “Wounded Soldier”

SpRinGtime for hitleR

The hidden art of the Third Reich, argues Roger Griffin, betrays uncomfortable links with more radical modernism

At the end of the Second World War, the American army confiscated thousands of examples of Nazi art. Deemed unsuitable for public display, they were spirited away to the United States and kept in private. The reason, according to researcher Gregory Maertz, was that these paintings were of such high aesthetic value that they were likely to complicate the official view or Nazism as pure and simple evil. Though many of these works of art were returned to Germany, their aesthetic power and humanity continue to trouble the authorities. Maertz reports that there are German museums who even today deny the existence of works he has seen in their holdings with his own eyes. For any notion of Nazi compassion,

or good Nazi art, confounds our deepest sensibilities and assumptions. In an episode of Inspector Morse called “The Twilight of the Gods” (1993), Morse confidently assures Sergeant Lewis that “What we are looking for here is the sort of person that slashes pictures, takes a hammer to Michelangelo’s statues and a flamethrower to books; someone who hates art and ideas so much that he wants to destroy them: a fascist.” For the opera-loving Inspector, then, it is axiomatic that fascism is a form of vandalism, a nihilistic assault on civilization itself which took its most infamous form in the terror regime led by Adolf Hitler. In 1989 the film-maker Peter Adam had at least taken Nazi culture seriously enough to produce

a two-hour documentary on Art in the Third Reich for the BBC’s prestigious cultural series Omnibus. Yet he too confirmed the stereotype of Nazi art when he warned his viewers that the paintings, sculptures, and buildings they were about to see were the expression of “a barbaric ideology”. “One can only look at the art of the Third Reich through the lens of Auschwitz,” he concluded. So while the catalogue of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s 2006 exhibition on modernism, “Designing a New World” singled out the Volkswagen as an outstanding specimen of modernist engineering and aesthetic principles, it still betrayed considerable uncertainty about how such an “advanced” and rationally beautiful piece of technology could emanate from a

July August 2007 new humanist 21