Some thoughts from the Nazis

Alfred Rosenberg from The Myth of the Twentieth Century, 1930 trans. Pois, reprinted in Art in Theory: 1900-2000. ed. Harrison and Wood pp. 406-407

“The metropolis began its race-annihilating work. the coffee-houses of the asphalt men became studios; theoretical bastardized dialectics became laws for ever-new ‘directions’. A race-chaos of Germans, Jews and anti-natural street races was abroad. The result was mongrel ‘art’.” p. 412

“Impressionism, which originally was borne by strong, talented artists, became a battle-cry of decomposing intellectualism. An atomistic world-view atomized even the colors; the dull level of understanding of natural science achieved its apogee in the practitioners and theoreticians of Impressionism. A mythless world procreated a mythless sensuousness. men who desired inwardly to break free from this were broken. Van Gogh is a tragic example of one who longed and went mad. Gauguin is another example of the attempt to break free from intellectualism. Only the Paul Singnacs painted on, uninhibited, unconcernedly, gluing their bits of colour next o one another.” p. 412

“Men no longer wanted intellectualism; they began to hate the endless dissection of colour and to despise the brown gallery-colours and copies of Titian. With correct feeling, they began to search for redemption, expression and strength. And the result of this powerful tension was – the abortion of Expressionism. A whole race had cried out for expression and now had nothing that it could express. It called for beauty and no longer had an ideal of beauty. It wanted to search for life in a revived spirit of creativity and it had lost every true ability to create form.” p. 413

Rosenberg offers an interesting perspective on what act means, and what makes it good. As with Hitler’s piece (below), Rosenberg carries on a meta-discussion about the meaning and purpose of art, contextualized within a historical narrative about the urbanization and then bastardization of art. I think it’s important to recognize many of his conclusions about ‘good’ or effective art as a construction of his time and place (obviously), and that the meta-discussion is carefully constructed to appeal to the German people following WWI.

So, Rosenberg:

Effective art provides self-evident, complete meaning that requires very little interpretation, but rather speaks to the essential character of the German people. Rosenberg seems to deal with with what Marx would call alienation – the condition of an urbanized people, in an ‘un-natural’ built environment. The reaction against ‘intellectualism’ could be interpreted as a response to the abstracted thought enabled by a division of labor between intellectuals and other forms of work. The desire to empower the ‘race’ also speaks to the state of disenfranchisement of the urbanizing masses, and the sense of castration felt by unemployed or menial laborers of industrial capitalism.

Taking these structural realities into account, Rosenberg makes a calculated meta-argument about how to think about effective art. He puts words in people’s mouths, then tells them to believe those words, knowing that they speak generally to the conditions under which the Germans lived.

Adolf Hitler, 1937 ‘Speech Inaugerating the ‘Great Exhibition of German Art’” trans Falk. Reprinted in Art in Theory: 1900-2000. ed. Harrison and Wood pp. 439-441

“On (these) cultural grounds, more than on any others, Judaism had taken possession of these means and institutions of communication which form, and thus finally rule over public opinion. Judaism was very clever indeed, especially in employing its position in the press with the help of so-called art criticism and succeeding not only in confusing the natural concepts about the nature and scope of art as well as its goal, but above all in undermining and destroying the general wholesome feeling in this domain…
Art, on the one hand, was defined as nothing but an international communal experience, thus killing altogether any understanding of its integral relationship with an ethnic group. On the one hand its relationship to time was stressed, that is: There was no longer any art of peoples or even of races, bot only an art of the times.” p. 439

“When, therefore, the cornerstone of this building was laid, it was with the intention of constructing a temple, not for so-called modern art, but for a true and everlasting German art, that is, better still, a House for the art of the German people, and not for any international art of the year 1937, ’40, ’50, or ’60. For art is not founded on time, but only on peoples. It is therefore imperative for the artist to erect a monument, not so much to a period, but to his people. For time is changeable, years come and go. Anything born of and thriving in a certain epoch alone, will perish with it. And not only all which had been created before us would fall victim to this morality, but also what is being created today or will be created in the future.
But we National Socialists know only one mortality, and that is the mortality of the people itself. Its causes are known to us. As long as a people exists, however, it is the fixed pole in the flight of fleeting appearances. It is the being and the lasting permanence. And, indeed, for this reason, art as an expression of the essence of this being, is an eternal monument.” p. 440

“‘Works of art’ which cannot be understood in themselves but, for the justification of their existence, need those bombastic instructions for their use, finally reaching that intimidated soul, who is patiently willing to accept such stupid or impertinent nonsense – these works of art will no longer find their way to the German people.
All these catchwords: ‘inner experience,’ ‘strong state of mind,’ ‘forceful will,’ ‘emotions pregnant with the future,’ ‘heroic attitude,’ ‘meaningful empathy,’ ‘experienced order of the times,’ ‘original primitivism,’ etc. – all these dumb, mendacious excuses, this claptrap or jabbering will no longer be accepted as excuses or even recommendations for worthless, integrally unskilled products.” p. 440

“I have observed among the pictures submitted here, quite a few paintings which make one actually come to the conclusion that the eye shows things differently to certain human beings than the way they really are, that is, that there really are men who see the present population of our nation only as rotten cretins; who, on principle, see meadows blue, skies green, clouds sulfur yellow, and so on, or, as they say, experience them as such. I do not want to enter into an argument here about the question of whether the persons concerned really do or do not see or feel in such a way; but, in the name of the German people, I want to forbid these pitiful misfortunates who quite obviously suffer from eye disease, to try vehemently to foist these products of their misinterpretation upon the age we live in, or even with to present them as ‘Art.’
No, here there are two possibilities: Either these so-called ‘artists’ really see things this way and therefore believe in what they depict; there we would have to examine their eyesight-deformation to see if it is the product of a mechanical failure or of inheritance. In the first case, these unfortunates can only be pitied; in the second case, they would be the object of great interest to the Ministry of the Interior of the Reich which would then have to take up the question of whether further inheritance of such gruesome malfunctioning of the eyes cannot at least be checked. If, on the other hand, they themselves do not believe in the reality of such impressions but try to harass the nation with this humbug for other reasons, then such an attempt falls within the jurisdiction of penal law” p. 441

Hitler takes an overstated, reductive approach to art, to the point of reducing the styles of modernism to a criminal or biological state. All this from a once-artist too.

Effective art, for Hitler, embodies the qualities of a pure race, which is a biologically pure group that transcends historical time and offers its members a shot at immortality. Effective art would remain relevant through the ages, as long as the race exists. Good art provides a reference point and index for the noble qualities of a race in its pure state. The emphasis must be on permanence and self-evident meaning.

What I find most interesting about these bits are the threats of the last clip, and its relationship to the clip immediately before it. It shows the true content of the supposedly self-evident meanings that ‘real Germans’ take from art. First of all, it shows that obvious meaning often is constructed, in this case by the very real threat of being turned over to the ‘Ministry of the Interior of the Reich” or prosecuted for your aesthetic choices. It also reveals the vast apparatus that goes into building legitimacy for speaking about ‘true’ meaning. Think about it: anyone making similar claims as an individual, causally about ‘eye disease’ might themselves be the target of ridicule, but Hitler’s claim clearly carries weight. Its legitimacy comes from context. Doubtless this speech was given before the immense bold banners of the Nazi Party, in uniform, flanked by other dignitaries of the party (also in uniform), all echoing the great images from massive rallies and torchlight parades. the legitimacy of his bizarre interpretation in fact lies on the larger tools used to build the image of Hitler’s power – his discourse on art merely turns artistic interpretation into another site of legitimacy-production.