The Rape of Europa (2 page)

Those who did attend were torn. Marianne Feilchenfeldt remembers that some who had agreed not to bid finally could not resist. She and her husband, appalled to note that one of the lots was a Kokoschka,
Cathedral of Bordeaux
, which they had donated to the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, did resist, and the picture did not sell. Friends with them eventually succumbed to the temptation of the low prices and bought Nolde’s
Red and Yellow Begonias.

The French journal
Beaux Arts
called the atmosphere at the Grand National “stifling.” The hall, it said, was filled with curious Swiss spectators, interested in the politics of the sale. American dealers bid low, and no French bidders were in evidence. The auctioneer did not conduct the proceedings as one would expect:

The sale was efficiently conducted by M. [Theodore] Fischer, who was not always able to hide his disdain for certain degenerate pieces. Presenting
Man with a Pipe
by Pechstein, he said, with a little sneer, “This must be a portrait of the artist” … when he withdrew other lots, which he had started at rather a high minimum, he took wicked pleasure in observing loudly, “Nobody wants that sort of thing,” or “This lady doesn’t please the public” … and he smiled when he said the word “withdrawn.”
⁷

Other accounts were not much kinder.

Theodore Fischer
(left, standing)
takes bids for van Gogh’s
Self-Portrait,
formerly in Munich’s Neue Staatsgalerie.

In the midst of all these passions, the quiet Belgian group did the best of all, acquiring a top Ensor, Gauguin’s
Tahiti
, Picasso’s
Acrobat and Young Harlequin
from Wuppertal, Chagall’s
Maison bleue
from Mannheim, and works by Grosz, Hofer, Kokoschka, Laurencin, and Nolde. In his wildest dreams, the Brussels banker who bought the Picasso could not have imagined that it would sell for over $38 million forty-nine years later.

When the auction was over, twenty-eight lots remained unsold. The sale did not bring in nearly as much as had been hoped. The proceeds, about SFr 500,000, were converted to, of all things, pounds sterling, and deposited in German-controlled accounts in London. The museums, as all had suspected, did not receive a penny.

These pictures had been banished from Germany as “degenerate art,” but the Nazi authorities were well aware of their usefulness as a convenient means of raising urgently needed foreign currency for the Reich. To Alfred Hentzen, a curator at Berlin’s Nationalgalerie who had been furloughed from his job for nine months in 1935 for showing excessive interest in modern art, it seemed that, with this auction of its national patrimony,
the German government had reached a degree of shamelessness and cultural decay unparalleled in the history of art.
⁸

With hindsight, the gradual progress toward this “shameless” event is clear to see. In the world of art, as elsewhere, the Nazis simply took existing prejudices and attitudes to incredible extremes. Few could believe or wanted to acknowledge what was taking place before their very eyes.

In 1933 Alfred Barr, while on a sabbatical year in Europe, wrote three articles on the National Socialist art phenomenon, which were universally rejected by major American periodicals as being too controversial.
⁹
Only his young associate Lincoln Kirstein was bold enough to print one in his new magazine,
Hound and Horn.
The others were belatedly published in October 1945 by the
Magazine of Art.
Jacques Barzun noted in that issue that “Mr. Barr’s three pieces are an embarrassing reminder of the public apathy that very nearly cost us our civilization.”

Barr, who attended the first public meeting of the Stuttgart chapter of the Nazi-affiliated Combat League for German Culture (Kampfbund für Deutsche Kultur) only nine weeks after Hitler had become Chancellor, was one of the first outsiders to hear the new regime’s cultural theories. To a theater crowded with the cultural elite of the city, the director of the Combat League set forth the new ideas:

It is a mistake to think that the national revolution is only political and economic. It is above all cultural. We stand in the first stormy phase of revolution. But already it has uncovered long hidden sources of German folkways, has opened paths to that new consciousness which up till now had been borne half unawares by the brown battalions: namely the awareness that all the expressions of life spring from a specific blood … a specific race! … Art is not international. … If anyone should ask: What is left of freedom? he will be answered: there is no freedom for those who would weaken and destroy German art… there must be no remorse and no sentimentality in uprooting and crushing what was destroying our vitals.

Applause, hesitant at first, by the end was stormy.
¹⁰

Action had, in fact, gone before words in Stuttgart. A major retrospective of the painter Oskar Schlemmer which had opened on March I was closed twelve days later, following an exceedingly nasty review in the local Nazi press: “Who wants to take these pictures seriously? Who respects them? Who wants to defend them as works of art? They are unfinished in every respect… they might as well be left on the junk heap
where they could rot away unhindered.”
¹¹
Intimidated, the museum locked up the whole show in a remote gallery. The Nazis had won their first parliamentary majority only six days before.

Alfred Barr, who was admitted to the show only because he was a foreigner, was so furious that he asked architect Philip Johnson to buy several of the best pictures “just to spite the sons-of-bitches.” Johnson complied and one,
Bauhaus Steps
, has been at the Museum of Modern Art in New York ever since.
¹²

Acceptance of these warnings was not made easier by the very mixed reception all modern art had endured for many years. As late as 1939 a Boston art critic, reviewing a show of contemporary German works, many of which had come from the Lucerne auction, sadly declared: “There are probably many people—art lovers—in Boston, who will side with Hitler in this particular purge.”
¹³
In Germany itself there was a long antimodern tradition, reaching back to Kaiser Wilhelm’s 1909 firing of Hugo von Tschudi, director of the Nationalgalerie, for buying Impressionist paintings. Max Nordau, a Jew who fortunately did not live to see the use made of his theories, had declared all modern art to be “pathological” in his 1893 book,
Entartung
(Degeneracy). He included Wagner, Mallarmé, Baudelaire, and the Impressionists.
¹⁴
Newspapers covering New York’s famous Armory Show in 1913 picked up this catchy phrase, referring to the “degeneration of art” exhibited there. In the same year an exhibition of Kandinsky’s works was described in a Hamburg newspaper as a “shoddy tangle of lines” and the artist himself as “this insane painter, who can no longer be held responsible for his actions.”
¹⁵
Before 1914 protests and counterprotests flew back and forth between conservative and modern painters. The fight became political enough to be discussed in the Reichstag, and the Prussian parliament even passed a resolution against the “degeneration” of art. But as was the case in other countries, the controversy remained in the realms of opinion and taste.

In the years following World War I the future “degenerates” enjoyed growing acceptance. Encouraged by the liberalism of the new Weimar Republic, museums showed their work extensively. Official sanction was given when Berlin’s Nationalgalerie opened a “New Wing” in 1919 in the Kronprinz Palais, which the fall of the monarchy had left empty. Critics of both left and right wrote negative articles, but this museum soon became a model for other such establishments at home and abroad.
¹⁶
Upon the death of the collector Karl Ernst Osthaus in 1921, the city of Essen, with funds raised by local business associations and Ruhr mining companies, bought the very contemporary contents of his Folkwang (Meadow for the
People) Museum and opened it to the public. By the late twenties modern works hung in most of Germany’s major museums. The government itself appointed a liberal, internationally oriented official as federal art officer in the Ministry of the Interior. In the city of Weimar, the Bauhaus, founded in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius, though controversial, received state support, and gathered an extraordinary array of artists, architects, and craftsmen.

Despite this encouraging atmosphere, the opposition was always there. In the twenties there appeared a group of art “philosophers” who, building on Nordau’s themes of degeneracy, produced the outlines of the future Nazi art creed. Their ideas were confusedly racist, and ultimately nonsensical: “The Hellenic image of beauty is absolutely Nordic … one could demonstrate the history of Greece as the conflict of the spirit of the Nordic upper stratum with the spirit of the lower stratum of foreign race,”
¹⁷
declared one Professor Guenther. Their fulminations were not limited to modern art. Great difficulty was found in dealing with the fact that the undeniably Nordic Rembrandt had painted so many works representing Jews. Matthias Grünewald (c. 1465–1528) was attacked for having the “psychosis of original sin” and even Albrecht Dürer was considered suspect because of “influences” he had absorbed on his trips to Italy in the sixteenth century.
¹⁸

These ideas became more extreme as the Nazi movement gained momentum. In 1928 Paul Schultze-Naumberg, a well-known architect, published
Art and Race
, a book in which photographs of diseased and deformed people, taken from medical texts, were paired with modern paintings and sculpture. The culmination of this school of thought was Alfred Rosenberg’s
Myth of the Twentieth Century
(1930), an unreadable tome which characterized German Expressionist art as “syphilitic, infantile and mestizo.” In it Rosenberg further claimed that the Aryan Nordic race had produced not only the German cathedrals but also Greek sculpture and the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. Even Hitler, who took Rosenberg into his inner circle, could never understand how this book had sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
¹⁹
He nevertheless agreed completely with its basic ideas. Rosenberg’s impeccable anti-Semitism and his role as founder of the Combat League for German Culture would soon bring him to great prominence in the new regime.

The Nazis had early shown particular eagerness to act on their artistic theories. In 1929 they won enough votes in the Thuringian elections to claim seats in the provincial cabinet. Dr. Wilhelm Frick, former director of political police in Munich, became the Thuringian Minister of the Interior and Education. Although all Bauhaus personnel had left Weimar in
1925 after their contracts had been cancelled by a right-wing majority in the local government, Frick, feeling that every trace of this sinister institution must be obliterated, turned his attentions to its buildings. Oskar Schlemmer’s murals on the staircases were painted over. A German crafts organization moved into the premises, under the leadership of the newly politicized Professor Schultze-Naumberg.
²⁰
Frick was so determined to eliminate all “Judeo-Bolshevist” influence that he next removed the works of Klee, Dix, Barlach, Kandinsky, Nolde, Marc, and many others, seventy in all, from the galleries of the Schloss Museum; banned Brecht’s film of
The Threepenny Opera;
and forbade the playing of Stravinsky or Hindemith at concerts. The rest of Germany regarded this as provincial excess, and Frick was fired in April 1931. They could hardly foresee that he would become the national Minister of the Interior in less than two years.
²¹

Weimar was not the only city in which such things were happening. In 1926 an Expressionist show in Dresden was condemned by no less than seven Pan-German,
Völkisch
, and military organizations, which accused the artists of insulting the German Army. The German Artists League criticized the Nationalgalerie for raising money to buy van Goghs rather than German works. The director of the Zwichau Museum, Dr. Hildebrand Gurlitt, was fired in 1930 for “pursuing an artistic policy affronting the healthy folk feeling of Germany,” and a show of “New German Painting” sent to Oslo aroused a furor of protest.