Paul Troost, House of (German) Art

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Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:05] We’re standing in Munich, looking at the House of Art, which was once called the House of German Art.

Dr. Beth Harris: [0:11] It was built for Adolf Hitler, and was a place to promote a very specific idea of German art.

Dr. Zucker: [0:18] This is thought to be the very first building that Hitler had commissioned for the Nazi state, and this was to be the first of many buildings that were to be constructed around the nation that were the embodiment of National Socialist ideology.

Dr. Harris: [0:31] As we look at this building, it’s hard not to notice that the Nazis were drawing on the classical tradition of ancient Greek and Roman architecture.

Dr. Zucker: [0:39] Yes, but by way of 19th century Classical Revival traditions, especially in Germany. We might think of the work of Schinkel up in Prussia, in Berlin especially, and we might think of the work of Klenze here in Munich. These were artists that took the ancient tradition and appropriated them for their age.

[0:57] This building is a little bit different. It is even more spare, it is even more stripped down, but we can see this long Doric colonnade on either side, giving a sense of order and power.

Dr. Harris: [1:07] I think timelessness is another word that we should use about this architecture. There was an aspiration toward the eternal, or timelessness; that ancient Greek architecture stood for those very values that the Nazis wanted to embody, as opposed to what they considered degenerate art, or sickly, unhealthy art, that was actually exhibited just a few blocks away.

Dr. Zucker: [1:32] There were two major exhibitions of art that were opened in 1937 that were meant to be seen in opposition to each other. They were only about a block and a half from each other. The Great Exhibition of German Art opened here at the House of German Art.

[1:44] Then, in a temporary exhibition space, was the first iteration of the Entartete Kunst Exhibition, the Degenerate Art Exhibition.

Dr. Harris: [1:53] We use that word “degenerate,” and what it really meant for the Nazis was an art that was sickly and unhealthy. The art that today we hold as most dear. If you go to modern art museums, you’ll be looking at the art the Nazis considered degenerate. Artists like Schmidt-Rottluff, or Paul Klee, or Max Ernst, Kirchner. All of the great early modernists.

[2:16] Those artists were drawing on so-called “primitive art.” They deformed the human body, they used extreme colors, they distorted space. These were all things that Hitler rejected. He was looking for an art that was ideal and beautiful and perfect and that represented a kind of timelessness.

Dr. Zucker: [2:34] This architecture and the art that it was meant to house were tied up in National Socialist ideology. Germany had gone through a very rapid industrialization, and the National Socialists, the Nazis, looked back to an invented agrarian past that they romanticized. And so the contemporary ills that came with industrialization, that came with urbanization, were vilified.

[2:58] Art that was representative of those changes, a kind of international character, a kind of risk taking, all of the aspects that we associate with modern art, is something that was vilified. This building was built specifically as a kind of antidote.

Dr. Harris: [3:13] You could say that another aspect of modern art is that it’s constantly changing. There’s Cubism and Futurism and Dadaism and all of these movements always trying to stay contemporary, as opposed to what Hitler was wanting for the Third Reich, which was timeless.

Dr. Zucker: [3:28] In fact, Hitler spoke to this directly.

Dr. Harris: [3:30] In the speech that Hitler gave on the opening of the first exhibition, he said, “Until the moment when National Socialism took power, there existed in Germany, a so-called ‘modern art,’ that is to be sure almost every year another one. National Socialist Germany, however, wants again a German art.”

[3:52] So when Hitler says, “a German art,” make no mistake, what he means by that is eradicating another kind of art and denying those artists the ability to make art. Sending some of them off to concentration camps. The artist whose work appears on the cover of the Entartete Kunst Exhibition was sent to a concentration camp and murdered. This was serious, frightening propaganda.

Dr. Zucker: [4:18] The kind of art that was being exhibited here was really an art of exclusion, and it was really a kind of propaganda. It reminds us of just how powerful the visual arts can be as a tool of the state.

[4:30] The person who embodies this most is a man named Adolf Ziegler, who was a painter and the man responsible for putting together the first exhibition of great German art here in the House of German Art and also organizing the Entartete Kunst exhibition.

[4:43] Ziegler was a favorite of Adolf Hitler. In fact, his painting “The Four Elements” was hung in the Reich’s chancellery in Hitler’s own office in Berlin. Characteristic of Ziegler’s work, and characteristic of much of the painting and sculpture that was exhibited in this first exhibition in the House of German Art, is a classicism.

[5:03] We see an emphasis on eternal properties like the four elements, like the four seasons. We see an emphasis on a particularity and a hyper-clarity that we might associate with 15th century Northern art.

Dr. Harris: [5:16] The art that was exhibited in the Degenerate Art exhibition was hung with art by people who were mentally and physically handicapped. That was art that was associated with all that the Nazis were eradicating — literally murdering.

Dr. Zucker: [5:32] And it was wildly popular. Estimates put the attendance to the Entartete Kunst Exhibition between two and three million people. You know what? Even now in the beginning of the 21st century, there is still real controversy about modernism. People still get upset.

[5:47] I think it’s important to understand our uncomfortableness, but also the kind of historical dimensions by which intolerance of art can become dangerous.

Dr. Harris: [5:56] Very dangerous. Maybe this is a good time to read a little bit more from Hitler’s speech at the inauguration of that first exhibition. “Art can in no way be a fashion. As little as the character and the blood of our people will change, so much will art have to lose its mortal character and replace it with worthy images, expressing the life course of our people.

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“[6:22] Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism, Impressionism have nothing to do with our German people. I will therefore confess now in this very hour that I have come to the final, inalterable decision to clean house just as I have done in the domain of political confusion, and from now on, rid the German art life of its phase-mongering.” Those are chilling words.

Dr. Zucker: [6:46] Of course, Hitler did with people what he also did with the art.

Dr. Harris: [6:50] It’s interesting to note that the motto of the Austrian avant-garde — and Hitler was, after all, Austrian.

Dr. Zucker: [6:58] And he was a would-be artist.

Dr. Harris: [6:59] The motto was, “To each age its art and to art its freedom,” the very opposite of the ideals that Hitler was trying to promote.

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