German art between the wars

Germany was defeated and exhausted in 1918 at the end of WWI. The equally exhausted victors imposed harsh terms on Germany. It was forced to forfeit its overseas colonial possessions, to cede land to its neighbors, and to pay reparations. As demobilized troops returned, German cities filled with unemployed, and often maimed, veterans. The Socialists briefly seized power and by the early 1920s hyperinflation further destabilized the nation. A new style called Neue Sachlichkeit (the New Objectivity) cast a cold sharp eye on Modern Germany’s hypocrisy, aggression, and destitution, even as extremists on the political right consolidated power. The National Socialists (Nazi) Party won the chancellorship in 1933 and quickly used art and architecture as a means build the myth of a pure German people shaped by the land and unsullied by modern industrial culture. This is a looks at the ways that competing political ideologies each used art for its own purposes.