“Fascist Art and the Nazi Regime:
The Use of Art to Enflame War”
A thesis submitted to
the Art History Faculty
of the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning
University of Cincinnati
In candidacy for the degree of
Master of Arts in Art History
Stephanie Petcavage
April 2016
Thesis Chair: Dr. Todd Herzog
Abstract
For centuries, political leaders have used propaganda to promote ideology and acts of
military aggression. In his studies of this concept, Walter Benjamin, in his aestheticization theory
of historical experience and sense perception focused on Nazi Germany’s use of aesthetics
politics and propaganda to redefine the political as the autonomous realm of absolute power over
ethical norms. The Third Reich manipulated Nazi culture and aesthetics to create a backdrop for
political ideology and the coordination of all cultural expressions during the Nazi period. Under
Hitler and the realm of the Third Reich, fascist politics infiltrated the arts and film industry
tapping its access to the masses. Two events most indicative of the exploitation of art for
propaganda use were the Great German Art Exhibition and the syndication of Leni Riefenstahl’s
film Triumph of the Will. Discussed in this paper is Hitler’s use of art as a tool to influence the
populace and recruit support for his cause. Using a qualitative method and a sociological case
study research design supported by a critical literature review and the conceptual framework of
Benjamin’s theory of Aestheticization of Politics under German Fascism, I examine how Nazi
propaganda, using the arts of the time selectively apportions acceptance of its social members.
Acknowledgements
Ever since my undergraduate studies at Kent State University, I have been enamored with
the history and radical movement of the Nazi Regime and their use of art in propaganda. This
thesis is an expanded research study on examining the exploitations of the visual arts for
authoritarian administrative power. Philosopher Walter Benjamin theorizes on this subject of
linking visual aesthetics and politics rendering to sense perception with specific focus on Nazi
Germany. The Nazis recasts the political realm as the “aestheticization of politics.” Writers, such
as Lutz Koepnick, Aristotle Kallis, and Martin Jay contribute support and extend Benjamin’s
analysis of Nazi fascism. Each of their publications has been useful in the completion of my own
research on the work of fascist aesthetics in Nazi Germany.
I would like to extend my gratitude to The Mary Ann Meanwell Art History Research
Support Fund, through the School of Art in the College of Design, Art, Architecture, and
Planning at the University of Cincinnati. The funding provided by Mary Ann Meanwell helped
defray academic costs in purchasing primary source materials about Leni Riefenstahl’s film
legacy and propaganda in Nazi Germany. It also provided research-related travel expense to
several libraries and archives for other related research.
I am indebted to my thesis committee members. First, I want to thank Dr. Harold Herzog
for giving me advice and encouragement. As my thesis chair and Director of Graduate Studies in
the German Studies Department and Director of European Studies, he has helped me to
understand the dense writings of Walter Benjamin and found time to look over my chapters and
sit down for numerous meetings. I am grateful for Dr. Morgan Thomas for her time, dedication,
and willingness to listen and offered her assistance throughout my thesis development. Dr.
Kimberly Paice’s interest and enthusiasm for my subject area is also greatly appreciated.
Table of Contents
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1
Literature Review………………………………………………………………………………….3
Chapter 1: Nazism and the Aestheticization of Politics………………………………………….10
Chapter 2: The Use of Film in Nazi Propaganda……………………………………………...…17
Chapter 3: The Use of Art in Nazi Propaganda………………………………………………….34
Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….……43
List of Illustrations…………………………………………………………………………….…47
Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………….….48
Illustrations………………………………………………………………………………………52
Introduction
Literature expounds on examples of political propaganda used to promote ideology and
acts of military aggression. Philosophers have theorized a strong link between aesthetics and
politics. The politicization of aesthetics implies the redefining of the state as the authenticity of
its proletariat culture; art is ultimately subordinate to political life. Walter Benjamin, a German
Jewish philosopher and cultural critic, theorizes on this subject with specific focus on Nazi
Germany. Benjamin sees the aim of aesthetics politics to be the redefining of the political as the
autonomous realm of absolute power over ethical norms.1
Benjamin’s aestheticization theory of historical experience and sense perception with its
Nazi Germany focus is a historical phenomenon. Lutz Koepnick, author of Walter Benjamin and
the Aesthetics of Power, argued that neither pre- nor post-fascist societies evolved similar
structures as those that facilitated fascist aestheticization to effect the ultimately catastrophic role
achieved in Nazi Germany.2 In his essay, “The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” Benjamin lamented the loss of the aura of originality to fascist aesthetic politics
that mobilized the lives of the masses. The power of autonomous agency and self-assertion was
stripped from the masses and transferred to a charismatic political leader.3
The Third Reich manipulated Nazi culture and aesthetics as if creating the backdrop for
political ideology and the coordination of all cultural expressions during the Nazi period. This
manipulation as highly choreographed; military parades and mass rallies were lavish. Elongated
swastika banners hung in the massive halls of the Third Reich. Filmmakers such as Leni
Riefenstahl used idiosyncratic techniques such as close-up shots of crowd scenes surging forth
1
Lutz Koepnick, Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska
Press, 1999), 3.
2
Ibid., 13.
3
Ibid., 118.
1
after Nazi speeches. Exploiting the power of the visual, the operatic extravaganzas of Nazi
culture and aesthetics remain today in the postmodern imaginations.4
World War I changed the German artistic landscape forever. Politics had infiltrated the
arts and film industry tapping its access to the masses. By the end of the war, the government
was developing films to use as propaganda tools.5 World War I set the stage for uprisings,
economic collapse, and the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. Adolf Hitler took advantage of the
troubled economic times of the Weimar Republic to indoctrinate public opinion using the arts. In
his aestheticization thesis, Benjamin saw this as a Nazi attempt to recast the political realm as
picturesque in order to compensate for disenchantment.
Two events in which this was most evident were in the Great German Art Exhibition and
the syndication of Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will. Both were used to familiarize the
population with the acceptable beliefs and idealisms of the time. Discussed in this paper is
Hitler’s use of art as a tool to influence the populace and recruit support for his cause. Using a
qualitative method and a sociological case study research design supported by a critical literature
review and the conceptual framework of Benjamin’s theory of Aestheticization of Politics Under
German Fascism, I examined how Nazi propaganda selectively apportioned acceptance of its
social members. Fascist Nazi propaganda was designed with such skill as to explicitly identify
what was acceptable to the Aryan society, while implicitly through exclusion, identifying the
interloper.
4
Lutz Koepnick, Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power, 1.
Thomas G. Plummer, Film and Politics in the Weimar Republic (Minneapolis: Holmes & Meier
Publication, 1982), 25.
5
2
Review of Literature
Propaganda and War
In its most impartial sense, propaganda is used to disseminate or promote an idea. In
“Semantics and Ethics of Propaganda”, Jay Black examined the social psychology and semantics
of propaganda, noting the influence propaganda has on individual ethics, belief systems and
values. Over time the word has taken on an undesirable overtone, as it is generally associated
with military aggression and “the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate
cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the
propagandist.”6
Human history abounds with instances of propaganda tracing back to ancient Greece for
philosophical and theoretical beginnings. Propaganda & Persuasion, written by Garth S. Jowett
and Victoria O’Donnell, followed the use of propaganda through the myriad of world conflicts
from Alexander the Great to current global issues. By the 20th century, the evolution of mass
media increased the complexity and efficiency of propaganda’s use for molding public opinion.
In Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes Jacques Ellul noted that the emergence of
mass media provided a platform for propaganda techniques on a societal scale. According to
Aristotle Kallis in Nazi Propaganda and the Second World War, propaganda could provide a
response to fundamental societal needs, such as integration, guidance, motivation, continuity,
and relaxation.
However, Kallis goes on to state that active complicity or passive consensus cannot be
taken for granted, even in a totalitarian system. Replacement of traditional values with
6
Garth Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell, Propaganda & Persuasion, (Los Angeles: SAGE Publications,
2015), 7.
3
revolutionary ideology approaches requires a step-by-step cultivation.7 Studies of propaganda
and its use in wars by authors such as Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell in which they
described psychological warfare as the use of symbols to promote policies, and Anthony
Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson who, in their book Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and
Abuse of Persuasion reported Hitler and Goebbels’ extensive use of symbols and monuments to
sell the Nazi regime, identify the psychological aspect of involvement to propaganda resulting in
a certain predictability of outcome. Walter Benjamin recognized this Nazi manipulation to recast
the political realm as the “aestheticization of politics,” a central factor to fascism, and in
particular German Fascism.
Aesthetics of Politics
In “Theories of German Fascism,” Walter Benjamin formulates the basic principles of his
analysis of German fascism. National Socialism instilled aesthetics into the political realm in
order to turn the German nation into a unified work of art. Fascism presents art as tools of
propaganda to mold the public into a unified ideological commodity. Nazi fascist art, considered
by Benjamin as propaganda art, reshaped aesthetic ideas of beauty in order to extend political
terror in the service of future warfare. This link between aesthetics and politics was seen as an
instrumental rationalization for the seductive fascination of fascism.
In his “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” essay, Benjamin sheds light
on the staging of political action in all cultural expressions in creating a palingenesis, a “national
rebirth” in Nazi Germany. Lutz Koepnick, author of Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of
Power helps to examine Benjamin’s works on the relationship between mass culture and fascism.
Koepnick and Martin Jay contribute support to the link between aesthetics and politics of Nazi
7
Aristotle A. Kallis, Nazi Propaganda and the Second World War, (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005), 4.
4
Germany and to what extent Benjamin’s analysis of fascism holds up to recent historical
analyses. In his “‘The Aesthetic Ideology’ as Ideology: Or, What Does It Mean to Aestheticize
Politics?” essay, Martin Jay considered the critical effects of the aesthetic in the “aestheticization
of politics”. He connected this practice to Hitler’s efforts in making fascism seductive by
presenting it as compelling and satisfying through certain formal and thematic qualities.
Referring to Walter Benjamin, Jay also discussed the pleasures of the sensory image in relation
to the aestheticization of politics as seen in fascist films such as Triumph of the Will. Fascism is
obsessed with visuality, a distraction to the real contradictions of Nazi terror.
Benjamin believed that the aim of aesthetic politics was warfare. The fascist phenomenon
is not only supposed to reconcile a deeply shattered society but to mobilize its subjects for
imperial war. Aristotle A. Kallis published Nazi Propaganda and the Second World War, in
which he identified strategies and tactics of social-psychological warfare. Kallis saw the
formulation of systematic propaganda beginning in WWI in Germany and elsewhere.
Dissemination of propaganda was seen as an “efficient information strategy to bolster morale at
the home front and mobilize society.” 8
Another author recognizing a pattern of conscious mobilization of the populace through
propagandistic strategies was David Welch. In The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda,
Welch recognized Germany’s programmatic approach to controlling entertainment and leisure as
essential to providing a medium for barraging audiences with symbols archetypal of Nazi values.
These symbols would process with reference to a perception of reality as mass information
intertwined with mass entertainment.
8
Kallis, Nazi Propaganda and the Second World War, 1.
5
In their anticipation and planning, the Nazi government worked to create a social shift in
individual value systems and fundamental beliefs.9 Recognizing the mass distribution of art and
film and its impact on social perception, the Third Reich exploited these two mediums,
employing them as a large part of their propaganda campaign. Through the application of
Benjamin’s theory on aesthetics and German fascism, I analyzed the structure, management, and
effectiveness of propaganda art used in Germany in WWII by focusing on two case studies, the
“Degenerate Art Exhibition” and the Triumph of the Will.
Case Studies
The idea of a superior race governed Adolf Hitler’s policies and conduct of war. Hitler
saw the elimination of the Jewish race as essential to achieving a purified Aryan race. Goebbels’
propaganda machine manipulated the powerful mythologization and beautification of Nazi
ideology.10 The Reich’s systematic plan to discredit, expropriate, and eventually eliminate the
Jews was the focus of propaganda works such as the 1935 film by Leni Riefenstahl The Triumph
of Will and the 1937 “Degenerate Art”. In the end, Hitler’s regime was responsible for the deaths
of 40 million people, many attributable to the worst genocide in the history of mankind.11
The Triumph of the Will
Hitler made use of film to bring his ideals to life. He recruited Leni Riefenstahl to
produce films that revolutionized the world of Nazi propaganda. Leni Riefenstahl, German
director, producer, screenwriter, editor, photographer, actress, and dancer, is best known for her
imposing films in support of the National Socialist Party during the 1930s. Steven Bach, author
9
David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda (2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2002), 810.
Klaus Hilderbrand, “Hitler's War Aims,” The Journal of Modern History 48, no. 3 (1976): 525-27.
11
Ian Kershaw, “Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism,” Journal of Contemporary History 39, no. 2
(2004): 239.
10
6
of Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl, discussed how her films promoted the
acceptance of Hitler’s regime and instilled the desire in millions of Germans to follow Hitler.
In this thesis, I focused on her most famous film, Triumph of the Will, as an example of
portraying the ideal Aryan society. This film is considered a prominent example of propaganda
in film history. Jürgen Trimborn, author of Leni Riefenstahl: A Life, analyzed the idiosyncratic
techniques that Leni Riefenstahl developed and used throughout her film career, particularly in
Triumph of the Will.
Compared to artworks, Leni Riefenstahl’s work in film was able to reach the public on a
grander scale, exposed to schools, theaters, and even international film festivals. Rainer Rother’s
book, Leni Riefenstahl the Seduction of Genius, addressed her innovative techniques with close
ups, filters, long shots, reverse angles, and reactions shots achieving national and global fame.
Steven Bach also discussed Leni Riefenstahl’s filming process of the Nuremberg Rally of 1934
describing the way she set up her camera angles around the town and on the political figures.
Hitler would be the star of the film Triumph of the Will, coming from the sky to liberate the
German people. In Ken Kelman’s article, “Propaganda as a Vision: Triumph of the Will,” he
discussed Riefenstahl’s choice of motifs for disorientation and animation. Disorientation was
achieved through mainly showing only the upper parts of things and people as “spiritualized”.
Close-ups and obscure camera angles from laying in ditches to climbing up ladders achieved the
effect of animation for a figurative reality.12 I discussed the importance of film in Nazi
propaganda in preparing audiences for social change and impending war, and how it was valued
as an essential propaganda instrument of enormous power to underscore Nazi ideology.
The Degenerate Exhibit
12
Ken Kelman, "Propaganda as a Vision: Triumph of the Will," Logos: A Journal of Modern
Society and Culture 7, no. 2.4 (2003).
7
Aryan aestheticism was the alleged answer to the purification of the degenerates. In
Hitler’s drive to purge the German population, the National Socialists took charge of fascist
aesthetics through the arts. An exhibition titled “Degenerate Art”, which circulated from 1937 to
1941,13 illuminated exclusion of discredited artists that produced works after 1910, works that
offended the German sentiment, and works that did not meet Hitler’s criteria for adequate
craftsmanship or natural form. It was under these criteria that Hitler denounced the avant-garde
style, which included Expressionism, Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism. It was planned as a
counter-exhibition to the first annual exhibition of “Great German Art”, which opened a day
earlier. The “degenerate” art was considered sullied reflections to similar works that were
sanctified in the “Great German Art” exhibition at the House of German Art in the same city.
Neil Levi wrote, “‘Judge for Yourselves!’-The ‘Degenerate Art’ Exhibition as Political
Spectacle” examining whether or not the Degenerate Art exhibition was a success or ultimate
failure for the potential purpose of the Nazi regime. Other resources on the distinctions of the
“Degenerate Art” and “Great German Art” exhibitions include: Berthold Hinz’s book Art in the
Third Reich, Stephanie Barron’s book "Degenerate Art": The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi
Germany, and Olaf Peters’ catalogue Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi
Germany, 1937. These provided information on how the exhibitions were a part of the political
propaganda campaign of reinforcing a German idealistic nation.
These exhibitions were considered as case studies to support my premise claiming their
role as propagandist tools to emphasize a unity against all that was ungermanized. I dissected the
intended purpose of the exhibitions, articulated the layouts, and analyzed the public’s reaction to
13
Neil Levi, “‘Judge for Yourselves!’-The ‘Degenerate Art’ Exhibition as Political Spectacle."
October 85 (1998): 41.
8
explain why the “Degenerate Art” exhibition was considered an ultimate propagandist failure
and the “Great German Art” exhibition a success.
Films including the Triumph of the Will and exhibitions such as the Great German Art
were intended to gather disenfranchised individuals into an embracing homogenization. In
addition, the French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, in Heidegger, Art and Politics: The
Fiction of the Political, described the link between art and politics as unseverable. At no time in
history was this more apparent than in Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Though evident in other fascist
states, the Nazis sought to break down modern boundaries between politics and aesthetics “to
turn life into a unified work of art”.14
14
Koepnick, Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power, 2.
9
Chapter 1
Nazism and the Aestheticization of Politics
Fascism, in Walter Benjamin’s understanding, interrupts the
dialectics between aesthetic and popular modernism, between
avant-garde art and modern industrial culture.
--Lutz Koepnick15
Aestheticization of Politics Defined
A discourse on aestheticization of politics must include the accepted definition of the
aesthetic it presumes; this is particularly true with the somewhat cryptic approach Walter
Benjamin’s writings take. S. Brent Plate, author of Walter Benjamin, Religion and Aesthetics:
Rethinking Religion through the Arts, challenged readers to identify Benjamin’s definitions of
terms like “aura”, “allegory”, and “history”; as Benjamin’s definitions kept slipping throughout
his writings. Consequently, for this paper, I used the pre-Kantian notion of aesthetics as sense
perception. This interpretation comes from the Greek aesthesis, having to do with perception
through our senses. Beyond the defining terms of “beauty” or “artificial” often attributed to the
word, the Greek focus of the term is on how we perceive the world through the stimulation of
our six senses. Sensations emerge when stimuli is received through bodily organs. Interpretive
meaning of these sensations evolves in the conscious brain, guided by learned structures of the
mind. As perception links the inner and outer world and is interpreted from learned structures,
this aesthetic activity can be decidedly influenced by political propaganda.16
Essential to this study is the belief that sense perception is a principal receptor and
creator of the idealized political realm. As we move through the world, we are constantly
stimulated by the smells, sights, and sounds of social life. The process of selecting, arranging and
15
Lutz Koepnick, Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power (Lincoln, NE: University of
Nebraska Press, 1999), 4.
16
S. Brent Plate, Walter Benjamin, Religion and Aesthetics: Rethinking Religion through the Arts (New
York: Routledge, 2005), vii-2.
10
forgetting some of these impulses shapes our world.17 Benjamin recognized the depth of
boundary transgression this inferred in terms of political influences on this process. For Walter
Benjamin, this implied a creative reception of experienced destruction and then (re)creation as
fascist propaganda permeated all of social life. For Benjamin, this process was grounded in the
technologically reproduced and dispersed works of art. The onset of the mechanical age of
reproduction changed the way of thinking about the artwork’s authenticity, mystery, eternal
value, and sense of distance.18 Art’s reproducibility changed society’s relationship to art and the
way the masses experienced the world. In short, the onset of mass art shattered the aura unique to
each piece of traditional art, consigning its interpretation and posturing to the whim of the
governing ruler.19
Aesthetics and Fascism
In the early part of the 20th century, fascism grew out of an attempt to reject alleged
degenerative elements of the modern age and a fear that influences of corruption were
undermining civilization. Fascism sought to reunite a deeply devastated society and mobilize its
populace for war. Aristotle A. Kallis published Nazi Propaganda and the Second World War, in
which he identified strategies and tactics of social-psychological warfare. Kallis saw the
formulation of systematic propaganda beginning in WWI in Germany and elsewhere. The
dissemination of propaganda was an “efficient information strategy to bolster morale at the home
front and mobilize society.” 20
17
Plate, Walter Benjamin, Religion and Aesthetics, 5.
Corey McCall, “‘Fiat Ars Pereat Mundus’: The Relevance of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ for Understanding the War on Terror,” Radical Philosophy Review 12,
no. 1-2 (2009): 164.
19
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” ed. Hannah Arendt,
trans. Harry Zohn, Illuminations (1968).
20
Kallis, Nazi Propaganda and the Second World War, 1.
18
11
The core tenets of fascism included nationalism, racism, totalitarianism, one-party state,
charismatic leadership, dictatorship, militarism, class collaboration, populist nationalism, and
imperialism.21 Residual socio-political tensions from WWI and the Russian Revolution were the
catalyst for these tenets to forge together fascist single party states. Though Griffin recognized
these fascist components in other states such as Franco’s Spain and the Romanian Iron Guard, he
focused on Italian Fascism and Hitler’s Germany. Within these two regimes, Griffin saw
elements that in “the extreme conditions of inter-war Europe could endow some variants of
nationalism and racism with extraordinary affective and destructive power”.22 There existed
profound differences in Mussolini and Hitler’s ideas of the new national culture. Yet both states
exhibited archetypal examples of fascism’s utopian aspirations as a revolutionary development
and its praxis as a regime.
Manifested in both Mussolini and Hitler’s governments were the tendencies to convert
political events into scenes, precessions, and melodramatic mass rallies. The fascist exhibition
organized modern experience to deploy sensory perception for the purpose of political
coordination and total mobilization. In Benjamin’s view, fascism was unequivocally the
introduction of aesthetics to politics. This staging of political action demoted autonomous art into
the realms of political action and everyday life; thus, mechanical reproduction fashioned the
existence of generically fascist art. Benjamin saw art relegated to the third-rate melodramatic
posturing of the political leader.23 As such, Benjamin affirmed a strong relationship between
21
Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991).
Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning Under Mussolini and Hitler (New
York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 2.
23
Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
22
12
fascism and the aestheticization of politics; a relationship Benjamin feared threatened the land of
his birth.24
In their writings, Lutz Koepnick and Martin Jay supported Benjamin’s view of a
connection between aesthetics and Nazi Germany politics. For Koepnick, the language of the
Third Reich transformed the German language and expressions into public speeches and
ritualized events. Koepnick saw the propaganda art and films as tools to supplant individual
direct experience with conceptions of group or crowd experiences. He recognized the appeal the
ostentatious had to strong emotions and desires.25 In Jay’s essay “‘The Aesthetic Ideology’ as
Ideology: Or, What Does It Mean to Aestheticize Politics?” he considered the critical effects of
the aesthetic in the “aestheticization of politics”. He associated this practice to Hitler’s efforts in
making fascism seductive by presenting it as compelling and satisfying through certain formal
and thematic qualities. In reference to Walter Benjamin, Jay discussed the pleasures of the
sensory image in relation to the aestheticization of politics as seen in fascist films such as
Triumph of the Will. Fascism was obsessed with visuality, a distraction to the real contradictions
of Nazi terror. Benjamin believed that the aim of aesthetic politics was military aggression. In
seminal works, Benjamin saw the use of art in aesthetic fascism to control perception and
response. In later essays, he proclaimed the real objective of aesthetic politics to be warfare.
Benjamin postulated that the reasonable outcome of fascism revolved around the
establishment of aesthetics into politics. In the epilogue of his essay “The Works of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin distinguished the expressive dimension of Fascist
aesthetics from the revolutionary dimension of Marxist aesthetics. Rather than altering the class
24
25
McCall, “Fiat Ars Pereat Mundus,” 158.
Koepnick, Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power, 65, 159.
13
structure of society through revolution as undertaken in Russia by the Bolsheviks, Fascism
depended upon the aestheticization of politics through war.26
German Fascism – Aestheticization of politics
World War I sowed many of the seeds resulting in fascism. In his essay “Theories of
German Fascism,” Benjamin suggested the German state had taken the loss of the war more
seriously than the war itself. Having lost the greatest war of all time, the material and spiritual
devastation was significant to the German people. The military virtues and devout patriotism
with which the later generations marched off to war were transformed into a specific type of
heroism during the last battles of World War I. The aestheticized heroism of the front soldier’s
experience of annihilation became legend within the Germanic volkish spirit.27
As National Socialism emerged in Germany, Walter Benjamin documented the social
shifts and coordination of all cultural expressions; the infusion of aesthetics into fascist Nazi
politics in an attempt to turn life into a unified work of art. Benjamin theorized that the
reasonable outcome of fascism revolved around aestheticized politics, which exploited the power
of the visual. Roger Griffin, in Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning Under
Mussolini and Hitler, described the inception of fascism as the vehicle for making history by
using the power of human creativity to create a new culture; a total act of creation with art
serving as its foundation.28
Hitler embraced the concept of fascism as a “revolutionary form of nationalism, one
which set out to be a political, social and ethical revolution, welding the people into a dynamic
26
Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
McCall, “Fiat Ars Pereat Mundus,” 158.
27
Ansgar Hillach, “The Aesthetics of Polities: Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theories of German Fascism’,” New
German Critique no. 17 (1979): 100-105.
28
Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, 4.
14
national community under new elites infused with new heroic values.”29 The Nazi leader trusted
that the core myth of national rebirth (palingenesis) could end the surge of decadence and
mobilize the masses. Nazism proved to be an outstanding specimen of generic fascism when
analyzed in terms of this core myth.30
In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Benjamin’s view
of aestheticization of politics was ominous. Benjamin emphatically noted, “All efforts to
aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That one point is war”.31 In retrospect, McCall
interpreted Benjamin’s point as such:
Benjamin points out that Fascism grants the newly proletarianized masses
expression rather than rights, and entertainment rather than autonomy.
The masses in Germany are given the right to express themselves not
as individuals but instead as a mass, and the Nazi regime was brilliant in harnessing the
technologies of mass media to give the masses this freedom to express their rage.32
Cleverly orchestrated by the regime, the masses redirected rage and violence caused by a
government denying them autonomy, to real and imagined “enemies of the state.” Initial
demonstrations of anger were in the form of pogroms such as the 1938 Kristallnacht, an
organized attack on Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues. The Nazi propaganda
machine fueled the rage by portraying Jews in Germany as an enemy within. Visual works such
as the 1935 Triumph of the Will and the 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition, and later 1940 film The
Eternal Jew, explicitly identified those accepted and those excluded within the Aryan society.
Fanned by the propaganda machine, the flames of rage escalated into a total mobilization
29
Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, 49.
Koepnick, Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power, 61.
31
Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
32
McCall, “Fiat Ars Pereat Mundus,” 160-161.
30
15
heading into war. This intensification of organized violence gave cause for Benjamin’s
observation of Fascism using war as a form of art and a means of expression. 33
Benjamin noted, “the manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium
in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as
well.”34 During the realm of Nazi Germany, German culture was committed to its aesthetic
imagination. Reality blurred with fantasy in films like Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.
Contrary to the implication of the glorification of mass media and the cinematic image,
readers often take away from Benjamin’s “The Work of Art” his revelations were much more
sinister. Susan Buck-Morss, in “The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades
Project,” reiterated Benjamin’s grave concerns of the dangers inherent in both film and print
media.35 In the epilogue of “The Work of Art”, Benjamin made clear the distinction between
Fascist aesthetics and the revolutionary Marxist approach to upending class structures of a
capitalist society through revolution. Fascism depended upon the aestheticization of politics
through war.36 The fascist spectacle that played out in Germany under the Nazi regime is in
Benjamin’s view a historical phenomenon; such that Lutz Koepnick argues neither pre- nor postfascist societies entail structures of experience identical with those that enabled fascist
aestheticization to assume its ultimately catastrophic role.37
33
McCall, “Fiat Ars Pereat Mundus,” 161.
Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 222.
35
Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1990), 312.
36
McCall, “Fiat Ars Pereat Mundus,” 158.
37
Koepnick, Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power, 13.
34
16
Chapter 2
The Use of Film in Nazi Propaganda
Crowds watching films learn from the screen to know themselves as
a crowd: moviegoing becomes a group rite, or a place where strangers
meet to dream together. The crowd comes to know itself as film.
---Alice Yaeger Kaplan38
Nazi Fascism and Film
By the early 1930s, the well-established German film industry was seen as very powerful
in Europe. Second only to Hollywood, the German cinema greatly influenced the thematic and
stylistic direction of the European cinematic industry.39 Hitler recognized the influence of the
German cinematography and exploited this to gain a broader base of support for his Nazi
ideology. Unlike Stalin or Mussolini, Hitler understood the potential of the new technologies of
filmmaking as a tool for access to the masses.40
The use of visual arts had a significant impact on the rise of the Nazi regime. Propaganda
was used to undermine the democratic republic and sell the masses on the belief of a strong,
authoritative government.41 Hitler made use of film to bring his ideals to life. Joseph Goebbels,
minister of public enlightenment and propaganda for Hitler, deluged the country with nighttime
bonfires, torchlight parades, Nazi processions, mass formations of marchers, and other
ostentatious displays of Nazi ideology.42 These ostentatious exhibitions provided great fodder for
film directors such as Leni Riefenstahl.
38
Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 154.
39
Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, 2nd Rev. ed. (London: I.B.
Tauris &, 1998), 142.
40
Steven Bach, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), 104.
41
Shearer West, The Visual Arts in Germany, 1890-1937: Utopia and Despair (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 2001), 182.
42
Bach, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl, 104.
17
Leni Riefenstahl was recruited by Hitler to produce films and revolutionized the world of
Nazi propaganda. A German director, producer, screenwriter, editor, photographer, actress, and
dancer, Leni Riefenstahl is best known for her imposing films in support of the National Socialist
Party during the 1930s. Riefenstahl’s films promoted the acceptance of Hitler’s regime and
instilled within millions of Germans the desire to follow Adolf Hitler and the ideologies of the
National Socialist Party, or more broadly, fascism.43 Generally stated, these ideals stood for the
perspective of life as art, the fascination with beauty, the obsession with valor, and the rejection
of the intellect beyond that of party heads; in short they stood for the family of man under the
parenthood of leaders.44
Goebbels systematically took control of the German cinema. Initially employing a covert
approach, the Nazis took control of the composition of the industry’s Universum Film AG
(UFA), the motion pictures production company, through the Reich Film Chamber. Through
censorship of films and prior censorship to conceptual ideas for films, the Nazi party controlled
the content of films. Eventually, total control of the industry was taken under the semblance of
overt nationalism. In 1934, Goebbels succinctly quantified the Nazi’s use of the film industry:
“The film is one of the most modern and far-reaching media that there is for influencing the
masses.”45 Within a short period of time, Goebbels and Hitler had altered the “apolitical and
escapist orientation” of the Weimar-era cinema into the totalitarianism that became German
society.46
43
Bach, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl, 117.
Susan Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism," The New York Review of Books (1975).
45
Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, 151.
46
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), 275.
44
18
In reality, all Nazi films were at some level propaganda films. Even entertainment films
were made to distract the populace from the Allied bombing and German defeats on the
battlefields; they presented a revolutionary message for the German masses. And Goebbels’s
control of film distribution ensured that no one within Germany escaped its viewing.47 Through
controlled distribution, works of film were able to reach the public through schools, theaters, and
international film festivals.
Leni Riefenstahl – her role in Nazi Germany
In 1932, Leni Riefenstahl had witnessed a captivating speech by Hitler during a political
rally. The idea of a superior race governed Adolf Hitler’s policies and conduct of war.48 Hitler
saw the elimination of the Jewish race as essential to achieving a purified Aryan race. Having
recently received harsh criticism from Jewish critics of a recent film, Riefenstahl found solace in
Hitler’s philosophy.49 She saw in Hitler, a protector from future such criticism. She was attracted
by the ideas and personality of Hitler even prior to his ascent to Führer. By attending several
rallies and speeches, she continued to learn more of Hitler’s dogma and became a believer.50
Thus when asked to produce films for the Nazi regime, she agreed to produce an image of a
resilient Germany. Riefenstahl portrayed Hitler as a creative genius, a man of reason, and a great
leader protecting the future of Germany.51 In a film titled Triumph of the Will, a 1935
propaganda film chronicling the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, Riefenstahl created a
work portraying the ideal Aryan society.52
47
Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, 277.
Klaus Hilderbrand, “Hitler's War Aims,” The Journal of Modern History 48, no. 3 (1976): 525.
49
Jurgen Trimborn, Leni Riefenstahl: A Life, trans. Edna McCown (New York: Faber & Faber, 2007), 55.
50
Trimborn, Leni Riefenstahl: A Life, 56.
51
Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge: Belknap, 2003), 34, 54, 78, 132.
52
Bach, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl, 128.
48
19
In filming the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, Riefenstahl focused on underscoring a
bond between the Führer and the people. Though in later years, she would deny any
acknowledgement of creating such propaganda. Riefenstahl’s ambition and inspiration resulted
in a political piece that transcended Goebbels’s utilitarian definition. Her work transitioned
campaign gatherings into historical events and grandiose rituals drawing hundreds of thousands
of the party faithful. Riefenstahl worked hard to glorify the party and the strength of Hitler’s
power.53 Triumph of the Will has been considered the most successfully and purely
propagandistic film ever made. Despite Riefenstahl’s disavowing its intended use for
propaganda, critics have declared its “very conception negates the possibility of the film maker’s
having an aesthetic or visual conception independent of propaganda.”54
Triumph of the Will – Explicit propaganda
The film, Triumph of the Will, epitomized the narcissism central to Nazi ideology.
Commissioned by Hitler as a record of the sixth Nazi party congress held at Nuremberg
September 5-10, 1934, the film was intended to be an artistic documentary work.55 The
Nuremberg rally itself was crucial propaganda for the moment; a critical demonstration of Nazi
strength at a time when Hitler needed to establish his authority as newly appointed chancellor
over Germany.
Preceding the sixth congress, a series of events took place in Germany, which served to
consolidate the Nazi regime. In January 1933, President Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler
chancellor of Germany. Hitler moved quickly to consolidate the country as a one-party state
under his direction and control. In July of 1934 a newly established Nazi secret police (SS)
53
Bach, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl, 113-114, 119.
Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism."
55
Thomas Elsaesser, "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman," Sight and Sound 3, no. 2 (1993): 15.
54
20
performed a series of political executions; individuals perceived as a direct threat to Hitler’s
recently gained power were slaughtered. The Röhm Putsch or “The Night of the Long Knives”
took hundreds of victims, many of whom were leaders of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the
paramilitary Brownshirts, with more than a thousand alleged opponents arrested. In addition,
President Hindenburg died in August of 1934 leaving Hitler free to become both the head of state
and the leader of the government. As Hitler stepped into the position of Chancellor of Germany,
soon to be dictator of Germany, the people were jobless, starving, and desperate for relief.56
The sixth congress rally was fashioned as a gesture of a renewed sense of national
identity and unity following the definitive end of the Weimer Republic. It took months to plan
and prepare the documentation of the events of the Nuremberg rally. Riefenstahl was unrestricted
in resources, unlimited in funds, the crew numbered in the hundreds, and an immense number of
cameras were at her disposal. The Führer served as the financial patron of the project allowing
Riefenstahl freedom and mobility with the assignment. Though the city of Nuremberg would
bear the cost for hundreds of thousands of extras, costumes, props, and technical apparatus. The
public would be led to believe the private film industry UFA financed the project; thereby
disassociating any connection to the political party or implication of propaganda.57
In Riefenstahl’s 1935 book Behind the Scenes of the National Party Convention Film (as
cited by Susan Sontag, 1975) Riefenstahl admitted, “The ceremonies and precise plans of the
parades, marches, processions, the architecture of the halls and stadium were designed for the
convenience of the cameras”.58 Through this admission, Riefenstahl demonstrated the radical
transformation of reality orchestrated by this film. The staging of the Nuremberg Rally served
56
Joseph W. Bendersky, A Concise History of Nazi Germany: 1919-1945, 4th ed. (Lanham: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers, 2014), 5.
57
Trimborn, Leni Riefenstahl: A Life, 102. Bach, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl, 124-128.
58
Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism."
21
not only as a mass meeting but also as the stage for a spectacular propaganda film. The event
was not an end in itself, rather a setting for a film passed off as an authentic documentary. In
effect, the document was no longer the recorder of reality as “reality” had been fashioned to
serve the document.59 Structured as a true documentary made up of actual footage, this film
transfigured the magic in cinema entertainment by purposefully indoctrinating reality to the will
of Hitler. The film industry created a transfiguration or triumph of the will over the world, the
dissolution of reality for those willing to purify the German nation.60
Hitler would be the star of the film Triumph of the Will, coming from the sky to liberate
the German people. The film starts on the first day of the Party Congress with Hitler’s arrival by
airplane immediately following the opening credits and introductory titles. It states:
Twenty years after the outbreak of the World War,
Sixteen years after the beginning of the German suffering (crucifixion),
Nineteen months after the beginning (start) of Germany’s rebirth,
Adolf Hitler flew to Nuremberg to review his faithful followers.61
From the very beginning, the film establishes audience identification with its hero as he descends
from the heavens. Hitler’s plane literally and metaphorically carries the Nazi message that
Germany is “awakening” and its historic mission will be carried out. As clouds part, the camera
views Nuremberg from above spotting military troops marching in the streets as if propelling to
greet the plane’s arrival. The plane glides over them like an eagle, or a cross, combining Nazi
and Christian iconography.62 “The Reich’s eagle, frequently detailed in the film, always appears
against the sky like Hitler himself _ a symbol of a superior power used as a means of
59
Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism."
Ken Kelman, "Propaganda as a Vision: Triumph of the Will," Logos: A Journal of Modern
Society and Culture 7 (2003).
61
Triumph of the Will, dir. Leni Riefenstahl (Berlin: Reichsparteitag-Film/UFA, 1935).
62
Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, 164.
60
22
manipulation.”63 Hitler is cast as a German Messiah who will save the nation, if only its citizens
will put their faith in the Fuhrer’s capable hands. Hitler is consistently shown throughout the film
shawled in a halo-like effect, giving him a godlike aura and furthering his role of savior for the
people. Riefenstahl plays with natural lighting as metaphorical of Germany emerging from
darkness of the Weimar Republic into the light of the Nazi resurgence. The city is decorated with
iconographic paraphernalia also suggesting the embrace of conjuncture from old to new.
“Passionate efforts are made to authenticate the people’s continued existence through multifold
picture illustrating Germany’s youth and manhood and the architectural achievements of their
ancestors.”64 Architectural details are interwoven as visual emblems linking the Fuhrer with the
German past and its future.65 This imagery is lyrical and messianic to set the metaphoric mood
for everything that follows.
The processions of adoring crowds throughout the film are composed of repeated
telephoto crosscuts between the Fuhrer and his flock creating suspense of absolute determination
and salvation for the revived Germany. Images of maternal bliss, youthful innocence, and nature
link Hitler to peace and love creating the impression that he is benign and caring. Riefenstahl
continued these alternating shots suggesting both his point of view separate from the crowd, and
the crowd’s point of view viewing Hitler from below as their savior.66 Kracauer mentioned that
“throughout the whole Convention masses already open to suggestion were swept along by a
continuous, well-organized movement that could not but dominate them.”67 With Germany in a
abhorrent state after WWI, the huge burden of reparations had damaged the economy, and the
63
Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 303.
Ibid., 303.
65
Bach, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl, 136.
66
Frank P. Tomasulo, “The Mass Psychology of Fascist Cinema: Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will,”
in Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, ed. Berry Keith
Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 104-105.
67
Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 301.
64
23
country had gone into hyperinflation. People were desperate for some relief, and Hitler and the
NSDAP offered it. It was all too easy to believe his lies; this film confirms this belief.
Hitler's supremacy was based on the unconditional allegiance of the population. The
German Nazi Party was focused on the devotion of the nationhood under the slogan, “One
people! One Reich! One Fuhrer!”68 One of the distinctive characteristics of Nazi propaganda
films is the enormous enthusiasm of the crowds conveying approval and encouragement for their
Fuhrer and country. In the choreographed film sequence of the Reichsarbeitsdienst, the Labor
Corps Rally forged the national identity of the volk working together, despite capitalist class
conflict, building one national German community. This agency was formed to help relieve
unemployment in Germany and militarize the workforce by indoctrinating Nazi ideology.69 The
staging of the outdoor ceremony is of great symbolic significance. It showed numerous men, in
uniform, gathered in Nuremberg from all over the Reich, somewhat creating a counterweight for
the dwindled SA members. Their performance won over Hitler and the spectators.70
This official state labor service was also used by the Nazis as a conformity of political
support of unemployed youth men and was later created along military arms. Hitler saw this
agency as a valuable tool in the physical building of his New Germany, molding the new
generation of Hitlerjungen, Hitler Youth.71 In Triumph of the Will, there is a recurrence of
youthful exuberance. As Hitler addressed them as His German youth, he stated, “We want to be
a united nation and you, my youth, are to become this nation. In the future, we do not wish to see
classes and cliques, and you must not allow them to develop among you. We want to see one
68
Triumph of the Will, directed by Leni Riefenstahl.
Tomasulo, “The Mass Psychology of Fascist Cinema,” 107.
70
Kiran Klaus Patel, Soldiers of Labor: Labor Service in Nazi Germany and New Deal America, 19331945 (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 2005), 93-94.
71
Tomasulo, “The Mass Psychology of Fascist Cinema,” 106.
69
24
Reich one day.”72 Riefenstahl uses cinematic means to impart the same idea of totalitarianism
Hitler bestows on the Hitlerjungen for German renewal. Surveying the enormous assemblage
standing and shouting in the name of the Fuhrer, the camera frame alternates an overflow of
closely packed idealized Aryan youngsters (figure 1). This imagery links the visual and verbal
themes of subtle Aryan dimensions to the idea of national unity.73
Through the speeches made during the film, the ideological message comprised a unified
theme by amplifying German unity under one leader. Many oaths of loyalty from various support
groups and supreme leaders are evident. Many speeches promoted the values asserted by the
Nazis, including the defense of blood and soil, the belief of their charismatic leader, the renewal
of the people’s nation, and intuitively, the creation of Nazi eugenics.74 For the opening speech of
the rally and film, Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Fuhrer, passionately spoke of leadership, loyalty,
unity, and German strength. Each dialogue in the film was formulated to coerce its audience with
an everlasting narcotization for its Fuhrer and instigation for his pursuit of an idyllic race and
nation in years to come. “Speeches tend to appeal to the emotions as well as the intellect of their
listeners; but the Nazis preferred to reduce the intellect by working primarily upon the
emotions.”75 There was no attempt to conceal the National Socialist message since the German
people was likely to associate with the thoughts and feelings being projected from these political
speeches. These rally speeches were portrayed in fragments at various times to consolidate
political sophistication. Riefenstahl even requested some speeches to be redelivered after the
rally in studios for dramatic impact. Edited by the director herself, it emanated the absolute
72
Triumph of the Will, directed by Leni Riefenstahl.
Tomasulo, “The Mass Psychology of Fascist Cinema,” 109.
74
Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, 142.
75
Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 300.
73
25
loyalty of the Fuhrer.76 The rally was considered a success by swaying the populace with
emotional stimulants establishing a “cult of personality” around Hitler, a mystical aura
associated with a “folkish” family-based patriotism.77 Even after the rally, the film itself would
propagate these ideas among the German people through theater screenings.
The leading figure of this film personified the best characteristics of his chosen people:
strength and perseverance, simplicity and reverence, compassion and generosity. This is the only
film that was constructed around Hitler himself. There would be no other filmmaker to elaborate
on the myth that Leni Riefenstahl had depicted in Triumph of the Will.78
Leni Riefenstahl’s Innovative Editing
Leni Riefenstahl’s innovative filming techniques with close ups, long shots, reverse
angles, and reaction shots achieved national and global fame. Triumph of the Will used crowded
wide shots, sometimes diagonal, of massed characters and then shifted to close-ups that isolated
a single passion. Focusing on clean-cut people in uniforms, cameras would catch them grouping
and regrouping, as if seeking the right choreography to express their euphoric loyalty to Hitler
and the Nazi party.79 Riefenstahl was meticulous in the way she set up her camera angles around
the town and on the political figures. Her choice of motifs for disorientation and animation was
achieved through showing merely the upper parts of objects and people, achieving a conception
of “spiritualized”. Close-ups and obscure camera angles from laying in ditches to climbing up
ladders achieved the effect of animation for a figurative reality.80 Kracauer confirmed, “This film
76
Rainer Rother, Leni Riefenstahl the Seduction of Genius (London: Continuum, 2002), 179-180.
Bach, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl, 137.
77
Tomasulo, “The Mass Psychology of Fascist Cinema,” 101.
78
Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, 154.
79
Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism."
80
Kelman, "Propaganda as a Vision: Triumph of the Will."
26
represents an inextricable mixture of a show simulating German reality and of German reality
maneuvered into a show.”81
Triumph of the Will was in a continuous state of movement. The numerous cameras at
Riefenstahl’s disposal constantly surveyed faces, uniforms, salutes, and marches, to transport the
viewer into a fabricated reality. She would introduce a certain photographic aesthetic into areas
of crowds, power, and politics.82 Her use of rhythmic montage, showing a series of short shots
suggesting a passage of time with special optical effects, glorified the event of a fascist stage of
submission and valor. Editing 61 hours of film, Riefenstahl worked five months to produce the
final fantastical version of Triumph of the Will.83 Each cinematic mechanism, camera angles,
editing, music, set design, lighting, and narration, was arranged to appeal to the irrational
character structure of its audience.84 In addition to outstanding filming techniques employed, it
was Riefenstahl’s editing techniques that produced the world-renowned recognition the final
product received.
Leni Riefenstahl’s cinematic techniques earned Triumph of the Will recognition as one of
the greatest propaganda films in history. It premiered in Berlin on March 28, 1935 at the UfaPalast am Zoo. Within the Party and larger Reich cities, the film proved successful. Nazi press
and publications celebrated the film as “a symphony of the German will,” a “national document,”
and an “exceptional event in an exceptional form.” For her efforts, Leni Riefenstahl was
rewarded the Gold Metal at the Venice Film Festival and the German National Film Prize in
Berlin in 1935, and the Grand Prize at the Paris World Exhibition in 1937.85 With these awards,
81
Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 303.
Elsaesser, "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman."
83
Taylor, Film Propaganda, 163.
84
Tomasulo, “The Mass Psychology of Fascist Cinema,” 102.
85
Trimborn, Leni Riefenstahl: A Life, 118-120.
82
27
Leni Riefenstahl would cite most of her life that the film could not be propaganda but a purely
historical artistic product.
Films such as Triumph of the Will were used as tools to liberate the energy and spirit of
the German people through a dynamic new movement with roots deep in their racial
consciousness. “Symbols chosen for their stimulative power helped in the total mobilization: the
city was a sea of waving swastika banners; the flames of the bonfires and torches illuminated the
nights; the streets and squares uninterruptedly echoed with the exciting rhythm of march
music.”86 Triumph of the Will is an amazingly successful attempt to demonstrate to the world the
new strength of the Nazi party, the unity of the people, and the magnitude of German power.
Siegfried Kracauer recognized how “Triumph of the Will is the triumph of a nihilistic will.”87 He
also stated, “At Nuremberg, therefore, steps were taken to influence the physical and the
psychological condition of all participants.” Propaganda is considered the art of persuasion and
Triumph of the Will is a superb example of artistically documenting and compressing core Nazi
ideology, political speeches and unified marches into a masterpiece of film propaganda
indoctrinating its captive audience.
Eternal Jew – Implicit Propaganda
In cinema, more than in theatre, the spectator must know whom
he should hate and whom he should love.
--Fritz Hippler88
Adolf Hitler was driven by the idea of an Aryan master race. The Nazi campaign saw the
cleansing of the Jewish race as essential to achieving a purified superior race. Goebbels’s
86
Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 301.
Ibid., 303.
88
Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, 174.
87
28
propaganda machine exploited the powerful myth of the Eternal or Wandering Jew.89 The
Reich’s systematic plan to discredit, expropriate, and eventually eliminate the Jews was the focus
of propaganda works such as the 1935 film by Leni Riefenstahl The Triumph of Will, the 1937
“Degenerate Art” exhibition and the 1940 film The Eternal Jew by Fritz Hippler. In the end,
Hitler’s regime was responsible for the deaths of 40 million people, many attributable to the
worst genocide in the history of mankind.90
The Germans saw World War I as “a purging of European cultures that were poisoned
and contaminated.” 91 A major part of transforming Germany, according to Hitler and the Nazi
Party, was the creation of a single racial state. Much attention was devoted to idealizing the
Aryan race. In Mein Kampf, Hitler defined this idealized race as the purest example connected to
the original racial stock of prehistoric Eurasia before interracial contaminations.92 To garner
national support for this superior race, Nazi ideology portrayed the Aryan race as being
threatened by inferior groups both inside and outside of Germany.93 As the Nazis’ racialized
political agenda spread, ethnic groups, more visible due to propaganda, became targets for racial
actions and crimes.94 The Nazis invested great effort in revolutionizing the Nazi State, even if it
meant massive violations of human rights toward the minorities. Information was dispersed to
label Jews and other minorities as the exceptional evil, working within the nation to subvert
racial purity.
89
Israel Idalovichi, “Creating National Identity through a Legend–The Case of the Wandering Jew,”
Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies 4, no. 12 (2010): 3- 26.
90
Ian Kershaw, “Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism,” Journal of Contemporary History 39, no. 2
(2004): 239-240.
91
Panikos Panayi, Weimar and Nazi Germany: Continuities and Discontinuities (Harlow: Pearson
Education Limited, 2001), 12.
92
Ibid., 226.
93
Kershaw, “Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism,” 247.
94
Panayi, Weimar and Nazi Germany, 221.
29
In order to get the populace to accept a totalitarianism that would destroy their individual
rights, films were massively distributed lauding sterilization and institutionalization of unhealthy
or “defective” members of society.95 Similar methods were used to turn German society against
Jews, suggesting that Jews were a threat to a stable, wholesome population. Nowhere was this
more evident than in Fritz Hippler’s film The Eternal Jew (Der Ewige Jude). This film was
ranked one of the most malicious propaganda films of anti-Semitism ever made. Made in 1940, it
was formatted as a documentary film of the world of Jewry, similar to Triumph of the Will as a
supposed “documentary” of the 1934 Nazi party rally. Its powerful effectiveness in the pretense
of documentary objectivity, The Eternal Jew had a purpose to tell the truth about Jews. These
images claimed to depict Jews as they really were, accentuating disgust and horror toward these
supposed oriental barbarians.96
The German invasion in Poland provided its viewers “actual shots of the Polish ghettos,
showing the Jews as they really look before concealing themselves behind the mask of civilized
Europeans.”97 However, the overcrowded and unhygienic conditions of the ghettos, the oldest
and most run-down city units, were a direct result of the Nazi racial policy for the ghettoization
of Polish Jews. The film commentator stated, “there’s a plague here: a plague that threatens the
health of the Aryan peoples. Richard Wagner once said, ‘The Jew is the demon behind the
corruption of mankind.’ And these pictures prove it.”98 The visual and verbal commentary at
points was supposed to be portrayed as disgusting and grotesque. The film’s objectivity is
95
Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003), 118, 155.
Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, 174-175.
97
The Eternal Jew, directed by Fritz Hippler (Deutsche Film Gesellschaft, 1940).
98
Ibid.
96
30
misleading by claiming that “they live for generations in the same dirty and bug ridden
dwellings.”99
The narrator persists the claims that the only object of value is money by living off the
“host” nations as “parasites.” The Jews allegedly portray a dangerous illusion, creating only a
guise for parasitic exploitation.100 In Jewish history, stories of wandering from place to place
benefit the film’s notion of settling like a plague of rats. “Parallel to these Jewish wanderings
throughout the world is the migration of a similarly restless animal: the rat. Rats have been
parasites on mankind from the very beginning.”101 Revealing powerful and stirring scenes of rats
swarming sewers and fondling over sacks of grain in unsavory conditions ensured viewers that
Jews are literally less than human.
By creating a tenacious society, it is important to define who is excluded from
membership. In one scene of The Eternal Jew, we are made aware of how Jews disguise their
appearance in a more European manner to hide his/her racial origins (figure 2-3). This is another
asserted form of illusion that Jews fabricate to undermine their “host” nation. “But the Jew is still
a rootless parasite” no matter how outwardly they strive to fit in with their hosts.102 By exploiting
pre-existing images and stereotypes, Nazi propagandists portrayed Jews poisoning culture,
religion, and economy. This revolting depiction of Jews is neither new nor unique, yet for the
Nazi Party it was iconic.
The film goes on to show Jews influencing and corrupting the artistic life of the nation.
“Jews are most dangerous when permitted to meddle in a people’s culture, religion, and art, and
pronounce their insolent judgment on them. The concept of beauty of the Nordic man is
99
Ibid.
Idalovichi, “Creating National Identity through a Legend–The Case of the Wandering Jew,” 5.
101
The Eternal Jew, directed by Fritz Hippler.
102
Ibid.
100
31
incomprehensible to the Jew by nature and will always remain so.”103 A series of paintings from
the Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937 is shown stating the corruption of art by the Jews. This
exhibition took place at a similar time when the first anti-Semitic exhibition, “The Wandering
Jew,” was being held in Munich at the Library of the German Museum.104 The audience can once
again feel animosity against Jewish artists defacing the German society.
To further demonstrate the undesirability of the Jews, the film includes footage of the
kosher-style slaughter of animals. The images of butchers slicing the throats of animals and
letting the blood drain onto the floor are very graphic. A notification from the National Socialist
movement appears on the screen avowing knowledge of this torture and advises viewers of Adolf
Hitler’s actions to forbid Jews from conducting this ritual slaughter. “Under leadership of Adolf
Hitler, Germany has raised the battle flag against the eternal Jew.”105
The film ends with Hitler expressing his thoughts on the Jews at the Reichstagssitzung on
January 30, 1939.106 The threats he inferred make it clear that the ritual slaughter sequence is an
allegory for the fate that is awaiting the Jewish race in Europe. Nazis clearly express, based on
this film, that Jews are no better than animals. The commentator finalizes the film by saying, “In
this spirit, the unified German people march on into the future.”107 The film concludes with a
sequence of the crowds saluting their Fuhrer, alternating to close-ups of Aryan blond boys and
girls grinning with immense hope for the future. The Nazis march toward a future of world
domination and racial purity. Similar to Triumph of the Will as the German people put their trust
in their Fuhrer and the National Socialist party, The Eternal Jew dissolves from images of the
103
Ibid.
Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, 182.
105
The Eternal Jew, directed by Fritz Hippler.
106
Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, 185.
107
The Eternal Jew, directed by Fritz Hippler.
104
32
swastika to absolute darkness. There is a note of hope for Nazi Germany. Once again, Hitler is
depicted as the savior of the Aryan race.
Premiered on November 28, 1940, The Eternal Jew is perceived as a prelude to the
Holocaust, a record of the early stages of the extermination of the Jewish race.108 The Nazis’ use
of the arts permeated National Socialist methodology and was used to portray Hitler’s view of
the world.109 In occupied Poland, Nazi propaganda reinforced quarantining Jews to ghettos by
rendering them a health threat. Such marketing of fear desensitized the public to the growing
persecution of the Jews. “Race, far from being a mere propagandistic slogan, was the very rock
on which the Nazi church was built.”110
108
Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, 186.
West, The Visual Arts in Germany, 182.
110
Hilderbrand, “Hitler's War Aims,” 525.
109
33
Chapter 3
The Use of Art in Nazi Propaganda
For this ‘modern art’ National Socialism desires to substitute
a ‘German’ art and an eternal art.
--Adolf Hitler111
National Socialist Art Policy
After World War I, Germany and the National Socialist Party feared a degeneration of
the German culture. The members of the National Socialist Party advocated the use of violence
to cleanse all aspects of political and cultural degeneracy of decay. In the early 1930s, the Nazis
carefully engineered a plan for cultural cleansing. Deleterious events such as the banning and
burning of books were the prequel to the purification of degeneration.112 Visual imagery sought
to manifest the healing of a German idealized nation.
Once Adolf Hitler and the Nazis assumed power in 1933, they encroached upon every
aspect of German cultural life, eventually seizing control over the German museums and art
galleries. The propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels was the first to conceive the idea of an
exhibit used to propagate the Aryan ideology through an exhibition composed of works
designated to be from “the era of decay.”113 The Nazis confiscated thousands of artworks
throughout Germany for the purpose of public ridicule and sterilization of degenerate elements.
It was implied that the removed art was so radical; it was essentially “non-art.”114 The National
Socialist degenerate art policy, Entartete Kunst Aktion, empowered the notion of ridding the
nation of all degenerate influences, especially in an artistic manner in accordance with academic
111
David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 205.
Berthold Hinz, "'Degenerate' and 'Authentic': Aspects of Art and Power in the Third Reich," in
Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators 1930-45, compiled by Dawn Ades, Tim Benton, David
Elliott, and Iain Boyd Whyte (London: Hayward Gallery, 1996), 330.
113
Olaf Peters, Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937 (Munich: Prestel,
2014), 113-114.
114
Stephanie Barron, “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (Los Angeles:
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991), 11.
112
34
formalist principles.115 Entartete Kunst Aktion was the legal means by which modern art was to
be eradicated and purified from German art culture.116 Adolf Ziegler, the Reich Chamber of
Visual Arts, was in charge of collecting art containing perceived asymmetries, abstraction,
skewed perspective, distorted human forms, the non-figurative, and violent color contrasts.117
Many German museum directors and curators devised counterattacks against the confiscations;
these actions resulted in their forced removal from office.118 This act of art removal was intended
to avert the public from cultural ridicule of their national aesthetics being portrayed in certain
degenerate imagery. It was meant to provoke public opinion in opposition of all forms of
modernism.119
This art removal was effective in initiating Nazi racist policies. In Munich in 1937, two
art events were sponsored largely for the purpose of their perceptual contrast. This muchpublicized confrontation was between the unvalued minority and the valued majority staged in
the domain of art.120 These two art exhibitions became a visualistic view in creating a dramatic
contrast of the German society.
Great German Art and Degenerate Art Exhibition
The Nazi Party hastened to form their aesthetic vision by displaying artworks that
represented the idealistic human form in the language of classicism in the first annual Grosse
Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition) in the newly structured Haus der
115
Brandon Taylor and Wilfried van der Will, The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture
and Film (Winchester: Winchester Press, 1990), 135.
116
Joan L. Clinefelter, Artists for the Reich: Culture and Race from Weimar to Nazi Germany (Oxford:
Berg, 2005), 91.
117
Berthold Hinz, Art in the Third Reich (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), 40.
118
Barron, “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, 15.
119
Rose-Carol Washton Long, ed., German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine
Empire to the Rise of National Socialism (New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1993), 307.
120
Hinz, “‘Degenerate’ and ‘Authentic’: Aspects of Art and Power in the Third Reich,” 330.
35
Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art).121 This House still stands today as the oldest civic
building constructed by the Nazis. From the time the foundation was set in 1933 to the museum’s
dedication in 1937, Munich was regarded as the major cultural center of Germany. It was the
birthplace of National Socialism and functioned as the capital city of German art.122 In Hitler’s
inaugural address of the dedication of the House of German Art, he labeled it a “temple of
German art.”123 The first of Hitler’s prestigious public buildings, and showpiece projects for
Nazi propaganda, the House was to epitomize the strength and health of the Nazi nation.124
Located across the street in Munich, occupied in the former Institute of Archaeology, a
second exhibition opened with the purpose of attacking works of modern art considered as
“other.” The Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) showcased art works by artists that were the
standard-bearers of the German avant-garde.125 This location was considered an insinuation to
how these artworks should no longer exist. This art was anti-classical in form and style,
described as products of insanity, impudence, and ineptitude.126 Opened one day after the Great
German Art Exhibition, the Degenerate Art Exhibition served as a contradictory positioning in
art. The minority and majority paradigms of art were defined based on elusive characteristics,
allowing the Nazi aesthetic to express an unequivocal value judgment against the degenerate.127
The term “degenerate” was denoted by the Nazis to be an inferior racial, moral, or sexual
type. During the 1930s, it befell to the reference of a taste in cultural ideologies that were
121
Hinz, “‘Degenerate’ and ‘Authentic’: Aspects of Art and Power in the Third Reich,” 330.
Henry Grosshans, Hitler and the Artists (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1983), 95-97.
123
Hinz, “‘Degenerate’ and ‘Authentic,’” 330.
124
Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century (New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1994), 136.
125
Hinz, “‘Degenerate’ and ‘Authentic,’” 330.
126
Peter Guenther, “Three Days in Munich, July 1937,” in “Degenerate Art:” The Fate of the AvantGarde in Nazi Germany, ed. Stephanie Barron (Los Angeles: LA County Museum of Art, 1991), 38.
127
Hinz, “‘Degenerate’ and ‘Authentic,’” 330.
122
36
unacceptable or abnormal.128 Art that appeared to deviate from naturalism or the formal
standards of academic art was declared as degenerate. The Degenerate Art Exhibition was
organized around this anti-formal quality. It was to show the public what constituted as
degenerate, to persuade the public on its potential for demoralization, and to exploit the art as an
attempt to create cultural and political anarchy by undermining traditional values. The
demoralized art featured in the exhibition were essentially abstract and expressionistic, including
all the modern art movements, such as Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, and
Dada. However, these modern artist groups deliberately sought to represent visual aspects that
rejected the norm.129 Their goal was to disrupt the classical pictorial representation. This route
led to much criticism. Artists of the confiscated art such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Emil
Nolde, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner were humiliated and forbidden to continue the art practice.130
Many of these ridiculed artists were expelled from their teaching posts, forbidden to exhibit
elsewhere, and had to turn to other ways of earning a living. Some artists left the country in
search of salvation. Others continued to work and sometimes even sell inconspicuously. It was to
be believed that these artists were visually dysfunctional, unable to see objects accurately.
The Nazis claimed that this “degenerate” art was the product of Jews and Bolsheviks, yet
only about six artists featured in the exhibition were actually Jewish. German Expressionist
works were presented as overpriced commodities and considered “out of place” in German
society. The most heavily represented German Expressionist in the exhibition was Emil Nolde.
He was one of the first Expressionist painters and considered one of the greatest painters of the
20th century. He was a supporter of the Nazi party and shared similar views with Joseph
128
Barron, “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, 11.
Neil Levi, "‘Judge for Yourselves!’-The ‘Degenerate Art’ Exhibition as Political Spectacle,”
October 85 (1998): 44-45.
130
Ibid.
129
37
Goebbels on opinions of Jewish artists. However, this did not save him from becoming defamed
during the Nazi “cleanse” of modern art. Emil Nolde’s The Prophet (figure 4), from 1912, is a
quintessential German Expressionist print, and was on display at the Degenerate Art Exhibition.
He had more than a thousand works confiscated for the exhibition and was banned from
exhibiting and practicing art thereafter.131
There is one true eternal art according to Hitler, “Nordic-Greek” art.132 In his Mein
Kampf, Hitler believed art to be an exterior form that embodied an inner national idea.133 He saw
that classical art was uncontaminated by Jewish influences and modern art was a feat of aesthetic
violence by the Jews and Bolsheviks against the German spirit.134 “To be German is to be clear,”
stated Hitler.135 For Hitler and the National Socialists, beauty and clarity in art portrayed a
perceptual functionality and acuity. Nazi Art was modeled after classical Greek and Roman art,
characteristic of alleged German bourgeois aesthetic values. Other art was excluded on the basis
of perceptual defects.
The Great German Art Exhibition was representative of the monumental style typical of
the Nazi aesthetic idea consistent with the paintings and sculpture that emanated within the
House walls. Hitler conceptualized art that encouraged and supported the ideals of the German
people. At least 800 artworks were exhibited, including portraits of Hitler, contrasting with the
form and style of the Degenerate Art.136 Guidelines were formed to define true German art; it
131
Levi, “‘Judge for Yourselves!,’” 44.
Adolf Hitler, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler: April 1922-August 1939, trans. by Norman H. Baynes, vol.
1 (New York: Howard Fertig, 1969), 567.
133
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. by Ralph Manheim, 15th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1971).
134
Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 10.
135
Adolf Hitler, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler: April 1922-August 1939, 587.
136
Henry Grosshans, Hitler and the Artists, 99.
132
38
must be national, comprehensive, eternal, and representative of the good and the beautiful.137
Depictions of military, domestic and genre scenes, female nudes were representational of a
Neoclassicism complementary to its structure in which it is housed. Glorified German men were
naturally represented with healthy, lean bodies ready to protect the nation in a time of war, and
women as bearers of life and culture; both embodied the creators of a new generation. Such
aesthetic ideals were expected to reflect the Nazi’s political ideology.138
There was no subject matter that remained unaffected. Landscapes, portraits, and genre
scenes all had to represent romanticized depictions of National Socialist realism of a pure and
stable peasant life in an idyllic country setting.139 This new art was created in a neoclassical style
that Hitler considered to be the highest standards of beauty. Figures and scenes were depicted in
detail with easily comprehensible forms, as opposed to the abstractions Hitler was trying to
eradicate. He stated that the highest culture was a combination of Hellenic and Germanic
civilizations.140 However, this new Nazi art projected a false representation of life contradictory
to the modern industrial and urban existence in Germany.
Contradictory in subject matter, the Degenerate Art and Great German Art exhibitions
were also opposite in exhibition design. Hitler encouraged the German public to judge the two
art exhibitions. However, the stages were set for visitors to see certain ideals and values on what
is and is not considered German art.
The arrangement for the Degenerate Art was purposefully incompetent; pictures were
hung too closely together, many were incorrectly attributed and labeled, separate artistic
movements were grouped together, and quotations from critics were displayed without regard of
137
Mary-Margaret Goggin, “‘Decent’ vs. ‘Degenerate’ Art: The National Socialist Case,” Art Journal 50,
no. 4 (1991): 85-86.
138
Hinz, “‘Degenerate’ and ‘Authentic,’” 332.
139
Clinefelter, Artists for the Reich: Culture and Race from Weimar to Nazi Germany, 62.
140
Taylor and Van Der Will, The Nazification of Art, 135.
39
accuracy.141 An example of this is the “Dada” installation section, which featured a quote by
George Grosz in 1920 saying “Take Dada Seriously! – It’s Worth It” (“Nehmen Sie Dada ernst!
– Es lohnt sich”). Below were two works by the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters and two title
pages from the Dada magazine. The section also incorporated works by Paul Klee and Wassily
Kandinsky, neither of whom was connected to the Dada movement (figure 5).
Many artworks were taken out of their frames, laminated with poor lighting, and partly
covered up by Nazi propaganda slogans, or derogatory slanderous remarks, distorting the actual
intent of the artist. It was a chaotic installation where narrow corridors led to small, cramped
rooms with low ceilings and rickety staircases creating a sense of claustrophobia and spatial
disorder. Chaos was especially transmitted through the concurrence of paintings suspended at
times from very low and unappealing angles brainwashing the publics attitude to suggest
disparaged qualities in modern art.142 Many books, graphic prints, drawings, and photographs
were also found throughout the exhibit.143 They too would be combined with text in the most
provocative and aggressive manner.
The exhibition was divided into nine categories, each representing some “negative”
aspect of modern art.8 Several rooms were grouped thematically; one room represented
blasphemy, one room contained works by Jewish or Bolshevik artists, and another on the
degradation of German women, soldiers, and workers. One room contained all abstract paintings,
one was labeled “The Insanity Room,” and the rest had no particular theme. As well as the wall
labels, a guide was provided with derogatory and inflammatory manner. The catalogue was used
as a reference guide for visitors walking through the exhibition, and to endorse the illustrations
141
Levi, “‘Judge for Yourselves!,’” 41.
Guenther, “Three Days in Munich, July 1937,” 43.
143
Mario-Andreas von Lüttichau, “Entartete Kunst, Munich 1937: A Reconstruction,” in
“Degenerate Art”: The Face of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, ed. Stephanie
Barron (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991), 45-82.
142
40
on what the Nazis deemed “bad art.” The exhibition guide explained that the aim of the show
was to “reveal the philosophical, political, racial and moral goals and intentions behind this
movement, and the driving forces of corruption which follow them.”144
The Degenerate Art Exhibition presented early twentieth-century German avant-garde
paintings, which the Nazis declared as fabrications of archaic deformities and mental illness
triggering discernments of abhorrence and indignation.145 This exhibition design was intended to
exemplify for the German people what type of art was unacceptable and what was deemed
nonsense by the Nazi regime. Installed in such haste, less than three weeks, the Degenerate Art
Exhibition emanated the discretization of the artworks prompting a negative reaction of abstract
art as a poisoning on the German culture.146
In contrast, the House of German Art emulated a flawless aesthetic appearance that
continued throughout the exhibition. Each room was monumental in size and space, creating a
sense of awe and reverence.147 Uniformed Nazi guards were patent among the German general
public that formed a severity of German aestheticism. The interior space and design was defined
by what it was not; disordered array of abstractions and derogatory slogans were nowhere to be
found. Artworks were celebratory in thematic categories of youth, hopefulness, power, and
eternal beauty. Artists such as Josef Thorak and Arno Breker, two sanctioned sculptors of the
Third Reich, created monumental sculptures hallmarking the archetypal neoclassical tradition.148
144
Fritz Kaiser, Degenerate Art: The Exhibition Guide in German and English (Burlington: Ostara
Publications, 2012), 2.
145
Charlotte Klonk, "Exteriority and Exhibition Spaces in Weimar Germany," in Spaces of
Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 176.
146
Altshuler, The Avant-garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century, 138.
147
Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 17.
148
Hinz, “‘Degenerate’ and ‘Authentic,’” 332.
41
More than 16,000 works were submitted and only 600 were exhibited.149 The Great
German Art Exhibition of 1937 was the first annual sale exhibition. These artworks were to be
bought and displayed with pride in German homes to prove how the cultural and artistic sphere
in Germany was flourishing under Hitler and the Third Reich.150 Many leading Nazi party
members, government officials, companies, and individuals partook in buying such art. Yet no
one bought as much as Hitler who spent millions accumulating his collection.151 The Great
German Art Exhibition showcased an academic style of a certain aesthetic criteria that
appropriated with the beliefs of the Nazi regime to eliminate those that disrupted the notions of
racial purity.
The “Degenerate Art” and the “Great German Art” exhibitions were part of the scheme to
showcase pure German culture. The exhibitions formed part of the Nazi worldview and
propaganda effort, which sought to link modern art with degeneracy and an assault on classical
values. The intention for the German public was to forge a link between physical degeneracy and
modern art that formally resembled it. Once the “degenerates” were excluded from the canon of
German art, the nation could be aesthetically pure. Hitler and the Third Reich policies
demarcating desirable and undesirable art were inseparable.152 This visualized and radical ideal
to incite public hatred through art was to ultimately cleanse the German nation in all aspects of
culture, society, and politics.
The Nazis intended the two shows as complementary demonstrations of racial types and
political motives in art. As stated before, both exhibitions are opposite in subject matter, style,
form, and design. They reflected what they believed to be the good and bad in art, the right and
149
Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 6-7.
Clinefelter, Artists for the Reich, 102.
151
Ibid., 102-104.
152
Hinz, “‘Degenerate’ and ‘Authentic,’” 331-333.
150
42
wrong. However, they were not complementary. If total attendance is any implication to the
success of an exhibition, the Degenerate Art Exhibition was the most profitable than any other
Nazi sanctioned cultural event. It attracted five times as many visitors than the Great German Art
Exhibition. It remains the most visited show of modernist art with a record of 2 million visitors,
as opposed to 420,000 people at the Great German Art exhibit.153 In addition, Peter Guenther’s
testament described great disparity between the two exhibits. In designing the layout of the Great
German Art Exhibition great care was taken to create a “semiecclesiastical atmosphere through
the size of the rooms, their décor, the impressive lighting, and the careful placements of the
exhibits.” In contrast, the layout of the Degenerate Art Exhibition was a “blatant intent to
discredit everything on view.”154 In the end, Guenther described a feeling of shock, dismay, and
sadness upon leaving the Entartete Kunst.
The success of the Degenerate Art exhibit inspired Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister
for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, to showcase the exhibition throughout Germany and
Austria from 1938 to 1941.155 Ironically, the degenerate art gained popularity internationally as
well as domestically because the Nazis opposed it. Some of the artists featured in the exhibition
are now considered among the greats of modern art. After the collapse of the Nazi Party, some of
the surviving artwork from the exhibit was found buried underground, others in private
collections, and many still yet undiscovered. Historians have deemed it the greatest art theft in
history.156
153
Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, "1930-1939," in Art since
1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 281.
154
Guenther, “Three Days in Munich, July 1937,” 34.
155
Long, German Expressionism, 307.
156
Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 404.
43
For the Nazi regime, modern art was a cultural manifestation that indicated a
“degenerate” collapse of the idyllic German community.157 Their aesthetic tastes were visibly
manifested in the Great German Art Exhibition. All things German needed to be separated and
protected against the destructive forces of urban city life and the “Jew” who sought its
destruction.158 This initial separation was performed under the Nazi’s Entartete Kunst Aktion and
constituted the basis of the Degenerate Art Exhibition. This exhibition was constituted to identify
the works in question as meaningless and unacceptable. It was meant to stir up negative
perceptions of the public to modern art, and brainwash the nation as a whole.159
Opening the Degenerate Art Exhibition only a day after the Great German Art Exhibition
proved significant for the Nazis. It assisted in defining the “other” through letting the German
people vote with their eyes. These exhibitions were classified as forms of propaganda, intended
to create a public perception that the exhibited art was either a threat or a defense to German
morality.160 The entire operation of “degenerate art” and the identification of a Nazi art played its
part in consolidating both the Nazi state and German community, and thus materially contributed
to the advent of the Second World War and to its correlated crimes.161
157
Ibid.,15.
Dagmar Grimm, “The Works of Art in ‘Entartete Kunst,’ Munich 1937,” in “Degenerate Art”: The
Face of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, ed. Stephanie Barron (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, 1991), 204.
159
Goggin, “‘Decent’ vs. ‘Degenerate’ Art,” 85.
160
Altshuler, The Avant-garde in Exhibition, 147.
161
Hinz, “‘Degenerate’ and ‘Authentic,’” 330.
158
44
Conclusion
Political success offered Hitler the narcissistic gratification he failed to receive in his
early career as an artist. Hitler’s obsession with aesthetics carried over in his political life. He
exploited aesthetics in disguising his hatred and aggression as he remodeled the German culture
to meet his own idealized and grandiose self-image. Hitler transmuted his failure as an artist into
a fantasy of social transformation. He sought to force global compliance with his archaic views
for protection and control. Through conspiracy, tyranny, and terror Hitler conquered Germany,
much of Europe and portions of Asia before the Third Reich was defeated.
Art, aesthetics, and culture drove Hitler’s social policy. Upon seizing power, he and the
new Reich took violent action to purge Germany of non-Germanic and anti-Nazi persons from
positions of cultural leadership. Through use of art and films, Hitler garnered support for his
racist policies, accusing these outside groups of conspiracy to demoralize and corrupt the cultural
purity of Germany. Hitler achieved and maintained political power through stage-managing the
social and cultural aesthetics of the German nation. Flags, uniforms, party rallies, and related
props all played a part in creating and propagating the cult and emotional power of Nazi
Germany; much of this orchestrated by film director Leni Riefenstahl and minister of
propaganda, Joseph Gobbles.
Amid his ostentatious rallies, Hitler elevated his genius for psychological manipulation
through exhibition. Walter Benjamin saw these rallies as microcosms of Hitler’s idyllic world: “a
people reduced to unthinking automatons subject to the control not of the state, not even of the
party but of him personally- and that unto death. Never before was there a clearer example of
aesthetics used to promote enslavement and heroic death.”162
162
Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 2003), 116.
45
Hitler romanticized love and death as ideals. Benjamin interpreted Hitler’s self-alienation
as an aesthetic sacrifice for the cause. Hitler’s opposing ideals, culture and vandalism, creativity
and destruction, beauty and horror, life and death demonstrated that culture and barbarism could
exist side by side and have the same predecessor. Walter Benjamin stated, “There is no
document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”163
163
Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, 400.
46
List of Illustrations
1. Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens), screenshot, Berlin:
Reichsparteitag-Film/UFA, 1996. Transit Film GmbH.
2-3. Fritz Hippler, The Eternal Jew (Der Ewige Jude), screenshots, Uraufführung: Deutsche Film
Gesellschaft, 1940. The Hebrew University Spielberg Film Archives.
4. Emil Nolde, The Prophet, 1912, woodcut, 50 x 36.5 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New
York.
5. Arthur Grimm, Archival photograph of the ‘Degenerate art’ exhibition held at
Archäologisches Institut, Munich, 19 July – 30 Nov 1937, 1937, The Getty Research Institute,
The Getty Center, Los Angeles. http://germanhistorydocs.ghidc.org/sub_image.cfm?image_id=2073
47
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Figure 1
Leni Riefenstahl
Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens)
1935
Screenshot
Transit Film GmbH
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Figure 2-3
Fritz Hippler
The Eternal Jew (Der Ewige Jude)
1940
Screenshots
The Hebrew University Spielberg Film Archives
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Figure 4
Emil Nolde
The Prophet
1912
Woodcut
composition: 32.1 x 22.2 cm; sheet: 50 x 36.5 cm
The Museum of Modern Art
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Figure 5
Arthur Grimm and unknown artist
Archival photograph of the ‘Degenerate art’ exhibition held at Archäologisches Institut, Munich,
19 July – 30 Nov 1937
Courtesy of Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Bildarchiv
Preussischer Kulterbesitz, Berlin
55