The inevitable question that every Art historian is asked is which one was the worst Art, the Nazi or the Soviet ? The inevitable answer people get is that they were both rather mediocre in so far as the imagination of the artist was deliberately bridled and stifled by political considerations. However some artists were better than others and Art like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. In Nazi Germany like in Soviet Russia, Art was defined by the State. So painters, sculptors, writers and other artists had to go with the lines and canons which were set for them by some representative of the official Art appointed by the Supreme Leaders, Hitler and Stalin. In the case of Russia it was Andrei Zhdanov (1896-1948), an early Bolshevik, who helped develop Stalin's cultural policy and was behind the establishment of the Union of Soviet Writers and the doctrine of Socialist Realism (S.R.). In the case of Germany, it was Dr. Paul J.Goebbels (1897-1945), Ph D in Philology, an ex-journalist who tried for several years to become a published author. He wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, Michael, two verse plays, and quantities of romantic poetry. In these works, he revealed the psychological damage his physical limitations (he had a clubfoot) had caused. Like Hitler, he was a failed artist and he helped his idol to define Nationalist Realism although with sometimes a margin of incertitude. In both countries, culture became the central element in the construction of the new order : Adolf Hitler like Joseph Stalin thought that culture had a enormous capacity to affect the state of mind and beliefs of the beholder or the reader. So the main goal in Art was to express approved social values and political ideas that could be appreciated by the general public rather than by the narrower world of art critics, patrons and the usual Maecenas who were too often Jewish or representatives of the hatred class of capitalists and bourgeois. The consequence was that official art became simple, didactic, heroic, sentimental and representational. In one word, boring most of the time. The proof was given in 1937 when Goebbels organized two Exhibitions very different in essence. First the regime opened an Exhibition of German Art in Munich on July the 18th : 15,000 entries were received reduced down to 900 paintings and sculptures before being showed to Hitler for final approval. The Führer chose 884 works of art of which he bought himself 202 thanks to his fortune made of the sales of Mein Kampf. (1) The exhibition was mixed success ; only 600,000 people came to look at the masterpieces of German art. |
| Andrei Zhdanov joined the Bolsheviks in 1915 and rose through the party ranks, becoming the party leader in Leningrad after the assassination of Sergei Kirov in 1934. He was a strong supporter of socialist realism in art. In 1946, Zhdanov was put in charge of the Soviet Union cultural policy by Josef Stalin. His first action was to abuse independent Russian writers such as Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko. In February 1948, he initiated purges in the musical area, widely known as a struggle against formalism. Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev and many other composers fell victims to these purges. His method reduced the whole domain of culture to a straightforward, scientific chart, where a given symbol corresponded to a simple moral value. Zhdanov and Goebbels had very similar views about Art, Literature and Propaganda but Goebbels was more sophisticated. 0 |
| Paul J. Goebbels was appointed Reich Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda (Volksaufklärung und Propaganda), with a seat in the Cabinet in 1933. The role of the new ministry was to centralise Nazi control of all aspects of German cultural and intellectual life, particularly the press, the radio and the visual and performing arts. He used to say that the purpose of both art and propaganda was to bring about a spiritual mobilisation of the German people. |
| Simultaneously Goebbels organized the Exhibit of Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst ) also in Munich : the Committe set up by the small Dr. Goebbels confiscated 16,000 drawings, paintings and sculptures from museums all over Germany amongst them paintings by Dix, Grosz, Kirchner, Beckmann, Kokoschka, Kollwitz, Chagall, Kandinsky (click here to see the whole list). Jumbled up with the confiscated artworks were drawing and paintings by psychiatric patients to demonstrate that the avant- garde too was deeply deranged. Contraryto the regime's expectations, the display was a huge success : 2 million visitors turned up in only 4 months. Then the exhibition was moved around Germany and another million people enjoyed it. As if it was not enough and the regime refused to understand the message, degenerate music joined the band and an exhibition of "black" jazz music was held in 1938. The Soviets stepped in the tracks of their Nazis enemies -soon to become allies- and organized in 1939 an exhibition named The Industry of Socialism which selected thousands pieces and contained finally 2,000 paintings and 700 registered artists. The idea of Socialist Realism was initially formulated by the director of the Izvestiia in 1932 : people, he said, need the sincerity and truthfulness of Socialism. Stalin jumped on the idea and added that an artist should depict "what leads to Socialism" ; what actually led to Socialism was left in the dark or to the improvisation of the leader himself. Some apparatchiki, like Maxim Gorky, honorary president of the Soviet Writers Union, flew to the rescue of the regime by explaining that S.R. was to illustrate the heroic present with optimism and dignity. It was an invitation to the Stalinist utopia. Andrei Zhdanov who was put in charge of the Soviet Union cultural policy by Josef Stalin after the war insisted that art should reflect social reality rather than personal artistic choice which was the negation of artistic life or artistic impulses and the denial of all form of creativity. He launched a policy dubbed "Zhdanovshina" suppressing any remainder of modern art, formalist or foreign influence in the arts until well after Stalin's death in 1956. For Stalin, artists were only engineers of the human soul and should show living people in forms that were living and comprehensible. Hitler had exactly the same views when he claimed that art was married to the people and not independent of it :"art is intolerable, he said in 1933, that can not rely on the joyous, heartfelt assent of the broad and healthy mass of the people." The same principles of simplicity that featured in Soviet statements were thus to be found in Hitler's artistic conceptions and prejudices. The difference and it was a huge difference was that for Hitler and the Nazis artistic creation was an expression of racial health and eternal racial value. It was called the Nationalist Realism (N.R.) : in consequence sculptures should copy the physical beauty of the Greek statues, architecture the Romano-Greek model of clarity, light and beauty and paintings reflect the harmony of nature and life in contradiction with the false Darwinism of Hitlerite philosophy. In fact and in practice, under the Nazis, official art became much more idealist and romantic than realist. |
| A.Plastov, The Germans are coming. July, 1941 |
| Alexander Zavyalov painted this life study in the 1950s. |
| Adolf Ziegler: The Four Elements Great German Art Exhibition, Munich, 1937. The onlooker will notice the same mediocrity and absence of inspiration in Russian and German paintings of the Nudes. |
| V.Serov, The enemy has been here! 1942 |
or the similar combats of Dr. Paul J Goebbels and comrade Andrei Zhdanov |
| VERSUS |
| Julius Paul Junghanns: Rest under the willow trees, 1938. For the Nazis paintings should reflect the harmony of nature even if this sapproach was in full in contradiction with the sub-Darwinism of Hitler's philosophy |
| Eventually both regimes, the Soviet and the Nazi, destroyed the cultural horizons and promoted a single, drably conventional artistic and literary genre : art was there only to respond to some sort of social command and not to satisfy to its own creative impulses. It was to put the art to the service of dogmas and political conventions. In Germany, as soon as 1933, all cultural associations were closed and centralized into a Reich Chamber of Culture. The Chamber had 7 subordinate chambers : music, visual arts, theatre, literature, press, radio, films. In the following months the regime promulgated 3 laws : the Cinema law (February), the unified Theatre law (March) and the law for literary leaders (October). And to make the whole artistic approach of the regime understood by the public at large, the status of the Chamber specified that "it is the business of the state to combat injurious influences and encourage those are valuable, actuated by a sense of responsibility for the wellbeing of the national community." (sic). This status made of the artist the servant of the regime, a sort of philanthropist only interested in the service to the community, the "Volk" (people) and totally unselfish. Once more it was the negation of what makes an artist. In the course of that policy, all modern culture became in the eye of the Nazis hostile to the Volk : impressionism, futurism, cubism, dadaism and notably the German impressionism were hated and dubbed as "subhuman", "alien", "negroid", "half-idiotic" and of course "entartete". At the same time, any attempt to defy the new cultural forms was suppressed via a combination of censorship, exclusion or terror. Painters like Beckmann and Kirchner had no other recourse to flee Germany in the case of Beckmann or commit suicide in the case of Kirchner. Some painter like Otto Dix went as far as saying that "war is the work of the devil" and that "lice, rats, barbed wires, fleas, shells, bombs, corpses, blood, that war is"... It was the exact opposite of Hitler's ideas which tended to promote war and self-sacrifice of the German youth as the supreme goal of life. To combat those dissident ideas, Alfred Rosenberg, the regime self-appointed ideologue, had created in 1928 the Kampfbund für Deutsche Kultur to defend the German essence against cultural decadence (sic). Merged in 1934 with the Labour Front of Dr. Robert Ley, it was renamed the National-Socialist Community of Culture but failed to make any significant achievements. Rosenberg was a confused mind who could not hold any organisational responsibilities. Nevertheless, under his influence, many "certified" authors, like Paul Schultze-Naumburg, summed up the popular belief that modern art was the product of diseased minds. Effectively the conflict between modernity and tradition long predated 1933 in Germany : it reflected the growing sentiment born at the turn of the century and exasperated by WW1 and defeat in 1918 that modern culture symbolized Germany's post-war condition and moral bankruptcy. Adolf Hitler was only one voice among thousands of well-thinking outraged Germans who considered that the artistic revolution was the proof of a racial degeneration, alien subversion or straightforward pornography. So as soon as March 1933, wasting no time Dr Goebbels, instructed the librarian Wolfgang Hermann to draw up a list of Jewish, Marxist and un-German authors : in April and May, Goebbels organized in Berlin, Breslau, Dresden, Frankfurt and Munich auto-da-fes that burnt thousands of books. At the same time, Goebbels, the failed author and journalist, cleansed the press and closed down 1000 titles and imposed a very severe censorship upon the film industry : one censor from the censorship bureau was assigned to every film being made. In 1935, the diminutive clubfooted minister of Propaganda decided he would be the final censor and one year later he banned all artistic criticism : the media were only allowed to print art reports. |
| Franz Marc (here the Schlafende Hirtin (Sleeping Shepherdess), 1912, one of the founders of the German expressionism was killed at Verdun in 1916. He shared with Otto Dix the idea that artists were not on earth to show the beauties of nature but the horrors of war and death as well. |
| Berlin Street scene : Leading painter of the Expressionist group DIE BRÜCKE (The Bridge); formed in Dresden in 1905 by some architecture students ( Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, Fritz Bleylwas) Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) said that "He who renders his inner convictions as he knows he must, and does so with spontaneity and sincerity, is one of us." He could not be further away to the Nazis' ideas and preferred to take his own life in 1938. |
The most stringent control was imposed upon the racial element of Germany's artistic creation. After the establishment of the Chamber of Culture, anyone with Jewish ancestry was debarred from membership of the Chamber : by 1938 2310 Jewish musicians had been expelled together with 1657 Jewish artists, 1303 Jewish authors and 1285 Jewish film or stage directors. Goebbels had decreted in 1933 that Jews could not be interpreters of Germanness, the worst insult he could throw to the face of the hundreds of Jewish people who died for Germany during WW1. However in spite of all his proclamations, Dr Goebbels was not too sure about what was acceptable and what should be rejected upfront : he himself kept a painting by Emil Nolde in his office for a long time before Hitler asked him to get rid of it. Emil Nolde, early supporter of the Nazi party, expressed negative opinions about Jewish artists and considered Expressionism to be a distinctively Germanic style. This view was shared by some other members of the Nazi party, notably Joseph Goebbels. However as Hitler rejected all forms of modernism as "degenerate art", Nolde's work was officially condemned by the regime. Until that time he had been held in great prestige in Germany. Over 1000 of his works were removed from museums. In the end, the strict canons of acceptable art were extremely difficult to define and acceptable culture came to be determined by what was excluded 1-in grounds of race or politics 2- by the subjective principles of the Führer who did not hesitate in the 30s to compare the IIIrd Reich to a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of Art. It was also the view of Stalin who was the unofficial chief censor of admissible art, literature and music. In the 30s however the censorship organization in Russia - the Glavlit- employed 6,000 persons and Stalin in the background was the inspiration that, under Socialist Realism, books should be cleansed of profanities, blasphemy, sex and even the natural functions of the body. If the racial element did not appeared as ominously in the censorship it was nevertheless present : in 1938-39 alone 16,453 titles were withdrawn from circulation and 24 million copies pulped. The censorship even touched words like "whores" that became the W.... word (like the American F... word) before to disappear altogether. The artistic survival in Russia was much more aleatory and capricious than in Germany : Jewish writers like Osip Mandelstam or Isaak Babel, although a friend of Ilya Ehrenburg and having been an ex-collaborator of the Cheka, were arrested and murdered whereas the film director Sergei Eisenstein died in his bed in 1948. Accused of alleged "Esthetism" and low productivity, Babel was arrested at his cottage in Peredelkino, and eventually interrogated at Lubyanka on charges of espionage. After a forced confession, Babel was tried, found guilty, and, on January 27, 1940, shot in Butyrka prison. The background presence of Stalin was much more menacing in fact that the overwhelming presence of the Führer as Stalin loved to play cat and mouse with his victims : Stalin literally destroyed Mikhail Bulgakov who during the 30s worked constantly on projects that were never staged or published. However in 1939 he was commissioned to write a play on Stalin's early political life. Presented to Stalin in July 1939, it was rejected by the Soviet tyrant. After that, Bulgakov declined and died in March 1940. His masterpiece The Master and Margarita, published in 1966 only, was an epitaph for Soviet literary repression. In a sense Nationalist Realism was more challenging : it put emphasis on historical grandeur whereas Socialist Realism contended with the sheer mood of Stalin. In Nazi Germany you had to exalt self-sacrifice, to appreciate the immanence of a glorious death, all virtues that were shared by millions of Germans. On the other hand, Socialist Realism exalted Socialism, a concept that had still to be defined and whose contents changed constantly with the whim of Stalin. National-Socialist culture reflected the wider values and interest of significant sections of the German population. Socialist Realism reflected more the values of one man at the top and of a bunch of apparatchiki who offered to the people the dreams of a materialistic future. In that sense, Moscow was much closer to Hollywood that offered in the 30s to the impoverished American people a glimpse of a bright consumer future. As Stalin said before his death, "Soviet culture is the art of the new world gazing boldly in the fututre" while the new German art had popular roots in the society at which it was directed. (1) Sales of Mein Kampf made Hitler a very rich man. Mein Kampf was compulsory reading for party members but married couple often received it at their wedding. In 1930, sales of MK were 54,000 but jumped to 854,127 in 1933. This year Hitler declared an income of 1.2 million Marks. In the following years, the copyright produced over 1 million Marks but Hitler did not collect all. By 1944, le NSDAP controlled 90% of the publishing industry through a monopoly, Standarte GmbH & Herold Press, that Hitler co-owned personally. The idea of a simple and frugal Hitler with modest tastes is a myth. All writing on this site is Copyright MC unless indicated otherwise. All rights reserved. Sources : this page of "Searching for Hitler" is based on Richard Overy's book : The dictators, Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia, Richard Evans's The coming of the Third Reich and Wikipedia. |
| Author Bertolt Brecht denounced the Nazi art circus and described the IIIrd Reich as a vast stage with Hitler as the Reich first actor. |
| Emil Nolde's Last Supper. Nolde (1867-1956) was one of the first Expressionists, a member of Die Brücke, and is considered to be one of the great watercolor painters of the 20th century. |
| Isaak Babel (1894-1940). At the first congress of the Union of Soviet Writers (1934), Babel noted that he was becoming "the master of a new literary genre, the genre of silence." |
| Max Beckmann (1884-1950) was dubbed a "cultural Bolshevik" by the Nazis and was dismissed from his teaching position at the Art School in Frankfurt. In 1937 more than 500 of his works were confiscated from German museums. |
NATIONALIST REALISM
| Ein Stück europäischer Kulturaufschnitt (A "slice" of european culture) 1922 - In this collage Otto Griebel unites the manifold aspects of big city life in its simultaneity. Officers and soldiers, bourgeoisie and proletariat, sex and crime, hunger and gluttony, inflation and market speculations compose this "slice" of European culture. Many German artists and members of the general public held that type of view after WW1. The rise of the Nazism can largely be attributed to this current of thought that manifested itself in paintings and literature. |
| Autumn Sea VII by Emil Nolde 1910- At some stage in his life, Emil Nolde wanted to study at the Munich Academy under the most celebrated painter in the city, Frans von Stuck, who will be later Hitler favorite painter. He was not accepted, and instead attended two private academies. In the autumn of 1899 he moved to Paris for nine months where he worked on and off at the Academie Julian. |
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| I.A.Wladimirow: "Lenin and Gorki" |
| W.G.Krikhatzkij: "The First Tractor" |
SOCIALIST REALISM
