How to crush a nation's soul: The Nazi crusade against "degenerate" art

[marmar]

How to crush a nation's soul: The Nazi crusade against "degenerate" art
The Third Reich sought to cleanse Germany of "decadent" art. Maybe it's just a history lesson with no relevance

By Nicholas Liu
News Fellow
Published June 8, 2025 5:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) In July 1937, artist Marc Chagall discovered that his paintings were enjoying a star turn in a singularly unexpected venue — an exhibition organized by the Nazi Party in Munich, the birthplace of its political fortunes. Chagall’s work often addressed explicitly Jewish themes: In one such painting, a bearded rabbi takes a pinch of snuff in ochre-yellow surroundings, his wry eyes looking in the direction of the viewer but not necessarily at them. How one is meant to interpret this painting, or the artist's intent, is not clear.

Adolf Ziegler, the Nazi functionary charged with overseeing the exhibition, perceived no ambiguity. He provided the supposed answer for "The Rabbi" and every other artwork displayed alongside it. "Look around you at these monstrosities of insanity, insolence, incompetence and degeneration," he declared in his opening address. "I would need several freight trains to clear our galleries of this rubbish ... This will happen soon."

....(snip)....

It featured 650 works confiscated from German museums and judged by a panel to represent "decadence," "weakness of character," "mental disease," "racial impurity" and other hallmarks of Weimar-era modernity. The exhibition included an entire room dedicated to the "Revelation of the Jewish Racial Soul" and featured paintings by and about the ethnic and religious group whom the Nazis largely blamed for Germany's supposed moral and material decline.

....(snip)....

Indeed, Nazi artists spared no effort in ferreting as much inspiration as they could from the pre-modern and mythic German past — the wars of the Nibelungen, the medieval Reich, the Teutonic crusades in the Baltic, the Protestant Reformation — and making extrapolations about the timelessness of German virtue. The Nazis even infringed on cultural prerogatives claimed by Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy, citing Germanophile philosopher Houston Steward Chamberlain’s claim that the German people, by right of Aryan blood passed down from the Greeks and Romans, were destined to revive the “lost ideal” of classical beauty. ............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/06/08/how-to-crush-a-nations-soul-the-nazi-crusade-against-degenerate-art/

[Ocelot II]

1. First thing I thought of when Trump took over the Kennedy Center

and when he issued the EO about "beautiful government architecture" (Albert Speer, can you hear this from your apartment in Hell?).