The Rape of Europa Read online

  That this humiliation of modern artists was not merely the idea of self-interested underlings was firmly established when Hitler made a surprise visit to the Nationalgalerie to see a show of paintings by Karl Leipold, a protégé of Rudolf Hess. Paul Ortwin Rave, a curator there at the time, described the scene:

  Leipold’s paintings … made apparently no impression on Hitler, so little did even his closest colleague know his taste. But the visitor, once there, went on … looked at the works of the Expressionists, but did not open his mouth, asked no questions, satisfied himself rather with derogatory gestures. He looked out the windows, and commented on the nearby buildings: the Zeughaus, the Wache, the Staatsoper, and only when he saw the Prinzessinnen Palace designed by Schinkel, did he become truly lively, and hold forth to his silent followers.32

  Despite this encounter, and attacks in the SS newspaper Schwarze Korps recommending a cleanup of the Nationalgalerie, Hanfstaengl, the new director, did not seem to get the picture either. All through 1935 he had continued to add works of new, young painters to the collection and to accept gifts from banned artists, though he had published a carefully edited catalogue of the museum’s holdings, which discreetly left out some of the more controversial objects. In this he was still tacitly supported by Rust at the Ministry of Culture, who even consented to the continued exhibition of works by the Jewish Liebermann. Hanfstaengl made sure that his museum was not left out of a citywide “German Art Since Dürer” show. His swan song was an exhibition entitled “Great Germans in the Paintings of Their Time” put on to coincide with the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. All floors of the museum were thrown open, with artists from Corinth to Klee in full view in the New Wing. The attendance of more than ten thousand a week broke all records. But Jesse Owens and modern art were too much for the Nazis. As soon as the tourist flow had slowed, on October 30, Rust, taking advantage of Hanfstaengl’s absence in Italy and following orders from the “highest places,” closed the New Wing of the Nationalgalerie. And a few days later orders were given to close similar installations in all the museums of the Reich.

  Meanwhile, Hitler’s “Temple of Art” in Munich was nearly finished, and would soon need to be filled. In a speech at the Nuremberg rally of 1934, the Chancellor, fresh from eliminating political opposition in his own party by his murders of Ernst Roehm and hundreds of other SA members, had begun to define more precisely the permissible range of art. Cubists, Futurists, Dadaists, and others were

  mistaken, if they think that the creators of the new Reich are stupid enough or insecure enough to be confused, let alone intimidated, by their twaddle. They will see that the commissioning of what may be the greatest cultural and artistic projects of all time will pass them by as if they never existed.33

  The continuing absence of absolute rules would show in the choice of works for the opening exhibitions of the new Temple of Art. Hanfstaengl, despite his resistance to National Socialist theories, was called to Munich in July 1936 to help decide what would hang in the new museum. Hitler wanted a “comprehensive and high-quality display of contemporary art.” The jury, which included several mediocre artists such as Adolf Ziegler, a painter of realistic nudes known in art circles as “the Master of the Pubic Hair,” and Gerda Troost, wife of Paul Troost, the architect who had designed the museum, was by now only too aware of what was not acceptable, but still not sure what was. They decided on an open competition. The only requirement for entry was German nationality or “race.” When Hanfstaengl asked if Nolde and Barlach could submit works, the Bavarian Minister of the Interior replied: “We will only refuse works, not names.” More than fifteen thousand works were sent in; nine hundred were chosen. Hitler himself came to see the selection and in one of his famous rages threw out eighty of these, declaring, “I won’t tolerate unfinished paintings.”

  To improve subsequent shows, held annually for the next seven years, Hitler also threw out most of the jury, and put his chief photographer and art adviser of the moment, Heinrich Hoffmann, in charge. Hoffmann soon became quite efficient at dealing with the thousands of works submitted: he would speed through the galleries in a motorized wheelchair, shouting “Accepted!” or “Rejected!” to scurrying assistants as he passed each picture. “I drove by two thousand pictures only this morning,” he proudly told a colleague. “How else could I get ready in time?”34

  In late November of the same year, Goebbels, further tightening control, forbade all art criticism:

  I granted German critics four years after our assumption of power to adapt themselves to National Socialist principles…. Since the year 1936 has passed without any satisfactory improvement in art criticism, I am herewith forbidding, from this day on, the conduct of art criticism as it has been practiced to date…. The art critic will be replaced by the art editor. … In the future only those art editors will be allowed to report on art who approach the task with an undefiled heart and National Socialist convictions.35

  And on June 30, 1937, he authorized Ziegler, who had survived the jury purge and been further elevated to the presidency of a branch of the Reich Chamber of Culture, to “select and secure for an exhibition, works of German degenerate art since 1910, both painting and sculpture, which are now in collections owned by the German Reich, by provinces and municipalities.”

  Frau Troost, Hitler, Ziegler, and Co., choosing objects for the opening of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, 1937 (Photo by Heinrich Hoffmann)

  Ziegler was not a great artist, but as an exhibition organizer he excelled. Although not given the official orders for seizure of works until June 30, he and his committee were able to “select and secure” hundreds of works, sort them out, and produce a show by July 19—a feat any museum director would admire. The swiftness of the action gave curators little time to react. In Berlin, Ministry of Culture officials hastily telephoned museums in Prussia to warn of the coming purge. To get pictures out of their buildings, curators everywhere rushed to return those on loan from private owners or artists, such as Erich Heckel’s famous Zeltbahn Madonna, which the artist buried in his studio for the duration. Works by Picasso, Braque, Dufy, and Munch belonging to the Friends of the Nationalgalerie were sent by Baron Edmund von der Heydt, president of the association, to the vaults of the Thyssen Bank. These were later sold in a panic by the Friends, after the issuance of a 1938 decree which declared that the government would not pay compensation for confiscated art.36

  On July 7 the exhibition committee arrived, lists in hand, at the Nationalgalerie. Heading it was Ziegler himself, assisted by Count Baudissin, Wolfgang Willrich (the fanatically racist author of a volume entitled The Cleansing of the Temple of Art), and several others of the same ilk. Hanfstaengl refused to receive them, and the job of escort again fell to his assistant Paul Ortwin Rave.

  In this first swoop 68 paintings, 7 sculptures, and 33 graphic works were taken. Similar scenes were repeated in museums all over Germany. At the Kunsthalle in Bremen, a Professor Waldmann, quoting the purgers’ own rules, managed to save 9 Liebermanns by saying they could not be exhibited because the artist was Jewish, and were therefore in storage and could not be removed. From Essen’s Folkwang Museum a staggering total of 1,202 objects left for Munich, the Nazi director, Count Baudissin, not being interested in saving any of these works. Among them was Matisse’s Bathers with a Turtle, soon to be rescued by Joseph Pulitzer. Hamburg lost 1,302. Karlsruhe was honored with 47 works in the planned show. By Friday, July 9, Ziegler and Co. had progressed to Munich, where they appeared in the offices of the director of the Bavarian State Collections demanding to be taken to the Neue Staatsgalerie, the exhibition spaces of the library, and the storage rooms. For the moment the Bavarian painting collections, whose director had close ties to the Führer, lost only 16 works.37

  The culmination of the frantic activities of these juries and committees came in what must be the strangest three days the world of art has ever experienced. On July 17 the Reich Chamber of Culture held its anniversary meeting. With Hitler in the audience
, Goebbels spoke of the “grave and fatal illness of the times, whose abominable symptoms, in the form of insolent and provocatively inferior works, slumber in the cellars and lofts of our museums.” Ziegler, in a flattering echo of recent outbursts by the Führer, added that:

  He who paints our youth as wasted idiots, and the German mother like a Neanderthal woman, has shown undeniable proof of his degenerate character, and he who submits a bad, mediocre or unfinished work to such a perfect House of Art, proves that he has not understood the cultural demands of our time.38

  The next morning, a lovely Sunday that had been declared the “Day of German Art,” the people of Munich were treated to an extraordinary spectacle. A pageant of more than seven thousand people, animals, and machines wound through the streets toward the new museum. The interpretation of “German” was broad: golden Viking ships were mixed in with ancient Germanic costumes. There were priests and seers from the sagas. Charlemagne walked just ahead of Henry the Lion and Frederick Barbarossa. Participants costumed as German artists of the Renaissance were preceded by a troop of armored mercenaries. Enormous scale models of new Nazi edifices were included. The Nazi newspaper Völkische Beobachter enthused:

  In the shadow of their sword, Dürer, Holbein, and Cranach created their works of art for the German people. Are they not brothers, the artists and soldiers?

  Königsplatz, Munich: parade for the Day of German Art, July 18, 1937

  Perhaps to leave no doubt about this point, the last “tableau” was made up of units of the Wehrmacht, SA, Work Corps, Motorized Corps, and SS.

  Here, before the gleaming marble of his first public building, Hitler delivered the coup de grace to his nation’s modern collections. Rave gives us this chilling account:

  People had expected that Hitler, given the happy occasion of the opening of the Haus der Kunst, would strike a note of celebration and give his people recognition and encouragement. In his speech there was little of that. People had become accustomed to invective and threats in the long political campaigns, but this ceremonial speech had a particularly frightening tone. After a long, dull introduction on the contrast between Modern and German ideas … and the difficult academic questions of Will and Knowledge in art, which he would have done better to leave out, Hitler did praise the merits of the new Haus, and his own share in it. Then, suddenly, in power-mad, overblown, scornful words, came the true message. He forbade artists to use anything but the forms seen in nature in their paintings. Should they nevertheless be so stupid or sick as to continue their present ways, the medical establishment and criminal courts should put a stop to the fraud and corruption. If this could not be achieved in one day, no one should deceive himself… sooner or later his hour would strike. With every sentence, Hitler’s manner of speaking became more agitated. He seethed with rage … saliva flowed from his mouth … so that even his own entourage stared at him with horror. Was it a madman who twisted convulsively, waved his hands in the air, and drummed with his fists … ? “We will, from now on, lead an unrelenting war of purification,” he shrieked, “an unrelenting war of extermination, against the last elements which have displaced our Art.”39

  Stunned by this speech, the audience entered the portals of the new museum, already dubbed “Palazzo Kitschi” and “Munich Art Terminal,” to a stultifying display carefully limited to idealized German peasant families, commercial art nudes, and heroic war scenes, including not a few works by jurist Ziegler himself. The newly disciplined art press dutifully reported that “sketchiness had been rigorously eliminated” and that “only those paintings had been accepted that are fully executed examples of their kind, and that give us no cause to ask what the artist might have meant to convey.” Despite the fact that the Führer was portrayed “as a mounted knight clad in silver armor and carrying a fluttering flag” and “the female nude is strongly represented … which emanates delight in the healthy human body,” the show was essentially a flop and attendance was low.40 Sales were even worse and Hitler ended up buying most of the works for the government.

  Quite the reverse was true of the exhibition of “Degenerate Art,” which opened on the third day of this Passion of German Art. Ziegler, who must have been quite exhausted by now, again began the proceedings with a speech echoing Hitler’s words of the previous day, adding a condemnation of museum directors who had expected their countrymen to look at such “examples of decadence.”

  “Degenerate Art” show: typical installation showing “Anarchist-Bolshevist” wall (Inscription: “‘They say it themselves: We act as if we were painters, poets or whatever, but what we are is simply and ecstatically impudent. In our impudence we take the world for a ride and train snobs to lick our boots.’ Manifesto A. Udo, Aktion, 1915. Anarchist-Bolshevist: Lunarscharski, Liebknecht, Luxembourg.”)

  In a run-down building formerly used to store plaster casts were jammed the hundreds of works removed from the museums in the previous weeks. Over the door of one gallery were inscribed the words “They had four years.” One hundred thirteen artists who had not understood the message were represented. Schlemmer and Kirchner illustrated “barbarous methods of representation.” The antimilitary works of Dix and Grosz were called “art as a tool of Marxist propaganda against military service.” Expressionist sculpture was accused of promoting “the systematic eradication of every last trace of racial consciousness” for its depiction of blacks. Another room was “a representative selection from the endless supply of Jewish trash that no words can adequately describe.” Abstract and Constructivist pictures by Metzinger, Baumeister, and Schwitters were simply called “total madness.” The catalogue, a badly printed and confused booklet, was laced with the most vicious quotes from Hitler’s art speeches. The walls were covered with mocking graffiti. To “protect” them, children were not allowed in.

  Before it closed on November 30 more than 2 million people poured through this exhibition, which was often so crowded that the doors had to be temporarily closed. Reactions were mixed. An association of German officers wrote to the Chamber of Art to protest the inclusion of the works of Franz Marc, who had been killed at Verdun and awarded the Iron Cross. Marc’s Tower of Blue Horses was quickly withdrawn, but four other pictures by his hand remained. Although the Hannoverian collector Dr. Bernhard Sprengel was inspired to rush out and buy Nolde watercolors from a Munich gallery, and many art lovers came to see their favorites for the last time, both Hentzen and Rave sadly note that the propaganda had had its effect: the government had successfully exploited the desire of all Germans to forget the grim harshness of the recent past, and the reality of a world in economic and social turmoil. This their modern painters would not let them do. The new reality would be fashioned by the Nazi regime alone.

  A few weeks after these momentous ceremonies, “total purification” began in earnest. Curators continued their delaying tactics, often aided by continuing aesthetic confusion on the part of the purgers:

  In Berlin the commission at first confiscated anything even a little impressionistic…. When Ziegler came the next morning and moderated the guidelines, a large number of pictures were put back. Herr Hofmann found everything Degenerate … especially the landscapes of Slevogt and Corinth…. The Inntal Landscape (1910) by Corinth was … according to Hofmann a typical case of how, in one picture, genius and decadence could be combined…. The landscape brilliant—the sky decadent!41

  Fortunately for this picture, the landscape prevailed, and it hangs in Berlin to this day. (Corinth, whose early works were widely acclaimed as “very German,” posed a problem that was neatly resolved by barring only the works he painted after 1911, the year in which he had suffered a stroke.)

  All over Germany curators presented excuses in their desire to preserve their collections: pictures were in the photography studio or being restored. Corinth’s Trojan Horse was saved when Rave suggested that the Nationalgalerie quickly trade it for a less “degenerate” work still owned by the artist’s widow. Some officials refused any removal order
not in writing. In Berlin’s Print Room the purification committee was presented with Stacks of boxes containing more than 2,000 prints. After pulling out 588, they left, confused and exhausted. That night curator Willy Kurth managed to replace some of his most valuable prints with lesser ones by the same artists from another museum, and thus to preserve many priceless works by Munch, Kirchner, and Picasso.42 Not all museums were so scrupulous: officials in Hamburg turned over some of their forbidden pictures, including a Degas, to eager dealers. But all these subterfuges saved only a tiny fraction of the collections. In the end, the confiscation committees removed nearly 16,000 works of art from German public collections.

  There now arose the problem of what to do with this mass of art. The “Degenerate” show, touring Germany after its Munich opening, only took care of a few hundred works. For the time being the purged objects were taken to Berlin and stored in a warehouse in the Copernicusstrasse. The Bavarian Museums carefully insured their shipment before it left, declaring “substantial market value,” and the Chamber of Culture generously paid the premium.43

  Goering, who had been forming his own collection for some time, was the first to recognize the potential monetary value of this trove. He sent his agent, Sepp Angerer, to put aside paintings which would have value abroad, a foray which netted him pictures by Cézanne, Munch, Marc—and no fewer than four van Goghs. These he used to obtain cash for the Old Masters and tapestries he preferred. Angerer sold Cézanne’s Stone Bridge and two of the van Goghs, Daubigny’s Garden and the Portrait of Dr. Gachet, to the banker Franz Koenigs in Amsterdam for about RM 500,00?.44 Goering, always scrupulous about appearances, paid the Nationalgalerie RM 165,000 for its purged work, a bargain since, according to Rave, Daubigny’s Garden alone was worth more than RM 250,000.