Page 30 - Studio International - April 1970

early in 1929 Rosenberg formally established
4&5
Views of the Munich 1937 exhibition of 'Degenerate
Art', showing works by Barlach and Belling.
6
Page from the catalogue of the 'Degenerate Art'
exhibition, showing works by Meidner, Freundlich,
Haizmann, Grosz and Chagall.
7&8
Schulze-Naumburg's comparisons of modern art to
physical deformity (Kunst und Rasse, 1928).
9 most notably Alexander von Senger.3 The
Comparisons of 'German' (Damberger) and 'degen-
erate' (Schmidt-Rottluff) art (Dresler, Deutsche Kunst
und entartete Kunst, 1938).
his Kampf bund für deutsche Kultur,2 wishing
to formulate a distinctive party policy for the
arts, and this remained the major instrument
of Nazi cultural propaganda until the party
gained governmental power in 1933, when
its legitimacy was challenged by Goebbels.
Rosenberg had studied architecture, painted
landscape, informed himself in art history and
was familiar with the general intellectual
currents of his time. The great prominence
he gave to art in his Der Mythus des zwanzigsten
Jahrhunderts (The Myth of the Twentieth Century,
1930) typifies what was to become current in
30s' totalitarian theory: art as a demonstra-
tion of an enveloping spiritual mythology and
art as an instrument of social integration.
Importantly, Rosenberg inherited from the
conservative criticism of Weimar art (which
had existed from its very beginnings) the
notion that modern art was un-German, both
politically and racially—an overstatement of
the liberal and permissive connotations of
Weimar and its art. The political charge had
been closely related to the atmosphere of the
early revolutionary years and had become a
significant part of the Weimar Bauhaus con-
troversy, but had subsided by mid-decade,
only to find new protagonists around 1930,
racial question had deeper roots, but had
developed consistently throughout the 20s in
the writings of people like Hans Guenther and
Paul Schulze-Naumburg, and the ascendency
in the Nazi hierachy of such figures or their
disciples cemented the condemnation of
modern art as 'degenerate'. Whereas before
the Völkischer Beobachter, as a political journal,
had concentrated its attacks on modern art on
the political front, looking mainly for signs of
`cultural bolshevism' while keeping up pres-
sure against 'foreign' elements (the 'nigger-
culture' of jazz, for example), the influence
of the racialist writers' assertions that the
proletarian social policy of Weimar was only
part of a broader cultural disintegration
caused as much by the whole Gesellschaft
make-up of the republic effected something
of a volte-face. Henceforward the rationalized,
capitalist and technologically obsessed brand
of modernism was no longer viewed as a
possible index of a national power structure,
but as a threat to 'German-ness' and to Kultur.
Schulze-Naumburg's hereditary determinism
and Walter Darré's ruralism began to weld
together a policy of individualism, folk-
nationalism, anti-industrialism and spiritu-
ality. 5 The targets of attack were therefore
significantly extended to the neue Sachlichkeit
architecture and design.6 Such attacks had
come from conservative intellectuals since
this style had emerged but now reached a new
pitch. In 1928, Schulze-Naumburg formed a
Block to oppose the Ring of Gropius and his
followers; by 1933 the criticism of 'the new
architecture' had supplanted attacks on all
other arts in the pages of the Völkischer