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David B. Dennis, American Historical Review, June 1997 Jonathan
Petropoulos. Art as Politics in
the Third Reich. Chapel Hill & London, The University of North
Carolina Press, 1996. Pp. xviii + 439. Cloth $45.00.
ISBN 0-8078-2240-x.
Petropoulos treats the history of Nazi art plundering
in two stages. In his first
part, he details how each of the Nazi principals, including Goebbels,
Rosenberg, Göring, Himmler, Ley, Rust, Schirach, Speer, and Hitler competed
to control party and state policies toward the arts.
Like Petropoulos, one is struck by the “inordinate amount of
time and energy” (5) they devoted to administering museums, academies,
art journals, exhibitions, and cultural exchanges at the same time as
managing the rest of the “Nazi revolution” and pushing their nation
into war. In his close reading
of many new-found sources, Petropoulos reveals much that justifies Martin
Broszat’s theses about the competitive environment within the top Nazi
clique. No area of cultural
authority remained uncontested as the subleaders struggled to earn their
Führer’s favor. In most cases
the intention was not to realize a vision of German or National Socialist
beauty, though all of these parvenus pretended cultural expertise. Many of the works they deemed unacceptable
were destroyed, but their main aim was to position themselves to be
best able to steal from the victims of Nazi race and foreign policies. In perhaps the most extreme and heinous case
of conspicuous consumption on record, these men (especially Hitler)
undertook a ferocious campaign of pillaging on a scale surely greater
than any in European history. In the second part of his book, Petropoulos aligns
chapters on the “collecting” habits of each of the major plunderers,
particularly in the occupied territories.
Supposedly devoted to establishing a new German community based
on subsuming individual under state identity, we learn here that the
thieves were motivated less by aesthetic, national, or even racist ideals
than by desire for personal gain. Behind
facades of ascetic commitment, greed, corruption, and a taste for luxury
were common to all the leaders of the “new order,” even the supposedly
respectable “artist,” Albert Speer.
Petropoulos is right when he describes this as a revival of “gift
and pillage” traditions: in the case of Himmler this was a way to live
out feudal fantasies. More broadly, Petropoulos holds, the amassing and exchanging of
stolen treasure was a process “laden with symbolic meaning” (15) by
which the perpetrators demonstrated personal authority (vis à vis victims
and other perpetrators), marked power alliances
(by giving gifts to friends and enemies), and competed for the affection
of the Führer (by providing him signs of fealty). Petropoulos closes by suggesting that the hoarding
was also meant to signify that these men constituted a new elite destined
to replace the old German aristocracy, and thus foreshadowed the class
war launched after 20 July 1944. One should be familiar with the literature on National
Socialist culture before reading this book, since Petropoulos offers
very little about the theories behind the policies: he often attempts
to explain concepts such as “völkisch aesthetics,” “Nazi art,” and “degenerate
art” in parenthesis. Moreover, he doesn’t discuss earlier phases
of the Nazi movement as regards art.
Though his story begins
in the thirties, it is wrong to state that attacks on modern art were
not common in the main party newspaper until that time.
A tradition of anti-modernism among people of all political persuasions
led up to the Nazi imposition of conservative aesthetic principles,
and this partly explains the enthusiasm, or at best indifference, with
which these measures were received by the public at large.
Besides leaving the artworks out of sight, Petropoulos also omits
stories about the persons victimized by these “policies.” While compassionate about the suffering they caused, he does not
communicate how art seizures added to the pain of people who lost everything. This said, Petropoulos has developed important
insights into the motives of the perpetrators, and thereby clarified
the context that surrounded specific actions described in Lynn Nicholas’
The Rape of Europa (1994). By mentioning these omissions, I do not mean to criticize
Petropoulos’ work, but to specify its content. Not about art as expression, but art as commodity,
this book might have carried a different title: perhaps “Artworks as
Booty Inside and Outside the Third Reich”?
If not a compelling read for someone interested in aesthetics
and ideology, it is an excellent source of information about art theft
and destruction by the self-styled cultural elite of the Third Reich:
men who obviously weren’t talented enough to create anything on their
own. David B. Dennis |