Third Reich’s Legacy of Second-Rate Art

The art that Adolf Hitler attempted to ban, burn and ridicule out of existence is well known. It’s called modern art, and it lives in museums around the world. Hitler’s most notorious condemnation of artistic free expression, a “Degenerate Art” exhibition, was re-created last year at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and is now drawing crowds in Berlin.

But what became of the art that Hitler promoted to glorify his ideals of Aryan perfection? Was it bombed to a pulp? Taken into custody? Hidden away in cellars or simply forgotten with the passage of time?

All of the above, according to a new book, “Art of the Third Reich” by Peter Adam (Abrams: $39.95). The book is based on a BBC television program, which will air on the Arts & Entertainment network on May 5 at 10 p.m. and repeat on May 10 at 9 a.m.

Adam, a British filmmaker who was born in Germany and lived in Berlin until the end of World War II, remembers Hitler’s brand of art well. The immaculate nudes, adoring mothers, heroic soldiers, happy peasants, official portraits and blissful landscapes--made by, for and about true Germans--were heavily promoted during the National Socialist regime, from 1933 to 1945.

“That was the art we saw at school and in museums,” Adam recalled during a telephone interview from his home in London. “Exhibitions that extolled such themes as motherhood and a pure German nation were tremendously popular,” he said. “The taste of the leadership and the masses was pretty much the same. Art that gives answers and doesn’t raise many questions is always popular.”

Hitler’s message went down particularly smoothly in the provinces, Adam said. “In Berlin, where the populace was better informed about avant-garde art, one understood pretty quickly that the government was influencing the arts. I grew up in a fairly intellectual family, so I was aware that certain books were suddenly not available, certain plays couldn’t be performed, works by Thomas Mann were no longer printed, and that an actress like Marlene Dietrich and a producer like Billy Wilder could just disappear,” he said.

Adam’s memories of the government-prescribed visual art of his youth faded until a few years ago when he began to do research for a film called “Richard Strauss Remembered,” which received the Golden Star Award for best full-length documentary at the 1988 Houston Film Festival. Searching for arts background material, Adam discovered repositories of Nazi artworks in the United States and Germany. That revelation led to “Art of the Third Reich,” first on film and now in a profusely illustrated book.

“After the war it was decided that everything that had to do with Fascism had to be destroyed,” Adam said. “The art (which was found stored in a salt mine as well as in museums) was taken to America, but nobody knew what to do with it.”

The Department of Defense locked up several thousand pieces of Nazi art until 1950, when 1,659 works were returned to Germany. In 1986, an additional 6,255 were sent back. About 800 pieces--those that depict swastikas and inflammatory themes--remain in a storeroom near the Pentagon, Adam said.

“The Germans were not very pleased to get the art back. They didn’t know what to do with it, either,” he said. One batch of the returned artworks is stored at the Army Museum in Ingolstadt. Another sits in a Munich customs office because museums and other owners of the art haven’t reclaimed it, he said.

Under these circumstances, access to the art is extremely limited. “That is dangerous because it creates false mythologies,” Adam said. “Some people think it’s better than it is, and some fear that letting it out will rekindle Fascism.” However, the main reason that Nazi art is not well known is simply that “museum people think it is not very good,” he said.

Adam agrees. The Nazi system “didn’t produce any original art at all. The quality is very second-rate,” he said. But he thinks Nazi art should be displayed “as a witness of the period” in a history museum. “Many people think that totalitarian systems don’t produce art, but the most skillful systems--including Russian and German--use the arts to influence and camouflage,” he said. “The arts are manipulated to give an impression of a civilized nation.”

Persuaded that this fact should be aired and shared, Adam has written about how the National Socialists used painting, sculpture, architecture and crafts to seduce a nation. “I didn’t set out to write an art history book or a coffee-table book,” he said. “This is a social history of art of the Third Reich. I wanted to know what kind of people the painters were and who bought the art.”

Adam met some resistance while doing his research, but “not for sinister reasons,” he said. “Germany today has nothing to do with the past. People born 20 years after Hitler say, ‘We accept that these things happened and we guarantee that they will never happen again,’ but they are tired of constantly having the finger pointed at them.”

These days, Adam thinks the finger should be pointed at a pervasive conservative mood that has raised serious questions about censorship. “I do not want to draw parallels between Nazi Germany and Germany of today, but there is an atmosphere--in Britain and America as well--that demands a reassuring, philistine middle ground,” he said. “I want the book to be a warning to all systems against the stifling of free expression. It points out how quickly a civilized nation can turn into something quite horrific.”