The Degenerate Art Show

I am, by nature, mostly a contrarian. I cannot remember a time when I didn’t feel an impulse to zig against the zags, or to bob against the weaves. I suppose that accounts for my political affiliation as an independent, and why I continue to find most political parties absurd on most levels. I was, recently, accused of being a “conservative”. It’s a throwaway label, and usually a cheap way to bracket a person’s point of view before firing for effect. I nurture conservative leanings, certainly, but in today’s fluid world that tends to make me something more of a classical liberal, if we have to brand it. And anyway, the fact of my contrary nature is hard to square with nearly every one of my various career choices: cowboy, teacher, Marine, cop, each of which has required varying levels of creativity, conformity, and obedience. My career as a writer requires conformity to some degree, but never obedience, and in the main I am in control of what I say and how I want to say it. It is a kind of bliss, which Joseph Campbell, in his enormous wisdom, encouraged us to follow.

The Marine Corps was naturally the most stringent employer: instant and willing obedience to orders is the standard, which I managed fairly well because I was—and remain—in love with the institutional traditions and its singular mission to locate, close with, and destroy the enemy. But even teaching, which allowed the greatest latitude for my manias, often provoked my inner Younger Bear, and so I found myself frequently on maneuvers against the robotic administration, or dropping a lecture on Wendell Berry to teach my students how to build field-expedient claymores–mostly as a kind of anti-academic protest and also as an instructional aid on building narrative structures. I had a friend come into class to build a chair–he built incredible chairs–for the same reason, and the students loved it.

 

Police work was its own animal, and I was still working that job when the tide of wokeness suddenly withdrew far out to sea—which is what always happens before a tsunami rolls back on the beach and sends the beachchairs, mini-vans, and cabana boys bodysurfing through parking garages. Thankfully, I retired and missed some of the bigger reeducation camps that followed, such as the Maoist idiocy of “implicit bias” training, but I was around as a test subject for “Cultural Sensitivity” brow-beatings–including an entire classroom week of “Brown Good, Black Good, White Bad” during the police academy. That was topped by a field trip to the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles, which was meant to impress upon us white folk, I think, that white cops are only a step or two away from becoming brainless Gestapo agents. A significant number of the cops in my shop had graduate degrees, and enjoyed a wide variety of cultural backgrounds and political inclinations—none of which included genocide or world domination.

The point of the trip wasn’t to proclaim that we were Nazis, only that we could become Nazis, which is also true of insurance salesmen, newspapermen, and baristas. Nevertheless, I was relieved at the end of our tour when we sat with holocaust survivors who shared their personal histories and who seemed quite interested in, and grateful for, the honorable profession we were pursuing here in the United States–with its judicial remedies and constitution and so forth.

And so it was to my great delight that I was reminded recently, while reading in William Shirer’s incredible memoir The Nightmare Years, of the now mostly forgotten Degenerate Art Show, which took place in Munich in 1937. As a student of art history (which has rewarded me many times over) I was familiar with the event, but it had faded into the deep background.

Shirer, if you are unfamiliar, was a foreign correspondent with an excellent portfolio (India, Afghanistan, Mesopotamia etc.) assigned to the German beat after a year in Spain, and found himself in a unique position to observe the ascension of Hitler to absolute power. He was present at the early Nuremburg rallies, attended many roundtable media events and formed impressions of the Nazi hosts who composed much of Hitler’s inner circle: Rosenburg (crackbrained), Hess (dimwitted), von Ribbentrop (vain, pompous, incredibly stupid) Göring (affable and even charming, but utterly ruthless), von Schirach (a dreadfully empty mind), Himmler (does not look like the head of a Cheka should), Sauckel (piggish, brutal, stupid), Eichman (a cipher), Goebbels (swarthy, dwarfish, complicated, neurotic), Ley (a staggering drunkard), Bormann (molelike), and so on. At one such roundtable Göring even offered to sell Shirer some of the paintings he and others were pilfering out of museums—the pride of European arts–and a collection that eventually included some 6,755 paintings found in the salt mines of Alt-Ausee at the end of the war.

Shirer’s initial assessments were correct, of course, as he was living and working in the Reich, and his frustration only mounted as visitor after visitor, including Charles Lindbergh, fell under the Nazi spell while making brief tours and swallowing whole-hog the Potemkin village that was shown to them.

Adolf Hitler, of course, was rejected from the Vienna Academy because he was not an artist, but nevertheless maintained a strident belief in his artistic genius even until his final hours in the Führer Bunker. “I was rather amused and intrigued at hearing the Führer’s idiotic pronouncements on art,” Shirer writes, “But later, as my experience of life in the Third Reich lengthened and deepened, I became aware that there was something frightening about them, because they had become the basis on which he meant to become the arbiter of artistic taste in Germany. It was he, it became apparent, who would decide what art was good for Germans and what was bad.”

There are echoes of that sentiment in contemporary American circles, where the Gauleiters of our mostly bad newspapers, social media, and various entertainment corporations—to say nothing of politicians of every stripe–seem to have decided they know what art–on top of everything else–is good for American minds. I have encountered a small sampling of this while trying to market what I think is a decent film. But, as I’ve been told, because it lacks an edgy “social justice” message–which means it is not championing the anointed victims of the day–or valorizing victimhood for political gain–that process has been frustrating.

At any rate, Hitler wanted art done his way even if, as Shirer has it: “…his appreciation of art was narrow and vulgar, and indeed, as with most of his ideas of politics and history, half-baked and irrational. And he insisted on inflicting it on the German people.” To that end the Führer had directed the building of a new museum to showcase Nazi art. Shirer: “The new museum, a vast pseudo classic edifice in shining white marble which the Führer had helped his favorite architect, Ludwig Troost, to design and which he described as ‘unparalleled and inimitable’ in its architecture was in truth a monstrosity–the good citizens of Munich were already calling it the Weisswurstpalast (the Sausage Palace). Inside were hung some nine hundred works, selected from fifteen thousand submitted, of the worst junk I had ever seen.” Shirer, who had been roommates with the classical guitarist Andrés Segovia in Spain, and mingled regularly with the excellent artists of his day, was a qualified eye–even if experience as a critic wasn’t a pre-requisite to despise Nazi “art”.

At the grand opening of the Sausage Palace, Hitler clarified the Nazi line: “Works of art that cannot be understood, but need a swollen set of instructions to prove their right to exist and find their way to neurotics who are receptive to such stupid or insolent nonsense will no longer reach the German nation. Let no one have illusions! National Socialism has set out to purge the German Reich and our people of all those influences threatening its existence and character…With the opening of this exhibition has come the end of artistic lunacy and with it the artistic pollution of our people.” 

It is true that there is art I do not appreciate, that doesn’t speak to me, or that I find just plain bad on some level. It’s also true that in some forms art can become a kind of pollution–Nazi art being a primary example. But I reject political purges in most cases and while gangster rap probably hasn’t done much to expand the minds and opportunities of Rolling 60s Crips in urban Los Angeles, it remains their own business. Saying the first half out-loud earns one the conservative badge–usually meant as a kind of pejorative–saying the second half out-loud does something else entirely.

One supposes Herr Hitler was also not a fan of stand-up comedy, even as it remains a vital cultural practice, and even as it runs into trouble in our own age whenever the dour formations of cultural regulators get their hackles raised by the perfectly insensitive nature of actual jokes.

But there was an alternative, which is both amusing and instructive. Elsewhere in Munich, in a “ramshackle second story gallery in the Hofgarten arcades where you reached by climbing a narrow, rickety stairway, was an exhibition of ‘Degenerate Art.’ ” The show had been organized by Goebbels, at the request of Hitler, to demonstrate to the people what horrors they were being rescued from. Inside was a collection of paintings by Kokoschka, Chagall, George Grosz, Kollwitz, Beckmann, and many others. “The day I visited it,” Shirer writes, “it was jammed, with a long line of people forming down the creaking stairs and out into the street. In fact, the crowds besieging the Exhibition of Degenerate Art became so great that Dr. Goebbels, incensed and embarrassed and fearing the Führer’s wrath, soon closed it.” In its brief lifetime the Degenerate Art show drew over two million visitors, far outnumbering the six hundred thousand who ever visited the “House of German Art”. Berthold Hinz wrote that the Degenerate Exhibition was “probably the most popular art event (in Germany) of all time.”

That’s instructive, and encouraging, for what it seems to indicate about human nature, even under the bizarre machinations of an absolute dictatorship.

1937 was a bad year–and they would get much, much worse. But the takeaways keep rolling in, even now, 85 years after the ribbon cutting at the Sausage Palace. One of those lessons is that such a thing could happen again, if we aren’t careful about where we pledge our allegiances. In some ways it is happening already, where media platforms routinely censor points of view they do not like, or in more subtle situations where self-censorship has become endemic out of fear. My contention is that if the worst happens it will happen quickly, much faster than the long, slow collapse we tend to assume. We are never more than 72 hours away from total calamity, and no political party in America is without its absurdities, or its potentially dangerous leanings. And so I would encourage you to keep zigging when the crowd zags, bobbing when it weaves, and to occasionally mount the rickety stairs for a look at the Exhibition of Degenerate Art.

I’d recommend getting there early, and often, and enjoying every last piece on display–before they close the whole thing down.