[Opening music]
Voiceover (narrator David McColloch): Here in Berlin in 1933,
the Nazi party came to power.
[Train clattering and whistling]
[Music]
At once they began burning books
and attacking writers and artists,
waging a full scale war on the modern imagination.
[Music]
In 1937, the Nazis held up for ridicule
the works of art they most despised
in the most infamous art show of all time.
Robert Hughes: Three million people went to it.
It was the most successful goddamn blockbuster
in the history of modern exhibition techniques
and 95% of 'em just laughed at it.
(Peter Selz - Art Historian)
- Here were outstanding artists who were highly honored
and then suddenly they were criminals,
and they were Jews, and they were Bolsheviks,
and they were all kinds of things.
Voiceover: In the end many artists and writers would flee.
Others remained to face ruined careers, suicide, and death.
The Nazis called the exhibition Entartete Kunst--
Degenerate Art.
[Music]
Narrator: The Altes Museum in Berlin, 1992.
Painting and sculpture
once part of the Nazi Degenerate Art Exhibition
has been gathered together by an American museum
and put on display here in Germany.
Today for most of us these works of art are no longer threatening
but there was a time when they outraged most people,
shocked and bewildered them.
In the 1930s, the Nazis said they were dangerous
and were bent on their destruction.
[Music]
[Drumming]
[Trumpets, drumming and cheering]
Nazi Germany was dominated by a single man, Adolf Hitler.
He called himself the Fuhrer and promised a new Germany,
peopled by a master race,
cleansed of degenerates.
[Music, crowd noise]
Modern artists, Hitler said, were degenerate
and he vowed to eliminate them.
[Music, crowd noise]
The show he called "Degenerate Art"
was to be more than an exhibition.
It was to be their funeral.
[Music]
Josephine Knapp: I had heard nothing about this Degenerate Art Exhibition.
I stumbled onto it.
It wasn't on my itinerary because--
Voiceover: Josephine Knapp was an American art student
traveling through Germany in 1937.
Knapp: I was walking on the street
and I saw the banner over the door, went inside,
rickety staircase. I went up
and then I almost bumped my head on the knee
of the great wooden Christ by Gies.
They'd hung it on the landing in such a way
that you had to get around it
when originally it had been hung high in the Lubeck Cathedral.
I'd turned off the landing and saw pictures crowded together,
some on burlap, some crooked, badly lighted.
Peter Gunter: It was a claustrophobic affair.
The rooms were relatively small.
Voiceover: Gunter witnessed the Nazi sponsored exhibition
as a 17-year-old.
Gunter: The walls were not hung in the normal way
but were plastered with works of art,
some of the pictures without the frames,
some of the abstract pictures upside down
with graffiti written behind them and above them
and around them.
Voiceover: The graffiti ridiculed the works of art.
"Nature is seen by sick minds," "An insult to German womanhood,"
"Crazy at any price."
Sander Gilderman, Cultural Historian: The common person
walked into the Degenerate Art Show
in a sense as a horror show-- a side show.
This stuff on the wall was the work of madmen.
This was the work of outsiders.
This was the work of people
who were out to destroy German culture.
Voiceover: Kurt Assis was a 16-year-old high school student
when the Degenerate Art Exhibit opened.
His teacher urged his entire class to go and see it.
Gilman: The Nazis took this art seriously.
It scared them and they wanted to control it.
It's very hard today in the United States, at least,
to imagine art having that power.
[Music]
Voiceover: To understand why the Nazis
attacked modern art you have to go back
to the turn of the century and look at
the work of a young Austrian struggling to
paint in the popular style of the day.
His name was Adolf Hitler.
He was rejected by the Academy of Visual Arts in Vienna,
and never did become a recognized artist.
But all his life he would insist that the only true art
was art that tried to imitate the natural world.
Gilman: He painted basically postcards and
you can't fault him for that; that's what sold.
He wants to represent the world the way it "really" is.
Sometimes it's called academic art
but it looks kind of real.
[Jarring instrumental music]
Now what modernism does is to say, "What we're going to
do is paint the world
underneath that external image.
We're not going to paint the skin, we're
going to paint the bones and the sinews.
[Discordant music]
Voiceover: Hitler and Germany's modern artists were
shaped by the same forces of history,
but they were set on a collision course.
The smash up would come when Hitler came
to power.
Bernard Schultze, today one of Germany's important abstract painters, was
an art student when he visited the exhibition.
Voiceover: In the early 1900's
a band of brash and confident young artists
were working at the same time as Hitler.
One of them was Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
He was an early modernist hero rallying young painters
to forge a new way of looking at the world
that came to be called Expressionism.
Peter Selz (Art Historian)
Selz: Kirchner started out as the leader
of the first expressionist group
and these people really tried to renew art.
They wanted to go beyond Impressionism
that's why they were called "Expressionists."
They distorted the figure, they used rather violent color.
Voiceover: Oskar Kokoschka
was another young controversial Expressionist.
Academic critics wrote that his paintings
were "repulsive plague sores and
phantoms of a morbid youth."
But his passionate distortions were never
meant to depict the natural world.
He painted the inner world, psychological landscapes.
Olda Kokoschka (Kokoschka's widow)
Viennese society didn't understand at all.
The reaction to his works was very violent
because I think the Viennese expected something
entirely different from artists.
It was something which was not normal to them
It was mad.
Selz: Nobody had ever painted portraits like he had.
So they called him the 'Mad Kokoschka'.
He has unbelievable psychological insight.
When he was very, very young, coming out of
nowhere, he painted these incredible portraits.
There was a portrait of an old man, and he
was very angry when he saw the painting.
He said it didn't look like him and Kokoschka
said, 'Well, 20 years from now it will'.
And it did.
Voiceover: The Expressionists were young
and passionate idealists at the start
of promising careers.
Adolf Hitler was unknown, painting sentimental
pictures and struggling just to survive.
Gradually he would rise to power and cut off
the great German modernists in their prime.
(Military Music)
World War I was the turning point for Hitler
and the Expressionists.
In 1914, fired by visions of glory,
they joined millions of young Germans
in an outburst of patriotic fervor.
In the Great War, Hitler would discover his destiny
and the Expressionists,
the shock and squalor of trench warfare.
(Whistling and Gunfire) Robert Hughes (Art Critic)
Hughes: The main effect of trench warfare on
these painters was to drive them crazy.
If you spent the best part of a year
sitting in this filthy mud hole
with a couple of corpses as your companions
listening to high explosives going off all the time
and looking at the people on the barbed wire
slowly falling to pieces,
you went crazy
and the more sensitive you were the crazier you went.
-Voiceover: The war shattered Oskar Kokoschka's mind and spirit.
Even before it began he sketched himself with a wound
he predicted he would receive,
a wound that eventually he did suffer,
and Kirchner, too, suffered a profound nervous collapse
from which he never fully recovered.
Hughes: Kirchner, for instance, paints the famous portrait of himself
as an inductee with that hand lopped off.
That startling piercing image of castration really.
There he is in his military uniform rendered impotent,
crippled already although he never was.
People think that pictures like Dix's renderings of the trenches
kind of distorted, exaggerated,
but they are really, practically photography.
Voiceover: 23-year-old Otto Dix had imagined war
as a kind of poetic initiation
until he manned a machine gun in the trenches.
But Adolf Hitler found in war a satisfaction
that redeemed the bitter years of frustration and failure
as an artist.
He was a twice-decorated dispatch runner
recovering from a gas attack when Germany surrendered.
"Hatred grew in me," he later wrote,
"hatred for those responsible for this deed,
"miserable and degenerate criminals
"in the days that followed my own fate became known to me
I resolved to go into politics."
Voiceover: Hitler was a nobody, he was nothing, he wasn't even a gofer.
He was just one of the hundred thousand soldiers without a war.
Voiceover: The war left Germany in chaos.
The fragile democracy reeled with turmoil
and a ruinous inflation.
Hitler abandoned his dream of becoming an artist
and formed a new political party,
the National Socialist Party.
He even sketched the party symbols.
He promised a rebirth of the fatherland,
peopled by a race of pure Aryans.
The vision appealed to one of the Expressionist painters.
Emil Nolde joined the Nazi Party in 1920.
Nolde was a loner bound only to Germany and his art.
(Discordant Music)
Hughes: Nolde exalted the primitive.
He loved the idea of that which was peasant,
that which was instinctive,
that which was harnessed to ancient rhythms
in a way which predated civilization.
Selz: In a way, those religious paintings
are the very essence of Expressionism,
but he was not really a churchgoing religious person.
It went very much deeper,
yet he had these mystical, spiritual experiences
which really shook his whole being.
I really think that in the long run
he painted the most powerful religious painting
of the century.
What Nolde was dreaming of was kind of a new Germany
where his kind of paintings would go into the churches
and exactly the opposite happened.
(Sombre Music)
Voiceover: In 1924 Adolf Hitler emerged from a Bavarian prison
where he had been held for trying
to overthrow the German democracy.
He was 35 years old.
At once he lashed out at those who had lost the war,
who had stabbed the fatherland in the back.
He called them Jews, Communists, and Bolsheviks
and borrowing an idea
popularized by 19th century science,
he called them degenerates.
Gilman: The idea of the degenerate was ubiquitous.
By the end of the 19th century anybody could use the term
and they did, degenerate,
as a sort of general term of opprobrium--
"You degenerate, you."
We can say that today without any problem
but what was understood under it
was a very specific form of deviance from the norm.
In the 19th century being degenerate
and knowing who is a degenerate
was a central aspect of medical science, biological science,
and anthropological science. If you were a
physician you had all sorts of signs and symptoms
that you looked for; the shape of their ears;
size of their nose;
whether they gazed at you in a certain way.
So it meant if you didn't look the right way
you're obviously a deviate from the norm
and therefore you're also obviously mad, you're crazy.
What also happened of course at the same time
was the Avant-Garde saw itself as mad,
saw itself as outside of the norms of accepted action,
statement, and belief.
The Expressionists, for example, without any problem
thought of themselves as the mentally ill
of the world of art.
They evoked that.
They said we are artists who are just like the mentally ill.
We stand outside of all institutions,
we use our own language.
They meant it, of course, metaphorically.
(Shouts and sinister music)
Voiceover: But in the 1920's the Expressionists had no reason
to fear the Nazis,
a tiny faction of misfits marginal at best.
There were fewer than 27,000 Nazis in all of Germany.
(1920's Jazz Music)
In Berlin, modern artists flourished
and their work sold.
A new freedom stirred the air.
Few people cared about Hitler and his fanatic ideas.
Berlin became the capital of the international art world.
Museum directors spent public funds on contemporary art
proclaiming, we cannot have museums that sit and wait.
Perhaps the most celebrated of all the artists
was Max Beckmann.
Beckmann had known success early before the Great War.
At 29 years old he was already praised
as a genuine and noble artist, a true German.
Then his work had little in common with the Expressionists
but he was transformed by the war.
He had volunteered for the ambulance service,
after months in the thick of the fighting he was discharged,
mentally exhausted.
His self-portrait in 1917 "Twisted and Defiant,"
bears witness to his experience.
"My pictures reproach God for his errors," he wrote.
Now in the 1920s Beckmann, at the height of his career,
continued to be haunted by the war.
"We have to lay our hearts bare to the cries of people
who have been lied to."
In 1929 Hitler got the chance he was waiting for.
The Great Depression broke the German democracy's back.
Over five million people were out of work.
Hitler rejoiced,
"Never in my life have I been so well disposed
and inwardly contented as in these days."
Hughes: People just felt the bottom had dropped out of their world.
The impotent rage that was generated by this,
the feeling that you had been betrayed,
all this was extremely ripe ground for the direction
of indignation against certain targets.
Gilman: They were the Jews,
they were the politicals who were not acceptable,
they were the ones who were infecting the bloodstream
of the pure race.
But he also sees the idea
of culture being infected by degenerates.
Modernism in art was a symptom.
There is a sign of what's going wrong with this society,
that's why you don't have a job,
that's why you're standing in a bread line,
that's why you're paying a million marks
for a loaf of bread.
It's because of that kind of sickness within the society
which is symbolized by this kind of art.
That became a very powerful argument.
Voiceover: Casting themselves as defenders of the middle classes,
the Nazis exploited public anxiety and fear
and harvested the protest vote.
They had no real program.
A Hitler lieutenant declared,
"National Socialism is the opposite of what we have now."
With the elections of 1930 and 1932, the Nazis emerged
as the country's largest political party.
(Patriotic Songs)
January 1933, German parliament deadlocks,
Hitler is appointed chancellor
of the very republic he had promised to crush.
The German democracy was near death.
(Cheers and patriotic singing)
The fires of the Nazi torchlight parades
would soon become the fires of the Berlin book burnings.
Voiceover: In power less than five months,
the Nazis fueled a bonfire in Berlin
with books by some of the greatest modern authors
and thinkers.
Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Albert Einstein,
Sigmund Freud.
The war on the modern imagination had begun.
(Ominous Music)
One of the painter's exhibited in the Degenerate Art show
was Titus Felixmuller's father, Conrad.
Voiceover: The Nazis swept through German museums firing directors.
The official term was vacationing,
confiscating works of art,
shutting down the modern wing of the Berlin National Gallery
and the Bauhaus,
famed symbol of modernisms commitment to social change,
was summarily closed forever.
Through it all Emil Nolde remained a loyal party member
attacking other artists calling them half-breeds, bastards,
and mulattos,
and extolling the natural superiority of Nordic peoples.
Hughes: There's no contradiction between
being a fascist and being an artist.
I'm sorry but there isn't.
It happens that not very many good artists have been Nazis.
It's not surprising, actually,
that Nolde was such an early party member
because the Nazis, too, believed in blood and race and soil
and the primitive and the truth of the peasants
and all the rest of it.
What is slightly more surprising
is the vehemence with which the party later turned on him.
Voiceover: Joseph Goebbels was Hitler's cultural deputy.
He headed the Nazi Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda.
Goebbels gained total power over public exhibitions,
films, radio, theater, music, literature, artists,
and the press.
Karla Eckert was working as a reporter
for a Nazi party newspaper
when she was sent to cover the Degenerate Art Exhibit.
Voiceover: All the arts were affected.
Films like this one by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy were banned.
Abstraction was strictly forbidden.
In music atonality, dissonance,
any deviation from classical tradition was not permitted.
Paul Hindemith, Alban Berg, and this piece by Arnold Schoenberg
were labeled degenerate.
All forms of modern music were ridiculed.
(Jazz Music)
Jazz was attacked and viciously parodied
in so-called degenerate music exhibitions.
One former jazz musician remembers
that the Nazis prohibited all mutes
which turned the noble sound of wind and brass instruments
into a Jewish-free masonic howl.
Hitler resolved to create a new culture for the new Reich.
There was no place for the sensitive or troubled soul.
A steady stream of propaganda infiltrated daily life.
The very first Nazi public building project
was to be a museum in Munich.
Hitler called it the House of German Art
and spent hours poring over the most minute details
of its design.
To honor its completion in 1937,
thousands of marchers celebrated in a pageant
called "2,000 Years of German Culture."
It was a vision of history based on a link with an archaic past
that had never existed.
On July 18, 1937, the House of German Art opened its doors
with an exhibition selected by the Fuhrer himself.
Here was Hitler's pantheon honoring what he called
a new and genuine German art
and it was all for sale.
People gathered especially around those paintings
and sculptures that Hitler had bought himself.
Hitler knew what he liked.
It was a celebration of Aryan ideals
of racially pure women and men.
Hughes: The art must be elevated, it must be classical.
I suppose you could say, yeah, it's bulls and Greeks
and naked woman.
It's the vocabulary of classism.
It has to have this character of permanence and nobility.
Now what they got out of it of course
was the most extraordinary kind of art deco kitsch.
Anybody can understand a whacking great surfer
with giant pecs holding up a sword.
Peter Guenther (Witness/Art Historian):
Guenther: The Haus der Deutschen Kunst is a very large building,
high ceilings, wide halls, and marble floors
and those enormous spaces
these muscle-bound huge, big figures,
they're relatively few people in there.
It was really kind of a frightening affair
and then the other thing which also disturbed me
and, I hope you don't mind, but was the 17-year-old one
were the enormous numbers of nudes.
Not only male nudes muscle packed
but also pink females in large numbers.
They were like manikins with no movement
and no expression and no character.
Basically to me that was by far closer to pornography
than anything which the Expressionists did.
The Expressionists' figures were all moving,
they were dancing or swimming or jumping or running
or doing something because they were out in nature.
They had just taken off this bourgeois clothing
and here they were full of joy of life.
As far as women were concerned
if you look at the Nazi depiction
they were really were only two roles,
either they were nude or they were mothers.
And then the other thing if you really want to look
at the two sides of the coin of what is war
look at the Nazis and look at the Expressionist
and you'll find out who is who.
The German Expressionists were all against the war.
There was not an Expressionist who was not against the war.
Now the Nazis considered war
as the greatest accomplishment of mankind.
The honored victory and the all circumstance
and even if you died you died in victory
and therefore you were a martyr.
Hughes: It is perfect hypocritical art.
It's hypocritical about the body,
about politics, every damn thing you can imagine.
What it has on its side is
a certain kind of technical virtuosity,
which is undeniably there
and which people certainly found attractive
and you know I dare say people still do.
One of the things that made the propaganda work
was the spectacle of the other.
It was the ability to hold up a painting of a distorted head
with its mouth going like that
and it's eyes goggling at you all in weird colors
and say if you don't believe in our kind of culture
this is what you're going to get.
Voiceover: Just across the park
the very day after the opening of the House of German Art,
the Nazi war against modernism came to a climax.
16,000 works of art had been snatched
from the great public museums of Germany.
Now 650 were put on exhibition in the Degenerate Art Show.
Along with German artists,
modern masters like Wassily Kandisnsky, Piet Mondrian,
and Paul Klee were put up for ridicule.
Hughes; It had the character of a show trial.
Very different matter just to say,
well, this is just a bunch of rubbish done by Jews and gypsies
and it's culturally hideous and let's get rid of it,
the important thing is that people should agree with you,
that they should see it for themselves with their own eyes
and then conclude that it's rubbish.
German Expressionism was an art which above all celebrated--
Ein Fuhrer,
and that which was inward must be outlawed.
This is the essence of totalitarianism
so therefore the project
was to sweep all these little inward thoughts
out of their secret chambers
and expose them to the light of ridicule, you know,
like spraying Raid on a bunch of cockroaches.
Knapp: I was asking at each picture, "Why?"
because some it seemed difficult to understand
why a particular picture had been taken
and they had an answer for everyone,
either it was a sick mind, it was Bolshevik, it was Jewish.
There were about 10 reasons.
The cows I couldn't understand that one.
Guenther: Franz Marc had once painted a happy cow.
Now that was unacceptable
and shows the Nazis very typically said
bring any farmer up and let him look at that
and he will say that's not a cow.
Hughes: It was a very naively-arranged show.
It wasn't a very systematic show,
I mean, they didn't go around picking artists
specifically through theme.
They didn't go around picking them specifically
because they were Jewish.
They just said, hey, look here's this whole bunch of rubbish
and now let's stick in front of the German public
and let them vote with their eyes.
Guenther: The number of Jewish painters was relatively small.
Now, Chagall was exhibited
although he was A, Russian and B, a Frenchman
but nevertheless he was "a Jew."
Voiceover: 112 artists had been singled out as degenerate,
only six in the show were Jewish.
Gilman: The interesting thing is that Jewish, degenerate,
Bolshevik, insane, become interchangeable categories.
Therefore everybody who paints paintings
that are hung in the Degenerate Art Exhibit are Jewish,
they're also insane, and they're also Bolshevik
no matter what their religious
or political identification really was.
Voiceover: Not even Nazi party membership was protection.
Emil Nolde had now been a Nazi party member for 16 years
but Nazi critics charged that his fascination
with the life of people of a simpler nature and darker color
was an indication of degeneration.
27 of his paintings were hung in the Degenerate Art Show,
more than any other painter.
The great altarpiece, "The Life of Christ,"
was flanked by commentary that read
"Insolent mockery of the Divine."
[ singing in German ]
- At the opening of The House of German Art,
Hitler told an enormous gathering,
"We are going to wage a merciless war of destruction
"against the last remaining elements
"of cultural disintegration.
"All those cliques of chatterers, dilettantes,
and art forgers will be picked up and liquidated."
Max Beckmann heard Hitler's speech on the radio.
He had been perhaps the most honored painter in Germany.
Now he and his wife quickly packed a few things
and left Berlin
never to return.
In Amsterdam, he painted a self-portrait.
He called it "The Liberated Man."
Oscar Kokoschka had fled to Czechoslovakia.
Olda: Because he suddenly saw himself
in front of nothing whatsoever
when everything that he has worked for and done
and developed and was proud of
was suddenly delivered through destruction.
It's a shocking thing to absorb somehow.
What happened was that he got ill.
He had a sort of nervous breakdown
which suddenly produced a physical weakness
and then he decided that painting was the one thing
which he really had to-- had to do.
At that time he was working on a self-portrait.
He suddenly pulled himself together
and it became one of the most important of his works
and it's called "The Portrait of the Degenerate Artist"
that really was an absolutely immediate rejection of pride.
Voiceover: Many artists emigrated
but Otto Dix chose to stay in Germany.
His son Ursus remembers why.
Ursus: He said he could not paint outside Germany
and then he said, "What can I do with two studios full of paintings here?
"I can't just leave that, the
Nazis will come in and confiscate it all."
He felt that his theme was people.
And there he was, dismissed from his job in Berlin,
he had to retire likely to the... furthest most corner
of Germany, to Lake Constance
where he could only paint landscapes.
Voiceover: "I painted landscapes," Dix said,
"that was tantamount to emigration."
(Discordant Music)
The exhibition called Degenerate Art toured Germany and Austria
for more than four years.
It became the most popular exhibition of art
ever assembled.
More than three million people came to see it.
Knapp: Here was the death--the absolute death
of art in Germany.
The wonderful things that had been taking place there,
the great artists, the Bauhaus,
all of these things were being killed.
Voiceover; The Nazis had hung Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's self-portrait
in the Degenerate Art Exhibit.
They renamed it "Soldier with Whore."
Kirchner had been a popular leader
of the Expressionist movement.
Now his work was outlawed.
Deeply agitated, he began to destroy the pieces
he himself owned.
He shattered his woodblocks and burned his paintings.
On June 11, 1938, he committed suicide.
Voiceover: For Emil Nolde, the Nazis seemed to harbor a special vengeance.
Selz: The Nazis really tried to eradicate this man.
They first prohibited him of exhibiting,
then actually put a cop around him
to prohibit him from painting
and he kept pleading with the Nazis.
He said, "Look, but I joined the Nazi party early."
They didn't want to hear any of this.
During that period he couldn't paint oils anymore
because people could smell the turpentine around his studio
so he painted what he called unpainted pictures
which are wonderful small watercolors very tiny
and this was some of his most extraordinary paintings,
of big mystery.
Voiceover: "Only to you my little pictures," Nolde wrote,
"do I sometimes confide my grief, my torment,
my contempt."
Voiceover: In 1938, the Nazis decided to turn the most valuable
of their plundered art into hard currency
and put them up for auction.
Gert Verneberg was responsible for cataloguing
the plundered art
when one day Emil Nolde came asking for help.
Voiceover: The auction was held in Switzerland in June 1939,
Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Gauguin,
along with the German artists were all put on the block.
Profits went directly into Nazi party coffers
but the loss to Germany was irreparable.
The Nazis were selling off the cultural heritage of the nation.
(Rousing Instrumental Music)
Voiceover: Every year Hitler mounted a new exhibition
at The Museum of German Art
and every year Hitler himself was the largest buyer.
He bought 264 works of art in July 1939.
Six weeks later German armies invaded Poland.
[ bombs exploding ] (Dramatic music)
The war would leave Germany in ruins, millions dead,
millions more murdered in the concentration camps.
Years before, the writer Heinrich Heine had warned,
"Where books are burned, people will be burned."
Hughes: One of the most grotesque kind
of unintended results of this-
I remember when I was a kid
seeing the newsreels of the liberation of the camps.
I never forgot that shot of the bulldozer
rolling the mass of starved corpses, the typhoid dead,
the murdered, into this enormous mass grave
and it always comes back to me strangely enough
when I look at the distortion and elongation
in certain German Expressionists' pictures
as though the aesthetic distortions of Expressionism
had been made real and concrete and absolute
on the real suffering human body by the Nazis.
As though this was some kind of climactic work of art
which ended up mimicking what they had attempted to repress.
This is a very superficial way of looking at it, I know,
because it leaves out the actually content
of the suffering,
but for a gentile boy seeing that in Australia
40-some years ago on a grainy movie....
I compare the two images and I can't help thinking of it.
Voiceover: The Degenerate Art Exhibit evokes an era
that continues to haunt us.
Look carefully at these paintings.
In their story lies the best and the worst of the human spirit.
Guenther: I think in order to continue any kind of free expression,
you have to know what happens
when free expression gets stifled,
and that great art can be vilified like this.
It makes you think--it makes you question authority.
I think that is where art is dangerous.
Gilman: It's terribly frightening to look into a work of art
and see those secret parts of yourself
those parts that you don't ever want to talk about or see
revealed to the world
and I think that's what scared the Nazis.
Hughes: The avant-garde had always hoped to be dangerous
that is the thing the guys with the armbands
were paying a kind of supreme compliment
even in the act of repressing it.
They were saying this really matters,
this really counts in the way that people react to one another
in the way in which states are formed.
This is language and it affects daily life.
Voiceover: In 1933, the great German novelist Thomas Mann
fled Hitler's Germany.
12 years later, the war at an end,
he spoke at the Library of Congress.
Mann: "This story should convince us of one thing--
"that there are not two Germanys,
"a good one and a bad one,
"but only one.
"It is quite impossible for one born there
"simply to renounce the wicked, guilty Germany
"and to declare 'I am the good, the noble, the just Germany.'
"It is always in me.
I have been through it all."