Degenerate Art - 1993, The Nazis vs. Expressionism (With English Subtitles)

This is a documentary from 1993 by David Grubin (written, produced, and directed) about the art exhibit under the Nazi regime of what they considered to be the most corrupting and corrosive examples of what they called 'Entartete Kunst' or 'Degenerate Art.' The exhibit, which opened in July of 1937, was meant to be laughed at and despised. I ran across it in a class on Modernism and Post-Modernism. The film is not generally available at the time of this writing (other than on VHS). Personally, I could think of no better backdrop for the ideas and pathos of expressionist art than Nazi Germany, shown by a great deal of actual footage (most provided by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art -- they had an exhibit of their own based on the event that same year). The music is similarly striking, including Schoenberg, Hindemith, and Wagner. All of the art shown, by the way, is referenced by name in the end credits, which I include.

[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."