From Modernity to Degeneracy:

On May 10, 1933, according to the Völkisher Beobachter, the official Nazi news publication, Dr. Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945), the Reich Minister of Propaganda excited a "revolution" to correct the "trash and filth" of the Weimar Republic, the German inter-war period, in an effort to "re-establish" an authentic German identity under the authority of German National Socialism. At this event, "thousands upon thousands" of German students congregating around the Propaganda Minister generated a "thunder of 'hail' and cheers" while casting books that the Nazi party considered inappropriate into a bonfire in Opernplatz of Berlin.

The German National Socialist party (1933-1945) flagrantly and publicly criticized the Weimar Republic (1919-1933), the German interwar period, as a hotbed of counter-normative and degenerate values and ideas that threatened the stability of the German polity. The era of the Weimar Republic precipitated remarkable cultural production, social progression, as well as economic cataclysm. Following the turn of the century, German bourgeois culture flourished, and the German expressionist artists, oftentimes, openly contested it in their art. During the rise of the Nazi regime (1919-1933), a drastic shift from Weimar liberalism and progression to National Socialist conservatism and tradition penetrated the German social, political, and most significantly cultural landscapes. Among the many goals of the Nazi party in fabricating a truly German identity was the return to a traditional society; in order to do this, the Nazi government stringently censored modern artistic expression, labeling it as degenerate. Degenerate art, as defined by Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) and the Nazi party, included all artworks that did not reflect National Socialist values and ideals, that portrayed themes considered immoral, or that supported political systems opposed to German National Socialism. According to the Nazis, one of the most threatening themes found in degenerate art was that of the New Woman, as she stood in direct opposition to the idealized German mother. By 1933, many modern artists, celebrated and collected by German institutions in the previous decades, were labeled as degenerate, banned from public exhibition, and some were even forced to destroy their works at public demonstrations. The Nazi party perceived these modern representations, and their explicit social and political critiques, to be morally corrupt and confrontational; they perceived these works of art to be, by their very essence, manifest from an anti-German aesthetic.

This project argues that with the advent of Nazi censorship of modern artistic ideologies, the Nazi regime attempted to obliterate oppositional, modernist experimentations. The Nazis criticized Kirchner’s art, especially works that feature primitivized and sexualized female subjects during his Berlin years (1911-1916), in an effort to revitalize traditional, academic conventions as well as to reinforce traditional social norms under the authority of German National Socialism. 

As an artistic movement, one cannot characterize German expressionism by a singular set of stylistic conventions; instead, artists employed deliberate aesthetic choices to represent their own individual experiences and anxieties. German expressionism, however, does reveal unique social and cultural realities of German society from the early 20th century. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a key German expressionist artist and a founding member of die Brücke (“The Bridge”), a group of expressionist artists from Dresden. Kirchner, among the other German Expressionist artists, explored many of the themes and apprehensions that proliferated throughout the German imagination: the fear for the fate of humanity, the perceived lack of authenticity found within the modern environment, the feeling of nostalgia for a simplistic, agrarian past within an urbanized society, and attempting to reconcile the legacy of the Great War. 

In order to depict such scenes, many members of the Brücke, including Kirchner, studied at the Dresden Ethnographical Collections, a museum of artifacts from German imperial territories, as these non-western, ‘primitive’ treasures demonstrated true “Unverfälscht” (“unadulterated purity”). Throughout Europe, ethnographical museums informed western audiences of non-western, colonial cultures functioning as a didactic tool. Very often, however, these museums did not exhibit colonial artifacts within their proper socio-cultural context, distancing the objects from their true purposes and meanings. Many African and other non-western cultures were, therefore, homogenized within a singular category of the exotic, despite each community having their own distinct set of cultural practices. Although many modern artists studied at ethnographical museums in search of genuine inspiration, “European (mis)conceptions” of non-western cultures guided their understanding. Many modern artists, including the German Expressionists, believed that the arts had been corrupted by “bourgeois culture,” therefore, across the movement, primitive elements began to appear and disseminate. During and in the aftermath of the Great War (1914-1918), Germany went through an extensive period of urbanization, modernization, and industrialization which led to German nostalgia for the ideal, agrarian, and primitive identity of the past- especially the German Expressionist painters, leading them to explore primitive, non-Western influences.

In his 1912 work, Seated Woman with Wood Sculpture (Fig.1), Kirchner seemingly created a double portrait of a European woman and a non-western sculpture. In some ways, this painting is an expressionist take on female portraiture. Unlike traditional portraiture, however, this piece emphasizes emotional expression and psychological intensity rather than realist imitation and illusion, despite following some of the basic conventions of the academic genre (Fig. 2). Stylistically, Kirchner depicted the female form centrally and slightly turned. The compressed pictorial space pushes the female form forward into the foreground, as she competes with the non-western statue for both centrality and space within the compositional frame. 

Although there were various anxieties that manifested within the context of modernity, the New Woman was among the most problematic, as she directly conflicted with conventional gender proprieties. Historically, society celebrated women who fulfilled the role of the traditional, idealized mother, as conservatives revered women for their fecundity rather than their intellectual capacities. Following the turn of the century, however, women began advocating from themselves, asserting agency over their lives, and participating in the public sphere as New Women. In the early 20thcentury, a series of social reforms swept across Europe as women began to step out of the domestic sphere and participate actively in public spaces.

With the exception of the Treaty of Versailles, the Woman's Question "was the most controversial topic in Weimar Germany" - Claudia Koons, Mothers in the Fatherland

 According to Dr. Elsa Hermann, a Jewish feminist writer, in an excerpt from her 1929 book, So ist die neue Frau (This is the New Woman), the New Woman was one who “depart[ed] from the ordained path” especially through the consideration of her life goals. While the woman of yesterday, the traditional woman, focused all of her actions towards the future through her desire to get married, to have children, and to create “foundations of future prosperity.” Contrastingly, the New Woman focused on the contemporaneity of the present. Throughout her life, Hermann struggled to prove that “the representatives of the female sex [were] not second-class persons” and were equal to their male counterparts. The philosophy of the New Woman, in many ways, articulated, self-determining, assertive, and even aggressive women, who had autonomy within German society. 

Many women of the Weimar era had lives separate from the domestic sphere, and one of the key anxieties that manifested within the Nazi party was the perceived moral degradation of the family based on women who stepped out of the feminine sphere, out of domestic spaces, and into the public workplace. Economically, the New Woman worked as a secretary, florist, or factory worker- all of which were considered feminine professions for the time; the New Woman, however, still confronted adversity in male dominated professional environments such as law and medicine. Although women struggled to gain access to these stereotypically masculine enterprises, they were not entering the workplace to usurp authority from their male counterparts. Instead, according to Hermann, they were trying to achieve “economic independence…through gainful employment.” Despite the prominence of the New Woman in Germany, the transition into the work force was not free from social stigmatization. According to Weimar social conventions from 1919, it was still customary for women to leave their positions following marriage, as the institution of marriage persisted as the pinnacle of feminine accomplishment. By 1925, thirty six percent, more than one in four workers, of the German workforce was composed of women. In addition to the gendered struggle that occurred within the workplace, men and women alike were forced to turn to prostitution as a means for self-preservation amidst the tumultuous economic conditions of the Weimar Republic, as the Treaty of Versailles following the Great War subjected Germany to outrageous reparations and rapid inflation of the German mark. 

Following the turn of the century, prostitution scenes proliferated throughout the European cultural landscape, as artists such as: Kirchner, Otto Dix (1891-1969), and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) employed these overtly sexualized and seductive themes in their works. For example, Kirchner’s Street, Berlin (Fig. 4) depicts two women who existed within the margins of a society in which everything was for sale- including their bodies which Kirchner rendered in vivid and garish non-representational colors. This work, among others, contributed to Kircher’s status as a degenerate artist who portrayed provocative and inappropriate themes. The prostitutes depicted in Street, Berlin exercised complete agency and authority over their sexual nature, as they strolled down the street while men gazed at them shrewdly. In many ways, the representation of the prostitute in Kirchner’s oeuvre represents an “emblem of commodified sexuality,” which is commodified for the consumption of the wealthy men that frame the composition as well as create the urban environment that Kirchner depicted.

The Nazi regime suppressed and censored works of art that they perceived to be a “threat to traditional values and institutions.” Therefore, the New Woman who exercised liberal agency over her sexuality during the Weimar Era, was a direct threat to Nazi values, most specifically to the Nazi Mother and was perceived to contribute to social and moral “decay.” Consequently, one of the first desired social programs of the Nazi regime was to regulate the New Woman’s sexual, social, economic, and political agency and to preferably return her to the domestic sphere, where she functioned as the beacon of moral stability- revitalizing the traditional, separatist gender framework which emphasized “Kinder, Küche, [and] Kirche” as the zenith of feminine accomplishment. According to the Frauen-Warte (The Women’s Viewpoint), a Nazi sponsored biweekly illustrated women’s magazine, in response to the activation and perceived degradation of the New Woman in the public sphere, Erna Grünter wrote that, “Everything is in turmoil, [and] something new is being born. Display the virtues of simplicity, of truth, of loyalty. Form the image of the German woman!” Consequently, based on Grünter’s perspective, one cannot extricate the identity of the German woman from traditional gender propriety.

For the National Socialists, the visual arts functioned as a means of propaganda to buttress their social, cultural, and even political agendas. It was common in the Nazi aesthetic for women to be portrayed as mothers, against a landscape that symbolized the fatherland, and with a child that represents the “future of the Aryan race.” To reinforce this message, the Nazi Regime created propaganda works that proliferated throughout Germany and linked the value of true womanhood inextricably to motherhood. The Nazi Office of Racial Policy published the ideal, Aryan mother and her child on the cover of Neues Volk (New People), a monthly illustrated magazine. This portrayal of mother and child conformed to the biological determinist framework which defined National Socialist social expectations. As the Nazi mother performed her biological function as a woman by nurturing and nursing her child, she provided intellectual and moral nourishment and stability to her family. For German women in Nazi era, it was a woman’s responsibility to instill an ideological foundation in their children who would then flourish under Nazi authority.

Following the troubling decline in the population following the Great War and the advent of contraception and abortion procedures, the Nazi regime began to reward women for their fecundity. The Nazi Government awarded the “Ehrenkreuz der Deutschen Mutter,” (“Cross of Honor of the German Mother”) to women who supported the Reich by functioning in traditional, motherly roles. The Nazis bestowed this honor on women who more have than four children, because by mothering large numbers of children they were, in fact, serving the nation. In another effort to encourage multiple births, Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945), a leading member of the German National Socialist Party, founded the Lebensborn Eingetragener Verein (Registered Society of the Well of Life) (1935-1945), a secret project that promoted the propagation and augmentation of the Aryan race that was in decline. The Lebensborn program encouraged racially pure, oftentimes, unmarried women to secretively give birth to Aryan children with SS officers and officials. Following the delivery of the baby, the Nazi party would take those children to Lebensborn nurseries and raise them in the Nazi ideology free from the influence of their mothers, a procedure that contradicts the socially constructed value of the Nazi Mother.

When one thinks of German artistic censorship, the Nazi regime is often the first example to come to mind. German censorship of artistic production began, however, under Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859-1941), when he ignored the Imperial Press Law of 1874 which permitted freedom of the press. As a law rather than a constitutional amendment, the Emperor possessed the authority to make such judicial decisions. Moreover, the German courts had the ability to “confiscate and with court approval [to] destroy” any materials which broke laws against “obscenity, blasphemy, or lèse majesté.” Therefore, the Imperial Code, in essence, permitted the German government to censor works at will due to the undeniable sentience of what is and is not appropriate. As a result, the Wilhelmine government (1888-1918) began actively censoring works by the Brücke artists, specifically that of Kirchner’s experiences in the streets of Berlin, as they were overtly sexual in nature and considered inappropriate to be on public display.

Similarly to Wilhelmina censorship, German leadership, under the influence of National Socialist politics, began censoring modern artistic expressions in 1929, four years before Hitler’s appointment to Chancellor. For instance, in 1919, several of van Gogh’s works were not acquired by the state and in 1930, the director of the Städtisches Museum was even dismissed from his post because he was a public supporter of Modernism.[1] The Nazis believed that during the Weimar Era, Jews and modern artists had “intentionally” deceived the German people into embracing a non-German, “nontraditional aesthetic.”[2] Considering non-western elements and influences were characteristic of modern aesthetic expressions, many modern artists, especially members of the Brücke, engaged with non-western objects and cultures. These non-western components, however, functioned both a source of artistic innovation for the artist as well as a damning critique by the National Socialist Party.[3]

On July 19, 1937, the first of the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibitions took place in Munich, attracting over two million spectators. The Nazis confiscated over 650 modern artworks, including thirty-six works by Kirchner, from European museums and private collections to display in major urban centers across Germany. In this exhibition, curators hung many works of art upside down in order to bolster the perceived lack of rationality and the disorder of the modernist aesthetic. These curatorial decisions expressed the anxious and disorienting experience desired by Nazi officials, as they wanted the exhibition to serve an educational function, to persuade the public that modern art is oppositional to traditional German values. To reinforce this message, the Nazi party provided didactic information as to why each of the works included was inappropriate. Room Three of the Munich exhibition was filled with works from various avant-garde movements, including Brücke expressionism. Among the inscriptions painted onto the walls, in Room Three, the Nazi’s claimed that, “The Jewish longing for the wilderness reveals itself- in Germany, the negro becomes the racial ideal of degenerate art,” connecting the perception of degeneracy to people of African descent and connecting non-western influences to modernism all of which threatened Aryan supremacy. Consequently, artistic expressions that privileged or even included non-western elements were vulnerable to National Socialist scrutiny. 

In the Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich, the Nazi regime displayed Kirchner’s Street, Berlin in Room Four of the exhibition. Interestingly, although the subject of this work conflicts with National Socialist ideology as well as their social program, the curators do not engage with the representation. For example, in the exhibition catalogue, the Nazis castigated artists who portray prostitutes, like Kirchner, as “morally depraved.” Interestingly, however, the labels for Kirchner’s Street, Berlin, which curators designed to provoke public audiences and promote antagonism for modernist expressions, noted that the painting was “purchased with the taxes of working German people” by the National Gallery in 1920 for 12,000 German marks. In Room Four, the Nazi’s created a “calmer and less emotive” space than in the catalogue, speeches, and other rooms in the exhibition. As a result, the emphasis was on logic and economics rather than subjectivity and sexuality. 

In contrast to the modernist works that the Propaganda Ministry displayed in the 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition, the National Socialist regime simultaneously held the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition) in the same city which featured artworks that the Nazi regime considered to be the zenith of aesthetic achievement. The curators of this exhibition selected representational, illusionistic, and traditional works for the galleries. For example, the selection committee included the work of Adolf Ziegler (1892-1959), one of Hitler’s favorite painters, the president of the Reich Chamber for the Visual arts, and the overseer of the purging of degenerate art, in the exhibition. It is important to note, however, that Ziegler did not always employ a traditional, German aesthetic. In fact, exiled museum director, Alois Schardt (1889-1955) noted that Ziegler was “one of the most extreme modern painters, but one of inferior rank.” Despite his radical aesthetic training in Weimar Germany, after becoming associated with Hitler in 1925, Zeigler abandoned his modernist style to “cultivate the Führer’s favor.” Consequently, Zeigler exchanged his artistic passion and style for professional success within an increasingly delicate art world and volatile society.

In 1937, The National Socialist party asked Kirchner to resign from the Prussian Academy. In his letter from July 12, 1937, Kirchner advocated for his Expressionism by claiming that it was a “strong new real German art” and “patiently await[ed]” the acceptance that he very much desired. Unlike Zeigler, however, Kirchner did not change his artistic style and continued to portray provocative themes in his works; in this way, he did not receive the same acceptance as his contemporary. Due to Kirchner’s confrontational and jarring aesthetic and primitivized visual vocabulary, in 1938, the Nazi regime declared Kirchner to be among the degenerate artists whose works they castigated for “materialism… decadence and moral decency… [and] political treason.”  Despite Nazi destruction of modern artistic production, Kirchner proved to be the primary antagonist of his own oeuvre, as he desecrated and burned many of his works before his anxieties climaxed in his suicide on June 15, 1938. Although the National Socialist Party heavily scrutinized works of German Expressionism, specifically that of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, his works continue to live on in the art historical canon as more than just modernist degeneracies.