Culture War Veterans:
German Expressionist Prints as Historical Artifacts

Mordecai Scheckter

 

The German Expressionist prints of Walking a Tightrope hold a unique
historical significance in addition to their immediately evident value
as aesthetic pieces. It is often only when placed within a continuum of
art history, compared to preceding and following endeavors, that the art
of many movements and periods, even other modern ones, reveal a
significance as unique or groundbreaking. But these Expressionist prints
possess an additional type of historical significance: they are visual
artifacts. They are objects once targeted by a political regime that
sought to eliminate them, and these undergone acts of destruction and
salvation give them a particular historical importance.

But before exploring their encounters with the National
Socialist seizure of power and subsequent cultural attack on the modern
and avant-garde, it is instructive first to describe how the printmaking
process itself gives Expressionist prints a certain importance as
objects. Although they are produced in quantity, printed impressions of
a block or plate can vary. Some impressions, usually earlier ones, are
sharper or bolder, an effect especially apparent in drypoint engravings
because the burrs, created by cutting into the metal, wear down during
the printing process.1 In these cases, because the plate changes over
time, each print becomes unique, despite being one of many. Other
variables such as edition, paper type, and production size distinguish
each print. For example, Franz Marc's Tiger (Tiger, Fig. 10) is one of
approximately ten proofs, while Max Beckmann's untitled print from Die
Fürstin (The Duchess, Fig. 22) is one of a total of five hundred, though
it is a part of a preferred edition of ninety-five prints on velin
(Hofmaier 115 B). Nevertheless, one could consider the Marc a rarer,
more unique object.

Sometimes, though, paying such close attention to each print as
an object can become problematic and obsessive. According to the
catalogue raisonné of Beckmann's prints, the publisher of the artist's
Gesichter (Faces, e.g., Fig. 30, Cat. 8-10) portfolio, the Marées
Gesellschaft (Marées Society), claimed to have destroyed all plates from
the series while in fact "all nineteen plates, some of which [were]
variously spoiled by corrosion, still exist" (Hofmaier 108). The
catalogue raisonné also notes that this same suspicious discrepancy
occurred again with a later Beckmann portfolio, Jahrmarkt (The Annual
Fair, e.g., Figs. 27-29), suggesting a desire to augment the apparent
uniqueness and resulting potential profit of each print by presenting it
as a no-longer reproducible item.

In other cases, printed objects become independently significant
when artists change the image between printings. Following the catalogue
raisonné of Erich Heckel's prints, this occurs in two of the current
exhibit's prints by the artist. The first, the 1916 woodcut Ein Wärter
(A Male Nurse, Fig. 23), has a cut over the subject's right eyebrow in
the exhibited second state but not in the first. The artist's lithograph
from the same year, In der Tram (In the Tram Car, Fig. 21) underwent a
more significant modification: about a third of the plate's area that
contained a third subject facing the two present in our example was
removed before the third state's printing.2 The production of prints
thus creates several different parameters that affect the uniqueness and
resulting monetary and novel value of each printed object. Yet, this can
occur with any print. What makes Expressionist prints all the more
meaningful is their history, or experiences, as objects.

Labeled as "Bolshevik" and "Jewish," Expressionism became a
cultural target during the Third Reich, a period described by historian
Henry Grosshans in Hitler and the Artists as the "...first time in
modern Western European history an official attitude toward art was
adopted and conformity to that attitude enforced.... German artists who
offended against what the Nazis thought of as proper aesthetic behavior
were regarded as enemies of the state" (8). Hitler became chancellor of
Germany in January 1933. By March, the Reich Ministry for Popular
Enlightenment and Propaganda, headed by Josef Goebbels, was established.
This same year, the Ministry began a mass confiscation of works and
crackdown on Expressionist artists and their proponents. In total, as
Stephanie Barron reports in her groundbreaking study of the phenomenon,
an estimated sixteen thousand paintings, sculptures, and works on paper
were confiscated under the regime, originally limited to German works
after 1910 but soon expanded to consume both earlier and non-German
pieces as well ("1937" 19).3

But such hostility towards modern art in Germany was not an
abrupt development begun in the Reich, and this was not the first time
progressive works were removed from the public. For example, in his The
Berlin of George Grosz, art historian Frank Whitford states that after
releasing the 1923 print series Ecce Homo, which includes Entkleidung
(Disrobing, Fig. 17), Grosz was taken to court, resulting in fines
placed on him and two co-publishers and the confiscation of fifty-two
images from the portfolio on the grounds that they were pornographic
(see Reid).

Clearly the Nazis capitalized on an already-present discomfort
with modern art. But also significant is that during the Third Reich not
all political supporters considered Expressionist works "degenerate"
productions that, as Propagandaminister Goebbels put it in a 1937 decree
to all major museums, "insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse
natural form, or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and
artistic skill" (qtd. in Barron, "1937" 19). Four years before
Goebbels's statement, the National Socialist Students' League of the
University of Berlin put on two exhibitions, later censored, Deutsche
Kunst (German Art) and Dreissig deutsche Künstler (Thirty German
Artists), which included works by Ernst Barlach, Heckel, Franz Marc,
Otto Mueller, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.4 Just as a voice of opposition
existed before the Nazis, a voice of praise existed among them,
disproving a pure black and white view of political policy toward
Expressionism.

But, as art historian Andreas Hüneke details, by the end of 1933
Hitler made clear at a party conference on culture that Expressionism,
"cultural Bolshevism," would not be tolerated and a neo-classical,
race-emphasizing Nordic Expressionist style became the sponsored (and
only permitted) art under the Nazis (122). A failed artist himself,
Adolf Hitler "was deadly serious in his aesthetic judgements.... In 1937
he ordered inscribed over the door of the recently constructed House of
German Art in Munich the words 'Art Is a Mission Demanding Fanaticism,'"
as Grosshans reports (11). Hitler was later reported to have stated
during a private conversation in 1942 that "[i]t's against my own
inclinations that I devoted myself to politics. I don't see anything in
politics anyway, but a means to an end.... Wars pass by. The only things
that exist are the works of human genius" (qtd. in Cameron, qtd. in
Grosshans 11).

The outcome of this vehement attitude was the systematic removal
of proponents of Expressionism and the avant-garde from society starting
in 1933: George Grosz's German citizenship was taken away while he was
visiting the United States, the Bauhaus school was closed, Käthe
Kollwitz was expelled from the Prussian Academy of Arts, and Beckmann
and Otto Dix lost their teaching positions (Grosshans 72). But the
Expressionist movement had already begun to deteriorate during World War
I. All major figures were affected by the war and suffered everything
from nervous breakdowns (Beckmann), to loss of a child (Kollwitz), to
death at the front (Marc). Furthermore, Expressionism lost credibility
as advertisements and pop-culture began to catch on to its style.

The Third Reich's policies took hold of Expressionism while it
was in this dying state. In the first wave, the Reich closed the Berlin
Nationalgalerie's nineteenth-century and modern sections for
reorganization and inspection. But, as Annegret Janda outlines in her
essay "The Fight for Modern Art: The Berlin Nationalgalerie after 1933,"
the ensuing appointment of Eberhard Hanfstaengl, secretly a supporter of
modern art, enabled the Nationalgalerie covertly to continue to buy
drawings and obtain some recent works through exchanges with artists.
According to the Nationalgalerie's own archives, in 1935 at a Berlin
auction, the Gestapo confiscated sixty-four works that were transferred
to the Nationalgalerie for storage the next year. "From these
Hanfstaengl selected four oil paintings and a portfolio of ten drawings
as 'contemporary documents to be preserved under lock and key,' while
the remainder were burned" as ordered (Janda 110). This is but one
illustrative example of the rescue and ruin Expressionist works
encountered. Those that remain today, including those of Walking a
Tightrope, are veterans of this cultural war and inevitably refer to
this period.

"[I]n 1936 the entire edition of a catalog of the works of Franz
Marc was seized by Nazi authorities...and four thousand copies of Ernst
Barlach's drawings - described as a danger to 'public safety, peace, and
order' - were destroyed by the Gestapo," as Grosshans details (75). This
act of excision was soon overshadowed when, in June 1937,
Propagandaminister Goebbels issued a decree calling for a mass
confiscation of "degenerate" art, ultimately to be exhibited and
ridiculed as the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) show planned for July
1937 in Munich. Simultaneously, the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung
(Great German Art Exhibition), an exhibit of state-supported German
works, was to open. Barron explains that the objective of these
coinciding exhibits was to

...wipe out any hint of the modernism,
Expressionism, Dada, New Objectivity, Futurism, and Cubism that had
permeated the museums, galleries, journals, and press since 1910. The
National Socialists sought to rewrite art history, to omit what we know
as the avant-garde from the history of modern art. ("1937" 18)

The Entartete Kunst exhibit featured over nine rooms cluttered
with paintings, sculptures, and prints by more than a hundred artists,
juxtaposed with derogatory commentary directly on the walls. Sixteen of
the nineteen artists featured today in Walking a Tightrope were
represented. Though it is uncertain whether our particular impressions
were present, some versions of our works definitely were. For example,
records show that Heckel's Beim Vorlesen (Reading Aloud, Fig. 24),
Beckmann's Die Bettler (The Beggars, Fig. 25), and Schmidt-Rottluff's
Mutter (Mother, Fig. 26) all appeared in Entartete Kunst (Lüttichau
49-80).5 Other plates from Max Pechstein's portfolio Das Vater Unser
(The Lord's Prayer, compare Fig. 15) were also shown, and a reproduction
of Grosz's Entkleidung (Disrobing, Fig. 17) was illustrated in the
exhibition's brochure (reproduced in its entirety in Barron, Degenerate
356-90). Again, it is impossible to tell which precise printed artifact,
that is, which numbered proof in a series, was included in the exhibit;
provenance records are not that complete. But certainly at least their
sister impressions, when shown today, carry with them this past of
specificly targeted denouncement, imbuing them with an all new
historical meaning and importance.

Other prints had different fates in the 1930s. According to
Wolf-Dieter Dube, "approximately a third of the [confiscated] works were
saved from destruction because they were sold abroad, another third,
considered unusable, were burnt" (20). Unlike everything in the
Entartete Kunst exhibit, these two categories are, for the most part,
not accurately recorded. As Goebbels's diaries record, it was the idea
of Herman Göring, second in command under Hitler, and Goebbels to
exchange some of the more marketable confiscated works such as those by
Picasso, Cézanne, and Van Gogh for "decent masters abroad" (qtd. in
Fröhlich, qtd. in Hüneke 124). In addition, some works were, in
Goebbels's words, used to at least "make some money from this garbage"
by selling them for foreign currency (qtd. in Fröhlich, qtd. in Hüneke
125). Various galleries and collectors from London, Paris, Oslo, Zurich,
and New York pursued the impounded collections. In one sense, through
these actions they supported or enabled the actions of the Reich, but in
another, they preserved and saved modernism from total effacement.

The other third's fate was not so fortunate. A
Verwertungskommission (Disposal Commission) met in late 1938 to arrange
a massive auction at the Galerie Fischer in Lucerne, Switzerland, to
take place in the summer of 1939 (Hüneke 128).6 But the auction would
contain no prints, so in March of that year Franz Hofmann, a former
gallery director employed by the Propagandaministerium who was "happy to
deliver a suitably caustic funeral oration," was granted permission to
burn the "undisposable remainder" of more than five thousand works.7
Works on paper, traditionally less valuable than painting and sculpture,
most likely constituted much of the burned lot. Perhaps their greater
risk of destruction makes them today more striking artifacts of this
time of cultural crisis.

Under the Nazi regime, all Expressionist and avant-garde pieces
were removed from public, some saved from destruction by galleries and
collectors. From such galleries John L. and Roslyn Bakst Goldman amassed
an extensive collection of these once endangered prints, and their
presentation of them to Grinnell College is an act of re-publicizing
works once removed from the public eye. Yet, one should be careful not
to subscribe to an ideal in which these prints, as artifacts, are
approached as heroic icons of modernity that stood up to what has became
the ultimate model of cultural, social, and political "evil." After all,
not all Expressionists actively opposed National Socialism, and some
were quick to deny Jewish or leftist ties and groveled to the
unsympathetic regime. What we can obtain from this collection is an
understanding of the prints' uniqueness as survivors of an extremely
destructive setting in which views of art were forced on the public, and
cultural and aesthetic choices were deeply rooted in political
thought-the works of Walking a Tightrope communicate an experienced
history and reverse an attempted revision of art history. Their
histories provide a severe example of the abiding link between politics
and art that, in the 1930s, became a tool for total social and cultural
control. Perhaps we can avoid such disastrous consequences in the future
by recognizing this ever-present link, visible today, and by tolerating
a variety of political and cultural views.

 

1. See Lovis Corinth's Bahnhof Tiergarten (Zoo Station, Fig. 4)
for one example of the typically feathered lines produced by fresh
burrs.

2. For reproductions of the first state of Ein Wärter and
pre-third state In der Tram see Dube H304 II and L 241 IIIB,
respectively.

3. See Grosshans for a more complete and detailed account of the
rise of Hitler and his confrontation with artists.

4. See Rigby, "Expressionism" 296-97 and Hüneke 122 for more
details about these exhibits and the accompanying cultural clashes
within the National Socialist party.

5. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art's 1991 exhibit and
catalogue Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany,
organized by Stephanie Barron, provides a nearly complete reconstruction
of the Entartete Kunst exhibit based on photos and first-hand accounts.

6. See Barron "Works of Art in the Galerie Fischer Auction"
(Barron, Degenerate 147-69) for a complete catalogue of the auctioned
works.

7. Selection from a letter to Goebbels from Hofmann, qtd. from
Zentrales Staatsarchiv Potsdam (Best. 50.01-1020, Bl. 19-21), qtd. in
Hüneke 128.