The Art of Genocide

Abstract

Rumours of art's death have been highly exaggerated. Such is the (negative) conclusion reached by two recent studies that explore with fresh insight Germany's art and architectural worlds during and after the Third Reich. Under the Nazi regime, idealist and transcendent notions of the aesthetic all but disappeared given the overtly propagandistic purpose Hitler and his minions compelled the arts to serve. After 1945, however, belief in art's 'autonomy' and 'freedom' reappeared and flourished and not for wholly positive ends. Within the context of Germany's attempt to come to terms with its unmasterable past, art's allegedly transcendent quality served the sinister purpose of exonerating art world luminaries of their complicity in some of the Third Reich's most criminal acts. Post-war judges concluded, time after time, that art had nothing to do with politics that those so intimately involved in 'culture' between 1933 and 1945 could scarcely have been guilty of political wrong-doing. In their recently published books, Jonathan Petropoulos and Paul Jaskot expose the political instrumentality of such notions of artistic autonomy. Petropoulos's Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany and Jaskot's Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy take as their moral centre and point of departure the postWorld War Two oblivion that made it possible for unrepentant art-world criminals to escape prosecution. Petropoulos's and Jaskot's texts cause us to look anew at such familiar luminaries as Albert Speer and Arno Breker and to consider, as well, a host of other art world figures who operated in their half-light. Through their meticulous sifting of previously unexplored archival materials, both authors uncover excoriating evidence that made its way neither into the denazification proceedings nor into the Nuremberg trials of the post-war era. These are sober and sobering accounts that fundamentally reorient our notions about the role of the arts administration and the nature of art and