Versions of Public Art: National Self-Representation in the Iconography of Nazi Germany and the New Deal

Abstract

American cultural historians, Lawrence Levine among them, have frequently emphasized the profound, almost traumatic impact the Depression had on the American imagination. Half a century after [it] ended Americans still sing about it, write and read about it, make and watch movies depicting it.. ., attend to the testimony of its survivors, revive its music, its drama, and its fashion.l Indeed, the Thirties are generally remembered as a period of hardship collectively endured. Whether they are celebrated as a period of social faith, of commitment to public causes and the common weal, or denounced as a period of un-American flirtation with collectivism: they are, in any case, seen as a crucial period of transition in which the insistence on a unique national culture and the appeal to \American values and traditions went hand in hand with profound changes in the economic and political structure of American society, specifically, with the redefinition of the function of the State, the extraordinary expansion of the role of the federal government.z In short, the Thirties not only demonstrate how the appeal to a memory of things past helped to invigorate a sense of national purpose, they have themselves entered the storehouse of collective memories from which the consciousness of