Reviewed by: Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts by Pamela M. Potter Martha Sprigge Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts. By Pamela M. Potter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016. Pp. xvi + 389. Cloth $65.00. ISBN 978-0520282356. Despite research that has demonstrated the relative lack of control the Nazi party had over the arts, the conception that German artists and their output were closely monitored during the Third Reich has remained firmly entrenched in both popular imagination and scholarly literature. Pamela M. Potter’s latest monograph interrogates and dismantles this myth. Her central claim is that the notion of artistic practice was stifled and censored under the Nazi regime is actually a product of the “postwar suppression of inconvenient truths about artistic productivity during the Third Reich” (3). She assesses the continued appeal of this narrative across multiple disciplines, revealing that many of the institutional structures, aesthetic ideals, and successful artists from the Third Reich were sometimes carried over from the Weimar Republic, and often stretched well into the postwar period. This overarching argument contributes to an ongoing critique of the “zero hour,” adding important insights into artistic disciplines during the Third Reich and the institutional structures that supported the study of the arts in the postwar period. Potter’s focus is on disciplines that “subscribed to the ideal of the ‘apolitical artist’ and found it difficult to shake off such notions” (44), including art history, architecture, theater, film, and music. The six chapters are organized loosely chronologically, spanning from an overview of how arts and political surveillance interlocked during the Third Reich, to a discussion of the continued popularity of the myth of Nazi artistic suppression in reunified Germany. Several overarching narrative structures emerge over the course of the book. The first is an intentionalist approach to the study of the arts, in which party sources are taken at face value and the focus is directed at a small group of Nazi leaders. This promotes an understanding of Nazi figureheads as omnipotent, artistically opinionated, and capable of carrying out their aspirations for controlling artistic disciplines more thoroughly than they did in reality. The second is a related tendency to draw totalitarian comparisons between artistic practice under different dictatorships, especially the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, and the GDR. Finally, Potter reveals an underlying defensive gesture at work in much postwar literature on this topic. For both Anglophone and German scholars, it was often easier to cordon off developments in the Third Reich rather than expose continuities of artistic practice, both in German contexts and in international trends. Though the title points toward the Third Reich, much of Potter’s focus lies in the postwar period. Chapters 3 through 6 offer a rich account of how scholarship on the Nazi period was significantly shaped by Cold War concerns, where many of the tropes that were essential to the “suppression” narrative of the arts in the Third Reich developed. Recent studies on artistic practice in the Eastern bloc have demonstrated [End Page 193] that even in totalitarian societies with an official position on artistic production, politics and aesthetics rarely move in lock step. Potter reveals that in the Third Reich the guidelines for connecting the two were never firmly established in the first place. A reliance on key moments for understanding Nazi artistic policy—such as the Degenerate Art exhibit held in Munich in 1937—has produced striking misunderstandings of the connections between the two under the Third Reich, and facilitated the persistence of this totalitarian reading in the postwar period. The structure of the book often means that chapters circle back around key points to add another layer from a different angle, occasionally in ways that repeat rather than enhance the main argument. Yet this approach has many advantages, allowing for sustained comparisons between developments across the arts, exposing readers to trends outside their home disciplines, and adding layers of historiography that set the stage for the proposals Potter puts forth in the final chapter. Here she elucidates the consequences of relying on a narrative of the arts as suffering...