The Lawrentian

BY RACHEL HOERMAN
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR

Lawrence Alumna April Eisman gave a lecture on Nazi art in Wriston auditorium on Monday. Eisman, who graduated from Lawrence in 1994 with a double major in Art History and English, received her M.A. in London at the Courtauld Institute of Art and focused her studies on German art, culture, and politics. She held a position at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and has had several articles published. Her lecture, entitled "Strength, Beauty, and Monumentality: Official Nazi Art," highlighted the utilization of art as a form of maintenance and propaganda in Nazi Germany.

Eisman stressed that until recently, the art of the Third Reich has been considered taboo, and thus was overlooked and largely unexamined. She pointed out that the United States Department of Defense still retains a collection of Nazi art confiscated during World War II. The art is stored in a warehouse and considered too inflammatory to return to Germany.

Eisman explained the power that art has, asserting, "Art played a huge role in the Third Reich and was a defining feature of Nazi Germany. It was a great way for the government to control people while hiding their actions." Remarking that the Nazis used art to justify their actions and establish a link with history, Eisman added, "Through their connection to art, the Nazis were taking on a 2000 year old past."

The caption on this common World War II Poster: “One People, One Reich, One Führer.”
image courtesy of the Calvin College website

Hitler recognized art as a means of social control and regulated it accordingly, "Hitler considered good art to be anything predating the nineteenth century. He brushed aside the impressionistic movements, artists involved in cubism like Pablo Picasso, the geometric shapes and bold colors of suprematism, and the dream-like and fantastical surrealism of Salvador Dali, viewing them as a threat. To Hitler, the modern art that was emerging in Germany in the 1930s made dangerous statements about the government with its themes of murder, chaos, and corruption," said Eisman.

The 1939 Nuremberg Rally was to be the “Party Rally of Peace,” but it was canceled when World War II began.
image courtesy of the Calvin College website

She pointed out that modern art went largely misunderstood by the general public, who found it offensive and considered it a corrupt hoax, and said that Hitler began to place restrictions on modern artists. By 1940, modern art in Nazi Germany had ceased to exist.

Eisman went on to say that Hitler utilized art as the fuel for his Nazi propaganda machine, and stressed Nazi ideals through the posters, paintings, sculpture, and architecture of the Third Reich. She said, "Hitler viewed the Third Reich as a cultural renaissance and revival, for which he was the crusader."

Paintings like Otto Kierkner’s "Old Man Reading a Newspaper" and Leopold Schmutzer’s "Girls in a field" featured simple, timeless subject matter that embodied the ideals of the Nazi party. Eisman explained, "The true art of the Nazi Party linked with simple and hard working German ‘folk’. It was easily understood, non-offensive, and tapped into the nostalgia people held for the simple country life that the Nazi party seemed to offer, which appealed to the masses of factory workers employed by in the industrial powerhouse Germany had become by the 1930s."

Eisman noted that the paintings, posters, and sculpture of the Third Reich placed a strong emphasis on family, which it considered the future and salvation of the state. It also featured honor, patriotism, self-sacrifice, battle, and gender, remarking that, "Nazi art offered a traditional view of the sexes which appealed to a vast amount of society, and featured stereotypical gender roles of men as strong, fearless warrior-providers, and women as healthy mothers and homemakers."

Eisman remarked that Hitler was a lifelong fan of architecture and an aspiring artist until the age of eighteen, when he was not admitted to an art school in Vienna. She said, "Hitler had a lifelong passion for architecture, and his tastes were very old fashioned and conventional. All architecture had to be decorated with sculpture, and was built on a colossal scale. Albert Speer, the official architect of the Third Reich during the war, was commissioned to reshape Berlin to Hitler’s bidding. His first project was the old Chancellory, where Hitler’s offices were kept. Visitors were forced to walk up three stairways, three sets of halls, navigating over polished and slippery marble floors, to reach Hitler’s inner chamber—a total of 720 feet, or three city blocks."

Eisman noted that Nazi architecture like the cathedral of light, which used searchlights borrowed from the Luftwaffe in an indoor extravaganza of pageantry, and the grounds for the 1936 Olympic Games, were intentionally designed to dwarf the individual, placing a greater emphasis on society as a whole. She also noted that artists were granted high social standing, and enjoyed special privileges, like avoiding the draft.

Eisman concluded her lecture by commenting that Nazi Germany used art to lend a human face to the savage Nazi regime and that it played a central role in German politics. Eisman ended with saying that although much of Nazi Germany’s art was lost or destroyed during World War II, it still remains an important part of art history, whose exposure and acknowledgement, and consequent evaluation, is long overdue.

A photograph of the Berlin Olympic stadium exterior.
photo courtesy of Florida Center for Instructonal Technology

Lecturer illuminates little-studied art of the Third Reich

Lecturer illuminates little-studied art
of the Third Reich