German show traces Nazi-era artists’ success

Some 300 artworks will shed light on the culture of the period

Berlin: A new show examining how some of the Nazis’ favourite visual artists were able to successfully continue their work in postwar Germany is set to open in Berlin this week.
“Divinely Gifted. National Socialism’s favoured artists in the Federal Republic” at the German Historical Museum traces the careers and works of many who figured on a list of “Divinely Gifted” artists, compiled in 1944 on behalf of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels.

In contrast, Jewish artists and those critical of the Nazis were defamed and persecuted while their works were banned from museums as so-called “degenerate art.” The “Divinely Gifted” list contained the names of more than 100 painters and sculptors counted among the most important representatives of the National Socialists’ cultural output.

Despite Germany’s aspired new beginning after the end of World War II in 1945, and the de-Nazification process, many of these artists were rehabilitated and successfully pursued their careers for decades.

They received lucrative commissions from government, industry and church organisations, taught at art academies and were represented at exhibitions.

Their designs for statues, reliefs and tapestries on public squares or theatres left their mark to this day on the face of many German city centers, the exhibition shows.

“The fact that many of the renowned protagonists of the National Socialist art world continued to work successfully in the post-war decades was blended out of the influential art-historical narrative of a new beginning after 1945,” the show’s curator Wolfgang Brauneis said.

At the German Historical Museum, some 300 sculptures, paintings, tapestries, models, photographs, film and sound documents — accompanied by explanations and analysis — try to shed light on both the Nazi-era and the post-war careers of artists such as sculptors Arno Breker and Willy Meller.

Often, the continued presentation of work by the Nazis’ favourite artists was met with no or little resistance by the public in the first postwar years.

That perception only changed slowly starting in the 1960s, when the younger German generations publicly began to question the atrocities committed by the Third Reich.