The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany (review)

Eric Michaud's long essay on the cultural revolution of National Socialism is a remarkable synthetic work on Nazi ideology, its theo-political foundations, and the part played by aesthetics in its imagination and construction of an Aryan utopia. By using the investigation of these issues as an account of Nazi social, political, and racial mythology, Michaud is able to insightfully approach a number of questions concerning political culture, racial aesthetics and propaganda, labor ideology and the aesthetics of work, faith and utopian expectations, and the use and transformation of Christianity. Broad in both scope and erudition, this book provides at once a cogent account of the share of art in National Socialism, a balanced history of its intellectual origins, and a considerable theoretical reevaluation of a number of premises underlying our understanding of the intersections between art and the politics of racial hygiene in 1933-45 Germany. In the course of its argument, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany also presents histories of significant intellectual and artistic tropes, such as the artist-prince, the engendering power of images, and the idealist-medical conjunction of racial improvement.

Michaud's approach circumvents a number of widely used starting points—such as political culture, propaganda (see 192-94), or ideology—favoring instead the umbrella of the Nazi myth, first suggested by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy in their synonymous 1980 philosophical essay (Editions de l'Aube, 1991; engl. trans. in Critical Inquiry, Winter 1989 [229n.31]). "Myth" as a term may be misunderstood: Michaud's usage refers neither to the Nazi taste for völkisch legend nor to structuralist terminology. His specific targets are (i) the elaborate strategies of metapolitical legitimacy that founded a Nazi logic, and (ii) the role of art in structuring and accentuating these strategies. In this regard, the book's English title is a bit misleading, given that The Cult of Art is avowedly (xi) not a history of Nazi art or even of its 'cult,' but rather (as the original French subtitle suggests) a study of the sociopolitical uses of image and time, and, in particular, of art's share in National Socialist racial thought and policy. Here, Michaud's work is at its best as a study of what George L. Mosse called "fascism's cultural revolution." Though Michaud's categories, areas of interest, and overall interpretation often differ from Mosse's, his approach starts out from some of the same presuppositions—notably that it is impossible to understand the force, goals, and violence of the movement and political revolution that was National Socialism without starting out from its cultural claims and its attempt to radically transform life in the Germany of the 1930s.

The Cult of Art opens with a long discussion of the theme of the artist-prince and its origins in nineteenth-century thought (7-8, 18-23), its applicability in the National Socialist context, and its legitimating power on a continent no longer ruled by divinely instituted monarchies (3, 6-8). Not only did the Führer lead "a government of artists" (29-30, 30-34, 38), he, like Mussolini, specifically conceived of himself as an artist using the masses as his material (4-5, 34-35), so as to purify and mold the German Spirit—the creative source of the Aryan race. This identification of political with artistic genius allowed Hitler to assume the role of Führer-Christ (56-59, 61, 81, 175) that relied on three intermingling foundations: (a) the power and task of the artist to provide paradise in a world emptied out of God (7-8); (b) the Wagnerian inflection of Göttesdienst (56) and the redemptive value accorded to the festival; and (c) Nazism's emphasis on a National Christianity and the exploitation/transformation of central Christian thematics—the Passion (53), and the liturgy (62).

The emphasis on Nazism's political theology, and in particular on its soteriological claims (38-42, 60-61, 183-85), not only makes for...