The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right

Notes

Introduction 1. The following biographical information is based on Backes and Jesse, Politischer Extremismus in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 343–44, and his obituary in David Childs, “Franz Schönhuber: SS Officer Turned Right-wing Politician,“ Independent, November 30, 2005, online edition. http://www.independent.co.uk/ news/obituaries/franz-schonhuber-517501.html. 2. For a brief discussion of the“new populism” in Europe, see Judt, Postwar, 736–48. 3. See, for example, the interesting essays in Ray, Joseph Beuys. 4. “Ausstellung Paul Mathias Padua.” 5. For a canonical approach to this question, seeYoung,The Texture of Memory , and more recently,the fascinating overview of Marcuse,“Holocaust Memorials.” For an analysis of the historiography on this topic, see Jaskot and Rosenfeld,“Introduction ,” in Rosenfeld and Jaskot, Beyond Berlin, 1–21. 6. Hilberg, Perpetrators Victims Bystanders, ix. 7. Waller, Becoming Evil, 175–235. 8. Ibid., xi. 9. Although I began with Hilberg, his typology of perpetrator, victim, and bystander has been generally acknowledged as too neat.Indeed,of importance in this book is how loosely the term can be applied. Famously, the blurring of victim and perpetrator status has been convincingly and starkly highlighted in Gross,Neighbors. 10. Herf, Divided Memory, 111. 11. Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front, 98–99. 12. Much important art historical work, for example, has been done on the political debates on the right and left in the Weimar Republic.Most recently,see van Dyke, Franz Radziwill and the Contradictions of German Art History, 1919–45. NOTES 215 13. See, e.g., the classic text on architectural continuity, Durth, Deutsche Architekten , or the recent essays and bibliography in Doll et al., Kunstgeschichte nach 1945. 14. Foundational texts on this subject include Reichel, Politik mit der Erinnerung , and Young, The Texture of Memory. 15. I discuss specific elements of this scholarship in the subsequent chapters on the individual artists. For an excellent example, though, see Biro, Anselm Kiefer and the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger. 16. The best in scholarship that dovetails with this trend can be found in the important catalog Barron and Eckmann, Art of Two Germanys. I refer to particularly useful essays from this volume later in the book. . National Socialists and Art 1. My project here parallels James Waller’s attempt to characterize the socialpsychological attributes of individuals who commit genocide.However,while Waller is looking for shared psychic and contextual patterns among individuals in general, my concern is more with how specific actions or moments in the implementation of oppressive policies in Nazi Germany became particularly recognizable to a postwar audience. The postwar temporal variability of what was recognized and when is, of course, the realm of the historian, which complements Waller’s work but leads to a somewhat different typology. Waller, Becoming Evil. 2. For examples of the integration of art, architecture, and art history into Nazi political goals, see, among others, Doll, Fuhrmeister, and Sprenger, eds., Kunstgeschichte im Nationalsozialismus; Jaskot,“Architecture and the Destruction of the European Jews”; and Peters, Neue Sachlichkeit und Nationalsozialismus. 3. Art and art history of the Nazi period have always been somewhat overlooked in the general triumphal march of modern art. Important surveys discuss the period, if at all, as background for exiled Modernists or with a few examples of propagandistic art that contrast with nonfascist examples. In the past few decades, important critical work has been done, particularly in Germany, including early scholarship by Berthold Hinz, Hartmut Frank, and Kathrin Hoffman-Curtius. More recently, art history under National Socialism has been of increasing interest in the work of, for example, Nikola Doll, Christian Fuhrmeister, and Olaf Peters. Still, while the earlier literature explored the ideological content of art and the more recent literature has begun to look at institutional contexts, a systematic and sustained account of National Socialist art, art policy, and the dynamics of the art world remains to be written. For an approach to a comprehensive analysis, see Spotts, Hitler and the Aesthetics of Power, or Backes, Hitler und die bildenden Künste. 4. By comparison, see, for example, the philosophically complex introduction to Brett Ashley Kaplan’s analysis of postwar aesthetics and the Holocaust. In spite of its title, “politics” is an intellectual claim with no historical specificity. Kaplan, “The Politics of Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation,” in Unwanted Beauty. NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 216 5. For a classic analysis of the involvement of individuals...