Nazi Exhibition Design and Modernism by Michael Tymkiw (review)

Art exhibitions in factories, photomurals in books with motorized page-turners, a sculpture including a towering spiral stair celebrating the manufacturers of nonferrous metals, and a series of buildings dismantled in the Soviet Union and reassembled in an exhibition hall in Berlin: these are only a few of the rich examples in Michael Tymkiw's new book that tell readers as much about modernism as they do about Nazi exhibition design. The exhibitions he discusses have their fair share of looming eagles, proud swastikas, and columns rhythmically marching through various Halls of Honor, and some punctuate the more traditionally honorific gestures with charging tanks and swooping airplanes. But even the conventional Nazi accoutrements are implicated in contexts that, as Tymkiw convincingly argues, have absorbed, transformed, and repurposed the forms, techniques, and experiences central to modern and, in many cases, avant-garde exhibitions in the 1920s.

Rather than offering a representative selection of all types of Nazi exhibitions to provide a comprehensive overview, Tymkiw focuses on exhibitions that use modern design to exhibit National Socialist ideology. Revealing the continuity of modern exhibition design from the Weimar through the Nazi period is at the core of the book; Tymkiw's argument rests on the multiple ways in which modern exhibition design contributes to the visual culture of National Socialism. Building on Jeffrey Herf's Reactionary Modernism (1984) and other contemporary scholarship, Tymkiw is able to demonstrate that the relationship between form and politics is not fixed. But he also challenges his colleagues' arguments by making an "historiographical intervention" (7), claiming that the character of modern form in Nazi exhibition design is not derivative or anachronistic, but rather a transformation of 1920s modernism with a status equal to its sources. This is one of the most significant points in Tymkiw's book. Along with enriching the palette of what is considered modern, he embeds form in its politics, thereby allowing it to contribute to a more complex understanding of the trajectory of modernism.

Tymkiw explores a variety of approaches to the reciprocal effect of ideology and form in Nazi exhibition design—and an epilogue is devoted to postwar exhibition design in East and West Germany. Rather than rely on art exhibitions, the conventions of which might obscure the relationship between form and politics, Tymkiw draws on exhibitions that include displays of industrial production: their ambition to portray the Nazi state as forward-looking provides a ready link to modernity, opening their designs to experimentation with the portrayal of progress. The ways in which modern approaches to art and the "engaged spectator" shape these exhibitions is emphasized. The relentless repetition of panels in a stained glass window and metal stairs in a towering sculpture in the 1934 exhibition Deutsches Volk–Deutsche Arbeit demonstrates a redirection of abstraction from its conventional interpretative openness to serve the principle of Gleichschaltung and all its unambiguous political connotations. In the series of Fabrikausstellungen, held from 1934–1939, modernism persists in content, form, and the logistics of exhibitions as a part of a program to insert industry into the National Socialist conception of culture. The 1937 exhibition Gebt mir vier Jahre Zeit, staged to rally Germans around the Four-Year Plan unveiled one year earlier, turns the reader's attention toward the "engaged spectator," refuting the usual association of Nazi visual culture with passive audiences. Here, modern content—images of work and production—and a variety of modern media and installation techniques transform visitors from mere spectators to participants in the production of Germany's future. Devices that had engaged visitors to avant-garde exhibitions in the criticism of the visual messages before them—such as the discontinuity of images and the viewing experience, the literal portrayal of those messages as constructed, and the denial of a commanding viewpoint that would immediately unify the exhibition and its message—are here repurposed and reconfigured to generate an allegiance to the Nazi vision of a new world, casting viewers as audience...