Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts

This provocative study asks why we have held on to vivid images of the Nazis’ total control of the visual and performing arts, even though research has shown that many artists and their works thrived under Hitler. To answer this question, Potter investigates how historians since 1945 wrote about music, art, architecture, theater, film, and dance in Nazi Germany and how their accounts were colored by politics of the Cold War, the fall of communism, and the wish to preserve the idea that true art and politics cannot mix. She doesn't deny that the persecution of Jewish artists and other “enemies of the state” was a high priority in the Third Reich, but this did not erase their artistic legacies from German cultural life. Art of Suppression examines the cultural histories of the Third Reich to help us understand how the circumstances of exile, the Allied occupation of Germany, the Cold War, and the complex meanings of modernism have sustained a distorted and problematic characterization of cultural life in the Third Reich.