In The Turbulent World of Franz Göll, historian Peter Fritzsche sifts through the lifetime of diaries kept by an ordinary twentieth century Berliner. A few weeks back, Fritzsche offered excerpts from the diaries to present the evolution of Göll’s attitude towards Germany’s Jews. Below, he gives us Göll’s thoughts on his 1938 visit to the infamous “Degenerate Art” exhibition staged by the Nazis as an attack on modernism.
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Hitler’s Third Reich wove a series of extraordinary spectacles through the fabric of daily life. The Nuremberg Rallies, May Day rallies, and Führer birthday celebrations all attempted to testify to the unity and enthusiasm of the German population. Huge propaganda exhibitions also aimed to show Germans new, more racially sound ways of looking at the world. One of these was the exhibit on “Degenerate Art,” which opened in Munich in summer 1937 (the cover of the exhibit program is pictured at right). The exhibit was designed as a horror show of modern art, which the Nazis believed was unhealthy because non-representational, abstract, and cosmopolitan. The pictures, including paintings by Marc Chagall, Otto Dix, Georg Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee, were hung to produce a chaotic, dizzying effect. Since the exhibit was closed to children, it had a built-in shock appeal, and most of the three million Germans who visited probably walked through the exhibit room snickering their outrage and incomprehension. But aside from the propaganda barrages produced by the exhibit itself, historians do not really know how individual Germans reacted. However, the diarist Franz Göll left behind a revealing and lengthy response upon visiting the exhibit when it arrived in Berlin.
On the eve of Germany’s march into Austria in March 1938, Franz Göll took a look to see what all the fuss was about. His response:
“Supported by the Propaganda Ministry and organized by the Nazi Party, the exhibit is designed to arouse the regime’s abhorrence of the mentality of this sort of art among the broad masses and to justify, substantiate, and strengthen the required opposition . . . The exhibit displays . . . a picture, ‘The War.’ This picture is not pretty; it is horror-inducing, shattering. But the repulsion you feel is not because of the representation, but the subject of representation, war with its ruination and destruction of property, blood, and soul. It presents a cross-section of the war, not as the general staff would see it, for whom the individual is merely materiél to be thrown into battle, but as the front soldier experiences it.” (12 March 1938)
In front of Otto Dix’s masterpiece, Franz came to the extraordinary conclusion:
“The picture is not a bloody-minded depiction of the degenerate, war is.”
He continued on through the exhibit:
“Moreover, there is another picture to be seen, entitled ‘War Cripple.’ Today one sees this picture as mocking the war wounded. But I actually read it as depicting the great and quiet spiritual tragedy in the life of a severely wounded war veteran. A picture of great sadness that really strikes a chord. A war invalid who wants to tenderly draw his wife to him with his prosthetic arms. He awkwardly places his artificial arm outfitted with a claw hook around his wife. From their expressions, it is obvious that this caress is not regarded as a moment of bliss, but as a painful disappointment over a happiness that is gone forever.”
Historians have almost no responses of ordinary Germans to the exhibit. However, Franz Göll’s diary provides one extraordinary example. It shows that Germans by no means all believed the propaganda they were fed and could use the propaganda to come to their own, even diametrically opposed opinions. Göll sympathized with the weak and vulnerable, the frightened soldier and the wounded veteran, and he recalled Dix’s vision when he recorded the news of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, a war that Hitler believed would leave only the “Annihilated” and the “Survivors.”
