The Faustian Bargain: the Art World in Nazi Germany'

H-German Jaskot on Petropoulos, 'The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany'

Review published on Thursday, November 1, 2001

Jonathan Petropoulos. The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 320 pp. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-512964-9.

Reviewed by Paul B. Jaskot (Department of the History of Art and Architecture, DePaul University) Published on H-German (November, 2001)

The study of National Socialist culture and cultural policy has become a standard and accepted subject for those scholars interested in the problem of understanding the development of modern German society. Few would argue today that we should not analyze Hitler's massive architectural schemes for the Reich, or the use of films like Harlan's Jud Suess (1940) to prepare and legitimate increased anti-Semitic measures, or the role architects played in the brutal construction of Auschwitz. Scholars have taken these examples and others from theatre, literature, music, and the visual arts as exemplary spheres of activity that tell us something crucial about the developing political and social dynamics of the Nazi state. On the one hand, these studies have provided clues into the complexity of Hitler and other individual leaders, obsessed as they were with developing a "Germanic" culture, however incoherent, contradictory, and violent were the results. On the other, scholarship on the Nazi attempt to implement a new definition of culture helps to clarify broader political questions such as the development of key institutions like Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry or the editorial policy of Rosenberg's Voelkischer Beobachter. The scholarly resistance to including Nazi cultural history has broken down even further now that more and more scholars in history, musicology, film studies, and literature are producing monographs on specific aspects of the field. Even the more recalcitrant discipline of art history, with its unwavering faith in modernist art, has allowed for an expanded if still marginalized discussion of National Socialist cultural policy in its publications and conferences.

And yet in spite of the growing number of books and articles on individual artists or specific institutions, we still know surprisingly little about the complexity of culture and the myriad and nefarious ways in which it was integral to Nazi policies. One reason for this lacuna is the striking historiographic emphasis on a select number of artists within Nazi Germany (Speer and Riefenstahl, for example) as well as the continued tendency in historical circles to view culture as important but almost always reactive--and hence secondary--to more central political, economic, and social developments. Certainly there are exceptions to these generalizations, such as the work of Werner Durth on the important role played by architects on Speer's staff both during and after the Nazi era, or Alan Steinweis' study of cultural policy within Goebbels' Reichskulturkammer.[1] But a broad and systematic look at what we might call mid-level artists and cultural administrators still remains to be done. The bibliography on Mies van der Rohe in exile might be as long as your arm, but you would be hard pressed, for example, to come up with one significant article on Adolf Ziegler, the head of the painting division of the Reichskulturkammer and a key player in the "Degenerate Art" Exhibition (1937).

Jonathan Petropoulos' latest book, The Faustian Bargain, goes a long way towards clarifying why a more complex understanding of culture is crucial for explaining the development of National Socialist Germany. He targets in his study a series of mostly unknown individuals active as art professionals in the period. These relatively hidden personalities had a great deal of contact with--and influence on-- the major policy makers of the regime, and Petropoulos makes clear that their interest in culture became a significant means by which key policies were implemented, not excluding anti-Semitic measures. Hence, researching the art world in Nazi Germany helps us to critically analyze how individuals were swept up into enacting criminal policies, the varied motivations that drove them to these actions, and the cooperation necessary in all areas of society to make vague and contradictory ideological claims into a series of brutal and grotesque policies with ultimately murderous results. Petropoulos' analysis clearly indicates that in order to explain the radicalization of the developing Nazi state means taking the complexity of interrelated individuals and institutions seriously. For him, the moral imperative of understanding the past lies in evaluating the innumerable ways in which art professionals (in this case) made peace with any supposed ethical quandaries they might have had and willingly participated in and promoted criminal policies. He succeeds in convincing us not only of the complex development of National Socialist institutions but also of the crucial role that cultural agents played in enabling some of their most brutal actions.

Petropoulos' argument focuses on exploring and analyzing the variety of motivations that led individuals to participate in state policy, thus drawing his book into the thicket of recent historiographic debates on the issue.[2] With his case studies of art professionals, he is interested less in the development of specific policies as he is in how policies were enacted and inflected by specific personalities and events. Of particular interest to Petropoulos is the participation of these professionals in the looting of art from Jewish and state collections in the occupied territories during the war. While not all of the individuals he studied participated in the vast looting schemes (e.g., the sculptor Arno Breker), the majority of his work focuses on the theft of art as the culmination of criminal participation by art professionals. Further, he carries this study into the postwar years in which the acts of cultural personnel, among other mid-level figures, were almost completed exonerated by both Allied and German courts. By analyzing what brought these elite and most often highly-educated individuals to the moral compromises necessary to complete their chosen tasks, Petropoulos draws an intricate web of social contacts, fateful meetings, and willful acts that connected these people to the highest levels of government power and brutal policy.

Crucial for Petropoulos is the metaphoric relationship of these individuals to the story that provides his title: the pact that Faust made with the devil for fame and fortune. As he notes in his introduction, the "Faustian bargain" is a phrase often applied imprecisely to anyone who participated in the Nazi state. But the story of Faust is more than a moral compromise made in exchange for worldly success. Rather, Faust "made his deal with the devil in return for greatness and in pursuit of a lofty ideal (in many versions, for knowledge). The figures in this study were not simply corrupt or self-promoting. They were at or near the top of their respective fields and held ambitions for even loftier accomplishment" (p. 4). For Petropoulos, the warped idealism of the art professionals and their intellectual or social claims to superiority is equally important to their more venal motivations in explaining their participation.

Trying to identify not only the actions of an individual but such subtle signs of motivation is, clearly, a tricky historical business, as Petropoulos admits. And if this were simply a string of psycho-

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Jaskot on Petropoulos, 'The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany'. H-German. 09-30-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/43642/jaskot-petropoulos-faustian-bargain-art-world-nazi-germany Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-German biographies, it would probably have remained unsuccessful. But what is ultimately surprising and convincing in Petropoulos' study is how many of these individuals knew each other, worked at times with or against each other's interests, served the same patrons, or even unintentionally overlapped in each other's work. That is to say, Petropoulos attempts to model a social history in the true sense of the term. These art professionals are part of a social world that draws them together, if for very different reasons and from widely diverse areas of activity. The interpersonal relations and the accumulation of a variety (but not unlimited number) of identifiable motivations deepen the individual accounts and give a broader understanding of why such mid-level figures were so crucial for the successful implementation of Nazi policy. His method of collective biography indicates not only how these art professionals were able to get as far as they did during the Nazi period but also clarifies how the vast majority avoided any real judicial scrutiny for their actions after the war.[3] As he states at the end of his introduction: "Within the cultural realm, then, what started out as compromise and collaboration on the part of a few individuals became a widespread phenomenon. For those who remained in Germany, so many were co-opted that one can talk of trends that applied to entire professions. In short, prosapography [sic] becomes social history and, in the process, shows us one of the most insidious aspects of Nazi Germany: that the regime co-opted 'ordinary' people--or alternatively, individuals induced themselves--to support the Nazi policies and participate in criminal acts" (p. 11). This is the heart of his argument and his defense of the importance of culture to an understanding of National Socialist Germany.

The Faustian Bargain is broken down into five chapters covering different art professions: museum directors; dealers; journalists; art historians; and artists. In each chapter, Petropoulos focuses on one key individual whose story he contrasts with brief accounts at the end of the chapter of professionals in the same field. So in the chapter on museum directors, for example, he describes the slide into complicity of Ernst Buchner. Buchner was the director of the Bavarian State Painting Collections from 1933-1945. He was trained by the well-known art historian, Heinrich Woelfflin, and he completed a dissertation on pre-modern German artists. While a nationalist, his willingness to follow fascism was not a given and his relation to the Nazi Party was mixed. Yet, according to Petropoulos, the temptation to increase the holdings of the museums under his control proved too much. By the war years, Buchner was working with the Gestapo to secure works from appropriated Jewish collections, and his activity peaked in 1942 when he led an expedition to secure the Van Ecyk brothers' Ghent Altarpiece. For Petropoulos, "[h]is motivation for collaborating with the Nazi leaders reflected a combination of rationalization and indoctrination, a very complex process that entailed an inner struggle" (p. 26). Such a sense of gradual descent into guilt and collaboration is contrasted to equally dramatic stories of such figures as Hans Posse, the director of Hitler's dream of a "Fuehrermuseum" for Linz. He built up the Linz collection ruthlessly, competing with other art professionals and working frequently with plundered art. He ultimately acquired over 8,000 paintings for the collection, which can be compared to the 3,000 paintings currently in the National Gallery collection in Washington, D.C. The avariciousness of these directors and their willingness to build what they perceived to be an ideal and "German" collection at all costs indicates powerful motivations for their Faustian bargains.

The other chapters in the book follow a similar structure in highlighting one major figure and then contrasting him with short reviews of the history of other individuals in the field. So, in the chapter on journalists, we get an extensive discussion of Robert Scholz who became a major critic for Rosenberg's Voelkischer Beobachter and then later involved in looting operations in Paris under the

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Jaskot on Petropoulos, 'The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany'. H-German. 09-30-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/43642/jaskot-petropoulos-faustian-bargain-art-world-nazi-germany Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-German aegis of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR). For art dealers, the focus is on Karl Haberstock, his initial beliefs in anti-Semitism as a "business ploy," his crucial role in the 1938 "Degenerate Art" Law, and his shady dealings in Paris working for the collections of the "Fuehrermuseum" and for his own profit. Even these individuals seem to pale in relation to the focus of the chapter on art historians, Kajetan Muehlmann, who Petropoulos claims was arguably "the single most prodigious art plunderer in the history of human civilization" (p. 170). Active in plundering during the war in Austria and the Netherlands, he achieved his real infamy in the Nazi period by being Göring's representative in the eastern occupied territories. Poland in particular was competitive territory as Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Goering, Himmler and, of course, Hitler himself had interests in the supposed cultural heritage of the Germanic past, and they employed a variety of different art experts to secure and support this goal. These representatives competed against each other, and individuals like Muehlmann could easily get caught in the political and cultural power struggles between the leaders. Explaining how these artistic practices intersected with the brutal development of anti-Semitic and occupation policy is one of the most valuable aspects of the book's extensive new research. Consensus and conflict both characterized this phase of occupational policy in which deprivation of cultural property was integral to the authoritarian negation of state's rights and the murder of its Jewish populations.

The chapter on artists is in some ways the exception to this plundering pattern, but here, too, Petropoulos emphasizes the importance of social contacts in the cultural policy of the Nazi state. Focusing on Breker with comparative analyses of the sculptor Joseph Thorak and the painter Ziegler, Petropoulos traces the gradual transformation of these figures into artists who served the interests of Hitler and other leaders. Breker, who was trained in the tradition of such conventional modernist sculpture as that of Rodin, possessed skills recognized by diverse critics and patrons in the Weimar Republic. Petropoulos argues that his idealistic pursuit of concepts of "lasting and indisputable beauty" (p. 222) formed the basis of a panhellinism that ultimately brought him into contact with Speer and would be adapted to the propagandistic interests of the state leaders after 1933. Here Petropoulos also ventures into aesthetic evaluation by defining the distinctive aspects of a supposed Nazi art as monumentality and the use of specific political allegories. Tracing the aesthetic, careerist, and social integration of Breker's biography with the development of National Socialist Gemany, Petropoulos argues for the importance of personal motivations and political structures. Breker never plundered, but he did accept an aryanized apartment in Paris as well as frequent cash and other gifts from the Nazi elite that paralleled the increasing propagandistic use of his art. This in turn followed the developing cruelty and brutality of state policy. That he, like most of the figures in this book, was exonerated after the war is another important discussion in Petropoulos' study. Until his death in 1991, Breker was in complete denial that he had done anything at all wrong and, in some right-wing circles, is still celebrated today as a modern German master.

But the section on the artists also raises the issue of how analyzing culture can be a problematic enterprise. In this part of the book, for example, he uses a range of loaded assessments such as "gifted artists and those lacking real talent," "something peculiar and trivial about Ziegler's art," "jarring and disquieting," "unsettling [aesthetic] results." When discussing older works in sections on plundering, these subjective assessments are complemented by occasional phrases such as "magnificent artworks" and "the exquisite ... palace." That is to say, while Petropoulos is careful to warn us in his introduction and elsewhere that part of the point of this book is to show how culture is just as corruptible and culpable as any other sphere of Nazi society, these occasional slips into

Furthermore, a slightly broader intellectual and professional context might have highlighted other ways in which these individuals were drawn together and enabled to commit criminal acts. For example, Petropoulos does highlight the intellectual and aesthetic interests of each individual in the book by noting the title of dissertations and publications, the content of a museum exhibition, the iconography of a sculpture, etc. But could the issue of the content of their aesthetic commitments (in addition to their plundering and compromising practice) be expanded beyond the individual to the social as well? This reader was struck by the fact that, almost to a person, many of these professionals were specialists in, collectors of, and aesthetically influenced by pre-modern German art. Obviously in the Nazi period, a variety of historical reference points were used to buttress different ideological goals. Yet in Petropoulos' cases, most often the point of reference for many of these individuals was German artists active between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries. Why is this so? Does it show the influence of Rosenberg's aesthetic values on the institutional implementation of plundering and anti-Semitic policies? In general, were people interested in pre- modern Germany more consistently represented in powerful positions throughout the cultural professions? Exception or the rule? What about the importance individuals like Breker placed on classical sources or the interest in archaic communities by SS officials? Focusing on the connections between the actual content of these individual interests as much as their actions before, during, and after the war might highlight an even deeper social history than is already laid out here.[4]

That said, it is hard to overestimate the value of Petropoulos' study. The subtle and well-researched analysis of individual actors who nevertheless coalesce into a social group of agents goes a long way into making our understanding of how Nazi policies of hatred and abuse were made possible and palatable to many who, on the surface, did not share the extreme world-view of the elite leadership. The job of a critical history is not only to identify events and analyze policies but to clarify exactly how policies are enacted through a variety of institutional, social, and ideological means. Focusing on art, the sphere of activity that is often taken as that which is good and ideal in any society, indicates just how complex the Nazi system of power was but also how corruptible the people of a given community can be. As such, this book should be necessary reading for any course that seeks to expose the workings of history and the ability of humanity to oppress. Such a lesson is not limited to National Socialist Germany, even if that society is to be taken as the extreme example in the modern period. It is certainly no exaggeration to say that one of our most important jobs as historians is to emphasize the complexity of given moments of oppression. Petropoulos' analysis of the complexity and culpability of art world professionals in the Nazi era is a crucial example of how this lesson can be communicated and, perhaps, learned.

Notes

[1]. Werner Durth, Deutsche Architekten. Biographische Verflechtungen 1900-1970 (Braunschweig: Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn, 1987); Alan Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

Press, 1992).

[2]. This debate, of course, has been most starkly highlighted in the last decade by the work of Christopher Browning and the critically received scholarship of Daniel Goldhagen. See, Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1992); Daniel Jonah Goldhagen,Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1996).

[3]. He follows in this regard earlier examples of prosopography such as Isabel Hull, The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1888-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

[4]. In a related point, the first real challenge to the continuity of fascist tendencies in postwar art history occurred at the 1970 Cologne art history conference. At this event, younger scholars organized a roundtable that addressed the presence of Nazi Party members and nationalist scholarship within the contemporary discipline. Perhaps the highlight was Berthold Hinz's discussion of the Bamburg Rider and its reception from the 19th century through the Nazi period and into postwar German art history. For a discussion of this moment, see O.K. Werckmeister, "Radical Art History," Art Journal 42 (Winter 1982), no. 4: 284-91.

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Citation: Paul B. Jaskot. Review of Petropoulos, Jonathan, The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany. H-German, H-Net Reviews. November, 2001.URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5621

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