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The Faustian Bargain: the Art World in Nazi Germany'

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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). 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. 1 H-German 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.
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