Questioning German Expressionism: Nazi Reception and Contradiction in the Art of Käthe Kollwitz
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Questioning German Expressionism: Nazi Reception and Contradiction in the Art of Käthe Kollwitz Madeline Ullrich Dr. Juliet Bellow Department of Art History General University Honors Spring 2014 My research is a study of Käthe Kollwitz's reception by the Nazi regime from 1933-1945 rather than one that focuses on her artistic production. Despite remaining a practicing artist up to her death in 1945, few art historians correlate her career with significant political events of the 1930s and 40s, such as the rise of the Third Reich. Relegated a “degenerate” artist by Hitler, Kollwitz’s art was initially included Degenerate Exhibition of 1937; however, her work was quickly removed from this derogatory spectacle. In fact, the Nazis even appropriated her work for their own propaganda. Hence, my project is defined by a single term: contradictions. The inconsistent treatment of “degenerate” artists reflects contradictions in a variety of realms: Nazi ideology, the artistic movement of German Expressionism as a whole, and gender. Exploring these contradictions not only reveals more about Kollwitz at the end of her career, but also speaks to her position as a German artist in contemporary art historical discourse. Ullrich 1 Berlin, 1941. Picture a small, poorly lit apartment, cluttered with items one would see in the studio of an artist: clay, drop cloths, modeling blocks, and the like. This is the home of the renowned German artist Käthe Kollwitz, which also became her studio in 1940. When Otto Nagel, a close friend and fellow artist of Kollwitz, came to visit her in this modest apartment the following year, he found the usually calm and reserved Kollwitz beside herself with rage. Kollwitz had just discovered her artwork had been plagiarized. Such a revelation would be horrifying for an author of any kind, but Kollwitz was upset not just because of the fact that her works were appropriated, but also about who had committed this deed: her intellectual property had been stolen by the Nazis.1 Images from Kollwitz’s print cycle Hunger, a series originally created to depict the horrific economic conditions faced by working-class German families in the aftermath of World War I, had been included in a Nazi-Fascist periodical. And not only had the print been reproduced without her knowledge or permission, but Warte (Viewpoint), a National Socialist women’s newspaper, changed their very meaning, claiming that these images showed victims of communism in Stalin’s Soviet Russia.2 To top it all off, Warte reproduced Kollwitz’s 1924 print Bread! (Fig. 1) under a fake signature, “St. Frank.”3 The scenario I just described occurred several times during the period of the Third Reich: the Nazis reproduced a number of Kollwitz’s prints without giving her credit, sometimes changing the artist’s signature altogether and reattributing their authorship. Kollwitz’s anger, conveyed in Nagel’s biography, was partially directed towards having her socially-concerned, left-leaning works appropriated for Fascist ends. But her anger must also have been fueled by the fact that only four years earlier, the Nazis labeled this very art “degenerate,” placing her works— 1 Otto Nagel, Käthe Kollwitz, trans. Stella Humphries (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1971), 81. 2 Ibid., 81. 3 Ibid. Ullrich 2 among the 650 pieces by 112 artists featured—in their notorious “Entartete Kunst” (“Degenerate Art”) exhibition in 1937. The intention of this now infamous exhibition was to show the German people the artwork—and, by association, the artists—that the Third Reich officially condemned, and thus deemed “un-German.” In his 1937 decree calling for museum leaders to relinquish modern artworks for “Entartete Kunst,” Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels requested any art that was seen to “insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form, or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill.”4 Kollwitz’s works were among the many removed from museums for such reasons. Yet, to complicate the story even further, while “Entartete Kunst” had a successful run in Munich in 1937 and went on to travel throughout Germany and Austria from 1938-1941, it seems that Kollwitz’s works only appeared in the original Munich version of the exhibition. Her work was subsequently removed once the show traveled to Berlin and on to other venues.5[6] My essay thus hinges on a paradox: why would the Nazis appropriate the work of an artist they ultimately disavowed? Furthermore, why would they condemn Kollwitz as “degenerate” only to exonerate her from this status after the first iteration of “Entartete Kunst”? Scholars have never discussed at length such facts concerning Kollwitz and her treatment during the Third Reich. Thus, my paper takes a twofold approach to Käthe Kollwitz. The unraveling of the Nazis’ contradictory behavior towards Kollwitz during the Third Reich—was she “degenerate,” or was she not?—reveals the internal struggle within Nazi ideology on modern art. 4 Stephanie Barron, “1937: Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany,” in “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, ed. Stephanie Barron (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991), 19. 5 Ibid., 20. 6 Christoph Zuschlag, “An Educational Exhibition: Precursors of “Entartete Kunst” and Its Individual Venues,” in “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, ed. Stephanie Barron (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991), 92. Ullrich 3 In turn, my study of Kollwitz’s reception during the Third Reich will simultaneously create a more complete understanding of this artist and explore the problem of her categorization within the German art world of the early twentieth century. I will argue that it is the “universality” of her art—that is, its ability to straddle artistic movements both thematically and stylistically—that facilitated the appropriation of her work, complicating her reception by the Nazis in terms of their Degenerate Art Exhibition and, consequently, her place in subsequent art-historical scholarship. Categorizing Kollwitz: Her Legacy in Scholarship While scholars have paid scant attention to Kollwitz’s late career and the reception of her work during the Third Reich, there is certainly a developed literature devoted to the artist; methodologically, that field is relatively limited, primarily emphasizing biographical interpretation. Scholars often view Kollwitz as a tragic figure, equating her eventful life circumstances with her grim, sometimes disturbing representations of war, death, and economic despair. Otto Nagel, a close friend of Kollwitz, wrote a biography of the artist only 18 years after her death, connecting the events of her life to a broader historical context and discussing the key influences on Kollwitz’s style and subject matter. However, unlike other authors, Nagel devotes considerable time documenting Kollwitz’s production from 1933-1945, the official years of the Third Reich. He is the only author to go beyond a cursory reference to the interaction between the National Socialists and Käthe Kollwitz. His descriptions of her interactions with Nazism, revealed in her interrogations by the Gestapo, the Nazi appropriation of her artwork, and the removal of her artwork from museums across Berlin and Germany, serve as one catalyst for my paper. Ullrich 4 Yet, despite the wealth of information Nagel provides, scholars seem hesitant to analyze the artist from more theoretical perspectives, resulting in texts that are biographical in nature, the majority of which lack in-depth, scholarly analysis. With the rise of the feminist movement in the 1970s, art historians started making attempts in reviving female artists and their histories through biographical methods. Thus, the first biography on Kollwitz written by an American scholar is Martha Kearns’ Käthe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist (1976). As is common with feminist texts of this era, Kearns’s goal here is to bring Kollwitz, as a female artist, out of obscurity and to place her within a historical context. While this is certainly a noble ambition, Kearns’s biography on Kollwitz falls prey to the problem typical of feminist scholarship at that time. That is, while feminist scholars may have brought women artists into the scholarly discourse, they were often not engaging with the societal constructs that caused female artists to fall by the wayside in the first place.7 As a result, my paper will instead favor a social, historical approach to Kollwitz, questioning the institutions that shaped her career both leading up to and during the Third Reich specifically. Elizabeth Prelinger’s work on Kollwitz, on the other hand could perhaps be read as a reaction to feminist art history’s hesitancy in discussing the more formal aspects of Kollwitz’s work. Prelinger is the first to discuss what she refers to as Kollwitz’s “ambivalence”: both the ease of appropriating Kollwitz’s works during her career, and scholars’ difficulty placing this artist within movements or categories.8 In her essay “Kollwitz Reconsidered” from 1992 National Gallery of Art exhibition catalogue Käthe Kollwitz, Prelinger sheds new light on the 7 Feminist thought was introduced to art historical discourse by means of Linda Nochlin’s renowned essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in which she asks art historians to consider the societal institutions that have prevented the success of female artists. Kearns’s biography on Kollwitz, though she does place the artist in some historical context, does not follow Nochlin’s call to action for a more social art historical approach. Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in Women, Art, and Power: and Other Essays, ed. Linda Nochlin, (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 169. 8 Elizabeth Prelinger, “Kollwitz Reconsidered,” in Käthe Kollwitz, ed. Elizabeth Prelinger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 77.