Staging Them Entartete Kunst from Past to Present
Staging Them Entartete Kunst from Past to Present Jonas Staal FINAL_interior.indd 51 08/09/2020 13:53 The Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition staged by the Nazi regime, stands as a historical case study of propaganda. Its denouncement of modern art, displayed as a chamber of horrors, contributed to compose an overarching enemy figure, a fabricated threat against the construct of the ‘Aryan’ nation. This translated to a fundamental opposition: modern art stood for chaos, immor- ality and madness—for degeneracy—and this threatened the har- mony, homogeneity, and racial purity of the true body politic. At the time of the first Entartete Kunst exhibition, the composition of this enemy figure took the form of the ‘Bolshevik-Jewish’ con- spiracy for world governance. But in the subsequent chapters of Entartete Kunst showcased throughout Germany, this enemy fig- ure of degeneracy would more emphatically come to include black peoples as well. The aim of propaganda is not to merely send a message, but to construct reality as such: to engineer a collectively embod- ied ‘new normal’.1 The Entartete Kunst exhibition clearly fits this definition of propaganda, as it aimed to enforce a new national consent based on the dichotomy of racial purity versus degeneracy. To construct a new reality, propaganda needs infrastruc- ture, it needs a narrative, and it needs an imagination. In the case of Nazi Germany, this infrastructure consisted of the entire con- trol over the state apparatus, which included all forms of media communication and cultural production. The narrative—or ‘mas- ter narrative’2 in the words of Terence McSweeney—is essentially the Nazi’s origin story that tells us of its past, its present, and its desired future, which in this case is based on a mythological construction of racial purity which needs to be regained in or- der to defend the body politic from degeneracy and collapse.
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