The Gallery of Miracles and Madness by Charlie English

Author:Charlie English [English, Charlie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

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From the first days, it was clear that Entartete Kunst was a hit, far more popular than the Große deutsche Kunstausstellung. More than a million visitors would shoulder their way through the overcrowded rooms of the Archaeological Institute by the end of August. As the Nazi press trumpeted the “artistic inferno,” Hitler and Goebbels traveled to Bayreuth for the Wagner festival, a long-standing fixture of the regime’s summer season. Hitler stayed as the guest of the family in the late composer’s villa, the Haus Wahnfried. (Wagner had explained his villa’s name, which means “mad peace,” with an inscription over the door that read: “Here where my madness has found peace, let this place be named Wahnfried.”) Basking in his victory, in the bosom of the Wagner clan, “Uncle Adolf” lavished approval and attention on Goebbels. “To the Führer at Haus Wahnfried, where I am also staying,” the minister noted in his diary for Saturday, July 24. “Führer very nice…The exhibition Entartete Kunst is a huge success and a big blow.” Here, between interminable operas, the pair discussed how to further exploit their confrontation with modern art.

Their first decision was that Entartete Kunst should come to Berlin in the autumn. Goebbels favored putting it on at the Kronprinzenpalais, where it would have a humiliating resonance. The Nationalgalerie should also be ordered to take a quarter of the works shown in the Große deutsche Kunstausstellung, which was to become an annual event. Eberhard Hanfstaengl should be sacked; Paul Ortwin Rave would be appointed director in his place.

Next, the two men decided that the confiscation of “degenerate” material must now be prosecuted systematically. Hitler gave Goebbels authority to seize all such works in German collections, and the propaganda minister telephoned Ziegler, telling him to “clean the museums.” To perform this vast, secret campaign—which Rave later described as “rape,” “looting,” and “mutilation”—required a dramatic scaling-up of the confiscation commissions. The extreme nature of the purge, which he estimated would take three months, appealed to Goebbels. “This is how it must be done,” he wrote. “Awaken the people’s interest by means of great actions.”

In mid-August, Rave was forced to look on in horror as a gang of anti-modern philistines, including Walter Hansen, rifled the Nationalgalerie’s priceless collection in a raid of “incomprehensible unscrupulousness.” Apart from the personal insults and moral wrongs inflicted on the artists and institutions, he estimated that the damage to the gallery’s inventory amounted to more than a million gold marks. Incalculable harm was also done to the country’s reputation. Goebbels had stipulated that “works of German degenerate art since 1910” were to be removed, but the commissioners also took works by foreign artists such as Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Munch, to whom, in an earlier life, Goebbels had once sent a congratulatory seventieth-birthday telegram. Hansen reviled Van Gogh in particular for his supposed mental illness. He even wanted to confiscate the works of Grünewald, whom he called psychotic, and Rembrandt, who had painted Jewish ghettos, but in these cases he was overruled.

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