scholarly journals Building the Visible Immortality of the Nation: The Centrality of ‘Rooted Modernism’ to the Third Reich’s Architectural New Order

Fascism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Griffin
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
New Order ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Third ◽  
Industrial Buildings ◽  
Conceptual Clarity ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The Many ◽  
Architectural Modernism

This article sets out to contribute conceptual clarity to the growing recognition of the modern and futural dynamic behind fascist cultural projects by focusing on projects for architectural renewal under the Third Reich. It starts by reviewing the gradual recognition of the futural temporality of the regime’s culture. It then introduces the concept ‘rooted modernism’ and argues for its application not only to the vernacular idioms of some of the Reich’s new buildings, but also to the International Style and machine aesthetic deployed in many Nazi technological and industrial buildings. The article’s main focus is on the extensive use made in the new civic and public architecture under Nazism (and Fascism) of ‘stripped classicism’. This was a form of neo-classicism widely encountered in both democratic and authoritarian states throughout the inter-war period, and which can be understood as an alternative strand of architectural modernism co-existing with more overtly avant-garde experiments in reshaping the built environment. The case is then made for applying a new conceptual framework for evaluating the relationship to modernity and modernism of architectural projects, not just in fascist cultural production, but that of the many authoritarian right-wing regimes of the period which claimed to embrace the national past while striving for a dynamic, heroic future. This opens up the possibility for historians to engage with the complex cultural entanglements and histoires croisées of revolutionary with modernizing conservative states in the ‘fascist era’.

Entartete Kunst

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Kelly Hamlin
Keyword(s):  
Third Reich ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
Paul Klee ◽  
Traditional Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Third ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Degenerate Art ◽  
The Third Reich

Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) is a term that was used by Nazi authorities to identify, censure, and confiscate art they considered inconsistent with their ideology. It was the cornerstone of an ambitious propaganda campaign that culminated in the exhibition Entartete Kunst, which took place in Munich in 1937. The majority of this so-called degenerate art was Avant-Garde in both form and subject. Abstract Art by German artists, including Max Beckmann, Max Eernst, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, and Franz Marc, was particularly vulnerable to Nazi attack; non-German artists such as Vasily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian were also singled out. As a polarizing concept, Entartete Kunst stems from an essentially anti-modernist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic position. It was designed to legitimize the art of the Third Reich, which was rooted in traditional art forms and characterized by an idealized naturalism that promoted heroic virtues and racial purity.

scholarly journals More Disagreement Over Human Dignity: Federal Constitutional Court's Most Recent Benetton Advertising Decision

2003 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
pp. 533-539
Author(s):  
Craig Smith
Keyword(s):  
Human Dignity ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The State ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
The Third ◽  
Federal Constitutional ◽  
Charter Of Fundamental Rights ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The Many

Article 1 is the Basic Law's crown. The concept of human dignity is this crown's jewel: an interest so precious that the state must affirmatively protect and foster its inviolability. This uniquely important status is evident from human dignity's prominence in the constitution, the early Federal Republic's pressing need to repudiate the Third Reich, the many judicial and scholarly exegeses of Article 1, and human dignity's unique claim to absolute protection. The success of the German legal construct of human dignity also is apparent from its influence on the European Union's Charter of Fundamental Rights. That document likewise begins with a provision nearly identical to the Basic Law's Article 1.

The Art of Forgetting

2021 ◽  
pp. 120-152
Author(s):  
Banu Karaca
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Art World ◽  
Art Collections ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Wealth Tax ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Artistic Interventions ◽  
Socialist Art

Chapter 4 examines decivilizing moments that constitute silences in national art histories and yet are formative for the art world in Germany and Turkey. These silences include art collections that are historically related to the dispossession of minorities during the Holocaust in Germany and the Armenian genocide and subsequent discriminatory practices (e.g., the wealth tax for non-Muslims, 1942) in Turkey. The chapter traces the tensions that have arisen in Germany’s struggle to re-acquire modernist works purged from its institutions during the Third Reich, a process that has often been aided by capital that is itself of Nazi provenance. It shows how East Germany’s socialist art came to be seen as a deviation from the modern paradigm in a reunited Germany, so much so that it was declared aesthetically and morally bankrupt and equated to Nazi cultural production. It outlines similarly forgotten processes in Turkey, e.g., a series of works created during the Anatolian painting tours (1938–43). “Failing” to adequately represent Turkey’s modernization, they have been lost to this day. Discussing artistic interventions of Stih and Schnock (Berlin) and Dilek Winchester (Istanbul), it shows how artists break these silences on historical instances deemed unspeakable within the civilizing narrative of the state.

Forschungen Zur Judenfrage: A Notorious Journal and Some of its Contributors

2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 395-415
Author(s):  
Reinhard Markner
Keyword(s):  
Third Reich ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
Theory Of Relativity ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Many

AbstractAmong the many publishing ventures of the “Reichsinstitut für die Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands,” the journal Forschungen zur Judenfrage (1936–1944) has gained most notoriety. In its nine volumes, various aspects of the “Jewish question,” ranging from the Jews in antiquity to Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, were dealt with from a strictly National Socialist point of view. The ambitious project proved to be a failure even before the Third Reich collapsed. While some of the journal's contributors managed to pursue their academic careers in post-war West Germany, its founder, Walter Frank, committed suicide in 1945.

scholarly journals THE AMBIVALENCE OF MODERNISM FROM THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC TO NATIONAL SOCIALISM AND RED VIENNA

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 223-234
Author(s):  
SIEGFRIED MATTL
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Artistic Style ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
The Third ◽  
Art Policy ◽  
Jazz Music ◽  
The Third Reich

Focusing on the spectacular propaganda exhibitions “Degenerate Art” and “Degenerate Music,” critical studies of Nazism's art policy long considered the regime's public attack on modernism and the turn to pseudo-classicism as decisive proof of Nazism's reactionary character. Studies such as Die Kunst im Dritten Reich (1974), which inspired broader research on the topic in the early 1970s, subscribed to a modern conception of aesthetics in which art expresses complex systems of ideas in progress. Artistic style, from this perspective, corresponded to political tendencies and reflected the traditional divide between conservatism and progressivism. But those boundaries have become blurred in the wake of more recent research, which has demonstrated the involvement of modernist artists in Nazi art (e.g. members of the Bauhaus involved in National Socialist architecture or avant-garde filmmakers such as Walter Ruttmann in National Socialist propaganda films) and, conversely, the continual performance of popular jazz music in the Third Reich (e.g. in radio programmes). Seen against such instances of modernist collaboration and its own occasional mimicry of modernism, National Socialism acquires a more ambivalent profile, characterized by the ongoing conflict between reactionary factions and those who favoured modernization for various reasons.

Ludendorff in the Third Reich

2021 ◽  
pp. 160-181
Author(s):  
Jay Lockenour
Keyword(s):  
Political Party ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
The Third ◽  
National Socialists ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Impact

This chapter outlines Erich Ludendorff’s attacks, written in his paper, Ludendorffs Volkswarte, on Adolf Hitler, the National Socialists, and their new cabinet allies after the political party consolidated their power in the summer of 1933. It discusses the relations between Hitler and Ludendorff throughout the first two years of the Third Reich. Despite the many ideological similarities with Nazism, the chapter reveals how Ludendorff’s followers experienced persecution, including their lectures being banned at the last minute or disrupted by Sturmabteilung (SA) rowdies. Some Ludendorffers lost their jobs or chances for promotion because of their championing the Feldherr’s cause. Some spent time in jail or concentration camps because of their “subversive” belief in Deutsche Gotterkenntnis. The chapter then discusses Ludendorff’s Volkswarte as a “purely religious” journal after the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) banned his paper and the Tannenbergbund. The chapter also mentions Ludendorff’s refusal to attend the festivities commemorating the Battle of Tannenberg. Ultimately, the chapter assesses the impact of Hitler and Ludendorff’s reconciliation on Germany.

Dix, Otto (1891–1969)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Van Dyke
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Academic Appointment ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Third Reich

Otto Dix was a painter who emerged as a leading figure of the German avant-garde after World War I. His expressionist caprices, dadaist collages, and verist grotesques challenged prevalent norms of taste and propriety in a number of ways, which include but are not limited to the mixing of high art with mass culture, testing the limits of obscenity and transgressing traditionally heroic images of war. These tactics, coupled with the energetic promotion of his work in the modern dealer–critic system, laid the foundation for the painter’s rapid professional ascent, which culminated in an academic appointment in 1926. At the same time, conservative, nationalist and Nazi artists, critics, and activists frequently attacked Dix’s work, which was prominently displayed in anti-modernist exhibitions such as Degenerate Art between 1933 and 1938. During the Third Reich, Dix was marginalized; he adapted by producing ideologically equivocal, marketable landscapes and religious scenes. After 1945, Dix abandoned the techniques and themes of his earlier, best-known work and sought to position himself in West and East Germany while maintaining his independence from both abstraction and Socialist Realism. His work of the 1920s is now canonical, although the character of his political ideology and the causes and implications of his depictions of the female body and sexual violence continue to be debated.

The Language of Ideology: Lingual Manipulation of Readers in German Literature of the Third Reich

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Michael Press
Keyword(s):  
German Literature ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
The Third ◽  
Historical Argument ◽  
Underlying Basis ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Post War ◽  
German People

In recognizing more than just hyperbole in their critical studies of National Socialist language, post-war philologists Viktor Klemperer (1946) and Eugen Seidel (1961) credit persuasive words and syntax with the expansion of Hitler's ideology among the German people. This popular explanation is being revisited by contemporary philologists, however, as new historical argument holds the functioning of the Third Reich to be anything but monolithic. An emerging scholarly consensus on the presence of more chaos than coherence in Nazi discourse suggests a new imperative for research. After reviewing the foundational works of Mein Kampf (1925) and Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), the author confirms Klemperer and Seidel’s claim for linguistic manipulation in the rise of the National Socialist Party. Most importantly, this article provides a detailed explanation of how party leaders employed rhetorical language to promote fascist ideology without an underlying basis of logical argumentation.

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