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.

Ostmark

2021 ◽  
pp. 268-287
Author(s):  
Helen Roche
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
World War ◽  
Terrorist Activity ◽  
Religious Buildings ◽  
Security Services ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich

Following Austria’s annexation by the Third Reich, the NPEA authorities were eager to pursue every opportunity to found new Napolas in the freshly acquired territories of the ‘Ostmark’. In the first instance, the Inspectorate took over the existing state boarding schools (Bundeserziehungsanstalten/Staatserziehungsanstalten) at Wien-Breitensee, Wien-Boerhavegasse, Traiskirchen, and the Theresianum. Secondly, beyond Vienna, numerous Napolas were also founded in the buildings of monastic foundations which had been requisitioned and expropriated by the Nazi security services. These included the abbey complexes at Göttweig, Lambach, Seckau, Vorau, and St. Paul (Spanheim), as well as the Catholic seminary at St. Veit (present-day Ljubljana-Šentvid, Slovenia). This chapter begins by charting the chequered history of the former imperial and royal (k.u.k.) cadet schools in Vienna, which were refashioned into civilian Bundeserziehungsanstalten by the Austrian socialist educational reformer Otto Glöckel immediately after World War I. During the reign of Dollfuß and Schuschnigg’s Austrofascist state, the schools were threatened from within by the terrorist activity of illegal Hitler Youth cells, and the Anschluss was ultimately welcomed by many pupils, staff, and administrators. August Heißmeyer and Otto Calliebe’s subsequent efforts to reform the schools into Napolas led to their being incorporated into the NPEA system on 13 March 1939. The chapter then treats the Inspectorate’s foundation of further Napolas in expropriated religious buildings, focusing on NPEA St. Veit as a case study. In conclusion, it outlines the ways in which both of these forms of Napolisation conformed to broader patterns of Nazification policy in Austria after the Anschluss.

Ernst Jünger and Storms of Steel

2019 ◽  
pp. 22-35
Author(s):  
Elliot Neaman
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Local Culture ◽  
World War ◽  
The Third ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Third Reich

This chapter discusses the life and work of Ernst Jünger, who was part of a strain in modern German conservatism that tested the limits of modernity and Enlightenment rationality. He catapulted to fame as a young man on the basis of his World War I memoirs, In Storms of Steel, which made him part of the antidemocratic forces of the Weimar Republic, but he retreated into the inner emigration during the Third Reich. After 1950 he lived a reclusive life but published a stream of essays and books and an impressive diary that chronicled almost four decades of life with sharp observations on a wide range of topics. He was a cultural pessimist who thought that the rise of a unifying planetary technology and the loss of local culture meant that we were entering into a posthistorical world of fragmentation, and new forms of cultural and political tyranny.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Heins
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Private Life ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
World War ◽  
The Third ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Third Reich

This concluding chapter reflects on the development of German melodrama in the aftermath of World War II. It traces a sense of disillusionment with the Nazi “deployment of sexuality” in films and how it had prepared the ground for the renewed postwar cultivation of domesticity and feminine nurturance in West Germany. The return to private life and to puritanical mores in the postwar era was partly a response to the attack on “bourgeois” sexual morality that had been carried out by the mass culture of the Third Reich. Turning against nudity and licentiousness in the early 1950s could be represented and understood as a turn against Nazism. Thus, this “reprivatization” and newly conservative culture left its mark on West German melodramas of the 1950s.

X. Gesetzesbruch als Prinzip. Entwicklungslinien des weltanschaulichen Radikalismus in der Führerdiktatur

2015 ◽  
Vol 132 (1) ◽  
pp. 420-440
Author(s):  
Anselm Doering-Manteuffel
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
World War ◽  
Legal Professionals ◽  
The Third ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The Relationship

Breaking the Law as a Norm: Contours of Ideological Radicalism within the Nazi Dictatorship. This article analyzes the relationship between Nazi legal experts’ efforts to create a canon of constitutional law for the Third Reich and the ideological radicalism characteristic of Hitler and the SS-state. The attempts of legal professionals to establish “völkisch” constitutional law emerged out of the staunch anti-liberalism that had spread throughout Germany since the end of World War I. However, this “völkisch” constitutional law bore no resemblance to rational European legal thought. It not only proved to be ineffective for this reason, but also because the ideological radicalism that reigned supreme in the Third Reich sought to break the law and let lawlessness rule.

“These Scoundrels Are Not the German People”

2020 ◽  
pp. 61-90
Author(s):  
Michael Geheran
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Death ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
German People ◽  
Reign Of Terror

This chapter discusses the Nazi seizure of power from 1933 to 1935. The chapter extends the argument that Jewish veterans used their record of fighting to counter antisemetic attacks into the early years of the Third Reich, demonstrating that Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 did not bring “social death” for the Jewish Frontkampfer. The reign of terror the Nazis unleashed on Jews, Communists, and other groups stood in marked contrast to their failed attempts to marginalize Jewish ex-servicemen, whose record of service in the front lines in World War I enabled them to claim and negotiate a special status in the new Germany. Jewish veterans did not break with their identity as Germans, and continued to demand recognition of their sacrifices from the German public as well as the Nazi Party.

Who Were the German Independent Socialists? The Leipzig City Council Election of 6 December 1917

1992 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 425-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Mckibben
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
City Council ◽  
Socialist Party ◽  
Social Democratic Party ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Third Reich

The emergence of the Independent Socialist party (USPD) in Germany during World War I had momentous and long-reaching consequences. Organized as a group of dissenters within the established German Social Democratic party (SPD), independent socialism grew into a movement that split Germany's working class into two, then three, warring factions. The result was a struggle for supremacy among socialist party factions to which subsequent writers have attributed the “failed” revolution of November 1918, a Weimar Constitution that alienated rather than satisfied German workers, and ultimately the inability of German Socialists to present a unified front against the ultimate threat to German democracy: Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.

The Prussian Paradigm?

2021 ◽  
pp. 197-220
Author(s):  
Helen Roche
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Boarding Schools ◽  
World War ◽  
The Third ◽  
Treaty Of Versailles ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
State Schools

The very first Napolas which were founded at Potsdam, Plön, and Köslin, as well as those which were subsequently founded at Naumburg, Oranienstein, Bensberg, Berlin-Spandau, and Wahlstatt, were deliberately established on the premises of the former Prussian cadet schools, which had been refashioned as civilian ‘State Boarding Schools’ (Staatliche Bildungsanstalten/Stabilas) after World War I, in accordance with the Treaty of Versailles. To an extent, the NPEA authorities deliberately wanted to resurrect the tradition of the Royal Prussian Cadet Corps at the Napolas, but in a new, Nazified guise. This chapter explores the extent to which the former cadet-school Napolas retained or regained their militaristic Prussian spirit, and examines continuities between the Prussian cadet schools, the Stabilas, and the NPEA. It begins by chronicling the demise of the cadet schools and their resurrection as civilian state schools, more or less dedicated to upholding the Weimar Republic, during the aftermath of World War I. It then goes on to chart the rise of revanchist sentiment and the formation of illegal Hitler Youth cells at the Stabilas during the early 1930s, before analysing the process of Napolisation which took place in 1933–4 in greater detail. In conclusion, the chapter sites the Napolas’ Janus-faced attitude towards the cadet-school tradition within existing debates regarding the affinities (or otherwise) between Prussianism and National Socialism, and the degree of continuity which existed between the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.

Weimar Germany and its Histories

2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 581-591 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric D. Weitz
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
World War ◽  
Total War ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The Times

Years later, after the catastrophes of the Third Reich and World War II, Arnold Zweig remembered how he had returned home from another disaster, World War I. “With what hopes had we come back from the war!” he wrote. Zweig recalled not just the catastrophe of total war, but also the élan of revolution. Like a demon, he threw himself into politics, then into his writing. “I have big works, wild works, great well-formed, monumental works in my head!,” he wrote to his friend Helene Weyl in April 1919. “I want to write! Everything that I have done up until now is just a preamble.” And it was not to be “normal” writing. The times were of galloping stallions and wide-open furrows, and talent was everywhere. War and revolution had drawn people out of the confining security of bourgeois life. “The times have once again placed adventure in the center of daily life, making possible once more the great novel and the great story.”

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
pp. 121-128
Author(s):  
Joachim Whaley
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
World War I ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
European Countries ◽  
World War ◽  
German Empire ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Third Reich

‘The legacy of the Holy Roman Empire’ describes the region’s history after 1806. The empire’s dissolution in 1806 effectively partitioned its territory into four zones. Would ‘Germany’ ever be united again? Napoleon’s defeat by the Austrians is discussed along with the creation of the German Confederation, the failure of the Frankfurt Parliament, the 1866 Austro-Prussian war, the creation of the German Empire in 1871, the aftermath of World War I, and the rise of the Third Reich. Is the empire relevant as a model for the present? There is no doubt that its traditions of law and of rights contributed, alongside the traditions that evolved in other European countries, to the development of modern Europe.

Enemy of Secrets: Transparency and Displacement in Interwar Glass

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Freyja Hartzell
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Values ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
The Third ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Color Texture

Abstract Glass is magic. Not quite liquid, not quite solid, it is a shape-shifter. A curious displacer, it dislodges space while itself appearing almost absent, optically permeable—ghostly. Glass’s unique conflation of materiality and immateriality recommended it for both practical and conceptual exploitation during the modern period. This essay considers glass objects and architecture produced in Germany during the Interwar years as both reactions to the cataclysms of World War I and responses to the shift in political values that fueled the advent of the Third Reich. It traces both glass’s own power to displace—to shift and change the cultural landscape of modernity—and its paradoxical powerlessness to resist its own displacement: its gradual evacuation of color, texture and presence—and the cultural and political consequences.

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