Art of the Third Reich

Art of Nazi Germany
Nude statues of the ideal female and male bodies, installed in the streets of Berlin on the occasion of the 1936 Summer Olympics. Berlin won the bid in April 1931, two years before the Nazis came to power. It was the last time ever that the International Olympic Committee gathered to vote in a city bidding as the host.
Die Partei, Arno Breker's statue representing the spirit of the Nazi Party

External video

Art in Nazi Germany, Smarthistory Painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a so-called degenerated artist

Art of Nazi Germany pertains to the government approved art produced in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. Upon becoming dictator in 1933, Adolf Hitler gave his personal artistic preference the force of law to a degree rarely known before. Only in Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union who were Socialist Realism, had become the mandatory style, had a state shown such concern with regulation of the arts.

In the case of Germany, the model was to be classical Greek and Roman art, seen by Hitler as an art whose exterior form embodied an inner racial ideal. It was, furthermore, to be comprehensible to the average man. This art was to be both heroic and romantic. The Nazis viewed the culture of the Weimar period with disgust. Their response stemmed partly from conservative aesthetics and partly from their determination to use culture as propaganda.

As indicated by historian Henry Grosshans in his book Hitler and the Artists, Adolf Hitler who came to power in 1933 (quote): "saw Greek and Roman art as uncontaminated by Jewish influences. Modern art was [perceived by him as] an act of aesthetic violence by the Jews against the German spirit. Such was true to Hitler – wrote Grosshans – even though only Liebermann, Meidner, Freundlich, and Marc Chagall, among those who made significant contributions to the German modernist movement, were Jewish. But Hitler ... took upon himself the responsibility of deciding who, in matters of culture, thought and acted like a Jew." The supposedly "Jewish" nature of art that was indecipherable, distorted, or that represented "depraved" subject matter was explained through the concept of degeneracy, which held that distorted and corrupted art was a symptom of an inferior race.