The Grosse Show

Not that we needed any more books. Two moves--and one retirement--meant leaving tons behind, but they accumulate anyway and now overflow three libraries in the new house. But an old friend insisted, and lots were on subjects I liked. Among them, this oddity, the Great German Exhibition, 1942, a paperback sales brochure of choice Nazi-approved art on exhibition in Munich while Hitler's armies were approaching Stalingrad. 

Der Fuhrer was an artist, or considered himself to be, and had a soft spot in his hard heart for art and the artist. It was his idea to create a national show, a bazaar of the kind of art he thought to be the kind of art the German people should appreciate and buy--and thereby support starving painters and sculptors. 

Great German Exhibition is a showbill, an introduction to the art available at this art mall for the volk. Written up and pictured on its pages is not what he considered "degenerate" art--there was a show for that too, attended by three times as many turnstile pushers, an exhibition of what not to like (including people like Van Gogh and Mondrian), a show of what specifically not to appreciate.

Hitler liked neo-classical work, art that participated in dialogue around already famous Greek deities, stories and mythologies that indicated German artists were contributing to themes that had occupied the Western mind for centuries, works like Karl Truppe's Bacchus and Ariadne you'll find here.

But if an artist wanted to locate his work on the approved list, he or she (mostly he) had to create work that was, if this is the right word, heroic in character. Nazi-approved art seemed to adopt realism, but Hitler and his judges wouldn't hear the word spoken. Contemporary work of the Nazi era had to feature "real" characters whose spirit (think divinity) was evident on the canvas, thus maybe heroic is a good qualifier. This woman, for example, from De Alm by Lobisser, a hearty folk hero.

Some of the work had obvious propaganda value--extolling the heroism of Hitler's infantry or commanding officers, like this oak-leaved captain, a man who carried the kind of dedicated jauntiness required to make him a leader of other heroic men.

or this one, Schmitz-Wiedenbruck's Fighting People, the workers and mothers up front in full support of the Blitzkrieg behind. 

Strangely enough--or maybe not--Hitler's tastes ran rather torridly toward naked people, and not just those who play well-established roles in classical lore. Because he heartily approved, the walls of the exhibition hall regularly included naked men and women, handsome adults who seemed not at all shy about being disrobed. There was nothing obscene about the disrobed Aryan ideal, so nakedness became, the history books say, something of a Nazi preoccupation. 

But what I find most remarkable about this old exhibition catalog isn't the art itself, even though it is fascinating. What seems so astounding is the sheer banality of the ads that sponsor the book and, I suppose, the exhibit itself. They run the gamut, really, from baby food to expensive galleries and museums. But what the picture is the unseen life of ordinary people. 

Through all of this--through the battle for Stalingrad, through state-sponsored art, through death camps--some already built, some in the planning--through an entire world at war, the insane dream of a madman out to cleanse the dirt from a master race, ordinary people, ordinary folk, took holiday vacations on trains to mountain hideaways. In Germany, under the reign of the Reich--in Germany, at war with the world--life went on as if there were nothing amiss. 

As if there were nothing amiss.