An Artist against the Third Reich: Ernst Barlach, 1933-1938

by Peter Paret

Overview

The conflict between National Socialism and Ernst Barlach, one of the important sculptors of the twentieth century, is an unusual episode in the history of Hitler's efforts to rid Germany of 'international modernism.' Barlach did not passively accept the destruction of his sculptures, but protested the injustice, and continued his work. Peter Paret's discussion of Barlach's art and struggle over creative freedom, is joined to an analysis of Barlach's opponents. Hitler's rejection of modernism, often dismissed as absurd ranting, is instead interpreted as a internally consistent and politically effective critique of liberal Western culture. That some radical national socialists nevertheless advocated a 'nordic modernism' and tried to win Barlach over, indicates the cultural cross-currents running through the early years of the Third Reich. Paret's closely focused study of an artist in a time of crisis seamlessly combines the history of modern Germany and the history of modern art. Peter Paret is Mellon Professor in the Humanities Emeritus of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Spruance Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. He is a member of the American Philosophical Society, which awarded him the Thomas Jefferson Medal and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The German government has awarded him the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit. His other works include, German Encounters with Modernism, 1840-1945 (Cambridge, 2001), Imagined Battles: Reflections of War in European Art (Univ, of NC, 1997), The Berlin Secession: Modernism and its Enemies in Imperial Germany (Harvard, 1989), and Clausewitz and the State (Oxford, 1985).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521035705
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	03/15/2007
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	5.91(w) x 8.74(h) x 0.55(d)

Table of Contents

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Hitler; 2. Barlach; 3. Nordic modernism; 4. The hounding of Barlach; 5. German and un-German art; 6. After the fact; A note on the literature; Notes; Documents and works cited; Index.

Editorial Reviews

Though Barlach's personal story resonates -- poor health and the state's hounding forced him to stop working at the very end of his life -- the historian Peter Paret's Artist Against the Third Reich sheds much light on the tortured evolution of Nazi policy. — Ted Loos

The New York Times

Before Hitler's mission to weld Nazi ideology to art produced in the Reich, modernists and National Socialists met their ill-defined enmity with fumbling hands. Paret (German Encounters with Modernism) views the clash through the career of Barlach (1870-1938) who emerges from this meticulous study paradoxically steadfast and yet destroyed. After 1933, the then renowned artist continued to sculpt and sketch broad-planed, fine-lined figures possessed of an earthy grace, and to proclaim that "[n]othing can be more certain than that art is not subject to the strictures of a political view of the world." As internal party factions sought correlatives to the "un-German" art that Hitler reviled, this avowedly apolitical work became a locus of rhetorical contest: vanguards proclaimed its Nordic virility while conservatives denounced its alien distortion. Paret finds that Barlach, in the beginning, had no clue of the magnitude of his affront to the manic radicals who finally deemed his drawings "`likely to endanger public safety and order.'" Ultimately, Barlach was disowned by the state that might have embraced him: cultural police moved his work from museum to warehouse, from the office of Goebbels (an early admirer) to the 1937 "Degenerate Art" exhibit. He died of a heart attack the next year. While Paret charts this history with graceful clarity, his appraisals of the sculptures sometimes want aesthetic defense. It's unclear, for instance, why certain pieces would "seem to belong not to a national or even an international world, but to a world that is non-national." Still, he succinctly assesses the artist's threat to the Nazi agenda-in particular, by setting Barlach's spare, mournful monuments to World War I against popular tributes to the invincible Reich. Wholly compelling yet never celebratory, Paret's account (including 38 halftones) grants Barlach his long-due regard in English. (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

"...an important intellectual biography of a nonpolitical artist who was forced to become a dissident, but also a lens by which to view the evolution of Hitler's war against abstract art." The Weekly Standard

"[Paret] succinctly assesses the artist's threat to the Nazi agenda - in particular, by setting Barlach's spare, mournful monuments to World War I against popular tributes to the invincible Reich. Wholly compelling yet never celebratory, Paret's account grants for Barlach his long-due regard in English." Publishers Weekly

"[T]he historian Peter Paret's Artist Against the Third Reich sheds much light on the tortured evolution of Nazi policy." New York Times

"As a book about process, as a case study in totalitarianism and a vignette of the crucial relationship between nationalism and war, it has a resonance—and a relevance—far greater than its own modest length." New York Sun

"Paret's effort to weave together the story of a single artistic career while interpreting the history of the Third Reich offers an eminently readable narrative and a potential model to scholars working on related material." CAA Reviews

"Concise, authoritative, with a style accessible to undergraduates, the book would be a good choice to assign in courses on the Third Reich." H-GERMAN Digest

"[A]n excellent contribution to our understanding of the nature of personal and artistic crosscurrent in the German totalitarian environment.... Highly recommended." Choice

"...(H)e has produced a volume that is a model of how the specific and particular can illuminate the general. It is a book to read more than once."
Neil Gregor, The Journal of Modern History

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