AUTONOM

Brekers work thrown in a backyard, 1945

By Tomislav Sunic

This essay was first published in the Croatian language in the Croatian cultural weekly Hrvatsko Slovo (September 3, 1999, Nr. 228; October 15, 1999, Nr. 243); in French, in Ecrits de Paris, (July-August, 2002, Nr 645).(Translated from Croatian into French and from French into English by the author). AUTONOM is the first to publish it in English, and have previously published part I and II. Part I can be read here. Part II can be read here.

About the author: Dr. Tomislav Sunic is a Croatian scholar, writer and thinker, having worked all over Europe and the USA, he is an important, critical voice for European and Occidental cultural heritage and innovation, constantly assessing and reassessing its history and status quo.

The Archaic Post-Modernity – continued from part II

The superman (Űbermensch) in the political arena was bound to find his superhuman place in the plastic art. Sculptures of athletes, warriors, nymphs and goddesses, were exposed in state galleries, but also along motorways, in front of the ministries, and beside army garrisons. Even a layman could realize that all those bas-reliefs and sculptures had a normative message and were not necessarily a replica of physical reality. Either in its representation of the morphology of the human body, or in the facial expression, the plastic art of that time highlighted the archetype of “the new European man” with all his imaginary and mythic qualities: the Nordic-dolicocephalic head, extended Gothic arms and legs, and Dinaric-Alpine defiance in eyes.

Partei und Wehrmacht, Arno Breker, Neue Reichkanzlei, 1939

Sculptures of naked women, such as “Flora” by Breker, “Girl” by Fehrle, or “Glance” by Klimsch, show excessively beautiful and geometrically pruned women who, sometimes, with their perfect bodies, with their narrow and lengthened ankles, with their well-rounded and well-proportioned breasts, tire the eye of the observer. In addition, the fact that many sculptures show naked males embracing naked females, indicates that National Socialism was by no means a “conservative” or “reactionary” movement, and that Puritan and Anglo-Saxon prudishness was completely alien to it. It is difficult to deny great talent of Breker or Klimsch, even if some critics justly estimate that their sculptures often show traits of solid manufacturing copies of classic artists.

Das Urteil des Paris, Haus des Deutschen Kunst, Josef Thorak, 1941

As a young man, Breker lived in France where he was influenced by his future friend and sculptor, Aristide Maillol. After the war, many of Breker’s sculptures were destroyed by the American soldiers. In spite of his political troubles, Breker continued to work after the war making busts of his friends and protectors, (Salvador Dali, Hassan II, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, etc). It should be noted that Breker, in the wake of the Allied occupation of Germany, was requested by the Soviets to continue his artistic career in the Soviet Union – an offer that he refused. It goes without saying that it is possible to draw certain parallels between the gigantism of the plastic art in National Socialist Germany and that of the Soviet Union (the naked Prometheus vis-a-vis the muscular and shirtless hammer-holding proletarian!). Yet the differences are again glaring: in communist countries one can never find sculptures representing nude women and men – which confirms our thesis that Communism, although politically frightening, was primarily a prudish and conservative system.

The Wave/Die Woge, Fritz Klimsch, , 1942

Indeed, even today, one can hardly encounter pictorial or plastic representations of embracing couples in China, Cuba or in North Korea. The sculptures of Venus or nymphs made by Breker or Thorak display nothing provocative or pornographic; they never trigger sexual fantasies or erotic dreams, as is perhaps the case with the stupendous naked beauties painted by the Italian artist Amadeo Modigliani. Upon the faces of the sculptures representing nude women made by German artists, one comes across an enigmatic and aristocratic smile and a deep sense of the tragic, which reflects, symbolically, the pessimism of a whole nation in search of its geopolitical identity. No trace can be found of female coquetry or flirtatiousness, such as one encounters among the nudes painted by the French realist, Gustave Courbet, by the Impressionist Edouard Manet, or by Paul Cézanne, the post-Impressionist.

“Die Kunstzeitschrift” (The Art Journal) by Udo Wendel, 1940 (the magazine page shows the Fritz Klimsch sculpture “Die Schauende”)

The German painting of that time represents a chapter apart. Contrary to widespread ideas, “kitsch” was never part of art in National Socialist Germany, and against “kitsch” in the arts the German National Socialist authorities adopted repressive measures resembling those invoked against the alleged degenerate art. As far as the painting of that time is concerned, Germany suffered a considerable regression in the quality of its pictorial production. The early school of expressionism was abandoned and even severely repressed by the authorities. Expressionism, compared to impressionism of the French source, is paradoxically the typical feature of the German character and temperament, just as it is of other Germanic peoples (Flemmings, Scandinavians).

Yet German artists of the expressionist school did not obtain the regime’s green light to exhibit their works. Schools of thought that had emerged from such cultural circles as Die Brücke or Neue Sachligkeit, and which, at the beginning of the twentieth century had produced some of Europe’s great masters, were assailed by the National Socialist censorship. German painters, who between 1933 and 1945, gained considerable reputation were neo-classicist self-portraitists and landscape painters who avoided pathetic and exaggerated compositions, and attempted to rid artistic work of every trace of the influence of cubism and abstract art. Overall, one can sense in their paintings the revival of the taste for primitive art and a return to the Flemish masters of the fifteenth century.

Weiblicher Akt, Adolf Ziegler, before 1942

Certain parallels can again be drawn with the paintings known as “socialist-realist” in the Soviet Union and other communist countries. However, even here the difference is obvious. Whereas one can see on the paintings of Soviet artists the peasants and workmen adorned with their perpetual grins, and in the background a factory under construction, on the German paintings of that time seldom can one seldom see signs of industrialization. Traces of the asphalt, chimneys spewing fumes, or factories in full gear – such as one can observe among “socialists-realist” painters (and in their titanic and apocalyptic form among the futuristic artists in fascistic Italy!), very rarely appear in the German paintings of that period.

Just as one can draw a comparison between German sculptors and Soviet sculptors, one can also notice a difference between figurative art under Communism and figurative art under National Socialism. In the art galleries of the Third Reich the scenes of handsome rural nymphs abound (Amadeus Dier, Johannes Beutner, Sepp Hilz, etc). These pastoral beauties who can be observed on oil paintings, exhale family harmony, and seem to anticipate a well deserved rest after a hard day’s work in the cornfields. Also worth mentioning is the artist and a wood engraver, Ernst von Dombrowski, whose scenes of country life and young children playing, still win great praise from critics.

Oskar Martin Amorbach, The Sower, 1937 

In conclusion, one can state that the German sculpture of that time, proclaims, at least as a rule, a message of racial and promethean hygiene, while the paintings of that time reveal a distinct and populist (völkisch) tendency which can hardly be misconstrued for any ideological or political speculation.