Art Against the Reich

...Barlach's sculptures and paintings expressed their figures' emotions not as Germans but as human beings...

...In his Magdeburg monument, for example, with its easily identifiable references to World War I, Barlach focused on the tragedy of death rather than celebrating those who died...

...And although he was uninterested in politics—in fact, even mildly welcomed the new government—he stubbornly resisted the Nazis' attack on art, as many of Germany's most acclaimed Modernist artists saw their compositions banned, their works removed from museums, and many of the most celebrated works of modernistic genius installed in the Nazi exhibition of degenerate art...

...Nazi leaders, such as Joseph Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg, elevated the attack on abstract art to an unprecedented level when they attacked Modernism by linking it with Bolshevism and the Jews...

...Despite the government's efforts to deny Barlach an audience, he stubbornly continued to paint and sculpt...

...In concept and detail, the monument rejected the party's rhetoric of patriotic struggle—and both Alfred Rosenberg and Joseph Goebbels accused Barlach of besmirching the sacrifices of German soldiers during the Great War...

...phy 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...

...Bar-lach, a non-Jew as well as the "least public figure imaginable," drew the ire of the Nazi leadership because his works did not conform to the ideological criteria the National Socialist movement demanded...

...When he died in 1938, an obituary in the SS magazine Das Schwarze Korps charged that his failure to accept National Socialism was a result of an immutable racial difference that separated Barlach from true Germans, or, at the very least, that he was corrupted by the Jews...

...Works of art were expected to celebrate heroism and patriotism, as well as being conscious of the racial divide that separated non-Aryans from the Aryan Volk...

...For the Third Reich, Paret writes, "the artist's mission was to be a voice...

...More, Barlach often depicted the horror of war...

...BY JACK FISCHEL Born in 1870, Ernst Barlach was one of Germany's most prominent Expressionist artists at the time the Nazis seized power in 1933...

...Still, though Barlach's experience never led to his internment in a concentration camp, what is exceptional about his life is that despite the artistic impediments, he continued to produce works of art that surmounted repression and have outlasted his Nazi opponents...

...Hitler argued that the essence of art rested in its racial ideals, and artists were required to reflect this theme in their compositions...

...He blamed all forms of modernistic art on the Bolshevik-Jewish conspiracy he was determined to purge from Germany's cultural institutions...

...Although Barlach faced obstacles in the Third Reich that were shared by other artists, some were treated more harshly by the regime than he was...

...Although Barlach's prominence did not allow the Nazis to ostracize him entirely, he did become an object of controversy because his works expressed an intense and unbroken interest in the individual...

...In a curious way, the Nazis took art very seriously, as Peter Paret documents in An Artist Against the Thiird Reich: Ernst Barlach, 1933-1938...

...that retold the National Socialist interpretation of the German race...

...Fancying himself an aesthete and an authority on music, painting, sculpture, and architecture, Hitler railed against much modern artistic innovation, which he equated with everything that was corrupt and subversive in Weimar culture...

...In focusing on the work of Ernst Barlach, Paret provides us with not only an important intellectual biograJack Fischel is chairman of the history department at Millersville University in Pennsylvania and author of The Holocaust and The Historical Dictionary of the Holocaust...