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Hitler’s Art Theory
hence the question of the eternal value of art becomes one of material constitution,
one of the body of its observer.
Thus Hitler by no means understood the search for the heroic in art to
be a superficial stylization of the glorious past. He vehemently rejected a
purely external, formalistic imitation of the past that tried to apply obsolete
artistic styles borrowed from the vocabulary of art history to the products of
technical modernity. Hitler recognized that such attempts were themselves a
regression into the past that would lead artists astray from the true goal
of achieving an artistic perfection adequate to their own historical time.
Hitler was full of irony when remarking on such regressive trends. In his
polemics against them, he liked to use arguments that the representatives of
modernism—in his view, “the Jews”—customarily used in such cases. Thus
he said that
the National Socialist state must defend itself against the sudden appearance of
those nostalgic people who believe they have an obligation to offer the National
Socialist revolution a “theutsche Kunst” with an h [i.e., “German art,” with an
archaic spelling—Trans.] as a binding legacy for the future handed down by the
muddled world of their own romantic conceptions. They have never been National
Socialists. Either they lived in the hermitages of a Germanic dream world that the
Jews always found ridiculous, or they trotted piously and naively amid the heavenly
crowds of a bourgeois Renaissance. . . . Thus today they offer train stations
in genuine German Renaissance style, street signs and typefaces in Gothic letters,
song lyrics freely adapted from Walther von der Vogelweide, fashions based on
Gretchen and Faust . . . No, gentlemen! . . . Just as in other aspects of our lives, we
gave free rein to the German spirit to develop, in this sphere of art too we cannot
do violence to the modern age in favor of the Middle Ages. 5
The very question of which style was appropriate to the art of the Third
Reich is one Hitler considered fundamentally wrong, because he considered
style to be a catchword that corrupted art just as much as the concept of the
new did. For Hitler, an artwork is good only if it achieves perfection in its
response to a specific, very concrete, present-day challenge—and not when it
presents itself as an example of a universal style, old or new. But how does a
viewer determine that this concrete artwork has achieved a specific, concrete
result with the greatest possible perfection How can art be produced and