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The Black Years

The flurry of dark forces and a polarizing political climate strike us when Hamburger Bahnhof exhibits art from the Nazi era.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)


New Gallery: The Black Age. Stories from a collection 1933 – 1945. Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin

Artists who were politically organized on the left in Germany's 1920 and 30 had to expect to be arrested by Gestapo and placed in concentration camps. At the Hamburger Bahnhof exhibition "Die Schwarzen Jahre" we are thrown right into the political struggle that raged in the Weimar Republic before Hitler came to power in 1933.

In the notorious, national socialist propaganda exhibition "Entartete Kunst" "degenerate art" in Munich in 1937, the exhibition organizers had painted a quote on the exhibition wall from the manifesto "Der Impertinentismus", which was printed in the journal Die Aktion. The author was named A. Undo, probably a pseudonym for the individual anarchist foreman and writer Hugo Kersten, who died at a young age. The following was on the wall: "They even say: We pretend to be artists, poets or whatever, but we are nothing, just voluptuous and rude in their full mouth. We bring about a great fraud in the world and cultivate snobs that lick our boots. "The Nazis wanted to show the" true face "of the modernists. The resistance was to be crushed.

Avantgarde. Among other things, it was the profits of the Jewish art dealer Paul Cassirer that after the scandal exhibition in 1892, Edvard Munch was fortified as a symbolist artist in Germany. Cassier's art trade was the first to show a large-scale impressionist and expressionist avant-garde in Berlin in the early 20th century.

Like Munch, the artist Arnold Böcklin was also a symbolist. Both are strongly present in the exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof.

In 1879 Arnold Böcklin visited the medieval castle of Castello Aragonese on the east side of the island of Ischia, and the cemetery island of San Michele in the Venice lagoon where tall cypresses shade the ancient tombs. Böcklin was inspired by the Etruscans' burial tombs carved into the steep Italian mountainsides. In 1883 Böcklin painted The Toten Island "Island of Death", where we see a tall, white figure wrapped in shrouds standing in a boat on its way over to the island of Necropolis, where the chosen of the gods are laid to rest forever. The painting became so popular in imperial Germany that Böcklin painted five versions of the motif. Adolf Hitler bought the third version in 1936 from the art dealer Maria Almas. Almas had previously been married to Ali Almas-Diamant and converted to the Jewish faith, but divorced her husband in 1938. Later, she provided hundreds of works of art to the driver, especially for the planned large "Führermuseum" in Austria.

One must ask: What happened in Europe as a whole?

Resistance. The work that makes the strongest impression in the exhibition about the black years at Hamburger Bahnhof is the bronze sculpture Beaten Jew by the artist Theo Balden. In the same way as the artists Hans Grundig and Horst Strempel, Theo Balden joined the German Communist Party in 1928, and the following year he became a member of the revolutionary artist organization ASSO. The painters Max Ligner and Hans Uhlmann, both represented in the exhibition, were also connected to communism. At the Hamburger Bahnhof, the disputes of the Weimar Republic come to life. "The black crowds" «black scissors» were anarchist and anarchist syndicalist youth groups that in many German cities organized resistance to the growing National Socialist movement in the 1920s and 30s. For a few years, the anarchist groups managed to protect meetings and gatherings in the working-class neighborhoods from Nazi atrocities before being ousted by the Gestapo. In the Rhineland, Central Germany and in Berlin, the black crowds were strong. In Horst Strempel's painting Night over Germany "Night over Germany" and in Hans Grundig's picture Fight of bears and wolves "Fight between bears and wolves" we clearly see the forces at work to prevent the fascist ideology from taking power. But how was it possible that Germany could "drown in this horrific barbarism", as the artist Hans Grundig wrote in a letter in 1936? One must ask: What happened in Europe as a whole? The fact is that the persecution of Jews in Europe has a 2000-year history. In imperial Germany, the Jews were not equated with other citizens until 1871, according to a bill by Bismarck. Everyone who has the opportunity should therefore also visit the Jewish Museum in Berlin and get an insight into the discrimination of the Jewish people in Europe – long before the Holocaust.

Politicized aesthetics. Journalists Edouard Drumont (French and born in 1844) and Wilhelm Marr (German and born in 1819) both contributed to spreading anti-Semitic propaganda through books and publications. Drumont's two-volume work France Juive (1886), which sold hundreds of thousands of copies in France and Germany, put forward a conspiracy theory about the Jews' secret collaboration with Freemasons and Jacobins, who together would take power in the French Republic. Drumont demanded that the Jews be excluded from French society. The left-wing democrat and anarchist Wilhelm Marr published the book in 1879 The Road to the Victory of Germanism over Judaism "The road to victory for the Germans over Judaism", in 1880 he published Golden rats and red mice "Golden Rats and Red Mice", thus laying the foundation for the conspiracy theory of the conspiracy between Judaism, capitalism and communism, which was later copied by Adolf Hitler in the book Mein Kampf.

The work that makes the strongest impression in the exhibition from the dark years is the bronze sculpture Beaten Jew by the artist Theo Balden.

The protagonists of modernism such as Klee, Dix, Heckel, Kirchner, Nolde, Kollwitz, Marc and Beckmann (all of whom appear in the exhibition) were systematically subjected to incitement and anti-Semitic attacks by the National Socialist press and the public. They were forced to resign from their professorships and teaching positions, and had to flee the brutal Germany of the 1930s.

Edvard Munch. "Munch still hangs on the wall," wrote the Norwegian daily newspaper Tidens Tegn in August 1937, a few weeks after the first major confiscations of Entartete Kunst took place in German museums across the country. The pictures the newspaper referred to here were works from the Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin, among them Melancholy by Munch. Museum director Paul Rave was able to reassure the newspaper that there was currently no danger that Munch's art would be considered "degenerate".

Four years earlier, in 1933, German newspapers had euphorically celebrated Munch's 70th birthday, praising him as a "Nordic-Germanic" artist and as the "Nordic ancestor of expressionism." This, however, did not prevent the later Nazi-appointed commission from removing and seizing Munch's work in 1937. At that time, Munch was slandered by the commission as a "pathological problem maker". In 1939, the painting became Melancholy sold in Oslo – the client for the sale was Hermann Göring. Munch's gallery owner Paul Cassirer took his own life in 1926.

The exhibition runs until 31 July.

 

Hans-Georg Kohler
Hans-Georg Kohler
Kohler is a regular reviewer for Ny Tid. Artist.

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