Nostalgia for the Future: Modernism and Heterogeneity in the Visual Arts of Nazi Germany

1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-3-8382-1281-4
Verlag: ibidem-Verlag

Buch, Englisch, 246 Seiten, Taschenbuch, Format (B × H): 148 mm x 210 mm, Gewicht: 324 g

In the first chapter on the German military’s unlikely function as an incubator of modernist art and in the second chapter on Adolf Hitler’s advocacy for “eugenic” figurative representation embodying nostalgia for lost Aryan racial perfection and the aspiration for the future perfection of the German Volk, Maertz conclusively proves that the Nazi attack on modernism was inconsistent. In further chapters, on the appropriation of Christian iconography in constructing symbols of a Nazi racial utopia and on Baldur von Schirach’s heretical patronage of modernist art as the supreme Nazi Party authority in Vienna, Maertz reveals that sponsorship of modernist artists continued until the collapse of the regime. Also based on previously unexamined evidence, including 10,000 works of art and documents confiscated by the U.S. Army, Maertz’s final chapter reconstructs the anarchic denazification and rehabilitation of German artists during the Allied occupation, which had unforeseen consequences for the postwar art world.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Maertz, Gregory

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte Kunstgeschichte: 20./21. Jahrhundert

Über Autor(innen)

Gregory Maertz is professor in the Department of English at St. John’s University in New York City. Author of Literature and the Cult of Personality (ibidem, 2017) and co-curator of Kunst i Kamp [Art in Battle] at Norway’s KODE museum, he has published extensively on the art of the Third Reich. The research for this book was funded by the ACLS, CASVA, the DAAD, the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, the Gilder-Lehrman Institute, the IAS in Princeton, the NEH, the NHC, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Wolfsonian-FIU.