Utopia and Dissent in West Germany

The Resurgence of the Politics of Everyday Life in the Long 1960s

Mia Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429753060
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

Just as Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was seeking re-election on a campaign of "no experiments, " art avant-garde groups in West Germany were reviving the utopian impulse to unite art and society. Utopia and Dissent in West Germany examines these groups and their legacy. Postwar artists built international as well as intergenerational networks such as Fluxus, which was active in Düsseldorf, Wiesbaden, and Cologne, and the Situationist International based in Paris. These groups were committed to undoing the compartmentalization of everyday life and the isolation of the artist in society.

And as artists recast politics to address culture and everyday life, they helped forge a path for the West German extraparliamentary left. Utopia and Dissent in West Germany traces these connections and presents a chronological map of the networks that fed into the extraparliamentary left as well as a geographical map of increasing radicalism as the locus of action shifted to West Berlin. These two maps show that in West Germany artists and their interventions in the structures of everyday life were a key starting point for challenging the postwar order.

Part I

Art’s autonomy and social function

1 A zero hour for the arts

[The artist] knows much, but he is only aware of it ‘later’.

Paul Klee¹

After Germany’s defeat in 1945, there was a complex layering of expectations as artists, art critics, intellectuals, and policy makers debated the role of art in the postwar cultural landscape, especially when it came to new art. Although general interest in “classical,” early 20th-century modernism encompassing artists such as Paul Klee or Wassily Kandinsky quickly revived, new abstract art lacked consistent state support. Disagreements revealed entrenched opposition to abstract art. Abstract artists did, however, manage to hold their ground, thanks in part to Cold War considerations. In the postwar period, West German institutions turned to new abstraction as a means of signaling the country’s disavowal of National Socialism’s art agenda and subsequent embrace of Western democratic values. Beyond political considerations, the resumption of these debates jumpstarted experimental art, in particular the search for art forms that could transform the relationship between art object and spectator and recover the utopian integration of art and society.

Hopes for the postwar order can be discerned a few years before the war’s end. In December 1943, just as the new year approached, the painter Willi Baumeister drafted a text full of hope. Baumeister had been dismissed from his post at the Frankfurt School of Applied Arts in 1933. A ban on his art followed in 1941. Despite the difficulties he faced, he continued to paint and write privately while he worked at the Wuppertal Varnish Factory. In 1943, in anticipation of the Third Reich’s defeat, he declared that “[i]n the face of the shock to all living conditions there arose despite everything a cautious periscope out of the buried cellars … driven by the pressure of a built-up, dammed-up impatience.”² In this text, which formed the basis for the book Das Unbekannte in der Kunst (The Unknown in Art), Baumeister dared to hope that he would live to once more share his art. And despite the uncertainties of the times, Baumeister’s optimism was not unique.

After Germany’s defeat, the recovery of the arts was slow and uneven. Still, all of the occupying powers saw art as an important political issue and tool for both education and entertainment. The occupation authorities advocated two positions: first, 1945 as a new beginning for art, and second, art as a realm of free, unpolitical (yet clearly politicized) expression. Within this framing, art was a key component of re-education in postwar Germany, meant to represent liberal democratic values as well as be an arena for the active processing of democratization and denazification. American officials in particular advocated the marriage between modernism and democracy. Meanwhile, both German and occupation officials, as well as individual philanthropists, private institutions, and art advocates, were all involved in recovering art objects, re-establishing international networks, and securing funds for artists and art institutions in addition to finding a vast number of specialists who could help rebuild the country’s cultural infrastructure at the federal, state, and local, as well as public and private, levels. And once funding became available, there was a significant reinvestment in historical spaces and objects damaged by the war, as well as funding for young artists; in different ways, both projects were viewed as integral components in the rebuilding of the nation and the strengthening of democracy. Yet the balance between these two areas of investment differed from one region to the next due to priorities set out by the occupying powers and local priorities. Under these conditions, artists also moved to negotiate their positions in the postwar order.

These various developments also included an initial examination of Germany’s cultural heritage. The four occupying powers – the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain, and France – recognized culture for its role in denazification and re-education. There were, however, pragmatic as well as ideological issues that hampered a consistent policy. In the midst of housing and fuel shortages and food scarcity, cinemas, theaters, or other meeting places provided a useful diversion as well as a few hours of warmth for a restless population. The pressure to realize these advantages meant that in some cases the occupation authorities used former Nazi-era personnel as well as Nazi-produced entertainment. Although German commercial cinema was slow to recover after the war – largely because its key propaganda role under the Third Reich made the Allies reluctant to put Germans back behind cameras – Allied powers rushed to use cinema as a tool of re-education, taking control of studios, production, and releases. As the cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch puts it, “business continued without production.”³ Émigré producers and directors like Fritz Lang did return to occupied Germany to make films but even the resumption of basic operations necessitated the employment of former Ministry of Propaganda employees.

At the same time, ideological divisions affected the assessment of National Socialist cultural policy and personnel. In the Soviet zone of occupation, art became a political showcase when antifascist artists such as Hans Grundig became members of the Academy of Fine Arts that opened in 1947.⁴ Then, in response to the Soviet implementation of Socialist Realism in its zone, the United States advocated art as a depoliticized realm of production. Invoking the discourse of totalitarianism, the Americans emphasized their rejection of cultural directives and censorship, a principle that opened up the possibility for both National Socialist themes and personnel to remain relevant in the postwar period. Rather than define “Nazi” or any other political aesthetic, art and artists were conceived of as belonging to a separate, non-political realm of production, with the result that many prominent artists who had actively supported the National Socialist regime were rehabilitated in the 1950s.

The rise and fall of modernist utopias

There were those, of course, who did not greet the defeat of the Third Reich as a new beginning. For some, too much had been destroyed. In late 1945, the Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka, who remained in exile in England, remarked in despair that the war had effectively put an end to European cultural values. He wrote that the Europe he had loved had disappeared; it no longer existed because too much had been lost. For Kokoschka, the defeat of Nazism could not offer any possibility of redemption or rebirth since Europe’s cultural destruction was inextricable from the moral destruction that had resulted from Europe’s general acceptance of fascism’s cold indifference to human life.⁵

Working with appraisals like that of Kokoschka, it would be tempting to focus exclusively on the National Socialists for the destruction of Germany’s modern art. However, to understand the legacy of anti-modernism after 1945, it is crucial to recognize that anti-modernist sentiments and suspicion of avant-garde groups were widespread well before the Nazis took power. A brief overview of development from the late 19th to the early 20th century contextualizes the Nazi assault on art and thereby clarifies the legacy of anti-modernism after 1945.

Moral and racial attacks against modernist and avant-garde art began to appear in the mid-19th century. In 1850, a still relatively unknown Richard Wagner published his first iteration of an essay on the Jewish influence in music, in which he railed against the corrupting influence of Jewish composers and musicians.⁶ He remained wedded to these ideas and published an expanded version of the essay two decades later at the peak of his fame and fortune. Impressionism, post-impressionism, expressionism, and abstraction all ignited fierce discussion on the values they imparted to modern life, including their connection to the decline of culture as well as that of racial purity.⁷ In 1913, the writer Philipp Stauff drew on a by then well-developed discourse of purity and Germanness when he published the second volume of his biographical dictionary of Jews and their Gentile associates entitled “The Alien Element in the Fine Arts in Germany, or Paul Cassirer, Max Liebermann, etc.” Here, he “revealed” that “ ‘Dealers, critics, and painters, who are strangers in our land and to our blood, stand today at the apex of the fine arts.’ ”⁸ The appointment of the German-Jewish painter Max Liebermann as president of the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1920 unleashed a series of antisemitic articles and discussions about Liebermann’s qualifications as a “German.” Although Liebermann assumed the post, he was forced to resign from the academy when the Nazis took power in 1933.

In little over a decade, the National Socialist regime pursued a radical agenda of racial purity in the visual arts in Germany and Nazi-controlled Europe. In the single summer of 1937, the Reich Chamber of Culture authorized the confiscation of approximately 16,000 works of art by 1400 artists.⁹ Even if the regime was hampered by internal squabbles such as those between propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and the party’s chief ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, it was remarkably effective in removing Jews and political opponents from the arts and forcing thousands of artists into exile in accordance with the regime’s monumental vision of racial superiority and exclusivity. The “Entartete Kunst” (“Degenerate Art”) exhibition of 1937 featured over 650 confiscated works of art described as the products of depraved or sick individuals and hence alien to German culture, encompassing almost the entirety of modern art from the late 19th through to the early 20th century, including impressionism, expressionism, abstract art, and New Objectivity. This comprehensive approach to “un-German” art had inevitable inconsistencies. Work from artists Emil Nolde, Ernst Barlach, and Rudolf Belling featured in both the “Degenerate Art” exhibition as well as the concurrent “Great German Art” exhibition on “Aryan” art.¹⁰ Nonetheless, art not sanctioned by the regime effectively disappeared from public view as modern art was confiscated as well as destroyed.¹¹ The few galleries that circumvented the ban on degenerate artists include the Franke Gallery in Munich, the Gallery Möller in Berlin, and the Gallery Vömel in Dusseldorf, which managed to secret away illicit artwork in backrooms while using their main exhibition spaces for 19th-century masters.

The National Socialists attempted to commandeer culture for political purposes and apply a single dictum that modernism was a form of degeneracy. The regime appointed artists and designated worthy art objects via appointments and commissions while excluding unworthy artists and art works through confiscation, destruction, and exclusion. Its system of patronage, censorship, and exclusion rendered mute the issue of autonomy.

In contrast, “l’art pour l’art” (art for art’s sake) separated art from explicit political content. Around 1850, the Brothers Goncourt – French authors Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt – used the phrase “l’art pour l’art” in their diary to indicate a free, independent art in contrast to one dictated by the ruling elite via contracts, privilege, or patronage. In other words, the free artist worked for himself and used his own judgment to decide form and subject. This notion of free, independent art emerged during a period of structural change that divided “true” artists (those who exercised their skill without dictates) from tradesmen (those who worked according to commercial interests) and created new specializations and professions including portraitists, illustrators, graphic artists, and scientific illustrators. While not absolute, these divisions indicated the changing conception of the artist and the nature of his work.

This notion of free art prodded core questions on art’s role in society. The early 19th-century utopian socialists Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier addressed art as a means to achieve social progress in its role as a cultural vanguard. By the mid-19th century, artists seemed to be responding to Saint-Simon’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I: Art’s autonomy and social function
• PART II: The primacy of political action
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index