The Third Reich 1027behind typewriters—girls seemingly indifferent to the squalor and agony
about them... and Gestapo agents asleep on tables.Moreover, thousands of Germans denounced neighbors to the Gestapo for
being Jewish, Socialist, or Communist, and did so well aware of the conse
quences of their acts. Certainly by 1939, most Germans were fully aware
of the existence of concentration camps. Indeed the Nazi government
eagerly publicized the “trials” and sentences that sent people to them.
Some intellectuals and artists jumped on the Nazi bandwagon. Very few
members—though the novelist Thomas Mann, who had moved from being
an angry conservative to a supporter of the republic by 1922, was one—
resigned from the prestigious Prussian Academy of Arts when called upon
to pledge allegiance to Hitler. The philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889
1976) saluted the Fiihrer as “guided by the inexorability of that spiritual
mission that the destiny of the German people forcibly impresses upon its
history.” Hitler hauled out Heidegger on formal occasions to claim that
Germany’s finest scholars had become Nazis. In fact, some of the finest
German minds were already leaving Germany.
The Nazis burned books that espoused ideas of which they disapproved.
In May 1933 storm troopers coordinated the burning of books by Jews,
Communists, Socialists, and other disapproved authors. In 1937, posters
in the municipal library of Essen boasted that in the four years that had
elapsed since the book burnings, there had been a “healthy” decline in
books borrowed and in the use of the reading room.
Hitler railed against what he called “decadent” art and its new experimen
tal forms, ordering many works removed from museums. During the Weimar
period, Berlin, a city with 40 theaters and 120 newspapers, had become a
center of daring and successful experimentation by artists, writers, and com
posers, as well as scholars. In 1919, the architect Walter Gropius (1883—
1969) had begun a school that combined art and applied arts in the town of
Weimar. The Bauhaus—“House of Building”—set the architectural and dec
orative style of Weimar, stressing simplicity and beauty, expressing function
through form, combining art and craft. By using the most modern materials
available in the quest for “total architecture,” Gropius hoped to reconcile art
and industry. The Bauhaus’s modernism and the presence of foreign archi
tects, artists, and designers made it suspect to Nazis. Hitler, the former
aspiring artist, detested modernism. He closed the Bauhaus as a symbol of
“cultural Bolshevism.”
In 1937, the Nazis in Munich staged an “Exhibition of Degenerate Art,”
including expressionist and dadaist paintings, among other modernist
works. A Great German Art Show opened at the same time, putting on view
officially approved painting. While Stalin’s preferred style of “socialist
realism” emphasized work, Nazi art celebrated being German. Nazi artists
offered sentimental portraits of German families tilling the land, blond