Art of Suppression

Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts

Pamela M. Potter

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780520422728
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: European Art

This provocative study asks why we have held on to vivid images of the Nazis’ total control of the visual and performing arts, even though research has shown that many artists and their works thrived under Hitler. To answer this question, Pamela M. Potter investigates how historians since 1945 have written about music, art, architecture, theater, film, and dance in Nazi Germany and how their accounts have been colored by politics of the Cold War, the fall of communism, and the wish to preserve the idea that true art and politics cannot mix. Potter maintains that although the persecution of Jewish artists and other “enemies of the state” was a high priority for the Third Reich, removing them from German cultural life did not eradicate their artistic legacies. Art of Suppression examines the cultural histories of Nazi Germany to help us understand how the circumstances of exile, the Allied occupation, the Cold War, and the complex meanings of modernism have sustained a distorted and problematic characterization of cultural life during the Third Reich.

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Subvention
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Visual and Performing Arts in Nazi Germany: What Is Known and What Is Believed
• 2. The Exile Experience
• 3. Occupation, Cold War, and the Zero Hour
• 4. Totalitarianism, Intentionalism, and Fascism in Cold War Cultural Histories
• 5. Modernism and the Isolation of Nazi Culture
• 6. Cultural Histories after the Cold War
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index