# data[].attributes.body
""This artwork became more attractive abroad, or certainly in anti-Nazi circles it gained values because the Nazis opposed it, and I think that over the longer run it was good for modern art to be viewed as something that the Nazis detested and hated."" ("Degenerate Art / Values" by Maysie Willis)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This week it was revealed that a huge stash of modern art had been found in a flat in Munich. Many of the paintings were considered "degenerate" by the Nazis, who staged an exhibition especially to ridicule them. Why did Hitler hate abstract art so much?

In July 1937, four years after it came to power, the Nazi party put on two art exhibitions in Munich.

The Great German Art Exhibition was designed to show works that Hitler approved of - depicting statuesque blonde nudes along with idealised soldiers and landscapes.

The second exhibition, just down the road, showed the other side of German art - modern, abstract, non-representational - or as the Nazis saw it, "degenerate".

The Degenerate Art Exhibition included works by some of the great international names - Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka and Wassily Kandinsky - along with famous German artists of the time such Max Beckmann, Emil Nolde and Georg Grosz.

The exhibition handbook explained that the aim of the show was to "reveal the philosophical, political, racial and moral goals and intentions behind this movement, and the driving forces of corruption which follow them".

Works were included "if they were abstract or expressionistic, but also in certain cases if the work was by a Jewish artist," says Jonathan Petropoulos, professor of European History at Claremont McKenna College and author of several books on art and politics in the Third Reich.

He says the exhibition was laid out with the deliberate intention of encouraging a negative reaction. "The pictures were hung askew, there was graffiti on the walls, which insulted the art and the artists, and made claims that made this art seem outlandish, ridiculous."

British artist Robert Medley went to see the show. "It was enormously crowded and all the pictures hung like some kind of provincial auction room where the things had been simply slapped up on the wall regardless to create the effect that this was worthless stuff," he says.

Hitler had been an artist before he was a politician - but the realistic paintings of buildings and landscapes that he preferred had been dismissed by the art establishment in favour of abstract and modern styles.

So the Degenerate Art Exhibition was his moment to get his revenge. He had made a speech about it that summer, saying "works of art which cannot be understood in themselves but need some pretentious instruction book to justify their existence will never again find their way to the German people".

Artists featured in the exhibition

Paul Klee was dismissed from Duesseldorf Academy and left Germany for Switzerland

Max Beckmann lost his job at the Academy in Frankfurt and fled to the Netherlands, then the US

Otto Dix was sacked from the Dresden State Academy, drafted by the Nazis in 1945, and captured by the French

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner committed suicide a year after hundreds of his paintings were removed from public collections - he had earlier suffered from mental illness

Max Ernst had already moved to Paris, but later fled to the US and eventually returned to France

In pictures: Long-lost art unveiled
The Nazis claimed that degenerate art was the product of Jews and Bolsheviks, although only six of the 112 artists featured in the exhibition were actually Jewish.

The art was divided into different rooms by category - art that was blasphemous, art by Jewish or communist artists, art that criticised German soldiers, art that offended the honour of German women.

One room featured entirely abstract paintings, and was labelled "the insanity room".

"In the paintings and drawings of this chamber of horrors there is no telling what was in the sick brains of those who wielded the brush or the pencil," reads the entry in the exhibition handbook.

The idea of the exhibition was not just to mock modern art, but to encourage the viewers to see it as a symptom of an evil plot against the German people.

The curators went to some lengths to get the message across, hiring actors to mingle with the crowds and criticise the exhibits.

The Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich attracted more than a million visitors - three times more than the officially sanctioned Great German Art Exhibition.

Some realised it could be their last chance to see this kind of art in Germany, while others endorsed Hitler's views. Many people also came because of the air of scandal around the show - and it wasn't just Nazi sympathisers who found the art off-putting.

Fritz Lustig was a young Jewish apprentice who went along to see the works of art. He says "they didn't seem to mean very much - if they were portraits they seemed to distort the faces... if they were things, they seemed to be quite different from what the things really looked like - I mean the word degenerate seemed to me to apply".

The exhibition went on tour all over Germany, where it was seen by a million more people.

Some of the art was later burned by the Nazis, and for many of the artists this was only the beginning of very hard times ahead.

Find out more

Lucy Burns was reporting for Witness

Witness airs weekdays on BBC World Service

It tells history through the eyes of people who lived it

Listen to Degenerate Art and the Nazis Subscribe to the Witness podcast
But Petropoulos says that for some, being banned by the Nazis turned out to have a positive side.

"This artwork became more attractive abroad, or certainly in anti-Nazi circles it gained values because the Nazis opposed it, and I think that over the longer run it was good for modern art to be viewed as something that the Nazis detested and hated."
Follow @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on Facebook
Some of the artists featured in the exhibition are now considered among the greats of modern art.

Lustig, who later fled the Nazis to settle in England, now enjoys the art that he once thought was degenerate.

"Well, I have grown up since that - I was pretty young and I hadn't seen all that much art - I've changed my mind since then," he says.

"I can appreciate modern art much better now than I did then. It's not meant to be beautiful is it?"

Lucy Burns was reporting for Witness - which airs weekdays on BBC World Service radio. You can hear her report on degenerate art here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This week it was revealed that a huge stash of modern art had been found in a flat in Munich. Many of the paintings were considered "degenerate" by the Nazis, who staged an exhibition especially to ridicule them. Why did Hitler hate abstract art so much?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Arts

Germany's Weimar Republic (1918-1933) was a colourful yet contradictory time marked by political, artistic and societal revolution. A new exhibition in Frankfurt showcases the art that stunningly captures the era.

Splendor and misery in the Weimar Republic

Georg Scholz, "Café (Swastika Knight)"

"Splendor and misery in the Weimar Republic" seeks to make clear just how the foundation for societal and economic advancements that we might take for granted today were laid during what many recall fondly, though not altogether accurately, as a decade of decadence. The exhibition runs through February 25, 2018 at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt.

Author: Courtney Tenz

Splendor and misery in the Weimar Republic

Georg Scholz, "Café (Swastika Knight)"

"Splendor and misery in the Weimar Republic" seeks to make clear just how the foundation for societal and economic advancements that we might take for granted today were laid during what many recall fondly, though not altogether accurately, as a decade of decadence. The exhibition runs through February 25, 2018 at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt.

Author: Courtney Tenz

The Weimar Republic, Germany's first attempt at democracy, came immediately on the heels of the First World War and ended with Hitler's rise to power in 1933.

Amid these contradictions, the era is often noted for its decadence: women experienced a self-liberation they had never felt before, homosexuality was slightly less taboo, and alcohol was flowing in dancehalls and venues across Berlin.

Indeed, Berlin's reputation preceded itself. A restructuring of its boundaries combined with an influx of immigrants made it the third largest city in the world during the 1920s. These immigrants flooding the city - the war injured, members of high society, industrial workers as well as artists - brought with them a diversity of experience that quickly made Weimar Berlin a study in contrasts.

While women strolled the Ku'damm in fur stoles, over in the working class neighborhoods hungry people were crammed into dirty tenements.

Berlin in 1919: Women go to the polls for the first time

While the era has now been portrayed on the screen in Tom Tykwer's acclaimed "Babylon Berlin" series, a new exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, "Splendor and Misery in the Weimar Republic," showcases the contemporary artists that captured the moment.

Comprising 190 works by 62 different artists from the Weimar era, the exhibition focuses on the uneasiness felt at the time - something which is evidenced both in the content of the pieces, but also in their motifs and styles that were influenced by the rising Dada and Cubist art movements.

George Grosz: "Fern im Süd das schöne Spanien" (1919)
Read more: How German was Picasso?
As the exhibition's curator, Dr. Ingrid Pfeiffer, explains, the exhibition seeks to explore the ways in which, 100 years following the beginning of the Weimar Era, we can see how it constructed the foundation of our modern principles.
Industrial advancements and economic depression
"We often read the history of the Weimar Republic from the end backwards-from its transition to National Socialism and World War II," she writes.

Weimar era artists, writers and other cultural players were intent on capturing the turmoil and hubbub of the times - especially in the capital of the republic, Berlin.

Alfred Döblin wrote of a street scene in his novel "Berlin Alexanderplatz," published in 1929, that is easy to envision:

"On Alexanderplatz they are tearing up the road for the underground train. You walk on boards. The electric trolleys cross the square and go up Alexanderstrasse through Münzstrasse as far as Rosenthaler Tor. There are streets to the right and left. In the streets, the houses stand close together. They are full of people from the cellar to the attic. Below are the stores...But above and behind the stores are apartments, and at the back are courtyards, side buildings, lateral buildings, buildings behind the tenements accessed via a courtyard, backs of buildings."

Read more: Weimar exhibition kicks off Bauhaus centennial
The new reality
On the one hand, you see industrial advancement and a hint of wealth in the post-war country. On the other, the social inequality that came along with economic depression.

Characterized by these social tensions and political struggles, the Weimar Republic proved fertile soil for artists working at the time.

Otto Dix: "Nelly als Flora" (1940)

Berlin-born Jeanne Mammen returned to her birth city from France as refugee during World War I. During the Weimar years, she maintained a studio just off the Ku'damm that afforded her a front row seat from which to survey the wealthy, privileged elite whom she sketched at nightclubs and parties.

Otto Dix, himself a veteran of the First World War, likewise captured social milieus in the city, though his focus was on the rampant prostitution and war injured who filled the streets.

These artists and their contemporaries showcased the struggle for democracy, and reflected the reality of trying to build a life in a transitioning society that was sandwiched between crises. The new realism, or New Objectivity, art movement of the time was filled with political and societal criticism, art that revealed the economic divide underlining industrialization.

Through documenting the contradictions of the times, modern art was also coming of age, according to Pfeiffer. "In spite of the negative sociopolitical developments that the artists so succinctly describe in their works, it was during the Weimar Republic that modernism, which continues to shape our lives to this day, developed," she said.
The exhibition runs from October 27, 2017 through February 25, 2018.
"The Weimar Republic was a progressive era in which many pioneering ideas were formed-not only in art, architecture, and design. Besides the manifest misery, it is these tendencies that for me distinguish the splendor of the Weimar Republic."

DW recommends

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How artists captured the splendor and misery of the Weimar Republic | Arts | DW | 27.10.2017

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Arts Germany's Weimar Republic (1918-1933) was a colourful yet contradictory time marked by political, artistic and societal revolution. A new exhibition in Frankfurt showcases the art that stunningly captures the era.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Germany - The Weimar Renaissance: Amid the political and economic turmoil of the early 1920s, Germany's cultural and intellectual life was flowering. The so-called Weimar Renaissance brought the fulfillment of the Modernist revolution, which in the late 19th century had begun to transform the European aesthetic sensibility.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
BBC - GCSE Bitesize - Weimar - strengths and weaknesses

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A secondary school revision resource for GCSE History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Weimar Republic | Facts, Constitution, & Downfall

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Weimar Republic: Weimar Republic, the government of Germany from 1919 to 1933. Economic crisis and political instability led to the collapse of the republic and the rise of the Third Reich. Learn more about the history and significance of the Weimar Republic in this article.

# data[].attributes.body
Easy to understand and has links to background info.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Degenerate art: Degenerate art, (German: Entartete Kunst) term used by the Nazi Party in Germany to describe art that did not support the ideals of National Socialism. It was also the title of a propagandistically designed Nazi exhibition of modern art held in Munich in 1937.