Customer Reviews

Degenerate Art A powerful story of the Nazis' vilification of the avant-garde and their attack on modern culture [VHS]

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This is a riveting PBS documentary by David Grubin, acclaimed director of many "American Experience" films. This one is about the National Socialist effort to stomp out modern art in Germany 1933-45. Liberal use of archival film combined with close-up views of the paintings themselves as well as knowledgeable interviews add up to a spellbinding primer on how modernism is a threat to totalitarianism. You think you may not like some of this art either, but the fascinating explanations and historical context will change your mind. As the critic Robert Hughes points out in the film, the attempt by the Nazis to censor "grosteque" art (and regiment culture) could have resulted in the grotesque horrors displayed in the concentration camps at the end of the war. If you are at all interested in "culture wars" or the relationship between art and politics you must see this.

This is a superb presentation of one of the lesser known aspects of the Third Reich. The Block Buster Degenerate Art Show in Germany, 1936, is detailed with actual footage from the original show along with excellent footage from the recent hanging of all the surviving work from that show back in Berlin. The documentary very effectivly details the history of the German Expressionists and Hitler's collision course with their work and it puts the work into the perspective of Hitler's "House of German Art," the invasion of Poland, and most importantly the liberation of the camps and the burial of the typhoid dead. Its presentation of book burning in Nazi Germany and the connection to the burning of people is profound.

This documentary was shown in my Art History class, and was used as an example of the extremes of censorship, and also the extent by which people will go to in order to silence works that they do not "get". It's a great video to watch if one would like to explore the insanities of the Third Reich further, or would like to see some great modern art pieces (a lot of great original footage).

Degenerate Art is a most valuable curriculum resource in the Advanced Placement Language and Composition classes I teach at a Catholic high school. Part of the AP Comp curriculum is Visual Literacy, and the ability to read Expressionist art is critical in this age of youth entitlement and pointless rebellion. The juxtaposition of Hitler's aesthetic to the "bones and sinews" of the Expressionists presents a brilliant opportunity to teach the power of visual rhetoric and the evil of propaganda. In Nazi Germany, life truly imitated art in the case of the tortured physiognomies of the concentration camp victims. That connection haunts me and, hopefully, my students, forever, while Hitler's idealized, saccharine images strike us merely as airbrushed myths.