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The Weimar Republic helped create
one of the freest artistic societies in history. All laws against minority
groups were either discarded or not enforced. Thus, Jews had been emancipated
in the nineteenth century and WW1 allowed women into the workforce and
hence began to play a role in the politics of the society, displacing
many men especially returning war veterans in 1918. Berlin was viewed
as a capital of homosexuality in the 1920’s especially in the world
of theater and film. Art of this period reflected the brutality of World
War 1; that is, the periodic political strife that troubled the Weimar
Republic encouraged experimentation with new forms.
The massiveness of new ideas and the crossing of traditional boundaries
(gender, race, religion, color, artistic and musical) created a great
disturbance among the conservatives in Germany especially the rural population.
The National Socialists (Nazis) called such innovative ideas “degenerate”.
They also applied the term to Germans who were called feeble-minded and
to those who had genetic diseases. Once in power after 1933, large-scale
sterilization programs were introduced to remove those with low intelligence
from the reproductive part of society. Male homosexuals were persecuted
after June 1934 with the revitalization of paragraph 175 from the Imperial
German Criminal Code of 1871, which outlawed male homosexuality (there
was no law against lesbianism).
Parallel to campaigns against human beings were the campaigns against
Degenerate Art and Music. Degenerate Art referred to most things modern
and abstract particularly art produced since the advent of cubism in
1905. By 1938, such art was confiscated from museums and either destroyed
or sold abroad, while Degenerate Music was an attack on “Afro-Judaic” music,
which was Nazi slang for Jazz and Swing music (a combination of Benny
Goodman and Louis Armstrong). Thus Nazism was not only an attack on the
Jews, but was also a cultural revolution to eliminate degenerate forms
of every sector of society and to replace them with new Aryan ideals.
While degenerate people were eliminated, especially after September 1,
1939 in the T-4 Program (300,000 people were killed in hospitals and
gas chambers by medical doctors and nurses), the next step was the mass
murder of the Jews which began in a more organized way in the summer
of 1941. The use of the word “degenerate” provides insight
into the racial and cultural utopian vision of National Socialism.
—Dr. Stephen Feinstein, Director
Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies
University of Minnesota
Related Sites:
Nazi
Art, Degenerate Art, Anti Art? Painting, Sculpture, Architecture
and Music in the Third Reich.
Music of
Rememberance: A Web site "dedicated to remembering Holocaust musicians
and their art through musical performances, educational activities,
musical recordings, and commissions of new works."
Entartete
Music: Music Supressed by the Third Reich.
"A year or so after the opening in Munich of the exhibition "Entartete
Kunst" (Degenerate Art), the cultural politicians of the Nazi regime
put on another, much less well-known show: this exhibition, entitled "Entartete
Musik", was staged in Düsseldorf in 1938...[Today] from a purely
musical point of view, the "Entartete Musik" series has, with
unanimous international critical acclaim, brought back to life more than
30 forgotten
key works from the first half of this century by composers such as Braunfels,
Goldschmidt, Haas, Korngold, Krása, Krenek, Ullmann and Waxman.
These recordings may help the listener imagine what the musical life
in Europe was before its destruction by the Nazis, and what it might
have been if these great branches had not been abruptly cut off."
The History of the Gay Male and Lesbian Experience During World War
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