Nostalgia for the Future: Modernism and Heterogeneity in the Visual Arts of Nazi Germany

From the early years of the Weimar Republic until the collapse of Hitler’s regime, demonizing modernist art as a symptom of the corruption of German culture was a standard trope in National Socialist propaganda. But how consistent and thorough was Nazi censorship of modernist artists? Maertz’s pioneering research unearths the persistence of recognizable modernist styles in painting and sculpture produced under the patronage of the Nazi Party and German government institutions, even after the infamous 1937 purge of “degenerate art” from state-funded museums. In the first chapter on Hitler’s advocacy for “eugenic” figurative representation embodying Nazi nostalgia for lost …