March 20: A Bonfire of “Degenerate” Art

The Nazis burned some 5,000 artworks that they had labeled “degenerate” in the courtyard of Berlin’s fire station on this date in 1939. Seven hundred of these paintings, drawings and sculptures, rounded up from museums and galleries throughout Germany in a thorough purge of modernism (including Bauhaus, Dada, Expressionism, and Cubism), had been displayed at a “Degenerate Art Exhibit” in Munich in 1937. Although children had been banned from viewing the exhibit, it had drawn three times more people than the Nazis’ “Great German Art Exhibition,” which had been approved by Hitler and was on display just a few hundred yards away. Only a few Jewish artists had contributed significantly to modernism in Germany (and only six of 112 artists in the “degenerate” show were Jewish), yet modern art in all its forms was proscribed by the Nazis as un-German and and reflective of Jewish “racial degeneracy.”

“As soon as I have carried out my program for Germany, I shall take up painting. I feel that I have it in my soul to become one of the great artists of the age and that future historians will remember me not for what I have done for Germany, but for my art.”
—Adolf Hitler