Art in Battle by Frode Sandvik, Erik Tonning

The exhibition “Art in Battle” at KODE – Art Museums of Bergen

deals with battles over art initiated by Nazi policies and European
conquests on several arenas. Problematising the overfamiliar
dichotomy of “Degenerate” versus “Great German” art, it
examines propaganda exhibitions in occupied Norway as well
as hitherto unseen art by soldiers stationed in Norway. The
catalogue both documents this ground-breaking show and
assembles leading experts on the history and ideology of Nazi
cultural campaigns in both Germany and Norway to initiate a
fresh discussion of the relationships between centre and periphery
within the artworlds of the Third Reich. Beyond historical re-
assessment, this project also asks more pressingly: How do we
encounter these battles over art today?

Contributors: Line Daatland, James A. van Dyke, Terje Emberland,

Matthew Feldman, Christian Fuhrmeister, Anita Kongssund,
Gregory Maertz, Dag Solhjell, Erik Tonning and Eirik Vassenden
Art in Battle
ISBN: 978-3-8382-1064-3
Art in Battle
Contents
14
Foreword
17
Exhibition
50
Art in Battle
Staging Power in the Art Museum
Line Daatland
76
Art and Non-Art

A Modern Iconoclasm
Anita Kongssund
98
What Battle?
A Critical Examination of the Role of the Art Field
in the Cultural Resistance Against the “Führer-
regime” in Norwegian Art Politics, 1940–1945
Dag Solhjell
118
Art and Wartime National Socialist

Foreign Cultural Policy in Norway
Glimpses, Observations, Hypotheses
Christian Fuhrmeister
138
The Teutonic Rage of the Ancient Timbers

Himmler, the SS and Norwegian Folk Culture
Terje Emberland
158
“Norwegian Spirit and Will”

Vitalism as Radical Aesthetic and Reactionary
Ideology in Literature and Art (1932–1942)
Eirik Vassenden
176
Art, Battle and Apocalypse

The Nazi System of Art
Erik Tonning
200
War Art/Art War

Wehrmacht Modernism in the Context of Official German
and Norwegian Art Policies in World War Two
Gregory Maertz
224
The Challenge of Nazi Art

(Why Julius Paul Junghanns Matters)
James A. van Dyke
240
Afterword: Art in Battle
Matthew Feldman
250
Contributors
252
List of Works
12—13
Foreword
Art in Battle is about art, ideology and politics. The project is a col-
laboration between KODE and the research project “Modernism
and Christianity” at the University of Bergen, and it involves a con-
ference, an exhibition and a publication. Its starting point is a dark
chapter of our recent history: the only known official presentation
of so-called degenerate art outside the Third Reich, which took
place in Norway. The exhibition Art and Non-Art (1942–43) was
inspired by official art exhibitions in Nazi Germany that sought to
distinguish between “exemplary Aryan” art and modern, suppos-
edly “degenerate” art, and to “cleanse” museum collections of the
latter.
When Art and Non-Art was shown in Bergen in January 1943,
several of the works presented as exemplary were borrowed from
Bergen Picture Gallery (now KODE). 19th Century paintings by
Frits Thaulow, Gerhard Munthe and Kitty Kielland were thus
appropriated and used to promote Nazi art propaganda. The
exhibition booklet is disturbing. Today, the rhetoric surrounding
the show – echoing the demand for a “cleansing” and the notion of
“degeneracy” in art – seems not only hostile to modern art, but also
to invoke the deeper abyss of human suffering caused by Hitler’s
regime.
Art in Battle was launched in connection with an international,
cross-disciplinary conference held at KODE in August 2014, fea-
turing invited speakers from Norway, Europe and the USA. The
articles in this present publication represent a selection of these
conference presentations. Matthew Feldman, who is Professor of
Modern History at Teesside University and an expert on the con-
temporary Far Right, was an official conference respondent and
has written a summarizing afterword for this publication.
The exhibition Art in Battle, shown at KODE from September
4th 2015 to February 7th 2016, focused on the ways in which art
and art institutions were used and staged during World War II.
To provide a context for Art and Non-Art, the show also included
works exhibited in the Great German Art exhibitions in Munich
from 1937 to 1944, where the “new” German art of the Reich was
promoted. Along with productions by soldier-artists stationed in
Norway during the war, these create a complex picture of Nazi art.
Just as the selection for Art and Non-Art, the works reveal a certain
arbitrariness in National Socialism’s art ideology when it was put
into practice.
Questions about artistic freedom are brought to a head under
conditions as extreme as those fostered by the Third Reich. At
the same time, we gain more clarity about what is at stake: Which
values do we take for granted? When and how can art become
“dangerous”? Under what conditions do art and art museums exist
during times of war, martial law and other exceptional circum-
stances? Under what conditions do they exist now?
We are deeply grateful to all the contributors, and I owe great
gratitude to our collaboration partners and co-curators Gregory
Maertz, Professor at St John’s University in New York, and Erik
Tonning, Professor at the University of Bergen as well as key staff
members at KODE, Frode Sandvik, Curator, and Line Daatland,
Director of Art and Design. I am also thankful for an excellent
collaboration with Deutsches Historisches Museum (Berlin), the
National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design (Oslo) as well as
public archives and private collectors in terms of loans and exper-
tise. Finally yet importantly, I would like to thank the Fritt Ord
Foundation and Bergen Research Foundation for their generous
financial support.
Karin Hindsbo
Director KODE – Art Museums of Bergen
14—15
Exhibition
KODE Bergen 4 September 2015 – 7 February 2016
Abbreviations:
DHM = Deutsches Historisches
Museum (Berlin)
NM = The National Museum
of Art, Architecture
and Design (Oslo)
[Cat 1]
J.C. Dahl (1788–1857)
Birch Tree in a Storm, 1849
KODE – Art Museums of Bergen
Photo: KODE/Dag Fosse
18—19
[Cat 2]
Gerhard Munthe (1849–1929)
Autumn Study, c. 1876
[Cat 3]
Gerhard Munthe (1849–1929)
Early Spring, 1887
Rasmus Meyer Collections
20—21
[Cat 4]
Frits Thaulow (1847–1906)
The Doctor’s Horse
(The Long Wait), 1888
[Cat 5]
Frits Thaulow (1847–1906)
Ravensborg Country Store, 1891
22—23
[Cat 6]
Kitty Kielland (1843–1914)
Peat Marshes at Jæren, 1897
[Cat 7]
Edvard Munch (1863–1944)
Youth, 1908
Rasmus Meyer Collections
24—25
[Cat 8]
Jais Nielsen (1885–1961)
Tightrope Dancer, 1917
The National Museum of Art,
Architecture and Design, Oslo
Photo: NM/Jacques Lathion
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016
[Cat 9]
Aage Storstein (1900–1983)
Thorough Cleaning, 1930
Photo: NM/Knut Øystein Nerdrum
26—27
[Cat 10]
Isaac Grünewald (1889–1946)
Katarinavägen, 1935
Photo: NM/Børre Høstland
[Cat 11]
Kai Fjell (1907–1989)
The Model’s Homage, 1936
28—29
[Cat 12]
Gert Jynge (1904–1994)
A Farmer, 1937
[Cat 13]
Johs Rian (1891–1981)
Red Autumn in Flatdal, 1937
30—31
[Cat 14]
Albert Janesch (1889–1973)
Water Sport, 1936
Deutsches Historisches
Museum, Berlin
Photo: DHM/Arne Psille
[Cat 15]
Julius Paul Junghanns
(1876–1958)
Summer’s Evening, 1939
Museum, Berlin
32—33
[Cat 16]
Arthur Kampf (1864–1950)
The Virgin from
Hemmingstedt, 1939
Museum, Berlin
Photo: DHM/Sebastian Ahlers
[Cat 17]
Ernst Liebermann (1869–1960)
By the Shore, before 1941
Museum, Berlin
34—35
[Cat 18]
Edmund Steppes (1873–1968)
Paladine des Pan, 1941/42
Museum, Berlin
[Cat 19]
Ewald Jorzig (1905–1983)
Steel Mill, 1938
Museum, Berlin
36—37
[Cat 20]
Arthur Ahrens (1890–1953)
Sandviken in Bergen, 1 May 1943
Museum, Berlin
[Cat 21]
Ulrich Ertl
Dovre Mountain, 1939/1945
Museum, Berlin
38—39
[Cat 22]
Ulrich Ertl
Logged Forest – Colour
Sketch, 1942
Museum, Berlin
[Cat 23]
Harry MacLean (1908–1994)
View towards the Sognefjord,
from Field-Gun Bunker
at Gudvangen, 1943
Museum, Berlin
40—41
[Cat 24]
Harry MacLean (1908–1994)
Direction-Finder Station
with Observation Posts
at Herdla, 1943
Museum, Berlin
[Cat 25]
Hanns Rossmanit (1907–2000)
Tromsø Harbour, 1941
Museum, Berlin
42—43
[Cat 26]
Heinrich Klumbies (1905–1994)
Blimps above an Industrial
Site in Norway, 1940/1945
Museum, Berlin
[Cat 27]
Heinrich Klumbies (1905–1994)
Seaplanes Anchored in a
Nordic Lake, c. 1944
Museum, Berlin
44—45
[Cat 28]
Wolfgang Willrich (1897–1948)
Tundra Landscape at
Dusk, 1941/1942
Museum, Berlin
[Cat 29]
Wolfgang Willrich (1897–1948)
Portait of a Worker in the OT
(page from sketch
book), c. 1942
Museum, Berlin
46—47
Terje Emberland – Art in Battle
Articles
Art in Battle
Staging Power in
the Art Museum
Line Daatland
Line Daatland – Art in Battle

It is part of the museum’s intention that its interpretations should be
unstable and capable of constant renegotiations.
Andrea Witcomb1
A few years ago, a letter from 1942 surfaced in KODE’s correspon-

dence archive. It was sent from the Reichspropagandaleitung,
district department of Western Norway. Propagandaleiter Lasse
Sandvik Rasmussen wrote to the Bergen Picture Gallery (the pre-
decessor of KODE), requesting a loan of exemplary works of art to
the exhibition Art and Non-Art that was being planned for Bergen.
Earlier that year, the NS-appointed director of the National Gallery
in Oslo, Søren Onsager, had organized a comparative exhibition
modeled on two different types of official art show in National
Socialist Germany: the annual Great German Art exhibitions held
in Munich from 1937 on, and the exhibitions Entartete Kunst,
likewise in Munich, in 1937 and 1938. After the show closed at the
National Gallery, the plan was to send a smaller version to the
art societies in the larger regional cities of Norway: Trondheim,
Bergen and Stavanger. The letter testified that the Bergen Picture
Gallery had in some way buttressed a cultural-political-ideological
bridge that stretched all the way from Munich. The museum had a
war history of its own.2
Few traces of World War II remain in Norwegian art museums.
For the last decade, KODE has had a chronological collection
display: a “walk through art history” from the Renaissance until
the present day.3 This is a fairly standard international exhibition
format for historical art, illustrating the narrative of Norwegian
art history as presented in the academic canon. This narrative has
some blank spaces. Some are due to gaps in the collection, oth-
ers to the way the narrative is organized. One empty space in the
chronology is the war years. In our information handouts, the years
of occupation, from 1940 to 1945, are mentioned only in the form
“after 1945.” So the end of the war is considered a beginning. But
there is no explanation of why there is a new beginning when no
clear ending comes before it.
While academic and popular biographies and history books
addressing military acts and ideological conflicts are being
consumed by many as an important reflective exercise, far less
attention is given to the battles of art during the war. Yet art was
50—51
[Fig 1] Letter to the Photo: KODE/Dag Fosse
Bergen Art Society from the
Reichspropagandaleitung,
district department of
Western Norway, 21 October
1942.

not only an important ideological vessel for the combatants: public
galleries themselves played a major role in the deployment of art
as a political instrument, from the centre to the peripheries of the
Reich. As keepers of historical art – should not art museums tell the
stories of the battles over art and examine the conditions of art in
battle?
Art in battle
The sweeping political conflicts of the twentieth century have had

enormous impact on society. In Norway, the deepest scars were
inflicted during the Second World War and five years of German
occupation. This period has been scrutinized by several genera-
tions of historians and the field of study is continuously broadened
and reappraised.4 While historians within other fields have traced
the massive impact of the war on Norwegian collective memory
and socio-political development, there has been far less research
on this period in Norwegian art history. Little space has been
devoted to this period, and there has been a tacit assumption that
not much of importance actually happened. In one of the major
collaborative art historical chronicles after the war, Norges kunst-
historie [Norwegian Art History], published in seven volumes
between the years 1981 and 1983,5 the authors present short chap-
ters within their main fields of research. Regarding the war years,
they have had little material to work on and look forward to future
research. One of them, Anniken Thue, states in the chapter on
applied arts that the artists’ wish to distance themselves from the
war and rather look ahead might have led to some artistic produc-
tion having “disappeared from the historiography.”6 In his chapter
on painting, Hans-Jakob Brun concludes that the occupation meant
a “five-year ice age” in Norwegian art life.7 The underlying assump-
tion is that when the war ended, the art world continued more or
less just as before 1940. But in 1990, Arild Hartmann Eriksen doc-
umented that the art scene in Norway had been far from paralysed
during the war,8 and Brun indeed revised his description with refer-
ence to Eriksen when the two-volume Norges malerkunst [Painting
in Norway] was published in 1993.9 While a few articles have
appeared on the Norwegian National Academy of Art10 and on the
52—53
influence of the war on Norwegian art after 1945,11 it is striking that
Eriksen’s unpublished master’s thesis is still the most comprehen-
sive study of the Norwegian art world during the occupation.
Those who experienced the war had good reasons to distance
themselves from it and to look forwards, as Anniken Thue puts it.
The years of occupation were connected with harsh restrictions,
and pain and shame still attaches to some of the issues at stake.
Still, it is important to direct a contemporary, discerning gaze at
the war and its aftermath. In their recent work on the so-called
honour courts of the Norwegian artists’ organizations, Dag Solhjell
and Hans Fredrik Dahl have shown that wartime events did indeed
have profound effects on the post-war life and work of some art-
ists.12 The dire consequences for individuals makes our present
need for clarity in the descriptions of what happened all the more
urgent. Germany’s long-lasting process of coming-to-terms-with
the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) is the foremost example of the
importance of re-addressing complicated historical issues. This
attitude is part of an international tendency towards a more open
treatment of the cultural products of National Socialism. What
is unpleasant still remains part of our history, and as public insti-
tutions, museums have an important mandate when it comes to
presenting that history.13 New generations pose different ques-
tions than the previous ones. The distance in language and shared
experiences between those who experienced the war and their
great-grandchildren becomes gradually more impenetrable. The
corrective gaze is also a self-reflective gaze. What is de-selected
when we choose to exclude certain themes in the museum narra-
tive? Which voices are important, and which are being silenced?
Who has the right to definition, who holds power in the museum?14
The cleansing of the temple
In the summer of 1937, Germany’s propaganda minister Joseph

Goebbels initiated a purge of the official collections of “decayed
art from 1910 on.”15 In the course of a few hectic weeks a five-man
commission ordered the removal of numerous artworks from
German museums. The commission was headed by the painter
Adolph Ziegler, and included among others the artist and writer

Wolfgang Willrich. Willrich was the author of the pamphlet Die
Säuberung des Kunsttempels [The Cleansing of the Temple of Art],
and his deeply racist ideas became an important basis for the
actions that followed. In the course of the next couple of years, a
total of 16,558 artworks would be confiscated from German public
collections, with Expressionism, Surrealism, Dadaism and Cubism
being especially heavily targeted. The inventory of confiscated
works, compiled by the Reichsministerium for Volksaufklärung und
Propaganda [Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propa-
ganda], show that more than 4000 artworks were destroyed and
more than 3000 auctioned off to foreign buyers. The remainder
was held in storage until the end of the war [Fig 2 and 3].16
Before this art was to be removed from German culture, some
examples were put on show in a series of mocking exhibitions,
called Entartete Kunst – “degenerate art”. The first one, showing
650 artworks from 32 different collections, opened in Munich
in July 1937 [Fig 4 and 5]. The premises of the archaeological
museum in the Hofgarten Arcade were temporarily made available
for the exhibition. The artworks were grouped under different
themes, installed haphazardly and presented with derogatory wall
texts. The aim was to evoke ridicule, contempt and anger. Thus,
it became a freak side-show to the Grosse Deutsche Kunst [Great
German Art] exhibition held at Haus der deutschen Kunst just
across the road [Fig 6].17 Inaugurated with great festivity this year,
the Haus der deutschen Kunst was the first monumental building
of Hitler’s “Third Reich” to be completed. Between 1937 and 1945,
a total of approximately 12,500 works were exhibited in the annual
exhibitions, entered by those artists that were still permitted to
practice their profession. At this main scene for officially approved
contemporary art, Hitler himself bought a considerable number of
works each year, around 800 in total.18
Hitler’s inauguration speech in July 1937 gives us an idea of
what it was all about. After lashing out at the Jewish conspiracy to
destroy art with avant-garde fashions and obfuscatory art criti-
cism, he continues to describe his own view of what art should be.
The expression “modern art” is to be replaced with “German art”
and “this shall and will be of eternal value, as are all truly creative
values of a people. Should this art, however, again lack this eternal
value for our people, then indeed it will mean that it also has no
54—55
[Fig 2] Adolf Hitler Photo: © bpk/Bayerische
examining confiscated art Staatsbibliothek/Archiv
in the collection depot Heinrich Hoffmann
of “Degenerate Art” at
Köpernicker Strasse 24A,
Berlin 13 January 1938.

[Fig 3] Works by Edvard Photo: © bpk
Munch in the collection
depot of confiscated
”Degenerate Art” at
Schloss Niederschönhausen,
Berlin 1937.
56—57
[Fig 4] Cover of the Photo: © bpk/
exhibition brochure Kunstbibliothek, SMB
Entartete Kunst (Degenerate
Art), Munich 1937.

[Fig 5] Installation Photo: © bpk/
view of the “Dada wall,” Zentralarchiv, SMB
Room 3 at the exhibition
Entartete Kunst (Degenerate
Art), Munich 1937.
58—59
[Fig 6] Haus der deutschen Photo: © Bundesarchiv,
Kunst (The House of German Bild 146-1990-073-26
Art), Munich 1937.

higher value today.” The Haus der deutschen Kunst was to be a
temple for “true and everlasting art for the German people.” He
continues: “For art is not founded on time, but only on peoples.”
The imperative for the artist is therefore to erect a monument,
not to a period, but to his people.19 In Hitler’s view, art had an
unchangeable essence and a fixed form that was in some way
anchored in the artist’s sense of belonging to his people. Art is not
for art’s sake but for the sake of the people. Thus, artistic respon-
sibility and the whole concept of individual intention are removed
from the equation. Art becomes an expression of a will that is
larger than the individual and transcendent of the flux of time. In
all its simplicity, this is a fundamentally anti-modernist view of
both art and history.
Art and Non-Art
A little less than five years later, on the 24th of April 1942, direc-
tor Søren Onsager cited Hitler in his own opening speech at the
National Gallery in Oslo, adding that “I hope that all other public
collections in the country will follow this example and effect a
purification. All this imported and foreign art does not fit with ours.
It has caused much damage, and has even driven our entire art of
painting into disintegration.” Regarding the degenerate art, he
continues: “This art implies a consciously destructive tendency.
Right from the start, it was headed by Jewish-Bolshevik artists,
which makes it naïve to assume that the horrible deliriums that
have amused exhibition-goers for years are just harmless out-
breaks of youthful recklessness or fantasies by the pioneers of art.
No, it is far more serious. It is an attack on European culture.”20
This attack appears, as Onsager sees it, both as harmful content
– Communist propaganda, or attacks on Christian values – and as
form, in the depiction of deformed and sick bodies in an unfin-
ished manner. In his catalogue preface, Onsager describes an art
that has deviated from the right path during the past few years:
“It is sad to witness talented painters degrade themselves and
our art into tasteless sensation painting, Communist propaganda
and all kinds of sickly and perverted excesses.” In an article in the
National Socialist periodical Ragnarok the same year, Onsager
60—61
[Fig 7] Spread from the Photo: KODE/Dag Fosse
exhibition brochure Kunst
og ukunst (Art and Non-
Art), Oslo 1942.
62—63
had described his vision for a true Norwegian art. The artists he
admires – Dahl, Thaulow, Munthe, Backer, Kielland – were all
“animated by Norway’s beautiful, characteristic, grand nature.”21
They held on to their own. Onsager hopes for what he calls a
“healthy naturalism,” a new start that will continue the line from
the last artists that felt a bond with Norwegian nature. And the
future seems bright: “When it comes to the so-called degenerate
art, we have to say that we have been luckier than most Euro-
pean countries. Our young artists are basically healthy, and will
hopefully open their eyes and acknowledge their need to be more
diligent at the craft and show more reverence for tradition.”22
The appointment of Onsager as director of the National Gallery
in 1941 and his subsequent purge of its collections was in line with
the so-called “reordering” of Norwegian art life during the occu-
pation. Immediately following the seizure of power in 1940, the
Norwegian National Socialist party started to establish a state cor-
poratism, branching into every part of cultural life. The Ministry of
Culture and Public Enlightenment was established on the German
model, and was to work towards pushing back the “Anglo-Saxon
and Marxist-Liberalist grip on Norwegian Culture.”23 The plan
was to achieve this with the support of consultative artists’ organi-
zations and the appointment of NS party members to significant
positions. In addition to the position as director of the National
Gallery, Onsager was also appointed professor of painting at the
National Academy of Art. Here, the sculptor and NS member Wil-
helm Rasmussen was the only original faculty member remaining.
In this way, preparations were made for the establishment of a new
school of Norwegian National Socialist Art. Nothing came of this,
however. The dismissed professors Jean Helberg and Axel Revold
continued to teach and most of the students followed them to the
illegal academy “The Factory.” The Academy of Art was closed in
1942 and did not open again until after the war.24
Blue horses in red forests
Onsager did, however, receive plenty of publicity around his

exhibition, which, according to official press reports, drew close to
21,000 people during the three-week exhibition period. It was also

[Fig 8] From the opening Photo: The National
of the exhibition Kunst og Library, Oslo/
ukunst (Art and Non-Art) © Filmparken AS
at the National Gallery,
Oslo 1942. Film stills
from the newsreel Norsk
ukerevy (Norwegian Weekly
Review) no. 28, 1942.
64—65
visited by envoys from Germany, including Ministerialdirektor
Alfred-Ingemar Berndt from the Reich Ministry of Public Enlight-
enment and Propaganda.25 From Bergen, Christian Bøbak had
paid close attention to the event. Bøbak was a portrait photogra-
pher of merit who owned a studio and shop in Christian Michelsen
Street. Before the war he had exhibited his own works in the Art
Society. In May, he contacted Onsager by letter, and “on behalf
of artists affiliated with NS and NS people at large,” he enquired
about the prospects of getting the exhibition to Bergen.26 Onsager
conferred with the ministry, which replied the following month
that the Minister of Culture Gulbrand Lunde did wish to send the
exhibition on tour. At this point, negotiations had already started
with the Art Society in Trondheim about opening the exhibition
there in the autumn. The ministry had also received an enquiry
from the art society member Karl Bergersen about sending the
exhibition to Stavanger. One can sense a growing scepticism in
Onsager’s correspondence with the ministry about the idea of
touring the exhibition. In his reply to Bøbak, Onsager wrote that
the National Gallery could not lend “any of the valuable art at this
time – it will only be the non-art.”27 This was the so-called cabinet
of horrors – the section of 37 artworks that Onsager had decided to
purge. Together with these objects, Onsager instructed that “the
entire development from Dahl to the deviation” should be fully
characterized.28 Onsager was dubious of the capacity of the local
art societies to illustrate this pedagogical point with enough ‘good
art’. He also feared that people would lose interest and that the
exhibition would lessen in impact as it dragged on.29 His worries
were justified in part for the Bergen exhibition.
Bøbak and Propagandaleiter Rasmussen did not have an easy
job organizing the exhibition. The Bergen art society was distinctly
lukewarm towards Bøbak’s energetic initiative. Their first answer
was that there was no space in their programme for an exhibition
in the autumn of 1942. The dialogue dwindled, and in October the
Propagandaleiter filed a complaint to the ministry over the attitude
of the board: “It is a well-known fact that the Art Society of Bergen
practices just as before and favors rebellious and communist-
inclined painters.” Rasmussen suggested that representatives of
the new order be appointed to the board. “If this first step towards
a Norwegianizing of the Art Society of Bergen is taken, the idea

is to use the antagonism of art and non-art for propaganda in an
extensive and thorough action.”30 After conferring with Onsager,
the Ministry recommended remaining passive. Eventually, a space
was cleared in the programme and a rental contract on ordinary
terms was agreed. The reciprocal distrust eventually culminated
when the Art Society reported the propaganda office to the police
for illicit use of the Society’s logo in newspaper advertisements
for the exhibition.31 The picture gallery had packed away the bulk
of the collection for safe storage in the countryside when the war
broke out. The few paintings that were available had to be supple-
mented with artworks on loan from private owners.
The exhibition Kunst og ukunst [Art and Non-Art] opened in the
Art Society of Bergen (today Bergen Kunsthall) on the 6th of Janu-
ary 1943. It ran for two and a half weeks. The editorial comments in
the NS-controlled press were enthusiastic and elaborated Onsager’s
pedagogical points: “How often did one not sit in deep and contem-
plative admiration over the reproductions of Leonardo da Vinci’s
‘Mona Lisa’, Millet’s ‘Angelus’ or our own J.C. Dahl’s ‘Birch tree in a
storm’. But when stopping by one of the so-called ‘art exhibitions’,
one saw to ones amazement the ugliest things – works that were
hailed by the press and authorities as ‘masterpieces’ and sold at
fantastic prices to private people and public galleries. Triangles and
squares painted in different colours. Blue horses in red forests. Men
with elephant sickness – portraits of famous people looking like a
bad joke. […] Cubism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Dadaism,
not to mention the latest fancy – Surrealism – and many other ‘isms’.
Everything was art, without regard of the most elementary human
laws of beauty. Can you blame the larger public for ‘not understand-
ing art’?” 32 [Fig 9]. At the same time, the press deplored the low
number of exemplary works in the Bergen version of the exhibi-
tion, and the fact that the quality of some of these works did not do
justice to the artist.33 A total of 48 artworks were shown in Bergen,
eleven in the category “art” and 37 in the category “non-art.” The
exhibition catalogue did not provide much information on each
work, which makes it difficult to positively identify them all. At least
15 of the non-art works were produced in the last 10 years and could
be defined as contemporary art. All artworks in the “art” section
were historical works from several decades back – corresponding to
Søren Onsager’s analysis of the art situation in Norway.
66—67
[Fig 9] “Do You Know “How often did one
the Difference Between not sit in deep and
Art and Non-Art?”. contemplative admiration
Editorial comment on over the reproductions
the exhibition Kunst og of Leonardo da Vinci’s
ukunst (Art and Non- ‘Mona Lisa’, Millet’s
Art) in Bergens Tidende, ‘Angelus’ or our own J.C.
7 January 1943. Photo: Dahl’s ‘Birch tree in a
The National Library, Oslo storm’. But when stopping
© Bergens Tidende by one of the so-called
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 ‘art exhibitions’, one
saw to ones amazement the
ugliest things – works
that were hailed by the
press and authorities as
‘masterpieces’ and sold
at fantastic prices to
private people and public
galleries. Triangles
and squares painted in
different colours. Blue
horses in red forests. Men
with elephant sickness
– portraits of famous
people looking like a bad
joke. Plates and cups
so crooked, it would be
an art in itself to eat
and drink from them.
Cubism, Impressionism,
Expressionism, Dadaism,
not to mention the latest
fancy – Surrealism
– and many other
‘isms’. Everything was
art, without regard
of the most elementary
human laws of beauty.
Can you blame the
larger public for ‘not
understanding art’?"
[excerpt]
68—69
Very little, if any, explicitly “Nazi” art was produced in Norway
during the occupation, even though a number of artists were NS
party members. While the pedagogical juxtaposition of good and
bad – Art and Non-Art – was inspired by the German exhibitions,
the art actually on show in the two categories was different in the
two countries. Much of the exemplary art in the Great German
Art exhibitions was contemporary, while the Norwegian Quisling
regime embraced mainly historical artworks. One reason was
that the exhibitions were based on public collections that were
mainly unavailable due to safety measures. The result was an
appropriation of artworks made several decades earlier, and under
completely different circumstances, into the category of suppos-
edly eternal, national art.
Ten out of the eleven "good" artworks in Bergen were landscape
paintings. The broad appeal, across all classes, of landscape paint-
ing was useful when art was to take on the function of propaganda.
The consolidation of the classical genres of painting (history paint-
ing, portraits, landscape and animal painting) has been considered
as a characteristic of Nazi art. It is easy to unite in the appreciation
of romantic or naturalistic landscapes. This art does not hold much
potential for subversion.34
The artists represented in the “art” section were Nikolai Astrup,
J.C. Dahl, Lars Hertervig, Kristen Holbø, Kitty Kielland [Cat 6],
Henrik Lund, Gerhard Munthe [Cat 2 and 3], Frits Thaulow
[Cat 4 and 5], and Bernt Tunold. At least six of the artworks were
from the collection of the Bergen Picture Gallery. In the “non-art”

section were found artworks by Reidar Aulie, Georges Braque,
Gideon Börje, Arne Ekeland, Martin Emond, Finn Faaborg, Kai
Fjell [Cat 11], Harald Giersing, Isaac Grünewald [Cat 10], Sigrid
Hjertén, Einar Jolin, Gert Jynge [Cat 12], Per Krohg, Karl Larsen,
Vilhelm Lundstrøm, Willi Midelfart, Eyolf Nagell Erichsen, Jais
Nielsen [Cat 8], Pablo Picasso, Johs Rian [Cat 13], Olaf Rude, Birger
Simonsson, Aage Storstein [Cat 9], Olav Strømme, Rudolph Thy-
gesen, Charlotte Wankel and Antony deWitt.
It is difficult to evaluate the actual reception of the exhibition in
Bergen. While some established art critics wrote regularly for the
press during the war, the reviews of this exhibition are all editori-
als. The reports of success are not necessarily trustworthy. The Art
Society considered the exhibition an extraneous event and might

not have included the visitor numbers (still high during the war) in
their annual report.
The modernist temple of art
Today, the landscape paintings by Gerhard Munthe and Kitty

Kielland hang on the walls in KODE’s permanent collection dis-
play, in their assigned place under Norwegian naturalism in the
“walk through art history.” They bear no signs of their short stint
as Norwegian Nazi icons. The same goes for the degenerate art
from the Art and Non-Art exhibition. After the war, the works went
back on the walls in the National Gallery in Oslo, and resumed
their role in the collection. Nothing about them reveals that at one
point they were almost lost. Around the same time as these works
were restored, those artists whose works had been purchased by
the National Gallery under Onsager’s directorship were obliged
to buy them back, as the acquisitions during the occupation were
nullified.35
Traditional chronological collection displays thus rarely reveal
the dramatic circumstances that are the fabric of history. The acts
of power, class struggles, battles for emancipation – the disrup-
tions, coincidences and losses – these are not visible. What you
see is a continuity of neat squares against an even backdrop. The
artworks are relieved from their complicated contexts and reduced
to their primary manifestation – art. The reason for this may be the
silent dogmas behind the art museum’s curatorial practices. We
intend to let art speak for itself, for fear of its being used instru-
mentally. Furthermore, the focus on biography and intention
in the wall texts tends to make the artist stand out as a singular
genius. We restrict the use of explanatory contexts, thus upholding
a notion of art as transcendent of time and inhabiting a reality of
its own.
All museums know the problem of balancing object and con-
text in an exhibition – the artefact versus the text that brings it to
life. But in the art museum this problem appears more urgent.
The object is valued differently. In a museum of cultural history,
the objects are part of a descriptive narrative. In an art museum,
the context of narration itself is normative. In an exhibition that
70—71
centers on artistic intention, the incidents of history become
subordinate. Artworks do not enter collections because they are
old. They are carefully selected according to more or less explicit
criteria of aesthetic quality. The fact that these works have been
thus selected, lends an aura and adds a value: the artistic intention
is being vouched for. The formation of meaning in this exhibi-
tion paradigm facilitates a certain aura around the experience of
artworks and around recognition of the artistic genius. So what
happens, then, if we insert an object like Arthur Kampf ’s Jungfrau
von Hemmingstedt [Cat 16] in the “walk through art history”?
The blind spot in the white cube
The generic, context-free exhibition space of modernism – ‘the

white cube’ – seems inadequate in several ways when it comes to
exhibiting historical art. Old artworks do not necessarily become
relevant, understandable and meaningful all by themselves. What
is the relevance of Arthur Kampf ’s painting to us today? We can of
course admire his style, but so did Hitler. And that is what makes
it difficult. The art museum cannot tell stories of art if the object
is not considered art anymore. It seems like choices made in fear
of instrumentalizing art may even deprive us of the ability to tell
stories about actual instrumentalizations of art.
When the exhibition Up for Discussion: The Sculptor Arno Breker
was on display in Schleswig-Holstein-Haus in Schwerin in 2006, it
created discomfort in Germany. “Breker is guilty of crimes against
humanity and against art,” said the director of the Art Academy
in Berlin about the sculptor – one of Hitler’s favourite artists.36
The German artists’ society demanded the exhibition closed after
three weeks, arguing that it functioned as an uncritical rehabilita-
tion of National Socialist art.37 In 2012, Haus der Kunst in Munich
– originally built to be Hitler’s temple of art – organized the exhi-
bition Histories in Conflict: The Haus der Kunst and the Ideological
Uses of Art 1937–1955. Nazi art was exhibited once again, this time
in an artistically developed concept, contextualized by archive
material.38 The director of the Haus der Kunst, Okwui Enwezor,
stated in the press release: “‘Histories in Conflict’ depicts, in an
exemplary manner, what Okwui Enwezor understands a ‘reflexive

museum’ to be: committed to contemporary art, while simulta-
neously examining and mediating the historical dimension of the
contemporary.” The exhibition showed both degenerate and Nazi
art. The degenerate art was mounted on the walls, whereas Hitler’s
official art was displayed on museum storage screens in the middle
of the room.
These artworks cannot, perhaps, share the same wall space.
The categories, values and artistic ideologies behind them are
incompatible. It is not possible to narrate the history of National
Socialism’s view on art in the white cube without cancelling out the
very premise that such an exhibition is built on. The need for con-
text thus becomes urgent. Displaying works by Kampf, or moving
artworks by Munthe and Kielland from a display on naturalism to
one on Nazism, reveals that art history is not only about individual
merits, but also about collective loss, discontinuities, restitutions
and difficult healing processes. It provides a fresh understanding
for new generations of why art institutions after the war embraced
abstraction and avoided great ideologies.
The story of shifting views on art and the extreme ideologies
that made use of art does need space on the exhibition walls. It
tells us something important about what is at stake. The fact that
we value artistic freedom today does not mean that art may not
be used instrumentally once again, even aided and abetted by art
institutions themselves. Laying bare such mechanisms affords an
opportunity to critically discern between art and politics, to make
us more conscious of our own responsibility as thinking and acting
individuals, and to reflect on the role of institutions and histori-
ans in shaping our understanding of art. The power staged in the
museum is changeable. This is why we should make it visible.
72—73
Works cited
Berg, Knut et.al., eds., Norges kunsthistorie Petropoulos, Jonathan, Art as Politics in the
(Oslo: Gyldendal norsk forlag 1981–1983). Third Reich (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of
— , ed., Norges malerkunst (Oslo: Gyldendal North Carolina Press, 1996).
Norsk Forlag, 1993). Rekdal, Per B., “Det sanne, det vanskelige
Corell, Synne, Krigens ettertid: Okkupas- og det kritiske,” Brudd, ABM-skrift #26
jonshistorien i norske historiebøker (Oslo: (Oslo: ABM-Utvikling, 1996).
Spartacus Forlag, 2013). Schlenker, Ines, Hitler’s Salon. The Große
Dahl, Hans Fredrik and Dag Solhjell, Men Deutsche Kunstausstellung at the Haus der
viktigst er æren. Oppg jøret blant kunstnere etter Deutschen Kunst in Munich 1937–1944,
1945 (Oslo: Pax, 2013). German Linguistic and Cultural Studies.
Eriksen, Arild Hartmann, Kunst og ukunst: Vol. 20, 2007.
aspekter ved nyordningen av kunstlivet i Norge Tiedemann, Anja, Die “entartete” Moderne
1940–1945 (Cand. Philol. [MA] thesis in Art und ihr amerikanischer Markt. Karl Buchholz
History, University of Bergen, 1990). und Curt Valentin als Händler verfemter Kunst,
Hinz, Berthold, Art in the Third Reich Schriften der Forschungsstelle “Entartete
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979). Kunst,” Vol. 8, Berlin: Oldenbourg Akademie
Høisæther, Ole Rikard, Reidar Aulie: Kunst Verlag, 2013.
og kamp (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1998). Ustvedt, Øystein, “Norge og den abstrakte
Kolsrud, Ole, En splintret stat. Reg jeringskon- ekspresjonismen,” Kunst og kultur (vol. 91,
torene 1940–1945 (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, no. 2) 2008: 90–107.
2004). Witcomb, Andrea, Re-Imagining the
Markussen, Åse, “Nyordningen og Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum (London:
‘Fabrikken’: Statens Kunstakademi under Routledge, 2003).
okkupasjonen 1940–1945”, Kunst og kultur Zuschlag, Christoph, “‘Es handelt sich um
(vol. 82, no. 2) 1999: 115–141. eine Schuleausstellung’. Die Vorläufer und
Onsager, Søren, “Om ‘entartet’ kunst,” in die Stationen der Ausstellung ‘Entartete
Jacobsen, Hans S., ed., Ragnarok. Årbok 1942, Kunst’,” in ed. Stephanie Barren, “Entartete
(Oslo: Kamben Forlag 1942), pp. 43–47. Kunst.” Das Schicksal der Avantgarde im
Onsager, Søren, ed., Kunst og ukunst i Nazi-Deutschland (München: Hirmer Verlag,
Nasjonalgalleriet. Opprydningen april 1942, 1992).
exhibition catalogue (Oslo: Det Mallingske St.meld. nr. 22 (1999–2000) Kjelder til
Boktrykkeri, 1942). kunnskap og oppleving.
Peters, Olaf, ed., Degenerate art. The Attack St.meld. nr. 49 (2008–2009) Framtidas
on Modern Art in Nazi Germany 1937 (New museum.
York: Prestel, 2014).
Endnotes
1 Witcomb 2003, p. 161. 9 Berg 1993.

2 Letter from Lasse Sandvik Rasmussen to 10 Markussen 1999 and Høisæther 1998.
museum director Moritz Kaland. Correspon- 11 Ustvedt 2008, pp. 90–107.
dence Archive of KODE/Bergen Picture 12 Dahl and Solhjell 2013.
Gallery 1940–45. 13 St.meld. nr. 49 (2008–2009).
3 From KODE’s presentation of the collection 14 The project “Brudd” [meaning “Dis-
display “Art 1400–1900” in the museum’s continuities” or “Fractures”], supported by
marketing material. the Norwegian Arts Council (1996–2014),
4 See Corell 2013 for an overview. challenged museums to tell unconvenient
5 Berg 1981–1983. stories. No art museums took part. Per B.
6 Anniken Thue, “Kunsthåndverket Rekdal wrote about the project: “To choose
1940–1980,” in Berg 1981–1983. is about power and politics, about who has
7 Hans –Jakob Brun, “Maleriet 1940–1980,” the right to define and who has the right to
in Berg 1981–1983. represent. It is about the power to define
8 Eriksen 1990. values and attitudes and power to define

what heritage is. Heritage is not given once 27 Copy of letter from Søren Onsager to
and for all, it is created and recaptured in a Christian Bøbak, 26/6/1942. Correspon-
process that is never neutral.” Rekdal 2006. dence Archive of the National Museum of
See also St.meld. vol. 22 (1999–2000) Kjelder Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo (220/–42).
til kunnskap og oppleving, p. 17 28 Copy of letter from Søren Onsager to
15 Including works in multiple versions Lasse Sandvik Rasmussen, 3/11/1942.
(graphic prints), the total number is cited by Correspondence Archive of the National
some as close to 20,000. See Tiedemann Museum of Art, Architecture and Design,
2013. Oslo (304/42) .
16 4,829 artworks were destroyed in a bon- 29 Copy of letter from Søren Onsager to the
fire in March 1939. In his preliminary report Ministry of Culture and Public Enlighten-
to Hitler on the ‘Entartete Kunst’ action in ment, 1/7/1942 . Correspondence Archive of
1941, Goebbels’ writes that ca. 3,300 art- the National Museum of Art, Architecture
works had been sold to foreign buyers. The and Design, Oslo (233/-42).
remaining confiscated works were stored in 30 Letter from Propagandaleiter Lasse
Schloss Niederschönhausen outside Berlin Sandvik Rasmussen to Minister of Culture
until the end of the war. See Petropolous Gulbrand Lunde, 8/10/1942. Archive of
1996, pp. 80–82. the Office of Culture, J.nr. 3088/42. II.1.
17 The exhibition was visited by more than Correspondence Archive of the Ministry of
2 million in Munich – far more than the exhi- Culture and Public Enlightenment, National
bitions of exemplary art. From 1938 to 1941 Archives of Norway.
it toured all the larger cities in Germany and 31 Copy of letter from Bergens kunstforening
Vienna. Zuschlag 1992, pp. 104–105. [Bergen Art Society] to Bergen Police Office,
18 Schlenker 2007. 15/1/1943. Correspondence Archive of
19 “Hitlers Eröffnungsrede im Haus der Bergen Art Society.
Kunst, München 1937.” Accessible: <http:// 32 Bergens Tidende, 7/1/1943.
www.kunstzitate.de/bildendekunst/ 33 Morgenavisen 8/1/1943.
manifeste/nationalsozialismus/hitler_haus_ 34 Hinz 1979, pp. 2–5. See also Olaf Peters,
der_kunst_37.htm> “From Nordau to Hitler. ‘Degeneration’ and
20 “Direktør Onsager avslører hvilken anti-modernism between the fin-de-siè-
fryktelig fare vi stod i.” [“Director Onsager cle and the National Socialist takeover of
reveals what a terrible danger we were all power”, in Peters 2014, p. 18.
in”], Norsk Telegrambyrå, 24 April 1943. 35 The new director, Sigurd Willoch,
Reproduced in Aftenposten 25 April 1942. appointed 1946, made agreements for the
21 Søren Onsager, “Om ‘entartet’ kunst” in buybacks with each artist. The negotiations
Jacobsen 1942. can be followed in museum correspondences
22 Onsager 1942, pp. 3–5. 1946–1950. Correspondence Archive of the
23 From Georg Wilhelm Müller’s speech “Ein National Museum of Art, Architecture and
Jahr deutsche Kulturarbeit in Norwegen,” Design, Oslo.
reproduced in Deutsche Monatshefte, May 36 “Staeck protestiert gegen Bre-
1941. Se also Kolsrud 2004, pp. 217–227. ker-Schau,” Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 9 July,
24 Markussen 1999. 2006. Accessible: <http://www.ksta.de/
25 “Lederen av propagandaavdelingen i det kultur/staeck-protestiert-gegen-bre-
tyske propagandaministerium på offisielt ker-schau,15189520,13631638.html>.
besøk i Norge,” [“The leader of the Propa- 37 “Nazi-Kunst: Künstler fordern
ganda Department of the German Ministry Schließung der Breker-Ausstellung,”
of Propaganda on official visit in Norway”], Der Spiegel Online, August 8, 2006. <http://
Fritt Folk, 11/5/1942. News Archive of the www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/
National Museum of Art, Architecture and nazi-kunst-kuenstler-fordern-schliessung-
Design, Oslo. der-breker-ausstellung-a-430163.html>
26 Letter from Christian Bøbak to Mr. 38 Geschichten im Konflikt: Das Haus der
Director Søren Onsager, 13/5/1942. Corre- Kunst und der ideologische Gebrauch von Kunst
spondence Archive of the National Museum 1937–1955, Haus der Kunst, 10 June 2012 –13
of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo January 2013.
(142/–42).
74—75
Art and Non-Art
A Modern
Iconoclasm
Anita Kongssund
Anita Kongssund – Art and Non-Art

Against a background of great Norwegian art, I have assembled a num-
ber of degenerate pictures to demonstrate what we have lost by giving
access to this kind of art.
These were the opening words at the inauguration of the exhibition

Art and Non-Art, on display at the National Gallery in Oslo in April
1942. The Director, Søren Onsager, was proud to welcome the pub-
lic to the most extensive exhibition in the National Gallery during
the German occupation, which was also the most prominent
manifestation of Norwegian Nazi art policy (Eriksen, 59). It drew
inspiration from two major exhibitions in Munich five years earlier,
presenting a sharp contrast between Degenerate Art (Entartete
Kunst) and Great German Art (Grosse Deutsche Kunst). The Norwe-
gian exhibition was probably the only locally initiated presentation
of so-called “degenerate” art outside the Third Reich.
The leading nationalist ideologue in the NS was the Minister of
Culture, Gulbrand Lunde. He instigated the exhibition and gave
Onsager his task: to “clear up and purge the National Gallery” of
every degenerate artwork and other unfavourable purchases from
the last few decades.1 According to Lunde, Norwegian cultural
life was afflicted with a general decadence, and the exhibition was
intended to mark the first step of a total rearrangement of the arts
as such (Onsager, 1942b, 5). Onsager put this radical iconoclasm
into practice. Norwegian and degenerate, two key words from his
opening speech, indicate the propaganda aim of the exhibition
(Eriksen, 59). Its main purpose was to warn against the artistic
decline in recent decades, thereby raising public awareness about
the undesirable influences from modern art movements. Thus the
show was staged in service of an overarching ideological and polit-
ical warfare. As Director of the National Gallery during the war,
Onsager was principally a political tool in the hands of the Culture
Ministry. The exhibition thus reflected the official art policy of the
NS, though inflected through Onsager’s own personal views and
preferences [Fig 1].
Søren Onsager was appointed Director of the National Gallery
on 1 August 1941. He succeeded Jens Thiis, who had been Director
since 1908. Onsager, at almost 64, was himself an artist and at
one time an early modernist of the Neo-Impressionist school. The
appointment of Onsager by the Ministry was no coincidence.2 In
76—77
[Fig 1] Søren Onsager Photo: © The Norwegian
with Minister Axel Stang Labour Movement
and Marie Lunde in the Archives and Library
"Chamber of Horror" at
the exhibition Kunst og
ukunst (Art and Non-
Art), Oslo 1942. Minister
of Culture and Public
Enlightenment Gulbrand
Lunde can be seen in the
background to the right.

the interwar period, he was known as a conservative, a xenophobe
and a fervent nationalist. He was also considered well past his
prime as a practicing artist.
Onsager championed “nationalism” and a “healthy naturalism”
(Onsager, 30 April 1942). According to Onsager, two main issues
had “troubled and disturbed” the domestic art scene in recent
years, with Jens Thiis, the former director of the National Gallery,
as a prominent culprit: the so-called “French snobbery” and –
even worse – “the contamination from international Jewish art”
(Onsager, 1942a, 49).
How did this artistic decline manifest itself, we may ask, and
how did Lunde and Onsager understand the term “entartet” or
degenerate?
In Norway at the time, the word “entartet” was simply adopted
from the German cultural debate (Eriksen, 60). Any expression
perceived as a subversive deviation from the accepted norm was
labelled degenerate: meaning diseased, primitive or alien. The
term was rooted in a socio-biological and racist interpretation of
history, society, culture and morals. In the field of visual art the
whole modernist movement was thus stigmatised – including the
so-called “Parisian models” or “-isms,” such as Cubism, Fauvism,
Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism.
These movements represented “disintegrative” tendencies in art,
supposedly visible in the deformation of natural form and beauty,
colour and line, and in an alleged lack of artistic skill and craftsman-
ship (Fritt Folk, 25 April 1942). Moreover, motifs of a defamatory,
blasphemous, psychoanalytic, Marxist or Jewish character were
denounced. The modernist movement was seen as an outgrowth of
international Culture Bolshevism, or, in Onsager’s own words: the
“deluge of Jewish recipes” (Fritt Folk, 10 March 1943). Furthermore,
cripples, freaks, pimps and whores were explicitly mentioned as
undesirable elements that should not be depicted in art.
With the Art and Non-Art exhibition, Onsager wanted to demon-
strate the artistic and cultural decay by presenting the evolution
of Norwegian painting, starting with J. C. Dahl and the glory days
of National Romanticism, and tracing the “national” trend all the
way to its supposed demise and all-time low following the impact
of the international modernist art movements in the 1920s and
-30s (Onsager, 24 April 1942).
78—79
Due to the war, the collection had been removed from the
museum walls; many artworks were evacuated to rural areas
[Fig 2]. In consequence, the full depth of the decay could not be
visualized, Onsager lamented (1942b, 4). The exhibition was

staged on the first floor of the National Gallery, in eight – mainly
small – exhibition areas, as well as in the so-called Square Room
and the Great Hall. On show were a total of 138 pictures by 82 art-
ists. The works dated from 1814 to 1940 and all the works belonged
to the museum. The show was organized as a chronological
national narrative, starting from the approved nineteenth cen-
tury highlights, and moving through the gradual “disintegration”
from about 1914 and onwards. For Onsager it was crucial that the
“non-art” be seen against a background of the “good stuff.” Only
then the public could fully appreciate the failure and decline that
followed.3
The exemplary highlights were shown in the first four cabinets,
which contained Norwegian artists only. First came the painters
who were educated (and mainly worked) in Germany, the Dres-
den painters; these were followed by the Düsseldorf painters.4
Cabinets 3 and 4 were devoted to the painters of the 1880s and
-90s: the Naturalists, Neo-Romantics and Symbolists, who had
studied in Munich, Karlsruhe, Berlin and Paris.5 In view of his
having been exhibited as “degenerate” in Germany in 1937, it is
interesting that Edvard Munch, too, was represented here in the
category of approved art with four paintings, albeit early and fairly
non-provocative ones: The Artist’s Sister (1884), Spring, (1889), Girls
on the Pier (1901) [current title: Girls on the Bridge], and White Night
(1900–1901) [Fig 3].
The public proceeded from The Square Room to The Great Hall,
which for the occasion had been dubbed the “Chamber of Hor-
rors,” a term borrowed from the minor exhibitions of degenerate
art on show for several years in Germany (Zuschlag, 83). The Great
Hall was exclusively devoted to the exhibition’s main subject:
decay. The majority of these “degenerate” works dated from the
1920s and -30s. In this space, chronology was abandoned, and the
artists were presented in alphabetical order. 27 artworks, mainly
Norwegian, were defined as degenerate in this way. A few works
by artists from Sweden, Denmark, France and Italy were also
included, in view of their “inferior nature” (Onsager, 1942b, 13).

[Fig 2] The evacuation Photo: © The Norwegian
of the National Labour Movement
Gallery, Oslo 1940. Archives and Library
80—81
[Fig 3] Edvard Munch: Photo: NM/Jacques Lathion
White Night, 1900/1901.
The National Museum
and Design, Oslo.

Finally, in the last four sections, Onsager had chosen to display
so-called “weak” and “totally indifferent” works by otherwise
competent artists. These artworks were not considered “degen-
erate,” yet they were not, Onsager claimed, up to National Gallery
standards and should be replaced with works of higher quality.
Let us now take a closer look at some works from the section of
degenerate art, with Onsager’s rhetoric and criteria in mind. What,
for him, characterized Norwegian degenerate art? To what extent
were the artworks on display consistent with Onsager’s rhetoric?
Was it primarily considerations of form or of content that qualified
a work for the term entartet? And, finally, did ethnicity and political
orientation play a role in assigning art and artists to the “degener-
ate” section?
Onsager’s method of selection has been examined by Norwe-
gian art historian Arild Hartman Eriksen. In the non-art section,
Onsager assembled the most distinctly modernist works in the
museum’s collection. Amongst the “degenerates” we find Gert
Jynges The Farmer (1937) [Cat 12]. Jynge belonged to a small group
of Norwegian modernists influenced by German Expressionism.
Similarly condemned was Olav Strømme’s Catch of Herring, (1938)
[Fig 4] which tended towards abstraction. Åge Storstein’s Two
Apostles (1932) [Fig 5] was influenced by Cubism and Expression-

ism, which were both among the most reviled -isms. The most
abstract paintings in the exhibition were by Picasso and Braque,
the very inventors of Cubism. A central figure in early Swedish
modernism was the Jewish Isaac Grünewald, who was represented
here with a French-style Expressionist work, the Riddarholm
Church (1914) [Fig 6]. Another Swede, Sigrid Hjertén, who was
Grünewald’s wife and painted in a similar style, was included with
her dark-skinned temptress, Reclining Odalisque, (1933) which car-
ries a reference to Matisse’s many odalisques from 1919 onwards
[Fig 7].
The paintings in the “non-art” section were all indebted to

one or more of the -isms that Onsager despised. In terms of their
iconography, the situation is less clear. The majority of works were
portraits, still lives, genre pictures, interiors and urban subjects
(Eriksen, 78–79). There were no striking examples of certain
hostile or subversive tendencies described by Onsager: art that
mocked or ridiculed Christianity, that was morally corrupting, or
82—83
[Fig 4] Olav Strømme: Photo: NM/Jacques Lathion
Catch of Herring, 1938. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016
The National Museum
and Design, Oslo.

[Fig 5] Aage Storstein: Photo: NM/Børre Høstland
Two Apostles, 1932. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016
The National Museum
and Design, Oslo.
84—85
[Fig 6] Isaac Grünewald: Photo: NM/Børre Høstland
Riddarholm Church, 1914.
The National Museum
and Design, Oslo.

[Fig 7] Sigrid Hjertén: Photo: NM/Børre Høstland
Reclining Odalisque,
1933. The National Museum
and Design, Oslo.
86—87
[Fig 8] Willi Midelfart: Photo: NM/Jacques Lathion
The Police Attacks, 1932.
The National Museum
and Design, Oslo.

[Fig 9] Henrik Sørensen: Photo: NM/Jacques Lathion
From Krøkje in Lom, 1933. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016
The National Museum
and Design , Oslo.
88—89
that advanced morbid or perverse ideas (Eriksen, 78–79). How-
ever, some sensitive NS beholder might perhaps find good reason
to reject the religious motifs, the social and working class images,
and a picture like Hjertén’s Odalisque. The exotic character of the
subject was probably not in keeping with NS art ideology. The
most explicitly political picture at the exhibition, Willi Midelfart’s
The Police Attacking [Fig 8], painted after a visit to an unstable and
polarized Germany in 1932, was described as “typical communist
propaganda, the like of which can often be found in the basement”
(Haug, 1942). Furthermore, regardless of their motifs, most of the
non-art pictures were painted by artists with socialist or commu-
nist sympathies.
Onsager’s distinction between non-art and “weak” art appears
somewhat arbitrary. All works originated from the same period,
and some artists were even represented in both categories. The
motifs were fairly similar: self-portraits, nudes and landscapes.
The section for “weak art” was dominated by a group of artists
labelled the Matisse students, featuring major Norwegian artists
such as Jean Heiberg, Per Krohg, Axel Revold, Per Deberitz and
Henrik Sørensen [Fig 9].6 Compared with the non-art section,
political themes were absent, and the weak art displayed a higher
degree of realism. As Eriksen has pointed out, seemingly harm-
less depictions of Norwegian nature, farming communities and
healthy young boys were relegated to the weak art section. Even
pictures with a national and relatively NS-friendly iconography
were deemed weak, which may indicate that formal criteria were
involved in the selection process (Eriksen, 85). Of course, Onsag-
er’s insistence that he was judging the “objective” quality of these
works may itself be considered a propaganda strategy, designed
to strengthen his own authority and by implication that of the NS
regime.
Three of the artists were represented with both “weak” and
“degenerate” works, illustrating Onsager’s heavy focus on for-
mal qualities. They were Per Krohg, Rudolf Thygesen and Isaac
Grünewald – the latter a “full-blooded Jew” (1942a, 56). Consider-
ing Onsager’s anti-Semitic rhetoric and frequent warnings about
“the infection from Judaism,” it is surprising that he should choose
to subordinate the racial dimension to the formal one. Perhaps he
was no consistent ideologue; or perhaps his professed contempt

concerning all things Jewish was not a decisive factor in practical
life. Most of the artists belonged to the political left, whereas with
the Matisse students we find a predominantly national artistic
profile; in both these contrasting cases it seems that their political
views were not the deciding factor in branding them either “degen-
erate” or “weak.” On the other hand, even the formal criteria
appear vague and ambiguous; one can hardly draw a clear line
between the weak and the degenerate works (Onsager, 1942a, 85).
With the exception of major artists such as Gustav Vigeland,
Edvard Munch, Anders C. Svarstad, and some lesser names,
artworks by practically all of Onsager’s contemporary artist
colleagues were labelled either degenerate or weak. No approved
contemporary works of art were displayed.
Was the Norwegian exhibition a replica of the

German anti-modern exhibitions?
Onsager had visited the Entartete Kunst exhibition in Hamburg in

1938, and his own rhetoric is very close to its German model. He
would even include quotations from Hitler’s inaugural speech at
the “Haus der deutschen Kunst” in 1937 in his own writings (25
April 1942). Still, there were some differences as well as similarities
between the German models and the exhibition in the National
Gallery.
In both countries, of course, an overarching contrast between
exemplary versus degenerate art was made (Barron, 12–13). Sim-
ple, binary comparisons of “good and evil” was a popular method
in Nazi propaganda strategy. It is worth repeating, however, that
in the Munich exhibitions, the two categories were on display in
different venues. Furthermore, the artworks were taken from a
variety of public collections across Germany. In Oslo, on the other
hand, all the works in the exhibition belonged to the museum’s
own collection, and contemporary art was pilloried as weak or
unacceptable.
The curatorial presentation of the degenerate works was in fact
markedly different in Munich and Oslo. In Munich, works were
displayed to illustrate abstraction, anti-militarism and other topics
or styles despised by the National Socialists. These were, in part,
90—91
grouped thematically using headings such as “Religion,” “Jewish
Art” and “Defamation of Women” (Barron, 12–13). In Norway,
there was hardly room for such thematic differentiation. Indeed,
it is worth noting that works by Isaac Grünewald – the Swedish
Jew – were found in both the merely “weak” and the “degenerate”
sections. In Germany, by contrast, “Jewish art” was automatically
categorized as degenerate.
A striking feature of the Munich exhibition was the vulgar
ridicule and mockery directed at the exhibited works. They were
deliberately displayed in a chaotic and careless fashion, poorly
lit and seasoned with aggressive quotes and slogans. Onsager’s
presentation appears dignified in comparison. In Munich, hand-
written labels also revealed to the public how much each piece of
degenerate art had cost the taxpayers (Barron, 20). By contrast,
although it was hardly in Onsager’s personal interest to protect the
former management of the National Gallery, he refused to reveal
the purchase prices.
Edvard Munch’s standing in Germany and Norway was strik-
ingly different. In the late 1930s, Munch’s works were being
labelled degenerate in Germany, whereas in Norway he was
a national icon and an artistic model, even in the minds of the
National Socialists.7 Onsager himself belonged to a select circle of
artists inspired by Munch.
The Art and Non-Art exhibition in Oslo was thus an offshoot of the
Munich exhibition and related German shows, but it was not in any
sense a simple copy. Onsager’s concept was somewhat less cate-
gorical and confrontational, for example in downplaying somewhat
the racial issue. Also, the category of “weak” art introduced another
nuance. There was no fixed template or instruction defining the
Nazi view of art, and this allowed for some local variation. Although
Onsager largely emulated the German rhetoric, the foreign map did
not quite match the Norwegian terrain. Norwegian modernist and
avant-garde art was more moderate, less provocative, and far less
influential – and the art scene as a whole was more provincial. As an
artist, Onsager was himself rooted in Neo-Impressionism. This may
have rendered him somewhat more open to an individually oriented
artistic approach (1942a, 57). Furthermore, the Art and Non-Art
exhibition was intended as “an instruction for young painters who
were misguided” (1942b, 4). Norwegian artists were considered to

be basically healthy, but an effort was needed to prevent backsliding.
Onsager’s more conciliatory approach may have been an attempt to
soften his critics inside the NS, as well as his artistic colleagues, who
were mostly outside the NS.
An integral aim of the respective strategies of the German
NSDAP and the Norwegian NS was to achieve a far-reaching
cultural revolution. In both a national and an ethnic sense, “purity”
was the potent catchword, and biology the common paradigm. The
main purpose of the exhibitions was propaganda, providing the
Nazis with an opportunity to portray themselves as saviours and
liberators, and as guardians of healthy national morals and culture.
By juxtaposing so-called good and bad art, people were invited to
judge for themselves the quality of modernist works, and to frown
at the misuse of taxpayers’ money. The layout and presentation
was consciously aimed at arousing disgust and contempt, while
reinforcing the self-identity of the visitors and identifying the
enemy – an art which had no right to exist (Zuschlag, 89).
Furthermore, the demand for a new, pure art – in fact a demand
for conformism and stereotype – was a tool to socialize, control
and mobilize the masses. A similar attitude and cultural practice
was to be found in the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin, even though
his efforts were less adamant. Modernist art movements were seen
by the Nazis and their followers as intellectual, elitist, subjective
and international. They were associated with anti-nationalist,
progressive, radical and leftist movements – even regardless of the
individual artist’s actual political attitude (Barron, 11). Essentially,
the exhibitions were a part of a broader critique of civilization,
where the aim was to give new birth to a lost, but glorious past. It
was necessary then to distance approved art from pre-war social
democracies, which were supposedly influenced by “Jewish
capitalism” and therefore morally corrupt (Onsager, 25 April 1942).
When Onsager and the Ministry of Culture embarked on their cru-
sade against modern art, the main strategy was to compare the old
with the new, greatness with decay, the national with the foreign,
as a part of the overall reorganization of society (Sørensen, 31–32).
In Norway the new cultural politics cannot be considered inde-
pendently from the German occupation and foreign rule.8 The
practical initiative to stage the Art and Non-Art exhibition was
nevertheless a local one, emerging from within the NS. But even
92—93
there one would find a measure of disagreement on these topics.
Onsager’s dedicated leadership of the battle over the Norwegian
art scene during the occupation may have contained an element
of personal vendetta. The new regime certainly gave his career a
considerable boost, and this controversial individual now had the
opportunity to get back at both the former museum management
and some of his contemporary artist colleagues. For several years
Onsager had been one of the harshest critics of Jens Thiis’ running
of the National Gallery.9 In 1941, Onsager became Thiis’ succes-
sor; he was also awarded a long desired professorship at the Art
Academy.
Art and Non-Art – a valid representation of Norwegian

art? How unique was the NS view of art within Norway?
Considering the fact that most of the works in the National Gallery
had been evacuated, the exhibition must be said to give a fairly
representative sample of the museum collection and a reasonable
overview of main currents and undercurrents in Norwegian art. The
only school that was poorly represented was Neo-Impressionism.
To be sure, the exhibition exaggerated the role of the avant-
garde in Norway. Very few artists could in fact be subsumed under
the labels of Cubism, Surrealism, Dadaism, abstract art or Expres-
sionism in the German vein. This kind of art was simply too far
from the ruling paradigm. This was also reflected in the National
Gallery’s accessions policy; only in the 1970s and -80s did the
National Gallery supplement their collection with works by the
post-war avant-garde.
Some deeply conservative public figures in the 1920s seem to
have adapted easily to an NS identity in the 1940s. However, the
National Socialist attitude to modern art was not an isolated phe-
nomenon, restricted to just the ultra-conservatives and the right
wing. Even anti-Semitic conspiracy theories were alive in Norway
between the wars, and these did not necessarily follow the left-
right axis. The Art and Non-Art exhibition represented the extreme
culmination of various conservative ideas circulating in the ongo-
ing art debate the preceding 20 years.
In a broader sense, the NS obsession with nationalism coin-

cided and merged with a contemporary national romantic trend
(Sørensen, 45). The idea of an organic connection between nation
and people and the search for a specific national character were
commonplace aspects of the Zeitgeist. Even leading contemporary
artists created what they considered to be a distinctive national art
by combining certain geometric, constructive principles, with a
decorative and colourful palette.10
Considering the rhetoric related to a national “character” ver-
sus foreign influence in art, the embrace of Edvard Munch by
the Norwegian NS is worth pondering, as Eriksen has pointed
out. Even within the pre-war contemporary art scene, Munch had
been criticized for his lack of a clear national profile. To Onsager,
however, Munch was one of the leading fathers of Norwegian art,
although his relationship to modernism and Expressionism was
not a topic in the narrative of his exhibition.11As we have seen,
some of Munch’s least provocative works were chosen for the
exhibition, implicitly suggesting that the National Gallery had pre-
viously purchased too much of his controversial “Bohemian and
Aasgaardstrand Period” (Onsager, 5 February 1925).
Concluding remarks
The 1942 Art and Non-Art exhibition was staged both as a warning
and an appeal from the NS regime. The primary aim was to change
the trajectory of art. Another aim was to strengthen the legiti-
macy of the new political system – by highlighting the supposed
decadence under the previous liberal system and the devastating
impact from modernist cultural manifestations. French decadence
and the infection of the Jewish race were considered the root
causes behind the decay of classical ideals of beauty and moral-
ity. According to the Minister of Culture it was through art that a
nation created significant values that could transcend individual
lives (Lunde, 109). On this view, art provided the litmus test of a
nation’s moral health.
As we have seen, Onsager’s verbal toolbox was German, but the
National Gallery’s exhibition was a Norwegian variation, with local
characteristics and preconditions. Despite its totalitarian ambi-
tions and indelible connection with the new NS one-party state,
94—95
the Art and Non-Art exhibition was a public success. During its
three weeks on display, some 20 000 people visited the exhibition
- provided that the official number is not part of the propaganda
(Adresseavisen, 19 May 1942). There may have been many reasons
for such an impressive turnout. The official press, loyal to the new
regime, was actively campaigning in favour of the exhibition. The
coverage was partially authored by Onsager himself, as well as by
the media’s own NS-friendly journalists (Eriksen, 59). As for the
motives and attitudes of the visitors, there was undoubtedly a core
audience of Nazi and NS sympathizers. However, a considerable
number of Norwegians who were ambivalent or even antagonistic
to the regime, might still endorse Onsager’s conservative view of
art. To many, modernism remained incomprehensible and elitist.
The sensational nature of the exhibition undoubtedly attracted
a wide range of visitors. Another reason for the success of the Art
and Non-Art exhibition may have been the general lack of cultural
events and entertainment. The second and third floors of the
National Gallery had been empty since the onset of the occupa-
tion, and its level of activity was low. We know that a number of
students from the Art Academy visited the exhibition. However,
artists in general appear to have boycotted the exhibition. In any
case, this exhibition was the only opportunity to see many of the
nation’s best-known artworks before they were packed away and
put into storage indefinitely.
Works Cited
Adresseavisen, 19 May 1942. —, Kampen for Norge (Oslo: Stenersen,

Aftenposten, 16 July 1925. 1941-’43).
Barron, Stephanie, ed., Degenerate Art: The —, letter to the National Gallery, 26 Novem-
Fate of the Avant-garde in Nazi Germany (New ber 1940 (NG-D-0022, Nasjonalmuseet for
York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, kunst, arkitektur og design).
1991). Onsager, Søren, Tidens Tegn, 5 February
Eriksen, Hartman Arild, Kunst og ukunst. 1925.
Aspekter ved nyordningen av kunstlivet i Norge —, letter to the Ministry of Culture and
1940–1945. (Bergen: MA diss. in Art History, Public Enlightenment (Kultur- og folkeop-
1990). plysningsdepartementet), 15 April 1942, jnr.
Fritt Folk, 25 April 1942. 118/42. NG-D-Da-23, Nasjonalmuseet for
Haug, Kristian, Aftenposten, 28 April 1942. kunst, arkitektur og design.
Lunde, Gulbrand, 21 February 1941. The —, Aftenposten 24 April 1942.
National Archive: S-6013, Ministry of Culture —, “Inauguration speech,” in Dagbladet,
and Public Enlightenment, Cultural Office, 30 April 1942.
series B-Copy books, copy book nr. 2 and nr. 3). —, “Norsk og fremmed i vår malerkunst,” in

Norsk åndsliv på vegen heim: foredrag holdt i Kultur 49 (1989), no. 7 (1989), 38–62.
Norsk rikskringkasting vinteren 1941–1942, ed. —, “Die Ausstellung Entartete Kunst,
Gustav Berg-Jæger (Oslo: I kommisjon hos München 1937. Eine Rekonstruktion,” in
Stenersen, 1942a), 49–58. Degenerate Art. The Fate of Avant-Garde in
—, Kunst og ukunst i Nasjonalgalleriet, Nazi Germany, ed. Stephanie Barron (Los
oppryddingen april 1942 (Oslo: 1942b). Angles: LA County Museum of Art, 1991).
—, Fritt Folk, 10 March 1943. Zuschlag, Christoph, “An ‘Educational
Sørensen, Øystein, Hitler eller Quisling. Exhibition’: The Precursors of Entartete
Ideologiske brytninger i Nasjonal samling Kunst and its Individual Venue,” in Degen-
1940–1945 (Oslo: Cappelen, 1989). erate Art. The Fate of Avant-Garde in Nazi
Von Lüttichau, Mario-Andreas, “‘Entar- Germany, ed. Stephanie Barron (Los Angles:
tete Kunst’: Der Ausverkauf Deutscher LA County Museum of Art, 1991).
Expressionisten,” Du: Die Zeitschrift Der
Endnotes
1 Letter from Søren Onsager to the Ministry “Die Ausstellung Entartete Kunst, München
of Culture and Public Enlightenment 1937. Eine Rekonstruktion,” in Barron and
(Kultur- og folkeopplysningsdepartementet), Guenther (eds.), 1991, 64.
15 April 1942, jnr. 118/42. NG-D-Da-23, Nas- 8 Less than one month after the assault on
jonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design. Norway, the German authorities demanded a
2 Even though Onsager was not yet a list of the art purchases made by the National
member of the NS and even an 8th degree Gallery in the past decade. In October 1940,
Freemason. the museum received a ban on any new art
3 Onsager, Letter to the Ministry of Culture purchases that lasted until Onsager came
and Public Enlightenment, 15 April 1942, jnr. to power in the summer of 1941. This is
118/42, NG-D-Da-23, Nasjonalmuseet for confirmed in a letter to the National Gallery
kunst, arkitektur og design. from the culture minister, Gulbrand Lunde,
4 Dresden: J.C. Dahl, Thomas Fearnley and 26 November 1940. (NG-D-0022, Nasjonal-
Jacob Calmeyer; Düsseldorf: Hans Gude, museet for kunst, arkitektur og design).
August Cappelen, Adolph Tidemand, Olaf Another letter from the Ministry dated
Isaachsen and Lars Hertervig. 21 February 1941 shows that at the request of
5 This section included works by Harriet the temporary Council, the ban on the pur-
Backer, Eilif Peterssen, Hans Heyerdahl, chases of art was upheld. Archive reference:
Christian Skredsvig, Christian Krogh The National Archive: S-6013, Ministry of
and Kitty Kielland. In the more spacious Culture and Public Enlightenment, Cultural
Square Room one would find Christian Office, series B-Copy books, copy book no. 2
Krogh, Gerhard Munthe, Erik Werenskiold, and no. 3).
Nicolai Astrup, Harald Sohlberg and Halfdan 9 Aftenposten 16 July 1925: “Søren Onsager
Egedius. anlægger sak mot direktør Thiis. For æres-
6 Other Norwegian artists in the “weak” fornærmelser i polemikken om de gotiske
section were: Leon Aurdal, Else Christie Kiel- hoder.”
land, Karl Høgberg, Alexander Schultz, Finn 10 In this context it may be worth mention-
Nielssen, Alf Jørgen Aas, Axel Revold, Ole ing that several prints by the Sami artist John
Mæhle. In addition there were artists from Savio were bought by the National Gallery
Finland, Sweden, Denmark and France. in 1941 – possibly making Onsager the very
7 Munch was treated as an artist of genius first to purchase art for a public art institution
even by the Nazi press, including the from a representative of this suppressed and
German-language newspapers published marginalized minority – the Sami people.
in Norway. In Munich, entartete works by 11 The national lineage, according to
Munch were shown in a room closed to the Onsager, could be traced from J. C. Dahl, the
general public. In the Berlin variant of the grandfather of Norwegian painting, through
Entartete Kunst exhibition, Munch’s works the Realists of the 1880s, on to contemporar-
were presented alongside the other degen- ies such as Edvard Munch, Gustav Vigeland
erates. See Mario Andreas von Lüttichau, and Anders Svarstad (Eriksen, 82).
96—97
What Battle?
A Critical Examination
of the Role of the Art
Field in the Cultural
Resistance Against
the “Führer-regime” in
Norwegian Art Politics,
1940–19451
Dag Solhjell
Dag Solhjell – What Battle?

First, some definitions. By “art political regime,” I mean a mode
of organisation whereby representatives from the field of art are
chosen by the government to be part of some intermediate body
between the state and art. This intermediate body is often called
a council, and its major function is usually to establish an “arm’s
length distance” between art and politics (Solhjell 2004, 19–20).
The traditional type of intermediate body is rooted in the academy:
a self-recruited, closed, elite body of artists whose modus operandi
is regulated by the government. Under normal circumstances, the
government grants this body a certain artistic autonomy. I shall refer
to this as an art political “academy regime.” In Norway an academy
regime operated both before and after the German occupation.
During the Nazi regime under the German occupation, this
intermediate body instead came to be governed by the Führer
principle, wherein all authority, including aesthetic authority,
derived from above. The members were appointed by the author-
ities rather than elected by the cultural organisations themselves.
Accordingly, art came under political control, and the arts council
was given authority to control and censor art along political lines
defined by the political leadership. I shall call this mode of art
political organisation a “Führer regime.”
“Norwegian art is sound at its core”
There was also talk of degenerate [entartet] art and names like Ekeland,
Strømme and Jynge. As regards the last two, they were admittedly influ-
enced by the Holsteinian Nolde for a period after a German exhibition
in Oslo. But this must be considered as part of the development and rip-
ening of an artist. In addition I would claim that in Norwegian art there
have been only weak reminiscences of the large fluctuations and partial
excesses that took place in larger countries of culture. Norwegian art is
basically sound at its core.2
I found this text in the archives of the Nazi-led Ministry of Culture

and Public Enlightenment [folkeopplysning], during my work on a
book about the “courts of honour” set up by the Norwegian artists’
organisations after the occupation had ended in May 1945 (see Sol-
hjell and Dahl 2013). These extra-legal courts were set up to judge
98—99
members that in some way or other had failed the national cause
during the Führer regime. The author of this letter to the Ministry
(dated 11 January 1941) was Ulrik Hendriksen, at that time still
President of the Norwegian Board of Visual Artists – BKS [Bildende
Kunstneres Styre]. However, BKS was dissolved by the end of that
month. When BKS was reconstituted on 11 May 1945, Hendriksen
was still President, in charge of its court of honour. He was also
vice-president in the court of appeal for all artists’ organisations.
Hendriksen had presented himself to the Nazi authorities in the
following way: “The undersigned president of BKS is 49 years old
and of pure Aryan descent, with a German mother. I am not and
have not been a member of any secret association or any political
party. […] As President of BKS I can state that the board is keenly
interested in any new arrangement that might increase the respon-
sibility of the government for the wellbeing of art, and that might
benefit Norwegian art and culture, and I can only regret that BKS
has so far not been given the opportunity to offer its contribution.”
Significantly, no copy of this correspondence was preserved
either in the archives of BKS, or in Hendriksen’s private archive
(later recovered in a safe in the offices of the Artists’ Relief Fund
[Bildende Kunstneres Hjelpefond], whose first director he became
in 1948).
The Hendriksen correspondence raises some interesting ques-
tions in our context.
1 What powers did BKS wield in the prewar field of art – what was its
precise role within the art political regime of that time?
2 What role did BKS have in making Norwegian art “sound to the core”?
3 What “unsound” art was not accepted by BKS? Was this the very
art that would be termed “entartet” or “non-art” under changed
circumstances?
4 Were the aesthetic preferences of BKS and the Führer regime closer
than we like to think?
5 Why was BKS the only artist organisation that was dissolved during
the occupation?
6 What influence did pre-war opposition against BKS have on deci-
sions made during the Führer regime? Can the situation during the
occupation be considered as extending pre-war divisions concerning
preferred directions in art?

7 Can one talk about an “art in battle” during the occupation? If so,
how did confrontations between the art field and the new Führer
regime take place?
8 How did BKS and its court of honour deal with artists that had collab-
orated with (or even just accepted the legitimacy of ) the art political
Führer regime? What difference, if any, did artistic style make in the
honour court context?
The academy regime – BKS
From 1888 and right up to 1974, the field of art in Norway existed
in close relationship with the government, with BKS in the tra-
ditional role of a royal or state academy, acting within rules
established by the ministry of education (Solhjell 2005a). BKS
administered a system of voting rights, awarded either to artists
whose work had been approved for exhibition at least five times
in an annual salon judged by a BKS-elected jury, or to those who
at least once had work purchased by the National Gallery (itself a
decision made by committees with a majority of BKS-appointed
members). The museum board had a BKS-appointed majority
as well. BKS either directly distributed or nominated all public
and private scholarships, grants and life-time incomes awarded
to artists. Until 1969, BKS also acted as the board of the Art
Academy; academy professors were thus appointed by BKS, and,
unsurprisingly, several of these were themselves BKS members.
BKS was the consultative body for the government in all matters
of art policy, including the election of artists for representative
exhibitions abroad. There were no annual meetings or annual
reports, no forum for oppositional work, no alternative member-
ships except for the Board. In 1930, BKS was given the House of
Art [Kunstnernes Hus], the largest exhibition space in Norway,
and proceeded to set up its headquarter there. BKS controlled
the whole field of art, and was in fact a semi-governmental and
undemocratic body.
However, one kind of democracy did reign within BKS: elections
were held by ballot. Written votes were sent to BKS, in a system
that provided some degree of proportional representation. That
meant that minorities would be represented to some extent.
100—101
[Fig 1] Barricades Photo: © NTB Scanpix/
outside Kunstnernes Aftenposten/Ingvald
Hus in Wergelandsveien Møllerstad
17, Oslo 1940.

With its semi-governmental status, BKS thus came to seem ripe
for replacement in the new art political “Führer regime.”
Attitudes to avant-garde art
The leading art critic Jappe Nilssen in Dagbladet commented about

the German group Der Sturm that exhibited in Oslo in 1923, that if
such tendencies became widespread “all artjews in the world will
throw themselves after it.” Furthermore, about Cubism generally
and the exhibition Eight Scandinavian Cubists (Kunstnerforbundet,
Oslo 1927), he argued that, “For a neutral judgement this can never
be other than affectation camouflaging a lack of talent.”3 Similarly,
the president of the jury for the annual salon Høstutstillingen in
1937 is on record as being pleased that “we have kept the surreal-
ists away.” Again, in 1938 the director of the National Gallery wrote
about Rolf Nesch (an experimental graphic artist in the expres-
sionist tradition) that his work had nothing to do with art.4
In 1938, BKS demanded that all foreign dealers of art should be
barred from operating in Norway until BKS had given its opinion of
them.5 In 1939, BKS further suggested to the ministry that all for-
eign art intended to be exhibited and sold in Norway should first
physically pass by Oslo in order to be shown to BKS for approval.
Thus a rigid control not far from censorship was part of the logic of
the academy regime.
BKS favoured mainstream, French-oriented post-impressionist
art (Matisse, Derain) and constructivism. It also created three
fronts: 1) against avant-garde and abstract art, 2) against commer-
cial art, and 3) against traditional realist art. Avant-garde styles,
including Cubism, Surrealism, Dadaism, Futurism, Suprematism,
and German-style Expressionism, were deemed unacceptable;
and all factions likewise opposed commercial art. Nonetheless,
there was serious opposition to the BKS regime amongst more
traditionalist artists. It was especially from this traditionalist
opposition, which had wielded little influence within BKS, that
the limited number of artists who became members of Nasjonal
Samling (NS) were recruited. These artists were willing to assume
positions within the new Führer regime that replaced BKS, thereby
accepting the legitimacy of that regime.
102—103
BKS dissolved
BKS was dissolved on 31 January 1941. Its semi-governmental

status made it vulnerable to political interference. No other
artists’ organisation was dissolved; they all continued to function
during the whole occupation. In retrospect, therefore, artists who
did have formal positions or contacts with the art political Führer
regime would be considered traitors to their own trade union.
BKS, on the other hand, was spared a critical light on its own
activities during the occupation. It was probably because of this
that the post-war conflict was especially tense and fiendish in the
field of art.
The Führer regime and Søren Onsager
The painter Søren Onsager became the leading – indeed almost

the only – ideologue of the Führer regime within Norwegian art.
He took up posts that he falsely believed would give him power to
realise some of his ideas on art political matters. It should be noted,
though, that some of these ideas would have been shared with
BKS, for instance opposition to commercial art.
In 1942, he protested against the publication of a revised ver-
sion of a history of Norwegian art, and especially its treatment of
the period after 1930 (a section which also mentioned Onsager
himself ). He wrote to the ministry: “I find that the book, because
of Østby’s supplement, should be confiscated, because the author
by his writing and choice of illustrations supports degenerate art.
Our programme commits us to working against this art, which is
so foreign and so destructive to our own art in its whole tendency.
We want to re-establish our art on a national foundation, and to
distance ourselves from all degenerate art” (quoted in Eriksen
1990, 54).
As so often before, Onsager did not succeed in his initiative: the
ministry would not intervene. They refrained to do so despite the
fact that book censorship was widely used in the field of literature.
Indeed, Onsager’s statement does articulate an essential feature
of the Führer regime – the prohibition of art that did not serve party
aims. “Cultural bolshevism” and “Jewish degenerate art” were

[Fig 2] Painter, Photo: © NTB Scanpix
professor and director
Søren Onsager, 1941.
104—105
[Fig 3] Sculptor and Photo: © NTB Scanpix
professor Wilhelm Rasmussen
with his bust of Vidkun
Quisling. Kunstnernes
Hus, 18 December 1940.

common expressions; and of course Communism was itself con-
sidered a type of Jewish conspiracy.
Søren Onsager had been a loser in relation to the stylistic
tendencies in art that the BKS-regime supported. He lost the
competition for the professorship in painting at the Art Academy
in 1925, and remained outside the more constructivist tenden-
cies that came to dominate Norwegian contemporary art in the
1930s. Onsager used his prominent position in the Führer regime
to support younger artists whose more traditional art had found
little support in the BKS regime. He also polarised the differences
between his own artistic position and modernism tout court, by
labelling it non-art or “entartet”; crucially, this also involved a
critique of those modern styles previously patronised by BKS. By
contrast, the sculptor Wilhelm Rasmussen, who also worked for
the Führer regime, did not have the same need for self-promo-
tion, in that the dominant tradition of contemporary Norwegian
sculpture at that time was quite traditional and more like the one
favoured by Nazi circles.
Onsager became director of the National Gallery and professor
at the State Art Academy, but he would try in vain to expand these
offices. The Art Academy was closed down, and the National Gal-
lery had is collections brought into safety in old silver mines.
The cultural council
In October 1940, all prerogatives previously held by BKS were

transferred to the so-called “temporary consultative council.” It
had a section for each of the major cultural fields, and was meant
to function as the link between the NS party and culture. The
art section was manned with NS artists and other collaborators;
in addition, for a shorter period it also contained some idealists
who thought they served the interests of art by acting as a coun-
terweight to the expected nazification of art policy. In 1942, a
permanent cultural council was established. Søren Onsager repre-
sented painting and Wilhelm Rasmussen, sculpture. Rasmussen
was a longstanding NS member, though he placed less emphasis
on the NS’ cultural and ultra-nationalist ideology than Onsager
did. As opposed to Onsager, Rasmussen was also a well-estab-
106—107
[Fig 4] Members of the Photo: © NTB Scanpix/
Cultural Assembly visit Johnsen
the Vigeland Park in
Oslo, 24 September 1943.
108—109
lished and highly respected artist. He had been commissioned by
Parliament to raise a large nationalist monument in front of the
parliament building to celebrate the constitution of 1814. After the
occupation, the commission was withdrawn at a point when the
twenty metre tall column was more than halfway completed (see
Møller, 1996).
The work of the section for art focused on four questions in
particular: reorganisation of the educational programme at the
Art Academy; scholarships and grants for artists; extension of the
National Gallery; and the question of the fees to be levied on art
sales at auctions. By May 1941 it had conducted 8 meetings, but
after that the activity was reduced. Other topics of discussion were
control of art critics, censorship of art exhibitions, and other ways
of controlling the field of art. Most of these ideas were not realised.
However, artists’ grants were raised, and a fee on auction sales was
introduced by law. The same law legalised the censorship of art
exhibitions, but to little effect. The driving force behind many of
the initiatives was Søren Onsager, but the results of his efforts were
meagre.
Nonetheless, a law on painting was enacted in October 1942,
and this must be counted as one of Onsager’s few successes. This
made it compulsory to seek written permission from the Ministry
to trade in or organise art exhibitions, though not in one’s own
studio or from home. Each public exhibition thus needed a permit.
Furthermore, a public fee of NOK 10 was to be levied on each work
of art offered for sale at auctions. The money was to be used for
the benefit of artists and their heirs. The law had three aims: one
was to stop the sale of non-professional artworks, the second was
to control what art could be exhibited and sold, and the third, to
provide aid for artists. It is worth noticing that the first two of these
three aims had also been BKS objectives. The ministry would not,
however, accept Onsager’s more radical proposal: to make publi-
cally expressed sympathy with the Führer regime a condition of all
permits to organise exhibitions or trade in art.
Onsager for his part claimed that this law was mainly intended
to control quality, but of course it was also used for censorship. A
permit was only issued to art dealers who would agree to the prem-
ise of government control of their activity, and who agreed to sell
only “good” or professional art, and no “degenerate” art.

The auction fee proved a lasting success. The money was depos-
ited in a fund that was handed over to BKS in its entirety after the
occupation. The Onsager model of levying a fee on all transactions
on the art market was reintroduced in 1948, now as a means of
funding to support elderly artists.
Onsager himself died in 1946, before his case could be brought
to court.
Art in battle?
During the whole occupation there were no instances of open

conflict between the Führer regime and any oppositional groups
within the field of art. No visual artists were arrested, nor (as far as
we know) did any feel the need to escape to Sweden. There were no
incidents of threats or any use of force. By contrast, other cultural
fields – literature, theatre and music – did have serious conflicts
with the Führer regime. As regards the field of art, it would be an
overstatement to claim that it was taking part in a battle. In fact,
artists experienced a record hike in the art market as a direct result
of wartime conditions: they certainly did not suffer economically.
The most prominent case of conflict was the exhibition Art and
Non-Art [Kunst og ukunst], held in the National Galley in 1942.
Afterwards, the saying was among “national” – or pro-resistance –
artists that it was shameful for an artist not to have been placed in
the “non-art” rooms. However, no public reactions against this
exhibition from any of the artists represented have been recorded.
The exhibition was also shown in Trondheim, Bergen and Stavan-
ger. The audience for its part liked these exhibitions, and most
were in sympathy with the traditionalist side, as perhaps a broad
audience always will be.
What kinds of resistance were possible in the field of art? After
BKS was dissolved, no real channels existed for organised oppo-
sitional activity against the Führer regime. Resistance primarily
took the form of directions for conduct published by illegal papers
or issued via the radio from London: the Norwegian term for this
is parole, or rallying cry. In the art field however, no parole was
issued until the autumn of 1943 [e.g. Fig 5]. Furthermore, no
representatives from the field of art took part in the bodies formed
110—111
[Fig 5] ”Isfronten” (The funds, Onsager’s rummaging
Ice Front). Directive in through the National
the illegal newspaper Gallery, monkey-business
Svart på hvitt (Black and and rabble-rousing with
White), 8 September 1943. the exhibition ‘Degenerate
Art’, and so forth.
“The Quisling government’s Now the artists have had
decision that visual enough; they protest and
artists must apply to endorse the ice front,
Fuglesang [Rolf Jørgen alongside others working
Fuglesang, Minister of in creative cultural
Culture] for permission production. Henceforth,
to hold exhibitions, no Norwegian artist will
and to Beggerud [Anders hold a solo exhibition or
Beggerud, Press Director] participate in collective
for permission to have exhibitions that have
them reviewed in the a clear programme or
press has caused the which appear as striking
cup of frustration to manifestations. Only normal
run over. This comes in sales exhibitions are
addition to all the other allowed. We ask the public
insults artists have to be loyal and to boycott
been subjected to by the exhibitions if they,
Quisling government: The against our expectations,
disolution of the artists’ are held. We shall in any
association, confiscation of case send a clear message.”

to cooperate with the resistance movement within other cultural
fields. It is not even known if the paroles that were issued on art
were initiated from within the field of art. We do know that no one
laid claim to having done so after the end of the occupation.
However, even in the absence of any parole to this effect, artists
did refrain from applying for grants and scholarships controlled by
the Führer regime from 1941 on, and from 1942 especially. Such
applications were understood as a legitimation of the regime.
Accordingly, they were labelled “un-national” by the post-war
courts of honour. Economically speaking, however, this had few
practical consequences, in that artists generally were able to sell
their work much more easily during the occupation than either
before or after. From autumn 1943 artists were instructed by parole
not to exhibit separately or in representative group exhibitions, but
the effect of this instruction was mostly limited to Oslo. And sales
exhibitions were still acceptable. In Trondheim, “many artists sold
everything they were willing to produce directly from their studios.
They did not need to exhibit, and they had difficulties in building
up a representative exhibition” (see Grimelund and Flønes, 1954).
It is true that an illegal academy was established as a means of pas-
sive resistance. On the other hand, Onsager and Rasmussen were
both teaching art students during the occupation.
During the occupation there was a tendency to boycott NS
artists from some exhibition spaces, as was the case in the Oslo
Art Association. But not, however, in Trondheim’s Art Assosiat-
ion. Its director, the artist Roar Matheson Bye – who painted in the
tradition of Neue Sachlichkeit – was member of NS. He naturally
favoured artists within the Führer regime, and kept in close contact
with Onsager.
Post-war sanctions and courts of honour
After the occupation ended in May 1945, all the artists’ organisa-
tions established courts of honour. Such extra-legal courts were
in fact set up in all manner of organisations across the country.
Furthermore, in collaboration with the other artists’ organisations
(the composers, musicians, actors, and writers) a court of appeal
was formed that was available to artists who did not accept the
112—113
sentences they received in the courts of honour. Three prominent
lawyers were engaged by the Department of Justice to give legal
advice to this court of appeal.
In 1940, 295 artists had held voting rights in BKS. From this basis,
after the war a reconstituted BKS – or rather its Board – appointed
itself as a court of honour. It engaged no legal advisors, as other
organisations did. There were two types of sanctions applied by
the BKS court of honour against artists within the BKS sphere: 1)
Nineteen BKS members had been NS members. They immediately
lost their voting rights for an unlimited time, without being heard
by the court and without any right of appeal. Their cases also went
to the criminal courts as a matter of course, which at least involved
normal legal procedures and the right to present a defence. 2) Six-
teen other artists faced individual accusations: typically, they had
either applied for scholarships controlled by the Führer regime,
taken commissions from it, taken part in exhibitions under its con-
trol, or somehow signalled public acceptance of the regime. Only
a few of these artists applied to the court of appeal. In addition, a
handful of others were called in for questioning, but no sanctions
were imposed.
Dividing lines
How, then, were Norwegian artists and their actions judged after
the end of occupation? According to the old borderlines between
stylistic tendencies in art? Or on their loyalty towards BKS? Or
according to their level of support for the “cultural front” of the
resistance movement?
Of the forty artists who were either condemned by the BKS
court of honour or examined by the court, only one had been
represented as “degenerate” in the National Gallery in 1942. That
was Rudolph Thygesen, who had been excluded because of his
brief membership in the preliminary consultative council until
May 1941. His exclusion from BKS was later revoked by the court
of appeal. It is clear that the Führer regime did not attract artists
belonging to the modernist faction within the academy regime;
whereas many – though by no means the majority – from the BKS
traditionalist faction did collaborate.

About half of the forty artists who came into contact with the
court of honour are represented in the National Gallery. Two
thirds of them can be classified as traditional or non-modernist
artists. There is some substance in the claim that the BKS regime
had favoured some versions of modernism while neglecting the
traditionalists. Indeed, this is a tendency that usually prevails in
every autonomous art world, by contrast to authoritarian regimes.
The court of honour never referred to the style of the artists
whose actions it judged; nor, with one or two exceptions, did
similar honour courts in other fields do so. The concept of “degen-
erate” art was thus not met by a counter-concept of any sort. The
concept of a loss of honour was not connected to the kind of art
produced. Nor was it considered dishonourable to make money
from selling one’s art in the conditions that prevailed during the
occupation.
Dishonour was attributed to any use of the economic and sym-
bolic resources of the art political Führer regime: in other words, it
was dishonourable to accept another power structure than the BKS
academy regime. Treason against the BKS regime was considered
treason against the national cause.
Artists were in fact considered to be representatives of their
country and bearers of national honour by the very nature of their
profession. This meant that the more famous and respected the
artist, the greater the loss of honour incurred in public acceptance
of the Führer regime.
The NS members among the artists received a threefold punish-
ment. Firstly, in the law courts where all NS members were tried
irrespective of the character of their party involvement. Secondly,
in the courts of honour, where, if sentenced, they would lose their
voting rights and all other BKS privileges. Thirdly, they were also
boycotted both by the art world and by audiences, and it became
impossible for them to gain incomes from the art market. This
third punishment was not, of course, part of the actual sentence.
Most of these artists are almost forgotten today.
Those who were sentenced only in the courts of honour lost
some of their rights for a shorter or a longer time. But they too were
boycotted for a long period by the art world and by audiences. In
practice, this was a severe punishment for what were mostly small
offenses.
114—115
The rapid growth in art sales during the occupation may indicate
that the strategy of passive resistance did not cost the artists very
much. In fact, their sales might possibly have suffered if they had
not adopted passive resistance, since some buyers might then have
shunned them. How ideologically motivated such passive resis-
tance actually was therefore remains an open question. Artists
who were members of NS along with others who would not com-
mit to passive resistance do seem to have been subject to a certain
boycott on the art market even during the occupation itself.
The chosen form of resistance in the field of art was the refusal
to make use of the art political resources controlled by the Führer
regime. This involved avoiding contact with its institutions, avoid-
ing consideration by the evaluating bodies of the Führer regime,
and generally letting artistic activities assume a more private, less
publically representative form. However, unlike in other cultural
fields such as theatre, music and literature, few artists suffered any
financial loss from this course of action.
Søren Onsager’s exhibition Art and Non-Art has drawn much

attention as a spectacular piece of regime propaganda. How-
ever, by focusing too exclusively on the stylistic contrast he set
up between “degenerate” modernists and Norwegian national
romanticism, we may miss the complex background of local
sympathies, antipathies, rivalries and art politics against which
it took place – a context that also extends into the post-war era of
Norwegian art.
Works Cited
Eriksen, Arild H., Kunst og ukunst. Aspekter —, Fra embetsmannsregime til nytt akademire-
ved nyordningen av kunstlivet i Norge 1940–45, gime. Kunstpolitikk 1850–1940 (Oslo: Unipub,
MA Dissertation, Institute of art history 2005a).
(Bergen: University of Bergen, 1990). —, Fra akademiregime til fagforeningsregime.
Grimelund, Josef Jervel and Flønes, Olav, Kunstpolitikk 1940–1980 (Oslo: Unipub,
Trondhjems Kunstforening 1845–1945 (Trond- 2005b).
heim: Trondhjems kunstforening, 1954). —, Kuratorene kommer. Kunstpolitikk
Møller, Arvik, Søyle i skyggeland. Billedhug- 1980–2006 (Oslo: Unipub, 2006).
geren Wilhelm Rasmussen (Oslo: Grøndahl —, and Dahl, Hans Fredrik, Men viktigst er
Dreyer, 1996). æren. Oppg jøret blant kunstnerne etter 1945
Solhjell, Dag, Akademiregime og Kunstin- (Oslo: Pax, 2013).
stitusjon. Kunstpolitikk fram til 1850 (Oslo:
Unipub, 2004).

Endnotes
1 This article is based on two main sources: 2 (KF), saksarkiv, box 48. Transcript of a
1) The author’s PhD dissertation “Kunstpo- letter dated 11 January 1941 from BKS (signed
litikk 1814–2006” (“Norwegian art policy Ulrik Hendriksen) to the Ministry of Culture
1814–2006”; see particularly the third and Public Enlightenment.
volume, “Fra akademiregime til fagforen- 3 <blogg.lundesgård.no/2008/05/01>.
ingsregime. Kunstpolitikk 1940–1980”). 4 Dagbladet, 28 January 1938.
See Solhjell 2004, 2005a, 2005b, and 2006. 5 Nasjonalbiblioteket [Norwegian National
2) Men viktigst er æren. Oppg jøret blant Library], BKS files, minutes dated 1 April
kunstnerne etter 1945 [Honour Above All. 1938.
Prosecutions within the Art World after
1945], co-written with Hans Fredrik Dahl.
See Solhjell and Dahl 2013.
116—117
Art and Wartime
National Socialist
Foreign Cultural
Policy in Norway
Glimpses,
Observations,
Hypotheses
Christian Fuhrmeister
Christian Fuhrmeister – Art and Wartime National Socialist …

My topic could hardly be larger, and I emphasise that my subtitle
– Glimpses, Observations, Hypotheses – should be understood as
precautionary. My essay aims to establish a general framework for
the analysis of the larger context in which the exhibition Kunst og
ukunst [Art and Non-Art: Oslo, Trondheim, Bergen and Stavanger,
1942–43] took place. While I will attempt to provide an over-
view, based on two decades of scholarship on issues of national
socialist art, architecture, propaganda, and art history, such an
ambitious undertaking inevitably entails shortcomings and gaps.
For instance, I do not intend to go into the intricate business of
definitions, categories and classifications of cultural policy in
general and of national socialist cultural policy in particular, as for
instance Glenn Cuomo did in a 1995 anthology. I will also bypass
the question of the structural differences between cultural policies
abroad during peacetime versus the rather rigid application of
such policies implemented when confronting an occupied country
in wartime (as in the case of Kunst og ukunst).
1. Did Nazi Germany have a Cultural Foreign

Policy for Occupied Norway?
Can we speak of a coherent foreign cultural policy that Nazi Ger-

many had devised specifically for occupied Norway? Or, was the
general approach that was being established for the West – notably
France, Belgium and the Netherlands – simply adopted or appro-
priated for Norway? If so, what were the key characteristics of that
approach? And do we know any other, similar exhibitions that
deliberately juxtapose official and “degenerate” art outside Ger-
many and Austria? I am afraid that I can answer these questions
only partially, if at all.
One reason is that German archival materials documenting
Kunst og ukunst (its preparation and production, its distribution,
consumption and reception) are not extant. For instance, the
Political Archive of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which
covers numerous similar cultural events in other countries, does
not house any documents that refer to this show.1
One reason why it is hard to believe that general national social-
ist approaches were systematically adapted to specific local or
118—119
regional circumstances is the incredible speed of the conquest and
subsequent occupation of many European states between 1939
and 1942.2 France, the Netherlands and Norway were all attacked
more or less simultaneously and forced to submit in late spring
and early summer 1940, while in 1941, the expansion – primarily
by extending the alliance systems of Germany and Italy – was
geared towards the southeast. The year 1942 sees the maximum
extent of the area occupied by German forces, notably in the east
(where it will first start to decrease in January 1943 after Stalin-
grad). Hence, talking about National Socialist Foreign Cultural
Policy in 1942 is almost equivalent to talking about Europe in 1942.
Furthermore, despite the seemingly unabashed and consolidated
process of military and ideological conquest, it is also largely
equivalent to talking about shoring up that conquest through cul-
tural propaganda.
This geographical (geostrategic, geopolitical) dimension is
certainly relevant to an art historical perspective, as it provides the
basis for understanding the truly imperial dimensions of national
socialist foreign cultural policy. Within just three years, from the
autumn of 1939 to the autumn of 1942, national socialist aesthetic
and cultural notions, preferences and agendas – themselves
heterogeneous rather than monolithic – were applied to an area
ten times larger than the Nazi Germany of 1937. This is indicative
of an incredible dynamism, almost an explosion, and at the same
it hints at the problems related to such an expansion: problems
that affected many European nation states. Given the very diverse
cultural issues at stake in those different occupied countries, it
goes without saying that German intentions and policies var-
ied considerably. Thus we need to pay minute attention to such
nuances – the more so since international post-war historiography
has often favoured a binary schematic model of interpretation,
establishing a simplistic dichotomy. I will return to the question of
black and white, good and bad,3 when discussing issues of com-
promise, forced cooperation, collaboration and the problems this
later posed for re-establishing national and collective identities
after 1945.
In April and May 1942, the National Gallery in Oslo presented
Kunst og ukunst; thereafter, the show travelled to Trondheim,
Bergen and Stavanger. How do we assess this Norwegian-German

or German-Norwegian initiative against the background of the
military machine that is rapidly overwhelming Europe?
Let us first turn towards the reasons for the occupation of Nor-
way – for these are somewhat different from most other countries
across Europe. As Ole Kristian Grimnes has pointed out, Norway
was not occupied for political or ideological reasons, but because
of pragmatic military considerations and strategic necessity: that
is, in order to prevent British dominance in the North Sea and the
Atlantic Ocean. Furthermore, according to Grimnes, Norway is
special for a number of reasons:
– As opposed to the practice in all other occupied countries, no Nor-

wegian workers were brought to Germany. On the contrary, Russian
prisoners of war were transferred to Norway.
– Norwegians were considered to be a superior race, part of the “Ger-
manic people”; some theorists even considered them more racially
pure than the Germans themselves.
– Of course, Norway’s economy was plundered, and had to serve
both the Wehrmacht and the German economy. Nonetheless, since
Norway was supposed to be a fortress, Nazi Germany invested more
resources in its infrastructure than it took away (Grimnes, 182–3).4
Another angle on the question of whether the situation in Norway

was similar to, or different from, other occupied countries is pro-
vided by contemporary sources. SS-Obergruppenführer Werner
Best, who had been instrumental in founding both the Gestapo
and the Reichssicherheitshauptamt or Reich Main Security Office,
reported in the summer of 1941 that four different models of
administration were currently used in the occupied countries (as
cited in Mohn, 24):
1 Bündnisverwaltung (administration by alliance) – e.g. Denmark –

rather loose control.
2 Aufsichtsverwaltung (administration by supervision) – e.g. Norway,
Netherlands – idea of supervision and cooperation/collaboration.
3 Regierungsverwaltung (administration by government) – e.g. Protec-
torate Bohemia and Moravia – strong German administration rules.
4 Kolonialverwaltung – e.g. General Government / General Governor-
ate – complete / absolute German rule.
120—121
The first two categories imply cooperation with existing forms
and structures of administration. For Norway, then, control and
supervision were considered appropriate, but also a certain toler-
ance and scope for development. It is important to realize these
gradual differences to achieve a clearer picture of the conditions
and framework of the cultural field. In this vein, it is also essential
to note that the Reichskommissariat Norway in Oslo had three main
departments: Verwaltung, Volkswirtschaft, and Volksaufklärung und
Propaganda [Administration, National Economy, Public Enlighten-
ment and Propaganda]. The latter was further subdivided into five
sections, on propaganda, the press, broadcasting, education, and
culture (Bohn 2000). As far as I understand, most of the files of
the Reichskommissariat are not to be found in Berlin, but in “Riks-
arkivet” in Oslo.
Very similar to the Reichskommissariat in the Netherlands, the
department of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in Norway
closely followed the structure of Goebbels’ Berlin ministry. It is
worth noting that in the autumn of 1940 a parallel Norwegian
Ministry had been founded, “Kultur- og Folkeopplysningsdepar-
tementet,” headed by the Minister of Culture Gulbrand Lunde
(Sørensen, 191–93). This exemplifies the ideas of supervision and
collaboration mentioned above. Robert Bohn mentions two other
specific characteristics that distinguish the occupation of Norway.
First, the SS played a smaller police enforcement role than in any
other occupied country in Europe.5 Secondly, throughout the occu-
pation, Norway remained an operation zone, since Hitler believed
– even after the landing in Normandy – that the danger of an allied
invasion was imminent. The result was an unusually high number
of 400.000 German soldiers permanently stationed in Norway.
Given the size of the population, this meant that one German sol-
dier faced 7 Norwegians (Bohn 2005, 186–91).
This suggests two conclusions. Firstly, since the cost of occupa-
tion was, as a rule, paid by the occupied country, Norway suffered
a lot. Secondly, the notion of “foreign cultural policy” has to be
somewhat modified if one out of eight potential visitors – for
instance, to an exhibition – might belong to the occupying nation.
What else is specific to the German occupation of Norway? On 26
October 1942, the Reichskommissariat enacted a law regarding the
confiscation of Jewish property in Norway (Henningsen, 166). This

is, however, very late if one considers the various steps that had
been taken in the preceding years both in the Altreich and in the
Ostmark (former Austria). The law for Norway comes almost a year
later than the infamous 11th ordinance or regulation of Novem-
ber 1941 (11. Verordnung zum Reichsbürgergesetz vom 25.11.1941)
which stipulated that, in accordance with the “final solution of the
Jewish question,” all property of a person immediately fell to the
state when that person crossed the nation’s border, for instance
because that person was deported to be murdered in Auschwitz.
And it comes more than three and a half years after the systematic
plundering of the Jews in Vienna – a concerted action called “Mod-
ell Wien” that was subsequently applied to all other countries the
moment the army invaded, because of its great “efficiency.”
We may reiterate, therefore, that the research literature does
not identify a specific, coherent, systematic plan in the field of
culture that National Socialist Germany had devised prior to the
1940 invasion and wanted to execute in Norway. Nonetheless
there are both general similarities and important differences with
regard to the concrete implementation of cultural policies. To put
it bluntly: the German ambitions in Norway were certainly greater
than the results that were achieved. Unfortunately, however, my
work is limited by a general problem of the humanities in Europe,
that of language. This exhibition project and catalogue is a useful
forum for communication between researchers writing in Norwe-
gian, German and English, in a field where there has been far too
little cross-cultural interaction. In other words: This article too is
doomed to be superficial, since I cannot fully grasp the Norwegian
literature, let alone the sources, and can at best sketch the work
that remains to be done.
2. Looking at the Larger Context of “Kunst og ukunst”
A case in point is the book by Dag Solhjell, Fra Akademiregime til

Fagforeningsregime: Kunstpolitikk 1940 – 1980. While I was most
happy to have found the two pages – to my knowledge the most
exhaustive scholarly treatment of the exhibition Kunst og ukunst
published so far – I was also disappointed and unhappy, since
I could neither understand this summary nor the unpublished
122—123
analysis that Arild Eriksen undertook in 1990 (Solhjell, 26–27,
Eriksen 1990). Hence, as a result of my inability to consult the
rich Norwegian scholarship (such as the multivolume series Norsk
Kulturpolitikk 1814–2014, edited by Hans Fredrik Dahl and Tore
Helseth), I had to look for accessible German papers. One of the
best pieces I found is by Martin Moll, a contemporary historian
from Austria. In his excellent article, “Zwischen Weimarer Klassik
und nordischem Mythos: NS-Kulturpropaganda in Norwegen
(1940–1945),” he investigates both the structure of the German
Main Office for Propaganda and Enlightenment in the Reichs-
kommissariat and their various activities, notably in the field of
performative arts, music, and literature (Moll 1998 includes an
extensive bibliography, cf. Moll 1999). He does not, however,
mention art or art exhibitions at all. But I understand that the
“avisutklipp,” the press clippings of the German office for cultural
affairs, are available in “Riksarkivet” in Oslo, and this is where
I would look for the news coverage that the four locations of the
travelling exhibition received.
Moll also makes clear that the very nature of the Norwegian
character of the time – a certain reluctance and stubbornness –
posed severe restrictions to the German authorities responsible for
cultural propaganda in Norway, although they were formally sup-
ported by Gulbrand Lunde and, after October 1942, by the young
secretary of Nasjonal Samling, Rolf Jørgen Fuglesang (Moll 1998,
195). Moll perceives a structural antagonism between the Ger-
man and Norwegian authorities in the field of culture, and argues
that the German side finally had to fail because the Norwegian
artists and the cultural elite reacted to those efforts with “inner
refusal, obstruction or even open boycott (Moll 1998, 203),”6 not
least because the general promise of the occupying forces in most
countries that national cultural heritage and identify should be
preserved was – again – not fulfilled. In the end, even the German
cultural heritage – notably the Weimar Classicism that exerted a
special attraction on Norwegians before the war – was disliked.
Kunst og ukunst is not, in other words, part of a success story.
Rather, I believe we have to conceive it as an expression of
heightened tension: an attempted but failed coercion. Essen-
tially, the show in Oslo, Trondheim, Bergen and Stavanger was
the appropriation of a model that could not be transferred: for

the circumstances of production, distribution and reception that
had prevailed in Munich in the summer of 1937 – when both the
defamatory show “degenerate art” and the first Great German Art
Exhibition were on view – were utterly different, and by now per-
haps also outmoded. As outmoded, one might add, as the gothic
type (Fraktur typography) which had so fervently been propagated
throughout the 1930s, as an expression of NS ideology, and which,
by 1942, was replaced with modern typography for utterly prag-
matic reasons: If you want to rule the world, your orders at least
need to be legible.
In a comparative perspective the marked differences between
Norway and a case like France are striking. In August 1940, Goeb-
bels had ordered experts (curators, archivists and librarians) to
provide lists that documented all items that had left Germany in
the past. In the beginning, this revanchist attitude extended back
to the Napoleonic seizures of German cultural heritage, but in the
next months it expanded further: to 1700, then to 1600 and finally
back to the year 1500. Furthermore, the scope grew from the
“repatriation” of former French war looting to encompass all sorts
of objects that had left German soil for any reason whatsoever,
including sale, gift, inheritance and so on (cf. Stein 2012). Nothing
like this was ever envisioned for Norway.
Similarly, we observe a striking absence of many of those organi-
zations that seized, looted, confiscated (and occasionally bought)
art and other cultural objects in other occupied countries, like
Poland, France or the Netherlands. As far as I can see, none of the
usual suspects were present and active in occupied Norway: not
the “Sonderkommando Künsberg” (first affiliated with Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, then part of the Waffen-SS), nor the Einsatzstab
Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), nor the “Dienststelle Mühlmann,”
nor Hermann Göring (and his agents), nor, finally, the curators and
directors searching for art suitable for the planned museum in Linz
(first Hans Posse, then Hermann Voss). Above all, it is notable that
one of the worst and fiercest national socialist organizations, the
ERR, was conspicuously absent in the North (given that the ERR
was even, after 1943, fighting the enemies of National Socialism
on the territory of its former ally Italy). Only the “Ahnenerbe” of
the SS had a keen interest (see the contribution to this volume by
Terje Emberland) in investigating prehistoric sites, following a
124—125
straightforwardly ideological and entirely “Germanic” agenda or
trajectory, and cooperating closely with SS, SD and police forces.7
The result is that out of the main four straightforward looting orga-
nizations, only one set foot on Norway.
Likewise, it has been claimed that the German Military Art Pro-
tection – which was officially installed in France, Belgium, Serbia,
Greece and Italy – did not operate in Norway.8 However, this is
not entirely correct. A rare booklet (only two copies are preserved
in German libraries9) of 83 pages, entitled Verzeichnis der unter
Denkmalschutz stehenden Baulichkeiten Norwegens, and published
in Oslo 1944, lists all sites protected historic heritage sites. Hence,
while it is correct that the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht did not
install an art historian in Norway to oversee the protection of cul-
tural heritage, the corresponding responsibilities were first given
to the SS-Archaeologist Herbert Jankuhn, and then, after May 1st,
1944, to the propaganda unit of the Wehrmacht. It is the latter that,
in 1944, published the small booklet.
Despite these protective efforts, the Allied forces report in May
1945 that “the Germans” stole 51 paintings from the Royal Palace
and 29 from the National Gallery Oslo (Coles and Weinberg 1964,
875).10 I do not know whether this particular theft has already
been investigated, or not. Perhaps not, since issues of provenance
research that transgress national boundaries have only very lately
encountered both scholarly and public awareness, as the case of the
Henie Onstad Kunstsenter testifies: Although this has nothing to do
with the German occupation of Norway, incidents like the restitu-
tion process of the Rosenberg Matisse that had been seized by the
ERR in France11 certainly belong to those many unresolved ends of
history – and art history – that show the need for further research.
3. “Kunst og ukunst” and Art Politics
Finally, at least three further aspects deserve our attention: archi-

tecture, the Great German Exhibition and the art market. All
three, I believe, have relevance both for National Socialist Foreign
Cultural Policy in Norway and for the juxtaposition of degenerate
and official art.
“New German Architecture” (Neue Deutsche Baukunst), the show

which travelled so widely and in varying forms, from Belgrade
and Athens to Sofia, from Budapest and Bucharest to Lisbon
and Madrid to Turkey, did not make it to Norway, but it did open
in Copenhagen in mid-November 1941.12 Further research is
needed to answer the question why – despite the important role
architecture in general played for the national socialist regime –
this travelling exhibition was not displayed in Norway; the more
so since, as Despina Stratigakos showed at the 2014 Art in Battle
conference, the colonial dimension was such a key feature for ini-
tiatives like Nordstern, the German plan for a new metropolis near
Trondheim. Likewise, the iconography, size and material of the
towering martial war memorial that Wilhelm Kreis had designed
for Ekeberg near Oslo around 1942 could be compared to the
various war monuments he envisioned for many sites in Eastern
Europe: what are the structural and semantic similarities, and what
are the differences? Such a research should investigate the fervent
antagonism between Kreis and Robert Tischler, who was respon-
sible for the new war cemetery in Oslo-Alfaset, built in 1952/53 and
inaugurated 1960.13
Furthermore, the plans for architectural reconstruction by
Hans Stephan – after the heavy destructions inflicted upon Nor-
wegian cities in spring and summer 1940 from both German and
Allied bombings – for cities such as Kristianssund, Molde, Narvik,
Steinkjer, and Trondheim deserve further investigation. Since
the imposing way in which their realization would have heavily
changed the existing infrastructure, one is tempted to ask whether
this axiomatic tendency might parallel the “export” of genuinely
national socialist aesthetics that is embodied in the concept of art
and non-art.
Finally, we need to turn to the “Great German Art Exhibition”
(Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung, GDK). The database www.
gdk-research.de was launched in October 2011, but it is constantly
being expanded due to continuous feedback. Among the various
search options – in addition to virtually walking the rooms or sim-
ply browsing the photo albums page by page – is the basic facetted
search. Entering “Norw” shows you most of the subject indexing
and all titles of artwork that relate to Norway [Fig 1]. Only 10
objects are indexed “Norwegen,” out of 12,550 that were on display
between 1937 and 1944 in Munich [Fig 2]. One of them is Advance
126—127
[Fig 1] Image and Research
database www.gdk-research.de,
search interface.
Zentralinstitut für
Kunstgeschichte, Munich

[Fig 2] Overview of
exhibits that relate to
Norway, as represented in
www.gdk-research.de,
Zentralinstitut für
Kunstgeschichte, Munich
128—129
[Fig 3] Leo von Welden’s Photo: Jaeger & Goergen,
Vormarsch in Norwegen © Zentralinstitut
(Advance in Norway), für Kunstgeschichte,
1940 or 1941, exhibited Munich, Photothek
at the Grosse Deutsche
Kunst (Great German Art
Exhibition) in 1941 in
room 16 (installation view
with Carl Weisgerber's
Schafherde bei aufziehendem
Gewitter on the left
and Welden's painting on
the right, cf. <http://
www.gdk-research.de/de/
obj19365419.html>).

in Norway by Leo von Welden, exhibited in 1941 in hall 16 [Fig 3].
It is most interesting and instructive, I believe, to compare this
painting both to the exhibition reviewed under the title “Soldaten
und Künstler,” presented by Erik Tonning, and to the works by
the war artists stationed in Norway presented by Gregory Maertz.
Which elements here are traditional and which conventional? And,
given the rather slow advance of the troops – who lack both heroic
sacrifice and victorious glory – in von Welden’s painting, can we
talk of propaganda? If so, in what sense? And is it significant that
the painting was not sold in 1941? Another painting by the same
artist, entitled Heimkehr der Wolhyniendeutschen [Return (Home
coming) of the Germans from Volhynia] [Fig 4], exhibited in 1940,
was bought by Adolf Hitler himself. As both paintings by von
Welden have the same structure and composition, with a long trek
moving from the background on the left to the foreground on the
right, one wonders why the artist uses the same visual language for
the resettlement “Heim ins Reich” and the swift military advance
into Norway.
Similar questions arise when looking at a second “Norwegian“
topic, the portrait head of a young Norwegian woman by the sculp-
tor Ulfert Janssen [Fig 5]. Exhibited in 1937 in hall 15, the work was
not sold during the show, but later acquired by Goebbels. While
the title Junge Norwegerin [Young Norwegian] sounds like a racial
or at least biopolitical designation in the sense of Wolfgang Will-
rich or Adolf Ziegler, the bronze – although certainly idealizing the
facial features – does not seem to illustrate a political or ideological
dimension, at least not in an outspoken way. At this point, I would
like to recall that the intention of the GDK was art, not politics.
While that art was, in Hitler’s words above the main entry to the
exhibition hall, a sublime or ennobling mission that demands
fanaticism (“Kunst ist eine erhabene und zum Fanatismus ver-
pflichtende Mission”), it was first and foremost art. It was the
“other,” the realm of silence in the midst of violence, oppression
and destruction. And precisely because of that, because it pre-
tended to be free of the politics and ideologies of the day, because
it pretended that all that counted were purely aesthetic predilec-
tions the individual might embrace or reject, as Hans-Ernst Mittig
has argued (Mittig, 458, 460), it was essentially stabilizing the sys-
tem and the regime. This phenomenon could be further illustrated
130—131
[Fig 4] Leo von Photo: DHM/Arne Psille
Welden: Heimkehr der
Wolhyniendeutschen
(Return [Home coming]
of the Germans from
Volhynia), 1939 or 1940,
exhibited at the Grosse
Deutsche Kunst (Great
German Art Exhibition)
in 1940 in room 11
Museum, Berlin.

[Fig 5] Ulfert Janssen: Photo: © Zentralinstitut für
Junge Norwegerin (Young Kunstgeschichte, Munich,
Norwegian), 1937 (cf. Photothek, NS-Archiv
http://www.gdk-research.
de/de/obj19400329.html),
exhibited at the Grosse
Deutsche Kunst (Great
German Art Exhibition)
in 1937 in room 15.
132—133
by other examples like the crazy success of Edmund Steppes who
showed 24 paintings at the GDK, of which two-thirds (or 16 works),
were bought by Hitler himself.
But the picture – in Germany and in Norway – remains incom-
plete if we do not also consider the “degenerate art.” Searching
the database “Entartete Kunst” at the Free University of Berlin
for “Norwegen,” provides 89 hits.14 86 of them relate to works by
Edvard Munch, two to Rolf Nesch (included in the database only
because his place of death was Norway), and one to Søren Steen-
Johnsen. Winter Evening by Steen-Johnsen had been confiscated
at the Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin. The Propaganda Ministry gave
it to the art dealer Karl Buchholz in 1939. He tried to sell it, but did
not succeed; it then passed to Bernhard Böhmer in 1940. What
happened after 1940 is not known. A second example is Edvard
Munch’s Sick Child: the work was confiscated in Dresden and sold,
in December 1938, to Harald Holst Halvorsen, who gave it up to
auction, where it was bought by Thomas Olsen, who then gave it to
the Tate Gallery in London as a present in 1939.
Holst Halvorsen bought quite a large number of works (for
relatively little money) from the four German dealers who were
officially commissioned to sell degenerate art abroad. Thus,
because of aggressive and occasionally contradictory national
socialist art politics at least some modernist works by Norwegian
artists left Germany and returned to Norway. I know of no studies
that investigate the impact of the occupation on these fairly com-
mon and established transactions.
And then, another crossover: there is the tricky case of the
pro-national socialist artist Olaf Gulbransson, who had long lost
the sting of his earlier acid caricatures that had made him famous.
During the German occupation of Norway, he did propaganda
drawings that mock the British war effort and Winston Churchill in
particular. In 1943, he was awarded the national socialist Goethe
Medal for Art and Science, and in 1944, he received Norway’s
highest cultural award.
Let me close by stressing that the questions raised by Kunst og
ukunst certainly have a lot to do with foreign cultural policy in
general and with the GDK in particular. However, I cannot imag-
ine studying Kunst og ukunst – or any of the Norwegian war artist
exhibitions – without also looking at the German artists who had

emigrated to Norway. What were the aesthetics preferences of art-
ists like Rolf Nesch, Bruno Krauskopf, Kurt Schwitters, and Ernst
Wilhelm Nay? Of course, Schwitters soon left for England, but
both Nesch and Nay – who had featured in the German degenerate
art show, but who were also promoted and exhibited in Norway by
Holst Halvorsen – remained in Norway during the occupation.
These are inconsistencies that have not yet received the
attention they deserve. At the same time, precisely these incon-
gruencies of the German-Norwegian relationship make it such a
fascinating, complex and demanding topic. Working in this field
will certainly demand the transgression of binary models, and
focusing instead on shades, nuances, and subtleties. In this sense,
a striking feature of Kunst og ukunst, when compared to the 1937
Entartete Kunst, is definitely the completely different historical
dimension. While in NS-Germany the defamed “art of decay”
(“Verfallskunst”) was officially located in the period after 1910,
and was often placed in deliberate juxtaposition to contemporary,
national socialist art, Søren Onsager, in the Oslo National Gallery
in April 1942, provided a very different trajectory. For instance, he
included works by Johan Christian Clausen Dahl that date back to
1814, as a positive example of a good national tradition; whereas
the contemporary scene of the late 1930s exemplified the decay of
that tradition. Moreover, we need to meticulously examine the dif-
ferent national oppositions of “traditional versus modern,” along
with such challenges as how “bourgeois” taste is defined in a given
society and a specific point of time, if we want to achieve a clearer
understanding. In such a wider study the comparison of Kunst og
ukunst with the Dutch Tentoonstelling Wansmaak en Gezonde Kunst
that was held 1 November to 20 December 1943 at the Stichting
het Nederlandsche Kunsthuis, Amsterdam,15 would play a central
role, as the political and ideological overtones that seem to gov-
ern all aspects may move to the background, and more common
distinctions – between high and low, kitsch and non-kitsch, and so
on – may play a larger role than expected.
134—135
Works Cited
Bohn, Robert, Reichskommissariat Norwegen: Das Funkkolleg zum Verständnis der Gegen-
“Nationalsozialistische Neuordnung“ und wartskunst, ed. Monika Wagner (Reinbek:
Kriegswirtschaft, vol. 54 of Beiträge zur Mil- Rowohlt, 1991), 443–466.
itärgeschichte (München: Oldenbourg, 2000). Mohn, Volker, NS-Kulturpolitik im
—, “Das ‘Reichskommissariat Norwegen’, Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren: Konzepte,
und Die Wehrmacht als Besatzungsarmee,” Praktiken, Reaktionen (Essen: Klartext, 2014).
in Hundert Jahre Deutsch-Norwegische Moll, Martin, “Zwischen Weimarer Klassik
Beziehungen: Nicht nur Lachs und Würst- und Nordischem Mythos: NS-Kulturpropa-
chen – Begleitbuch zur Ausstellung, ed. Bernd ganda in Norwegen (1940–1945),” in Kultur
Henningsen (Berlin: 2005). – Propaganda – Öffentlichkeit: Intentionen
Bruland, Bjarte, “Wie Sich Erinnern? Deutscher Besatzungspolitik und Reaktionen
Norwegen und der Krieg,” in Mythen der auf die Okkupation, ed. Wolfgang Benz,
Nationen: 1945 – Arena der Erinnerungen, Gerhard Otto, Annabella Weismann (Berlin:
vol. 1, ed. Monika Flacke (Mainz: Deutsches Metropol, 1998), 189–223.
Historisches Museum, 2004), 453–80. —, “Zwischen Weimarer Klassik und
Coles, Harry L. and Albert K. Weinberg, Nordischem Mythos: NS-Kulturpropaganda
Civil Affairs: Soldiers Become Governors in Norwegen (1940–1945),” in Das Dritte
(Washington D.C.: Office of the Chief of Mili- Weimar: Klassik und Kultur im Nationalsozial-
tary History, Dept. of the Army, 1964). ismus, ed. Lothar Ehrlich, Jürgen John, Justus
Cuomo, Glenn R., ed., National Socialist H. Ulbricht (Köln: Böhlau, 1999) 103–31.
Cultural Policy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, —, “Norwegens Hauptstadt Oslo 1940–1945:
1995). Eine Besetzte ‘Germanische’ Stadt im
Emberland, Terje and Matthew Kott, Kampf um Kulturelle Deutungshoheit,” in
Himmlers Norge: Nordmenn i det Storgerman- Evropská Velkoměsta za Druhé Světové Války:
ske Prosjekt (Oslo: Aschehoug, 2012). Každodennost Okupovaného Velkoměsta:
Eriksen, Arild Hartmann, Kunst og ukunst: Praha 1939–1945 v Evropském Srovnání, vol.
Aspekter ved Nyordningen av Kunstlivet i Norge XXVI of Documenta Pragensia, ed. Olga
1940–1945, (Bergen: Hovedoppgave i Kuns- Fejtová, Václav Ledvinka, Jiří Pešek (Praha:
thistorie, U of Bergen, 1990). Scriptorium, 2007), 513–46.
Fuhrmeister, Christian, “75 Jahre Gegensä- Solhjell, Dag, Fra Akademiregime til Fag-
tze? Zur Gegenwart der Vergangenheit,” in foreningsregime: Kunstpolitikk 1940–1980
1938: Kunst, Künstler, Politik, ed. Eva Atlan, (Oslo: Unipub, 2005).
Raphael Gross, Julia Voss (Göttingen: Wall- Stein, Wolfgang Hans, “L’idéologie des
stein, 2013), 301–15. Saisies: Les Revendications Allemandes des
Grimnes, Ole Kristian, “Einleitung: Die Archives, Bibliothèques et Collections de
Besatzungszeit 1940–1945,” in Hundert Jahre Musées Publiques Françaises,” in Saisies,
Deutsch-Norwegische Beziehungen. Nicht nur Spoliations et Restitutions Archives et Biblio-
Lachs und Würstchen – Begleitbuch zur Ausstel- thèques au XXe Siècle, ed. Alexandre Sumpf,
lung, ed. Bernd Henningsen (Berlin: 2005). Mikhaïl D. Afanas’ev (Rennes: Presses U de
Henningsen, Bernd, ed., Hundert Jahre Rennes, 2012), 67–82.
deutsch-norwegische Beziehungen. Nicht nur Sørensen, Øystein, “Nasjonal Samling und
Lachs und Würstchen – Begleitbuch zur Ausstel- die Regierung Quisling,” in Hundert Jahre
lung (Berlin: 2005). Deutsch-Norwegische Beziehungen: Nicht nur
Mittig, Hans-Ernst, “Kunst und Propa- Lachs und Würstchen – Begleitbuch zur Ausstel-
ganda im NS-System,” in Moderne Kunst: lung, ed. Bernd Henningsen (Berlin: 2005).

Endnotes
1 In an email dated 23 January 2014, the Kamerad [Herbert] Jankuhn [1905–1990]

archive states that they do not possess docu- seit einigen Wochen in Oslo ist, um den
ments of German activities in Norway after Denkmalschutz wahrzunehmen. Er ist beim
1941; they have thus not found any reference SD-Einsatz-Kommando zu erreichen […]
to the exhibition in the files of the German Der Reichsführer SS hat angeordnet, dass
embassy in Oslo nor of the consulate general alles getan wird, um die vorgeschichtlichen
in Bergen. Moreover, the exhibition is also Denkmäler Norwegens zu schützen und ihre
not mentioned in the few remaining files of Erschliessung zu fördern. Er betrachtet dies
the Ministry of Culture, which suffered many als eine Ehrensache von SS und Polizei. In
wartime losses. Dänemark ist übrigens in gleicher Weise Dr.
2 See <http://commons.wikimedia.org/ Kersten aus Kiel tätig.”
wiki/File:Second_world_war_europe_anima- 8 See e.g. the organizational chart of the
tion_small.gif> Military Art Protection unit in Bundesar-
3 I have discussed the problem of binary chiv-Militärarchiv Freiburg/Breisgau, RH 3,
oppositions in Fuhrmeister 2013. Cf. Bruland, 154, Bl. 50.
and in particular Moll 2007, 514–5. 9 Universitätsbibliothek Marburg, call num-
4 Cf. <http://www.oslo.diplo.de/ ber LV 13 29, and library of the Zentralinstitut
contentblob/2768260/Daten/856824/41_ für Kunstgeschichte Munich, call number
DownloadDatei_DE.pdf> Terje Emberland XI 26/14.
informed me during the conference that 10 Coles and Weinberg cite a document
the state of research in Norway has evolved, by SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters, Allied
and that Grimnes is now more critical of the Expeditionary Force), May 1945.
effects of the German occupation. 11 See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
5 See Emberland and Kott for further details Henie-Onstad_Art_Centre and http://
and recent scholarship that partly expands www.hok.no/a-painting-with-a-his-
and nuances Bohn’s findings. I owe this tory.5196228–175056.html> (both last visited
reference to Erik Tonning. 1 February 2015).
6 “Im Gegensatz zu der dank der freiwilligen 12 Belgrade, 5.–16.10.1940; Athens,
Mitarbeit der Künstler weitgehend reibung- 25.1.–12.2.1941; Sofia, 25.1.-12.2.1941; Buda-
slos ablaufenden Steuerung des Kulturlebens pest, 20.9.–5.10.1941; Bucharest, planned
in Deutschland durch die Machthaber kon- for 17.5.– 30.6.1941, but not realized; Lisbon,
nte in Norwegen weder von einer freiwilligen 8.–23.11.1941; Copenhagen, from 15. 11. 1941
noch von einer erfolgreich erzwungenen onwards; Madrid, 6.-26.5.1942; Ankara,
(Selbst-) Gleichschaltung der ‘Kulturschaf- Istanbul, Smyrna, 1943. These data were
fenden’ die Rede sein. Vielmehr waren dort collected by Kathrin Müller-Kindler who is
innere Ablehnung, Obstruktion oder gar off- preparing a Ph.D. dissertation on architec-
ener Boykott an der Tagesordnung, weshalb tural exhibitions during National Socialism
ein den deutschen bzw. NS-Vorstellungen at the LMU Munich.
halbwegs entsprechendes kulturelles Leben 13 The Political Archive of the Ministry of
überhaupt nur unter ständigem druck und Foreign Affairs in Berlin has a good docu-
ständiger Überwachung stattfinden konnte mentation of these processes.
(Moll 1998, 203).” 14 <http://emuseum.campus.fu-berlin.
7 An early piece of evidence is a letter pre- de/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalInter-
served in the Bundesarchiv Berlin (formerly face&lang=en>
Berlin Document Center): DS G 0126, signed 15 Cf. Exhibition poster in NIOD (Neder-
letter [presumably Walther Wüst, curator lands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie,
of the “Ahnenerbe”] to first lieutenant and today Institute for War, Holocaust and
company commander Prof. Dr. Alexander Genocide Studies), Amsterdam, available
Langsdorff, 17.6.1940: “Ich freue mich via <http://www.beeldbankwo2.nl/detail.
für Sie, dass Sie den Norwegen-Feldzug jsp?action=detail&recordidx=1>, Beeldnum-
mitmachen und erleben durften. Es mer: 105602.
wird Sie besonders interessieren, dass
136—137
The Teutonic
Rage of the
Ancient Timbers
Himmler, the SS
and Norwegian
Folk Culture
Terje Emberland
Terje Emberland – The Teutonic Rage of the Ancient Timbers

In 1934 the German playwright and poet Hanns Johst [Fig 1] vis-
ited the Folk Museum at Bygdøy in Oslo. In his travelogue Maske
und Gesicht [Mask and Face], published a year later, he describes
the impression traditional Norwegian wooden architecture made
on him: “One shudders at the subdued pride still rumbling in these
logs,” he writes (Johst, 149).
Back home in Germany, Johst was an important figure. The
year after his visit to Norway, the Nazi regime nominated him a
national poet and president of the Reichsschrifttumskammer – the
Reich Literature Chamber. He joined the NSDAP as early as 1927,
and the infamous line “when I hear the word culture, I reach for
my gun” – often attributed to Hermann Göring – derives from his
play Schlageter from 1932 (Longerich, 393).
However, in our context it is the inscription in Maske und Gesicht
that is important. It reads: “Für Heinrich Himmler in treuer Fre-
undschaft.” Since the mid-twenties Johst had been a close friend
and admirer of the Reichsführer SS and could address his letters
“to my dear friend Heini.” Himmler, for his part, initiated Johst
into the SS with the rank of SS-Oberführer and appointed him the
“bard” of his elite order (Ackermann, 104).
And it is precisely the mythopoeic language of the “bard” Johst
uses in describing to his friend the impression the ancient wooden
houses made on him: “Only a fool can resist shivering in the pres-
ence of the eternal, silent rage still quivering in these massive tree
trunks.”
The “rage” Johst mentions seems to allude to the Furor Teu-
tonicus which the Romans attributed to the Germanic tribes after
they had annihilated three whole roman legions in the Battle of
the Teutoburg Forest in the year 9 CE. The buildings at the Bygdøy
Folk Museum still contained this noble, Germanic savagery, Johst
seems to think.
This was a language his friend Heinrich understood perfectly.
There was a racial force dormant in the Nordic blood, Himmler
believed. And as long as this blood was dominant in a people, it
would manifest itself in its culture. The Nordic-Germanic blood
was “the bearer of the creative and heroic, the life-sustaining qual-
ities in our people,” Himmler states.1
To Himmler, the community of blood was something eternal and
omnipresent which stretched far beyond the borders of Germany
138—139
[Fig 1] Hanns Johst, 1933. Photo: © Bundesarchiv,
Bild 183-2007-1010-501

and included all peoples of predominantly Nordic race. The SS
ideology was therefore less centred on the notion of a German
Volksgemeinschaft, or German people’s community, and much
more on the Nordic Blutsgemeinschaft, that is, the supranational
racial community of blood.
This also had consequences for his political vision of the future.
To Himmler it did not entail a fulfilment of conventional German
claims on continental hegemony in an expanded and powerful
Germany, but the realization of the Greater Germanic Reich – the
political and cultural unification of all peoples of Nordic blood.
This Blutsgemeinschaft did not only transcend national boundar-
ies, but also the centuries. It was the source of Germanic greatness
both past and present. Himmler’s understanding of history
presupposed an unbroken line, or rather an identity, between the
pre-Christian Germanics and their present-day descendants. The
link between past and present was for him absolute and direct and
needed no further validation (Kater, 18).
Hence, in his SS, all historical accounts of Germanic bravery
became normative examples for emulation, for it was almost
unthinkable that the forefathers could have made mistakes, since
all their thoughts and actions were directed by their uncorrupted
racial instinct (Ackermann, 56).
This racial metaphysics led to pure mystical speculations.
Himmler seems to think that the Nordic blood mediated a form
of collective memory, by which one can gain access to an eternal
racial wisdom. As he states in a speech to the German police in
1937:
The Volk is understood not as a random collection of individuals, not

even as the sum of all living people with the same blood, but rather as
a suprapersonal and timeless collective being, incorporating all gener-
ations sharing the same blood, spanning from the earliest ancestors to
their youngest descendants. (Himmler 1937)
You only needed to listen to “the voice of the blood” to experience

the “unio mystica” with this “suprapersonal and collective being.”
When Johst feels the presence of the Furor Teutonicus in the
ancient timbers, it is therefore not only a poetic metaphor. It is the
racial blood itself which speaks to him.
140—141
The Nordic-Germanic race had acquired these unique and
mystical qualities by a process of selection and adaptation to a par-
ticular environment. Like the Völkisch movement at the turn of the
century – which greatly influenced National Socialist thinking – SS
ideology postulates a fundamental bond between a people and the
landscape it inhabits.
“The Germanic people is a people of the forest,” reads an ideo-
logical instruction booklet of the SS: “From the earliest times the
forest and the people have mutually influenced each other. The
continuous struggle against the growing forest has given the peo-
ple its distinctive character.”2 Nordic man was thus fundamentally
connected to and formed by the deep forests where he harvested
his timber. Consequently, the formative force that generated the
unique qualities of Germanic Man not only manifested itself in his
bold and beautifully built log cabins, but was also encapsulated in
the age-old timber itself.
At the same time, this racial power was still present in the
Norwegians of today, the descendants of these old builders – even
more strongly than in any other tribe of the Germanic community
of blood.
Evidence shows that the Norwegians were considered the pinna-
cle of racial superiority within SS racial ideology, superseding the
Germans themselves. According to manuals used in the ideo-
logical education of the SS, the ratio of pure Nordic blood in the
German population was somewhere between 50 and 60 percent.3
In Norway and Sweden, this percentage was supposedly much
higher, in excess of 70 or 80 percent.4
As one can read in the instruction material aimed at German
SS-officers commanding Nordic volunteers:
The Nordic volunteer is a proud being with a pronounced sense of hon-

our. He feels himself related to his great forebears, the Vikings, which
he also obviously is, since his ancestors were able to protect themselves
from immigration of inferior races and thus managed to keep their good
Nordic blood virtually untainted.5
This exalted position was the result of theories developed by Hans

F.K. Günther (1891–1968) and Richard Walther Darré (1895–1953).
Hans F. K. Günther published a number of very popular books

on racial theory in Germany during the interwar period and is
regarded as a chief influence on Nazi racial theories. In the 1920s
he was the central figure of the German Nordicist movement.
This movement claimed the existence of an original Nordic race,
exceptional in terms of cultural creativity. This “strain of Nordic
blood” was, however, endangered, which constituted a threat to
all civilisation. But the ongoing racial decay could be reversed by
promoting racial awareness, practising strict racial hygiene and
implementing other political measures (Lutzhöft 1971, Karcher
2009).
Günther claimed that the southern part of Norway and Sweden
was the “ur-heimat” of the Nordic race. The population in this
region had not been subject to the same mixing of races as on the
Continent and still showed many original Germanic traits, both
biologically and culturally. Günther was married to a Norwegian
and lived a few years in Skien in Norway and later in Stockholm,
where he used Scandinavian anthropological research to support
his theories (Emberland and Kott, 59–72). Even at the current time,
he claimed, it was easy to find simple peasants and common folk in
Norway who displayed almost pure Nordic racial features, other-
wise only to be found in the old, pure-blooded nobility in Germany
(Günther 1926, 18; Günther 1927a, 78f.).
Günther was a major influence on the leading ideologist of
the SS in the early 1930s, Richard Walther Darré, the first head
of the SS’ Race and Settlement Main Office (SS Rasse- und Sied-
lungshauptamt). Darré developed Günther and the Nordicist
movement’s theory concerning the racial purity of the Norwegians
and Swedes by linking it to his core concept of Blut und Boden
(blood and soil).
According to Darré, the ancient Germanic concept of Odal, the
heritage farm, was the source from which the people drew its racial
purity and rejuvenating strength; it was accordingly dubbed Das
Lebensquell der nordischen Rasse [The Life-Source of the Nordic
Race]. This form of agricultural organisation, typical of the ancient
Germanic tribes, had prevailed throughout the ages in Norway and
Sweden, relatively unaffected by feudalism and later agricultural
developments. That is why, Darré argued, the Norwegians and
Swedes had remained the purest bearers of the Nordic race (Darré
1929, 84).
142—143
As head of the Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt (Race and Settle-
ment Main Office), Darré was responsible, not only for the racial
screening of members of the SS, but also for their ideological train-
ing. As a result, the “Nordic Idea,” including the idealization of the
Norwegians and Swedes and their culture, became an integral part
of SS ideology.
This “Nordenschwärmerei” was, however, nothing new to the
SS. The search for an ideal, ancient Germanic society was sparked
by the emerging German nationalism of the 19th century and
particularly promoted by the racialist and nationalist Völkisch
Movement at the turn of the century.
The works of Roman historians, especially Tacitus’ Germania,
were used to promote national pride and create a heroic past for
the newly unified Germany. Like their ancestors, described by the
Romans, modern Germans were portrayed as a natural, indomi-
table and heroic breed of people (Arvidsson 2000). The depiction
of the Germanic tribes as free and natural meant, however, that
they could come across as rather primitive. It therefore became
essential to prove that the ancestors had a highly evolved culture.
But this posed a fundamental problem: there were, in fact, very
few actual sources and archaeological finds which could be used to
substantiate the existence of such an ancient Germanic civilisation.
The solution was to invent a Germanic prehistory based on –
indeed virtually identical to – Norse culture. Runic inscriptions,
the Edda and the Icelandic Sagas were thus used as proof of an
original Germanic high culture.
This strategy was also taken over by the SS. And here Günther and
Darré’s theories about the primeval purity of the Norwegians proved
beneficial in creating a link between Norse culture and the alleged
Germanic ur-civilisation. Since culture essentially was a product of
inherent and unchanging racial qualities not fundamentally altered
by historical developments, Norse culture was an uncorrupted
source of information about the earlier Germanic past, despite the
latter having emerged many centuries earlier and in a different part
of Europe. As it is stated in Darré’s ideological journal Odal:
Since our own mythical works have been lost, the Nordic Edda, along
with various other works, can provide an image of the blood-related
Germanic mythology, which was destroyed by Charlemagne. (Stief, 829)

But even present day customs and folk art in Norway was a source
of inspiration to the ideologues of the SS: “In the same way, the
remains of folk art and rural culture in Norway can show us what
the Germania of Central Europe would have looked like before
the Roman West-Frankish cultural distortion and devastation took
place.”
Accordingly, Norway became ideologically important to the
SS already in the early 1930s. It became vital to accumulate
knowledge on the Norse and Norwegian cultural heritage and to
examine present-day Norwegian folk culture in order to create this
idealised image of the Germanic past as a cultural blueprint for the
utopian Greater Germanic Reich of the future.
The ideological importance of Norwegian cultural heritage led
to several undertakings from the side of the SS from the mid-1930s
on. Himmler sent his experts on cultural history to Norway, where
they documented archaeological finds and ethnographic artefacts.
As we shall see, SS institutions also sponsored local ethnographic
research.
Many of these experts were employed by the Ahnenerbe [Heri-
tage of the Forefathers], an SS research-institution founded in 1935
to find new evidence of the Germanic heritage and to prove that
the Nordic race had once ruled the world.
To illustrate this activity directed towards Norway in the inter-
war years, we can take Himmler’s visit to Norway in 1941 as a
starting point (Emberland and Kott, 178–85).6
During his visit to Norway in January and February 1941, the
Reichsführer SS believed he had found abundant evidence of the
proud prehistory of the Nordic-Germanic race, both in ancient
monuments and local folk art.
Like the German Nordicist movement, he believed that the
Nordic race was the only race capable of creating high culture.
Therefore the great civilisation of Greek and Roman Antiquity
must also have been the achievement of this race. From their ori-
gin in southern Scandinavia and northern Germany, Nordic Man
had supposedly travelled south and spread his culture to the Medi-
terranean and further on as far as India. Himmler believed to have
found proof of this in Norway, as we can read from this telegram to
the Ahnenerbe:
144—145
After the end of the war, the Reichsführer SS wishes to start a research
project to document the close historical connections that must have
existed between the Norwegians and the ancient Greeks. As an exam-
ple Reichsführer SS mentions the similarities between Norwegian and
Greek place-names. “Phyle” (individual families) and the expression
“fylke,” which is still used in Norway, must be related.7
Immediately after landing at Fornebu airport on 28 January 1941,

Himmler visited the rock carvings near the Nautical College in
Oslo [Fig 2]. His particular interest in these carvings was stim-
ulated by the Dutch amateur researcher Herman Wirth, whom
Himmler had appointed head of the Ahnenerbe in 1934.
Wirth studied archaic symbols in a search for similarities
over time and across cultures, and claimed that these symbols
were the remnants of an original written language developed by
the sun-worshipping “Aryan race” of Atlantis. The Aryans had
abandoned their original home when the continent disappeared
beneath the sea and they subsequently spread their religion and
symbolism across the globe (Wiwjorra 1988, Löw 2009).
Scandinavian rock carvings played an increasingly important
role in his search for the original Aryan symbols. Thus one of the
first expeditions made by the Ahnenerbe in 1936 went to Sweden
and Norway to make casts of rock carvings.
But Wirth and his colleagues also visited the folk museum in
Lillehammer to document ornaments on old folk art, which Wirth
believed also contained traces of the original written language of
the Atlantic Arians. On his journey to the north of Norway in 1941,
Himmler also made a stop at Lillehammer Folk Museum to inspect
these supposedly antediluvian remnants.
A bit further north Himmler and his company visited the medi-
eval farm Tofte in Dovre, which to the Nazis was “typical of the
Norwegian heartland of the Germanic race.”8 After a tour of the
farm, they entered the “Stolpestugu,” a lavishly decorated room
from 1783. Here, they were served coffee and the traditional sour-
cream porridge, “rømmegrøt.” Their visit lasted over two hours,
almost as long as the entire time Himmler spent with the Norwe-
gian National Socialist party leader Vidkun Quisling during his
visit (Emberland and Kott, 183–85).
Himmler's visit to Tofte may have been suggested by Dr Wil-

[Fig 2] Himmler and Photo: © Bundesarchiv,
his entourage visit Bild 101III-
the rock carvings at Moebius-030-24/Möbius
Ekeberg in Oslo, 1941.
146—147
[Fig 3] Himmler listening Photo: © Bundesarchiv,
as the folk musician Olav Bild 101I-091-0168-08A/
Brenno playes the Norwegian Max Ehlert
zither in one of the old
wooden houses at the Folk
Museum at Bygdøy, 1941.

helm Saure. In 1936, Saure was visiting Norway as German
representative to the annual meeting of the international agricul-
tural commission.9 However, it was in his capacity as an official of
the SS’ Race and Settlement Main Office that he undertook a tour
through the Gudbrandsdal Valley. His choice of travel route was
not accidental. The Norwegian racial researchers Halvdan Bryn
and Jon Alfred Mjøen – who to a large extent had shaped Gün-
ther’s racial view of the Norwegians – concluded that it was in this
particular valley one could encounter the Nordic type in almost
completely pure form (Mjøen, 175). Hence, Saure’s expedition
was a form of “racial safari,” whereby he not only could study the
Germanic heritage preserved nearly intact in the culture and cus-
toms of the local farmers, but also observe living specimens of this
exceptional racial type.
Later that year, Saure presented his impressions of Norway in a
lofty speech at the Reich Farmer’s Convention (Reichbauerntag) in
Goslar, echoing Hanns Johst’s exaltations a year before in Maske
und Gesicht: “Since the dawn of Germanic history, these Nordic
farmers have developed an unsurpassed rural culture. Confronted
with these cultural treasures preserved by providence, we can only
stand in awe” (Saure, 176).
Returning to Oslo in late February 1941 Himmler visited the
Viking ships and Folk Museum at Bygdøy, accompanied by Reichs-
kommissar Josef Terboven and the ethnologist Friz Vollberg, who
for many years also had worked as an agent for the SS intelligence
service [Sicherheitsdienst] in Norway.
Here Himmler listened very attentively as the folk musician
Olav Brenno played the Norwegian zither in one of the old wooden
houses at the Folk Museum [Fig 3]. Himmler believed he could
hear the “original voice of the race” in Nordic folk music, and on
his initiative the Ahenenerbe established a department for the study
of Germanic folk music under the head of ethnomusicologist Fritz
Bose (Pringle, 85). Himmler’s plan was to identify elements of
authentic Germanic music and use it in the rituals of the SS. For
this purpose he also ordered Fritz Bose to reconstruct the ancient
horns depicted on Swedish and Norwegian rock carvings.
As part of this reconstruction scheme the Ahnenerbe financed
the recordings of Norwegian folk music carried out by the Norwe-
gian ethnologist Christian Leden, an acquaintance of Wirth and
148—149
Walther Darré. In the summer of 1937 and 1938, Leden travelled
across Norway and made some of the first phonographic record-
ings of Norwegian folk music – all paid for by the Reichsführer SS
and later on to be analysed by Fritz Bose (Engevold 2013).
During the German occupation of Norway from April 1940 to
May 1945, the SS came to exercise greater influence than in any
other West European country under Nazi rule. This was mainly
due to the establishment of a German civil administration under
Reichskommissar Josef Terboven.
Among Terboven’s main responsibilities was to secure order
and stability and to “win the Norwegian people” for the Führer. To
manage this assignment efficiently, he needed to secure executive
power outside the Wehrmacht; hence his cooperation with the
SS. This power configuration put the Reichsführer SS in a position
where he could demand large concessions, including the establish-
ment of the office of a Higher SS and Police Leader (Höhere SS- und
Polizeiführer) in Norway under his direct control.
Furthermore, Himmler insisted that his influence should not be
limited to security and police matters, but should also include pop-
ulation policies (volkstumspolitische Fragen), in line with his racially
motivated interest in the Norwegians and Norwegian history and
folk culture.
But even before the SS had established its power-base in Norway,
Himmler was engaged in securing the relics of Germanic heritage
in the country. The first priority was to protect the Viking ships and
the Folk Museum in Bygdøy from acts of war. Already by late April
1940, the head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, SS-Gruppen-
führer Reinhard Heydrich, had on Himmler's orders developed
extensive plans for the protection of Norwegian and Danish
museums and ancient monuments (Arisholm and Emberland 2012,
69–84).
It is also telling that the first SS representative to arrive in occu-
pied Norway was the archaeologist Herbert Jankuhn, head of the
department of excavations in the Ahnenerbe. Already in late April
he was sent to give expert advice in securing archaeological sites
and monuments, and – on behalf of the Sicherheitsdienst – to
assess the political and ideological positions of his Norwegian
colleagues.
During a conference with Himmler in August 1940, Jankuhn

summarised his activities: He had started excavation of a burial
mound at Rygge and secured one in Hamar and in Værnes outside
Trondheim; furthermore, in cooperation with the Luftwaffe, he
had secured an archeologically interesting area at Lista. He had
also offered his Norwegian colleagues financial and expert help
form the Ahnenerbe in the ongoing excavations of the mysterious
Raknehaugen in Ullensaker – quite an impressive list after only five
months of German occupation.10
The influence of the SS in Norway culminated in 1942, when
Hitler gave Himmler responsibility for all so-called “Germanic
work” in the occupied Germanic countries. This made it possi-
ble to launch a massive propaganda campaign order to win the
Norwegians for the “Greater Germanic” idea. This was followed
by considerable institutional expansion, with the establishment
of the Germanische Leitstelle [Germanic Headquarters] for
recruitment of Norwegians to the Waffen-SS, the “Germanske SS
Norge” (a Norwegian section of Allgemeine SS), the Germanische
Landdienst [Germanic Agricultural Service] for the recruitment of
young Norwegians as colonists in the occupied East, and – in our
context most importantly – of the Germanische Wissenschaftsein-
satz [Task Force for Germanic Scholarship] (Emberland and Kott,
309–50).
Under this name the Ahnenerbe was to cooperate with other
SS-institutions and local collaborators in an effort to strengthen
the pan-Germanic identity in the occupied Germanic countries.
This was to be achieved through a propaganda-effort focusing
on scientific proof for the existence of a cultural and historical
heritage common to all peoples of Germanic race. Dr. Hans Ernst
Schneider of the Ahnenerbe formulates this strategy thus:
The Reichsführer-SS regards Germanic research as particularly valuable,

not only because it concerns Germanic brother-nations, but because
the results of this kind of research are much needed in the political work
in these countries. To clarify such similarities on Germanic grounds is
often the only political bridge by which one can reach larger sections of
the population in these Germanic nations.11
In 1942 Dr. Hans Schwalm, professor of geography and SS-Haupt-

sturmführer, came to Norway as the official representative of the
150—151
[Fig 4] An explosion in Photo: © Bundesarchiv,
Bergen harbour on 20 Bild 101I-117-0353-30/
April 1944 led to massive Maltry
damages to Bergenhus,
Håkonshallen and “Bryggen,”
the old Hanseatic buildings
alongside the harbour.

152—153
Ahnenerbe and the Germanische Wissenschaftseinsatz. He imme-
diately ran into problems. Wilhelm Rediess, the Höhere SS- und
Polizeiführer in Norway, had no intentions of sharing his power
with this newcomer-institution, which was not even equipped
with any formal powers by the Reichsführer SS. Therefore, the
professor was told that his work was to be carried out under the
leadership of the Germanische Leitstelle. Consequently, Schwalm
became rather isolated and powerless and soon gave up the ambi-
tious plans of the Germanische Wissenscaftseinsatz. Instead he
devoted his time to more practical conservation-work. And here,
with the help of his boss, Himmler, he proved to be much more
successful (Gasche, 202–26).
An explosion in Bergen harbour on 20 April 1944 led to massive
damages to Bergenhus, Håkonshallen and “Bryggen”, the old
Hanseatic buildings alongside the harbour [Fig 4].
While the mediaeval stone-architecture was quickly restored,
very few displayed any interest in Bryggen. The local Wehrmacht
commander wanted, for military reasons, to use the opportunity to
clear the harbour area. The city’s building council had also voted
for demolition, supported by the Fire Chief and even the owners of
the houses themselves, who wanted to erect modern commercial
buildings on the site.
However, Hanns Schwalm was dismayed at the prospect of
losing these well-preserved examples of Hanseatic architecture,
and travelled to Bergen to assess the damages and possibilities of
restoration. Foreseeing that Reichskommissar Terboven had no
interest in this kind of conservation work, Schwalm wrote directly
to the Ahnenerbe in Berlin, urging them to take the matter up with
Himmler himself. Time was running out, he wrote, since some
of the owners already had started dismantling their buildings.12
The Ahnenerbe reacted swiftly and sent their expert on Germanic
architecture, Hermann Phleps, up from Berlin. In his report Phleps
also concluded that the buildings could and should be rescued
(Arisholm and Emberland, 69–84).
On reading the Schwalm and Phleps reports, Himmler inter-
vened directly and ordered Höhere SS- und Polizeifürer Rediess
to take the matter up directly with Terboven. In his telegram to
Rediess he wrote: “The conservation of ‘Bryggen’, as an unparal-
leled token of German Hansa-spirit and at the same time a unique

example of German-Norwegian architecture, is without a doubt
essential, since it is one of the earliest cases of German-Norwegian
cooperation.”13
Terboven, for his part, had no interest in annoying the
Reichsführer SS in such a trivial matter, and made sure that the
Organisation Todt made the necessary building materials avail-
able for the restoration work, headed by Norwegian architects in
the local Antiquarian committee. Therefore we are still able to
enjoy these beautiful old buildings – one of the major tourist sites
in this lovely city.
This happened at a time when the German occupying forces in
Norway were expecting an allied invasion any time soon, and all
building materials were needed for essential military fortifications.
But this is far from only example of how Himmler put aside all con-
siderations of military and security expedience in order to protect
the sacred Germanic heritage in Norway.
To give just one more example: In 1943, Himmler was informed
that Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, Heinrich
Fehlis, intended to burn down all farms and log cabins close
to Swedish border in order to supress resistance activities and
prevent escapes to the neighbouring country. But Himmler
immediately ordered a stop to these plans. Such destruction of the
Germanic cultural heritage was completely out of the question, no
matter how urgent this was from a security viewpoint.
The idealisation of Norwegian folk culture was connected to the
core racial beliefs promoted by Himmler and his order, and thus
became an integral part of the utopian worldview of the SS. Norse
and Norwegian folk culture was simply vital in the construction of
an idealised image both of the Germanic past and of the Greater
Germanic Reich of the future.
Many of the organization’s activities and priorities in Norway
will seem incomprehensible if one does not bear this in mind. They
only make sense if one takes a closer and broader look at SS ideol-
ogy, including the cult of Nordic Man and the utopian visions of a
future Greater Germanic Reich.
Until relatively recently, historians often have been loath to
examine this ideology as an independent explanatory factor. This
has now gradually changed, but still today, there is a tendency
to focus only on the genocidal aspects of the racial ideas. But to
154—155
fully comprehend the fundamentally utopian and millennarian
character of SS’ worldview and how it shaped the activities of the
organisation, one must not only pay attention to those who occu-
pied the lowest place in the racial hierarchy, but also those who
were placed at the top.
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Endnotes
1 Speech in Posen, “Das Ausleseprinzip,” 7 From Himmler’s personal staff to the

4/10/1943, Nürnberg-dok. 1919-PS, IMT leadership of the Ahnenerbe, 30/5/1941,
(1949), vol. 29. Bundesarchiv, Berlin, NS 21/805/1.
2 “Skogen,” in Germansk Budstikke, 5 1942, 8 Deutsche Zeitung in Norwegen, 4/2/1941.
SS-Hauptamt, Berlin. 9 Nationen, 30.07.1936.
3 Der Reichsführer-SS/SS-Hauptamt, 10 “10.08.1940: Neumann. Jankuhns Arbeit
Rassenpolitik (Berlin: Der Reichsführer-SS/ in Norwegen,” entry in Himmler’s calendar
SS-Hauptamt, [1942]), 19. 1940, Bundesarchiv, Berlin, NS 19/3954.
4 Der Reichsführer-SS/SS-Hauptamt, Bundesarchiv, Berlin, SSO-akten, Hans
SS-Mann und Blutsfrage (Berlin: Der Reichs- Hendrik Neumann.
führer-SS/SS-Hauptamt, 1941), 13; Der 11 Schneider to Rudolf, 16/11/1942, Bunde-
Reichsführer-SS/SS Hauptamt, Rassenpolitik, sarchiv, Berlin, NS 21/805).
17–19. 12 Sievers to Rudolph 10/7/1944, Bundesar-
5 “Richtlinien zur Behandlung von chiv, Berlin, NS 21/43.
Freiwilligen aus dem Norden,” undated, 13 Brandt to Rediess, undated, 1944, Bunde-
Bundersachiv Berlin, NS 31/411. sarchiv, Berlin, NS 21/43.
6 “Program für Besuch des Reichsführer
SS in Norwegen,” Norwegian Resistance
Museum, PA Skodvin.
156—157
“Norwegian
Spirit and Will”
Vitalism as Radical
Aesthetic and
Reactionary
Ideology in
Literature and Art
(1932–1942)
Eirik Vassenden
Eirik Vassenden – “Norwegian Spirit and Will”

Vitalism, or Lebensphilosophie, was an important ideological and
aesthetic current found in most cultures in Northern Europe before
and after the turn of the twentieth century. The pivotal concept of
vitalism was life: a fundamental, pre-rational and natural principle
that modern, civilized mankind had lost its relation to – a relation
that urgently needed to be rekindled. These ideas were found on
all sides of the many ideological conflicts during the first decades
of the twentieth century, and seemed to be available for use by
anyone who claimed to have a better understanding of – or a more
direct connection to – life and vitality itself: artists, writers, politi-
cians or philosophers. Thus it is also a concept and a phenomenon
that may make it harder to distinguish “reactionary” from “radical,”
both aesthetically, ideologically and politically. Vitalism also sus-
pends some of the most important cultural parameters, such as the
critical distinction between “good” and “bad” art and literature, as
well as the emphasis put on tradition or convention. For the vitalist,
there is life or non-life and – importantly – more and less alive.
In the following I will give an overview of some of the most
important aesthetic and ideological impulses that characterize
vitalism, and try to explain how one single idea could on the
one hand be put to use in reactionary national-socialist art and
propaganda, yet still be an important part of a new, emancipatory
paradigm of art: a dynamic and rule-breaking expression of the
new. One central example here will be the Norwegian critic and
vitalist poet Åsmund Sveen, who published his first collection
of poems in 1932. Sveen joined the nationalist socialist party
Nasjonal Samling after the occupation in 1940, was made secre-
tary in the Press Directorate, head of the governmental Theater
Directorate, and principal officer in the Department of Culture
during the war. In 1941, he was given the task by Gulbrand Lunde,
the Norwegian Minister of Culture and general education, of
compiling an anthology of literary texts under the title Norsk ånd
og vilje [Norwegian Spirit and Will]. This volume of exemplary
texts, which starts with the Old Norse apocalyptic poem Voluspá
and ends with nationalist poems by the self-declared national
socialist “bard” (and NS member) Kaare Bjørgen and the poet
Olav Aukrust (1883–1929), should be seen as an attempt to create
a literary canon. This canon, then, is set to serve the national-so-
cialist political agenda, while at the same time compiling excerpts
158—159
from both the greatest Norwegian writers and regular Nazi pro-
paganda, including several of Prime Minister Vidkun Quisling’s
speeches. This version of great Norwegian literature – a pendant to
the “Kunst” part of the Kunst og ukunst exhibition in the National
Gallery – was “curated” by and filtered through the aesthetic (and
ideological) sensibility of Åsmund Sveen. Still, the anthology by no
means promoted a specifically non-modernist or “Nazi” aesthetic,
or made distinctions between “healthy” and “decadent” art. In
one sense, the contrary seems to be the case: the one poem Sveen
chose to represent himself and his own literature, is not only both
modernist and vitalist, it is also openly homoerotic.
To ask what part vitalism played in art and literature before and
during the occupation of Norway is in this context a question of how
vitalism and its aesthetics corresponded – or collided – with fascist
and national-socialist ideologies. Before we can discuss Åsmund
Sveen’s vitalistic, modernist poetry and its place in his national-so-
cialist canon project in light of this overarching question, we need to
know more about vitalism as a literary and cultural phenomenon.
“Vitalism”
“Vitalism” is, in a Scandinavian and German context, used as a cul-

tural historical term, and describes a current in philosophy, art and
literature that had its heyday in the years between 1900 and 1940.
This meaning of the term, derived from the Latin noun vita, for
“life,” is related to the narrower English and French term “vitalism,”
which often refers specifically to the (now abandoned) doctrine in
biology and natural philosophy that life originates in a vital prin-
ciple distinct from chemical and mechanical forces. This set of
ideas is incorporated within the cultural historical term “vitalism,”
meaning that when we refer to “vitalism” in our setting, we are not
discussing a period, a school or a specific movement, but a broader
family of ideas that all belong to the same cult of biological life.
Vitalism involves a number of prominent philosophers and intel-
lectuals, foremost Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche,
but also speculative biologists and philosophers like Ernst Haeckel,
Hans Driesch and Henri Bergson. On this abstract, philosophical
level, vitalism does not lend itself to any particular political use. It

does seem, however, to go hand in hand with a certain reformist
or revolutionary tendency, and it is as a protest against rationality,
norms, history, traditions, and social contracts – in short, civili-
zation – that it comes to the forefront. This is particularly evident
during the first decades of the twentieth century, where it emerges
as a proposal of a less cerebral and artificial life-form, a way of
living more in accordance with the authentic, genuine and undis-
torted life-forces.
Life and nature, the vitalists claimed, give a set of very sim-
ple rules and regulations: strong and healthy organisms live on,
whereas weak and unhealthy ones die, in the natural, self-regulat-
ing cycle of life. On the same note, we find idealizations of youth;
the young represent growth, renewal and creation. The focus on
health and strength does also cause a tendency to understand the
world as a hierarchy: where there is strong and healthy, there must
also be stronger and healthier. And where there are exemplary
specimens, there must also be less exemplary specimens. The
tendency to idealize strength and hierarchy is often seen in an idol-
izing of the strong individuals, the great men, the leaders. In 1944
Eric Bentley identified this as “heroic vitalism,” which he found in
a great number of literary and philosophical writers from the nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries – Thomas Carlyle, Friedrich
Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Oswald Spengler, Stefan George – and
considered to be “the origins of fascism and Nazism” (Bentley,
1957, 4). For Bentley, “the heroic vitalists” have a tendency to both
construct and exploit myths of hero-worship, and to see these as
examples of biological determination. The strong survive, because
they are destined to, and so on and so forth.
If this makes vitalism sound like a brutal, anti-humanist way of
turning biology into morals, it's because it only gives part of the
picture. Henri Bergson’s version of vitalism contrasts with that
of Nietzsche and other “heroic vitalists.” Bergson emphasizes
the way vitalism teaches us to see nature and life as the common,
shared basis of our world, and a way of understanding the anti-hi-
erarchical “universal sympathy” that ties all living beings together.
It is a way of (re)creating the world as a place for shared existence:
“[…] with [such a doctrine] we no longer feel isolated in humanity,
humanity no longer seems isolated in the nature that it dominates”
(Bergson, 1998 [1907], 270). In this version, instinct and intuition
160—161
is in itself a source of infinite sympathy between all living beings, for
whom the life force is the common denominator. In this view we are
all, from single-celled organisms to higher primates, parts of – and
expressions of – life. The vitalist perspective excludes and includes.
From the idea that all life and all living organisms stem from the
same source – a natural life force of some kind – vitalism branches
out into social criticism and social reform, philosophy, pedagogy,
art and literature, pledging the need for more “natural” practices
in all fields. In art and architecture, some of this is easily recog-
nizable by both motifs, themes and the use of natural shapes and
curvatures, for instance as stylized in art nouveau.
Many of the Northern European movements of social and
cultural reform from the years around the turn of the century start
out with an analysis that goes something like this: the industrial-
ized high civilization of the late nineteenth century has brought
humanity too far away from nature and from life itself. Civilization
has built man into an inauthentic, machine-like construction. For
the modern citizen this has the catastrophic consequence that he
has ended up as an overcivilized character, with little contact with
nature around him and in him. He no longer has any substantial
ties to life itself, and he is dying or already dead, like the civiliza-
tion around him. Vitalism is seen as a way to start afresh: if life is
able to unfold unhindered and free, then the life force will both
function as a cure for the “diseases” of civilization, and as an
organizing principle of a new, better and freer society. “At this very
moment, throughout all of the civilized world, there is a movement
towards the primitive,” Danish author and journalist Johannes
V. Jensen writes in 1907: “it is an awakening general sense of
nature and cultivation of healthiness, which amongst other things
is rooted in a necessary reaction against the previous century’s
immense development of the city and its technology” (Jensen,
219). The new, life-centered, vitalistic understanding of society,
world and man is an awakening. Or, as Ernst Jünger put it far more
aggressively in 1932, it is “[t]he irruption of the elementary in
the bourgeois world” (Jünger, 1981 [1932], 23). In 1929, Ludwig
Klages championed a biozentrisch philosophy, which he regarded
as the antidote to the logozentrisch society of his own time. In all
three cases, life represents both the means to and the end goal of
a revolution of some kind. For the vitalist, then, this is not poli-

tics: politics belong to the civilized, bourgeois and corrupt society.
Rather, what they are describing is the protest of elementary forces
against artificial and life-diminishing practices, it is life that speaks
up for itself. And who could argue against that?
Vitalism in art and literature: the ambiguous caress of the sun
The “sense of nature” and “health cultivation” that Jensen spoke

of in 1907 is easily recognized in the many nature cults of the
early twentieth century. The same goes for “primitivism.” In fact,
what all vitalists share is a mutual fascination for the most “prim-
itive,” “powerful,” and basic of all subjects, namely the source
of all life as we know it: the sun. It is the most common and most
powerful motif in vitalistic art. This “love of the sun,” as Knut
Hamsun called it in 1890, has to do both with the recognition of
the sun as the main source of power and life, the health effects of
sunlight (well documented even at the time), and its purely aes-
thetic features. Representations of the burning fireball in the sky
are common in art from the earliest parts of our history, and now
the new primitivists embraced this most powerful of all symbols.
The central element in Edvard Munch’s famous decoration of The
University Aula in Oslo, entitled The Sun, is of course an emblem
of this[Fig. 1]. Munch puts the sun at the centre of it all: landscape,
history, science, love, procreation, athleticism, production, family,
as shown on the side panels. Particularly important here is the rep-
resentation of the human being. In vitalistic art the human body,
often naked, is the second most important motif. It goes almost
without saying that the combination of sunlight and naked bodies
is frequently found. However, the relation between sun and man
is complex. Often, naked bodies exposed to the warm, embracing
sunlight are painted as the epitome of free, modern life, as in many
of J.F. Willumsen’s pictures from Skagen in Northern Denmark
or the Amalfi Coast in Italy. Another example is Trygve David-
sen’s commercial poster, made for The Norwegian State Railway,
advertising Norway as a tourist destination, the selling point being
climate and lifestyle. Here, apparently, Norway is all about the
healthy, athletic and Arctic version of sun-worshipping [Fig 2].
Willumsen’s images of naked, playing children are typical, as
162—163
[Fig 1] Edvard Munch: Photo: © "O Væring
The Sun, 1909–1916. Eftf. AS, Norway
Decorations for the
University Aula, Oslo.

[Fig 2] Trygve Davidsen: Photo: Norwegian
Norway Norway, 1925. Railway Museum
Commercial poster for The
Norwegian State Railway
164—165
they show us youth, innocence, nature, the ocean and the sun. They
also show us dynamics, movement and life unfolding. Here, as in
Munch’s Sun, motif and aesthetic converge, and the result is a cele-
bration of the sun that leaves little room for reflection or distance. If
Munch’s sun was not staged as unequivocally good and vivifying, we
would perhaps have labelled it as threatening, maybe even violent.
The sun illuminating naked bodies also draws our attention
to a different scenario, one in which a merciless power source is
unleashed on an exposed subject, unable to protect itself. This is
a motif that we find regularly in expressionist and vitalist art and
literature, and that points to one of the dilemmas of vitalism: if the
all-embracing, creative and violent life is at the center of every-
thing, then what is the status of the individual, of the specimen, so
to speak?
Vitalism both dissolves and emphasizes the individual and
subjective to various degrees and in a multitude of genres. We find
expressionist and modernist painting and poetry, but we also find
a similar cosmology in realist literature, such as Hamsun’s The
Growth of the Soil, by several critics characterized as his vitalistic,
ideological “gospel.”
Vitalism in Norwegian art and literature, then, is many things.
It is both warm, sun-filled, soft and including, and also violent,
merciless – an uncontrollable, threatening force. And it is also both
expressionist, modernist, and traditional realism bordering on the
regressive and reactionary. More often than not, these different
versions intertwine.
If we now return to Åsmund Sveen, editor of the propagan-
da-anthology Norsk ånd og vilje, we find that the different sides
of vitalism are clearly visible in Sveen’s work right from the very
first pages. In the first poem of his first book The Face (1932), a
young boy is woken by “the spring,” and is taken, and carried, by
the spring day’s “strong, uncontrollable hands,” willingly at first,
because this is an embrace of inclusion. However, turning the page
takes us to the second poem, which starts with an objection:
But as life embraced me for the first time

and let me own the great bliss,
and as I half asleep heard the song of the blood
and felt the caress of the heather and the wind and the sun –

There follow several lines of aroused, eroticised nature fantasies,
until:
I suddenly awoke –
I was reached by a warning and a fear:
What does life want and what does spring want from you?
(Sveen, 1932, 9).1
Further on, the caress of the sun – anthropomorphically described

as “arms,” “hands,” and “fingers” – becomes more violent, and in
other poems both “fondle” and “hit” the boy. The sun is good, but
also a dangerous, violent force. The ambiguity is characteristic of
Sveen’s poetry, and is clearly captured in the cover art work, where
a naked, sculpted male body tries to protect itself against the sun’s
rays, which seem to pin him down. Sun exposure is perhaps unavoid-
able, but also dangerous [Fig 3]. Sveen’s poetry is also dangerous
in a totally different matter: he is among the very first Norwegian
poets to write openly about love and passion between men, and
some of his sun-imagery clearly describes homosexual desire.
In the poetry of Sveen, the life forces are seen both as sun and
shadow, ecstasy and fear, erotic bliss and raw violence. Sveen seems
to separate the two aspects of the life forces – often by staging con-
frontations and conflicts of interest in his poems, within the lyrical
subjects. His use of contrasts between light and dark, warm and cold,
seems also to suggest that there is an on-going discussion in his early
work, about the validity of vitalism and its ideals, or about the nature
of the life-force; is it good or bad? The question seems open: “What
does life want and what does spring want from you?”
This possible dilemma seems to have been contained as in 1940
Sveen published his fourth collection of poetry, with the properly
vitalistic title Såmannen [The Sower]. The book was published on the
8th of April, the day before the German invasion. It had cover art and
several vignettes by Sveen’s friend from the early 1930s, the painter
Kai Fjell, who had illustrated Sveen’s previous books, and who prob-
ably also provided the unsigned cover art for his first collection of
poetry, Andletet [The Face]. In 1942, Fjell was the artist with the most
paintings included in the “non-art” section of the National Gallery
Exhibition. Interestingly, Fjell did not escape harassment after the
war: in 1949, he was again the object of the same type of criticism. A
166—167
[Fig 3] Cover art for Photo: The National
Åsmund Sveen’s Andletet, Library, Oslo
1932. The artist is © Gyldendal Norsk Forlag
probably Kai Fjell. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016

satirical book, that included a thirty-five pages long mock-modernist
collection of poetry (and a number of fictitious reviews), sparked
the first big public debate on lyrical modernism in Norway (later
nicknamed the “glossolalia debate”). The book was illustrated with
comic parodies of Fjell’s illustrations to modernist poetry.
In The Sower, Sveen includes both traditionalist poetry and rural
idylls. “To the young men” – perhaps the most interesting single
poem in the book – is an exemplary piece of vitalistic modernist
poetry, where Sveen hails youth, strength, sexuality and mas-
culinity in a more or less ecstatic tribute. The 68-line poem is an
expressive and quite explicit erotic celebration of masculinity
and athleticism. The young men, in plural, are described as active
and dynamic; they are both human bodies in motion and almost
animalized representations of nature. In the first lines of the poem
they are said to have “thighs of oak, chests of birch, hands of juni-
per root” (l. 2); further on they are “Sons of the Northern Wind!
Lovers of the Southern Wind!” (l. 29), and “Knights of cliffs and
hills!”( l. 30). The “young men” are god-like ideals, riding horses of
“noble blood” (l. 34), “smiling in chariots of lightning” (l. 35), they
are “Sowers of God and of the world!” (l. 44), building “homes for
children and women” (l. 51). The poem presents us with a stream of
idealized images, only interrupted by regular devoted exclamations
of admiration and love from the poet: “oh, I like you like that.” (l. 9,
14, 22, 37, 41), “oh, I know you like that” (l. 26), or “oh, I love you
like that!” (l. 54), and without the exclamation mark, near the end of
the poem: “I like you” (l. 66). At regular intervals, the “young men”
are questioned, in both singular and plural: “Does your soul dance
at sunset?”; “Do you, too, feel the dizzying leap into – into / the
heaven of the heart?”; “Are you building a spiritual society?”
In a thorough analysis of this poem, Dean Krouk points out that
it “brings together a bizarre catalogue of Sveen’s intellectual and
poetic concerns – from mystical homoeroticism to the hope for a
‘spiritual society’” (67). However, he does not say much about the
formal aspect of this “catalogue” – the fact that it pushes all the
buttons of lyrical modernism, and seems to evoke a sense of rad-
ical and vital presence. What are we to make of a poem that both
presents us with a classic fascist utopian vision and qualifies as an
aesthetically “good” poem? The final stanza of Sveen’s “To the
young men” goes like this, in my translation:
168—169
Oh, children of sun and light,
you who have received such tribute from nature!
I see you on yellow beaches by green lakes,
exercising your bodies and loving the sun.
I like you.
Do you, too, feel the sun of truth
burning at midnight? 2
(1940, 26).
The erotic and spiritual praise is explicit, and also very matter-of-
fact. A difficult question here is how to read the final line, with its
almost threatening, burning “sun of truth”. Is this an ultimatum,
a final intensified plea, or an inclusion into a secret community?
One major difference between Sveen’s poem and a more didactic
vitalism like Hamsun’s lies in the radical way in which he chooses
to present his lyrical subject. The “I” in “I like you” has singled
out himself from the “young men” – and a collective “we” is hard
to find in this poem. The lyrical subject and “the young men” are
separated all through the poem, and we are left to speculate: is
this the authoritative, exhorting voice of the ideologist, driving
the young men on towards chiliasm, to build the thousand-year
“spiritual society?” Or, rather, is this the voice of quite a vulnerable
outcast, trying to find some common ground between himself and
the idealized young men?
No matter what we make of it, this poem is both radical and
reactionary with regard to both aesthetics and ideology. This was
also the poem Sveen chose to represent himself in the authorized
anthology of national socialist literature. Almost at the very end
of his 500-page, NS-sanctioned canon, he inserts this ambiguous
tribute “To the young men.”
Norwegian Spirit and Will: Exemplary,

“great” Norwegian literature?
In the Kunst og ukunst exhibition, and also in literary criticism in

general during the occupation, the battle over the definition of
national identity and Norwegianness was tensely contested. The
connection between “the national,” biology and ethnicity was

often quite explicit, as in Søren Onsager’s catalogue text for the
Kunst og ukunst exhibition. The difference between “our own”
and a “foreign” culture is more or less the same as the difference
between “healthy” and “degenerate” art. In this way, national
socialism and vitalism share a common tendency to biologize any
discourse.
The teaching of literary classics – and the practical and symboli-
cal control of culture – during the occupation was to a large degree
a part of this. Some works went straight onto the index early on;
for instance, a new edition of the poet Henrik Wergeland’s famous
historic pamphlet On the Jew Question, from 1841, was confiscated
and destroyed in 1942. But nazi propagandists also used literary
tradition in a more “edifying” manner. Sveen’s anthology project
was initiated by the Minister of Culture Gulbrand Lunde, and
Sveen here collects a series of undisputed and canonized texts,
from the medieval, apocalyptic Voluspá-text, Norse poetry and Ice-
landic sagas, through the Golden Age of Ibsen, Bjørnson, Kielland,
Skram, Garborg and Hamsun. In short, anyone worth mentioning
in Norwegian literature until 1900 is included in this compilation
[Fig 4]. Together, these texts express what Sveen calls “Norwegian
self-consciousness as it has manifested itself through our history”

(Sveen, 1942, unpag.). His selection of twentieth century texts is
definitely more adjusted to serve an ideological purpose. From
the 1920s and 1930s Sveen also includes definitive non-classics
and non-fiction, such as a small number of explicitly nazi writers,
and Quisling’s speeches, along with essays by Hamsun and Erling
Winsnes, an explicit biological vitalist and one of the main inspira-
tors of the far-right wing magazine Ragnarok (which from the late
1930s until about 1940 functioned as a party outlet for the mem-
bers of NNSAP, the second Norwegian national socialist party).
Interestingly, Sveen in his introduction stresses that he has had to
“rigorously select from amongst all the ideological material that pre-
sented itself, and keep mainly to the purely literary” (Sveen, 1942).
The idea of the specifically literary here seems to function as an
argument that this is not ordinary propaganda, but something with
a greater legitimacy: a deeper, inner force in Norwegian literature.
Thus, he writes, nationalism is a core value, also for those writers
who should resist or oppose being included in this book. On this
view, nationalism is not rooted in contemporary issues or in politics,
170—171
it springs from much deeper sources. On the many Norwegian writ-
ers who denounced nazism during the 1930s and 1940s, he writes:
“Many all-Norwegian poets distrust the Norwegian national-social-
ist movement. And still the words that this movement gives birth to,
spring from the same fundamental will that these poets have gath-
ered their inspiration from. The connection is there – whether one
likes it or not. In twenty years, all this will seem clearer. In fifty years,
it should be absolutely clear” (Sveen, 1942). However, this was not
clear to everyone. In one of the very few openly critical reviews the
anthology received, Anton Beinset wrote in Dagbladet, the radical
daily, that “the author Sveen must have had a hard time dealing
with the NS-ideologist by the same name, or else the book wouldn’t
have had the marks of outright confusion that it has” (Beinset, qtd.
in Gatland, 149). Beinset was imprisoned shortly afterwards, and
after he was released he received a publishing ban and was denied
permission to remain in Oslo.
Sveen’s method in this anthology should not be seen simply as
the the work of making a compendium, a collection of texts fitting
the national socialist bill. Rather, he seems to be more in line with
the tendency Mark Antliff has described as the “fascist method
of dealing with tradition,” to “selectively plunder their historical
past for moments reflective of the values he wished to inculcate for
their radical transformation of national consciousness and public
institutions” (2007, 26). In other words, the classics of the past are
organized into an implied narrative leading up to the present and
the national socialist project.
One of Sveen’s editorial strategies is, however, worth noticing.
As any anthology of the classics would, the Norsk ånd og vilje anthol-
ogy mainly follows a chronological order. But it deviates from the
anthology standard at one point: none of the texts in the anthology
are dated. This means that part of the historical picture is removed.
The effect is interesting: the past is still there, as a mythical quan-
tity, but it is also made present; everything in this book exists in
a construed, artificial here-and-now. This creates a feeling that
the canon of Norwegian classics is not just a regular historical list,
a pensum, so to speak. Rather, it presents itself as a continuum,
where all texts and names and ages are connected.
Sveen’s anthology does not, however, seem to be dominated
by vitalistic literature. Of course, in the last third of the anthology,

[Fig 4] Cover art Photo: The National
for Åsmund Sveen’s Library, Oslo
anthology Norsk ånd og
vilje (Norwegian Spirit
and Will), 1942.
172—173
where we meet the contemporary poets, we do find examples of
both realist, thematic vitalism (rural, farming motifs), and a few
examples of a more expressionist vitalism. The explicitly national
socialist poets (Kåre Bjørgen, Kristen Gundelach, Cally Monrad)
could be called mythical “heroic vitalism,” but all three lack artistic
integrity, and tend to make slogans instead of poetry. The non-nazi
vitalist poets, like Kristofer Uppdal, are more often than not repre-
sented by texts highlighting the traditionalist aspect of their work.
Still, we do find exemplary vitalistic poetry here, such as Louis
Kvalstad’s symbolist and eroticist poem “Flood of Life,” and Rolf
Jacobsen’s vitalist and expressionist “Origin.” But apart from this,
the aesthetics of vitalism seems to play a limited part in Sveen’s
anthology. Quisling’s speeches contain nothing of the kind. Sveen
seems almost to have reserved the vitalist bracket for himself.
His own version of a “Norwegian Spirit and Will,” as realized in
his canonizing anthology, is not aggressively nationalist in any polit-
ical (or antisemitic) way. It seems to build on a more general utopian
idea, the very utopian idea he elaborates on in “To the Young Men,”
the idea of a “society of spirit,” of “homes to children and women”
and “bridges over gaping gulfs,” as he puts it in the poem.
Vitalism as ideology
Vitalism and national socialism seem to have had different func-

tions before and during the occupation and the war. Before the
occupation, vitalism was part of a fundamental critique of civiliza-
tion, and of the “dead” and “inauthentic” way of life both in Norway
and in Germany. But by 1942, little is left of the reformist and rev-
olutionary potential in Norwegian vitalism; it seems to have been
engulfed by the machinery of war, and of wartime pragmatism in an
occupied country under very strict administrative rule. Censorship,
strict regulations and wartime bureacracy do not seem to go well
with vitalism’s penchant for dynamic, overflowing, violent forms.
Apart from a select number of texts, the Norsk ånd og vilje anthol-
ogy is not particularly vitalistic in its aesthetics; it serves more of
a historical-ideological purpose. What this anthology does share
with vitalism in general is a very important fundamental way of
thinking: a near biological, evolutionary understanding of history,

nation and ancestry. Sveen has, in short, collected texts that do
not promote any particular aesthetic ideal, but that put essential
emphasis on heritage, blood, and nation.
This, then, also seems to be a fitting description of vitalism
in Norwegian literature during the occupation. As an aesthetic
ideal, it moves into the background – or transforms into more rigid,
heroicizing shapes. Yet as an ideology and a way of understanding
life as a pervasive continuity, and as biological inevitability, it still
remains an important factor.
Works Cited
Antliff, Mark, Avant-Garde Fascism. The Sveens diktning (Vallset: Oplandske Bokforlag
Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in 2010).
France, 1909–1939 (Durham: Duke UP, 2007). Krouk, Dean, “A Queer Fascism? Åsmund
Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution, 1907 Sveen’s Vitalist Aesthetics and Politics,” in
edition (Mineola: Dover Press, 1998). eds. Karlsen, Ole and Hans Kristian Rustad,
Bentley, Eric, A Century of Hero-Worship. 2010.
A study of the idea of heroism in Carlyle and Sveen, Åsmund, Andletet (Oslo: Gyldendal,
Nietzsche, with notes on Wagner, Spengler, 1932).
Stefan George, and D.H. Lawrence (Boston: — , Såmannen (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1940).
Beacon Press, 1957 [1944]). — , Norsk ånd og vilje (Oslo: Stenersen, 1942).
Gatland, Jan Olav, Det andre mennesket. Eit Tjønneland, Eivind, “Åsmund Sveens
portrett av Åsmund Sveen (Oslo: Det Norske antologi Norsk ånd og vilje og litteraturen i
Samlaget, 2003). norsk nazisme,” in eds. Karlsen, Ole and
Jensen, Johannes V., Den ny Verden. Til Hans Kristian Rustad, 2010.
international Belysning af Nordisk Bondekultur Kristian Rustad (eds.), “der vårgras brydder.”
(København: Gyldendal, 1907). Nye lesninger i Åsmund Sveens diktning (Vall-
Jünger, Ernst, Der Arbeiter. Herrschaft und set: Oplandske Bokforlag, 2010).
Gestalt (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsan- Vassenden, Eirik, Norsk vitalisme. Litteratur,
stalt, 1932). ideologi og livsdyrking 1890–1940 (Oslo: Scan-
Karlsen, Ole and Hans Kristian Rustad, dinavian Academic Press, 2012).
“der vårgras brydder.” Nye lesninger i Åsmund
Endnotes
1 “Men medan livet femnde meg for første 2 “Å born av sol og ljos, / de som har fått
gongen / og let meg eige av den store sæla, / slik hyllest av natura! / Eg ser dykk på gule
og med’ eg halvt i ørske høyrde ådresongen strender ved grøn sjø, / de dyrkar lekamen
/ og kjende lyng og vind og sol meg kjæla – / dykkar og elskar sola. / Eg likar dykk. /
[…] det var som vakk eg brått av blide blundar Kjenner de og den sannings sol / som brenn
– // det nådde meg eit varsel og eit våord: ved midnatt?”
/ Kva vil deg livet og kva vil deg våren?”
[Unless otherwise stated, all translations
from the Norwegian are my own].
174—175
Art, Battle and
Apocalypse
The Nazi System
of Art
Erik Tonning
Erik Tonning – Art, Battle and Apocalypse

1. Soldiers and Artists
In the December 1941 edition of Deutsche Monatshefte in Norwegen,

a lavishly illustrated propaganda monthly produced by the Wehr-
macht and circulated to all troops stationed in Norway, we find an
article called “Soldaten und Künstler” [Soldiers and Artists] which
is styled by the anonymous author as a reflection upon a recent
exhibition of soldier art in Oslo’s National Gallery [Fig 1]. The exhi-
bition was called Schaffen und Gestalten der Luftwaffe – “Creation
and form-giving of the Air Force.” It is a title that now seems dis-
tinctly odd; we might associate the Luftwaffe more with destruction
than creation, and in any case, why is the German army promoting
an image of soldiers as painters and sculptors in wartime, when
they might be presenting an image of invincible firepower and
single-minded resolve? Why was art not regarded as frivolous for
soldiers at such a time? The article provides an explanation:
Whoever visits this exhibition is given the following impression: Here

painting is not subject to external command, but emerges rather from
joy in the work, from a longing for inner satisfaction. And in this lies
a profound symbolic meaning: German man possesses a soul that
demands more than food and drink alone. Indeed, the fact that such an
exhibition is organised by the military proves its will to carefully nurture
this force, dormant even in the simplest soldier. It is this German spirit
that allows our soldiers to bear all burdens. This spirit also gives them
the power they need for victory. (Anonymous 1941, 15; my translation.)
This subtle piece of propaganda opens by disavowing any notion

that the Oslo “Luftwaffe” exhibition is propaganda at all: these
soldier-artists have not been artifically “commanded” to create, oh
no! It is their spontaneous joy in the work, their longing for inner,
spiritual satisfaction, their quintessentially artistic and anti-mate-
rialist German soul – unable to “live by bread alone” – that is their
real driving force. The Wehrmacht for its part, says the author,
reaches out through this exhibition to care for and nurture this
creative spirit latent in even the simplest soldier – a spirit that will
in turn ensure victory.
These soldier-artists are thus portrayed as channelling a cre-
ative, mystical “spirit” of the German Volk itself; and the qualities
176—177
[Fig 1] First page of Photo: KODE/Dag Fosse
“Soldaten und Künstler”,
article printed in the
propaganda monthly
Deutsche Monatshefte in
Norwegen, December 1941.

of artist and soldier begin to mesh and intermingle in the descrip-
tions of that spirit. In Nazi ideology, the Aryan race is not just the
master-race of martial strength and relentless will; it is also, just as
importantly, the race of the Kulturbegründer, the natural founders
and creators of culture throughout the ages. The phrase comes
from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925/7), which also identifies the
destroyer of culture, the arch-enemy, as the Jew.1
The article goes on to mention the ill effects of the “Judaization”
of German art, which supposedly made art unpopular and irrele-
vant to the “Volk.” This had perversely separated art from the very
race that is the primordial source of all culture; but National Social-
ism has now reconnected Volk and art. However, our unnamed
author continues, those who would confine art to some separate,
non-violent sphere forget the perpetual threat from the arch-en-
emy of art and culture, for “evil cannot be conquered through
good words alone, but sometimes only through violence, through
a violent exertion of spirit, or, when necessary, through violence of
the fists” (1941, 16; my translation).
Here, war becomes the continuation of art by other means: a
“Gewaltanstrengung des Geistes,” a violent exertion of spirit,
is said to be necessary for a defence of the Good (Aryan creativ-
ity) against Evil (Jewish destruction of culture). The “Gewalt der
Fäuste,” violence of the fists, martial violence, is thus depicted
almost as a sort of extension and by-product of this primarily
“spiritual” and creative effort. The article concludes, with mount-
ing absurdity, that Germany will win its war precisely because in
the midst of one of the most violent wars of all time, her soldiers
can still “have the spiritual power to grasp the paintbrush” – “die
seelische Kraft haben, zum Pinsel zu greifen” (16).
This vignette illustrates the intimate, complex and often dis-
turbing connections made in Nazi ideology between art and battle,
Kunst and Kampf. This system of thought – presented here in sche-
matic, general outline – affected the regulation, the institutions
and the practice of art throughout the course of the Nazi regime in
a remarkably pervasive way. In particular, we need to understand
the apocalyptic underpinnings of the Nazi idea of “Kampf ”: for
Nazism was a millennialist political religion that sought to engage
the entire German people in an all-pervasive battle. The question
then becomes: what was the place of art within that battle?
178—179
2. Defining the Nazi “Kampf ”
We need look no further than Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf for con-
firmation that the idea of a constant and all-pervasive struggle is
central to the Nazi imagination. A recent study of this founding
document of Hitler’s movement by Felicity Rash focuses on its
“language of violence” (Rash 2006). As Rash points out, it is often
unclear when the notion of Kampf, which appears on every page,
is to be taken metaphorically, and where it refers to threats of
actual war. The metaphorical field POLITICS IS WAR dominates
Hitler’s text, and propaganda is singled out as a major weapon of
this war:
Propaganda works on the general public from the standpoint of an idea

and makes them ripe for the victory of this idea, while the organisation
achieves victory by the persistent, organic, and militant union of those
supporters who seem willing and able to carry on the fight for victory.
(Mein Kampf, qtd. in Rash 2006, 136)
The NSDAP are described as avant-garde political warriors in

need of a fanatical fighting spirit; and from the very beginning the
movement was a uniformed one, with a battle standard designed
by Hitler himself. Hitler’s personal experience as a soldier in
the Great War is central to the self-mythologising narrative of
Mein Kampf. Indeed, the Nazi movement is seen as continuing
the nationalist war of 1914–18: a struggle supposedly cut short by
a mythical “stab-in-the-back” on the cusp of victory in 1918 by
Germany’s internal enemies, who would go on to form the Weimar
republic. Hitler’s declaration of war on the existing political order
generated “heroes” and “martyrs” willing to sacrifice themselves
for the cause. Mein Kampf is dedicated to the “fallen” of the 1923
Beer Hall Putsch, who were later memorialised yearly in the Third
Reich on 9 November in cult-like ceremonies which commem-
morated the “Kampfzeit,” or era of struggle, between 1918 and the
Nazi seizure of power in 1933.
But the political struggle is also understood in wider terms as
part of a “battle for existence” (“Existenzkampf,” “Lebenskampf,”
“Kampf ums Dasein”; see Rash, 136). An important strain of
Hitler’s thought is his Social Darwinism, which portrays all social

life in terms of the survival of the fittest in the battle for scarce
resources. In this sense, life as such is Kampf.
Social Darwinism for Hitler provides justification for engaging in
racial war, for the survival and dominance of the Aryans as opposed
to the “parasitical,” destructive Jew. The Jew is the enemy in the
great battle or “Riesenkampf ” to come, and much of Mein Kampf
is, Rash notes, taken up with the construction of a “Feinbild,” or
image of the enemy (Rash, 47). The enemy is violent, and must be
met with ruthlessness and brutality if victory is to be achieved.
The Jews are portrayed on the one hand as representing a disease
attacking the people’s body or “Volkskörper,” using words such as
“Pest [plague]” “Krebs [cancer],” “Geschwür [ulcer],” “Bazillus
[bacillus]” (Rash, 52). On the other hand, they are portrayed as mon-
strous: “satanisch [Satanic],” “teuflisch [devillish],” “das Gezische
der jüdischen Welthydra [the hissing of the Jewish World Hydra],”
“den ewigen Blutegel [the eternal blood-sucker],” “ewiger Spaltpilz
der Menscheit [the eternal bacteria of mankind]” (Rash, 51).
With these mythical, hyperbolic and extreme images, we begin
to touch on the specifically religious and apocalyptic dimension of
the Nazi idea of “Kampf.” I therefore move on from considering
Hitler’s book to recalling a few points from the rich scholarship
in this area, which includes work by Norman Cohn, Claus Ekke-
hard-Bärsch, James M. Rhodes, David Redles, Roger Griffin and
Richard Landes.2
The Jews in Nazi mythology are not simply a historical people
or the adherents of a historical religion, they are imagined on the
model of the Antichrist, very often in terms appropriated from the
Book of Revelation and Christian apocalyptic imagery.
One of the chief negative characteristics of “the Jew” is that he
is “materialistic,” his conspiratorial hand being equally at work
in both International Capitalism and Marxist Bolshevism. The
Aryan, on the other hand, is “national,” spiritual and religious. The
role and destiny of the German people is Christlike: it has a “call-
ing” (Sendung) that will finally save the world (Erlösung) from the
Jewish anti-Christ. This salvation will bring about a Third Reich,
or “Tausendjähriges Reich,” both terms that draw on chapter 20 of
John’s Apocalypse.3
Hitler himself was worshipped as prophet and messiah: no mere
political leader, but Führer, to be greeted with a “Heil Hitler,” a
180—181
word meaning blessing and alluding to the idea of a “Heiland,” or
saviour. An experience of religious conversion is very often evoked
on first encountering Hitler’s charisma as a speaker.
This worship was systematized in the gigantic and infamous
public “liturgies” of the Nazi state, which developed into some-
thing like a yearly liturgical calendar: the 9 November Putsch
commemorations, the May Day celebrations, and most spectacu-
larly of all, the yearly party rallies held between 1927 and 1938, the
Reichsparteitage [Fig 2]. Richard Landes notes:
… the brilliant use of time and setting, enchanced with modern technol-
ogy – nighttime rallies, “a forest of fiery red flags with a black swastika
on white ground” and myriad spotlights pointed skyward, creating a
“cathedral of light.” One American journalist recalls being caught in a
crowd of ten thousand people outside Hitler’s hotel in Nuremberg in
1934 and being “shocked at the faces, especially those of the women,
when Hitler finally appeared on the balcony for a moment […] They
looked up at him as if he were the messiah, their faces transformed into
something positively inhuman.” (Landes, 377)
The apocalyptic battle that this messiah-figure had instigated

required commitment to a reordering of human time itself into an
alternative calendar, centred on the Kampfzeit and culminating
in the 1933 seizure of power. Landes points out that such reorder-
ing is a classic symptom of apocalyptic movements throughout
recorded history, from Egypt’s pharo Akhenaten who reigned from
1360–1347 BC, right up to the UFO cults or the global Jihadism of
the present day: “For people who have entered apocalyptic time,
everything quickens, enlivens, coheres. They become semiotically
aroused – everything has meaning, patterns. The smallest incident
can have immense importance and open the way to an entirely
new vision of the world, one in which forces unseen by other mor-
tals operate. […] Sometimes the apocalyptic pattern they detect is
frighteningly nefarious – an international conspiracy by the forces
of evil to enslave humankind; sometimes benevolent – the dawn of
a new age” (Landes, 14). Of course, Nazism combined these two
patterns in its appeal to the masses.
This semiotic arousal, this sense of a new time and an all-im-
portant, all-encompassing apocalyptic “Kampf ” to be fought to

[Fig 2] “Reichsparteitag Photo: © Bayerische
der NSDAP,” 8–14 September Staatsbibliothek
1936 in Nuremberg; night on München/Bildarchiv
the Zeppelin field; Albert
Speer’s dome of light.
182—183
the bitter end against a monstrous and satanic opponent, underlies
the totalitarian mobilisation of German society during the Third
Reich. A crucial mediator for this total mobilisation was the idea of
a “Volksgemeinschaft,” a “community of the Volk.” How did the
Nazi party and state use this idea to enlist the German people in its
apocalyptic “Kampf ”?
The concept of “Volksgemeinschaft” was a propaganda con-
struct, which projected much more unity onto German society
than actually existed. It served to legitimize radical social and
legal transformations and a new totalitarian order that wielded
a constant threat of surveillance, repression and terror against
non-conforming citizens. The risk of exclusion as a Gemein-
schaftsfeind, or enemy of the community, was ever-present for all.
Nonetheless, as Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto put it:
The notion of Volksgemeinschaft evoked a utopia that promised both

material well-being and a sense of purpose in which individual exis-
tence could be transcended in an almost limitless mission. […] The
concept of Volksgemeinschaft […] promised redemption in a secular
utopia of renewal, purification and salvation, where dedication was both
demanded and rewarded. (Steber and Gotto 2014, 20–21)
The organisation of industrial work and large-scale building and

engineering projects in the Nazi state went along with an intense
propaganda exaltation of “the worker” and “the honour of work.”
Farming had its own powerful ideological connotations of “blood
and soil,” with farmers supposedly working close to the German
soil and retaining a purity of racial blood through staying put in
the same place for generations. Motherhood was another area of
intense focus and interest to the state. The infamous “Law for the
Protection of German Blood and German Honour” of 1935 prohib-
ited the marriage of Aryans and Jews. In general, the designated
role of the mother was to purify the blood of the race by choosing
an appropriate partner and giving birth to many children, while
raising them in the National Socialist worldview; all this was
depicted as her holy sacrifice and fruitful gift to the Volk. These
children would then be mobilised and indoctrinated from a very
early age through the Hitlerjugend and Bund Deutscher Mädel
youth organisations, which took over much of their spare time.

Similarly, all sports and leisure organisations were Nazi-con-
trolled, and all cultural and artistic activity was organised through
the Reich Chamber of Culture.
Of course, the utopian concept of Volksgemeinschaft has a
deeply sinister aspect, in that this was a society arming itself for
racial and ultimately genocidal war. When the Second World War
started, the “Volksgemeinschaft” was frequently relabelled as
a Kampfgemeinschaft, which in fact it had been from the begin-
ning. Towards the end when it was clear Germany was losing, the
terminology became even more disturbing: Opfergemeinschaft,
a community of sacrifice, with undertones of ritual slaughter;
and the cynical Schicksalsgemeinschaft, a “community of destiny”
forced to fight on to utter destruction in a deranged real-world
enactment of the Wagnerian Götterdämmerung.
3. “Kunst” as integral to the Nazi “Kampf ”
What, then, was the role of “Kunst” within this all-pervasive

“Kampf ”?
“Kunst” was, as we have seen, understood as inherently asso-
ciated with the Aryan Kulturbegründer or creator of culture, as
opposed to the destructive, parasitic anti-culture of the Jew: the
very idea of “Kunst” is thus deeply implicated in the whole apoca-
lyptic duality that was the driving force of the Nazi world view.
This then created a pre-determined, pre-fabricated ideologi-
cal space for the idea of an attack upon, and public purging of, a
supposedly “Jewish” anti-art, a mock-art that wilfully corrupts and
infects true art, just like the Jewish bacillicus or cancer infects the
Aryan “Volkskörper.”
This is a crucial point to be borne in mind when we consider the
Nazi campaign against so-called “degenerate art.” It is not that the
Nazis carefully considered this or that modern artist or stylistic
direction and then decided that it was against their principles; in
fact, no official criteria were ever formulated for what did or did
not count as “degenerate.” Rather, they needed to fill a pre-exist-
ing ideological container – labelled Jewish anti-art – with specific
content.
It is telling that the infamous 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibition,
184—185
where about 650 works were shown, actually contained only eight
artists of Jewish descent. Furthermore, the so-called “Expres-
sionismusstreit,” or quarrel within the NSDAP over whether or
not German Expressionism was to be considered a truly Nordic
and German artistic style, shows clearly that a different outcome
was fully possible. The Reich propaganda minister Joseph Goeb-
bels was in fact, as Frederic Spotts puts it, something of a “closet
modernist,” an admirer of formally experimental artists like
Emil Nolde, Ernst Barlach, Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch
(Spotts 2003, 155). The Führer’s Commissioner for Party-Ideolog-
ical Education, Alfred Rosenberg, on the other hand, campaigned
vociferously against it. Hitler’s personal preference for nine-
teenth-century realism and classical Greek and Roman art decided
the matter. Goebbels sensed where the wind was blowing, and
took the initiative in suggesting and then rapidly throwing together
the 1937 exhibition in a matter of weeks, using the Führer’s per-
sonal decree to have artworks appropriated in ad hoc, haphazard
fashion from museums and collections across Germany. Nolde
and Munch were prominent among the “anti-artists” exhibited,
despite Goebbels’ personal support for them. Nolde himself had
been a Nazi party member since 1925, and several other artists
exhibited as “degenerate” were either party members, sym-
pathisers, or willing to collaborate. Such was the confusion that
two artists, Rudolf Schlichter and Rudolf Belling, were exhibited
in both the “degenerate art” exhibition and in the parallel Great
German Art exhibition displaying officially-approved art across the
street in Munich in 1937. When the attempt was made to actu-
ally fill the ideological container, one paradox after another was
generated.
The aim of the anti-“degenerate” propaganda exhibitions was
ultimately iconoclastic: to destroy the false works of the mythical
destroyer of art itself. In particular, they functioned as a kind of
externalisation of all the distortion and monstrosity that Hitler had
attributed to the Jew from the outset of his career. In more spe-
cific historical and political terms, these exhibitions were a way of
smearing the Weimar republic for encouraging the Jewish enemy
in its corruption of the Volk. The wall-texts in the Entartete Kunst
exhibition harp on this theme again and again: Insolent mockery of
the divine under Centrist rule! Revelation of the Jewish racial soul!

An insult to German womanhood! Here the whore is made into
a moral ideal! Deliberate sabotage of national defense! German
farmers – a Yiddish view! Nature as seen by sick minds! A further
theme was art as economic swindle: “internationalist” Jewish art
dealers had cynically manipulated the public into believing that
this worthless, anti-nationalist trash was art!4
But the intense focus on art in the Third Reich was not motivated
simply by the animus against the Jews and the need to externalise
images of the enemy. This was a regime that placed enormous
positive emphasis upon art, in order to shore up and foster the idea
of the Germans as a “Kulturvolk,” the true inheritors of the Aryan
founders of culture, enjoying a cultural renaissance brought about
by the Nazi revolution. It therefore lavishly supported the arts,
including painting, sculpture, music, drama and architecture;
prized artistic creativity in its ideology and invested the artist with
a quasi-religious authority; measured the “greatness” of the Nazi
cultural project by the artistic monuments and ruins it would leave
behind; and attempted to interest and engage the entire “Volks-
gemeinschaft” in artistic matters.5
As Eric Michaud points out in his astute book The Cult of Art
in Nazi Germany (2004), all this activity can be understood as a
continuous vast-scale staging, before and by the “Volksgemein-
schaft,” of the Nazi myth of the Aryan culture-creator. This is
perhaps nowhere more evident than in the enormous and pomp-
ous public parades around the theme of “Two Thousand Years of
German Culture” first staged in Munich on the Day of German
Art in 1933, and then again in an expanded version on 18 July 1937
on the opening of the House of German Art. This building would
house the yearly Great German Art art exhibitions, featuring
approved works of painting and sculpture. The 1937 procession
was three kilometres long, with thirty parade floats, five hundred
horsemen, and 2000 men and 2500 women in historical costumes
[Fig 3. In a staggering appropriation and ideologisation of the past,
all the “ages” of German-Aryan culture were represented, all the

way back to its supposed heyday in Classical Greece and Rome.
Michaud comments:
The myth within which the people were supposed to be awakened was
suddenly deployed, live, before their eyes. All at once, in the very streets,
186—187
[Fig 3] “Two Thousand Photo: Stadtarchiv München,
Years of German Culture: Bild NS-00087/Kurt Huhle
The New Age: Sacrifice,
Loyalty and Faith,”
Munich 18 July 1937.
188—189
a whole legendary Germany was resuscitated, a blessed Germany that
knew nothing of the warfare, crises and nightmares of the Weimar
Zwischenreich. (Michaud 2004, 103–4)
The 1937 procession before the new House of German Art “had
something of the character of a circus parade, inviting the massive
crowds to enter into the temple precinct; it also smacked somewhat
of a lesson in the history of art, preparing the same crowd for the
rediscovery of the unity of the German genius. But the historical
nature of the forms displayed was eclipsed by their actualization, so
the history of art turned into a live presentation of the myth” (106).
The constant use of the term “Ewigkeit,” eternity, in virtually
all references to art by Nazi propagandists again recalls the apoc-
alyptic structure of Nazi faith: there is an Eternal battle at work
between the Kulturbegründer and the Kulturzerstörer, enacted upon
the stage of history.
Of course, the Munich parade was very evidently propaganda, of
a piece with the round of other public “liturgies” in Nazi Germany
mentioned before. Today we are immediately tempted to say that
art was simply appropriated and exploited by the Nazi regime as
just another form of propaganda. We hold that art should be free to
criticise ideologies and to provoke rulers, and what the Nazis did
to art was a terrible stifling of this creative, questioning and playful
spirit. In a democracy, the rulers do not intervene in the arts in dra-
conian fashion, they stay at arm’s length in order to preserve this
kind of autonomy for art. Such a critique is of course valid enough
from our contemporary point of view, but we also need to be able
to understand how the Nazis could see their whole system of “art
as battle and art in battle” as fostering and embracing art, rather
than stifling it.
The idea of propaganda is here a case in point. Propaganda for
Hitler and Goebbels was a powerful weapon in the Nazi “Kampf,”
to be deployed ruthlessly but also artfully; it was itself an art, the
art of manipulating the masses. But propaganda was also not mere
manipulation: the point was to actually awaken the Will of the
people, to mobilise its soul, and therefore also its mighty creative
force as Kulturbegründer. What confuses us today about Nazi
propaganda is that it is so evidently cynical and manipulative in
its methods, and yet the very manipulators believed in and were

[Fig 4] Poster Kunst Photo: The Wolfsonian-
der Front, Rijksmuseum, FIU, Florida
Amsterdam 1943.
190—191
engrossed by the spectacle they had produced. The Kunst-Kampf
conjunction that we have been discussing sheds some light on this
riddle. For one thing, propaganda on this view inherently partakes
of the whole condition of art-as-battle, and the fine arts thus did
not lose their status and authority by sometimes conveying direct
propaganda messages. Yet at the same time, this did not mean that
artists were allowed to do nothing but ape the Nazi propaganda
machine. On the contrary, genuine art was supposed to stem from
an inner drive, from the Germanic Soul itself, as we saw in our
analysis of “Soldaten und Künstler.” Again, from this point of view,
“Kampf ” might be seen as a “Gewaltanstrengung des Geistes,” a
violent exertion of spirit: finally a type of “Kunst” by other means.
One thing that “Kunst” and “Kampf ” had in common on this read-
ing was the will to sacrifice oneself for a higher ideal: namely the
health of the “Volkskörper,” the collective “body” of the people,
unified by its mystic life-blood. The activity of the artist was thus
in one sense of a piece with all the other types of manic collective
mobilisation – from motherhood to motorways – enacted in the
Reich in the name of the new Volksgemeinschaft (or Kampfgemein-
schaft). Yet the artist’s role was also specially symbolic, in that
his activity could frame that whole mobilisation as itself deeply
spiritual and creative. The artist was no mere individual, therefore,
standing over against politics, autonomous, observing from the
sidelines, ironic or playful, perhaps rebellious. The “true Aryan”
artist embodied the soldierly virtue of collective discipline.
4. The “Staffel der bildenden Künstler” and Nazi Modernism
Clearly, then, the figure of the soldier-artist was a particularly

potent and impressive one for the Nazi imagination. It is not sur-
prising, therefore, that the exhibition of artworks by the Luftwaffe
in Oslo was no isolated, marginal incident: it was part of a massive
and officially sanctioned effort by German soldier-artists across
occupied Europe. Indeed, there were 289 artists associated with
a special unit of the Wehrmacht, the “Staffel der bildenden Kün-
stler” [Squadron of Visual Artists]. This unit was under the direct
patronage of Hitler himself, and its artists were able to exhibit their
works in Germany and across occupied Europe in officially-ap-

[Fig 5] Karl Busch: Photo: DHM/Sebastian Ahlers
Spähtrupp I (mit Tod)
(Vanguard I [with
Death]), 1941/45.
Museum, Berlin.
192—193
[Fig 6] Rudolf Photo: DHM/Sebastian Ahlers
Hengstenberg: Der Soldat
nach der Schlacht
(The Soldier after
the Battle), c. 1944.
Museum, Berlin.

[Fig 7] Berthold Rothmaier: Photo: DHM/Sebastian Ahlers
Searchlights II, 1942.
Museum, Berlin.
194—195
[Fig 8] Ulrich Ertl: Photo: DHM/Sebastian Ahlers
Erlöserberg, 1940/45.
Museum, Berlin.

[Fig 9] Ernst Widmann: Photo: DHM/Sebastian Ahlers
Trondheim Hafen (Trondheim
Harbour), undated.
Museum, Berlin.
196—197
proved exhibitions often bearing names like “Kunst der Front.”
[Fig 4] Gregory Maertz’ groundbreaking research has brought to
light the story of these artists and the confiscation of their art by
the American military after the war.
In conclusion, I wish to raise a particular issue first addressed by
Maertz in an article from 2008.6 Observing the stylistic features of
some of these works – from post-Expressionism to New Objectivity
to near-abstraction [Fig 5–9], we inevitably ask: “But this is mod-
ernist art, and the Nazis hated, ridiculed and destroyed modernist
art: how can these artworks have been produced under the patron-
age of Hitler and the Wehrmacht, and how could they have been
approved for exhibitions in Germany?”
In fact, there is a clear logic as to how “Nazi modernism” became
possible under regime control and protection. In the first place,
after the Entartete Kunst exhibition, the propaganda battle against
“Jewish degenerate art” was already won. The artists who had
publicly opposed the regime were fled or had been incarcerated. But
even more crucially, the artists who actually joined the Wehrmacht
to fight for Germany were in a different political and ideological
category altogether: before any of them had painted a single picture,
they collectively embodied the creative, forceful, form-giving,
self-sacrificing will of the Aryan Kulturbegründer. To find fault
in their style would be petty: the attitude of an armchair Kritiker
as opposed to a soldier-artist immersed in the Fronterlebnis, the
transformative experience of front fighting, the cleansing violence
of spirit and weapons alike. In other words, the whole system of Nazi
art, with its intricate conjunction of “Kunst” and “Kampf,” created
a pre-fabricated ideological space for the soldier-artist, no less than
for the enemy-Jew. Hence the paradox: while some of the modernist
works of art produced within the Wehrmacht could easily have been
selected for display as “degenerate” in 1937 had they been part of
one of the public and private collections raided back then, it is also
evident that they were viewed very differently when produced and
exhibited as soldier-art from the Front. Again we find a tension, and
often a mismatch, between a pre-fabricated ideological container
and the works and individuals required to fit that mould under fluc-
tuating historical circumstances.
Among these soldier-artists themselves, attitudes of course dif-
fered widely. Some skilled artists did willingly and even religiously

join their Kunst to the Nazi Kampf, and used this world-view as
their inspiration. Others, more ambiguously, made pragmatic
use of the officially-approved Kunst-Kampf conjunction to go on
working within the regime, producing competent and sometimes
impressive artworks under regime patronage without necessarily
adhering to its political aims and full-scale apocalyptic vision. If we
can and must criticise the Nazi Kunst-Kampf conjunction as being
mostly detrimental to art and the artworld, we should also – how-
ever uncomfortably and paradoxically – be able to see how it may
in practice have become enabling for some artists nonetheless.
Works Cited
[Anonymous], “Soldaten und Künstler,” Unearthing the Lost Modernist Art of the
in Deutsche Monatshefte in Norwegen 2: 11 Third Reich,” in Modernism/modernity 15: 1
(December 1941), 15–18. (2008), 63–85.
Barron, Stephanie, ed., “Degenerate Art”: Michaud, Eric, The Cult of Art in Nazi
The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany Germany, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford, CA:
(Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum Stanford UP, 2004).
of Art, 1991). Rash, Felicity, The Language of Violence: Adolf
Bärsch, Claus-Ekkehard, Die politische Hitler’s Mein Kampf (New York: Lang, 2006).
Religion des Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Redles, David, Hitler’s Millennial Reich: Apoc-
Fink,, 2002). alyptic Belief and the Search for Salvation (New
Cohn, Norman, The Pursuit of the Millennium: York and London: New York UP, 2005).
Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Rhodes, James M., The Hitler Movement: A
Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Modern Millennarian Revolution (Stanford:
Totalitarian Movements (New York: Harper, The Hoover Institution, 1980).
1957). Spotts, Frederic, Hitler and the Power of Aes-
Griffin, Roger, Modernism and Fascism: The thetics (Woodstock and New York: Overlook,
Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler 2003).
(London: Palgrave, 2007). Steber, Martina and Bernhard Gotto, eds.,
Landes, Richard, Heaven On Earth: The Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social
Varieties of the Millennial Experience (Oxford: Engineering and Private Lives (Oxford: Oxford
Oxford University Press, 2011). UP, 2014).
Maertz, Gregory, “The Invisible Museum:
Endnotes
1 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, qtd. in Michaud 4 For the most comprehensive account of
2004, 76. this exhibition, see Barron 1991.
2 See the bibliography for details of these 5 For discussions of the range of cultural
works. activity during the Third Reich, see Spotts
3 See Bärsch 2002, 53–146, for a very thor- 2002, and Michaud 2004.
ough discussion of these themes. 6 See Maertz 2008.
198—199
War Art/Art War
Wehrmacht
Modernism in
the Context of
Official German
and Norwegian Art
Policies in World
War Two
Gregory Maertz
Gregory Maertz – War Art/Art War

1. The Nazi Culture War
Official National Socialist art policy came into focus on 18 July 1937
in Munich with the opening of the Great German Art Exhibition
[GDK 1937], which was intended to display the regime’s preferred
court style cleansed of modernist anti-bodies, and on 19 July,
with the opening of the Degenerate Art Exhibition [EKA], which
sought, once and for all, to pathologize the much-reviled idioms
of progressive modernist art. As the leading Nazi journalist Adolf
Dresler reported in Deutsche Kunst und Entartete Kunst [German
Art and Degenerate Art] (1938), Hitler’s art policy was not merely
a question of something as ephemeral as taste preferences. For the
Leader art was as a matter of life or death for the German Volk:
Those who visited the Degenerate Art Exhibition in the capital of the
movement saw in the bright light of day the unveiled visage of Judaism
and Bolshevism, stripped bare of all its camouflage. The images on dis-
play defined the liberal era in all its gruesome decay and reverence for
that which is lowest and most beastly. Had the Führer not at the eleventh
hour pulled the German people out of this quickly rising tide of decay
(Zerzetzung), their actual psychological and physical states might also
have been redefined by the images that Jewish art composes by its very
nature. (Dresler 1938, 5)
The opening of these fraternal twin exhibitions should have

marked the conclusion of the internal culture war that had raged
in Germany for four and a half years since the seizure of power. It
had pitted Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who was in favor
of adopting certain progressive modes—most notably, Expres-
sionism—as regime-approved, on one side, and Alfred Rosenberg,
Commissar for Supervision of Intellectual and Ideological Edu-
cation of the NSDAP and implacable opponent of progressive
modernism, on the other. Rosenberg and his allies, including the
artist Wolfgang Willrich, author of the quasi-official guide to the
EKA, Die Säuberung des Kunsttempels [The Cleansing the Temple
of Art] (1937), took their marching orders from Adolf Hitler, who
in Mein Kampf described modernist art as “the sick production of
crazy people.”1
Despite emerging as the loser in his dispute with Rosenberg over
200—201
the status of progressive art in Hitler’s Germany, Goebbels aggres-
sively tackled the responsibility for transforming the regime’s
formerly random or “wild” acts of anti-modernist cultural van-
dalism into a coherent-seeming policy. This change of tack was
signaled by the purging of thousands of works of progressive mod-
ernist art from publicly owned collections throughout Germany
and the hasty organization of the EKA, which, despite its consid-
erable size, was executed in just one week. Perhaps unsurprisingly,
Goebbels’ grandiose, overambitious undertaking (with the painter
Adolf Ziegler as his accomplice and front man), from the plunder-
ing of state museum holdings to the staging of the EKA and the
GDK 1937, was itself characterized by errors and incongruities,
such as the inclusion of sculptures by Rudolf Belling in both exhibi-
tions (the mask-like Kopf and a statue of the world champion boxer
Max Schmeling).
Often mistaken for the definitive statement of Nazi aesthetic
ideals, the GDK 1937 was very nearly cancelled on the eve of its
opening. Indeed, so dismayed was the Leader by what he saw
during a preview of the objects chosen for the inaugural GDK that
he demanded that the selection of objects be completely done
over again. This criticism in turn caused Gerdy Troost, chair of the
jury and the widow of the building’s architect, to resign, leaving
Heinrich Hoffmann (a former art student, along with Paul Klee,
under Heinrich Knirr at the Munich Academy of the Visual Arts), to
drastically adjust the selections. Notwithstanding the investment
of four years in the construction of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst,
vast oceans of ink spilled in the press touting the cultural objectives
of the Nazi regime, and the thousands of submitted objects that
were vetted by the jury, there was still no consensus concerning
the “new art” of the “new Germany.” As a consequence, each of
the eight GDKs represents at most a discrete moment, a dipperful
of water drawn from the endless stream of cultural production
swirling outside the HdDK (like the nearby river Eisbach), and a
snapshot of fugitive attempts by artists to bring their individual
creative endeavors into alignment with unstable, evolving Nazi
aesthetic expectations. Such stylistic discord is exemplified by
two pictures, both of which were collected by Adolf Hitler at the
GDKs on behalf of the German people, that were executed in
shockingly different styles. The first, Paladine des Pan by Edmund

Steppes (GDK 1942) [Cat 18] is a delightfully mysterious exercise in
pastoral surrealism, while the other, Arthur Kampf ’s Jungfrau von
Hemmingstedt (GDK 1939) [Cat 16] is a perfect example of the mon-
umental heroic style that now seems emblematic of the regime’s
taste preferences.
The combined failure of the EKA and the GDK 1937 to articulate
a fixed stylistic template for German artists to follow was, however,
consistent with the inherent nature of Nazi aesthetics to be never
fulfilled, always in process, and in a state of permanent artistic
revolution advancing toward an aestheticized utopian fantasy of
biosocial perfection. This unresolved state of affairs anticipated
the dissonance in cultural policy represented by Baldur von Schi-
rach’s Junge Kunst im Deutschen Reich [Recent Art in the German
Reich] exhibition held in Vienna in 1943, the Kunst der Front [Art of
the Front] exhibitions sponsored by the Oberkommando der Wehr-
macht [Supreme Command of the German Armed Forces] (OKW)
in the last years of the war, and, in German-occupied Norway, the
Kunst og ukunst [Art and Non-Art] exhibition at the Oslo National
Gallery in 1942.
2. Kunst og ukunst
The most prominent art exhibition held in occupied Europe that

sought to incorporate National Socialist aesthetic norms into
a non-German vernacular style was Kunst og ukunst [Art and
Non-Art] that opened in Oslo in April 1942 and later travelled to
Trondheim, Bergen and Stavanger. Organized by the well-known
Norwegian painter and home-grown Nazi, Søren Onsager, who
served as director of the National Gallery, Kunst og ukunst was the
most conspicuous attempt by the Norwegian arts establishment
to mobilize itself in conformity with National Socialist ideas about
modern art. Chief among these were the polarizing categories of
“degenerate” and official art represented by the EKA and GDK. But
there were also major differences between Kunst og ukunst and the
EKA on the question of the fate of progressive artists. For example,
Onsager introduced a third category of “weak” art to accompany
the pre-existing German categories of “degenerate” and “strong”
or officially patronized art. This departure from National Socialist
202—203
orthodoxy served the needs of Norway, as Onsager saw it, as well
as the new Nazi order: for “weak” Norwegian art was not peremp-
torily dismissed in the same way that “degenerate” art was in the
German context, but was instead considered redeemable with a
bit of tweaking. Besides salvaging the talent of progressive young
artists for the good of the Norwegian Volk, the absence of a mono-
lithic arts policy actually furthered National Socialist objectives:
complete adherence to German cultural templates was sacrificed
on the altar of greater regional autonomy and self-expression. This
was, as long as long as it remained under the overarching umbrella
of National Socialism, a central pillar of German foreign policy
in the occupied lands, especially in those, like Norway or Bur-
gundy, which were deemed to be of special racial value to German
blood. Thus, instead of displacing local arts administrative bod-
ies or overtly imposing German aesthetic values on such prized
regional cultures, it was the general practice of German occupation
authorities to extend legitimacy to pre-existing local organizations
and to encourage these bodies to express their solidarity with
the National Socialist project in ways that reflected the distinc-
tive regional, ethnic, and national character of the communities
in question. This was as true in the Altreich as it was in the “new
territories” annexed to Germany and in occupied countries such
as Norway, where home-grown Nazis oversaw the mobilization
of local cultural bodies to serve the new European order under
German leadership.
3. Junge Kunst im Deutschen Reich
Baldur von Schirach, Gauleiter [regional leader] of Vienna, opened

Junge Kunst im Deutschen Reich [Recent Art in the German Reich]
(JKDR) on 6 February 1943, just a week after the catastrophic Ger-
man debacle at Stalingrad. Aside from the obvious transgression
of including artists who were deemed wholly unsuitable for the
GDKs,2 Berlin’s main objection to the JKDR exhibition concerned
its revelation of the unsettled nature of internal German cultural
politics and revival of old feuds. Indeed, the title of the exhibition
suggested not the work of outsider artists deemed marginal to
the Nazi aesthetic project, but rather “recent” art that manifested

the anti-progressive cultural values of the Reich government and
carried its endorsement. But rather than a reinforcement of the
Leader's GDK-inflected orientation, the opening of the JKDR
exhibition announced the arrival of a third variant of “official”
art that claimed the imprimatur of the regime, in addition to the
futural utopian aesthetic of the GDKs and the Wehrmacht-spon-
sored exhibitions of peri-modernist art. It would be difficult to
conjure up aesthetic harmony out of three such dissonant bodies of
objects. In its scale—with 175 participating artists and a total of 589
works on display (of which 234 were oil paintings, 247 were prints of
various kinds, and 108 were sculptures made of stone, wood, metal,
and plaster)—the JKDR ranks as a large exhibition for its time and
was comparable in size to the GDK 1943.
Even a cursory examination of the identities and backgrounds
of the artists whose work was selected for the JKDR reveals the
causes for the exhibition’s divergence from Munich-based stylistic
and iconographic conventions. Some interesting data underscore
the “outsider” nature of the exhibition and the status of many
works in it as an alternative or counter-canon of Nazi art.
First of all, the strong contrasts in style and the use of media
between works in the JKDR and the GDKs are explained by the fact
that 104 of the 175 artists (nearly 60% of the total) whose works are
represented in the JKDR—73 civilian and 31 Wehrmacht artists—did
not participate in the GDKs. In addition, 63 JKDR artists or fully
36% of the total were making their first appearance as representa-
tives of “official” National Socialist culture. Prior to the JDKR, 59 of
these 63 artists exhibited chiefly in the more liberal northern and
western German cities, such as Berlin, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, and
Cologne, where official patronage mechanisms functioned in less
proscriptive ways than those operating in Munich. Chief among
these artists, many of whom were leading figures in the pre-1937
German art scene, are Theo Champion, Maximilian Florian, Erich
Glette, Ferdinand Kitt, Ferdinand Lammeyer, Anton Kolig, Arvid
Mather, Wolf Panizza, and Toni Stadler.
In addition, of the 46 Wehrmacht artists who appeared in the
JKDR, 31 exhibited in no other civilian art exhibitions in Nazi
Germany (15 of the 46 artists in this category did participate in
the heavily war-influenced GDK 1943 and GDK 1944). 40 artists
in the JKDR exhibited in three or fewer exhibitions (including the
204—205
JKDR) in the Third Reich (suggesting really just how junge Schi-
rach’s artists actually were) and there were 10 artists whose only
recorded showing in an exhibition during the Nazi period is in the
JKDR exhibition (Eduard Bäumer, Maximilian Florian, J.L. Gampp,
Ferdinand Kitt, Clarissa Kupferberg, Wilhelm Landgraff, Oskar
Laske, Rudolf Müller, Viktor Pipal, and Karl Potzler). 15 women
artists participated in the JKDR, more than appeared in any of
the eight GDKs. They were M.F. Auer, Marianne Coenen-Ben-
dixon, Rosmarie Dyckerhoff, Irmintrud Ferdin-Rummel, Ludmilla
Fischer-Pongratz, Grete Fleischmann, Maria Fuss, Chrysille
Jansson-Schmitthener, Clarissa Kupferberg, Hanna Nagel, Hanne
Pflumm, Marianne Richter, Milly Steger, Maria Weber, and M.L.
Wilckens. In another major contrast with the GDKs, only 8 JKDR
artists were members of the NSDAP (Karl Albiker, Albrecht Braun,
Franz Gebhart-Westerbuchberg, Hermann Mayerhofer-Passau,
Richard Pietzsch, Peter Jakob Schober, Friedrich Schwarzbeck,
and Josef Steib) and only 9 (Frank Devilla, Max Florian, Max Frey,
Alfons Graber, Oskar Laske, Anton Mahringer, Viktor Pipal, Igo
Pötsch, and Rudolf von Zeileisen) were associated with what might
be construed as the more conservative, völkisch artistic tradition
of Vienna; yet only one of them, Rudolf von Zeileisen, participated
in a GDK, that of 1943. Finally, 133 of the 175 artists (or 76%) were
54 years old or younger, and were thus associated professionally
with organizations and patronage machinery decoupled from the
Party’s domination of the cultural scene in Munich.
As a consequence of such a large number of artists who were
deemed marginal to the regime’s cultural agenda (in the sense of
having either having entered internal emigration or served in the
Wehrmacht) and thus were working according to nonexistent or
different patronage expectations, most of the objects in the JKDR
(as well as many works of art produced by Wehrmacht combat
artists) challenged the Leader's prohibition against “unfinished”
surfaces and displayed qualities—the loose, quick application of
pigment and media with a palette knife associated with Post-Im-
pressionism and Expressionism—that he abhorred in progressive
modernist paintings. A good example of how one artist in partic-
ular sidestepped GDK stylistic norms is found in Paul Matthias
Padua’s painting Blumenstand [Flower Stall] [Fig 1], which evokes
the spirit and style of Post-Impressionist Paris and represents a

[Fig 1] Paul Matthias
Padua: Blumenstand
(Flower Stall), 1942/43.
Reproduction from the
exhibition catalogue
Junge Kunst im Deutschen
Reich (Vienna, 1943).
206—207
[Fig 2] Paul Matthias
Padua: Der 10. Mai 1940
(The 10th of May 1940).
Reproduction from Walther
Troge: Feuer und Farbe:
155 Bilder vom Kriege
(Vienna, 1943).

radical departure from the many patriotic works that he exhibited
in the GDKs (where he was a major presence), such as Der 10. Mai
1940 [The 10th of May, 1940], which depicts German commandos
initiating the invasion of France [Fig 2]. Generically, the JKDR
also broke with GDK norms as many objects were idiosyncratic
and non-monumental, such as candid self-portraits and intimate
renderings of wives, families, children, and even pets. Landscapes
with abstract qualities dominated the JKDR as they would have
done in an exhibition of Die Brücke. In fact, Ferdinand Lammey-
er’s Moor im Böhmerwald [Moor in the Bohemian Forest] [Fig 3] is
a haunting image of a desolate landscape rather than the fruitful
pastoral fantasyland that is conjured up in GDK pictures of the
Nazi racial utopia, such as Julius Paul Junghanns’s Sommerabend
[Summer’s Evening] [Cat 15]. Among the sculptures in the JKDR
many depicted “primitive,” non-aryan subjects, which was clearly
taboo in the GDKs, and there were many imitations of archaic
rather than classical Greek sculpture, with more abstract than real-
istic representations of the human form. Schirach’s support of a
competing state-sponsored style to that of the GDKs creates a kind
of retroactive cognitive dissonance that transports the spectator
back to the conflict years between the Machtergreifung [seizure of
power] and the GDK 1937. But this whiff of chaos is emblematic of
the art scene in Nazi Germany. Without a monolithic arts policy,
consistency was sacrificed on the altar of local control, which was a
central pillar of the leader’s cultural policy. Local cultural identity
was cultivated as a corollary to the development of a broader Volk
identity that nonetheless ran the risk of fomenting contradictions
between national policy and local interpretations of that policy.
Vienna’s Künstlerhaus (built in 1865–68) was also a consequential
choice for the JKDR. The building was charged with the symbolism
associated with major developments in recent cultural history. The
home, since 1861, of the Gesellschaft bildenden Künstler Österreichs
[Austrian Society of Visual Artists], the Künstlerhaus functioned
for the next 9 years, until the 1897 schism by the Wiener Secession,
as the institution that embodied the collaborative comity of the
city’s academic, more tradition-minded artists, with the emerging
avant-garde. By incorporating a significant presence of peri-mod-
ernist artists alongside the better-known, well-established, and
thus aesthetically (and politically) conventional artists from the
208—209
[Fig 3] Ferdinand Lammeyer:
Moor in Böhmerwald (Moor
in the Bohemian Forest),
1942/43. Reproduction from
the exhibition catalogue
Junge Kunst im Deutschen
Reich (Vienna, 1943).

GDKs into the JKDR, Schirach seemed determined to effect a rec-
onciliation of the original rift in Vienna’s cultural scene that dated
from the 1897 secession—a schism that was revived in 1937 with
the expunging of progressive art from German public collections
and the expulsion of artists from public life who had any obvious
connections to the demonized Weimar era. In its inclusive scope
and in the symbolism of the Künstlerhaus as the exhibition venue,
the JKDR offered a direct challenge to the aesthetic orthodoxy that
was intended for the GDKs in their staging in the HdDK and the
cultural prestige of Munich as a stand-in for Berlin.
With his alternate roster of “official” artists who asserted a
recognizably progressive aesthetic to represent the Reich, Schi-
rach, as patron of the JKDR, blurred the line between völkisch and
progressive modernist art and recreated the gray zone that had
characterized the art world in Germany from the Machtergreifung
[hereafter MEG] until the opening of the GDK 1937. Vienna’s
Gauleiter lured artists out of inner emigration with the prospect
of exercising greater freedom of expression than was deemed
permissible in the GDKs or, for that matter, anywhere else in the
Reich. While no artists under official bans were selected to par-
ticipate in the JKDR, several were chosen who had not previously
exhibited their work in Germany since 1933. By including the work
of so many marginalized artists, including an unusually large
number of women painters and sculptors, who, after July 1937,
were absent from Party-sponsored exhibitions in Munich, Schirach
challenged the dominant paradigm of the GDKs and put his own
personal seal on the art of the Third Reich.
Schirach’s cultural coup d’état is comparable to earlier pre-EKA
and GDK 1937 efforts to articulate a more inclusive, less overtly
polarized vision of German art following the Nazi seizure of power,
such as Bruno Kroll’s Deutscher Maler der Gegenwart: Die Entwick-
lung der Deutschen Malerei seit 1900 (DMG) [German Painters of
the Present: The Development of German Painting since 1900],
which was published in January 1937, six months prior to the
opening of both Munich exhibitions in 1937, and Peter Breuer’s
Münchner Künstlerköpfe (MKK) [Munich Artists’ Heads], published
in July 1937. Both books attempt to articulate an updated, contem-
porary, Party-friendly vision of German art, but in the end each
tome presents a line-up of artists that differs markedly from the
210—211
artists actually selected for the GDK 1937: of the 74 artists Kroll
identifies as representative of the present state of German art, only
25 appeared in the GDK 1937, and only 45 of the 125 artists featured
in Breuer’s book participated in the GDK 1937. Gegenwart or “pres-
ent,” which is comparable to junge or “new,” is another word in the
National Socialist lexicon freighted with suggestions of modernity,
freshness, and contemporaneousness. Kroll, an historian, prolific
author, and editor of monographs on artists such as Leo von König,
Philipp Franck, and Arthur Kampf, which were, like DMG, pub-
lished by the Rembrandt Verlag, an NSDAP-sponsored publisher
of books with highbrow pretensions. Thus laden with ex cathedra
authority, Kroll seeks to frame the National Socialist perspective
on modern art in a neat canonical package. The result is not a
“work of art history scholarship” but instead “a picture book for the
German Volk” (Kroll 1937, 7). And yet, despite Kroll’s disclaimer,
which is consistent with Goebbels’s ban on art criticism issued in
November 1936 just months before DMG is published, he does
advance an implicit argument about art history as seen through a
National Socialist lens. In stark contrast to the radically sanitized
treatment of twentieth-century art history featured in the EKA,
Kroll’s version of Nazi taste is appreciative of the legacy of Impres-
sionism, embraces Expressionism’s “return to nature” as central
to Nazi aesthetics in the months leading up to Ziegler’s purge, and
relies on images to propel his narrative. Kroll included works by the
“degenerate” Lovis Corinth and other artists who are conspicuously
absent from the inaugural GDK. Their presence in DMG strikes
a discordant note and suggests just how volatile was the cultural
scene in Germany in the weeks of ferment leading up to 19 July.
Breuer’s MKK was another attempt at articulating an updated,
contemporary, thoroughly National Socialist vision of German art.
Intriguingly, even MKK, published to coincide with the opening
of the GDK 1937, offers of a line-up of artists that differs markedly
from the artists actually selected for the GDK 1937. Out of a total
of 125 artists Breuer considers to be in the brown vanguard, fewer
than half—only 45—were selected that month to appear in the GDK
1937. 21 would later appear in the JKDR. Demonstrating the abso-
lute lack of consensus about Nazi art even among those considered
to be in the know, only 6 of Breuer’s artists would appear in both
the GDK 1937 and the JKDR (Bernhard Bleeker, Otto Coester, Otto

Dill, Richard Knecht, Fritz Koelle, and Hans Wimmer). The images
in MKK and DMG suggest what the initial and ultimately rejected
selections for the GDK were like prior to Hitler’s intervention,
which would have meant a much more progressive roster of objects
than was finally delivered to the public on 19 July.
4. Wehrmacht Combat Artists
The Staffel der bildenden Künstler (SBK) [Squadron of Visual Art-

ists], a freely circulating autonomous combat art unit, was formed
in 1940 in response to an order by Adolf Hitler to the Oberkom-
mando der Wehrmacht over which the leader exercised absolute
control. Captain Luitpold Adam, a member of a multi-generational
family of military artists, was assigned to lead the SBK. From the
selection of artists to the organization of artists’ working proce-
dures, exhibition practices, and sales of work, Adam exercised
an astonishing degree of individual initiative and flexibility in
supervising his artists who embedded with Wehrmacht forces
throughout Europe and North Africa. As a semi-autonomous
branch of the Nazi cultural bureaucracy whose activities were
geographically dispersed throughout the Reich, the SBK was not
subject to direct Party oversight. Thus, as the Reich expanded and
military lines of communication and control were extended into
the marginal spaces of Europe, an inherent dynamism entered the
cultural activity associated with German military conquests, both
in the work of the SBK and that of indigenous Nazi cultural bureau-
crats such as Onsager in Norway. In this sense, the SBK’s modus
operandi was more akin to that of a collaborating arts organization
in an occupied country—a zone of greater artistic freedom and
hybridity—than to the Munich-centered exhibition culture that
was the focus of state and Party patronage at the annual GDKs. As
a prime example of the law of unintended consequences, while it
was on Hitler’s command that the SBK was formed, many of the
conscript soldier artists recruited by Captain Adam had progres-
sive modernist affiliations in their careers prior to the MEG and
because their work had not found favor with the regime they were
not shielded from military service. Among the countless battle-
fields where the SBK served, Adam’s artists were assigned to some
212—213
of the eighteen divisions (400,000 troops) of the Wehrmacht
that remained in Norway till the end of the war, and works of art
survive from 30 German combat artists who served in such posts
as Kirkenes, Gudbrandsdalen, Namsos, Åndalsnes, Tromsø and
Narvik.3 Two members of the SBK based in Norway were Ulrich
Ertl and Ernst Widmann. Prior to the MEG they had belonged to
the avant-garde leaning Neue Secession and works that survive from
their posting in occupied Norway reveal progressive tendencies
[Fig 4 and 5]. Another member of the SBK in Norway was a former
student of the Bauhaus, Kurt Kranz. His New Objectivity-inflected

portrait of a German soldier and Berthold Rothmaier's surrealist
landscape also quite obviously violate GDK norms. [Fig 6 and 7].
Previously unpublished facts concerning the SBK:
– 289 artists in total served in the SBK

– 169 or 58% of these artists exhibited in GDKs
– 120 or 41% did not appear in the GDKs
– 3 artists were purged as “degenerate” (Hans Purrmann, Erwin Hen-
ning, and Heinrich Ehmsen)
– 46 or 26% of these artists exhibited in the JKDR
– 19 belonged to the progressively-aligned Secession
– 7 belonged to the Neue Secession (including Ulrich Ertl and Ernst
Widmann, both of whom served in Norway)
– 2 belonged to the Bauhaus (Wilhelm Wessel and Kurt Kranz)
These facts concerning the pre-war affiliations of the artists who

served in the SBK reveal that a large percentage of them had
peri-modernist tendencies. They also reveal how deeply mili-
tarized and therefore covertly peri-modernist the Party-centric
GDKs had become with the increased participation of combat art-
ists in the twilight years of the regime. A picture that was submitted
for the cancelled GDK 1945 perfectly exemplifies this liberalizing
tendency. The elegiac and anti-war picture Abschied [Departure]
was, moreover, executed by a woman artist, Helga Tiemann
[Fig 8]. Another SBK painting that displays unexpected sympa-
thy for victims of the war as well as distinctive surrealist stylistic

features is Karl Busch’s Flüchtlinge in Russland [Refugees in Russia]
(1943/44) [Fig 9].
The lasting importance of the SBK, especially the works of art

[Fig 4] Ulrich Ertl: Photo: DHM/Sebastian Ahlers
Polarlandschaft mit
Drahtsperren (Polar
Landscape with Barbed
Wire), 1943/44.
Museum, Berlin.
214—215
[Fig 5] Ernst Widmann: Photo: DHM/Sebastian Ahlers
Landschaft in Blau (Blue
Landscape), 6.9.42.
Museum, Berlin.
216—217
[Fig 6] Kurt Kranz: Photo: DHM/Sebastian Ahlers
Grenadier beim
Handgranatenscharfmachen
(Grenadier Priming
Handgrenades), 1944.
Museum, Berlin.

[Fig 7] Berthold Rothmaier: Photo: DHM/Sebastian Ahlers
Nächtliche Landschaft mit
Flakscheinwerfern, die
ein Flugzeug fokussieren
(Night Landscape with
Searchlights Focusing on
an Airplane), 1943/44).
Museum, Berlin.
218—219
[Fig 8] Helga Tiemann: Photo: DHM/Sebastian Ahlers
Abschied (Departure), 1944. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016
Museum, Berlin.

[Fig 9] Karl Busch: Photo: DHM/Sebastian Ahlers
Flüchtlinge in Russland
(Refugees in Russia)
(1943/44). Deutsches
Historisches
Museum, Berlin.
220—221
produced by Wehrmacht combat artists while on occupation duty
in Norway, lies in its identity as a counter-archive, a counter-canon
of art and alternate modes of representing “official” German visual
arts culture in the twilight years of the Hitler regime. Through the
SBK’s representation of combat in Norway and Finland by tropes
and styles associated with progressive modernism, the Wehr-
macht’s map of extreme violence and terror is transformed into a
landscape elevated above atrocity—a landscape, sanctified by its
totalizing Nordicness, that was set aside for colonization by and
purification of the German Volk. Ultimately, the creative space gov-
erned by military authority functions as a site of radical openness
and even a potential site of resistance to the aesthetic norms gov-
erning the civilian arts scene in Nazi Germany as headquartered
in Munich, the Reich capital of art. Along with the peri-modernist
works of art exhibited in Kunst og ukunst and JKDR, the SBK works
of art produced in occupied Norway have the potential to shift our
focus away from the oversimplified idea of an aesthetic rupture
between progressive and “reactionary modernism” to the pres-
ence of documentable internal dissent from the standards and
conventions of the Munich court art of the GDKs.
Works Cited
Breuer, Peter, Münchner Künstlerköpfe Petropoulos, Jonathan, Art as Politics in the

(München: Callwey, 1937). Third Reich (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina
Bussmann, Georg, Kunst im 3. Reich: P, 1996).
Dokumente der Unterwerfung (Frankfurt: Steinweis, Alan, Art, Ideolog y, and Econom-
Frankfurter Kunstverein, 1974). ics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of
Dresler, Adolf, Deutsche Kunst und Entartete Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts (Chapel
Kunst (München: Deutscher, 1938). Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1993).
Hinz, Berthold, Die Malerei im Deutschen van Dyke, James A., Franz Radziwill and
Fascismus (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1974). the Contradictions of German Art History,
Kroll, Bruno, Deutscher Maler der Gegenwart: 1919–1945 (Ann Arbor: The University of
Die Entwicklung der Deutschen Malerei seit Michigan P, 2011).
1900 (Berlin: Rembrandt, 1937). Willrich, Wolfgang, Säuberung des Kunst-
Michaud, Eric, The Cult of Art in Nazi Ger- tempels (Berlin: Lehmann, 1937).
many, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford
UP, 2004).
Paret, Peter, German Encounters with Mod-
ernism, 1840–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2001).

Endnotes
1 Still unsurpassed in their treatment of the so-called “inner emigrants” or those whose
art world in Nazi Germany are the following: artistic endeavors were restricted to service
Berthold Hinz, Die Malerei im Deutschen Fas- as members of Wehrmacht combat art units:
cismus (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1974); Georg Theo Champion, Franz Danskin, Erich
Bussmann, Kunst im 3. Reich: Dokumente Glette, Tom Hops, Ferdinand Kitt, Anton
der Unterwerfung (Frankfurt: Frankfurter Kolig, Ferdinand Lammeyer, Hans Lichten-
Kunstverein, 1974); Alan Steinweis, Art, berger, C.O. Müller, Bruno Müller-Linow,
Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: Wolf Panizza, Kurt Schwippert, Will Sohl,
The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Kurt Sohns, Toni Stadler, A.Paul Weber, and
Visual Arts (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Hans Zimbal.
P, 1993); Jonathan Petropoulos, Art as Politics 3 They are: Arthur Ahrens, Heinrich Amers-
in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: U of North dorffer, H.E. Dettmann, Ulrich Ertl, Eduard
Carolina P, 1996); and Peter Paret, German Freiherr van Handel-Mazzetti, Rudolf Heng-
Encounters with Modernism, 1840-1945 stenberg, Erwin Henning, Gerhard-Fritz
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001); Eric Hensel, Karl-Hermann Joksch, Heinrich
Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, Klumbies, Kurt Kranz, Robert Kretschmann,
trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford UP, Wilhelm Krieg, Harry MacLean, Emil Rizek,
2004); James A. van Dyke, Franz Radziwill Hans Rossmanit, Eduard Schloemann, Julius
and the Contradictions of German Art History, Schmitz-Westerholt, Paul Schröder-Brand-
1919–1945 (Ann Arbor: The University of städt, Kurt Schwippert, Kurt Sohns, Max
Michigan P, 2011). Spielmann, Blasius Spreng, Johannes Thiel,
2 Such “untouchables” included artists Fritz Vahle, Ernst Widmann, Wolfgang Will-
who either disappeared from public view as rich, Ernst Witt, and Bodo Zimmermann.
222—223
The Challenge
of Nazi Art
(Why Julius
Paul Junghanns
Matters)
James A. van Dyke
James A. van Dyke – The Challenge of Nazi Art

The recent exhibition Degenerate Art at the Neue Galerie in New
York City included several works by artists closely associated with
the Nazi regime and its artistic culture – Richard Scheibe, Hans
Schmitz-Wiedenbrück, Adolf Wissel, and Adolf Ziegler. The
display of such objects in close proximity to major works by canon-
ical figures in the history of German modern art was not the only
interesting aspect of the exhibition’s staging, but the presence of
these things, normally kept in storerooms or shown in places less
concerned with the modernist artistic tradition to which the Neue
Galerie is committed, is what was most notable about the event.
Why? Since 1963, historians and cultural historians have pro-
duced invaluable studies of art institutions and policy. Since the
1980s, the relationship of modern art to Nazism has been reexam-
ined. But there has been little interest in the art and artists actively
promoted by or at least publicly accepted by the most influential
groups in Hitler’s dictatorship. Those studies that do exist have
focused entirely on iconography and ideology, with close visual
and material analysis almost nonexistent. The exhibition in New
York, on the other hand, offered an opportunity to register the
differences between the hard polish of Wissel’s portraits, Ziegler’s
softer neoclassicism, and Schmitz-Wiedenbrück’s loose brush-
work. Looking at such things carefully is necessary for a materialist
art history that aims to understand the realities of Nazi artistic
culture and the artists who worked within it.
This essay will draw attention to the work and career of a painter
whose work has often been reproduced in books on art in Nazi
Germany, though it was very different from the iconic, exhortative
paintings displayed in the Neue Galerie. It will suggest that the
work of Julius Paul Junghanns, one of Germany’s leading painters
of animals, pastoral idylls, and agricultural labor between 1900
and 1945 [Fig 1], matters for a critical, materialist social history of
art that seeks to challenge the assumptions and values that under-
write most critical and scholarly writing about nineteenth- and
twentieth-century painting.
Junghanns’s work had nothing to do with the ruptures and irony
of Courbet’s Realist depictions of the French countryside or, more
appositely, with the expressive, sometimes whimsical modernist
menageries of Franz Marc or Heinrich Campendonk. Hence he
and his pictures have been ignored by historians of twentieth-cen-
224—225
[Fig 1] Julius Paul Photo: DHM/Arne Psille
Junghanns: Pflügen
(Plowing), 1940.
Museum, Berlin.

tury art. If Junghanns remains known at all, then it is because his
pictures have been identified with blood-and-soil ideology and its
representations. His work has been linked to the “substantializa-
tion” of art in Nazi Germany; that is, the effort to use text – titles,
captions, commentary – to provide artistically mediocre, run-of-
the-mill pictures with heightened, explicitly ideological meaning
(Bussmann, 321; Hinz, 82, 107).
Such associations of Junghanns's painting with the idea of Nazi
art are by no means wrong. Yet this essay argues that they overlook
something significant. To make this case, the essay examines Jung-
hanns’ role in the city of Düsseldorf ’s art world in and after 1933.
After this, it analyzes a well-known painting and its reception. Both
aspects indicate Junghanns’ ability to operate in the field of Nazi
artistic culture, yet at the same time suggest the limits of simple
categories such as “Nazi art.”
Julius Paul Junghanns began his artistic career in the late 1890s
as a student at the Munich art academy under the tutelage of
Heinrich von Zügel, whose pastoral iconography and broadly
impressionist style Junghanns adopted with success (Wessing,
12–13). In 1904 the young painter, only twenty-five years old,
joined the faculty of the state academy of art in Düsseldorf, one of
Germany’s most distinguished art schools and a bastion of mid-
dle-class taste during the Wilhelmine Empire. He remained at the
academy until it was forced to close in 1944.
Junghanns took a particularly active role in local art politics in
the turbulent decade following the end of the First World War,
the November Revolution, and the post-war economic crisis. For
instance, he was among the leaders of the opposition to the city
administration’s decision to abandon old agreements and to align
with the local avant-garde in the organization of an important art
exhibition in 1927–28, arguing that the democratic associations of
artistic practice were being usurped.1
Furthermore, Junghanns was among the many who aligned
themselves, for a variety of reasons, against the modernist art his-
torian Walter Kaesbach, who was appointed by the Prussian state
to be the director of the academy in 1924. In particular, Junghanns
filed a grievance against Kaesbach in 1932, after the latter had
ordered the razing of the academy’s old glass atelier building for
animal painting while Junghanns was on an excursion with stu-
226—227
dents, and had then allegedly demeaned the painter’s pedagogy.2
That was the year after Paul Klee’s arrival, crowning Kaesbach’s
transformation of the academy. However, that modernization was
soon snuffed out. In the weeks after Hitler was handed Germany’s
government on 30 January 1933, Kaesbach was among the first art
professionals in Germany to be purged. As the senior member of
the academy’s faculty by that time, Junghanns was appointed his
interim successor, much to the joy of the local Nazi press (Alberg,
37–41; van Dyke, 2011, 102–103).
Junghanns’ resentment of the modernization of Düsseldorf ’s
artistic life in the 1920s, his appointment as interim director of
the Düsseldorf art academy in March 1933, his signature on a
report of 6 April 1933 discussing the artistic, political, and racial
acceptability of his colleagues, and the celebratory whoops of local
right-wing commentators have all made it easy to identify the
painter entirely with the new Nazi regime. Yet a careful reading
of the infamous report suggests that Junghanns may have been
pushed by younger, more radical agitators and groups within
the Nazi Party and its cultural auxiliaries. On the one hand, he
presented himself as someone who, after long reflection, con-
curred with the views of an investigative committee established
by the local Nazi Party’s leadership. On the other, he recognized
the pedagogical excellence of many of those whose dismissal he
recommended, and kept his distance from the grounds for those
potential dismissals by using passive speech. When it came to
Paul Klee, for instance, he wrote: “Wird als Jude und als Lehrer für
unmöglich und entbehrlich gehalten” [“Is perceived as a Jew and
as a teacher who is impossible and extraneous”; my translation].
Remarkably, Junghanns envisioned the retention of the modern-
ist sculptor Ewald Mataré and the Expressionist painter Heinrich
Campendonk, who shared his interest in the depiction of animals,
as well as of Oscar Moll, who had once been a student of Matisse.3
Other documents further suggest that Junghanns was not cate-
gorically opposed to artists working in different styles, may have
sought to help some of his modernist colleagues at the academy,
and four years later was taken aback by the staging of Degenerate
Art.4
It is important to note that whatever his individual views and
actions might have been, Junghanns and his peers – that is, tradi-

tionalist artists who had established themselves before the First
World War – were not particularly highly regarded by the young
Nazis who had just assumed control of state art policy in Prus-
sia. In May 1933, after visiting Düsseldorf, one of these officials
reported his displeasure at what was happening at the academy.
Not only had Junghanns allowed a Jewish colleague to continue to
work in the academy, but he was also, simply put, not revolution-
ary enough. According to this official, it was imperative that the
academy should not be allowed to slide back into its traditional,
“reactionary” ways (Van Dyke, 2011, 103–4). The effort to develop a
new art and art policy in Prussia could not be based on restoration,
he asserted. It was not traditional genre painters like Junghanns,
but rather well-known modern painters with stronger political
sympathies and commitments like Franz Radziwill and Alexander
Kanoldt who were identified as the painters of the new Germany
and emerged, for the next few years, as the regime’s vanguard.
In the end, however, cultural critics and nationalist revolution-
aries like Radziwill and Kanoldt eventually ran afoul of or were
disappointed by intrigues, denunciations, and factional infighting
in the artistic culture of Nazi Germany. While their careers stalled,
Junghanns steadily developed his position. Beginning in 1937, he
showed several examples of his new work every year at the central
showcase of contemporary art patronized by Hitler’s regime, the
Great German Art Exhibitions in Munich, and his paintings were
regularly discussed and reproduced in the officially supported arts
press.5 After the death of Zügel in 1941, Junghanns was considered
to be Germany’s best animal painter and thus was awarded a pres-
tigious Goethe-Medal by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels
(Thomae, 278–9). In December 1943 he was officially announced
as the new vice president of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, the
professional association that since 1933 had been charged by the
state with the regulation and policing of artistic practice, and a few
months later was appointed to the Reich Cultural Senate.6 While
all the new appointments made to the Düsseldorf academy in 1933
were gone by 1938, Junghanns, a leader of a locally situated, profes-
sionally engaged, stolidly traditional artistic craft, remained until
the bitter end.
Later developments notwithstanding, Junghanns’s activities
and positions in 1933 suggest that at least some degree of caution is
228—229
[Fig 2] Heinrich von Photo: Museum Georg
Zügel: Schwere Arbeit Schäfer, Schweinfurt
(Hard Work), 1928
Museum Georg Schäfer,
Schweinfurt.

warranted when characterizing who did and stood for what at the
outset of Hitler’s dictatorship. That was a moment when a whole
range of definitions of authentic German art were being advanced,
from Nolde’s Expressionism to the so-called Neoromanticism of
Radziwill and others, to the traditional genre painting produced
by artists such as Junghanns. It was during those years that many
Nazi activists proclaimed their horror at the very idea of a “Nazi
art,” identifying tendentiousness with the partisan propaganda
of the left (Van Dyke, 2007, 250–252). When all was said and done,
many of the protagonists of German artistic culture of the late
1930s were far from being the most engaged, active, and militant
artists during the National Socialist revolution of 1933. In the case
of Junghanns, it appears that he rose by professional default rather
than ideological commitment.
Having told that story, it is time to look at one of Junghanns’s
best-known paintings of the late 1930s, Plowing, which was made,
exhibited, and sold after modern art had been effectively driven
from Germany’s public art institutions and contemporary art mar-
ket, and after critical discussion had been severely constrained.
This is clearly a painting rooted in the tradition of nineteenth-cen-
tury realism outside the modernist tradition.7 Its iconography,
composition, and spatial organization bear a close resemblance
to pictures by leading nineteenth-century European painters such
as Rosa Bonheur, Constant Troyon, and Ilya Repin. But perhaps
it is most closely affiliated to the work of Junghanns’s old teacher,
Heinrich von Zügel, who over the years had made some twen-
ty-four closely related pictures on the subject of the hard work of
plowing [Fig 2]. This resemblance raises a few questions. Given
the iconographic and compositional similarities between Zügel’s
work and Junghanns’s painting, is it conceivable that Junghanns
painted the picture more than anything else as an homage to his
old mentor, who celebrated his ninetieth birthday in October
1940? Given both the professional and artistic continuity embod-
ied by Junghanns, and what we know about the various ways in
which he and his work were viewed between 1933 and 1945, how
is the relationship between Nazi ideology and traditional artistic
practice such as his own best characterized?
There are certainly good reasons to see Plowing as a straight-
forward, unproblematic visualization of Nazi ideology. First, the
230—231
subdued palette and low-key handling of paint in this picture differ
markedly from many of Junghanns’s earlier, smaller, brighter
pictures, though his oeuvre – as far as one can survey it – is charac-
terized by the strong degree of thematic continuity and coherence
typical of so many European genre painters since the seventeenth
century. Whereas the early pictures are comparable in some
technical and formal aspects to the contemporaneous work of
someone like the German Impressionist Max Liebermann, this
painting’s surface is far less painterly and worked, while its palette
tends towards a yellowish-brown monochrome – perhaps the sepia
of nostalgia, perhaps the brown of Nazi symbolism, perhaps the
tint of varnish. Second, the centralized composition of Plowing,
though nothing new in this genre, produces a powerful effect of
dynamic, heroic monumentality that is far less, if at all, evident
in the more anecdotal lyricism and dispersed, informal arrange-
ments that seem to have been most characteristic of Junghanns’s
earlier idylls. This monumentalizing painting offers a romantically
mythologized view of rural life and labor that was not uncommon
in the visual culture of the conservative middle-class (Czech, 338).
Nowhere to be seen are modern technologies, contemporary class
tensions, or the insistent demands made on farmers by the Reich
Ministry of Food and Agriculture to produce more in order to
achieve autarky in preparation for war (Czech, 337). Junghanns’s
plowing farmer might not be quite as heroic as the farmers and
peasants represented in some programmatic paintings, such as
Schmitz-Wiedenbrück’s well-known triptych Workers, Farmers,
and Soldiers of 1941 [Fig 3], and the shadowing of his facial fea-
tures precludes easy racial characterization, but he nonetheless
seems quite literally to arise out of the soil he plows, or to be rooted
in it. Third and lastly, the painting measures 150 × 245 centimeters.
While not as large as the most monumental pictures that hung in
the Great German Art Exhibitions, as a photograph of the paint-
ing’s installation indicates, it is significantly larger than the small
cabinet pictures – much like the ones flanking Plowing in the Haus
of German Art in 1940 – that had constituted the bulk of Jung-
hanns’s production [Fig 4]. Plowing was thus unlikely to have been
intended to hang over the fireplace or dining-room table in a mid-
dle-class residence, but rather was presumably made for display in
the larger spaces and taller ceilings of a public building. (At some

[Fig 3] Hans Schmitz- Photo: DHM/Arne Psille
Wiedenbrück: Arbeiter, and U.S. Army Center
Bauern und Soldaten of Military History,
(Workers, Farmers, Washington DC. Courtesy of
and Soldiers), 1941. the Army Art Collection,
Side panels: Deutsches US Army Center of
Historisches Museum, Military History
Berlin, central panel: U.S.
Army Center of Military
History, Washington DC.
232—233
[Fig 4] Julius Paul Photo: GDK-Research,
Junghanns's Plowing, 1940, © Zentralinstitut für
as hung in the exhibition Kunstgeschichte, Munich
Grosse Deutsche Kunst
(Great German Art) in
the Haus der deutschen
Kunst, Munich, 1940.

point Junghanns made an etching based on the painting, perfect
for a broad market, and in 1957 painted a much smaller, more col-
orful version of the same subject).8
With this arises the question of reception, which is the key for
thinking about the question of meaning. In the case of Plowing,
this seems simple to reconstruct. In 1940 the picture hung in a
gallery of landscapes and genre scenes punctuated by an ecstatic
female nude by Josef Thorak and Schmitz-Wiedenbrück’s large
Johannesfeuer, the depiction of a popular custom associated with
the summer solstice. Junghanns’s painting was part of an event
staged not only because the art market continued to exist despite
the outbreak of war, but also to attest to the undiminished cul-
tural vitality of the German people during wartime. It was bought
for 18,000 Reichsmark by Hitler’s Reich Chancellery, indicating
its apparent congruity with Hitler’s frequently articulated views
about art, which had legitimated the political campaign against
modern art since 1930.9 The painting was reproduced as a picture
postcard and also in the luxurious official art journal, Kunst im
Deutschen Reich [Art in the German Reich]. There it was stylized
as the expression of a “strong renewal of the moral picture of the
peasantry in our time” and as the proof of a “recuperation of the
philosophy and the firmness of the attitude in German paint-
ing” (Van Dyke, 2007, 255). The painting was taken as evidence
of Junghanns’s artistic health, thereby inserting the picture into
the opposition typically construed in National Socialist discourse
between a robust art of the people or nation, and a sick or degen-
erate cosmopolitan modernism. Whatever the painter’s views
and intentions, this makes clear how easy it was for writers to
fix the meanings of relatively anodyne genre pictures such as
Plowing, with their traditional craftsmanship and avoidance of
current events or overtly political iconography. Regardless of what
Junghanns had done in the past, and meant to do by painting this
picture, Plowing became a public visualization of National Socialist
ideology.
Yet at this point, when the ideological tie between Junghanns’s
painting and the Nazi dictatorship is clear, it is important to
recall the critical voices that were recorded by the regime’s secret
security service between the years 1938 and 1945. However
hard commentators in the arts press worked to instrumentalize
234—235
paintings such as this one, many people who visited official art
exhibitions were apparently disappointed by what they saw. They
acknowledged the solid technical quality of most things, but also
began to complain as early as April 1940 about the high price of
art, which contradicted the regime’s stated desire to bring art to
the people. At the same time, they repeatedly criticized artists for
failing to engage with current events. In early 1943, for instance,
the predominance of landscape painting in German art exhibitions
was characterized as a “dubious flight into idyllicism” that ignored
the widespread wish to see contemporary history painting about
the war (Van Dyke, 2007, 255).
The views of professional commentators on art thus differed
considerably from those of many ordinary Germans. The latter
by no means necessarily saw pictures like Junghanns’s Plowing as
illustrations of Nazi ideas. While certainly useful to some factions
within the Nazi dictatorship in their representation of a timeless
rural world imagined by blood-and-soil ideologues, Junghanns’s
pictures did not work the same way as, for instance, the much
younger Hans Schmitz-Wiedenbrück’s triptych of the following
year, in which the figure of the peasant was organized far more
ambitiously into an unequivocal image of unshakeable national
unity and support for the war. Junghanns’s painting did not inter-
pellate the viewer as powerfully. In their appearance and reception,
Junghanns’s paintings point instead to the different, even contra-
dictory interests of traditionalist artists, who tended to paint what
sold best to a middle-class clientele, and of more politicized ele-
ments within the German populace, which desired something very
different. Even though traditional genre painting was supported
by the art bureaucracy and leaders of the Nazi dictatorship and
was charged with significance by writers working in the controlled
press, Junghanns’s painting, though anything but modernist or
dissident, suggests that the relationships between art, ideology,
and politics in Nazi Germany were less straightforward than art
historians have believed.
This is not meant to underplay Junghanns’s alignment with the
Nazi dictatorship or to suggest that his painting articulated some
form of challenge to the regime. This painter clearly functioned
smoothly in National Socialist Germany, and his work offered
no significant resistance to that system's ideology and policies,

even as it materialized the conservative professional values that
the painter had embodied since the Wilhelmine Empire. Yet it is
important to point out that even Plowing, the work of a painter who
succeeded in the artistic culture of the Nazi dictatorship, cautions
against identifying everything painted in Germany between 1933
and 1945 simply as “Nazi art.” One must emphasize not just the
rupture that 1933 ultimately meant for many, but also the profes-
sional continuities and political failures that would often force the
regime, when it came to art, to appropriate rather than to innovate,
to make do rather than to triumph. Art historians need to take note
of tensions and conflicts. Hitler’s claims of total unity between
the state and the people, and between both them and a particular
kind of art, were important cultural political assertions rather than
simple facts. Critical art historical scholarship must examine such
claims carefully to determine their limits.
The only scholarly publications on Junghanns are a slim, hard-
to-find monograph published by a little-known press in 1995, an
entry in the catalog Kunst und Propaganda (an exhibition organized
at the German Historical Museum in Berlin in 2007), and my own
remarks in several publications on art and art politics in Düsseldorf
in the 1930s. Pictures like Plowing are almost exclusively seen in
temporary thematic exhibitions in museums of history, displayed
in the context of propaganda, or offered as a foil to the modernist
work suppressed by the dominant faction within Hitler’s dicta-
torship. They are used to reinscribe what Georg Bussmann once
perspicaciously called “the useful myth” of “Degenerate Art,” in
which modern art occupies the positively marked position in a
structural opposition of abstraction and realism, avant-garde and
kitsch, heroic sophistication and monstrous philistinism, inno-
cence and barbarism (Bussmann,113–122). Despite the steady
growth of a small but valuable literature over the last fifty years
and such very recent exhibitions as the one at the Neue Galerie in
New York, such paintings continues to constitute a challenge to the
modern art museum.
It is not difficult to understand why this is so. As Carol Duncan
has noted, since their emergence in the eighteenth century, public
art museums have always functioned as the repositories and ritual
spaces of a given society’s official cultural memory, its highest
values and truths, its most precious objects. They serve to edify, but
236—237
also to transport the ideal visitor, to provide the art lover with the
expected pleasure of dehistoricized aesthetic experience (Duncan,
7–20). While temporary exhibitions now often explore topics with
great nuance and present material outside the canon, the perma-
nent galleries of modern art museums still almost always play it
safe, celebrating the so-called masterpiece. In spaces reserved for
twentieth-century art, that means exclusively presenting work by
the usual authoritative modernists. Much the same can be said of
the majority of art historians working in other institutional contexts.
Art history has changed much over the last half-century, becom-
ing ever more critical. And yet most people become art historians
because they love art. Even those who ultimately take critical or
radical approaches often remain deeply invested in the tradition of
modernism. Despite advances in art historical thinking and curato-
rial practice, and despite the erosion of old taboos, the modern art
museum still fails to take most of the art and visual culture of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries into account, especially when
it comes to the twelve years of Hitler’s dictatorship. One might thus
see art history largely as a form of affirmative culture.
This is what makes it virtually impossible for a painting such as
Plowing to be shown in a museum, yet so important to do so. It is
almost unthinkable for a professional art historian who studies the
officially supported and publicly acclaimed art of National Socialist
Germany to admire the objects of her or his study. To work on such
things is necessarily to be forced into a critical attitude that abjures
simple conclusions. To encounter such things in the art museum
would challenge one to see that the history of modern art is not the
same thing as the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art.
One would be encouraged to understand the contingency of the for-
mer within the broader field of artistic production and the broader
economic, political, and social fields in which artists and art objects
are embedded. One would be required to acknowledge the function
of all forms of art in historical struggle. Conservative artists such
as Junghanns constituted a major position in the twentieth-century
field of German artistic production and were deeply compromised
by their success in Hitler’s state. Thinking about and exhibiting
their work is thus one way to make art history and the modern art
museum, so often servants of economic interests and hegemonic
knowledge, into agents of a truly historical, radical project.

Works Cited
Alberg, Werner, Düsseldorfer Kunstszene Junghanns, Julius P., Stadtarchiv Düssel-

1933–45 (Düsseldorf: Stadtmuseum, 1987). dorf III 730, 90; February 1927
Boime, Albert, “The Second Empire’s Klee, Paul, Briefe an die Familie, vol. 2, ed.
Official Realism,” in The European Realist Felix Klee (Cologne: DuMont, 1979).
Tradition, ed. Gabriel P. Weisberg (Bloom- Thomae, Otto, Die Propaganda-Maschinerie.
ington: Indiana University Press, 1982), Bildende Kunst und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit im
31–123. Dritten Reich (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1978).
Bussmann, Georg, ed., Kunst im 3. Reich: Van Dyke, James A., “Über die Beziehun-
Dokumente der Unterwerfung (Frankfurt: gen zwischen Kunst, Propaganda und Kitsch
Verlag Zweitausendeins, 1974). in Deutschland 1933 bis 1945,” in Kunst und
—, “Degenerate Art: A Look at a Useful Propaganda im Streit der Nationen 1930–1945,
Myth,” in German Art in the Twentieth Cen- ed. Hans-Jörg Czech and Nikola Doll (Dres-
tury: Painting and Sculpture, 1905–1985, ed. den: Sandstein, 2007), 250–58.
Christos Joachimides, et al. (Munich: Prestel, —, Franz Radziwill and the Contradictions
1985), 113–22. of German Art History, 1919–45 (Ann Arbor:
Czech, Hans-Jörg and Nikola Doll, eds., University of Michigan Press, 2011).
Kunst und Propaganda im Streit der Nationen Weisberg, Gabriel P., ed., The Realist
1930–1945 (Dresden: Sandstein, 2007). Tradition: French Painting and Drawing,
Duncan, Carol, Civilizing Rituals: Inside 1830–1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University
Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, Press, 1981).
1995). Wessing, Gudrun and Julius Paul
Hinz, Berthold, Art in the Third Reich, Junghanns, Julius Paul Junghanns: Skizzen
trans. Rita and Robert Kimber (New York: Und Gemälde Aus Dem Nachlass (Bielefeld:
Pantheon, 1979). Pendragon, 1995).
Endnotes
1 Junghanns, 1927, 90. no. 3 (1 December 1943), 54, 74; Die Reichs-
2 Nordrheinwestfälisches Hauptstaatsarchiv kulturkammer. Amtliches Mitteilungsblatt der
BR 1021–39, 108–13, 115–16, 134, 141–42. Reichskulturkammer 2, no. 3/4 (March/April
(Hereafter cited as NRW-HptStA.) 1944), 57.
3 NRW-HptStA 1021–39, 240–3. Reproduced 7 See Weisberg (ed.), 1981. See also Boime,
photographically in Alberg, Düsseldorfer 1982, 31–123.
Kunstszene, 40–41. 8 <lauritz.com/de/auktion/
4 See Paul Klee to Lily Klee, 3 April 1933, in julius-paul-junghanns-1876–1958-pfluegen-
Klee 1979, 1233; van Dyke, 2011, 138. der-bauer-mit-pfer/i2174282/>; <lempertz.
5 For more information see Thomae, 1978, com/de/kataloge/lot/927–1/81-julius-
406; see also the website GDK-Research: paul-junghanns.html> (Last accessed 24
<http://www.gdk-research.de/db/apsisa. November 2014.)
dll/ete>. 9 <gdk-research.de/> (Last accessed 24
6 Die Reichskulturkammer. Amtliches November 2014.)
Mitteilungsblatt der Reichskulturkammer 1,
238—239
Afterword:
Art in Battle
Matthew Feldman
Matthew Feldman – Afterword: Art in Battle

“Nazi culture” is not a contradiction in terms, though it is easy to
get this impression. A familiar illustration of this tendency may be
observed in the infamous quotation, cited in Terje Emberland’s
contribution to this volume: “When I hear the word culture …
I remove the safety of my revolver." This well-known statement
is often wrongly attributed to Hermann Göring, a leading func-
tionary in the Third Reich. Sentenced to death for crimes against
humanity at Nuremberg, Göring’s association with this phrase in
the public mind acts as a kind of illustrative shorthand for Nazism’s
supposed negation of culture, its nihilism. This is understandable
in light of the unprecedented villainy of the Holocaust – events for-
ever known to the world after the collapse of the Third Reich in the
first months of 1945. Viewed through the lens of Auschwitz-Birke-
nau, the very term “Nazi culture” has long appeared to be an
oxymoron. Never had such a threshold been crossed in terms of
systematic genocide – an awareness that has grown exponentially
in the decades since for a variety of reasons.1 But one consequence
of this focus on Nazi barbarity has been the sidelining of National
Socialist views of culture in general, and the arts in particular.
“Wenn ich Kultur höre... entsichere ich meinen Browning!” is
thus worth reconsidering briefly in this Afterword to Art in Battle.
For the unexpected history of this phrase aptly corresponds to the
cutting-edge research represented in the objects in this exhibition,
and to the accompanying texts by leading scholars in this cata-
logue: historical recovery forces a rethinking of our interpretations.
In this light, consider again the line above, actually deriving from
Hanns Johst’s 1932 play Schlageter. This play was based upon the
life of the Nazi ‘martyr’ Leo Schlageter, executed for an attempted
bombing of French troops occupying the Ruhr Valley in 1923.
Schlageter was first performed on Hitler’s 44th birthday on 20 April
1933 and, correspondingly, six months later Johst signed the
infamous Gelöbnis treuester Gefolgschaft [Proclamation of Loyalty
of German Writers] declaring his fealty to Adolf Hitler alongside
87 other leading artists in Nazi Germany. Johst went on to head
the Reichsschrifttumskammer from 1935. He was included in the
so-called Gottbegnadeten-Liste of indispensable artists nearly a
decade later, and thus protected from military service during the
downfall of the regime in 1944–45 as one of the six most valued
writers in the Third Reich.2 The context for Johst’s dramatic line,
240—241
then, turns out to reveal a situation quite opposed to the popular
myth of Nazi “anti-culture”: Johst’s line was part of a play about
and within Nazi culture, and was officially acclaimed as such at the
time.
While the utility of anecdotal evidence is naturally limited,
contrasting the history and legend of the Johst-“Göring” line none-
theless speaks to the historical reconstruction undertaken by Art
in Battle. Indeed, quite apart from the writer Johst, there were also
major figures in the art world who were card-carrying members of
the NSDAP, including Christian Schad and Franz Radziwill – the
latter two being perhaps the most accomplished of the painters
associated with Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity] movement.3
Yet large gaps in scholarly knowledge remain, as James van Dyke
stresses, for little attempt has been made to “understand the real-
ities of Nazi artistic culture and the artists who worked within it.”
Even seemingly “blood-and-soil” artists like Julius Paul Junghanns
present a more complex case when closely examined, van Dyke
maintains in his contribution, for “the relationships between art,
ideology and politics in Nazi Germany were less straightforward
than art historian have believed.” Precisely this emphasis on the
plural – as opposed to older, top-down scholarly models stressing
totalitarian conformity and homogeneity, even in the art world – is
echoed in Christian Fuhrmeister's essay. Calling for more research
on the subject, Furhrmeister points out that “non-monolithic, but
heterogeneous” Nazi “aesthetic and cultural notions, preferences
and agendas were put into contact or directly applied to an area ten
times larger than Nazi Germany in 1937.”
Genocidal as the Third Reich was, artistic production continued
apace throughout what scholars are increasingly willing to under-
stand as a Nazi “colonialisation.” Indeed, already in 1966 George
Mosse’s landmark Nazi Culture showed that, whether in Nazi
science or in the veneration of historical myths and symbols, the
Third Reich’s “cultural expressions of the true community moved
to the forefront as symbols of the new society.”4 Yet the notion that
an organic, genuine, and even seductive cultural Volksgemeinschaft
existed within Nazi Germany remains highly debated. Quite apart
from potential criticism about in effect rehabilitating or “normaliz-
ing” Nazism, Peter Adam spoke for many in 1992 when he asserted
that “[o]ne can only look at the art of the Third Reich through the

lens of Auschwitz.”5 Continuing controversies over Martin Heide-
gger, Leni Riefenstahl, Paul de Man, Ezra Pound, Knut Hamsun
and other key modernist figures highlights how, even at a vantage
point of three-quarters of a century, canonical cultural figures
found to be collaborating with Nazism remains a controversial
subject in the twenty-first century.
Art in Battle challenges a number of all-too-common assump-
tions about Nazi culture and its terrifying expansion across what
Mark Mazower has recently termed Hitler’s Empire.6 Laudable also
in this volume is the bringing together of Norwegian, German and
American specialists who have, as Christian Fuhrmeister registers,
to some extent talked past each other up until now. This is espe-
cially relevant for art-historical approaches to the binary “Art and
Non-Art.” This has, to date, referred to the Third Reich’s infamous
Entartete Kunst exhibition alongside the 1937 Grosse Deutsche Kun-
stausstellung, or to the lesser known but no less singular Norwegian
case, the 1942 Kunst og ukunst exhibition. That these art versus
non-art exhibitions were juxtaposed both in “peacetime” Nazi
Germany and in wartime Norway is striking, piquing larger ques-
tions about the role of Norway in Nazism’s envisaged “New Order”
in Europe. That Søren Onsager, Nasjonal Samling collaborator
and director of the wartime National Gallery in Oslo, introduced
the liminal category “weak” art to the 1942 show, moreover, is an
important reminder that even Nazi-occupied Europe was more
nuanced than simple binaries might suggest.
One example here would be the expressionist Emil Nolde’s long-
term Nazi membership (from the NSDAP’s refounding in 1925), or
as Erik Tonning highlights in his essay, the “paradox” of Rudolf
Schlichter and Rudolf Belling’s inclusion in “both the ‘degenerate
art’ exhibition and in the parallel ‘Great German Art exhibition’”
of 1937. As Tonning reveals with respect to “soldier-artists,”
emphasis on cultural greatness was an integral part of Nazism’s
dualistic “political religion,” even if there was nonetheless “a ten-
sion, and often a mismatch, between a pre-fabricated ideological
container and the works and individuals required to fit that mould
under fluctuating historical circumstances.” Likewise for Edvard
Munch, labeled Entartet by Nazi Germany in 1937 but already held
in such high esteem in Norway that this was impossible; accord-
ingly, Anita Kongssund reveals in her chapter, four of his more
242—243
orthodox images were included in April 1942 Kunst og ukunst as
“approved” art, of which more below.
Given this “unresolved state of affairs,” in Gregory Maertz’s
words, conceiving of Nazi art – let alone its evolving art policy – in
monolithic terms is surely mistaken. Striking departures from
“Aryan” bio-epic kitsch are demonstrated, above all, by the variety
of styles evident in the “Squadron of Visual Artists” which Maertz
overviews in this catalogue, and expands upon elsewhere. The
SBK was a combat art unit established in 1940 – by Hitler and the
Wehrmacht’s High Command, no less – to paint in the occupied
territories. Some 9,250 previously unknown objects relate this
remarkable undertaking, Maertz continues, using
a variety of media and employing recognizable Modernist idioms [that]

resist easy classification. Contrary to what one might expect given
the aesthetic orthodoxy dominating the home front, especially the
state-sponsored Great German Art Exhibitions at the House of German
Art, German combat artists exercised considerable freedom in repre-
senting the experience of combat, the variety of landscapes in which they
found themselves, and the diverse human types they saw in the ranks of
German soldiers, Allied prisoners, and among the civilian populace.7
This “counter-archive” of what Maertz has dubbed “peri-mod-

ernist” art, furthermore, includes fully 23 German combat artists
working in occupied Norway (stationed there alongside some
400,000 Wehrmacht soldiers between April 1940 and May 1945).
Yet even before this, as Terje Emberland explains in his essay,
interest in Norway amongst some National Socialists was running
at fever pitch. This was particularly the case with the notorious
Schutzstaffel, who believed that “Nordic” blood had an alleged
purity level of 70–80% in parts of Norway, making it “the pinna-
cle of racial superiority within SS ideology.” This “blood and soil”
worldview saw numerous trips by the SS Ahnenerbe (a quasi-cultic
archeological “research division”) to Norway in the 1930s and
during the war – including several trips by Heinrich Himmler
between 1940 and 1942; that is, during the initial implementa-
tion of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” Norway was
to be part of the “Greater Germanic” ideal community, Himmler
claimed in the latter year, leading to the SS’s intense engagement

with Norwegian artifacts, mythic history and folk culture.8 As with
the simultaneous Holocaust, this interaction between the imperial
centre and actors at the periphery was an important dynamic in
“Hitler’s Empire.”9
Norway’s status as a “special case” no doubt fed into the Norwe-
gian art world under the occupation. Under what Dag Solhjell calls a
“Führer regime” that replaced the semi-official Bildende Kunstneres
Styre (BKS) in 1941, “art came under political control” and Søren
Onsager emerged as the leading artistic ideologue for Quisling’s
Norway. Solhjell's summary here, deriving from his extensive work
on the subjects finds that 19 BKS members were also NS members,
with 40 of the 295 artists with pre-war voting rights investigated
for collaboration after the end of World War Two.10 Painters, he
finds, were both less affected and less persecuted in Nazi-occupied
Norway, and did not have the “serious conflicts” with the regime
like “other cultural fields – literature, theatre and music.” In BKS
investigations after the war, heavy penalties were extended to
collaborators, in both official and “boycott” manifestations leading
to several dozen Norwegian painters working at the time who are
“almost forgotten today.”
So too the unique “Art and Non-Art” display opening in Oslo’s
National Gallery in April 1942, an important aspect of this Art
in Battle exhibition and catalogue. Under the neo-Impressionist
Søren Onsager, finds Anita Kongssund, Kunst og ukunst drew upon
the 1937 GDK and Entartete Kunst Exhibitions in Munich, but was
both less venomous and structurally different than its predecessor
shows. Onsager included a weak or “totally indifferent” category,
even if the criterion for distinguishing these objects from the
supposedly “degenerate” ones was ultimately “vague and ambigu-
ous.” Just as contributors to this catalogue have stressed the lack of
agreed regime style throughout the Third Reich, so too Kongssund
finds that Onsager’s “local variation” touring Norway in 1942 was
more “conciliatory” and less overtly racist than that touring Nazi
Germany in 1937.
These various applications of National Socialist ideology – itself a
contested and fluid term – in Nazi-occupied Norway is also pres-
ent in Eirik Vassenden’s contribution here on vitalism as radical
aesthetic and reactionary ideology in his contribution. Reviewing
Åsmund Sveen’s 1942 “attempt to create a literary canon” with Norsk
244—245
ånd og vilje [Norwegian Spirit and Will], Vassenden finds Vidkun
Quisling’s speeches alongside “openly homoerotic” vitalist poetry
and traditional Norwegian literature. Like in the aforementioned
instance of the painter Junghanns, traditional themes, arrange-
ments and palettes could be easily recruited for the revolutionary
Nazi “New Order.” Moreover, just such complexity confronts us
with the more progressive, even modernistic styles, sometimes tol-
erated – or even supported, as with the “Squadron of Visual Artists”
– by the NS regimes in wartime and Germany and Norway.
Some of these objects, presented in Art in Battle, raise perplex-
ing issues about cultural production under Nazism, which in some
cases, Vassenden argues, “conveys a classic fascist utopian vision,
and qualifies as … aesthetically ‘good.’” This catalogue success-
fully raises these and other questions, helping to provide a more
complete, nuanced picture of cultural production in the mercifully
short-lived “Nazi empire.” In doing so, Art in Battle suggests that
the plague of Nazism engendered an art that must be studied to
be understood, and which was, in turn, part of a wider culture that
cannot be so easily separated from wider European considerations
– then or now – no matter how much we wish it were otherwise.
Works Cited
Adam, Peter, Art of the Third Reich (London: Maertz, Gregory, “The Invisible Museum:
Thames and Hudson, 1992). Unearthing the Lost Art of the Third Reich,”
Baranowski, Shelley, Nazi Empire (Cam- Modernism/Modernity, 15/1 (2008).
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Mazower, Mark, Hitler’s Empire (London:
Dennis, David B., Inhumanities: Nazi Inter- Allen Lane, 2008).
pretations of Western Culture (Cambridge: Mosse, George, Nazi Culture (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2012). Grossett and Dunlap, 1966a).
Emberland, Terje and Matthew Kott, —, “Introduction: The Genesis of Fascism,”
Himmlers Norge: Nordmenn i det storgerman- Journal of Contemporary History 1/1 (1966b).
ske prosjekt (Oslo: Aschehoug: 2012). Pine, Lisa, Hitler’s National Community:
Euchner, Maria, “Irresistible innocence: Society and Culture in Nazi Germany (Lon-
Reappropriations of Weimar and Nazi-era don: Hodder Arnold, 2007).
Schlageter,” in Reworking the German Past: Pringle, Heather, The Master Plan:
Adaptations in Film, the Arts, and Popular Cul- Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust (Lon-
ture, eds. Susan Figge and Jennifer K. Ward don: Harper Perennial, 2006).
(Rochester NY: Camden House, 2010). Solhjell, Dag, Fra embetsmannsregime til
Feldman, Matthew, “Debating Debates in nytt akademiregime: kunstpolitikk 1850–1940
Holocaust Studies,” Holocaust Studies 16/3 (2011). (Oslo: Unipub, 2005).
Koonz, Claudia, The Nazi Conscience (Lon- van Dyke, James, Franz Radziwill and
don: Bellknap, 2003). the Contradictions of German Art History,
Lawson, Tom, Debates on the Holocaust (Man- 1919–1945 (Ann Arbor: University of
chester: Manchester University Press, 2010). Michigan Press, 2011).

Endnotes
1 To mention but a few, major developments academic works on the subject in English
in the academic field of “Holocaust Studies” includes Dennis 2012; Pine 2007; and Koonz
include the Eichmann trial; opening of war- 2003.
time archives in former USSR countries; and 5 Adam 1992, 9.
most recently, an increasing turn towards 6 Mazower 2008; see also Baranowski 2011.
the oral history of Holocaust survivors (see 7 Maertz 2008, 78.
Lawson 2010, chs. 1 and 2). 8 See Pringle 2006; and in Norwegian,
2 See for example Euchner 2010. Emberland and Kott 2012.
3 See van Dyke 2011. 9 See Feldman 2011, 165
4 Mosse 1966a and 1966b. More recent 10 Solhjell 2005.
246—247
Appendix
Contributors
Line Daatland is an art historian and Director of Art and Design at
KODE – Art Museums of Bergen. She is part of the curatorial team
for the exhibition “Art in Battle.”
James A. van Dyke is Associate Professor of Modern European

Art History at the University of Missouri. He has published widely
on the political history of modern art, with a particular focus on the
relationship between art and anti-democratic ideology.
Terje Emberland is a senior researcher at the Norwegian Center

for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities in Oslo. He is
the author of several books on fascism and the history of occupied
Norway.
Matthew Feldman is Professor in the History of Modern Ideas

and Co-Director of the Centre for Fascist, Anti-fascist and
Post-fascist Studies at Teesside University. He has published
widely on European modernism, fascist ideology and the postwar
far right in Europe and the US.
Christian Fuhrmeister has been managing research projects at

the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich since 2003. His
research and publications focus on art, power, and politics, notably
during the Weimar Republic, National Socialism, and the post-war
period.
Anita Kongssund is a curator at the Documentation Archive of

the National Museum for Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo.
Formerly, she was Director of the Documentation Archive at
the National Gallery in Oslo, Director of the Norwegian Labour
Movement Archive of Northern Norway, and an archivist at the
Norwegian National Archive.
Gregory Maertz is Professor of English and Visual Culture at St
John’s University in New York City. He has published widely on
nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, most
recently on American interventions in the post-World War Two
German art scene. He is co-curator of the exhibition “Art in Battle.”
Dag Solhjell is an art sociologist. He was formerly a Senior

Lecturer in Art Communication at Telemark University College.
He is the author of several studies on the history of art politics in
Norway.
Erik Tonning is Professor of English literature and Culture, and

Research Director of the “Modernism and Christianity” project at
the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Bergen.
He is co-curator of the exhibition “Art in Battle.”
Eirik Vassenden is Professor of Scandinavian Literature at the

Department of Literary, Linguistic and Aesthetic Studies at the
University of Bergen. He has published widely on both historical
and contemporary Scandinavian literature, and literary criticism.
250—251
List of Works
DHM = Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin
KODE = KODE – Art Museums of Bergen
NM = The National Museum of Art and Design, Oslo
1 9
J.C. Dahl (1788–1857) Aage Storstein (1900–1983)
Birch Tree in a Storm, 1849 Thorough Cleaning, 1930
Oil on canvas, 92 × 72 cm Oil on canvas, 36 × 49 cm
KODE/BB.M.539 NM/NG.M.01716
2 10
Gerhard Munthe (1849–1929) Isaac Grünewald (1889–1946)
Autumn Study, c. 1876 Katarinavägen, 1935
3 11
Gerhard Munthe (1849–1929) Kai Fjell (1907–1989)
Early Spring, 1887 The Model’s Homage, 1936
Oil on canvas, 68.6 × 94.4 cm Oil on canvas, 126 × 140 cm
KODE/RMS.M.279 NM/NG.M.01855
4 12
Frits Thaulow (1847–1906) Gert Jynge (1904–1994)
The Doctor’s Horse (The Long Wait), 1888 A Farmer, 1937
Oil on canvas, 29.5 × 39.5 cm Oil on canvas, 112 × 90 cm
5 13
Frits Thaulow (1847–1906) Johs Rian (1891–1981)
Ravensborg Country Store, 1891 Red Autumn in Flatdal, 1937
Oil on canvas, 76 × 138 cm Oil on cardboard, 46 × 53.5 cm
6 14
Kitty Kielland (1843–1914) Albert Janesch (1889–1973)
Peat Marshes at Jæren, 1897 Water Sport, 1936
Oil on canvas, 104 × 158 cm Tempera on canvas, 153 × 208 cm
KODE/BB.M.252 DHM/Gm 98/254
7 15
Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Julius Paul Junghanns (1876–1958)
Youth, 1908 Summer’s Evening, 1939
KODE/RMS.M.261 DHM/Gm 98/257
8 16
Jais Nielsen (1885–1961) Arthur Kampf (1864–1950)
Tightrope Dancer, 1917 The Virgin from Hemmingstedt, 1939
NM/NG.M.01212 DHM/Gm 98/288
17 26
Ernst Liebermann (1869–1960) Heinrich Klumbies (1905–1994)
By the Shore, before 1941 Blimps above an Industrial Site in Norway,
Oil on canvas, 120 × 165 cm 1940/1945
DHM/Gm 98/347 Watercolour, opaque colour and tempera,
25.5 × 50 cm
18 DHM/Gr 2006/29.89
Edmund Steppes (1873–1968)
Paladine des Pan, 1941/42 27
Tempera on hardboard, 120 × 100 cm Heinrich Klumbies (1905–1994)
DHM/Gm 98/558 Seaplanes Anchored in a Nordic Lake, c. 1944
Watercolour and tempera, 32 × 44.2 cm
19 DHM/Gr 2006/29.103
Ewald Jorzig (1905–1983)
Steel Mill, 1938 28
Oil on canvas, 110.5 × 135.5 cm Wolfgang Willrich (1897–1948)
DHM/Gm 2005/198 Tundra Landscape at Dusk, 1941/1942
Tempera and watercolour, 29.7 × 39.8 cm
20 DHM/Gr 2006/111.18
Arthur Ahrens (1890–1953)
Sandviken in Bergen, 01.05.1943 29
Watercolour, 24.1 × 30 cm Sketch book of Wolfgang Willrich
DHM/Gr 2005/126.1 (26 pages)
c. 1942
21 Pencil, charcoal, chalk, red pastel chalk,
Ulrich Ertl watercolour
Dovre Mountain, 1939/1945 26.6 × 34.7 cm
Gouache and watercolour, 39 × 56.5 cm DHM/Gr 2006/111.1
DHM/Gr 2005/145.2
30
22 [Eric Marable]
Ulrich Ertl Exhibition model for «Degenerate Art» 1937
Logged Forest – Colour Sketch, 1942 at Hofgarten, Munich
Watercolour, 30.7 × 41.5 cm Part 6 (upper level, room 7, north side)
DHM/Gr 2005/145.16 After 1992
Wood, plywood, metal and paper
23 67.4 × 66 × 29.1 cm
Harry MacLean (1908–1994) DHM/K 96/1.6
View towards the Sognefjord, from Field-Gun
Bunker at Gudvangen, 1943 31
Watercolour, 36.5 × 50.6 cm [Eric Marable]
DHM/Gr 2006/25.6 Exhibition model for «Degenerate Art» 1937
at Hofgarten, Munich
24 Part 12 (upper level, room 7, south)
Harry MacLean (1908–1994) After 1992
Direction-Finder Station with Observation Wood, plywood, metal, paper
Posts at Herdla, 1943 67.4 × 66 × 29.1 cm
Watercolour and tempera, 33.9 × 43.8 cm DHM/K 96/1.12
DHM/Gr 2006/25.43
25
Hanns Rossmanit (1907–2000)
Tromsø Harbour, 1941
Watercolour, 34.6 × 44 cm
DHM/Gr 2006/28.3
252—253
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Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
verzeichnet diese Publikation in der
Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte Introductory photographs:
bibliografische Daten sind im Internet pp. 2–3: General Nikolaus von
über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Falkenhorst opens the exhibition
PK – Kämpfer und Künder at the
Bibliographic information published National Gallery in Oslo, August 1944.
by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Photo: Aftenposten/© NTB Scanpix
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek pp. 4–7: Installation view from the
lists this publication in the Deutsche exhibition Norges Nyreising [New Order
Nationalbibliografie; detailed in Norway] at the National Gallery,
bibliographic data are available in the Oslo 1942. Photo: © NTB Scanpix
Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. pp. 8–9: Installation view from room 6 in
the exhibition Entartete Kunst, Hofgarten
First edition published in 2015 Munich, 1937. Photo: © bpk/Arthur Grimm
in conjunction with the exhibition pp. 10–11: Joseph Goebbels and Minister
ART IN BATTLE Gulbrand Lunde, 1941. Photo from the
KODE – Art Museums of Bergen, book Et liv i kamp for Norge [A Life in
4 September 2015 –7 February 2016 Battle for Norway], published by the
Reichspropagandaleitung (Oslo: Blix, 1942).
Editors: Frode Sandvik and Erik Tonning
Gedruckt auf alterungsbeständigem,
Design: Daniel Bjugard & Rune Døli/Modest säurefreien Papier
Typography: Lyon Text & Akkurat Mono Printed on acid-free paper
Paper: 115 g Profimatt
ISBN: 978-3-8382-7014-2 Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist
urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung
© ibidem-Verlag außerhalb der engen Grenzen des
Stuttgart 2017 Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung
des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Dies
© KODE – Art Museums of Bergen gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen,
Bergen 2017 Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und
elektronische Speicherformen sowie
All rights reserved die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung
Alle Rechte vorbehalten in elektronischen Systemen.
The publication is supported by: All rights reserved. No part of this

publication may be reproduced, stored
in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form, or by
any means (electronical, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise)
without the prior written permission
of the publisher. Any person who does
any unauthorized act in relation to this
publication may be liable to criminal
prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Foreword and caption texts page 69
and 112 translated by Arlyne Moi.

Art in Battle by Frode Sandvik, Erik Tonning

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The exhibition “Art in Battle” at KODE – Art Museums of Bergen

Contributors: Line Daatland, James A. van Dyke, Terje Emberland,

Art and Non-Art

Art and Wartime National Socialist

The Teutonic Rage of the Ancient Timbers

“Norwegian Spirit and Will”

Art, Battle and Apocalypse

War Art/Art War

The Challenge of Nazi Art

Director KODE – Art Museums of Bergen

Line Daatland – Art in Battle

A few years ago, a letter from 1942 surfaced in KODE’s correspon-

Line Daatland – Art in Battle

The sweeping political conflicts of the twentieth century have had

The cleansing of the temple

In the summer of 1937, Germany’s propaganda minister Joseph

Line Daatland – Art in Battle

Line Daatland – Art in Battle

Line Daatland – Art in Battle

Line Daatland – Art in Battle

Art and Non-Art

Blue horses in red forests

Onsager did, however, receive plenty of publicity around his

Line Daatland – Art in Battle

Line Daatland – Art in Battle

from the collection of the Bergen Picture Gallery. In the “non-art”

Line Daatland – Art in Battle

The modernist temple of art

Today, the landscape paintings by Gerhard Munthe and Kitty

The blind spot in the white cube

The generic, context-free exhibition space of modernism – ‘the

Line Daatland – Art in Battle

1 Witcomb 2003, p. 161. 9 Berg 1993.

Line Daatland – Art in Battle

Anita Kongssund – Art and Non-Art

These were the opening words at the inauguration of the exhibition

Anita Kongssund – Art and Non-Art

visualized, Onsager lamented (1942b, 4). The exhibition was

Anita Kongssund – Art and Non-Art

Anita Kongssund – Art and Non-Art

Apostles (1932) [Fig 5] was influenced by Cubism and Expression-

The paintings in the “non-art” section were all indebted to

Anita Kongssund – Art and Non-Art

Anita Kongssund – Art and Non-Art

Anita Kongssund – Art and Non-Art

Anita Kongssund – Art and Non-Art

Was the Norwegian exhibition a replica of the

Onsager had visited the Entartete Kunst exhibition in Hamburg in

Anita Kongssund – Art and Non-Art

Art and Non-Art – a valid representation of Norwegian

Anita Kongssund – Art and Non-Art

Adresseavisen, 19 May 1942. —, Kampen for Norge (Oslo: Stenersen,

Anita Kongssund – Art and Non-Art

Dag Solhjell – What Battle?

“Norwegian art is sound at its core”

I found this text in the archives of the Nazi-led Ministry of Culture

Dag Solhjell – What Battle?

The academy regime – BKS

Dag Solhjell – What Battle?