Paul Schultze-Naumburg. Kampf um die Kunst [The Struggle for Art], 1932

CLICK HERE FOR ITALIAN VERSION

German Artists' Writings in the XX Century - 11

Paul Schultze-Naumburg
Kampf um die Kunst [The Struggle for Art]

National Socialist Library N. 36
Franz-Eher-Verlag, Munich, 1932

Review by Francesco Mazzaferro

[Original Version: January 2017 - New Version: April 2019]

Fig. 1) The front-cover of the book

Art Literature at the service of National Socialism

With the pamphlet "The Struggle for art" by Paul Schultze-Naumburg [1] (1869-1949), art literature fell into the black hole of history: National Socialism. The text aimed at convincing German readers of the perceived good reasons of the Nazi ideology in supporting and promoting a certain kind of art, while condemning another one. It was published by the printing house of the Nazi party (the same that published every day the Völkischer Beobachter, the party official newspaper). We felt useful to examine this pamphlet for two reasons: first, because a review of German art literature in the twentieth century would not be complete if it did not take into account the theoretical texts of National Socialism, however repellent their arguments may certainly have been; and secondly, because it allows to better recognize future risks, wherever they may appear in the world. To be clear: reading the text of Paul Schultze-Naumburg teaches us that sometimes also the most dangerous arguments may be presented in a particularly effective way. He wrote the pamphlet in a clear and effective style, and presented his reasons so as to make sure they would appear obvious and evident. His opponents' arguments were not given any legitimacy; the tone (in the radicalness of an openly racist discourse) was dogmatically affirmative and aimed at providing easy (and, exactly for this reason, dangerously charming) mental shortcuts also in the thinking on the art. Many of the writings of the artists who would eventually fall victims of Nazi persecution (consider, for example, the anthology of art history sources by Paul Westheim, published in 1928) were certainly richer, more interesting and more thoughtful, but clearly showed a serious underestimation of the threats of those years, and they did not have the same ambition to convince readers of the need to undertake a struggle for art. And the only battles that one is sure to lose are those who are never fought.

Paul Schultze-Naumburg

 

Fig. 2) Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Art and Race, in the edition of 1928

The author of the pamphlet (published in 1932, one year before the elections that would lead to the seizure of power by Hitler, but according to internal evidence actually written in 1930) had already released in 1928 a broader essay titled "Kunst und Rasse" (Art and Race) which would be published again in 1935, 1938 and 1942. That essay turned to become the theoretical reference used by the Nazi regime to prepare the exhibition on degenerate art of 1937 [2]. Schultze-Naumburg, however, formally joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party only in 1930, at the age of 51; his race-based concept of art was therefore probably a legacy of his previous activity at the beginning of the century within the so-called Völkisch movement (i.e. the German nationalist movement), even before becoming an integral part of Nazi fanaticism.

Fig. 3) Paul Schultze-Naumburg, The technique of painting (1898)

After an education as a painter, Schultze-Naumburg (his real surname was Schultze; however, following a widespread fashion in the late 1800s Paul also assumed the name of his hometown) chose to become an architect, pursuing that profession with great success. In addition, he authored a very large production of essays, both in the field of art in general and in architecture. His first writings dated back to 1896 and 1898, respectively on the "Course of studies of the modern painter. A guide for students" (Der Studiengang des modernen Malers. Ein Vademecum für Studierende) [3] and "Painting technique" (Die Technik der Malerei) [4], followed by "The study and the tasks of painting" (Das Studium und die Ziele der Malerei) [5] in 1900. In those years, Paul even affiliated himself to the newly formed Berlin Secession; in fact, we have already met him in this blog as a correspondent of Max Liebermann since 1898. Already in those years he revealed a deeply conservative aesthetic taste, although in 1901 promoted, along with Henry van de Velde (a famous architect and designer, friend of the main German artists and critics of those years) and Anna Muthesius (a musician and designer) a successful campaign to overcome the use of the corset in female clothing. He devoted an essay to this issue with the title "The culture of the female body as a basis for ladies clothes” (Die Kultur des weiblichen Körpers als Grundlage der Frauenkleidung). This strange coexistence of cultural conservatism in the area of art and architecture and progressive insights on women's issues explains why, in the course of the last decade, his figure has raised harsh controversy in Germany. On the one hand, there are those who are trying to rehabilitate his memory, stressing his social modernism; on the other one, those who believe that such an attempt would imply a dangerous revisionism. Reading the pamphlet has left me no doubt about this: he was a dangerous fanatic of the worst kind.

Fig. 4) Paul Schultze-Naumburg, The culture of the female body as a basis for ladies clothes, 1902

The theorist of a traditionalist architecture

Schultze-Naumburg’s deeply conservative nature became clear when, during the first decade of 1900, he turned to be the theorist of the so-called Heimatschutzarchitektur, or (translating it literally) "the architecture to defend the homeland". Until a few years before, a historicist taste had prevailed in the German architecture, which loved to reproduce past patterns (e.g. neo-Gothic, neo-Renaissance, neo-Baroque, Neoclassical) as the elements of identity for the new German Empire; at the beginning of the new century, however, completely divergent streams arose, which either pointed to a modernization of urban environments (the so-called Neues Bauen – new building – by Bruno Taut and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe), or to a return to the traditions of rural origins, both in terms of materials and formal schemes. Schultze-Naumburg was one of the main proponents of the latter direction (as evidenced by the Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam, which he built between 1914 and 1917 on a commission from the Royal House, and was included in the list of world heritage works by Unesco in 1990).

Figure 5-7) Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Three views of the Cecilienhof Palace, 1914-1917

  

In order to consolidate this architectural style, Schultze-Naumburg took two initiatives. First, he founded a colony of artists and architects in the form of an industrial consortium (Saalecker Werkstätten). The group operated between 1901 and 1925 and represented, in a sense, the cultural rival of the future Bauhaus, tying art, design and architecture together, albeit in a rural context. At the same time, he began to publish a series of theoretical texts under the name of Kulturarbeiten, ("Cultural works") which become the bible of traditionalism in architecture and urbanism. As you can see from the title list below, it was a large-sized endeavour with great ambition:

Volume 1: "The construction of the house. Introductory thoughts on the cultural works." (Hausbau. Einführende Gedanken zu den Kulturarbeiten), 1901;

Volume 2: "The gardens" (Gärten), 1902;

Volume 3: "Villages and settlements" (Dörfer und Kolonien), 1904;

Volume 4: "The construction of towns" (Städtebau), 1906;

Volume 5: "The middle class house" (Das Kleinbürgerhaus), 1907.

Volume 6: "The Castle" (Das Schloss), 1910.

The volumes from the seventh to the ninth were gathered under the common heading "The organization of the landscape by man" (Die Gestaltung der Landschaft durch den Menschen). They were as follows:

Volume 7: I. "Streets and roads" (Wege und Strassen); II. "The vegetation and its contribution to the landscape" (Die Pflanzenwelt und ihre Bedeutung im Landschaftsbilde), 1916.

Volume 8: III "The geological basis of the landscape" (Der geologische Aufbau der Landschaft und die Nutzbarmachung der Mineralien); IV. "Water management" (Wasserwirtschaft), 1916.

Volume 9: V. Industry (Industrie); VI. "Settlements" (Siedlungen), 1917.

Fig. 8) The first volume of the Kulturarbeiten: "The construction of the house.Introductory thoughts on cultural works" 1901

Schultze-Naumburg argued that it was high time to go back to the architecture of the early nineteenth century. He believed that during the 1800s, and particularly since 1870, Germany had been the victim of a real architectural devastation, which had erased the country’s identity and contributed to the depletion of its culture. Paul’s message had a highly moralising tone, driven by the idea of finding harmony and marry again 'beauty' and 'good', but, of course, also it strongly displayed anti-modernist features.

Fig. 9) A 'good' (left) and a 'bad' (right) example of architecture, from two buildings adjacent to each other in Jena.
From the first volume of the Kulturarbeiten.
Source: https://archive.org/stream/kulturarbeiten01schu_0#page/20/mode/2up

The military defeat in World War I and the collapse of the Empire were a violent shock. Paul (as it is also clear in The Struggle for Art) differentiated between two worlds: the one before and the one after 1918. To use a term which has become customary, he 'radicalized' in the course of the Twenties. He continued however his intense and successful activity as an architect.

Fig. 10) Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Villa Charlottenhof, 1929–1933

Fig. 11) Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Castle Dahmshöhe, 1930–1932

  

The collective concept of art in the National Socialist doctrine

Let us now return to The Struggle for Art. It theorised a crucial element that one must immediately understand. For Schultze-Naumburg, art was not an expression of an individual genius, but of a community, a Volk. Consequently, also art literature became the expression of a collective will, assuming the features of an instrument of political struggle. There was a huge jump compared to the previous logic of German idealism, which had considered art as the expression of exceptional individual personalities, often incomprehensible to their peers, to the point that reading art writings was the only way to understand artworks (think, for example, of the introduction of the anthology of letters of artists edited by Hermann Uhde-Bernays, and published in 1926). It is important to emphasize the complete break with the tradition of German thought, a break that was entirely contradictory with respect to the author's claim to preserve the national character of art.

Art - as mentioned – had to be the mirror of a people, not the product of the spirit of individual artists. Art production was seen as offering a faithful visual image of the community sustaining it: "It is often said that every genuine art reflects the people that originates and sustains it. Obviously, each artist can capture, through his mirror, only a specific part of the character of his people. And yet, it is completely unthinkable that art can live a life of its own and that the beings that appear in front of our eyes are not a true representation of the beings that physically represent a people in the flesh. We know that, from the works of art that the peoples and the times have left us, we can draw a picture of their true spiritual essence, form and environment" [6]. It would seem obvious: Egyptian art would give us an accurate picture of how the Egyptians (physically) looked like, and the Greek art would display us the men and women in the streets at the time of the Greeks. Yet, not everyone thought so in those years: think for example of the spreading of Beuronese art in German monasteries. They considered the ancient Egyptian, Greek and Byzantine art as an important inspiration in the direction of abstraction of religious art. In reality, therefore, the reading of art history was more and more becoming the expression of present preferences: for Beuron religious artists, the antique justified the aspiration towards universality and abstraction, for the Nazi theorists it rather served to justify the idea that art should only ever be the faithful expression of the physicality of a race.

According to Schultze-Naumburg, art should also not be the expression of a personal style. There should be limits to how much an artist can indeed deviate from the art of his people, although obviously "not every image can always be a faithful picture of the reality of a given condition. The individual personalities of the artists are too different to reach full overlap. There are those that are tightly oriented to the model and their environment and reproduce it faithfully on the canvas, and those who can only give shape to their dreams of that reality. It does not matter if art is an accurate representation of reality – like it has always been the task of the fine arts - or if it reflects only the times from a spiritual point of view, as a perceptible expression of the substance of reality. After all, one cannot ignore that the higher task of the artist is to show the final objectives to the people of their time, to make visible the image towards which one wishes to move, so that all people could recognize beauty and can start the contest to imitate it and to make themselves compliant with that ideal" [7]. A world where every artist would be free to follow his own style and pursue his own objectives was therefore inadmissible.

It is extremely interesting that there is no reference in the pamphlet to any German art critic, neither of the nineteenth or of the twentieth century, nor to any school of art history. The birth of art criticism, and the very concept of individual style, had been one of the main achievements of the nineteenth century German culture, even if it was often viewed with suspicion by the representatives of other European linguistic areas, as if it were a manifestation of cultural hegemony. The author attacked with great vigour the art critics, as they were supporting contemporary art, and argued that art criticism was a diabolic invention of the recent years (in his opinion, only related to dissemination of contemporary art at the beginning of the century, due to transnational commercial interests). He did not even consider that art criticism was born for the need to understand and systematize a vaster and vaster, and increasingly diverse, artistic heritage. He attacked art criticism with the argument that it was in most cases not politically homogeneous with national thinking. In the National Socialist thought, there was no space for any art criticism (remember that the National Socialist authorities would eventually officially ban it).

To art critics Schultze-Naumburg reproached many things. They would be based on the concept that "art cannot have anything to do with the people. That people would not understand anything of art, and it would be a worrying sign, even an index of inferiority of an art work, if it pleasured those who do not belong to the profession" [8]. "After all, such normal people would not be able to 'understand' anything, and only the art experts of our day would be reserved the task to discover what delicious delights" artists can offer "as caviar to the people" [9]. Also from the lexical point of view - the author insists - art criticism would be essentially extraneous to the world of German culture, having to import new words of foreign origin (he mentioned examples like Dynamik, Polarität, kosmisch, Synthese) in order to express its concepts [10]. The ultimate goal of art criticism would be "to organise the abandonment of the traditional habits of the people" [11]. It is therefore understandable why, during the Nazi period, even art critics with a strictly nationalist and conservative orientation, such as Max Sauerlandt, never succeeded to convince the National Socialist regime of their reasons.

The issue of race

If, then, art should not be a question either of individual genius, nor style, nor, finally, art criticism, what should determine its orientation? The answer was clear: the race. And in support of this thesis Schultze-Naumburg brought three arguments.

First, he argued that the whole of the North-European statuary, from 700 until 1300 A.D., was characterized by an iconographic continuity marked by the figures of the Nordic hero and the Madonna [12]. Racial uniformity produced therefore a uniformity of art orientation.

Fig. 12) A photographic comparison of a Cubist painting (whose title are not mentioned) vs. the Gothic statuary (St. Catherine in St. Sebald church in Nuremberg). Source: Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, page 15.

Fig. 13) A photographic comparison of a figure representing the 'ecclesia' in the cathedral of Bamberg vs. the 'Portrait of young woman' by Amedeo Modigliani (1918). The author never provided any information on the author/title of the art pieces he considered 'negative'. The indication is my work. Besides being a vanguard artist, Modigliani was, as well-know, also a Jew. Source: Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, page 18.

Secondly, he exploited a thesis of Leonardo's Treatise of painting, in which the Renaissance artist wrote that a painter - when needs to set the basic features of the image he wants to portray – would tend to instinctively draw inspiration from his own face. The cases of Rubens, Rembrandt, Michelangelo and von Stuck confirmed, in his opinion, this thesis: their self-portraits would look like the figures they painted or sculpted [13].

Figures 14-17) Four comparisons between the portraits by Rubens, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, von Stuck and their works. Source: Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, pages 30-33.

From these premise, Schultze-Naumburg drew a comparison ad absurdum: contemporary art paintings reveal the true mental characteristics of their authors. The act of creation would be "in fact a process that can only be explained by an analogy with the laws of genetics" [14]. The artist's genetic characteristics would be communicated to the work, and the characteristics of the work would therefore reveal both the artist's racial identity, as well as the state of his health. It is easy to deduce the conclusion: those who produced contemporary art (at least, outside the supposed artistic canons of Germanic art) would, according to Nazi doctrine, either be members of other races or members of the same Germanic race, but corrupted by disease. It is a senseless argument, which, however, was narrated by the author in clear language, seemingly well-argued and above all in an apparent logical sequence which, despite being inherently wrong, was presented as ostensibly quite evident.

"As a single person you can never escape to belonging to his race, even if you made a huge effort in this direction; in the same way, the artistic creation cannot circumvent the physical and spiritual characteristics of its creator. An individual who basically belongs to the world of the north will always create Nordic creatures, while a member of the Mongolian race will attribute to their figures a Mongolian attitude; in the case of a Jewish painter, the painted figures will all easily receive a Jewish character, even when the model is not Jewish, and the Japanese will make them equal to the Japanese" [15]. He concluded with comments on the nudity of women and the influence of African art in the iconography of contemporary art, as signs that he interpreted as symptoms of an ongoing racial decay among Germans [16].

In short, the traditional concepts of art history did no longer apply: the same German art national identity was not based on "language, state and habits", but on the community of blood: "every race is pursuing its particular goal in terms of its image, and will always follow it necessarily and unconsciously. The desire for a universal ideal that goes for the whole of humanity will always remain a dream, and a dream certainly not beautiful in most cases. Only one race can contemplate the goal of an image in a clear and unitary way and - as long as it remains healthy – can try to personify the image both in its ethical behaviour as well as in its visible works" [17]. It was a betrayal of the universal idea of culture that the German classical world (think to Schiller’s Ode to the Joy) had worked out one hundred fifty years before.

Fig. 18) Examples of so-called pathological art according to the racial art thesis by Schultze-Naumburg.
Source: Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, page 35.

In aesthetic terms, Schultze-Naumburg wrote a passionate plea for the return to unity of a single style within each racial 'reality', as tested - at least in his view - by Periclean Athens, and above all in the German cities under the Hohenstaufen [18], when the people had found "their options and the source of a deep inner well-being in our Gothic cathedrals with their heroes in stone and their saints in wood" [19]. Within each racial group - he wrote - art should not show fundamental differences in their developments; equally, societies should remain politically cohesive around a single purpose. It is a fact, however, that in order to identify role models of a society without any competing art movements (or perceived to be such) Schultze-Naumburg was forced to go back to the Middle Ages or the age of Pericles. This shows how artificial this uniform state of mind of the art community would be (and obviously, it never occurred even in those cases). The history of art shows - contrary to what Schultze-Naumburg wrote - that for God’s sake artists who belong to the same cultural area always tend to split in thousand streams, looking for personal answers to common problems.

From aesthetic questions to political ones

Obviously, it would have been possible to conceive a genuine wish for a return to the past of art and a preference for more unified positions among artists also as part of normal aesthetic dialectics, in a liberal society where all positions are present. And instead the author strongly denied any chance for a dialogue, "because German art has unleashed a struggle for life and death, just as in politics" [20]. "The lasting antagonism we see around us can no longer be ignored in an attempt to try understanding each other, but it should result in an open-field battle" [21]. And finally: "You cannot be a National Socialist and come to terms with the enemies in the field of art and in the organization of our lives” [22].

The success of contemporary art in Germany was explained by the policy reversals Germany suffered after 1918 (this was a lie: the expressionists and avant-garde movements, such as the Brücke in Dresden and the Blaue Reiter in Monaco, all blossomed prior to World War I). He wrote that, when he asked the supporters of contemporary art to explain their reasons "I do not receive from them any other answer except that it is the expression of the new era which opened in 1918. We can do nothing but believe the truth of this statement. (...) And it is a fact extremely characteristic that a number of artists living in Germany since 1918 no longer operate alone, but in groups which always include the participation of foreigners" [23]. It was also a lie. In fact, we know that - with the exception of the Bauhaus - after World War I we witnessed a process of fragmentation of vanguard art, with the melting down of secessionist and expressionist groups. But Schultze continued (always talking about the perceived pernicious foreign influence): "And this happens not only in exhibitions, but also our museums are regularly purchasing foreign artists who belong to those circles" [24]. And here it should be noted, again, that the most serious episode of contestation of purchases of German museums (to the benefit of French Impressionists) took place in 1911, under the auspices of Carl Vinnen [25]: again an earlier episode, and not after the World War.

Fig. 19) Carl Vinnen, A protest of German artists, 1911

In Nazi rhetoric, Germany was now a crushed country, where "no one dares to say loud and clear what he likes and what he does not like, what makes him rejoice and what horrifies him in the deepest of his soul" [26]. Indeed, Germany would now be a country without art "because the contemporary art offered in the exhibitions and public collections may rarely have the ambition to impress a German" [27]. "There may perhaps still be an art which, with its material means, depicts figures of people who can still be seen in the main market place of a town; and yet, it happens that, in our shows and within the huge amount of prints overwhelming us day and night, such art cannot emerge from this flood" [28]. "Surely, there are many artists with great capacities, whose voice of the heart does not allow them to play the same music of the official art. But they remain unknown, no one knows their name. Even the older ones, who have already achieved notoriety, are increasingly losing their link with the public opinion. Thus, an overall view is lacking of what now remains of an art with a German sentiment and what are its products" [29]. "According to an already well-known model, those in power have taken over not only all public and private exhibition spaces, but they subjugated the entire press to their power. To this it does not only belong admittedly the left press; even the bourgeois newspapers do no longer dare to write or publish anything against the official views" [30]. Anyone who has followed the vicissitudes of the extremely severe clashes which divided the representatives of the secessions, of the academic schools, of the avant-garde and many other rival groups can only conclude that those were years when, in fact, any ability to forge a broad consensus on homogenous art proposals was missing: the Nazis, however, perceived all representatives of the different rival schools of aesthetics as a compact 'block' against them, when in fact they were all against all, without any possibility of mediation.

The fact is that, immediately after the Nazis conquered power, artists claiming to belong to the new power orientation began to sprout like mushrooms. This was the case, for example, of the most famous among them, the painter Adolf Ziegler, who had never exhibited any painting before being admitted to the Council of the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, and who would become soon an iconic painter in the years under Hitler.

How was it possible to convince readers of these awful arguments?

Fig. 20) The rhetorical questions posed by Paul Schultze-Naumburg
immediately under the photo of "Paradise Lost" by Emil Nolde (1921)
ource: Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, page 8.

How could Paul Schultze-Naumburg propose so odious theses without arousing a feeling of rejection? The author combined lies and refined rhetorical tools, in order to draw preconceived conclusions. He knew very well that the traditional German world was not at all in a process of cultural melting-down: the most radical phase of vanguard art (if it ever really was in disagreement with the German art, since it instead represented a continuation of its idealistic stream of the nineteenth century) had already seen his peak and the art world was in a full process of a "return to order" (German expressionism was already in crisis, while New Objectivity was flourishing and French purism was gaining ground). Moreover, he was certainly aware that part of contemporary art was rightist (think of Italy in those decades). He could also not fail to be aware that the most radical forms of aesthetic innovation (abstraction, atonal music) were also the answer to the mass dissemination of new technologies which allowed the mass reproduction of the most traditional forms of art (radio, cinema, phonograph). Yet, the most insidious arguments were placed in the form of rhetorical questions, inviting the reader to manifest a natural consensus. "Here, then, it appears a question not without justifications: do we really recognize ourselves with what is now hailed as a great art? May these faces and bodies and their expressions correspond to what constitutes and defines perceptibly the essence of our German people, in terms of body and spirit? Alternatively, do they really represent images of a desire that manifest itself in our people? Do we have evidence of a desire on the part of each of us to become as much as possible like them, as it happens with the works of the best times of Greece, when we are surrounded by a world of gods and heroes in marble? " [31]. "What do these works have to say? Can they enrich you, can they arouse those emotions which one alone cannot bring about? Can it be made sure that those emotions would reach the size, clarity and richness, which only an artist can guarantee?" [32].

Where it comes to aesthetic issues, it is certainly legitimate to ask questions about the value of art works. But here these apparently innocent questions were actually raised as part of a political program, which aimed at sentencing (and subsequently destroying) the production of an entire generation of artists. The answers to the rhetorical questions were even less acceptable. Contemporary art, in fact, "is only a still raw sketch of a gravely inferior humanity, a sketch that is neither beautiful nor charming, and has none of the qualities of madness, or the mood of the joke. The only concept inspiring us is that the greatness of humanity is being dragged down here" [33]. And since one of the principles of the most radical political fight is to never name the arguments of the enemies, the author never mentioned in his manifesto the names of condemned artists or the titles of their works: as they were not considered artworks, the author did not see the need to identify them [34]. In the Struggle for Art, there was already a logic of annihilation of the artworks and of their authors.

Finally, there is a section on architecture. It was obviously the field in which Schultze-Naumburg was more competent, but strangely it is also the section in which the controversy was less virulent. He railed, of course, against the architecture of the Neues Bauen, something he had already done since the beginning of 1900. However, it is evident that the author also disliked the kind of imperial and totalitarian architecture that would eventually prevail in the National Socialist regime. Rather, he was the representative of an intimate and rural Germany, whose ideal models should not be sacrificed to industrialization and materialism. While his racial doctrine imposed itself for painting among Nazis, I do not think that Schultze-Naumburg significantly affected the regime's thinking in the field of architecture (certainly he did not have, even remotely, the importance of somebody like Albert Speer).

In conclusion, the pamphlet shows us how art literature became an instrument of the most radical and illegitimate political regime in history. The author expressly said it in the introduction: "We often come across with the opinion that art can produce so many pleasures, introducing the beauty in life. When it comes instead of the most important questions of life, art would have nothing to say. Who thinks so, is not clear on the concept of art and the scale of the task that it has to play in people's lives. Actually, those who think that artistic activity consists of the fact that one is rich enough to buy a French impressionist, in order to display it with pride to friends, capture a very small and not important piece of the whole. If you want to give a simple and essential meaning to the concept of art, you might say, it is always the expression of man's desire, which is hereby translated into a perceptible form. This putting-in-shape is a creative act, for which the artist forces are necessary. (...) The essential element of art, as we understand it, is therefore to always show a ‘spiritual direction’. And the idea of National Socialism is based on appropriately 'giving direction' to the German people and leading it to salvation. And since that task is substantially conducted with spiritual tools, national socialism cannot ignore the instrument of art" [35].

Unfortunately, whatever the abyss has been into which humanity was able to sink, there has always been found an artist who would be ready to offer the basics for theorizing it. The hope is that, at least in this case, history will not repeat itself.

NOTES

[1] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, Nationalsozialistische Bibliothek (National Socialist Library) N. 36. Franz-Eher-Verlag, Munich, 1932, 67 pages. The text is available on the website of the University of Frankfurt. See: 

http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/varia/content/pageview/7085418

[2] Schultze-Naumburg, Paul – Kunst und Rasse, Munich, J.F. Lehmanns, 1928, 144 pages. 

See: http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_image.cfm?image_id=4217. 

An English summary is available at: 

http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/CULT_SCHULTZE_ENG.pdf

[3] Schultze-Naumburg, Paul - Das Studium und die Ziele der Malerei: ein Vademecum für Studierende, Leipzig, Eugen Diederichs, 1896, 125 pages.

[4] Schultze-Naumburg, Paul - Technik der Malerei. Ein Handbuch für Künstler und Dilettanten. Leipzig, E. Haberland, 1900, 176 pages. 

See: https://archive.org/details/technikdermalere00schu.

[5] Schultze-Naumburg, Paul - Das Studium und die Ziele der Malerei. Jena, Eugen Diederichs, 1900, 98 pages.

[6] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), p. 8.

[7] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), p. 8.

[8] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), p. 6.

[9] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), p. 7.

[10] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), p. 37.

[11] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), p. 39.

[12] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), pp. 13-15.

[13] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), pp. 30-33.

[14] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), p. 33.

[15] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), p. 34.

[16] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), p. 40-44.

[17] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), p. 6.

[18] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), p. 5.

[19] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), p. 7.

[20] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), p. 5.

[21] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), p. 5.

[22] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), p. 67.

[23] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), p. 11.

[24] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), p. 11.

[25] Vinnen, Carl - Ein Protest deutscher Künstler, Jena, Eugen Diederichs, 1911, 80 pages.

[26] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), p. 6.

[27] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), p. 7.

[28] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), p. 12.

[29] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), p. 45.

[30] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), p. 45.

[31] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), pp. 8-9.

[32] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), pp. 9-10.

[33] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), p. 9.

[34] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), p. 9.

[35] Schultze-Naumburg, Kampf um die Kunst, (quoted), pp. 3-4.