The recent exhibit,
New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919–1933, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was a very comprehensive thematic exhibit but somewhat complicated. Retrospective exhibits of an artist, or exhibits about a particular style such as the numerous shows on French Impressionism, or exhibits about a genre are much easier to understand. The New Objectivity was not a genre, art style or group of artists with a manifesto . The turbulent years of the Weimar Republic and the different art styles don't fall into a neat package. New Objectivity is the translation of Neue Sachlichkeit, a 1925 exhibition in Mannheim, that broke away from pre-war Expressionism. To convey Germany's devastating aftermath of the War and the ensuing inter war years of sexual expression, developments in industry and shifting gender identities a new realism would be needed. "Objectivity" implies a lack of interpretation or insight. However sachlich the adjective can mean "matter of fact" or "impartial." Sachlichkeit as a noun and has the implication of "that's the way things are". In much of the art of the New Objectivity there is plenty of interpretation. Verism, a term to show all the gritty details in a painting of sculpture can be exaggerated for social typecasting, sarcasm and emotional expression. New Objectivity is more of a practical engagement with the ongoing political and cultural events.
Pre-War Prostitutes
Prostitutes were on the streets of Berlin in large numbers even before the war. Kirchner moved to Berlin in 1911 and soon started painting his Street Scene series. Although they are in his expressionistic Die Brücke style with emotionally agitated zigzag angular brush strokes, there is realism in his representation of the prostitution in Berlin before the war. There was essentially no attempt by the police to restrict prostitution to designated areas of the city. Kirchner’s images reinforce the prevailing attitude that a well-dressed and behaved woman would be permitted on the fashionable streets. He also is one of the first artists to bring to Berlin the flâneur (stroller), essential to any literary work or painting of 19th century Paris.
After the war the number of prostitutes dramatically rose. The financial ruin of middle class families meant they could no longer afford their house servants who were frequently young unmarried women. It would be several years before there would be employment opportunities in the regrowth of industry. Ethnic Germans who before the war were living in the Eastern provinces of Prussia or Eastern Europe now found themselves in areas captured by Russia. Refugees, frequently widows with children, increased the population of Berlin. The unskilled unmarried woman suffered more than men during the hyperinflation from 1921 to 1924. Germany did not fund the war with taxes, borrowing or bonds. A victory and annexing territories rich in resources and industry was the plan to finance the War. The Mark devalued steadily during the war rom about 4 to 8 Marks to the Dollar. In November 1923 the exchange rate was 4,210,500,000,000 Marks to the Dollar.
Berlin became a destination for foreign sex tourists with convertible hard currency like Pounds Sterling or Dollars. Every specialty and age was available on the streets, in the brothels, private clubs, and the cabarets.
Currency revaluation plans were attempted, but it wasn't until 1925 that the economy was stabilizing. By 1925 about a third of the Germany's women were in the work force. Feminist culture studies blame the misogyny of Weimar culture to the New Woman taking jobs away from veterans.
Post-War Prostitutes
Post war New Objectivity depicted prostitution on the streets sarcastically and more realistically. Kirchner had both the women and the men fashionably dressed. He presented the prostitutes as integrated into street scenes on a par with the bourgeois flâneurs. But prostitutes don't act like the bourgeois strolling the sidewalks going to cafes or cabarets or looking at the fashions in the department store windows. They walk slower, often linger, make frequent eye contact, and nod to potential clients. It was illegal in Berlin for the prostitute to initiate a conversation. Fashion such as the color of their lace boots would be an indicator of their specialty. Grosz's
Before Sunrise, lacks the movement seen in Kirchner's street scenes, and their bodies are partially exposed. In Brüderstrasse a zaftig woman is leaning against the building. Dix's Three Prostitutes on the Street at fist glance looks like only the two standing on the right, with garish red blotchy faces are working. The one in the middle is in a typical pose hiking her skirt with her hand. The better dressed woman walking past them, with a blemish free white and her nose up in the air, looks like a bourgeois woman. The red gloves mark her as the third prostitute
The War Images
Otto Dix served in the forward trenches and kept a journal of what he experienced. In 1924, fifty of his etchings were published as
Der Krieg The fright on the soldier in
Wounded Soldier is probably because he knows he will be left lying in no man's land to die. Going "over the top" for an assault on the enemy's forward trench was suicidal. The new machine gun gave the advantage to the defensive positions.
It was not long after the war started that there was a stalemate as both sides dug a series of trenches from the sea to the Swiss border.
Well-dressed stretcher-bearers or ambulance drivers pay no attention to the victims of nerve gas or chlorine gas.
The German government censored images of poison gas victims during the war. In Great Britain The Daily Mirror
had a front page picture of two dead soldiers in a trench. The headline read, "DEVILRY, THY NAME IS GERMANY!": SOLDIERS TRAPPED BY A GAS CLOUD, LIE UNCONSCIOUS IN A TRENCH."
Death was a constant reality in the forward trenches – a sniper's bullet, artillery shell or a cloud of chlorine gas. This soldier must eat with the skeleton of death next to him.
The gas masks with the dark lenses surrounded by white make these troops look like living dead.
The returning troops are poorly clothed and look like walking dead. The administrative officer is well fed and has a clean nicely fitting uniform. In Stanley Kubrick’s anti-war film,
Paths of Glory (1957) the French General goes into one the forward trenches to lend moral support before the assault. A shell explodes and he is annoyed that his uniform sleeve got dirty. He sops talking to the soldier as he becomes preoccupied wiping off the sleeve of his ornate dress uniform.
Dix's art dealer, Karl Nierendorf. would not include
Soldier Raping a Nun in the original 1924 portfolio publication of the Der Kreig series. He felt it would be degrading to the surviving veterans tarnishing the image of the German hero. This event was never witnessed by Dix.
Mud was an enemy to soldiers to both the Allied and Central powers fighting in the trenches. Front line trenches were often shallow and didn't have walking boards. The next several rows of trenches were deeper and often had duck boards. After rains the water and mud often rose above the boards. Feet that were wet for as little as a day started to developed blisters and swelling. A few days more there were open sores and fungal infections. Later stages were characterized by tissue necrosis that required amputation. Having someone else in the platoon responsible to check a soldiers foot daily became highly effective in controlling the condition. Washing and drying the foot was the prevention.
Picasso's famous painting Guernica is considered the most powerful work about the horrors of aerial warfare to helpless civilians. But Guernica is symbolic painting that has almost as many interpretations as viewers. Dix's expressionistic sketch doesn't require interpretation. The terror in the faces of the of the women and children in the foreground running from the Allied biplane is so intense that it is felt by the viewer and doesn't need interpretation. Adding to the tension is that the plane is low and large, almost touching the roofs on both sides of the street. With it's nose pointing down it looks like the plane had been in aerial combat and is now going to crash in the street. The dead people lying on the street make it clear that the plane deliberately strafed the street. The picture might have been more famous if it were a German plane committing the atrocity.
The environmental destruction of the battlefield has a haunting quality as he captured how the field looked from a falling flare. The craters would fill with rain and would slow an advance through no man's land giving the defensive machine gunners in the front trenches soldiers an even better advantage.
The dead sentry has a bare foot and mangled limbs probably from an exploding artillery shell. Dix has vividly shown numerous ways a soldier could meet death at any moment.
Dix explained in an interview why he volunteered to go to the front trenches. "I had to experience how someone beside me suddenly falls over and is dead and the bullet has hit him squarely. I had to experience that quite directly. I wanted it. I’m therefore not a pacifist at all – or am I? Perhaps I was an inquisitive person. I had to see all that myself. I’m such a realist, you know, that I have to see everything with my own eyes in order to confirm that it’s like that. I have to experience all the ghastly, bottomless depths of life for myself…"
The soldier in the foreground is looking at the well dressed Belgium prostitutes and is disgusted at what he sees. He might be thinking that they are war profiteers but in fact they lived in terrible conditions and paid high prices for food and shelter. Venereal disease was so high among German soldiers, that the army had officially sanctioned brothels where military doctors inspected the women. The soldiers were issued ration coupons to the brothels. Dix often frequented the brothels.
Kirchner volunteered for military service in September 1914. In 1915, he had a nervous breakdown and was drinking heavily and developed a dependence on morphine and barbiturates. He also had a hysterical paralysis with his hands and feet partially paralyzed. He returned to Berlin and painted Self Portrait as a Soldier. It is in his imagination that he has lost his right hand and no longer will be able to paint. Feminist criticism of this painting is that Kirchner is blaming the nude model for not being able to paint and be creative. In this painting there is no emotional connection between him and the model, as there was in his previous works wit a model in the background. Kirchner stands detached and castrated without a hand in front of what he would need to make art – an easel and a model. Later Kirchner was living in Davos Switzerland and was convinced the Germans would invade. He committed suicide in 1938.
Lustmord
Lustmord is usually translated as "sex-murder." However, the German word
lust is similar to the English words
lust or
pleasure. Lustmord art appeared even before the war ended. Henrich Maria Davringhausen’s , The Sex Killer, 1917, is strikingly similar to Manet’s Olympia 1917 with a cat on the bed but also a serial killer under the bed. What caused this graphic art in Germany has been intesely debated. The general thread in feminist criticism since the 1970's has been that there were social anxieties about the roll of women that artists, intellectuals, and the middle class shared or Men’s fear of women was heightened by the feelings of vulnerability and impotence that soldiers had experienced during the war.
A simpler more direct explanation is that there was an unusual number of serial killers in Germany. There were frequent sensational headlines that had the population constantly aware about serial killers. The artists were drawing what was happening rather than anti women sentiments. During one week in February 1909, thirty Berlin women were stabbed by an unknown attacker. B.Z. am Mittag (Berlin newspaper at noon) put on the front page "Das Schrecken von Berlin" (the fright of Berlin). Newspaper sellers announced the headlines to sell papers and many of the serial killers had vivid nicknames.
Fritz Haarmann, who sexually assaulted and dismembered at least 42 boys and young men from 1918 until his arrest in 1924, was known as both the Butcher of Hanover because of his mutilation of the bodies and the Vampire of Hanover because he usually bit through the neck into the throat.
In August 1921, Carl Friedrich Grossmann was arrested in his apartment after neighbors heard a woman screaming. The police found a dead woman on the bed. Neighbors then told the police that many women had gone to his apartment for several years but they couldn’t recall more than a few who had left. Großmann sold meat on the black market and also had frankfurter stand.
Friedrich Schumann raped and killed women between 1911 and 1919,and was known as the “Massenmörder vom Falkenhagener”. His title has often been translated into English as the Terror of Falkenhagen Lake, however the German word Massenmörder means mass murderer. His infamy continued because Schumann went to trial and was beheaded two years later in 1921
In 1924, Karl Denke was arrested after he attacked a man with an axe. Police searched his home and found flesh in jars of curing salts. Denke had methodically kept a ledger that had details of at lest 42 people he had killed and eaten. He hanged himself in jail before he acquired a nickname.
During most of 1929, Peter Kürten committed a series of rapes and murders and was known as the Düsseldorf Monster. After he drank the blood of a killed swan he was also known as the Vampire of Düsseldorf. Prior to his arrest it was not known if the Butcher and the Vampire of Düsseldorf were the same person
The executioner was also part of the public spectacle. Carl Gröpler wore a tailcoat, top hat, and white gloves. His identity was not secret. Theodor Lessing, the German Jewish philosopher, nicknamed him the "Red Judge." Gröpler used an axe to behead the condememed. In some cities he used a guillotine.
During the early years of the Republic, there were several classic German Expressionism horror films. In F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). Orlok a vampire terrorizes the city of Wisborg. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) directed by Robert Wiene, features an insane hypnotist who uses a somnambulist to commit murders. In The Head of Janus (1920) directed by F. W. Murnau, a Dr. Warren played by Conrad Veidt is transformed into the madman Mr. O'Connor through a bust of Janus and then terrorizes the city.
Georg Wilhelm Pabst directed Pandora's Box (1929). The American actress Louise Brooks who popularized the flapper look with the bobbed hairstyle and short skirt, played Lulu a woman who had committed two murders and fled to London. She is in a desperate financial situation and becomes a street prostitute. Out of the London fog lurks Jack. A sign (in German) on a wall warns London women about a man who is killing women. She entices Jack to be her first customer. He says he has no money but she says she likes him and invites him inside, perhaps because It is Christmas eve. They embrace on the stairs and Jack pulls a knife out of his pocket. After the camera has lingered on the knife, he decides to drop it. When they embrace inside her room, he sees another knife on the table. There are reaction shots of his demonic expressions and cuts back to the knife. He finally can’t control his urge and kills her.
In 1931 Fritz Lang’s M, about a serial killer of children in Berlin was released. There were no vampires, hypnotisms or transformations, but there was Peter Lorre in his first role, playing the creepy looking serial killer Franz Becker. Alfred Hitchcock, who had worked in Germany in 1924 and 1925, continued to make films about serial killers for almost half a century. In The Lodger (1927), “The Avenger” kills blonde women on Tuesday nights. In Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Charlotte "Charlie" Newton suspects her Uncle Charles "Charlie" Oakley of being the "Merry Widow Murderer". With the similarity in names is Hitchcock saying there is the potential for murder inside each of us? In Psycho (1960) Norman Bates had poisoned his Mother and Stepfather. Ten years later he stabbed Marion Crane in the shower. In Frenzy (1972), "The Necktie Murderer” is raping women and then strangling them.
The War Wounded
Otto Dix made several satirical paintings and sketches of wounded veterans.
The Match Seller, reveals a blind veteran missing both legs. The three well dressed people from higher classes, who probably did not serve in the trenches or as nurses in battlefield hospitals, are hurrying away from him. Only their lower extremities are seen. The little daschund is lifting his leg and urinating on the veteran's stump.
There are two amputee veterans in
Pragerstrasse, 1920. In the shop window are artificial limbs, trusses, and a corset. An well off gentleman wearing a gold cuff link is dropping a worthless postage stamp into the man's hand. Under the wheels of the board that supports the other veteran is a leaflet that says, "Juden raus!" (Jews out!). Veteran organizations were usually anti-Semitic and a ready made audience for ultra-nationalist propaganda.
Large gaping facial wounds were often seen in surviving veterans. World War I ordinance did not have the explosive power to create small high velocity fragments of the casing. The larger slower moving fragments caused large soft tissue wounds.
Two Victims of Capitalism shows a prostitute with a syphilitic lesion on her face that looks like a bullet hole and a veteran with a battlefield wound that is shaped like a vagina. The original title was
Whore With War Cripple, but was renamed when it was reprinted in the communist journal Die Pleite.
The caustic irony in Otto Dix's
War Cripples is that the three men who have lost their legs
are now parading past a shoe maker's shop with the sign "Schuhmacherei" and the boot in the window.
In Dix's The Salon, aging women are surviving the economic crisis by resorting to prostitution. The under weight women on the right is revealing her long pendulous breasts through the shear flimsy gown. Thy patiently sit waiting to make some money.
The Cabarets
The left panel of
Metropolis shows a crippled war veteran in a poor section of Berlin being greeted by a line of prostitutes. A man is lying or dead in the street. In the center panel is the prosperity of the city inside a jazz club or cabaret. On the right are the flashy prostitutes in an affluent part of the city.
In Tingel-Tangel the patrons seem to be oblivious to the partially naked performers. The man in an army uniform is not watching the show. the two well to do men, one in a Fedora, the other with a monocle also are not interested. The partially naked prostitute at the table in Ziegler's Couple at a Table, doesn't seem to be successful at stimulating the man. Probably all she will get from him is the drink and she will move on to another table.
To Beauty is a self portrait of Otto Dix. There really is no beauty in this brothel. Only Dix and the drummer seem to have any emotion. Dix with a threatening look and the black man with an absurd smile that reinforces a racial stereotype. The handkerchief in his breast pocket is an American flag. 1922 is a little early for Black musicians to be performing in Berlin. At this time most black musicians were in Paris. The torso of the woman is supported by a metal pole and is mannequin for wigs.
Max Beckmann revealed himself through a series of self portraits over his career.
Self- portrait with Champagne glass was done a few months after he was in Berlin during the bloody street battles of the March Rebellion in 1919. His glass of champagne is upright but the wall is canted. Alcohol could provide comfort in a violent distorted city.
He was awarded a very prestigious university position in Frankfort in 1927, and felt that artists were part of a social elite and ambassadors of the state. . The tuxedo was his uniform. There is very little in the painting to detract from the black and white of his uniform, while he portrays himself as self assured and arrogant.
Anita Berber frequently danced in cabarets totally nude. Her drug addiction and bisexuality were no secret. Besides alcohol, cocaine and opiates she was partial to chloroform mixed with ether. She frequently would be in a hotel lobby nude but partially covered with a fur coat. There is no anti male criticism of Grosz portrayal of the well to do cabaret patron as a pig. The nude prostitute at his cabaret table has been the target of how male artists portray women.
Fetishes for Every Fancy
There is a definite realism in Rudolf Schlicter art about sado masochism because he also was an avid practitioner. In 1927, he met Elfriede Elisabeth Koehler, he called Speedy, a prostitute from Geneva who had a passion for bondage.. Later he felt he needed to be punished for his transgressions and re joined the Catholic Church and started moving in conservative circles. He has been quoted as saying, "There is no more unfortunate creature under the sun than a fetishist who yearns for a woman’s shoe and has to settle for the whole woman.”
Meeting of Fetishists and Maniacal Flagellants is a realistic depiction of a group scene that has not changed in clubs today – nude submissives and clothed dominants and voyeurs.
The gay and lesbian magazines ran ads for the clubs and also personal ads. In 1923 an personal ad read, A young married couple seeks social connection. Wouldn't it be nice if we were similarly sympathetic?" Police were known to write letters to the magazines. Certain level of vagueness was required to avoid a fine. A man named Bock responded to an ad saying, "Wouldn't it be lovely if we could exchange our wives and enjoy communal love? We are 26 and 28 years old . My wife is skinny and red-blond. I am dark and of middle height." Block was arrested and fined for obscenity.
Schlicther's own personal experience gave his work more realism than other artists' work about alternative sexual activities.
Androgyny
Otto dix has exagerated the androgynous look of Sylvia von Harden, a poet and writer of short stories who frequented the Romanisches Café in Berlin and sat at her corner table. The café regulars were the who's who of the Belin avante garde, including Oto Dix, Bertolt Brecht, George Grosz, Alfred Döblin, Joachim Ringelnatz, Erich Maria Remarque, and Billy Wilder. Aspiring writers would go the Romanisches Café in hopes of launching their careers. Those already established were at tables séparées. At the beginning of the 1972 musical film
Cabaret, about 20 seconds after Joel Grey starts to sing "Willkommen", there is a brief recreation of this painting. Von Harden loved this caricature of herself. Many of the industrialists hated the distortions in their portraits by Dix. Her female figure is flattened by the dress. The fingers are grossly elongated and her left hand covers her breasts and the left goes across her pelvis. Her hair was in the new bob style or as it is called in German, Bubikopf. Dix told von Harden "I must paint you! I simply must! ... You are representative of an entire epoch!' The monocle was Dix's idea.
The more traditional couple in the background are gossiping about the absurdity of Fräulein Mia a man wearing high heeled shoes or a woman in a man's jacket and tie. She forgets she has her hair almost as short in the now accepted Bubikopf.
Many of the works of Anton Räderscheidt depict a stiff couple where the woman resembles his wife the painter Martha Hegemann. There is the implication that he has painted himself as a woman, although the self portrait maybe him in front of a painting of a woman.
Marlene Dietrich's androgynous costumes and dress were known world wide but it happened after she left Germany. Josef von Sternberg, the Austrian American film director was invited to make the first feature-length full-talkie in Germany, The Blue Angel (1930), a co production of Paramount and UFA. English and German versions were made simultaneously. Dietrich played Lola Lola, a cabaret performer in a top hat but with her legs exposed. Von Sternberg bought her to Hollywood, where they made six more films together. In her first American film Morocco (1930), Sternberg insisted that she wear a black tuxedo. Her insatiable sexual appetite for both women and men started in Germany, but received its notoriety in America.
Gender Issues
Gay magazines started being published before the turn of the century and and increased after the war. Magnus Hirschfeld a Jewish German physician became the world’s most renowned sexologist. A journalist Maximilian Harden published an article in 1907, that General Kuno von Moltke was having a homosexual relationship with Prince Philip von Eulenburg, Kaiser Wilhelm’s best friend. Molke filed criminal liabilty against Harden, who was found not guilty. A civil suit followed. The homosexual cicle around the Kaiser and in the military was exposed. From 1906 to 1907, six military officers committed suicide. Hirschfeld, a homosexual, testified that homosexuality was part of a normal spectrum of of human sexuality. The judge, outraged because “homosexuals have the morals of dogs” reversed the jury verdict. Nationalist political groups and newspapers (völkisch) relentleslly villified him as a Jew and homosexual. Posters appeared that read, “Dr. Hirschfeld A Public Danger: The Jews are Our Undoing!”
Under the liberal Weimar Reublic he opened in 1919 the Institute of Sexual Research in Berlin.
In last year’s film The Danish Girl, Lili goes to Weimar Germany for her sex reassignment surgery. Actually she had four surgical procedures. The first was done in Berlin under Hirschfeld’s supervision was removal of the testicles. The other three were performed in Dresden by Kurt Warnekros, a gynecologist. The procedures included an ovary implanted into the abdominal wall, the removal of her external genitalia, and then a uterine transplant with vaginal construction. She died after the fourth procedure. To perform the transplant in an era without tissue typing, antibiotics, and immunosuppressive drugs to prevent transplant rejection was the result of a surgeon’s overextended ego and criminal.
Krall was a well known homosexual who travelled in openly gay circles. In this portrait Dix has him turned in a pose more typical of female models. Dix has exaggerated his appearance by painting him as if he were squeezed into a tight corset painting his head red as if the blood were stagnating in the skin. Possibly he is wearing lipstick and makeup. His name Krall is similar to the word "Kralle" which means claw or talon. Dix has distorted the fingers of the left hand to be like claws as they grasp his jacket. The painting is culturally important because it is from an era when homosexuals were becoming more visible and important.
The Economic Recovery
How Germany went from a defeated country in 1919 with the burden of massive reparations payments, triple digit inflation during the immediate post war years followed by the hyper inflation from 1921 to 1924, an economic crisis in 1931 during the world wide Great Depression, to a rearmed country that was able to wage war against France, England, the Soviet Union, and the United States was beyond most of the world's comprehension. The Treaty Versailles imposed harsh reparations on Germany to pay for the cost of civilian damage in Europe. The total cost was set at 132 billion gold Marks (US$ 33 billion).
In 1923 Germany defaulted on its quota to deliver steel and iron. Belgium and France then occupied the Ruhr valley. Future Vice President of the United States, Charles G. Dawes reorganized the reparations and the United States loaned Germany $800 million. When the Mark stabilized foreign investment came into Germany. In 1929 Owen Young, ex president of RCA created a plan to end the reparations. The plan would be financed with loans from U.S. Investment banks and coordinated by J.P Morgan. These plans closely linked the German economy to that of the United States and subsequently Germany was directly affected by the Depression of the 1930’s. During a depression prices drop and those with money can buy more goods and services. Foreign tourists with money liked what they could now get at bargain prices in the cabarets and clubs of Berlin
The Profiteer, 1920-1921was made during the low triple digit inflation. The safe on the right contains no money. Only a small businessman would need money. He only needs a telephone in his office. He could borrow money to buy materials or other companies and then pay back the loan when the money was worthless. This cycle initially helped the German economy. The skyscrapers without any ornamentation on the facades did not exist at this time. Fritz Lang’s vision of stripped down facades in the film Metropolis was filmed in 1926. The Empire State Building with minimal ornamentation on the lower floors was started in 1930
Most of the battlefields on the western front were in Belgium and France. Some of the Eastern Front battles were in East Prussia, which is now Poland. German industrial sites were intact after the war. An intact industrial infrastructure allowed Germany to experience a more rapid economic expansion.
Karl Völker also worked as an architect. His paintings of buildings have very strong diagonal lines and receding perspectives to emphasize the architectural structures.
Concrete, also known as Factory by a Railroad Track has the look of tracks descending into the factory. The diagonal of the top of the brown wall on the right causes this illusion. In realty trains can only navigate very low grades. The slow speed required to go into the factory to be loaded or unloaded would necessitate there be no grade.
Grossberg's industrial images are using "precisionisn," considered an American style developed after WWI. The style suited Hitler well to showcase his modern and rapid tecnologocal growth. The precisionist style was in keeping with the goals of national socialism.
This photo essay starts before the Weimar era with Krichner's expressionism of pre war Berlin street Scenes. It ends a year after Hitler becomes Chancellor with these industrial Precisionist paintings.
Most of the pevious works were labeled Entartete Kunst or Degenerate Art and were confiscated from public museums in German. Hitler picked what he liked about America before the Second World War including most Hollywood films but not Jazz, Swing Dancing, Benny Goodman, or Olympic Medalist Jesse Owens.
