War and Bloody Ancient Greece

For Hitler, Aryan culture was something perfected thousands of years ago by the ancient Greeks and Romans, and he set the goal of returning to the purity once attained by these great european empires. Hitler's New Germany would mirror the art and architecture of the ancients. At the same time, Hitler labelled modern-art, any illustration where the sky wasn't an accurate blue, "degenerative". In 1938 he commissioned an exhibition called "Entartete Kunst" which was a collection of forcibly confiscated modern-art, displayed in a ramshackle way with derogatory captions. Millions saw the exhibition.

This (and my arts degree) got me thinking about what modernity and progress actually are. This mini-mini historical, fictiony story, about the Entartete Kunst exhibition, provides one perspective.   
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It was April 1937, and the tips of Heidi’s face were red with cold. She was waiting for the first delivery of paintings, standing below a banner that read “ENTARTETE KUNST (Degenerate Art), Open’s July 19^th”. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_art) . Across the road, the commuting workers walked like toy soldiers past Hitler’s Haus der Deutschen Kunst (Image of Haus der Deutschen Kunst). It was a new museum, the latest masterpiece to drop from Hitler’s dreams onto the streets of Munich. Looking at it, you could tell what it was that Hitler dreamt of for Germany. The museum had enormous concrete pillars and classical open steps: It was a dream about a purity that once existed.  With every new towering monument raised in its name, and with every new athletic male that was born, the German’s would return to the Aryan purity of the ancients. To Heidi, the museum looked like an old Greek ruin, but it had Nazi flags waiving either side of it- at least that was something new.

A tall green truck groaned to a halt, hanging over the gutter. Two soldiers dropped out, one laughing “Why didn’t you break his hands? Then he wouldn’t have been able to paint that shit again”. The other soldier asked for Heidi’s papers, and pointed her to the back of the truck. When she opened the door, a painting fell onto the snowed foot-path. She picked it up, and the snow underneath was left with a line of red; there was blood on the canvas-frame. It was a Kirchner, titled Brandenburger Tor (Image of Brandenburger Tor, Kirchner).   It showed a classical monumental building, just like the Haus der Kunst across the road, but it was bent and slipping down the canvas, in warm orange and blue. Its great pillars were buckled and out-of-place in Kirchner’s new world. Heidi took the Kirchner into the exhibition building, shaking her head and mouthing the words: “i’m sorry”.

The curator of Entartete Kunst, Zeigler, told Heidi to take the painting off the frame, and hang it at knee height in the next room. Eugen, who was working with Heidi, was in the second room, painting a sign on the wall. Heidi walked up behind him to read it: “which of these three drawings is the work of an inmate of a lunatic asylum?”. Heidi dropped the Kirchner, and fell to the ground with it.

Eugen turned from his ladder “Heidi?”. He jumped down, and knelt next to her. She was crying. “what’s wrong Heidi?”

Heidi gattle-gunned a sentence

“This is wrong. Its wrong but its still happening”

Eugen placed his hand on her back, she was shaking. She said

“Progress is just crap. You know I thought it was backward to steal paintings from people, to persecute people, but apparently that’s progress.”

“I know” said Eugen

Heidi looked back to the Kirchner on the ground “Forwards has nothing to do with progress, with what’s right. Everywhere, anywhere is forwards. War and Bloody ancient Greece are forwards from here.”