Art and Propaganda in Concert/Theater Programs, Art Catalogues, and Brochures in Germany 1913-1961

Much has been written on the Nazi use of art and culture as propaganda tools. Perhaps the most famous example is the 1937 exhibition titled: Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art). The exhibition displayed more than 650 paintings, prints, sculptures, and books which were confiscated from over thirty German museums and claimed by the Nazi regime. Its aim was to demonstrate the distorted and depraved nature of expressionist and avant-garde art, which the Nazis referred to as “Jewish”. Alongside the Degenerate Art Exhibition, the Grosse deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition) served as a complementing example of a regime's dictation of a set of aesthetic values and preferences that aligns with its ideology. To contrast the modernist character of the so-called “degenerate art” the coinciding Grosse deutsche Kunstausstellung featured officially approved works of art comprising primarily of pieces glorifying Greek and Roman history, heroic battle scenes, as well as the enchantment of rural life. 

Heralding exhibitions like Entartete Kunst and the Grosse deutsche Kunstausstellung were publications such as Paul Schultze-Naumberg's Kunst und Rasse (Art and Race, 1928) and Die Kunst der Deutschen. Ihr Wesen und ihre Werke (The Art of the Germans. Its Nature and its Works, 1934) that served explicitly to associate particular works of art with specific ideologies. The theories evinced in these books set Greek and Roman sculptures as a physical ideal and contrast these with avant-garde, or modernist “degenerate” works, as they are called by Schultze-Naumberg, which, according to him, imitated physical deformities. 

However prevalent this explication of Nazi values through overt propaganda was, there were also numerous cultural events that took place in Germany during the Nazi regime—either theater performances, concerts, operas, or literary events—that were not accompanied by any explicit piece of propaganda meant to “illuminate” the works. Such events are perpetuated in the programs collected by Richard Campbell in the Richard Campbell Collection at the University of Colorado Boulder Special Collections and Archives. They detail the works (chiefly musical and theatrical) that were performed in various venues throughout Germany. While some programs may provide an anecdotal discussion of a formal or historical feature of the work such as the merits of sonata form in the traditional symphony or the plot of an opera by Richard Strauss that merely alludes to Nazi ideals, others seem at first glance to indicate nothing more than the titles of the works and name of artist(s).

The idea of the program itself, its design and distribution to the public—the audience of a cultural event—calls us to reflect on Adorno and Horkheimer's famous critique of the Culture Industry and particularly of advertising in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (originally published 1944, Trans. Edmund Jephcott, 2002):

“Today, When the free market is coming to an end, those in control of the system are entrenching themselves in advertising […] So complete is their triumph that in key positions it is no longer even explicit: the imposing buildings of the big companies, floodlit advertisements in stone, are free of advertising, merely displaying the illuminated company initials on their pinnacle, with no further need of self-congratulation […] Advertising becomes simply the art with which Goebbels presciently equated it, l'art pour l'art, advertising for advertising's sake, the pure representation of social power.” (DE, 132)  

Advertisements, say Adorno and Horkheimer, are no longer required to do actual advertising. What they stand for becomes abstract, its symbol as if detached from actual substance. A similar danger exists in the idea of l'art pour l'art, art for art's sake. The separation of art from life, its treatment as an absolute that has no bearing on social and political conditions, allows for the perpetuation of certain ideologies that now no longer need to be articulated. Thus, the names Goethe, Schiller, Liszt, or Beethoven on concert and theater programs no longer need further advocating. The program itself, disseminated among the crowd of spectators or listeners as though it were an advertisement of sorts, can display nothing but the name of an artist and the title of the work without further elaboration on how, if at all, the choice of this specific work fits into any particular ideology.