Although the Third Reich famously suppressed what it labeled “degenerate art,” it gave a fair amount of leeway to actors, architects, artists, musicians, and filmmakers—provided they had no Jewish ancestry, weren’t socialists, and were willing to keep any questionable political opinions to themselves. In a new book, Jonathan Petropoulos explores the careers of such artists and the moral compromises they made. Mark Falcoff writes in his review:
The Nazis welcomed the accommodations [of these artists] because they had settled on no hard-and-fast aesthetic of their own. From the late 1920s, the Nazi-party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg attempted to separate “good” and “bad” art through his Fighting League for German Culture, calling for a kind of “blood and soil” folklorism in the plastic arts and literature. But his efforts came largely to naught, partly because while the Nazis knew what they didn’t like, they weren’t so certain about what they did. Even Expressionism, the quintessential art form of the Weimar Republic, was not ruled out of bounds during the National Socialist period. . . .
[Joseph] Goebbels’s control of German culture operated through a series of “chambers” (literature, film, music, etc.) and also through preexisting “academies,” which he immediately purged of Jews and leftists. But a surprising number of creative people looked past this detail and were happy to work with a regime that, unlike its predecessor, was generous with funding for the arts. The poet Gottfried Benn, a modernist, served for a time as head of the Prussian Academy. Moreover, as Petropoulos writes, “among non-Jewish writers a relatively large number with stronger-than-average talent were accepted by the regime.”
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/artistic-collaboration/