Adolf Hitler's speech at the opening of the
"Great German Art Exhibition" in the new House of German
Art in Munich (München) 18.7.1937
At the festive laying of the foundaton stone for this building four years
ago, we were all aware that not only the stone for a new house was to be
laid but that the ground had to be pepard for a new and truly German art.
We had to bring about a change [turning point] in the development of the
entire German
cultural creation.
[ . . . ]
The collapse and general decay of Germany was ... not only economic or
political but, perhaps to a much greater extent, cultural. This cannot be
explained by the fact of the lost war alone.
Such disasters happen to peoples and states, and they
are often the motivation for their purification.. The flood of mud and
debris that the year
1918 brought to the
surface of our lives was not caused by the loss of the war, but was only
released by it. A thoroughly corrupt body learned only by the
defeat the whole extent of its internal decomposition. After the
collapse of the seeming order of our previous social, governmental and
cultural forms, the already existing vulgarity began to triumph
in all areas of our lives.
The economic decline was naturally the most tangible, because
it imposed itself most insistently on the people's consciousness.
The political collapse was simply denied by many Germans or at least not
recognized. The cultural was neither seen nor understood by the vast
majority of our people.
It is noteworthy that along with the general decline and collapse, buzz-
words and phrases began to triumph in the very same proportions.
But it was difficult to fight a very real economic collapse with bombastic
pale theories. Certainly, there was much talk of modern
achievements socialist or communist content, of liberal economic views, of
the eternal laws national economic facts or conditionalities. The
general poverty, especially the unemployment of millions was not altered,
nor were those affected dissuade the consequences. So it was much harder to
hide by buzzwords or phrases, the economic collapse of the nation, or its
politcal collapse.
Some concealment of the problem was achieved for a certain period of time
by the
November Republic. This was born along with democratic and
Marxist phrases and continued references to international solidarity, the
effectiveness of international institutions, etc. The effect on the German
people was to obstruct their understanding of the full extent of the
disaster.
In the long run, buzz-words succumbed to the impact of the facts
- but only thanks to the Nazi
Enlightenment (nationalsozialistischen Aufklärung). More
and more people
realised that what the marxist-parliamentary democracy and economic
management had done was to constantly increase ideological and political
fragmentation, undermining the possibility of a unified national feeling
and
thus the national community, and paralysing the
inner and outer life force of our people. This weakening of the internal
German body led to that international lawlessness in which
foreign policy was a constant denial of equal rights for Germany. It is
only a belief in the forgetfulness of people when foreign politicians or
diplomats give the impression that all would be well if we had a democracy.
Well, having
a
parliamentary-democratic, foreign form of
government, copied from abroad, did not prevent Germany being blackmailed
and
plundered a few years ago.
No: For very understandable reasons our internal and external
enemies tried to put the German collapse [swoon - faint] into a different
language [spell it differently] with a haze of formal international
customary phrases. But the hardness of the facts has helped to
educate the German people, and to open its eyes about the extent of the
collapse and decay it had suffered under the auspices of his Western-
oriented democratic
League of Nations ideologues (Völkerbundsideologen). Much
more successful and
especially persistent contrast was achieved by Keyword and Phrase confusion
of views about the nature of culture in general and of German cultural life
and cultural decay in particular.
First is
1. The circle of people involved in cultural matters is not nearly as large
as the number who have to deal with economic tasks;
2. Judaism has more control of resources and facilities in this area as in
every other area that shapes public opinion. The Jews have especially taken
advantage of their position in the press, by means of so-called art
criticism, gradually to confuse not only the
natural views about the nature and function of art as well as their
purpose, but even to destroy the overall healthy feeling in this field.
[ . . . ]
There was now no art of peoples, or rather of races, anymore, but only arts
of the times. According to this theory, Greek art was not shaped by the
Greeks, but is an expression of the time in which it was created.
...
Therefore there is now no German, no French, Japanese or Chinese art, but
it is just "modern"... marked today with the word "modern" and therefore
tomorrow unfashionable because it will be outdated.
...
And according to the principle: Every year something different. Once
Impressionism, then Futurism, Cubism, Dadaism, etc.
[ . . . ]
Wenn ich mir nun anmaße, hier ein Urteil abzugeben, meine
Auffassungen zu
äußern und entsprechend diesen Erkenntnissen zu handeln, dann
nehme ich
zunächst das Recht hierzu in Anspruch nicht nur aus meiner Einstellung
zur
deutschen Kunst überhaupt, sondern vor allem auch aus meinem eigenen
Beitrag, den ich für die Wiederherstellung der deutschen Kunst
geleistet
habe.
If I presume to make a judgment, speak my opinion,
and act accordingly, I do this not just because of my outlook on German
art, but I claim this right
because of the contribution I myself have made to the restoration of German
art. Because our
present state, which I and my comrades in the struggle have
created, has alone provided
German art with the conditions for a new, vigorous flowering.
It was not Bolshevik art collectors or their literary henchmen who laid the
foundation for a new
art or even secured the continued existence of art in Germany. No,
we were the ones who
created this state and have since then provided vast sums for the
encouragement of art. We
have given art great new tasks.
[ . . . ]
For art happens to be no fashion. As little as changing the essence and
blood of our people, the art must lose the character of the ephemeral to
be, instead, in their continued enhancing a pictorial creations worthy
expression of the life course of our people. Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism,
Impressionism, etc. have nothing to do with our German people. For all
these terms are neither old nor are they fashionable, but they are just the
ramblings contrived by people to whom God denied the grace of a truly
artistic talent and has it given the gift of the clamorous or deceptive.
I declare here and now that it is my irrevocable resolve
that just as in the sphere of political bewilderment, I am going to make a
clean sweep of phrases
in the artistic life of Germany. "Works of art" which cannot be
comprehended and are validated
only through bombastic instructions for use ... from now on will no longer
be foisted upon the German people!
All these buzzwords such as "inner experience", "strong spirit", "powerful
will", "promising sensation," "heroic attitude", "significant empathy",
"experienced time order", "original primitive", etc., all those stupid,
hypocritical excuses, phrases, or chatter will make any excuse or
endorsement for worthless in itself, simply because ungekonnte more
products. Whether someone has a strong will or an inner experience, which
he likes for his work and not through chattering harsh words prove.
We are more interested in ability than in so-called intent. An artist who
is counting on having his works displayed, in this House or anywhere else
in Germany, must possess ability.
The will is surely self-evident from the start! For it would be the
highest of all, if a man molested his fellow citizens with works in which
he did not even want to do.
These windbags have tried to make their works more palatable by
representing them as expressions of a new age; but they need to be told
that art does not create a new age, that it is the general life of peoples
which fashions itself anew and therefore often seeks to express itse lf
anew.
Only that which spoke in the last decades in Germany of new art that has
the new German time at any rate not understood. Because writers are not the
designer of a new era, but the fighting men who truly shape, and lead lead
people and make history. For this purpose, these poor, confused or Pinsler
scribblers will but hardly expected.
Aside from that, it is either impudent effrontery or an inscrutable
stupidity to exhibit to our own age works that might have been made ten or
twenty thousand years ago by a man of the Stone Age. They talk of primitive
art, but they forget that it is not the function of art to retreat backward
from the level of development a people has already reached. The function of
art can only be to symbolize the vitality of this development.
The new
age of today is at work on a new human type. Tremendous efforts are being
made in countless spheres of life in order to elevate our people, to make
our men, boys, lads, girls, and women healthier and thus stronger
and more beautiful. From this strength and beauty streams forth a new
feeling of life, and a new joy in life.
Never before was humanity in its
external appearance and perceptions closer to the ancient world than it is
today.
Sports, competition and fighting games steels million youthful body and
show it to us now rising in a form and constitution, as they might have
been a thousand years not seen hardly guessed. A bright beautiful type of
person, to grow, pays homage to the beautiful old adage for the highest
performance: Acid weeks, but happy festivals.
The type of person we saw appear before the whole world last year during
the Olympic games in his brilliant, proud, physical strength -
this type of person, gentlemen prehistoric art stutterer is the type of the
new age.
But what do you
manufacture? Deformed cripples and cretins, women who inspire only
disgust, men who are more like wild beasts, children who, if they were
alive, would be regarded as God's curse! How dare these cruel amateurs
... imagine this as the art of our time, that is as the expression of what
shapes the present time and stamps it image on it.
Let no one say that that
is how these artists see things. From the pictures submitted for
exhibition, I must assume that the eye of some men shows them things
different
from the way they really are. There really are men who can see in the
shapes of our people only decayed cretins; who feel that meadows are blue,
the heavens green, clouds sulfur-yellow. They like to say that they
experience these things in this way.
I do not want to argue about whether or not they really experience this.
But in the name of the German people I only want to prevent these pitiable
unfortunates, who clearly suffer from defective vision, from attempting
with their chatter to force on their contemporaries the results of their
faulty observations, and indeed from presenting them as "art."
Here there
are only two possibilities open: either these so - called artists really do
see things this way and believe in that which they create - and if so, one
has to investigate how this defective vision arose - if it is a mechanical
problem or if it came about through heredity. The first case would be
pitiable, while the second would be a matter for the Ministry of the
Interior, which would then deal with the problem of preventing the
perpetuation of such horrid disorders. Or they themselves do not believe in
the reality of such impressions, but are for different reasons attempting
to ann oy the nation with this humbug. If this is the case, then it is a
matter for a criminal court.
This House, in any case, was not planned or built for the works of art
incompetents or for maltreaters of art. A thousand workmen did not labor
for four and a h alf years on this building only to have creations
exhibited here by people who are lazy to excess and who spend but five
hours bespattering a canvas, while hoping confidently that the boldness of
the pricing would produce the desired effect and result in t he hailing of
the work as the most brilliant lightning - birth of a genius. No, the hard
work of the builders of this House demands equally hard work from those who
want to exhibit here. I do not care in the least if these pseudo - artists
then are left to cackle over each other's eggs!
The artist does not create for the artist, but for the people! We will see
to it that from here on the people will be called on to judge their own
art. No one must say that the people have no appreciation for a truly
valuable e nrichment of its cultural life. Long before the critics did
justice to the genius of a Richard Wagner he had the people on his side.
For their part, however, during the last few years the people have had no
affinity for the so - called modern art that was pl aced before them. The
mass of the people moved through our art exhibits in a completely
uninterested fashion or stayed away altogether. The people's healthy
perceptions recognized that all these smearings of canvas were really the
outcome of an impudent an d unashamed arrogance or of a simply shocking
lack of skill. Millions of people felt instinctively that these art -
stammerings of the last few decades were more like the achievements that
might have been produced by untalented children of from eight to ten years
old and could under no circumstances be regarded as the expression of our
own time or of the German future.
Since we know today that the development of millions of years repeats
itself in every individual but is compressed into a few decades, we hav e
the proof that an artistic creation that does not surpass the achievement
of eight - year - old children is not "modern" or even "futuristic" but is,
on the contrary, highly archaic. It probably is not as developed as the art
of the Stone Age period, when pe ople scratched pictures of their
environment on the walls of caves. [ . . . ]
I know, therefore, that when the Volk passes through these galleries it
will recognize in me its own spokesman and counselor [ . . . ] it will draw
a sigh of relief and joyously express its agreement with this purification
of art. And this is decisive, for an art that cannot count on the ready
inner agreement of the broad, healthy mass of the people, but which must
instead rely on the support of small, partially indifferent cliqu es, is
intolerable. [ . . . ] We are convinced that the German people will again
fully support and joyously appreciate the future truly great artists from
within their ranks. [ . . . ]
This exhibition then is but a beginning.
[ . . . ]
But the opening of
this exhibit is also the
beginning of the end of the stultification of German art and the end of the
cultural destruction of
our people.
[ . . . ]
Many of our young artists will recognize the path they will have to take;
they will draw inspiration from the greatness of the time in which we all
live, and they will draw the courage to work hard and will in the end
complete the task. And when a sacred conscientiousness at last comes into
its own, then, I have no doubt, the Almighty will lift from this mass of
decent creators of art, several individuals who will rise to the eternal
star - covered heaven of immortal, God - favored artists of great ages. [ .
. . ] We believe that especially today, when in so many spheres the highest
individual achievements are standin g the test, so also in the sphere of
art will the highest value of personality again emerge to assert itself
[ . . . ]
I hereby declare the great German Art Exhibition 1937 of Munich opened!
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