Neurobioloska Osnova Emocija

By Pamela Potter

During the twelve years of the Third Reich's existence, there was no shortage of hyperbole in the representation of art's role and artists' obligations within the new state. Anyone who approaches the subject will be familiar with Leni Riefenstahl's brilliant piece of film propaganda, Triumph of the Will, with the sleek and imposing neoclassicism of the Olympic stadium and Reich Chancellery, with their muscle bound statuary and with Paul Ludwig Troost's House of German Art. Digging deeper, one discovers that Hitler laid the cornerstone for this art museum amidst a pompous procession of the history of "German" art that borrowed shamelessly from ancient Greece, and that the museum's grand opening in 1937 featured not only a hand-selected collection of works considered truly German but also an accompanying exhibit of illegally seized modernist art displayed, mockingly, as the "degenerate" work of charlatans, racial inferiors and the mentally deranged.

One year later it was music's turn with the creation of the Reich Music Days, which assembled music organizations from around the country and which Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels opened with a speech on the "ten commandments" for German music. A parallel exhibit on "degenerate music" vilified jazz, modernism and the alleged Bolshevik and Jewish domination of German musical taste under the Weimar Republic.

Yet, tempting though it may be to take the Degenerate Music exhibit at face value and to regard it as a global statement of Nazi Germany's repression of musical freedom, some important questions must be asked in order to arrive at an understanding of the event and its impact. Could an exhibit about music successfully convey a clear delineation between ideals of "good" and "bad" creative work as effectively as an exhibit of visual arts? Did this exhibit truly represent the state of German musical life at the time or merely the wishful thinking of rabid ideologues? The images and vitriolic language of this event are abhorrent to our twenty-first-century sensibilities, but how might such visual and verbal rhetoric have resonated in 1938?

Although the events of the Reich Music Days