Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The political elite of Nazi Germany perceived itself as a cultural elite as well. In Art as Politics in the Third Reich , Jonathan Petropoulos explores the elite's cultural aspirations by examining both the formulation of a national aesthetic policy and the content of the private art collections held by high-ranking Nazis. He demonstrates that these leaders manipulated public policy and their own collecting patterns to articulate fundamental tenets of Nazi ideology.

Petropoulos begins by tracing the evolution of official aesthetic policy, from the purges of museum staff and academics labeled as 'undesirable' in 1933 to the confiscation of Jewish-owned artworks in the late 1930s and the organized plundering of art from occupied areas during the war. He then reconstructs the collections of a dozen prominent Nazi officials -- including Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Speer, and Ribbentrop -- and argues that their private holdings defined their relationships to one another within the Nazi hierarchy in addition to reflecting their racist and nationalist beliefs. According to Petropoulos, art collecting offered the political elite a way to achieve legitimacy and social standing, thereby providing a common cultural language for the leaders of the Third Reich.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Illustrations (p. ix)
• Acknowledgments (p. xiii)
• A Note on Names, Titles and Abbreviations (p. xv)
• Abbreviations and Acronyms (p. xvii)
• Introduction (p. 3)
• I Administering Art the Competition for Cultural Control (p. 17)
• Chapter 1 The Establishment of the National Socialist Cultural Bureaucracy 1933-1936 (p. 19)
• Chapter 2 Degenerate Art and State Interventionism, 1936-1938 (p. 51)
• Chapter 3 From Confiscation to Aryanization the Radicalization Cultural Policy, 1938-1939 (p. 75)
• Chapter 4 Art (p. 100)
• Chapter 5 Occupation and Exploitation, 1940-1943 (p. 123)
• Chapter 6 The Contraction of the Cultural Bureaucracy 1943-1945 (p. 151)
• II Collecting Art the Certification of an Elite (p. 177)
• Chapter 7 An Overview of the Leaders Colletions and Methods of Acquisition (p. 179)
• Chapter 8 Art Collecting as a Reflection of the National Socialist Leaders' Worldviews (p. 241)
• Chapter 9 Art Collecting and Interpersonal Relations among the National Socialist Elite (p. 262)
• Conclusion (p. 308)
• Appendix: Organizational Charts and Glossary of Key Figures (p. 313)
• Notes (p. 323)
• Bibliography (p. 385)
• Index (p. 417)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Numerous works, e.g., those by Berthold Hinz and Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, have detailed National Socialist antipathy towards modernism in the visual arts. Others have presented accounts portraying the "coordination" of artists under Goebbels's Reich Chambers (Alan Steinweis's Art, Ideology & Economics in Nazi Germany, 1993) or the wholesale wartime expropriation of European masterpieces (Lynn Nicholas's The Rape of Europa, CH, Nov'94). Petropoulos provides an in-depth description of two critical aspects of visual arts policies under the National Socialists. He discusses the multiple, confusing, and often overlapping jurisdictional bureaucracies entrusted with advancing Hitler's attacks on modernism. Second, he details the Nazi leaders' collecting proclivities and the confiscation of artworks for their personal collections. Using a variety of archival sources, Petropoulos convinces the reader that art was employed as a means of displaying power in the widest political sense. Dividing his account in two sections--administering art and collecting art--Petropoulos demonstrates the interconnectedness of the two enterprises and reminds the reader that for the Nazis, art was politics, and politics a high art. All levels. M. Deshmukh George Mason University

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Jonathan Petropoulos is John V. Croul Professor of European History at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California.