Abstract
Even today, more than sixty years after the German surrender in 1945, accounts of the transatlantic interchange between Germany and the United States about Hitler’s artists in exile inaccurately dramatize them as representatives of all the victims of the Third Reich. Undoubtedly, the experience of exile and emigration changed the path of artists’ lives significantly. Many encountered the geopolitical displacement as double loss: they felt exiled from Nazi Germany and as outsiders in the United States. Although their traumatic experiences unify them as a social group, their reasons for emigration and exile vary greatly These include political and racial persecution, individual decisions to pursue life in a democracy and the simple fact of better career opportunities in the New World. Similarly, to follow their aesthetic endeavors means to follow individual creators rather than to identify collective goals and a unified artistic voice.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Sibyl Milton, “Is there an Exile Art or only Exiled Artists,” Exil: Literatur und die Künste nach 1933 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1990), 83–89.
See Jan Assmann and Tonio Hölscher, eds., Kultur und Gedächtnis (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1988)
Mieke Bai, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, eds., Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999)
Harald Welzer, ed., Das soziale Gedächtnis. Geschichte, Erinnerung und Tradierung (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001)
Etienne Francois and Hagen Schulze, eds., Deutsche Erinnerungsorte; 3 vols. (Munich: Beck, 2001).
Rosamunde Neugebauer, “Avantgarde im Exil? Anmerkungen zum Schicksal der bildkünstlerischen Avantgarde Deutschlands nach 1933 und zum Exilwerk Richard Lindners,” Exil und Avantgarden, ed. Claus-Dieter Krohn (Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 1998), 35
Christoph Zuschlag, “Entartete Kunst.” Ausstellungsstrategien im Nazi-Deutschland (Worms: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1995).
Werner Haftmann, Verfemte Kunst: Malerei der inneren und äußeren Emigration (Cologne: DuMont, 1986), 17.
Donald Kuspit, “Flak from the ‘Radicals’: The American Case against Current German Painting,” Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 137–151.
Leslie Topp, “Moments in the Reception of Early Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Decorative Arts in the United States,” New Worlds: German and Austrian Art 1890–1940, ed. Renée Price (New York: Neue Galerie, 2001), 579.
Sabine Eckmann, “The Loss of Homeland and Cultural Identity: George Grosz and Lyonel Feininger,” Exiles and Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, ed. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 296–303.
Barbara McCloskey, “George Grosz,” New Worlds: German and Austrian Art 1890–1940, ed. Renée Price (New York: Neue Galerie, 2001), 331.
William H. Jordy, “The Aftermath of the Bauhaus in America: Gropius, Mies and Breuer,” The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–60, ed. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 485–543
Cynthia McCabe Jaffe, ed., The Golden Door: Artist-Immigrants of America, 1876–1976 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1976).
Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” Under the Sign of the Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 71–105.
Katrin Bettina Müller, “Verlorene Perspektiven,” Die Tageszeitung, October 11, 1997; and Annette Lettau, “Produktiv im Exil,” Focus, 6 (October 1997): 181.
Barbara Copeland Buenger, “Antifascism or Autonomous Art: Kurt Schwitter,” Exiles and Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, ed. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 84.
Barbara Copeland Buenger, ed., Max Beckmann: Self Portrait in Words (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 288.
Peter Hahn, “Bauhaus and Exile: Bauhaus Architects and Designers between the Old World and the New,” Exiles and Émigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, ed. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 211–25.
Philip Johnson, “Architecture in the Third Reich,” Hound and Horn, 7 (1933): 138–139.
Willy Brandt, “Literatur und Politik im Exil,” Literatur des Exils. Eine Dokumentation über die FE.N-Jahrestagung in Bremen vom 18. bis 20. September 1980, ed. Bernt Engelmann (Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 1981), 170–171.
Moritz Wullen, “Exil—Flucht und Emigration europäischer Künstler,” Museumsjournal, 4 (Fall 1997): 20.
Hilton Kramer, “The Age of the Émigrés,” The New Criterion, 16 (April 1997): 17.
H. W. Janson, “Benton and Wood, Champions of Regionalism,” Magazine of Art, 39 (1946): 184.
Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
Martin Warnke, “Einführung,” Künstlerischer AustauschlArtistic Exchange. Akten des XXVIII. Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte, ed. Thomas W. Gaethgens (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), 161–175.
Karen Caplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 27–65.
Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998).
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2007 Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Koepnick
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Eckmann, S. (2007). German Exile, Modern Art, and National Identity. In: Eckmann, S., Koepnick, L. (eds) Caught by Politics. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08032-5_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08032-5_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-73739-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-08032-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)