Interestingly, Hitler’s Mein Kampf was written just as Dada hit a peak in Paris, and Hitler’s comments about Jewish influence on Western art need be understood in this context. He discusses the “artistic aberrations which are classified under the names of Cubism and Dadaism,” and clearly has the Dadaists in mind when he observes that: “Culturally, his [the Jew’s] activity consists in … holding the expressions of national sentiment up to scorn, overturning all concepts of the sublime and the beautiful, the worthy and the good, finally dragging the people to the level of his own low mentality.”[xxix] Likewise when he recalls how he once asked himself whether “there was any shady undertaking, any form of foulness, especially in cultural life, in which at least one Jew did not participate?” Subsequently he discovered that “On putting the probing knife carefully to that kind of abscess one immediately discovered, like a maggot in a putrescent body, a little Jew who was often blinded by the sudden light.”[xxx]
In 1933 Hitler’s new government announced that “The custodians of all public and private museums are busily removing the most atrocious creations of a degenerate humanity and of a pathological generation of ‘artists’. This purge of all works marked by the same western Asiatic stamp has been set in motion in literature as well with the symbolic burning of the most evil products of Jewish scribblers.”[xxxi]
At the exhibition of degenerate art held in Munich in 1937, Dadaist works were considered the most degenerate of all – the very epitome of Kulturbolschewismus. In that year the Ministry for Education and Science published a pamphlet in which Dr Reinhold Krause, a leading educator, wrote that “Dadaism, Futurism, Cubism, and other isms are the poisonous flower of a Jewish parasitical plant.”[xxxii]
Paul Johnson points out that “Hitler always referred to degenerate art as ‘Cubism and Dadaism’, maintaining that it started in 1910, and the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition bore a curious resemblance to the big Dada shows of 1920–22, with a lot of writing on the walls and paintings hung without frames.”[xxxiii] He also notes that the National Socialist campaign against “degenerate art” was “the best thing that could possibly have happened, in the long term, to the Modernist Movement.” This is because since the National Socialists—universally reviled by all governments and cultural establishments since 1945—tried to destroy and suppress such art completely, then its merits were self-evident; anything the Nazis opposed was assumed to have merit – on the illogical basis that the enemy of my enemy must be my friend. “These factors,” notes Johnson, “so potent in the second half of the twentieth century, will fade during the twenty-first, but they are still determinant today.”[xxxiv]Adolf Hitler visits the Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937
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