The most substantial studies on the art and politics of Nazi Germany in English have been written, with few exceptions, by historians. Why art historians have not taken a stronger interest presumably has to do with a strongly rooted aversion to cultural artifacts so closely associated with modern dictatorial power, so alien from the things the profession has tended to think possess cognitive interest and aesthetic appeal. In any case, the longstanding discrepancy between the attention given to National Socialist Germany by historians and its neglect by art historians continues to exist. At a CAA Annual Conference session on German art and politics in 1997, a paper discussing the work of sculptor Arno Breker was punctuated by the author’s jokes and bursts of laughter from the audience. While everyone recognizes the historical gravity of this period, its art frequently continues to be regarded with levity. Epithets like “kitsch” prevail over critical scholarship.

Peter Paret’s new book on the career of the sculptor Ernst Barlach during the years of National Socialist rule testifies to the persistence of this remarkable disparity—and a serious attempt to overcome it. As a scholar, Paret, emeritus professor of history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Stanford University, has pursued two interests. In the 1960s and 1970s, he published books on Carl von Clausewitz, Frederick the Great, and Count Yorck von Wartenburg and the reform of the Prussian state in the early nineteenth century. In 1980, he turned in a new direction, writing an important study on the Berlin Secession, which, he argued, epitomized liberal cosmopolitanism in German artistic culture before the First World War. Ever since, he has published almost exclusively on topics in modern German art and cultural history. Typically, he has examined the tense relationships among the protagonists of modern artistic culture, organized politics, and state institutions in Germany. Paret always evinces interest in the achievements of liberals in the face of considerable and ever-increasing pressure from conservative and nationalist groups. This approach drives his monograph on Barlach: it tells, with the author’s typically elegant concision, a story of one individual artist’s efforts to preserve his career and maintain his integrity in the face of bitter polemics and dictatorial obstruction.

Among prominent, early-twentieth-century German sculptors, Barlach is the best suited to frame the issues that have been of greatest interest to recent scholarship in the field. First and foremost, Barlach’s work exemplifies the style and ideology of modernist primitivism. After a momentous trip to Russia in 1906—a mythical, primordial place regarded both with fear and deep fascination by German intellectuals—the artist turned from the allegorical and sentimental themes of his early production to representations of peasants, beggars, and berserkers. These archaic types would become his trademark. At the same time, he continued to simplify his formal vocabulary and began to use wood in addition to ceramics and bronze. Barlach’s clarification of the tectonics of his figures might have been related to sophisticated debates on sculpture, but his work’s materials and archaic associations resonated with the primitivist imagination inspired by Paul Gauguin, whose work was admired in modernist circles in Germany in the 1900s, and with the German Expressionist revival of the woodcut. Barlach’s use of wood and his adaptations of Christian and Nordic iconographies was easily linked with the Late Gothic by writers seeking to establish the national bloodlines of German Expressionism.

Barlach’s archaically abstract and expressively authentic art testifies yet again to the well-known ideological ambivalence of modernist primitivism. What is more, his career suggests to the precarious situation of the modern artist in industrial, urban society. After returning from Russia, Barlach joined the Berlin Secession and signed a contract with the prominent German-Jewish art dealer Paul Cassirer, identifying himself as a member of the cosmopolitan elite and its art market, however earthy and elemental his work was and despite his preference for country life. Barlach was one of many modern German artists who responded to the outbreak of the First World War with hope, becoming disillusioned only when it was clear that the war would not be a brief, gloriously purgatory conflagration out of which a new postbourgeois Europe would arise. Like all of the artists associated with the term Expressionism, Barlach’s postwar fortunes were entwined with the institutionalization of the modern elite and with the frequent association of modern art and the crises that wracked Germany between 1919 and 1924. It was, of course, to the fears and resentments they generated that Adolph Hitler, the most prominent populist foe of modern art of them all, appealed with great success.

Paret’s account of Barlach’s work and career is necessarily an abbreviated one, given the book’s concision and structure. An Artist against the Third Reich: Ernst Barlach, 1933–1938 consists of a brief introduction followed by five chapters and a conclusion: “Hitler,” “Barlach,” “Nordic Modernism,” “The Hounding of Barlach,” “German and Un-German Art,” and “After the Fact.” Only two of the chapters are focused fully on the artist’s work and career, and it is to them that I turn first. In chapter 2, “Barlach,” Paret discusses Barlach’s work and retraces his career in order to suggest why the sculptor was so vulnerable to attacks from many on the right. In Paret’s estimation, Barlach had three strikes against him. Institutionally, Barlach had played with the wrong team. Barlach’s links to the Berlin Secession cast a shadow on the national character of his work in many minds, especially when paired with Barlach’s Russian journey. The second, argues Paret, was a profound incompatibility between Barlach’s conception of sculpture and the view dominant within the Nazi Party. Barlach was never interested in classicized, heroic nudes in bronze or marble, presumably even less when such figures were representations, as Paret puts it, of an “ideology that uses people as raw material for its own purposes” (37). Instead of the icons of masculine resolve and feminine grace that dominated by the later 1930s (but were by no means absent earlier), Barlach was the sculptor of spiritual and physical exaltation and suffering. As Paret puts it, these were “themes that celebrated the autonomous individual…” (30).

Decisive for Barlach’s later professional misfortunes in the Third Reich, however, were the war memorials he completed between 1927 and 1931. These prominent public commissions signified Barlach’s stature in the artistic elite of the 1920s. But it was over the explosive question of how to commemorate the lost war that Barlach’s sculpture failed to connect with the ideological and aesthetic preconceptions of various organizations from the center to the far right during the Weimar Republic. Neither traditionally heroic nor acceptably abstract (simple stone blocks accompanied by crosses, steel helmets, and the like were frequently set up in Germany in the 1920s), Barlach’s unconventional monuments were easy targets for antimodernist polemicists.

The fourth chapter, “The Hounding of Barlach,” turns to Barlach’s career in the years immediately after Hitler’s appointment as the head of the national government. Not unexpectedly, we read about the intensification of polemics against Barlach, the dismantling and confiscation of his sculptures, and the suppression of a major volume of his drawings in 1935. Yet it becomes clear that artists like Barlach could still find reasons to hope that all was not lost. Private individuals emerged as possible patrons. Contradictory signals were sent as the central leadership of the regime improvised art policy and, more generally, moderated its political tone at certain times. For the first time in an English-language study, Paret offers a view of art politics in Nazi Germany as not solely a matter of central agencies and high-ranking individuals in Berlin. He also gives the reader a strong sense of the uncertainty that typified many individuals’ experience of the gradual process of radicalization characteristic of the Hitler State. The reader learns of Barlach’s changing perceptions and misperceptions, of his swings from deep depression to relative optimism. Indeed, in 1934 Barlach decided, like a number of other modern cultural luminaries, to sign a “Declaration for Adolf Hitler!” For an artist who was neither Jewish nor a Communist and who was trying to fathom from the outside the chains of authority and quick shifts of influence within the Nazi regime, it took years before illusions were exposed and hopes abandoned. Ultimately, it took the shock of the Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937 in which Barlach was represented (perhaps surprisingly by only one sculpture, his censored book, and four drawings) to make things absolutely clear to the sculptor. Paret’s documentation of regional variations and central debates within the Nazi Party, as well as the changing perceptions of individuals caught in its web, are invaluable in suggesting the complexity of the regime and life under it, however brutal its basic ideological premises.

One of the most distinctive things about Paret’s book, though, is not its focused account of Barlach’s career and work, but rather its structure: alternating between monographic chapters and those concentrating on Hitler’s ideology, culture debates within the Nazi Party, and the development of the art policies of Hitler’s regime. Hence, the book begins not with Barlach, but instead with an instructive analysis of the views of art held by the most influential cultural-political protagonists in the Nazi leadership—Hitler, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, and Party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg—and the measures the Party took when given the opportunity in Thuringia in 1930. Chapter 3, “Nordic Expressionism,” once again moves away from Barlach to summarize the typical structures and dynamics of the “Hitler State.” Hitler suggested broad principles, but it was lower-level functionaries who turned pronouncements into policy, hoping to realize best Hitler’s often-nebulous intentions. Paret discusses the first phase in the Nazi consolidation of state power and the establishment of new institutions for the regulation of professional artists, then recounts the well-known story of the heated debate about Expressionism within the Nazi Party in the first years of Hitler’s regime. Barlach was one of the artists most admired by the young Nazi students and activists as well as a few prominent art historians, who argued that Expressionism was Germanic and revolutionary and hence the artistic correlate of the Nazis’ “national revolution.” Ultimately, of course, this position lost the internecine struggle, and Chapter 5, “German and Un-German Art,” chronicles the development of the dictatorship’s art policy once Goebbels realized that Hitler would have no part of such arguments. The chapter summarizes the current debate between historians about the best way to characterize the relationship between ideology and bureaucratic competition, between Hitler and his subordinates, in the decision-making processes of the regime. In all three chapters, Paret clearly shows how National Socialist cultural policy—which culminated in the pairing of Degenerate Art and the First Great German Art Exhibition in 1937—exemplified the regime’s fundamental dynamics and structures on the whole.

There is much to applaud here, yet the book raises a few questions—especially concerning individual agency and personal relationships rather than institutional mechanisms. Why does Paret name so few individuals aside from the usual suspects? What were the ideas, functions, and relationships of the lower-level yet nonetheless influential bureaucrats in the Prussian and Reich Cultural Ministry, the Propaganda Ministry, and Rosenberg’s agencies? What about the relationships of German modern artists to antidemocratic intellectuals and circles during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich? Paret’s chapter 3, “Nordic Expressionism,” and the concluding section, “After the Fact,” do consider some of Barlach’s peers and their interpretation of the artist’s “Germanness.” Yet there is more to explore. What is to be made of the long friendship between Barlach and the aesthete Arthur Moeller van den Brück, who was a leading “young conservative” and author of prominent books on political philosophy and contemporary culture? Since Moeller van den Brück committed suicide in 1925, he was not a factor in Barlach’s situation in the 1930s. But what were the ideological implications of this earlier relationship? Paret might also have said something about the introduction to the crucial volume of Barlach’s drawings in 1935. It was written by Paul Fechter, who in 1914 had published the one of the first books to argue for Expressionism as an emphatically German art. Fechter, a neoconservative intellectual marginalized in the Third Reich, nonetheless wrote of Barlach as a full-blooded “Lower” German. Such a characterization was not uncommon in the critical reception of the artist’s work and is significant because it immediately recalls late-nineteenth-century antimodern cultural criticism. By neglecting these relationships, the networks of which they were a part, and the images of Barlach they proposed, Paret downplays the extent to which Barlach was a modern artist whose primitivizing work could be, and was, appreciated by antiliberal intellectuals.

Finally, by focusing on Barlach in and after 1933, Paret cannot engage with a crucial, yet neglected, issue for art historians working on twentieth-century German art: the often openly authoritarian monopolization of the institutions of public artistic culture in the 1920s by the modern artistic elite, and the consequences of the attendant struggle between modernists and conservatives, as well as between established members of the modern elite and less-fortunate modern artists. Paret calls the artists associated with the most conservative elements in the Nazi Party “academic,” which, presumably, is meant as a kind of shorthand for a particular stylistic category. This terminology, however, ignores important changes in the institutions of the German art world between 1919 and 1933, especially in Prussia. The appointment of numerous modern artists to professorships at state art academies and the extensive, virtually exclusive acquisition of modern art by public collections after 1919 prompts the question: Who was “academic” by 1933? Our revulsion toward the degenerate art campaign and its link to war and genocide should not lead us to forget that the art world of the Weimar Republic, out of which the art politics of the Third Reich emerged, was a battlefield with many fronts, with everyone involved firing broadsides as they sought to entrench themselves in the state and economic institutions of German art production. Modern artists and their advocates did not pull their punches and were not averse to exclusionary tactics. A more-truthful, less-idealizing historical account of twentieth-century German art will have to take these struggles more fully into account in order to avoid the implicit tendency to reiterate a binary opposition between an ostensibly democratic, utterly benign modernism and the monstrous, murderous philistinism of the Third Reich. The differences between the modern artistic culture of the Weimar Republic and the art world during the National Socialist dictatorship are of course overwhelming, but state and other forms of power were not only exercised by modern art’s enemies.

Paret’s effort to weave together the story of a single artistic career while interpreting the history of the Third Reich offers an eminently readable narrative and a potential model to scholars working on related material. However, Paret’s view of the individual artist, artistic individuality, the representation of individuals, and the value judgments he attaches to all three raise questions. Certainly, this is no naïve biography. Indisputable evidence testifies to Barlach’s antipathy toward mass politics and social conformity. Paret is careful to suggest that what matters is not some ostensibly true definition of Expressionism, the category with which Barlach’s work is typically associated, but rather what Nazi commentators claimed it was. The book concludes with the views of Barlach stated in obituaries published in 1938. But does the artist’s work really “celebrat[e] the autonomous individual” (30), as Paret claims? However elemental the situations and states figured in Barlach’s sculptures, are these not representations of types, laden with conventional historical and cultural meanings? For instance, in using the image of mourning women in several of his war memorials, does not Barlach share a key iconographic convention with the official commemoration of war, however imaginative his formal language and compositional solutions? Here Paret overlooks the work of German and American feminist art historians such as Dora Apel, Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, and Silke Wenk, all of whom have delved into the gendered stereotypes of memorials and pacifist imagery.

Further, what exactly is the evidence to support Paret’s claim that Barlach’s book of drawings was not suppressed on iconographic, stylistic, political, or racial grounds, but rather because of its putatively subversive appeal to “the reader to join in the artist’s deep involvement with the unorganized individual” (105)? When discussing particular art objects, why does Paret so frequently abandon the dispassionate tone of the historian for the value-laden language of an advocate? Despite its historical solidity and nuance, the book nevertheless wants to convince the reader of a relatively clear opposition between the uncompromising, misunderstood artistic genius and the Nazi regime’s perfidious or simply dull—and in any case tasteless—artistic “hacks.” As a result, some of the most provocative questions about art, taste, and politics in Germany, both before and after 1933, are left unasked. Paret’s book dispels a number of popular misconceptions about the relationship between modern art and Nazism, but it does not mount a strong challenge to the romantic assumptions some readers may harbor about the politics and ideology of German modernism.

Whatever its limitations, Paret’s book is a most welcome addition to the literature, especially in the face of the paucity of English-language studies that examine the Nazi period. An Artist against the Third Reich offers succinct discussions of recent important historiographic debates about the structure of the Hitler State, linking political dynamics to the story of an important, controversial artist whose career spanned the Imperial era, the Weimar Republic, and much of the Nazi dictatorship. Most of the material and these issues are familiar to specialists who know the historiography and have read published primary sources in German, but this book will undoubtedly prove to be a provocative reading assignment in both undergraduate- and graduate-level history and art-history courses. It will also be an excellent introduction for art historians whose training has left them unfamiliar with this chapter of the tumultuous political history of twentieth-century art. I only hope that the publisher issues a paperback edition to make this title more affordable for as wide a readership as possible.