Stefan Schweizer. "Unserer Weltanschauung sichtbaren Ausdruck geben": Nationalsozialistische Geschichtsbilder in historischen Festzügen zum "Tag der Deutschen Kunst". Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007. 332 pp. EUR 29.00 (paper), ISBN 978-3-8353-0107-8.

Reviewed by Paul B. Jaskot (Department of the History of Art and Architecture, DePaul University)
Published on H-German (May, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

Parades as Nazi Spectacles

Stefan Schweizer's book on the four historical parades that took place in Munich during the National Socialist era opens up a fascinating and complex view into a generally unanalyzed or misunderstood phenomenon. Every scholar of the period and, indeed, almost anyone who has watched the History Channel for more than five minutes, has seen a clip from these famous parades, often used as a backdrop to an explanation of the regime's cultural aspirations or as a shorthand visual indicator of the Nazi descent into kitsch. The parades involved thousands of individuals in both their production and staging, and highlighted through thematic floats various moments of German (or, at least, proclaimed "German") political or cultural achievement. Here rode a participant on horseback dressed up like Charlemagne, there wafted past a plaster representation of the famed Bamberg Rider. Audience members followed along with a detailed printed guide, and photographers caught the reaction of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels on the main tribune. And yet, while in retrospect these events appear to have been fairly fluffy affairs, Schweizer argues successfully that too many historians have caricatured their ideological transparency as well as their significance for the regime. Through a careful reconstruction of each of the four parades and an analysis of their relation to Nazi concepts of history, Schweizer reinserts the festivals into a broader interpretation of German culture and its political instrumentalization. Such an analysis demands that we take seriously the infiltration of the Nazi propaganda apparatus into every crevice of society and the willingness of seemingly neutral actors (like artists and art historians) to advance the cause through every means at their disposal.

Beginning with the reevaluation of Hitler's own artistic self-fashioning, the argument that culture played a seminal role in the National Socialist regime has been predominantly accepted by scholars, even if it has not taken center stage in Holocaust studies and other interdisciplinary venues. Even so, the Munich parades raise questions about how far the centrality of all cultural production should be pushed. Were these of national importance in the 1930s or regional festivals that had a very different significance? Should the real study here be the function of kitsch as a prop to the party, or are the parades a view into the most sophisticated historical concepts that provided the foundation for high-profile members of the state? These are difficult, serious historical and historiographical problems, ones that Schweizer certainly helps us address. Whether his study brings us to a resolution to the issue of culture's position within the Nazi state, however, is another matter.

Schweizer organizes his text initially chronologically, with the first few chapters covering the 1933, 1937, 1938, and 1939 festivals. While these chapters are mostly comprised of an analysis of the producers of the parades, the involvement of local Nazi officials, and a detailed interpretation of the floats and staging in each year, he moves to a broader thematic focus in the last three chapters. These address what we can tell in terms of the reception of the parades from an audience's perspective, as well as the ways in which historical choices made in the festivals paralleled a larger discourse of art history during the Nazi period. He concludes the volume with a short set of six "theses" à la Walter Benjamin highlighting the theoretical and conceptual implications of studying such historicist cultural expressions. Schweizer uses this structure to argue that the historical parades supported the minimum consensus ("Minimalkonsens" [p. 306]) of what constituted an acceptable and usable "Nazi" history among the diverse perspectives of powerful party officials. Understanding their historicist ideology clarifies the subtle legitimating role of the parade as it intersected with various völkisch, racist, nationalist, and militarist strands within party pronouncements and Nazi-aligned academic culture. In the latter, he is particularly concerned with the role of art historians such as Hans Kiener (a Heinrich Wölfflin student) and the parallels of the presentation to similar pronouncements by Wilhelm Pinder, a topic that has been of great concern in the last decade in German art historical circles.[1]

The first two chapters get the book off to a good start, introducing respectively the extent of historical Festzüge in Germany and an analysis of the 1933 parade, the first to be produced after the regime came to power. Schweizer explores the long history of such parades, particularly those organized by communities in the nineteenth century. These parades had emphasized local craft as well as important works of art in order to demonstrate bourgeois self-actualization and Bildung. Such spectacles became more professionalized in the Wilhelmine period and, not surprisingly, lost some favor among local communities in the Weimar era. However, as Schweizer notes, their appearance in Nazi Germany should be seen as a continuity with the past, as with so many aspects of cultural production in which conservative traditions were revived and reinstrumentalized for specific purposes. This conclusion is particularly relevant to Munich, a city that had clocked more historical parades than any other in Europe and which had been promoting itself to a greater or lesser degree as a cultural alternative to Berlin ever since the latter had been chosen as the German capital. Nazi officials could thus take advantage of a ready-made conservative cultural tradition and shape its presentation and reception to specific ends.

Schweizer accounts for the party's interest in the parades in the first place due to the specific nature of the parade as a medium, like painting or architecture. He argues that the performative aspects of the parade, especially the presence of contemporary bodies alive and moving in historical garb, made the festivals more convincing as a means of naturalizing a particular historicist ideology. The bodies of the participants were themselves sites at which the historical and the contemporary were collapsed, thus blending the ritualistic and mythic with the believable and the real. A living presentation of art history accomplished this goal and could be the means of legitimizing state positions. With this claim, Schweizer is attempting to blend a more theoretical literature on performance with his specific analysis of the parades.[2]

He puts this historical and theoretical framework to good use in his analysis of the 1933 show, entitled "Glanzzeiten Deutscher Geschichte." As Schweizer notes, the few scholars who have addressed the festivals most often skip over the earliest in favor of the later parades, which aligned with the opening of the Great German Art Shows. But the 1933 festival is quite revealing in the way that conservative historical conventions could be recontextualized in the streets of Munich and made of use to the Nazi Party. The event was planned in relation to the laying of the ground stone for Paul Ludwig Troost's Haus der Deutschen Kunst. Schweizer draws on the extensive literature that has positioned Munich as a Nazi cultural center, with the nineteenth-century patronage of Ludwig I becoming a model for the reassertion of German culture after the interregnum of decadent Berlin. To complement the architectural and museological ambitions of the new building, at the last minute officials under the Gauleiter and Bavarian Minister of the Interior Adolf Wagner called for a festival parade. Well-known local sculptor and academic Joseph Wackerle received the commission, and he led the efforts, with the assistance of painter Conrad Hommel, costume designer Leo Pasetti, and architect Georg Buchner.

Within a month, they put together a lavish spectacle that emphasized academic cultural values in art ("architecture" was represented totemically by a large ionic column of plaster, for example) and various representations of German art from the medieval up through the modern. The parade ended with a large float featuring the model of Troost's museum, thus cementing the canonical artistic conventions of the academy with the new cultural moment of the rising Nazi state. All of this imagery was framed with multitudes of costumed attendants as well as a complete decoration of the entire parade route with color-coordinated banners that changed along the way. As Schweizer successfully shows, history and ideology were effectively blurred, while Buchner's street decorations in particular made the party's presence explicit. In terms of the latter, the parade entered the Karolinenplatz, just before the headquarters of the Brown House, to be surrounded by black banners alternately topped with the Iron Cross and swastikas with SS attendants at the base in their black uniforms and carrying red flags and standards. The narrative of the sacrifice of past wars and the militarization of the new state was visualized and literally embodied. Schweizer's detailed description, attention to archival sources, and interpretation of photographic evidence make his argument most effective in his analysis of the parades themselves.

Still, while there is much in Schweizer's text to admire, decided ambiguities of argument and overinterpretation of evidence at points detract from the success of his endeavor and, more importantly, leave unresolved some of the major issues that have bedeviled the study of cultural production in National Socialist Germany. The careful reconstructions and analyses are effective, but Schweizer ultimately does not completely convince us of the centrality of these parades to the regime, other than as complements to well-known racist and antisemitic cultural events like the "Degenerate Art" show (1937) or the film Der ewige Jude (1940). Partially this is a problem of analysis, as too often the major policy shifts and social developments within the period are more hinted at than integrated with the interpretation of the festivals. So, for example, the expansion of the parades in the later decade to include examples of "German" art from the "repatriated" areas of the Sudetenland, Austria, and Bohemia, among others, is asserted as a cultural representation of expansionist military and racialized policies. Well, certainly, but the mediation needed here, to indicate how such local cultural production intersected with developing state policy, is lacking. Otherwise, the political importance of the cultural event comes off as flatter and indeed less important that Schweizer wants to suggest. If the parades were so central to embodying a Nazi view of history that legitimated the party's ideological goals, why, for example, were they stopped in 1939 with the beginning of the war, while other cultural forms that claimed a historicist agenda, such as architecture, were continued at least through 1942 and, in the case of film, to the very end? The need to see the parades as the supreme expression of a consensus historical view (a difficult position to maintain within the multiple historical positions claimed by various Nazi leaders) is not supported by the significance of the evidence provided here.

Schweizer's concluding substantive chapter on the art historical parallels to the parades makes this problem most evident. Analyzing the work of Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Kiener, and Pinder, Schweizer shows that the broad discourse of a völkisch art history "paralleled" (p. 266) the historical presentation of German art in the parades. In this analysis, the overt racism of Schultze-Naumburg is implicit in the nationalist and highly selective Germanic world displayed, with its particular emphasis on the medieval and the projected continuity through the presentation of models of Nazi architecture and the increasing appearance of party members at the end of the march. There is no question that these individuals and the parade organizers were playing out variations on a theme, but whose theme is the particularly important question. Schweizer never quite convinces that this event essentially becomes a Nazi parade, as opposed to a parade firmly rooted in the German nationalist art history of Georg Dehio and other pre-Nazi scholars of which the local and, occasionally, national officials could take selective advantage.[3] The nationalization of art historical traditions was and still is a hallmark of conservative conventions, of which many groups on the Right could take advantage. The need to work out more specific institutional affiliations as well as the reliance of artists or organizers on individual art historical attitudes could buttress an argument that showed how such conservative positions became National Socialist ones. That work of mediation is lacking in this text and, as a result, the art historical chapter seems more like a summary of other well-known debates on art history and Nazi ideology than an integral part of an explanation of the Munich events. Munich remains tangential to this argument and, ironically from Schweizer's position, apparently less relevant.

Schweizer's occasional forays into argument-by-assertion, however, should not deter any scholar with a serious interest in cultural production during the Nazi era from taking up this volume. While elements of the analysis are pushed further than the evidence will allow, it is nevertheless a compelling, well-researched view into these important events. Those with a particular interest in Munich and Bavaria will find it of special value. More broadly, his book is also of use for understanding how the questions of mass mobilization and elite culture could be successfully melded in spite of their apparent contradictory forces. That art and art history also played a role in this synthesis is crucial to remember, especially for those unaware of the many new analyses of the last decade. Intellectuals, cultural elites, and aesthetic taste all play a central role here as they did in specific moments and for particular policies of Hitler's regime. Schweizer's text helps affirm that position and expands our ability to argue it with conviction.

Notes

[1]. See Nikola Doll, Christian Fuhrmeister, and Michael H. Sprenger, eds., Kunstgeschichte im Nationalsozialismus: Beiträge zur Geschichte einer Wissenschaft zwischen 1930 und 1950 (Weimar: VDG, 2005).

[2]. Given this position, Schweizer acknowledges the importance of work on ritual in the Nazi state such as that of Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), but claims that it lacks the historical specificity to account accurately for culture's function in society. Theoretically, he highlights his reliance on Erika Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004) although he could have also extended his citations to Judith Butler and others.

[3]. See Georg Dehio Geschichte der deutschen Kunst (Leipzig: de Gruyter, 1919). For an analysis of Pinder in relation to this tradition, see Sybille Dürr, "Wölfflin, Hauttmann, Pinder: Das Kunsthistorische Institut der Universität München," in Münchner Moderne, eds. Felix Billeter, Antje Günther, and Steffan Krämer (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2002), 268-217.

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Citation: Paul B. Jaskot. Review of Schweizer, Stefan, "Unserer Weltanschauung sichtbaren Ausdruck geben": Nationalsozialistische Geschichtsbilder in historischen Festzügen zum "Tag der Deutschen Kunst". H-German, H-Net Reviews. May, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24522

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