Nine years ago, the then Austrian Defense Minister, Norbert Darabos, had the base of a memorial opened in the crypt on Heldenplatz in Vienna, which the sculptor Wilhelm Frass had designed in 1935. For decades rumors had lingered that he had hidden a message under the grave of the Unknown Soldier, and indeed: Frass had drawn up a kind of “foundation stone certificate”. It was found in a metal capsule under the base – ironically next to a second capsule with a contrary message in which an assistant to the sculptor, Alfons Riedel, stated that he hoped he would no longer have to build memorials for the victims of wars.
Kellernazi Frass, on the other hand, spoke of his “belief in the eternal strength of the German people”, to whom he dedicates this stone – and he hopes that the Lord God will lead “our glorious people, united under the sign of the sun wheel to the Most High”. Frass, during the time of Austrofascism the president of the “Artists’ Association of Austrian Sculptors”, had already been a busy man in the 1930s; However, he still wrote his message to posterity as an illegal member of the NSDAP.
The secrecy ended quickly: from 1938 he successfully served himself to the Nazis in Vienna, who controlled the art scene in the “Ostmark” under the leadership of the “Reich Chamber of Fine Arts”, and explored which of the then Vice-Mayor Hanns Blaschke in the cultural office Sculptors should benefit from municipal funding.
From this Thursday on, both men, Frass and Blaschke, can be encountered in an exhibition at the Vienna Museum entitled “On Line. Nazi Art Policy in Vienna”, like the Reich Chamber and local Nazi greats thousands of Viennese Forcing artists into their system. Only those who were acceptable in terms of art and race politics were allowed to practice their profession. A stroke of luck in Vienna: the files of 3000 compulsory members of the Reich Chamber are still preserved; they were handed over to the re-established professional association of visual artists in 1946. Ingrid Holzschuh and Sabine Plakolm-Forsthuber, who also curated the exhibition in the museum, worked on it.
Can you show Nazi propaganda art in a museum today? And if so: how?
Not only did they target the files, but also the artistic legacies of the Nazi era in Vienna, and, like the museum itself, found themselves faced with a difficult task. How do, asks Holzschuh, “institutions deal with the fact that works from the Nazi era are in their holdings – and yet are never exhibited”? In concrete terms, should one show Nazi art from the museum’s collections, and above all: how? Hundreds of objects from that period came together from municipal property, through purchases, donations and legacies. Much, but not all, is propaganda art, and much, but not all, has historical or scientific value.
Under Reich Governor Baldur von Schirach, who between 1940 and 1945 was very close to the Viennese cultural elite and who caused irritation in Berlin with his dictum that “all art is at home” in Vienna, music and the visual arts in particular were strongly promoted. The historian and Schirach biographer Oliver Rathkolb writes that he had “loosened up considerable budget funds” while he “administered the city’s cultural institutions directly”. He enjoyed the role of patron and bought numerous paintings – for public institutions, but also for himself. The fact that his own extensive collection was based in part on Aryanization and art theft is a different story.
The two researchers at the show on Nazi art policy decided together with the responsible curator of the Vienna Museum, Gerhard Milchram, to show the paintings, graphics and objects as they are kept, archived or restored in the museum’s depot in order to make them aesthetic break: on easels, on metal hooks, in packaging, in the studio environment. For Milchram one thing is clear: “Disposing”, meaning disposal, is not an option. Keeping it under lock and key either. To work on the works scientifically, to analyze, to research, and then to show them in context – that is the right way.
Neither hide nor celebrate: the museum shows art from the Nazi era, here a painting by Hertha Karasek-Strzygowski from 1940, as it is being kept, researched and restored in the depot.
(Photo: Paul Bauer / Wien Museum)
The museum’s depot is a large, white cube on the eastern edge of the city; seven floors full of stone carvings, paintings and graphics, fashion and trinkets, armor and furniture, art and clutter – what comes together over the decades, when an urban institution that sees itself as a universal museum and objects from the Neolithic to the robes of the Life Ball , the big Viennese AIDS charity event, collects. Shortly before the opening, Milchram takes a short walk through the fundus; the works from the Nazi era are labeled and cataloged on an equal footing between Art Nouveau and old masters.
Even the apparently unpolitical was controlled, nothing was innocent
“The Nazi stuff didn’t matter for a long time,” he says; A new examination of the reception of these works is only slowly beginning, apart from further unresolved restitution issues. As is well known, the Nazis inscribed themselves consciously and with all their might with their own works and their own collections in the history of the city, says Milchram and very carefully unwraps a carefully wrapped and glued Eternit plate with the image of a so-called July fighter – one of those putschists who 1934 fatally injured the then Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss during the uprising against the federal government. The National Socialist Hans Domeser was executed because of his participation in the 1934 coup; his portrait was shown in the extremely well-attended Nazi exhibition on the “Battle for Vienna”.
This work is a classic of the “self-historization” of the Nazi fighters from that time, says Milchram and, as a further example, pulls a portrait of the Alpine Club chairman and legendary mountaineer Eduard Pichl from a meter-high metal shelf. As an ardent anti-Semite, Pichl had already introduced the Aryan paragraph in the “Austria Section” of the Alpine Club in 1921; early on he was considered the “hero” of the movement. Series of war scenes, tanks and firefights, burning ruins and martial-looking heroes hang a few meters further in oil and watercolor – between winter landscapes and summer idylls from the Viennese Alps, where the liberal bohemians and the Jewish bourgeoisie once took a summer break. None of this, even the apparently apolitical, according to curator Milchram, was ever “innocently created, innocently conceived”: “All art was controlled and seen through the filter of the culture chamber, pleasant art was wanted by pleasant artists.”
Particularly popular works such as the “Fuehrer’s Journey to the Proclamation on March 15, 1938” by the Viennese specialist in painting in the Reich Chamber of Culture, Igo Pötsch, have been reproduced hundreds of times; the original was given as a gift to Schirach’s hated predecessor, the Gauleiter of Vienna, Josef Bürckel. But cautious moves away from the art of those years, which were brought into line, can also be found in the depot: In the graphics collection, Milchram pulls out a large-format briefcase in which Hitler’s pictures are stacked. The reproduction of a graphic shows him in uniform with touching red cheeks and an unusually bushy mustache – not quite the usual, stylized depiction of Hitler. The original from 1940, which was temporarily relocated due to the war, was apparently lost in 1945. With a faint smile, Milchram shows an archivist’s comment on the loss on the back of the sheet: “No harm.”
Much disappeared after the end of the war – and it was not always, as the Viennese like to claim, “the Russians”. Local looters and SS troops, according to the curator, had also towed away what was not nailed down in the last few months before the defeat. Some of what is left is now being shown in Vienna – parallel to the individual fates of Viennese artists who can be filtered out of the files of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts. Next spring, the Nazi art will go back to the Vienna Museum’s depot. Before that, however, there will be another debate in a symposium as to whether there is a “correct” way to deal with Nazi art and whether it should actually be shown again today, almost 80 years later: researcher and exhibition maker Sabine Holzschuh thinks that this art is a must show, with all refractions, because the Nazi era is largely faded out in most depictions of art history in Austria in the 20th century.
Numerous artists who were highly respected during the Nazi era and who enthusiastically worked for the regime were also well paid and busy stars of the art scene in Austria even after the end of the war. In the exhibition they can be seen in their more questionable roles. Which in turn leads back to Wilhelm Frass, the sculptor from the crypt on Heldenplatz: After 1945 he was classified as “less polluted” and reintegrated into the art world. When he died in 1968, he was given a grave of honor in Vienna’s central cemetery. His status was only revoked in 2012.
In line. Nazi art policy in Vienna. Vienna Museum. October 14th to April 24th. The catalog costs 34 euros.