Perhaps the oddest exhibit in the whole history of art is the one that opened on July 19, 1937, in Munich, Germany. Certainly it remains the most legendary, an event often mentioned when censorship is the subject. Few people alive can claim to have seen it, but now the German Historical Museum is bringing it back to life.
To prepare the exhibition, a team of Nazi experts toured the museums of Germany. They identified 112 artists whose work they considered Degenerate. Among the collected paintings and prints, their choices included Picasso, Matisse and Chagall. A scribe named Fritz Kaiser wrote wall texts telling the public how to respond to what they were seeing. After Munich, the exhibition moved to Berlin and then to half a dozen other cities.
The Nazis claimed that their decisions, far from degrading the arts, were in fact part of the defence of what they considered “real” culture. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, declared at a Nazi party congress in 1935 that “Bolshevism is the declaration of war by Jewish-led international subhumans against culture itself.”