IN THE FIFTH ZONE: ABSTRACT PAINTING, MODERNISM, AND CULTURAL DISCOURSE 

IN THE WESTERN ZONES OF GERMANY AFTER WORLD WAR II 

By 

YULE FREDERIKE HEIBEL 

B i A . Hons., The U n i v e r s i t y o-f B r i t i s h Columbia, 1983 

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF 

THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF 

MASTER OF ARTS 

i n 

THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES 

(Department of Fine A r t s ) 

We accept t h i s t h e s i s as conforming 

to the r e q u i r e d standard 

THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA 

September 1986 

(g) Yule F r e d e r i k e H e i b e l , 1986 



In p r e s e n t i n g t h i s t h e s i s i n p a r t i a l f u l f i l m e n t of the 
requirements f o r an advanced degree at the U n i v e r s i t y 
o f B r i t i s h Columbia, I agree t h a t the L i b r a r y s h a l l make 
i t f r e e l y a v a i l a b l e f o r reference and study. I f u r t h e r 
agree t h a t p e r m i s s i o n f o r e x t e n s i v e copying of t h i s t h e s i s 
f o r s c h o l a r l y purposes may be granted by the head o f my 
department o r by h i s or her r e p r e s e n t a t i v e s . I t i s 
understood t h a t copying or p u b l i c a t i o n o f t h i s t h e s i s 
f o r f i n a n c i a l gain s h a l l not be allowed without my w r i t t e n 
p e r m i s s i o n . 

Department of -r̂ W / f W ? •  

The U n i v e r s i t y of B r i t i s h Columbia 
1956 Main Mall 
Vancouver, Canada 
V6T 1Y3 

Date l(> 'Ctph^lyt^ M?(r 



ABSTRACT 

A f t e r t h e de-feat of H i t l e r Germany i n 1945, m o d e r n i s t p a i n t i n g i n a 

n o n - g e o m e t r i c , l a r g e l y a b s t r a c t s t y l e took h o l d i n the w e s t e r n o c c u p i e d zones of 

t h e c o u n t r y ( 1 9 4 5 - 4 9 ) , and f l o u r i s h e d f o r a l l i n t e n t s and p u r p o s e s u n c h a l l e n g e d 

as the f o r e m o s t e s t a b l i s h e d s t y l e of p a i n t i n g d u r i n g the e a r l y y e a r s of t h e 

F e d e r a l R e p u b l i c of Germany (1949 t h r o u g h t h e 1950s). Most a r t h i s t o r i c a l 

s c h o l a r s h i p t o d a t e p o s i t s t h i s phenomenon i n one of two modes: 

1. Germany, e n t h r a l l e d by b a r b a r i s m f o r t w e l v e y e a r s , i n the west opened i t s 

e y e s t o t h e modern p a i n t i n g of i t s European n e i g h b o r s and of t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s , 

and v i a s t u d i o u s a p p l i c a t i o n , managed t o c a t c h up t o t h o s e a l l e g e d l y p r e -

e x i s t a n t s t a n d a r d s ; o r , 2. Western Germany became a pawn of t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s 

i n i t s C o l d War s t r u g g l e w i t h t h e S o v i e t Union and i t s a r t " r e f l e c t s " t h i s . 

In c o n t r a s t , my t h e s i s shows t h a t t h e s e v i e w s , w h i l e " t i d y i n g up" the 

c o n t r a d i c t i o n s of the p e r i o d , i n the f i n a l a n a l y s i s a r e u n t e n a b l e s i n c e : 

1. A s t a t i c s t a n d a r d or "norm" o f m o d e r n i s t p a i n t i n g had nowhere i n Europe 

s u r v i v e d i n t a c t the u p h e a v a l s of t h e e a r l i e r p o r t i o n of the t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y — 

and i n p a r t i c u l a r of the war; 2. The i n i t i a l postwar p e r i o d , from c.1945/46 

t h r o u g h t o 1948/49, cannot be d e s c r i b e d as a p e r i o d of c u l t u r a l 

" A m e r i c a n i z a t i o n " because US c u l t u r a l p o l i c y i t s e l f was a t t h i s time f a r from 

u n i v o c a l ; and 3. W i t h i n Germany, many c u l t u r a l opponents of N a z i s m , p e o p l e who 

had been p r o p o n e n t s of advanced a r t b e f o r e t h e N a t i o n a l S o c i a l i s t p e r i o d , were 

a c t i v e l y i n v o l v e d i n f o r g i n g a renewed c u l t u r e of modernism. F a r f r o m b e i n g 

i i 



p a s s i v e r e c i p i e n t s , t h e s e a r t i s t s , w r i t e r s , and i n t e l l e c t u a l s were h e l p i n g t o 

c r e a t e t h e new i n d e x of postwar modernism. 

C r e a t i n g t h i s new i n d e x took p l a c e w i t h i n the c o n t e x t o f g r e a t p o l i t i c a l 

and s o c i a l i n s e c u r i t y w i t h i n Germany as w e l l as w i t h i n Europe g e n e r a l l y , and i t 

took p l a c e w i t h i n t h e c o n t e x t o f renewed i n t e r n a t i o n a l — i n p a r t i c u l a r F r a n c o -

G e r m a n — c o - o p e r a t i o n . These c o n d i t i o n s i n t u r n a f f e c t e d the a r t i c u l a t i o n of 

advanced a r t . My t h e s i s then a l s o s u g g e s t s answers t o t h e q u e s t i o n of why the 

p a r t i c u l a r s t y l e of a b s t r a c t i o n based on s u b v e r t i n g f o r m , r e j e c t i n g non-

o b j e c t i v e p a i n t i n g , and e m p l o y i n g a r c h a i c and p r i m i t i v e m o t i f s , w h i l s t e s c h e w i n g 

a l l f o r m s of d i d a c t i c i s m or o t h e r d i r e c t a d d r e s s t o the v i e w e r , s h o u l d become 

t h e p r e f e r r e d s t y l e of advanced p a i n t i n g i n West Germany. The d i s c u s s i o n 

i n c l u d e s t h e a r t i s t s W i l l i B a u m e i s t e r , F r i t z W i n t e r , E.W.Nay, Theodor Werner, 

H e i n z T r f l k e s , and o t h e r s . To answer t h e s e q u e s t i o n s and t o p r o v e my 

c o n c l u s i o n s , I employ a method of i n v e s t i g a t i o n based on a c l o s e r e a d i n g of the 

c r i t i c a l t e x t s r e l a t i n g t o a r t and c u l t u r e p r o d u c e d d u r i n g t h i s p e r i o d , i n 

p a r t i c u l a r as f o u n d i n a r t m a g a z i n e s l i k e Das Kunstwerk; a c o m p a r a t i v e a n a l y s i s 

o f c o n c u r r e n t d e v e l o p m e n t s i n F r a n c e and the US, n o t a b l y s i m i l a r q u e s t i o n i n g s of 

t r a d i t i o n a l h i g h modernism by F r e n c h " i n f o r m e l " and " a r t a u t r e " s t y l e s ; and a 

r e - e x a m i n a t i o n of p o l i t i c a l movements and t e n d e n c i e s i n postwar Germany w h i c h 

t o d a y have been l a r g e l y f o r g o t t e n , e s p e c i a l l y t h o s e s o c i a l i s t movements w h i c h 

s t r i v e d f o r a u n i f i e d and n o n - a l i g n e d Europe. The u n d e r l y i n g a s s u m p t i o n 

t h r o u g h o u t i s t h a t the postwar p e r i o d p r i o r t o c.1958/52 i n w e s t e r n Germany was 

one o f s u r p r i s i n g c u l t u r a l v i t a l i t y and f e r m e n t w h i c h was, however, l a r g e l y 

e c l i p s e d by t h e more f a m i l i a r image of an e c o n o m i c a l l y r e s u r g e n t , a r t i s t i c a l l y 

more c o m p l a c e n t , and s u p p o s e d l y A m e r i c a n i z e d West Germany i n t h e 1950s. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

L i s t of I l l u s t r a t i o n s v 
Acknowl edgements . v i 

I n t r o d u c t i o n 1 
N o t e s 1? 

C h a p t e r One: S e a r c h f o r a M e a n i n g — P o s t w a r I n t e l l e c t u a l and C u l t u r a l D i s c o u r s e 

The " D a r m s t a d t e r Gesprach 1958": M i r r o r of C u l t u r a l 
Concern 22 

T h e o r y of C r i s i s , T h e o r y i n C r i s i s : The E f f e c t of 
H i s t o r y on A r t and C u l t u r e 27 

L o o k i n g f o r t h e New R e a l i t y : The I n t r u s i o n of the A r c h a i c 34 
"Europeans A f t e r A l l " — t h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l Resonance of 

Breakdown 43 
Breakdown as B r e a k o u t : The R e s t o r a t i v e F u n c t i o n of 

E x i g e n c y 54 
N o t e s 62 

C h a p t e r Two: The I n t e r a c t i o n of P o l i t i c s and C u l t u r e : The N e c e s s i t y of 
F i n d i n g an A p p r o p r i a t e R e p r e s e n t a t i o n i n A r t 

B e r l i n e r K O n s t l e r 1958: An E x h i b i t i o n w i t h a P u r p o s e 71 
When 4 E q u a l s 2 Because 3 E q u a l s 1: W e s t - I n t e g r a t i o n 

and B l o c P o l a r i z a t i o n . . . . . 79 
"One B o r e s Us": Propaganda and O p t i m i s m , a S o p o r i f i c 

C o m b i n a t i o n 83 
The F r e n c h C o n n e c t i o n and the "Germany of Tomorrow" 97 
Changes i n t h e A m e r i c a n A p p r o a c h — T h e F l u i d i t y of 

C o n c e p t s 187 
N o t e s 114 

Cone 1 u s i o n 122 
N o t e s 123 

B i b l i o g r a p h y 138 

i v 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

F i g . 1: W i l l i B a u m e i s t e r , Two E r a s , 1947 p.12 

F i g . 2: W i l l i B a u m e i s t e r , Composi t i o n . c . 1938 p. 13 

F i g . 3: W i l l i B a u m e i s t e r , V a r i a t i o n of E i d o s . 1938 p.14 

F i g . 4: W i l l i B a u m e i s t e r , P e r f o r a t i o n . 1944 p.15 

F i g . 5: George G r o s z , The P a i n t e r of the Hole. 1948 p. 16 

F i g . 6: W i l l i B a u m e i s t e r , U r z e i t q e s t a l t e n . 1946 p.59 

F i g . 7: E r n s t W i l h e l m Nay, Autumn Sono. 1945 p.68 

F i g . 8: E r n s t W i l h e l m Nay, M e l i s a n d e . 1948 p.61 

F i g . 9: F r i t z W i n t e r , BlacK-Whi t e . 1955 p.113 

v 



ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

I w o u l d l i k e t o thank S e r g e G u i l b a u t and D a v i d S o l k i n -for a l l o w i n g me t o 

p u r s u e t h i s t o p i c and w r i t e the t h e s i s w i t h c o m p l e t e and u t t e r independence 

w h i l e s i m u l t a n e o u s l y m a i n t a i n i n g t h e i r e x p e c t a t i o n of e x a c t i n g s t a n d a r d s — n o 

mean f e a t c o n s i d e r i n g t h e f a c t t h a t t h i s t h e s i s was p r o d u c e d " l o n g d i s t a n c e , " 

t h a t i s , c i r c a 2,480 mi 1 e s - a s - t h e - c r o w - f 1 i e s - 1 o n g - d i s t a n c e . 

F u r t h e r m o r e , I thank my husband Werner Bah I k e f o r h i s u n w a v e r i n g 

s u p p o r t , c r i t i c i s m , h a r a s s m e n t , and h a r a n g u i n g — i n the end, i t d o e s n ' t m a t t e r 

who i r r i t a t e s whom, i t ' s the p e a r l t h a t c o u n t s . ( O l d o y s t e r wisdom.) 

And then t h e r e a r e f r i e n d s who, whether they know i t or n o t , p r o v i d e 

needed r e s p i t e s from a r t h i s t o r y — l i k e h o l d i n g up a m i r r o r and l e t t i n g me see 

some r e a l human comedy. In p a r t i c u l a r , I thank G a b r i e l a and C h r i s t i a n , S e v e r i n 

and L i o b a , who " M e i s t e r " - f u l 1 y c o d d l e d me back t o l i f e d u r i n g my s t a y a t t h e i r 

house i n M u n i c h , and M a r i l y n D a n i e l s and S c o t t M a c k e n z i e f o r making 2,688 m i l e s 

f e e l l e s s l i k e i t was on a n o t h e r p l a n e t , and B e t s y B u r k e f o r t h a t and many o t h e r 

t h i n g s b e s i d e s — l i k e memory, f o r i n s t a n c e . 

v i 



INTRODUCTION 

To t h e e x t e n t t h a t t h e l a s t works of a r t s t i l l communicate, t h e y 
denounce t h e p r e v a i l i n g forms of communication as i n s t r u m e n t s of 
d e s t r u c t i o n , and harmony as a d e l u s i o n of decay. 

— M a x H o r k h e i m e r , " A r t and Mass C u l t u r e " (1941) 

T h i s s t a t e m e n t , made d u r i n g Max H o r k h e i m e r ' s e x i l e from N a z i Germany i n 

New Y o r k , 1 announces what c o u l d not be s a i d a l o u d w i t h i n the T h i r d R e i c h , but 

what w o u l d become the k e y n o t e i n t e l l e c t u a l v i e w p o i n t a f t e r the d e f e a t of f a s c i s m 

i n 1945. I t a n t i c i p a t e s the deep p e s s i m i s m w h i c h r e s u l t e d from t h e p e r c e i v e d 

c r i s i s of o c c i d e n t a l c u l t u r e , a c r i s i s w h i c h was f e l t t o be never c l e a r e r than 

i n the y e a r s f o l l o w i n g t h e war. Whereas i n the e a r l i e r p a r t o f t h e t w e n t i e t h 

c e n t u r y t h e hope f o r a r a d i c a l p o l i t i c a l change i n w e s t e r n s o c i e t i e s , a change 

b o r n e by the w o r k i n g c l a s s i n c o a l i t i o n w i t h p r o g r e s s i v e c u l t u r e p r o d u c e r s and 

i n t e l l e c t u a l s , k e p t a l i v e t h e image of a humanity w i t h o u t o p p r e s s i o n , the r i s e 

o f f a s c i s m i n E u r o p e , the 1939 H i t l e r - S t a l i n p a c t , and W o r l d War I I d e r e a l i z e d 

the r e m a i n i n g v e s t i g e s of t h i s hope i n the h e a r t s and minds of many. 

The e n s u i n g " n i h i l i s m " — a c a t c h - a l l p o p u l a r i n the postwar p r e s s 2 — w a s 

such a p r e v a l e n t theme i n Germany t h a t we have t o ask i n what way i t a f f e c t e d 

and i n t e r a c t e d w i t h c u l t u r e and m o d e r n i s t p a i n t i n g . To do t h i s we can compare a 

p a i n t i n g made i n 1947 by W i l l i B a u m e i s t e r t o H o r k h e i m e r ' s p r e s c i e n t s t a t e m e n t of 

1941. B a u m e i s t e r , a l o n g w i t h p a i n t e r s such as E r n s t N i l helm Nay, Theodor 

Werner, and F r i t z W i n t e r , among o t h e r s , came t o r e p r e s e n t the m o d e r n i s t a b s t r a c t 

p a i n t i n g i d i o m of the 1958s i n West Germany. W i l l i B a u m e i s t e r was born i n t h e 

- 1 -



late nineteenth century, like Horkheimer, in Stuttgart. 3 He had not emigrated, 

instead staying in Germany during the twelve years of NS rule, holding out in 

what was referred to as "inner emigration." Denounced as a degenerate a r t i s t , 

he was forbidden to paint, and like many others, was conscripted into some sort 

of service to the regime—in Baumeister's case, he worked as an advisor in a 

paint factory. Whilst the "outer emigres" were often isolated in their new, 

sometimes temporary homes,4 the "inner emigres" were totally cut off from 

international developments, isolated by the censorship of the "thousand year 

realm." 

The painting, called Two Eras (fig. 1), shows two crudely marked 

totemic figures bunched toward the right of the canvas and set on a pale 

ground. These rough figures partially overlay geometric shapes which look to be 

free-floating in a kind of utopic, imaginary space. The scene is anchored by a 

horizon line made of the same crude material as the primitive shapes arising 

from i t — i t is their humus, so to speak. This ground and its totemic offspring 

are the dominant force in the painting: both are drawn in a purplish brown, 

heavy line, contrasting greatly with the much brighter squares and circles— 

green, yellow, orange, blue, dark pink—in the background, overcoming geometry's 

vibrancy through sheer oppressive darkness. Although threateningly dominant, 

they are not substantial because they are sheer, that i s , they exist only in 

outline and hence thereby increase their ghostliness. What is striking is that 

the lighter, elegant geometry floating in the void behind the figures came 

f i r s t , while the totems, overlaying their ground, came after. And, adding to 

the paradox, that this ideal stencil which is the impossible ground of the 

figures is also connected by fine broken lines to the humus of primitivism. One 

era is overlaying another, and both are facing the viewer. The older era forms 

-2-



the ground -for the newer, and it is shown as an impossible world where gravity 

counts -for nothing. Yet this Utopia has to be an illusion since i t , too, is 

rooted in the ground. The same ground, in fact, as the era which follows i t , 

and which takes the shape of a kind of mute and ghostly primitivism. 

A look at Baumeister's prewar work leaves one with the impression that 

Two Eras is a comment on recent history. Baumeister, who was already a 

well-known artist during the Weimar period, had been passingly associated with 

the Bauhaus,5 and during the 1920s and 1930s he made paintings which depended 

on geometric regularity, as, for example, his Composi tion. circa 1930 ( f i g . 2 ) . 

This constructed vision gradually gave way during the later 1930s to more 

disturbingly irregular, amorphic shapes and sometimes surrealist themes, an 

attention to the subconscious, and to myth. Thus, a painting like variation  

of Eidos I, 1938 ( f i g . 3) has relinquished the geometric faith in reason which 

in Composi tion shows a human figure, newly designed, taking pride of place in a 

series of logically ordered squares, and instead shows the disintegration of the 

human figure: although not yet headless, the depicted figure's head, located top 

centre, is separate from the rest of i t s anatomy which consists of amoebic, only 

vaguely articulated shapes. During the war years and after, this breakup of 

rational figuration is increasingly exacerbated, as is clear in the 1944 

Perforation ( f i g . 4), and disintegrates into a world of mute, hermetic, non-

communicative informal ism. 6 In Two Eras, the harmony between those two worlds 

of reasoned geometry and subsequent primitivism is a delusion of decay and the 

communication of this idea shows the destructiveness of the f i r s t era, the 

rawness i t has begat. 

The question which then arises for culture itself is: given the examples 

of Horkheimer's pessimistic statement and the seemingly irreconcilable "two 

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worlds" shown in Baumeister's painting, what were the options open to culture 

after the Second World War? How could artists and intellectuals, and through 

them the country, rebuild culture, especially in relation to its failures before 

and during the war? In dealing with this topic, the researcher is bound to 

encounter a number of prejudices which must be dismantled. Due to the postwar 

creation of two r i v a l l i n g power blocs in Europe, one beholden to the leadership 

of the United States and the other to the Soviet Union, abstraction, according 

to a pro-western view, is seen primarily as an expression of "freedom" in 

contradistinction to the propagandists art of social realism which, being the 

Soviet aesthetic, is "dictated."7 The apologists for "freedom" then r a l l y 

around abstraction and proclaim the vital superiority of occidental culture: 

Hardly had the ideal of modernism risen again to the surface here and 
there, in the midst of the hunger and misery of a ruined Germany, than 
it was at once clear that it had not been affected by the war and the 
horrible political events. Rather i t had completely preserved that 
former continuity of thought which nourished i t , and was responding to 
the same forces which guided the new European generation in p a i n t i n g . 8 

By presenting the "ideal of modernism" as some sort of (ideal) essence which 

miraculously rises all by i t s e l f , Werner Haftmann, the art historian just 

quoted, makes of a l l modernism a wholly unhistorical process which then in turn 

can dismiss history: "not been affected by the war..." Haftmann presents a 

continuity untouched by historical events by relying on an essentialist view of 

modernism. Using a different strategy, but arriving at the same destination, 

are those historians who harp on the concept of the "Zero Hour," that i s , that 

with the defeat of the Third Reich one had the chance of starting over 

completely, utterly, from "scratch," as it were, again giving the false 

impression that the past would not intrude.9 Here again it is appropriate to 

cite another 1941 essay by Horkheimer: "It is vain to hope that in better times 

[ i . e . , when the war is over and Hitler is defeated] men will return to 



morality," 1 0 a warning, it seems, against "zero hour" naivete. 

Meanwhile, those in the west who are c r i t i c a l of the point of view 

presented by Haftmann in his 1957 Museum of Modern Art catalog essay tend to 

denounce all hermetic and non-communicative art as having been instrumental in 

the failure of the German people to come to terms with their past and, i t seems 

to be implied, with their "German-ness."11 Here again we face an essentialist 

outlook. The historically determined tendency of Germans to regard themselves 

as having a "special" history is here repeated in the assumption that only the 

Germans among all modern nations have failed to come to terms with their past.* 2 

In those art histories which point an accusing finger at the west and in 

particular the United States, but which also maintain the basic assumption that 

in the course of historical development Germany has taken a "Sonderweg," an 

essential s p i r i t is supposed to exist a p r i o r i . On the one hand this "spirit" 

is "special," whilst on the other it is continually made the object of others's 

whims—that i s , it is prevented from coming into its own. The resultant 

Weitschmerz then becomes an a f f e c t - f i l l e d vehicle designed to run down 

windmills. Hence, when in the 1970s the grip of American dominated formalism 

loosened, "neo-expressionism" could be brought on stage as the incorporation of 

the Zeitqeist (German, of course) and as the supposed coming to terms with past 

history (special, of course). Typical of this is a 1983 catalog-book, 

Expressions; New Art from Germany, in which Siegfried Gohr, one of the authors, 

wri tes: 

[Baselitz's] conception of painting has shown both that it is impossible 
for modern art to deal naively with nature, and that artists must defend 
themselves against pressures to conform—a necessity particularly marked 
in Germany, a society that in the immediate postwar period derived its 
standards from external sources and, oriented to the West and to 
America, once again relinquished its own t r a d i t i o n . 1 3 

In particular the suggestion that Germany "once again relinquished its own 



tradition" hearkens back to a pre-modernist, pre-critical concept of nationalism 

which the Second World War had bankrupted. That this is an ahistorical view 

clothing i t s e l f in History should no longer surprise those who examine the 

immediate postwar production of culture—including intellectual discourse and 

painting—and thereby r i d themselves of the attitude that German postwar culture 

was on the one hand "special"—in relation to the rest of bombed and burning 

Europe—and on the other hand solely "object," that i s , s t r i c t l y at the whim of 

the A l l i e d occupiers and assorted "bad" Germans. 

Hermetic, non-communicative painting could be as c r i t i c a l of the past, 

of Nazism, and of the failures of occidental culture in general as the most 

accusative expressionism or realism of the time. There i s , for example, no 

garantee that, had realism dominated abstraction in the 1950s, a work such as 

George Grosz's 1948 The Painter of the Hole ( f i g . 5) would not have generated a 

formulaic, standardized style. This is a work f i l l e d with interesting allusions 

—note the hole in the painter's head, the same hole repeated on every canvas, 

the rats crawling from the hole and over the rim of the canvas, the fact that 

the painter is but a living corpse with a hole where his viscera should be, a 

rat where his genitals should be, a manacle s t i l l round his neck—but even 

though i t speaks of the painter's inability to speak, of his lack of any subject 

left untouched by the ravages of war which could s t i l l be painted, one 

nonetheless associates the work with preconceived ideas of pain, exigency, and 

despair. It could thus be argued that since abstract, non-communicative 

painting was a negative response, a refusal to engage in outworn categories of 

thinking, it was often more c r i t i c a l than i t s humanist-inspired counterpart. 

That this kind of art should in later years help to engender a non-commital 

relationship with the past, as Ganter Grass has maintained in the a r t i c l e 

-6-



cited above, is an historically determined matter, not one which is essentially 

of the art. Only by rejecting this essential ist view and making our analysis 

historical can we understand the conditions o-f culture's production and in turn 

understand the product. We will also come closer, I hope, to better 

understanding the intricate process whereby a c r i t i c a l , negative culture helped 

to reshape history affirmatively. That i s , I am suggesting that abstract 

painting in postwar Germany was the logical counterpart of a discourse of 

pessimism, and that in turn the reshaping of the negativity entailed in this 

culture was crucial to the regrouping and reintegration of western Europe 

today. 

Affirmation—of conformist modernism and "Americanization" on the one 

side and social realism and "Stalinization" on the other—did not occur 

immediately upon the division of Germany into four zones and i t s later 

consolidation into two states. The complexity of postwar culture was far too 

unmanagable for anyone to impose an instant conformity on i t . In the Soviet-

occupied zone, for example, where a similar cultural policy was followed as in 

the western zones, art exhibitions featuring a broad spectrum of styles were 

mounted.1 4 The f i r s t major show in the east zone took place in Dresden in 1946 

and included all major styles from realism through to expressionism, surrealism, 

and abstract a r t . 1 5 

Likewise did the west zones show all the art which had been suppressed 

during the Nazi period. In June 1946 a major exhibition of modern German art 

was mounted in Konstanz (southern Germany), where again the core of the 

exhibition was formed by the art suppressed during the Third Reich: i t included 

the expressionism of the "Brflcke" group, Nolde, Schmitt-Rottluff, Rohlfs, 

Heckel, Dix, and others, as well as the cool constructivism of Bauhaus artists 



such as Oskar Schlemmer, and also abstractionists like Max Ackermann and W i l l i 

Baumeister.is In this immediate postwar period, an emphasis on pluralism 

provided the keynote theme to almost every exhibition. The reason •for this can 

be found in a desire to evade the stigma of dictatorship which the Nazis had 

imposed during their twelve year reign. But what was also at stake for the 

German organizers of these exhibitions was reaching the generation of twenty- to 

thirty-year olds who had grown to maturity during the Third Reich and who were 

wholly unfamiliar with the aims and history of modern art. As one reviewer of 

the Konstanzer show put i t : 

What, for example, can a twenty-year old today, one who was not blessed 
with receiving in his parents's home an a r t i s t i c stimulus and an 
awareness of the tradition of a r t i s t i c development, know of the 
expressionists, of the strivings of abstractionists or s u r r e a l i s t s ? 1 7 

The need to escape from the enforced backwardness of "blood and soil" culture 

was crucial to regaining a measure of c r e d i b i l i t y within Europe. This need was 

perceived by almost everyone—excepting those who s t i l l adhered to Nazism—in 

the German postwar political and cultural spectrum, and the way that it could be 

exploited and forged into an ideological vehicle is a major concern of this 

paper. 

One of the ways of rectifying the damage wrought by Nazism was through a 

recourse to humanism. Here again the eastern and the western establishment did 

not d i f f e r . Whilst the western establishment recuperated the c r i t i c a l thrust of 

a painting like Two Eras into the uninterrupted continuum of modern art, firmly 

entrenched in a humanist idealism (we need only recall Haftmann, cited above, as 

one example among many of this), an orthodox marxist view denies the existence 

of c r i t i c a l content, and instead chides the west for its anti-humanism, its 

attempt to thwart the humanism of communism: 

A coalition of all reactionary, anti-humanist, and anti-national forces 

-8-



ever brought forth by the dominant culture of German imperialism along 
with the equally reactionary forces of American imperialist culture was 
made possible on the basis of Americanization and militarization. The 
importation of imperialist mass culture brought about a kind of fusion 
of these imported cultural goods with the ruling imperialist culture of 
the Federal Republic of Germany at the expense of the humanist cultural 
tradition and of the progressive national cultural h e r i t a g e . 1 8 

Analysis will show that the traditionalists on both sides wanted to claim 

"humanism" for themselves, whereby each side modified its definition. For the 

west, humanism is that factor supposedly common to all men and women which binds 

us to each other, to which we can all relate, and which ameliorates our 

community. C r i t i c s of this ideology have pointed out, however, that the appeal 

to "our common humanity" is in an exploitative, capitalist society used to 

whitewash basic structural injustices which have l i t t l e to do with an abstract 

concept of humanity or humanism, but which are brought about through man's 

ruthless and arrogant ambition to dominate other men and women. In a commmunist 

ideology, "humanism" is more akin to a radical potential which will be liberated 

as a result of revolutionary struggle; here, too, it is an abstract principle 

drawing heavily and largely uncritically on earlier, nineteenth-century 

conceptions of humanism, only now linked to revolution, a bourgeois bete noir. 

Yet there was another discourse at work during this period which through its 

pessimism and nihilism called into question the very concept of nineteenth-

century humanism, which critiqued it and posed a threat to i t , thereby gnawing 

at the bourgeois roots of the concepts which supported social configuration in 

the west and in the east. This critique gained momentum due to the abhorrent 

culmination, at war's end, of twentieth century history: genocide, millions 

dead, the survivors—natives and "d.p.'s" alike—living in rubble without heat 

in winter and very l i t t l e food, a social structure that was in shambles, the 

guilt of being responsible for this, the fear that war would break out yet 

- 9 -



again, this time -fought with atomic weapons. As conditions o-f li-fe changed, 

however—in the west notably with Marshall Aid from 1947 onward—so did the 

grounds o-f the negative response to the original c r i s i s , which in turn changed 

the way cultural products -functioned ideologically in society. 

Beyond attempts by traditionalists to re-implement a prewar style 

attached to a humanist outlook were c r i t i c s who at a very early stage were 

demanding a more current, selective, and rigorous painting in the attempt to 

detoxify German culture of Nazism. One writer in the independent magazine 

Die Geoenwart specifically called on modern art to help in this task. But a 

clear caveat was added: 

If one tries to upkeep a "Modernity" with works whose masters are today 
standing at the edge of old age, if one thus tries to reestablish a 
connection with an a r t i s t i c style that was valid over thirty and more 
years ago, one would yet again rescucitate a past as model for the 
present. That this would be a mistake does not need to be elaborated. 1 3 

The f i r s t voices to call for an art appropriate to the time were making 

themselves heard. The reference to taking "a past" as a model seems to refer to 

the NS credo of trying to turn the clocks backward, of rejecting modern culture. 

They, too, took "a past" as a model, and any attempt to do so after their defeat 

—even if one takes a "good" past—is doomed from the outset. Embracing the 

modern and the future was in this sense not simply a flight from the past, but a 

necessary corrective to i t . 

The dilemma, then, was one of having to face an immediate past which is 

tainted forever, of not being able to reconnect with an even more distant past 

without running the risk of repeating a NS tactic, and also of facing on the one 

hand an orthodoxy of the left and the right which wants to reinstate "humanism," 

and on the other hand the presence of dissatisfaction, disillusionment, and 

"nihilism," which, by rejecting almost everything, is threatening the very 



possibility of rebuilding society. In the following chapters, we will examine a 

series of events, occuring around 1958, which will enable us to understand how a 

discourse of negativity could be recuperated into affirmation and why only the 

abstraction of artists like Baumeister and those associated with a brand of 

"informal" painting succeeded in establishing itself as the emblem of postwar 

German painting. The f i r s t chapter will deal with the intellectual/cultural 

discourse and i t s relation to painting. A 1958 symposium on "the image of man 

in our time," held in Darmstadt, will serve as the introductory event to the 

issues as well as some of the protagonists. In this chapter I will examine how 

the concerns of 1958 were rooted in the previous decade and what their 

international resonance was. 

The second chapter leads more immediately into the political issues of 

the day. By examining an exhibition of Berlin artists held in the Federal 

Republic's new capital city of Bonn in 1958, I will show why the p l u r a l i s t i c 

approach of the f i r s t postwar exhibitions could by 1958 no longer represent 

modern and free culture. These inquiries will show in what way modernism— 

discredited by the Nazi regime—could be restored f i r s t in the western zones of 

Germany, and eventually reach its dominant position in the Federal Republic of 

Germany. 

Unless specifically noted otherwise, all translations into English of 

the German a r t i c l e s , books, and catalogs quoted in this thesis are my own. 

- 1 1 -



F i g . 1: W i l l i Baumeister, Two Eras, 1947, oil on canvas. 

- 1 2 -



Fig- 2 : W i l l i Baumeister, Composi tion. c. 1938, pencil and gouache on cardboard, 
Cambridge, Busch-Reisinger Museum. 



- 1 4 -



F i g . 4: W i l l i Baumeister, Perforation, 1944, oil on canvas. 



F i g . 5: George Grosz, The Painter o-f the Hole. 1948, aquarelle, Cambridge, 
Courtesy o-f The Harvard U n i v e r s i t y Art Museums (Busch-Reisinger Museum) 
Purchase-Germanic Museum Association 

-16-



NOTES 

iThe quote heading this paper comes -from Max Horkheimer, "Art and Mass 
Culture," Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941), p.295. 

Horkheimer left Germany for New York City in 1934; the journal 
Zeitschrift fOr Sozialforschunq. published by the Institut fdr Sozial-
forschung and edited by Horkheimer, existed from 1932 (Frankfurt) to 1941(New 
York). Until volume 8 nr.3 (1939/48) articles were s t i l l published primarily in 
German, with a few English-language pieces throughout. Thereafter, the journal 
appeared in English, also changing its name to Studies in Philosophy and Social  
Science. 

2 A perusal of journals like Frankfurter Hefte and Die Geoenwart confirms 
this, as do Max Frisch's observations in his postwar journal: 

The word with which one can cause the most mischief these days is 
Nihilism—one only has to leaf through our papers and already another 
one has been spotted! Sartre is one, Wilder is one, Jflnger is one, 
Brecht is one... A truly binding word! I can l i t e r a l l y see them, our 
second-rate reviewers, dashing about with their germicide spray, and as 
soon as something living frightens them, they spray with eyes closed: 

"Nihilism, nihilism!" 
N i h i l i s t in the sense of our press is the doctor who x-rayed me 

today instead of rouging my cheek: because what shows up when he x-rays 
won't be p r e t t y . . . . 

What they call positive: 
The fear of the negative. 

— entry from late Autumn, 1947, in: Max Frisch, Taoebuch 1944-1949 (Frankfurt: 
Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1985), pp.176-7. 

Max Frisch became one of the best-known and most important authors in 
postwar Europe. Born in 1911 in Zurich, he became an architect and only 
gradually relinquished this profession in favor of writing. His 1946-49 journal 
was published in 1958; later journals were published in 1972. He began 
publishing fiction in 1948; his best-known works include Sti11er. 1954, and 
Homo Faber. 1957. In 1948 he came into contact with Bert Brecht who was in 
Zurich at this time, passing from exile in America to the east zone of Germany. 
Brecht was at this time also consolidating his most important postwar play, Die  
Taoe der Commune, about the 1871 Paris Commune. In 1946 Frisch had travelled 
through Germany, Italy, and France, and in 1948 he travelled to Prague, Berlin, 
and Warschau. 

3 W i l l i Baumeister, b.Stuttgart in 1889, died in 1955; Max Horkheimer, 
b.Stuttgart in 1895, died in 1973. 

4See Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise; German Refuoee Artists and  
Intellectuals in America, from the 1938s to the Present (Boston: Beacon Press, 
1983). 

-17-



5For biographies and monograms on Baumeister, see Will Grohmann, Wi11i  
Baumeister (Stuttgart: W. Kohl hammer Verlag, 1952)—this was the -first postwar 
monogram published on a German artist—and, for a more comprehensive work, 
G6tz Adriani, editor, Baumeister: Dokumente. Texte. Gemalde (Cologne: 
DuMont, 1971). 

6 " In-formal ism" is the English translation -for "l'art informel." This 
term was -first extensively used by Michel Tapie in his book Un art autre 
(1952). It is "an extremely broad term" used in the 1950s to describe "a mainly 
abstract but non-geometric style characterised by such terms as "shapeless", 
"intuitive", 'psychic improvisation". L'Art Informel included such tendencies 
as Tachisme, Matter Art, Lyrical Abstraction, and American Action painting 
(though i t refers primarily to European art)." —see John A. Walker, 61ossarv  
of A r t . Architecture and Design since 1945. 2nd rev. ed. (London: Clive 
Bingley L t d . , 1977), s.v."L'Art Informel," pp.41-42. 

S t y l i s t i c a l l y , "informal ism" bears certain, identifiable hallmarks: it 
is largely abstract, although some artists associated with it s t i l l use 
figuration, provided that the figurative elements are distorted or otherwise 
"estranged" from their "natural" appearance; i t s forms are "informe" in the 
sense that they f a l l outside of conventional recognizabi1ity or accepted/ 
traditionalist categories of aesthetic beauty; its abstraction is rooted in 
surrealism, automatism, and even expressionism, but never in geometric styles of 
abstraction. In a way, it is an assault on form and on almost everything 
conventional associated with "form." It is a style of painting which burgeoned 
during the post-WW II period in practically every European country. One of the 
most codified manifestations of "informal ism" occured in Paris when the art 
c r i t i c Michel Tapie began writing about "art autre"—he published a book by 
that name in 1952. Phi 1osophical1y and ideologically, "informal ism" goes far 
beyond the categories of style and becomes very d i f f i c u l t to pin down. In part, 
this text is an attempt to "pin down" whatever there was of informal ism (and 
why) in the art produced in Germany during the postwar period. 

Pitting itself against conventions of "form," informal ism was often also 
a challenge to other conventions, such as those of traditional language and 
communication. In that sense, it can be called non-communicative. But I have 
to point out that I am not using the word "non-communicative" because the 
artists at the time here under discussion thought of their work in this way (at 
least I have not found any published statements to support this); the 
designation "non-communicative" stems more from the pejorative statements of 
informal ism's foes—Gunter Grass's later statements, discussed in the 
following pages, are such an attack, for example. While it is my contention 
that the art under discussion here posed a challenge to conventional modes of 
communication, it also seems to me that its "non-communicativeness" was 
something which became dominant and which was exarcerbated by this informal type 
abstraction's success and acceptance in the 1950s. The more it was embraced 
into the bosom of the art market, the more "non-communicative" i t perforce 
became since communication would have entailed making apparent i t s 
differentiated "historical becoming" and its reasons for its "crisis in 
reception" and its "lack of social compliance"—see my discussion of Adorno's 
1950 statements regarding this issue, page 26 of this text. By using the label 
non-communicative, while simultaneously analyzing in what way this art was 
engaged in communication or in establishing an alternate language, I hope to 
push the reader toward seeing the paradox, and possibly realizing that it was a 

- 1 8 -



subsequent development—in which popularity and sales play a dominant r o l e - -
which made people -forget that this painting once had something important to say. 

'There have been a number o-f thoroughgoing studies in recent years on 
the ideological usefulness of American abstract expressionism as a means of 
furthering American goals and policies. See for example Eva Cockcroft, 
"Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War," Artforum 12 (June 1974):39-41, 
John Tagg, "American Power and American Painting: The Development of Vanguard 
Painting in the United States since 1945," Praxis 1 Nr.2 (Winter 1976):59-78, 
Jane de Hart Mathews, "Art and P o l i t i c s in Cold War America," American His-
torical Review 81 (Oct. 1976):762-787, and Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole  
the Idea of Modern A r t , trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of 
Chicago Press, 1983). 

^Werner Haftmann, German Art of the Twentieth Century (New York: The 
Museum of Modern Art, 1957), p. 130. Original English text quoted. 

9The "not been affected by the war" analysis as well as the "zero hour" 
analysis are really both just two sides of the same coin. In both cases, there 
is a stubborn insistance on separating art from history, culture from p o l i t i c s . 
Culture is at best allowed a spurious relation to p o l i t i c s . 

The "zero-hour" analysis is also sometimes used in an "historical-
c r i t i c a l " manner, that i s , it is assumed that Germans truly could "start over," 
build a just society, etc., and that they failed to do so even though they—and 
only they—had this once in a lifetime opportunity. A moderate version of this 
is Karin Thomas, Zweimal deutsche Kunst nach 1945; 48 Jahre Nahe und Feme 
(Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 1985). The f i r s t chapter is called "The victory of 
the 'great abstract' over the 'great real'—the search for a reconnection to 
modernism after 1945" and is subdivided as follows: "1. 1945—'Zero Hour' and 
new beginning; 2. Reconnection with the 'International Style'; 3. Realism on 
the sidelines; 4. Sculpture betwixt convention and avant-gardism." 

The problem with this seems to me to be one of assuming that a "norm"— 
in this case "modernism," "international style" (Thomas does not refer to 
architecture here, but to abstract painting), etc.—exists, prefabricated, so to 
speak, ready to be "reconnected" to (which then makes those who reconnect either 
"modern" or "conformist") or "deviated" from, as the case may be. I would 
prefer to argue that "norms" do not exist pre-given, in a void, but rather are 
worked out, worked on, and bargained, bartered, and traded upon by all parties 
concerned. Norms change and are continuously adapted; such a thing as a 
modernist norm could hardly survive intact the history of the twentieth century 
and hence, I would argue, did not even exist in a consentaneous, "international" 
form at war's end. That a new norm was worked out by the early 1950s does not 
mean that it existed in 1947 or that it spontaneously appeared above the 
players's heads like an epiphany. 

10Max Horkheimer, "The End of Reason," Studies in Philosophy and Social  
Science 9 (1941), p.376. Original English text. 

J 1See the criticism launched by GOnter Grass, "Geschenkte Freiheit; 
Versagen, Schuld, vertane Chancen," Die Zeit Nr.20. 17 May 1985, pp.14-15. 

1 2 F o r a thoroughly revised look at the thesis of the German "Sonderweg" 

-19-



see David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History;  
Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford and New 
York: Oxford University Press, 1984). Eley's and Blackbourn's book was 
originally published in German, Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibuno. by the 
Ullstein verlag in 1988. 

Although this book deals mainly with the period up to Weimar, it has 
repercussions on the way post-World War II history has been written. It caused a 
major furor amongst German historians and was the subject of extensive media 
debates. The book is pertinent to this paper since much postwar art history, 
especially in view of the recent resurgence of neo-expressionism, focusses on 
the idea that Germany has not come to terms with its past, and that Germany is 
somehow unique in this regard. This, however, would presuppose that, for 
example, Britain has come to terms with colonialism, France with Algeria, the 
United States with Vietnam. Since f a i l i n g to come to terms with the national 
past is not a purely German t r a i t , as the preceding references indicate, an 
insistence that only Germany has committed this error seems to me to be another 
way of evading history. Eley and Blackbourn refer to Hans-Magnus Enzensberger 
who, in the 1960s cited the words, "qui s'accuse, s'excuse," as an illustration 
of how the ideology of the "Sonderweg" can function as an opiate and/or excuse. 
This is in no way intended as a lessening of the enormity of Germany's crime as 
perpetrator of genocide, racism, and war, but I do suggest that the often s h r i l l 
insistence on German "uniqueness" strikes me as an almost gloating excuse for 
what Germany has done. It gloats at having succeeded at evading a real coming 
to terms with history. 

Eley's qualifying remarks in the book's introduction explain his intent 
and also serve as an example of what I hope to do in this paper: 

...the purpose of these remarks and the detailed exposition which 
follows is not to minimize the differences between Germany and other 
European societies and to homogenize nineteenth-century and twentieth-
century European history in some kind of capitalist developmental stew. 
My aim is not to argue that before 1914 Germany was merely one 
capitalist society like any other, separated only by certain "accidents" 
of previous historical development from Britain or France. I have no 
desire to demote the importance of specific political differences 
amongst societies or to explain away the patent authoritarianism of the 
German political system, diminishing the latter to a pure epiphenomenal 
significance. Nor (to go to the other extreme) am I advocating the 
practical historian's familiar nominalism, in which every society is 
"peculiar" and history's comparative calling completely dissolved. 
(...) I am really arguing for an experimental shift of perspective. In 
the following pages it will certainly be argued that Imperial Germany 
was less "backward" and more "modern"—and therefore more positively 
comparable to say Edwardian Britain—than most historians have been 
prepared to admit. But in general my wish is not to question the 
existence of "authoritarian and anti-democratic structures in state and 
society" (Bracher). My aim is simply to ask how else they might be 
understood, with a view to generating some new and interesting 
questions, [p.50] 

1 3 S a i n t Louis, Art Museum, Expressions; New Art from Germany. June-

- 2 8 -



August 1983 (travelling exhibition), p.32. Siegfried Gohr's catalog essay, 
pp.27-41, is entitled, "The Difficulties of German Painting with i t s own 
Tradition," and recapitulates the German "Sonderweg" thesis in art history. 

i^Jutta Held, Kunst und KunstpolitiK 1945-49; Kulturaufbau nach dem  
2.Weitkrieq (Berlin: Verlag fur Ausbildung und Studium in der Elefanten Press, 
1981), p. 15. 

1 5 T h i s i n i t i a l l y flexible cultural policy in the east zone was of course 
eventually abandoned; by 1947, when the US's policy of Marshall Plan aid made i t 
clear that there could be not uncompromised participation for communism with 
capitalism in Europe, a Soviet style of social realism began to be more and more 
o f f i c i a l l y encouraged as a way for east zone Germany to differentiate itself 
further from developments in the western zones. 

1 6 The "Konstanzer Kunstwoche"—Constance Art Week—was held for a month, 
from the 1st to the 30th of June 1944 and included an exhibition of German 
contemporary art (239 paintings plus graphic a r t ) . 

I' L . E . R e i n d l , "Moderne Kunst in Konstanz," Das Kunstwerk 1 Nr.2 
(1944/47), p.32. 

18Imperialisrous und Kultur. edited by the Institut far Gesel1schafts-
wissenschaften beim ZK der SED, Lehrstuhl fur marxistisch-leninistische 
Kultur- und Kunstwissenschaften (Munich: Damnitz Verlag, 1975), p.151. 

isBkd., " S c h r i . k u n s t . s c h r i D i e Geoenwart 1 Nr.4/7 (1944), p.18. 
"Bkd." could be one of the magazine's contributing editors, Ernst Benkard. The 
t i t l e of the a r t i c l e refers to the text beneath a Magdalen altar painted in 1431 
by Lucas Moser, "Schri.kunst.schri.und.klag.dich.ser.din.begert.jeez.niemen.mer. 
so.o.we." Roughly translated this means, "Cry art cry and thineself deplore, for 
no one wants you anymore. So alas." In the 1950s an avant-garde German art 
magazine took "schri kunst schri" as its t i t l e . 

-21-



CHAPTER I: SEARCH FOR A MEANING—POSTWAR INTELLECTUAL AND CULTURAL DISCOURSE 

The "Darmstadter Gespr&ch 1958": Mirror of Cultural Concern 

In 1958 the Magistrate of the city of Darmstadt and the Committee 

"Darmstadter Gesprach" sponsored a symposium on the topic of Das Menschen-

b i l d in unserer Zeit—"the image of man in our time"—to which were invited some 

of West Germany's most significant culture spokesmen: W i l l i Baumeister, by then 

the country's leading abstract a r t i s t ; Theodor Adorno, philosopher and returned 

emigre; Alexander Mitscherlisch, psychoanalyst; and Hans Sedlmayr, the 

conservative art historian. While the symposium took place from the 15th to the 

17th of July, an art exhibition with the same t i t l e could also be visited 

through the period of 15 July to 3 September 1958.1 This chapter will examine 

the issue the symposium meant to address as well as this issue's rootedness in 

the intellectual history and discourse of the postwar period. The p a r t i c i -

pants's contributions as well as a reflection on the t i t l e of the symposium will 

show that the key issue of the talks was the status of "man" in contemporary 

society; that i s , primacy seemed to be no longer accorded as a matter of course 

to the conception that rational man stood at the centre of thought, society, 

p o l i t i c s , culture. 

The symposium participants approached this issue in varying ways, 

stressing different aspects of "the image of man in our time." Hans Sedlmayr, 

whose 1948 book verlust der Mitte—"loss of the centre"—had garnered a wide 

response,2 considered the entire modern European cultural development a decline 

of man from God. As a conservative he prescribed a medicine which differed from 

that advocated by other symposium participants, yet there was s t i l l a basic 

-22-



agreement on the diagnosis of the ailment. According to Sedlmayr, the usual 

hierarchies of top and bottom, of anthropocentricism, were in disarray, and 

their disintegration had become programmatic: 

The c r i t e r i a for differentiating between the subnatural and the 
supernatural are also not always easy; in primitive art there is often a 
fusion of the sacred and the cacodemonic, and thus also an unprecedented 
blurring of these two spheres of being is occuring today, indeed, it is 
being consciously strived for by some tendencies, such as the 
surrealists. The exchanging of top and bottom is the agenda.3 

Sedlmayr advocated abandoning modern art altogether in favor of what he 

perceived to be the secure values of older, humanist art which had given to man 

an unquestioned central place in exchange for the unquestioned place of God at 

the head of an hierarchy of values. Whilst this prescription placed him in the 

camp of the reactionary foes of modernism, his perception of the crisis—the 

deliberate violation of the separation of "lower" and "upper" spheres and its 

resultant undermining of a rational image of man—belied an understanding of the 

modern akin to that of i t s most progressive champions. 

The notion that "culture" and "barbarism" should be mutually exlusive 

had given way to the recognition that instead they were indeed often twinned. 

This was a new perception in the sense that culture criticism had previously 

focussed on the notion of degeneracy or decadence, a criticism which left the 

idea of culture i t s e l f intact. Now culture was examined as a theoretical object 

seen in dialectical relation to its obverse. Seeking a way of coming to terms 

with this new perception, the psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscher1isch, another 

symposium participant, suggested a therapeutic approach to the problem of the 

culture-barbarism dialectic. Unlike his conservative colleague, he did not 

advocate a banishment of the "lower" spheres (inclusive, following Sedlmayr, of 

most "tainted" modern culture), and instead retained a therapeutic thrust by 

reminding the audience of the dangers of repression: 

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The "lower" is maybe not at all "demonic" as long as the "upper" doesn't 
deny its existence! To be sure, when this occurs, it [the "lower"] 
avenges i t s e l f with a primal power, reaching into the most remote areas 
of human a c t i v i t y . And let's not forget: it has the power to make of 
reason a whore!4 

Mitscherlisch warned that repression—which Sedlmayr commended—would not equal 

security against the "lower" or demonic spheres, as the reference to reason's 

whorishness—its role in the Nazi regime as servant in crimes against humanity— 

implies. 

Such a therapeutic strategy, implying a confrontation with the unknown 

and demonic in order to avoid repressing i t , also is present in W i l l i 

Baumeister's defense of modern art. "I protest," said Baumeister, "against the 

claim that modern art is a symptom of a broad degeneracy or that it is 

degeneracy i t s e l f . " 5 Baumeister tried to defend the symbolic power of art, 

which, he emphasized, need not be rooted in naturalism and naturalistic 

depictions of man. Abstract art is able to f a c i l i t a t e a confrontation with the 

unknown and thereby lead to a positive understanding of man and the unknown, and 

not, as Sedlmayr would claim, to a furtherance of demonic powers, of decadence 

and decay in the world. Baumeister, who expressed his philosophy in his book 

Das Unbekannte in der Kunst6—"the unknown in art"—lauded the recent discovery 

of cave paintings in the Dordogne,7 primitivism, and "the unknown," thereby 

c r y s t a l l i z i n g a rather widespread feeling that a recourse to "beginnings," to 

primary phenomena can be a means of mastering one's present situation. 

This concern for primitivism also signalled a concern for authenticity. 

That i s , with the irrational or primitive so strongly f e l t , it could be argued 

that a repression of "the unknown" would also betray a lack of authentic 

response to the contemporary condition. The recent past, Nazi atrocities, the 

Second World War, and the physical as well as spiritual destruction of Europe 

-24-



had taken place, and hence, simply to return to a past model which proposed to 

advocate a one-sidedly bright, "upper" sphere view of culture which would 

eliminate the "lower" sphere by decree was seen as inauthentic at best and as 

caught up in the aesthetics o-f kitsch at worst. 8 The interest in kitsch and its 

opposite, authentic art, had never been entirely extinguished even during the NS 

period. In the period from 1933 to 1945, eighty-three articles on the nature 

and phenomenon of kitsch were published in Germany, and after the war, Clement 

Greenberg's "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," originally published in the United States 

in 1939, was translated and published in Germany in 1949.8 

That the best modern art is concerned with authenticity was the argument 

reiterated by Theodor Adorno at the Darmstadt symposium. Besides insisting on 

the differentiated gualities to be found in "radical painting,"1 0—that i s , that 

abstract art was not a single undifferentiated mass but rather that it showed 

layers of historical becoming—Adorno also emphasized the power of attraction 

which the disharmonious elements in the modern arts exert: 

A very peculiar relationship which one should want to describe very 
subtly and very precisely is to be found here, a being-pul1ed-into, a 
peculiar attraction which exudes exactly from those non-harmonious 
elements, a being-enticed-by-adventure, by the not-yet-experienced; 
simultaneously, the willingness to resist harm by helping it to adopt a 
s i g n . 1 1 

Thus, the abstract painting which contains these non-harmonious elements is in 

fact offering resistance to suffering by providing it with a sign, by making a 

differentiated emblem in which a viewer can decipher a truthful—because not 

harmoniously reconciled—picture of the world. 

It is in this way that the dissonance, the break with the traditional 

aesthetic of harmony and tradition per se. which had usually accorded priority 

to the image of man, constitutes art's authenticity in the modern period: 

If at all there is a preservation of tradition, a rescuing of tradition 

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—I am here citing Juan Gris verbatim—then it could only have its place 
where one no longer has anything directly to do with tradition, whereas 
everywhere in modern art where one does re-fer to tradition, precisely 
those moments which are the salient ones to modern art are obscured and 
levelled to the category of universal beauty which has become so deeply 
suspect to us al1 . 1 2 

A break such as this in turn has social consequences for art since it brings 

with it a c r i s i s in reception: 

That a c r i s i s in reception, in the sense that most of the public is 
alienated from modern art, exists in today's art is something no 
reasonable person would deny. (...) This lack of social compliance on 
the part of modern art is in itself a social expression. If one takes 
social responsibility as seriously as i t should be taken, ...then one 
has to own up to the fact that modern art was driven to break with 
consumption, that the breadth of production, insofar as it wants to 
remain viable on the market—for the sake of its saleability—has 
intensified the mechanisms of the commodity character of art i t s e l f , has 
intensified everything which makes reality despicable and unbearable to 
us. In actual fact, the interests of human beings (...) are today 
represented only by that art which orients itself in no way according to 
conventions, to cliches, to the s p i r i t of the illustrated press, the 
radio, and the magazines. Probably the only artist today who represents 
the interests of society is the one who does not let himself be made the 
mouthpiece of those who pretend to speak for society when in reality 
they are concerned only with manipulating society as consumers, their 
own claim to truth notwithstanding.1 3 

Adorno is here attacking both Eastern and Western ideologies since he saw both 

as trying to manipulate people into "buying" a particular "line" which in turn 

blocks c r i t i c a l t h i n k i n g . 1 4 The artist has to refrain from becoming either 

side's mouthpiece. While Sedlmayr saw the modern artist in cahoots with modern 

society in trying to dethrone man—and God—from their centrality as point of 

reference, Adorno saw modern art as being the authentic resistance to a 

brutalizing and barbaric history, and even as an authentic attempt to c r i t i c i z e 

and offer an alternative, whilst in the west the logic of consumer society 

offered the inauthentic alternative of commodified man. 

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Theory of C r i s i s . Theory in C r i s i s : The Effect o-f History on Art and Culture 

This then was the state of a particular kind of advanced cultural 

criticism in Germany in 1959, a criticism that offered.a diagnosis of a point of 

c r i s i s in modern culture which even conservatives like Sedlmayr would agree 

with, no matter how different the latter's prescription was. What I would like 

to ask now is what specifically had produced this sense of c r i s i s , where i t s 

roots in recent history lay, and how i t manifested i t s e l f in the painting being 

produced. W i l l i Baumeister, for example, often referred in his immediate 

postwar production to the thematics outlined above. A painting like the 1946 

Urzeitoestalten ( f i g . 6), with i t s cave-wall like ground of sand-colored, thick 

impasto and i t s primitive, shaman type figures does not provide the renaissance 

spatial perspective indicative of hierarchy which Sedlmayr valued so highly. 

Instead, man is dethroned, God is absent except perhaps in the form of ritual 

magic, and the human figures, outlined with coarse black, purple, and reddish 

lines, are barely recognizable since they are placed on the same level of 

differentiation as their environment of signs, symbols, and object-shapes. This 

conglomeration of shapes also lends a certain impenetrability to the painting, 

underscoring the sense that everything is taking place on the surface, on the 

wall of this cave, beyond which no world of man-made architecture can be found. 

Instead, the cave wall—the canvas—is the only ground on which this new-ancient 

world acts: the rest is lost in oblivion, or perhaps has been deliberately 

abandoned. But the viewer is neither delivered into total chaos since the 

figures and their archaic world are s t i l l placed centrally on their ground. The 

Menschenbi1d—"the image of man"—however encoded, strives to assert i t s e l f . 

Ernst Wilhelm Nay, another painter who came to represent German postwar 

-27-



modernism, in his immediate postwar work manifested the same struggle, using 

different s t y l i s t i c means. His Autumn Song of 1945 ( f i g . 7) shows a canvas 

covered with a jagged patchwork of brushstrokes creating planes or surfaces 

which obscure and then reveal parts of houses, figures, and landscapes. In the 

foreground of this f i e l d , two figures, elongated or otherwise made to f i t the 

flow of the picture, are discernible. At the bottom left a seated figure holds 

what could be a flute, while on the right another dances with upraised arms and 

thrown back head and face. The figures are distorted, they tend to merge with 

their patterned background, and are perhaps not v i s i b l e to the cursory glance; 

they do not stand out in the picture the way one might expect i f they belonged 

to traditional figuration. In some ways the painting looks like it hearkens 

back to a prewar expressionism, but it does not exactly repeat this affective 

moment: these figures and their ground are modified by an interweaving of 

surfaces and passages which does not permit the figurative to dominate. The 

texture of figures and ground are interwoven. This serves somewhat to mute the 

affective. 

This ambivalent "toning down" of affect—ambivalent because it is s t i l l 

allowed to show through in the agitated brushwork and the choice of colors even 

if the subject matter is now encoded—is also apparent in a 1948 work called 

Melisande ( f i g . 8). Somewhat like in a cubist picture the eye is led along 

the surfaces of different objects and planes, including those of human figures, 

and sometimes can discern a roof, a head, body parts, something to suggest that 

there is subject matter intended behind the play of pattern and color. But the 

human does not dominate, except perhaps in the crass appeal of the painting's 

colors to e l i c i t a strong—positive or negative—(human) response in the 

viewer. Nay seems to be trying to use a form idiom associated with Picasso and 

- 2 8 -



with cubism to metamorphose an essentially expressive, affective intention into 

something which evades direct association with German prewar expressionism. His 

fusion of cubist and expressionist elements tends to serve to disintegrate any 

recognizably human figures, but these are nonetheless present in the paintings, 

simultaneously asserted and called into question.Is 

This struggle between assertion and cal1ing-into-question must be 

followed through the 1940s in order to understand its valency in 1950. What 

must be understood f i r s t is the deep mistrust with which European culture— 

obviously most especially Germany with its historical self-designation as "a 

nation of poets and thinkers"—was regarded by many of i t s former masters and 

apprentices after the war. As the Swiss architect and writer Max Frisch, 

travelling throughout Europe after the war, noted during a 1948 stay in Hamburg: 

One of the most decisive experiences which our generation, born in this 
century but reared s t i l l in the s p i r i t of the previous one, has been 
able to make—especially during the second world war—is that people who 
are full of that [ i . e . , 19th c.] culture, connoisseurs who can with wit 
and enthusiasm discuss Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Bruckner, can 
easily act as butchers; both in the same person. Let's call that which 
distinguishes these people an aesthetic culture. Their special, 
identifying trait is their non-commitment, the clean separation between 
culture and p o l i t i c s . . . . It's a frame of mind which can think the 
loftiest (for the earthly is tossed overboard so that the hot-air 
balloon can rise) and which doesn't prevent the basest, a culture which 
rigorously exempts itself from the demands of the day, which is f u l l y at 
eternity's service. Culture in the sense of an idol which is satisfied 
with our a r t i s t i c or scientific achievements but which licks the blood 
of our brothers behind our backs—culture as moral schizophrenia is in 
our century customary. How often, when once again we speak of Germany, 
someone brings up Goethe, S t i f t e r , Hblderlin, and all the others which 
Germany has produced, namely in this sense: Genius as a l i b i . 1 6 

Culture, usually removed to ethereal spheres in order to serve as the a l i b i of 

greatness able to excuse the corruption of p o l i t i c s , was seen to be stripped of 

i t s ideological veil by Frisch and many other c r i t i c a l thinkers. The illusion 

of maintaining two separate spheres—politics and culture—was shattered: 

"Whoever doesn't concern himself with p o l i t i c s has already executed the taking 

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o-f sides which he wanted to spare himself: he serves the ruling p a r t y . " 1 7 

The critique of this breakdown of culture, reason, and individuality 

which was seen to culminate with fascism began prior to war's end, often in 

exile from NS Germany, and sometimes within the borders of the NS regime i t s e l f 

as the immediate flourishing of these critiques after H i t l e r ' s defeat indicates. 

In exile, Horkheimer in 1941 wrote an essay entitled "The End of Reason." He 

noted that: 

The destruction of rationalistic dogmatism through the self-criticism of 
reason, carried out by the ever renewed nominalistic tendencies in 
philosophy has now been r a t i f i e d by historical r e a l i t y . The substance 
of individuality i t s e l f , to which the idea of autonomy was bound, did 
not survive the process of industrialization. Reason has degenerated 
because i t was the ideological projection of a false universality which 
now shows the autonomy of the subject to have been an i l l u s i o n . The 
collapse of reason and the collapse of individuality are one and the 
same. 1 8 

Here the historical groundwork for the struggle between the assertion of the 

individual and i t s being questioned is described. It is a process rooted in 

enlightenment thought based on s e l f - c r i t i c i s m . Unforseen was the rigor with 

which self-critique and analytical reason would undermine their own ontological 

bases. Yet the problem is not a "purely" philosophical one, but rather is a 

process aided by concurrent social and economic developments, as Horkheimer 

i11ustrates: 

With the disappearance of independent economic subjects, the subject as 
such disappears. It is no longer a synthetic unit; it has become 
senseless for it to preserve itself for some distant future or to plan 
for its heirs. In the present period the individual has opportunities 
only on short term. Once secure property has vanished as the goal of 
acquisition, the intrinsic connection between the experiences of the 
individual disappears. Concern for property under orderly competition 
and the rule of law has always been constitutive of the ego. Slaves and 
paupers had no individuality. The "premise of all my acting in the 
sensuous world, can only be as part of that sensuous world, i f I live 
amongst other free beings. This determined part of the world . . . i s 
called...my property." 1 9 

Horkheimer links the contemporary breakdown of reason and individuality—of 

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the subject—with the economic anarchy o-f advanced capitalism and o-f fascism. 

It should be clear as well that with the collapse of the NS regime, "order" did 

not return to Germany. Instead, social and economic anarchy increased in 

virulence as the remnants of society struggled with disease, hunger, "displaced 

persons," military occupation, and a lawlessness on the streets which manifested 

i t s e l f in black market dealings, a widespread breakdown in acceptable sexual 

mores, promiscuity, as well as assorted forms of violence. Pre-Marshal1 plan 

social conditions in Europe, particularly Germany, did not manifest a return to 

planned, orderly society, and hence neither to integrated subjectivity. 

Furthermore, Horkheimer makes an intrinsic connection between oppression 

and language, an emphasis which is also reexamined by other writers in several 

postwar a r t i c l e s . Horkheimer writes: 

[Fascism] strikes down that which is tottering, the individual, by 
teaching him to fear something worse than death. Fear reaches farther 
than the identity of his consciousness. The individual must abandon the 
ego and carry on somehow without i t . Under Fascism the objects of 
organization are being disorganized as subjects. They lose their 
identical character, and are simultaneously Nazi and anti-Nazi, 
convinced and sceptical, brave and cowardly, clever and stupid. They 
have renounced all consistency. This inconsistency into which the ego 
has been dissolved is the only attitude adequate to a reality which is 
not defined by so-called plans but by concentration camps. The method 
of this madness consists in demonstrating to men that they are just as 
shattered as those in the camps and by this means welding the racial 
community together. Men have been released from such camps who have 
taken over the jargon of their j a i l e r s and with cold reason and mad 
consent (the price, as it were, of their survival) tell their story as 
i f i t could not have been otherwise than i t was, contending that they 
have not been treated so badly after a l l . Those who have not yet been 
j a i l e d behave as if they had already been tortured. They profess 
everything. The murderers, on the other hand, have adopted the language 
of the Berlin night club and garment c e n t e r . 2 0 

What has seemingly irrevocably occured is that the identi ty-buildinq function of 

language has been lost or corrupted. The very language which people speak under 

fascism and also under advanced capitalism is incapable of creating identity or 

community. A 1947 a r t i c l e which dealt with German's drift into argot—and with 

- 3 1 -



the concommitant ineffectuality of "straight" language—analyzed the cause to be 

Fascism's failure to create a new language despite its attempts to create "the 

new man" and to have left behind nothing but disintegration: 

The fact is that Fascism f a i l e d , despite i t s claim to total transforma-
tion of human beings, in achieving a depth effect on language even 
remotely comparable to the effect on language which the French and 
Russian revolutions achieved. A new order was anchored, in language as 
well, through the force of principles. National Socialism and Fascism, 
which did not believe in principles, could not have a true language, 
either.21 

The process begun by capitalism run wild, which culminated in Fascism, had left 

behind disintegration, loss of identity, and loss of language, according to many 

of the postwar analyses. Despite the claim of the totalitarian regime to 

explain every facet of l i f e , i t s explanations were always disingenuous because 

they were made on the basis of preconceived answers to preconceived questions: 

"The speeches were always the same. And every schoolboy knew how to imitate 

them. (...) That's where the real danger of thinking in the ' t o t a l ' lay: 

nothing in the world required a serious examination, a new mental effort; for 

every question the answer had already been preconceived."2 2 Old language has 

thus become corrupted but new language is not taking form, either. The 

dilemma—focussed on language and culture but intricately interwoven with 

society, economics, and politics—was overwhelming, but both Reifenberg and 

Krauss, the two writers cited above, warned of the dire effects of relying on a 

merely passive resistance to the lies of fascist language and on a merely 

quietist fatalism vis-a-vis the lack of a new, vital language. No one, 

however, as yet proposed a new program for language's renewal. 

The pessimistic fatalism which writers warned of could be discerned in 

the form of radical disinterest on the part of youth in p o l i t i c s , culture, and 

society. Describing the state of intellectuals in postwar Germany, the magazine 

-32-



Frankfurter Hefte came to the conclusion that the situation was catastrophic— 

although i t added that this was not restricted to Germany alone. The situation 

was especially bad among the young, students in this case, who dared not talk of 

their war experience without running the risk of being accused of harboring Nazi 

sentiment—who hence were unable to "work through" those experiences—and who 

displayed an alarming pessimism which far outstripped the sense of c r i s i s 

experienced by their elders! 

But the knowledge of what they want is for these students less 
significant than their knowledge of what they do not want. And that is 
why pessimism so often lies like a dark shadow over their lives. "You 
asked me what's going to happen now," a student answered me, "I believe 
nothing will become of us anymore. There's just going to be another war 
anyway."23 

And what of political parties and their a b i l i t y to generate a committed 

following? The parties were tainted with the same paralysis and decrepitude 

which had undermined the v i a b i l i t y of society. The Christian Democrats, a 

largely conservative, highly anti-communist party, prescribed a warmed-over 

traditionalism which the younger generation found d i f f i c u l t to believe i n , the 

Communist Party, a poor cousin to the Social Democrats, seemed incapable— 

whether due to being shackled to a Stalinist line or to being traditionally 

distrusted and eventually hounded out of existence in West Germany—of renewing 

public imagination. The SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany), which should 

have been able, given i t s traditionally strong support in Germany, to do just 

that, f a i l e d , it could be argued, more than any other party in f u l f i l l i n g its 

mandate. 

This party should have taken on the mantle of a c r i t i c a l reexamination 

of the past—including the mistakes made by anti-fascists like themselves which 

helped make Nazism possible. But instead the party radically refused to do this 

and instead upheld a mythology of innocence and blamelessness for the past: the 

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SPD after the war reasserted its prewar, 1930s rallying cry, Nach H i t l e r , wir! 

-"after H i t l e r , i t ' s our turn!"—meaning that Social Democracy would take over 

a-fter H i t l e r ' s defeat, without ever asking any questions about how this overly 

confident, naive 1930s view had perhaps contributed to the consolidation of 

H i t l e r ' s power, and how it could possibly survive the war, the genocide 

perpetrated by the Nazis, intact. Needless to say, the party also failed to 

examine i t s role in the Weimar government as possibly having aided the rise of 

fascism. Instead, Kurt Schumacher, himself a survivor of H i t l e r ' s camps, took 

over the Party's leadership after the war and gave to it the myth of original 

grace: the Party has never made a mistake. 2 4 Hence, the SPD, too, operated with 

the language of "the total," of preconceived answers to all questions. Despite 

the fact that i t had a large following after the war—as it did prior to 

H i t l e r ' s rise to power—it failed to be a source of real renewal, as i t s 

willingness to accomodate the occupying powers in their reinstitution of the old 

capitalist structures demonstrates. Thus the only common denominator which 

could be said to exist amongst progressive tendencies in Germany after the war 

was not a political a f f i l i a t i o n with any one party; rather only an unstructured 

anti-fascism had united them during the war and remained the common bond 

afterwards. 

Lookinq for the New Reality: The Intrusion of the Archaic 

In art also an anti-fascistic, whether passive or active, stance was the 

identifying characteristic of progressive postwar art p r a x i s . 2 5 The most 

obvious signifier of this stance was the valorization of styles repressed during 

the NS period. Hence, as mentioned in the introduction, all the occupied zones 

- 3 4 -



showed a r t t h a t was p r e v i o u s l y s u p p r e s s e d as " d e g e n e r a t e , " and a l s o t r i e d t o put 

on e x h i b i t i o n s w h i c h c o u l d s e r v e as l e s s o n s i n modern a r t h i s t o r y i n o r d e r t o 

h e l p o r i e n t the g e n e r a t i o n o-f twenty- t o t h i r t y - y e a r o l d s who, h a v i n g come t o 

m a t u r i t y d u r i n g H i t l e r ' s r e i g n , had not been exposed t o t h e a r t o f the e a r l y 

t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y . A s i m u l t a n e o u s t h r u s t r e q u i r e d l o c a t i n g a new, a p p r o p r i a t e 

s t y l e or v i s u a l language f o r the t i m e . A s u r v e y o f what was d i s c u s s e d and 

p u b l i s h e d on modern, i n p a r t i c u l a r a b s t r a c t , a r t w i l l show t h a t i n the a r t 

d i s c o u r s e t h e c r i t i c i s m of o l d language and a concommitant c a l l f o r a new one, 

f o r a new r e a l i t y was as i n s i s t e n t as i n the l i t e r a r y magazines and t h e 

d i s c u s s i o n s s u r r o u n d i n g s o c i a l i s s u e s . The p a i n t i n g p r o d u c e d by a r t i s t s l i k e 

B a u m e i s t e r , Nay, and o t h e r s was o f t e n an a t t e m p t e d e x p r e s s i o n of t h i s c a l l . The 

p u b l i s h e d a e s t h e t i c d i s c u s s i o n s were u s u a l l y of a n o n - p o l i t i c a l c h a r a c t e r f a r 

removed f r o m t h e c o n c e r n s of p e o p l e l i v i n g a m i d s t r u b b l e ; however, s i n c e t h e s e 

d i s c u s s i o n s a r t i c u l a t e a s o c i a l l y r o o t e d c o n c e r n w h i c h emanates f r o m 

s u b s t r u c t u r a l d i s i n t e g r a t i o n t h e y a r e of i n t e r e s t i n d e t e r m i n i n g how t h e 

s u p e r s t r u c t u r e , i n r e l a t i o n t o i t s b a s e , r e c o n s t i t u t e s i t s e l f . 

One of t h e landmarks o f the d i s c u s s i o n s was a book p u b l i s h e d on " t h e 

c r e a t i v e f o r c e s of a b s t r a c t p a i n t i n g , " i n 1947, by Dr.Ottomar Domnick, a 48-year 

o l d p s y c h i a t r i s t . 2 6 I t c o n t a i n e d c o n t r i b u t i o n s by the a r t i s t s W i l l i B a u m e i s t e r , 

Max Ackermann, H . A . P . G r i e s h a b e r , Georg M e i s t e r m a n n , R u d o l f P r o b s t , O t t o R i t s c h l , 

F r i t z W i n t e r , and Hans H i l d e b r a n d t , the w r i t e r K u r t L e o n h a r d who sometimes 

c o n t r i b u t e d a r t i c l e s on modern a r t t o Das Kunstwerk and o t h e r a r t m a g a z i n e s , and 

o t h e r s . The theme of the book i s t h e n e c e s s i t y and a p p r o p r i a t e n e s s of a b s t r a c t 

a r t t o t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y man. As the n e c e s s a r y o p p o s i t i o n t o a m a t e r i a l i s m gone 

bad, a b s t r a c t i o n r e p r e s e n t s the p o s s i b i l i t y of a r e a r t i c u l a t i o n o f modern man by 

g e t t i n g r i d of the o l d , s e c u r e , c o n s c i o u s l y d o m i n a t i n g m a t e r i a l man and i n s t e a d 

- 3 5 -



p o s i t i n g h i s s u b c o n s c i o u s o t h e r . 

In h i s i n t r o d u c t i o n , Domnick d e s c r i b e s the r e a c t i o n , on the p a r t o-f 

c o n s e r v a t i v e b o u r g e o i s , t o a n t i - n a t u r a l i s t i c s t y l i s t i c developments a t the 

b e g i n n i n g o f t h e c e n t u r y : "One spoke of ' i n s a n i t y ' and hoped f o r a r e t u r n t o 

n a t u r e . T h i s d i d not happen. The n a t u r a l i s t s t y l e d i c t a t e d by the T h i r d R e i c h 

was an e p i s o d e i n Germany. I t o n l y o u t w a r d l y i n t e r r u p t e d t h e development. 

Hidden f o r c e s a l l o w e d the ' o t h e r ' t o g r o w . " 2 7 T h i s development of t h e " o t h e r " 

i s i n t e g r a l t o t h e t i m e , a c c o r d i n g t o Domnick. I n f o r m a l - t y p e a b s t r a c t i o n , w h i c h 

by r e v o k i n g the p r i m a r y p o s i t i o n o f the c o n s c i o u s one and t h e r e b y a l l o w i n g t h e 

o t h e r t o a p p e a r , i s not o n l y a s t y l e but a l s o the answer t o the r e q u i r e m e n t of 

t h e age. F u r t h e r m o r e , t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y i s e q u a t e d w i t h m a t e r i a l i s m , and 

t h e a p p r o p r i a t e s t y l e of m a t e r i a l i s m was n a t u r a l i s m . The u n b r i d l e d f a i t h i n 

s c i e n c e and t e c h n o l o g y o f the p r e v i o u s c e n t u r y w h i c h attemped t o dominate n a t u r e 

t o d a y meets w i t h s c e p t i c i s m . I t i s because of t h i s , a c c o r d i n g t o Domnick, t h a t 

a b s t r a c t i o n i s not o n l y a n t i - n a t u r a l i s t i c , but a n t i - m a t e r i a l i s t i c as wel1 s i n c e 

i t opposes t h e l e g a c y of t h e n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y . I t i s a t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y 

o p p o s i t i o n , i t i s modern, and i t i s not n e c e s s a r i l y happy i n i t s t r i u m p h — 

p e s s i m i s m and d o u b t , i t w i l l be r e c a l l e d , d e t e r m i n e d the postwar t e n o r : 

No bounds seemed t o r e m a i n f o r a n a l y t i c a l r e a s o n ; h u m a n i t y ' s f o r t u n e , 
v i a t h e h a r n e s s i n g of m a t e r i a l , seemed a l m o s t made. But a t t h e moment 
o f v i c t o r y , i t became d o u b t f u l . Romain R o i l a n d has i l l u s t r a t e d t h i s 
w i t h M i c h e a l a n g e l o ' s V i c t o r who t u r n s away, i n a d i s a p p o i n t e d - r e s i g n e d 
manner, f r o m the v a n q u i s h e d . V i c t o r y s l i p s away from him. C o n c u r r e n t 
w i t h the moment when the d o m i n a t i o n of the m a t e r i a l seemed t o t a k e 
m a t e r i a l i s m t o i t s peak, F r e u d d e v e l o p e d p s y c h o a n a l y s i s w h i c h d i s c o v e r e d 
f o r c e s o p e r a t i v e beneath t h e s u r f a c e , f o r c e s w h i c h s u b j u g a t e man more 
than he can s u b j u g a t e m a t e r i a l . T h i s was a shock not e a s i l y overcome. 
New s p i r i t u a l f o r c e s s t e p p e d i n t o v i e w . The s t r u g g l e a g a i n s t 
m a t e r i a l i s m , a r t i s t i c a l l y s p e a k i n g a g a i n s t n a t u r a l i s m , i s the 
d i s t i n g u i s h i n g mark of modern p a i n t i n g . 2 8 

The s i m p l i s t i c c a u s a l i t y s t i p u l a t e d by Domnick i n t h i s development has the 

f u n c t i o n of a p a c i f i e r i n t h r e a t e n i n g l y a c a u s a l t i m e s : the p e s s i m i s m o f postwar 

- 3 6 -



c u l t u r e i s e l e v a t e d t o an a b s t r a c t , s p i r i t u a l r e a l m where m a t e r i a l i s m i s 

b a n i s h e d . I n s t e a d o-f the s h a r p a n a l y s i s of t h e i n t e r a c t i o n between c u l t u r e and 

( m a t e r i a l ) s o c i e t y , as H o r k h e i m e r , K r a u s s , and o t h e r s p r e s e n t e d i t , Domnick u s e s 

t h e i n s i g h t s of o t h e r s t o a r r i v e a t a d e s c r i p t i o n o f modern p a i n t i n g w h i c h r u n s 

c o u n t e r t o t h e p o s s i b i l i t y of i t b e i n g a p r o c e s s , a d i f f e r e n t i a t e d becoming 

( A d o r n o ) , and i n s t e a d p o s i t s i t as s t a t i c : i t i s a d i s t i n g u i s h i n g mark, a 

trademark w i t h o u t m a t e r i a l l y - r o o t e d h i s t o r y , w i t h o u t a d i a l e c t i c a l r e l a t i o n s h i p 

t o m a t e r i a l i s m . In t h i s s e n s e Domnick's t e x t p r e f i g u r e s t h e a f f i r m a t i v e 

i n t e r p r e t a t i o n of ( n e g a t i v e ) i n f o r m a l p a i n t i n g i n the 1950s by Werner Haftmann 

and o t h e r s . 

A l t h o u g h Domnick, a t h e r a p i s t i n o p p o s i t i o n t o r e p r e s s i o n , s o o t h e s the 

p u b l i c ' s f e a r o f t h e o t h e r , he does not go i n t o d e t a i l e d d e s c r i p t i o n of how t h i s 

new, t o l e r a n t - o f - t h e - o t h e r s t y l e s h o u l d l o o k ; t h e i n c l u s i o n i n h i s book of 

B a u m e i s t e r , Ackermann, R i t s c h l , W i n t e r , e t c . , does however i n d i c a t e t h a t i t was 

t o be a n o n - g e o m e t r i c , i n f o r m a l - t y p e a b s t r a c t i o n . I t was i n the a r t magazines 

t h a t one c o u l d f i n d more d e t a i l e d p r e s c r i p t i o n s of how t h i s a b s t r a c t i o n s h o u l d 

l o o k . E s p e c i a l l y n o t a b l e was the magazine Das Kunstwerk. a p p e a r i n g i n Baden-

Baden f r o m 1946 onward. I t s p u b l i s h e r was the Woldemar K l e i n v e r l a g w h i c h a l s o 

p r o d u c e d monographs on modern a r t i s t s and w h i c h showed an o v e r a l l d e d i c a t i o n t o 

modern, i n p a r t i c u l a r F r e n c h , a r t . Through i t s f o c u s , i n s e v e r a l i m p o r t a n t 

a r t i c l e s , on p r i m i t i v i s m and i t s i m p o r t f o r modern c u l t u r e , the magazine 

d i s t i n g u i s h e d i t s e l f from o t h e r , more n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y humanist i n s p i r e d a r t 

d i s c o u r s e , and t h e r e b y f u r t h e r e d a t y p e of a b s t r a c t i o n w h i c h p a r a l l e l e d t h e 

s e a r c h f o r a new r e a l i t y i n the i n t e l l e c t u a l d i s c o u r s e . Das Kunstwerk t y p i c a l l y 

r e p e a t e d t h e r e j e c t i o n of n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y n a t u r a l i s m , but not n e c e s s a r i l y by 

e q u a t i n g t h i s w i t h a h u m a n i s t i c a n t i - m a t e r i a l i s m as espoused by Domnick. In an 

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a r t i c l e w r i t t e n by one of the e d i t o r s , L e o p o l d Zahn, c a l l e d "Abkehr von der 

N a t u r " — " t u r n i n g away f r o m n a t u r e " — O r t e g a y G a s s e t i s q u o t e d t o s u g g e s t t h a t 

n a t u r e and a r t have an a c t i v e r o l e i n d i s m i s s i n g man: t h a t i s , i t i s not o n l y 

man who t u r n s away from n a t u r e , but r a t h e r n a t u r e , as a t h r e a t e n i n g o t h e r , 

e x p e l l e d man, t h e c o n s c i o u s one. What t h i s seems t o i m p l y of c o u r s e i s t h a t 

t h o s e p a i n t e r s d e a l i n g w i t h the " o t h e r " a r e a l s o d e a l i n g w i t h n a t u r e — t h e 

e x p u l s i o n i s not j u s t a t u r n i n g away from " n a t u r a l i s m " <as Domnick w o u l d have 

i t ) but an i n d i c i u m of l a c k of c o n t r o l o v e r n a t u r e . T h i s i s i n t u r n l i n k e d t o 

t h e breakdown o f humanist c u l t u r e and the i n t e r e s t i n p r i m i t i v i s m : 

"The e x p u l s i o n of man from n a t u r e and a r t " ( O r t e g a y G a s s e t ) can be seen 
as an a s p e c t of a g e n e r a l breakdown of h u m a n i s t - r a t i o n a l c u l t u r e . T h e r e 
does s t i l l e x i s t a s u p e r f i c i a l l y a l i v e a r t w h i c h h o l d s f a s t t o the 
c o n v e n t i o n s o f R e n a i s s a n c e r a t i o n a l i s m , but e s p e c i a l l y t h i s a r t shows 
how sapped and f e e b l e t h i s t r a d i t i o n has become.29 

T h e r e i s no p o i n t i n t r y i n g t o a v o i d f a c i n g the breakdown s i n c e the c u l t u r e 

p r o d u c e d by t h i s a v o i d a n c e i s weak and f a l s e . What t o d a y ' s a r t i s t has t o do i n 

o r d e r t o a v o i d t h e e n f e e b l e m e n t a s s o c i a t e d w i t h t r a d i t i o n a l a r t i s t o " l i n k up 

w i t h t r a d i t i o n s b e l o n g i n g t o p r e - r a t i o n a l l e v e l s of human h i s t o r y , " i n c l u d i n g 

a r c h a i c , p r i m i t i v e a r t , a r t of c h i l d r e n , and of the " m a t t r e s p o p u l a i r e s . " s o 

M o r e o v e r , modern man has been s p l i t ; he i s no l o n g e r an i n t e g r a l b e i n g . 

Hence the r e g r e s s t o " t h e o r i g i n a l f o r c e s of the s u b c o n s c i o u s " 3 1 whose c a u s e s 

l i e w i t h t h i s r e - s t r u c t u r i n g of modern man: 

Modern man, as b e a r e r of a c o l l e c t i v e s o u l , i n whom, as w i t h t h e 
p r i m i t i v e , t h e v i t a l , e m o t i o n a l , i r r a t i o n a l d r i v e s d o m i n a t e , i s a k i n d 
of homo magus r e d i v i v u s , who m a n i f e s t s h i m s e l f a r t i s t i c a l l y — j u s t l i k e 
t h e o r i g i n a l homo m a g u s — i n a b s t r a c t i o n s "removed from n a t u r e . " 

The c o l l e c t i v e man of l a t t e r - d a y p o s t - i n d i v i d u a l i s m i s however 
s i m u l t a n e o u s l y a homo t e c h n i c u s (one c o u l d s a y t h a t the o c c i d e n t a l homo 
s a p i e n s h a s , i n the t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y , s p l i t i n t o the homo magus and the 
homo t e c h n i c u s ) . W h i l e an e m o t i o n a l , v i t a l i s t s o u l p r e d o m i n a t e s i n the 
homo magus, t h e homo t e c h n i c u s i s under the i n f l u e n c e o f t h e 
i n t e l l e c t u a l s p h e r e . 3 2 

The " t e c h n i c i a n " and the " m a g i c i a n " o r " r e b o r n p r i m i t i v e " s u f f e r under the same 

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threatening, alienating aspect of modernity: what is betrayed or revealed in art 

today is "the existential fear of modern man who (see Heidegger) feels himself 

senselessly thrown into a being toward death." 3 3 

Both the existential fear of feeling senselessly thrown into a being 

toward death (Heidegger) as well as the helplessness of the disintegrated 

subject (Horkheimer), while positing different "images of man," express the 

sense of "homelessness" or loss experienced by the postwar individual standing 

on the brink of a void. The intrusion of the archaic or primitive in imagery 

then becomes an attempt to find a mirror for this loss of self. This then also 

means that post-World War II existential fear is not appropriately expressed 

through an Angst-ridden expressionism since this style would amount to an 

impossible assertion of subjecthood. Instead, the intrusion of an impersonal 

archaic suffices to represent primal fears. Expressionism has anyway been 

enervated through repetition and thus cannot f u l f i l the requirements of a 

postwar modernity: 

The numerous paintings of classical expressionism which were on view 
these last two years could only be interpreted by the ignorant as being 
in keeping with our new and different situation. The ignorant do not 
know that romantic-ecstatic expressionism was overrun twenty to 
twenty-five years ago by a following of hangers-on and imitators and 
hence suffocated in the chaos and bombast of its own phraseology.3* 

It is instead important to work toward developing a new style "in keeping with 

our new and different situation." This was, however, something which the 

functionaries—the o f f i c i a l culture bureaucracy—at that time were f a i l i n g to do 

since they chose to exhibit a moderate kind of art, neither bad but not really 

gripping, e i t h e r . 3 5 O f f i c i a l l y , a pluralism and eclectic exhibition policy was 

s t i l l adhered to. On the one hand policy makers wanted to avoid the appearance 

of "dictating" any style whatsoever; and neither would an art which looked too 

"difficult" and which was too critical—however encoded—further the goals of 

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rebuilding society (or restoring the old system, as some c r i t i c s said). 

"Advanced" art, there-fore, during this i n i t i a l period o-f rebuilding the country, 

was not univocally championed by o-f-ficial cultural policy. The role o-f 

dissemination was thus left to advanced artists themselves and their supporters, 

that i s , c r i t i c s and private galleries. 

What c r i t i c a l artists also struggled against besides the culture 

bureaucracy's unwillingness to face the new and different was the "inflationist 

culture-flood" 3 6 unleashed on the country after H i t l e r ' s defeat. This refers to 

the (indiscriminate) exhibiting of all art suppressed during the Nazi regime. 

As previously discussed, art repressed during the Third Reich was exhibited in 

every zone of Germany as a sort of cultural anti-Nazi vaccine. But as Trflkes 

seems to suggest in his a r t i c l e , the indiscriminateness of this policy excluded 

a c r i t i c a l function for the art shown. These exhibitions can in that sense be 

seen as a restorative tactic intended to reinstitute a particular kind of 

function for culture, the function that Frisch described as "alibi": 

Almost every town had, in the context of a "culture week," an exhibition 
of "art of the twentieth century." One did not shrink from once again 
speaking of the nation of poets and thinkers. In the exhibitions "art 
of our time," pictures from 1918 through 1925 were shown as if they 
addressed our current s i t u a t i o n . 3 7 

Clearly, to re-activate the myth of "poets and thinkers"—slightly reminiscent 

of superman ideology—for some artists could only mean that a reactionary 

"alibi" function of culture was being restored. What those artists working in 

an abstract style which incorporated "the other," primitivism, surrealism, and 

"pre-rational" levels of human history wanted was not a warmed over old r e a l i t y , 

but "a new r e a l i t y . " 3 8 And to find the new reality required the recourse to 

primitivism, levels of the subconscious usually buried by c i v i l i z a t i o n , and 

automatist abstraction. A l l of these qualities can be found, to one degree or 

- 4 6 -



a n o t h e r , i n the w o r k s o-f B a u m e i s t e r , Nay, W i n t e r , and s e v e r a l o t h e r s . 

The d i s s a t i s f a c t i o n w i t h the p a s t and the c o n c u r r e n t d e s i r e t o c r e a t e a 

new r e a l i t y a l s o s t r u c k Adorno upon h i s r e t u r n t o Germany from e x i l e . He 

d e s c r i b e d h i s s u r p r i s e a t t h e s p i r i t u a l / i n t e l l e c t u a l c l i m a t e o-f the c o u n t r y . 3 8 

S i n c e t h e o u t s i d e w o r l d had i m a g i n e d t h a t t h e b a r b a r i s m of the H i t l e r r e g i m e 

c o u l d o n l y have l e f t b a r b a r i s m b e h i n d , t h e o u t s i d e r i s a s t o n i s h e d t o d i s c o v e r 

t h a t t h i s i s not the c a s e . T h i n g s c u l t u r a l / i n t e l l e c t u a l / s p i r i t u a l took on the 

q u a l i t y of s u b v e r s i v e n e s s under the " r e i g n of t e r r o r " s i n c e t h e s e were 

unsubsumable by N a z i t o t a l i t a r i a n i s m . 4 0 T h i s q u a l i t y of r e s i s t a n c e s u r v i v e d t h e 

war, and, Adorno adds, t h e r e l a t i o n s h i p t o c u l t u r a l m a t t e r s a f t e r the war i s 

even s t r o n g e r than i t was d u r i n g t h e p e r i o d p r e c e d i n g i t . The c a u s e f o r t h i s 

Adorno l o c a t e s i n t h e breakdown of the mechanisms of mass c u l t u r e i n postwar 

Germany: t h i s has a l l o w e d an independence of t h i n k i n g w h i c h d u r i n g Weimar, w i t h 

i t s w e l l f u n c t i o n i n g mass c u l t u r e , was s h a c k l e d . That i s , t h e i n s t i t u t i o n s of 

mass m e d i a — r a i n b o w p r e s s , r a d i o , e t c . — h a v e been r a z e d , f r e e i n g s p i r i t from i t s 

e n s l a v e m e n t t o them. 

T h i s was one a s p e c t of breakdown w h i c h c o u l d g i v e hope t o many postwar 

c u l t u r e p r o d u c e r s s i n c e t h e y b e l i e v e d t h a t t r u l y new c u l t u r a l s t r u c t u r e s c o u l d 

now be put i n p l a c e . The mass media mechanisms f o r MerdummunQ ( s t u p i d i f i c a t i o n ) 

were a t l e a s t t e m p o r a r i l y p a r a l y z e d , w i t h o u t , however, c u l t u r e or the mechanisms 

f o r p r o d u c i n g c u l t u r e b e i n g e q u a l l y lamed. P o l i t i c a l l y , c u l t u r e was now aimed 

a t a r e j e c t i o n of b o t h A m e r i c a n s t y l e l i b e r a l i s m — w h i c h "appeared t o g u a r a n t e e 

t h e power o f t h e s t r o n g e r and the impotence of the w e a k e r " 4 1 and R u s s i a n s t y l e 

o r t h o d o x y — w h i c h was seen t o b l o c k f r e e i n g u i r y . A new d e m o c r a t i c s o c i a l i s m was 

the o v e r r i d i n g hope of a m a j o r i t y of a r t i s t s , w r i t e r s , women, and men. The 

w r i t e r s a s s o c i a t e d w i t h the magazine Per Ruf. l e d by Hans-Werner R i c h t e r of the 

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"Gruppe 47," voiced the Utopian desire o-f many when they called -for a unified 

and socialist Europe. In an a r t i c l e entitled "Germany—Bridge between East and 

West" o-f 1 October 1946, Richter describes the course o-f development in the 

representative democracies as being toward socialism and the course o-f 

development in the USSR as being toward democratization. East and West are 

currently are -facing of-f in a vacuum—in which live the Germans. The latter are 

swamped by propaganda: they are to be re-educated, toward democracy in the west, 

toward socialism in the east. But since they have lost all naive f a i t h , they 

cannot be satisfied by such simple either/or propositions: what they want is a 

combination of both democracy and s o c i a l i s m . 4 2 By positing the development 

toward socialism in the major democracies and the course toward democratization 

in the USSR as an historically inevitable process, Richter expressed a 

hopefulness far beyond fact, yet the desire to achieve a unified and socialist 

Europe was an unquestionably dominant wish of the majority, leading i n i t i a l l y to 

a common front. The attempts to create a new language, a new reality in art, 

were not a direct cultural representation of a desire to found p o l i t i c s on new 

terms. However, the evolving "new reality" in art, while never exactly 

synchronous with p o l i t i c a l l y motivated w i l l , at this time was spoken and written 

about in terms very similar to the alternate political discourse, thus 

indicating a shared context. That context was provided by the breakdown of 

previous cultural and political structures. 

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"Europeans A-fter A l l " — the International Resonance o-f Breakdown 

A new modernism appropriate to the time had to be developed, but the 

problem of the alienated younger generation continued to exist not only in 

society generally, but in the f i e l d of painting as well. As one c r i t i c pointed 

out in a review of yet another "art of our time" exhibition, out of 130 

participants exhibiting, only 15 were younger than forty years of age. "It is 

not out of the question that a c r i s i s of the younger generation, as i t is 

present in other areas, is here, too, coming into view." 4 3 Youth had become 

like a stagnant pool and had to be reconnected at all costs to the vital 

currents of the time. Those artists over forty years of age who were working 

toward developing a "new reality," a new kind of modernism, were, however, not 

helped by c r i t i c s whose understanding of the new situation was not particularly 

keen. These c r i t i c s continued to want an art that would communicate 

traditionally, an art that would be socially binding at a time when all 

traditional concepts of communication and binding interaction between artist and 

consumer were turned inside out. 

Writing for the magazine Die Kunst. the c r i t i c Fritz Nemitz exemplified 

this old-fashioned understanding when he reviewed the f i r s t postwar "Grosse 

MOnchner Kunstausstel1ung," a tradition which had been interrupted for 

thirteen years. He noted that in Munich "tendencies of a different painting are 

apparent," 4 4 but his assessment of these tendencies which are "different" 

betrays a desire to make them comply with normal expectations of art: 

We have to put our hopes into this new painting, not because experience 
always shows us, as the current exhibition of "The Blue Rider" 
demonstrates, that the authentic forms will prevail despite all struggle 
against them and all resistance, but because the building blocks for a 
binding art can be gotten only from the vital forces of today. This 
cannot be achieved by the artist alone. To do this he has to be 

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liberated from his isolation and put in touch with the problems of the 
t i m e s . 4 5 

Nemitz does not understand that easily understood—"communicating"—art has 

become an almost impossible proposition. If art communicates readily now, it is 

not presenting "a new reality." If it f a i l s to represent a new r e a l i t y , 

however, it will s t i l l be inappropriate for a youth which feels that the past 

has been thoroughly bankrupted and s u l l i e d . Nemitz furthermore does not see the 

advanced artists in the exhibition as representing the avant-garde, and he also 

does not differentiate between them. The styles of Tr&kes, Baumeister, and 

Nay, for example, are not seen as deriving from different s t y l i s t i c concerns— 

Tr&kes oriented toward surreal i s m , 4 6 Nay coming from expressionism but 

reworking it through an adapted cubism, Baumeister exploiting primitivism and 

surrealism in order to arrive at a new kind of abstraction, etc. Instead, the 

c r i t i c here sees in postwar modern painting only disparate individuals, some 

accidental convergences of point of view. By not differentiating the advanced 

modernist artists from more traditional modernists, he thereby also f a i l s to see 

the former as a singular tendency—versus the p l u r a l i s t i c "tendencies" he 

describes. 

I believe that it can be argued that one reason for this i n i t i a l 

inability to differentiate the new abstraction which eschews ready communication 

from more traditional modern styles derives from a blocked understanding of the 

nature of resistance. I have tried to show that the desire for a new language 

and reality stemmed from a c r i t i c a l recognition of breakdown, a c r i t i c a l i t y 

which perforce had opposed the status quo, both the National Socialist and to 

one degree or another the c a p i t a l i s t . This c r i t i c a l attitude was an aspect of 

resistance. In Germany the problem of resistance becomes very complex, 

however. Within the country, actual political resistance to Hitler was, mildly 

-44-



put, an ambiguous object both during and a-fter the war. The best way to deal 

with it was to pretend that it had not existed. Every other European country 

was proud of i t s resistance to Hitler; within Germany, however, resistance to 

the regime could only imply—once the war was underway—working for the total 

defeat of the whole country. 4 7 The reason for this was that onward from an 

early stage of the war, the A l l i e s , in particular the US, wanted the 

unconditional surrender of NS Germany.48 This absolutely precluded on the part 

of the A l l i e s negotiating with or recognizing in any form a German resistance to 

H i t l e r . Hence, this resistance—never organized into an effective political 

instrument anyway48—worked and wished for the unconditional defeat of Germany, 

the country it ostensibly wanted to save. But by hoping for i t s destruction?— 

this would be how many Germans saw the resistance. It was not a real political 

force which could negotiate with the A l l i e s and hence could offer nothing to the 

Germans but defeat, and worse: one only has to recall the Morgenthau Plan. This 

US plan called for the transformation of Germany—one of the world's most highly 

industrialized and modern nations—into an agricultural state without any 

industry whatsoever. Obviously, a resistance whose only option was to make 

common cause with plans such as these, a resistance without the slightest 

p o l i t i c a l clout, would not exactly be the focus of the populace's admiration. 

Once the war was ended, the Nazi genocide perpetuated on European Jewry 

was exposed and rightly provoked the horror and condemnation of Germany by the 

world's nations. At this time, too, was cemented the thesis of collective 

g u i l t , that i s , that all Germans, regardless, were guilty and were Nazi. This 

thesis, knowingly or not, was in a sense so undifferentiating that it succeeded 

in achieving the opposite of what should have been: it prevented Nazis from 

being tried and prosecuted by non-Nazi Germans and by diffusing the blame unto 

-45-



the entire populace prevented a true purge of Nazism in Germany.50 If all were 

guilty, how could anyone have been a resister?, and i f resisters really did 

exist, they were guilty, by the above outlined logic, of betraying the 

"fatherland.n Resistance thus became a kind of shameful part, hidden from the 

naive but possibly prying eyes of the young. The only resistance which did 

however become part of the popular discourse was the attempt, by a group of 

conservative army officers, to assassinate Hitler on 28 July 1944. The attempt 

f a i l e d , and Hitler ordered 5080 political prisoners of the regime—including 

Social Democrats, Communists, and c r i t i c s out of conscience or religion—to be 

summarily executed. These latter, however, were not widely discussed after the 

war ended and Hitler was defeated. Rather, only the conservative army officers 

—the "20th of July group"—could be upheld as being the incorporation of 

resistance. But the conservatives of the postwar era were manifestly not 

interested in rethinking the polarized categories of communism and capitalism, 

as some of the other opponents of the regime had been; they were on the 

c a p i t a l i s t s ' s s i d e . 5 1 A "third way" springing from resistance to the NS regime 

and to a capitalist status quo was nipped in the bud, as the resolute course of 

anti-communism and pro-capitalism undertaken by West Germany's f i r s t chancellor, 

the anti-Nazi and very conservative Christian Democrat Konrad Adenauer, makes 

clear. 

Resistance to the status quo—the social as well as the intellectual one 

which perpetrated set ways of thinking about p o l i t i c s and culture—remained as 

p o l i t i c a l l y insignificant and diffuse as it had during the war. It had failed 

to achieve a p o l i t i c a l identity and role, and this perhaps explains the great 

resonance which cultural critiques focussed on negativity could eventually 

generate amongst some of the artists and the public passively or actively 

- 4 6 -



opposed to Nazism. Resistance retreated to the f i e l d of culture, coming 

dangerously close to recapitulating a romanticist hankering for despair. It 

also exacerbated the gulf between those "in the know"—the ones whom Adorno 

praised for not being the mouthpieces of social "manipulators"—and the 

alienated public-at-1arge, as Nemitz's complaint about the a r t i s t s ' s inability 

to "communicate" indicates. 

At the same time, although the German case was unique in some respects, 

the search for a new language—for an appropriate modernism—and the pessimistic 

sense of p o l i t i c a l frustration were not at all restricted to only that country. 

A glance at Germany's most important neighbor, France, reveals more parallels 

than divergences. If German postwar youth was generally despondent and 

pessimistic, it certainly cannot be claimed that French youth delighted in an 

unbounded optimism. On the contrary, the experience of the war was seen quite 

clearly to tie into a larger breakdown of European, occidental culture, 

resulting in a c r i t i c a l view of all traditional values. Les Temps liodernes. the 

journal founded at war's end by Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice 

Merleau-Ponty, and others, in 1948 published a long article called "Nes en 

1925." It consisted of a series of contributions by different authors whose 

common characteristic was that they had been born in 1925. They wrote about 

their perspective on the world in view of recent history. The general tone was 

one of pessimism and negativism, as the article contributed by Jean-Francois 

Lyotard made clear; he wrote, "We were twenty when the Camps vomit ted up what 

they had not had the time or the appetite to digest. These hollowed faces 

tormented our own reflection: Europe here had assassinated its liberalism, three 

or four centuries of greco-latin t r a d i t i o n . " 5 2 

This theme was sounded out at length in other a r t i c l e s , and in other 

-47-



media—as the manifestation of what by 1952 was called "art autre" illustrates. 

"Autre" art, i t s name already signalling parallels of concern with what Domnick 

called the "other" in art, was a style of abstraction exemplified by the artists 

Wols, Jean Fautrier, Georges Mathieu, and others. It was a term f i r s t used 

extensively by Michel Tapie in his book Un art a u t r e . 5 3 Except for the 

Germans Wols and Hans Hartung—who had emigrated to France in the 1930s—Tapie 

did not include other German abstract a r t i s t s , although the argument could be 

made that painters like Baumeister, Nay, and Werner would not have jarred 

Tapie's overall orchestration of an "other" discourse in painting too 

g r e a t l y . 5 4 "Autre" art's ancestry, according to the book, includes Nietzsche, 

Dada, Expressionism, and Surrealism—all of these alternately c r i t i c a l and 

negative intellectual manifestations are taken to an exponentially higher stage 

by "autre" art. The power which fueled this art, however, was recent history 

and the widespread pessimism concerning traditional expectations of the future. 

Like Lyotard's assessment of the assassinated European tradition, the same 

impulse powered German critiques of the irrevocable break between the old and 

the new, and also the frustration over the impossibility of a critique since 

this critique would presuppose an orientation toward previous or old v a l u e s . 5 5 

These the young knew to be bankrupt. Widespread disappointment among the 

younger generation was the new norm; for them, nothing but chaos is left, yet 

even this is better than the old o r d e r . 5 6 

The Europeans also shared a sense of being caught in the middle between 

two great powers gearing up for a showdown. Art and culture, far from being 

beyond the reach of partisan attacks, was often targeted. The Soviet pre-

scription of social realism was early on the object of satire and disdain; the 

east's assessment of what was wrong with western culture was seen to be 

- 4 8 -



retardataire and a caricature: 

Thus spoke the Soviet painter Gerassimov: "Modern French art is sick and 
decayed. We face an unbelievable decadence of bourgeois art in Europe 
and America. Armed with the method of social realism, as it was 
ingeniously determined by comrade Stalin, the Soviet artist creates for 
the people, serves the interests of the people. Therein lies his 
strength. He will glorify the great deeds of the patriotic war; as a 
landscape painter he will depict the greatness and immensity of the 
Russian fatherland; if he paints man, he shall make v i s i b l e the benefits 
for man of agricultural collectivism." 

Sick, decayed, decadent...(oh noble members of the PCF—Pablo 
Picasso and Henri Matisse!) ...armed ...ingenious ...interests of the 
people ...great deeds of war . . . greatness of the fatherland..., we've 
heard all this before, —it wasn't even so long ago, —who was i t ? 5 7 

In Germany, the Soviet administered style of social realism was from an early 

stage onward equated with H i t l e r ' s art policies. Americans fared not much 

better since their culture was seen to be equally suspect. Their values were 

perceived to consist of a vapid optimism and a singularly crass materialism, or 

what we would now more aptly call consumerism. When the debate over r e m i l i t a r i -

zation was launched in 1948, the US and those in Germany who were fanatical 

"west-integrationists" —that i s , pro-western/pro-US and anti-neutralist—were 

attacked and exposed in some articles as not having the best interests of Europe 

in mind. These anti-communists might call themselves "defenders of the 

Occident," but in r e a l i t y they were ignorant of occidental culture; all they 

were actually interested in defending was the importation of "sliced bacon," 

i . e . , Americanism, for many Europeans an i r r i t a t i n g l y naive world v i e w . 5 8 Once 

again it was Max Frisch who found the perfect literary illustration to express 

this resentment which Europeans—in particular the French, but also the Germans, 

at least up to the time of the Berlin blockade5 8 in 1948/49—felt toward 

Americans: 

In Thornton Wilder's second play there's a passage which unsurpassedly 
illustrates the process; Mr.Antrobus, the father, has just invented the 
wheel, the wheel i t s e l f , and barely has the boy played with it for a 
minute that he makes a suggestion to his father: Dad, one could attach a 

- 4 9 -



seat to this! The -father [Europe] invents, the son [New World] will 
appropriate the invention. Sure, hollers Mr. Antrobus, now any idiot 
can play with i t , but I had the idea -first! What's at work here is less 
an hierarchy, I believe, but rather a phenomenon, a process. Younger 
nerves, lack of historical experiences, of scepticism, these are of 
course the prerequisites for appropriating the paternal wheel and for 
ruling the world. Lack of scepticism, lack of irony: that's what it i s , 
after a l l , which from the f i r s t makes their physiognomy appear strange 
to us. I've noticed several times in Paris that the Germans, 
yesterday's oppressors, are here less hated than the Americans, the 
liberators, which doesn't speak for oppression and against liberation, 
but rather only expresses, I believe, that feeling of strangeness: the 
Germans were, despite everything, Europeans.6 0 

In terms of actual policies, this aspect of having more in common with 

each other than with the Americans expressed itself in a surprisingly early and 

f a i r l y close postwar cultural cooperation between France and Germany, especially 

in the f i e l d of modern culture. Obviously, for the reasons outlined above, the 

interest in modern art—especially French art, the leader in modernism—was 

f a i r l y great in Germany since it was seen as a necessary cultural corrective to 

the Nazi toxin. As early as October 1947, the French sent an exhibition of 

their twentieth century art to Freiburg; the show was called "The Masters of 

French Contemporary Painting" and was organized by Maurice Jardot, the French 

army's cultural representative in Germany. Braque, Chagall, Gris, Leger, 

Matisse, Picasso, and Rouault were represented by six works each. The show was 

an enormous popular success and special arrangements were even made with the 

other western military occupiers so that v i s i t o r s could pass freely from the 

English and American zones to Freiburg in the French zone of occupation. 6 1 

Arrangements were even made with Switzerland and the Alsace to f a c i l i t a t e border 

crossings; to the Iron Curtain, it was said, one opposed the "Rideau de  

Dentelles." 6 2 

Cooperation was manifest even earlier than this. The f i r s t German 

postwar cultural conference took place in Bberlingen, also in the French zone, 

- 5 6 -



on 28 October 1945; it was initiated by the Germans but the French occupiers 

readily supported i t . 6 3 Also in the French zone, the "Constance Art Week" took 

place in June 1946. Some o-f the contemporary art exhibitions, facilitated by 

the cultural bureaucracies of both the Germans and the French, were however 

considered too staid and "old-hat" by some, as I already outlined above, and 

were c r i t i c i z e d in the press for not being quite the appropriate new modernity 

which postwar reality required. These exhibitions typically recapitulated the 

strategy of presenting a p l u r a l i s t i c view of modern art in the belief that this 

was the best antidote to NS Gleichschaltuno (co-ordination). The problem was 

that this strategy was seen by some as being incapable of providing the country 

with a vital modern culture. 

In areas removed from official culture policies, an intense interest on 

the part of German artists and c r i t i c s in what was happening in advanced 

painting and thought in France was apparent. For example, W i l l i Baumeister, who 

published his 1943-written book The Unknown in Art in 1947, wrote an enthusias-

tic "Open Letter" to Andre Malraux. It was originally published in Ueroer— 

the French Army cultural magazine in Germany—and reprinted in Das Kunstwerk in 

1947.6 4 Baumeister's letter is a response to an article Malraux wrote called, 

"Man and a r t i s t i c culture"; the painter felt compelled to respond because of the 

parallels he saw between his and Malraux's texts. The latter wrote, "The power 

of the west lies in the willing recognition of the unknown," and, "Europe has 

always stressed the idea that the great artist lives by discoveries, and that 

his discoveries are irrational and largely unforseeable."6 5 Baumeister points 

out that he pursued the same ideas in his book and that there appear to be many 

points of congruence in their outlooks. He closes with the wish that this 

shared point of view be understood in the way i t would have been in 1933, that 

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i s , prior to the outbreak of the war. The shared outlook is meant to prove 

German "Europeanism" and g o o d w i l l . 

This concern -for Franco-German cooperation on the part o-f some German 

a r t i s t s and intellectuals -for the sake of European unity came up also in 1958 

when the German government made the mistake of sending to Paris Wilhelm 

Hausenstein as the f i r s t German consul to France since h o s t i l i t i e s between the 

two countries ceased. In the 1920s and 1930s, Hausenstein had been a champion 

of modern art, but during the interim a change of mind came over him; in 1949 he 

published this changed opinion in no uncertain terms, advising modern artists to 

hang up their brushes because they simply would never be able to reach once 

again the perfection of classical art. Baumeister was appalled that someone of 

this mind-set should represent Germany in the capital city of modern art, and he 

began publicly agitating for Hausenstein's replacement. The dispute between 

Baumeister and Hausenstein eventually included Theodor Heuss, Germany's f i r s t 

president, who made the mistake of telling Baumeister to stay out of the 

government's a f f a i r s . This only fanned the flames since i t enraged Baumeister's 

sense of democracy: Heuss more or less claimed i n f a l l i b i l i t y for the state, and 

told the artist that he had no right to c r i t i c i z e the state's decisions. 

Baumeister then went on the offensive, accusing Heuss of an anti-democratic 

disposition. The dispute became internationalized when Le Matin reported i t , 

noting that according to the cliche, the Germans are usually suspect to their 

neighbors because they tend to agree amongst themselves, and thereby make a 

formidable common front. This time, however, Le Matin was pleased to note that 

there was great disagreement and it was being publicly played out. Le Matin 

noted that Baumeister has many European friends, including the former British 

consul general in Munich, John Anthony Thwaites, as well as many French friends, 

-52-



and that it was encouraging to see these European friends supporting the German 

in his struggle to assert the primacy of modern art! this was seen as a "symptom 

of increasing European cooperation." 6 6 

The platform which "Europe-oriented" artists and c r i t i c s had at their 

disposal for the propagation of modern art was the magazine Das Kunstwerk. It 

consistently articulated a European view versus any one-sided focus on problems 

particular only to Germany.67 This magazine included many articles on twentieth 

century French painting generally, on surrealism, and on cubism. The language 

used was often reminiscent of the language of "otherness" and of existentialism; 

for example, Kurt Leonhard, writing about Picasso, states that this artist 

displays "the freedom to place himself, with unforseen leaps, into the sometimes 

utterly Other, beyond the results of his own creations." 6 8 And: 

The belief in a constant, persistent, and closed "I," in a fastness of 
character, as maintained by classical philosophers, seems to be over-
turned by Picasso's abi1i ty to chanoe. as is the identity [Wesensoleich-
hei t3 of the natural object and the mundane meaning of things proven 
wrong by his a b i l i t y to transform. As if with the red and green neon 
signs of flaming metropolitan letters, the word of Nietzsche, prophet of 
nihilism, is written, enticing and threatening, over his head: "Nothing 
is true, and everything is permitted." He is the type of the isolated 
solitary of our times, of whom the French writer Jean-Paul Sartre says: 
"he is condemned to be free." ...[Picasso speaks] as a person who does 
not, like Luther, testify: " . . . I cannot do otherwise, God help me, 
Amen," but rather as someone who puts the greatest value on always 
proving, through his deeds, "I can do otherwise, too." That i s , he does 
not want to live in dependence and obedience—not to God, like Luther, 
and not to nature, like older art—and not even to a proper [eioenen]. 
immutable law of being [Wesensoesetz] like practically all of his 
contemporaries—but rather free in every aspect, as no one has ever 
dared to be free—unless i t be that s p i r i t of contradiction which 
created the statement: "Only the one who changes rests kindred to me." 6 9 

The antenna tuned to pick up on parallel concerns, especially as they occured in 

France, regarding the questioning of traditional anthropocentric conceptions was 

in Das Kunstwerk functioning at maximum capacity. What the skies were scanned 

for were the signals of a common plight: das Menschenbi1d was in dire straights, 

-53-



but resignation had to be ruled out. A new modernity, appropriate to the 

prevailing -flavor of exigency, had to be defiantly finessed from the rubble. 

And i t was to be gotten from the European rubble, not just the German, since the 

feeling of exigency constituted a new internationalism. One recognized the 

like-minded by their display of contempt for the positive and the traditional. 

Breakdown as Breakout: The Restorative Function of Exigency 

In Germany, resistance to Hitler never became a political force to be 

reckoned with. Those who opposed National Socialism were united only by their 

opposition, not by a party. Thus, Catholics and Communists, Socialists and 

Conservatives found themselves in a broad coalition of opposition. This was a 

common front unable to create a political unity, however; especially during the 

later years of the NS regime, i t was for oppositionals a major task even to 

stay in touch amongst themselves.7 0 Baumeister, who was not a "politicized" or 

engaged artist but who was opposed to the Nazis, worked in isolation: in his 

case protest was restricted to secretly choosing to think and paint in a way 

which would have aroused the displeasure of the rulers had they known. Once the 

war ended, this i n i t i a l body of opposition perhaps s t i l l had a chance of 

creating an oppositional poli tical discourse, of coalescing into a political 

force. The country was in shambles, the policies of the occupiers were often 

contradictory, indicating that they, too, were as yet unsure about what plan of 

action to follow, and the barriers which would once again create the old 

differentiations between good and bad, east and west, communist and democrat, 

although not entirely knocked down were not yet r i g i d l y drawn. 

This drawing of lines only came to be acutely felt after the infusion of 



Marshall Plan aid to Europe, in particular Germany; receiving sorely needed aid 

meant accomodating the US in one way or another in its consolidation o-f overseas 

markets for its surplus economy, and thus -facilitated a rebuilding o-f the 

country along capitalist lines, that i s , -facilitated a restoration o-f the old, 

prewar economic system. 7 1 Whatever could be "new" -for p o l i t i c s became 

marginalized very rapidly in the -face of the onslaught of the "old," and, as 

suggested above, retreated to the f i e l d of culture criticism. The restorative 

bent of p o l i t i c s was c r i t i c i z e d throughout the late 1940s by those who continued 

to hope for a more socialist structured society. 

The point can be made that the younger generation was the one to lose 

the most power through the restoration. By the late 1940s, the generation of 

thirty-year olds was the one most alienated from p o l i t i c s and culture. Silent 

and sullen, resentful of the past and the present, they were asked to submit to 

"re-education" while the politicians left over from the Weimar period picked up 

in 1945 as though the experience of the interim had not been their a f f a i r . 7 2 

And at international meetings of the youth membership of European political 

parties, such as the one which took place in the British zone of occupation in 

the summer of 1948, the internationally prescribed medicine for the "German 

problem" was liberalism, equally advocated by the French (Joseph Rovan) and the 

Americans (Edward Ladd). The latter even lectured the audience on the 

detrimental effects of having political parties which are steeped in ideologies: 

this is something which should be thrown overboard, seemingly much in keeping 

with America's evolving concept of "the vital center." 7 3 Resistance, never an 

organized factor in Germany to begin with, was practically finished as an 

independent force, although it now became of interest to uphold it as a myth: 

When the great dissolution of coalitions began in international p o l i t i c s 
during this postwar period, resistance, as far as it wanted s t i l l to 

-55-



•function as one political -factor in our times, could remain o-f interest 
to the West only if it consented to being formed by—and to forming—the 
forces against the dangers and methods of Eastern totalitarianism. If 
i t did not do this, it even became suspect. 7 4 

It was thus usurped by traditional party p o l i t i c s and was ideologically 

refunctionalized. By the date of the a r t i c l e quoted here, resistance was being 

used by each camp to denounce the other side; the East denounced imperialism, 

which used to mean Hitler but now meant the US, while the West denounced 

totalitarianism, which used to mean H i t l e r , but now meant the USSR. 

The different conceptions of fascism developed in the East and the West 

also colored the two sides's conception of resistance. The USSR propounded an 

economically-rooted analysis of fascism; that i s , fascism was analyzed to be the 

culmination of a process begun by capitalism, it was the logical next step of a 

capitalism pushed into a corner. In the opinion which gained support in the US, 

fascism was almost exclusively a psychological problem, something essentially 

inherent in the German "soul" and in German c u l t u r e . 7 5 This allowed the US 

emphasis to be placed on "re-education" while allowing all the old capitalist 

structures to remain intact. Similarly, conceptions of resistance diverged: in 

the East, resistance focussed on eliminating capitalism, while in the West, 

resistance was increasingly restricted to "values," to a belief in "liberalism" 

(versus totalitarianism), and to the realm of Geist—Theodor Adorno would on 

this level find himself in agreement with naked Cold Warriordom, protestations 

of not wanting to be a "mouthpiece" notwithstanding. The ideology of the 

impossibility of political praxis and the resultant retreat to the realm of 

theory was eminently suited to the restoration of capitalism in postwar western 

Germany. 

On a l l fronts resistance was being blocked out of participating in the 

p o l i t i c a l creation of change, and was instead harnessed into a restoration of 

-56-



the old. Reduced to Geist. to the personal and the individualist, it thereby 

became more susceptible to ideological manipulation. In 1949 the question, 

"What can be done to strengthen the vital -function o-f resistance?" was answered 

with a prescription o-f strengthened individualism, lest Europe become a mere 

appendage of "America or Asia."76 Yet it is precisely this emphasis on 

individualism which furnishes the illusion of internal freedom that masks the 

continuation of repression and unfreedom resulting from "American" and "Asian" 

superpower r i v a l r y . 

This chapter began with the 1958 symposium in Darmstadt which asked 

after the valency of the image of man—das Menschenbi1d—and proceeded to trace 

the roots of this concern to the 1940s. We saw the Menschenbi1d being corroded 

and questioned, yet simultaneously trying to assert i t s e l f , and we saw that 

history—Nazism, the war, and the breakdown of European culture—had created an 

exigent physical and mental state. From the beleaguered Berliner dependent on 

a i r l i f t e d food to Adorno's "damaged l i f e , " all were suffering under this 

unprecedented state of exigency. Modern art especially could see i t s e l f as 

particularly endangered since it faced enemies on both the right and the left. 

While the old bourgeois humanist concept of culture from the nineteenth century 

was discredited by history, the orthodox communist left also presented no viable 

alternative since i t , like the right in this respect, called for a naive kind of 

humanist communication at odds with the modernists's search for a new r e a l i t y . 

But modernists on the other hand followed in the arena of culture a 

similar strategy as the SPD in p o l i t i c s : they claimed blamelessness for 

Nazism. They were innocent victims of Nazism, and now after the war faced 

enemies on all sides. This seemingly typical "instinct" of culture—its most 

negative representatives notwithstanding—to try to absent i t s e l f from p o l i t i c s 

-57-



•facilitated the affirmative embrace of negativism in art. Modernists, rooted in 

negativity, call upon the concept of culture in c r i s i s , of exigency and 

adversity; this f i t s into the negative discourse of the disintegration of the 

subject, the death of the individual, and the impossibility of "rational" man. 

But it also provides the terms for the search for man, that i s , the positive 

discourse of the MenschenbiId; in this sense, theory, although c r i t i c a l , aids in 

reconstituting the image of man: 

That the spector of "exigency" was ever again conjured up was in part, 
to be sure, an honest perception of things, but also in part a trick. 
One always talks of exigency when it is an immense exigency under which 
many are suffering, that i s , one which is perceived as fateful. The 
question of possible guilt and responsibility of those thus afflicted 
can then not even arise. When everyone is in the same boat, rescue 
seems more important than c r i t i c a l thinking. If many are afflicted by 
i t , then exigency can take on a levelling quality, because if it is 
generally perceived as breakdown, as downfall, as l i f e threatening, then 
one can also believe that possibly existing guilt is compensated by i t . 
One "needs" exigency so that the new man can arise therefrom.7 7 

The exigency of non-communicative painting, however rooted in c r i t i c a l i t y , was 

in this sense f u l f i l l i n g a positive function since, as the last sentence of the 

guoted passage indicates, it allows the new man to be b o r n . 7 8 But unfortunately 

the new man will almost always be the sum of the structures left over from the 

old system. 

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F i g . 6: W i l l i Baumeister, Urzei toestalten. 1946, oil on canvas, Stuttgart, 
Staatsgalerie. 



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F i g . 8: E r n s t W i l h e l m Nay, M e l i s a n d e , 1948, o i l on c a n v a s , B e r l i n , 
S t a a t l i c h e Museen P r e u s s i s c h e r K u l t u r b e s i t z , N a t i o n a l g a l e r i e . 



NOTES 

iSee Hans Gerhard Evers, ed., Erstes Darmstadter Gesprach 1958:  
°Das MenschenbiId in unserer Zelt" (Darmstadt: Neue Darmstadter verlags-
anstalt, [1951]). There were subsequent symposia during the 1958s on the topic 
of architecture, technology, the individual and the organization, theatre, e t c . , 
in Darmstadt. 

2The response was often scathingly negative; see for example Hermann 
voss, "Hans Sedlmayr, Verlust der Mitte. Otto Mailer Verlag, Salzburg 
(1948)," Zeitschrift for Kunst 4 Nr • 1 ( 1958) :78-83. 

3Hans Sedlmayr, "Giber die Gefahren der modernen Kunst," talk given by 
Sedlmayr at Darmstadt; quoted in G6tz Adriani, ed., Baumeister; Dokumente,  
Texte, Gemalde (Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1971), p.197. 

^Alexander Mitscherlisch, "Das MenschenbiId in unserer Zeit in der Sicht 
der Medizin," talk given by Mitscherlisch at Darmstadt, quoted i b i d . . p.198. 

5 W i l l i Baumeister, "Verteidigung der modernen Kunst gegen Sedlmayr und 
Hausenstein," talk given by Baumeister at Darmstadt, quoted i b i d . . p.198. 

fcWilli Baumeister, Das Unbekannte in der Kunst (Stuttgart: Schwab, 1947) 
was written by him in 1943 during a period when he was forbidden to paint and 
also unable to acquire the materials, with the exception of cheap cardboard, 
with which to paint in secret. 

'The prehistoric art of cave paintings was also linked to the condition 
of contemporary man in art magazine articles like Hermann Weidhaas, "Zur B i l d -
kunst in frohen Gesel1schaftsformen," Zeitschrift far Kunst 4 Nr.3 (1958): 
228-231. The t i t l e alone lets one suspect the adjunct "Zur Bildkunst in 
spaten Gesel1schaftsformen." 

8 A r t i c l e s on kitsch or on art otherwise pandering to banality crop 
up repeatedly during the 1948s. Some examples are Paul Renner, "Psycho-
analyse und moderne Malerei," Zeitschrift fur Kunst 1 Nr.4 (1947), pp.68-71 on 
the theme that since psychoanalysis, reason has had to abdicate its reign; man 
is not healed and the question is asked whether all optimism is kitsch; also 
Walter Dirks, "Jazz," Frankfurter Hefte 3 (September 1948), pp.798-791 that jazz 
is an authentic music for today and that the "Singsang- und Operettenkitsch aus 
Paris, Berlin und Wien" (p.791) cannot even come close to competing with jazz; 
i t reflects the "Wahrheit, Bewusstheit, dem Ref1exionsstand, dem Formgefuhl 
und dem musikalischen Geschmack unserer Welt," it is the music of urbanity and 
c i v i l i z a t i o n ; those who wish to flee these things remain caught in musical 
kitsch and reject jazz.(p.791) Also, attacks on kitsch monuments in "Beobach-
tungen und Bemerkungen," Frankfurter Hefte 4 (January 1949), p.15: the 
"Deutsches Eck" in Koblenz (where the Rhine and the Mosel meet) was to get a new 
monument in lieu of the old Kaiser Wilhelm statue; the winning design turned out 
to be "allegorical figures of Father Rhine and Mosella," to which this column 
noted that "Wir leben im Zeitalter der Restauration," that people today failed 

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to be able to come up with anything different than in "greatgrandfather's time," 
and that one develops an irresistable urge to yawn in the face of this banality. 

9See Hermann Schilling, Zur Geschichte der asthetischen Wertung;  
Bibliooraphie der Abhandlunoen Qber den Kitsch (Giessen: Universitats-
bibliothek Giessen, 1971). "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" was published by a magazine 
called Glanz. Nr.3 (1949). 

*°Theodor Adorno, "Schlussgesprach," talk given by Adorno, quoted in 
Adriani, p.198. 

" I b i d . 

i s i b i d . . p. 199. 

isjjbid. 

1 4 I n The Dialectic of the Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno and Max 
Horkheimer ( f i r s t published in Amsterdam in 1947), one reads: "Whether a citizen 
chooses the communist or the fascist ticket is already determined by whether he 
lets himself be more impressed by the Red Army or by the laboratories of the 
West." —quoted in a book review of Dialectic of the Enlightenment. Karl Thieme, 
"Entzauberte Entzauberung," Frankfurter Hefte 4 (August 1949), p.716. 

1 E A f t e r 1948 Nay's work becomes increasingly abstract, renouncing any 
allusions to the figurative, instead exploring form, pattern, color. Prior to 
this, his work s t i l l exhibits this tension between abstraction and encoded 
figure. It could also be argued, however, that the later work, based on 
properties belonging to painting only (self-referentiality) but appealing, 
through what Nay said of his work, to "spiritual" qualities, s t i l l addresses the 
human subject and thereby (ideologically) incorporates him/her in this 
ostensibly wholly abstract art. It has changed its terms, yet carried the 
concerns of the late 1940s with i t . 

i&Max Frisch, Taoebuch 1946-1949 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp verlag, 1985), 
p.287. For information on Frisch, see Introduction, note 2. 

i 7 J b i d . 

18Max Horkheimer, "The End of Reason," Studies in Philosophy and Social  
Science 9 (1941), p.376. 

1 9 I b i d . . p.377; Horkheimer quotes I.G. Fichte, The Science of Ethics, 
translated by A . E . Kroeger, New York, 1897, p.308. 

gQIbid., pp.384-385. At the time Horkheimer wrote this, he was likely 
unaware of the existence of death camps; he refers here to concentration camps 
for the malcontents, the ones accused of various forms of "mischief," or 
troublemaking. The reference to night club and garment d i s t r i c t jargon is to 
Yiddish, that i s , to the fact that Nazi anti-semites would nonetheless 
incorporate into their vocabulary words like koscher, zores, meschugge, etc., 
while carrying out their racist program. 

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21Werner Krauss, "Ober den Zustand unserer Sprache," Die Geoenwart 2 
Nr.28/29 (1947), p.29. Krauss was a well-known Romance-language scholar and had 
been in opposition to H i t l e r . 
In this regard see also Roland Barthes, Part I o-f Writino Deoree Zero, section 
called "Political Modes of Writing," f i r s t published in 1956 and reprinted in 
the volume A Barthes Reader, edited by Susan Sontag (New York: H i l l and Wang, 
1982, pp.31-61. 

22Benno Reifenberg, "Deutschlands Verstummen," Die Geqenwart 1 Nr.4/5 
(1946), p.7. 

"Walter Weymann-Weyhe and Rudiger Proske, "Die Lage der Intel 1ektuel-
len in Deutschland," Frankfurter Hefte 3 (June 1948), p.534. 

2 4 See Theo Pirker, Die SPD nach Hitler; Die Geschichte der Sozialdemo-
kratischen Partei Deutschlands 1945-1964 (Munich: Ratten & Loenig Verlag GmbH, 
1965). Pirker was thrown out of the SPD's council for being too left-wing. 

" J u t t a Held, Kunst und Kunstpolitik 1945-49. p.4. 

"Ottomar Domnick, Die Schopferischen Krafte in der abstrakten  
Maierei; Ein Zyklus (Bergen: Mailer & Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1947). 

2 ? I b i d . . p.13. 

" i b i d . , p. 14. 

"Leopold Zahn, "Abkehr von der Natur," Das Kunstwerk 1 Nr.8/9 
( 1946-47), p.4. 

s o i b i d . . pp.4-5. 

3 U b i d . . p.5. 

S 2 I b i d . Homo technicus: man the technician; homo magus: man the 
magician (shaman); homo magus redivivuss man reborn as magician, the new 
magician or shaman. 

" I b i d . Martin Heidegger in 1947 published his "Letter on Humanism," 
reprinted in book form in 1949. It was a rebuke of Jean-Paul Sartre's brand of 
existentialism and attacked and questioned the idea of the centrality of the 
subject. It was also an attack on conventional humanism. As one book reviewer 
noted in 1949: "Heidegger interprets our current c r i s i s as deriving from the 
desperate selfassertion which man seeks to find in totality—all in order to 
preserve his subjectivity. He calls individualism just as unhistorical as 
collectivism, since in both instances man, as the animal rationale, circles 
about himself, disdaining the truth of being and hence being expelled from i t . " 
Walter Rest, "Ober den Humanismus und Marx," Frankfurter Hefte 4 (September 
1949), p.894. 

3"Heinz Trokes, "Moderne Kunst in Deutschland," Das Kunstwerk 1 Nr.8/9 

-64-



(1946/47), p.75. 

s s i b i d . . p.73. 

s&lbid., p.75. 

3 7 I b i d . 

3 3 I b i d . 

39Theodor Adorno, "Auferstehung der Kultur in Deutschland?" Frankfurter  
Hefte 5 (May 1958), p.449-477. 

*QIbid.. p.449. 

4 1 A l f r e d Grosser, The Western Alliance; European-American Relations  
Since 1945. trans. Michael Shaw (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), p.53. 

42Hans-Werner Richter, "Deutschland—Brflcke zwischen Ost und West," 
a r t i c l e in Der Ruf. 1 October 1944, quoted in Klaus-J&rg Ruhl, editor, "Mein  
Gott. was soil aus Deutschland werden?" Die Adenauer Ara 1949-1943 (Munich: 
Deutscher Taschenbuch Merlag, 1985), pp.53-54. 

43Clemens Monster, "Deutsche Malerei und Plastik der Gegenwart," 
Frankfurter Hefte 4 (July 1949), p.425. 

4 4 F r i t z Nemitz, "Grosse Mttnchner Kunstausstel1ung (Malerei)," 
Die Kunst 48 (November 1949), p.52. 

4 5 I b i d . The artists discussed by Nemitz in this connection include 
E.W.Nay, Georg Meistermann, Heinz Trokes, Max Ackermann, Baumeister, and 
others. 

4 6 Tr6kes wrote an enthusiastic a r t i c l e , "Der Surrealismus," for Das  
Kunstwerk 1 Nr.8/9 (1944/47):38-34. Surrealism is not a n t i - l o g i c a l , it is a-
logical; it demasks what is hidden behind facades; things, animals, humans 
metamorphose into one another, but never in the sense of conventional humanism 
wherein rational man lords over being and l i f e ; most surrealists are marxists 
although they do not allow economically based analyses to be applied to things 
of the s p i r i t ; and they are internationalists. "There existed and exists s t i l l 
(...) an international and subterranean solidarity of point of view which 
stretches across the whole world. This is why surrealism is not bound to any 
one nation." (p.35) In his a r t i c l e , "Moderne Kunst in Deutschland," Trfikes 
does, however, insist that old style surrealism is inadequate for the present, 
that it cannot be taken over as i s . 

4 7 T h i s problem was discussed after the war in articles like Eugen Kogon, 
"NOrnberg und die Geschichte," Frankfurter Hefte 1 (April 1944), pp.3-5; and 
the same, "Gericht und Gewissen," Frankfurter Hefte 1 (April 1944), pp.25-37. 

4 8 See Friedrich Minssen, "Der Widerstand gegen den Widerstand," Frank- 
furter Hefte 4 (October 1949), pp.834-838, a review of Hans Rothfels's The 

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German Opposition to Hitler (1949). 

4 9 T h e opposition's political ineptitude was addressed in Alice Platen-
Hal lermund, "Der deutsche Widerstand," Frankfurter Hefte 3 (March 1948), pp.280-
282, a review of Allen Welsh Dulles's Germany's Underground (New York: 
Macmillan, 1947). 

5 0 T h i s thesis was c r i t i c i z e d by Kogon and Walter Dirks, the latter's in 
"Der Weg zur Freiheit; Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Selbsterkenntnis," Frankfurter  
Hefte 1 (July 1946), pp.58-68; also, the critique in the volume Imperialismus  
und Kultur. cited previously, pp.124-125, where the collective guilt thesis is 
attacked as a means of cloaking the imperialistic nature of fascism under the 
guise of psychologism. 

5 1 There were some very notable exceptions like Gustav Heinemann, a 
thorough c r i t i c of Cold Warriordom. He resigned from the Adenauer cabinet (he 
was a CDU politician) in 1958 on the issue of German rearmament. He then helped 
found the GUP—Gesamtdeutsche Volkspartei—in 1952, an anti-fascist, pro-
neutralist, anti-Cold War party. This party did not last long, and by 1957 
Heinemann was a member of parliament for the SPD. He continued agitating 
against the Cold War, atomic weapons, etc. In 1969 he became President of the 
Federal Republic of Germany during the last months of an SPD-CDU coalition 
government which in the f a l l of 1969 gave way to the major political change of 
postwar Germany: the SPD-FDP coalition government of W i l l i Brandt and later of 
Helmut Schmidt. He died in 1976. 

52jean-Francois Lyotard, "Nes en 1925," Les Temps Modernes 3 (1948), 
p.2853. 

5 S Michel Tapie, Un art autre; ob i l s'aoit de nouveaux deVidaqes  
du reel (Paris: Gabriel-Giraud et F i l s , 1952). 

5 4 B y 1949 (July), German artists like Max Ackermann, W i l l i Baumeister, 
Hubert Berke, Julius Bissier, Rolf Cavael, Fritz Winter, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, and 
Theodor Werner were all exhibiting at the Third Salon de Nouvelles Realitees 
in Paris. Tapie, who was not associated with this gallery, might for this 
reason, among others, have been reluctant to include any of them in his book. 

5 5 See for example Rfldiger Proske and Walter Weymann-Weyhe, "Wir aus 
dem Kriege; der Weg der jflngeren Generation," Frankfurter Hefte 3 (September 
1948), p.792-883. 

5 6 T b i d . . p.798. Also, the sense that the problem of evil was not just a 
German one is made clear by this account of a newspaper item given by Frisch in 
his Taoebuch. entry from summer, 1946, p.61-62: 

In the paper: 
A man, who had already spent two thirds of his existence as an honest and 
trusted bank t e l l e r , woke up in the night because of a need to relieve himself; 
on his way back, noticing an ax glinting in a corner, he bludgeoned to death his 
entire family, including grandparents and grandchildren; a reason for his 
monstrous behaviour, i t is said, could not be given by the culprit; it is not a 

- 6 6 -



case o-f embezzlement.... 
"Perhaps he drank." 
"Perhaps. 
"Or maybe i t was an embezzlement which will only later be discovered." 
"Let's hope so " 
Our need for a cause: as garantee that such a disorder, which reveals the 
insecurity of human being, shall never be able to a f f l i c t u s . . . . 
Why do we talk so much about Germany? 

5 7 Rudolf Andersen, "Mom Sinn der Malerei," Frankfurter Hefte 3 (February 
1948), p.133. 

5 8Eugen Kogon, "Der entscheidende Schritt," Frankfurter Hefte 3 (July 
1943), p.586. 

"The Berlin c r i s i s began when the three western zones (British, French, 
American) unilaterally carried out the currency reform (which incidentally 
produced the economic collapse of numerous independent journals) on 18 June 
1943; five days later, the Soviets carried out a currency reform in the east 
zone—but this reform was to apply to all of Berlin, which, although in the 
eastern zone, was supposed to be a four-zone c i t y . Next, the supply of coal and 
e l e c t r i c i t y to the c i t y ' s western sectors was cut off. The western a l l i e s then 
introduced the Westmark as the western sector Berlin's currency; the situation 
was exacerbated ever more, and routes leading from the western zones of Germany 
(through the east zone) to western sector Berlin were blockaded. This led to 
the famous Berlin Air L i f t , where the western sector of the city was kept 
supplied with food and coal until an agreement regarding access to Berlin was 
f i n a l l y reached on 5 May 1949. To maintain west sector Berlin as a non-Soviet 
outpost—to not let the Russians take over all of the former capital city— 
became an enormous point of prestige for the US and for West Germans. The 
financing of the a i r l i f t was largely American, although not only American planes 
were involved. As Alfred Grosser notes, p.83, "German-American solidarity 
established i t s e l f during that winter of 1948-49." And, same page: "Any German 
foreign policy which was not based on gaining the confidence of the Americans so 
that they might continue extending their protection to Berlin and West Germany 
seemed unacceptable henceforth." The logic of the Cold War reigned henceforth. 

"Max Frisch, Taoebuch. entry from July 1943, pp.249-256. 

6 1 K u r t Martin, Erinnerunoen an die franzosische Kulturpolitik in  
Freiburo im Breisoau nach dem Krieo (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke verlag KG, 
1974), p.[3]. Martin does not specify whether any arrangements were made with 
the Soviet occupiers to allow people living in that zone to pass the military 
borders into the French zone. 

" I b i d . . p.C4]. 

" I b i d . 

s^Willi Baumeister, "Offener Brief an Andre Malraux," Das Kunstwerk 1 
Nr.8/9 (1946/47), p.79. 

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" I b i d . Translated -from the German translation. 

" T h i s entire dispute is capsulized and quoted in G6tz Adriani, 
Baumeister. pp. 191-192. The Le Matin a r t i c l e is by F. Joubert and appears 
translated into German -from the original French in Adriani; it is called, "The 
council o-f contemporary art, or: the professorial dispute" (Hausenstein, Heuss, 
and Baumeister all held the t i t l e of professor; no doubt the Frenchman Joubert 
had German pedanticism which values t i t l e s in mind when deciding what to call 
his a r t i c l e ) ; it is dated 29 May 1950. Hausenstein's polemic, which accused 
modern art of "nihilism," was called "What is the meaning of modern art?" and 
appeared in 1949. Heuss, at an early stage of the dispute, publicly called 
Baumeister a dumb ox—which, considering the a r t i s t ' s burly physique, must have 
been too close for comfort. Thinking that Baumeister would be an artist who 
paints, not speaks, he miscalculated because one of this painter's favorite 
a c t i v i t i e s seems to have been writing and speaking, and Baumeister, far from 
retreating, charged into print as the democratic defender of modern art against 
the anti-democratic restorative tactics of the government. Adenauer, the 
Chancellor, was Christian Democrat, Heuss, the President, a Free Liberal 
Democrat. 

6 7 I would take issue here with an interpretation of the success of 
informal type abstraction given by Jost Hermand, "Modernism Restored: West 
German Painting in the 1950s," New German Critique Nr.32 (Spring/Summer 1984), 
pp.23-41. Hermand neglects any analysis of the immediate postwar discourse, 
focusses instead on Wohlstanddeutschland's facile relationship with modernism, 
and suggests, p.25, that Das Kunstwerk. by having only abstract painting on the 
agenda (a not entirely true claim), propagated an undifferentiated, uncritical 
idea of abstract modernist painting. In actual fact, the magazine was one of 
the most intelligent sources of information on the new abstraction. 

"Kurt Leonhard, "Picasso," Das Kunstwerk 1 Nr.8/9 (1946/47), p. 13. 

" I b i d . . p. 19. 
7 0 F o r a first-hand description of the d i f f i c u l t i e s of maintaining any 

kind of network—information, cooperation, etc.—between the different groupings 
of oppositionals, see Peter Weiss, Die Asthetik des Widerstands. 3 volumes, 
originally published in 1975, 1978, and 1981; published in one volume in 1983 
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp verlag, 1983). It must be added that Weiss, who in exile 
met and worked with Bert Brecht, would have scorned the unpolitical art of 
informal type abstraction as well as the discourses of Frankfurt School type 
intellectuals. Brecht in fact parodied the latter as the Tel 1ekt-Ual-Ins. 
Neither the Weissian or the Brechtian aesthetic had much chance of 
flourishing in 1950s West Germany, although both playwrights produced plays 
which could not be ignored. (Weiss is best known for "Marat-Sade.") 

7 1 6rosser, p.72, cites a "prayer" which circulated in the Marshall-
aided London of 1948, expressing in toto the restorative function and Cold War 
mechanism set in motion as a prerequisite to receiving aid: 

Our Uncle which art in America 
Sam be thy name, 

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Thy navy come, thy will be done, 
In London as ' t i s in Washington. 
Give us this day our Marshall aid, 
And forgive us our un-American a c t i v i t i e s , 
As we forgive your American activities against us; 
And lead us not into Socialism 
But deliver us from Communism, 
For thine is our Kingdom, 
The Atom power and the Tory, 
For ever and ever; G-men. 

One could contrast this quite nicely to the money-poor policy of the Soviets 
which inspired the east zone Germans to come up around the same time with a 
parody of the German national anthem: 

Deutschland, Deutschland ohne alles, 
Ohne Butter, ohne Speck, 
Und das bisschen Marmelade 
Fressen uns die Russen weg... 

—cited in Anthony Mann, Comeback: Germany 1945-1952 (London: Macmillan London 
Limi ted, 1988), p.99. 

7 2R0diger Proske and Walter Weymann-Weyhe, "Wir aus dem Kriege; der 
Weg der jflngeren Generation," Frankfurter Hefte 3 (September 1943):792-883. 

7 3 K a r l Wilhelm B&ttcher, "Die junge Generation und die Parteien; 
Bericht tiber ein Gesprach," Frankfurter Hefte 3 (August 1948):756-761. 

7 4Eugen Kogon, "Der politische Untergang des europaischen Wider-
standes," Frankfurter Hefte 4 (May 1949), p.489. 

7 S See Heilbut, cited previously, pp.413-414, for a discussion of the 
different receptions of Hannah Arendt's and Franz Neumann's books on Nazism and 
totalitarianism. Arendt condemned all of Germany and claimed that it had 
offered no resistance to H i t l e r . Her book The Qrioins of Totalitarianism 
received wide attention. This, according to Heilbut, "evidenced the curious and 
probably unparalleled coalescing of a literary emigre's reading of history 
with the political demands of American Cold Warriors. As a case in point, 
consider the far less rapturous reception for Franz Neumann's equally massive 
study of Nazi Germany, Behemoth (1942). Of course, Neumann's Marxist analysis 
was less flattering to American readers than Arendt's conviction that 
totalitarian societies were something new under the sun, and quite unlike any 
elements in American l i f e . Neumann's study had its flaws, particularly in i t s 
underestimation of the virulence of German anti-Semitism and in i t s programmatic 
appeals to the A l l i e s to cultivate the German resistance (Neumann was a member 
of the OSS when he wrote the book). Yet his study has proved to be more 
prophetic and, for many scholars, more helpful than Arendt's idiosyncratic work. 

"Unlike Arendt, Neumann had l i t t l e use for the abstract model of 
'totalitarianism,' recognizing that it blurred the continuities and resemblances 
between all capitalist societies." 

- 6 9 -



Along the same lines, it is striking that Thomas Mann, another German who 
adhered to a blanket condemnation of his countrymen—a writer who was 
conservative, a monarchist, and generally p o l i t i c a l l y apathetic preferring the 
realm of "geist" instead—received a great deal of attention while his brother 
Heinrich Mann, a c r i t i c a l , p o l i t i c a l l y left thinker capable of great 
differentiation in his analyses, did not. 

? 6Bernhard Guttmann, "Die Funktion des Widerstandes," Die Geoenwart 4 
Nr.6 (194?), p.9. 

7 7 Heinrich Kupffer, Der Faschismus und das MenschenbiId in der deutschen  
Padaqoqik (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuchverlag GmbH, 1984), p.129. 

?8A clarification is in order here: I noted earlier (Introduction, note 
6) that the label "non-communicative" only becomes truly appropriate at a later 
stage—around the start of the 1950s when the struggle over the political 
structures in the two Germanys and in Europe had been largely, though not 
entirely, settled. In the 1940s, most of the artists concerned would no doubt 
have been insistent that their art "communicated"—if nothing else, i t spoke of 
the search for a new language. I would argue that as long as the fluctuating 
p o l i t i c a l situation existed, the "communication" of advanced art attempting to 
speak in a new language constituted a kind of praxis. That i s , although 
addressing "exigency," it tried to intervene in this state of a f f a i r s . Once the 
p o l i t i c a l issues become settled, its context of communication is practically 
elided—it becomes "non-communicative." It also becomes marginalized to theory, 
but it does not relinquish its emblematics of exigency. It is at this point, as 
Kupffer says, that "One 'needs' exigency so that the new man can arise 
therefrom." I do not believe that in this case this is a process inherent in 
the art, but rather something dependent on its social context. I also reject 
the idea that the context "cheapens" the art in any way: it continues to have 
meaning in i t s e l f , in relation to i t s changed context, in relation to i t s 
traditions (painting), and in relation to future art praxis. I do suspect and 
would c r i t i c i z e the tendency to f a l l into complacency in the 1950s on the part 
of many German painters, and the tendency to obliterate from memory the "rubble 
years" which after all had provided the context for this kind of abstraction's 
birth—a style which subsequent artists busily copied. 

- 7 8 -



CHAPTER 2: THE INTERACTION OF POLITICS AND CULTURE: 
THE NECESSITY OF FINDING AN APPROPRIATE REPRESENTATION IN ART 

Berliner KQnstler 1958: An Exhibition with a Purpose 

We have seen that in 1958 a symposium was held in Darmstadt at which the 

main c r i t i c a l concerns o-f the day—in relation primarily to art ("the image o-f 

man")—were articulated, and that these concerns already existed, were -fully 

present, throughout the 1948s, both in the discourse as well as in part o-f the 

art produced. The question this now raises is whether these concerns were being 

translated into exhibition policies, and if not, in what way could they 

eventually come to be relevant to the official propagation of culture? In order 

to formulate answers to these questions, we will turn to another event of 1958: 

Berliner KQnstler 1958. an exhibition sponsored by the city of Bonn and 

organized by a Berlin committee.1 Domestically, it was shown only in the city 

of Bonn, the newly created capital of the Federal Republic of Germany, and was 

thereafter shipped to Paris and to several American c i t i e s . Examination of the 

catalog will show that i t s intention was to attest the cultural freedom of 

Berlin, and proceeding from this intention, we will ask two questions: could 

this exhibition represent Berlin cultural freedom, and i f so, could it 

simultaneously represent European modernism? The theses which I will put 

forward regarding the success and failure of this show—and what this would 

signify for exhibition policies—will be proven by once again working backward 

from the event, examining the p o l i t i c a l and cultural developments and events of 

1947 up to 1958. This uncovering of pre-history will also show the differing 

strategies at work, strategies which served to nullify the cultural method put 

forward by Berliner KQnstler. 

- 7 1 -



The exhibition numbered thirty—five artists -featuring a cross section of 

styles, from Karl Schmitt-Rottluff and Max Pechstein through to Ernst Schumacher 

and Theodor Werner, that i s , from expressionists through to abstractionists. 

Falling in the middle ranges were many artists who painted traditional subjects 

"in the manner of": either school of Paris, adapting elements from Picasso or 

Matisse, or, referring to an even earlier style, from Lovis Corinth and German 

impressionism.2 Most of the art concerned itself with traditional subject 

matter and figuration expressed in various styles, rather than abstraction. The 

catalog's introductions by the mayors of the c i t i e s of Berlin and Bonn make 

clear that this exhibition—particularly in its plurality of styles— 

incorporated a p o l i t i c a l w i l l . As Ernst Reuter of Berlin stated: 

For the f i r s t time, a collection of works by Berlin artists is shown, 
which for many represents a rememberance of this city and a testimonial 
to the attitude and the l i f e of these a r t i s t s , who, despite the greatest 
exigency, did not follow the path of eastern dictatorship but rather 
have elected western democracy.3 

The fact that Berlin was s t i l l producing a diverse body of contemporary art, 

despite i t s existence under unusual circumstances, was meant to be read as a 

sign of cultural v i t a l i t y and by extension, cultural freedom: western democracy 

versus eastern dictatorship. This will to v i t a l i t y was also seen as the conduit 

which instantly could connect cut-off Berlin with the other centers of western 

c i v i l i z a t i o n . Hence, "In regard to foreign art exhibitions held in Germany, one 

has rightly pointed out that the western world, whether in Paris, London, New 

York, or Berlin, is following related impulses in art and that therein i t is 

already in agreement."4 Art was to serve, in other words, as a means of 

unifying and codifying the common outlook of "the western world"; in fact, since 

the latter is "already" in agreement in matters of art, art even paves the way 

for p o l i t i c a l consolidation. 

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Because o-f the wide range o-f styles o-f contemporary art shown at this 

exhibition, one could argue that i t succeeded in representing Berlin's cultural 

freedom. The eclectic mixing of various types of modernisms illustrated the 

freedom from outside constraint, that i s , that unlike art in the Third Reich or 

art under Stalinism, no direction or tendency was tabooed. Heinz Trdkes was 

represented by surrealist-inspired works, Theodor Werner by abstract work, and 

Pechstein, Hofer, Schmitt-Rottluff by expressionism. Yet this eclecticism, 

while intended as a statement in praise of "democracy" and its functioning in 

Berlin, failed to engage in a v i t a l l y interesting way the issue of freedom 

i t s e l f as i t was articulated by the discourse described in the previous 

chapter. The cultural freedom of Berlin, represented by this show, was only one 

aspect of freedom, namely, lack of dictatorship. But as the deep concern over 

the state of language and i t s functioning indicated, many c r i t i c s found that 

"freedom" was defined not merely as an absence of dictatorship, and that it was 

not to be very easily found in the systems of western democracy, either. By 

presenting a cross section of Berlin's contemporary art the organizers hoped to 

give a representative view of cultural freedom; they thereby reproduced the 

freedom equals lack of dictatorship equation. In the more advanced modernism 

searching for a "new reality," however, this praxis of putting together a 

contemporary cross section was giving way to presenting the rigorously selective 

as the index of a c r i t i c a l modern painting. 

It will be recalled that c r i t i c a l intellectuals and cultural producers 

of the post war era perceived a particular, nineteenth century type of humanism 

to be irrevocably discredited. The overall emphasis on the human and the 

affective in the Berlin exhibition, intended, as the catalog text f l a t l y t e l l s 

us, as a signifier of positive human existence, eschewed acknowledging this 



bankruptcy, and by implication -failed to encode an effective negative resistance 

to recent history. By placing the work of someone who made tame imitations of 

styles current in the 1928s or 1938s next to the work of Trokes or Werner who 

were trying to find a "new reality," the exhibition, although a cross section, 

discredited the intense search for freedom which preoccupied writers, c r i t i c s , 

and a r t i s t s . For art to be authentically of this time required that it have a 

close relationship to the c r i t i c a l concerns being articulated, concerns not 

mirrored in eclecticism or liberalism. 

The art historian and c r i t i c Will Grohmann, who, along with Werner 

Haftmann, profiled himself during the postwar period as a spokesperson for 

abstract art, wrote the catalog essay for Berliner Kflnstler, a task which he 

may have considered important given the exhibition's ideological role—showing 

Berlin as a once again credible art centre to West Germany, to Paris, and to New 

York and Washington—but one which he was unable to commit himself to f u l l y , as 

his text indicates: 

Berlin's artists have never been able to live from Berlin alone. During 
the last five years they were forced to, i t was not easy; so much 
greater their joy at having found their way to freedom. Berlin has 
always demanded much of its people, and was feared for its critiques. 
This has not changed. For failure there is no excuse, therefore 
everyone tries hard and gives to the last. More than what is shown by 
the Bonn exhibition cannot be offered by Berlin. Is it enough?5 

Interestingly, Grohmann does not answer his own laconically put question, and he 

in fact is unable to praise any of the painters outright, mentioning by name 

only the sculptors Uhlmann, Karl Hartung, and Bernhard Heiliger, who were all 

concerned with developing a new sculptural language. Failing to address the 

overall discourse of negativity (the famous postwar "nihilism"), this exibition 

could thus not represent the European modernism which was in the process of 

being articulated in the west. Grohmann, himself a Berliner otherwise sensitive 

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and central to this articulation in the realm o-f painting especially, here takes 

a decidedly cautious approach to the writing o-f the catalog essay for this 1950 

exhibi t i o n . 6 

In 1948, two years prior to the Berliner KQnstler exhibition, Grohmann 

wrote the preface to another exhibition catalog o-f Berlin a r t i s t s : Karl Hartung, 

Hans Uhlmann, Jeanne Mammen, Mac Zimmermann, Hans Thiemann, and Heinz Trokes 

briefly joined together -for one group exhibition which they called "Zone 5."7 

The two sculptors Hartung and Uhlmann pursued a modernist style far removed from 

the then also popular Barlach style of expressionism: Hartung's works were 

smoothed ciphers of figuration most readily comparable to Henry Moore, and 

Uhlmann's works were completely abstract constructions. The four painters all 

subscribed to one degree or another to surrealism, with Zimmermann being the 

most figurative, Mammen, Thiemann, and Tr6kes tending more to automatism and 

abstraction. This group of artists pursued not so much a common style but more 

appropriately a common Weitanschauunq which absolutely precluded the eclectic 

incorporation of a diluted modernism. That i s , unwilling to copy styles from 

the past, they were instead all concerned to develop an art appropriate to "the 

new reality." For this exhibition we find Grohmann's catalog essay 

unconditionally endorsing the strategy of "Zone 5." He asks i f one should s t i l l 

form groups, and affirms this tactic for the same reason that was given in the 

Berliner KQnstler catalog: that it is something which is common to other 

countries and centers of art, i . e . , the forming of groups is something which is 

taking place in France, in England, and in America. 

However, note that Grohmann, unlike Holzhausen in the 1950 catalog, sees 

this internationalism being forged on the basis of selective avant-gardism: 

a r t i s t s form groups, writes Grohmann, because they desire to make common front 

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against reaction, against a lazy art, to de-fine themselves against the epigones, 

and to be truly rigorous and avant garde. 8 Hence, "Zone 5" was formed, "six 

friends of the generation after Picasso," who share in common the courage to 

experiment and the desire to "renew the medium of language."8 The two themes 

central to the articulation of "the new reality" are here touched upon: the 

death of the old language, and the knowledge of history, in this case a 

knowledge of modernism and of the necessity of its renewal ("the generation 

after Picasso"). That an avant garde art should be at least a counterpoint if 

not an outright opposition to p o l i t i c s is made clear in the name which the group 

chose to exhibit under, as Grohmann's closing comment indicates: "The six are 

indeed a zone in i t s e l f , and we wish them luck on their way."1 0 Advanced art, 

the kind that is searching to "renew the medium of language," is a fifth zone in 

four-zone B e r l i n ; 1 1 if art and p o l i t i c s are vying for power, the strategy for 

art is clear: an advanced style, an ironic tone, and a banishment of the old 

style humanism-cum-ec1ecticism of "contemporary" art which could only bring it 

into the orbit of party p o l i t i c s . The "Zone 5" grouping soon disbanded and thus 

only forms a moment in the history of postwar art, but its self-definition and 

Grohmann's accompanying text serve as a kind of prototype for a strategy of 

modernism in post-1945 Germany. Compared to "Zone 5"'s belligerent attitude 

—forming a group to fight against reaction, laxness, and epigones—and its 

selective exclusivity, the Berliner Kflnstler exhibition with its aim to 

represent most of the c i t y ' s contemporary artists presents a dangerous weakening 

of modernism's c r i t i c a l powers. 

As the examination of reviews dating from the years 1946 through to the 

establishment of the two German states in 1949 and beyond will show, a lack of a 

selective and avant-garde reading weakened art's powers, served to make of art 

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an object at the whim of politics—whether as representative of Berlin's 

cultural freedom (in the example of the 1958 exhibition described above), or, as 

in the reviews of the large postwar Dresdener art exhibitions, as the hope of 

p o l i t i c a l unification: 

What was at stake was to refute the nonsensical talk of an iron curtain 
behind which the free unfolding of mental work is supposedly hindered. 
And also at stake was to show that the unity of Germany, which is being 
strived for by an intelligent and perspicacious p o l i t i c s , exists in the 
realm of culture, today an again undeniable fact. Both intentions were 
f u l f i l l e d . In this salon, the levelling which since 1933 determined the 
appearance of art exhibitions, could not be perceived. 1 2 

What the (east-zone) Dresdener exhibitions, f i r s t held in 1946, in fact strived 

for was the identical strategy implemented by the (west-zone) Ber1iner 

KQnstler exhibition: the prevailing of pluralism over and above any sense of 

levelling (associated with Hitler) or s t y l i s t i c selectivity. But since this 

pluralism is harnessed in front of a political vehicle, art is once again not 

allowed to define the terms of i t s being read, but instead is read through the 

terms of an existing political situation. A strategy like "Zone 5"'s, on the 

other hand, far from denying the existence of p o l i t i c s , posits i t s own utopic 

terms of representation—a separate zone. This fierce disengagement/separation 

from p o l i t i c s , far from being—initially at least—a depoliticization, is a 

criticism of a status quo from which art wants to exempt i t s e l f . 

A further weakening of art's powers can be observed in the lack of 

"direction" produced by "contemporary art" shows. These were seen—openly or 

obliquely—by many c r i t i c s as a kind of demise of art, even if the exhibited 

eclecticism was meant as an illustration of democracy and pluralism. Thus, in 

another review of the same 1946 Dresdener show and of a 194? exhibition held in 

Baden-Baden of contemporary German art, an overall absence of tendency is noted 

as being the most striking feature of both exhibitions: "...there is no longer 

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any large, common current, experiment stands beside experiment..." 1 3 This 

aimlessness is summed up as a death in the observation that expressionism has 

•finally, definitively died: 

The once dominant current of expressionism has split into many 
streamlets, the singular stormcloud capable of gathering up the entire 
landscape in its fallow light has passed on: a more neutral light once 
again allows local coloring to appear. 

One no longer saw avid accusations, no fiery dislocations, no 
ecstatic pathos. Painting in Germany seems to have become calmer, 
lighter, as it were more southerly. It is as though, having foreseen 
the horror, it now, having seen i t , has turned away from i t . And what 
could chaos, ruin, destruction have said to it that was new? It after 
all foresaw all this. And since its visions of horror have been 
overtaken by r e a l i t y , a painting of the terrible could no longer be 
called Expressionism, but only "Newest Reality" CNeueste Sachlichkeit3. 
But even therein lies hardly a possibility. Because while the 
illustration of the horrible strikes us as cheap when i t becomes 
pathetic, it strikes us as anemic when it tries to be o b j e c t i v e . 1 4 

This passage in its assessment of expressionism uncannily echoes the assessment 

concurrently made in France about surrealism, namely that reality had overtaken 

i t . 1 5 In their way, these movements were the locus of radicality for the 

respective countries. This very locus has been superseded by historical 

events. A r t , then, is in this new situation cast out of i t s e l f , into a 

wandering, "homeless" condition, in search of a subject and a style. It cannot 

be returned to its lost position through the generous display of pluralism, 

either; this only contributes to i t s sense of aimlessness. 

Two further reviews i l l u s t r a t e this point and also give an indication of 

why this p l u r a l i s t i c aimlessness progressively could come to be seen as an 

handicap in the struggle between east and west. While in 1958 a reviewer could 

s t i l l praise yet another Berlin exhibition with these words: "Prejudices against 

any particular tendency were not at hand, the separate tendencies were instead 

set together into a p l u r a l i s t i c panorama...," 1 6 the reviewer of the Dresdener 

Second German Art Exhibition in a 1949 critique perhaps inadvertantly gives the 

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reason for why the west will not win in the cultural arena if it pursues 

piuralism: 

If one surveys the west's contribution to the painting section of 
the Second German Art Exhibition, the result is that even given the fact 
that more conservative forces were favored and that the individual was 
not always able to be represented by his strongest works, the problem of 
communicating a cross section of the entire German production was 
solved. But a new persuasion nowhere stepped into view. New paths were 
not t r o d . 1 7 

There is a certain ambivalence at work here; on the one hand this reviewer seems 

to praise the fact that a "cross section" was achieved despite some restrictions 

—such as painters not being represented by their best work and by a generally 

conservative exhibition policy on the part of the west. But in the very next 

sentence, this cross section approach is devastated: the west has nothing new to 

offer, no new persuasion or conviction, no vitality—despite p l u r a l i t y . This 

could only be indicative of cultural f a i l u r e . The Dresdener exhibitions, it 

must be remembered, took place in the east zone and invited contributions from 

all zones of Germany. By 1947-4? this cultural forum had become the arena for 

east-west r i v a l r y . And this means that the focussed search for "a new reality," 

born of a genuine despair over the past, will henceforth be steadily propelled 

into p o l i t i c a l competition since i t will come to serve as the new persuasion, 

and the effectiveness of the p l u r a l i s t i c approaches exemplified by the 

exhibitions Berliner KQnstler will eventually wither. 

When 4 Equals 2 Because 3 Equals 1: West-Inteqration and Bloc Polarization 

What were the conditions external to art which permitted this shift 

to occur which would come to see plurality as essentially a lack of cultural 

representation? It is in the political events of the postwar years that we have 

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to look for an explanation and an understanding of the dynamic involved. With 

the unconditional capitulation of the Hitler regime on 8 May 1945, the German 

Reich was divided into four zones of occupation. In the three western zones, 

German politicians from the f i r s t were able to contribute i n i t i a t i v e and 

responsibility to the process of German democratic renewal, but they were not 

able to play a part in determining the role of Germany in international affairs. 

However, in the numerous l i t t l e magazines which sprang up after war's end, 

politicians and writers published varying conceptions of how Germany could best 

pursue her national interests in the context of a rapidly changing political 

w o r l d , 1 8 conceptions which rivalled each other in trying to obtain dominance. 

In the west, the main ideas revolved around two poles: neutrality or west-

integration . 

The A l l i e s during the last years of the war had not developed an overall 

plan for Europe. Basically, the defeat of Hitler was the primary goal, and 

under President Roosevelt the Americans thought mainly of maintaining the anti-

Hitler coalition so that upon victory, the US, Great B r i t a i n , and the USSR could 

proceed to ensure world peace—the ideal of "one world." In part because of 

this emphasis on the A l l i e d , primarily Russian-Anglo, opposition to H i t l e r , the 

European resistance movements for a united Europe failed to achieve resonance 

amongst the A l l i e d governments when, for example, they wrote their "Declaration 

on European Cooperation" in May 1944.1 9 This project was put together by 

"several active partisans of resistance movements in Denmark, France, Italy, 

Norway, the Netherlands, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, as well as 

representatives of a group of active antinationalsocialists in Germany."20 In 

Point I, the solidarity of the peoples of Europe in resistance to Nazism is 

asserted as well as the right of all the countries whose representatives 

- 8 8 -



formulated this declaration to have a say in "the construction of peace and the 

reconstruction of Europe in full equality with the other victorious 

countries." 2 1 Point II underscores the need for the renunciation of individual 

states's sovereignty, and the necessity of a federalist organization. Point III 

asserts that peace in Europe is the key to world peace, and the existence of 

thirty sovereign European states is given as the cause for the anarchism that 

allowed two world wars to start t h e r e . 2 2 Economically, the declaration called 

for the abolition of monopolies and autarchy. Of course this project was never 

able to attain real political shape and power. The "victorious countries" were 

hardly willing to allow "full equality" to countries like Poland, Italy, or— 

even less likely—Germany in determining the reconstruction of Europe. 

Although the hope for an east-west unified Europe was s t i l l maintained 

as late as 1947, this grander scheme, for lack of practical realization, receded 

into the realm of the utopic. Thus, by 1945/46 most independent left-oriented 

intellectuals and politicians in Germany were obliged to settle for propagating 

a German neutrality which would allow a "bridge" to be built between the eastern 

and western zones of the country, so that eventually Germany could develop into 

a strong but neutralist country, part, i t was s t i l l hoped, of a unified Europe 

from which the two superpowers would leave off. Each political party seemed to 

have i t s "leftist" advocates of this strategy, from the generally conservative 

CDU, where neutrality was advocated by Jakob Kaiser, the CDU leader in Berlin 

from 1945-47, and Ulrich Noack, who formed the "Nauheimer Kreis" made up of 

neutralists and former resisters to the Nazi regime, all the way through the 

p o l i t i c a l spectrum to the independent, non-aligned intellectuals and writers 

clustered around magazines like the previously discussed Der R u f . 2 3 On the 

whole, although some "neutralists" could be found within the established 

- 8 1 -



p o l i t i c a l parties, the majority were outside of the party system; none of the 

large, established parties advocated i t . 

The SPD under Kurt Schumacher, for example, never endorsed neutralism; 

the party leader, a staunch anti-Stalinist and a German nationalist, wanted a 

strong—even armed—independent but west-oriented and anti-Soviet Germany of the 

western zones which would force the USSR to give up i t s hold on the Germany of 

the eastern zone. The economics of this socialist Europe of the "third force" 

which Schumacher wanted—and which was rejected by the Americans as well as the 

CDU— was theoretically elaborated by the returned emigrant "Paul Sering," a 

pseudonymn for Richard Lowenthal, a Frankfurt Institute member. It was an 

economic theory c r i t i c a l of capitalism and the Soviet variant of a Communist 

economy, and unlike the theories of more utopic European neutralism, it 

precluded the incorporation of eastern Europe into the newly proposed "third 

force" E u r o p e . 2 4 For Schumacher, this political and economic concept of Europe 

rested on the leadership of Great Britain (many Social Democrats had found 

refuge in Britain during the war, and close ties between them and the Labour 

party ensued) and the cooperation of the US. But the Americans were most 

reluctant to work with the bellicose Schumacher, distrusting his nationalism as 

well as his socialism, and preferred rather to work with more moderate political 

forces in the west zones, including the SPD's Dr. Carlo Schmid, the party's 

second in command, as well as the majority of the CDU's politicians, who 

advocated a western capitalist economy. It soon became clear that within the 

p o l i t i c a l parties, the neutralists distinctly were a minority: in p o l i t i c s , the 

dominant pole was that of west-integration. It seems that the pole of 

neutralism and opposition to west-integration—which was not the same, however, 

as opposition to a unified Europe—became ever more limited as an extra-

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parliamentary force. 

Outside of the established parties, there were those who continued to 

believe in the possibility of evading an increasingly obvious polarization 

between the east and west zones. They were the remnants of resistance groups 

and socialists who wanted a reunification of the country and a unified and 

socialist Europe, independent of American capitalism and Soviet 

totalitarianism. Shortly after the war, the "Europa-Union," founded in 

Switzerland, succeeded in getting the representatives of federalist movements 

which wanted a unified and planned-economy Europe to meet in Hertenstein from 

the 14th to the 21st of September 1946. At the end of the meeting this group 

put forward a twelve-point program for federalism which was henceforth 

recognized as the basic program of all federalist groups. 2 5 During the same 

week, however, the former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill also came to 

Switzerland, and in Zurich held a talk on the 19th of September 1946 wherein he 

proposed the union of all "free" European states into a confederacy. This the 

European federalists in Hertenstein rejected outright since it fed the east-west 

polarization which they wanted to counter through the unity of all European 

s t a t e s . 2 6 Churchill wanted the union of only the "free"—that i s , the western 

—European states. The Hertensteiner federalists avoided this distinction and 

instead deliberately included all of the European states, including those under 

Soviet occupation. 

Churchill's talk and the p o s s i b i l i t i e s it opened up caused much debate. 

The US government and Congress had s t i l l been hoping for an "arrangement" with 

the USSR,2 7 but within a few months (from the autumn of 1946 to the spring of 

1947) a l l of this changed. For one thing, the US was consolidating i t s hold on 

not only i t s own, but also on the English and French zones of occupation in 

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Germany. In the f i r s t half of 1946, Britain—greatly in debt at war's end—was 

to receive a $3.75 b i l l i o n loan from the U S . 2 8 This indebtedness in turn 

obliged Britain to cede administrative control of the British zone to the 

Americans. Thus "Bizonia"—as the Germans called it—was created. It then only 

remained to coerce the French to integrate their zone into the administrative 

structure of Bizonia. This would occur within the following years when the 

Marshall Plan made European cooperation with the US a prerequisite for receiving 

aid. By the beginning of 1947, then, the US already had administrative control 

over two thirds of the western occupied zones of Germany and would soon expand 

i t s control over the remaining third. 'A larger change in US attitude was then 

signalled by a shift in foreign policy toward a greater commitment on the part 

of the US to involve itself in a structural reform of the world economy. The 

opening key event was a speech given by John Foster Dulles in New York City on 

17 January 1947. Dulles, too, demanded the economic unity of Europe, but it was 

obviously a western union he had in mind. In his speech, he immediately 

attacked the Soviet Union for i t s "aggressiveness," and proceeded to emphasize 

that the US would henceforth have to provide more aid to the Europeans—and not 

only Dollar-aid, but "spiritual" and intellectual "aid" as well in order to ward 

off this supposed threat by the USSR. By March 1947 the American Congress put 

out a Resolution wherein it supported plans for western European economic 

unity. This was of course essential to the American economy which was producing 

a record surplus in need of an enlarged market. Europe—re-built and 

financially healthy—would provide this outlet. The beginning of Marshall Plan 

aid in June 1947 provided the financial prerequisites for rebuilding western 

Europe and for making it a reliable component of a structural reform intended to 

f a c i l i t a t e a capitalist economy. 

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The idea o-f European unity now became increasingly susceptible to a cold 

war logic since it was being elaborated on the ground of economic unity between 

the western European s t a t e s . 2 9 By 22 January 1948 the British Prime Minister 

Bevin—leader of the Labour party—was agreeing to a Westunion of Europe. 3 0 A 

further p o l i t i c a l weakening of a possible European union of east and west 

occured when in May 1948 a congress of European movements was held in Den Haag. 

Attended by 898 delegates, including all the prominent pro-western and 

even cold warrior politicians: Churchill, Robert Schumann, Paul-Henri Spaak, 

Alcide de Gasperi, and many others, the congress worked out agreements for 

western European unity as well as a memorandum which was sent, on 23 November 

1948, to all western European governments. But therein the movement for 

European unity was already degenerating almost to the level of a "club": it 

neither demanded nor even suggested that a European federal parliamentary body 

with real legislative powers binding for its member countries be created. This 

is what had been demanded by the other European federalists (the UEF) who meant 

to include all of the European states (not just the "free" ones), a demand to 

curb the sovereignty of European states reiterated at their conferences in 

Interlaken in September 1948 and in Venice in October 1949,3 1 and which was also 

demanded by the United States of Europe during their Paris Congress at the 

beginning of 1949. This gradual elimination of a unity of all European states 

(east and west) into a socialist Europe in favor instead of an economic union of 

the sovereign states of western Europe (the Western Alliance) would of course 

also diminish any real possibility of a unification of east and west Germany. 

And in fact, the acceptance of partition was considered by some within 

Germany as early as 1945. In the spring of that year, Wilhelm R&pke, a 

professor for sociology in Geneva, published an article entitled, "The German 

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Question," which had a wide resonance in Germany.32 He suggested that the 

country should be partitioned along the lines of east-west occupation. 

Likewise, the writer Ernst Friedlaender expressed the same idea in the newspaper 

Die Zei t , 3 3 while in the Rhineland, traditionally west-oriented, a group 

focussed around the newspaper Rheinischer Merkur argued along the same lines; 

the CDU politician Konrad Adenauer, who was from Cologne, was close to this last 

group. Adenauer developed his political conception of a west-integrated Germany 

early on and never waivered from i t . He was convinced of an essential 

belligerance on the part of the USSR and thought that only the western bloc 

could offer resistance to Soviet power. All areas of Germany not occupied by 

the Soviets were to be put into as close as possible an economic relationship 

not only to each other, but to other western European states as well. Adenauer 

also professed to believe that a strong western Germany in a strong western 

alliance would eventually force the Russians to abandon the occupation of east 

Germany. However, considering his early willingness to accept a partioned 

country, it is doubtful whether this was anything more than paying l i p service 

to the general wish of the German populace for a unified country. It was after 

all Prussia that was occupied by the Soviets, a region unloved by Rhinelanders, 

who in the past had themselves been occupied by their fellow Germans. 

Adenauer instead pushed for cooperation between France and Germany.34 

Like de Gaulle, he could admonish his countrymen to remember who they were: west 

Europeans. As early as 1945, he considered the Soviet occupied part of Germany 

to be lost, and instead saw that it was important to keep the western occupied 

parts together, for example by fighting against France's plans to take over and 

neutralize the Rhine-Ruhr area for its own gain. Any neutralization of this 

v i t a l l y important industrial region would result, Adenauer predicted, in the 

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drifting away of the other German western zones to the east zone, especially 

since the Russians occupied the old "heartland" of Germany. The Rhine-Ruhr 

region had to be maintained as part of west-zone Germany so that it could act as 

a magnet which would prevent a drift of the west zones to the east. For 

Adenauer, it was especially important to prevent the possibility of this d r i f t , 

to weave together west-zone German and other west European economies, so that 

there would be created common economic interests. This, he insisted, would be 

the best way to ensure peace between the states. And through this economic 

interweaving, French and Belgian security interests would also be satisfied. 

With such a seemingly watertight logic of political interaction backing 

him up, it is easier to understand how Adenauer could eventually r a l l y enough 

support to get elected, to work in harmony with the other western European 

states, and to achieve such an incredibly supportive relationship with the 

Americans: here was an anti-fascist who was also an anti-communist, and who used 

all of his keen intelligence to wean war-weary Germans away from irresponsible 

notions of neutralism toward the more or less enthusiastic support of "Europe" 

—the western alliance. While it is possible to marvel at the restoration of 

West Germany under Adenauer, it must also be recalled that this success meant 

the failure of another idea, that of a socialist Europe, a failure which was 

perceived and felt by many. That a different Europe, one not torn in half along 

the east-west line, was s t i l l hoped for by many became clear for perhaps the 

last time when the issue of German rearmament sparked off emotional debates 

within the country. 

On 25 June 1950 the Korean War started, provoking a panic within West 

Germany over the possibility of a Soviet attack—the Russians had developed 

their own atomic bomb in 1949 and Europeans (especially those in Germany) felt 

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terrorized by the threat o-f atomic war on their s o i l . 3 5 As early as Winter 

1949, Adenauer had brought up the issue o-f German security in an interview. 3 6 

Thus, when on 11 August 1958 Churchill suggested before the European Parliament 

that there should be a west European coalition army with German participation, 

Adenauer saw his chance. The Americans, against the wishes of the French, were 

with Churchill on this issue, and Adenauer, without consulting his own cabinet 

nor the Bundestag, sent two memoranda to the US High Commission wherein he 

offered to them a West German defense/army contribution, as well as suggestions 

for dissolving the occupation statute. At the New York City conference of 

foreign ministers, dominated by the Korean issue, the US foreign minister urged 

his colleagues to plan West Germany into the western defence concept. 

Domestically, Adenauer's offer to the US caused turmoil. The thought of German 

soldiers shocked many, and an attitude of "ohne roich"— "without me"—became 

widespread. This reaction, usually interpreted as apathy, was perhaps also the 

last possible response to this irreversible process of not just west-

integration, but cold war polarization. The final agreements for German 

rearmament were signed on 26 and 27 May 1952 in Bonn and Paris. Neutralism, by 

the time of the Marshall Plan and the Korean War, that i s , from as early as 1947 

through to 1958/52 and beyond, was an issue without any chance of political or 

practical success whatsoever in West Germany, even though it continued to 

resurface as a possibility as late as 1952. 

"One bores us"; Propaganda and Optimism, a Soporific Combination? 

Yet it would be erroneous to think that the idea of an un-Stalinized and 

an un-Americanized Europe was easily relinquished. In the west, the main 

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objection by the Germans to the Americans, despite the -fact that their money was 

welcomed, was that they were naive and optimistic, and not too terribly 

sophisticated. That this would eventually be a l i a b i l i t y in their competition 

with the Soviets, whose culture- and peace-offensives garnered much goodwill, 

was clear. Max Frisch, who travelled through the eastern zones o-f Europe in 

late 1947, was impressed by the cultered Russians assigned to Germany who not 

only spoke the language o-f the country perfectly, but who also knew how to 

discourse on German literature and philosophy as well as the theatre and its 

prominent playwrights, the latter point being of particular interest to Frisch, 

who was both a professional architect and a playwright. Frisch noted that in 

comparison, the American "theatre officer" in Frankfurt, although to be 

commended for manifesting prodigious amounts of agreability and helpfulness, had 

never heard of E l i o t . 3 7 

The propagandists efforts by the Americans to stamp out "communism" in 

west zone Germany were not, however, hampered by a lack of education. By 

1947/48, the transregional "Kulturbund." an activist cultural organization with 

a definite tendency toward the USSR and a belief in art's role in the class 

struggle, was summarily closed down and declared illegal by the western 

authorities in what some have described as a "Nacht und Nebel Aktion." that i s , 

a sudden operation taking place under cover of n i g h t . 3 8 Once these overtly 

l e f t i s t organizations were eradicated in western Germany, such crude attempts at 

curbing l e f t i s t influence were met with criticism, however, as this 1949 

"observation" in the Frankfurter Hefte makes clear: 

"Bert Brecht, currently in Austria," reports the Weit am Sonntaq of the 
f i f t h of June, "intended to return to Berlin via Munich where he wanted 
to attend a performance of his 'Threepenny Opera.' The American 
passport-office has denied him passage through the American zone of 
Germany due to 'technical d i f f i c u l t i e s . ' " 

The individualistic west is proving to be the tractable rather 

- 8 9 -



than the original pupil o-f the totalitarian east. Here as there the 
bosses are growing lazy. One no longer tries to l i e to us. One no 
longer claims that we are being lied to. One no longer even tries to 
make fun of us. One bores u s . 3 9 

This is a clear message for those willing to read it that the west must learn to 

be a bit more subtle in i t s propaganda. The overt suppression of l e f t i s t s 

—especially prominent ones like Brecht—in the west, particularly as this 

a r t i c l e suggests by the Americans, was not going to win friends among cultural 

producers for the cause of "freedom." 

If in matters of culture the west simply tried to posit an antithesis 

to whatever i t perceived eastern culture to be exploiting, it would f a i l . To 

win, it would have to posit a synthesis, a third factor. Thus, if the American 

forces saw Germany to be threatened by negativism, pessimism, and—it was feared 

—by a subsequent susceptibility to communism, they were bound to f a i l to 

convince the country of western superiority if they simply relied on importing 

optimism. This variant of "re-education" would be most likely met with scathing 

satire, at least in the pages of independent cultural magazines. Thus, when a 

German-translation version of Reader's Digest was introduced to Germany in 1948, 

it provoked this response: 

The question i s , within the bounds of the Marshall Plan, can optimism as 
a way of l i f e possibly be a necessary German import a r t i c l e . (...) It 
is probable that the belief in a pessimistic interpretation of history 
rather than i t s opposite is more widespread in Germany today than 
anywhere else in the world. (...) That optimism [which is being 
imported via Reader's Digest] is not a philosophical view, but rather a 
collectively suggested individual way of l i f e : one must smile when one 
would rather wail, fear of death is compensated for with comfortably 
furbished coffins at reasonable prices. The corpse, in the totalitarian 
East the result of painless liquidation and not the object of human 
excitation, in the West wears make-up.4 0 

This is an example of the f a i l u r e , in cultural matters, to counter perceived 

problems with merely an opposite force. "Optimism" was of course the hallmark 

of ki tsch, an object of studied concern, and something to be avoided by real and 

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serious culture. This was made clear in many articles throughout the decade. 

In "Art and Mass Culture" Max Horkheimer in 1941 linked the development o-f 

individual enjoyment o-f art, which developed at the expense o-f a public role -for 

art, to the development of capitalist society. In this society, the new 

"public" art is mass culture, which "the private atomic subject," so elided and 

impoverished, must try to withstand: "Individuality, the true factor in a r t i s t i c 

creation and judgment, consists not in idiosyncracies and crotchets, but in the 

power to withstand the plastic surgery of the prevailing economic system which 

carves all men to one pattern." 4 1 Mass culture and kitsch are the scalpels used 

in this plastic surgery, and "keep smiling" the preferred all-purpose 

anasthesia. 

Horkheimer remains caught, however, in the belief that the highest 

purpose of art is to allow humanity to recognize i t s e l f , thereby reproducing the 

dangers inherent in conceptions of the "Menschenbi1d" touched upon in the 

previous chapter. He agrees with Kant that the cause for art's resonance in the 

individual is due to the fact that art allows man to recognize his humanity; 

Horkheimer then links this to the idea of resistance: "An element of resistance 

is inherent in the most aloof a r t . " 4 2 That i s , modern art, with its 

unwillingness to communicate, resists the scalpel of mass culture—but i t is 

left with only passive resistance as a means of maintaining the hope in 

humani ty: 

These inhospitable works of art, by remaining loyal to the individual as 
against the infamy of existence, thus retain the true content of 
previous great works of art and are more closely related to Raphael's 
madonnas and Mozart's operas than is anything that harps on the same 
harmonies today, at a time when the happy countenance has assumed the 
mask of frenzy and only the melancholy faces of the frenzied remain a 
sign of h o p e . 4 3 

When this analysis is linked to the works of "the new reality"—informal 

- 9 1 -



abstraction, primitivism, advanced modernism—it becomes apparent why these 

works, as represented by Two Eras. Mel isande. or numerous others, would be 

perceived as offering resistance to a detested status quo, a resistance not be 

found in positive images nor in any of the old style humanisms of both the left 

and the right which would "carve all men to one pattern." Yet to posit a 

recognition of humanity presupposes an agreed upon concept thereof, but this is 

precisely what has become questionable. A basic unwillingness to probe 

alternative conceptions to humanity shows itself in the messianic or religious 

postulate which Horkheimer then attributes to art: "Art, since it became 

autonomous, has preserved the Utopia that evaporated from r e l i g i o n . " 4 * This 

leaves "man" with no exit, but it will leave an entrance for ideological 

manipulation. 

Meanwhile, against this continued backdrop of philosophical inquiry into 

the constitution of ki tsch, optimism, mass culture, resistance, negativism, art, 

and humanity, the US for its part was attempting to formulate a cultural image 

in the realm of painting which would gain resonance in Germany. Cultural 

competition between the US and the USSR and the fact that the US was not winning 

hands down made this imperative. The US State Department undoubtedly was 

hampered by the domestic hostility—on the part of US senators and others— 

toward modern a r t , 4 5 and this could be the reason why the f i r s t notable 

exibitions of modern American art in Germany were sponsored not by the US 

Government but rather by private agencies. In 1948, for example, an exhibition 

of "Non-Objective Painting in America," sponsored by the Solomon R. Guggenheim 

Foundation in New York City, was shown in the Staatliche Kunsthalle in 

K a r l s r u h e . 4 6 The catalog preface was written by Kurt Martin, the same man who 

had worked closely with the French in bringing contemporary French art to 

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Germany, and was published by the Woldemar Klein Merlag in Baden-Baden, the 

parent house of Das Kunstwerk. Here we see one of the f i r s t attempts to bring 

modern US art to Germany, but what was brought was an art relying on precisely 

the kind of harmonious and rational conception of culture which the war had in 

Europe discredited, namely, non-objective, geometric abstraction. Martin's 

catalog essay attempts to paint in as positive a light as possible the 

achievements of American painting, but it is too clear that the non-objective 

abstraction discussed has an entirely different philosophical premise and 

starting point than the kind that was gaining rapid c r e d i b i l i t y amongst advanced 

cultural producers—and that in fact had the greatest c r e d i b i l i t y with the 

magazine Das Kunstwerk and the people associated with the Woldemar Klein 

Uer1ag. 

Martin notes that Germans know too l i t t l e about American art, but that 

for several decades very exciting things have been happening in the US: one of 

the key differences to Europe is that the museums play such a large role in 

educating the public toward an acceptance of modernism.47 Therefore, unlike 

Europe, audiences for non-objective painting are not restricted to small, 

e l i t i s t snob groups but rather can be found amongst average Americans.4 8 v"ery 

clearly an ideal situation is presented to Europeans—Germans, in this case—for 

their emulation: benevolent museums, impartial and never connected to corporate 

business or government agencies, propagate the spread of culture and manage to 

reach and enthuse large masses of the populace who henceforth hold a positive, 

enlightened attitude toward modern art, toward modern l i f e . To make this 

credible could indeed only mean that Germans knew l i t t l e of American art—and 

the circumstances of i t s reception. What is intended here is to show not only 

the superiority of a non-objective painting based on harmony and rational 



enjoyment, but also to remind Germans that this kind o-f painting (so accepted in 

the US, according to the catalog) originated in Germany: "Non-objective 

painting, so called in contrast to abstract painting which always proceeds from 

the object and which 'abstracts' this object more or less, received i t s decisive 

impulses from Germany."43 Martin points to Kandinsky's start in Munich, his 

association with the Bauhaus and Moholy-Nagy, and immediately proceeds to 

Berlin's Rudolf Bauer and then to Hi 11a Rebay, who now happens to be in America 

and who, along with Solomon Guggenheim helped bring the present show to Europe. 

From the German seed, this painting spread according to the history presented 

here: it f i n a l l y becomes not just German, but European, and in America it 

reaches i t s culmination: 

The breaking-through to non-objective painting is a European achievement 
but America has independently and productively joined into this 
development. For the Americanness which speaks from this painting and 
which differentiates it from its similar European kind seems to me to 
rest in an optimistic a t t i t u d e . 5 0 

But with this last statement about non-objective painting's "optimism," we can 

see why the show failed to go anywhere,51 failed to garner a large resonance. 

One c r i t i c in 1958 tried to resuscitate i t , but he, too, had to note 

that the original response in the press had not been e n t h u s i a s t i c . 5 2 He begins 

by noting that "all around the occidental c i r c l e of culture" a c r i s i s in 

painting has been apparent for several y e a r s . 5 3 But thereupon Schwank tries 

to bend the Zei tqeist to f i t American optimism: after recapitulating the 

chronology already outlined by Martin, he proceeds to state that only in America 

can painting breathe free. "This 'free a i r ' America gave; and in this breezy 

air the still-young plant thrived and quickly unfolded powerfully and 

g r e a t l y . . . " 5 4 Schwank then follows up with a dismissal of abstract art in the 

style of W i l l i Baumeister as well as of surrealism "as it is vividly alive in 

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contemporary F r a n c e . " 5 5 While stressing that non-objective painting is 

diametrically opposed to "what Jean Paul Sartre teaches," he goes so far as to 

suggest that perhaps it is an American variant o-f existentialism—positive, 

metaphysical existentialism, completely free of all traces of pessimism, 

negativism, and n i h i l i s m . 5 6 This article is particularly interesting since it 

praises a p o s i t i v i s t i c view of America, yet the magazine which published it 

originated in Leipzig, in what was by 1956 East Germany. What is 

attacked—rather obliquely but s t i l l unmistakably—is surrealism, French 

existentialism, and abstract (versus non-objective) art in the style of W i l l i 

Baumeister. These cultural phenomena would indeed, whether because of their 

"criticality" or their "decadence," turn out to have a more corrosive impact on 

the east-west cultural struggle as well as on the humanist conception of culture 

shared by both establishments than mere western "formalism" in the style of non-

objective painting. That i s , an a r t i c l e like Schwank's appearing in an East 

German art magazine should not be interpreted as a cold war text but rather as 

an attempt by a liberal writing in East Germany to try to mend the fractured 

vessel of positive, progress-oriented humanism. This was doomed to f a i l — i n the 

east since a kind of social realism was to take the place of modern art, and in 

the west because of the need for a new r e a l i t y . 5 7 

Although the Guggenheim-sponsored exhibition of non-objective American 

art was accompanied by a catalog published by the Woldemar Klein Uerlag, this 

publishing house's well-known magazine did not encourage a prewar non-objective 

abstraction which now looked anachronistically optimistic. It instead furthered 

the dissemination of an advanced abstract modernism drawn more from surrealism 

and automatism, as is evident from the numerous articles on the topic. 

Furthermore, the Kunstwerk kept tabs on the international art world by reporting 



on developments abroad if it perceived these to be significant to the reception 

of advanced modernism. In 1948 the magazine reported that the Boston Institute 

of Modern Art had changed its name to Institute of Contemporary Art, and 

immediately situated this name-change in the political context which i t had in 

the US: "The process [ i . e . , name-change] had the effect of s t i r r i n g a hornet's 

nest. The reactionaries scented morning air [ i . e . , a fresh up-draft], the 

'Moderns' protested and declared that the freedom of art was being threatened by 

a tutelage like that in R u s s i a . " 5 8 Thus, the attempt of the Boston institute to 

be "contemporary" instead of modern, and therefore to try to reconnect to an art 

discourse which emphasized pluralism and humanism, was affirmed as a step 

backward for modern art in its struggle with the forces of reaction. This would 

be of particular interest to the German magazine which recalled the reactionary 

cultural legacy of Nazism only too well. To give in even a l i t t l e bit on this 

front would be immediately interpretable as a capitulation to the forces which 

would keep Germany out of the cultural vanguard of European nations and thus 

help to enforce German isolation. 

When we relate these factors back to the Berliner KQnstler 1958 show 

it becomes clear that although "Berlin" was a locus of propaganda and an 

important symbol of "cultural freedom," it could not be a symbol of a new 

"Europe" precisely because it was from the 1948 a i r l i f t on far too inextricably 

caught in the obviously visible east-west power struggle: i t s very location in 

the midst of eastern territory made it a magnet for the struggle. But "Europe" 

as envisioned by the alternate discourse in culture and of the extraparliamen-

tary pole instead was an idea which required a certain distance from this power 

bloc struggle—a utopic place, a "fifth zone," from which could be drawn hope. 

It was an idea which originally had not wanted to choose between the two 

-96-



" t i c k e t s , " w h i c h wanted "an element of r e s i s t a n c e " t o show through even i t s 

"most a l o o f a r t . " B e r l i n c o u l d not a f f o r d t o be a l o o f . And as West Germany 

became p a r t of t h e Western A l l i a n c e — t h e economic u n i o n of s o v e r e i g n c a p i t a l i s t 

European s t a t e s — i t a l s o became i m p e r a t i v e t o have once a g a i n a measure of 

c u l t u r a l p r e s t i g e c a p a b l e o f r e p r e s e n t i n g r e - e s t a b l i s h e d b o u r g e o i s hegemony. No 

c u l t u r e was b e t t e r s u i t e d f o r t h i s , however, than the a v a n t - g a r d e w h i c h had 

d e v e l o p e d out of t h i s " f i f t h zone" u t o p i a : 

...what t h e a v a n t - g a r d e c o n t e s t s i s the b o u r g e o i s i n a r t or m o r a l s — t h e 
s h o p k e e p e r , t h e P h i l i s t i n e , as i n the heyday of R o m a n t i c i s m ; but as f o r 
p o l i t i c a l c o n t e s t a t i o n , t h e r e i s none. What the a v a n t - g a r d e does not 
t o l e r a t e about the b o u r g e o i s i e i s i t s l a n g u a g e , not i t s s t a t u s . T h i s 
does not n e c e s s a r i l y mean t h a t i t a p p r o v e s of t h i s s t a t u s ; s i m p l y , i t 
l e a v e s i t a s i d e . Whatever t h e v i o l e n c e of the p r o v o c a t i o n , t h e n a t u r e 
i t f i n a l l y e n d o r s e s i s t h a t of " d e r e l i c t " man, not a l i e n a t e d man; and 
d e r e l i c t man i s s t i l l E t e r n a l M a n . 5 9 

As Germany once a g a i n became a b o u r g e o i s s t a t e l i k e any o t h e r , i t needed i t s 

a v a n t - g a r d e — a n d not an a n a c h r o n i s t i c , p l u r a l i s t h u m a n i s m — t o p r o v i d e i t s 

c u l t u r a l image. 

The F r e n c h C o n n e c t i o n and the "Germany of Tomorrow" 

Due t o t h e i r c u l t u r a l s i m i l a r i t i e s , t h e i r s h a r e d "European" t r a d i t i o n s , 

the c o o p e r a t i o n w i t h F r a n c e was i n i t i a l l y t h e most i m p o r t a n t f a c t o r i n the 

c u l t u r a l r e b u i l d i n g o f Germany and Europe. P a r i s was s t i l l seen as the c a p i t a l 

of m o d e r n i s m — t h e f l a r e - u p between B a u m e i s t e r and H a u s e n s t e i n o v e r the l a t t e r ' s 

a n t i - m o d e r n i s m and h i s p o s i t i o n as German c o n s u l i n P a r i s i s o n l y one i n s t a n c e 

among s e v e r a l w h i c h i l l u s t r a t e s t h i s . Y e t i t must be p o i n t e d out t h a t t h e 

i n t e r e s t worked i n b o t h ways: w h i l e t h e Germans l o o k e d t o F r e n c h a r t and c u l t u r e 

as a m o d e l , the F r e n c h a l s o e x p e c t e d t o p r o f i t from Germany, i f not the "Germany 

of t o d a y , " then a t l e a s t t h e "Germany of tomorrow." The e d i t o r of the 

- 9 7 -



F r a n k f u r t e r He-fte, Eugen Kogon, was i n 1949 i n v i t e d t o t h e Sorbonne t o speak 

b e f o r e t h e "Comite Fran<;ais pour l e s Echanges avec 1'Allemagne N o u v e l l e , " 

one o f s e v e r a l p r i v a t e l y - s p o n s o r e d g r o u p s w h i c h s p r a n g up i n both c o u n t r i e s 

a f t e r t h e war t o a i d i n r e c o n c i l i a t i o n . 6 0 In h i s s p e e c h , Kogon n o t e s t h a t what 

i s r e a l l y a t s t a k e i n t h i s i n t e r e s t i n Germany i s not so much the Germany o f 

t o d a y , but the one of tomorrow: w i l l i t be "good" or " b a d " ? 6 1 Kogon p r o c e e d s t o 

p r e s e n t a c l a s s a n a l y s i s of t h e c o u n t r y i n o r d e r t o d e t e r m i n e whether or not the 

new Germany of tomorrow w i l l be good or bad, t h a t i s , a good p a r t n e r o r a bad 

c o m p e t i t o r . H i s d i s c u s s i o n c o v e r s t h e m i d d l e c l a s s , t h e upper c l a s s and the 

i n d u s t r i a l i s t s , the w o r k e r s , t h e f a r m e r s , the employees, and the s t u d e n t s . The 

key t o whether or not t h e r e w i l l be Franco-German c o o p e r a t i o n , however, r e s t s 

not w i t h one c l a s s a l o n e , but r a t h e r w i t h the a v a n t - g a r d e w h i c h can be f o u n d 

t h r o u g h o u t t h e c l a s s s p e c t r u m : 

L a d i e s and g e n t l e m e n , t h i s i s the p i c t u r e I have t r i e d t o convey t o you. 
I t w o u l d not be a c o n t o u r i f I d i d not p o i n t out t h a t t r u e a v a n t o a r d i s t s 
i n t h e renewal of t h e European s p i r i t a r e a t work i n a l l t h e above named 
l a y e r s and g r o u p s of the German p e o p l e of t o d a y . They a r e a m i n o r i t y , 
i n f a c t w i t h o u t a doubt a f a i r l y s m a l l m i n o r i t y . But i n w h i c h c o u n t r y 
o f t h e w o r l d i s t h e a v a n t - g a r d e not a m i n o r i t y ? (...) 

T h i s a v a n t - g a r d e cannot d e c i d e by i t s e l f , i t can o n l y c o n t r i b u t e 
t o an u n u s u a l d e g r e e t o the d e c i s i o n . (...) The p o s i t i v e or n e g a t i v e 
r e s u l t of t h e c u r r e n t a t t e m p t i s s u r e l y dependent on the d e c i s i o n i n t h e 
a l t e r n a t i v e : e i t h e r an e r a of A m e r i c a n e f f i c i e n c y , w i t h European 
c o l o r a t i o n a n d — n a t u r a l l y — t h e r e b y i m p a i r e d , i n w h i c h c a s e i t w o u l d be 
a l m o s t u n a v o i d a b l e t o r e a c h German-American c o o p e r a t i o n w i t h i n Europe 
w i t h i n a few y e a r s , from w h i c h w o u l d d e v e l o p the t h i r d and g r e a t e s t 
c a t a s t r o p h e f o r E u r o p e , or an e r a of l a s t i n g c o o p e r a t i o n o f the European  
s t a t e s and p e o p l e s , i n i t i a t e d and f u r t h e r e d through A m e r i c a n a i d , on t h e 
l e v e l o f a f e d e r a t i o n w h i c h w i l l be the r e s u l t of a l i q u i d a t i o n of t h e 
s u p p o s e d l y a b s o l u t e l y s o v e r e i g n n a t i o n - s t a t e s . 6 2 

The n e c e s s i t y of A m e r i c a n a i d and t h e o v e r a l l p r i m a c y of economic m o t i v e s i s 

t a k e n i n t o a c c o u n t as a r e a l i t y , but the w i s h f o r a f e d e r a l Europe not based on 

a b s o l u t e l y s o v e r e i g n s t a t e s r i n g s t h r o u g h v e r y c l e a r l y , and t h e g r o u p s w h i c h 

r e p r e s e n t t h i s i n t e r e s t a r e d e s c r i b e d as an a v a n t - g a r d e of renewed European 

- 9 8 -



s p i r i t . To avert the possibility o-f the undesirable -first alternative 

(Americanization o-f Europe), Kogon c a l l s upon France and the Benelux countries 

to play a more important role for Germany.63 

Obviously, cultural exchange would become a large factor in this 

cooperation. As one German cabinet minister noted in 1978 in a retrospective 

look at Franco-German reconciliation: "In this [postwar] situation, the depth 

and constancy, the unifying power of European culture manifested i t s e l f . (...) 

Culture preceded p o l i t i c s , opening the way."6 4 The French had to be interested 

in cooperation as well; as early as 1945 their Minister of Education asked 

French parents to consider allowing their children once again to learn German as 

a second language: 

Notre position geographique va certainement jouer, t6t ou tard, en 
faveur d'une reprise des echanges commerciaux avec l'Allemagne. Une 
fois la paix de nouveau retablie, on peut prevoir que les relations 
entre la France et les pays de langue germanique recevront une impulsion 
nouvelle et vigoreuse. 6 5 

If German language instruction as preparation for the resumption of economic 

relations was one step on the road to reconciliation, reestablishing the 

prestige of French culture in Germany was another: 

Dans 1'ensemble des rapport franco-al1emands, les relations culture!les 
constituent un fait isolable. (...) De nombreuses initiatives 
individuel1es ont vu le jour depuis 1945, accueillies en France tantbt 
avec reserve, tantdt avec bienvei11ance. Peu a peu, on a compris 
que le developpement des echanges avec les universites allemands 
etait u t i l e , voire necessaire, au maintien du prestige culturel 
franqais o u t r e - R h i n . 6 6 

To this emphasis on contact and exchange between the countries's universities 

should be added the egually important exchange in the realm of painting and 

culture: this becomes clear from the almost immediately held exhibitions of 

French art in Germany after war's e n d , 6 7 and by the rapid proliferation of 

"Institutes Francais" in western Germany.68 

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Yet there were problems, despite the -fact that French art was being 

shown and that thereby French cultural prestige was being reestablished in 

Germany. The problem that was noted in the press was that the same situation as 

in German art existed in French art: modern art was being upheld by artists well 

past middle age. There were no new young a r t i s t s , no fresh talent, despite the 

fact that a vital political interest was attached to the subject of art and 

culture from the start, as this 1946 review makes clear: 

For the myopic view of National Socialism, Europe is divided into a 
senseless mosaic of self-sufficient Cautarkerl pieces, but to the 
European sensibility, the national borders transform into an interior 
design which receives meaning and sense from the encompassing contour. 
It is not easy to coax the people of today, in particular the German 
youth with i t s nationalist-disturbed way of seeing, to grasp this 
contour. Perhaps art can help, however. In particular in the 138 
pictures of the exhibition "French Contemporary Art" we can recognize 
that the national peculiarity which speaks to us in these artworks is 
assimilated into a general principle which rules through Europe t o d a y . 6 9 

Although this review by Zahn argued positively for seeing the legacy of European 

culture as a unifying contour, other reviews of the same exhibition focussed on 

the problem of youth and v i t a l i t y : the youngest artist shown was sixty, the 

eldest, were he in fact not already dead, would have been e i g h t y . 7 0 This review 

in the Frankfurter Hefte continued to uphold the importance of Paris as a symbol 

of the freedom of modernity, however. The reviewer notes that only Picasso and 

Chagall truly stand out amongst the art shown. Even in their differences from 

one another they are exemplary and unusual: 

Picasso: Spanish and representative of the west, ironic, challenging, 
objective Coeoenstandlich3. emphasized outlines, geometric forms, 
strong, often raw colours which are placed side by side without 
transition, a master of many styles which are all his style. Chagall: 
Russian Jew and representative of the east, mystical, inward, symbolic, 
with flowing transitions, organic forms, differentiated even if glowing 
colours, a master of one style which is more his own than any of 
Picasso's are h i s . 7 1 

The point for this c r i t i c , as he continues, is that Paris, that important 

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symbol, can c o n t a i n P i c a s s o and Chagall both. T h i s i s the aspect which i s 

common to these two r e p r e s e n t a t i v e s of the west and the e a s t : the c i t y wherein 

they choose to l i v e and work. S y m b o l i c a l l y , P a r i s s t i l l f u n c t i o n s as the 

c a p i t a l of modernism, a modernism which i s furthermore able to accomodate both 

east and west, thus underscoring the c i t y ' s u n f l a g g i n g symbolic power w i t h i n 

Germany as an alembic of c i v i l i z a t i o n . 7 2 

As f o r the opposites i t could c o n t a i n , although C h a g a l l ' s more l y r i c a l 

approach maintained i t s m y s t i c a l appeal f o r many, P i c a s s o ' s much more aggressive 

stance, h i s unabashed Naturbeherrschunq (domination of nature) f a s c i n a t e d 

c r i t i c s f o r whom the whole concept of Herrschaft (domination) had become suspect 

to the core yet somehow i n d i s p e n s a b l e . T h i s P a r i s i a n - b y - c h o i c e seemed to 

express no gualms i n h i s a r t about h i s r i g h t to dominate nature, to change i t s 

forms, to v i o l a t e i t s order. T h i s proved f a s c i n a t i n g as the a r t i c l e on P i c a s s o 

by Kurt Leonhard, discussed i n the previous chapter of t h i s t e x t , i n d i c a t e d . 

At the same time, we a l s o saw that postwar a b s t r a c t modernism, even i f discussed 

i n the context of "otherness" by Domnick, f o r example, was often t r e a t e d as a 

t u r n i n g away from nature, as a r e c o g n i t i o n of the wrongheadedness of a 

nineteenth century m a t e r i a l i s t philosophy of domination of nature. T h i s i s why 

i n the t h e r a p e u t i c s of Domnick, i t was suggested that Naturbeherrschunq i s 

wrong. The suggestion that t h i s dominance has to be r e l i n q u i s h e d i s d i r e c t l y 

r e l a t a b l e to the d i s a s t r o u s and g u i l t y h i s t o r y of twentieth century Germany: the 

path from Naturbeherrschunq to the German Nazi Herrenmensch could be seen as a 

s t r a i g h t and d i r e c t l i n e . 

Hence, i n i t s favour, non-objective p a i n t i n g always emphasized i t s 

a f f i n i t y to music and i t s 1ack of a f f i n i t y to nature, and by e x t e n s i o n , to 

dominance of nature. Why then d i d t h i s a r t not gain a wider audience? I would 

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suggest that since non-objective painting was presented as having bracketed out 

the whole problematic o-f dominance and power in relation to man and nature it 

could not be considered as an authentic coming to terms with the problem. 

Dominance implies -force, violence, in Germany unavoidably associated with war 

and Nazism. But since there was no organized resistance to Nazism, there was no 

counter-force or counter-violence with which positively and in an unguilty 

manner to identify. To turn away from force completely i s , however, 

disingeneous, since i t s t i l l continues to exist undisturbed. A bracketing-out 

of these issues thus was not possible for artists and c r i t i c s aware of violence, 

upheaval, and s t i l l aware of the precariousness of their own positions during 

twelve years of Nazi rule. Since there did exist an avantgardist cultural 

resistance to Nazism, this resistance would see in the Naturbeherrschunq 

exuberantly exercised by Picasso an approval of force, a confirmation—an arena 

in which to act, to be an agent, active and demanding, to be a sovereign 

individual, and not just an "object." That i s , non-objective painting, for 

example, which in this way offered no emblem of resistance, seemed to make the 

individual not an active, sovereign—and aggressive—ego, but merely a passive 

receptacle for metaphysical sensation, and therefore would not draw to itself 

the focus of avant-garde discourse. 

It is undoubtedly an ideological contradiction for the avant-garde 

discourse on the one hand to recognize the breakdown of individuality (as linked 

to capitalism in particular) and on the other hand to search desperately for a 

way to assert the sovereignty of the ego. Unlike non-objective painting, an 

abstraction steeped in a discourse of "otherness," which abstracted from nature 

and thereby simultaneously showed the breakdown of order, of the rational 

one-to-one relationship of subject and object, but which thereby also 

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"dominated" nature by violating i t s -forms, could contain this contradiction, it 

could do both because it symbolized a synthesis: illustration o-f the breakdown 

o-f the individual and assertion o-f the sovereign ego's right to do as it 

pleases. Any art, whether non-objective or p l u r a l i s t i c a l l y humanist, which did 

not encode this painful dialectic -failed to offer a venue for resistance. About 

Picasso, Leonhard writes: "In front of some of his works one thinks of the 

terrible words of the anarchist and atheist mystic Michael Bakunin, a precurser 

of the Russian Revolution, of whom Picasso is an enthusiastic admirers 'If God 

existed one would have to destroy h i m . ' " 7 3 The violence of this statement, in 

view of Germany's inability to have provided political resistance to Nazism and 

of the thesis of German collective g u i l t , contradicts the philosophy and 

strategy offered by Americanization. The latter denied the existence of any 

kind of resistance and offered "re-education," an application intended across 

the board, without differentiation. For the avantgardists, however, this failed 

to be able to channel their (cultural) "resistance." Therefore, the French and 

European tradition, which these writers and artists share, offered resistance 

and a venue for intellectual force and violence, offered the recognition of a 

common strategy, while the US, caught up in fighting "communism" and hence 

"offering" an oppositional stance to Germans ("resist communism!") actually 

seemed to make Germany culturally an object without resistance. No matter how 

the individual artist or writer may have felt about the p o l i t i c s df west-

integration or communism, as an avantgardist this reduction to objecthood— 

taking away his a b i l i t y to resist—would be unacceptable. Hence the intense 

interest in French modernism, in the articulation of Formzertrtimmeruno 

(destruction of forms) by Picasso and eventually by the "informalists," and the 

two countries's shared cultural legacy. 

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That this aspect o-f resistance, of a cultural venue for violence, was 

necessary to the avant-garde artists involved, and that a dynamic of power could 

be encoded in the art and culture of modernism is made clear by a statement 

W i l l i Baumeister made in 1949. Describing the fact that modern art could once 

again be shown in Germany, Baumeister said: "The f i r s t exhibitions of the 

re-established equality were held in the Autumn of 1945."74 What he meant was 

that the German modern a r t i s t , deprived of the freedom openly to resist the Nazi 

regime, had, upon the defeat of that regime, regained an equal status to his 

colleagues in the other European nations. Baumeister thus expressed a sentiment 

which Grohmann and many other champions of modernism in Germany would have 

shared, namely that they had resisted—culturally—the regime and could thereby 

lay claim to moral equality with their foreign, and in the case of art, 

especially French, colleagues. And this was in fact also acknowledged by 

foreign c r i t i c s and a r t i s t s , especially in Baumeister's c a s e . 7 5 

This cultural exchange between France and Germany did not occur on a 

one-way street, however, since political developments continued to affect the 

flow. By 1958 the informal type abstraction of Baumeister, Nay, Werner, Winter, 

et a l i a , had succeeded in gaining so much ground that these artists without a 

doubt could be counted as the foremost a r t i s t i c representatives of the new 

Germany, "contemporary" art exhibitions in the style of the Berliner Kflnstler  

1958 show notwithstanding. The Germany of tomorrow had come to define i t s 

painting; what could oppose it? Expressionism was dead, k i l l e d (temporarily?) 

by history just like traditional surrealism, non-objective abstraction remained 

without resonance, and figuration and realism also appeared far too traditional 

to be able to encode resistance. But Paris, due to the very fact that its 

twentieth century artists had represented the tradition of modernism—and 

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Picasso -for one was s t i l l around to function as a living incorporation of that 

tradition—resisted the tendency toward informal abstraction, an i r r a t i o n a l , 

sometimes violent abstraction from nature, more tenaciously than Germany, for 

whom the move to something new could after all in many ways mean the blessing of 

oblivion. Even though many artists in Paris were making paintings which 

addressed the same concerns of abstraction, automatism, primitivism, and so 

forth, these artists faced a more intact, an entrenched and symbolically laden 

tradition of modernism and hence struggled more rigorously for acceptance. The 

need for the discourse of "otherness" and all it could possibly connote had, 

however, become part of the building blocks of the new Europe. 

Thus, when in 1950 the Kunstwerk published a series of articles on 

modern French art in chronological order, from the art of Manet through to the 

present (mid-century), all the articles sang the praises of the accomplishments 

of French painting, except the final one. This last article on painting in 1950 

sounded an off-note in i t s discussion of the "reaction" against abstraction: 

The reactions against abstract art also are a national symptom. One 
perceives abstract art, which has gained so much ground in Germany and 
in America, as being unfrench. Although artists like Hans Arp, Gleizes, 
Herbin, Kupka, Delaunay, Mondrian, Valmier, Mi 11 on formed in 1931 the 
Association Abstraction-Creation, although of late there is a Salon 
des Realites Nouvelles formed by abstract painters—to which also 
belongs the Saxon painter Hans Hartung (b.1904) who emigrated to France 
—the decisive talents are not to be found in the ranks of the "non-
figurative" painters. 

To guess the path which French painting will henceforth follow 
is impossible. Daring and a sense of proportion, those two constants of 
the French national character, will probably continue to influence. But 
the breathtaking display which French painting showed to all the world 
when Matisse, Picasso, and companions began their Argonaut-treks into 
the "unknown" will probably not be repeated very s o o n . 7 6 

To suggest that French nationalism is responsible for the rejection of 

abstraction and, almost by implication, of the blocking of voyages into the 

"unknown," is a very serious charge when we recall the distrust which 



nationalism met with in the (unfortunately utopic) hope -for a unified socialist 

Europe. The introduction o-f the American factor—by 1958 the art of Pollock, 

de Kooning, e t c . , would be becoming familiar to European c r i t i c s and artists 

—also points to the increased complexity and potential for exploitation 

inherent in this discourse. If the German avantgardists had to worry on the 

home front about the contemporary potpourri exhibitions supported by official 

—and in their eyes reactionary—exhibition policy, they now worried about 

France's entrenched opposition to an abstraction of "otherness." These 

developments, domestic and foreign, were dangerous to the significance of 

informal abstraction, to its power to convey resistance—a cultural, fifth-zone 

kind—and thereby link up to and build an international idea of Europe. 

France was encouraged to reconsider in the same issue of Kunstwerk. It 

was reminded of its surrealist heritage, that locus of r a d i c a l i t y , as I have 

suggested, co-efficient to expressionism in Germany. According to this a r t i c l e , 

surrealism is an important source for abstraction, and French painting should 

explore i t so that ground may be gained by abstraction. 7 7 The artists which are 

discussed here are not, however, those which became well-known around 1952 when 

Michel Tapie published his book on Un art a u t r e . 7 8 Again it was Kurt Leonhard 

in a review of a German language book on surrealism who identified the 

surrealist movement with two artists who were crucial to the development of the 

abstraction known as informal, action, or abstract expressionism. Leonhard 

condemns the book under review because i t neglects Matta and Miro, who are "the 

most significant artists of surrealism." 7 9 These two painters did turn out to 

be far more significant to the development of abstraction than did D a l i , for 

example. Thus, a c r i t i c a l eye was kept on publications, events, and exhibitions 

in order to influence through criticism the German public's perception of modern 

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art. At the same time, surrealism was o-f ten discussed in relation to dadaism, 

which was considered a primarily German phenomenon, thereby creating a c r i t i c a l 

circuit o-f exchange. Although these articles would not be in a position to 

in-fluence a r t i s t i c development in France, they do help to consolidate c r i t i c a l l y 

the position o-f German artists like Baumeister, Julius Bissier, Rol-f Cavael , 

Nay, and others, whose abstraction shows a knowledge o-f surrealist sources or 

who by abstracting -from nature are articulating a Formzertrflmmerung. They 

also indicate that the pool o-f ideas common to both countries could be enlarged 

upon and shared by both. 

Changes in the American Approach—the Fluidity o-f Concepts 

What -finally needs to be touched upon is the American interaction with 

this pool of ideas prior to circa 1950/51.8 0 It should be kept in mind that in 

both France and Germany c r i t i c s and artists would in large measure have been 

concerned with domestic developments and how these were being shaped. They 

would have remained either unaware or sketchily informed about the changes 

taking place on the American scene which would eventually bring about the 

refunctionalization of American Abstract Expressionism into a weapon of the Cold 

War. Abstract Expressionism when it made its appearance would instead have been 

seen as a confirmation from abroad that the non-geometric abstract movement did 

indeed represent the avantgardists, those on the forefront of new developments. 

Yet the approach taken by American propaganda was, as late as 1949/50, quite 

inadequate to the situation in Europe. That i s , the discourse of "otherness" 

was not exploited for Cold War purposes from the start. Instead, attempts were 

s t i l l made to steer the focus away from "otherness" to more familiar concepts, 

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such as romanticism. 

Thus, in 1949 an a r t i c l e by Frederick Night o-f the Institute of 

Contemporary Art in Boston was introduced to German readers. Called "American 

Contemporary Painting," it was a translation of an article which had originally 

appeared in Atlantic Monthly and which was now reprinted for German consumption 

in the American-funded newspaper Amerikanische Rundschau.81 In this a r t i c l e the 

attempt is made to divert the flow of ideas away from the "modern" instead 

toward the "contemporary." Wight does this by valorizing romanticism as the 

authentic continuing factor in the production of contemporary art and by denying 

any key influence of Surrealism and automatism.8 2 While favourably discussing 

Gottlieb, Baziotes, Stamos, and Byron Browne under the category of non-geometric 

abstraction, Wight does not mention the name of Jackson Pollock; geometric 

abstraction is also favourably discussed in the same passage so that both types 

—geometric as well as non-geometric or organic abstraction—can appear to be 

the equivalent expressions of "contemporary" p a i n t i n g . 8 3 In view of the 

importance attached to surrealism and automatism in the Kunstwerk articles 

discussed above—an importance relating to an avant-garde conception of Europe 

—an a r t i c l e like Wight's would typify the wrong approach. His emphasis on 

romanticism is far too conventional, treacly almost, 8 4 to be able to usurp the 

emphasis given to "otherness" in the European discourse. Furthermore, Wight 

commits the "sin" of praising the pluralist approach! in a description of the 

1947 Chicago Art Institute exhibition, he notes that although abstraction 

predominated, no single direction or tendency dominated all the others. This, 

according to Wight, is a good t h i n g , 8 5 but as we have seen, the lack of tendency 

was considered a drawback by many in Germany. 

What was feared by the humanistically inclined c r i t i c s in America was 

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made clear in a later, 1952 a r t i c l e . 8 6 This article predicted the death o-f art 

along with the death o-f man ("Abolition o-f Man") i-f the trend to "a-humanism" 

and primitivism persisted. Accordingly, primitivism is indicative of a lack of 

belief in human individuality and personality—an interestingly acute assessment 

when we recall Horkheimer's analyses in "The End of Reason" and the "intrusion 

of the archaic" discussed in this text. Gowans writes that: "This longing for 

primitivism i s , of course, connected with a conscious working for the 

destruction of current society," and goes on to equate this "revolutionary" 

modernism with "'revolution' in the commoner, p o l i t i c a l , Communist sense."8 7 

Modernism of the kind which drew on the sources of primitivism, automatism, 

surrealism, certain aspects of expressionism, and dadaism was simply feared to 

be too revolutionary and to be communistic. This art posited a relation of man 

to often strange and unfamiliar environment/nature without the usual ameliorat-

ing—because familiar and not strange—relation of man to man. This abandonment 

of emphasis on man's relation to man was seen to threaten the fabric of 

society. 

Unless of course the negativism, even violence, of primitivism could be 

made to represent merely another aspect of aesthetics, and thereby be brought 

back into the line of relations of man to man. Violence will then become but 

the mediator between men and thereby become an aspect of humanism once more. The 

bombed ruins and ideological combat zone of Berlin, for example, become an 

object of aesthetic interest and a mediator of humanity: 

Berlin is today without question one of the most fascinating c i t i e s of 
the world, not only because the effect of total bombing is demonstrated 
more forcefully in the former German capital than in any other place in 
the West, but because the worldwide struggle between the two conflicting 
ideologies can be observed at f i r s t hand, since, in Berlin alone, one 
can move freely between the Eastern and the Western s e c t o r s . 8 8 

While the ruination of war is recuperated into the realm of aesthetic phenomena, 

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Munsterberg is also careful to privilege Berlin and Munich as the country's most 

important art centres—two c i t i e s which happened to be in the American zone 

during the period of occupation. He also makes sure to claim that this distance 

from French influence has benefitted German art, and one wonders i f there is not 

a deliberate wedge being driven between the similar negativism of both 

countries. For Munsterberg, "the most original and creative artist working in 

Germany today" is Fritz Winter, of whom he says: "His works are very abstract, 

like those of the young painters of France, but they are less decorative, being 

closer to the German t r a d i t i o n . " 8 9 (See f i g . 9.) 

American art was by this time talked about by i t s protagonists—notably 

Clement Greenberg—in the context of v i t a l i t y , of strength, and was seen to be 

free of French "decorativeness." The epithet "decorative" came to denote 

weakness, effeminacy. For Munsterberg to claim that Winter—the most obviously 

expressionistic abstractionist of the German artists —was not "decorative" like 

the French painters had a dual effect: on the one hand, i t reduced French art to 

a rather simplistic label, and on the other, i t negated the commonality of 

concern between French and German art at that time and as exemplified by a r t i s t s 

like Winter, Baumeister, Nay, and others on the German side and Dubuffet, 

Mathieu, Fautrier, and others on the French side—not to mention the Germans 

Wols and Hartung who had become Parisians by choice. Winter could be transposed 

out of this context into a completely different one, namely, the old nationalist 

one. Furthermore, his art was now talked about in relation to violence as an 

aesthetic phenomenon which mediates relations among men: 

His heavy black lines and his somber reds and greys seem to reflect the 
experience of the burning c i t i e s and the barbed wire fences of the 
concentration camps, yet all this is done in terms of a formally 
beautiful and controlled art which never resorts to mere illustration or 
sentimentali t y . 9 0 

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This hearkens back to a romanticist conception o-f art—like a domesticated 

sublime, the horror has become "formally beautiful and controlled." And to 

avoid "decorativeness," it also "never resorts to mere i l l u s t r a t i o n . . . " The 

visceral response has to be maintained. What this shows is how through the 

discourse—through the way the art is talked and written about—art can be made 

to comply with different views. 

The difference was often simply a nuance. The establishment of the 

CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1950 signalled this shift in 

awareness on the part of the Americans. The f i r s t meeting of the Congress was 

in Berlin and a magazine called Der Monat also was established to act as the 

Congress's mouthpiece in Germany.91 Except for some particularly virulent 

articles attacking the by now East German Kulturbund—the one that had been 

outlawed in West Germany—and its leading poet and writer Johannes Becher, 

Per Monat usually did not engage in crude or abusive anti-Communist rhetoric. 

This would have been far too unsubtle. The magazine instead followed another 

tack: for example, it reprinted in German translation essays by Albert 

Camus—but not by Jean Paul S a r t r e . 9 2 A Camus essay on the freedom of art which 

was also reprinted in a Berlin art exhibition catalog argued against the 

a r t i s t ' s "engagement"—by this time a word very much associated with Sartre—in 

p o l i t i c s since this would be tantamount to a curtailment of a r t i s t i c freedom: 

In view of the current political structure of society, there is only one 
consistent position which the artist can take—unless he turns away from 
art completely: refusal all along the line. Even if he wanted to, he 
could not become the accomplice of those who use the language and the 
means of our modern ideologies. 

For this reason it is senseless and ridiculous to demand of us a 
j u s t i f i c a t i o n , an engagement.93 

Camus pleads fgr the a r t i s t ' s freedom to refrain from engagement: in a way, this 

is like the "fifth zone" demand for the right to disengage. We can therefore 



ask what difference there is between the two. Perhaps the answer is one o-f 

awareness, that i s , everyone knew that Der Monat was an American-backed magazine 

and hence locked in the Cold War struggle. Yet Camus never protested the -fact 

that his a r t i c l e was made use o-f in this way by a propaganda magazine—one 

wonders i f this perhaps did not signal approval. In that case, the plea for 

a r t i s t i c "freedom" is disingeneous since the author knows that its use as an 

American propaganda tract is not "dis-engaged." Disengagement in one context at 

one time—in the case of the "Zone 5" exhibition in 1943—is a political 

c r i t i c i s m , especially since in this case one could read through it the subtext 

of an "alternate Europe," one not polarized. In another context, that of a 

Camus essay arguing against engagement, an essay reprinted in a Berlin 

exhibition catalog from a German translation which had f i r s t appeared in an 

American-funded anti-Communist propaganda magazine, disengagement becomes 

p o l i t i c a l acquiescence to a status quo which is being consolidated. 

Only a nuance separates the two, yet their resonance in p o l i t i c s is 

considerable. Around this time—1958/51—the Americans learned to exploit the 

nuances. This concept of manipulation and co-optabi1ity has become a familiar 

one, but what has often been overlooked in descriptions of this period in German 

art history is that something has to be given f i r s t l y in order to be 

"manipulatable." The uncovering of this "given" has been the main concern of 

this text. 

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F i g . 9: F r i t z W i n t e r , B1ack-Whi t e . 1955, o i l on c a n v a s , B e r l i n , 
S t a a t l i c h e Museen P r e u s s i s c h e r K u l t u r b e s i t z , N a t i o n a l g a l e r i e . 



NOTES 

JBonn, MOnsterschule, Berliner KQnstler; Malerei. Grafik. Plastik, 
27 July - 27 August, 1958. The catalog introduction was supplied by Ernst 
Reuter, the chief mayor o-f Berlin and Peter Stockhausen, chief mayor of Bonn. 
The preface was written by Dr. Walter Holzhausen. The "Berlin Committee for 
Exhibitions of Painting and Sculpture" organized the show; members included the 
a r t i s t s Berhnhard Heiliger, Karl Hofer, Max Kaus, Hans Kuhn, Karl Schmitt-
Rottluff; also Walter Holzhausen and Gerhard Beyrodt. The committee's secretary 
was Mrs. Eline McKnight, who, according to the introduction, provided the 
i n i t i a l idea for the exhibition. The main catalog essay was written by Will 
Grohmann. 

20nly a handful of names of those exhibiting are today s t i l l remembered; 
the following is a complete l i s t of the artists: 
Alexander Camaro (1981), Paul Dierkes (1987), Else Driessen (1912), 
Wolfgang Frankenstein (1918), Ernst Fritsch (1892), Alexander Gonda (1985), 
Karl Hartung (1988), Bernhard Heiliger (1915), Werner Heldt (1984), 
Egon Holzmann (1917), Karl Hofer (1878), Wolf Hoffmann (1898), 
Willy Robert Huth (1898), Hans Jaenisch (1987), Max Kaus (1891), 
Carl-Heinz Kliemann (1924), Juro Kubicek (1986), Rudolf Kuegler (1921), 
Hans Kuhn (1985), Hans Laabs (1915), Heinrich Graf v. Luckner (1891), 
Katja Meirowsky (1928), Max Pechstein (1881), Erich Philipp (1927), 
Richard Scheibe (1879), Karl Schmitt-Rottluff (1884), Ernst Schumacher (1985), 
Renee Sintenis (1883), Luise Stomps (1988), Paul Strecker (1898), 
Hans Thiemann (1918), Heinz Troekes (1913), Hans Uhlmann (1988), 
Heinz Weber (1918), Theodor Werner (1886). 

3Ernst Reuter, "Introduction," Ber1iner Konstler. n.p. 

"Walter Holzhausen, "Preface," i b i d . 

5Wi11 Grohmann, "Berliner Kunst—Heute," i b i d . Grohmann was already a 
champion of abstract art during the interwar years; he wrote many essays and 
books the subject, treating Kandinsky, expressionism, French art, the Bauhaus, 
etc. Known and respected at home and abroad, Grohmann would have been the 
logical choice of the Berlin Committee—interested as it seemed to be with 
proving the cultural prestige of Berlin—to author the catalog text. 

6 I would suggest that Grohmann steered clear of privileging any of the 
individual painters here in order to avoid being accused of tendentiousness— 
something this exhibition made a virtue of avoiding. 

7 B e r l i n , Galerie Franz, Zone 5. 4 September-28 October 1948. 

s i b i d . , [page 13. 

s j b i d . , [pages 1-2]. 

" I b i d . 

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1 J A t the time o-f this exhibition, Berlin was s t i l l a 4-zone c i t y , i t s 
three western zones dependent, in the -fall of 1948, on the a i r l i f t for supplies 
of food and coal. 

12Wolfgang Balzer, "Die Allgemeine Deutsche Kunstausstel1ung in Dresden 
1946," Zeitschrift fur Kunst 1 Nor.l (1947), p.56. 

" L i l o Ebel, "Deutsche Kunst der Gegenwart," Frankfurter Hefte 3 (May 
1948), p.476. 

* « I b i d . . p.477. 

l s S i m i l a r debates were going on in France at this time about the 
painting legacy and how an advanced modernism could be articulated. On the 
subject of surrealism's "demise" due to the fact of its having been overtaken by 
r e a l i t y , war, atrocities, etc., see Cammille Bourniquel, "Magie, surrealisme 
et liberte," Esprit 15 (November 1947), pp.775-732. 

i6"Ausstellungen; Berlin," Die Kunst 48 (February 1958), p.81. 
1 7 F r i t z Loffler, "Die Zweite Deutsche Kunstausstel1ung in Dresden und 

die westdeutsche Malerei," Zeitschrift for Kunst 3 Nr.4 (1949), p.288. 

"Klaus-Jorg Ruhl, p.39, introduction to the section "Aussenpolitische 
Konzeptionen in den Besatzungszonen." 

""Projekt einer Deklaration ober die europaische Zusammenarbeit— 
ausgearbei tet von Widerstandskampfern aus verschiedenen europa1 ischen 
Landern, Mai 1944," reprinted in Europa—Dokumente zur Fraoe der europH- 
ischen Einiouno, edited by the Forschungsinstitut der deutschen Gesellschaft 
for Auswartige Politik (Munich, 1962), pp.103-106; reprinted in Ruhl, 
pp.13-16. 

" I b i d . , p.13. 

z i l b i d . . p.14. 

" I b i d . . p. 15. 

"See "Aus der Rede Jakob Kaisers auf dem Parteitag der ostdeutschen CDU 
in Berlin fiber deutsche Einheit, 16.6.1946," and "Hans-Werner Richter: 
'Deutschland—Brflcke zwischen Ost und West,' 1.10.1946," both reprinted in 
Ruhl, pp.51-56. 

24See Paul Sering, Jenseits des Kapitalismus. published in 1947. 

""Das Hertensteinter Program, 21.9.1946," f i r s t published in Die  
Friedenswarte (1947), p.68; reprinted in Ruhl, p.21. 

"See "Politische Resolution von Montreux, August 1947," in Dokumente  
zur europaischen Einiqunq. edited by the Auswartiges Amt (Bonn, 1959), 

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p.87ff., reprinted in Ruhl , pp.24-25. 

2?See Gabriel Kolko, Main Currents in Modern American History (New York: 
Pantheon Books, 1984, section "The Perpetual C r i s i s : American Foreign Policy 
Since 1946," pp.348-398, esp. p.351. 

z s i b i d . . pp.352-353. 

291 have not been able to research this aspect, but it seems not 
improbable that i f the extraparliamentary pole was that of neutralism and a 
s o c i a l i s t , unified Europe, with the withering of the possibility of the latter, 
this pole of neutralism would impoverish itself through a grim and dogged, even 
cranky and eccentric neutralism—one which in turn would provoke the mistrust of 
Germany's other European neighbours. And in fact, this lack of "Europeanness" 
and not-to-be-trusted "German" "neutralism" is exactly what only in recent years 
some non-German c r i t i c s have complained about. The "Greens" and the "RAF" of 
today, for example, are not well understood abroad. Even worse, they are often 
ahistorical1y put down to irrational Germanness, but I believe their roots 
should be sought not in any kind of transcendentalism but in postwar history 
instead. 

3°Ruhl, pp.26-27 where Bevin's speech dated 28 January 1948 is 
reprinted. 

s l S e e "Aus dem Memorandum der Europaischen Par 1 amen tarier-Union dber 
die 'Struktur Europas,' 17.18.1949," reprinted in Ruhl, pp.34-35. 

3 2 R u h l , pp.42-44. 

3 3 E r n s t Friedlaender, "Neuer Abschnitt," dated 1 January 1948, reprinted 
in Ruhl, pp.64-66. 

3 4 I f Schumacher and the SPD had close ties to B r i t a i n , Adenauer was 
caught in a relationship of mutual distrust and dislike with the Labour-governed 
island. He was even arrested and incarcerated several times by the English, and 
always felt that they were trying to sabotage his career. On the other hand, 
the French socialist leader Vincent Auriol detested Schumacher, while Adenauer 
got on quite well with the French. See Alfred Grosser, The Western Alliance, 
p.187: 

"One would hardly believe that Kurt Schumacher had spent the entire Nazi 
period in a concentration camp and now headed a foreign sister party i f one 
could have heard the Socialist chief of state Vincent Auriol say to a v i s i t o r in 
1951: 'Schumacher is a Nazi, for between him and Hitler there is no difference 
except that he isn't c r u e l . . . . Schumacher is a madman, the head of that German 
Social Democracy about which I wonder if it has not already become the successor 
of National Socialism.'" 

Two pages e a r l i e r , however, Grosser also wrote: "In France, Vincent 
A u r i o l , head of state until January 1954, jotted in his diary: 'The Americans 
are stupid, naive, and understand nothing.' Reading his personal thoughts on 
the United States or on German p o l i t i c s , one is tempted to make a similar 
judgment about him." (p.185) 

-1 16-



35Adenauer encouraged a hysterical view of the Soviets and the East. He 
compared the East German "VolKspolizei"—a sort of people's m i l i t i a called 
"Vopo" for short—to the North Korean army, claiming that West Germans 
(presumably like South Koreans) had no garantee that the Vopos would not try to 
overrun a defenseless West Germany. See Ruhl, pp.89ff. 

3 6 A n interview in The Cleveland Plain Dealer, discussed by Adenauer in 
his memoirs, quoted in Ruhl, pp.84-85. Anthony Mann in Comeback notes that 
since Germany s t i l l did not have embassies in foreign countries, Adenauer 
sometimes used the device of giving an interview to a correspondent of a 
newspaper of the country he wanted to influence. According to Mann, p.226, "the 
Chancellor's press advisors were inexperienced, and this policy had backfired 
badly in Nov 1949, when the Cleveland Plain Dealer published an interview in 
which Adenauer was reported as supporting German rearmament and the creation of 
independent German armed forces. This caused a furore, and Adenauer issued 
several statements that he had been completely misunderstood: this was the exact 
opposite of what he wanted." 

This seems doubtful since Adenauer did indeed want rearmament and the 
return of state sovereignty (unlike the neutralist-socialist Europeans), and 
since even though Adenauer's aides may have made errors, the Chancellor himself, 
known as "der alte Fuchs"—"the old fox"—would hardly have let himself be so 
badly misinterpreted in an interview. 

3 7 F r i s c h , p.198-191, entry from November 1947. 

3 8Imperialismus und Kultur. pp.131-132. 

39»Beobachtungen und Bemerkungen," Frankfurter Hefte 4 (July 1949), 
p.559. 

* ° t h . , "Optimismus auf der Einfuhrliste," Die Geoenwart 3 Nr.19 (1948), 
pp.19-28. 

"iHorkheimer, "Art and Mass Culture," p.290. The similarity in thrust 
of this a r t i c l e and the critique of Reader's Digest in Die Geoenwart by a 
contributor identified only as "th.," tempts me to suspect that "th." could be 
Theodor Adorno, Horkheimer's colleague and fellow philosopher. Die Geoenwart 
was published in Freiburg im Breisgau and i t s editors were Ernst Benkard, 
Bernhard Guttmann, Robert Haerdter, Albert Oeser, and Benno Reifenberg. 

" z i b i d . . p.291. 

4 3 I b i d . . p.294. Since this position has today become something to be 
"harped upon," it would be interesting to know what conclusions Horkheimer would 
arrive at today. Extrapolating from his and Adorno's unwillingness to 
relinquish the "Menschenbi1d." i t would probably not differ from their opinions 
of the late 1930s and of the 1940s. 

4 4 I b i d . , p.292. 

4 5 See for example, Jane de Hart Mathews, cited previously, for an 

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examination o-f the domestic forces at work in US cold war culture. 

4 6Kar1sruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Geoenstandslose Malerei in Amerika. 
March/April 1948. 

•"Ibid.. pp.5-6. 

" s i b i d . . p.6. 

* 3 J b i d . , p.7. 

" I b i d . 

E 1 Figuratively speaking, that i s . The exhibition in fact had the 
previous year been shown in Paris and Zurich, and after its German showing was 
headed for Amsterdam and London before returning to New York. 

5 2 F r i e d r i c h H. Schwank, "Malerei aus dem Geiste der Musik; Zur Gegen-
wartssituation moderner Malerei in Amerika," Zeitschrift far Kunst 4 N r . l 
(1958), pp.78-75. 

" I b i d . . p.78. 

5 4 j b i d . , p.72. 

" I b i d . , p.73. 

" I b i d . 

5 7 T h i s magazine, very much oriented toward modern art in its f i r s t two 
years of publication, began, around 1949/58, to change its focus: articles on 
modern art became increasingly rare and eventually disappeared altogether in the 
last issues. But the magazine did not instead switch to covering social 
realism, either. It sought to evade the modern problematic by focussing on 
older art—renaissance, gothic, nineteenth century, etc. As far as I know, it 
folded in late 1958. 

""Aus dem Notizbuch der Redaktion," Pas Kunstwerk 2 Nr.4 (1948/49), 
p.47. The Kunstwerk also made sure to report on favorably interesting 
developments. Thus, the formation of COBRA was immediately reported. 

"Roland Barthes, "Myth Today," originally appeared in Mytholooies. 
reprinted in A Barthes Reader (New York: H i l l and Wang, 1982), pp.127-128. 
The "derelict" man is the abandoned man, very apropos to "homelessness" and 
Heideggerian decentering. The "alienated" man is a marxist concept which had 
grown less serious—people were learning to live with alienation. 

"Eugen Kogon, "Deutschland von heute," Frankfurter Hefte 4 (July 1949), 
pp.569-582. Alfred Grosser was a founding member of the "Comite" and 
translated the speech for Kogon so that he could deliver it in French to his 
Paris audience. 

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feilbid.. p.549. 

" I b i d . . pp.580-581. Emphasis in the original text. 

" I b i d . , p.581. 

6 4 Heinz KOhn, then Minister President o-f Northrhine Westphalia, 
introductory essay, La Realite Quotidienne des Echanoe Franco-Al1emands 
(Strassbourg: Istra, 1970), p.14. 

65i_bid., p. 16; Kflhn quotes from a circular distributed by the French 
Ministry o-f Education in 1945. 

"Pierre-Paul Sagave, preface to Henri Reynaud, Les Relations Universi- 
taires entre la France et la Republique Federale d'Allemagne de 1945 k  
1973 (Reims: Matot-Braine, 1979), p.5. 

6 7 Exhibitions like the previously mentioned Franzdsische Meister der  
Geoenwart shown in Freiburg and others, and resonance thereof in the art press, 
especially in Das Kunstwerk; see, for example, Leopold Zahn, "Franzosische 
Malerei—Gestern und Heute; zu den Ausstel1ungen in Baden-Baden und Berlin," 
Das Kunstwerk 1 Nr.3 (1946/47), pp.33-40. 

"The Institutes Francais were established in Germany as follows: 
1946: in Tubingen, Freiburg, and Berlin; 
1948: in Mainz; 
1949: in Munich; 
1950: in Bremen, Dflsseldorf, and Stuttgart; 
1951: in Hamburg and Cologne; 
1952: in Aachen and Bonn; 
1956, 1958, and I960: in Hannover, Heidelberg, and Frankfurt, respectively. 

"Zahn, p.33. In the last sentence quoted, Zahn's original text reads: 
"Gerade von den 130 Bildern der Ausstellung 'Franzosische Malerei der 
Gegenwart' erkennen wir, dass die nationale Eigenart, die uns in diesen 
Kunstwerken anspricht, sich in eine allgemeine, Europa durchwaltende 
Gesetzmassigkeit aufhebt." I have translated "sich ...aufhebt" as "assimilated 
into," a technically not absolutely correct rendering, but aufheben or Aufhebuno 
is not an easy concept to find a one-word correlate for. Aufhebuno in the 
Hegelian sense—which I am certain Zahn is implying here—means that something 
is simultaneously "overcome" or assimilated but also not replaced or destroyed 
outright; it is transcended, in a way. This is of course a flattering way of 
dealing with nationalism since it is saying that "French" art "speaks" to us as 
"French," but that it also speaks as not-French, as not national, as "European" 
or universal; that i s , one can have one's French art and Europe, too. Ditto for 
German art, etc. 

'^Christian Mertens, "'Abstrakte Malerei'; Aus Anlass einer 
Ausstellung," Frankfurter Hefte 3 (February 1948), pp.185-187. The exhibition 
comprised all the traditional "masters" of French modern art, including Georges 
Braque, Juan Gris, Georges Rouault, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Marc 
Chagall. The fact that the same exhibition would be discussed in reviews as far 

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apart as 1946/4? and 1948, as is the case with Zahn and Mertens, was probably 
due to the technical d i f f i c u l t i e s involved in crossing zone borders, procuring 
paper for printing <and hence priority would be given to political articles 
versus art reviews in Frankfurter Hefte. whereas Das Kunstwerk would of course 
report on art right away), etc. 

7 1 i b i d . , pp.186-187. 

? 2 I b i d . . p.187; the other factor which Mertens cites as being common to 
both is a continued reference to nature—no matter how much they abstract from 
nature, the reference to it (unlike non-objective painting) is ever there. 

7 8Leonhard, "Picasso," p.19. 

7 4Quoted in Adriani, p. 196, taken from a manuscript Baumeister wrote for 
the Neue Zeitunq—an American-backed newspaper in Munich; i t is not clear from 
Adriani whether this text was indeed published by the paper. 

75Baumeister showed in Paris with the Galerie Jeanne Bucher after the 
war and was favourably reviewed by Christian Zervos, "Notes sur W i l l i 
Baumeister," Cahiers d'Art 24 (1949), pp.342-344. Also, as previously 
discussed, Le Matin's comment that this artist had many foreign friends, 
including Herbert Read and Anthony Thwaites. 

7 6 T h e Editors, "Franzftsische Malerei Heute," Das Kunstwerk 4 Nr.3 
(1959), p.58. 

7 7 D r . Lindemann, "Junge franzftsische Malerei in Dflsseldorf," 
Das Kunstwerk 4 Nr.3 (1950), pp.64-66. 

78Lindemann discusses Bertholle, Bazaine, Manessier, and especially 
Schneider and Hartung. 

7 3 K u r t Leonhard, "Dieter Wyss; Der Surrealismus; Uerlag: Lampert 
Schneider, Heidelberg," Das Kunstwerk 4 Nr.5 (1950), p.64. Leonhard praises 
Wyss, however, for not having been uncritically taken in by Salvador D a l i . 

soBeyond the Korean War (1950) and the death of Stalin (1953), the 
power of American presence in Western Europe waxes; this paper is concerned with 
the pre-history of the "fifties" (whose main characteristics in Germany seemed 
to be conformism, economic miracle, and turning away from recent history) and 
therefore will not deal with those developments. 

8 F r e d e r i c k S. Wight, "Amerikanische Malerei der Gegenwart," Amerika-
nische Rundschau 5 Nr.24 (1949), pp.61-72. I do not know the t i t l e of the 
original version, but "American Contemporary Painting" is a translation of the 
German-version t i t l e . During the war, Wight worked for the OSS, forerunner of 
the CIA. 

s s i b i d . . pp.70-72. 

8 8 I b i d . . p.71. 

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8 4 I b i d . . p.72, Wight praises the work o-f Walter Stuemp-f i g , noting that 
this artist is the most important one -for the -future because o-f his "gripping" 
depictions o-f "yearning." He could not have been more wrong in his assessment of 
the necessity of Stuempfig's humanist depictions of "longing." 

" I b i d . . p.72. 

"Alan Gowans, "A-Humanism, Primitivism, and the Art of the Future," 
Col lege Art Journal 11 (Summer 1952), pp.226-239. 

8 ? I b i d . . p.235. 

88Hugo Munsterberg, "Art in Berlin: Summer, 1951," Colleoe Art Journal 
11 (Winter 1951/52), p.118. The journal states that Munsterberg was originally 
from Berlin, that he emigrated to the US in 1935, attended Harvard (A.B. in 1938 
and Ph.D in 1941), and at the time of writing was teaching at Michigan State 
Col 1ege. 

8 8 I b i d . 

" I b i d . 

9 1 F o r information on the Congress of Cultural Freedom, on Melvin Lasky 
(the editor of Per Monat). and other persons involved, see Christopher Lasch, 
"The Cultural Cold War," in The Aoony of the American Left (New York: Mintage 
Books, 1968). 

"The a r t i c l e was called "The Artist and Freedom" according to the 
German translation; i t was subsequently reprinted as a catalog essay for an 
exhibition of Berlin artists; see Berlin, Schloss Charlottenburg, Ber1iner Neue  
Gruppe 1958, 1958; the same catalog also contained an article by Will Grohmann 
called "Defense of Art." 

8 3 B e r l i n e r Neue Gruppe 1958. n.p. Grohmann's essay, which follows this 
one, once again c a l l s for the formation of avant-gardes to fight against the 
epigones. 

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CONCLUSION 

Abstract painting as practiced by German artists like Baumeister, Nay, 

Werner, Winter, and others and by their French counterparts clustered, for 

example, under Michel Tapie's c r i t i c a l umbrella o-f "art autre" contributed 

greatly to the culture o-f a unified Europe. The idea of Europe underwent, 

however, major changes during these postwar years. As the wish for unification, 

it travelled the road from political possibility to Utopia and back again to 

p o l i t i c a l expedient. While the French understandably were anxious that a 

unified and re-armed Germany—even within the context of alliance to France— 

could one day again pose a threat, the USSR, another victim of German 

aggression, also feared a unified Germany, especially in a unified Europe: a 

Europe which would perhaps one day side with a renewed German attack on Russia. 

The Americans, on the other hand, worried about a unified neutralist Germany 

excluded from a west European alliance; i t was thought that this kind of Germany 

would naturally be pulled into the Soviet orbit since the Russians could offer a 

market to German industrialists for their products. 

As late as 1952, the American State Department's Paul Nitze, Charles 

Bohlen, Laukhauff, Lewis, and Garland Ferguson debated amongst themselves about 

a solution to the "German Question," according to a declassified protocol of a 

1 April 1952 meeting.1 There were "very substantial differences of opinion"2 

over whether Germany should be re-unified. Nitze's and Bohlen's ideal was a 

unified, EDC-member Germany, although both realized that France would never find 

this acceptable. This solution would also have been the "worst case scenario" 

for the USSR. On the other hand, Bohlen thought that a unified Germany in a 

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divided Europe would very soon succeed in again achieving a dangerous dominance 

on the continent. And he added that Stalin's offer to hold free elections in 

both Germanys to decide on re-unification was aimed at Adenauer-supporting 

rightwing industrialists in West Germany, not at the Social Democrats: the 

Russians wanted to lure industry with their east-bloc market potential 

stretching "from Eastern Europe to the Pacific (including China)—markets which 

Germany would in the west be able to win only with great d i f f i c u l t y . " 3 Thus, 

while a neutralist, non-aligned Germany would be advantageous to the Russians 

—since in this case Germany would not be in a position to instigate an attack 

against the USSR—it would be disadvantageous to the US which saw the threat of 

Germany's d r i f t to the east, lured by the USSR's vast market potential. And 

while the French might have liked to have a disarmed, neutralized Germany as a 

neighbour, they could not do without Europe—and of this Germany had to be a 

vital component, not a dead weight. The partition of Germany solved the problem 

for all sides, especially for the West Germans who now could work at becoming a 

trusted sovereign partner of the west. 

Yet something was gained in an undesirable way, too: art became an 

ideological pawn. As long as conceptions of unification, neutralism, and/or 

west-integration remained confused and somehow in flux—as indeed was the case 

as late as 19524—the "contemporary" art of Berlin shown in a p l u r a l i s t , non-

avant-garde manner at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s could 

stand indefinitely on the threshhold of cultural p o s s i b i l i t y . In the West, 

however, where west-integration was an increasingly accepted and even strived 

for r e a l i t y , conceptions of Europe's unification focussed on Western European 

unification. In art this implied an amplification of the shared Western 

European discourse focussed on "otherness," bankruptcy of old values—the work 

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o-f art no longer communicates—and the search -for a new r e a l i t y . Not only did 

the unification of Germany gradually recede into the background in the west, but 

a re-unified Germany could come increasingly to be perceived as an obstacle to a 

unified western Europe: the French would not be willing to put up with an armed, 

unified Germany, practically restored to its prewar capabilities, and neither 

would the Russians. It would threaten war between east and west. A unified 

western Europe, although at one remove from the conception of an east-west 

socialist unified Europe, was by now preferable to the alternative of a 

patchwork of squabbling states. Western Europe could at least be a third player 

to be reckoned with in the on-going struggle between the two "non-European" 

forces of America and Russia. 5 

In B e r l i n , where the idea of a western alliance was more remote, a 

p l u r a l i s t i c exhibition policy which avoided avant-garde "tendentiousness" made 

sense insofar as avant-gardism came to be linked with the west, with France, and 

even with the US. But Berlin also wanted to claim the right to represent German 

art abroad—and this created heated opposition on the part of avantgardists who 

on no account wanted Germany to be represented by works which could be deemed 

mediocre, by a representation which lacked selectivity and rigour, or which 

failed to differentiate i t s e l f from the past. In 1958 an a r t i s t s ' s league 

called "Deutscher Konstlerbund 1958" was re-established after having been 

outlawed by the Nazis in 1935. The league's location in the former German 

capital and i t s "clean" credentials (it was suppressed by the Nazis) gave it the 

status of primary organizational representative of German art. It held its 

f i r s t exhibition in 1951 and immediately signalled adherence to a pluralist and 

eclectic exhibition policy: 

We believe that the formation of our directorate and of the jury 
provides a garantee that no one-sided tendencies will prevail. We would 

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like at this opportunity also once again to emphasize resolutely that 
the German A r t i s t s ' s League 1950 does not -favour or represent any 
tendency within contemporary German a r t . 6 

This was the sort of approach which c r i t i c s like Grohmann along with the artists 

discussed here would have found most harmful to the cause of modern art—and to 

the image of Germany abroad. 

The artists Baumeister, Uhlmann, Werner, and Winter responded with the 

threat of quitting the league in March 1952,7 a strategy supposedly instigated, 

according to a private letter to the artist Meistermann, by Will Grohmann.8 

The four artists accused the league's directorate and "privileged members" of 

practicing tolerance in order to be tolerated themselves. It called instead for 

a "real selection": rigorous selectivity was considered by these four artists to 

be absolutely essential to the v i t a l i t y and effectiveness of the league.9 The 

league, headed by Karl Hofer, responded to the a r t i s t s ' s letter with indignation 

and surprise, but also with obvious incomprehension of the i s s u e . 1 0 To 

Baumeister's and the others's accusation that the league represented a "mass 

organization of artists" in which mediocrity dominated—intended as a 

denigration of the league's p l u r a l i s t i c eclecticism—Hofer and his colleague 

Kuhn noted that there were approximately 25,880 artists in Germany and that the 

league only had 92 members. This ratio, according to Kuhn and Hofer, proved 

that the epithet "mass organization" was inaccurate. That the numerical facts 

were not the issue at all seemed not to be grasped by the league's directorate. 

Likewise, to the dissenting a r t i s t s ' s claim that the league's exhibition did not 

address the needs of today's man, Hofer and Kuhn noted that the show could boast 

a record of 15,000 v i s i t o r s ; here, too, the league's response proved that it did 

not share the e l i t i s t modernist's opinion that the selective, rigorous, and 

"difficult" work was more appropriate to modernity than the eclectic policy 

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capable o-f drawing large numbers of v i s i t o r s . 

While the league did not have an o f f i c i a l government function, i t 

nonetheless often was instrumental in determining which German artists were 

selected for international exhibitions abroad, including those held in Venice 

and even in New D e l h i . 1 1 The cultural policies which the German government or 

organizations like the league followed were out of synch, however, with advanced 

painting and i t s discourse. This lack of unity was exemplified in the diverging 

ideologies articulated by the participants at the "Darmstadter GesprSch" 

symposium on the one hand and the exhibition of "Berliner KQnstler 1958" in 

Bonn on the other. That this could be the case as late as 1958—and even 

beyond, as exemplified by the dispute within the "Deutscher Kdnstlerbund" in 

1952—refutes the often prevalent view that the postwar culture of the two 

Germanys simply corresponded to "Stalinization" and "Americanization," and also 

takes issue with the notion that a "German" style had been suppressed. The 

issues after the war were not German ones per se, but rather circled around the 

problem of Europe. The pluralists as well as the avant-gardists made this the 

focus of their concerns, albeit in different ways. The former adhered to what 

the latter perceived to be a too-optimistic humanism which was no longer 

appropriate to current modernity. The avant-gardists conceived a rigorous, 

e l i t i s t modernism capable of representing the renewed European s p i r i t of unity. 

In pointing out these discrepancies and conflicts, I hope that this 

paper has contributed to breaking down preconceived ideas of postwar German and 

European history, art, and culture. The "European" thrust of postwar cultural 

production furthermore strikes this researcher as deserving of attention 

especially in view of the recent resurgence of "neo-expressionism" which 

purports to signify a re-found "German" style. That nationalistic signification 

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should once again be used to grease the wheels of the (art) marketplace would 

surely have provoked the disdain of those Europeans concerned with unity and 

modernity. As Walter Dirks, co-editor of the Frankfurter Hefte noted in 1946: 

"Europe, the poor continent, can only maintain itself and last if it pulls 

i t s e l f together... Our peace is lost since we have become modern: we can only 

attain a new balance i f we become more modern s t i l l . " 1 2 The combatative selec-

t i v i t y of the advanced artists was such an attempt to become "more modern s t i l l " 

and thereby attain a new European balance. 

This sometimes mercurial, sometimes stolid idea of "Europe" hence 

underlaid the maneuverings and motions of both the pluralist and the 

avantgardist artists and c r i t i c s . In this sense, art was political and 

expressive. The much berated consolidation into conformism in 1950s West 

Germany, the scandal of its repression of the past, and the fact that abstract 

painting could come to function as the collective wallpaper of capitalism could 

only come about once the new European order was secure, once the search for a 

new language and a new reality was superfluous, and modernism was restored. 

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NOTES 

^"Classified Protocol of a Meeting of Ranking Members of the US State 
Department on the Topic of How to Proceed in the German Question, 1 April 1952," 
reprinted in Ruhl, pp.140-142. 

2J _ b i d . , p. 148. 

s i b i d . . p.141. 

4The last joint Four-Powers conference was in June 1949; it was declared 
that attempts to reconstitute Germany as a political and economic unity would be 
based on Four-Power efforts. The f i r s t i n i t i a t i v e to re-unify after the 1949 
founding of the two German states came not from Adenauer, but from the 
Americans. The US-High Commission pressured Adenauer to put forward a proposal 
for free elections toward re-unification. The East Germans and Soviets did not 
respond, however. The East's disinterest turned when at the end of 1950 the 
West began discussing the possibility of West Germany's integration into a 
western defense concept (the EDO. On 30.11.1950 Otto Grotewohl, head of state 
of the German Democratic Republic, wrote to the government of the Federal 
Republic of Germany, offering talks and the setting-up of a committee to prepare 
free elections. He also suggested that the Germans should take the 
reunification issue into their own hands and put their proposals to the 
occupying forces, not vice versa. The Federal Government rejected the proposal , 
demanding free elections prior to the formation of committees and/or provisional 
governments. On 15.9.1951 the GDR repeated i t s offer, but again the FRG 
rejected i t . The GDR meanwhile rejected the FRG's demand that the UN oversee 
any elections. In the west, talks on the EDC stepped up—ratification of the 
treaty was drawing near. On 18.3.1952 Stalin sent a "note" to the western 
treaty was drawing near. On 10.3.1952 Stalin sent a "note" to the western 
powers, offering a peace treaty with Germany, German unity, a pull back of 
occupation, and the creation of a national army. Again, the western powers 
answered on 25.3.1952 with a demand for free elections f i r s t . They also 
c r i t i c i z e d Stalin's proposed neutral status for Germany. On 9.4.1952 the USSR 
said it agreed to the west's demand for free elections as a precondition for 
further negotiation. The western powers hesitated in giving their answer until 
12.5.1952: they demanded total freedom of action for the proposed all-German 
government. The USSR pushed for immediate talks regarding a German treaty on 
24.5.1952—on the eve of the signing of the EDC treaty. On 10.6.1952 the west 
answered, agreeing to a conference to investigate conditions for free elections. 
Then, on 29.8.1952 the USSR shifted gears and suggested postponing the peace 
treaty talks. On 23.9.1952 the west again called attention to its offer, but 
the USSR did not respond. That was the end of the dialog on the subject of re-
unification . 

For the relevant documents, see Ruhl, pp.122-155. 

5The prejudice against the "non-European" Russians and Americans cropped 
up repeatedly. Benno Reifenberg, "Die Dunkle Zone," Die Geoenwart 3 Nr.1/2 
(1948), p.7, writes about the vacuum left behind in Germany, a vacuum into which 
the US and the USSR are making exploratory forays: "The two non-European 
superpowers are seeking to stake out their areas of influence in this large 
no-man's terrain of the earth." Theodor Plievier, "Entscheidung fur Europa," 
Die Geoenwart 4 N r . l (1949), p.8, admonishes Europeans not to feel forced to 
choose between "East and West," i . e . , Russia or America, but to choose Europe, 
instead. And Bernhard Guttmann, "Die Funktion des Widerstandes," cited 

-128-



previously, also warns of the dangers o-f Germany and Europe becoming a mere 
appendage of "America or Asia." (p.?) 

6 B e r l i n , Charlottenburg, Deutscher Kflnstlerbund 1956; Erste Aus- 
stel 1uno, 1951, n.p. 

7See the copy of the letter by the four artists to the league, dated 
22.3.1952, in the Archiv fu> bildende Klinste in Nflrnberg; the letter is 
located in the f i l e on Georg Meistermann. 

8See the Meistermann f i l e , Archiv fur bildende Konste, Nornberg. 

8 Letter to the league, 22.3.1952. 

1 0 See letter to W i l l i Baumeister, copy thereof in Meistermann f i l e . 

"See letter from the "Deutscher Kflnstlerbund 1950" to Dr. Frahne in 
the German Foreign Ministry, 2.2.1953, in the Meistermann f i l e , Archiv fur 
bildende Kflnste, Nornberg. 

1 2Walter Dirks, "Die zweite Republik; Zum Ziel und zum Weg der deutschen 
Demokratie," Frankfurter Hefte 1 (April 1946), p.17. 

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Unpublished Material 

The Archiv fur bildende KGnste in Nflrnberg, Germany: a r t i s t s ' s f i l e s used 
were E.W. Nay's and Georg Meistermann's. The Meistermann f i l e contained the 
letters cited here: letter from Baumeister, Uhlmann, Werner, and Winter, dated 
22 March 1953 to the "Deutscher KOnstlerbund 1959": private letter to Georg 
Meistermann, not dated, circa 1952/53; letter from the "Deutscher Kflnstlerbund 
1958," signed by Hofer and Kuhn, dated 28 March 1952; and the letter from the 
"Deutscher Konstlerbund 1950" to Dr. Frahne of the Foreign Ministry, dated 
2 February 1953. 

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