The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany

Jonathan Petropoulos, Professor of History at elite Claremont McKenna College, presents an academic subject with a style that reads as a "user-friendly" narrative. He explores the manner in which certain Nazi-era museum directors, art dealers, art journalists and art historians, and, finally, artists, themselves, negotiated the dangerous terrain of Hitler Germany in order to enjoy the benefits of Reich approval. Petropoulos keeps the reader aware of moral, ethical, and legal issues as he paints a damning portrait of opportunists, both talented and not, who sold their souls to the National Socialist devil. In the end, one is left with a sorrow for their choices, and, in all honesty, a realization that the art produced for this regime was weak, coarse, and ultimately foolish.

Rather than producing another dry narrative of events in the artistic world during the Nazi era, the author brings the subject to life by taking a prosopographic approach: comparative biographies of a number of interesting figures in Nazi art (not only artists but critics, museum directors, etc.), following their careers both before and after 1945. A fascinating series of case studies. But I must agree with the previous reviewer that there are problems with editing: "prosopography" is misspelled throughout -- eek!

I've always wondered how I would have reacted had I lived in Germany in the 1930s. As a Jew, as a Lutheran, as a man or a woman, as an intellectual, as a peasant, as a business owner. The author does a fair job covering the members of the art world, artists, dealers, museum directors, critics. He picks one or two of the worst in each group and also a few shaded lighter grey. The only fact I would question is the name of the main Jewish bookdealer in Munich. Wasn't it Emil Hirsch rather than Heinrik Hirsch? Also it's slightly annoying to see some people's birth and death dates in brackets but not all and even more annoying to see a birth date and a questionmark for the death date. Did his editor not get around to filling in the dates?