Establishing Artistic Standards in the Third Reich

Art has the unique ability to conger up emotions among its audience. The Third Reich used this fact to its advantage, explaining to its followers how one should perceive various forms of artistic representation. According to the film, the officials of the Third Reich were predominantly art advocates, at least in the sense that they appreciated certain types of art. Their ability to exert their corrupt interpretations of art would eventually help them establish a societal expectation of a unified aesthetic. Good art and bad art were labeled early on in order to emphasize the importance of understanding what they understood to be stemming from artistic works.
Good art, for them, was a relatively limited term. It consisted of art that reflected works of the Roman and Greek empires. Cohen relates Hitler’s interest in and respect for these ancient societies to his liking of their artistic productions. Statues and paintings of glorious figures with white skin and “ideally” strong physiques were at the forefront of their artistic desires. These types of images helped portray to the masses what exactly they “should” be, namely, physically fit and certainly not deformed.
This idea of deformity brings us to the emphasis placed by the Third Reich on exploiting the corruption of bad art. The party rejected modern and abstract approaches to representing the human body, denouncing such artistic works as dangerous due to the fact that they display humans that do not fit the physical descriptions demanded by the Nazi Party. I found this to be both nonsensical and evil. I found it to be nonsensical for two reasons: 1) a figure in a painting may be represented abstractly in a way that does not even accurately portray its physical characteristics, thus implying that not only were the people under the Third Reich expected to appear a certain way, but their imaginations and efforts to view the world differently were limited, and 2) because the idea of a pure and beautiful unified aesthetic is something that inherently excludes more people than it includes due to diversity across the globe. I found this idea to be evil, because limiting self-expression is something that a government should never do. It is easy to retrospectively see how such manipulations lead to the creation of an atmosphere in which a single totalitarian authority has complete control. Limiting artistic expression limits personal expression, which forces people to choose sides either in support of or against a powerful military regime.