>>9009The Nazi campaign against ‘degenerate’ art is viewed differently by different classes.
For the bourgeoisie, the main victims in this campaign were the bourgeois avantgardists: Klee, Kandinsky, Schonberg and others whose work did in fact reflect the ideological degeneration of the bourgeoisie into metaphysics.
From the proletarian point of view, the main victims were the Communist artists of the Weimar Republic: Georg Grosz, Käthe Kollwitz, Hanns Eisler, Bertold Brecht.
The German capitalists brought the fascists to power as a last resort, a desperate gamble to stave off collapse.
On the cultural front their attack was twopronged: on the one hand they suppressed the culture (the bourgeois avant garde) that reflected the bankruptcy and weakness of their own class, and on the other they suppressed the culture that reflected the growing consciousness and militancy of their enemy, the working class.
The antisemitic line of the campaign was just a red herring.
There was no need for the Nazis to ban Mahier’s works, for instance, but they did because he was a Jew.
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