Germany ruins and wall

Germany, which emerged from the war in total ruins, faced a very different political situation. Divided into four zones each occupied by one of the four allied forces, it was literally cut into two by the so-called iron curtain, which had divided the world into Eastern and Western Europe. In Germany, the East was being occupied by the Soviet Union, and the West by the three western allies: France, England and the US. This led in 1949 to the foundation of two different German nations: The federal Republic of Germany (i.e. West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). The mostly antagonistic dialogue (or even lack thereof) between those two entities reflected the polemic and confrontations of the Cold War. [51] Accordingly the art scene too was essentially divided into two very different artistic experiences, one each side of the political divide.

In West Germany the reeducation program of the allies played a vital role and instilled democratic values and an awareness of and responsibility for the past. [52] Meanwhile in the East, the Soviets recast all East Germans as communist and therefore as victims of Fascism, regardless what their beliefs during the Nazi period had been.

This meant that while both sides were haunted by the trauma of the Hitler years and the war, West German artists alone had to bear the guilt and legacy of the holocaust. [53] Moreover German artists could not rely on a continuous national narrative as a basis for their postwar art, as artists in France and England had. [54] German modernist art was unknown to the younger generation of German artists, as it had been ridiculed and expunged by the Nazis, who declared it to be degenerate, which had led to the exile of most of its practitioners. Moreover the younger Germans did not want to look into their countries past, they wanted to forget it and view the end of the war as what was called the hour 0, a new beginning. Which was illusory, of course. There never could be a tabula rasa. And in fact the burden of the past is coloring German art up to this day. [55]

In the early days after the war, however none of this applied. While apocalyptic images of the war and its destruction understandably abound, artists were unwilling or simply incapable of dealing with recent history. [56]

The kind of expressive realism as in Hofer’s or Otto Dix’s work soon was replaced by abstraction in the West and Socialist Realism in the East. While abstraction was still denigrated from the right as well as the left of the political spectrum, it was also – at least in the Western sector—celebrated as having been a victim of fascism and identified with freedom of expression and democracy. [57]

Some artists such as Willie Baumeister looked to archaic forms in order to find an idiom that was devoid of any historical association. [58] On the whole all through the 1950s West German art, such as the abstractions of Ernst Wilhelm Nay, lacked originality and were heavily influenced by international modernist abstraction. [59]

In East Germany all modernist and in particular abstract art was condemned as bourgeois, nihilistic and decadent, and unreadable for the masses. [60] After 1948 Soviet style Socialist Realism became institutionalized in the East as the only accepted form of representation in the arts. And this despite the fact that much Socialist Realist art had an weird resemblance to the Realism favored by the Nazis. [61]

Willy Sitte, Massaker, 1959

And yet not all figurative art satisfied the dictates of Socialist Realism. Willy Sitte’s Massacre, for example, although clearly figurative, was condemned by the government for its Picasso influenced style. [62]

Otto Nagel, although respected for his long commitment to communism, was criticized for his painting “Young Bricklayer,” which was not enthusiastic enough in its description of labor. Although Nagel clearly meant to ennoble his worker by monumentalizing him, the dogmatic application of Socialist Realism’s precepts left absolutely no room for even the slightest freedom in creativity. [63]

Hans Drache’s painting “Das Volk sagt Ja zum friedlichen Aufbau” of 1952 was considered more politically correct in the description of the cheerful workers on the construction site of the monumental Stalin Allee.

Construction of Stalin Allee; Photo of Stalin Allee

In fact, the reality looked quite different. In 1953 some 20 000 Stalin Allee construction workers staged the first serious rebellion against the regime. Quickly and brutally suppressed the revolt led to imprisonment and executions and the exodus of some 120 000 East Germans who fled to west.

Only after Stalin’s death in 1953 and Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of the Stalin cult, a somewhat greater liberalization took place, and while Socialist Realism continued to be the official style, it became permissible to integrate some modernistic stylistic tendencies into painting. [64]