The result was uncertainty in judgements passed on art and the silencing of those who might otherwise have protested against this Kulturbolschewismus, while the press continued to poison our sound appreciation of art. These newly created art phrases would be comic, if they were not tragic. Art is a “time-conditioned phenomenon.” So today there is not a German or a French art, ‘but a “modern art.” This is to reduce art to the level of fashions in dress, with the motto “Every year something fresh” – Impressionism, Futurism, Cubism, perhaps also Dadaism.
– a particular period had found in each art its expression. Thus it was not Greeks who created the art of Greece, Romans the art of Rome, etc. Here the influence of the Jews was paramount and through their control of the press they were able to intimidate those who desired to champion “the normal sound intelligence and instinct of men,” Art was said to be “an international experience,” and thus all comprehension of its intimate association with a people was stifled: it was said that there was no such thing as the art of a people or, better, of a race: there was only the art of a certain period. Far more lasting was the effect of these phrases in the cultural field, where they resulted in a complete confusion concerning the essential character of culture. But in the long run the failure of the parliamentary-democratic form of government, copied from the West – a West which regardless of this democratic form still continued to extort from Germany whatever there remained to extort – defeated the phrase-mongers. It was an age of phrases and catchwords: in the economic sphere the hard facts of misery and unemployment deprived these phrases of their force: in the political sphere such phrases as “international solidarity” had more success and veiled from the German people the extent of the political collapse. On July 18, 1937, Hitler delivered a speech at the opening of the House of German Art in Munich, which was to take the place of the former “Glass Palace.” In the collapse of Germany after the war, he said, the economic decline had been generally felt, the political decline had been denied by many, the cultural decline had not even been observed by the majority of the people. The Reichskulturkammer was to control all aspects of culture, and this included the fine arts, applied arts, industrial design, sculpture, architecture and film. At the 1933 Nürnberg Reichsparteitag, the new Chancellor, Adolf Hitler proclaimed the dawn of an era of ‘New Art’ – and instituted the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture) to oversee the cultural life of Das Dritte Reich, (the Third Reich).