The author of numerous volumes on the history of art plundering in the Third Reich, Jonathan Petropoulos has now written an engaging and well-documented study of those who operated within the complexities and contradictions of artistic developments in Nazi Germany. Scholars in many fields have shown that control over the arts under the Third Reich was far from monolithic and that, contrary to long-held assumptions, artists continued to embrace modernism at many different levels. Architects Walter Gropius and Albert Speer, sculptors Ernst Barlach and Arno Breker, composers Paul Hindemith and Richard Strauss, author Gottfried Benn, painter Emil Nolde, actor Gustaf Gründgens, and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl have all gained notoriety and extensive scholarly attention for remaining active during the Third Reich. Petropoulos usefully investigates their relationships to one another, to numerous other artistic figures, and to larger Nazi policies in a single volume, building upon past research as he interrogates the narratives and myths of these modernists and of modernism more generally. In this disturbing and riveting story, he adopts a flexible definition to accommodate widely varying perceptions of modernist form, content, and quality; at the same time, he contexualizes how Cold War fears stimulated misleading interpretations of modernist abstraction as not only heroically antifascist but also opposed to both Nazi and Soviet Realism.

Petropoulos devotes his introductory section to the debate about Expressionism that continued during the Third Reich despite long-time National Socialist attacks on modern artists, museum closures, and dismissals of professionals hired during the Weimar Republic. In Berlin, painter Otto Andreas Schreiber, as well as Nazi art students and their supporters, championed Expressionism in the journal Kunst der Nation until it was banned in February 1935, and then long afterward in their own art and exhibitions. Other admirers of modern art joined the debate; this initially included Josesph Goebbels and Hermann Goering, who hoped that Germany might follow the example of Fascist Italy, which sent Berlin two modernist art shows in the 1930s. As Petropoulos, as well as Pamela Potter (Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts [2016]), James van Dyke (Franz Radziwill and the Contradictions of German Art History 1919–1945 [2010]), and others have repeatedly emphasized, Adolf Hitler was outspokenly critical of modernist abstraction, distortion, and lack of finish, but remained equivocal about German Expressionism until the opening of the 1937 “Degenerate Art” exhibition—and was inconsistent on the subject even after that.

The second part of the book illuminates the slow and contradictory ways in which art policy emerged. To that end, Petropoulos contrasts the stories of five individuals who unsuccessfully sought accommodation with the regime in the Reich's early years. Emil Nolde was notoriously antisemitic and joined the Danish National Socialist Party early on. In contrast to previous accounts, Petropoulos demonstrates that, even though Nolde was ultimately ejected from the party and severely victimized during the “Degenerate Art” actions, he was nonetheless able to paint, sell, and travel widely up to and through World War II. As Petropoulos similarly indicates, scholars have long debated Paul Hindemith's position as well. During the Weimar Republic, Hindemith had occasionally collaborated with leftists such as Bertolt Brecht, but he had also criticized modernists Arnold Schoenberg, Ernst Krenek, and Kurt Weill, and, by the 1930s, had adopted a more accessible neoromantic idiom. The symphonic suite from Mathis der Maler, his opera inspired by Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim altarpiece, was well received when it premiered in 1934, but, during the politicized summer that followed, Nazi rivals began to attack Hindemith for some of his earlier works. The latter withdrew to teach in Turkey and complete the opera. Though he would never again regain a high profile, he continued to have performances in Berlin, Lübeck, Essen, Baden-Baden, and Hamburg through the summer of 1936. That fall, Goebbels forbade further public concerts of Hindemith's work, and the composer went into exile in 1938.

Because he is also such an icon of modernism, Walter Gropius's efforts at accommodation have long been forgotten. After suffering Nazi attacks, the Bauhaus that Gropius had helped found was closed in 1933, but he, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and many of their associates initially sought and sometimes found commissions for their new style in the Third Reich. A German nationalist but not a Nazi, Gropius submitted (in vain) a design for the new Berlin Reichsbank, remained in touch with Reich officials when working in England, and, when he left the country in 1937 to accept a job in the United States—where he and Mies long neglected to mention their projects undertaken in the Third Reich—refused to consider himself an exile.

The third section discusses five artistic figures who successfully found a place in the Third Reich, enjoyed considerable celebrity and influence there, and remained largely unapologetic for their actions after the war. Richard Strauss, an older but far from uncontroversial pillar of modern German music, had long worked to protect the royalty rights of musicians and considered his work as president of the Reich Music Chamber to be a natural extension of those activities. Sensitive to attacks against Jews because of his Jewish daughter-in-law and his longtime collaboration with librettist Stefan Zweig and many other Jewish artists, his support for them was largely ineffective. Long known for his accomplishments on the modernist stage, his Communist politics, and his close association with the children of Thomas Mann, the famed actor Gustaf Gründgens found latitude to perform what and how he wanted as a result of Goebbels's and Goering's efforts to upstage each other as patrons of the arts. After an extensive examination of the case of Leni Riefenstahl (whom he was able to interview), Petropoulos ably undercuts the filmmaker's denials of complicity through chilling revelations: that she witnessed the murder of Polish Jewish citizens at the beginning of the war, for example, and that she used Roma slave laborers later executed at Auschwitz in her mountain epic Tiefland.

Petropoulos's conclusion reviews the postwar reception, treatment, and behavior of these major artists and of other, more minor figures. Besides providing a “hall of shame” of complicity, he offers larger reflections on why they sought accommodation, why the regime wanted to enlist them, and why and how so much of this story remained concealed for so long. His unsurpassed knowledge of the policies, personalities, and events enables him to bring insight, vitality, and clarity to his investigation of the gray zones in which these figures operated. While generally tough though fair-minded, he nevertheless occasionally exaggerates the degree of accommodation with the Nazis. Petropoulos rightly notes that “artists in all fields benefitted from the Nazis’ ambitious cultural plans” (62), but not all artists were involved in those initiatives. After the Nazis had fired him from his teaching position in Frankfurt am Main, Max Beckmann chose the greater anonymity of Berlin, where the National Gallery had just opened a room in his honor, and joined the Reich Chamber so that he could continue to purchase artistic supplies and exhibit his work. Petropoulos uses an undated quote to support his assertion that Beckmann “thought his art would represent a positive contribution to the Third Reich and … help determine the direction of his discipline” (62): “After the simplification practiced by [Vincent] Van Gogh and [Paul] Gauguin, it's time to go back to multiplicity. There is no way past those two: You have to take what they have achieved, turn back, and look for a new path from some earlier point on the route.” Yet, those were words from a 1909 diary entry and referred to a much older struggle. In Nazi Berlin, the artist, now broken financially, worked prodigiously and sought support from wealthy and well-connected private patrons and dealers—until July 1937, when seizure of his art from various museums for the so-called “Degenerate Art” exhibition convinced him that he no longer had a place in Germany.

Along similar lines, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's images of dancers for his murals in the Essen Folkwang Museum derived more from drawings he had made of Mary Wigman and Gret Palucca in 1928 and 1930 and from his continued fascination with Pablo Picasso, abstraction, and printmaking, than from “Nazi pageants” (170) he would have had little, if any, opportunity to have seen. In his final years, Kirchner hoped that his art might prove to be “truly” German, and wrote despicably antisemitic letters rarely noted in the scholarship. When he committed suicide in June 1938, Kirchner was nevertheless despondent about the political situation in Germany, the “Degenerate Art” degradations of his art, the Anschluss of Austria, and the increasing numbers of Nazis in the town of Davos, Switzerland, where he lived—not by just an “eventual loss of faith … that his work would ultimately find acceptance in the Third Reich” (171). Such passages needlessly detract from an otherwise powerful and respectable volume full of provocative questions and insights about the mysteries of artists’ behavior under Hitler.