| The proposed research focuses on the relations between art and politics in interwar Germany while looking at its history of mentality hidden from sight, namely the anxieties, wishes, traumas and ambivalences that drive the course of the republic and pre-war Nazi regime within an environment of confusing modernity. These are detectable in different modes of artistic expression and are discussed here by means of looking closely at three German contemporarily celebrated artists emerging from their cultural background: the painter George Grosz, the writer Hans Fallada and cineaste Leni Riefenstahl. These three figures serve me as prototypes for the artists condition and possible responsibilities facing politics, as they chose different paths of reaction to the change of regime in 33: re-spectively immigration, inner immigration and cooperation. What are the factors that guided each one of them to a different solution? A feasible direction would be to examine the aspects of modernism they reject and the ones they embrace, along side with those shaping their attitudes unconsciously; this will be realized through seeing their handling of the term decadence or to be more precise, through the way the language of decadence (with its follow up degeneration) is mani-fested and deciphered through depictions of violence, gender and purity in their work. We can clearly see that all three are attacking the middle classes with its bourgeois ideol-ogy of classical liberalism, by means of decadence as a leading tool of criticism encom-passing any specifics. The language of decadence will be clarified through three major concepts: violence, gender and purity, deeply interwoven through blood. |
