ART IN NAZI GERMANY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 84, Issue 15, 18 January 1940, Page 8

ART IN NAZI GERMANY

The composer Herr Oscar Strauss has assumed French nationality, notes the Daily Telegraph, and another distinguished musician is lost to lhe land of his birth. “I am really an artist at heart,” Hitler once explained; and when he is not too busy being Bismarck and talking blood and iron, or Napoleon, and riding behind his soldiers into ravished lands, he likes to pose as a patron of the arts. What artists themselves think of his pretensions may be gathered from the fact that scores of famous writers, musicians and painters have escaped from Germany and found a home in freer air. The true artist expresses himself as he must, not as his rulers think he should. It was predicted that the coming of Communism to Russia would be followed by a flowering of the arts like that of the Renaissance; but even the Russians have been disappointed at the results. Art cannot be canalised, the genius cannot. be drilled. The lowest Nazi bully can take his life, but to enforce the creation of a “Mona Lisa” or an “Ode on a Grecian Urn" is beyond the power of a Charlemagne, let alone the inferior water colourist who bestrides poor Germany in his shoes.