1st Edition
Jewish Art in Nazi Germany The Jewish Cultural League in Bavaria
This book provides a social and cultural history of Jewish art in Nazi Germany, with a focus on the Jewish artists, art critics, and audiences in Nazi Bavaria.
From the time of its conceptualization in the autumn of 1933 until its final curtain call in November 1938, the Jewish Cultural League in Bavaria sustained three departments: music, visual arts, and adult education. The Bavarian example steps outside the highly professional cultural milieu of Jewish Berlin, and instead looks at relatively unknown efforts of Bavarian Jewish artists as they used art to define what it now meant, to them, to be Jewish under Nazism.
Insightful and engaging, this book is ideal for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars interested in social and cultural histories of Jews in Germany.
Introduction
Part One
1933-1935
1. Jewish Exclusion from the ‘German’ Cultural Sphere: Impact and Responses
2. Kultur and Bund: The Theory and Frameworks of ‘Jewish’ Culture in Bavaria
3. Jewish Music and ‘the Most German of the Arts:’ Liturgy, Folk Music, and Mendelssohn
4. The ‘Kulturbund’ and the Kunststadt:’ Visual Arts in Nazi Bavaria
Part Two
1935-1938
5. From Munich to Berlin: The Loss of Regional Autonomy and a National Jewish Cultural League
6. A Bavarian Musical Department without Bavarian Musicians: Repertoire, Artists, and Venues
7. Bavarian Visual Artists within the National and Regional Context: Exhibitions and Marionettes
8. The Final Curtain: Emigration, Poverty, and ‘Liquidation’
EpilogueConclusion
Biography
Dana Smith is an assistant professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Keene State College, in Keene, New Hampshire. Her research interests include German Jewish history, Holocaust studies, and cultural histories of the Third Reich.
