Teaching History: Expressionism vs. Fascist Art.

 

Some years ago, teaching my year10 history class, we examined the rise of the Nazi Party pre-WWII and the personality and political machinations of Adolf Hitler.

The female students in the class find, generally, the subject of war boring. But, on the other hand, the male students are more engaged than usual. They are particularly interested in the personality of the 20th century’s most notorious dictator. Hitler has become a household word for a variety of reasons. Ironically, however, you ask a 15-year-old boy to tell you who Hitler was and why he is so infamous, their eyes roll back into their little heads, and the response is usually vague at best.

It wasn’t until I did my ‘chalk & talk’ lesson on Adolf Hitler for the class that week that the sound of penny’s dropping throughout the classroom told me that these young adults didn’t have a clue as to who and what this famous man was responsible for during the first quarter of the 20th century. To my astonishment, while I paraded around the classroom, gesticulating and screeching my chalk against the blackboard (yes, our school at the time, in certain rooms, still use this antiquated teaching tool), every eye and ear paid attention, hanging on my every word.

Why do these young minds have such a fascination with a man responsible for millions of innocent deaths? How does such an evil individual continue to reach out from history and grab the full attention of our cyber-drenched youth of today? In all fairness, your guess is as good as mine…but the fascination remains.

Because history in our State curriculum focuses, for the most part, on names, events, dates, and movements of the period under study, there is not much time to capture the feelings and emotions of the people involved. That is to say, history is the story of our past, and it is not just about names, dates, and events; history is about motivations, emotions, circumstances, and atmosphere.

I devised a small research project to involve my female students, attempting to make it a little more interesting for them. They had to investigate the life of Eva Braun, Hitler’s beautiful and intriguing mistress. Once in a while, a teacher will hit a subject on the nose where the students will dive into the subject matter with full enthusiasm – this was one such case.

During their research, they came upon something that I was not even aware of, and that is the home movies that Eva Braun shot while at Hitler’s home in the Black Forest, Berchtesgaden. Eva met Hitler while working as an assistant in a photography shop. She hit meters and meters of film depicting Hitler’s numerous guests, his inner circle, Speers, Himmler, etc., but until a few years ago, we could not determine what was being said at those gatherings. The new software has been developed to analyze the lips of subjects on silent film and, through an exciting process, can determine with 100% accuracy what is being said. A group of Oxford Historians used this process on the Braun home movies with exciting results.

(To view the documentary on the new software and Braun’s home movies, go to Google and type “Hitler Speaks” you can view the entire doco online.)

In terms of history as a subject, approaching the human side, so to speak, has opened whole new vistas for the young student in the academic study of our past.

I devised a PowerPoint lesson on Expressionism vs. Fascist Art. In this presentation, I revealed the Expressionist art movement as an expression of the “inner world” and “emotion” of the artist of the time. In this case, the drastic turn in Art after WW1 from Neo-Classicism & Impressionism to Surrealism & Expressionism and why this might have occurred.

This prelude will lead to the “Politics of Art” and Hitler’s realization that by including propaganda in culture and the Arts, one can change the consciousness of an entire nation.

During this time, Hitler went on a rampage, closing down galleries all over Germany and Austria, damning the expressionist art movement as “decadent” and part of a Jewish plot to influence the minds of the pure German race. In addition, Hitler imprisoned many artists and destroyed thousands of valuable pieces of artwork from this period, replacing it with his notions of what Art really is…

The presentation showed many examples of Nazi Art, Hitler’s somewhat distorted Neo-classic style, depicting the German people and the Nazi party as Natural, Heroic, and Superior to all other nations. By doing this, as this lesson is an extension of “What is Fascism?” show my students fascism in action, as it were, excluding all ideas, beliefs, self-expression other than the One, in this case, Hitler’s and the Nazi Party.

This is not to say, of course, that I strayed from the Department of Education and Training’s suggested curriculum; however, I attempted to include other dimensions, different approaches to our past, to maybe provide for the student a fresh perspective of what the subject of history is really all about.