German Studies

Franz Radziwill and the Problem of Nazi Art by James van Dyke

Hitler and the Holocaust in German Memory, 1945 to the Present by David Crew

Franz Radziwill and the Problem of Nazi Art

James van Dyke

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

Franz Radziwill (1895-1983) was a German painter whose work and career were profoundly shaped by the tensions, violence, and trauma of German history from WWI to the Cold War. He was one of the most prominent "New Objectivity" painters in Germany in the 1920s, closely connected to such artists as Otto Dix and George Grosz. Yet despite his association with progressive aspects of Weimar culture, Radziwill sympathized with the Nazis as early as 1930. His tumultuous career during the Nazi era—alternately supported and ostracized—vividly illustrates how an individual career was affected by the deeply fragmented Nazi leadership.

James van Dyke's book uses the 'case' of Franz Radziwill to examine the complex relationship of modern art, avant-gardism, and Hitler's dictatorship. Founded on extensive archival research in the institutions of the German art world, close readings of contemporary art criticism, and precise visual analysis, the book will help change how we think about the very notion of "Nazi art."

No other book exists in English on Franz Radziwill, though there are some on art and the Nazi regime, including Jonathan Petropoulos's The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany (Oxford 2000) and Art As Politics in the Third Reich (UNC Press 1999); and Alan E. Steinweis's Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts (UNC Press 1997).

An assistant professor of Art History and Humanities at Reed College, James van Dyke has published extensively on German modern art. From 1997 to 2000 he was a visiting lecturer at the Kunstgeschichtiliches Seminar of the University of Hamburg and in the Kunstgeschichtiliches Institut at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main.

October 2008
272 pages

Hitler and the Holocaust in German Memory, 1945 to the Present: A Reader

David Crew

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

Hitler and the Holocaust in German Memory, 1945 to the Present surveys perhaps the single most-discussed subject in German studies: the shift in German memories of Hitler and the Holocaust from postwar reconstruction through the Cold War, the rise of consumer culture, and reunification; and the struggle over how to memorialize the past, in a country where almost every square inch can somehow be implicated in the story of Nazism and the Holocaust.

David Crew is, alongside Geoff Eley, one of this country's leading Germanists. As a researcher, writer and mentor, Crew has been instrumental in shaping the thought of an entire generation of European historians.

April 2012
264 pages