| Jewish Museum Milwaukee
1360 N Prospect Avenue
Extended through August 20
Featuring art from private and institutional collections, this exhibit explores the Third Reich’s use of modern art as a tool of propaganda for public indoctrination to Nazi ideology and some of the artists, movements, events and outcomes of being branded ‘degenerate’.
Between the end of WWI and the Nazis’ rise to power, the Weimar Republic era was a period of social, economic, and political upheaval in Germany and of thriving cultural and artistic experimentation. Modern Art, which cut ties from rigid tradition and promotes freedom of expression, was rising in popularity with new movements like Dadaism, Cubism, Expressionism, and Abstraction taking strong footholds in German society. Hitler considered modernist tendencies to be the result of genetic inferiority and society’s moral decline, labeling the artists and their work as Entartete Kunst, or ‘degenerate’. An unprecedented attack to change and cleanse Germany’s cultural landscape was unleashed – a key step in Hitler’s plans for racial cleansing.
RACE, DEGENERACY AND EUGENICS IN THE LATE 19TH/EARLY 20TH CENTURIES
Thursday, May 11
7 p.m.
Jewish Museum Milwaukee
In the 19th century, in fields as diverse as evolutionary theory (Darwin) and bacteriology (Pasteur), ‘the human sciences’ as we know them today were born. Along with the promise of progress, science simultaneously espoused ideas about racial purity and ‘degeneration’. Sadly, many contemporary views on human nature have been greatly influenced by that seemingly distant world of social engineering and eugenic speculation.
Learn about the dawn of the eugenics movement and how concepts of race, purity, and degeneracy intertwined in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Register here for this talk by Sander L. Gilman, a cultural and literary historian, and professor emeritus at Emory University.
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