(originally published by H-German on 10 October 1995)
After the sweeping criticisms of the U.S. role in postwar Europe and Germany by American revisionists and many West German scholars during the 1970s and early 1980s, a spate of recent studies has reexamined U.S. occupation records especially in the area of cultural policies and come to a much more positive assessment of the American contribution to the shaping of a new, Western-democratic Germany. In this context Prof. Deshmukh focuses specifically on the Berlin National Gallery to "describe the postwar cultural policies of American occupation forces as well as those of the vanquished Germans that forged occupied Germany's cultural identity." In light of the National Gallery's towering importance in collecting and promoting modern art in Germany through the Nazi seizure of power and its likely cultural preeminence in the coming "Berlin Republic," this was clearly a splendid choice. Few institutions could provide a better symbolic narrative for the stormy, multi-ruptured German cultural and political identity in this century.
This article lays a descriptive foundation for one piece of such a narrative. It recounts, primarily through OMGUS Cultural Division records in the U.S. National Archives, the postwar efforts by the museum's largely continuous top personnel and supporters to rebuild the Gallery's traditional role of displaying and promoting contemporary as well as past art. Oddly, Deshmukh's research shows the contribution of American occupation authorities to have been extraordinary minimal in this area. Even though highly qualified MFA & A (Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives) officers recognized the significance of the arts for remaking a German political as well as cultural identity, American arts policy remained passive and reactive and apparently gained little of the profound cultural influence of the America Houses, foreign exchanges, and associated cultural programs.
The focus on the U.S. occupation may thus conceal the most critical events in the recovery of German culture in postwar Berlin. The explosion of the arts and art consumption in culture-starved postwar Berlin was already well under way before the American (and British, French) arrival in the city. Ignited at first by a Soviet-backed anti-fascist cultural drive, the initiative remained in the hands of a dynamic group of German artists like Max Pechstein, Karl Hofer, Hans Uhlmann, Renée Sintenis, architect Hans Scharoun, or the charismatic art historian Edwin Redslob. The modernist renaissance in the visual arts was initially on the left and thus centered in the East, until Stalinist Socialist Realism supplanted the modernists. America Houses offered American literature, film, and music to culture-starved Germans, but U.S. officials were more concerned with restitution of property in the fine arts and actually removed collections from the National Gallery for "safe-keeping" in Washington.
Deshmukh nicely illustrates the shift of the locus of modernist art from East to West Berlin with the initial establishment of the "Gallery of the 20th Century" on Museum Island in the East, still under the auspices of an all-Berlin administration, and its subsequent move to West Berlin near Zoo Station and eventually the "New National Gallery" in West Berlin's Tiergarten. As she points out, the Cold War and German economic growth led to much competitive growth of museums and other cultural institutions on both sides of the wall. For Berlin visitors (not residents) this made for a rich diet between the old splendor of Museum Island in the East and the expanded Dahlem Museum and the Bauhaus-style New National Gallery in the West. West Berlin art and architecture seemed to turn to a hectic modernism not so much from spontaneous creative impulses like those of pre-World War I and the 1920s, but as a Cold War challenge to the oppressive grey of the East. The unequivocal modernism of West Berlin was a statement of economic superiority as much as one of artistic freedom and tolerance. The new Berlin has not only had to cut staff, budgets, and museum space, but will also have to find a new cultural identity. Undoubtedly the National Gallery/ies will again be (an) essential symbol(s).