Franz Radziwill, the Art of Politics of the National Socialist Regime and the Question of Resistance in Germany, 1930-39

This dissertation analyzes the relationship between the German painter Franz Radziwill, the National Socialist Party (NSDAP), and the National Socialist regime between the years 1930, when Radziwill's sympathies for the NSDAP emerged, and 1939, when his membership in the NSDAP ended after his induction into the German army. In 1933, Radziwill was one of the artists named by the new government under Hitler to succeed the modem art establishment of the Weimar Republic. Between 1935 and 1938, however, Radziwill was marginalized as centralized art institutions came to be dominated by hostile factions within the NSDAP. This dissertation addresses Radziwill's ultimately unsuccessful effort to reconcile modern painting, neoconservative ideology, and political engagement within the political and professional conditions provided by the Weimar Republic between 1930 and 1933, and by the NS-regime between 1933 and 1939. it discusses his career in terms of the relationship between traditional and National Socialist cultural elites, of policy-making in the NS-regime, and of the boundaries between consent and dissent in Germany between 1933 and 1945. After an introductory Chapter 1, Chapter 2 situates Radziwill within the artistic culture of the Weimar Republic, emphasizing the prevalence of conservative cultural criticism there and reinterpreting several of his acclaimed paintings, particularly those of the First World War. Chapter 3 focuses on Radziwill's engagement with the NSDAP, his turn away from leftist painters, and the remarkable influence of his circle in the Prussian Cultural Ministry in 1933. Chapter 4 details Radziwill's activities as a professor at the state art academy in Dusseldorf beginning in 1933 and traces the denunciatory campaign that led to his dismissal in 1935. Chapter 5 concludes with an analysis of Radziwill's later career in northwestern Germany, where he won the support of political leaders, military officers, and influential colleagues, but was unable to cross the threshold from regional recognition to national rehabilitation. This frustrating situation, exacerbated by the ramifications of the exhibition "Degenerate Art," led Radziwill to renew his conservative cultural critique, now directed against the NS-regime's populism and exploitation of modern media, while he supported the war it unleashed in the name of the nation.