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Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. xviii + 276 pages.
Eric Michaud's long essay on the cultural revolution of National Socialism is a remarkable synthetic work on Nazi ideology, its theo-political foundations, and the part played by aesthetics in its imagination and construction of an Aryan Utopia. By using the investigation of these issues as an account of Nazi social, political, and racial mythology, Michaud is able to insightfully approach a number of questions concerning political culture, racial aesthetics and propaganda, labor ideology and the aesthetics of work, faith and Utopian expectations, and the use and transformation of Christianity. Broad in both scope and erudition, this book provides at once a cogent account of the share of art in National Socialism, a balanced history of its intellectual origins, and a considerable theoretical reevaluation of a number of premises underlying our understanding of the intersections between art and the politics of racial hygiene in 1933-45 Germany. In the course of its argument, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany also presents histories of significant intellectual and artistic tropes, such as the artist-prince, the engendering power of images, and the idealist-medical conjunction of racial improvement.
Michaud's approach circumvents a number of widely used starting pointssuch as political culture, propaganda (see 192-94), or ideology-favoring instead the umbrella of the Nazi myth, first suggested by Philippe LacoucLabarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy in their synonymous 1980 philosophical essay (Editions de l'Aube, 1991; engl. trans. in Critical Inquiry, Winter 1989 [229n.31]). "Myth" as a term maybe misunderstood: Michaud's usage refers neither to the Nazi taste for völkisch legend nor to structuralist terminology. His specific targets are (i) the elaborate strategies of metapolitical legitimacy that founded a Nazi logic, and (ii) the role of art in structuring and accentuating these strategies. In this regard, the book's English title is a bit misleading, given that The Cull of Art is avowedly (xi) not a history of Nazi art or even of its 'cult,' but rather (as the original French subtitle suggests) a study of the sociopolitical uses of image and time, and, in particular, of art's share in National Socialist racial thought and policy. Here, Michaud's work is at its best as a...