Is it right for the Dutch to stage an exhibition on ‘Design of the Third Reich’?

A major exhibition of Nazi design opened recently, not in Germany but at the Design Museum in Den Bosch in the southern Netherlands. Yes, that’s the country where, until a few years ago, German tourists were liable to be greeted with the angry words “Give me back my bloody bicycle!”

The exhibition opened on 7 September to a storm of protest, not only from within the Netherlands, but from all over the world. The reasons for the objections tended to focus on the growing danger from the far-Right (Geert Wilders — him again) and have been “proved correct” by the fact that the show has been extremely popular. The museum has responded by banning selfies with the exhibits. As someone who tried, often in vain, to look at the impressionists in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris this summer, I can only say that all museums should ban selfies, full stop — if they can.

Critics point out that much of the material on display originated as propaganda for the Nazi regime. Joseph Goebbels put on festivals, presided over the cinema and patronised poster-designers to distract and manipulate the minds of the German people. Distraction had been done before, as Goebbels was well aware: the French had made good use of festivals during their Revolution, and they in turn had got it from the Romans, with their “bread and circuses”.

These facts notwithstanding, at first sight it is hard to see what the fuss is about here. One of the exhibits, for example, is a Volkswagen Beetle — or Kraft-durch-Freude (“Strength-through-Joy”) car. In theory every German was to get one, but apart from the Führer (who was presented with one on his fiftieth birthday), no one ever did. Production was revived by the British after the war, who made it the “wheels of the Occupation”. You could still buy them all over the world until a few years back when production stopped. If you really object to Nazi cars, you shouldn’t be driving a Volkswagen in the first place: the very name reeks of Nazism.

Then there are Leni Riefenstahl’s films. Film buffs wax lyrical about these, but I have to confess I yawn during the Triumph of the Will, and my interest in her film Olympia tends to flag after the bit of healthy Teutonic nudity at the beginning. Next up is the Autobahn (still there — albeit much updated), oak trees (Nazis don’t have a monopoly on oaks), Hitler’s desk from the Chancellery, Hugo Boss’s SS uniform designs and a lot of Nazi kitsch. A picture shows a ceramic Blondi-type German shepherd. A bit of tat that you might have found flanking the complimentary copy of Mein Kampf you were given on your wedding day and placed reverentially in your “gute Stube” (or parlour), to be admired by occasional like-minded guests.

Times have changed and anyone with a computer can watch almost all the Nazi propaganda films banned after the war, including Jew Süss and The Eternal Jew. The Arsenal cinema in Berlin shows most of them as well. Two years ago, Mein Kampf became officially available in German for the first time since 1945, and all over the former Reich there are still Nazi buildings, shorn of their swastikas, serving municipal purposes, generally as tax offices. There is even a lively, highly profitable trade in Nazi art and other memorabilia.

Design is a banalisation of art which occurs when art goes public. It is quite possible for design to be “Nazi”. However much we decry it now, the Third Reich was intrinsically artistic. Hitler had imbibed Wagner’s aesthetic ideas about the Gesamtkunstwerk or “total work of art”. The state itself was to be creatively “designed”. But while the overall concept is clear, defining a “Nazi” painting, say, is less easy. The exhibition contains a number of paintings and perhaps it was wrong to include them at all. I see a painted nude, some naked sculptures by Arno Breker, as well as some war art — executed, I imagine, by painters attached either to the Wehrmacht or the SS. There are tapestries too. Much of this would have been exhibited at the annual state-sponsored Hitler-patronised exhibition in Munich from 1937. Subject matter was circumscribed, but it would not be fair to say that all the painters who exhibited there were Nazis. Only a prominent few, such as Wilhelm Willrich, actually used art to carry a Nazi message.

Of course, there are swastikas just about everywhere at the new exhibition, a symbol banned in postwar Germany outside a purely academic context. Perhaps the most daring inclusions are some plans of concentration camps and a guide to the badges worn by their inmates. The West German newspaper WAZ asked if it was all worth it. The exhibition amounted to the “aesthetics of horror” and the paper suggested that the museum’s director, Timo van Rijk, was aiming for a succès de scandale.

There must be some small truth in this. Van Rijk made it clear when he took on the job that he wanted to stoke things up and used language that was calculated to enrage modern susceptibilities. He made the valid point, however, that it was wrong to ignore the epoch of the Third Reich, when museums cover all other periods of recent art history. In his own defence, he said he had made an effort to render the exhibits less seductive (!). Flags had been laid flat, so it was less easy to pose next to them and the “audio” adhered strictly to the message that the public should not like what they saw. However hard he tried, however, it seems the Dutch have finally come to terms with the loss of their precious bicycles.

“Design of the Third Reich” runs until 19 January 2020.