Heil the Hero Klimt!’

In the winter of 1943 the city of Vienna was no longer the capital of Austria, but one of the Gaue , or districts, of Ostmark, the easternmost regions of the Third Reich. The city was firmly under the rule of Baldur von Schirach, the former head of the Hitler Youth, the highest ranking Nazi in Vienna, and a man known as the ‘poet laureate’ of the Nazi party. The gold-domed Secession building, one of the most well-known icons of fin-de-siècle Vienna, had been renamed the Friedrichstrasse Gallery. Inside the building, at the instigation of von Schirach, the largest retrospective of Gustav Klimt’s work ever assembled was on display ( Figs. 1 and 2 ). This exhibition, virtually neglected in the copious literature on the artist, raises a number of compelling questions. 1 How did Klimt – arguably the most important early twentieth-century Viennese Modernist and mentor to a later Expressionist generation – not only escape being cast as entartet (degenerate) but end up positioned as a cultural hero at the height of the Nazi regime? How was the art of Klimt reconceived and portrayed in this exhibit to place his work in accord with the sensibilities of von Schirach and the Viennese public? Is there something inherent in the art of Klimt, but perhaps overlooked in Modernist narratives, that appealed to Nazi aesthetics? What does von Schirach’s embrace of Klimt tell us about the complex rivalry among Nazi officials, and among various cities, over cultural dominance in the Third Reich?

Archaeology · Art · Art history · HERO · Literature · Nazism · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Central European national history · History · Kierkegaardian Philosophy and Influence