Art and Foreign Cultural Policy in Weimar Germany, 1917-1933

This thesis tells the story of how German art was transformed into a tool of cultural propaganda and then ‘mobilised’ as a form of foreign cultural policy in Weimar Germany from 1917 until 1933. It questions how, why and with what intentions the German Federal Foreign Office pursued an official representation of the new Republic abroad through art, at a time when the visual arts were increasingly seen as important in Germany’s foreign affairs. The thesis is divided into four chapters. It starts by looking at the first official German art propaganda exhibition mounted in Zurich by Paul Cassirer and Harry Count Kessler in 1917, which marked Germany’s entry into modernist *Kunstpropaganda* in the neutral countries. It then outlines how the institutional organisation of foreign cultural propaganda and *Kunstdiplomatie* took form at the Wilhelmstrasse in the aftermath of the First World War. By 1920 the newly founded Cultural Department included a *Kunstreferat*, supervised by the art historian and civil servant Johannes Sievers, who together with the *Reichskunstwart* and the Prussian *Kultusministerium* aimed to take control of the newly emerging foreign art policy. In chapter 3 the thesis turns to the practice of Weimar Germany’s foreign *Kunstpolitik*, especially the involvement of a set of Germany’s most eminent museum directors with whom the Foreign Office sought to control and stage multiple official and semi-official German art exhibitions during the period 1919-1926. In its fourth and final chapter the thesis reviews how in the second half of the 1920s dozens of artists who felt excluded from Weimar Germany’s official art exhibits, began to voice their dissent, before the *Kunstreferat* was taken out of the Foreign Office, and integrated in the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda on 1 April 1933. The thesis concludes that Germany’s foreign cultural policy towards the visual arts was modernist as well as traditional, internationalist yet patriotic, and firmly rooted in a Wilhelmine belief in the German *Kulturnation*.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Middelkoop, Mary-Ann

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Evans, Prof Sir Richard J.

• Visual Arts
• Foreign Cultural Policy
• Weimar Republic
• Cultural Propaganda
• Exhibitions
• First World War
• Cultural Nationalism
• Internationalism
• German Foreign Office
• Museums

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/346717d4-0dcb-470f-b007-2e188ba1968b/download
• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

en

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.50094

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/303018