Hitler’s Sculptor

When I first started studying history, I got lost for several months down a rabbit hole, reading books written by German authors about World War II.  Naturally, many of the books expressed an attitude that, while they disagreed with Nazi policy, they were powerless to stop its advance…All of them.  Evidently, the only “real” Nazis who weren’t killed in combat were the thirty-five war criminals executed following the various Nuremberg trials. 

Right—and my cat just won the Nobel Prize for Hairballs.

I think the breaking point came while I was reading Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer.  He gives a very plausible description of being swept along by the tide of events that I bought into…. until somewhere about two-thirds of the way through the book when I suddenly realized…. Wait!  This guy’s a lying Nazi!  After I started reading Speer’s books a little more critically, it was easy to catch him in dozens of lies in which he tried to present himself in a better light.  In my opinion, that Nuremberg execution number should have been thirty-six.

We have a similar problem assessing the artwork of Hitler’s favorite sculptor, Arno Breker.  Look at the photo to the right:  It is June 23, 1940, and Speer (left), Hitler, and Breker are standing on the terrace of the Palais de Chaillot admiring the Eiffel Tower.  Just a few years later, Hitler was dead by his own hand and Speer was writing his self-serving books from Spandau Prison.

Arno Breker, by comparison, was still producing the same kind of artwork that had glorified Nazi ideals—larger-than-life, Neoclassical sculptures that were both militaristic and vaguely angry. 

Before the Nazi era turned him into Hitler’s pet sculptor, Arno Breker’s early life read almost like the script of an ambitious art-school drama.  Born in 1900, in the Rhineland town of Elberfeld, he was the son of a stonemason — which meant he grew up literally surrounded by chisels, dust, and blocks of stone just waiting to be transformed into something more glamorous than garden walls.  After a stint studying at the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts, young Breker found himself increasingly drawn to the classical ideals of the human figure.  He flirted with the avant-garde crowd but never quite married into it, preferring a clean, heroic style that looked back more to Ancient Greece than to Picasso’s Cubist puzzles.

By the mid-1920s, Breker was traveling and absorbing the culture of Paris, where he rubbed elbows with artists like Pablo Picasso, Aristide Maillol, and Alexander Calder.  He picked up a reputation as a talented sculptor who had impeccable technique and a knack for monumental form — the kind of fellow who could make marble look like it was about to step off its pedestal and order a coffee.  Paris was his playground and while his art already leaned toward the monumental, it was still seen as stylishly neoclassical rather than politically loaded.  In those years, Breker was essentially a promising cosmopolitan artist, enjoying the bohemian whirl of Paris cafés and ateliers, before the winds of history swept him back to Germany and into the orbit of a very different kind of patron.

While living in Paris, Breker became friends with many influential Jewish artists and dealers.  In the decades that followed, while Breker never renounced any of those friends, there is no evidence that he ever used his influence to help those friends, either.  This is sort of the pattern with Breker:  there’s no direct evidence that he was a Nazi, but he never took a firm stand against Hitler, either.

Once back in Germany in the 1930s, Breker’s career accelerated at the speed of state-sponsored propaganda.  His muscular, larger-than-life style seemed tailor-made for the aesthetic the Nazis adored: marble gods, bronze athletes, and statues that looked like they could bench-press a Tiger tank.  Hitler took notice of Breker’s style and that was all it took:  By the late 1930s, Breker was officially the Reich’s star sculptor, showered with commissions for the new “Germania” capital that Albert Speer was designing.  His works — like the heroic Zehnkämpfer (Decathlete) and the impossibly serene Siegerin (Victress)—stood at the Berlin Olympic grounds, projecting the image of a superhuman nation, frozen in bronze and marble.  (Unlike 90% of the works Breker produced during the Nazi era, both statues still stand in their original location.)

Breker wasn’t just churning out art for show—he became part of the inner circle.  After accompanying Hitler on his trip to Paris, the perks piled up:  a villa in Berlin, a studio with virtually unlimited materials, 43 assistants, and the ear of the Führer himself.  Hitler added Breker to the list of 378 “Gottbegnadeten" (divinely gifted) artists who were exempt from compulsory military service.

Artists who had once mocked him for his classical obsessions now had to watch as he became the embodiment of official taste.  Even though Breker insisted after the war that he had never joined the Nazi Party, he was undeniably one of the regime’s cultural darlings, producing the monumental “Aryan” figures that filled plazas, government buildings, and parade grounds.

Of course, monumental fame came with monumental compromise.  Breker’s art became inseparable from the regime’s message and his statues became a visual shorthand for Nazi ideology.  While his contemporaries in Paris and elsewhere were experimenting with abstraction, surrealism, and other modern twists, Breker was chiseling out a kind of fascist neoclassicism that was all muscle and no irony. The man who had once hung out in Paris cafés now oversaw studios humming with assistants turning out state-commissioned busts of Nazi leaders.  (Breker creates a bust of Speer, right.)  His reputation — and his paycheck — soared, but so did his entanglement with a regime whose cultural “patronage” came at the steepest moral cost imaginable.

After 1945, Arno Breker’s life took a sharp turn from monumental commissions to monumental awkwardness.  Once celebrated as Hitler’s favorite sculptor, he suddenly found himself on the wrong side of history, with Allied authorities eager to figure out what to do with an artist who had been churning out bronze superheroes for the Third Reich.  He was put through a denazification trial but managed to dodge the harshest penalties by insisting that he’d never actually joined the Nazi Party.  Conveniently, many of his more embarrassing commissions had already been destroyed when the Reich Chancellery and other Nazi showpieces were blown to rubble, so there was less incriminating evidence in the landscape.  Still, the aura of being “Hitler’s sculptor” clung to him like marble dust.

Breker worked hard to rehabilitate his reputation.  When Joseph Stalin offered him a lucrative commission, the artist declined, saying, "One dictatorship is sufficient for me".

His postwar career was, shall we say, more modest.  While his reputation in Germany was radioactive, Breker did manage to get work again, often leaning on sympathetic collectors or quietly producing smaller-scale works.  Some of his surviving statues — like Zehnkämpfer and Siegerin at the Berlin Olympic grounds — remained in place, partly because they were athletic enough to pass for apolitical once the swastikas were gone.  But many other pieces that were clearly tied to Nazi grandeur were either melted down, were looted, or were left to languish in storage.  Breker lived on into the 1990s, carving, exhibiting, and defending his legacy, but he never shook the shadow of the regime that had made him famous.  In the end, his sculptures outlasted the Reich, but their survival came with the permanent footnote: “By the way, these were Hitler’s favorites.”

Even today, there is still sharp debate whether his remaining sculptures should be exhibited or destroyed.  Are they artwork or the last remaining cancerous cells of a sick regime?   Would their destruction be vandalism, acts of iconoclasm, or justice delayed?

In 1956, the people of Budapest rebelled against the Soviet domination and Hungary’s puppet government.  Marching to the City Park, they attacked the 24-foot-tall statue of Stalin with ropes, blowtorches, and sledgehammers, eventually toppling it.  Some said that the protestors were destroying history.  Others said what they did was history.