by Pamela M. Potter (Author)

This provocative study asks why we have held on to vivid images of the Nazis' total control of the visual and performing arts, even though research has shown that many artists and their works thrived under Hitler. To answer this question, Pamela M. Potter investigates how historians since 1945 have written about music, art, architecture, theater, film, and dance in Nazi Germany and how their accounts have been colored by politics of the Cold War, the fall of communism, and the wish to preserve the idea that true art and politics cannot mix. Potter maintains that although the persecution of Jewish artists and other "enemies of the state" was a high priority for the Third Reich, removing them from German cultural life did not eradicate their artistic legacies. Art of Suppression examines the cultural histories of Nazi Germany to help us understand how the circumstances of exile, the Allied occupation, the Cold War, and the complex meanings of modernism have sustained a distorted and problematic characterization of cultural life during the Third Reich.

Front Jacket

Pamela M. Potter's excellent critical historiography boldly breaks down the barriers between the disciplines of music history, theater and film history, and art history to show how the historiography on culture during the Nazi period produced blind spots and distortions that are still in fundamental need of correction.--Paul B. Jaskot, author of The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right

Author Biography

Pamela M. Potter is Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, author of Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler's Reich, and coeditor of Music and German National Identity.

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