Breker and Calder: Pals in Paris

Hitler offed himself over sixty years ago, cowering in his Berlin bunker. But to judge from current political spleen in the German press, you’d think he was still around. Swiss Jew Dani Levy’s new film, “Mein Führer,” dares to tickle smiles from Germans over Adolf as a bed wetter who plays with toy battleships in his bathtub. And the Social Democrats are fighting the old DDR lefties over whether folksinger Wolf Biermann should be made an honorary citizen of Berlin--he’s the heroic East German whose citizenship the DDR brass revoked in 197--while he was singing in West Germany! And to show how nasty polit-bureaucrats can be, they emptied his East Berlin apartment and shipped its contents to him!

But those snarls are minor league compared with the SuperSnit that ensued when a minor little gallery in Schwerin (the capital of Mecklenburg/Vorpommern) decided to show the sculpture of Arno Breker (1900-1991), Hitler’s so-called favorite sculptor—at least those works which escaped the looting and destruction of the victorious Allies in 1945. My German wife’s relatives in Schwerin were celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary, so I snuck in a long look at Breker’s work.

Most art historians concentrate on details like his arrival with Hitler and Albert Speer in Paris the day the French were defeated in 1940. They were there because Hitler wanted to look at all the great monuments so he could outdo them in his planned makeover of Berlin code named Germania. Flying back to Berlin with Hitler, the dictator told him how many complaints about him he had received in 1934-35. When Breker asked him why they snuck into Paris instead of driving triumphantly down the Champs Elysee, Hitler said “I do not want to do that to this great cultural people.”

Still Alfred Rosenberg, editor of the Nazi newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter (The People’s Obsever), accused Breker of being a “decadent”. But he never joined the Party, regardless of how many commissions and favours Hitler sent his way, including a full professorship at the Berlin Academy of Arts and a ranch north of Berlin, Jäckelbruch. He won the silver medal for his two sculptures for the 1936 Berlin Olympics (the judges awarded him the gold, but Hitler for diplomatic reasons, gave it to his ally, Italy)

In a symbolic encounter when he got the silver medal, Hitler playfully punched him on the shoulder, and told Breker he didn’t want him living in a garret. He arranged for a spread worthy of a Duke. Breker spent so much time and energy defending his Parisian friends from the Gestapo (saving both Picasso and Jean Marais) that Albert Speer warned him he was playing with fire. Breker ignored him, accepting invitations to dine with Hitler at the Chancellery so he could intervene for more persecuted artists and Jews, like his dealer Alfred Flechtheim and publisher Peter Suhrkamp. Hitler’s attitude was that artists knew nothing about politics, that they were hapless Parsifals. It appears that Hitler was compensating for his own failure as an artist in his regard for Breker. And the sculptor appeared impervious to German taunts that he was “the Frenchman” and the gossip that his Greek mistress/wife, Demetra Messala, was a Jewess.

He certainly was no anti-Semite. He made a bust of his close friend Max Liebermann, and for his widow, a death mask. When the Nazis cashiered Max as President of the Academy of Art, he continued to stand by his friend. (Incidentally, the main instigator of the squall over the Schwerin exhibition, was the current president of that most prestigious German art association, Klaus Steckel, a poster designer who cancelled his projected 2007 exhibition at Schwerin. In the 1980’s Staeckel was also an organizer of a No Nazi Art in German Museum movement. After the war, even artists he had saved ratted on him to the deNazification officials. Finally, he was fined 100 marks for being a “fellow traveller”. The American General in charge offered him the alternative penalty of creating a fountain for Donauwörth. He scornfully rejected that alternative penalty as undignified extortion of a defeated enemy. Breker perhaps felt that the Allies looting or destroying 90% of his work at Jäclelbruch was punishment enough.

The first astonishment I discovered in researching Breker’s career was that Alexander Calder worked and bunked in his atelier in 1927. Calder’s animated Circus—tiny wire performers moved through gears to German march music. His “act” was a sensation among Paris literati, who crowded into his bedroom, SRO (sitting room only), to watch this sensational preliminary to his invention of the Mobile. The French highly regarded the regular circus, with respected critics evaluating their performance. It was Calder’s instant passport to the artistic community, Man Ray (another Philly!), Jean Cocteau, Maurice de Vlaminck, the Delaunays, Isamu Noguchi, and others reveled in Calder’s funky invention.

Breker’s reputation remains contested to this day. He was the eldest son of a stone mason and gravestone maker in Northwest Germany. At age 15, he saw a Rodin at the Dusseldorf Museum of art which moved him to study sculpture. During World War I he took over his father’s workshop while he was at the front. Between 1920 and 1925 he studied sculpture and architecture at the Dusseldorf Academy of Art. In 1927 he moved to Paris where the Jewish dealer Alfred Flechtheim took him on. On the way to a drawing trip in Tunisia, he introduced himself to Aristide Maillol who was moved to call him the Michelangelo of Germany. In 1932, the Prussian Ministry of Culture gave him a fellowship in Rome where he studied classical sculpture. In 1934, the great Jewish painter Max Liebermann, also the president of the Academy of Art, counseled him to return to Germany. Und so weiter.