VISITS BY SHENANDOAH MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENTS

Throughout the month of May, more than two hundred Shenandoah Middle School students studying the Second World War and the Holocaust have come to the Wolfsonian library to see a presentation of primary source materials from the collection. Before coming to the Wolfsonian, the students participating in the museum education program had the chance to hear a talk by a Holocaust survivor and to read Anne Frank’s famous Diary of a Young Girl, chronicling her life in Amsterdam hiding during the Nazi occupation.

At the museum, each visiting class was split up into two groups of twenty to thirty students. Wolfsonian Manager of Youth & School Programs Coordinator, Claudia Caro Sullivan took half of them on a guided tour of the museum galleries, and some of them also participated in an art project involving the creation of a book of self-portraits. The other group was ushered up to the library for a talk about the rise of Adolf Hitler to power in Germany in 1933, and a discussion of the history of racial discrimination in the United States and Germany. The students learned that although the United States was still struggling with segregation, horrific lynchings and KKK terror, Jim Crow laws, and other discriminatory practices, some progress towards civil rights began to be made during the Roosevelt Administration. Ironically, at the same time, Germany’s rather tolerant record as regards Jewish emancipation and assimilation and Jewish-German mixed marriages made an immediate about face as the Nazi regime promoted anti-Semitism and goose-stepped the nation down the path of a racist regime. After the discussions, the students in my group joined Claudia, and those in her group came up to the library.

One of the questions we tried to address during the back-to-back discussions in the library was how Hitler and the National Socialists were able to seize power, exercise dictatorial control, and to perpetrate such a monstrous program as the liquidation of six million Jews and another six million Gypsies, Russians, homosexuals, disabled persons, and a host of political dissidents. The materials laid out on the table suggested that Hitler and his gang recognized the importance of propaganda, for even a dictator needed to maintain at least the appearance of popular support.

Garnering the support of talented graphic artists, photographers, and filmmakers Hitler and his Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945) staged rallies and parades and a paper campaign designed to forge a positive image for himself and his party that belied the hideous program he had in store. Promising work in a time of global depression, a revival of German fortunes after the humiliations of defeat in the catastrophic First World War, Hitler appealed to German patriotism and provided them with a scapegoat aimed at uniting the nation against a common enemy. During the war, the Nazis forced Jews to wear badges to single them out and employed heavy doses of anti-Semitic propaganda to dissuade persons in the occupied territories from sheltering the “enemies” of the Third Reich (like Anne Frank and her family) and to encourage them to turn them in to the Gestapo for deportation to “work camps.”

The bachelor führer was also savvy enough to recognize the importance of posing with youngsters. He also provided propaganda books for the schools and established the Hitler Jugend as a means of brainwashing an entire generation of impressionable youths.

The visiting middle school students, however, were not so easily manipulated by the propaganda. Many perceptively noted the discrepancies between Hitler’s racist rhetoric and reality. As one French caricature from the period made clear, (and as Charlie Chaplin had hilariously pointed out in his brilliant and pointed satire, The Great Dictator), the browned-eyed, brunette leader of the blonde race did not match the Aryan ideals he promoted.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJOuoyoMhj8

It became obvious from our discussions that it was not possible to determine a person’s race by appearances, and that the horrible stereotypes of Jews the Nazis created as a prelude to the Holocaust were caricatures as absurd as the idea of an Aryan “master race.” If it were so easy to identify Jews, some concluded, why had it have been necessary for the Nazis to force persons of Jewish ancestry to wear badges identifying themselves as such?

NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH THE WORLD EROTIC ART MUSEUM !

Peddling past the Miami Beach Convention Center this morning en route to the Wolfsonian Museum, I noticed the banners by the entrance marketing the annual EXXXotica Expo, a three-day trade adult event billed as a "Celebration of Sexy." Hosting an adult trade show might seem out of place in other city convention centers, but it seemed perfectly in keeping with South Beach’s reputation for sun, skin, and hedonistic partying. Among the sponsors listed on the banner is WEAM, the World Erotic Art Museum, located on east side of Washington Avenue just a couple of blocks north of the Wolfsonian. The very different collections of the Wolfsonian and WEAM are not such as to invite confusion—although in the course of looking up Miami Beach museums on the internet, my brother-in-law from Colombia did assume that I worked for the latter museum. When he and his family visited last year, their guided tour through the Wolfsonian certainly altered their expectations of what they might see, but did not appear to be a let-down or disappointment.

Upon arriving at the museum this morning, I began to think about what objects in our collection might appeal to the typical EXXXotica expo attendee. The erotic tendency in art is, of course, as old as art itself if one considers the earliest cave drawings and sculpture. Even in a collection like the Wolfsonian which is weighted towards the propaganda and persuasive arts, there are objects and materials with an erotic edge. Certainly, artists like Eric Gill (British, 1882-1940) did not shy away from depicting the nude in his artwork, and certainly saw nothing incompatible in celebrating religiosity and the procreative urge of the world. http://www.librarydisplays.wolfsonian.org/Eric%20Gill/Eric%20Gill.htm

Our current library exhibit looks at the influence of body-builder and publisher Bernarr Macfadden and the Physical Culture Movement he championed. Macfadden used his publishing empire to attack Victorian prudery and to promote physically-healthier citizens and attitudes towards the human body. Ironically, while publications such as Sunshine and health magazine were originally attacked as pornographic, the nudist lifestyle they advocated in the 1930s was naturalistic rather than hedonistic, and marketed as family-friendly. http://www.librarydisplays.wolfsonian.org/Physical%20culture/PC.htm

Another area of the collection actually celebrates the erotic are some of the deluxe edition books produced in France in the interwar period. Often focusing on the decadence of the aristocratic class of the Ancien Régime and employing the pochoir (stencilwork) technique, these luxuriously illustrated books were marketed to a wealthy clientele with a penchant for erotica. The Wolfsonian has a number of such works in its collection, but my personal favorite is a parody of that erotic tradition. Elphie et son éléphant is a tongue-in-cheek satire of the popular Babar the Elephant character that appeared in children’s books promoting French nationalism and pride in her colonies. This playful parody for adults, however, chronicles the amorous adventures of an adulterous elephant. A few of these books and portfolio plates appeared in a past library display, Fashion and Passion: Deluxe Pochoir Editions.

http://www.librarydisplays.wolfsonian.org/Pochoir/Pochoir.htm

In the same period, European regimes also resorted to creating sexualized imagery of “native” women in much of the propaganda produced to drum up interest in their colonies. Posters, postcards, and other ephemera aimed at recruiting young men into colonial armies or promoting colonial tourism would invariably depict the women of those regions as enticingly exotic beauties.

Unquestionably, the most disturbing examples of sexual imagery in our collection are the propaganda materials created with the aim of sowing the seeds of hatred against real or perceived “enemies of the state.” During the First World War, the protagonists often resorted to employing subtle and obvious rape imagery to demonstrate the uttery depravity of the enemy. The “Huns” were frequently depicted as brute beasts intent on rape and their Turkish allies as degenerate Sultans smoking opium from hookahs and hanging out in harems.

In the wake of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, the Nazis created many disturbing children’s books and booklets for adult depicting Jewish men leering at Aryan women and children with lecherous and perverse intent. During wartime, propaganda produced for the troops used “rape” imagery to inspire hatred for the enemy, while leaflets dropped behind enemy lines used sexualized imagery to sap the morale of lonely soldiers at the front or promote discord and distrust in the ranks of allied armies.

OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE NEW…

LAST CHANCE TO SEE BERNARR MACFADDEN AND THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL CULTURE MOVEMENT LIBRARY DISPLAY BEFORE IT IS REPLACED WITH UNREAL(IZED) ARCHITECTURE EXHIBIT

Earlier this week, I completed a draft for the descriptive and interpretative label text for a new library display to be installed in the third floor foyer next week. That means that this weekend will be the last opportunity that museum patrons will have to take a look at body-builder, publishing magnate, and champion of the Physical Culture movement in America, Bernarr Macfadden. Virtually all of the materials on display were donated to the museum library by Robert J. Young, an ardent disciple of Macfadden and the crusade for better living through a regimen of exercise, abstention from tobacco and alcohol, and a healthy diet. Having assembled a large personal library on the subject, Mr. Young donated the materials to the museum to ensure that they would not be lost to future generations of students and scholars.

As the American Institute of Architects will be holding their convention in Miami this June, we thought that our new display ought to show off some of the architectural gems in the library collection. During a brainstorming session, our rare books cataloguer came up with a brilliant suggestion for a unifying theme for the exhibit. Dr. Harsanyi proposed that we focus on some of the illustrious architects and theorists represented in our collection whose designs for edifices and city plans had not been realized at the time. Visitors coming to the museum this summer will be treated to some rare designs by Leopold Bauer, Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott, and Charles Rennie Macintosh and his wife Margaret Macdonald for an early twentieth-century competition to build a House for an Art-lover. Portfolio plates of a Frank Lloyd Wright multiplex housing development and plans for a utopian industrial city by Tony Garnier will also be on display.

As anyone who knows anything about the Wolfsonian might expect, our exhibit on architecture will also touch on the propagandistic element inherent in such project proposals for designs for monuments, buildings, and cityscapes to be built for the totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany. Come in next week and experience the imaginary architectural landscapes envisioned by architects such as Vladimir Tatlin, Boris Mihailovich Iofan Mario Palanti, and Hermann Geisler. As a teaser, here are some other works by these architects that give you a sense of what to expect.