ABSTRACT
The human body was one of the ideological battlegrounds between the two World Wars, when complex social, cultural, and political forces clashed. Such conflicting views can be observed in German arts and media. On the one hand, Georg Grosz, Otto Dix, and Max Beckmann depicted amputated and disfigured soldiers and so did the photographs in Ernst Friedrich’s book War against War (1924). On the other hand, healthy, athletic bodies and nudism were promoted by Hans Surén’s book Man and Sunlight (1924), and films like Ways to Strength and Beauty (1925) and Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938). They contributed to a cult of the body with their references to ancient Greece and classical sculpture, while advocating military readiness. However, near the end of the interwar period, two major art shows were organized by the Nazis: the Great German Art Exhibition, where Hitler praised the Discobolus as a model of beauty to be surpassed by the German race, and the Degenerate Art show, which included Grosz, Dix, and Beckmann, among other artists, and resulted in the destruction of over 5,000 “degenerate” artworks. Given the context, can idealization of the body be perceived as some kind of liberation and remedy to the ills of war?
