ABSTRACT
In Nazi Germany, the museum acted as a frame wherein a prescribed process of forming the ideal citizen, a subscriber to the Aryan spirituality, the Volk, was catalyzed. The utilization of religious practices as well as the religiously oriented ideology of the Nazi museum further limited one’s ability to question, resulting in the strengthening of the univocal statement of the Nazis. The official Nazi ‘ideal’ art was a strange combination of nineteenth- century Biedermeier and Romantic dominated by Classical styles - it was an art that was easily legible to ‘the masses’. Within the Temple of German Art, the visitors, the virtual ‘ideal’ citizens, were enticed by democratic notions of ownership and of public right to ‘their’ art. The Great German Art Exhibition provided an arena wherein the audience could form an identity of the citizenry in a national museum.
