Introduction

Artworks created during the Third Reich, in both the prewar period and World War II, were produced under a variety of very different circumstances. Karl Schwesig and other artists who were interned in the French camp system worked freely, whereas those who created artworks in camps and ghettos in the East at places like Terezin Ghetto or the Kovno Ghetto made art secretly and at their peril. The larger sociopolitical, historical, economic settings, and the ideologies that supported them are equally important to consider. This Introduction identifies the influences of German Romanticism, Communism, race science and eugenics, and the proliferation of racism, including the racialization of Jewish persons, during the early 20th century. All are key to grasping who Karl Schwesig was and how he perceived the world. Unsurprisingly, anti-Communism, racism, the uses of race science, and anti-avant-garde perspectives are attributable to the Nazi Party’s worldviews and particularly their conceptualization of Jews, the disabled, and other social groups. These influences notwithstanding, Robert O. Paxton has argued that the rise of fascism’s nationalistic appeal, bereft and unchecked by both an internal intellectual consistency ¹ and bolstered by a penchant for extrajudicial violence, ² was well poised to take advantage of Weimar’s weakness. This enabled the Nazi Party to use nationalistic sentiments to bolster Germany following its World War I loss. Together, extrajudicial violence and ultra-nationalism seem to have been dangerously appealing. It is important to bear in mind, however, that long before the Nazi Party evolved, various groups across the political spectrum throughout the world had developed, nurtured, and embraced some of the ideologies that were so prominent in Nazi Germany, including nations that eventually constituted the Allied forces during World War II.