Nazi persecution and censorship of modern art

Nazi persecution and censorship of modern art is rendered through conversations in which artists describe expulsion, racialized denunciation, the destruction and sale of their work, and the personal costs of remaining or leaving. The sequence makes censorship concrete: it reaches the artist’s body, the home left behind, and the physical fate of artworks. Its speakers answer that violence with bitter humor, but Käthe Kollwitz’s wish to mix the ashes of burned art with her paints leaves the section with an image in which destruction and artistic practice cannot be cleanly separated.

The artists under attack

The first scene is set in 1933. Ernst Barlach cracks his knuckles while the tea before him cools, and says that his hands hurt. Paul Klee, who has just been expelled from the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, nods and describes the abuse directed at him: he is being called a Siberian Jew. The exchange places institutional exclusion beside the bodily strain of making art. The persecution is not presented as an abstract dispute over taste; it is felt in an artist’s hands and enacted through expulsion from an academy.

Klee identifies Das Schwarze Korps when asked who is responsible for the denunciation. He also reports that books containing images of the artists’ work are being burned, and that he is called a Slavic lunatic. Barlach’s reply that the slurs are correct “about both of us” is darkly comic, not an endorsement of the labels. The joke exposes their absurdity by accepting them with a deadpan literalness, while the surrounding facts make the threat behind the language unmistakable. The artists’ conversation refuses the persecutors’ power to define them without pretending that mockery can stop the persecution.

Expulsion, exile, and the choice to remain

A later exchange shifts attention from Klee’s departure to Käthe Kollwitz’s decision not to leave home. She tells Klee that he was fortunate to leave when he did, but that she could not bring herself to abandon her own home. The contrast does not turn staying or leaving into a simple measure of courage: it records two different responses to danger, each bound to what the artist could bear to relinquish. Kollwitz’s attachment to home makes persecution intimate, reaching beyond public institutions and artworks to the place where a life is rooted.

The conversation also widens from the persecution of particular artists to the regime’s hostility toward bodies in art. Kollwitz objects to the prudishness and hostility to sexuality she associates with powerful men, and connects that hostility to the treatment of the “nymphettes” of Mueller as well as the work of Ernst Kirchner. Her remarks frame censorship as more than the removal of one style or one group of images: in the artists’ account, it polices what may be represented, including sexuality and the body. The passage presents this as the artists’ own pointed diagnosis, articulated through argument and satire rather than through a detached account of policy.

Confiscation and the fate of the work

Kollwitz names a Commission on the Value of Confiscated Works of Degenerate Art and describes what it does: works are sold to foreigners, sold for almost nothing, or burned. That sequence matters. The state’s treatment of the art is not limited to public denunciation or the closing of institutional doors; it converts seized works into disposable or saleable property, while destroying those that are not sold. The title of the commission gives this process an official, administrative face, set against the blunt outcome Kollwitz describes.

Her response is to imagine the ashes of the bonfire mixing with her paints. When Klee calls the idea lovely, she asks the reader to imagine the smell of the ashes, and he agrees. The exchange makes an image of material destruction linger as a sensory and artistic problem. The ashes are at once what remains after the work has been burned and a substance Kollwitz would bring into her own practice. The text does not claim that this transformation can undo confiscation or restore the lost works; its force lies in the refusal to let destruction become a clean, finished act. The scene ends not with recovery, but with the artists imagining how the residue of censorship might enter art.

The passage within the novel

These scenes are presented through dramatic conversation rather than through a continuous historical exposition. Their clipped questions, jokes, and shifts in subject give the artists room to name the mechanisms of persecution themselves: expulsion, racialized insult, book burning, confiscation, sale, and the decision to stay or leave. The conversational form also sustains an uneasy tonal contrast. Barlach and Klee joke about the insults, and Kollwitz punctures the solemnity of official power with a deliberately irreverent attack on its hostility to the body; yet the burned books and lost works remain material consequences, not merely subjects for wit.

The novel’s wider concern with artistic classification provides a further, distinct context for this episode. Thelonious Ellison describes how reviewers and editors question whether his formally ambitious fiction represents African American experience, while a bookstore places his books in an African American Studies section rather than with literature. In another passage, he reflects that refusing to write as racial testimony can itself leave him marginalized and pressured to wear an expected mask. These episodes do not equate the censorship of modern art with the treatment of his own writing. Instead, they create a structural parallel: in each case, institutions and audiences attempt to sort art according to prior ideas about what it should represent. The conversation among Barlach, Klee, and Kollwitz gives that larger concern a historical and material counterpoint, where classification is joined to expulsion, seizure, and destruction.