Simona Risi, “Hitler’s Big Fear – The Trial of Degenerate Art” (2026)
Centred on a major exhibition of 20th-century German art held by the Musée National Picasso-Paris in early 2025, with a focus on art deemed by the Nazi German government to be “degenerate” and exhibited as such across Germany in 1937, this documentary investigates the Nazi repression of art – in particular, painting, literature, music and architecture – through various archival images, censored, works, interviews with art historians and curators, psychoanalysts, sociologists and architects, and explorations of the lives of individual artists whose work was either censored or banned outright and/or whose careers (and even lives) were cut short by Nazi oppression. By examining what the Nazis considered “degenerate” art, the documentary calls attention to aspects and qualities of artistic endeavour and creativity that clashed with or threatened Nazi ideology and control: aspects such as the role of art in society, what messages it should or should not disseminate, whether art should only exalt what society’s elites deem appropriate or portray social conditions and people with all their faults and differences, and the place of art in society itself, as a forum to express individual freedom and creativity, to challenge conventional ways of thought and action, and ultimately to highlight hypocrisy, falsehoods and control of people’s hearts and minds.
Seeing this documentary in the cinema, I did initially find Italian actress Iaia Forte’s voiceover narration rather loud and hurried, but I appreciate that her narration is necessary to guide viewers as the documentary covers much ground across different art forms, focusing on particular individuals associated with those art forms, and even touching a little on the historical context behind Nazi resentment and persecution of artistic life and culture in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s. We are treated to a snapshot of what cultural life in Berlin was like during the wild Weimar years (the 1920s) and the remarkable artistic movements, such as the Bauhaus movement in arts and crafts design and architecture, and the rise of German Expressionism, associated with this period. At the same time, the film calls attention to the art the Nazis produced, and the values associated with that art – values based on militarism and racial hygiene that exalted perfection in human bodies, and which pigeon-holed women into roles of childbearing and rearing in marriage. Art that critiqued modern life and the intrusion of technology into people’s lives, and which drew attention to society and governments’ treatment of marginalised people such as people with disabilities, was declared “degenerate”.
The Nazis’ treatment of dissident artists like Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, whose Expressionist paintings of mentally ill people were condemned as “degenerate”, makes for horrific viewing and hearing: the artist herself was admitted to a mental asylum in the early 1930s and was forced to undergo sterilisation in 1935. Committed to a psychiatric institution in Prina near Dresden, Lohse-Wächtler was later killed in 1940 as part of the Aktion T4 euthanasia program which targeted mentally ill people and those with mental and physical disabilities. Another artist who fell victim to Nazi repression, and whose work was part of the 1937 “degenerate” art exhibition, was painter / sculptor Otto Freundlich who was deported to the Majdanek concentration camp – the film says he went to Sobibor – where he was gassed to death.
There is much information to absorb in this 100-minute documentary which is fairly brisk in pace and rarely lingers long over particular images. Director Risi makes much use of old archival film and photographic material from the 1930s – this means having to look at images of Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels and other unlovely Nazi politicians, and hearing them speak as well – and viewers will be fully immersed in the message the documentary conveys about the importance of art and artistic freedom in modern societies, and the extent to which Nazi Germany tried to smother artistic freedom and to control the production and consumption of art.
In an age in which Western governments are increasingly censoring artistic expression, not only by repressing its production but by denying public access to forms of art deemed unacceptable or unpatriotic, or denying funding to artists and art institutions, this documentary needs to be seen and heard by everyone.