Paul Schultze-Naumburg
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Paul Schultze-Naumburg (June 10, 1869–May 19, 1949) was one of Adolf Hitler's architects and one of its most vocal political critics of modern architecture. Schultze-Naumburg with German architects Alexander von Senger, Eugen Honig, Konrad Nonn, and German Bestelmeyer were members of a National Socialist para-governmental propaganda unit called the Kampfbund deutscher Architekten und Ingenieure (KDAI).
Schultze-Naumburg was born in Almrich, Sachsen and by the early 20th century was a well-known painter and architect. Beginning before World War I he wrote articles and books condemning modern art and architecture in racial terms, thereby providing much of the basis for Hitler's theories in which classical Greece and the Middle Ages were the true sources of Aryan art.[1]Schultze-Naumburg wrote such books as Die Kunst der Deutschen. Ihr Wesen und ihre Werke (The art of the Germans. Their nature and their factories) and Kunst und Rasse (Art and Race), the latter published in 1928, in which he argued that only "racially pure" artists could produce a healthy art which upheld timeless ideals of classical beauty, while racially "mixed" modern artists evidenced their inferiority and corruption by producing distorted artwork. As evidence of this, he reproduced examples of modern art next to photographs of people with deformities and diseases, graphically reinforcing the idea of modernism as a sickness.[2]
He died in Jena in 1949.
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- Adam, Peter. Art of the Third Reich (1992). New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.. ISBN 0-8109-1912-5
- Barron, Stephanie, ed. 'Degenerate Art:' The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (1991). New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.. ISBN 0-8109-3653-4
- Grosshans, Henry. Hitler and the Artists (1983). New York: Holmes & Meyer. ISBN 0-8419-0746-3
