Why am I passionate about this?

I am a professor of English and Visual Culture at St. John’s University in New York. My research in recent years has focused on reexamining the fate of modernist art in Hitler’s Germany. I have chosen five books that have shaped our understanding of Nazi art and have new resonance with the present resurgence of fascism and authoritarian governments around the world.


I wrote

Nostalgia for the Future: Modernism and Heterogeneity in the Visual Arts of Nazi Germany

By Gregory Maertz,

Book cover of Nostalgia for the Future: Modernism and Heterogeneity in the Visual Arts of Nazi Germany

What is my book about?

Based on previously unpublished sources and including more than 75 reproductions of paintings and sculptures not seen since the collapse…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany

Gregory Maertz Why did I love this book?

Painstakingly researched and written with a novelist’s eye for telling details and colorful personalities, Petropoulos’s book is an early (2000), ambitious attempt to bring to life the most influential and, because of their collaboration with the Hitler regime, controversial figures in German art under National Socialism—the directors of museums, art dealers, art journalists, art historians, and artists. 

By Jonathan Petropoulos,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Faustian Bargain as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Nazi art looting has been the subject of enormous international attention in recent years, and the topic of two history bestsellers, Hector Feliciano's The Lost Museum and Lynn Nicholas's The Rape of Europa. But such books leave us wondering: What made thoughtful, educated, artistic men and women decide to put their talents in the service of a brutal and inhuman regime? This question is the starting point for The Faustian Bargain, Jonathan
Petropoulos's study of the key figures in the art world of Nazi Germany.
Petropoulos follows the careers of these prominent individuals who like Faust, that German archetype, chose…


Book cover of Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts

Gregory Maertz Why did I love this book?

This is one of the most influential studies of cultural politics in Nazi Germany which takes as its focus the bureaucracy Joseph Goebbels charged with integrating pre-National Socialist artists and their organizations into the new cultural and political order. Noteworthy, of course, throughout Steinweis’s masterpiece of institutional reconstruction, is the revelation that National Socialist aesthetic preferences were not novel but represented the appropriation of the prevailing conservative taste dominant in the late Weimar Republic.

By Alan E. Steinweis,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From 1933 to 1945, the Reich Chamber of Culture exercised a profound influence over hundreds of thousands of German artists and entertainers. Alan Steinweis focuses on the fields of music, theatre and the visual arts in this study of Nazi cultural administration, examining a complex pattern of interaction among leading Nazi figures, German cultural functionaries, ordinary artists, and consumers of culture. Steinweis gives special attention to Nazi efforts to purge the arts of Jews and other so-called undesirables.


Book cover of The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany

Gregory Maertz Why did I love this book?

A superb English translation has transformed Michaud’s Un Art de L’Éternité into a classic study of the ultimate purpose of Nazi aesthetics: to convert depictions of present reality in Hitler’s Germany into enduring images of National Socialism’s aspiration to generate aesthetic values that would last an eternity. In addition, Michaud argues persuasively how art was central to Nazi ideology.

By Eric Michaud, Janet Lloyd (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany presents a new interpretation of National Socialism, arguing that art in the Third Reich was not simply an instrument of the regime, but actually became a source of the racist politics upon which its ideology was founded. Through the myth of the "Aryan race," a race pronounced superior because it alone creates culture, Nazism asserted art as the sole raison d'etre of a regime defined by Hitler as the "dictatorship of genius." Michaud shows the important link between the religious nature of Nazi art and the political movement, revealing that in Nazi Germany…


Book cover of Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich

Gregory Maertz Why did I love this book?

Another highly original study—of the confluence of politics, technology, and culture in Nazi Germany as a holdover from tendencies already present in the Weimar Republic. Herf’s striking and influential phrase, “reactionary modernism,” encapsulates the seeming paradox of a future-oriented and technologically advanced regime that nonetheless adopted a seemingly archaic symbolic vernacular. 

By Jeffrey Herf,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Reactionary Modernism as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In a unique application of critical theory to the study of the role of ideology in politics, Jeffrey Herf explores the paradox inherent in the German fascists' rejection of the rationalism of the Enlightenment while fully embracing modern technology. He documents evidence of a cultural tradition he calls 'reactionary modernism' found in the writings of German engineers and of the major intellectuals of the. Weimar right: Ernst Juenger, Oswald Spengler, Werner Sombart, Hans Freyer, Carl Schmitt, and Martin Heidegger. The book shows how German nationalism and later National Socialism created what Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, called the 'steel-like romanticism…


Book cover of Totalitarian Art: In the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People's Republic of China

Gregory Maertz Why did I love this book?

Rich in illustrations, ambitious in scope, and still relevant despite having been written in the pre-perestroika Soviet Union, Golomstock makes his four-way comparison accessible and convincing by insisting that “totalitarian art,” a distinct genre with its own aesthetics and style, organization, and ideology, emerged with the rise of the four regimes indicated in the title of his book. 

By Igor Golomstock, Robert Chandler (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Totalitarian Art as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In the Soviet Union, and later in Maoist China, theories of mass artistic appeal were used to promote the Revolution both at home and abroad. In Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy they asserted the putative grandeur of the epoch. All too often, art that served the Revolution became "total realism," and always it became a slave to the state and the cult of personality, and ultimately one more weapon in the arsenal of oppression. Igor Golomstock gives a detailed appraisal of the forms that define totalitarian art and illustrates his text with more than two hundred examples of its paintings,…


Explore my book 😀

Nostalgia for the Future: Modernism and Heterogeneity in the Visual Arts of Nazi Germany

By Gregory Maertz,

Book cover of Nostalgia for the Future: Modernism and Heterogeneity in the Visual Arts of Nazi Germany

What is my book about?

Based on previously unpublished sources and including more than 75 reproductions of paintings and sculptures not seen since the collapse of Nazi Germany, this book unearths the survival and repurposing of recognizable modernist styles in German art produced under the patronage of the Nazi Party and German government institutions—both before and after the infamous 1937 purge of “degenerate art” from state museums.  According to previous studies of Nazi art, this was not supposed to have happened!

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Book cover of Secret St. Augustine: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure

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