Paul Schultze-Naumburg

Paul Schultze-Naumburg (June 10 1869 – May 19 1949) was a Nazi architect and one of Nazi Germany's most vocal political critics of modern architecture. Along with Alexander von Senger, Eugen Honig, Konrad Nonn, and German Bestelmeyer, Schultze-Naumburg was a member of a National Socialist para-governmental propaganda unit called the Kampfbund deutscher Architekten und Ingenieure (KDAI).

Life

Schultze-Naumburg was born in Almrich (now part of Naumburg) in Prussian Saxony, 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 Adolf Hitler's theories in which classical Greece and the Middle Ages were the true sources of Aryan art.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.

Schultze-Naumburg died in Jena in 1949.

Bibliography

• Jose-Manuel GARCÍA ROIG, "Tres arquitectos del periodo guillermino. Hermman Muthesius. Paul Schultze-Naumburg. Paul Mebes", Valladolid (Spain), 2006, ISBN 978-84-8448-370-0, Universidad de Valladolid, Spain

References

Sources

• 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