'Hitler's Favorite Sculptor' Is Back, Hitting Raw Nerve
First there was a debate over two Breker statues that stand near the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, where the World Cup final was held earlier this month. A few critics argued, without success, that they should have been removed, or covered up, to avoid offending visitors. Now, this out-of-the-way town in northeastern Germany is mounting the first publicly financed exhibit since World War II devoted to the works of Mr. Breker, who died in 1991 at the age of 90.
Though regarded as one of this country's more important 20th century artists, Mr. Breker dwelt in the shadows in postwar Germany, never able to wash away the taint of his association with the Third Reich.
The decision to show his work, at long last, has kicked up a summer squall here. Critics contend that Mr. Breker should have been left in the shadows -- especially since this is a delicate time in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, the eastern German state of which Schwerin is the capital. Two months before elections, the state has been trying to tamp down a spurt of far-right and neo-Nazi political activity.
''It is wrong to recognize an artist who created the physical images of Nazi ideology,'' said Klaus Staeck, the president of the Berlin Academy of the Arts. ''He was not only a protege of Hitler's, but a profiteer.''
Mr. Staeck, a graphic artist, pulled out of a planned exhibit of his own work here next year in protest. ''When you break a taboo, you've got to have good reasons,'' he said. ''I don't see their reasons.''
Cultural officials here counter that six decades after the end of the war, Germans are more than ready for a discussion of how a gifted artist accommodated, and was co-opted, by the Nazi government. Mr. Breker's moral corruption, they said, is precisely what makes him worth studying.
That view has won some weighty support in intellectual circles: Gunter Grass, the Nobel laureate, spoke out in favor of the exhibit, saying it could help answer the nagging question of how talented artists and thinkers could accept such a government. While Leni Riefenstahl, the filmmaker who won renown for her Nazi epics, managed to keep herself in the spotlight, Mr. Breker's story had all but been largely forgotten, particularly in the former East Germany.
''The debate over whether Mr. Breker was a great artist or a terrible artist is not so important to us,'' said Hermann Junghans, a deputy mayor of Schwerin who oversees cultural affairs and pushed for the show. ''What is important is to show the interaction of art and ideology.''
The exhibit, which opened Friday, dutifully details Mr. Breker's cozy ties with Albert Speer, Hitler's architectural muse, and with Hitler himself, who chose the young sculptor to give him a guided tour of the treasures of Paris in June 1940, shortly after the Germans had subjugated France.
Among the 70 figures on display are outsized, muscular Aryan men, striking heroic poses, like those Mr. Breker designed to guard the entrance of Hitler's Reich Chancellery. There are also smaller, more expressionist figures from his work during the Weimar Republic.
Despite being discredited as a public figure in Germany, Mr. Breker maintained a thriving commercial career after the war, and the exhibit includes busts of Salvador Dali, Anwar el-Sadat, Konrad Adenauer, West Germany's first postwar chancellor, and Jean Cocteau, the French filmmaker and novelist, who was a loyal friend.
That friendship is what originally drew the interest of the exhibit's curator, Rudolf Conrades. A soft-spoken fellow with fly-away white hair, Mr. Conrades prefers to view his subject as an ''extraordinarily complex figure.''
Mr. Breker, he noted, interceded with the Nazi authorities to save the life of a jailed German publisher, Heinrich Peter Suhrkamp. The catalog for the exhibit devotes a chapter to Mr. Breker's supposed efforts on behalf of other politically vulnerable figures, like the French actor Jean Marais.
Ninety percent of Mr. Breker's lifetime output was destroyed in wartime bombing, which has made this exhibit wholly dependent on loans from the artist's widow, Charlotte. That disturbs some critics, who say that Schwerin is merely helping to take some of the tarnish off Mr. Breker's reputation.
People who turned up on opening day, however, did not view it as an exercise in revisionism. Part of that may have to do with the exhibit's installation in Schwerin's cultural center, a half-timbered building known as Schleswig-Holstein Haus. The low ceilings of the galleries seem to bear down on the statues, depriving them of chances for glorification.
''I think they're doing something courageous,'' said Ingeburg Schwibbe, an art historian visiting from Berlin.
Still, Ms. Schwibbe said she saw a danger that the works could be exploited to promote neo-Nazi ideas. ''That's why they have to be presented in the proper historical context,'' she said.
Staging the exhibit here, rather than in, say, Berlin or Munich, adds to the fears of some critics. Mecklenburg-West Pomerania has become a fertile ground for right-wing political groups. Nearly one person in five is out of work, the highest unemployment rate of any German state.
Far-right parties are well organized, and a recent poll indicated that they could win more than 5 percent of the vote in elections in September, entitling them to seats in the state Parliament.
''The question is, how will this exhibit affect, or frame, the debate in Mecklenburg over the next few weeks?'' said Hajo Funke, a political scientist at the Free University of Berlin. ''Merely presenting the work might lead to a more refined view of Breker's racist Nazi images.''
Mr. Junghans said he expected far-right groups to distribute pamphlets outside the exhibit. The police and intelligence officers will be on hand to make sure it is not disrupted, though they will not stop people from entering.
''Ninety-five percent of the visitors will be good democrats, and the other 5 percent will not be very happy with how we present Breker,'' he said. ''But we didn't do it for this 5 percent.''