Paul Schultze-Naumburg: Difference between revisions

[[File:Paul Schultze-Naumburg.jpg|thumb|Paul Schultze-Naumburg, 1919.]]

Schultze-Naumburg was born in Almrich (now part of [[Naumburg (Saale)|Naumburg]]) in the current federal state of [[Saxony-Anhalt]], and by 1900 was a well-known painter and architect, first emerging as a more-conservative member of the group of artists who established the [[Jugendstil]] and the Arts and Crafts workshops in Munich. His series of books the ''Kulturarbeiten'' ("Works of Culture"), nine volumes published 1900-19171900–1917, were extremely popular and established him as a major tastemaker for the German middle class. By the First World War, he had become a major proponent of traditional architecture, an originator of the "Circa 1800" movement, and an important voice in both the [[Deutscher Werkbund]] and the nationalist German architecture and landscape preservation movement. A well-known example of his architecture from this time is the [[Cecilienhof]] Palace in Potsdam, built by order of [[Wilhelm II]] for his son, crown prince [[Wilhelm, German Crown Prince|Wilhelm]] in 1914-19171914–1917.

On January 5, 1922, Paul Schultze-Naumburg married in Saaleck Margarete Karolina Berta Dörr (1896 - 19601896–1960). They were childless and divorced nastily on February 7, 1934. A couple of weeks later Margarete married the Reich Minister of the Interior [[Wilhelm Frick]].<ref>[http://www.saaleck-werkstaetten.de/archiv/personen/familie_schultze-naumburg.html „Familie Paul Schultze-Naumburg“]</ref>

In response to the defeat of the First World War and of his own marginalization in the interwar architectural discourse, Schultze-Naumburg's articles and books began to take on a far harsher and less progressive character, 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.<ref>Adam, ppp. 29-3229–32</ref> Schultze-Naumburg wrote such books as ''Die Kunst der Deutschen. Ihr Wesen und ihre Werke'' ("The Art of the Germans. Its Nature and Its Works") 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 [[Platonic idealism|ideals]] of [[classical beauty]], while racially "mixed" modern artists showed 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.<ref>Grosshans, p. 9</ref>

Along with [[Alexander von Senger]], [[Eugen Honig]], [[Konrad Nonn]], and [[German Bestelmeyer]], Schultze-Naumburg was a member of a [[Nazi Party|National Socialist]] para-governmental propaganda unit called the Kampfbund deutscher Architekten und Ingenieure (KDAI).<ref>{{cite book |last=Diefendorf |first=Jeffry M. |authorlink= |title=In the Wake of War : The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War II |url= |accessdate= |year=2000 |publisher=Oxford University Press Inc. |location=New York |isbn=0-19-507219-7 |page=51 |pages=}}</ref>

Schultze-Naumburg died in [[Jena]] in 1949. His ashes were placed in the mausoleum designed by him in 1909 for the poet [[Ernst von Wildenbruch]] in [[Historical Cemetery, Weimar|Weimar Historical Cemetery]].