Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, explores 600 years of Germany's complex and often challenging history using objects, art, landmarks and literature.
Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, explores 600 years of Germany's complex and often challenging history using objects, art, landmarks and literature.
Neil MacGregor examines how the Nazis attacked art they viewed as 'entartet' - degenerate.
He charts how Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, led a process designed to purify all German culture, including books, music, paintings and pottery.
The programme focuses on a vase created by Grete Marks, with an evident debt to Chinese ceramics, and a loose brush-splashed glaze suggestive of modernist painting. Goebbels condemned this vase in his newspaper Der Angriff - The Attack. Grete Marks, who was Jewish and had trained at the Bauhaus, left Germany for England.
Producer Paul Kobrak.