Imagine a storeroom of history.
What would you find there,
away from the eyes of the world?
Monuments to passing regimes
which have no place now but cannot be thrown away?
And if it was German history of the last century,
wouldn't that be a dark place?
This warehouse on the edge of Berlin is the artistic guilty conscience
of a nation which has functioned under
two opposing totalitarian regimes,
both of which ruled with violence and terror.
There are objects here which are almost toxic by association.
There are relics of a whole country that vanished -
the German Democratic Republic,
short-lived socialist sidekick to Stalinist Russia.
There are fibreglass monuments to a dead ideal of German nationhood.
But I'm looking for something more substantial.
It's a massive bronze cast of a figure by a sculptor
called Arno Breker.
This sculpture was created in 1938.
It was one of two monumental figures that guarded the entrance
to the Chancellery of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler's front door.
It's a personification of the Wehrmacht,
the Nazi military machine that was about to lay waste to Europe.
It's a chilling work of art.
It feels almost radioactive, as if it's still emitting
the evil energies of an evil regime.
No wonder people don't want to look at it any more.
Hitler himself was an artist,
a man obsessed by painting, sculpture and architecture.
Now, what he did to art and with art
might have been horrific, but unless you confront it,
you can't possibly understand
the story of German art in the 20th century.
From 1919 to 1933, Germany was a democracy.
Politically, it was a basket case, still reeling from the humiliations
of the First World War.
But that didn't stop the music.
This is Clarchens Ballhaus, and with its peeling walls
and its blistered mirrors,
it's a wonderful relic.
It's one of the very few surviving cabaret venues
from what was once known
as the Weimar Republic.
It was a divided society, unhinged by the bitterness of defeat.
There was fighting in the streets, but also an air
of sexual and artistic experimentation,
played out in the nightclubs and brothels of vibrant, modern Berlin.
But behind the masquerade, modern art movements with names
like Dada and New Objectivity
could cut their teeth on an awful reality.
Post-war Germany, the Germany of the Weimar Republic, was full of broken,
dismembered, injured bodies.
Journalists of the time described seeing, on every street corner,
men without legs wheeling themselves along,
and Otto Dix took that image and turned it into
his most potent symbol for what he regarded as a broken society.
This picture is called Skat Players,
and it shows us three war veterans, who've somehow managed
to survive the most horrific injuries, playing cards.
It's an incredibly powerful image.
It's one in which Dix has taken
all the elements of modern art - collage,
cubistic fracturing of form,
introduction of unusual textiles -
and yet he's pushed all of those things together,
he's, so to speak, put them all in the Dix liquidiser and come up with
an image designed actually to rub your face in the gruesome reality
of these people's lives.
He's only got one arm, so he's using
his only good leg to hold the cards in.
This character's got no arms,
so he has to hold his cards in his teeth.
This figure has been fitted by Dix
with an obscene prosthesis,
a false jaw, and Dix has signed this prosthesis, saying,
"Only valid with a portrait of the creator,"
and there's his self-portrait.
Now, George Grosz was, with Dix, the other great anatomiser
of the Weimar Republic, and this is his Grey Day.
It was painted a year after Skat Players,
and it offers us a rather more melancholic vision of a Germany
that desperately needs to be rebuilt.
Is it going to be rebuilt? Hm, can't be sure.
Here's the civil servant, the cross-eyed,
ineffective civil servant, somehow engaged in architectural practice.
He's got a set square under his arm.
He's obviously an extremely right-wing chap.
He's got the scars on his face
of the old Prussian fencing fraternities.
I don't think we can be too confident that he's going to do much
about the plight of Germany.
This miserable soldier paces that way.
The faceless worker paces that way.
The factory smoke steams as the industrialist schemes.
It's a very bleak image of Weimar society.
But here, suddenly, we're in 1926.
He called this painting The Pillars Of Society,
and it's really a vision of hell. It makes me think of
medieval German art, of the Isenheim Altarpiece,
except this is a hell on Earth.
This isn't some hell that you fantasise about,
it's actually taking place in the here and now.
Society is ruled by four different types of pig.
Political pig,
with his red nose.
Literally, he's got shit for brains,
a steaming turd emerges from his cranium.
Lawyer pig, representative of the justice system.
He's got his scars.
He's got a swastika, too.
He's a member of this new, rather unpleasant political party.
And we know what they're going to do.
Journalist pig, media scum incarnate.
Chamber pot on his head, he's marinated in his own ordure.
Here are his weapons, newspapers,
the pencil, just as mighty as the sword.
And the whole scene presided over
by the fattest, nastiest pig of all, priest pig, who, under the guise of
encouraging religion, is bringing war into society.
The building is burning.
George Grosz looks into the future
and it's not a pretty sight.
500 miles away from Berlin and its artistic avant garde,
in the conservative heartlands of southern Germany,
a very different view prevailed. Munich was the power base
of a watercolourist-turned-politician
from Austria, called Adolf Hitler.
This is where he developed his ideas.
And it's often overlooked that the whole Nazi movement began
with a hatred of modern art.
As a young man, Hitler was fascinated by painting
and by architecture.
These are some of his pictures.
They're remarkably unremarkable.
Hitler was deeply conservative in matters of taste
and utterly horrified by the art of the modern age.
In 1923, Hitler staged an unsuccessful putsch
against the local socialists and was nearly shot on this very spot.
He escaped unscathed and was sent to jail.
So you could say that this is where it all began.
Because in prison, he wrote what was both a blueprint for a new Germany
and a devastating work of cultural criticism.
It was called Mein Kampf.
In it, Hitler developed a deeply paranoid theory.
Modern art, he argued, was a moral plague, sent by Russian communists,
using Jewish art dealers to infect Germany with cubism and other forms
of Bolshevist visual madness.
Modernism may have been a nightmare to the Nazis, but to others,
it held out the promise of a dream.
The Bauhaus school of art and design
took modern style to a radical, utopian extreme.
These are the houses that the founders of the Bauhaus
built for themselves when they moved here to Dessau from Weimar.
They lived side by side, their gardens not even separated by fences
and not only is this a very beautiful place,
it's also one of THE sacred groves of the whole modern movement.
Somewhere where you could really sense that spirit of idealism
that pulses through every line
of Walter Gropius's first Bauhaus manifesto.
"The new structure of the future
"which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity"
was the ambition, according to Gropius.
The Bauhaus at Dessau, with its white, stucco walls,
clean lines and acres of glass
has been described as "the crucible of modernism".
But this time, it was beginning to produce the industrial designs
for which it would become famous.
Its accommodation block seemed to embody the community spirit.
It was said that to call a friend,
all you had to do was step out on your balcony and whistle.
For its students, it was a rather eccentrically-brilliant
modern art school.
At the heart of the Bauhaus was this simple staircase,
where students and teachers would meet and pass one another every day.
As far as they were concerned,
they weren't just part of the school of art and design.
They were ascending, step by step, towards a brighter, better future.
But to their right-wing critics,
Bauhaus was Hitler's Jewish threat incarnate,
the home of schizoid scribblings and experiments in embarrassment.
Oskar Schlemmer, a tutor here, painted this cubist-inspired version
of the Bauhaus staircase in 1932.
But by then, the dream was over.
The Bauhaus, with its grids and cubes and hard edges,
was too modern for its own good.
The Nazis moved in, smashing windows and hurling sketches
and artists' tools
into the street below.
The school was closed on 30th September 1932.
The great Nazi programme of art destruction
planned in Mein Kampf had begun.
Nothing was safe from the wrecking ball
that was laying waste to modern culture.
Not even the new and apparently objective medium of photography.
A photographer called August Sander set out to make a systematic record
of the German people.
In the city of Cologne and the countryside around,
he began a quest to record,
describe and document a certain kind of truth.
Little did he know then that he would end up recording a nation
tearing itself apart.
August Sander asked himself a question - "Wer sind die Deutschen?"
"Who are the Germans?" And he would spend his whole life
looking for the answer through his lens.
Sander's subjects meet the camera's gaze directly,
often posing for up to seven seconds.
Something happens in that space of time,
a very particular capturing of humanity.
Sander was nothing if not methodical.
He arranged his portraits according to his subjects' station in life,
their work, their metier.
The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker.
He was interested in types,
categories, but what shines through in every portrait is individuality.
Wow. This is all Sander?
Yeah, this is where we store the negatives.
Is this all the German people?
All the German people are sitting here in these boxes!
Yeah, this is all August Sander.
This is a pastry chef. A pastry chef.
So this is a pastry chef, and what else do we have?
I always think he's like the king of his domain.
Totally, he believes what he does.
He really does.
And what do we have here?
The Young Farmers.
They're so beautiful.
That's such a wonderful picture.
That's one of the classic 20th-century photographs.
This is where August Sander was famous.
What do you think was the driving ambition
behind this extraordinary project?
He wanted to have a mosaic.
A mosaic, I like that phrase. That's a nice phrase.
He wanted to show that there were different forces,
different energies also, in society.
Society is complex.
Yeah, that all the society parts are living side by side and that there is
something coming together, which of course, was also quite explosive.
Almost inevitably, Sander's composite portrait of
the German people ran counter to the racial policies of the Nazis.
His first published work, Face Of Our Time, was confiscated,
the printer's plates destroyed.
The problem was, he was just too inclusive.
Everybody had a place in his society, everyone was an individual.
He added a category called The Last People. The disabled.
The blind.
The elderly.
It seems to me that part of the tragic power of these images is that
this is the image of a society that they systematically set out to purge
anybody who was deemed not to be,
as it were, fit breeding material for the Aryan race of heroes.
This really is a lost world.
Photography always is, but this has a particular poignancy.
Yeah, this is the melancholy dimension of this work.
After his brush with the Nazi authorities,
Sander turned more and more to work in the landscape.
In 1934, his son was sentenced to ten years in prison
for circulating communist literature.
He died there, a few days before his release date,
when he was refused medical attention for a burst appendix.
But even in the countryside, Sander couldn't escape the march of Nazism.
A new element in the landscape was brutally evident.
The Fuhrer-Strasse,
the autobahn.
The autobahns had tremendous propaganda value to the Nazis.
These monumental construction projects seemed to solve
the unemployment problems of the early '30s,
and symbolised the nation-building ambitions of the 1,000-Year Reich.
Hitler took a personal interest,
emphasising the visionary and utopian elements of the new roads.
A way of promoting the German landscape for the German people.
We think of roads as desecrating nature, but to Hitler,
the political artist, every autobahn was a vivid line drawn on the land,
and designed to connect the German Volk to their land.
Nazi propaganda encouraged ordinary Germans everywhere
to take to their cars and travel into nature.
The routes the roads took were specifically designed to offer
the most beautiful views of mountain and forest.
There were picnic spots everywhere.
This was Hitler cleverly playing to the deeply ingrained
German love of nature.
Nazified, automotive romanticism.
The idea that art can take many forms
and can reach into every corner of life
was deeply rooted in Germany...
going back to Wagner's ideas about opera as total spectacle.
Hitler made politics into his own kind of opera.
A master of mass persuasion,
he carefully choreographed the party's rallies,
even deploying the Luftwaffe's entire battery of searchlights.
As playwright Bertolt Brecht said, Hitler's virtuoso use of lighting
was matched only by his virtuoso use of the truncheon.
At home, good Nazis didn't want Bauhaus,
but they did want this doll's house.
Lovingly crafted by an anonymous party member,
it's Hitler's Heimat in miniature.
The doll's house was made for a Catholic family,
to judge by the Madonna in the bedroom.
In the living room, there's the obligatory picture of the Fuhrer.
And in the kitchen, something we may find even more sinister...
wallpaper showing the Hitler Youth in action.
And at the heart of the home,
the greatest propaganda instrument of all - the radio.
'Die Augen der ganzen Welt sind auf Berlin gerichtet,
'wo in wenigen Tagen,
'die elften Olympischen Spielen feierlich eroffnet werden'.
In 1936, there was only one story,
and it was broadcast around the world.
The Olympics were a perfect opportunity for Hitler
to demonstrate the efficiency of Nazi Germany.
For two weeks in August, the Nazi dictatorship
hid its anti-Semitic agenda from the world,
and conjured up the spirit of Ancient Greece.
Hitler had a personal aesthetic attachment to the Games.
He was fascinated by the athletic ideal,
especially as expressed in sculpture.
"Mens sana in corpore sano", as the Romans said -
a healthy mind and a healthy body.
But that was a dangerous idea in Nazi Germany,
where to be unhealthy could be a death sentence.
It should come as no surprise that the first public building
commissioned under an art-obsessed Fuhrer was an art gallery.
Haus der Kunst in Munich.
And it was in the stripped-down classical style
that would become the trademark of the fascist regime.
It was begun by Paul Ludwig Troost in 1933.
When finished in 1937, its regular columns earned it the nickname
"The Sausage Stand".
Hitler called it the first beautiful building of the new Reich.
But nowadays, it's not quite so cherished,
masked by trees.
So I get the feeling
that a building that was meant to be very, very, very public,
now feels rather hidden away?
It is, absolutely, because in the beginning of the '50s,
we had a so-called "period of normalisation",
which is, as you can see, surrounding it with greens.
And we call it our pubic hair!
We have many trees in front of it, and many trees in the back.
So this great sort of phallic Nazi thing has to be...
It has to be this great ocean liner, so to speak, because the architect,
Troost, was an architect engineer.
And he never, never really did many buildings.
He made a small villa which was admired by Hitler because Hitler,
we always forgot that, first wanted to become an architect.
Troost died before the building was finished.
Some detect the hand of Hitler himself in its final form.
He was certainly the puppet master.
The building was designed to house a great annual exhibition
of contemporary art, the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung.
It was, in effect, the climactic gesture of the Nazis' art war,
which would present officially approved art in triumph
over decadent modernism.
'Chris Durcan has discovered that, after all these years,
'the building's basement still contains some unpleasant secrets.'
These are paintings shown in the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung,
and here is the idea of the Holy Family.
And these kind of scenes...
Can we uncover it?
Of course we can do that.
This is actually a drawing, a sketch for the parade, in 1937.
I'm just fascinated by this picture.
I know that Hitler took religious iconography and played with it,
and used it.
You have to imagine that Hitler was active in
co-creating this exhibition,
taking out things which he didn't find were fitting his vision of
the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung. So he's going around the show...
Yes, with Goering and other people and saying, "This is a good one."
He wouldn't say, "This is a good one," it's there.
But he would take out the bad ones.
With a hanging committee, including Gerdy Troost, the architect's widow,
the whole thing was rather like the Royal Academy summer show,
with more than 15,000 submissions.
Here you see a slightly...
pornographic image. The Wehrmacht
got to take - and this was very popular -
they got to take some of these postcards with them to Russia.
So Hitler's army was actually supplied with Nazi-approved art?
Yeah. To keep it in good spirits.
This is sort of Aryan soft porn?
Exactly. To keep the troops happy. Wow!
Despite his obsession with art,
Hitler could be bizarrely blind to its nuances.
Adolf Wissel's Kahlenberger Farm Family depicts
state-approved subject matter, with its cast of fair-skinned Aryans.
It passed Hitler's selection process,
but I think there was rather more to it than met his eye.
On the surface, all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
Yet I can't help feeling there's something sour,
something wrong about this idyll.
Look at the figures' eyes.
None of them is meeting any of the others' gazes.
They seem lost to each other, lost in themselves.
And they all seem deeply melancholic.
The man and his wife both seem sunk in deep, sad inner thoughts.
Look at the children - the little boy gazing out here.
And this little girl, the pig-tailed girl.
She seems absolutely full of a kind of deep...
puzzling, enigmatic melancholy.
And I wonder about this figure, the doll.
This prone...
figure with sightless eyes,
almost like a surrogate corpse placed in the corner of the picture.
Now I don't think it's possible
to plant that much unease in a painting by accident.
I think Wissel meant this picture to say these rather disquieting things.
And it's very telling that Hitler,
who prided himself on having such a good eye,
he actually bought this picture. In other words,
he didn't get it. He couldn't see it.
Because, of course,
he had absolutely no sense of human empathy.
So the emotions of unhappiness and melancholy
that radiate from this picture, he was just oblivious to them.
So I think Wissel accomplished something rather remarkable.
He smuggled this Trojan horse of a painting
right into the Nazi citadel.
Hitler may not have known exactly what he wanted when it came
to painting, but he certainly knew what he didn't like.
Just a stone's throw from the Haus der Kunst,
in the very week that it opened,
the Nazis staged one of the most remarkable art shows of all time.
The evil twin of the Great German Art Exhibition.
It was called Entartete Kunst - Degenerate Art.
The show was put together in under two weeks, but contained
a massive haul of significant modern art from all over Germany.
In the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin,
there's a doll's house version
of some of the rooms from the exhibition.
You've got an assembly of works of modern art, which are held by
the Nazis to be unpatriotic.
We've got a Beckmann allegory in which one of his strange,
harpy-like female creatures seems to be tempting a soldier who digs his
phallic bayonet into her back.
You've got one of Otto Dix's harrowing depictions of war cripples
with their prosthetic faces.
You've got Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's self-portrait
with an amputated hand.
In fact, just about all the pre-war German artists
we now think of as great were included in
what must have been an extraordinary exhibition.
But what an extraordinary thing for Hitler to have done.
Stalin would never have done it.
His approach to artists, dissident
intellectuals, was simply to disappear them quietly in the night.
But Hitler wanted to make a public exhibition of the modernist enemy.
He called this "mein Schrekenskammer" -
"my chamber of horrors".
The exhibition pandered to lowest-common-denominator outrage.
A lot of the exhibits were accompanied by inscriptions saying,
"Guess how much money the art museum of Linz paid for this work of art?"
"Yes, 1,000 deutschmarks of your money."
And people were outraged and they were amused, and they laughed along
with the Nazi carnival version of modern art.
But some people could see exactly where this was leading, and in 1937,
that early, a Jewish intellectual, a Jewish writer called Ernst Bloch,
visited the exhibition, he went round,
he was horrified, but he understood
what this rounding up of degenerates,
Jews, dissidents,
what it portended. He said,
"This is a concentration camp
"for people to look at."
In 1939, Hitler plunged Europe into war.
His blitzkreig cut through French defences, and by 1940,
Paris itself was occupied.
It set the scene for what was perhaps the single happiest day
of Hitler's life.
He visited Paris, he toured the sites.
"He seemed to know every stone," said his companions.
And who were they?
His favourite sculptor, Arnaud Brecker
and his architect, Albert Speer.
Of all the arts employed in the seduction of the German people,
Hitler reserved a special affection for architecture.
He called it "the word in stone".
In 1940, he said, "Military battles are eventually forgotten.
"Our buildings, however, will stand."
Even at the height of the war, he diverted money, materials and effort
to his rebuilding of Berlin as Germania, capital of the new Europe.
Its centrepiece was a huge
meeting space under a dome 16 times larger than the dome of St Peter's.
A space for 150,000 to gather, to listen to and worship the Fuhrer.
It is still shocking to see the scale of a single human figure.
Towards the end of the war, as Allied bombs reached
deeper into Germany, Hitler remarked that the destruction
of Berlin would only make his rebuilding of the city easier.
His greatest pet project of all was for his home city of Linz
in Austria to become a city of culture.
He stared at this model for hours,
and was very precise about his requirements.
"In the tower I want a Carion to play,
"not every day but on special days,
"the theme from Bruchner's Fourth, The Romantic Symphony."
On 8 February, 1945, the architectural model of Linz was
brought down into Hitler's bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery.
His personal valet, Heinz Linge, reported that Hitler visited it
at 4am the next morning,
and 3am the day after that.
As his empire crumbled,
he retreated into an architectural fantasy.
Because he dropped out of art school, it is often said
that Hitler was a failed artist who turned to politics.
But I think he was a monster precisely because he brought into
the real political world his own
sick version of the visionary artists' transforming zeal.
The writer, Isaiah Berlin, had a good phrase for the syndrome.
"The sinister artist whose materials are men."
Hitler poisoned the very idea of art in Germany,
dragged it into the black hole that was the Nazi catastrophe.
The man who was obsessed with building a thousand-year future,
brought immeasurable destruction down
on the cities of his own country.
For nearly two decades after the war, Germany dedicated itself
to a painful purging, rebuilding and forgetting, as it concentrated
on getting back to business.
The result was a post-war boom, an economic miracle.
# Casanova bac-bac, Casanova bac-bac Casanova bacciame!
# Casanova kiss kiss, Casanova kiss kiss, Casanova kiss me... #
But what about art?
In 1958 the industrial town of Gelsenkirchen
invested in a palace of culture.
It built a music theatre costing more than had been spent on all the
theatres of Britain since the war.
When the architect Werner Ruhnau went shopping for cutting-edge art
to complete his vision, he pointedly didn't go to Germany.
He went international.
He turned to a young French conceptual artist, Yves Klein.
They devised giant murals 20 metres by seven, studded with sea sponges
to enhance the interior space.
They were painted in Klein's trademark colour,
which he called International Klein Blue,
a colour, he said, was the invisible become invisible.
In Germany, it was the colour of amnesia.
This was perfect art for Germans after the war.
They could come here, forget their dark past and troubled history
and they could immerse themselves in the radiance of Klein's sea and sky.
I think of this whole space with its beautiful optimistic architecture,
open to the elements with its clean lines, as a sublime piece of
art therapy, a kind of recovery room for a traumatised nation.
But Germany was not just traumatised by the Second World War.
It was divided by the Cold War.
In 1961, the differences between democracy in the West
and Communism in the East took the solid form of a wall
built through the middle of Berlin.
The inner German border had existed
since the end of the war
but since 1952, it had become one of the world's
most heavily-fortified frontiers.
The physical manifestation of the Iron Curtain.
It ran like a jagged wound through the middle of the country.
One painter in particular,
brought up in East Germany, picked at the scars of German history.
Georg Baselitz painted what he called "hero paintings"
for a post-war world without heroes.
Figures stumbled through a wasteland, their clothes rags,
their bodies raw.
In later work, Baselitz literally turned the world upside down.
In a series of dramatic inversions determined to see Germany afresh.
To haul back something from the artistic
black hole that was the Third Reich.
If there's one picture that sums up and seems to distil
the salutary rage of Baselitz
during his early years, then for me, it has got to be this one.
It's called The Big Night In The Bucket.
When it was first shown in 1963,
the German authorities actually had it confiscated for obscenity
and what it shows is an encephalitic evil little misfit
stranded in a void, and he is
frantically masturbating a penis the size of a large bratwurst.
It's a deeply disconcerting image. In some ways, I wonder
what Baselitz meant by it. There are clues.
The figure is wearing the kind of shorts that were
favoured by the Hitler Youth Movement and if you
look at the figure's face, if you look at that slicked-down
black hair - could it be a kind of parodic image of Hitler?
Is this Baselitz's way of saying, "Look,
"this is all Hitler was, this horrible little grotesque,
"inflicting his sick, weird masturbatory
"fantasies on the entire world?"
I think he is also accusing
whoever looked at it, he's saying, "You allowed this to happen.
"And you want to forget about it, you want to embrace the new economic
"miracle. I'm not going to let you forget about it.
"I want you to look at this picture and remember what happened here in
"Germany and remember it forever."
But confrontation is not the only way of remembering.
There are other strategies.
At first sight, the photographic work of Bernd and Hilla Becher
seems single-mindedly to look away from the human story.
Their subject matter is the industrial past
of the late 19th century.
But the presentation and approach
is reminiscent of August Sander's great project.
Since the '60s, their reputation as artists and teachers has grown.
They are considered among the most influential photographers
of the century.
Her husband, Bernd, died in 2007 but Hilla Becher
is still working and maintains that you can detect
something of a national mentality in these unassuming structures.
Let's start with the French...
So these are winding towers?
These are French? These are all French.
What makes them French?
They can't stand to just have scaffolding in the landscape.
Too ugly, too functional? It is too ugly
and they don't like steel structures anyway so whenever possible,
they go into concrete. What about the Eiffel Tower?
They hate it! They hate the Eiffel Tower.
You don't know that? I wasn't aware of it.
Ask any taxi driver, everybody hates it.
OK, so that's the French. Where are we now?
This is the English. Oh, this is us?
A wheel, just a wheel. We don't mind that functionality?
No. What makes a German winding tower German?
To me, they've got a kind of monumentality about them...
Yes. ..that the English ones and the French ones don't have.
What does that tell us about the Germans?
It tells you that they thought...
It's a little while ago, but they thought about eternity.
I feel like you've made me into a connoisseur of winding towers!
I feel I've been taught by a master of wine
to appreciate a special bouquet!
Why did you want to photograph those things?
These objects are very thoughtful in the visual sense.
There is a lot to discover
and you are surprised yourself what you see and what you find.
If you look closer, it's like a kind of universe.
I know your work is very, very different, but if I think of Bosslet
and I think of artists who are saying to Germany,
"Don't forget, you mustn't forget.
"If you forget, I'll dig it up again."
In a way, are you saying that it's the same impulse in your work,
that you want to dig up history and look at history?
Yes, especially when it changes all the time.
Right after the war, nobody wanted to remember anything.
And even things that were very innocent from the past,
they didn't want to know.
Nobody wanted to look back at all, even though, you could say,
a blast furnace, that's hardly a relic of war,
it's hardly a Holocaust subject, it's just a blast furnace?
Yes, but a blast furnace makes iron,
and iron makes steel, and steel makes bombs.
So...
It makes hospital beds as well but...
'Remembering the past was one thing, but how to recover from its trauma?
'That was the question asked by the most important
'influential German artists of the century, Joseph Beuys.
'Beuys was the anti-Hitler.'
If Hitler said everybody had to be a Nazi,
Beuys replied, "Everyone is an artist."
'One of his favourite devices was the installation
'with glass cases known as vitrines.
'Emblematic objects lie open to the interpretation of the viewer.
'Beuys always leaves room for our imagination.'
He used his materials like a shaman,
for their energy, their elemental essence - iron, gold, felt, fat.
'He created a symbolic world
'deeply bound up with his own personal mythology.'
Beuys came to sculpture late in a life that had begun
before the Third Reich.
He flew in Stukas with the Luftwaffe.
He told and retold a story, a parable really,
about how he crashed and was rescued by a group of nomads,
Tatar tribesmen, who wrapped him in fat and felt to keep him warm.
At the height of the Cold War,
he thought warm sculpture was what Germany needed.
It was 1969 and Beuys to the rescue
with a piece that he called The Pack.
I love everything about this piece.
I love the battered old VW camper van
with its smeared and smudged windows and its rust-stained flanks.
I love the way that he's signed it,
just above the D for Deutschland, with Beuys.
Making it his signature vehicle. The Beuys-mobile.
But above all, I love the way that he's arranged the sleds
just like a kind of pack of huskies.
There's something wonderfully light-hearted and witty
about the whole piece, and if any one work,
I think, plunges you straight to the centre of that famous Beuys story
about the Tatars saving him by smearing him in fat
and wrapping him in felt, it's got to be this one.
There's the fat, there's the felt, there are the little flashlights.
And I think there's the sense,
not just in Germany, but throughout Europe,
that the world might be on the brink of another terrible apocalypse,
this time a nuclear holocaust.
And I think this piece is Beuys's rather gentle way
of saying we needn't succumb to a catastrophe of that nature
IF we listen to the nurturing side of ourselves.
I think of it almost as a kind of sculptural way of saying
all you need is love.
But then there's Show Your Wound.
'Bleak. Enigmatic.
'Is this what art looks like after Auschwitz?'
I think, looking at this installation,
you feel Beuys's absence somehow all the more keenly.
He's so important as an animator of his own work,
but here, he's so obviously gone.
You feel almost as if you're at the scene of some eccentric lecture
and the teacher's just left, leaving these two blackboards
with inscriptions on each. And what are we to make of it?
Beuys's work is by no means universally popular.
There are plenty of people who see him as an emperor with no clothes.
'And it is visually challenging.
'Ambiguous, dark, difficult.'
But my answer to Beuys's critics would be simple.
Whether you like it or not, this art changed the way Germany is today.
It's taken a long time, but in the Berlin of the present
there are signs that Germany has come to terms
with its difficult past.
The monument to the victims of the Holocaust
is an extraordinary act of remembering,
and this awkward, uneasy installation
is not in an art gallery.
Nearly five acres of land in the centre of the city,
visited by thousands every week, all dedicated to the memory
'of one of the worst crimes in human history.
'And I think it owes its existence to the post-war artists, like Beuys,
'who consistently campaigned against forgetting.'
If the shows the wound of Nazism,
what about the wound of that other terror regime to the East?
This was once Checkpoint Alpha -
a customs and surveillance post on the old East German border.
'This, too, is now a memorial.
'A frozen relic of an everyday tyranny.
'It was brightly lit, casting no shadows, leaving no place to hide.
'And it still feels haunted.
'By preserving it, they've made it an object of contemplation.
'A Becker photograph you can walk round.
'Its rows and rows of glass boxes
'are also eerily reminiscent of Joseph Beuys's vitrines,
'each preserving the banality of a regime of terror.
'This is heritage, German-style.
'And its message is the same as that of the post-war artists.
'You must meditate on this
'because this...must never happen again.'
Apart from his installations, Joseph Beuys was famous for his actions,
performance pieces and his politics.
When the Wall came down in 1989, I remember an art dealer
from Cologne saying it felt like a huge Beuys happening.
Beuys himself had been dead for nearly three years,
but it was in a sense the final fruition
of all he'd spent his life agitating for.
Freedom of expression, freedom of thought, freedom.
'And then there's Tacheles, Berlin's oldest and most famous squat.'
It's not exactly the Bauhaus staircase, is it?
I don't think I've ever seen so much graffiti in my whole life.
'It's now home to a seemingly numberless shifting population
'of artists of all descriptions.
'These, you might say, are the children of Beuys.'
EERIE WHOOPING CRIES
'So this is what the world looks like when everyone's an artist
'and anything can be art.'
I've got my best stripy socks on especially, just in case.
I don't have socks on.
Oh, brilliant! Thank you.
Wow.
So, it's the same idea of the meditation...
So these are little works I've done.
I work a lot with sparkles...
..and pearls. My father was born in India.
Oh, right. Yeah.
And I like the intensity of this colour.
And you know colours sort of talk with you
and your state of mind and it affects you?
And so the idea is to...
be surrounded by this feeling.
I like Kandinsky, actually.
Oh, right! Kandinsky is wow for me!
And I like a lot the idea...
He was a mystic. Yes. Well, I am.
A transcendentalist. Yes. Ah!
Now I'm getting a common theme.
And the shapes and the forms - I like the abstraction a lot.
'Artists in Germany feel free at the start of this century
'as they never did during the last.
'Sometimes it seems as if the whole country
'is one big artists' colony where anything goes,
'and, if the rent's cheap enough, anything seems possible.
'If one person provoked the current free-for-all, it was Joseph Beuys.
'But there's another aspect of his legacy that I'm more interested in,
'not to do with freedom but responsibility.'
I began this journey through German art
with Goethe's comparison of a Gothic cathedral to a spreading oak tree
The oak was a symbol of mythic power to Beuys, too,
but he linked it to German society itself...
a vast, living organism in constant need of nurture.
'Beuys left an extraordinary legacy of that idea in the city of Kassel,
'in the heart of Germany.'
It all began as a project at the Documenta art fair here in 1982.
Beuys wanted to plant 7,000 trees.
These are the first and the last.
Each tree was to be accompanied by a pillar of basalt stone.
These were delivered first,
dumped outside the museum in the centre of town.
Beuys only had five years left to live
and knew he could never see it through.
It was to be the supreme gesture of what he called "social sculpture".
It was a challenge to Kassel and its people to make the whole thing work.
'Thirty years on, all 7,000 trees have been planted.'
Committees and subcommittees of citizens have been spawned
to take responsibility for them...
re-checking, re-planting, re-siting,
so that 7,000 trees are always there.
In a most gradual, unobtrusive way,
a whole city really has turned itself into a work of art.
It was very important to Beuys that this piece be sited
in Kassel, because this place had suffered particularly badly
during the Second World War.
Thousands of people had lost their lives.
In fact, 85% of the city had been flattened.
But what was it that he felt such a burning need to say,
that he said it 7,000 times?
Well, ultimately, for me,
I think its message is quite straightforward.
The standing stone stands for society, settlement, civilisation.
Think of the standing stones of Stonehenge.
And the oak tree, that ancient German symbol?
Well, here it stands for the world, and I think what he's saying is that
no civilisation can thrive unless it exists in harmony with the world.
It's an emblem of hope for a new Germany.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd.
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