Translated from the German of Berthold Hinz in his book Art in the Third Reich
And what do they fabricate? The formed cripples and Christians, women who inspire nothing but discuss, human beings that are more animal than human, children who, if they look like this, could be nothing but God’s curse on us! And these cruellest of dilettantes dare to present this to today’s world is the art of our time, as the expression of what our time produces and what gives it its stamp. Let no one say these artists depict what they see stop among the paintings submitted for this exhibition, there were many many works that would actually lead us to believe that there are people who see things differently than they are, that there really are men who see the present-day figures of our people only as degenerative cretins – men who are determined to perceive, or, as they would say, to experience, Meadows is blue, sky is green, and clouds are sulphur yellow. I do not intend to debate with these individuals do in fact see and perceive in this way. But in the name of the German people, I mean to forbid these pitiable unfortunates, who clearly suffer from visual disorders, from attempting to force the results of the defective vision onto their fellow human beings as reality all, indeed, from serving it up as “art”.
In the Degenerate Art Exhibition catalogue July 18, 1937 Hitler went on to write wrote as quoted in translation from William L Shirer Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich
Works of art that cannot be understood but neither swollen set of instructions to prove their right to exist and find their way to neurotics who are receptive to such stupid or insolent nonsense were no longer openly reached the germination… With the opening of this exhibition has come the end of artistic lunacy and with it the artistic pollution of our people.
Quoted by Donald Kuspit in his essay “Diagnostic Malpractice: The Nazis On Modern Art 1986”.
