Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism Through the Eyes of Everyday People

by Julia Boyd

In his book Just Back from Germany (1938), British writer J. A. Cole reflected a widespread view when he wrote, ‘Some of the works I liked, some left me indifferent and some I was frankly unable to understand.’ Everywhere, he noted, were labels, exclamations and question marks deriding the exhibits. ‘It was almost as though the Nazis feared the visitors would not jeer enough.’ The middle-aged man he spotted egging on visitors to poke fun at the art was almost certainly one of the actors hired by the gallery to do exactly that. In fact most people, Cole observed, showed no reaction at all. ‘They just walked through dumbly, looking stolidly at pictures as they might have done in any art gallery on a wet Sunday afternoon, and then went out again.’ Although Cole was not himself particularly avant-garde, halfway round the exhibition he experienced an odd exhilaration. ‘The audacity of these pictures was infectious,’ he wrote. ‘It was like walking into a lunatic asylum and realizing that one had been trying to become a lunatic for years.’