Can one adequately discuss the history and art of an abject regime by following a traditional historical or art historical approach? Is it possible to write about art in the Third Reich, in Stalin's Soviet Union or in Mao Zedong's China without immediately identifying the artworks with the political regime? Is it even possible to speak about ‘art’ when a totalitarian regime strictly controls the art world and uses art as a means to help express its ideology? Or do these questions overestimate the power of politics and underestimate the creative power of art, even under dire circumstances?

Art from the Third Reich has long been neglected by art historians, with the exception of modern artworks deemed ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis. National Socialist art, as far as it survived the Allied bombings and the extensive art theft by Allied troops after World War II, was stored away in the darkest vaults of German museum depots. Until the early 1960s, there was not much public critical reflection on the recent past in Germany. Many people wanted to forget about their traumatic experiences and their sense of shame, and focus as much as possible on building up a new society. The arrest and detention of Adolf Eichmann (1960-61) and the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials (1963-65), however, evoked an intense critical public debate about the Third Reich. The so-called ‘generation of 1968’ in West Germany not only turned against American imperialism and the war in Vietnam but also against its own fathers and grandfathers, who had lived and sometimes served under the Nazis. By this time, art historians had started to study Nazi art and Nazi architecture, not as valid art forms but as expressions of a thoroughly criminal political system.

In the 1980s the study of Nazi art became more differentiated. It is possible that the konservative Wende (conservative turn), beginning in 1982 under the new Chancellor Helmut Kohl, influenced this process, as did the so-called Historikerstreit (battle of the historians), a fierce public debate among professional historians and others about the interpretation of the Third Reich, following an op-ed article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung by historian Ernst Nolte in 1986.