Staging power. Aesthetic fascination in fascism
This extensive reader was published by Dirk Nishen Verlag in 1987 to accompany the nGbK exhibition of the same name at Kunstquartier Ackerstrasse. As the working group put it in their foreword, it aims “to approach fascism’s appeal to the imagination in a way that temporarily leaves the issue of guilt and prohibition to one side, focusing on an attitude that engages, that is receptive and differentiated, that breaks down and reassembles.” The writers approached the topic analytically and descriptively with essays, for example, on the 1937 World’s Fair, the reception of Prussian classicism in the Nazi years, or Mussolini’s aesthetic education in Italian fascism. The central question was always: How did the Nazis manage to generate approval within the population? The exhibition went one step further, using the visual means at its disposal to reconstruct fragments of the fascination of the aesthetic—the distinction between historical exhibition and art exhibition was abolished.

Arbeitsgruppe: Karin Bartl, Klaus Behnken, Wieland Elfferding, Karoline Hille, Gabriele Huster, Patricia Krey, Gudrun Linke, Frank Wagner, Silke Wenk, Kurt Winkler, Christiane Zieseke