In the first chapter on the German military's unlikely function as an incubator of modernist
art and in the second chapter on Adolf Hitler's advocacy for eugenic figurative representation
embodying nostalgia for lost Aryan racial perfection and the aspiration for the future
perfection of the German Volk Maertz conclusively proves that the Nazi attack on modernism was
inconsistent. In further chapters on the appropriation of Christian iconography in
constructing symbols of a Nazi racial utopia and on Baldur von Schirach's heretical patronage
of modernist art as the supreme Nazi Party authority in Vienna Maertz reveals that sponsorship
of modernist artists continued until the collapse of the regime. Also based on previously
unexamined evidence including 10 000 works of art and documents confiscated by the U.S. Army
Maertz's final chapter reconstructs the anarchic denazification and rehabilitation of German
artists during the Allied occupation which had unforeseen consequences for the postwar art
world.
