What motivated artists, art historians, and art dealers to try to link expressionism with Nazism? What mechanisms defined the canonization of expressionism in art history after the Second World War and the return of ideologically charged concepts and patterns of argumentation in the present? This collection of essays explores these questions. The contributions were presented at an international conference that was held in May 2019, a collaboration between the Neue Nationalgalerie and the Freie Universität Berlin organized by Meike Hoffmann and Dieter Scholz. Several essays in this volume also discuss new, innovative exhibition formats, responsibilities, and perspectives: How can the richly diverse and contradictory image of the German art world between 1933 and 1945 be represented in the institutional context of an art museum today?

Contributors: Eugen Blume, Bernhard Fulda, Meike Hoffmann, Andreas Hüneke, Joachim Jäger, Gregor Langfeld, Michael Nungesser, Gerhard Paul, Olaf Peters, Sebastian Peters, Sebastian Preuss, Wolfram Pyta, Julius Redzinski, Christian Ring, Thomas Röske, Christina Rothenhäusler, Lisa Marei Schmidt, Dorothea Schöne, Dieter Scholz, Aya Soika, Janosch Steuwer, Michael Tymkiw, Volker Weiß, and Christoph Zuschlag

This conference volume and the associated colloquium were initiated and financed by the Ferdinand-Möller-Stiftung.