Adelheid von Saldern, Kunstnationalismus: Die USA und Deutschland in transkultureller Perspektive (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2021), 494 pp.

Adelheid von Saldern is a noted expert on modern U.S. and German cultural history. With this remarkable study she duly crowns her academic career. It comes as a big volume of more than 420 pages of well-written text, supplemented by an extensive bibliography and an index of persons as well as subjects which testify to the author’s meticulousness. Von Saldern’s wide-ranging study is concerned with what she calls “artistic nationalism” in the United States and Germany from around 1900 to the end of World War II. Her notion of “artistic nationalism,” as briefly delineated on pages 20-21, includes various phenomena: overemphasis on the arts in their importance for a national culture, affirmative orientation of the arts and of art criticism toward national concerns, and political instrumentalization of the arts for the supposed good of the nation. “Kunstnationalisten” (“art nationalists”), according to the author, were those mostly male members of the cultural elites who expressed concerns along these lines (21-22). Accordingly, von Saldern’s book is more about historical discourses and empirical facts than a critical inquiry of the aesthetics of a nationalist art or of nationalism in art. Whereas this art-historical reviewer appreciates the fact that the eminent historian takes the arts seriously and grants them a significant part in the formation of national(ist) narratives and identities, she nonetheless deplores the kind disregard of a genuinely artistic agency in this context. Are forms and visuality really so arbitrary? Is it really all in the framing? Van Saldern does not offer a single close reading to at least scrutinize the issue. Her understanding of the arts appears friendly but detached, and there is no apparent reflection of art history as a discipline with its own agenda. Instead, she refers to Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory to define the arts and then analyzes their connections to politics (20). The book does not claim to be and in fact is not the interdisciplinary exercise one might surmise from its title.

Von Saldern’s investigation of “artistic nationalisms” aims at comparison and, for that matter, strives at an analytical linking of transnational as well as national phenomena and discourses. The book has a very clear, almost rigid structure, which underlines the comparative approach and its pragmatic implementation. After the introduction, in which the author defines core concepts and terms, there are three major parts devoted to “artistic nationalism” in the United States (I), “artistic nationalism” in Germany (II), and Atlantic comparisons and significant aspects of an entangled history (III). Each part consists of five chapters, which—in parts I and II—have the same thematic focus and also highly similar subchapters.

The first chapters give general and well-informed overviews of the state of the arts in the United States and Germany. There is a certain focus on the visual arts but van Saldern also deals with popular culture, radio broadcast, film, photography, architecture, and design as well as classical music. She points out artistic themes, trends, and traditions that more or less shaped an interest in a decidedly national art that was increasingly articulated in both countries during the interwar period. The second chapters are devoted to the promotion of the arts by various institutions and, above all, by the state. As might be expected, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs and German Nazi propaganda measures take up much space here. But there are also other interesting observations, for example, on American documentary programs as a form of arts promotion, among them the American Guide Series (1937-41), which was designed to make people familiar with the country’s states and their major cities and maybe recurred to colonialist traditions of exploration and discovery as well as to landscape painting in the United States.

There are particularly rich chapters (I. 3 and II. 3) on folk and popular songs in both countries. Von Saldern explores a vast terrain of popular music, singing, and dancing as they had to stand in for some sort of national authenticity but also made feelings of community physically tangible—for the dominant majority of society as well as for minority groups such as African Americans, Jews, Romany, and others. Very interesting chapters are devoted to what von Saldern calls “divergent and complimentary nationalisms” (I. 4 und II. 4). In both the United States and Germany, there existed a surprising variety of nationalist sentiments, agencies, and artistic means to transport and shape them. Von Saldern highlights the paradoxical role of the regions and regional identities that represented diversity but nonetheless were appropriated for nationalist projects and patriotic home tinkering. Museums such as the “Museum für deutsche Volkskunde” in Berlin, which from 1935 on presented variants of German folk art together under one roof, belong to this context. On the other hand, also the German Werkbund’s modern designs were considered representative of the nation and, most of all, profitable for its export industry.

After having spread out all these facets and aspects of “artistic nationalism(s)” in the United States and Germany, one expects Astrid von Saldern to change gear and to embark on a more focused analysis in her book’s third and final part. It is devoted to systematic comparisons and instances of transatlantic entanglement, and once more the author is spreading out large amounts of interesting facts and findings. She points to the need for more in-depth analyses (368) but remains vague as to what exactly that could mean for a methodological approach that takes greater account of the interdependency of the art work and its contexts.

Astrid von Saldern’s achievement is to have presented an empirically and analytically rich account of “artistic nationalism” as it manifested itself in the two countries in the historical epoch. Her book brings together an extremely large number of phenomena and discourses under an intellectually challenging umbrella term. Its meaning and interdisciplinary versatility will occupy researchers for some time to come. In this respect, it is a seminal book this reviewer had the pleasure to read.

Sigrid Ruby (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen)