Culture as resistance or escape

What can an art exhibition, a concert hall and Classical town tell us about twentieth century German history? On Radio 4's weekly discussion programme, setting the cultural agenda every Monday, Samira Ahmed leads a conversation exploring what inter-war Weimar, the Nazi's obsession with so-called 'degenerate art' and the programming of German music at the Wigmore Hall in London reveal about the course of German history and our responses to it.

Katja Hoyer's last book, Beyond the Wall was a history of East Germany which concentrated on the consequences the Nazi rule and the Second World War. Now the Anglo-German Historian has turned her attention to Weimar, the town that gave its name to the ambitious republic whose failure paved the way to Nazism. Looking at the stories of a series of varied individuals, she asks how a nation that prided itself on its culture and civility enabled Nazism and why it haunts us to this day because we fear a repeat. Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe is BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week for a fortnight.

Art historian John-Paul Stonard's new book is The Worst Exhibition in the World: Degenerate Art, 1937. The exhibition of Entartete Kunst ('degenerate art') was held in the Hofgarten arcade in Munich in the summer of 1937. Just a few weeks earlier, the same paintings and sculptures by modern German artists had been on display in some of the most prestigious museums in Germany. An extensive propaganda campaign of confiscation and defamation by the Nazis saw the condemnation of works by Jews, Bolsheviks and the enemies of the German Reich. It remains one of the most visited exhibitions ever - and it shaped views of modern art well into the second half of the twentieth century.

Julia Boyd's There is Sweet Music Here: The World of Wigmore Hall tells the story of London's privately run music venue. During the Second World War it was possible for audiences to hear exiled German and Austrian Jewish musicians playing Beethoven among a wide range of recitals. Other concerts programmed included Entartete Musik (forbidden or so-called 'degenerate Music’), including the banned composer Gustav Mahler.

Producer: Ruth Watts