Antifascist Dad Podcast UNLOCK: 13.1 More Degenerate Art, Please! w/ Sarah Jaffray pt.2
I'm back with Sarah Jaffray to probe the aesthetics of fascism and the politics of cultural memory. We talk about how fascist movements rely on a triumphalist victim complex that cannot tolerate vulnerability or disability, and how this connects to the Nazi impulse to purify society through the language of degeneracy and the “enemy within.” Of course we also ping Hitler’s own frustrated artistic ambitions and the nineteenth-century “beautiful ruin” vibe, tracing how nostalgia for an imagined past becomes a visual template for authoritarian order.
I close out with a personal coda on writing, mentorship, attention, and rebuilding an inner voice after a personal collapse—through time and cursive.
You can support the show on Patreon!
All theme music by the amazing www.kalliemarie.com.
Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times (North Atlantic Books, April 2026).
Preorder: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/807656/antifascist-dad-by-matthew-remski/
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Notes
Barron, Stephanie, ed. “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991.
https://www.getty.edu/publications/virtuallibrary/0892362651.html
Bauhaus-Archiv Museum für Gestaltung. “Bauhaus History 1919–1933.”
https://www.bauhaus.de/en/das_bauhaus/21_history/
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 1935.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
Dixon, Paul. “Uncanny Valley.” Encyclopaedia Britannica.
https://www.britannica.com/science/uncanny-valley
Dix, Otto. “War (Der Krieg), 1929–1932.” Dresden State Art Collections.
https://skd-online-collection.skd.museum/Details/Index/334771
Evans, Richard J. The Coming of the Third Reich. New York: Penguin, 2003.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/297974/the-coming-of-the-third-reich-by-richard-j-evans/
Gross, George. “Background and Biography.” Tate.
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/george-grosz-1188
Harrison, Charles, Francis Frascina, and Gill Perry. Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300055191/primitivism-cubism-abstraction/
Hitler, Adolf. Speech at the opening of the Entartete Kunst exhibition, Munich, July 19, 1937.
English excerpts reproduced at:
https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/entart.htm
Holbein, Hans (the Younger). “The Ambassadors.” National Gallery, London.
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/hans-holbein-the-younger-the-ambassadors
Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. 1911.
https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/3483
Lawrence, Jacob. “The Migration Series.” Museum of Modern Art.
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/37346
Nochlin, Linda. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” ARTnews, 1971.
https://www.artnews.com/art-news/retrospective/why-have-there-been-no-great-women-artists-2413/
Riley, Bridget. “Lecture and Interviews.” Tate Britain Archive.
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/bridget-riley-1845
Rothko, Mark. “Rothko Room.” Tate Modern.
https://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern/rothko-room
Schulz-Hoffmann, Carla, and Judith C. Weiss, eds. Neue Sachlichkeit / New Objectivity. Munich: Prestel, 2015.
https://www.prestel.com/books/neue-sachlichkeit-new-objectivity/
Tate. “Dada.”
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/d/dada
Tate. “Surrealism.”
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/surrealism
Velázquez, Diego. “Las Meninas.” Museo del Prado.
https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/las-meninas/9fdc5f42-5e09-4c5a-9d50-70b43fca0a30
Walker, Kara. “Artist Overview.” Tate.
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/kara-walker-2660
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. History of the Art of Antiquity. 1764.
English edition via Project Gutenberg:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21891