In the summer of 1937, two exhibitions sponsored by the Nazis opened in Munich. For the Degenerate Art exhibition, hundreds of confiscated works by banned modern artists – including Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso – were gathered: a derisive demonstration of the supposedly anti-German spirit of contemporary culture. The show was also meant as a counterpoint to the first Great German Art Exhibition, essentially an art fair for state-sanctioned work, which ran annually until 1944. The official style of Aryan art was traditionalist neoclassicism; popular subjects included idealised female nudes, pastoral landscapes and heroic battle scenes. Hitler was among the main buyers. You probably haven’t heard of any of those artists.
What if one of them were secretly a Jew, working under a pseudonym? Rebecca Birrell’s debut novel imagines this scenario, telling the story of a fictional Jewish artist who comes of age in Berlin in the last days of the Weimar republic. Hannah Sherman is working as a seamstress for the family business when she learns that she is about to be married off. She runs away, finding lodgings using the “desirable Christian” name of Schmidt, and begins to realise her artistic ambitions. A free-thinking New Woman, she also takes two lovers: Saul, a museum curator, and Charlotte, a dancer at a lesbian bar where Hannah likes to sketch.
