Klee’s Telegram: The political toying with education in Florida now fills me with terror

On April 21, 1933 the visionary modernist and teacher Paul Klee received a telegram, firing him from the Düsseldorf Art Academy. The message came from acting director Julius Paul Junghanns, a traditionalist whose work was more appreciated by Germany’s freshly solidified Nationalist Socialist party. The telegram to Klee is the first thing visitors see at Düsseldorf’s spectacular K20 Museum.

Not Picasso. Not Matisse. Not Gerhard Richter, nor Klee himself, none of the avant garde’s household names. But a telegram.

The framed telegram sends a clear message to those of us who like to visit museums in the United States. In this country we are trained to value modernism for innovation.

We seek out paintings because a textbook or magazine tells us they are important. We want to gaze upon the original before buying the poster, postcard, or t-shirt in the gift shop.

In Germany, a country scarred by its recent fascist past, one is reminded that decisions about culture and art carry a political charge.

Four hours east, in the capital city of Berlin, an understated monument recognizes book burnings from the early days of the regime. Weeks after Paul Klee got fired, on May 10, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels railed before a crowd of 40,000 in Berlin’s Opera Square against “decadence and moral corruption.” Students torched foreign, “degenerate,” and as you would guess, Jewish-authored books. A monument rests there today in the middle of Opera Square. People gather around a simple pane of glass in the cobblestone, looking onto empty library shelves below.

We carry vivid memories of the German war machine, the Chaplinesque madman, the ridiculous salutes, the shuddering Holocaust. But we easily forget where the story begins. In their assault on humanity, the Nazis party started with culture and art.

The political toying with education in Florida now fills me with terror. Last Tuesday, a board of trustees stacked by Ron DeSantis replaced New College president Patricia Okker with the right-wing former state house speaker Richard Corcoran. The board will target tenure next, not stopping until they have transformed a perfectly functional, artsy-fartsy liberal arts school (the best undergraduate value in the state) into a conservative fringe think tank.

Up the road in northern Pinellas County, a math teacher at a private Christian academy has complained about books on the shelves at Palm Harbor University High. Students will have to go elsewhere to find Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” Anthony Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange,” and Kate Chopin’s feminist cri de cœur, “The Awakening.”

We know how it ended for the Nazis. The German people, to their credit, have openly marked every step in their fall to fascism. We cannot say, in the United States, that our incipient decline into public evil will have started with firing a college president or with pulling titles from Palm Harbor U. Who knows where the path of Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, and other political extremists will lead? But we can say the story has started this way before. With culling books from Berlin libraries. Or a telegram, firing the professor of art.

Tell our leaders to stop.

This article appears in Feb 2-8, 2023.