I’m choosing to study art and its impact on nationalism, because I want to find out how one reinforces the other, in order to understand how past (and possibly future) periods of nationalism can impact art.
Thesis statment: Art, in all forms (whether it be in the visual or performing arts) can be impacted by periods of intense nationalism, with art either stoking these feelings or showing us how artists may have resisted these anxieties their country was suffering from by creating their own movements or through their own creative expression.
Most of my sources came from JSTOR; a huge help for finding readings and documents from historical sources. I found mostly secondary sources (which I will hopefully balance out with more primary sources). One of my sources was a deeper look into the art of Germany under Hitler, one looked at how the art of the Weimar Republic indicated the future Germany was headed towards, one was a timeline that shows various events in 20th century German expressionism and compares it to events going on in the world at those times. One was a painting from a series depicting the Niebelungenlied, an epic poem that was a great source of German pride (and an inspiration for Richard Wagner, a notorious German nationalist and antisemite, who’d go on to write the Ring cycle). I also looked at a source that discussed Wagner’s rather intense nationalism, and how his upbringing and the art he enjoyed growing up reflected that later in life.
After doing this research, I think I’d like to build a timeline going over various events in German history, probably starting in the 18th and/or 19th centuries, and going over how specific world events impacted art (something like my source I mentioned with the timeline, but a bit more in depth and looking at more art movements than just expressionism).
Finding sources themselves was rather painless, but I found it’s a bit easier to find secondary sources compared to primary sources. For future research, I’d definitely like to find more primary sources (which may prove difficult in some cases, like in Nazi Germany, where a lot of protest art was more than likely destroyed, for example).
As far as remaining questions go, I’d ask how Germany tries to romanticize its past. Does it show its best moments, or does it simply paint them (sometimes literally) in a different perspective to make them the good guys in a story where they’re bad? I’d also like to compare and contrast Beowulf and the Nibelungenlied; both are epic poems about heroes, but one is far better known to English speakers, while plenty of German speakers learn about the latter. I think it’d be looking at comparing those and how they may have once played a role in national pride.