In the first half of the 20th century, Germany experienced the last years of the German Empire, World War I and the revolution that followed, the liberal Weimar Republic, the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust. Modern art played an important role in the discourse of the period, and politics influenced the arts.

This exhibition features more than 70 paintings and sculptures from the collections of the Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery), the distinguished modern art museum of the Berlin State Museums. It traces the German experience in the visual arts over four decades.

Beginning with the Expressionist reaction and opposition to the conservative artistic regime of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the exhibition moves on to the New Objectivity movement, the modern style of the 1920s. Between the wars, German artists participated in international experiments with abstraction. Painters and sculptors critiqued social currents, but most were silenced under the Nazis. This exhibition concludes with an epilogue that examines the ambiguous aftermath of World War II.