Whether you believe Coates or Prawer, it is clear that Expressionism was co-

opted by its own enemies for nefarious purposes. This co-option occurred in several

places. One example is above: the tropes of Expressionism were adopted by German

cinema to depict the outsider as horrific rather than empathetic. Another example is the

use of "folk" movement in Primitivism. While the Primitivist use of local folk art was an

attempt to get in touch with a "simpler" lifestyle, it also had dangerous side effects. Colin

Rhodes writes,

 For many progressive artists folk arts and crafts assumed importance both as art
 and, perhaps more disturbingly in the light of events in Europe with the rise of
 Fascism in the 1930s, as a symbol of the distinct racial character of a region's
 past. Thus,... artists... emphasized the physical, moral, and religious
 superiority of the indigenous peasant populations of their respective home-
 lands. ... It must... be seen in terms of a deep-seated reactionary distaste for
 cosmopolitanism ... fueled by Social-Darwinian beliefs in the catastrophic results
 of miscegenation on the 'national stock.' (24)

 In other words, Primitivism's conception of rural folk as "pure" was one that Fascists

 were able to use as a rallying cry for National Socialism. The "essence" that the rural

 folk had access to shouldn't, in the fascists' minds, be diluted by outsiders-hence the

 Aryan philosophy.

 Another aspect of the Primitivist movement that the dominant regime in Germany

 co-opted for its own use was the love of Nature. The reader will remember that the

 Primitivist movement idealized nature as another way to connect with a truth otherwise

 unattainable. Again, the Fascists capitalized on this idea in film, creating what Kracauer

 calls "the mountain film." The mountain films were a group of films that revolved