The Painter Werner Peiner, the Culture of the German Oil Industry, and the Nature of Hitler’s State

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the monumental mosaics, large stained glass windows, and illustrated maps that the German painter Werner Peiner (1897–1984), now best known for his designs for the representative buildings of Hitler’s dictatorship, produced between 1931 and 1935 for Shell Oil and its German subsidiary. The discussion of these commissions, which emerged from Peiner’s social networks of the 1920s and contributed to his career as a state artist after 1933, explains their function as ideological images promoting the interests of a global corporation and affirming modern automotive technology using conservative, mythologizing tropes of paradisical nature, traditional cultural landscapes, and immutable national communities that the painter later employed in his work for Hitler’s state.