the dark reaction!") and "Wie kämpfen wir gegen ein Drittes Reich?" ("How do we fight against a Third Reich?"), published at the Communist newspaper Welt am Abend. In the article he argued for a nonpartisan initiative against the NSDAP. On April 1, 1933 Hofer was defamed in a poster together with Oskar Schlemmer and other teachers of the Berlin Art Academy as "representatives of the decomposing liberal-Marxist-Jewish alliance". He was then on a leave and was dismissed from teaching in the Summer of 1934. At the beginning of Nazi Germany, Hofer still tried to conciliate his art with the new regimen ideology to a certain extent. Despite his rejection of National Socialism, Hofer believed that his art could be accepted by the regimen, because he understood it as being German. In the exhibition of the Berlin Secession in the Summer of 1933, the catalog preface said that German art was expressed in Hofer's painting. At the same time he participated with the article "Der Kampf um die Kunst" ("The struggle for art") in a series of articles on German art in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. Among other things, he argued that German art was "free of Jews", like no other area of society, except the military. Nevertheless, his work, like other German expressionist painters, was condemned by the regimen as degenerate art. Hofer was represented with eight works in the Nazi propaganda exhibition "Degenerate Art" held in Munich, in 1937. In 1938 he was expelled from the Prussian Academy of Arts. Because of his marriage with Mathilde, considered a Jew according to the Nazi laws of marriage, despite being a convert to Protestantism, Hofer was threatened with exclusion from the Reich Chamber of the Fine Arts . In July 1938, the couple was divorced. Hofer was expelled from the Reich Chamber of the Fine Arts in October 1938, since the confirmation of the divorce came too late at the Ministry of Propaganda. He was then no longer allowed to sell his works publicly in the art trade or at auctions; the exclusion was therefore considered a professional ban. In November 1938, Hofer married for a second time to Elisabeth Schmidt, considered an "aryan" according to Nazi standards. As a result the ban was lifted and Hofer was reinstated by the President of the Reich Chamber in February 1939. After the divorce, his ex-wife Mathilde was no longer protected for being