The Politicized Culture
Chapter 4 Section 5
Click here to navigate the table of contents.
This below is Chapter 4 Section 5:
The Politicized Culture
At the height of European world dominance, between 1875 and 1900, hardly any conception was more valued than that of culture: the community of civilized states were in the process of raising the backward areas of the earth to a higher level of culture, and Nietzsche counted himself and his kind among the “exempted cultured man.” Culture meant the totality of the higher expressions of life, which, of course, was no longer supported by a basic religious attitude, as in Mesopotamian, Greek or medieval high culture, including a common knowledge or belief about the universe and the basis of the world as well as the right life of people . Rather, since the beginning of modern times, it had split into a number of relatively autonomous sub-areas such as religion, philosophy, science and art, which were further differentiated within themselves. What was regarded by some as cultural progress might appear to others as a lamentable dissolution of that common understanding of life in which all members of a people or nation have their unity. But neither the eulogists nor the critics of “contemporary culture” would have admitted by 1900 that any aspect of culture was wholly subordinate to politics, and it was the Marxists who intended to liberate culture from the political constraints to which they are still subject in capitalist society.
Of course, Russia found itself in the most peculiar position among the European civilized states. The great achievements of its culture, such as the works of Pushkin, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, were in no way inferior to the greatest works of Western culture and were highly acclaimed in Berlin and Paris, Vienna and London. It was to a large extent a self-confident culture, the culture of the leading stratum of one of the world powers, which made missionary claims and wanted to be considered the “Third Rome.” But the bearers of this culture were almost without exception shaped by the awareness that they were few in number and that the endless land areas of the empire were, in the eyes of their Western partners, filled with culturelessness, i.e. inhabited by many millions of illiterate peasants. On the other hand, these peasants, with their orthodox belief and their loyalty to the Tsar, were a reality that could be contrasted with the Western lack of faith and division with a positive emphasis. Thus, Russian intellectual life was determined far more than German or even French by the struggle for one’s own way, by despair at one’s own lack of culture and backwardness on the one hand and by the proud self-confidence of a unified existence rooted in religion on the other . But not a few of the Westerners adopted the missionary consciousness and sense of superiority of their opponents, and many of the Slavophiles became Narodniks [agrarian socialists], who turned harshly against autocracy and orthodox religion.
But European socialism was also characterized by criticism of liberalism, individualism, isolation and alienation; and peculiar syntheses or syncretisms became conceivable. A Westerner like the literary critic Belinsky did not shy away from demanding that hundreds of thousands of parasites and reactionaries be eliminated in order to bring happiness to the millions of ordinary people; members of the high aristocracy Bakunin and Kropotkin became the founding fathers of anarchism in Europe, and at the same time envisaged for Russia a prominent role opposed to the West. The longing for the wholeness of life and against atomization and individualistic greed in the West formed a common trait of almost the entire Russian intelligentsia. The only ones who resolutely opposed any kind of separate path for Russia seemed to be the Marxists around Plekhanov, but keen observers doubted early on whether Lenin’s intolerant dogmatism and his hatred of everything petty-bourgeois might not be keeping him and his group close to Bakunin and even the Slavophiles.
Thus, before the outbreak of World War I, Russian culture was more political than, say, German or English; the spheres of pure art and objective science were smaller; but it was not a culture that was oriented exclusively to the demand for catching up and the destruction of unmodern conditions. All tendencies of European art and European science found a strong and productive echo in Russia: Symbolism and Futurism, Cubism and Constructivism, Empiriocriticism and Pragmatism, Positivism and Lebensphilosiohie had no less a place in the studios, academies and universities of Petersburg and Moscow than in the metropolises of the western world.
The Bolshevik revolution confronted all artists and all scientists with a fundamental decision: the decision of approval or rejection, participation or emigration. All pure art and all pure science were swept away as if by a storm, if only because its representatives no longer knew where to get their daily piece of bread. Writers and poets fought in the red armies, and other poets and writers followed on the side of the Whites; scholars and professors declared themselves with one side or the other, and when they were among the losers, they tended to seek refuge abroad. Nevertheless, the first years after the civil war were an eventful and lively time for Russian culture. The most famous of the Symbolists, Alexander Blok, extolled the revolution, and the most famous of the Futurists, Vladimir Mayakovsky, even made himself a champion of it. (His idol and teacher, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, turned to fascism around the same time.) Constructivists and Cubists gave their direction to the actual revolutionary art, and with equal determination they carried out their attacks on everything old, outdated and bourgeois. Mayakovsky expressed the myth of the new collectivism most effectively in his poem “150 Million”:
Down with the world of romance! Down with the defeatist lamentations! With the pessimistic faith of the fathers! Down with possessiveness, in whatever form!... The almsgivers, the navel-gazers, Let the ax dance over their bald heads! Kill! Kill!! Bravo: and skull cups go well with ashtrays. We hurl new myths Let’s ignite a new eternity... Gather yourselves! Step out of the millennia of darkness! Lockstep! March!... Revenge is the master of ceremonies. Hunger is the steward. Bayonet, Browning, Bomb... Forward! Tempo!
At that time, in the midst of the greatest material need, numerous poems were filled by this fiery breath of shedding the old, conquering the new, immersing yourself in the liberating collective, the dissolution of all artificial separations, building a new unity of life, inspiring many paintings, permeating not a few designs for monumental structures. Now it became possible what had never existed in Europe, that one of the leading statesmen, namely Leon Trotsky, in a manner that was as witty as it was knowledgeable, commented on the poems and novels of the new proletarian poets, but also of the companions from the old intelligentsia, the Popuchiki: on the islanders and the Serapion Brothers, on the “forges” and on the Futurists, on Andrei Belyi and Alexander Blok, on Vladimir Mayakovsky and Boris Pilnjak. And in precisely these essays on “Literature and Revolution” from 1924, the War Commissar formulated a creed that, in its boundless trust in science and in its irrepressible activism, was probably the most extreme and yet symptomatic testimony to that idealism on which “historical materialism" is based: “The socialist man wants and will control nature in its entirety, including the grouse and the sturgeons, with the help of machines... Man, when he has rationalized his economic order, i.e. has filled it with consciousness and subjected it to his purpose, will leave no stone unturned in his present sluggish and thoroughly rotten everyday life... The human race will not stop crawling on all fours before God, emperors and capital, to face the dark laws of heredity and the law of to humbly blind sexual selection... Man will set himself the goal of mastering his own feelings, raising his instincts to the height of consciousness, making them transparent, penetrating with his will to the deepest depths of his unconscious and thus raising himself to a level—one higher socio-biological type, and if you will—to create the superman... The average human type will rise to the level of Aristotle, Goethe and Marx. And above this mountain range new peaks will rise.“
These enthusiastic hopes, these upsurges, these stirring goals were never entirely lost in Soviet culture. But even their most convincing beginnings were marked by the enormous gap to the miserable and gray reality that prevailed in the vast expanses of Russia and which, compared to the pre-war period, so unmistakably represented a decline and at best stagnation. And neither one nor the other could be combined with subtlety, social culture and everyday academic work. The finer minds such as Anna Akhmatowa or Boris Pasternak withdrew into obscurity as far as they did not emigrate, the old professors were increasingly pushed out and replaced by poorly trained young people from the “Institute of the Red Professorship.” In the process of purging the universities of foreign and hostile elements, it became possible for the GPU to accuse a professor of outright sabotage by using 500 rubles of state funds to purchase a copy of the Song of Igor, that “monument to the 12th-century princely chauvinism.” A medical doctor was attacked and removed from his position for holding the “incorrect view” that infant mortality had declined only slightly in the Soviet Union and that the heritability should not be completely disregarded.
A state censorship agency, “Galli,” had already been set up in the early 1920s and watched with eagle eyes to ensure that no state secrets or hostile views got into the press; the state was the sole publisher from the start. It was taken for granted that all educational and artistic activity must be permeated by the spirit of class struggle and that there could be no pure science. Nevertheless, it was still possible for years that the “Association of Proletarian Writers” rejected direct party influence on literature, and for high-ranking literary journals such as Voronsky’s Red New Land or the magazine Lef of the “Left Front” to resist the simple identification of art and politics.
But after the beginning of the Five Year Plan, not only did the scientists lose the last chance of individual and dissenting questions, but also the schools of artists and writers, which had been quite diverse until then, were robbed of their autonomy and strictly restricted to serving the construction of socialism. The “Association of Proletarian Writers” was dissolved and a unified writers’ association created; referring to an article by Lenin of 1905 which had stated that all social-democratic literature must become party literature, the Central Committee now decreed that the intensified class struggle did not admit of any neutrality; “cultural armies” swept through the country in “cultural campaigns” in order to bring down the still very high rate of illiteracy. With Gorky’s help, a new standard was created in the form of socialist realism, which was characterized by partisanship and popularity and made the typical the subject in the sense that it did not describe what happened to be real, but rather what was already future and therefore normal in the present.
Now novels such as Sholokhov’s “New Land Under the Plow” came into being, where, in complete contrast to “The Silent Don,” the positive and negative heroes were most precisely distinguished, Nikolai Ostrovsky’s “How The Steel Was Hardened,” whose composition type has been compared with the structure of Byzantine saints’ lives, or Gladkov’s “Energy,” where the depiction of production processes seems to be more important than the portrayal of living people. Mayakovsky committed suicide in April 1930. Everything that was daring, non-objective or constructivist disappeared from the paintings: cheerful shock workers forge iron, kolkhoz women ride behind a caterpillar tractor singing to work in the fields, sturdy girls help with the construction of the subway, and sailors ready for battle stand in front of the gun turrets of their battleships. Thus, in Stalin’s Soviet Union of the 1930s, culture with all its spheres had in fact once again become an integral part of the social whole, a servant within the one great task of production, which was certainly a catching up and yet at the same time wanted to be an overtaking, the one turned an ancient agrarian country into a modern industrial state and which, in the exclusivity of its self-glorification, was fundamentally different from all other industrial states and for that very reason had to appear all the more threatening as a military power.
The National Socialist cultural policy began towards the end of the 1920s with an attack on those who came under fire in the Soviet Union at the same time, namely the so-called “cultural Bolsheviks,” and it postulated the cultivation of what was cultivated in the Soviet Union a little later: popular art with its roots in national history. Of course, there was no such thing as development pathos, and there was no reason in Germany for “culture campaigns” to combat illiteracy. Until the end of the Weimar Republic, National Socialist cultural policy could hardly be distinguished from that of the German Nationalists.
In 1929 Alfred Rosenberg founded the “Combat League for German Culture,” which campaigned against “cultural decline” and for a “spiritual rebirth” of the Germans. The artistic avant-garde was consistently equated with “Bolshevik chaos”: Le Corbusier was called the “Lenin of architecture,” and the Bauhaus was described as “the enemy’s Bastille in the middle of the German fatherland.” The architect and art historian Schultze-Naumburg spoke in numerous lectures about the battle of worldviews in art, comparing works by Nolde, Barlach, Heckel and Hofer with photos of physical deformities and “racial degeneration.” Wilhelm Frick, as Minister of the Interior and Education in Thuringia, issued decrees such as “Against the Negro Culture for German Nationality” and, against the will of the faculty, he appointed the racial researcher Hans F. K. Günther to a chair in Jena.
It was therefore consistent that he had modernism excluded from the Weimar Castle Museum: Feininger, Kandinsky, Klee, Barlach, Kokoschka, Marc and others were no longer allowed to be shown. The literary historian Adolf Bartels, whose widespread “History of German Literature” was something of a hunt for Jews and “spiritual Jews,” exercised considerable influence throughout the Reich. The call for a “national dictatorship in art matters” was not uncommon.
In 1933, this demand was also quickly realized. “Art commissars” were deployed in many places, including Hans Hinkel, who later became “Reich Culture Administrator” in the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Already at the beginning of April, a large exhibition was opened in Karlsruhe entitled “Government Art from 1918 to 1933” which attempted to denounce painters of the “Brücke,” the “Blauer Reiter” and younger Expressionists by simply showing them. The poetry section of the Prussian Academy of Arts underwent a kind of major purge: Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Käthe Kollwitz, Alfred Döblin, Rudolf Pannwitz, Franz Werfel and others left and most of them emigrated. The “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” provided the means for the dismissal of the entire Bauhaus staff; of the great musicians Arnold Schönberg, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Fritz Busch and others left Germany. Wilhelm Furtwängler tried to stand in front of the Jewish musicians and wrote to Goebbels in April 1933 that he ultimately recognized only one dividing line, namely that between good and bad art, but the minister answered exactly as Lenin could have put it : “Art in the absolute sense, as liberal democracy knows it, must not exist.” On May 10, long columns of German students gathered in the squares of many German cities to carry out a great book burning, and in Berlin Joseph Goebbels and the new professor for political education Alfred Baeumler delivered impassioned speeches against the intellectual decomposition that had beset Germany for fourteen years. Among other things, books by Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster, Karl Marx, Erich Maria Remarque were burned; some of the “fire sayings” read as follows: “Against decadence and moral decay. For discipline and morals in family and state! I hand over the writings of Heinrich Mann, Ernst Glaeser and Erich Kästner to the flame.”—“The nobility of the human soul. I hand over the writings of Sigmund Freud to the flame.”—“”Against literary betrayal of the soldiers of the world war, for the education of the people in the spirit of truthfulness! I hand over the writings of Erich Maria Remarque to the flame.” The Germanist Hans Naumann interpreted the event in Bonn with the words: “We are shaking off foreign rule, we are lifting an occupation,” and Alfred Baeumler said in Berlin that National Socialism meant spiritually “the replacement of the educated by the soldier.”
Now the burning of documents and books, but also of dolls of political figures, had a long and predominantly progressive tradition not only in Germany but also in England, from Martin Luther to the Wartburg Festival and to the burning of symbolic straw dolls in the Chartist era. Some of the branded authors were also inaccessible to the ordinary reader in the Soviet Union, where the “Committee for Public Education” had even indexed Plato and Schopenhauer in the early 1920s, and where large special departments had been set up in public libraries to store unwanted literature. But the entire world press was gathered in Berlin, and its correspondents were not subject to the pre-censorship that from the outset made it unwise for Western reporters in Moscow, even in 1925, to report on the courageous and sharp words with which the German student Kindermann had confronted the judges in the so-called “Student Trial.” Thus what was denounced throughout the world as “medieval” was essentially a consequence of anti-liberal totalitarianism, and Nazi Germany suffered a severe intellectual defeat because it was far more accessible and open than the Soviet Union. The unmistakable conservatism, which with its respect for the Wehrmacht proved to be advantageous in terms of rearmament and readiness for war, in this spectacular and radicalized form made National Socialism alien even among the most conservative English, precisely because Germany was still unquestionably part of the European cultural community.
The period up to early 1934 was, however, a transitional stage, and it was made possible largely by the rivalry between Goebbels and Rosenberg, the first of whom was more liberal or less dogmatic. Some exponents of the National Socialist German Student League tried to save Expressionism as a German movement, and indeed one could point to Hanns Johst, who had once stood alongside Johannes R. Becher as an artist, but now—like Becher on the other side—mainly wanting to be a champion of the party and uttered the infamous sentence when he heard the word “culture,” he would draw his revolver. For their part, the remnants of the National Socialist left polemicized violently against the art reaction and demanded a complete revolution that would also transform art as well. Hitler himself spoke out against both ethnic dogmatism and avant-garde modernism. The most important organizational basis for National Socialist culture was created as early as September 22, 1933: the Reich Chamber of Culture Act made the practice of art at least tendentially an office of the ethnic state. The individual chambers, such as the “Reich Literature Chamber” and the “Reich Chamber of Fine Arts” imposed rigorous discipline on their members, loss of membership was identical with professional, even work bans; the best-known victim was Ernst Barlach. The most important party official bodies dealing with culture were the office of the Führer’s representative for the supervision of the entire ideological training and education of the NSDAP under Alfred Rosenberg and the “Examination Commission for the Protection of NS-Literature” under Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler. They can be compared with “Glavlit” and partly also with the Central Committee Department for Propaganda and Agitation, while the Reich Literature Chamber corresponded to the Writers’ Union.
From the beginning of 1934, only “NS-Art” officially existed alongside the large area of non-political entertainment. But since numerous private publishers were still active, many non-compliant authors could continue to publish their works as long as they did not take a conspicuous position against the regime. But the undisputed dominance was “folk poetry,” in which peasant novels held a prominent place. In addition to the “blood and soil” poetry, Werner Beumelburg, P.C. Ettighofer and Hans Zöberlein portrayed the positive experience of war, the mythicization of German history by Hans Friedrich Blunck and Wilhelm Schäfer, the national struggle by Hans Grimm and Wilhelm Pleyer, and German metaphysics with Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer. However, this literature is only inadequately characterized as the “victory of the most flat country”: the connection to important figures such as Stefan George, Ernst Jünger and Gerhart Hauptmann was evident in many places. It would be better to say that a main tendency of German literature was prepared, which condemned itself to barrenness or isolation, as was particularly vividly shown by the example of Gottfried Benn, who first welcomed the Third Reich and then chose inner emigration in the Wehrmacht. In 1938, inner-German literature counted just as little in the global context as did the literature of “socialist realism”: it only wanted to be German, and it also proved that literature as such cannot live from one root.
A similar development took place in the visual arts. Here Hitler’s interest was much stronger. With a negative purpose, he had the “Degenerate Art” exhibition set up, which was supposed to be an “exhibition of ‘cultural documents’ of Bolshevism” and actually aroused a lot of sincere indignation among the numerous visitors. The “Great German Art Exhibitions,” which Hitler usually opened himself in Munich’s “House of German Art,” were to have a positive effect: in addition to many still lives, there were the peasant romanticism of Sepp Hilz, Adolf Ziegler’s nude naturalism and the monumental sculptures of Josef Thorak and Arno Breker , and a curious example of the Führer cult was Hubert Lanzinger’s “Banner Bearer Hitler,” where Hitler was depicted in knight’s armor. Everything difficult, complicated and surprising had disappeared, simple lines reigned everywhere for a kingdom of a thousand timeless years.
In the area of the theater, the “Thing Sites” were to be seen as an independent National Socialist attempt. Here too, as in Meyerhold’s Moscow experiments, the intention was to abolish the separation between artist and audience. In 1933, Richard Euringer’s “German Passion” was performed for the first time in this way. But the transition to the pagan symbolic world did not succeed, and in 1937 the experiment came to an end. The theater of the National Socialist period remained essentially bourgeois educational theater, which had its most important protector in Hermann Goering and its most famous actor in Gustaf Gründgens.
Things were quite different in architecture. It was regarded by Hitler as his own field. Huge plans for the reorganization of Berlin were drawn up by Albert Speer on behalf of Hitler, which were not inferior in monumentality to the plans of the early Soviet period; the Nuremberg party rally grounds were at least partially completed. The New Reich Chancellery and the House of German Art were classical, the Ordensburgen somber and threatening, while the model of the “High School” deserves at best the title “mindless-monumental.” The later designs for monuments to the dead in the Russian steppe were nightmares of quasi-oriental excess. The “National Socialist desire to build” cannot be understood without the background of cultural criticism and without the will to abolish modern alienation, but it actually implemented the law of all great despotisms.
This atmosphere was particularly paralyzing for philosophy and science. But here, too, there was no mere external collapse. The old antithesis of philosophy and science had been developed from the beginning of the century to the point of antiscientism. Germany’s most important philosopher sided with National Socialism, as did the best-known jurist. However, Heidegger had already changed his mind in 1934, and Carl Schmitt also became suspicious of the party in the end. There were a number of points of contact with National Socialism in the specialist sciences, although only a very small proportion of the professors were National Socialists. But even a man like Eduard Spranger welcomed the liberation from Marxism and psychoanalysis, and Karl Jaspers’ 1930 “Spiritual Situation of the Present” was hardly likely to lead young readers away from National Socialism, since the writing was close to the spirit of the conservative revolution. The Germanists and historians were overwhelmingly on the national side from the earliest Weimar days, and if until 1933 they had tended to counterbalance the encroaching social sciences, they now seemed to dominate the field completely unchallenged. The largest proportion of Jewish professors was to be found in non-political subjects such as medicine and the natural sciences, but also in subjects that were not yet fully recognized, such as sociology and political science. There was very little resistance from German scholars to the dismissal or expulsion of their Jewish and leftist colleagues, but a breach of solidarity had often occurred earlier and not always from just one side. However, one could by no means speak of a brown university. A kind of university revolution did indeed take place, but it was initiated by the students, and old motives also played a role here, such as the fight against “professorial rule” and for student co-determination. Spontaneity from below, however, was soon replaced by taut authority from above, as the rector and deans now became superiors and “leaders.” However, there was still much dissatisfaction among the young, who were not all young in years, but wanted a National Socialist science. These included Ernst Krieck, Alfred Baeumler and Walter Frank. Frank’s attack on one of the most respected men of the guild, Hermann Oncken, which he published in the Völkischer Beobachter under the heading “L'Incorruptible,” probably aroused more fear than outrage. But Frank’s “Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany” nevertheless never became an analogue of the “Institute of the Red Professorship” and was essentially limited to “Research on the Jewish Question.” In the influential Historischen Zeitschrift, Friedrich Meinecke was replaced as editor by Karl Alexander von Müller, but von Müller was also one of the established scholars, and Frank was not able to penetrate the core area of the journal, where the old scholarly line was still being followed.
National Socialism was in fact harshly opposed to the principle of science, and when the Nobel Prize winner Philipp Lenard highlighted this fact particularly clearly in the title of his book “German Physics,” then the distance to the concept of “objectivity of science” was even greater than in the case of the “science of the proletariat” in the Soviet Union, because the proletariat raised a claim to universality and Germanness did not. And so it was objectively unjust that many intellectuals in the countries of western democracies hardly took any notice of the millions of victims of collectivization and the resulting famine and directed all their indignation at National Socialist Germany, but from the point of view of culture their behavior was justified or at least not incomprehensible.
An agrarian state which carries on its industrialization with all its strength and ruthless use of force, depriving culture of all autonomy and forcing it entirely in the service of the supreme end, may be a terrifying and dangerous state for its neighbors. But a modern industrial nation that celebrates the deeds of war and the gods of its forefathers at thing sites—even if it is just the intention—is an inherently untrue entity that is only temporarily possible under very specific conditions if it does not resort to violent measures of persecution and if one admits that industrial society makes non-industrial forms of life possible.
If, therefore, despite the similar politicization, the difference between the regimes in the area of culture is particularly visible, the similarity may become more apparent as soon as the basics of everyday existence are at stake, of law and lawlessness.
