Especially in music and theater, where renowned personalities were able to continue their work after 1945 with little or no disruption, these fields were inclined to cling to the notion that professionals had no choice but to conform to aggressive Nazi demands to commandeer their crafts. Film Culture and Kulturfilm: Walter Ruttmann, the Avant-Garde Film, and the Kulturfilm in Weimar Germany and the Third Reich. PhD diss., University of WisconsinMadison, 1982. . The final version essentially grossly overestimated the singular power of Nazi aggression. Weikop, Christian. Taylor claimed to distance himself from the totalitarian model but justified his comparison of the two systems with the contention that Soviet Russia and Nazi 290 Notes to Pages 155160 Germany are the two best documented examples of highlyand overtlypoliticised societies the world has ever seen, 3. Bentwich, Norman. Giselher Schubert, The Aesthetic Premises of a Nazi Conception of Music, in Kater and Riethmller, Music and Nazism, 70. Fulks, Film Culture and Kulturfilm, 123, 126. Art in the Third Reich. Hans Mommsen, Cumulative Radicalisation and Progressive Self-Destruction as Structural Determinants of the Nazi Dictatorship, in Kershaw and Lewin, Stalinism and Nazism, 7587. Even the earliest Cold War cultural historians had to concede that both Hitlers and Stalins sentiments may have found some sympathy among the masses. Editors Foreword. In Theatre and Film in Exile: German Artists in Britain, 19331945, edited by Gnter Berghaus. 90. Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1993. As a byproduct of the Historikerstreit, historians of the Holocaust conceptualized the progress toward genocide as successive periods of increased radicalization, viewing 1933 to 1936 as a period in which the Nazi regime exercised a degree of moderation, as they were primarily focused on stabilization and achieving full employment. The industry was finally nationalized only in 1942 under the special circumstances of war. Minutes of the meeting of May 6th were read and approved. 145. 37. Who Cares If You Listen? High Fidelity 7, no. Bauhaus-Architekten im Dritten Reich. In Bauhaus-Moderne im Nationalsozialismus: Zwischen Anbiederung und Verfolgung, edited by Winfried Nerdinger and Bauhaus-Archive, 153178. Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden stated in 1941 that the Nazi system represents the mentality of the great majority of the German people, and the Labour Partys international secretary, William Gilles, asserted in 1943 that the Germans spirit is not really democratic.62 But the challenges in Britain were not only political but also aesthetic, which meant that refugees were forced to grapple not only with British suspicion toward any German exiles but also with Britains cultural conservatism.63 Ernst Toller wrote and produced only one theater work, No More Peace, during his British exile, to mixed reviews.64 He received praise in retrospect for his persistence in raising consciousness about the Nazi scourge even in the face of threatened deportation, but his civil courage was not appreciated at the time.65 Those who fled to the United States encountered an economic strain on theaters that was not markedly better. Levy, Alan. Leoni am Starnberger See: Druffel, 1978. Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1989. The Face of East European Jewry, by Arnold Zweig, with fifty-two drawings by Hermann Struck. Walter Grasskamp, The De-Nazification of Nazi Art: Arno Breker and Albert Speer Today, in Taylor and Van der Will, Nazification of Art, 231248. Moeller, Felix. Aus Berlin emigriert: Werke Berliner Knstler, die nach 1933 Deutschland verlassen mussten. Jonathan Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 113153; and Andreas Hneke, Der Fall Robert Scholz: Kunstberichte unterm Hakenkreuz (Cologne: AICA, 2001). Meanwhile, Hindemith, hoping for rehabilitation, also continued to have his music performed in Germany to rave reviews.64 Perhaps the most surprising survivor of these attacks was jazz. Hitlers Classical Architect. Nation, May 21, 2013. www.thenation.com /article/hitlers-classical-architect/. London: Allen Lane, 2004. Von Papen, Manuela. Habakuk Traber and Elmar Weingarten (Berlin: Berliner Festspiele und Argon, 1987), 195204. Gtersloh: Sigbert Mohn Verlag, 1963. . Nazi Germany: Confronting the Myths, published in 2015, successfully outlines and dismisses many myths about Nazi Germany, but it nevertheless singles out the Reich Culture Chambers as the epicenter of cultural Gleichschaltung and reaffirms Hitlers power over dictating artistic tastes.7 The catalog of the 2014 What Is Known and What Is Believed 3 exhibition Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany 1937 at the Neue Galerie in New York reasserts that the National Socialists produced mediocre, politically motivated art and aesthetic irrelevancies and undermined the conditions of real art and destroyed artistic modernism.8 The purpose of this book is to understand why certain assumptions about the Nazis manipulation of the visual and performing arts have remained so compelling, even as mounting evidence continues to erode their credibility. Stefan Zweig and the Fall of the Reich Music Chamber President, Richard Strauss. In Music and Nazism: Art under Tyranny, 19331945, edited by Michael H. Kater and Albrecht Riethmller, 269291. As was noted above, Thomas Manns impressions of Nazi mass hysteria bore striking similarities to Dorothy Thompsons characterization of the Third Reich, and they helped her to make the early connections between Nazism and Stalinism that would persist in cultural histories thereafter. Pike, Politics of Culture, 235245, 531536, quote on p. 239. University Park: College Art Association of America, in association with Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990. Ibid., 65. Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1988. In November 1937, Lady Noel E. Norton envisioned an exhibit titled Banned Art, which would have a special focus on expressionism, and she intended to purchase the entire Degenerate Art exhibition from the German government, along with other modern German works.32 By April of the following year, however, as British appeasement policies leading up to the Munich Agreement led to strict censorship of any anti-German propaganda, the exhibitions proposed name was 56 The Exile Experience changed to Twentieth-Century German Art, and the work of Georg Kolbe was to be included, despite his known support of the Nazi regime. Hartmut Frank, Welche Sprache sprechen Steine? In music, as in the other arts, the economic and political upheavals of the 1930s triggered a widespread stylistic simplification. She goes on to say that, despite the ideological differences that separated Nazi Germany from her neighbors, the tonally oriented, nationally tinged styles adopted by a broad range of composers in the 1930s made feasible Germanys attempt, after the isolation of the early Nazi years, to reenter the wider world of modern music.172 Erik Levi later alluded to this as well, noting that operas premiering in France, Switzerland, and the United States rarely adhere[d] to the modernist styles embraced during the 1920s, instead placing greater emphasis on utilizing folk idioms, or making a conscious effort to effect a directness of expression. For Levi, however, this revelation posed the uncomfortable conclusion . Jutta Raab, InternierungBombadierungRekrutierung: Musiker-Exil in Grobritannien, in Heister, Zenck, and Petersen, Musik im Exil, 279296; Erik Levi, Carl Ebert, Glyndebourne, and the Regeneration of British Opera, in Berghaus, Theatre and Film in Exile, 179188; and Levi, Mozart and the Nazis: How the Third Reich Abused a Cultural Icon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 96104; Ambrose, Hitlers Loss, 131141; and Berta Geissmar, The Baton and the Jackboot: Recollections of Musical Life (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1944). 1 (1992): 4167; Stig Hornshj-Mller, Der Ewige Jude: Quellen-kritische Analyse eines antisemitischen Propagandafilms (Gttingen: Institut fr den wissenschaftlichen Film, 1995); Thomas Sakmyster, Nazi Documentaries of Intimidation: Feldzug in Polen (1940), Feuertaufe (1940) and Sieg im Westen (1941), Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 16, no. 102. Hartmut Frank, Bridges: Paul Bonatzs Search for a Contemporary Monumental Style, in Taylor and Van der Will, Nazification of Art, 144157. Bhnigk, Volker, and Joachim Stamp, eds. Vol. 57. Nazification, Time 21, no. For example, Adornos most quotableand misquoteddeclaration, To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, has not only been taken out of context and perverted in its meaning by most people who cite it but was also written decades before Auschwitz came to symbolize the full extent of Holocaust atrocities. Michalski, Sergiusz. . I am grateful to Christian Fuhrmeister and Barbara Buenger for furnishing me with this information. Wayne Kvam, The Nazification of Max Reinhardts Deutsches Theater Berlin, Theatre Journal 40, no. This would involve overseeing exhibitions, theater, concerts, and conferences that were intended to impress not only the Germans but also the other Allied powers with the high quality of French culture.84 Much of the cultural work was concentrated in the Institut Franais en Allemagne in Freiburg and its satellites, the Centres dtudes Franaises Occupation, Cold War, and the Zero Hour 105 in Mainz, Tbingen, and Trier, which were also under the auspices of the DEP and comparable to the Amerika-Huser and British Centres.85 The Soviets established the House of Soviet Culture (Haus der Kultur der Sowjetunion) in Berlin in 1947 and various friendship organizations throughout the zone of occupation, supervised by leaders specially trained in anti-Fascist schools and mandated to spread truth about the Soviet Union and fight every kind of slander and opposition.86 At the same time that they wished to impress the Germans with their own culture, the Allies wished to keep their policies from coming across as invasive and dictatorial, which compelled all four powers to show tolerance for German culture. In April 1949, Harlan was Occupation, Cold War, and the Zero Hour 103 acquitted due to a lack of evidence that Jew Sss had led directly to persecution of Jews. Furtwngler. Much care was taken throughout the years of the Third Reich to mold propaganda to appeal to German citizens, and the relentless promotion of the Volksgemeinschaft ideal actually encouraged many individuals to denounce others.137 Members of the artistic community, for their part, may have had much to celebrate in hearing promises of new opportunities and in finding their purpose in contributing to the Volksgemeinschaft ideal, yet they may have also carefully considered the potential risks inherent in challenging authority. What is distinctive to the cultural operations of the Third Reich, then, is not the promotion of certain Nazi individuals, ideology, or aesthetics but the extreme care taken in presenting the arts to the public as proof of German greatness. . Kreimeier, Klaus. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. 170. Beal, New Music, 39. See especially the introduction to the volume and the introductions to the sections Music and Architecture, Fine Arts, and Film; the essays by Schulze-Vellinghausen (La peinture) and Trier (La sculpture), originally published in French in Documents, appear here in English translation. Critics regarded the interspersed commentaries that stressed the Nazi exploitation of the masses to have little connection to the works on display and even compared the curators tactics to those found in the Degenerate Art exhibition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Fleming, Donald, and Bernard Bailyn, eds. Kunst und Literatur im antifaschistischen Exil 19331945 2. Painting and sculpture received the most attention, followed by architecture, while other arts were virtually ignored until the 1970s and 1980s. Culture in Dark Times: Nazi Fascism, Inner Emigration, and Exile. Schebera, Jrgen. Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Reimer, 2007). Furthermore, attempts to encourage the establishment of private theatersan operational norm in the United States but a relative anomaly in Germanyfailed due to general economic hardship in the immediate postwar years.113 By promoting openness to national as well as international repertoire, American authorities did relatively little to alter the existing balance between German and non-German offerings, which sometimes resulted in some controversial allowances. Angelika Ruge-Schatz, Grundprobleme der Kulturpolitik in der Franzsischen Besatzungszone, in Die Deutschlandpolitik Frankreichs und die Franzsische Zone 1945 1949, ed. Friedrich, City of Nets, 153154. Kunst und Literatur im antifaschistischen Exil 19331945 6. Christian Weikop. Ibid., chapters 2 and 3. Eckmann, Ruptures and Continuities, 5051. paralleled by the reactionary art policies simultaneously instituted in Russia, only to be revived after World War II.36 The only postwar attack on expressionism came from Robert Scholz, who was still so firmly entrenched in the mindset of Degenerate Art that he unequivocally rejected expressionism as primitive, decadent, and un-German, despite the ardent support of its erstwhile Nazi advocates (Gottfried Benn, Emil Nolde, and the National Socialist Student League). Rabinbach, Anson G. The Aesthetics of Production in the Third Reich. Theories of Fascism, special issue, Journal of Contemporary History 11, no. Marc Silberman, German Cinema: Texts in Context (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995). 106. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. . As for East Germany, the editors wrote that its contempt for Western avant-garde innovation left it with only three successful composers, two of them old timers (Eisler and Dessau). Postwar historiography took a once positively conceived concept of Germanys Sonderweg and turned it into something negative. Survivors scavenged among corpses for food, water, and fuel, forced to compete for scarce resources with the floods of returning soldiers, liberated prisoners, and those who had been expelled from ceded eastern territories. 126. Originally published as Tanz unterm Hakenkreuz: Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 1996). Cologne: DuMont, 1986. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum, in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1997. . With two separate currencies in place in two diverging economic systems, the division of Germany into two separate countries was inevitable: the western zones, with the exception of the western sectors of Berlin, formed the Federal Republic of Germany in May 1949, and the Soviet Zone became the German Democratic Republic in October, with the Soviet Sector of Berlin established as its capital. Hans Richter, quoted in Brockmann, German Culture, 17. Reich, 97105; and Roswitha Mattausch and Brigitte Wiederspahn, Das Bauprogramm der Deutschen Arbeitsfront: Die Umwelt der Arbeiter, in Bussmann, Kunst im 3. The Pledge Betrayed: America and Britain and the Denazification of Post-War Germany. Hitler and Goebbels continued to make references to totality until they were corrected by Rosenberg, who insisted on distinguishing between Italys total state and Germanys total movement or German state.1 As the term retreated from the spotlight in Germany, it gained prominence as an object of criticism among the exile communities in the United States and England and then became universally accepted for highlighting the similarities between Nazism and communism.
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