Boyd D. Cathey writes: This past November 30, 2015, was the sixty-first anniversary of the death of German musician Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886-1954). Despite controversy surrounding his decision to remain in Germany during World War II, he is recognized globally today as one of the greatest musical masters of the twentieth century. From 1922 to 1945, and again after 1950, he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. His subsequent and wide-ranging influence over modern orchestral direction has been immense. Of him, the Wikipedia states: “He is considered to be one of the greatest symphonic and operatic conductors of the 20th century.” In the classical central European repertory—Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, Brahms, Bruckner—he was unexcelled in his mastery. He was also a composer of considerable merit, whose compositions have been recognized as continuing that great European classical tradition.
Underscoring his enduring greatness, in recent years there have been several in-depth biographies and a successful 1996 Broadway play (and subsequent movie), “Taking Sides,” that portrays his postwar denazification process. And the compact disc medium has witnessed steadily strong sales of his performances, many of them live and some of them made available by dusty archives only recently. Furtwängler societies are active in France, Britain, Germany and other countries. His overall reputation, however, especially in America, remains controversial.
Following the National Socialist assumption of power in 1933, a number of prominent musicians—including notable Jewish artists such as Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer and Arnold Schoenberg—left Germany. Most of the nation’s musicians, however, including the majority of its finest talent, remained and even flourished under the new regime. With the possible exception of the composer Richard Strauss, Furtwängler was the most prominent musician to stay and continue his career under the regime.
Consequently, discussion of his life still provokes heated debate about the role of art and artists under Hitler and, on a more fundamental level, about the relationship of art and politics.
An Old Fashioned Patriot
Like Alexander Solzhenitsyn in literature several decades later, Wilhelm Furtwängler drew great inspiration from his homeland’s rich cultural heritage. His world revolved around music, specifically German music. Although essentially non-political, he was an ardent German patriot, and leaving Germany was simply out of the question.
Philosophically he may perhaps be best characterized as a man of the “old” Imperial Germany—a conservative and an elitist. Along with the great majority of his countrymen, he initially welcomed the end of the corruption-plagued “Weimar republic” (1918-1933). Indeed, he was the conductor chosen to direct the gala performance of Wagner’s opera “Die Meistersinger” for the “Day of Potsdam,” the solemn state ceremony on March 21, 1933, at which President von Hindenburg, the new Chancellor Adolf Hitler and the newly-elected Reichstag formally ushered in the new National Socialist government. Nevertheless, Furtwängler never joined the National Socialist Party and always refused to give the Nazi salute.
It wasn’t long before Furtwängler came into conflict with the new regime. In a public dispute in late 1934 with Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels over artistic independence, he resigned his positions as director of the Berlin Philharmonic and as head of the Berlin State Opera. However, given Furtwangler’s fame and importance, a compromise agreement was soon reached whereby he resumed his posts, along with a measure of artistic independence. He was thus able to exploit both his prestigious position and the artistic and jurisdictional rivalries between Culture Minister Bernhard Rust, Goebbels and Hermann Göring to play a greater and more independent role in the cultural life of Germany.
From then on, until early 1945, he continued to conduct to much acclaim both at home and abroad, including a highly successful concert tour of Britain in 1935 and justly famous performances of Wagner’s “Ring des Nibelungen” operatic cycle at the Covent Garden Opera House to celebrate the coronation of King George VI in 1937. He was also a guest conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic during 1939-1940, and at the Bayreuth Festival. On several occasions he led concerts in support of the German war effort. He also nominally served as a member of the Prussian State Council and as vice-president of the “Reich Music Chamber,” the state-sponsored professional musicians’ association, but he was never active in either organization.
Throughout the Third Reich era, Furtwängler’s influence on Europe’s musical life never really diminished.
Cultural Activity in the Third Reich
For Americans conditioned to believe that nothing of real cultural or artistic merit was produced in Germany during the Hitler era, the phrase “Nazi art” is an oxymoron—a contradiction in terms. The reality, though, is not so straightforward, and it is gratifying to note that some progress is being made to nuance the historical record.
This is manifest, for example, in the publication in recent years of two significant studies that deal extensively with Furtwängler, and which generally defend his conduct during the Third Reich period: The Devil’s Music Master by Sam Shirakawa and Trial of Strength by Fred K. Prieberg. These revisionist works not only examine in exhaustive detail Wilhelm Furtwangler’s role in the cultural life of National Socialist Germany, they challenge the widely accepted perception of the place of artists and the arts in the Third Reich.
Prieberg’s Trial of Strength concentrates almost entirely on Furtwängler’s intricate dealings with Goebbels, Göring, Hitler, and various other figures in the cultural life of the Third Reich. In so doing, he demonstrates that in spite of official measures to “coordinate” and control the arts, the regime also permitted a certain degree of artistic freedom.
Even the anti-Jewish racial laws and regulations were not always applied with rigor, and exceptions were not infrequent. Among many instances that could be cited, the prominent musician Leo Blech retained his conducting post until 1937, in spite of his Jewish ancestry. Other prominent musicians with Jewish spouses and relations, including Max Lorenz, Frida Leider, and Richard Strauss, continued to perform throughout the period. Furtwängler exploited this situation to intervene successfully in a number of cases on behalf of artists, including Jews, who were out of favor with (and potential victims of) the regime. During his denazification trial various Jewish artists testified on his behalf, declaring that he helped many to escape persecution or to emigrate. Prominent Jewish musician, Hugo Strelitzer, declared: “If I am alive today, I owe this to this great man. Furtwängler helped and protected a great number of Jewish musicians and this attitude shows a great deal of courage since he did it under the eyes of the Nazis, in Germany itself. History will be his judge.”
The artists and musicians who left the country contended that without them, Germany’s cultural life would collapse. High culture, they and other critics of Hitler and his regime believed, would wither in an ardently nationalist and authoritarian state. As Prieberg notes: “The musicians who emigrated or were thrown out of Germany from 1933 onwards indeed felt they were irreplaceable and in consequence believed firmly that Hitler’s Germany would, following their departure, become a dreary and empty cultural wasteland. This would inevitably cause the rapid collapse of the regime.”
Time, however, would prove these critics mostly wrong. While it is true that the departure of such notable artists as Fritz Busch and Bruno Walter hurt (and dealt a blow to German prestige abroad), many of the nation’s renowned musicians—including Richard Strauss, Franz Lehar, Carl Orff, Karl Böhm, Hans Pfitzner, Wilhelm Kempff, Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, Herbert von Karajan, Anton Webern, as well as Furtwängler—remained, sometimes uneasily, to produce musical art of superior standards. Regardless of the emigration of a number of Jewish and non-Jewish artists, as well as the promulgation of sweeping anti-Jewish restrictions, Germany’s cultural life continued at a high level during the period.
The National Socialists regarded art, and especially music, as an expression of the nation’s character, history, and ideals. An appreciation, albeit one narrowly-focused, of Germany’s cultural achievements, they believed, encouraged national pride and fostered a sense of national unity and mission. Because they regarded themselves as guardians of their nation’s cultural heritage, they opposed most modern trends in music and in the other arts, as assaults against the cultural traditions of Germany and the West.
Acting swiftly to promote a broad revival of the nation’s cultural life, the new National Socialist government made prodigious efforts to further the arts and, in particular, music. As detailed in two more recent studies (cf. Michael Kater’s The Twisted Muse and Erik Levi’s Music in the Third Reich), not only did the new leadership greatly increase state funding for such important cultural institutions as the Berlin Philharmonic and the Bayreuth Wagner Festival, it used radio, recordings, and other means to make Germany’s musical heritage as accessible as possible to all its citizens.
As part of its efforts to bring art to the people, it strove to erase classical music’s snobbish and “class” image, and to make it widely familiar and enjoyable, especially to the working class. At the same time, the new regime’s leaders were mindful of popular musical trends. Thus, much of the music heard during the Third Reich era on the radio or in films was not classical. Light music with catchy tunes—similar to those popular with listeners elsewhere in Europe and in the United States—was featured on radio and in motion pictures, especially during the war years.
The person primarily responsible for implementing the new cultural policies was Joseph Goebbels. In his positions as Propaganda Minister and head of the “Reich Culture Chamber,” the umbrella association for professionals in cultural life, he promoted music, literature, painting, and film in keeping with what he believed were German values and traditions, while at the same time consistent with popular tastes.
The Role of Hitler
No political leader had a keener interest in art, or was a more enthusiastic booster of his nation’s musical heritage, than Hitler, who regarded the compositions of Beethoven, Wagner, Anton Bruckner and the other German masters as the highest expressions of German culture.
Hitler’s reputation as a bitter, second rate “failed artist” is somewhat undeserved. As harsh a critic as John Lukacs acknowledges in his historiographic work, The Hitler of History (pp. 70-72), that the German leader was a man of some artistic talent and considerable, if often erratic, artistic discernment. Additional studies by such noted authors as Frederic Spotts, in his Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (2003), and Brigitte Hamann, in her detailed biography of the mistress of Bayreuth during the Third Reich years, Winifred Wagner (2006), reveal that Hitler was by no means a closed-minded artistic “reactionary,” as is often portrayed popularly. His support for modernizing traditional Wagnerian presentations at Bayreuth, for example, against other members of the National Socialist party, may surprise those who know little of the complexity of artistic life during the Third Reich period. And his rather remarkable knowledge of opera was commented upon by visitors to Bayreuth.
We perhaps can never fully understand Hitler and the spirit behind his political movement without understanding that he drew great inspiration from, and identified with, the heroic figures of European legend, and whose stories are immortalized in the great musical dramas of Richard Wagner and others.
This was vividly brought out by August Kubizek, Hitler’s closest friend as a teenager and young man, in his postwar memoir published in the United States under the title The Young Hitler I Knew. Kubizek describes how, after the two young men together attended for the first time a performance of Wagner’s opera Rienzi in the Austrian city of Linz, Hitler spoke passionately and at length about how this work’s inspiring story of a popular Roman tribune had so deeply moved him. Years later, after he had become chancellor, he related to Kubizek how that performance of Rienzi had radically changed his life. “In that hour it began,” he confided.
Hitler recognized Furtwängler’s greatness and understood his significance for Germany and German music. Thus, when other officials (including Himmler) complained of the conductor’s nonconformity and lack of enthusiasm for the regime, Hitler overrode their objections. Until almost the end, Furtwängler remained his favorite conductor. He was similarly indulgent toward his favorite heldentenor Max Lorenz (a homosexual), and Wagnerian soprano Frida Leider, each of whom was married to a Jew. Their cultural importance to the regime trumped racial or political considerations.
Humiliations after the War
A year and a half after the end of the war in Europe, Furtwängler was brought before a humiliating “denazification” tribunal. Operated by American occupation authorities, the process was from the beginning deeply flawed. So much vital information was withheld from the defendant that, Shirakawa suggests, it appears that the occupation authorities were determined to “get” the conductor. In his closing remarks at the hearing, Furtwängler defiantly defended his record:
I knew Germany was in a terrible crisis; I felt responsible for German music, and it was my task to survive this crisis, as much as I could. The concern that my art was misused for propaganda had to yield to the greater concern that German music be preserved, that music be given to the German people by its own musicians. These people, the compatriots of Bach and Beethoven, of Mozart and Schubert, still had to go on living under the control of a regime obsessed with total war. No one who did not live here himself in those days can possibly judge what it was like. Does Thomas Mann [who was critical of Furtwängler’s wartime actions] really believe that in ‘the Germany of Himmler‘ one should not be permitted to play Beethoven? Could he not realize that people never needed more, never yearned more to hear Beethoven and his message of freedom and human love, than precisely these Germans, who had to live under Himmler’s terror?….I could not leave Germany in her deepest misery. To get out would have been a shameful flight. After all, I am a German, whatever may be thought of that abroad, and I do not regret having done it for the German people.
Even with serious gaps in the record and a strong bias against Furtwängler, the tribunal was still unable to establish a credible case against the conductor, and he was, in effect, cleared. Nevertheless, he was banned from performing in West Germany by Allied authorities for several years. Outraged by this action, famous Jewish violinist Yehudi Menuhin publicly defended the German artist. In a wire to General Robert A. McClure (February 1946), he wrote:
Unless you have secret incriminating evidence against Furtwängler supporting your accusation that he was a tool of Nazi Party, I beg to take violent issue with your decision to ban him. The man never was a Party member. Upon numerous occasions, he risked his own safety and reputation to protect friends and colleagues. Do not believe that the fact of remaining in one’s own country is alone sufficient to condemn a man. On the contrary, as a military man, you would know that remaining at one’s post often requires greater courage than running away. He saved, and for that we are deeply his debtors, the best part of his own German culture….
With the relative cooling of wartime passions and the growing threat from Soviet Communism in Europe, views of Furtwängler began to change. Nevertheless, an invitation in 1949 for him to assume direction of the Chicago Symphony was met with fierce opposition in the United States. (He was no stranger to America: in 1927-29 he had served as visiting conductor of the New York Philharmonic.) On learning of the invitation, various members of America’s cultural establishment launched an intense campaign—spearheaded by The New York Times, musicians Artur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz, and New York critic Ira Hirschmann—to scuttle Furtwängler’s appointment. As described in detail by Shirakawa and writer Daniel Gillis (in Furtwängler and America) the campaigners used falsehoods, innuendos, and even death threats to achieve their goal of thwarting the appointment.
Typical of its emotionally charged rhetoric was the bitter reproach of Chicago Rabbi Morton Berman:
Furtwängler preferred to swear fealty to Hitler. He accepted at Hitler’s hands his reappointment as director of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. He was unfailing in his service to Goebbels’ ministry of culture and propaganda … The token saving of a few Jewish lives does not excuse Mr. Furtwängler from official, active participation in a regime which murdered six million Jews and millions of non-Jews. Furtwängler is a symbol of all those hateful things for the defeat of which the youth of our city and nation paid an ineffable price.
After Furtwängler was finally obliged to withdraw his name from consideration for the Chicago post, a disillusioned Moshe Menuhin, Yehudi Menuhin’s father, scathingly denounced the attacks on him. Furtwängler, he declared,
…was a victim of envious and jealous rivals who had to resort to publicity, to smear, to calumny, in order to keep him out of America so it could remain their private bailiwick. He was the victim of the small fry and puny souls among concert artists, who, in order to get a bit of national publicity, joined the bandwagon of professional idealists, the professional Jews and hired hands who irresponsibly assaulted an innocent and humane and broad-minded man….
COMMENTS:
* Thomas Mann’s criticism of Furtwaengler’s wartime actions in Hitler’s Germany contrasts, I suppose, with Mann spending the war years composing Allied propaganda broadcasts while poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel. (Yep, sarcasm.)
So much of the criticism of individual Germans and German institutions during the Hitler era seems to me at the level of profound bad faith. At one and the same time we hear that Nazi Germany was a deeply oppressive totalitarian state with its tentacles around everything, and that individual Germans and German institutions ought to be roundly bashed for failing to exercise moral courage and political liberty that are difficult even in relatively liberal democracies. Well, if the Nazi state was so awful, how can anyone reasonably expect meaningful dissent from a cowed constituency?
* Hitler was knowledgeable about art, but his taste was very limited and his art policy was pure kitsch. Also, he didn’t understand the true dynamics of creativity. Creativity may produce things of beauty and ‘nobility’, but the source of creativity is dark, murky, mysterious, eccentric, and peculiar. Hitler was too creatively limited and emotionally repressed to access this side of art. For him, art and culture were all about pretty pictures, orderly ideals, and heroic poses.
He didn’t understand that even the pretty stuff in art comes from strange regions of the mind. It’s like life is created through the yucky process of birth. It’s like beautiful flowers grow from stuff rotting in the dirt.
Art isn’t so much about construction as transformation.
Take cheese. How is it made? The milk has to be transformed by germs into curdy stuff. Without that controlled ‘decaying’ process, there is no cheese. But Hitler view of art and culture was to antiseptic to allow such fermentation. Hitler’s idea of art/cheese was to kill all the germs in milk and then freeze milk into a solid.
But frozen milk isn’t cheese. Nazi ultra-idealism and antisepticism didn’t allow for fermentation of life or ideals into art. It was like a gardener trying to grow roses without dirt. Flowers aren’t gonna grow without dirt. So, if you don’t wanna handle dirt, you better just make plastic roses. And this is why so much of Nazi art looks artificial, inorganic, and plastic. On the surface, they are pretty, heroic, noble, epic, grand, and etc. But they don’t seem to have grown from within the personal/individual/eccentric soul. It looks like kitschy hackwork, as if Hitler hired a bunch of second-raters and third-raters to just to imitations of the Classic Ideal.
When we look at the works of the Ancient Greeks, Renaissance artists, and Rodin, the works like they flowed out something mysterious and genius within the artist. It’s like a tree grows from the seed out from the ground.
But look at Nazi Art, and we sense no organic growth. In fact, we don’t sense much in the way of creativity at all. Instead, we sense that Hitler put forth an Ideal(taken from classicism) and told hacks to create uninspired imitations and replicas.
Some of the technique is pretty good, even expert. But there is no tweak or twist in the technique. It is this tweaking that is necessary to have real art.
Again, milk turns to cheese because of the X-factor of the lactobacillus that can transform milk into cheese. Without lactobacillus, you don’t have cheese. Fresh milk is nice, but it’s not cheese. Likewise, prettiness and grandeur are nice, but neither, by itself, is art. Art needs some turning-agent that can make something into something special. Any art student can learn to draw pretty well and make nice pictures of pretty men, women, children, animals, nature, and etc. But that isn’t enough for Art. The artist has to have some creative bacillus that is lacking in most people to turn the image, story, or idea into a kind of vision. And Hitler had no idea how this worked.
It’s like wine. Juice is nice enough, but it’s not wine. Juice needs yeast and a certain process to be turned into wine. Nazi policy was like trying to turn grapes into wine without yeast. Hitler was too much of a purist and idealist to be comfortable with strangeness that is the necessary turning-agent ingredient in art.
Even great pleasant works of art have something a bit strange about them. Take the works of Botticelli. Lovely and beautiful, but there’s something more than prettiness, more than mere beauty. But Hitler was too bourgeois and pedestrian in his tastes to understand or appreciate this quality. He lead a bohemian existence once, but he was never comfortable in ‘exile’. He resented being poor, and even as he loathed the pompous bourgeoisie, he wanted to win their approval and favors. His paintings are decent enough but there’ s no daring, no individuality, no eccentricity. It’s all just cut-and-dry technique. As for Lukacs, his tastes are too bourgeois for my taste. His conservative disposition has problems with modernism. I can understand why he prefers Speer to most modernists — I do too since Speer did have genuine talent, except for the ridiculous mega-dome he designed for Germania — , but Lukacs has been a man of limited imagination when it came to art and culture.
(If the problem with Nazi Art was the lack of creative bacteria/yeast, the problem of so much of Modern Art was just cultural rot. You need bacteria to make cheese, but there is a process and not just any bacteria will do. If you just leave milk outside, it will ‘turn’ alright, but it will no turn into cheese. It will just turn sour and yucky. Too much of modern art was like leaving milk or grapes outside to rot. Art calls for certain degree of ‘creative decay’ but random rotting. Artist has to be like cheesemaker or winemaker. He has to know how to use the creative germs to turn something fresh into something richer and deeper without making it rot into gooish stuff.)
Because Nazi art lacked the germic turning-agent, they were too simple and obvious. They were what they were and nothing more. They failed to fascinate. Nazis admired the Greeks but didn’t really understand them. Take this video below that says Greeks became experts at ‘exaggeration’. Actually, the video is misleading, but that’s what happens when you seek the advice of a silly dotkin. Hindu stuff is full of exaggeration, so he may be projecting his culture onto the Greeks. Though the video refers to it as ‘exaggeration’, the effect is closer to paradox, like with the tortoise that Achilles cannot outrun to jump in the air and drive his sword into some big bald-headed guy.
The ‘exaggerated’ statue in the video below isn’t about exaggeration. Instead, its power lies in a kind of ambivalence, an impression of something that seems real but can’t be real. Exaggeration is obvious, ambivalence isn’t. And that was the genius of Greek art. It could convey competing or contradictory meanings and ideas at once and almost imperceptibly, and that is why the viewer feels that there is something more than what is immediately apparent. You don’t get this effect with Nazi Art that are all just ‘what you see is what you get’.
It’s long been said that USSR produced better art than Nazi Germany, but the comparison isn’t really fair because the USSR lasted much longer. Nazi Germany lasted only 12 yrs, and the last 5 yrs were engulfed in massive war.
Also, Nazi Germany was far less murderous than Stalin’s USSR when it came to most artistic figures. As long as artists were not blatant trouble-makers, they were left alone. In contrast, even artists most loyal to the regime could be taken away in the middle of the night. Hitler could be ruthless, but he generally wasn’t paranoid 24/7 like Stalin was. But then, Hitler was a Austro-German ruling over mostly Germans. Stalin had more to fear and worry about since he was a Georgian ruling over a vast multi-ethnic empire.
Even though Nazi Germany was less murderous to artists than the USSR was to its own, there was two strikes against Nazi creativity, indeed even in comparison to the USSR. One was the ultra-idealism of Nazi art policy. Ideals are nice and useful but when made pathological, they have a way of stamping out the richness of life. Nazism was so much into the Ideal Human Type that it didn’t make enough room for the full range of humanity.
Communism had its ideals too, but it was okay with all sorts of people. The ideal didn’t have to be perfectionist and superior. The essence of Nazi Art policy can be found in the philistine Alex Kurtagic, the moron of Alt Right with a hardon for Hitler.
http://www.radixjournal.com/altright-archive/altright-archive/main/the-magazine/wanted-something-to-dream
Another Nazi-esque tard of the Alt Right is Greg Johnson. Kurtagic and Johnson are reasonably intelligent but lacking in taste, insight into the strangeness as source of creativity, and moral sense. For all their highfalutin knowledge of ‘cultural’ and ‘intellectual’ matters, their vision of art doesn’t go much further beyond racial propaganda. And in this, they are neo-Nazi tards. Johnson’s smarts, though real, is useless because his tastes suck so bad that he even lowers himself to reviewing stuff like FIREFLY. I mean how tarded can anyone get?
Firefly
The other reason for the failure of Nazi Art Policy was the stifling of passion and craziness. The many great German artists, writers, and composers were marked by passion, vision, decadence, eccentricity, even madness, etc. (The failure of German creativity since the end of WWII has to do with German fear of their own passionate souls lest they lead to something like Nazism again. Ironically, it was Nazism that
snuffed individual Germanic passion, but Germans seem to learn the wrong lessons over and over.) In Nazi Germany, Hitler hogged all the mad passion and craziness for himself through his cult of personality and oratory. No one else could be ‘crazy’ and ‘inspired’. Everyone had to bow down to Hitler and salute him. Hitler was Randall McMurphy as Nurse Ratched who disallowed any other would-be-Randall-McMurphies. So, while Hitler himself could play the creative visionary using history as his art project, no one else could be crazy in Germany. But German culture without craziness isn’t possible. German culture, unlike English culture, was more about passion than manners.
Beethoven didn’t just make beautiful and noble music. He made it with a certain craziness. So did Wagner. Nietzsche was mad-nutty in his genius. Heidegger must have been kooky too because his book BEING AND TIME is impenetrable from page one, the only page I dared read. Carl Jung was nutty too. Thomas Mann had a mad-decadent streak. Richard Strauss was nutty with stuff like Salome. Hesse was certainly weird. Jews had nutty creativity too, with the likes of Kafka and etc.
Even if Nazi Germany wasn’t murderous to most artistic types, it didn’t allow much in the nuttiness. This is like policy for Jew comedians where they aren’t allowed to be witty. It’s like music policy for Rappers where Negroes can’t be wild. German art needed some degree of mad passion and nuttiness, but such was restrained in Nazi Germany. The general policy was to play everything safe.
Now, Goebbels had better understanding of art and creativity than Hitler did. Initially, he championed Expressionism. He could see its power and mad vision, whereas the limited Hitler only saw ugliness. But Goebbels was too much of an opportunist, blowhard, toady, and manipulator to really understand art and creativity. Even though he could appreciate creativity, his main view of art was to use it for propaganda purposes.
Nazi Germany art policy turned out to be less fertile than Soviet policy because it was more clearly laid out. Hitler made it very clear what he wanted, what he would tolerate and what he wouldn’t. Also, as Nazi Germany was a far-right movement, leftist artists(and most creative types tended to be on the left) knew they better either leave Germany or play it very safe.
In contrast, USSR was founded on revolution, and many creative types from all over the world saw it as a great experiment in just about everything. The revolutionary policy was very destructive of old art and tradition but unleashed all kinds of possibilities in the early years. And then Stalin clamped down, but his policy was nevertheless inconsistent. Sometimes, he would praise something that might be experimental and eccentric. Other times, he would send bunch of people to the Gulag for much less. So, it was never sure what Stalin really wanted or would allow. There was the officially favored style of Socialist Realism, but not everything had to be in that vein. Also, Socialist Realism was more expansive than Nazi Idealism because it had room for all sorts of people whereas Nazi Idealism tended to favor only the noble heroic types. (Of course, most German movies of the period were little more than Hollywood knockoffs.) Because Soviet policy was to destroy old culture and make new culture, it open up all sorts of new possibilities, even though ‘heretical’ pursuit of them could lead to persecution and even death. Communism was about destruction and creation.
Nazism was mostly about preservation and to build upon readymade rules of classicism. So, less creative energies were unleashed. In contrast, much new energies were released in the USSR even though it wasn’t long before the system became censorious and began to clamp down on excessive cultural adventurism and deviation from officialdom.
Also, attitudes matter in art and creativity. Though communism was ruthless and hostile to its enemies, it had an expansive and embracing attitude toward all humanity and cultures. It didn’t feel contempt for peoples and races around the world. In contrast, Nazi attitude was based on contempt and arrogance toward other races and cultures.
As much as I value nationalism as a political policy, historical consciousness, and social organization, it is generally not good creative or cultural policy.
Individualism is best for creativity. Communism severely limited individualism, but it at allowed for humanism. The humanist element in socialism allowed Soviet artists to have expansive feeling about humanity and cultures as a whole. This inspired some degree of empathy and curiosity about all sorts of peoples and lives in both USSR and abroad. In contrast, Nazi emphasis on radical racism and nationalism made Germans feel smugly blind and arrogant about other peoples, and we can find such negative attitude still in many on the Right. Even if you don’t like certain peoples, you can still appreciate the genius of creativity that exists in all people. Negroes are animated by the troublesome spirit of Jafro, but it had led to some remarkable creative outputs like Diana Ross and the Supremes. No sense going supremacist against the Supremes.
Complacency is the death of lots of things, and Nazi complacency about the superiority of the ‘Aryan’ race didn’t do much for creative inspiration.
Take Odysseus. He wants to go home, but he is fascinated by all the strange things he encounters along the way. If Hitler were Odysseus, he would just made sour faces at all the strange things and felt nothing but impatience. This wasn’t a failure of intelligence as Hitler was smart enough. It was a failure of temperament, taste, attitude, and sensibility.
The difference between Alexander the Great and Hitler was this: Alexander, though ruthless and bloody, was also full of curiosity, admiration, and fascination with the world outside the Hellenic world. Even as he spread Hellenic ways, he was open to learning about other ways.
Hitler had no such curiosity. He just felt contempt. His plan for Moscow? To raze it to the ground and wipe out all vestiges of Russian civilization. So, even though Hitler studied art and loved art, he didn’t understand the true meaning of art. Art, as an expression of creativity, is the accumulation of genius and inspiration of all peoples around the world. If you truly love art, you will appreciate the creativity of all peoples. But Hitler loved tribal ideology above all else, and his main purpose for art was to serve as ‘Aryan’ propaganda. If Hitler had to choose between pedestrian ‘Aryan’ art that agreed with his ideology and great Jewish art, he would have chosen the former. His regime favored third-rate music composers while shunning Mendelssohn and Mahler to the side. While there were exceptions were Jewish artists were spared by Hitler, there were the exception. But then, you can find exceptions in any system. Not all capitalists were killed by Stalin and Mao.
Now, there are ‘Hitlers’ among all peoples. Even among Jews. There are plenty of Jewish Hitlers in the US who would ban art on the basis of ideology or tribal interest. If a great film-maker tried to make a movie about Nakba, Jewish Hitler would all their power to shut him down. Also, the Holocaust Movie has been turned into a genre, and they have become as predictable as Nazi films. Despite their arthouse cinema packaging, they are more like quasi-religious films filled with the usual sanctimony.
Has the West been easier on Soviet artists than Nazi ones? Yes, given that the Western media and academia came to be dominated largely by Jews. Also, as Western Europe was dominated by Nazi Germany than the USSR, the Western historical narrative understandably sees Nazis the main bad guys. But it was the Nazis who ignited the fuse that led to WWII. Also, when Germany attacked Russia first with the purpose of killing tens of millions of Russians and enslaving the rest and then even wiped out lots of Jews, Nazi Germany did rightfully gain the reputation as the worse of the two.
That said, one can argue that the dirty secret of the past 4o yrs is the triumph of Pop Fascist style, especially beginning with the stunning success of STAR WARS which is like Nazi space opera. Most blockbuster movies owe something to fascist imagery and the cult of ubermensch. And we see it in rock and rap imagery as well.
The moral failure of Nazism was the ultra-narcissism that negated humanism. Nazism was a collective racial narcissism of the ‘Aryans’ who turned art into a mindless cult of self-worship.
But in the long run, most people are attracted to narcissism than humanism. People want to fantasize about being badass powerful and so glamorous and stuff.
Mishima himself failed to see the contradiction in his self-styled fascism. He condemned modern Japanese culture for its mindless consumerism and etc, but he failed to recognize that his own vision was no less mindlessly narcissistic as pop culture. Mishima said he didn’t want to live past the age of 40 because old people look ugly and wretched. And in way, his attitude wasn’t much different from modern pop culture that makes people wish they were young and pretty forever.
Also, the cult of narcissism is amoral since beauty trumps issues of right and wrong. And we see this in our Pop Fascist culture with rappers, athletes, movie stars, superheroes, and etc all acting big and badass and are so into themselves and self-worship. The only kind of fascism that will work is humanist-fascism, and it was possible in the early stages of Italian Fascism, but that blowhard fool Mussolini turned fascism into his private ego-trip. Ataturk is the one who understood how to make it work as a moral system.
Anyway, even as PC makes us condemn the ‘far right’, so much of our culture is all about pop-fascist celebration of me, me, me, my power, my riches, my badassness, etc. And even in blockbuster movies where fascist-like forces are presented as evil, they are made to appear magnificent and awesome, like the Empire in STAR WARS. Fascist own cool villainy.
And even the rebels against the fascist powers are essentially fascist archetypes of the superhero or superheroine. They are not like the humanist heroes of SEVEN SAMURAI who, for all their skills and tenacity, are recognizably human. Instead, they are like the superbabe Diana-hunter-goddess-like killer in HUNGER GAMES who seems to have the power down an entire empire with her bow and arrow.
Pop fascism is multi-culti, but the aesthetics are closer to what Riefenstahl in her mountain movies and grand spectacles were aiming for. Jewish Hollywood has discovered that nothing sells tickets like fascist spectacle, grandeur, and thrills.
But, shhhhhh, we are not supposed to notice. And many people don’t notice since they just equate Nazism with racial theory and not with an aesthetic.
But Susan Sontag saw through all that. She argued that fascist imagery and themes can be found OUTSIDE the Nazi/German context and that, in fact, Riefenstahl’s fascination with the Nuba tribe of Africa recycled the same old Germanic themes. She was right.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/02/06/fascinating-fascism/