The only people who cared about literature were the KGB

If I recall correctly Julian Assange expressed a similar sentiment, to the effect that there’s still some hope for China because their censors still care what you say. (Whereas in the West, you can say what you like because the government is confident it will make no difference…)

An excellent article and a practical example of history being written, and then edited by, the victors/survivors.

The examples given of Stalin editing his own name out of various texts was to me the most interesting. Its either the most exteme egoism to assume he’d be remembered regardless of whether he was named or not; or fierce belief in his own cause and the primacy of the party. No doubt a bit of both, but interesting all the same – thanks for highlighting.

I’m particularly interested in that annotated edition of the Short Course! I picked up an old copy at a library sale (red cover and all), tho somehow I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet …

Stalin also wrote about the philosophy of language, repudiating Marr, surely there must be some connection between his views on that and his editing work. Altogether it is very strange how somebody who was supposedly in control of everything in the USSR let Lysenko and Marr go about their ways, whilst himself obviously not believing any of it.

@9 Authoritarian and totalitarian societies are usually enthralled by and aiming at ethereal immortal values – be it the goodness and justice of Communism, or the soil and the spirit of the ancestors. And this was indeed still true in the later “mellow” years of the Real Socialism, the 1970s and 1980s. While the state was often hostile to the silly trivia coming from the Western pop culture the same state censors (actually better to speak of the party and the cultural elites) approved – and facilitated the import – of the best of the bourgeois high culture which treated such immortal values, and often employed the inventive artistic language to do so.

There was no ‘cult of personality’ about Hitler: there were no giant statues of him put up about Germany, German cities were not named ‘Hitlerville’ (or whatever)

All *sorts* of things were named after him.

“I wonder whether the only people who cared about literature were indeed the KGB, or whether this phenomenon extends a little more broadly. … the Pushkin original was part and parcel of their education.”

I’m afraid many of the young generation in later years had been corrupted by decadent bourgeois culture; by The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and such. Due to the proliferation of miniature cassette-playing machines. The dedicated and ideologically strong KGB comrades – not so much.

If Comrade Stalin did indeed write the anonymous reviews of Shostakovich’s music that are said to be by him, then he was no slouch at music criticism either. His taste was something else, but he had a good ear and a good understanding of music history.

Stalin rewrote like the Tea Party rewrites economics. And like them, he would surely pay attention to literature coming from others. This would serve two purposes. He would find supporting propaganda to add to the doublespeak, and he would find budding young dissidents to neutralize.

There is also the great care for premises and terminology, and the need to expunge heresy. Bateson noted this among both Marxists and Catholics:

“I have taught various branches of behavioral biology and cultural anthropology to American students, ranging from college freshmen to psychiatric residents, in various schools and teaching hospitals, and I have encountered a very strange gap in their thinking that springs from a lock of certain TOOLS of thought. This lack is rather equally distributed at all levels of education, among students of both sexes and among humanists as well as scientists. Specifically, it is a lack of knowledge of the presuppositions not only of science but of everyday life.

“This gap is, strangely, less conspicuous in two groups of students that might have been expected to contrast strongly with each other: the Catholics and the Marxists. Both groups have thought about or have been told about the last 2,500 years of human thought, and both groups have some recognition of the importance of philosophic, scientific, and epistemological propositions. Both groups are difficult to teach because that attach such great importance to “right” premises and presuppositions that heresy becomes for them a threat of excommunication. Naturally, anybody who feels heresy to be a danger will devote some care to being conscious of his or her own presuppositions and will develop a sort of connoisseurship in these matters.

“Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.

“The subject matter of this book is notably close to the core of religion and to the core of scientific orthodoxy. The presuppositions — and most students need some instruction in what a presupposition looks like — are matters to be brought out into the open.”

Mind and Nature, p. 26

There was no ‘cult of personality’ about Hitler

Are you one hundred per cent sure of this? IIRC, he made it compulsory for everyone in schools to read his terrible autobiography. For instance.

You know, when the official salutation is “Heil Hitler!” , the issue of whether a “cult of personality” exists seems irrelevant.

I don’t have anything to say about Stalin as editor — but I think it’s worth just commenting that in addition to being a ghastly dictator, he was also an interesting and remarkable man in ways that I certainly don’t associate with Hitler. A citizen of a remote colony he rose from great poverty to find his way into a seminary, became a gangster and bank robber, a social theoretician, he lived for four years in an indigenous village in remote Eastern Siberia, was instrumental in leading a tiny fringe group to power, outmaneuvered his rivals many of whom had social and cultural connections that he lacked, and held onto power for decades. It’s as if the political and intellectual history of the United States in the 20th century was dominated by a Navajo poet.

German cities were not named ‘Hitlerville’

Is it too obvious to point out that assuming this is true, it is actually a way Stalin and Hitler were *not* the same, because a Russian city was in fact renamed Stalingrad?

Also, surely it would have been “Hitlerburg”, to be properly Germanic?

@17 ““Never marry a railroad man” is indeed a stunning attack on the collectivist values of the proletariat.”

No, not the Railroad Man. This Satanic chant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_%28Shocking_Blue_song%29#.22Shizgarah.22.2C_or_.22Venus.22_in_Russian_urban_folklore

A handy list of streets, squares, etc named for Hitler: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_als_Namengeber_von_Stra%C3%9Fen_und_Pl%C3%A4tzen

I could be wrong, but I got the impression that, in general, most of the Bolshevik leaders were intellectuals, and the Nazi leaders just tribalistic troglodytes.

Goebbels was an intellectual. Of the left Hegelians, here’s Spufford, _Red Plenty_ p. 272

“In a way, the surprise is that Bolshevik idealism lasted as long as it did. Stalin took his philosophical obligations entirely seriously. The time he spent in his Kremlin library was time spent reading. He held forth on linguistics, and genetics, and economics, and the proper writing of history, because he believed that intellectual decision-making was the duty of power. His associates, too, tended to possess treasured collections of Marxist literature. It was one of Molotov’s complaints, after Stalin’s death, that by sending him off to be ambassador to Outer Mongolia, Krushchev had parted him from his books. And Krushchev, in his turn, tried his best to talk like the great theoretician one magically became by elbowing and conniving one’s way to the First Secretaryship. It came even less easily to him, but the transition to utopia by 1980 was all his own work, and so was the idea of peaceful competition with capitalists. He was not a cynic. The idea that he might be committing an imposture bothered him deeply: he worried away at it, out loud, in public, busily denying and denying. A sculptor dared to tell him he didn’t understand art: ‘When I was a miner’, he snapped, ‘the said I didn’t understand. When I was a political worker in the army, they said I didn’t understand. When I was this and that, they said I didn’t understand. Well, now I’m party leader and premier, and you mean to say I still don’t understand? Who are you working for, anyway?’ Stalin had been a gangster who really believed he was a social scientist. Krushchev was a gangster who hoped he was a social scientist. But the moment was drawing irresistibly closer when the idealism would rot away by one more degree, and the Soviet Union would be governed by gangsters who were only pretending to be social scientists.

“the Soviet Union would be governed by gangsters who were only pretending to be social scientists”

As opposed to the United States, which is being held hostage by gangsters who reach for their revolvers at the slightest mention of social science.

@ 34

Strange how idealism can ‘rot away’ in an environment dominated by hard-core materialists that used it as one of their primary terms of abuse.

Hitler used oratory as a tool in his path to power, he had a grasp of human psychology that, coupled with a dedication to practicing such skills, allowed him to rise to power by appealing to the masses directly.

Also, he started out wanting to be an artist, whereas Stalin wanted to be an intellectual, going into the seminary was his mothers’ idea, not his.

Alan Bullock’s Hitler and Stalin wd seem relevant to this discussion (haven’t read it).

Mao@35: I’m not sure Marxism-Leninism was all that complex a worldview. YMMV.

ajay@41: “…named entire formations after himself.” Plus the Hitler Youth.

No, it’s the underlying idea. One is a complex intellectual worldview, and the other the basic “blood and soil” thing.

I don’t know. The Nazi worldview, with all its peculiar beliefs about Jewish conspiracies, Bolsheviks, autarchic economics etc, was pretty complex. Nuts, but complex. Certainly compared to “Communism is Soviet power plus electrification”.

Not sure about that. I would imagine here was plenty of ludicrous race science, etc. published during the Nazi period, not to mention all the Social Darwinism and declinist nonsense that is the intellectual substrate of Nazism just as the socialist books in your social democrat’s library are the substrate of Bolshevism. Comparing “everything that every Bolshevik might ever have read” to Mein Kampf isn’t really apples to apples.
Plus, if you want Nazi intellectuals, there are some impressive ones: Lenard won a Nobel prize, which is more than can be said for the major Communist intellectuals.

And don’t forget, too, that the Bolsheviks were around for a lot longer – more time to write books.

Heh heh. I’d like to play, but I’m kinda busy tonight, sorry. Maybe tomorrow.

Germans were taught to worship Hitler as a near demi-god, to the point where crucifixes and pictures of Christ and Martin Luther were replaced with pictures of Hitler in many public places. If that’s not a cult of personality…

Just look at this painting, with the instructive title “Am Anfang war das Wort” (In the Beginning was the Word)

http://images-00.delcampe-static.net/img_large/auction/000/119/728/517_001.jpg

The Nazis were a movement that attracted intellectuals in spite of themselves. It’s hard to gauge the “complexity” of an ideology, but I challenge anyone to find many passages in Mein Kampf that would not have been considered respectable in certain educated circles at the time. Most aspects of Nazi racial policy were regarded as scientifically grounded, and countries like Sweden and America upheld similar laws.

This pamphlet offers a fairly good summary of the revolutionary and world-historic importance the Nazis accorded their ideology:

http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/rassenpo.htm

Mussolini was an intellectual, though his appearance (prognathic jaw and barrel chest) and later decisions make people forget that. Not only could he speak four languages (Italian, French, German, English), but he was also fairly well-versed in political theory and art, and often courted artists and intellectuals to great success. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Fascist Italy was the most intellectual right-wing regime of the twentieth century.

Of course Stalin purged the party of intellectuals during the 1930s and replaced them with provincial mediocrities like Molotov and Khrushchev. Any interesting Communist intellectual works published after 1930 came from the West (Gramsci in particular). By 1940 there probably wasn’t a great deal of difference in intellectual firepower between the leadership of the NSDAP and the CP of the USSR.

Speaking of weird thoughts: Lenin = Kerouac; Stalin = Cassady?

Jacob McM @50
Most aspects of Nazi racial policy were regarded as scientifically grounded, and countries like Sweden and America upheld similar laws.

Sweden and the U.S., in certain of its states (and see Buck v. Bell), prob. had laws permitting involuntary sterilization of the mentally ill or handicapped, but certainly the U.S. did not, at least AFAIK, have laws prohibiting intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews and *systematically* discriminating vs. Jews in the way Nazi Germany’s legal code did in the ’30s. There was antisemitism and discrimination vs. Jews in the U.S. in the 20s and 30s, to be sure, but it was not systematically enshrined in govt policy the way it was in Nazi Germany.

Anderson @51
Heidegger soured on the Nazis but did he ever *publicly* repudiate or renounce his political stance of the 30s? IIrc, no. (that might be wrong, in which case someone will tell me)

@56

The U.S. certainly had anti-miscegenation laws at the time, though it’s true that they did not apply to Jews. The Nuremberg Laws not only prohibited mixing between Aryans and Jews, but also with any “non-Aryan.” The point was that both countries upheld laws seeking to safeguard “racial purity” and codified White supremacy, with the qualification that in America Jews were considered sufficiently “White” to intermarry. Hence my use of the word “similar” rather than “identical.”

@57, 58
Yes, points taken. (I read Jacob McM’s “similar” too narrowly.)

The monotony of having the same headline at the top of the page for so long causes it to take on different meanings. If only the KGB cared about literature (Steiner is wrong, incidentally, that fascism was incompatible with art; it produced some effective film, stage direction, and architecture, and probably though not in Germany painting and sculpture also; also incidentally, Alex Ross’s book is terrific but is the heaviest paperback I have ever owned), what did other people do? Ignore it? Consume it uncaringly, or otherwise lackadaisically?

On intellectualism, my understanding is that most of the foundations even for fascism were laid long before Hitler took them up and gave them a new name.

@Daragh McDowell: “Stalin looks to have been pretty firmly in the driver’s seat of the Caucasus communists from around 1905 onwards…” Agreed. He was an influential and effective regional party leader, but not a member of the Bolshevik intellectual “elite.”

“As to Lenin and ‘Koba’ I’m not sure how much use Lenin would have had for ethnic issues in 1913…” Let me translate more from his 1913 note:

“As for nationalism, I agree with you completely – we need to approach this more seriously. We’ve got a wonderful Georgian here writing a big article for Prosveschenie [Enlightenment, a legal Bolshevik monthly published in St. Petersburg in 1911-14], having collected all the Austrian and other material… In the Caucasus, we had social-democratic Georgians+Armenians+Tatars [Azeris]+Russians working together, in one soc-dem organization for ten years. This is not an empty phrase but the proletarian solution to the national [ethnic] question. The only solution. Same in Riga: Russians+Latvians+Lithuanians. Only the separatists stood apart, the Bund. Same in Vilno. There are two good brochures on the national [ethnic] question – Strasser and Pannekoek…”

Stalin’s long article appeared in three issues of the journal and (sort of) established him as a party authority on the ethnic question. I’m not sure it had much bearing on the actual Bolshevik policy post-1917.

@Marcus: “…if figures like Mikhail Bakhtin and Ewald Ilyenkov can present themselves to me in English translations that stimulate my own thought, then there must have been some soil out of which they emerged that was quite fertile.”

Bakhtin was born in 1895 and Ilyenkov in 1924, almost 30 years later. Intellectually, one cannot say they grew out of the same soil.

the 30s US did not have laws forbidding the intermarriage of Jews and non-Jews and systematically discriminating against Jews

I seem to recall reading about university quotas? But apart from that, correct, of course.

Steiner is wrong, incidentally, that fascism was incompatible with art; it produced some effective film, stage direction, and architecture, and probably though not in Germany painting and sculpture also

In fact, architecture, with its focus on grands projets and magnificent vistas, is probably the most fascist of the arts (with the possible exception of couture). I remember reading a NYT article in which Iraqi architects mourned the end of the Saddam regime, which at least understood architecture: nowadays the People (ugh) were allowed to build whatever they wanted and paint it whatever colour they liked, which had led to the Baghdad Trade Ministry looking like a giant Neapolitan ice cream.

@65 “And they made him gensec.” A position regarded by the rest of the old Bolsheviks as rather unimportant administrative position – certainly nowhere near as important as chairing the Politburo or SovNarKom!

@64 – Thanks very much for the further info. Very interesting. I’ll have to dig into my old copies of Service further, and perhaps expand the reading list too… Ahh to be a young Grad student again!

@ajay
I seem to recall reading about university quotas?
yes, but they weren’t mandated by federal law.

Not only at the university level, but often semi-surreptiously, i.e., everyone knew (at various institutions) that there were quotas, but they were not “public knowledge,” IIRC. At least by the 1950s-60s (post WW2) it wasn’t good public relations to be openly anti-Semitic. Whereas segregation, as pointed out above, was actually The Law in several Southern states (although not national policy once Truman integrated the Armed Forces in the 1940s).

Both racism and anti-semitism were real, and unpleasant for their victims, but only the former was official policy, FWIW.

The quotas weren’t exactly a big secret; I’ve seen a letter sent to my father’s PhD adviser that thanked him for his application but informed him that the year’s quotas for Jews had already been filled and so he would not be considered. I think the letter was from Harvard, but I may be misremembering.

More generally, and lasting much longer than school quota limits, well into the 70s some housing developments and neighborhoods had a No Jews policy (sometimes formally, in the Homeowner’s Agreement), and some professions effectively did (for all the cliches about Jewish Bankers, some of the biggest banks were reluctant to hire anyone who wasn’t a WASP, including Jews and Catholics).

Before us Ukanians tut at transatlantic bigotry which could never happen in our dear academia, note this: An old friend of mine, recruiting for Courtald’s in the 1960s, discovered that the head of careers at Edinburgh university was rabidly antisemitic, and attempting to actively dissuade him from hiring Jewish students. Apparently this careers advisor got his office turned over by rioting students in 1968 <- too good a story to check.

@79:

Gottfried Benn.

And, er, Vasily Grossman.

I thought about including Grossman but he’s primarily known as a journalist and simultaneously he’s more in the “straddler” camp.

Gottfried Benn works (and I had not heard of him) but for others, it’s important to separate plain ol’ “German nationalist” (interwar Europe was overflowing with nationalists of various stripes) from “Nazi”.

There’s also the “worth reading” qualification, which is different than “people at the time thought they were worth reading”. Quiet Is the Don is still worth reading.

Haven’t read him, but Benn is definitely in the pantheon of German writers. Btw, Grass was in the SS, which caused a bit of a stir recently – less because of his actual membership, he was very young, more because he had kept it secret for his entire career and lectured everybody and their dog about morality.

@82, Josef Weinheber’s poems still appear in Austrian textbooks and, unlike Benn, he wrote poetry that explicitly supported Nazi ideology (though those are not the works which appear in textbooks, of course).

Ernst Jünger is generally considered among the finer German writers of the last century, and he was associated with the Nazis in the 1920s, though not in the 1930s when they seized power. Ernst von Salomon also enjoys a solid reputation, though his link with the Nazis was primarily through the Freikorps.

If Günter Grass counts, then perhaps you can include Heimito von Doderer as well. Doderer was another Austrian Nazi, but, like Grass, he didn’t write any of his important works until after WWII and after disowning any Nazi sympathies, though he remained conservative. Doderer is highly esteemed in Austria, but his work hasn’t yet caught on stateside.

I’ve always thought that George Steiner quote odd, since he himself has been a champion of the French fascist Lucien Rebatat, who was just as hardcore a racist and a collabo as Celine.

Benn is a great writer, but hardly a great writer within the Nazi camp (so to speak). Wikipedia says he was one of those Expressionist types who longed for a revolution and hoped that the Nazis were it, but found out otherwise:

Appalled by the Night of the Long Knives, Benn abandoned his support for the Nazi movement. He lived quietly, refraining from public criticism of the Nazi party, but wrote that the bad conditions of the system “gave me the latter punch”, as he quoted in a letter — a “dreadful tragedy!”[11] He decided to perform “the aristocratic form of emigration” and joined the Wehrmacht in 1935, where he found many officers sympathetic to his disapproval of the régime. In May 1936 the SS magazine Das Schwarze Korps attacked his expressionist and experimental poetry as degenerate, Jewish, and homosexual. In the summer of 1937, Wolfgang Willrich, a member of the SS, lampooned Benn in his book Säuberung des Kunsttempels; Heinrich Himmler, however, stepped in to reprimand Willrich and defended Benn on the grounds of his good record since 1933 (his earlier artistic output being irrelevant). In 1938 the Reichsschrifttumskammer (the National Socialist authors’ association) banned Benn from further writing.

During World War II, Benn was posted to garrisons in eastern Germany where he wrote poems and essays. After the war, his work was banned by the Allies because of his initial support for Hitler.

So if he’s the best they’ve got for “Nazi writer,” then the pickings for “German Nazi-associated writer” look slim.

Well, Benn’s politics were definitely right-wing enough to dovetail neatly with the Nazis. He loathed democracy, liberalism, and Marxism, and as a doctor, he was also a firm supporter of eugenics (doctors were among the most Nazified of all professions).

He was also a reader of Nietzsche, and published articles at the time which defended slavery as providing the necessary soil for high culture.

Don’t be misled too much by the “Expressionist” label.

Expressionists came in many flavors. But “right-wing” doesn’t get you to “Nazi,” as Benn himself found out. (I like his poems, but I wonder about his bedside manner. Are doctors in America any less right-wing, on average?)

Gotta say, Weimar politics got an “A” for candor.

I will overlook your implication that Nietzsche was a fascist.

Ajay: Himmler was a kook with many non-“Nazi” interests, and if the regime bans you from writing, I think it’s a stretch to identify your writing with the regime.

As for Grass’s (teenaged!) commitment “to a cause,” sure. What cause? Nazism? Nationalism?

I have no moral interest in pretending the Nazis lacked intellectuals. But Nazism was a fundamentally anti-intellectual movement, unlike the Communists. The Nazis were more like today’s GOP – basic German common sense and loyalty to the Blood and the Soil were supposed to triumph over pointy-headed Jewish-liberal intellectualism.

Richard J. Evans on Benn: “He regarded Hitler as the great restorer of German dignity and honour. But after the intial purges of the Academy, Benn fell rapidly out of favour with the regime. As the Nazi cultural establishment turned its guns on Expressionism in music, art and literature, Benn made things worse for himself by attempting to defend it. The fact that he did so in terms he thought would appeal to the Nazis, as anti-liberal, primal, Aryan, born of the spirit of 1914, did not impress those who denounced it as unpatriotic, over-intellectual, perverse and immoral. ‘If anyone is to be named as the moving spirit of the bolshevistic delight in the disgusting that celebrates its orgies in degenerate art,’ one of his critics told him, ‘then you have a right to be the first to put in the pillory.'” – Third Reich in Power, at 157.

As Evans says elsewhere (318), the Nazi regime “was built on contempt for the intellect.”

he volunteered for service in U-boats. Don’t forget that. U-boat service in 1944 (or at any time in the war really) was close to a certain death sentence and he volunteered for it.

U-boats were spiffing! Wouldn’t you have volunteered for them?

99: Thanks, Cleanthes! Evans just says that Benn retorted that exiles couldn’t appreciate the revivification caused by the Nazis ….

Benn could definitely have held down a job at National Review.

Andersen:
The narrative you give suggests that Benn supported the Nazis, possibly helped them come to power, and then they turned on him. They censured him, and he did what they told him to do.

By comparison with Mayakovsky, Benn is more identified with the regime, and no one doubts Mayakovsky was a Bolshevik.

Or compare with Emil Nolde, who was pretty confident his Expressionist painting expressed National Socialist principles, and didn’t decide Nazism was wrong until after they condemned his work and himself (which Benn didn’t do even at that point).

If you’re talking only about his writing . . . maybe. Say, Luther: obviously he is not a Catholic writer. Is it possible that a Catholic writer, for example, might be forbidden to publish by the Catholic church, and that even his writings both before and after that point would still be considered “Catholic”? Probably not, but in politics, it doesn’t seem impossible for someone to be identified with the government’s professed ideology even if the government opposes them.

Bianca: I think the issue is whether Benn proved mistaken about what the Nazis were up to. A lot of people were – wishful thinking or whatever. One could be a loyal Nazi but fall out due to bureaucratic infighting, so in that sense, rejection by the regime doesn’t imply lack of fidelity to the cause. I thus agree with your last sentence, but I don’t think that describes Benn.

As for

Is it possible that a Catholic writer, for example, might be forbidden to publish by the Catholic church, and that even his writings both before and after that point would still be considered “Catholic”?

Hans Küng comes to mind – not forbidden to publish, only to teach, but a Catholic whose Catholicity in his writings would be questioned by some in that church.

(Sad – pulled him up on Wikipedia and saw that he is contemplating suicide due to Parkinson’s Disease.)

Given the continuing power of Nazi esthetics in current society, from S&M to political pageantry, disputing the artistic contributions of fascism just seems oblivious. Granted they’re not high-minded contributions, but they are still living contributions.

True enough. Riefenstahl perfected the concert film. But I think we’ve been focusing, in fact, on the existence vel non of “high-minded contributions.”

@105
Somebody above noted that Jack London and John Steinbeck for instance were widely popular. Here both have been demoted to children’s literature. Do you really think this is an accident? Montefiore? Spufford? Do people really take them seriously?

WTF? The fact that ‘Of Mice and Men’ is read in middle school or whatever does not mean Steinbeck has been demoted to children’s lit. That’s just one of his bks.
(As for Spufford: if you’re not already aware of it, this blog devoted an entire symposium to ‘Red Plenty’. So the answer to yr perhaps rhetorical question is: yes.)

109: haven’t looked at the Nordau since grad school, but wasn’t he just part of the whole “ooh look, decadence” fad in late 19C Paris? If I can recall anything original about the book, it’s that he associated physical degeneration with decadence, tho even that probably wasn’t original – didn’t some critics of Impressionism say that there was obviously something wrong with the painters’ eyes?

Whatever one wants to say about Gautier, Baudelaire, Bourget, I don’t think there’s anything terribly fascist going on there, or anything liberal for that matter. It would seem to be more rooted in a reaction against the bourgeois age, which puts it closer to fascism than to liberalism, but “decadence” was the kind of label poets etc. could adopt, which is not at all fascist.

The fact that Nordau was a Jew is a funny little bonus. I wonder was his book banned in Germany, or just reprinted without his name on it?

. . . were banned.

continuing power of Nazi esthetics in current society, from S&M

In the recently liberated east, it is the Stalinist aesthetic which throbs through S&M. Cf Lupus Pictures.

@113
I would bet that any English-language book on decadence that you pick up will have an index entry for Nordau. Hobsbawm does, in “Age of Empire.”

For the record: Baudelaire openly declared himself a disciple of Joseph de Maistre while Paul Bourget ended up as an anti-Dreyfusard and early supporter of the Action française. I recall that the Action française’s newsletter, which was of high literary quality and read by people like Proust and Gide, attempted to claim Baudelaire as part of a reactionary aesthetic patrimony.

Another complicating factor is the fact that non-Nazi fascist movements often embraced aesthetic modernism. Fascist Italy the most overtly and proudly, but also the Spanish Falange, many French fascists, etc.

Well, not just Marxist. Daniel Bell, quite a good liberal, would probably attribute Baudelaire’s rebellion against his society to the antinomianism natural to liberalism. Possibly he derived that idea from Marxism at some level of remove, but somehow it doesn’t seem likely (though now that I’ve written this I’m no longer sure).

oops — my 121 was a response to bianca’s 109

My local library used to have “The End of Ideology,” but it no longer does. It’s been a long time since I picked it up, though excerpts seem to have been anthologized relatively frequently.

Among composers, Alex Ross also names Anton Webern as a Nazi enthusiast, although yet another one whose aesthetic was not in line with the regime’s taste.

“(for all the cliches about Jewish Bankers, some of the biggest banks were reluctant to hire anyone who wasn’t a WASP, including Jews and Catholics).”

In contrast, Goldman and Meril Lynch were happy about every protestant applicant.

bianca steele,

Do you mean to be saying that the works of Woolf, Joyce, H.D., et al, have implicit fascist affinities? Or if this is limited to the visual arts: Picasso, Braque, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy—implicitly fascist all in their work? I suppose by this reasoning it may well turn out that “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Repropduction” may well turn out to be an implicitly fascist work? I hold no brief for liberalism but I find this beyond bizarre.

And I wouldn’t describe it the way you did; you seem to have jumped to conclusions out of offense that anybody would associate a famous work of art with politics.

I’ve asked before, but can anyone point to a piece sympathetic to Heidegger that attempts to explain the relationship between his support for (some version of) Nazism and his general philosophical position, and shows how the two can be disentangled?

Or, for that matter, anything arguing that his philosophy should have led him to oppose Nazism, and that his actions were the product of some combination of hypocrisy and self-deception?

@134, I don’t think the two can be successfully and fully disentangled; on the other hand, lots of the fascist/proto-fascist content in a work like Sein und Zeit, such as Resoluteness and the importance of confronting one’s own Death for the proper comprehension of Being, is not immediately obvious unless one is well-versed in Weimar interwar radical conservatism, which the average contemporary reader, including most college students, is not.

As an addendum, things are also muddled by the fact that there is now a left-wing “irrationalist” school of thought — think of people like Bataille and those influenced by him, like Foucault — that has taken up many of the same themes as Nietzsche and Heidegger. Richard Wolin has written extensively on this, citing it as a case of right-wing intellectual currents “infiltrating” the left.

Yeah, I think we agree more than we disagree. It’s just that I don’t think you can get any thesis about modernism per se, or what’s inherent in modernism (which was Mondrian and van Doesburg, and Picasso and Braque, etc, etc., as much as it was Leger, etc.). I don’t even think you can get a thesis about _those strands of modernism_ that were grappling with the questions that the fascists were to grapple with a little later, within which strands I would include a bunch of Bauhaus stuff, the Russian constructivist stuff, etc.

But the “degenerate art” business at least as deployed by the Nazis was clearly aimed at all of these and more. So while I might well agree with you about Leger and a couple of others, I still recoil at (what still seems to me like) the far more general claim at 103/109.

Still, sorry to have misunderstood originally.

I remember about 20 years ago, going into the modest-looking house in L.A. of a man named Sylvain Robert to fix a faucet. It was chock-a-block with astonishing artifacts from all over the world, an intricate jade Shiva 4 feet high, lots of other wild stuff. He explained that he had been an opera star at in the 1920’s and travelled and collected, then came to Hollywood and was technical advisor on “Passage to Marseilles” (a Bogart picture) among other things. (He is in the IMDb.) He was in his mid-90’s with two strings of hair combed over his bald head, but just danced rings around me and laughed and laughed: no one except little children move that fast… I tried to guess where the art pieces were from (I have no training at all, just love museums.) Anyway, he had a very odd thing hanging inside the front door, sort of an ancient Greek warrior’s helmet, except it was about three times life-size, and the lines were very simplified, and kind of modern, but not really: at first glance, you might have thought it was ancient classical. He thought he would stump me, and so I took a wild guess: “Nazi kitsch?” He punched me in the arm and roared laughing. It was indeed from pre-WWII Germany! I have never seen anything else like it, and I cannot find a photo of anything similar. It was extremely watered-down classical, not attractive really, but very interesting.

@134:

You’ve asked about Heidegger before. My response at the time is that he couldn’t provide any epistemological guidance, because part of the upshot of his work is the critical dissolution of the epistemological project in modern philosophy, (in which respect he’s comparable to Wittgenstein, with Richard Rorty just recycling their arguments in the context and idiom of Anglo-American Analytic philosophy, without adding anything original). But there is much more to Heidegger than just his Nazi entanglement, which accounts for his continuing influence. For one there is his account of human existence as a thrown project, which gives rise to existential hermeneutics. And that in turn amounts to a kind of philosophy of praxis, uncovering what underlies one’s cognitive, because practical, commitments. IOW it invites reflection on just what basic and “ultimate” ends one is pursuing and their desirability qua “authenticity”, precisely because such ends are not pre-given, but projectively constructed, solely a human responsibility, (Lucien Goldman, a disciple of Lukacs, argued that SZ was a rejoinder to “History and Class Consciousness” from the right). Being-toward-death BTW plays the role in SZ that theoria played in the 10th book of “Nichomachean Ethics”, as the limit condition for human ends, given the modern metaphysical groundlessness of human existence.

In his later work, Heidegger carries out the project of the “Destruktion” of the history of ontology that SZ announced and was to prepare for. I.e. the dismantlement of the schemas of metaphysical thought, from which Western ideas about “reason” originated (with the Greeks). This is another valuable and influential part of Heidegger’s legacy, bringing out and critically questioning the substantialist roots of such thinking, (which H. restyles as the interpretation of Being as the presence of the present, drawing that insight much more from Husserl than from the Greeks) and the unitary logic it gives rise to. That’s not simply reducible to “irrationalism”, since it amounts to a “meta” reflection on the sources and presuppositions of what we mean by “reason” and its effects: metaphysics as totalizing objectifying “reason” and its reifying effects upon our understandings of the world and the beings in it. Now I happen to think that there is something of an irrationalist cult of sacrifice buried in and bound up with Heidegger’s mode of thinking. (Levinas is the best source on excavating that, but that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms, as he’s himself a very difficult thinker, who is at once thoroughly dependent on Heidegger and conducting an excoriating critique of him). But it’s a petitio principii to reduce Heidegger’s whole body of work and thinking to mere irrationalism and reactionary motives. (If he’s a reactionary, it’s of a very sophisticated sort, not turning the clock 180 degree back but 180 degrees forward).

That leads on to reflections on modern technology, as a self-proliferating complex that reduces everything, including human beings, to raw material in its service. (I happen to think his lucubrations on technology to be insufficiently differentiated to be of much use, but the Frankfurt School’s “critique of instrumental reason”, a better, more differentiated account of the pervasively manipulative attitude toward the world and human beings, parallels it, and he does have a point). And to reflections on language as “ontologically” disclosive of beings and Being, and hence to the poesis, “thinking, building, dwelling”, that modern human beings, in their care, are tasked with.

As to Heidegger’s Nazi involvement, it’s always to be taken under advisement. He was always a nationalist conservative, a man of the right. (He was by origins a south German RC peasant boy, educated on scholarship to become a priest). He was also something of a socialist, so if you take the notion of “national socialism” seriously, the self-seduction becomes even plainer. (He was heavily influenced at the time by Ernst Juenger, who never joined the party and who styled his own views as “national Bolshevism”). But his intense involvement lasted maybe 2 years, and his rectorship even less, followed by gradual disillusionment. And he was among the least successful of aspirants to influence. There is some fairly nasty material in the archives, but he doesn’t seem to have been a virulent anti-semite, (his wife apparently being another matter), but more of a cultural-nationalist sort, for whom Jews, like leftists, vitiated the “purity” of the German spirit. The crude biological racial theory of the actual Nazis ran entirely counter to the linguistic turn of his own thinking. (So, yes, he should have known better, by his own lights). In the early ’50’s, writings were published based on lectures from the late ’30’s, which cause as scandal because he retained a phrase about “the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism”. It’s obvious that he remained an authoritarian-elitist sort and never became a liberal-democrat. But what was that “inner truth”? Presumably he meant the confrontation between modern human beings and the complexes of modern technology, so as to overcome the nihilism, the “forgetfulness of Being”, that he saw it giving rise to. (Hence Adorno’s quip that efforts to overcome nihilism are always worse than the thing itself). In his quietistic post-war phase, while never quite recanting or issuing any apologia, he reconfigured his thinking, so that “the leaders” were the culmination and not the cure for nihilism. Just as he had reconfigured his own prior thinking in the infamous “Rectoral Address”, which had a perverse dark majesty to it. The call to service to the “Fuehrerprinzip”, exoterically, was rallying for the new regime. But, esoterically, he likely was translating the Greek “arche”, under the delusion that he would “fuehren der Fuehrer”.

So to return to the subtopic here of this thread, 2/3 of the members of the German Philosophic Association, (the professional body of the academic discipline), joined the Nazi Party. Most of them are long forgotten, and even some who remain of some minor significance, such as Nicolai Hartmann, (d. 1936), are forgotten in that respect. Heidegger is reproached because he “failed” to break his silence and because of his continued renown and semi-relevance. But actually Nazi ideology was such an incoherent and crazy hodge-podge, that while it attracted much initial enthusiasm amongst the intelligentsia, as a revolution of national renewal, it neither produced nor attracted any lasting creative achievements. Post-war we tend to think of intellectuals as tending left, with the right being an embattled minority amongst them. But my sense is that in pre-war Germany, the reverse was true. Heidegger was just one among many, though it’s little likely he intended the “final” result or failed to grasp the catastrophe that ensued, even if from his own premises and commitments. Though it’s clear the man himself failed to live up to his own self-proclaimed criterion: to stand out, ek-sist, in (one’s exposure to) Being and let it make or break you.

Richard Wolin is a second tier Habermasian, and, whatever one makes of Habermas, his work is question-begging, in terms of defining “reason” unquestioningly as “Enlightenment values”. Which in this age of neo-liberal agnotology, is even more questionable. I can’t think of anything that clearly and simply lays out the question of Heidegger’s Nazism, (since, as I hope to have made plain, it’s neither clear nor simple). But the best, clearest intro to Heidegger that I ever read was by the Indian philosopher J.L. Mehta, (though the version with a summary of SZ, since the later stuff makes no sense without it). But that’s old, from my school days, and possibly out of print.

But then I don’t think Heidegger would be to JQ’s taste anyway.

re way up thread:
How is it that Stalin’s configured permanently infamous and Beria’s MIA? Not to engage the literary discussion on that, but isn’t Stalin’s infamy permanent? Isn’t that the moustache? He’s got a moustache, he’s infamous, oh and maybe some kind of influence on later Soviet then Russian etc. society tied into the infamy
. Beria’s dragging a lot of the same ghosts around, but he’s invisible. No moustache.

146: and Stalin, at least, was not a serial rapist. That we know of.

146: Shostakovitch has become acceptable since he was claimed as an anti-Communist. Insofar as constructivists are still significant outside specialist circles, I gather they get the same treatment: Acknowledged success in creating art is directly proportional to their anti-Communism.

As to Stalinist imagery in east European S&M, well, the poor slobs haven’t caught up with the lifestyles of the free & rich yet, no?

Not from a high enough class to comment on Fascist vs. Communist esthetic influence in high culutre.

#149

As j.c. halasz said, there’s a bit of a petitio principii to your thinking: Of course if you want to find this stuff in Heidegger it is there and his life and work leaves enough room for ambiguity that interpretations of it can be fine-tuned in many ways to fit our initial assumptions.

I don’t mean this as an attack, I’m just a bit tired of a certain tendency to judge, sort and categorize writers according to moral and political axioms. Not because I think that this can’t be a worthwhile undertaking in itself on some level, but because I think it often precludes us from actually reading and engaging with the works of those writers with an open mind or even altogether. Also, there is a philosophical level of discourse that is interesting and valuable quite independently, just as there is a level of appreciating art and literature independent of morality and politics. Finally, Heidegger (like e.g. Hegel) inspired so many and such diverse thinkers that one needs to ask oneself why all these brilliant people would have bothered reading and discussing him, if his works could be dismissed so easily.

The most interesting thinkers on the right, it seems to me, are all about holding the center, or rather a center, against what they interpret as the ever-present threat of chaos and the dismemberment of consciousness. In fact, a good part of their effort is spent not on defending a center, but on locating it once and for all where everyone can see it and therefore can’t deny it.

The thing is, chaos is our nature, mortality, whether of individuals or whole societies, is inescapable, and our bulwarks, no matter how carefully constructed, tend to follow us into the grave. One of the reasons the left has a hard time getting anyone’s ear these days, is that it’s succumbed to the temptation to build even more shining and permanent cities-on-hills than its adversaries on the right have already established. Really, this isn’t our game, and we shouldn’t try to play it.

@154:

“are all about holding the center, or rather a center, against what they interpret as the ever-present threat of chaos and the dismemberment of consciousness. In fact, a good part of their effort is spent not on defending a center, but on locating it once and for all where everyone can see it and therefore can’t deny it.”

That sounds more like Kant to me.

Lots of modernists were on board with art as a substitute for religion or aristocracy as something pure vs the masses. Evidently some could con themselves that Nazism was filling the same slot, subordinating the mob. Even today, the more democratic side of modernism is held inferior compared to Yeats, Eliot, etc.

The most surprising thing I learned from this thread is the existence of communist-flavoured BDSM pornography. Yes, I know, “Rule 34: if it exists, there is porn of it”. And I say this as someone who knows the local kink community, via LGBT political activism. (So I do have some idea of the things they get up to…)

Judged by their subsequent influence on porn, the Nazis did have better uniforms than the Soviets. I think this is objectively true, in so far as fashion preferences can be objectively true :-), and it’s not just that the Soviet-style BDSM scenes hold no personal relevance for me.

[And in case you’re wondering: the local scene over here is more influenced by St. Trinians than the Nazis or the Soviets, as far as I can tell…]

JQ @ 149:

At any rate, just a few follow up points:

1) What I regard as one of the most valuable and lasting parts of Heidegger’s work is the existential hermeneutics that formed the innovative method of SZ. One of his students provided a generalized account:

http://www.amazon.com/Method-Continuum-Impacts-Hans-Georg-Gadamer/dp/082647697X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1381707062&sr=8-2&keywords=gadamer+truth+and+method

It’s written in clear conventional academic prose and, though long, an interesting and enjoyable read. I myself much prefer his justification of the “humanities” to French Structuralist clap-trap. It’s at least a good “beach read”.

2) As to the later Heidegger and the “Destruktion” (i.e “deconstruction”) of the history of philosophy, it is difficult to convey to someone not versed in the disciplinary commitments of philosophy the full “force” of that project. What I mean is that all academic or scientific disciplines have constitutive rules delimiting their basic concepts, domains and angles of approach and applicability. (For traditional and academic philosophy, that would be the provision of grounding arguments, with respect to the intelligible experience and order of the world and the phenomena within it and how that is possible). Heidegger’s readings at once revive and undermine virtually the entirety of Western philosophical heritage. (Which is why the likes of Rorty, who in one of his banal provocations, declared himself a “Hubert H. Humphrey democrat”, could be so impressed.) Heidegger could be regarded as the last “pure” philosopher. After him, in his utmost extremity, philosophy has lost any self-grounding “autonomy” as a discipline. It’s no longer “metaphysics as the queen of the sciences”, nor even philosophy as the handmaiden of science, but with the loss of its “authority”, its concerns migrate to other disciplines or become questions we all (can) ask. It’s the strength of questions and not any particular answers that matter, because, to quote to old wizard, “questioning is the piety of thought”, i.e. finding and asking the “right” questions open “things” up to where to look for answers, are revealing, whereas “bad” questions serve to distract and detract from “truth”.

3) I had some reservations about Jacob McM’s response, insofar as he was doing intellectual or political history rather than “philosophy” proper. Heidegger’s political views were shared by a large sector of the German “mandarin” intelligentsia and were not very original and even rather conventional among that set, and he wasn’t regarded before or after as an especially acute political thinker. But I take the whole Black Forest ski hut routine as a piece of schtick and I don’t think it amounts to merely a nostalgia for rural life and a wish to preserve it against encroaching industrialization in the name of “blood and soil” ideology and thus simply reactionary. To put it in terms of his own dubious distinction, whatever was spinning in his head ontically in the early ’30’s, that does not reduce the ontological generality of his thinking, as it is only one particular instance of a range of possibilities and commitments. And far from rejecting the advent of technological civilization and wishing to return to some earlier era, Heidegger is concerned with its “productivity”, (together with the tendency to fetishize such productivity), and wanted to re-think how to live with it without succumbing to its domination. (He was rather too impressed with the early cybernetic musings of some German physicists and left such scientific matters to their care). The Greek words “poesis”, (i.e. “production”) and “techne” (i.e. craft) are central to that re-thinking. Drawing out and enhancing the potentials of “physis” (i.e. nature as a generative order), without over-running its limits are what he sees as the problem of a post-metaphysical future, not any actual return to its origin. Economists, by their disciplinary commitments, tend to regard ever expanding productivity as an unmitigated good, but that’s something to be drawn into question, since the world and the human and natural beings in it are not reducible to “economy”. (I mentioned neo-liberal agnotology, because, aside from just having finished Philip Mirowski’s not very useful book, the experience of watching mainstream economists agreeing on a common paradigm, only to discover that they didn’t at all agree amidst the GFC, calls into question and reflection what basic project they are pursuing, not merely an “epistemological”, still less just a methodological, question of disciplinary “foundations”, but a matter that operates “beneath” such questions without providing any alternative “grounding”). At any rate, what remains of value in Heidegger is not any particular answers that he might have be inclined toward, but the “force” of the questionings he left behind, (which can readily be turned against him).

I tend to agree with Novakant that what “saves” Heidegger isn’t the man himself, but the quality of his students. It’s easy to make a list, some of whom are directly his students, some of whom are just strongly influenced by studying him, some of whom are of Jewish extraction, others not, some of whom are conservatives and others ranging left in various degrees, but none of whom were Nazis or had pro-fascist (or even “left-fascist”) sympathies. Even excluding po-mo types. But it’s not that reading Heidegger is somehow obligatory, (other than as a general matter of his having occupied a certain central place in mid-20th century intellectual history). It’s just that he’s also not easily and reductively dismissible.

But maybe the Safranski book, which I hadn’t heard of, that Novakant uncovered would suffice to satisfy JQ’s limited interest. The subtitle alluding to Celan is encouraging and the reviews indicate, any biographical fallacy aside, it mostly attends to the work. (And the author was once a student of Adorno).

Czech s&m movies were rigidly patriarchal; even on those occasions when it did become F/f, there was likely to be an erect, bearded, frock-coated, figure directing proceedings. F/m or switching was entirely absent. Lupus also made vanilla tv productions–so production and directorial values, for the porn movies, were high. The writing had an educated, Middle-European, sensibility, and processed the extended trauma of Stalinism; extended, that is, in Decartes’ sense of extended. Perhaps, the nearest western analogue, to the erotics of writing a poem that may attract the attentions of the KGB (if one writes it exceptionally well) is doing homework one’s homework–exceptionally badly–and attracting the attentions of the teacher’s cane?