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Culture in Three Tyrannies
THE OPENING OF this book maintained that the relationship between culture and tyranny is a complex one, and indeed questioned whether culture was even possible in a dictatorship. Examining the place of culture in other despotisms against the background of the Third Reich might offer some enlightening perspectives. In Fascist Italy, unlike in Nazi Germany, culture had been a constituent element in the formation of the new authoritarian state since before 1922, the year of Benito Mussolini’s infamous but theatrical March on Rome. The flag-waving poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti combined political and cultural aspirations on the platform of the Futurist movement, which became part of Mussolini’s evolving ideology. A formative element of this movement was a vision of modernity, symbolized by the interaction of machine-age inventions such as the airplane with day-to-day politics, which together signified youth, dynamics, violence, and a crass rejection of the Liberal age prior to World War I. Hence technology and modernity (in contrast to the aesthetically intellectualized movement of “modernism” in the parallel Weimar period, much of it associated with democracy) became catchwords of the new-born, defiantly anti-democratic, Fascist era. As a precursor of dictatorial Nazi practices, Mussolini, in developing a police state that had established its main contours by 1924, set up corporatist structures to administer the arts and letters (“Syndicalism”). Re-created in the RKK of Goebbels, this emphasized national cultural events such as patriotic exhibitions, and forced an artist-state consensus that the Nazis later claimed was reconfigured in a racial, culturally determined Volksgemeinschaft. Under the Duce until the early 1930s cultural exhibitions focused on Italian artists, and unlike in the Third Reich, foreign influences such as American films (and jazz) were tolerated, avant-garde music like Schoenberg’s was performed, and non-Italian authors were read. An aesthetic pluralism characterized Fascist Italy into the 1930s, but such pluralism was stamped out under Hitler’s tyranny beginning early in 1933.1
The fact that culture, despite the appearances of autonomy, was marshaled in the service of the state had become obvious at least by 1932, when in Italy the Fascist dictatorship of Mussolini had been fully launched, paralleled in Germany by Hitler’s rise to power the following year and the first of Stalin’s purges in the Soviet Union in 1936. In 1932 in Italy a Futurist-inspired painting of machinery, airplanes, and ocean liners symbolized ten years of Fascist rule, and an official “Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution” allowed avant-garde art to illuminate the political landscape. By this time Fascist iconography featuring images of the Duce was deeply entrenched, in various melodramatic, imperious poses, in films, and in popular culture, perhaps on beer steins; this was very unlike the austere Hitler, who generally disliked overly dramatized reproductions of his image. The populist Duce was the recipient of praise in works of music dedicated to him, for instance the Ninth Psalm for chorus and orchestra by Goffredo Petrassi, in 1934. Mussolini himself had now assumed a more strident role at the heart of cultural censorship, especially in literature and theater, similar to but not as dogmatic as the role Hitler was then playing in the visual arts. Earlier than the Nazis, however, the Fascists had come to the realization that their form of art had so far been disappointing, and in 1936 they also rued the failure of their literature, despite such pretentious novels as Giulietto Calabrese’s Nozze fasciste: Il romanzo fascista (1934), which depicted the life of an exemplary young Italian family, characterized by black shirts, shotguns, and wide-hipped maternal fecundity.2
A new dimension, politically as well as culturally, was added to Italian authoritarianism, driving it more in the direction of totalitarianism by the specter of war in 1934, even earlier than in the case of Germany. During that year it became clear that Mussolini coveted territory in North Africa. As part of the Fascist ideological canon colonial imperialism had a history going back to the pre-1922 Futurists, who patterned much of their imagery on Italy’s conquest of Libya in 1911, and an appetite for more North African land throughout the 1920s.3 It gave rise to Fascist imaginings of African natives as biologically inferior, sexually subversive, and fit to be exploited, dreamt up out of a self-arrogated right to safeguard (a fictitious) humanity. This had manifested itself culturally in 1932, for example, when the Afro-American cabaret dancer and singer Josephine Baker was banned from performing in Italy. The German parallel was in the racist condemnation of Jews, Gypsies, and black people by the Nazis, which had gradually developed since the humiliation through the Treaty of Versailles and led to ramifications in the treatment of “Jewish” culture by the late 1920s. The Duce’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia was predictably marked by unspeakable atrocities; cultural symbolism, as in Giannino Antona-Traversi’s play L’offerta (The Offering, 1935), which celebrated a missing soldier’s body, condoned aggression aesthetically and morally, as would German art for the Führer’s eastern campaign from 1941.4
Because of its Ethiopian adventure Fascist Italy was drawn into the pro-Axis orbit, whereupon its cultural pluralism, already attenuated, was further shattered. Once the Fascists started supporting General Franco’s Nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War, depictions of animal-like black people and Spanish republican fighters multiplied in their art; in 1937 the reverberations from Hitler’s “Great German Art” exhibition in Munich encouraged Fascist hardliners in the arts to allow more cultural currents to flow from their northern neighbor. In 1936 the anti-Semitic Fascist functionary Roberto Farinacci was instrumental in a meeting of the Fascist Grand Council on November 19, during which Mussolini announced “that the time had come to introduce racial policies in Fascist literature and doctrine.” Under pressure from the Führer, Fascist politics aligned itself with Nazi legislation by way of discrimination against Jews; the Roman race laws of November 1938 coincided with the monstrosity of Kristallnacht. For Italy, the cultural ramifications amounted to a removal of Jews from the professions, including journalism; from education, including art academies; and from the artists’ syndicate.
The Pact of Steel forged early in 1939 between Germany and Italy ushered in a climate congenial to more Fascist-beholden artworks. Inevitably, the venal, publicity-crazed Mussolini would feature in the foreground: in a painting People Listening to a Speech by Il Duce on the Radio (1939), or in a film (1941) showing sailors in a sinking submarine, celebrating their leader before drowning, in heightened verisimilitude – what one may call examples of Fascist Realism. These images were imbued with anti-Semitic implications, and the self-proclaimed avant-garde Futurists, maintaining their former claim to modernity, now emphasized their own anti-Semitic feelings. Emblematic of these developments was a competition in 1940 for “best racial monograph,” about which one of the runners-up later reminisced that he had “dedicated many hours of study to racism.” Jews were not allowed to participate in the Florentine Maggio Musicale festival in 1939, and in 1941, like Jud Süss in Nazi Germany, a momentous anti-Semitic film was on the Fascist drawing boards.5
But that filming never took place; Fascist Italy lay broken in 1943. With all the censorship and restrictions on culture forced upon its creators, the arts and letters in that country never came under the same degree of pressure as they did in the Third Reich, although, as there, they also never attained sovereign originality either. One reason surely was that – similar to Germany with its porous gubernatorial structures and unlike the centralized Soviet Union – Italy had a multitude of cross-defeating agencies and culture bosses who varied in their conceptions of art (and in their belief in pro-Fascist political symbols); for example, a Fascist intellectual such as the Hegelian philosopher Giovanni Gentile would differ significantly in his views from a Party hack like Farinacci.6 Yet in the final analysis these agencies were embedded in a political system that was, in comparison with Hitler’s and Stalin’s, considerably less brutal and more forgiving.7
As far as culture was concerned, the Soviet Union constituted yet another proposition. German cultural influences there were less pervasive than in Italy and, for reasons of war, virtually absent after 1940. If anything, it was the other way around: Wassily Kandinsky, who started with the Weimar Bauhaus in the very early 1920s, had first worked with the Russian revolutionary artists under culture commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky; and Moholy-Nagy’s Constructivist background, possibly through the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, was also indebted to revolutionary art under the Bolsheviks.8
There were also progressive, modern artists before the Bolshevik Revolution and under the tsars, and they continued their work in the optimistic belief that their art would help to shape a new, Communist society, with the new government backing them. Kazimir Malevich painted bold geometric shapes with strong colors, inventing a school of painting he called Suprematism around 1915. Vladimir Tatlin, inspired by Picasso’s Cubist collages in Paris during 1913, helped found Constructivism that year, where pieces of material – glass, wood, or metal – were made into objets d’art. Vladimir Mayakovsky thought his new poetry could establish a discourse with the great unwashed, while Vsevolod Meyerhold and Sergei Eisenstein thrived in experimental theater and film. It was a time of youthful merriment as well, reminiscent of Dadaism in the Weimar Republic. Eisenstein later remembered how “greased pigs were let loose among the members of the audience, who leapt on their seats and screamed. It was terrific. Goodness, how we enjoyed ourselves!”
Another movement in popular culture close to the bottom of the social scale originated during the revolutionary years – the Proletkult. It utilized circus acts, folk songs, and primitive movies with proletarian content to further the new egalitarian political goals. Many of these efforts fused with those of the modern bourgeois artists, but, as it turned out, Lenin and his clique, especially the watchful Lunacharsky, with functions like Goebbels’s or Rosenberg’s, suspected there was too much independence in these artistic currents that they might not ultimately be able to harness. Hence both movements, to all intents and purposes, were snuffed out by orders from on high as early as 1920, causing the exodus abroad of many members of the creative class, such as Marc Chagall and Kandinsky, whereas others, like Malevich and the painter and poet Pavel Filonov, stayed on in the Soviet Union and just barely survived.9
The pattern in the Soviet Union thus far resembled that of culture early on during the Third Reich when Modernist experiments were officially canceled, even after a certain lapse of time. In Italy, of course, things were different because vengeful rogue elements embraced the avant-gardists, bending them to their purpose, with their art adapted to the brutalisms of an emerging Fascist ideology, aiming for totalitarianism. The situation changed in the Soviet Union, however, when Lenin, through the spirit of his New Economic Policy (NEP), allowed for a type of cultural pluralism the Italians also tolerated for a while, one that was typically absent from Nazi Germany. After 1920, therefore, under the Communist regime more traditional forms of culture flourished again, such as classical music, theater, and opera; and the vaunted jazz made its appearance in Soviet cities in 1922, although these were imperfect performances. But Lenin’s political doctrine underlay much of this culture – high and low. Yakov Protazanov’s 1927 film The Forty-First, for example, was adapted from a civil-war story about a female Bolshevik sniper who, having killed forty White soldiers, adds another notch on her rifle after she has shot her lover, a young aristocrat whom she had initially sheltered because of his good looks. Nevertheless, during this period of apparent relative freedom between 1921 and 1928, censorship in the Soviet Union was firmly in place, especially regarding new literature, which was always suspect, and particularly books by foreign authors.10
Joseph Stalin’s rise to power after Lenin’s death in 1924 meant the elimination of his fiercest rival Leon Trotsky and the beginning of what has been called the Cultural Revolution in 1928. What this amounted to was a complete denial of the frail freedoms that had been granted in the NEP era, so that novel experiments like jazz were trampled underfoot, private sheet-music publication was stopped in 1929, libraries were purged, and Gypsy music was prohibited in broadcasting.11 Stalin started establishing dictatorial rule through the initiation, economically, of the first Four Year Plan and, culturally, a broad program of Socialist Realism that aimed for a true representation, in the arts and letters, of Soviet personages and material achievements. Chief among the former was of course Stalin himself, who wished to establish a Stalin Cult as an instrument of power, something vaguely akin to the “Hitler Myth.”12 But whereas, in the cultural arena, Stalin always tended to force a strong representation of his self, Hitler increasingly enhanced his aura by his physical absence.
The most significant artistic discipline for Stalin, as certain visual arts were for Hitler, came to be literature, in which he always took an enduring personal interest, to the point of reading plays and novels in manuscript carefully before allowing publication. One reason for this (apart from being a promising poet when young) was Stalin’s upbringing in the traditional Russian canon, Pushkin, Chekhov, and Tolstoy, even if his passion had mostly been for revolutionary pamphleteering; in this he resembled Mussolini, whose true trade was journalism. More importantly, however, as the Soviet Union, after the years of cultural turbulence until about 1932, was poised under Stalin to gradually advance along a steadier, totalitarian path, he capitalized on the power of the written word as a constituent element of national law and order. Paintings of Stalin with pen in hand near a green-shaded lamp, signifying intelligence and erudition, are among the most compelling portraits of the tyrant posing as benevolent ruler. They rival photographs of the Führer gazing at exhibits in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Munich, in July 1937. The novelist Maxim Gorky, finally returned from self-exile in Italy in 1932, until his death in 1936 became Stalin’s most trusted companion in cultural affairs, similar to Hitler’s Albert Speer, who helped to assure for the Third Reich the supremacy of the visual arts, especially sculpture and architecture. But architecture also became more important under Stalin. As high towers were built in Moscow and other cities, for instance, the Supreme Leader assumed the stature of a vigilant watchtower over the nation’s fortunes.13
Stalin embarked in 1932 on a series of steps that put in place organizational critiques of writers that culminated in the Committee on Arts Affairs, directly controlled by the Supreme Council of Soviets, in 1935. In good time, similar controls were patterned on these steps for all the other Soviet arts. In their totality, they greatly resembled the institutional controls that Hitler imposed, through Goebbels, on German culture creators with the foundation of the RKK in this period (with Fascist Italy clamping down harshly on the eve of its racial war campaigns in North Africa as well).14
The political purges that Stalin initiated in 1932, and which grew to cataclysmic proportions between 1936 and 1938, found their cultural equivalent in the fight by the Supreme Council’s department of cultural affairs against what was called Formalism, anything deviating from Soviet-prescribed literalist representation. Its henchmen terrorized authors as much as filmmakers and musicians, already famous artists and mostly good Communists, such as the poets Anna Akhmatova, Ossip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak. The reign of terror entrapped those and many other artists. Some like Mandelstam died in camps, others like Mayakovsky committed suicide, while the great theater actor, director, and producer Meyerhold was tortured and shot.15 It has been claimed that these early Russian purges encouraged Hitler toward his own Röhm Purge in the summer of 1934 and that this action again in turn motivated Stalin to reinforce his terror between 1936 and 1938 (when German actress Carola Neher’s tragic fate in captivity had already been sealed); what is certain is that Hitler did not single out creative individuals for special punishment, as Stalin seems to have wanted to do. This suggests that the Russian tyrant accorded even more significance to the potentially undermining influence of great writers and artists, as being a threat to his power, than did the Führer.
The Great Purges came to an end as war was dawning, without heavy censorship and yokes of repression having been lifted. But after 1941 the Soviet Union’s cultural elites were solidly behind Stalin’s effort to win the war against Nazi Germany, with Soviet Jewish culture connoisseurs aware of the Nazis’ attempts to eliminate Jews. Hence filmmakers and journalists such as Eisenstein and Ilya Ehrenburg – many of them Jewish – willingly served the patriotic cause. Artists were enlisted.16 That situation was no different from the one in Germany where painters like Ferdinand Spiegel were working for the Nazis and, to a lesser extent, Fascist Italy. After the war, Stalin’s glum grip on culture did not lessen (there was another anti-Formalist wave in the late 1940s), and it was even strengthened by anti-Semitic outbursts from the despot himself. It eased up only in March 1953, following Stalin’s death, after he had been accusing a clique of Jewish doctors of wanting to assassinate him.
From the point of view of culture alone, the Communist regime in the Soviet Union represented the worst of three tyrannical situations. A number of factors point to that conclusion. First, no one other than Stalin ever gave the appearance of being so totally conversant with and personally interested in controlling arts and letters in the quest for a spiritual elixir to nurture the nation’s life, even if deficiencies of a new, regime-specific, culture were lamented here as in Germany and Italy.17 Second, even before judging hunger-induced mass murder on the one side against Jewish genocide on the other, no dictator was as cruel as Stalin equally in his civic as in his cultural policymaking, utilizing terror as an instrument of ultimate control. His governing secret, as demonstrated hundreds of times through his show trials, which were supported by elaborate indictments, judgments, and signed confessions (for the attainment of which any torture was justified),18 lay in the unpredictability of the purgative mechanisms and, to heighten the terror, Stalin’s willingness to sacrifice even his most devoted henchmen, without apparent rhyme or reason, from one day to the next. Hitler refrained from this; his personal relationships were more transparent. Altogether, he was known to be too lenient to old Party cronies from the Time of Struggle, for example, no matter what their possible transgressions; hence the Nazi poet Hanns Johst, dependably loyal, never had to fear. Neither had other literati or musicians in the Third Reich who consistently toed the line. On the other hand Stalin, after criticizing the manner in which his idol, Tsar Ivan the Terrible, had been portrayed in a devotional film, once said that it was good for Ivan to have been “very cruel,” and that it would be well to show that cruelty as long as it could be justified.19 The greatest cruelty of all, of course, was Stalin’s determination never to justify his own. Thus he perfected terror.
Such circumstances led, thirdly, to a degree neither seen in Fascist Italy nor in Nazi Germany, to personality twists in the men and women whom Stalin had vowed unto himself to rule over and to use. The most publicized of these cases are those of the police chiefs Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov, and after Stalin’s death, Lavrentiy Beria, all of whom had been prosecutors and ended up being tried for treason and executed. In the realm of culture, the tragic figure of Dmitry Shostakovich stands out. The Soviet Union’s great hope in contemporary music (along with Sergei Prokofiev), and initially much lauded for his idiosyncratic avant-garde style, Shostakovich was attacked by the anti-Formalists in 1936 over his new opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. This made him a victim of Soviet cultural policy, but due to his outstanding qualities as a composer and his international acclaim he overcame opprobrium sufficiently to be ensconced as a member of the prestigious Stalin Music Prize committee, whose favor as a beneficiary he himself enjoyed. Scarcely had he been thus established than Shostakovich bowed to anti-Formalist guidelines in his own evaluation of prize candidates. He once more became a defendant during the final onslaught of the anti-Formalists in the late 1940s and then lived out his life as a respected Communist with many official titles. However, although he knew better, he again moved against the avant-garde in 1961.20 In the annals of culture under Hitler, there were no such complex turncoats.
This was not the only difference in the cultural arena between the Soviet Union under Stalin and the Third Reich. If in a pluralistic, democratic society culture at the extremes is often the most powerful expression of its time, either as assent to existing circumstances or as protest, all three tyrannies were united in a negation of those variable functions. Instead, culture had to be an instrument of autocratic rule, manipulated by political revolutionaries from the top, on the path to or in perfection of totalitarianism. However, whatever regulation against or encouragement of certain cultural trends Nazi Germany may have shared with Fascist Italy and Soviet Russia, the uniqueness of the cultural situation under Hitler consisted logically of sequential steps almost to the end, which contrasted with an arbitrariness of decision-making in cultural affairs under both Mussolini and Stalin.
Thus when Hitler and Goebbels had decided they needed culture as an instrument of power over the population, the destruction of what was termed Weimar culture, embodying the freedoms of modern democracies, to them was a cogent prerequisite, especially because the Jews could be simultaneously eliminated. Against the resistance of many artists and intellectuals opposed to political controls, the leading Nazis, even in the face of dissension within their own ranks, prevailed. Flagrantly conspicuous book-burnings, and by 1938 two signally censorious exhibitions castigating what was called degenerate art and music, were meant to establish new official taboos. These were aligned with novel police and administrative controls, such as the restrictive Reich Culture Chamber.
That chamber was also used to help establish new norms of creativity in a National Socialist spirit. So-called revolutionary standards for specifically Nazi arts were put forward but failed to take hold for lack of original content and human craft, so that recourse had to be had to older movements and patterns, traditionalist and neo-Romantic, mostly reaching back to the nineteenth century. Hitler also condoned such works of art, many of them derivative, although he himself for political reasons only singled out art forms in which he took a private interest: some visual art and architecture, some films such as Riefenstahl’s, and Wagner’s music, in particular his operas.
Foreseeably from these formative settings, defeat for culture in Nazi Germany – ultimately expressed through the failed grafting of a Nazi-specific ersatz culture – was further accelerated by the exodus or elimination of the uncommonly creative Jews and the course of World War II. Establishing a ghetto culture league for Germany’s remaining Jews was a well-calculated slap in the face intended to demean and control those formerly integrated citizens, now seen as racial and cultural aliens who had to be entirely removed. In the fall of 1941, when the Jewish Kulturbund was officially dissolved, culture in Germany had been made fully subservient to the requirements of warfare, which now compounded Goebbels’s already existing difficulty of superintending culture for political ends. This resulted in a first disruption to the Nazi logic: Most Germans increasingly expressed mistrust in Goebbels’s stratagems of conjuring a Final Victory based on “Blood and Soil” culture. Subsequent Nazi planning was irreparably upset when after the defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943, Goebbels, and seemingly an ever-absent Hitler, kept insisting that culture-based propaganda would guide the people.
As early as 1933 a counter-culture to Nazi culture had taken hold, however timidly, in countries where forced emigrants from the Third Reich, mostly Jewish, had sought refuge. But due to the trauma suffered by those German-speaking creative artists, who were often unfamiliar with the new language and culture, and could be the object of disdain and professional rejection, a German culture abroad found little space in which to develop. A notable exception, as mentioned, was the work of the internationally famous novelist Thomas Mann, who became a spokesman for German culture beyond Germany, even a political prognosticator, a moral challenger to Hitler. The fact that he, not to mention a multitude of lesser colleagues, was not welcome in a post-war Germany attempting to emancipate itself from Nazism, was indicative of the intellectual and psychic paralysis that had overtaken many inhabitants of the new western democracy. It would take decades of cleansing and reconstruction to prepare the ground for a complete cultural rebirth.