CHAPTER 6

FROM VIENNA TO LONDON AND NEW YORK 1938–41

Leaving the Museum

In May 1937, Kris traveled to England to present a paper on caricature at the Warburg Institute, the first public presentation of his joint work with Gombrich. A year later, he would return to England as an exile from Vienna, hoping to make London his permanent residence, the Warburg reading room his workshop, and British psychoanalytic circles his new professional community.

When Kris arrived at the Warburg Institute in 1937, no prospect existed for publishing the caricature book on the European Continent. Saxl had expressed a desire to promote it and in his presentation Kris emphasized points that met the interests of Saxl and his fellow listeners. Warburg’s study of Botticelli and Freud’s analysis of Shakespeare’s King Lear had interpreted Renaissance artworks as hybrid products—compounds of magical thinking, symbolic imagery, and humanist criticism—and Kris adopted a similar perspective. Focusing on the relation between the emergence of caricature and the decline of magic, the paper sketched the development of caricature from the Carracci and Bernini to Hogarth and the eighteenth-century English satirists. Yet, in the following year, it appeared under Kris and Gombrich’s names not in the Warburg journal but rather in the pages of the British Journal of Medical Psychology, which provided an outlet in Britain for Freudian ideas. Kris might have had several reasons for placing the article here: his concern that Saxl not feel pressured into accepting a psychoanalytic contribution, Saxl’s own hesitation, or Kris’s simultaneous efforts, as seen in earlier letters to Saxl, to create a bridge between the Freudian community and the Warburg circle in London.

Psychoanalysts within the British Psychological Society had spearheaded the creation of the British Journal of Medical Psychology in 1920. At the time of Kris’s Warburg presentation, John Rickman served as its editor, while Ernest Jones acted as an editorial advisor. A Quaker, Rickman joined the Friends’ War Victims Relief Unit in Russia after completing his medical training in 1916. A friend and colleague of William H. R. Rivers, the eminent Cambridge neurologist and anthropologist who applied Freud’s theories to the treatment of war neuroses, Rickman acquired a broad psychiatric training before gravitating toward psychoanalysis and undertaking sessions with both Freud in Vienna and Jones in London. Freud urged Jones to find a role for Rickman in England and by the 1930s he had become a leading figure in the British psychoanalytic community.1

Publishing in Rickman’s journal allowed Kris to associate the caricature project more directly with Freud. As a result, the article’s preface sounded a far different note than the foreword to the book manuscript:

With the turn of the century came a new means of grasping the ways in which the mind plays with elements of sensory experience and out of them shapes new patterns. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1913) marks a turning point in the history of aesthetics just as it does in psychiatry.²

Psychoanalysis offered a scientific perspective that possessed the unity and integrity of an artwork:

In passing it might be noted as one of the aesthetic pleasures of psychoanalytic research that a study such as this which starts out as a survey of pictures of a bygone time may throw some light on the problems of the clinician to-day—there are no boundaries in science, and in none, perhaps, do we meet with so many cross-illuminations as in psychology—the science of the integration of sensation, perception, and desire.3

The article further explained that the study of caricature relied on Panofsky’s insight into the role of ideas in art history. Caricaturists sought the Platonic Ideas—the true realities—hidden within external appearances. Portraitists accomplished that aim by re-forming their vision of the world; caricaturists achieved the same goal by de-forming it:

By the seventeenth century the portrait painter’s task was to reveal character, the essence of the man in an heroic sense. The caricaturist has a corresponding aim. He does not seek the perfect form but the perfect deformity, thus penetrating through the mere outward appearance to the inner being in all its littleness and ugliness.⁴

The Neo-Platonic mission altered neither the aggressive nature of caricature nor its fundamental reductionism: “The deeper sense of such an action is obvious: by singling out and reproducing an outstanding part of a personality, we destroy its unity, its individuality.”⁵

In this more strongly Freudian essay, Bernini’s line drawings and the work of Hogarth, who stressed the necessity of primitive simplification and absence of design, became the chief touchstones for interpreting caricature. “Even now,” the article stated, “caricature has its strongest effect in reduction, in formulae”⁶—and they cited David Low’s caricatures of politicians as the clearest evidence. In an earlier century, Mannerism had encouraged such imaginative abstraction, and under its influence art became conceived as a mental sketch projected onto the external world:

The work of art is—for the first time in European history—considered as a projection of an inner image. It is not its proximity to reality that proves its value but its nearness to the artist’s psychic life. Thus for the first time the sketch was held in high esteem as the most direct document of inspiration. Here is the beginning of the development which culminates in the attempts of expressionism and surrealism to make art a mirror of the artist’s conscious or unconscious.7

The practice of image magic receded and “play with forms”⁸ replaced it. Ambiguous hybrids of human and non-human features culminated in Philipon and Daumier’s nineteenth-century pear—“a catchword, a symbol in the battle of the French people for their freedom”⁹—and in Low’s contemporary political animals.

Although caricature recalled image magic in its power to reconfigure the viewer’s “memory-picture,”¹⁰ Freudian psychology showed that, as with jokes, the caricature already existed within the picture. The primary process, wrote Kris and Gombrich, “cannot produce a joke which is not hidden in the language. Neither can the caricaturist follow his arbitrary will alone. He is bound to follow the rule of his language, which is form.”¹¹

The aggressive and reductionist techniques of caricature built upon a learned, experimental process:

This innermost primitiveness in style as well as in mechanism, in tendency as well as in form, is the secret of the caricature’s appeal. Here, too, the pretext of humour has first conceded what nowadays seems to have conquered a vast field of modern art. But it has since, perhaps, become clear how artificial is this primitiveness and with what difficulty it was acquired.¹²

Caricature could be interpreted both as a liberating psychological transformation—a regression in the service of the ego—and as an acquired mental construct. Kris and Gombrich made reference to French republicanism in the article, but they left full discussion of political art to the book manuscript, stating only:

This paper is based on a lecture given by Dr Kris at the Warburg Institute on 25 May 1937. A book on the same subject by the lecturer and Dr Gombrich is in course of preparation. Many questions which are only touched on here will be dealt with fully in the book.13

In September and October 1937, the Kunsthistorisches Museum presented Kris’s last exhibition in Vienna, titled simply Forged Artworks. As he described in the catalog, forgery thrived in periods when the public, out of hostility to its own artists, exalted artists of the past. Relying on that exaltation, forgers exploited the “passion for collecting.”¹⁴ In the late Roman world, copyists plied their trade among patrons who, scorning imperial art, sought objects from the Greek past. The modern bourgeoisie—committed to eclectic, historical revivals—created an avid market for forgeries: “in art, it was the fate of the consciously retrospective nineteenth century to be presented with forgeries of all those periods which it pretended to reanimate.”¹⁵ The bourgeois desire to live vicariously through art became symptomatic of an age that sustained itself through falsity.

How then could art specialists and the public recognize and appreciate authenticity? “The forms of forgery are always new,” Kris warned, “and always new must be the means of their unmasking.”¹⁶ What could the museum curator bring to the task? Investigating and exhibiting the extent and power of artifice remained possible but led inexorably—like all art history—to disillusionment: “Every piece [of forgery] attempts to cover a treacherous nakedness [eine verräterische Blösse], and the society of other ‘unmasked objects’ is thereby no succor, but creates only an even more sobering atmosphere.”¹⁷ A treacherous nakedness. The term brought to mind Austrian politicians and jurists who claimed that they defended the republic by bringing the Vaterländische Front to power, churchmen who asserted that they protected the soul of man by siding with authoritarian movements, and scholars who claimed that they advanced the study of art by exposing its supposedly degenerate tendencies.18 Surrounded by unmasked figures from his workplace and city, Kris’s exhibition of forged art conveyed his farewell message to the museum and to his Viennese public.

The End of the Republic

In 1938, the Anschluss with Germany destroyed the remaining republican façade in Austria. In the final, crucial hours, the European powers failed to provide necessary support from the outside, but by that time Austria’s Christian Social party, as well as large segments of the population, had deserted the republic from within. Politicians and citizens now poured forth to welcome Hitler. Crowds in Vienna’s Heldenplatz and intellectuals in places such as the art historical institute joined together in proclaiming the end of the republican era. When Hitler entered Vienna in March, Theodor Cardinal Innitzer allowed Viennese churches to sound their bells and display the swastika. He supported the circulation of a pastoral letter calling on Austrians to approve the Anschluss in the April plebiscite and appended to it his own epistle, signed with “Heil Hitler.” Like Seyss-Inquart, the new Austrian chancellor, Innitzer regarded attachment to a Greater Germany as the long hoped-for opportunity to secure a Catholic Austrian state in central Europe and to rid Austria of the socialist threat. During the Anschluss, he extended protection to Jews who had converted to Catholicism but refused assistance to the unconverted and offered no word of protest against Nazi violence directed against them.¹⁹ At the university, Sedlmayr announced his support for Anschluss in a scholarly festschrift and concluded the declaration with his own “Heil Hitler.”²⁰

In the Gombrich family, the Anschluss aroused concern for the fate of Lisbeth Gombrich. Karl and Leonie Gombrich recognized that their younger daughter, as an active socialist, faced immediate danger. A Swiss piano student of Leonie Gombrich—and a former competitor for the hand of Ilse Heller—promised to accompany Lisbeth across the border into Switzerland. The day after the Anschluss, she left Austria. Her parents, however, persisted in the conviction that they and their older daughter Amadea could survive in Vienna. Their determination to remain did not alter until the Gestapo called Leonie Gombrich in for questioning, during which it became clear to her that the state police had intercepted and read her private letters. After returning home, she decided that the family must leave Austria.21

On the day of the Anschluss, Kris resigned his position with the museum’s sculpture and applied art collection. Museum authorities pressed him to change his mind and stay on as curator, and later, when he was brought before the police, he was given to understand that political authorities would not interfere with the museum’s offer. Kris refused it.²² In May, two months following the Anschluss, he, his wife, and their two children departed Vienna. He had the British consul’s office notify Saxl of their imminent arrival in London. On May 6, 1938, the consulate telegrammed the Warburg Institute, “Your friends arriving Monday 16.20 Victoria Station” and requested that the institute “Advise Dr. Ernest Jones.”²³ Following Freud’s recommendation, Kris had remained in his curator’s job until political circumstances forced him to leave.

Seeking a Public in London

Unlike many émigré scholars, Kris and Gombrich could tap a potential public in London—but an audience still, perhaps, unaware of its own existence. From 10 March to 6 April 1939—the weeks during which Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia—the Anglo-French Art and Travel Society and its sister organization, the Comité de l’Association Art et Tourisme, sponsored an “Exhibition of a Century of French Caricature 1750–1850 with some English Caricatures of the Napoleonic Period” at the New Burlington Galleries. The previous year, the same association had exhibited in Paris a selection of English caricatures.

The return display of French caricature in London emphasized the ties that now bound the two countries. With two hundred and forty-two French caricatures, the size of the show approached that of Kris’s Daumier exhibition. The curator of the print collection at the Bibliothèque Nationale, P. A. Lemoisne—who had provided Kris with prints for the Viennese exhibition—wrote an introduction for the catalog. Highlighting caricature’s non-revolutionary impulses and downplaying its republican instincts, Lemoisne emphasized the influence of Hogarth, Rowlandson, and the English satirists on French caricature—especially “the caricature of manners.”24 The London exhibition displayed the work of Philipon, Daumier, and their colleagues at La Caricature and Le Charivari, but Lemoisne derided their politics, describing their caricatures as “drawings of obvious artistic value and of biting satirical power, but of such violence that Louis-Philippe, in spite of his liberalism, was compelled to restrain a liberty which too often degenerated into licence.”²⁵ Daumier’s artistic ability received high but qualified praise: his drawing “amplifies reality and transforms it—sometimes at the expense of his models.”²⁶

The cut-off date of the exhibition—1850—allowed the display of several caricatures of mid-century mores but prevented the viewing of Daumier’s images of the destruction of the French republic and the spread of European militarism. Fittingly, the exhibition’s French galleries concluded with a room of Dantan’s sculpted, pre-revolutionary caricatures of English lords and politicians. At the moment of its appearance, the Art and Travel Society’s exhibition reflected the self-contained, self-protective world of the European bourgeoisie, who even when confronted by post-Munich realities shuddered not at the specter of fascism but at the thought of republican excess—the same bourgeois world that Jean Renoir targeted in his own scathing caricature of manners, La Règle du jeu, which also appeared in spring 1939. The London exhibition shunned the spirit of the Popular Front that infused Kris’s Daumier exhibition.

For Kris and Gombrich, the Warburg circle represented the genuine audience for their caricature project. Perhaps they believed that Kris’s presentation at the institute in 1937 confirmed Saxl’s intent to publish their book, but when Saxl finally faced the decision, he delayed. Gombrich recalled: “He gave it to someone else to read, who was against psychoanalysis.”27

Another opportunity appeared. Penguin Books invited Gombrich to write a volume for its King Penguin series. Working from the unpublished manuscript, Gombrich composed a highly abbreviated history of caricature and included Kris’s name with his own on the title page; as he recalled, “although I wrote it alone, the book really had two authors.”²⁸ Also titled Caricature, it proved to be their only book publication on the topic.

The publisher of Penguin Books, Allen Lane, began to commission King Penguins a year before the war and chose Elizabeth Senior from the British Museum as the first series editor. Modeled on a collection printed by Insel Verlag in Germany, King Penguins were hardbound, pamphlet-sized art books that included color illustrations and cost only a shilling. Appearing originally in November 1939, King Penguins quickly became a popular wartime series. Print-runs averaged 20,000 copies.²⁹

Kris and Gombrich’s slim volume—twenty-seven pages of text, with sixteen color plates and nineteen black-and-white illustrations—appeared in 1940. It traced the background of caricature to Greek vase paintings and travesties of mythic heroes, all of which exposed the “contrast between crude reality and lofty idealism.”³⁰ Mimicry—as seen in grotesques and effigies—combined comedy, derision, and aggression: “To copy a person, to mimic his behavior, means to annihilate his individuality.”³¹ Caricature art could emerge in the age of the Carracci and Bernini because fear of mimicry had begun to lose its hold over the mind:

We think that portrait caricature was not practiced earlier because of the dire power it was felt to possess; out of unconscious fear of its effect. Before caricature as an art could be born, mankind had to become mentally free enough to accept this distortion of an image as an artistic achievement and not as a dangerous practice.³²

Hogarth distanced caricature even further from physical mimicry by linking his masks of personality to roles within society: “the figures in his pictures are actors who are meant to express in their outward appearance the parts they have to play.”33

Gillray and Rowlandson took the next step by aiming their art specifically at those who enacted roles on the political stage. What began with ancient travesties culminated with Daumier, who created an art that “far transcends any such division as that of the ridiculous to the sublime.”³⁴

The contemporary style of caricature and comic illustration—the style that characterized Edward Lear and Max Beerbohm, as well as Töpffer and Busch—sought to “simplify the world and reduce its representation to an easy game.”³⁵ Through the old magic or the new style, caricature continued to attract a public, to whom it offered a playful and controlled release of aggression. The King Penguin book ended with a psychoanalytic conclusion: Freud had shown that jokes released unconscious impulses through word games; caricature offered the same release through play with images.

The book received four brief reviews. Three of them—by Clive Bell in the New Statesman and Nation, John Piper in The Spectator, and an anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement—focused on the book chiefly as an example of what to expect from the King Penguin series. Bell, the theorist of significant form in art, and Piper, the painter of architectural ruins and local landscapes, reviewed the book as a companion to Ernst Kitzinger and Elizabeth Senior’s Portraits of Christ, which King Penguin issued at the same time as Caricature. Both Bell and Piper praised Penguin’s effort to provide the broad reading public with an affordable source of color prints and both deplored the quality of the reproductions. Their reactions to Kris and Gombrich’s book, however, reflected separate cultural concerns.

Tapping new audiences remained the heart of the King Penguin mission and Bell urged Allen Lane, Elizabeth Senior, and the King Penguin authors to rally the public against the twin evil of the private film industry and government-sponsored mass culture. The hopeless, rearguard nature of his cause seems to have made it all the more appealing to Bell:

If the Penguin publishers really intend to issue a series of short, readable, illustrated monographs at a shilling each, edited and written by scholars and people of taste, it is just possible they will arouse such interest in visual art that when that government comes into power which is to decree the conversion of all picture galleries and museums to movie-houses there will be quite a brisk opposition.36

Bell searched artworks for their defining form and he examined Kris and Gombrich’s book, as well as Kitzinger and Senior’s, for what they had to say about artistic technique. Depictions of Christ interested Bell far more than caricature drawings, but he did find in the caricature book “bright ideas and ingenious theories,”³⁷ if also some questionable art historical judgments, such as the claim that Hogarth worked from the tradition of Dutch genre painting.

John Piper evaluated the King Penguin books in light of early wartime efforts to bring art to the masses. Public institutions and private sponsors organized popular concerts, lectures, theater performances, and radio talks that both reminded the general population of the common danger and promised an oasis of normalcy. They ranged widely, from projects for historical preservation to the antifascist film documentaries of Humphrey Jennings. Piper, who before the war had already turned away from non-representational art to history and nature paintings, now depicted wartime landscapes. His paintings of the Blitz and the ruins left by German raids focused attention on the immediate threat, while his nostalgic visions of the countryside and its ancient relics satisfied a longing for quietude.³⁸ Supported by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC) and the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), Piper—unlike Bell—regarded wartime mass communication as essential both to preserving the national heritage and regenerating the visual arts. A neo-Romantic concerned with how monuments from the past communicated their spirit to the present, Piper believed that both King Penguin books would strike a meaningful chord with readers: “These two books look more modest than they are, for if they are successful and if the series grows there is a chance that fine art will be disseminated by them much as the wireless disseminates fine music.”39 Yet, he regretted that the caricature volume relied too heavily on what he considered to be popular psychology. Reaching the masses was better left to the artist than to the psychoanalyst.

Like Piper, the anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement found the use of psychology intriguing but suspect: “The suggestion that portrait caricature was delayed by fear of its magical effect upon the victim is so ingenious that one hopes it to be true.”⁴⁰ This last statement represented the furthest extent to which Bell, Piper, and the TLS reviewer concerned themselves with Kris and Gombrich’s psychological theory.

No longer needing Saxl’s urging to show his support for the caricature project, Herbert Read—the fourth reviewer—gave the King Penguin book its most thorough and serious reading. In his Art and Society, first published in 1937, Read had drawn attention to the identity between caricature and Expressionism. Like Kris, Read interpreted caricature as a rechanneling of aggression that required the hard-won complicity of the audience. The caricaturist and Expressionist, in his view, confronted modern spectators with unprecedented challenges:

Expressionism lives up to its name; that is to say, it expresses the emotions of the artist at any cost—the cost being usually an exaggeration or distortion of natural appearances which borders on the grotesque. Caricature is a department of expressionism, and one which most people find no difficulty in appreciating. But when caricature is carried to the pitch and organization of a composition in oils, or a piece of sculpture, then people begin to revolt. The artist is no longer “appealing” to them—he is not flattering their vanities nor satisfying their super-egoistic idealism in any way.41

In Britain, Read became an active and outspoken advocate of the German and Austrian Expressionists, not only advancing the work of individual artists but also promoting one of the most important interwar exhibitions of Expressionist art in the English-speaking world. Held in July 1938 at the New Burlington Galleries, the London Expressionist Exhibition offered a response to the infamous 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich, which Nazi officials had organized to demonstrate the supposed decadence of modernist art.⁴² The New Burlington exhibition, which contained a significant number of Expressionist paintings, included Oskar Kokoschka’s Portrait of a Degenerate Artist. Read had promoted Kokoschka’s work in particular and eventually wrote the preface for a 1947 English-language biography. In Kokoschka he perceived what Dvořák had seen in the Expressionists after the First World War: “there is no other artist of the present time,” Read stated, “so near to El Greco as Kokoschka.”⁴³ Kokoschka’s was the art of exposed, lacerated nerves, of “the mute suffering of the individual, of the person crucified on the codes of false social values.”⁴⁴ It recalled not only the images of El Greco but also Goya’s disasters of war. In October 1938, Read helped to bring Picasso’s Guernica to London.⁴⁵

Kokoschka’s spirit did not strike Read as utterly foreign to British art. The Austrian’s landscapes recalled Turner, who abandoned classical restraint for “a return to nature, to nature in the sense of the English landscape, a return which involved an honest attempt to render the sensations experienced in the observation of nature.”⁴⁶ Turner’s images of nature—a proto-Expressionist venture “to make the work of art a symbol of the artist’s inner or subjective feelings”⁴⁷—exerted a near hypnotic effect on later painters, including Piper: “Even the landscapes of John Piper, though they may be controlled by a conscious desire to make a topographical record of the scene or building, are generally inspissated with a romantic melancholy which is essentially expressionistic.”⁴⁸ For Read, the vital force in art came from subterranean, psychological drives. Piper and others tried to diminish or deny the influence of those drives; Turner, Kokoschka, the Expressionists, and the caricaturists confronted and released them.

Read’s review of Caricature appeared in the BBC’s weekly, The Listener. Founded in 1929, The Listener reached 52,000 readers during the 1930s—a total greater than the readerships of the New Statesman and Nation and The Spectator combined—but the number dropped to just below 50,000 on the eve of the war.49 Read’s review, which also covered Kitzinger and Senior’s volume on portraits of Christ, praised Allen Lane for bringing color illustrations to a wide public. But he dismissed as mere grumbling any objection to the quality of the color. Lane had successfully adapted scholarly commentary to a popular format, an achievement that set him apart from other publishers: “each volume is not merely the kind of entertainment we expect to pick up on a bookstall, but also a work which every student will want to add to his library.”⁵⁰

Read demonstrated his familiarity with Kris’s psychoanalytic writing and his own interest in caricature as an art form. What Piper dismissed as popular psychologizing, Read recognized as the book’s critical core. He drew attention to Carracci’s claim that the classical artist and caricaturist remained allied to each other in seeking and exposing the subject’s true personality. Read stressed that psychological revelation and controlled aggression linked caricature to Expressionism:

[T]he caricaturist must reveal the essential ridiculousness of his subject, contrasting the pretentiousness of his ideas or actions with the absurdity of his personal appearance. The art of caricature is therefore essentially a destructive art, and it is this fact which gives it its psychological significance—a significance which has been studied by Dr. Kris from a psycho-analytical point of view.⁵¹

A zealous supporter of modernism, Read argued that the caricaturist reduced art to its most fundamental elements, calling upon “a deep knowledge of the sources of expression such as will enable him to build up a life-like face out of a few strokes.”52 Analysis of caricature thus required not only a psychology of instincts, such as Kris brought from Vienna, but also a psychology of perception, as Gombrich later pursued in London.

Read’s diverse interests as poet, art critic, and anarchist thinker inspired a sympathetic review. His devotion to artistic experimentation and political iconoclasm led him to recognize clearly the crucial principles of caricature as Kris and Gombrich saw them: unmasking, controlled aggression, and social documentation.

The BBC and the Journey to New York

The King Penguin Caricature appeared in the first year of the war, at a time when the power of spoken language, not of visual imagery, still remained the decisive tool of wartime communication. As Asa Briggs pointed out, whatever the sway of poster art or motion pictures, the Second World War on the political and cultural fronts remained predominantly a war of words.

At the beginning of the struggle, the new British Ministry of Information as well as the BBC moved to create offices to transmit British radio messages to the Continent and to monitor Nazi broadcasts in Germany and the occupied territories. At the BBC, Richard Marriott and Oliver Whitley assembled a listening and translating cohort that drew chiefly from émigré scholars but also included young British academics in search of professional employment. Less than a month after the start of war, the group began its routine. Monitors submitted relevant portions of broadcasts to BBC staff who then distributed them to the Ministry of Information, the Foreign Office, and the service branches. The monitoring corps kept lengthy daily digests, as well as highly condensed summaries, of all information that they recorded from German radio, materials that provided the chief sources for Kris and Gombrich’s wartime research.⁵³

After Britain went to war in September 1939, Kris immediately joined the BBC monitoring service as a researcher and analyst of Nazi propaganda. The position grew out of his vocation as an art historian and museum curator, as well as his work with the London Press Exchange, where he had served briefly as a consultant on advertising and propaganda. Jessica Mitford, employed as a polltaker by an advertising firm in London on the eve of the war, recalled the dreary and often unedifying nature of advertising and opinion research:

Market research was considered slightly above selling or office work; the pay was higher and it was the kind of employment that might “lead to something better.” It attracted a mixed assortment; my co-workers, all women roughly between twenty-five and forty-five, were ex-chorus girls, wives of businessmen, friends of copy writers, aspirant newspaper reporters. We traveled by train in teams of six or eight, herded by the supervisors, to manufacturing towns in the Midlands or the north of England … The work itself was based on a very new idea recently imported from America. We were told that its originator was Dr. George Gallup, a person with the unusual but descriptive title of Pollster. The objective was to compile information for the use of the advertising agency about public reaction to various products, and to this end we were provided with elaborate forms to be filled out in the course of door-to-door interviews. The questions, of course, varied widely according to the product. Interviewing for a breakfast food or household cleanser was fairly plain sailing, while the form dealing with deodorant was likely to contain the question: “How often do you find it necessary to wash under the armpits?”—with the attendant risk that the market researcher might face swift ejection by the housewife thus approached. The supervisor cautioned us that the Dr. Gallup method included a built-in safeguard against cheating on the part of interviewers, and inferred that somehow he would know if we should be so dishonest as to fill in the questionnaires over a nice cup of tea in the nearest Lyons.54

Although mass advertising had appeared suspect to Kris, the new business of public opinion research opened an avenue to participation in the war effort. In a curriculum vitae that he submitted to the AAC on 4 June 1939, he wrote the following about his employment skills:

I think that I have a vast experience in any kind of practical work as connented [sic] with exhibitions. Propaganda by pictures is of special interest to me and I have devoted many years of research to it. I have in the last months been consulted by the London Press Exchange, in connection with questions on Propaganda. I am collaborating with the scientific staff of this firm in developing psychological principles of advertisement, a research carried out mainly on practical lines.55

At the BBC, Kris quickly advanced to the post of senior research officer and began training a sizeable staff of broadcast monitors.⁵⁶

On the morning of 10 May 1940, German armies crossed into Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, moving toward France. British government tribunals had already begun to identify and classify enemy aliens, dividing them according to those who posed an imminent risk and had to be interned immediately, those who bore watching, and—the greatest number—those who seemed to present little or no cause for concern.⁵⁷ Now on 10 May the British War Cabinet issued its first order for general internment of German and Austrian émigrés, calling for the incarceration of all male enemy aliens residing in coastal areas threatened with invasion. That same day Winston Churchill succeeded Neville Chamberlain as prime minister and six days later, in one of his first acts as head of the War Cabinet, Churchill expanded the internment directive to cover the entire country.⁵⁸ Although the Home Secretary Sir John Anderson opposed the policy as a xenophobic reaction, which could revive the domestic hysteria of the First World War, the military chiefs of staff pressed for internment and Churchill backed their demand.⁵⁹

In June, the War Cabinet concluded that internment had not proceeded intensively or rapidly enough and called for a concerted roundup of the majority of enemy aliens, with little regard for age or political loyalties. Police officials no longer had to determine a refugee’s attitude toward the Allied war effort.60 By August 1940, authorities had interned 22,000 German and Austrian émigrés.⁶¹

The BBC could offer no assurance to Kris that his family would escape internment or that he would preserve his position with the monitoring service. Officially, BBC supervisors offered him temporary protection by transferring him to Canada to assist with creating a Canadian listening post. Unofficially, they held out the possibility of bringing him back to England. Uncertain of his future, Kris also considered an offer from the New School for Social Research in New York. In a letter of 10 July 1940 he explained the alternatives to his British contact with the AAC, Esther Simpson:

It is possible that I shall be leaving this country on a semi-official mission towards the end of next week or a little later. The work I am supposed to do will take me to Canada and possibly to the United States, where I have been offered a Chair at the New York [sic] School of Social Research … I wish I could explain the situation more fully to you, but this is impossible for obvious reasons. I hope, however, to be able to do so on my return—in a few months’ time if things go well.⁶²

In August, writing to Simpson from the offices of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, he expressed deep personal and political frustration. The Battle of Britain had begun and he had no opportunity for direct engagement. He merely waited for a visa to the United States: “I need not tell how I feel in these days: as an exile from Britain. My heart is with all of you and my only wish is to know that the attack fails. I wish I were there in the midst of it.”⁶³

He continued to receive broadcast digests, special studies, and weekly summaries from colleagues in the monitoring service and he sent back his own propaganda analyses, especially on the state of opinion in the United States. His reports included advice on where to aim antifascist propaganda in the United States and on how the British and Americans could begin cooperation in listener research.

Kris’s communications from Canada reflected his view that the United States needed to have a coalition along the lines of a Popular Front to ensure that Roosevelt won reelection, that the country continued with rearmament, and that the United States entered the war against Hitler. In September, writing from Montreal, he analyzed American public opinion. On the Right he found “unconditional isolationists of the old school, which are up to a point, but not totally, amalgamated with the fifth columnists.”64 Of far greater concern was the

Wall Street section of isolationism; this section does, at present, not interfere with rearmament. Their whole interest seems to be concentrated in getting Roosevelt out of office. Their intention—“Appeasement” and “business with New Europe”[—]is not yet outspoken … On the whole, these people seem to assume that some kind of peace between a weakened [British] Empire and Hitler might be a good thing.”⁶⁵

Kris worried deeply about the large numbers who remained defeatist toward Hitler out of “the belief in his invincibility” and “the disillusionment in democratic resistance (France!).”⁶⁶ Support for the war came from rearmament advocates, but perhaps more importantly from the Left—“the unconditioned anti-fascist and those for whom Britain was not an empty word.”⁶⁷ In another report Kris advised that British overseas broadcasts stressed to listeners that the war meant not only a military struggle against Germany but also a political fight to bring social change. He was well aware of the sensitivities that such a Popular Front approach aroused in both Britain and America, but he remained convinced of its necessity:

People here are not aware of the fact that Britain is experiencing a social evolution which may lead her very far, that Mr. Chamberlain is without influence, and that the British people are not just “tough” but conscious of the new spirit. I know it is a ticklish problem. How far is it true and how far will people on this side appreciate it. I feel however that it ought to be emphasized over and over again. It will help in convincing the people in Canada and in America that this is a serious war. And I suggest that prominent Labour leaders should be asked to broadcast more frequently in “Britain Speaks”. They should mention the subject of the “future” as frequently and as tactfully as possible. My reasons for making this suggestion is that no other slogan of nazi propaganda has had more success than that of “British plutocracy”. It ought to be exterminated. “It” means here the slogan.68

After Roosevelt’s reelection, writing from the United States to monitoring chief John Salt, he criticized BBC officials who

are obviously well connected but the USA they know is not that of the people, [w]ho have, [sic] just now entered upon social revolution on a minor scale. Make no mistake about it, this election was one in terms of social problems. Only the people are prepared to fight this war. The wallstreet people are still if not appeasers, at least without any real conception of the issues at stake.⁶⁹

A month later he expressed support for the appointment of Lord Halifax—one of the advocates of appeasement—as ambassador to Washington but hoped that “somebody with appeal to the labor, comes with him. The Wall Street racket is overwhelmingly powerful. They are just everywhere.”⁷⁰

In December 1940 Kris joined the Graduate Faculty of the New School. There, with the German émigré sociologist Hans Speier, he quickly designed a project to collect and analyze German radio propaganda. Speier had been teaching at the New School since 1933. He was one of the earliest members of the University in Exile, which the school’s director Alvin Johnson had assembled to rescue scholars threatened by Hitler. The Rockefeller Foundation had provided support for the program as part of its effort to promote American social sciences in Europe and advance non-Marxist scholarship in the United States.71 In 1934 the foundation had also paid for half the salaries of Fritz Saxl and Edgar Wind in London, playing its part in keeping the Warburg Institute in England.⁷² As Speier recalled, Kris suggested they seek foundation support for their project analyzing Nazi propaganda. He assured Speier that the BBC would provide access to monitoring reports and digests.⁷³ Speier recognized the unique potential of access to BBC material: “There was at that time no better opportunity in the United States for closely examining the Nazi mentality while trying out new methods of content analysis.”⁷⁴ And Kris intended the plan extend beyond a single project, as he had written to Salt: “I hope to get a research Institute going, which would study totalitarian propaganda … The intention of the work, which would be stricklty [sic] academic, is to supply material for commentators, agitators, jou[r]nalists, which could use the Institut[e]’s publication.”⁷⁵

Marshall, Lynd, and Content Analysis

At the Rockefeller Foundation, the associate director for the Humanities, John Marshall, provided crucial support for Kris and Speier’s proposal. Trained in medieval literature, Marshall implemented the Humanities Division’s new policy to shift support away from, in the words of the foundation’s appraisal and planning committee, “a cloistered kind of research” to projects that could reach a mass audience. Toward that end, he began to organize projects and grants on how to use mass media—including radio, photography, and film—to bring the humanities before a wider public. Marshall built a network of thinkers and activists who evaluated not only the contemporary social functions of mass communication but also its political impact.⁷⁶ More clearly than many at the foundation, he recognized that radio, cinema, newsreels, and popular art created unprecedented opportunities for scholars to serve as mass educators and opinionmakers. Marshall intended his projects to help define long-term principles of cooperation between traditional academics, government agencies, cultural organizations, and expanding media empires.

In the near term, as war approached, Marshall sought to direct foundation support toward antifascist activities in general and to émigré intellectuals in particular.77 In contrast to other foundation administrators, he steered grants toward Jewish scholars, socialist theorists, and left-wing artists, for example, funding the young Viennese émigré and Jewish social democrat Paul Lazarsfeld in the investigation of radio and mass communication and the composer Hanns Eisler in the study of film music.⁷⁸ By contrast, Tracy Kittredge, a Rockefeller official who served in Paris, nervously reported in 1933, “Many of the leaders in this field are Jews or social democrats, or worse.”⁷⁹ Similarly, Marshall’s Rockefeller projects differed from those of his counterparts at the Ford Foundation in that his efforts did not aim at forming an anti-Communist intellectual network. In September 1940, as Kris prepared to come to New York, Marshall urged the foundation to promote more extensive research into German and Italian media. His plans envisioned not only the analysis of totalitarian communication but also the organization of an antifascist response.⁸⁰

Kris’s plan to study German radio broadcasts and to create a corps of propaganda analysts in North America coincided closely with Marshall’s aim to prepare American scholars for intelligence gathering and counter-propaganda. In the curriculum vitae that Kris provided Marshall, he sketched in rapid outline a self-portrait from the prewar years. It included the political essentials: “I was born in Vienna, Austria of Jewish extraction, and I lived there until to [sic] Hitler’s invasion of Austria.”⁸¹ With equally concise strokes he commented on the split in his scholarly endeavors and his effort to resolve it through research into image making: “Though my fields of work—the history o[f] art and psychology—seem little connected I have never experienced the diversity of subjects, the common problem being that of man’s reaction to the appeal of symbolic stimuli.”82 After interviewing Kris in December 1940, Marshall described for foundation officials the personal necessity behind his journeys to Canada and the United States: “When it seemed likely that all enemy aliens would be interned, he was sent to Canada on a temporary mission, on the completion of which he entered this country on a quota visa.”⁸³ Marshall reported on the strongest message conveyed by Kris: “[H]e cannot associate with anyone who is not interested in seeing Germany defeated. Interestingly enough as later appeared, this referred to the Institute of Propaganda Analysis, whose work seems to Kris neutral to the point of defeatism.”⁸⁴ Kris informed Marshall that he admired the work of Harold Lasswell, Marshall’s academic éminence grise and a pioneer in the new field of political psychology. In his first psychoanalytic essay on propaganda, Kris would apply Lasswell’s definition of propaganda as the “management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbols.”⁸⁵ Having studied briefly in Berlin with one of Freud’s early Viennese followers, Theodor Reik, Lasswell interpreted politics in part as an arena of unconscious projections. He drew, however, far more strongly on the ideas and practices of George Gallup and the new pollsters, with which he sought to transform political psychology into a quantitative science.⁸⁶ Kris, Marshall reported, indicated that in this regard “he feels Laswell [sic] bound by his techniques.”⁸⁷ Interpretation of mass communication, Kris told Marshall, must penetrate “even to the instructions that underlie it, and definite instructions can safely be taken for granted in the totalitarian countries.”⁸⁸ As Kris later wrote, propaganda had to be approached on two levels: as “the images he [the propagandist] has created in the minds of his audience”⁸⁹ and as the conscious “configuration”⁹⁰ propagandists produced as an instrument of state.

In March 1941, with Marshall’s strong recommendation, the officers of the Rockefeller Foundation approved Kris and Speier’s proposal. They supported the project as a contribution to communication studies and not as an arm of the British war effort:

Dr. Kris’s earlier analysis of these materials [British monitoring digests] was necessarily hurried and largely directed toward meeting governmental needs. He will now assemble the evidence these materials afford on the trends and purposes of totalitarian communication, both within Germany and in programs which the Germans have directed toward other countries.91

Kris informed Salt that Marshall, however, was “extremely anxious to know as much as possible about the process of [monitoring] work. The idea of my cooperation with the Rockefeller Foundation is, of course, a double one. While research is one aim, another is to get ready for action by securing influence and training people.”⁹²

Kris, Speier, and their research team at the New School began work in April 1941.⁹³ Like Kris, Speier questioned the American over-reliance on opinion polling, standardized interviews, and marketing surveys. After receiving his doctorate in sociology from the University of Heidelberg, he had written poetry, stories, and part of a novel, and worked closely with the economist Emil Lederer, a colleague and follower of Max Weber who later became the first dean of Johnson’s University in Exile. A socialist youth who opposed the Marxist sociology of class conflict and class consciousness, Speier interpreted the German bourgeoisie’s contempt toward workers and its rejection of an antifascist alliance in Weberian terms—as the result of a middle-class preoccupation with traditional prestige.⁹⁴

Speier shared both the Left’s opposition to Bonapartism and liberalism’s fear of mass politics. He admired the 1864 critique of Louis Napoleon, Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, written by Maurice Joly, who had “stood between the political fronts, perceiving the hazards of popular sovereignty as well as abuse of power by social engineers.”⁹⁵ Joly’s Machiavelli combined the views of a “modern caesar”⁹⁶ who ruled through the “unscrupulous use of force and cunning”⁹⁷ and the insights of a modern politician who saw the instability of revolutionary movements and “corruptibility of the masses.”⁹⁸ In 1942, Speier moved to Washington to direct the German section of the FCC’s Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service—an agency similar to the British monitoring service—and in 1944 he joined the Overseas Branch of the Office of War Information (OWI) where he organized American broadcasts into Germany. In 1948, he became director of the RAND Corporation’s Social Science Division. Years later the scholar who had denounced Bonapartist caesarism and censorship continued to the last to condemn Daniel Ellsberg’s publication of the Pentagon Papers as “an act of sensational insubordination.”99

While he remained firmly attached to his contacts within the psychoanalytic movement and the Warburg Institute, Kris found new colleagues and exemplars within Marshall’s network of American social scientists and émigré scholars. Important among them was the Columbia University sociologist, and consultant to Marshall, Robert S. Lynd. Like Marshall, Lynd urged the Rockefeller Foundation to pursue an explicitly antifascist agenda by countering neutralist sentiments and pro-fascist sympathies within the mass media and wider populace.¹⁰⁰ In 1939, Lynd incorporated Marshall’s radio research project into the new Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia. There he organized the series Radio Research, in which Kris would publish an early analysis of German propaganda.¹⁰¹

As he later wrote to Gombrich, Kris came to regard Lynd as an intellectual model. In 1929, Lynd had published with his wife Helen Merrell Lynd the groundbreaking Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, a seminal work of cultural anthropology and a profound social psychological case study. Researched in 1924–25 and published on the eve of the Depression, Middletown—in actuality Muncie, Indiana—examined an American community undergoing rapid, disorienting change and suffering from the dysfunctional gap between early twentieth-century cultural institutions and the new social reality forcing itself upon them.¹⁰² The book combined the social scientist’s accumulation of quantitative data on collective behavior with the humanist’s exploration of the content of the individual’s choices and responsibilities. Culture functioned as a crucial analytic and dynamic concept that encompassed the mass communication of institutional values and pressures, the spectrum of personal responses to them, and the numerous points of friction among private aspirations, institutional demands, and communal needs. In the scientific rigor of their analysis and the literary consciousness of their presentation, the Lynds offered a new methodology and shared direction to psychology, the humanities, and the social sciences.

Through Marshall and the Totalitarian Communication Project, Kris briefly collaborated with the émigré critic and film scholar Siegfried Kracauer. As a reporter for the Frankfurter Zeitung, Kracauer—who had studied Kant with his friend and colleague Theodor Adorno—incorporated the Frankfurt School’s critical Marxism and Freudianism into his film writings.103 While still a working journalist, he began to accumulate and organize the material that after the war he built into his pathbreaking work on film psychology, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film.

Kracauer left Germany in 1933, lived in France until the German occupation, and settled in New York with the help of Marshall and Iris Barry, the curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s Film Library, recently created thanks to a Rockefeller grant.¹⁰⁴ In New York, Kracauer approached both Marshall and Barry about utilizing MoMA’s library to undertake a study of Nazi film. Marshall stipulated that Kracauer coordinate his proposal with Kris and Speier, who both agreed to serve with Barry as his references.¹⁰⁵ In her May 1941 letter supporting Kracauer’s request for support, Barry characterized the significance of his work: “A coordination of the two studies in radio communication and in film communication would thus be effected, which seems desirable in the interest of an integrated content-analysis of totalitarian communication in wartime.”¹⁰⁶

Marshall not only approved funds for Kracauer’s research into Nazi film propaganda but also provided him with a crucial recommendation to the Guggenheim Foundation when it considered whether to support the completion of From Caligari to Hitler. Seeking to pre-empt political objections at the Guggenheim, Marshall stressed Kracauer’s journalistic approach to film and his experience of American social—not socialist—research:

[H]e brought to this country an unusual acquaintance with German films, but more unusual still is the context of his view of them. As Kracauer has said, he regards himself, and quite properly, primarily as a “social reporter.” If he were less modest he would probably claim status as a socialist, but he is both modest and just in holding himself to the function of “social rapportage” … His painstaking ability in research was amply evidenced in the work which underlay his report on the German propaganda film. In that work he adopted the best objective techniques of analysis, particularly those developed by Dr Ernst Kris and Dr Hans Speier at the New School for Social Research in their analyses of German radio propaganda.107

In his wartime study of Nazi film, Kracauer analyzed German propaganda to show how it corrupted and exploited republican art forms that the German middle class had abandoned, a theme that he explored in detail in From Caligari to Hitler. In contrast to Herbert Read, he viewed the radical pacifist and antibourgeois current within Expressionism as a sign of withdrawal into an alternative inner world, an irresistible “retreat into a shell.”¹⁰⁸ In a prewar essay comparing interwar German film to Russian cinema, he similarly asserted: “What is more essential is that Eisenstein and Pudovkin—in contrast to a mere caricaturist such as George Grosz—are informed about human affairs.”¹⁰⁹ Manipulating an art form already robbed of its substance, wartime German propagandists employed the outward appearances of a realist vision to transmit a “pseudo-reality,”¹¹⁰ turning nineteenth-century documentary art against itself. The emptiness of the images reflected Nazism’s lethal void, “its own nihilism.”¹¹¹

Kris also came to admire one of Kracauer’s other supporters—Meyer Schapiro, the young art historian and lecturer at the New School, who, like Kracauer, applied both Marxist and Freudian understandings to cultural history.112 In 1936, in one of the first substantial critiques of the New Vienna School, Schapiro had warned that although Sedlmayr and his colleagues invoked Riegl’s notion of Kunstwollen—the inherent direction or moving principle within an artwork—in practice their interpretations either relied on conventional antiquarianism or emphasized vague national traditions and racialist mentalities. The followers of the New Vienna School, Shapiro explained, “tend to isolate forms from the historical conditions of their development, to propel them by mythical, racial-psychological constants, or to give them an independent, self-evolving career.”¹¹³

Marxist analysis provided a corrective: “[A] materialistic view of art history is not necessarily a theory of materials but of the concrete historical determination of forms as against a purely immanent, automatic, logical, or animistic determination.”¹¹⁴ Treating the artwork as a self-contained artefact led to historical mystification. Schapiro could have written much the same about Sedlmayr’s teacher, Schlosser.

Marshall and Lynd had thus organized a circle of American and émigré scholars who approached the study of images and propaganda as a combined scientific, humanist, and activist endeavor—in Barry’s phrase, as integrated content analysis. Yet Kris continued to feel deeply ill at ease both with politics in the United States and with his own immediate situation. He reached a particularly low point in early 1941, writing to Salt:

Since I believe that any progress in Britain will have to lead to a further strengthening of the left wing movement, any such progress will reflect upon the internal situation in the United States and public opinion will not be at peace, as I see it, and no unity of action will here be achieved for a long time.¹¹⁵

The atmosphere of the Warburg reading room and a psychoanalytic office felt far more natural than did the New School with its quasi-governmental status as a think-tank. Although a Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service existed by the time he began his research at the New School, and propaganda analysis and counter-propaganda moved forward at the FCC, OWI, and Library of Congress, Kris, unlike Speier, avoided joining government departments.116 Nor did he accept the Rockefeller Foundation’s mission of creating a new academic discipline of mass communication studies. Kris had preferred educating and agitating; he saw his chief work in New York as countering neutralist attitudes and convincing young scholars to join the war effort. Throughout the years of his Rockefeller research, he looked forward to returning to London, resuming his activity with the BBC, and renewing contacts with the Warburg circle.¹¹⁷ He wrote to Salt from New York as he had written to Saxl from Vienna: “The feeling of complete isolation remains strong and unchanged.”¹¹⁸

As he moved forward with the Totalitarian Communication Project, Kris continued to hope that colleagues in Britain would act on his behalf. By the end of 1942, he decided against applying for an extension of Marshall’s grant beyond the following spring, indicating to Bing that he wanted to remain a propaganda analyst, but with the BBC monitoring service rather than the Rockefeller Foundation:

My Rockefeller Project expires in March and I shall not apply for a prolongation. I do not know where my future will be enacted. But since the British authorities here did not, last summer, wish to dispense with my services when I requested them to send me back to England, I do not know whether attempts to that end which I will repeat have a chance of succeeding. I am acting as a “brain-truster” and I am now fed up with the ridiculesness [sic] of this situation.¹¹⁹

As before his forced exile, Kris continued to view his personal and professional destinies as in some sense enacting themselves, beyond his will.¹²⁰

Kris, Speier, and their research team completed the Rockefeller project in 1943 and published the results the following year as German Radio Propaganda: Report on Home Broadcasts During the War. Although it focused on radio broadcasting, the psychology and history of images remained relevant. Wireless broadcasts, according to Kris, generated mental projections as visceral in their impact as visual symbols:

The German propagandist talks about the world to his audience in terms of images. These projections are not only simplified to the utmost, but are also of remarkable coherence. In the ideal instance no inconsistent traits appear in them. The words that are to build up the image are vivid, composed like a poster, seductive, easy to remember, and meant to be “taken for real,” but deprived of the complexities of reality.121

Such images reinforced ideological manipulation, intensified political terror, justified militarism and expansion, and—when Hitler’s war failed to go as predicted—rationalized mounting German failures. But Kris held to the belief that countervailing anxieties—fears of military defeat and economic uncertainties—would ultimately counteract the workings of Nazi propaganda and prepare the ground for effective antifascist messages.

Psychology and Propaganda

From the early war years on, in published and unpublished analyses of fascist propaganda and public opinion, Kris stressed the symbiosis between propaganda and terror.¹²² Fascism as a movement did not arise from crowd psychology, he argued, but instead aimed to create one. It used propaganda as a conscious instrument toward that end. He discussed these views in his inaugural lecture to the New School faculty, which he delivered in December 1940 and which was reported on in the New York Times.

Hitler’s propaganda, like all hypnotic strategies, targeted the instincts, but the “extremes only, apathy, panic or frenzy.” Although Hitler and Nazi propagandists manipulated such instincts, and in particular the “desire to be dominated,” their propaganda appealed to a psychology that it sought first to manufacture politically and ideologically. Politically, “Hitler must transform men by this [totalitarian] force in order to make them into what his conception says they are.” Furthermore, “there must be an ideology behind it, something to inspire the imagination, and whatever you say, you must repeat it.” As a combined instinctive, ideological, and political phenomenon, propaganda functioned without regard for contradictions. In fact, as a conscious political tool aimed at different audiences, propaganda demanded self-contradiction. Nazi propaganda to the United States sought to re-enforce already existing American isolationism and anti-British attitudes, but to Canada and Latin America, it warned instead of Yankee empire building and warmongering, tendencies promoted especially by “Jewish New York.” Political strategies, in the end, proved of greater concern than instinctual or hypnotic tendencies: as a result of repeated Nazi propagandizing, “distrust extends to all news, first to all news from belligerents, and then to all news in general. One of the ultimate aims of Nazi propaganda is to create doubt, confusion, and thus, apathy.”123 Kris’s chief concern remained not a supposed mass or crowd psychology but the ideological conditions for resistance and the emotional obstacles to it, especially a pervasive indifference or neutralism that he feared was taking hold in both occupied and unoccupied countries.

In published and unpublished papers, Kris concluded that theorists—in particular the psychologist Gustave Le Bon—who characterized the human being as subject to an instinctive crowd mentality did not depict psychological reality but instead described a strategic, instrumental policy. Propagandists targeted the ego before the instincts. They mobilized existing anxieties or aroused new ones to produce hallucinatory, suggestible conditions in their audiences. Their thought-experiments conjured images of control over a feared object or enemy so as to generate identification with political leaders and their symbols. In an unpublished draft, “The Place of the Audience in German Propaganda,” Kris summarized this psychological and political process, by which paramilitaries and propagandists consciously functioned together as the instruments of Bonapartist intimidation and coercion:

German propaganda aims at paralyzing the critical judgment of the audience, at canalizing its emotions and at finally terrorizing it into panic … In “Mein Kampf” Hitler has dealt with propaganda and organization as two most important weapons; he has in wartime entrusted the military machinery with the function which in civil war the Stormtroopers and after access to power the Gestapo exercised; in all three cases the real power was planfully exaggerated in order to supplement fear by anxiety. These devices of German propaganda are clearly correlated to a certain conception about the nature of man; he is considered only as a member of a crowd. It is the conception of Gustave Le Bon. If we keep that in mind one aspect of the relation of National Socialist organization and propaganda becomes clear: the organization is supposed to drive man into the mass, to bring him into that state in which he will be a playball of propaganda. Propaganda in a preliminary phase intends to attract him, in order to “deal with” him in the end. The relation between Le Bon’s doctrine and National Socialist practice goes however further. Le Bon has stressed the necessity of illusions for mass formation. Psychological research has since enlarged upon that aspect and Freud has shown that we can distinguish masses according to their allegiance to concrete persons as leaders or to leading ideologies, which may to some extent, alternate in their function.124

In his published essay “Some Problems of War Propaganda: A Note on Propaganda New and Old,” Kris explained the background and reception of the psychological theories of Le Bon, a nineteenth-century, old-guard conservative who in the twentieth century applauded the fascist new guard. Le Bon, Kris wrote,

was one of those French reactionaries who had seen revolutions in plenty. He was terrified by the specter of socialism. His life—a peculiar sequence of endeavors on the fringe between journalism and science—was intrinsically devoted to warding off this peril … In Eastern Europe, this pupil of Gobineau learned to hate the Jews. In his own country he opposed the forty-eight hour week, the abolition of child labor, the expansion of education to lower-income groups … The success of Le Bon’s writings, especially his Psychology of the Crowd, was largely dependent on a public of specific occupation: translations, except into English and German, were sponsored by Grand Dukes, Ministers of Justice, and General Staffs … When Mussolini came to power he professed the influence of Le Bon’s doctrine. Le Bon, almost ninety years of age, became the admirer of the “new order” in Italy.125

Here Kris emphasized again the close functional connection between organized propaganda and organized violence. “Propaganda,” he wrote, “becomes a supplement of violence, and violence a prerequisite of propaganda.”¹²⁶ Fascist propaganda thus possessed a dual emotional and instrumental nature, provoking both psychological anxiety and political violence. Measuring the psychological impact on audiences was difficult if not impossible in the midst of war, but an integrated analysis of the content could at least give insight into the political purposes and strategies behind it.