CHAPTER 7

WAR WORK 1941–45

Scholarship and War

Several months after the Allied landings in Europe, John Marshall undertook a fact-finding mission to Britain to explore the role that the Rockefeller Foundation could play in postwar reconstruction. At Kris’s urging, he arranged to meet with Gombrich. Kris pressed upon Gombrich the importance of Marshall as a professional contact and awaited Gombrich’s account of their meeting. In November 1944, Marshall and Gombrich spoke in London. During their conversation, Marshall posed a question regarding the caricature project and Gombrich’s work as a monitor of German radio propaganda: “He asked me,” Gombrich reported to Kris, “whether it had ever struck me how natural was the transition from Caricature to Propaganda, I said it had.”1 Gombrich described Marshall as “a serious person, alive and progressive and likely to do a lot of good.”²

Twenty-five years later, Gombrich recounted the path that led him and Kris from interpreting caricature to analyzing propaganda. He wrote:

[T]he evil art of hate propaganda is not so far removed in technique from the mechanism of real art … Unconscious projection merges into conscious distortion. Sometimes the stereotype will automatically modify the motif he [the artist] wishes to portray, another time the transformation becomes more conscious in the interest of an artistic aim, as happens in caricature and cartooning.3

By personifying and demonizing imagined types the propagandist created the equivalent of modern myths: “Just as the primitive myth studied by anthropologists tends to personalize the forces of the natural universe into beneficent or malign beings, so the Nazi propagandist transformed the political universe into a conflict of persons and personifications.”⁴ From caricature to propaganda, experimental visions had transformed into self-animating constructs, Daedalus’ demonic, ill-begotten creations.

Since the Warburg Institute had been established in London, Fritz Saxl had provided a place of refuge for émigré scholars—Gombrich secured a space in the institute’s reading room for Elias Canetti⁵—and from 1939 on he worked strenuously at demonstrating the relevance of the institute for the war effort. He photographed buildings threatened by bombing, organized photographic exhibits for CEMA, and sponsored public slide lectures, including a series on the links between British and Mediterranean art that he later published as a book.⁶ In his own research and lectures, Saxl explored the influence of politics on art, as in the design of the Vatican Appartamento Borgia under Pope Alexander VI or Velázquez’s paintings for the court of Spain.⁷ He carried on such efforts, perhaps with all the more intensity, despite the fact that the University of London, on instruction from the government, had closed the Warburg Institute’s facilities in September 1939. Bing explained the situation to Gombrich, who had moved his wife and two-year-old son to safety outside of London: “We shall probably only have a much reduced war budget at our disposal, and carry on for the time being with a skeleton staff at the old address.”⁸ With the help of Rudolf Wittkower, a mainstay of the institute faculty, Saxl continued to publish the English-language Journal of the Warburg Institute.⁹

Throughout 1939, Gombrich expressed his restlessness to participate in some direct way in the antifascist cause. In April, a month after Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, he wrote to Esther Simpson that “one feels that reading the papers and [of] 16th century humanists is really not enough these days.”10 Immediately after the start of war, he repeated his dissatisfaction to Bing, who counseled patience: “I feel quite sure that you will find something to do in the way of public service before the war is over.”¹¹ News in September that the institute was losing its space at the university deepened Gombrich’s sense of marginality. The reading room that had been his refuge and workplace was now shutting down:

That the Warburg institute should actually be packed away again belongs to the many things which one might know today without being quite able to realise them. On the other hand[,] the atmosphere of the reading room belonged so intimately to peace and everything it implies that it might have been difficult mentally to adjust it to “war-conditions.” I find it difficult in any case. If one accepts it as inevitable—as surely one must if one wants to survive—all the efforts of the last years seem so utterly futile. I do not mean my private efforts—though I won’t pretend that I would not have wished them to bear some kind of fruit—but the whole history of the last 21 years with all its illusions and incompetence which doom the last war and all the years we have lived through to something next to meaningless. Well—I should not bore you with this kind of useless sentimentalities, it seems that one has to pass from reflection to some kind of action and I wish we were given the opportunity to do that step as soon as possible.¹²

The opportunity he awaited was official approval from the Home Office to serve in the National Emergency as a non-British resident. He had submitted the paperwork but had yet to receive a response.

The Home Office’s delay represented only one aspect of the situation that troubled Gombrich. Speaking before Parliament in September and October 1939, the prime minister and chief architect of appeasement Neville Chamberlain described Britain’s decision to go to war as a response not to European fascism but to German aggression, even implying that he would accept Hitler keeping power in Germany if he ended the occupation of Eastern Europe.13 A government that mistrusted German-speaking refugees still showed willingness to reach an understanding with the Third Reich. Gombrich feared the spread of xenophobia toward émigrés and a return to the policy of accommodating Hitler:

I do not want to pose as a hero but I am afraid [that] for the sake of our future position in this country one has to take every opportunity to serve – Not that it helped the German Jews very much that they had done it but there does not seem to be an alternative –. You know me well enough to know that I am rather pessimistic again and find the outlook for the future in general rather gloomy, for the Jews in particular worse and perhaps for what we used to call civilisation worst. Did you notice by the way how far the slogan “no talk with Hitler” has receded already? But much as they may wish it they can’t go back now.¹⁴

Gombrich had not yet succeeded in convincing himself.

Waiting for word about his future, Gombrich considered reviving projects from his past. In October 1939, he wrote Bing that he had essays in mind for the Warburg journal, including one on caricature and another on Warburg:

I promised Dr. Wittkower an article cut out from the corpse of our caricature-book, on Physiognomics in art but this means a good deal of reproductions to be of any value (comparisons etc.) Would you care to consider to take my article on Warburg’s philosophical ideas instead, that means of course if you think it worth printing and approve of its content?¹⁵

The essay on Warburg would explore the philosophy of historical recollection behind the Mnemosyne, Warburg’s vast, uncompleted visual atlas identifying links between images across time and cultures. Gombrich did not write on the Mnemosyne, but in late 1939 or early 1940, he did, it seems, prepare for Wittkower a work on caricature: an undated draft of one hundred and twenty-nine pages typed in English, with revisions in Gombrich’s hand. It cited the article published in the British Journal of Medical Psychology but not the King Penguin book. After discussing the psychology of caricature, the paper devoted a separate section to the work of French political caricaturists under the bourgeois monarchy and then traced the history of caricature from the Carracci to the British satirists. A commentary on “Caricature and Physiognomics”—with Leonardo as its starting point—served as an appendix.16

In this unpublished work, one sees Gombrich’s concern over the persistence of appeasement within conservative political circles. The essay discusses David Low’s famous creation from the 1930s, Colonel Blimp—the supporter of appeasement, defender of Empire, and model of deference. The farcical Blimp revealed the tragic dangers of a timeworn ideology and outmoded sense of honor. Here Gombrich depicted Low as carrying on the French tradition of Callot. Like Callot’s comic, fantastic stage figures, Blimp represented a disturbingly real social type. Low himself explained his art in Political Parade with Colonel Blimp, which Gombrich quoted:

I regret that contrary to the custom now established among authors, I am unable to declare, that “the characters of this book are entirely ficticious [sic]”[.] As one convinced sceptic of human greatness to another, I agree that Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt, Baldwin and MacDonald have no real existence; but I am perfectly sure that Colonel Blimp exists, obstinately and ubiquitously[.]¹⁷

In December 1939, Gombrich contributed to The Listener an article on art and propaganda. There he cited the example of two fifteenth-century English students in Prague who, prohibited from preaching their Hussite, antipapal ideas, painted on the walls of their lodging images that opposed a humble Jesus to a power-mad pope. The story of English students in Prague might have brought to the minds of British readers not only the first city occupied by Hitler after the Munich agreement but also the political risks taken by émigrés. Gombrich reproduced Daumier’s searing image of the family of Parisian workers murdered in their home by agents of the bourgeois monarchy:

To make things “plain appear” simply and silently has sometimes been the most powerful effect of great propaganda artists. Among Daumier’s 4,000 lithographs there is perhaps none more stirring than the one that portrays with grim objective realism the interior of a proletarian home at Rue Transnonain after the ruthless quelling of revolt under Louis Philippe. But pictorial art can do more. It can give visual reality to the wishes and desires of the masses. It can show the menacing opponent as humiliated and defeated, pilloried, hanging on the gallows or tortured in hell.18 (Plate 15)

With Daumier political protest generated a new form of art and communication, as Gombrich stated: “generally speaking opposition has more chance of finding genuine and even artistic expression than official adulation.”¹⁹ He contrasted the artistic bankruptcy of Nazi images:

What hopeless results had not Diderot’s exhortations to his friend the painter J. B. Greuze, that he should depict the alluring qualities of bourgeois life and glorify the charm of happy family with as many children as possible! It gives a kind of foretaste of the results of a similar effort, magnified through totalitarian efficiency, in the official art—and there is no other—of the Third Reich.²⁰

No stronger antifascist message could have been conveyed to British readers. Nazi propaganda celebrated Kinder, Küche, Kirche, while Daumier documented the murder that occurred at the behest of guardians of middle-class domestic bliss.

Saxl and Bing kept the Warburg Institute running with a highly restricted budget and virtually no assistance. In October 1939, with the institute’s needs and the authorities’ treatment of refugees in mind, Bing strenuously advised Gombrich against seeking government employment: “Saxl with whom I talked about it this morning is under the impression that you will all feel compelled to join up as time goes on, but I would advise you not to do anything rash.”21 Yet, as Kris had predicted, art history now seemed personally inconsequential and socially irrelevant. In December, Gombrich made his decision and accepted a position with the BBC as translator and analyst of German radio broadcasts.²² Kris provided the necessary recommendation.

From Reading Room to Listening Post

At the BBC monitoring service, Gombrich met those who had believed even before September 1939 that Britain had to commit itself to an antifascist war. Richard Marriott, who with Oliver Whitley organized the original monitoring group, recalled:

I think we were all praying for the war to begin, which is not as ghoulish as it sounds, because we had probably none of us been in agreement with appeasement at any stage, and by that time it had become clear to practically everyone that war was inevitable.²³

In February 1940, only weeks after he began his work at the listening post in Evesham, Gombrich wrote to Bing that he had finally found a political outlet:

I really have no intention of giving up my line and becoming a professional monitor for [a] life time. I only feel that it is a kind of mental safeguard to put that in the foreground which after all pushes itself into the foreground sooner or later. I admit that i [sic] sometimes felt the tension and inconsistency rather hard when all the posters shouted “Barcelona bombed” or “Hitler asks Jews to quit” and I went to the Museum to order Philostrat or Gyraldus. I admit that Gyraldus is more “real” than Hitler but only after Hitler is disposed of.24

War work and, at this moment, reading outside the monitoring center about ancient Judaism lessened his feeling of detachment and helped him manage his sense of fatalism:

It may seem odd but after having listened to the Nazi-news for eight hours I feel much more free to read, say, Wool[l]ey’s book on Abraham, or to work on the Atlas, then [sic] I did when all that was only looming at the background. “Activation”—if ever such a word does exist—is certainly the best way of fighting anxiety. And to hear the most pessimistic version first—over the German wireless—is strangely enough the most efficient antidote against my inborne [sic] pessimism which I have yet discovered. One does no longer fear that this country may lose if one hears the German shouting that all the time. I do not mean that I have developed into a radiant and beaming optimist, I am pretty sure that we will have to face hard times, and may be [sic] very soon, but this hysteria over there does not sound very confident.²⁵

Gombrich continued his researches into Jewish historical memory and the psychological transmission of memory fragments. He read Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, and offered an opinion on its psycho-historical theory to Bing:

The points of contact between the Moses and some of Warburg[’]s mnemic thoughts are however so surprising that I must urge you to read the book in spite of the obvious Widerstaende [resistances] whcih [sic] you are sure to feel. Dont [sic] give up before reading the last chapters because it is there that Freud reveals that [sic] he really believes, that strong experiences of the past like the killing of the primaeval father survive as memory traces in the unconscious of the nation and can be evoked through a new experience or return after a long “latency period” with all their power. I could not say that he has convinced me but the similarity with some of the basic conceptions of the Mnemosyne is really surprising.26

After several weeks such reading and reflections seemed to belong to a distant, unfamiliar world. In May 1940, Gombrich contrasted the nervous intensity at the Evesham listening post to the quiet atmosphere at the British Museum reading room where so many exiled scholars had once found a haven:

I need hardly tell you that the world looks pretty ghastly now. Not even I find it exhilarating to listen to these [sic] news although I must confess that I find the tension and rush during our working hours (they are working-hours) more in harmony with my state of mind than I would probably find the Reading Room of the B.M.²⁷

The hastily assembled monitoring center had displaced the bookshop and museum.

Despite their connections to the Bonham Carters and the BBC, the Gombrich family still felt the antirefugee backlash in 1940. Gombrich’s parents and his sister Amadea lived in Stratford and, through former students and contacts, his mother began to give piano lessons in Oxford.²⁸ An accomplished violinist, Amadea Gombrich performed in Stratford and was allowed later in the year to take her university exams at Edinburgh.²⁹ Gombrich’s own activities remained restricted, as he described to Bing in June 1940: “I do not think that I am allowed to enter the Bournemouth area at all, all male ‘enemy’ aliens between 16–60 have been interned there.”³⁰

Days later, the general internment order went into force. On 7 July, Gombrich wrote that his father Karl Gombrich had been incarcerated in a camp outside Liverpool:

I am afraid life must be rather gloomy in your circles now with all the xenophobia which is rife—have there been other victims? My father has been interned a week ago and we have not even got his address yet! All this is rather sad, but probably inevitable from the point of view of mass psychology. I see in todays [sic] paper that even recruiting of refugees has been stopped and I wonder what all these people are going to do. Our position here seems as yet—knock wood—comparatively safe but of course nobody can know what is going to happen when the so called “real thing” starts.31

Gombrich knew that Otto Kurz had been caught up in the anti-alien reaction, and wrote dejectedly to Wittkower at the end of July that: “I fully appreciate my undeserved luck to have escaped internement [sic] by virtue of my occupation. My father has been interned and so have practically all non British people I know.”³²

At the end of the summer, Karl Gombrich was released, which Gombrich reported to Kris in October:

My father, by the way, has returned to Stratford about a fortnight ago, he looked quite well and is alright. Strangely enough he seemed to have minded the actual hardships of the first weeks much less than the drab and dreary routine camp life under the somewhat improved conditions later on. Particularly the last period of waiting for the release which he expected every day seems to have had a very depressing effect on him and also the small and comparatively trifling indignities which are inevitably connected with these things. But I think that my mother suffered more than did he.³³

During Karl Gombrich’s internment, the phony war ended and the “real thing” began: from July to September bombing raids on Britain increased heavily in number and intensity. From 7 September to 2 November, German planes attacked London every night. Gombrich’s sister Lisbeth, having made her way from Switzerland, held a temporary job in London and carried on through the Blitz:

She had one very narrow escape in a basement shelter but as a rule she says that she sleeps alright and that the behavior of the Londoners is really admirable. Personally she is most concerned about health conditions in winter with most of the windows smashed, people crowding in cold shelters and the danger of any ’flu epidemic taking very serious forms most obvious. Unfortunately her bosses have now preferred to leave and to close down their shop so that she had (more or less) lost her job. They still talk about transferring it elsewhere, but she does not believe that they are serious about it.34

After the Blitz, Lady Violet Bonham Carter secured Lisbeth an employment interview at Bedford College, University of London, the first women’s college in Britain. In 1942, she moved to Oxford with her parents, and worked there in the same office as her father.³⁵ Gombrich’s family survived the Battle of Britain. German bombs, however, killed Hans Meier, the Warburg Institute’s librarian in 1941. A year later Gombrich learned that a German bombing raid had also taken the life of Elizabeth Senior, the editor who had published the King Penguin caricature book.³⁶

By the summer of 1941, Saxl, Bing, and Rudolf and Margot Wittkower had relocated the Warburg staff safely to Denham where they now stored the only remaining catalog of the library’s holdings, reassembled collections of books and photographs, and supported research and preservation activities as best they could for the duration of the war.³⁷ Gombrich kept in contact with the Denham circle, which included the Wittkowers, Otto Kurz, and the medievalist Hugo Buchthal. He agreed to Saxl’s requests for art historical talks and articles and contributed to the lecture series on Britain and the Mediterranean with a presentation on “Heroic Landscape in England.” Saxl attempted to dissuade him from further work on caricature, writing in August 1941:

I don’t think you should again take up the subject of Caricatura. Not because we wouldn’t like to have it but I think it would be more amusing for you to deal with the “heroic landscape”, as you first suggested. An imperfect lecture on the “heroic landscape” seems to me preferable to an almost perfect lecture on Caricature.38

The topic of landscape art would better assist Saxl’s plan to connect the institute to the wartime historical preservation campaign.³⁹

Yet, Saxl perhaps underestimated the relevance of Gombrich’s interest in caricature, a relevance that Allen Lane and the King Penguin editors still appreciated. In 1943, the King Penguin series reprinted an abridged version of The Microcosm of London, a collection of color plates originally published during the Napoleonic Wars in 1808 after the victory at Trafalgar but before the end had come into view.

In the Microcosm, one hundred prints depicted sites of London’s political, economic, and cultural life: the House of Commons, law courts, and royal palaces; the Guildhall, board rooms, and Stock Exchange; churches, schools, and hospitals; the Royal Academy, Christie’s auction room, and the comic stage at Sadler’s Wells. Every location conveyed the message that the home front had not succumbed to fear and isolation but instead successfully maintained normalcy and continuity. A. C. Pugin—the architectural illustrator, preservationist, and father of the architect and medieval revivalist A. W. Pugin—drew the buildings and meeting places, coloring them by hand. But the caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson drew the people who lounged about, crowded within, and streamed through the streets and interiors.

The introduction to the King Penguin prints reminded readers that the original Microcosm had been the brainchild of the émigré publisher and bookseller Rudolph Ackermann—“German by birth, cosmopolitan by nature.”⁴⁰ Ackermann’s Microcosm embodied the spirit of Londoners who “lived their lives against a background of world war, of sweeping armies and mass fanaticism.”⁴¹ From Napoleon to Hitler, questions and fears remained the same: “‘Can he invade us?’ ‘Will he attack Spain?’ ‘Can the Russians hold him?’ ‘What is America thinking?’”42 Pugin’s colors and backgrounds transported readers into an old, nearly mythic London; Rowlandson’s “sharp observation”⁴³ of people returned them to the present.

Caricature art accorded far better than landscapes with Gombrich’s state of mind. Having contributed to The Listener articles on artists, propaganda, and the art of war, he wrote to Saxl that he envisioned writing another for the same periodical on “‘war artists’ in the sense of officially appointed chroniclers of war.”⁴⁴ In Saxl’s view, Gombrich had lost his commitment to the projects Saxl believed were crucial to the institute’s wartime survival and long-term future; from Gombrich’s perspective, Saxl refused to accept his decision to join the listening post and had—without saying so outright—withdrawn any vestige of support for the caricature book. Their mutual sense of disappointment persisted beyond the war, becoming a source of tension in what remained a still vital professional collaboration.

While Gombrich’s decision to join the BBC stemmed from several motives—including his desire to provide security for his wife, his son, and his émigré parents—his determination to follow Kris into the monitoring service signified a political choice. In his letters to Kris, Gombrich grappled with the changing realities of wartime politics. Writing frequently and at length, he tested his ideas and sought Kris’s responses to them. The correspondence reflected the thoughts of a concerned scholar, attentive to ideological debates within the anti-Hitler coalition and well attuned to the layered meanings of political language.

The life that Gombrich had pursued in the reading rooms of London yielded completely to the listening post at Evesham. Yet, the monitoring service produced its own disappointments. As he wrote later, he knew that as a toiler at the bottom grades he would gain only a “frog-eye view”⁴⁵ of the war. Still, he grew frustrated with rapid analyses, inexact translations, and lax reporting, the results of bureaucratic pressures and political myopia in the BBC. In August 1941, he accepted promotion to monitoring supervisor in part to introduce some reform in procedure.46 But early in 1942 he wrote to Kris about his ongoing disenchantment with “the germ of journalism in our place which I try in vain to combat.”⁴⁷ He continued:

You cannot imagine how few people there are left with the sort of scholarly approach you and your work stood for … My own job as a “supervisor” still does not give me an awful amount of satisfaction. I am not ambitious, as you know, at least not for “authority,” and I preferred being an actual ear witness of events and racking my brain over translations of such beauties as “Freiheit ist Bindung” to a[n]swering umpty telephone calls about little matters and passing on requests for special carbon copies. Still, it is not always quite as bad as that, and perhaps I can do a little for the preservation of the standard.⁴⁸

For Gombrich, the heads of his department—Marriott and Whitley—embodied that standard. They protested when the BBC ignored the work needs and professional opinions of the large émigré staff at Evesham, and in January 1942 they left the listening post to enlist in the armed forces.⁴⁹ Gombrich reported the news to Kris:

Both Marriot[t] and Whitley resigned and have already joined up. For me personally the whole affair was extremely sad and worse than that for I had come to have a very high regard for both of them, for their absolute integrity of motive and their almost fanatical devotion to duty. I daresay they were no diplomats in the way they handled their conflict with the powers that be but it is not easy not to feel bitter about it all.⁵⁰

Oliver Whitley provided a political as well as professional model for Gombrich. His father J. H. Whitley, a Yorkshire Liberal and religious Nonconformist, had been both Speaker in the Commons and chairman of the BBC governors. Not only did the elder Whitley’s background mirror Asquith’s Yorkshire and Nonconformist upbringing but his continued devotion to Asquith’s party after its steep decline in 1918 paralleled the interwar activism of Violet Bonham Carter. Gombrich traced the younger Whitley’s self-discipline, his lack of deference toward BBC superiors, and his independent political commitment to his family’s Dissenting and Liberal roots, writing to Kris: “Whitley in particular (who, as a son of the speaker in the House of Commons) is a real embodiment of fairness and non-conformist ethical standards.”51

Gombrich’s pessimism returned at Evesham, where he directly confronted the limits of Asquith’s Liberalism in wartime. He had already experienced the revival of xenophobia in Britain; now he encountered an anti-intellectual, antiforeigner, status-conscious mentality—Low’s Blimpism—at the monitoring service. Most importantly, new alliances had reshaped wartime politics, at home and abroad. In 1940, Churchill—a rebel against his Tory family and once a Liberal ally of Asquith before the First World War—had returned to power as Conservative party leader and given the crucial post of wartime Foreign Secretary to Anthony Eden, the representative of post-Munich conservatism. But only a year later, with the invasion of Russia and the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, the possibility of victory over Hitler now meant joining forces with Stalin and Communism. Committed to principles from the age of Asquith, hesitant to embrace Popular Front politics, and isolated as an Austrian émigré, Gombrich immersed himself in propaganda analysis. But he sought also to define for himself, for Kris, and for his colleagues his position in the antifascist movement.

Theories of Propaganda

From the German invasion in June 1941 until the turning of the tide against German armies in Russia in February 1943, the antifascist cause experienced its worst military setbacks and most severe tests of endurance. For many observers—Gombrich among them—the shock of Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union reinforced their fatalism about the war. In a letter to Bing, Gombrich confessed his profound apprehension and complained of his dull political sense. His conception of Soviet prospects turned bleak:

Incidentally, I proved once more completely ignorant of politics—I never believed a word of the rumours concerning an impending attack on Russia … It is surprisingly like Napoleon—but Napoleon did reach Moscow, after all, and only committed the blunder of starting his campaign so late in the year. One really wonders whether the Russians have much chance.52

The Soviet entry into the war sent political and ideological reverberations throughout Britain and the United States. During the next two years, antifascism confronted renewed anti-Bolshevist and xenophobic tirades from individuals and groups fearful that the alliance with Russia against Nazism would pull the war effort and domestic policy toward the Left. The war in the Soviet Union and reactions to it on the home fronts now provided new background to Kris’s propaganda research in New York and Gombrich’s political analyses in London.

Before June 1941 the British government not only had conducted the sole military defense against Hitler but also controlled political and ideological warfare, which it had divided among various ministries and departments: the Foreign Office under Eden; the Office for Economic Warfare under the Labour minister Hugh Dalton; the military service branches; the Ministry of Information; and the BBC. Churchill gave little direction to messages broadcast to the Continent but deferred to the Foreign Office and military service chiefs, eventually removing Dalton—one of a small number of Labour leaders who supported rearmament in the 1930s—from propaganda work. Official ideological strategy mirrored Conservative foreign policy concerns and Anthony Eden’s diplomacy.

Before the war, Eden had served as minister to the League of Nations where he advocated principles of collective security but also offered a territorial settlement to Mussolini in advance of the invasion of Ethiopia. He became Stanley Baldwin’s Foreign Secretary during the Ethiopian occupation and remained in that post when Neville Chamberlain became prime minister. Agreeing with Chamberlain that Britain should enlist Mussolini’s aid in protecting Austrian independence, Eden advised that Britain officially accept Italy’s occupation of Ethiopia if Mussolini would withdraw his soldiers from Spain. His strategy aimed not at defending the Spanish Republic but at negotiating a favorable settlement with Germany and exerting greater pressure on Italy. In February 1938, a month before the Anschluss, he resigned from the cabinet, distancing himself from Chamberlain but not actively opposing appeasement.53

As Churchill’s Foreign Secretary, Eden sought to maneuver collaborationists away from Germany to the side of Britain, and following the Battle of Britain, his Foreign Office remained intent on preserving friendly contacts with Catholic authoritarian governments in Vichy France and Franco’s Spain. Eden insisted that Britain’s war against Hitler aimed at the defeat of German aggression and expansionism rather than the overthrow of fascist collaborators and sympathizers. The British fought the war, he and Conservatives argued, not to transform governments and reshape societies but to suppress a threat to peace in Europe and to Britain overseas.

Critics on the Left—from Labour and trade union leaders to independents such as J. B. Priestley and George Orwell—called for popular antifascist mobilization and demanded a statement of war aims that included plans for political and social reform. Some served as members of Dalton’s Economic Warfare division, which maintained liaisons with partisans and resistance groups. Others brought their message before the public as BBC broadcasters.⁵⁴ By 1943, a Radical Action group had formed within the Liberal party to press the government for a new social agenda and to recruit candidates for parliamentary elections. British Labour representatives and trade union leaders demanded that the government develop proposals to protect health, disability, and retirement; to expand the educational system; and, most crucially, to end chronic unemployment and housing shortages. Such programs would require nationalizing major industries and creating a comprehensive system of health care. Early in the war, trade unionists had suspended workplace rules and contracts in the name of the war effort; after the Battle of Britain, they sought to regain their shop floor rights.

In military strategy, the differences between Conservatives and their critics arose over the need for a Second Front to relieve pressure on the Red Army and Russian civilians in the east. In October 1941, as German armies neared Leningrad and Moscow, demands in Britain for a Second Front grew more insistent. Approval of the War Cabinet’s military plans declined sharply. The head of the Ministry of Supply, Lord Beaverbrook, pushed for the shipment of a far greater number of tanks to the Soviet Union and sounded the call for a Second Front in the newspapers of his press empire. In 1942, after Stalin ordered a halt to the Red Army’s retreat at Stalingrad, pressure on the government to create a Second Front became unrelenting. From July to September, Stalingrad remained continuously in the dailies’ headlines and Conservatives became increasingly concerned that the movement for a Second Front in Europe would strengthen the Left at home.55

In the trade unions, Communist shop stewards campaigned for a Second Front and pressed for the revival of a workers’ Popular Front in opposition to the national coalition of party leaders and independents in the War Cabinet. Yet, many union members—now that the country had survived the Battle of Britain—wanted changes not in the War Cabinet’s military tactics but rather in its economic planning. At the Labour party conference in 1943, trade unionists soundly rejected the Communist party’s request for a renewed Popular Front from below, but the question of how to connect the military struggle against Hitler to a political movement for reform remained a pressing issue for the Labour party leadership and on the shop floor.⁵⁶

From his liberal royalist background, Kris saw in communism the nucleus of a totalitarian state. Furthermore, he believed that Stalinist propaganda in the years of the Hitler–Stalin Pact had helped fuel anti-British sentiments in the United States.57 But Kris also recognized the danger posed by ideological anti-Bolshevism. After the German invasion of Russia, he and his research team in New York painstakingly charted the revival of anti-Bolshevik propaganda on German radio.⁵⁸ Following the Hitler–Stalin Pact, Nazi propaganda against the Soviet Union had been comparatively quiescent. In November 1941, however, German broadcasts both at home and in the occupied countries proclaimed the construction of a Festung Europa—a Nazi fortress of Europe—within which European civilization would find security against Bolshevism. From then on, German radio propagandists repeatedly conjured the image of an anti-Bolshevik citadel to be built and defended by national fascists and political collaborators throughout the occupied Continent. Kris and his colleagues detailed the symbols that Nazi broadcasters presented continuously to their listeners:

But the fortress was more than just a military fortress. It was a munitions factory, a brotherhood, a living testimonial to Nazi justice, a new ideology, a concatenation of all the victories. It provided the newest of the new orders.⁵⁹

When the German invasion of the Soviet Union stalled, Nazi propagandists stressed even more adamantly the threat from communism and the need for an anti-Bolshevik political fusion of Europe.

Months before the invasion of Russia, Gombrich began to prepare his own treatise on the messages and mechanisms of German propaganda. Monitoring the German wireless for long hours both day and night, he developed a numbing familiarity with Nazi claims. As early as February 1941, in a memorandum for the monitoring service, he began to outline a theory of propaganda on paper.⁶⁰

To explain Nazi propaganda Gombrich first applied an analytic framework within which to interpret the nature of fascist regimes. Although the writings of the medieval cleric and historian Giraldus Cambrensis—Gerald of Wales—had seemed less inspiring after he moved to the listening post, he continued to read them and found there a version of the dual state theory of fascism. In March 1941, Gombrich wrote to Saxl that the cleric had anticipated the competitive alliance between state and party that existed in contemporary fascist regimes:

I am now reading “The Autobiography of Giraldus Cambrensis” (De rebus a se gestis) XIIth cent. which I found in the Evesham public library in a modern translation. I find it amazingly interesting. It gives a very vivid picture of the conditions in Wales and probably everywhere with the constant tussels [sic] and conflicts between various dioceses and between State and Church[;] that dualism was really something like the dualism of “party” and “state” in authoritarian states nowadays.61

Gombrich added to the duality of the party and civil service a third institutional partner: the Church.⁶² In July 1941, he wrote to Kris that he had progressed far enough in his thinking that he was “sometimes toying with the idea of writing something very general on propaganda.”⁶³ Eventually, he approached colleagues at the listening post to join in a compendium of essays on Nazi propaganda.

Just as Kris sent Gombrich drafts of his book chapters and copies of his articles, so Gombrich kept Kris apprised of the ideas that he intended to incorporate in his treatise on propaganda. Before the invasion of Russia, he focused on formal techniques of Nazi communication, distinguishing between various types of propaganda. A smooth brand was “carried out at dinner tables by semi-official business envoys”; radio propaganda, however, was “as subtle as a steamroller.”⁶⁴ Mein Kampf had given instructions in propaganda methods and German radio adhered to the techniques absolutely. Hans Fritzsche, who served under Reich press chief Otto Dietrich, applied them most adroitly. As a radio broadcaster and eventually the chief of Nazi radio propaganda, Fritzsche avoided overt ideological indoctrination. Rather, his speeches persistently spread the myth of Germany as the victim not the aggressor in the current war, a conflict which was “always represented as horrible and as a ter[r]ible necessity ‘forced upon us’ rather than as a climax of life.”65

But Fritzsche’s image of Germans compelled to wage war against their will represented more than a strategic effort at legitimizing expansionism and arousing retaliation: it revealed the obsessively formulaic and projective nature of Nazi propaganda. Gombrich gave particular attention to propaganda as a mental construct and mode of political perception, emphasizing that the propagandist aimed above all at preserving a schema. Thus, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Nazi propagandists devoted continuous and increasing energy to solidifying the mythic construct of German history and destiny. A month after the invasion, Gombrich explained to Kris the theory that now guided him:

The main “point” of my story would be that it is a misconception to think of “propaganda” as of a means to put “something” across—say the idea, that America is an invincible industrial ally or so. It is first and foremost a way of se[e]ing things, an interpretation of events, not of some events but of all events, past, present and future. Everything must fit in and the “moral” of ever[y]thing must always be “I told you so” … [T]he myth to which everything is reduced is, of course, born out of the most simple and primitive mechanism of that kind: projection. That is to say, the “stop thieve[s]” technique which [one] can always enjoy with so much pleasure in German propaganda—(the others strive for world domination, regard Europe as “a mere reservoir of slave labour”, play the socialists to dupe the masses, and have stolen the V sign from the Germans who invented it)—has very deep roots in the whole technique.⁶⁶

Although agreeing with Kris that propagandists sought both to manipulate emotional states and promote instrumentalist goals, Gombrich stressed the nature of Nazi imagery as a projective construct. Only by approaching propaganda as the imposition of modes of seeing and interpretation could one fully explain its hegemonic reach and purpose.

The Dilemma of Antifascism

Propaganda analysis led Gombrich, as it did Kris, to examine the political and ideological difficulties confronting the antifascist war effort. In early January 1942, Kris wrote to Gombrich that his research team had nearly completed its first Rockefeller Foundation report on German radio broadcasts. In the letter, Kris detailed his ongoing concern about the obstacles that stood in the way of building a strong antifascist movement in the United States and forming a political alliance with Britain. Anti-Bolshevik hostility toward Russia and anti-British sentiment among Catholics posed the most difficult barriers:

As to the future of the war: I feel that it may take much longer than any of us are inclined to believe and I am anxious to detect any chink in the Allied armour; the one I mind most is the antagonism against Russia, prevailing in this country and supplemented by the catholic [sic] prejudice against England; catholics [sic] here are largely Irish or Italian.67

Antifascism in the United States had still to become a strong unifying force. Kris conveyed his most dismal assessment of global prospects at any time during or after the war: “I take the view that the world war has just begun and that many more wars are going to start before they all can be composed by victory.”⁶⁸

In reply, Gombrich pointed out that the antifascist cause suffered inevitably from having to reject in principle any schematic construct, any comprehensive formula. All propaganda—past and present—meant the propagation of a faith and the manufacture of a myth to justify that faith:

As long as it is not, as it was originally[,] a “propaganda fides” it is no propaganda at all. That is to say it is more and more my conviction that its function is to interpret events (all events) in one given sense, to fit them into a pre-existing pattern rather than to advertise them.69

Regarding the search for a unified antifascist movement, Gombrich cautioned Kris against accepting the framework of the Marxist Left:

Marxism with its primitive interpretation of history and politics has an easy game, Nazism with its far more primitive myth of a world in which the radiant [illegible] Siegfrieds are fought by a Jewish conspiracy has an even easier task.⁷⁰

Gombrich despaired at the Allies’ disappointing and half-hearted efforts at political warfare and he shared Kris’s frustration with those who impeded the creation of a broad antifascist message: “But that does not mean that we can dispense with any interpretation … But as one can’t concoct a ‘fides’ (at least we can’t) the whole thing makes me rather sick.”⁷¹

Gombrich acknowledged that the unhealthy miasma of Allied propaganda derived not from the ideas of the Left but from the attempt to construct an instant ideology of Christian democracy. Not only Eden but also Franklin Roosevelt wanted to placate the Vichy government and draw it over to the Allies:

Roosevelt has most of it, but the background [of] this christian democratic creed is historically and sociologically so far removed from the past of continental nations (where progress and enlightenment was championed by the Voltaires) that I doubt whether it can have much appeal there.⁷²

A Christian democratic creed, which emphasized that the danger represented by Nazism was the spread of pagan belief, would not stir French citizens “who suffer from the betrayal of their Catholic Pétains.”73 Such propaganda would do nothing to undermine the reactionary nationalism that helped give rise to Nazism in Germany: “the trouble there seems to me that since the days of the French Revolution the national enemy happened to coincide with the champion of progressive, liberal ideas.”⁷⁴

Gombrich had lived under a Christian Social regime and understood its nature. He opposed the rehabilitation of Catholic collaborationist regimes in the guise of postwar Christian democracies. Instead, antifascist propaganda had to focus on building a secular, reformist European identity. But unlike Kris and despite his criticism of Christian democratic ideology, he recoiled from advocating Popular Front politics as the means of realizing this Voltairean vision.⁷⁵

At the listening post, the idea of the externalization and modification of conceptual schemas in both art and politics took ever stronger hold of Gombrich. In March 1942, he wrote to Kris that he had been preparing the promised lecture on English heroic landscape. Intended for the Courtauld Institute, it interpreted eighteenth-century landscape painting through “the whole process of ‘projection’ which is going on.”⁷⁶ He summarized his argument:

At the first stage (roughly) there is an “ideal landscape” (illustrative of the literary genres of pastoral and epics) and, somehwere [sic] below the threshold of “art”[,] topographical painting. Then travellers etc. “project” Claudes into English landscape and admire the “prospects” never forgetting to compare them with Claude etc. Gardeners “improve” sceneries to conform to Claudian standards (there are plenty of documents for this), and painters start selecting beauty spots to paint Claudes from Nature (slightly adjusting the composition to make nature conform to the rules of the game)[.] Only then landscape painting in our sense becomes “possible” (in the Woefflin sense) … Well, there it goes, the whole thing should end in Turner on the one side who starts from this convention but transcends it by expanding it and Constable who breaks it with the help of the Dutch convention.77

Gombrich had turned Saxl’s request for a talk on landscape art into a lecture on experimentation with mental and cultural constructs:

[T]he evolution as outlined is really very typical of evolutions as such because you know that this is an old hobby of mine that “nature” can only be grasped (in art) in terms of some pre-conceived pattern which is streched [sic] and adapted to conform to new demands but not easily exchanged for a new one.⁷⁸

The Courtauld presentation contained the theoretical kernel and the visual image—Constable’s depiction of the English countryside—that inspired Gombrich’s postwar analysis of the manipulation and transformation of artistic schemas. Saxl had been right: English heroic landscape would provide Gombrich with a vital stimulus. At the same time, Gombrich responded by integrating it with, not isolating it from, his political analyses of conceptual constructs in image making. Paradoxically, in Gombrich’s view, art might possess greater power to combat propagandistic formulas than did the strategies of politicians, information officers, or monitors—a conclusion that reflected less his confidence in the artist than his growing pessimism toward politics.⁷⁹

An Integrated Front

A new resurgence of xenophobia in Britain coincided with the invasion of Russia and intensified the difficulty of sustaining a coherent antifascist message. One highly public form of antiforeign attitudes went by the name “Vansittartism,” a term that referred to Conservative diplomatist Lord Vansittart and his series of published radio talks, “Black Record.” His talks drew the attention of large numbers of listeners and readers, including Kris and Gombrich. A revived chauvinism now attached itself to the debates over the social aims of the war.

Throughout the 1930s, Lord Vansittart served as permanent under-secretary to the Foreign Office. After Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, he helped to construct the Hoare–Laval proposal for a partition of the occupied country. If implemented, the proposal would have satisfied Mussolini’s territorial demands while allowing him to avoid oil sanctions by the League of Nations. In September 1938, Vansittart supported conceding the Sudetenland to Hitler but insisted on a statement promising British action in case of any further German annexations of Czech territory. Vansittart’s stance led Chamberlain to demote him to the status of chief diplomatic advisor. In May 1940, with the defeat of France looming and the British Expeditionary Force falling back to the sea, Vansittart—still with contacts in foreign embassies and the intelligence services—helped to arrange a meeting between the Italian ambassador to London and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax. Vansittart hoped the government would use Mussolini to seek favorable peace terms for France, and, if necessary, to organize a conference with Hitler. After the meeting, Halifax thought the idea worth exploring further; Churchill, supported by Labour’s Clement Attlee, rejected it.80

In November and December 1940, Vansittart delivered seven BBC radio lectures on the war. The Sunday Times immediately printed portions in its New Year’s edition. Published as Black Record: Germans Past and Present, the talks went through fourteen printings by December 1941. According to various estimates, copies reached tens of thousands to one million people—not including radio listeners.⁸¹

Vansittart’s lectures sounded a single theme: Nazism represented the most recent and most extreme incarnation of the ancient Germanic danger to Latin civilization and European Christendom. From the Roman Empire to the present, Vansittart explained, the German people—“Germans in the plural”⁸²—had posed a recurrent threat to a peaceful Europe. For confirmation he referred to the Germania and Annals of the Roman historian Tacitus, who gave a detailed account of the society and customs of early Germanic tribes and whom Vansittart had read as a student. The main point for Vansittart was that Tacitus, who “admired them in some ways, but found them disquieting neighbors,”83 recognized in the Germanic population and their leaders a hatred of peace. As a self-conceived, modern-day Tacitus, he now stressed, “there is nothing new in Hitler.”⁸⁴ Nor was there anything new in the contemporary response of the German people to Hitler and his expansionist mission: “there have been potential reformers in Germany,” Vansittart explained, “but they have always been a weak minority, and have never been able to impede the iniquitous habits and courses of the majority.”⁸⁵

According to Vansittart, only the Church and the British Empire could impede German ambitions. The German churches, he acknowledged, had offered almost no opposition to the spread of Nazism. But in an early formulation of Christian democratic ideology, he asserted that Latin Christendom—which he associated with both Austria and France—represented an essential barrier to Hitler’s “anti-Christian”⁸⁶ regime. Both Bismarck and Hitler had perceived Austria, which in Vansittart’s vision was Hitler’s first victim, as the initial obstacle to subduing Latin civilization, a mission that they both completed with the conquest of France.⁸⁷ It now remained for British soldiers and citizens to undertake not only an imperial duty but also a Christian obligation to defeat Nazism.⁸⁸

The term “fascism” never appeared in Vansittart’s talks, which interpreted the war as a patriotic and Christian fight against German expansionism. Emphasizing the weakness of internal opposition to Germany’s leaders, he discounted German social democracy as an agent of reform. Not surprisingly, conservative editorialists applauded Vansittart. Conservative Foreign Office officials, however, remained mixed in their reactions: they supported Vansittart’s stress on the German nation, not fascism, as the enemy and welcomed his support for the Churchill wing of the Tory party, but they saw no reason to bring a loose cannon back into decision-making circles. Among Labour members of government, the figure in the strongest position to answer Vansittart—Hugh Dalton, the early opponent of appeasement—had also promoted xenophobic counter-propaganda.89

Excluded from the Foreign Office, Vansittart zealously exploited his access to the radio microphone and his position in the House of Lords. Yet, despite their xenophobia, his talks brought attention to two questions that would become decisive after the war: how to identify the nature of the German people’s complicity in Hitler’s crimes and how to confront the denial of responsibility for those crimes. As Vansittart emphasized, Goering’s bomber pilots destroyed Guernica but the “Old-School Neurath”⁹⁰ oversaw the violence against the Czechs. Concluding his lectures, Vansittart demanded: “Above all, never be duped by the type of German who says that he disapproves of atrocities, but was obliged to commit them out of loyalty to the Fatherland.”⁹¹ Responsibility reached not only to “camp-followers”⁹² but also to those who averted their gaze: “All these will join unctuously in long litanies of denial.”⁹³ Those indictments and predictions carried weight beyond Vansittart’s historical views and political motives.

Black Record brought swift and strong responses from the émigré community and from the Left. Like a long line of polemicists before him, Vansittart had brought Tacitus into the political arena, and the German refugee Heinrich Fraenkel immediately questioned his claim to be educating a British audience in the same way that the ancient writer had educated the Romans.⁹⁴ In a pamphlet published by the Fabian Society, Fraenkel responded that unlike Vansittart, Tacitus never exploited xenophobia in his readers. A great deal was at stake to Fraenkel and writers on the Left: not only how émigré opponents of Hitler were being treated in Britain but also how the government and public viewed the rise of fascism in Europe and how they intended to prevent a fascist resurgence after the war. As Fraenkel wrote, Vansittart ignored how Germany’s aristocratic, military, and industrial elites raised Hitler to the chancellorship, and he intentionally overlooked how British and French policies from 1936 to 1939 abandoned republican Spain to dictatorship and indulged Hitler’s territorial claims. Perhaps of most concern to Fraenkel, Vansittart refused to acknowledge the German opposition. According to Fraenkel, of the many who supported Hitler, the largest number did so not from active conviction but from feelings of passivity, indifference, or selfishness. Not only had a unified German resistance slowly come into being among exiled Social Democrats, but a growing segment of the German masses were ready also to engage in resistance once the prospect of victory came closer:

Next to the vanguard of heroes and martyrs comes a group of those who hate Nazism no less but are not prepared to risk their lives in active oppositional work, at least not so long as they cannot see an immediate chance of success. That group does run into millions; it contains the bulk of the politically-minded workers and peasants, and a good many intellectuals from all strata of the population.95

Vansittartism, which refused to take that possibility into account, foreshadowed a Draconian peace that would hinder the process of postwar recovery and reform.

More than one reply to Vansittart appeared on the British Left, including contrasting responses from Victor Gollancz and George Orwell. In early 1942, as editor of the Left Book Club, Gollancz published a rejoinder that reasserted the antifascist principles he had spelled out before the war, including that the anti-Hitler struggle must adopt no imperialist claims and contain “no trace of the wrong sort of war feeling.”⁹⁶ Like Fraenkel, Gollancz stressed Vansittart’s ill effect not only on wartime behavior but also on how Britain would make the peace and undertake reconstruction.

By contrast, Orwell regarded Vansittartism not as the ideology of a single, well-placed government figure but as the reflection of an existing, increasingly widespread political assumption. In one of his first London Letters to the Partisan Review in New York, written in April 1941, Orwell explained that Vansittart’s ideas fit with the recent upsurge of nationalism:

Propaganda enters into our lives more than it did a year ago, but not so grossly as it might. The flag-waving and Hun-hating is absolutely nothing to what it was in 1914–18, but it is growing. I think the majority opinion would now be that we are fighting the German people and not merely the Nazis. Vansittart’s hate-Germany pamphlet, Black Record, sold like hot-cakes.97

As Kris had observed about the United States, anti-Hitler feeling did not represent an antifascist mentality; rather it expressed a patriotic, wartime reaction. As Orwell continued, “nor is ‘anti-Fascism’, of the kind that was fashionable during the Popular Front period, a strong force yet. The English people have never caught up with that.”⁹⁸

In a London Letter published in January 1942, Orwell returned to the topic of Vansittartism. Nationalist feeling had produced xenophobic outbreaks. Governing circles—fearful of egalitarian tendencies within the resistance movements—welcomed those outbursts:

Vansittart’s thesis is that the Germans are all wicked, and not merely the Nazis. I don’t need to tell you how gleefully the Blimps have seized upon this as a way of escaping from the notion that we are fighting against Fascism. But of late the “only good German is a dead one” line has taken the rather sinister form of a fresh drive against the refugees.⁹⁹

Not only British elites but antirepublican émigrés also sought to convert the war against Hitler into a struggle against socialism and the reformist agenda:

The Austrian monarchists have fallen foul of the German left-wingers, whom they accuse of being pan-Germans in disguise, and this delights the Blimps, who are always trying to manoeuvre their two enemies, Germany and socialism, into the same place. The point has now been reached where anyone who describes himself as “anti-Fascist” is suspected of being pro-German.100

Orwell rejected Fraenkel’s view that there existed a latent anti-Nazi resistance within Germany, but he did not renounce the radical aims of the antifascist struggle: “The pinks cannot admit that the German masses are behind Hitler any more than the Blimps can admit that their class must be levered out of control if we are to win the war.”¹⁰¹

For his part, Vansittart supported the émigré organization “Fight for Freedom,” which had been founded by the German exile Walter Loeb. This nebulous group feared that British workers might veer too far toward the Left, especially if they believed that a socialist uprising in Germany would defeat Hitler. It published its own polemical literature, including a broadside against Gollancz, and lobbied trade unionists to reject socialism and communism.¹⁰²

Gombrich reacted strongly to Vansittart’s radio address. Having seen the excerpts that appeared in the press on New Year’s 1941, he wrote to Kris the following day: “By the way, what is your opinion on Sir Robert Vansittard’s [sic] talks to overseas? I read them in the Sunday Times yesterday and I found them rather deplorable from all points of view.”¹⁰³

Vansittart made a travesty of the historical record. His argument from Tacitus was “bad history because it should be wellknown [sic] by now that Tacitus is not a source but an adaptation of ‘topoi’ to the Germani whom he, incidentally[,] represents as the virtuous natives.”¹⁰⁴ But the significant issue was political, not academic. Vansittart’s tirades closely resembled fascist broadcasts:

But most of all it is bad propaganda because it is so entirely irrelevant and why waste the time and the air with past sins when the present ones are crying to heavens and why spoil a noble cause with so ignoble arguments. After all if one would stop to take them seriously for a moment they would boil down to a theory of racial determinism, that is to say just what we are fighting against.105

In the months that followed, Gombrich—like Orwell—concluded that the “anti-Hun” mentality reflected more than momentary fear and zealotry: it received impetus from the political classes who used it as an ideological diversion. In a January 1942 letter to Kris, Gombrich described the combination of reactionary nationalism and political calculation that sustained Vansittartism and that threatened to revive fascist sympathies within British political life:

I can’t help feeling however that apart from being a most natural and comprehensible reaction to events the “Hun propaganda” here is fostered by quarters who want to blur the issues of this war. This seems to me more dangerous than it may look at present but we can’t help it anyhow. There are other signs here of a possible fascist mentality after the war but there is nothing we can do about it.¹⁰⁶

To the end of the war Gombrich remained mistrustful of the propaganda that emanated from governing circles and wary of the chauvinism that circulated within and beyond them. For him, European fascism, not German Nazism alone, was the enemy and in that struggle British anti-Hun propaganda proved as misbegotten as Christian democracy.¹⁰⁷

In March 1942, Gombrich wrote to Kris that the most serious discussions of the war occurred within the working class. The Labour movement—in contrast to the behavior of Conservatives—did not blur the issues. What concerned Gombrich was that the debate over the Second Front would lead Labour to discard its political moderation and succumb to appeals from the Communist party. After 1945, Gombrich would condemn what he called the “glib and irresponsible talk of civil war”¹⁰⁸ coming from the émigré Austrian socialist press after the Dollfuss coup; he interpreted the demands for an immediate Second Front as equally self-destructive. Yet, while he opposed the popular agitation for a Second Front—especially the arguments from the Communist party—he just as strongly rejected Red Scare tactics:

On the other hand I fear that where there is less complacency and more thought, that is to say with the workers, there is precious little understanding of the situation as it is. This constant call for “action” and for “taking risks” and, naturally for the “second front now,” is naturally (and openly) fostered by the Communists, but I wonder whether it is not rather ill considered and dangerous. Strangely enough words have lost all meaning becuase [sic] if people talk of taking risks they never seem to think what the risks are and what we can afford to stake. I have sometimes the impression, which may very well be wrong, that some of this activist shouting is fostered, through some devious channels, by Axis propaganda, mostly because of the restiveness and sense of frustration which it creates but perhaps for even more sinister reasons. I could well imagine, though I can’t, of course, prove it, that some Communist or pseudo communist elements who have been Nazi dupes before Hitler’s attack on Russia, are still, without knowing it, the dupes of some Nazi-fostered whisper propaganda. Don’t think that I am bitten by the anti-Bolshy scare, for I am not in the least …109

Gombrich remained profoundly hesitant toward the call for an immediate Second Front. But faced with a revival of nationalist hysteria and fearing the reemergence of fascist political sympathies, he continued to argue against Christian democratic, anti-Bolshevist strategies.

In November 1942, Kris completed an essay in which he detailed his own concerns about the reemergence of xenophobic propaganda. To sustain the German war effort, especially at a time of German military setbacks in Russia, Goebbels had repeatedly stressed the threat of retaliation from Germany’s enemies, claiming that the Allies would make no distinction between Nazis and Germans in taking their vengeance. Kris argued that material such as “Lord Vansittart’s pamphlet”¹¹⁰ indirectly assisted such propaganda. His last contacts with Germans in 1938 and recent reports that some Germans had shown signs of sympathy toward Jews after the imposition of the Yellow Star led Kris—like Fraenkel and other émigrés—to conclude that perhaps “still the urge to oppose exists in Germany.”111 Opposition, however, did not mean a commitment to resistance. Rather, now that the military tide was beginning to turn, those who had denied knowledge of brutalities, evaded responsibility, or applauded early military successes simply disavowed the regime. German military failures suddenly led such persons to rediscover their souls:

The preconscious belief in the ultimate divine protection of the successful will, when disappointed, give rise to a different reaction; and the voice of conscience, so long in check, will gain in strength. “After all, my original feeling that this is evil was right; what looked like inspired leadership is crime after all.”¹¹²

Those who showed gestures of support toward Jews included “many who were in search of alibis,”¹¹³ as well as “those whose wavering conscience was awakened, since the approach of failure had broken the spell.”¹¹⁴ According to Kris, propaganda analysis would yield more information about the actual extent of opposition within Germany, especially the relative significance of long-term resistance as opposed to immediate defections.

In August 1943, several months after Russian victories in the east and Allied victories in North Africa, Gombrich commented on the revival of chauvinism, both within the general population and the intelligentsia. In a letter to Kris, he lamented that British universities had no professors like Robert S. Lynd. On Saxl’s recommendation, Gombrich had read Lynd’s Knowledge for What? The Place of Social Science in American Culture. Ten years after Middletown and on the eve of the Second World War, Knowledge for What? described the same dysfunctional state in the social sciences that Lynd had discovered in Middletown. Calling on scholars to incorporate the sciences of psychology and sociology into their thinking, he warned that academics risked marginalizing themselves as a profession if they refused to confront pressing societal problems.115 Gombrich now agreed: “Recently I read some of the essays in Robert Lynd’s ‘Knowledge for What’? (Saxl drew my attention to them) and I found them very stimulating and very ‘American’—are’nt [sic] they?”¹¹⁶

Gombrich informed Kris that recent xenophobic attitudes could very well last beyond the war:

There is a definite danger of a pseudo fascist reaction here with talk of the kind one hears already “the foreigners and Jews stayed behind and took all the cushy jobs etc.” and though my job is anything but cushy it is difficult for outsiders to see it in this light. In this respect too you are better off as an immigrant in the USA then [sic] we here who are only here on toleration. As you know naturalisation does’nt [sic] make any difference here.¹¹⁷

Service with the monitoring center had not counteracted Gombrich’s sense of social isolation. Yet, despite harboring a similar feeling of dislocation and pessimism, Kris still found in popular reform movements and in the ideas of the Left the possibility of a new direction. He agreed with those in Britain and the United States who urged wartime policymakers to prepare blueprints for postwar reforms. If the antifascist struggle did not bring about change, Britain and the United States risked a relapse into political ideologies and economic conditions that produced the Depression and Nazism. In September 1943, Kris responded to Gombrich’s concerns about close-minded scholars and resurgent xenophobes in Britain:

As far as the general situation goes the concern of common people about the future is the one hopeful sign I can see. Peace plan[n]ers have as yet not been able to integrate their work and policy makers have failed or avoided to publicize their plans. The concern of the common people however remain the motiv[e] power which will help to overcome inertia and may well guarantee that easy go lucky back to normalcy speakers won[’]t find followers. Their kind is naturally more rampant in this country than in England. Here normalcy means “free” enterprise, anti new deal policy, and in the long run the old mess.118

Like Gombrich, Kris perceived the danger of a fascist revival in peacetime and thus intellectuals like Gombrich would have important roles to perform after the war:

I like to think of the day when people like yourself will be busy debunking the mythology they carefully recorded. Our anti Nazi propaganda must start when the war is won, or we may well see the third world war emerge from the second as the second emerged from the first.¹¹⁹

Kris sought more information about Vansittartism. He feared that it would split Labour and become an influential postwar doctrine:

May I in this connection solicit a comment of yours on Vansittartism. What do you, what do progressives in Britain think about V. [Vansittart] and the fight for freedom Loeb who has swayed the labour party and was rebuked by the T.U.C. the other day? I am asking you since after a careful study of British views, (pamphlets, speeches, articles) I am unable to guess how the majority of people are likely to react to Vansittartism in say a year from now.¹²⁰

Thus in the months after completing his essay on defections from Nazism, Kris had again become more sullen. He could not agree with those in the émigré community or on the British Left—represented by Richard Crossman, assistant editor at the New Statesman and Nation—who claimed that an incipient German resistance was looking for the correct moment to rise up. Like Orwell, he believed that Vansittart—however misguided strategically and politically—sounded an important warning. After the war, German citizens would refuse to confront the full extent of their participation in Hitlerism. Almost all would find reasons to convince themselves that they had been good Germans:

You may suspect that I myself hold profound views on the question. In fact I don’t. I do however feel that V. is more nearly right than those of the Crossmanites who expect German social democrats to wait for their liberators. There are those who wait and there are those who will say that they have been waiting. To my mind the latter will be so numerous that nobody will be able to distinguish between truth and pretense; not even those who pretend, i.e. the Germans themselves.121

Kris stressed to Gombrich the value and relevance of the work of Left intellectuals such as Robert S. Lynd, whose ideas in fact did not represent the thought of a generic American social scientist:

Robert Lynd, whom you seem to consider as typical American, is undoubtedly one of the leading if not the leading American sociologist; he is a true leftist, to the left of ordinary Marxists, and is undoubtedly a brilliant man. You may have met him or [will] meet him in England since he is supposed to act there as a[n] OWI speaker, as Margaret Mead is doing. She is one of my close friends and again typical only of herself. There are not many of his or her kind around.¹²²

And among such scholars and writers Kris’s letter included not only Harold Lasswell but also Meyer Schapiro.

Kris’s political advice had limited effect on Gombrich. To counter wartime xenophobia and “Blimpism”—whether among Vansittart’s supporters or in the BBC bureaucracy—Gombrich turned not to contemporary critics on the Left but to an older, conservative tradition. Responding in November 1943 to Kris’s request for information about Vansittart, he began:

Now to your question about “Vansittartism”. I am afraid I know very little about it. My own views on this subject in general were anticipated by a certain David Hume in his essay “On national character.” (Generally I am inclined to think that human intelligence progressed till it reached its peak in England round about 1730–1760 with people like Swift or Hume or young Burke and that it declined afterwards till it reached the nadir in the brains of my present superiors, but this is a digression).123

Gombrich likely recalled the opening sentence of Hume’s essay “Of National Characters”:

The vulgar are apt to carry all national characters to extremes; and, having once established it as a principle that any people are knavish, or cowardly, or ignorant, they will admit of no exception, but comprehend every individual under the same censure.¹²⁴

In Gombrich’s view, however, Vansittartism had not yet sunk permanently entrenched roots in society:

The other people I know are hardly very characteristic examples. My Evesham landlord, for instance, is an utterly egocentric brutal retired market gardener and horsedealer who does’nt [sic] really care but who is all for the view that the only good hun is a dead hun. But generally this problem plays only a minute part in his mental universe for his only real interest is horse-prizes and profit making. He is not an exceptionally bad or unkind man but this is [h]is world—we have had three years of “fieldwork” studying it.¹²⁵

At the listening post, however, other analysts shared Gollancz and Crossman’s opinion that Vansittartism represented a more widespread phenomenon: “People whom I meet in the course of my work here naturally incline towards the opposite view—for they are more often than not of a leftish New Statesman hue.”126

Gombrich rejected both the wartime ideas of the Conservative ruling circle and the criticisms leveled against it by the British Left. But he now distanced himself even from the position of Labour moderates. Instead, as at the start of the war, he turned toward the past—toward an older British philosophy that reflected his own persistent sense of alienation.

Combative Pessimism

Gombrich’s analysis of fascism and fascist propaganda derived chiefly not from his experience of monitoring German broadcasts, nor from his feeling of displacement within British political culture, but from his vivid memory of the Austrian debacle. The experience of Austro-Fascism, especially the political and moral collapse of both the Austrian Church and Austrian liberalism, remained strongly in his mind.

In April 1943, writing from the listening post’s new home in Reading, Gombrich responded vigorously to Kris’s draft of a chapter for German Radio Propaganda, which stated: “Before each of the great holidays, the radio broadcast comments on its meaning in Teutonic mythology.”¹²⁷ Gombrich warned that the statement was misleading:

The notion that Nazidom is “pagan” is only true if one implies with it the denial of what is called the values of Christian Civilisation. It becomes ludicrous if one hints that they are worshipping Wotan. They don’t. They worship nothing at all.¹²⁸

Rather, the Catholic hierarchy’s political collaboration with Nazism—to the point of adopting its signs and symbols—exemplified pagan behavior far more closely:

On the other hand it was Innitzer, still Archbishop of Vienna, who added with his own hand “Heil Hitler” to the Church’s pronouncement on the invasion of Austria and for a Prince of the Church to do that is, I think, “Paganism”. I really don’t think, for all [the] respect I have for the Faulhaber’s and von Galens, that the Church is fundamentally anti Nazi. There is a Kulturkampf going on, that’s all, none is on in Italy or Spain and they might just as well come to terms in Germany.129

In Austria, the Kulturkampf—the cultural war between Nazi party officials who wanted to install a new Germanic religion and Austrian clericals who advocated collaboration as spelled out in the Concordat between Hitler and the Church hierarchy—had stretched from the year of the Anschluss to the invasion of the Soviet Union. In 1938, Innitzer expected to reach his own accord with Hitler that would allow the Church to keep control of its schools, property, and pastoral work; the fact that the majority in Seyss-Inquart’s cabinet belonged to the Catholic National Opposition gave him confidence in his negotiating position. Although the Church offered compromise, the Austrian Nazi party, with the support of Seyss-Inquart in Vienna and Hitler in Berlin, imposed state control over education, closed parochial schools and seminaries, and confiscated Church property. Yet, led by Innitzer, the Catholic hierarchy continued to affirm its political loyalty to the Reich and seek accommodation with the regime. Religious worship as well as spiritual instruction remained under its supervision. Ultimately, after the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler ended confiscations so as to unite pan-Germans and Austrian clericals in the anti-Bolshevik crusade.¹³⁰ As in Spain and Italy, the Kulturkampf in Austria subsided when the two sides joined against a socialist enemy.

Against this background, Gombrich remained skeptical toward the Church as a source of antifascist opposition. As he wrote to Kris:

Naturally the Church, as an organised body outside the State and the Party[,] is a potential center of resistence [sic] but the whole sphere of problems would require a very very dispassionate and thorough analysis far removed from any facile labels and slogans.131

For Gombrich, it was essential that no one construe from Kris’s reference to Teutonic mythology that there existed any hope of the Church hierarchy resisting Nazism. It had already shown itself all too willing to compromise.

If the Anschluss exposed the collaborationism of Austrian clericals who served the Church, neither did it permit illusions concerning the behavior of anticlericals who served the state. Gombrich did not forget the Josephan civil servants who had defected to pan-Germanism after the First World War. Joseph II’s enlightened German administrators, who in the eighteenth century had enforced limited religious toleration toward the monarchy’s Jews, revealed in the twentieth century their fervid German nationalism. Then, after 1933, they readily pledged fealty to Hitler’s Third Reich rather than support a restored Austrian Catholic state, as Gombrich recalled to Kris: “Nor need I tell you that anti clericalism drove many liberals in Austria into the Nazi camp, people who essentially embodied the “‘Josephinische Tradition’ of liberalism.”¹³²

Like the Church hierarchy, the secularized civil service had made its peace with Nazi politics and ideology. The moral collapse of clerical and anticlerical authorities alike—the almost complete absence of either religious or liberal resistance—reflected the crisis from which fascism emerged:

My view, in a nutshell, is that the rise of Nazidom has much to do with the decline of religion in Germany and the crisis of European civilisation caused by this momentous fact but it is vital not to take cause for effect. Nor did Nazidom put Paganism in the place of Christianity but simple Nihilism, Opportunism and Cynisism [sic], disguised as a worship of force and of the Survival of the Fittest.¹³³

Both devout clericals and statist liberals refused to offer protection against fascism. Instead, they submitted to it and advanced it, sacrificing both faith and reason. Gombrich’s reflections on Austria recalled Balzac’s furious judgment against sacrilegious churchmen and unprincipled bourgeoisie in a society that discarded what was both sacred and real.

For Gombrich, at that moment of history, the aim of propaganda analysis was therefore to combat intellectual nihilism. In August 1943, he responded irately to an essay on Goebbels’s conception of propaganda written by Hans Herma, a member of Kris’s research team:

Though there are passages in it which I would heartily endorse, I do not only think that the whole paper is rather inadequate but, in parts it is definitely wrong. You can imagine that owing to my particular occupation the note 2 “as a result of the peculiar use of language by totalitarian authors their meaning is not always clearly ascertainable” drove me into harness … Forgive this outburst but I am sure you will realise that I had plenty of opportunity to ponder general problems of translation and meaning and that “I stand no nonsense” in this respect.134

Meanings remained accessible through their contexts, a spectrum that ranged from the scientific and philosophic to the ideological and political to the institutional and social. Summoning inspiration from the young Burke, Gombrich concluded:

Apart from this “spectrum” there is, in the Nazi use of language, a definite attempt to increase the evocative character of certain words as emotional stimulus and, consequently a blurred logical meaning, this, incidentally[,] is nothing new but was described with supreme insight by Edmund Burke in one of the last chapters of the “Sublime and Beautiful”. But even so it seems ridiculous to say that these words have no “meaning”[,] they have a very strong emotive meaning which is quite easily ascertainable. (Through the study of contexts, like all meanings.) Basta.135

Toward the end of his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Burke had examined the impact of language by virtue of sound, imagery, or the “affection of the soul produced by one or by both of the foregoing.”¹³⁶ Emphasizing that words exerted strong emotional effect even without producing clear images, Burke lamented that he found it “very hard to persuade several that their passions are affected by words whence they have no ideas.”¹³⁷ Here as elsewhere Gombrich’s intellectual model derived from the early Enlightenment, from the time when the young Irishman and émigré liberal Burke experienced a profound sense of social alienation and before political disenchantment and fear of revolution took hold of him.

By November 1943, Gombrich had produced “my mammoth study of totalitarian propaganda.”¹³⁸ Several colleagues contributed to the volume and Gombrich hoped that the monitoring service would publish it. But in April 1944 he wrote to Kris that his effort would never see print, the chief problem being that “all the contributions together came to some 100 000 words which is madness.”¹³⁹ Yet, the fragments of his propaganda study that surfaced in letters to Kris reveal not madness but an engaged and divided spirit, one plagued by an increasing pessimism and a deepening mistrust of popular politics.

Gombrich’s mood recalled the mindset of his Tory exemplars: Swift, Hume, and the young Burke, all critics from the age of Hogarth and Rowlandson, the first golden age of caricature. Disgruntled and caustic writers, hard-bitten satirists, and disenchanted caricaturists, they built their polemics not only on psychological analysis and moral iconoclasm but also on an inveterate social pessimism and deep aversion to mass political action—the ideologies for which the aging Burke became the famous spokesman. Throughout the war, Gombrich became increasingly drawn toward that worldview, toward the fatalism of an alienated, exiled liberal who identified neither with a Conservative political class in power nor with a popular alliance on the Left. When the monitoring service rejected his manuscript, he thus saw nowhere else to turn with it.

Although he persisted in a sweeping rejection of Marxism, Gombrich continued to remain immune to wartime anti-Bolshevism and anti-Labour ideology. Moreover, despite his later criticism of the socialist press, his letters to Kris contained no signs of dissatisfaction or hostility toward the political behavior of Austrian Socialists, and he would later characterize the Austrian Christian Social regime as “the semi-fascist government of Dollfuss.”140 For Gombrich, political xenophobia and intellectual nihilism posed the great threats of his time—and those threats, he believed, would persist beyond the war. Nazism had combined nationalist counter-revolution with nihilist ideology, a phenomenon to which Allied propagandists gave little or no account. If they had, then they would have appealed to the European Enlightenment tradition rather than to the Christian democratic creed—the phoenix that rose after the war from the midst of the discredited Church hierarchy and self-serving civil bureaucracies. Gombrich had respected the wartime spirit of the Labour moderate, but he could not shed the political pessimism of the disaffected Tory. He remained an ambivalent, isolated liberal, pulled in opposing directions and unable to accept the wider identity that Kris derived from Popular Front culture.

Fatalism had also accompanied Kris’s odyssey, in his case from liberal royalism to antifascist republicanism. He had seen the collapse of his monarchical ideal, lived through the disintegration of the Austrian republic, and witnessed the succession of defeats suffered by the Popular Front. Yet, in Vienna and in New York he continued to support a broad antifascist front and held onto the idea that military victories would undermine support for Hitler in Europe. Thus too, in his 1943 article on “Some Problems of War Propaganda: A Note on Propaganda New and Old,” he contrasted the propaganda system of totalitarianism to that of the democracies. Totalitarian propagandists acted on Le Bon’s theories of mass suggestion and the hypnotic susceptibilities of the crowd to transform their audiences into a psychologically fused organism—or rather to convince them to perceive themselves as such. By contrast, antifascist propagandists approached their listeners as an integrated body of individuals or groups who still retained their distinct identities. Authentically democratic appeals tolerated new information and critical viewpoints, and provided the foundation for a new postwar propaganda generated not by government leaders but by opinionmakers—writers, editors, broadcasters, and scholars—utilizing mass media for instructive purposes. Kris’s vision of postwar social communication incorporated the full range of his political ideas and values: a sense of royalist guardianship, commitment to the civic task of the intellectual as Marshall, for example, had defined it, and ongoing support for Popular Front republicanism.141

Reacting to Kris’s analysis in “Some Problems of War Propaganda,” Gombrich stated that in his own manuscript on totalitarian propaganda he too had “tried to uncover the symptoms of this distrust of propaganda in totalitarian countries and the way its managers are trying by a number of makeshift arrangements to counter this distrust and to adopt some of the externals at least of democratic or ‘new’ propaganda.”¹⁴² He came, however, to a far different conclusion:

For in this one respect I find your paper a little too optimistic. I see no reason why the insights of the “new” approach should not also be used for very sinister ends—that is to say no intrinsic reason.¹⁴³

Briefly revising his argument in April 1944, Gombrich wrote to Kris that he had drafted an essay explaining that the Nazi effort at imitating Allied propaganda techniques would ultimately fail at winning over the German people—but only because defeat now loomed close at hand.¹⁴⁴ But in January 1945, he returned to his previous desolate judgment. Unconvinced that even military defeat would uproot fascist influence from Germany, he wrote:

[T]ime has shown that the view expressed in your +++book [German Radio Propaganda] that Nazi propaganda thrives on victories and cannot cope with defeats is wrong. I don’t blame you for that, I also thought so and tried to prove it at some length. Or is it our propaganda that keeps them going?145

The schematic mental constructs of fascism that had preceded the war would outlast it.

In 1945, however, Gombrich’s somber appraisal of events generated a new impulse for political work. Although unshaken in his original decision to join the BBC, he remained acutely aware of the disruptions, strains, and loss that exile imposed on wartime scholarship. In January, he reflected on his choice to leave the Warburg Institute:

I do not think I could have “survived” the war in the manner Kurz[,] Buchthal or Saxl are doing it though I know that a good many people are genuinely grateful to the Warburg Institute for keeping “the torch burning” while nearly everything closed down and stopped.¹⁴⁶

Gombrich’s decision to leave the institute had reflected his impulse for immediate wartime activity. Now his concern that Nazism would reemerge in Germany, that the Allies would fail to inculcate an antifascist mentality on the Continent, and that neo-fascist, anti-alien attitudes would reappear in Britain almost physically demanded in him further engagement:

What I should probably like best of all after the war, would be taking part in some positive reconstruction work, educational or antiquarian or in the field of intellectual cooperation. I have the feeling that things are bound to be in a fearful mess and that one will feel little more inclined than one is now to remain altogether aloof from what is happening. Though I think that theoretically the persuit [sic] of pure knowledge is probably the best service one can undertake in the circumstances it may need stronger nerves than mine to stick that out.¹⁴⁷

After Germany’s surrender, Gombrich remained with the monitoring service where he joined the work of German and Austrian denazification. In September, he briefly explained to Kris that he was participating in “the vast field of ‘re-education’ into which I have already been drawn through various confidential activities of lecturing and translating and which also threatens to get hold of me.”148 In 1946, after having returned full-time to the Warburg Institute, he continued to devote himself to the denazification effort:

The only outside activity I allow myself at present is a once-monthly lecture tour to Austrian Prisoners of War connected with the general re-education schemes about which you may have read in the papers. I am not very suitable for this job but they want me and I did not think I could refuse it. It is strenuous and not un-exciting. Since most of the audience usually consists of rather dumb and poor peasant lads I always feel that despite my desperate efforts to be popular we still talk a different language. Can you imagine me in a huge Nissen hut all by my little self discussing politics with, say, 300 men? I can’t, in fact I often have the feeling of playing a role in whi[c]h I am rather miscast, but the others do not seem to feel it to the same extent.¹⁴⁹

In fact, Gombrich—who had worked with Kris on the Daumier exhibition, left the Warburg Institute for the listening post, and compiled his own study of totalitarian propaganda—had been preparing himself for the role of a political educator for several years.

During the war, Kris and Gombrich had acted from a disenchanted mindset that nonetheless abhorred intellectual nihilism and loathed political defeatism—a combative pessimism. That divided spirit had characterized Swift, Hogarth, and the young Burke—Enlightenment critics who condemned humanity’s self-elevation and self-admiration and who seconded Swift’s lament from his Meditation upon a Broom-Stick: “Partial Judges that we are of our own Excellencies, and other Mens Defaults!”150 As psychologists and moralists, they had exposed the human being as a self-idealizing creature who sought from society only a role to play, a mask to wear, and a small stage on which to perform. Human reason, as they conceived it, was a limited, surgical instrument of self-criticism or, at best, a defense against illusory pride. Their discontents led them into deep personal disillusionment and finally political reaction. Their image of humanity conformed to Swift’s broomstick, the literary parallel to Hogarth’s vision of man as a line and a dot:

His Animal Faculties perpetually mounted on his Rational; his Head where his Heels should be, groveling on the Earth. And yet, with all his Faults, he set up to be a universal Reformer and Corrector of Abuses … sharing deeply all the while in the very same Pollutions he pretends to sweep away.¹⁵¹

Combativeness dogged by pessimism characterized the spirit not only of Swift and Hogarth but also of Callot, Balzac, Daumier, and in Kris and Gombrich’s day, David Low. Like their Enlightenment counterparts, these critics recognized that masks—even propagandistic ones—against the intention of their wearers revealed essential truths, an insight Daumier transformed into a tool for documenting social realities and confronting political propaganda. A combativeness that resisted the impulse to fatalism: the sub rosa conflict within caricature defined Kris and Gombrich’s wartime antifascism.