To spend any intellectual time at all with the Third Reich, even in the thoughtful company of Jonathan Petropoulos, is dispiriting. We are again mired in the dilemma posed by Hannah Arendt’s idea, writing about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, of the banality of evil. Evil is not banal. You cannot think of the Holocaust or the wartime deaths of millions of combatants and civilians as either routine or boring. Yet the individuals who wreaked such horror were in everything but destructiveness irredeemably unexceptional. A great 20th-century allegory, The Wizard of Oz, filmed the year the Second World War began, reveals how the feared and mighty Oz is only a dismissible little man in a suit. Given the 20th century’s scientific and artistic achievements, and all the excitement of its intellectual history, how could such Chaplinesque figures as Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels have done such harm?
At one level, answers are easy. You can erase an aristocracy, you can appease a proletariat but if you threaten the silent, massive, educated middle, things fall apart and centres refuse to hold. Each of us is furnished, on average, with about one hundred others: family, friends, acquaintance. Beyond these, social intercourse depends on the passage from hand to hand of cash. Lose trust in the medium of exchange and expect fragmentation. People seek an external villain or villains thought to have penetrated the body politic: bankers, immigrants, fellow citizens of different ethnic origin or cultural habit. And in Germany’s case, Hitler, who fought bravely in the Great War, subscribed like many others to the myth of betrayal. Indeed Germany was not yet militarily defeated when internal depletions of war caused revolution and collapse.
All this poses another question. When a civilisation breaks down, what happens to the civilised? Artists Under Hitler is a set of essays on talented individuals who did not, like the most gifted of all, Einstein and Thomas Mann, scram when the Nazis took over but tried instead to conduct their lives and exercise their talent within what remained one of the most creative and accomplished nations of the world. Two such, Leni Riefenstahl and Albert Speer, sit rather oddly with the others. They were not really accommodators or collaborators, rather co-architects of Nazism. I suspect Petropoulos includes them because they did produce the only “good” art we can call Nazi, as distinct from good art produced during the Nazi era. Riefenstahl’s films and Speer’s choreography for Hitler’s rallies had architectural, theatrical and filmic effects which dazzled all, even opponents, who saw them.
But the architect Walter Gropius, the composers Richard Strauss and Paul Hindemith, the painter Emil Nolde and the poet Gottfried Benn are important and enduring figures of 20th-century world culture. They did not anticipate genocide or global war. It is, however, fair to say that they might have done so if, like individuals as distinct from each other as Thomas Mann and Winston Churchill, they had read Mein Kampf attentively. In different ways and at different speeds these artists fell in with and then out with the regime. Benn fell out early, in 1934, the time of the putsch against the Brownshirt leader Ernst Röhm.
Given hindsight, which they did not have, it is easy to condemn them. The more valid condemnation remains the case for Hitler’s one virtue being explicitness. He told us what would happen and it did. A political danger of demagogues is that they tend to be found useful in the short term and underestimated in the long. There was much admiration, in 30s Britain, even more in America, for Hitler’s exemplary Keynesianism. He put Germany back on its feet through public spending, borrowing and, it must be said, confiscation.
Throughout these individual studies Petropoulos uncovers those elements of what he calls, perhaps a bit generally, “Modernism” (that is, late 19th- and early 20th-century artistic innovation), which turned out to be compatible with Fascism. These include admiration and celebrations of machines, emphasis on the importance of the irrational, and belief in the general superiority of form over content. Nazi form was Nazi content: consider the swastika, the oath, the “Aryan”, the Hitler salute.
Though this book does not cite him, W.H. Auden, whose early poetry bell-wethered the rise of Fascism in Germany, mischievously titled a series of post-war lectures “Romanticism from Rousseau to Hitler”. Auden argues that artists must often ruthlessly expunge even benign—in the sense of beautiful or fluent—elements in a composition if it is to work as a whole. The corollary, making politics conform with art, is always wrong and always wicked. When it dawned on Hitler that his German “composition” was not turning out the way he wanted, he did his effective best to erase the entire country. So many of humanity’s ills come down to category confusion. Art is a critique, a reflection, of life, not life itself. The body politic is a city, not a blank canvas. It is to the credit of artists such as Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner that they woke up to this distinction, even if rather late.
Grey Gowrie, a former UK minister for the arts, is the chairman of the Fine Art Group
Artists Under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival
in Nazi Germany
Jonathan Petropoulos
Yale University Press, 416pp, £25 (hb)