J. Zimmatore (Lower Sixth)
From the first Sieg Heil to the new Führer in 1934, to the bullet in the bunker eleven years later, art was dead in Germany. Fascism is an ouroboros that took its first bite in 1920 , sticking its fangs deep into the German population and paralysing them- morally, spiritually and artistically.
Whilst Hitler's venom of vitriol only took full effect in 1934, Germany was not devoid of hatred before this. The Treaty of Versailles left Germany in ruins, and where there is tragedy, there are scapegoats. Much is said about Hitler's skills as an orator, how he could silence thousands of people with a single word, bring crowds to sheer ecstasy with just a sentence, and radicalise an entire country through his speeches; less is said of just how immense the scale of Germany's propaganda machine was and how it was created. During his time in Vienna, Hitler politically sympathised with the Greater German People's Party, but believed that to gain a following, he would have to follow the example of the Christian Social Party- he had to attract a crowd before he could radicalise them. To achieve this, he harnessed the frustration of the German people, combined with the wealth of German corporations to fuel his "masterpiece of propaganda". Hitler's promises of less bureaucracy and regulation under his government kept German corporations pleased and his pockets lined. And so, with the combined wealth of large German businesses behind him, Hitler turned the machine on.
A hydra of indoctrination, the Nazi's methods of propaganda were as multifaceted as they were cruel. Posters, films, public demonstrations, radio broadcasts, newspapers: Hitler had created a juggernaut of loathing, an unstoppable agitprop train which crashed at high speed into the heart of Germany. But it is important to know that while this initial propaganda push was effective, the Nazi party only ever accrued 17 million votes, which were 44% of the total votes. Whilst this was a majority, this was not the overwhelming victory Hitler had envisioned. From that point on, the road to Hitler's dictatorship was paved not mainly through indoctrination but through simple fear-mongering and espionage, intimidating the other parties into submission and dissolution. When the Nazi dictatorship began, it meant that the Nazis could not just merely steer the Zeitgeist- they were the Zeitgeist. The Third Reich was a black hole, subsuming all culture into itself and tearing it apart.
Hitler's right-hand man in indoctrinating the masses was Joseph Goebbels, an aspiring author who, supposedly after reading Mein Kampf and meeting Hitler personally, became one of Adolf's closest allies. Goebbels shared Hitler's seething hatred of Jewish people, and an astute knowledge of how to manipulate the masses. After Hitler became Führer, Goebbels was quickly appointed as the Minister for Cultural Enlightenment and Propaganda- an oxymoronic title that Goebbels held until the fall of the Reich. The Reich Chamber of Culture was an intellectual bulwark, an immovable obstruction that blocked all art from being released to the public unless it met the Reich's draconian standards. Any artist who wanted their work to be published had to have an Aryan certificate, proving that they were a member of the "superior" race , as well as the work itself representing Nazi views. This, of course, attempted to erase Jews and other minorities entirely from Germany's cultural footprint. The word of the Reich has to be right in a land where there is only one perspective. Goebbels remained fiercely loyal to Hitler, even becoming chancellor of Germany after Hitler's suicide, although this was short lived, as Goebbels' suicide followed soon after.
Despite being adamant about their superiority over others, the Nazis were inherently barbaric; untethered to notions of culture and morality. Adolf and his ilk had a single-minded, and ultimately futile, obsession with power. There was no progress to be made, no songs to be sung, no masterpieces to be painted, unless it directly benefited the Führer. Simultaneously pragmatic and fanatical, the Nazis squashed real art only to replace it with shallow vehicles for nationalism and eugenics. To call the Third Reich's research into race and ethnicity a pseudo science would be too generous. It was simple malice, now just institutionalised. Irrational, intense hate was now just masked as "caution" to "The Jewish Problem". Hitler, a chronic narcissist, thought of himself as a renaissance man, when the reality couldn't be further from the truth; the Führer had infamously accrued below-average grades during his time in high school, fancying himself to be an artist rather than a civil servant. He applied twice to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, being immediately rejected the second time due to the poor quality of his artwork. He renounced art that day, dedicating the rest of his life to spreading the deep-seated hate he had harboured for most of his life to the masses. He lacked every conceivable attribute an artist should have- empathy, flexibility, vision, talent. During his early tenure as leader of the Nazi party, Hitler made constant reference to his disdain of modern art. In his spiteful eyes, anything subversive or thought-provoking was repulsive. Hitler coined the terms "degenerate art" and "cultural Bolshevism" to describe modern artistic movements. For the Führer, the world was in black and white and red. This was the man who had the fates and culture of 70 million German people in his hands - a maniacal objectivist who had to create a new field of "science" to rationalise his hate. An artist with no body of work but the blood on his hands. A narcissistic man-child. It is no wonder then, that erudition evaporated under his watch. Wisdom dissolved into the gutters and went up in smoke.
Never before in a modern society had anti-intellectualism been so greatly encouraged. Beginning in 1933, book burning events were held, beginning at the Institute of Sexology in Berlin. Thousands of books regarding homosexuality, gender identity, intersexuality and other topics that the Nazis found detestable were burned. This regressed the LGBT movement by decades, and the "success" of this first burning inspired barbaric displays all across the country. Germany was swept up in infernos, not dissimilar to the Reichstag fire of 1933, an act of arson that allowed the Nazi party to fear-monger their way into a total dictatorship. The key difference, however, was that whilst the fire originally aimed to diminish the Nazi's power, these book burnings were ruthless demonstrations of the very same thing. Of course, the enemies targeted in these book burnings shifted, as there must always be a new scapegoat in fascism. The works of philosophers, psychologists, physicists, sexologists, poets, playwrights, foreign authors, communists, socialists, anarchists, liberals, pacifists, all swept up in infernos of willful ignorance and malice. Germany now had no cannon - no genuine cannon, anyway; and if there is no cannon, there is no past, and if there is no past, there is no guilt, conscience, morality or hesitation. No reminiscing over the real past, only blind worshipping of the German monolith, nostalgia for a past Germany that never existed. Somehow, the Third Reich was not only able to destroy Germany's culture, but to transform its destruction into a celebration, which thousands of Germans took part in.
There could be no culture in Germany. Nazism had constricted art to its breaking point, leaving only a hollow facsimile of art in its place: dull propaganda films, monochrome murals and redundant radio broadcasts. Art does not exist in a vacuum- it is birthed from deconstructing and dissecting the world around us, but Germany, under the spiteful eyes of Hitler and Goebbels, was so suffocating that art could not escape, fly out of their iron grasp. There were no chisels or paint brushes, and instead there were only hammers and batons. To put it simply, to create art is to appreciate, a task that is impossible when in a state built entirely off of hate. It's ice in the desert. It's fire in a freezer. It's impossible.
Of course, that is not to say that the whole of the German population was devoid of all artistic merit during this time. There were those who raged against the dying light, but it was clear that their vision was not welcome in Hitler's "reborn" Germany. Great artists and composers, such as Paul Hindemith, left Germany in droves in the 1930s, leaving the country culturally barren. The old guard of artists relocated to more stable footing, while a whole new generation of possible artists were poisoned, the creativity sucked out of them, so they could be sent off to the Hitler Youth and moulded into the perfect cannon fodder for the coming war.
Even Germans hated the state of German art. The press which, like everything else, was filtered through the Chamber of Culture, was strongly criticised for its robotic repetition of Nazi talking points, and a lack of variety among newspapers. Even Joseph Goebbels himself, the architect of Nazi propaganda, believed that the press had become too sanitised by the Nazis, and had become boring.
And as Germany cannibalised itself, the world at large was more than happy to sit on the sidelines for much of Hitler's early reign. The nation experienced a meteoric increase in tourism during the early years of Hitler's reign, despite the first concentration camp being established in 1933. One explanation of this apathy to the Jews' plight is that while the Nazi's actions were utterly revolting, they were unfortunately not revolutionary. Many of the Nuremberg laws were directly inspired by the Jim Crow laws implemented and being enforced in the US, an example of this being the outlawing of Jewish citizens from marrying non-Jews. The Nazis had preserved this codified cruelty, and merely redirected its target from African-Americans to Jewish people, although those of African descent were also not exempt from the Reich's scorn. As Germany slithered further to the right, many areas in the US were doing just the same. While the German public were bitter and emboldened after the loss of the First World War, many in the US had become radicalised during the Great Depression, the desolation of the era combined with an influx of immigrants entering the country melding to forge a deep xenophobia. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Ku Klux Klan in the US grew more and more popular, their sights broadening from targeting just African-Americans to Jewish people and Communists. This "second wave" of the KKK was, in many ways, a mirror image to the Third Reich that rose to power just a few years later. And while they never had legislative power, the KKK still had a considerable stranglehold over much of the USA, with an estimated 4% of the population - or 4 million people - being members of the Klan during the 1920s. This complete ignorance, or lethargy ,to the suffering of thousands of minorities is exemplified by the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Signs that read "Nur für Deutsche" and "Jugendfrei" were quietly hidden away so Germany at least maintained the illusion of being a welcoming country. The Olympics were an astounding success, solidifying Germany in the eyes of the major world powers as a reborn, and "more efficient" country. The United Kingdom, United States, France and countless other countries were witnesses to the murder of German culture, and they cheered. It was only after countless atrocities were done, after Auschwitz and the trenches and the mustard gas and the Blitz and the prisoners of war and the blood on sandy beaches that the Nazis fell and the world was forced to reconcile with the monster that they had let grow.
Fascism is a snake that can not shed its skin. It is static and stoic, a grotesque creature that decomposes to reveal the deepest cruelty. While the creature was defeated into Germany, it multiplied, slithering to the USSR, China and North Korea. Art, in the jaws of totalitarianism, can not exist. It is merely sustenance for malice, digested and transformed into a tool to justify obscenity.
Bibliography
The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich- William L Shirer
Hitler's American Model- James Q Whitman