Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (59 page)

In Lisanne Radice’s words,
Soviet Communism: a new civilisation?
was ‘monumental in conception, in scope, and in error ofjudgement.’
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The Webbs truly believed that Soviet communism was superior to the West because ordinary individuals had more opportunity to partake in the running of the country. Stalin was not a dictator to them, but the secretary of ‘a series of committees.’ The Communist Party, they said, was dedicated to the removal of poverty, with party members enjoying ‘no statutory privileges.’ They thought OGPU did ‘constructive work.’ They changed the title of their book in later editions, first to
Is Soviet Communism a New Civilisation?
(1936), then
Soviet Communism: Dictatorship or Democracy?
(released later the same year) – suggesting a slight change of heart. But they were always reluctant to retract fully what they had written, even after the Stalinist show trials in the later 1930s. In 1937, the height of the terror, their book was republished as
Soviet Communism: a new civilisation –
i.e., without the question mark. On their forty-seventh wedding anniversary, in July 1939, Beatrice confided to her diary that
Soviet Communism
was ‘the crowning achievement of Our Partnership.’
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Dissatisfaction with the performance of capitalism led few people as far astray as it did the Webbs.

Russian communism was one alternative to capitalism. Another was beginning to reveal itself in Germany, with the rising confidence of the Nazis. During the Weimar years, as we have seen, there was a continual battle between the rationalists – the scientists and the academics – and the nationalists – the pan-Germans, who remained convinced that there was something special about Germany, her history, the instinctive superiority of her heroes. Oswald Spengler had stressed in
The Decline of the West
how Germany was different from France, the United States and Britain, and this view, which appealed to Hitler, gained ground among the Nazis as they edged closer to power. In 1928 this growing confidence produced a book which, almost certainly, would never have found a publisher in Paris, London, or New York.

The text was inflammatory enough, but the pictures were even more so. On one side of the page were reproductions of modern paintings by artists such as Amedeo Modigliani and Karl Schmidt-Rotduff, but on the other were photographs of deformed and diseased people – some with bulging eyes, others with Down’s syndrome, still others who had been born cretinous. The author
of the book was a well-known architect,
Paul Schultze-Naumburg;
its title was
Kunst und Rasse
(Art and Race); and its thesis, though grotesque, had a profound effect on National Socialism.
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Schultze-Naumburg’s theory was that the deformed and diseased people shown in his book were the prototypes for many of the paintings produced by modern – and in particular, expressionist – artists. Schultze-Naumburg said this art was
entartet —
degenerate. His approach appears to have been stimulated by a scientific project carried out a few years earlier in the university town of Heidelberg, which had become a centre for the study of art produced by schizophrenics as a means of gaining access to the central problems of mental illness. In 1922 psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn had published his study
Bildnerei der Geisteskranken
(Image-making by the Mentally 111), based on material he gathered by examining more than 5,000 works by 450 patients. The study, which demonstrated that the art of the insane exhibited certain qualities, received serious attention from critics well beyond the medical profession.
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Art and Race
caught Hitler’s attention because its brutal ‘theory’ suited his aims. From time to time he attacked modern art and modern artists, but like other leading Nazis, he was by temperament an anti-intellectual; for him, most great men of history had been doers, not thinkers. There was, however, one exception to this mould, a would-be intellectual who was even more of an outsider in German society than the other leading Nazis –
Alfred Rosenberg.
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Rosenberg was born beyond the frontiers of the Reich. His family came from Estonia, which until 1918 was one of Russia’s Baltic provinces. There is some evidence (established after World War II) that Rosenberg’s mother was Jewish, but at the time no suspicion ever arose, and he remained close to Hitler for longer than many of their early colleagues. As a boy he was fascinated by history, especially after he encountered the work of Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
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Chamberlain was a renegade Englishman, an acolyte and relative by marriage of Wagner, who regarded European history ‘as the struggle of the German people against the debilitating influences of Judaism and the Roman Catholic Church’. When Rosenberg came across Chamberlain’s
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
on a family holiday in 1909, he was transformed. The book provided the intellectual underpinning of his German nationalistic feelings. He now had a reason to hate the Jews every bit as much as his experiences in Estonia gave him reason to hate the Russians. Moving to Munich after the Armistice in 1918, he quickly joined the NSDAP and began writing vicious anti-Semitic pamphlets. His ability to write, his knowledge of Russia, and his facility with Russian all helped to make him the party’s expert on the East; he also became editor of the
Völkischer Beobachter
(National Observer), the Nazi Party’s newspaper. As the 1920s passed, Rosenberg, together with Martin Bormann and Heinrich Himmler, began to see the need for a Nazi ideology that went beyond
Mein Kampf.
So in 1930 he published what he believed provided the intellectual basis for National Socialism. In German its tide was
Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts,
usually translated into English as
The Myth of the Twentieth Century.

Mythus
is a rambling and inconsistent book, and consequently hard to
summarise. (One example of how obscure it was: a contemporary admirer published a glossary of 850 terms that needed explaining.) It conducts a massive assault on Roman Catholicism as the main threat to German civilisation. The text stretches to more than 700 pages, with the history of Germany and German art making up more than 60 percent of the book.
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The third section is entitled ‘The Coming Reich’; other parts deal with ‘racial hygiene,’ education, and religion, with international affairs at the end. Rosenberg argues that Jesus was not Jewish and that his message had been perverted by Paul, who
was
Jewish, and that it was the Pauline/Roman version that had forged Christianity into its familiar mould by ignoring ideas of aristocracy and race and creating fake doctrines of original sin, the afterlife, and hell as an inferno, all of which beliefs, Rosenberg thought, were ‘unhealthy.’

Rosenberg’s aim – and at this distance his audacity is breathtaking – was to create a substitute faith for Germany. He advocated a ‘religion of the blood’ which, in effect, told Germans that they were members of a master race, with a ‘race-soul.’ Rosenberg appropriated famous German figures from the past, such as the painter Meister Eckhart and the religious leader Martin Luther, who had resisted Rome, though here again he only used those parts of the story that suited his purpose. He quoted the works of the Nazis’ chief academic racialist, H. F. K. Guenther, who ‘claimed to have established on a scientific basis the defining characteristics of the so-called Nordic-Aryan race’. As with Hitler and others before him, Rosenberg did his best to establish a connection to the ancient inhabitants of India, Greece, and Germany, and he brought in Rembrandt, Herder, Wagner, Frederick the Great, and Henry the Lion, to produce an entirely arbitrary but nonetheless heroic history specifically intended to root the NSDAP in the German past.

For Rosenberg, race – the religion of the blood – was the only force that could combat what he saw as the main engines of disintegration – individualism and universalism. ‘The individualism of economic man,’ the American ideal, he dismissed as ‘a figment of the Jewish mind to lure men to their doom.’
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At the same time he had to counter the universalism of Rome, and in creating his own new religion certain Christian symbols had to go, including the crucifix. If Germans and Germany were to be renewed after the chaos of military defeat, ‘the Crucifix was too powerful a symbol to permit of change.’ By the same token, ‘The Holy Land for Germans,’ Rosenberg wrote, ‘is not Palestine…. Our holy places are certain castles on the Rhine, the good earth of Lower Saxony and the Prussian fortress of Marienburg.’ In some respects, the
Mythus
fell on fertile ground. The ‘religion of the blood’ fitted in well with new rituals, already developing among the faithful, whereby Nazis who had been killed early on in the ‘struggle’ were proclaimed ‘martyrs’ and were wrapped in flags that, once tainted with their blood, became ‘blood flags’ and were paraded as totems, used in ceremonies to dedicate other flags. (Another invented tradition was for party members to shout out ‘Here’ when the names of the dead were read out during roll call.) Hitler, however, seems to have had mixed feelings about the
Mythus.
He held on to the manuscript for six months after Rosenberg submitted it to him, and publication was not sanctioned until 15 September
1930, after the Nazi Party’s sensational victory at the polls. Perhaps Hitler had put off approving the book until the party was strong enough to risk losing the support of Roman Catholics that would surely follow publication. The book sold 500,000 copies, but that means little, as all secondary schools and institutes of higher education were forced to buy copies.
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If Hitler did delay publication because of the effect
Mythus
might have on Catholics, he was being no more than realistic. The Vatican was incensed by its argument and, in 1934, placed it on the Index of Prohibited Books. Cardinal Schulte, archbishop of Cologne, set up a ‘Defence Staff of seven young priests, who worked round the clock to list the many errors in the text. These were published in a series of anonymous pamphlets printed simultaneously in five different cities to evade the Gestapo. The most brutal use of the book was as a tool to expose priests: Catholic Nazis were ordered to refer to the
Mythus
in the confessional, and then denounce any priest who was so duped into criticising the ideology of the NSDAP.
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For a time it seems that Rosenberg truly believed that a new religion was coming into being – he told Hermann Goring as much in August 1939. Within a month, however, Germany was at war, and after that the impact of the
Mythus
was patchy. Rosenberg himself remained popular with Hitler, and when the war began, he was given his own unit, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, or ERR, charged with looting art.

Although they were incoherent and arbitrary,
Art and Race
and the
Mythus
were linked by the fact that each attacked the intellectual and cultural life of Germany. Whatever their shortcomings and failings, however crude and tendentious, they represented an attempt by the Nazis to focus on thought beyond the confines of party politics. In publicising such views, the Nazis now left no doubt as to what they thought was wrong with German civilisation.

With many people so worried about the direction civilisation was taking, with evidence for such a dire fate being adduced on all sides, it is perhaps not surprising that such a period, such a mood, produced one of the great works of literature of the century. One could argue that John Steinbeck was
the
chronicler of unemployment in the 1930s, that Christopher Isherwood’s novels about Berlin served as an antidote to the sinister absurdities of the
Mythus.
But the worries and the bleak mood went far wider than unemployment and Germany, and this pessimism was clearly captured by someone else – by Aldous Huxley, in
Brave New World.

Seven years younger than his brother Julian, the eminent biologist, Aldous Huxley was born in 1894.
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His poor eyesight exempted him from service in World War I and he spent the time working on Lady Ottoline Morrell’s farm near Oxford, where he met Lytton Strachey, T. S. Eliot, Mark Gertler, Middleton Murry, D. H. Lawrence, and Bertrand Russell. (Eliot said Huxley showed him some early verse, which he was ‘unable to show any enthusiasm for.’)
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Very well read and deeply sceptical, Huxley had written four books by the early 1930s, including the novels
Crome Yellow
and
Antic Hay.
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Brave New World,
published in 1932, is a dystopian novel, a pessimistic taste of the possible horrific consequences of twentieth-century thought. It is, at one level, science
fiction. But
Brave New World
was also designed to be a cautionary tale; if Freud, in
Civilisation and Its Discontents,
explored the superego as the basis of a new ethics, Huxley described a new ethic itself – in which the new psychology was as much to blame as anything.
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Huxley’s targets in the book are primarily biology, genetics, behavioural psychology, and mechanisation.
Brave New World
is set well into the future, in
AF
632,
AF
standing for After Ford (which would make it around 2545
AD).
Technology has moved on, and a technique known as Bokanovsky’s Process enables one ovary in certain circumstances to produce sixteen thousand persons, perfect for Mendelian mathematics, the basis for a new society in which vast numbers of people are, even more than now, all the same. There are neo-Pavlovian infant-conditioning methods (books and flowers are linked with noxious shocks), and a ‘sleep-teaching process by which infants acquire, among other things, the rudiments of class-consciousness.’
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Sex is strictly controlled: women are allowed a pregnancy substitute, and there are bandolier-containers, known as Malthusian belts, which carry not bullets but contraceptives. Polygamy is the accepted norm, monogamy a disgrace. The family, and parenthood, are obsolete. It has become ‘improper’ to want to spend time alone, to fall in love, and to read books for pleasure. In a chilling echo of the
Mythus
(Huxley’s book was published in the same year), the Christian cross has been abolished by the simple expedient of having its head removed to form the letter T, after the ‘model B Ford.’ Organised religion has been replaced by ‘Solidarity Services.’ The book solemnly informs us that this new world resulted from a nine-year war in which biological weapons wrought such devastation that ‘a world-wide federation and foolproof control of the people were the only acceptable alternative.’ Huxley is specific about the eugenics that help exercise this foolproof control, showing how eggs are graded (alphas to epsilons) and then immersed in ‘a warm bouillon containing free-swimming spermatozoa.’ We encounter half-familiar organisations such as the ‘Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre.’ Some of the characters – Mustapha Mond, the Resident Controller for Western Europe, and Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne – remind us of what the new world has lost from the past and what the society has chosen to remember. Huxley is also careful to show that snobbery and jealousy still exist, as does loneliness, ‘despite all attempts to eradicate such feelings.’
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