Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (63 page)

If Hitler and Ziegler thought they had killed off modern art, they were mistaken. Over the four months that
Entartete Kunst
remained in Munich, more than two million people visited the Archaeological Institute, far more than the thin crowds that attended the House of German Art.
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This was small consolation for the artists, many of whom found the show heartbreaking. Emil Nolde wrote yet again to Goebbels, more than a trace of desperation in his demand that ‘the defamation against me cease.’ Max Beckmann was more realistic, and on the day the show opened, he took himself off into exile. Lyonel Feininger, born in New York of German parents but living in Europe since 1887, fell back on his American passport and sailed for the New World.

After it closed in Munich
Entartete Kunst
travelled to Berlin and a host of other German cities. Yet another retroactive law, the degenerate art law of May 1938, was passed, enabling the government to seize ‘degenerate art’ in museums without compensation. Some of the pictures were sold for derisory sums at a special auction held at the Fischer gallery in Lucerne; there were even some pictures that the Nazis decided were too offensive to exist – approximately 4,000 of these were simply burned in a huge bonfire, held on Kopernikerstrasse in Berlin in March 1938.
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The exhibition was a one-off, mercifully, but the House of German Art became an annual fixture, at least until 1944. Here the sort of art that Hitler liked – pastoral scenes, military portraits, mountainscapes similar to those he himself had painted when he was younger—hardly changed from year to year.
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Hitler’s assault on painters and sculptors has received more attention from historians, but his actions against musicians were no less severe. Here too there was an initial tussle between Goebbels and Rosenberg; the modernist repertoire was purged from early on in 1933, with ‘degenerate’ composers like Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Ernst Toch, and conductors who included Otto Klemperer and Hermann Scherchen expelled. An
Entartete Musik
exhibition was held in Dusseldorf in May 1938. This was the brainchild of Adolf Ziegler, and a major feature was photographs of composers – Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Webern – who were considered to have a destructive influence on German music. Jazz was treated less harshly. Goebbels realised how popular it was with the masses and that its curtailment might lose the Nazis much sympathy, so it could be performed, provided it was German musicians who were playing. Opera, on the other hand, came under strict Nazi control, with the ‘safer’ works of Wagner, Verdi, Puccini, and Mozart dominating the repertoire as modernist works were discouraged or banned outright.
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If Alfred Rosenberg, on behalf of the Nazis, was to create a new National Socialist religion, as he hoped, then such religions as existed had to be destroyed.
More than anyone else, Protestant or Catholic, one man realised this and the dangers it posed: Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The son of a psychiatrist, Bonhoeffer was born in 1906 in Breslau, the brother in a set of nonidentical twins, the sixth and seventh in a family of eight. His father was one of the leaders of the opposition to Freud. He was taken aback when his son felt called to the church but, as a liberal, raised no objection.

Bonhoeffer had an academic bent and High Church leanings. Although he was a Protestant, he liked the confessional nature of Catholicism and was much influenced by Heidegger and existentialism, but in a negative sense. One of the most influential theologians of the century, he wrote his major books in the 1930s, during the Nazi era –
The Communion of Saints
(1930),
Act and Being
(1931), and
The Cost of Discipleship
(1937) – though
Ethics
(1940—4, never completed) and
Letters and Papers from Prison
(1942) – also became famous. As the second title hints, Bonhoeffer agreed with Heidegger that it was necessary to act in order to be, but he did not think that man was alone in this world or faced with the necessarily stark realities that Heidegger identified. It was clear to Bonhoeffer that community was the answer to the solitariness bemoaned by so many modern philosophers, and that the natural community was the church.
⁷⁴
Community life was therefore, in theory at least, far more rewarding than atomised society, but it did involve certain sacrifices if it was to work. These sacrifices, he said, were exactly the same as those demanded by Christ, on behalf of God: obedience, discipline, even suffering on occasion.
⁷⁵
And so the church, rather than God, became for Bonhoeffer the main focus of attention and thought. Operating within the church – as a body that had existed for centuries, since Jesus himself – teaches us how to behave; and this is where ethics fitted in. This community, of saints and others, teaches us how to think, how to advance theology: in this context we pray, a religious existential act by means of which we hope to become more like Christ.
⁷⁶

It was no accident that Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on community, obedience, and discipline should become central theological issues at a time when the Nazis were coming to power, and stressing just these qualities. Bonhoeffer saw immediately the dangers that the Nazis posed, not just to society at large but specifically so far as the church was concerned. On 1 February 1933, the very day after Hitler took power, Bonhoeffer broadcast a contentious speech over Berlin radio. It was entitled ‘The Younger Generation’s Changed Views of the Concept of Führer,’ and it was so directly confrontational that it was cut off before he had a chance to finish. In it he argued that modern society was so complex that a cult of youth was exactly what was
not
needed, that there was a false generation gap being created by the Hitler Youth movement, and that parents and youth needed to work together, so that the energies of youth could be tempered by the experience of age. He was in effect arguing that the Nazis had whipped up the fervour of the youth because mature adults could see through the bombastic and empty claims of Hitler and the other leaders.
⁷⁷
This speech reflected Bonhoeffer’s beliefs and attitude but, as Mary Bosanquet, his biographer, makes clear, it also highlighted his courage. From then on, he was one of those who repeatedly attacked efforts by the state to take over the
church, and the functions of the church. The church, he said, was founded on confession, man’s relation with God, not with the state. He showed further courage by opposing the ‘Aryan’ clause when it was introduced the following month, and arguing that it was a Christian duty to care for the Jews. This made him so unpopular with the authorities that in summer 1933 he accepted an invitation to become a pastor of a German parish in London. He stayed until April 1935, when he returned to take charge of a seminary at Finkelwalde. While there he published
The Cost of Discipleship
(1937), his first book to attract widespread attention.
⁷⁸
One of its themes was a comparison of spiritual community and psychological manipulation. In other words, he was contrasting the ideas of the church and Rosenberg’s notions in the
Mythus
and, by extension, Hitler’s techniques in eliciting support. Finkelwalde was closed by Himmler in that same year, the seminarians sequestered, and later in the war sent to the front, where twenty-one died. Bonhoeffer was left untouched but not allowed to teach or publish. In the summer of 1939 he was invited to America by the theologian Reinhald Niebuhr, but no sooner had he arrived in New York, in June, than he realised his mistake and returned to Germany, taking one of the last ships before war broke out.
⁷⁹

Unable to take part in ordinary life, Bonhoeffer joined the underground. His brother-in-law worked in military intelligence under Admiral Canaris, and in 1940 Bonhoeffer was given the task of holding clandestine meetings with Allied contacts in neutral countries like Sweden and Switzerland, to see what the attitude would be if Hitler were assassinated.
⁸⁰
Nothing came of these encounters, though the group around Canaris continued to work toward the first plot to kill the Führer, in Smolensk in 1943. This failed, as did the attempt in the summer of 1944, and in April 1945 Bonhoeffer was arrested and held in Tegel military prison in Berlin. From here he sent out letters and other writings, which were published in 1951 as
Letters and Papers from Prison.
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The Gestapo had never been absolutely sure how close Bonhoeffer was to the German underground, but after the second attempt on Hitler’s life failed, on 20 July 1944, files were found at Zossen which confirmed the link between the
Abwehr
and the Allies. As a result Bonhoeffer was transferred to the Gestapo prison on Prinz-Albert-Strasse and then, in February 1945, sent to Buchenwald. It was a slow journey, with the Reich collapsing, and before he reached the camp, Bonhoeffer’s party was overtaken by emissaries from Hitler. Trapped in his Bunker, the Führer was determined that no one involved in the plot to kill him should survive the war. Bonhoeffer received a court-martial during the night of 8—9 April and was hanged, naked, early the next morning.
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Hitler had devised a system to persecute and destroy millions, but Bonhoeffer’s death was one of the last he ordered personally. He hated God even more than he hated artists.

In 1938 a young (twenty-year-old) Russian writer, or would-be writer, sent an account of his experiences in Kolyma, the vast, inaccessible region of Siberia that contained the worst camps of the Gulag, to the Union of Writers in Moscow. Or he thought he had. Ivan Vasilievich Okunev’s report, written in
a simple school notebook, never went anywhere. It was kept by the KGB in his file until it was found in the early 1990s by Vitali Shentalinsky, a fellow writer and poet who, after years of trying, finally managed to persuade the Russian authorities to divulge the KGB’s ‘literary archive.’ His tenacity was well rewarded.
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Okunev had been arrested and sent to the Gulag because he had allowed his (internal) passport to lapse. That is all. He was put to work in a mine, as a result of which, after several weeks, the sleeves of his coat became torn. One day the camp director announced that if anyone had any complaints, they should say so before that day’s shift began. Okunev and another man explained about their sleeves, and two others said they needed new gloves. Everyone else was sent off to the mines, but the four who had raised their hands were sent instead to the punishment block. There they were sprayed with water for twenty minutes. As it was December, in Siberia, the temperature was fifty degrees below zero, and the water froze on Okunev and the others, so that the four men became united as one solid block of ice. They were cut apart with an axe, but since they couldn’t walk – their clothes being frozen solid – they were kicked over and rolled in the snow back to the hut where they slept. As he fell, Okunev hit his face on the frozen ground and lost two teeth. At the hut, he was left to thaw out near the stove. Next morning, when he woke, his clothes were still wet and he had pneumonia, from which he took a month to recover. Two of the others who had formed the same block of ice with him didn’t make it.
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Okunev was lucky, if you call surviving in such conditions lucky. It is now known that up to 1,500 writers perished under the Soviet system, mainly in the late 1930s. Many others were driven into exile. As
Robert Conquest
has pointed out,
The Penguin Book of Russian Verse,
published in 1962, shows that since the revolution, poets who lived in exile survived to an average age of seventy-two, whereas for those who remained in or returned to the Soviet Union, it was forty-five. Many scientists were also sent into exile, imprisoned, or shot. At the same time, Stalin realised that, in order to produce more food, more machinery, and as the 1930s wore on, better weapons, he needed scientists. Great pressure was therefore put on scientists to accede to Marxist ideology, even if that meant ignoring inconvenient results. Special camps were developed for scientists, called
sharashki,
where they were better fed than other prisoners, while forced to work on scientific problems.

This Russian inquisition did not arrive overnight. In summer 1918, when the civil war started, all non-Bolshevik publications were banned. However, with the New Economic Policy, unveiled in 1922, the Communist Party (as the Bolsheviks were now called) allowed a curious form of mixed economy, in which private entrepreneurs and co-operatives were established. As a result, several pre-revolutionary publishers re-emerged, but also more than a hundred literary cooperatives, some of which, like RAPP (the
Russian Association of
Proletarian Writers), became quite powerful. In literature the 1920s were an uneasy time. Several writers went into exile, but as yet there was no firm distinction between what was and was not acceptable as literature. The mind of the leadership was clearly on more pressing things than writing, though two
new journals,
Krasnaya nov
(1921) and
Novy mir
(1925), were under the control of hard-line Marxists. Certain writers, like
Osip Mandelstam
and Nikolay Klyuev, already found it difficult to be published. In 1936, a decade later, no fewer than 108 newspapers and 162 periodicals were still being published, in the Russian language,
outside
the Soviet Union.
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Science had been ‘nationalised’ by the Bolsheviks in 1917, thus becoming the property of the state.
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To begin with, according to Nikolai Krementsov, in his history of Stalinist science, many scientists had not objected because under the tsars Russian science, though expanding slowly, lagged well behind its counterparts in other European countries. For the Bolsheviks, science was expected to play an important role in a technocratic future, and during the civil war scientists were given several privileges, including enlarged food rations
(paiki)
and exemption from military service. In 1919 there was a special decree ‘to improve the living conditions for scholars.’ During the early 1920s international currency was made available for scientists to buy foreign equipment and to make specially sanctioned ‘expeditions’ abroad. In 1925 the Lenin Prize for scientific research was established. Scientists occupied places on the highest councils, and under their guidance numerous institutes were opened, such as the X Ray Institute, the Soil Institute, the Optical Institute, and the Institute of Experimental Biology, a large outfit that housed departments of cytology, genetics, eugenics, zoo-psychology, hydrology, histology, and embryology.
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This modern approach was also reflected in the publication of the first
Great Soviet Encyclopedia,
and the period saw the great flowering of ‘Soviet physics,’ in particular the Leningrad Physico-Technical Laboratory, when relations with the West were good.
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Science was no longer bourgeois.