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fpbThis essay originated in a surprising little discovery I just made. Like everyone else who is interested in modern history, I knew that the Nazis had a marching song called the Horstwessellied, from an early militant who had died in a street riot. Recently I became curious to hear it.
The first thing that struck me was a slight feeling of disappointment. For the marching song of a powerful mass movement, even a vicious one, this was pretty ordinary stuff. Certainly it did not stand up well to the Internationale, let alone the Marseillaise, nor yet to El pueblo unido or the Battle Hymn of the Republic or even the Italian Fascist anthem Giovinezza (which at any rate was originally the song of a Socialist fraction). All these songs, whether the causes they supported were good or not, bore the sense of common excitement of a population on the rise, stirred and driven by a sense of comon values and grievances to be righted. They have a sense of going somewhere - even if the somewhere turned out, at the end, to be just delusional. The Horstwessellied, to my ear, simply did not.
Now comes the strange little discovery. The Nazi tune is very close indeed to one of the most deservedly popular modern Christian hymns, How great Thou art. You can check by listening to the Nazi song (http://ingeb.org/Lieder/diefahne.html - ignore the opening trumpet call) and the hymn (http://www.cyberhymnal.org/non/sv/ostoregu.htm). The first line especially is almost identical. This is probably a coincidence: the hymn tune is apparently a Swedish folksong first recorded in 1881, and the march melody was composed by a minor French composer called Etienne Mehul for an opera, and then given some rather silly German lyrics (http://ingeb.org/Lieder/ichlebte.html). Unless the folksong derives somehow from Mehul's tune (and classically composed tunes have become folksongs before now), there is no relationship between them.
I started reflecting on this coincidence. While the similarities seem to have no historical relevance, they certainly have an aesthetic one. The Christian tune, whatever its origin, does have exactly what the Nazi one lacks: the wonderful excitement, the upward thrust of voice and passion, in its bursting refrain - Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to Thee, how great Thou art, how great Thou art!" - stretching the voices of ordinary congregation member to their natural limits. The Nazi tune stomps along; the Christian tune starts like that - then suddenly soars.
Now this reminded me of an exhibition of Nazi-period, officially approved German art I saw long ago. What struck me at the time, and seems even more important now, was the sheer emptiness of these canvases. They attempted a sort of heroic and at the same time arcadic vision, and only succeeded in producing excellent and thoroughly hollow essays in anatomy - feeble in colour, listless in composition, and aesthetically as dead as any doornail you care to mention. To give an utterly outrageous comparison, anyone who has seen the paintings that illustrate recent editions of the book of Mormon will have seen the products of a similar aesthetic, infinitely better realized; just as implausibly heroic, just as bodybuilding-big, just as rooted in a false and romantic view of the past, and just as repetitious, but infinitely more lively, vigorous, and exciting.
Adolf Hitler started as an artist, and regarded himself as one all his life. Yet the movement he founded was the most aesthetically incompetent of any of the great political parties of recent history. From its choice in marching song to its official buildings and artwork, Nazism was aesthetically the dampest of damp squibs. There have been a few good and enduring Nazi works of art, foremost among them Carl Orff's great choral work Carmina Burana and Leni Riefenstahl's famous documentaries; but Riefenstahl carried into the Nazi period the aesthetic of Gemeinschaft against Gesellschaft organic community against artificial modern society, that were a major issue long before and outside Nazism, and have remained so ever since; and the Carmina, while indeed incarnating the Nazi gambler ethics and earnest immoralism, were as far away from the mild, suburban pseudo-heroism of the official art as it is possible to be. They were a purposeful hymn to mutability, to chance as the ruler of all things, whose dark heart is seen in the horrible song of the swan being cooked, and whose solemn and majestic moods are given to the vision of Fortune crushing kings and queens. A more uncomfortable and nihilistic message has never been delivered by music.
And just as Nazism was essentially bound up in the person of Adolf Hitler, so its aesthetic failures were directly to do with the artistic personality of its founder. Not only Hitler's political choices, but Hitler's personal tastes, seeped down the German power structure in a dozen subtle ways. It was known, for instance, that the best way to get a private audience with Hitler after dinner was to bring details of a building project. Then there was Hitler's private circle, including the photographer Hoffman, who was always keen to inform Hitler of his latest art purchases in Munich (Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 190-191). Hitler himself wanted to endow a great art museum in his hometown, Linz, and, according to his last will, bought a great deal of art for that purpose. As political leader, ultimate judge of official projects, and private Maecenas and friend of other Maecenates, Hitler's aesthetic influence on his empire was unavoidable; and its aesthetic life - or lack thereof - reflected his own.
Hitler's early paintings are not particularly badly made, but they are incredibly mild performances. There is no heat or passion of vision there at all; certainly not what you would expect from a man who cut himself off from his petty-bourgeois family to pursue his dream of being an artist, and who was, even before the war and his post-war "discovery" of the Jews as agents of all evil, a famously passionate and fluvial talker in dingy cafes and male doss-houses. One begins to have a feeling of a fractured personality, delivering ferociously intense oratory about a bizarre but elaborate philosophy of life while being unable to develop anything like a living aesthetic, even (as in the case of Carl Orff) a living aesthetic of evil. He wanted to an artist; but he produced no more lively art than the average camera. His political ideas seemed intensely held, and claimed to amount to a total world-view, a philosophy; yet, when he sat down to paint, absolutenly none of that philosphy, let alone of that anger, managed to reach his brush.
The one person who can speak authoritatively about the aesthetic personality of the "mature" Hitler, Albert Speer, is invaluable here. This passage from his description of the grand plan for the rebuilding of Berlin is particularly symptomatic. (Inside the Third Reich 197-8.) "Nowadays, when I leaf through the numerous photos of models of our onetime grand boulevard, I see that it would have turned out not only crazy, but also boring.
"We had, of course, recognized that lining the new avenue solely with public buildings would lead to a certain lifelessness and had therefore reserved two-thirds of the length of the street for private buildings. With Hitler's support we fended off efforts by various government agencies to displace these business buildings. We had no wish for an avenue consisting solely of ministries. A luxurious movie house for premieres, another cinema for the masses accommodating two thousand persons, a new opera house, three theaters, a new concert hall, a building for congresses, the so-called House of the Nations, a hotel of twenty-one stories, variety theaters, mass and luxury restaurants, and even an indoor swimming pool, built in Roman style and as large as the baths of Imperial Rome, were deliberately included in the plans with the idea of bringing urban life into the new avenue.' There were to be quiet interior courtyards with colonnades and small luxury shops set apart from the noise of the street and inviting strollers. Electric signs were to be employed profusely. The whole avenue was also conceived by Hitler and me as a continuous sales display of German goods which would exert a special attraction upon foreigners.
"Whenever, nowadays, I look through the plans and the photos of the models, even these varied parts of the avenue strike me as lifeless and regimented. When on the morning after my release from imprisonment I passed one of these buildings on the way to the airport,' I saw in a few seconds what I had been blind to for years: our plan completely lacked a sense of proportion. We had set aside block units of between five hundred feet and six hundred and sixty feet even for private businesses. A uniform height had been imposed on all the buildings, as well as on all the store fronts. Skyscrapers, however, were banished from the foreground. Thus we deprived ourselves of all the contrasts essential for animating and loosening the pattern. The entire conception was stamped by a monumental rigidity that would have counteracted all our efforts to introduce urban life into this avenue."
The lack of variation, the steadily repeated size, is at the heart of this aesthetic failure. In Hitler's mind, grandeur was achieved by taking something and multiplying by ten thousand, making everything equally big. On the other hand, the aesthetic power of the New York skyline arises from variation and adaptation, both individually and collectively. Individually, something like the Chrysler building or the Empire State building shows an understanding of the aesthetic of size: it is not merely a ten-floor building stretched out over a hundred floors, but something sui generis, which shapes the long lines created by height into a novel and harmonious shape. Collectively, the effect of the Manhattan skyline depends on their rising like a sudden, unexpected wave of concrete and glass, as the central and climactic point of an enormous urban sprawl that spreads over three states, but that centres on that one heaven-stormingly mad, visually dramatic and compelling upwards explosion in Manhattan.
Hitler, in short, sought for grandeur in the wrong places. For a radical misunderstanding of everything about public buildings and public manifestations, one has to look no further than one of the buildings projected for Hitler's future Berlin, an imperial city to dwarf ancient Rome: a grand meeting hall capable of seating 100,000 persons. What would one do with such an object? Crowds do not belong in closed spaces; from the beginning of our civilization, those governments in which the mass, the crowd, played a part in public life, have kept it in the open, creating appropriate spaces for it - the Greek agora, the Roman forum, the medieval city square. Covered halls are for senates, for small assemblies in which the voice of each member may not only count but be easily heard by any other. To multiply such a hall by 5,000-plus meant simply to create a space without a purpose, which would have staued expensively empty most of the year.
Nor had his work gained any vivacity since the days of his youth; instead of becoming animated by the inward fires that indubitably burned in him, it just developped that astonishing original mildness into a complete soullessness, an aesthetic emptiness repeating itself infinite times. And he was wholly unaware of his aesthetic failure; he never had a doubt. The hysterical tone and steamroller attitude of the Hitler of public speeches and policy decisions show all too clearly the gnawing of self-doubt, the Hitler who looked at Speer's three-dimensional models of Berlin's future was a different man. "There was no need for me to do the talking, for Hitler, with flashing eyes, explained every single detail to his companions. There was keen excitement when a new model was set up and illuminated by brilliant spots from the direction in which the sun would fall on the actual buildings... Hitler was particularly excited over a large model of the grand boulevard on a scale of 1:1000. He loved to "enter his avenue" at various points and take measure of the future effect. For example, he assumed the point of view of a traveler emerging from the south station or admired the great hall as it looked from the heart of the avenue. To do so, he bent down, almost kneeling, his eye an inch or so above the level of the model, in order to have the right perspective, and while looking he spoke with unusual vivacity. These were the rare times when he relinquished his usual stiffness. In no other situation did I see him so lively, so spontaneous, so relaxed, whereas I myself, often tired and, even after years, never free of a trace of respectful constraint, usually remained taciturn. One of my close associates summed up the character of this remarkable relationship: "Do you know what you are? You are Hitler's unrequited love!"
"Happy, his eyes shining, without his usual stiffness": Hitler was as satisfied about these aesthetic failures, as confident of their effect, as if he were Mozart contemplating the achievement of the Jupiter Symphony. He had rooted himself as an artist into a completely false aesthetic world, one that reflected a wholly disoriented personality, to the point where the very perversion of basic aesthetic standards was exactly what gave him aesthetic pleasure. And in spite of the crimes, of the violence he instigated and was a part of from the moment he entered politics, from his pleasure in vicious humour and third-party humiliation, it is still possible to see how this vision developped from a nerveless, suburban pseudo-arcadia, flavoured by Austrian indolence. No wonder that, as a politician, he became distinguished by his usual and inevitable use of lies; this was a man whose perception of the world was so shifted and fractured that it was completely incapable of truth.
And I wonder whether this absence of truth, this whirl of fractured elements that do not add up to anything except an aesthetic void multiplied to infinity, was not the secret of his success. Had he been capable of truth to the extent of Orff's hideous "Swan song", could he possibly have drawn crowds, have inflamed ordinary people, have won the confidence of millions? Not for a minute. Only a consciousness so fractured as to be capable of sounding and indeed feeling angry about injustice while meaning the very reverse could so deceive Germany's defeated conservatives; make them feels that here was someone who stood by patriotic values while he was busy destroying them, who stood for the old Germany while he castrated and replaced its ruling classes, who stood for Kinder, Kirche, Kuche, while dedicated to eugenics, paganism and "functional" sexual ethics. No wonder that, as one of the Nuremberg defendants said, "anything was possible in the Third Reich." Not only lies, but internal contradictions, were on the throne and shaping the state.
The first thing that struck me was a slight feeling of disappointment. For the marching song of a powerful mass movement, even a vicious one, this was pretty ordinary stuff. Certainly it did not stand up well to the Internationale, let alone the Marseillaise, nor yet to El pueblo unido or the Battle Hymn of the Republic or even the Italian Fascist anthem Giovinezza (which at any rate was originally the song of a Socialist fraction). All these songs, whether the causes they supported were good or not, bore the sense of common excitement of a population on the rise, stirred and driven by a sense of comon values and grievances to be righted. They have a sense of going somewhere - even if the somewhere turned out, at the end, to be just delusional. The Horstwessellied, to my ear, simply did not.
Now comes the strange little discovery. The Nazi tune is very close indeed to one of the most deservedly popular modern Christian hymns, How great Thou art. You can check by listening to the Nazi song (http://ingeb.org/Lieder/diefahne.html - ignore the opening trumpet call) and the hymn (http://www.cyberhymnal.org/non/sv/ostoregu.htm). The first line especially is almost identical. This is probably a coincidence: the hymn tune is apparently a Swedish folksong first recorded in 1881, and the march melody was composed by a minor French composer called Etienne Mehul for an opera, and then given some rather silly German lyrics (http://ingeb.org/Lieder/ichlebte.html). Unless the folksong derives somehow from Mehul's tune (and classically composed tunes have become folksongs before now), there is no relationship between them.
I started reflecting on this coincidence. While the similarities seem to have no historical relevance, they certainly have an aesthetic one. The Christian tune, whatever its origin, does have exactly what the Nazi one lacks: the wonderful excitement, the upward thrust of voice and passion, in its bursting refrain - Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to Thee, how great Thou art, how great Thou art!" - stretching the voices of ordinary congregation member to their natural limits. The Nazi tune stomps along; the Christian tune starts like that - then suddenly soars.
Now this reminded me of an exhibition of Nazi-period, officially approved German art I saw long ago. What struck me at the time, and seems even more important now, was the sheer emptiness of these canvases. They attempted a sort of heroic and at the same time arcadic vision, and only succeeded in producing excellent and thoroughly hollow essays in anatomy - feeble in colour, listless in composition, and aesthetically as dead as any doornail you care to mention. To give an utterly outrageous comparison, anyone who has seen the paintings that illustrate recent editions of the book of Mormon will have seen the products of a similar aesthetic, infinitely better realized; just as implausibly heroic, just as bodybuilding-big, just as rooted in a false and romantic view of the past, and just as repetitious, but infinitely more lively, vigorous, and exciting.
Adolf Hitler started as an artist, and regarded himself as one all his life. Yet the movement he founded was the most aesthetically incompetent of any of the great political parties of recent history. From its choice in marching song to its official buildings and artwork, Nazism was aesthetically the dampest of damp squibs. There have been a few good and enduring Nazi works of art, foremost among them Carl Orff's great choral work Carmina Burana and Leni Riefenstahl's famous documentaries; but Riefenstahl carried into the Nazi period the aesthetic of Gemeinschaft against Gesellschaft organic community against artificial modern society, that were a major issue long before and outside Nazism, and have remained so ever since; and the Carmina, while indeed incarnating the Nazi gambler ethics and earnest immoralism, were as far away from the mild, suburban pseudo-heroism of the official art as it is possible to be. They were a purposeful hymn to mutability, to chance as the ruler of all things, whose dark heart is seen in the horrible song of the swan being cooked, and whose solemn and majestic moods are given to the vision of Fortune crushing kings and queens. A more uncomfortable and nihilistic message has never been delivered by music.
And just as Nazism was essentially bound up in the person of Adolf Hitler, so its aesthetic failures were directly to do with the artistic personality of its founder. Not only Hitler's political choices, but Hitler's personal tastes, seeped down the German power structure in a dozen subtle ways. It was known, for instance, that the best way to get a private audience with Hitler after dinner was to bring details of a building project. Then there was Hitler's private circle, including the photographer Hoffman, who was always keen to inform Hitler of his latest art purchases in Munich (Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 190-191). Hitler himself wanted to endow a great art museum in his hometown, Linz, and, according to his last will, bought a great deal of art for that purpose. As political leader, ultimate judge of official projects, and private Maecenas and friend of other Maecenates, Hitler's aesthetic influence on his empire was unavoidable; and its aesthetic life - or lack thereof - reflected his own.
Hitler's early paintings are not particularly badly made, but they are incredibly mild performances. There is no heat or passion of vision there at all; certainly not what you would expect from a man who cut himself off from his petty-bourgeois family to pursue his dream of being an artist, and who was, even before the war and his post-war "discovery" of the Jews as agents of all evil, a famously passionate and fluvial talker in dingy cafes and male doss-houses. One begins to have a feeling of a fractured personality, delivering ferociously intense oratory about a bizarre but elaborate philosophy of life while being unable to develop anything like a living aesthetic, even (as in the case of Carl Orff) a living aesthetic of evil. He wanted to an artist; but he produced no more lively art than the average camera. His political ideas seemed intensely held, and claimed to amount to a total world-view, a philosophy; yet, when he sat down to paint, absolutenly none of that philosphy, let alone of that anger, managed to reach his brush.
The one person who can speak authoritatively about the aesthetic personality of the "mature" Hitler, Albert Speer, is invaluable here. This passage from his description of the grand plan for the rebuilding of Berlin is particularly symptomatic. (Inside the Third Reich 197-8.) "Nowadays, when I leaf through the numerous photos of models of our onetime grand boulevard, I see that it would have turned out not only crazy, but also boring.
"We had, of course, recognized that lining the new avenue solely with public buildings would lead to a certain lifelessness and had therefore reserved two-thirds of the length of the street for private buildings. With Hitler's support we fended off efforts by various government agencies to displace these business buildings. We had no wish for an avenue consisting solely of ministries. A luxurious movie house for premieres, another cinema for the masses accommodating two thousand persons, a new opera house, three theaters, a new concert hall, a building for congresses, the so-called House of the Nations, a hotel of twenty-one stories, variety theaters, mass and luxury restaurants, and even an indoor swimming pool, built in Roman style and as large as the baths of Imperial Rome, were deliberately included in the plans with the idea of bringing urban life into the new avenue.' There were to be quiet interior courtyards with colonnades and small luxury shops set apart from the noise of the street and inviting strollers. Electric signs were to be employed profusely. The whole avenue was also conceived by Hitler and me as a continuous sales display of German goods which would exert a special attraction upon foreigners.
"Whenever, nowadays, I look through the plans and the photos of the models, even these varied parts of the avenue strike me as lifeless and regimented. When on the morning after my release from imprisonment I passed one of these buildings on the way to the airport,' I saw in a few seconds what I had been blind to for years: our plan completely lacked a sense of proportion. We had set aside block units of between five hundred feet and six hundred and sixty feet even for private businesses. A uniform height had been imposed on all the buildings, as well as on all the store fronts. Skyscrapers, however, were banished from the foreground. Thus we deprived ourselves of all the contrasts essential for animating and loosening the pattern. The entire conception was stamped by a monumental rigidity that would have counteracted all our efforts to introduce urban life into this avenue."
The lack of variation, the steadily repeated size, is at the heart of this aesthetic failure. In Hitler's mind, grandeur was achieved by taking something and multiplying by ten thousand, making everything equally big. On the other hand, the aesthetic power of the New York skyline arises from variation and adaptation, both individually and collectively. Individually, something like the Chrysler building or the Empire State building shows an understanding of the aesthetic of size: it is not merely a ten-floor building stretched out over a hundred floors, but something sui generis, which shapes the long lines created by height into a novel and harmonious shape. Collectively, the effect of the Manhattan skyline depends on their rising like a sudden, unexpected wave of concrete and glass, as the central and climactic point of an enormous urban sprawl that spreads over three states, but that centres on that one heaven-stormingly mad, visually dramatic and compelling upwards explosion in Manhattan.
Hitler, in short, sought for grandeur in the wrong places. For a radical misunderstanding of everything about public buildings and public manifestations, one has to look no further than one of the buildings projected for Hitler's future Berlin, an imperial city to dwarf ancient Rome: a grand meeting hall capable of seating 100,000 persons. What would one do with such an object? Crowds do not belong in closed spaces; from the beginning of our civilization, those governments in which the mass, the crowd, played a part in public life, have kept it in the open, creating appropriate spaces for it - the Greek agora, the Roman forum, the medieval city square. Covered halls are for senates, for small assemblies in which the voice of each member may not only count but be easily heard by any other. To multiply such a hall by 5,000-plus meant simply to create a space without a purpose, which would have staued expensively empty most of the year.
Nor had his work gained any vivacity since the days of his youth; instead of becoming animated by the inward fires that indubitably burned in him, it just developped that astonishing original mildness into a complete soullessness, an aesthetic emptiness repeating itself infinite times. And he was wholly unaware of his aesthetic failure; he never had a doubt. The hysterical tone and steamroller attitude of the Hitler of public speeches and policy decisions show all too clearly the gnawing of self-doubt, the Hitler who looked at Speer's three-dimensional models of Berlin's future was a different man. "There was no need for me to do the talking, for Hitler, with flashing eyes, explained every single detail to his companions. There was keen excitement when a new model was set up and illuminated by brilliant spots from the direction in which the sun would fall on the actual buildings... Hitler was particularly excited over a large model of the grand boulevard on a scale of 1:1000. He loved to "enter his avenue" at various points and take measure of the future effect. For example, he assumed the point of view of a traveler emerging from the south station or admired the great hall as it looked from the heart of the avenue. To do so, he bent down, almost kneeling, his eye an inch or so above the level of the model, in order to have the right perspective, and while looking he spoke with unusual vivacity. These were the rare times when he relinquished his usual stiffness. In no other situation did I see him so lively, so spontaneous, so relaxed, whereas I myself, often tired and, even after years, never free of a trace of respectful constraint, usually remained taciturn. One of my close associates summed up the character of this remarkable relationship: "Do you know what you are? You are Hitler's unrequited love!"
"Happy, his eyes shining, without his usual stiffness": Hitler was as satisfied about these aesthetic failures, as confident of their effect, as if he were Mozart contemplating the achievement of the Jupiter Symphony. He had rooted himself as an artist into a completely false aesthetic world, one that reflected a wholly disoriented personality, to the point where the very perversion of basic aesthetic standards was exactly what gave him aesthetic pleasure. And in spite of the crimes, of the violence he instigated and was a part of from the moment he entered politics, from his pleasure in vicious humour and third-party humiliation, it is still possible to see how this vision developped from a nerveless, suburban pseudo-arcadia, flavoured by Austrian indolence. No wonder that, as a politician, he became distinguished by his usual and inevitable use of lies; this was a man whose perception of the world was so shifted and fractured that it was completely incapable of truth.
And I wonder whether this absence of truth, this whirl of fractured elements that do not add up to anything except an aesthetic void multiplied to infinity, was not the secret of his success. Had he been capable of truth to the extent of Orff's hideous "Swan song", could he possibly have drawn crowds, have inflamed ordinary people, have won the confidence of millions? Not for a minute. Only a consciousness so fractured as to be capable of sounding and indeed feeling angry about injustice while meaning the very reverse could so deceive Germany's defeated conservatives; make them feels that here was someone who stood by patriotic values while he was busy destroying them, who stood for the old Germany while he castrated and replaced its ruling classes, who stood for Kinder, Kirche, Kuche, while dedicated to eugenics, paganism and "functional" sexual ethics. No wonder that, as one of the Nuremberg defendants said, "anything was possible in the Third Reich." Not only lies, but internal contradictions, were on the throne and shaping the state.
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