From: Patsloane-AT-aol.com
Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 03:33:37 EDT
Subject: Re: hating the modern


In a message dated 5/30/00 11:54:26 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
Everdell-AT-aol.com writes:

> <<Which romantics thought the State was all, the individual nothing, or 
that 
>  "racial hygiene" ought to dictate state policy?>>
>  
Bill Everdell has given an eloquent answer. Let me add that eugenics got a 
big boost from Luther Burbank, who strongly urged applying to people what he 
had learned about plants. Also, I'd question whether the fascists, as opposed 
to the communists, believed that "the State was all, the individual nothing." 
I'm reading all that mythic talk of a master race as a glorification of the 
individuals of that race. Had the individual been "nothing," there would have 
been no need for all that talk of how beautiful it was to be blond, 
blue-eyed, and Aryan, and how awful and ugly to belong to one or another of 
the "inferior" races.  Certainly, if you want, point out that the state 
controlled individuals precisely by flattering them as to how beautiful they 
were, and how glorious their destiny would be. But it certainly wasn't 
denigrating the individual or demoting him to "nothing." What would be the 
point of all that dialectic about a master race (races are composed of 
people) if the state was a giant bureaucracy that didn't acknowledge the 
existence of people? I don't think there's ever been a government in history 
that flattered its people so much, or laid so much emphasis on the importance 
of being the right kind of person rather than the wrong kind of person. Nazi 
propaganda reads like one big Romantic fantasy about a glorious, beautiful 
people destined to take over the world. That kind of over-heated rhapsodizing 
and heroic sense of one's own importance is virtually  Byronic.  

If you have time  to read the librettos for, say, Wagner's Ring cycle, it's 
not hard to see why Hitler was so crazy about Wagner, who's the epitome of 
the Romantic. Also, Hitler didn't share your suspicion that there was 
supposed to be an affinity between fascism and modernism. He hated modern 
art, removed it from museums, destroyed some of it, closed the Bauhaus, 
forbade the artists to work and sent storm troopers to enforce the ban (read 
a biography of Emil Nolde), sent some of the artists to concentration camps 
(Max Jacobs), and drove most of the others to New York.  Seems clear enough 
how he felt. Only in architecture does one find the Nazis apparently 
embracing modern styles, and I don't personally feel what they produced was 
distinguished.  As the title of this thread is "hating the modern," let me 
say that Hitler was one of the most extreme haters of  modern art that we've 
seen so far. Because so much of modern art isn't figural, it doesn't lend 
itself to propaganda purposes as easily as Romantic art. If one wants to 
commision a heart-wrenching painting of a beautiful young son of the master 
race in all his glory, one doesn't choose Picasso,  Braque, Mondrian, or 
Kandinsky  as the artist.

It's pretty much a given that the roots of Naziism can be traced back to 
Romanticism. But I'd be interested in your alternative theory. I can't for 
the life of me see much influence coming from, say, neoclassicism. 

pat sloane