Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 12:00:33 -0400 (EDT)
From: Howard Hastings <hhasting-AT-osf1.gmu.edu>
Subject: Re: hating the modern


On Wed, 31 May 2000 Patsloane-AT-aol.com wrote:

> 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. 

This hints at quite another source of fascism than romanticism, doesn't
it?

Also, I'd question whether the fascists, as opposed 
> to the communists, believed that "the State was all, the individual nothing." 

I am just going by what they said and how they behaved.  I know of no
Italian or German fascist who thought that the state existed (as it does
in liberal theory) to serve the individual.  All the ones I have read
insist the individual is there to serve the state. Their domestic and
foreign policy, seems to bear this out, as does the behavior of countless
individual fascists.

> I'm reading all that mythic talk of a master race as a glorification of the 
> individuals of that race.

Then you are missing the antagonism to the bourgeois concept of the
self-interested individual which motivated both Italian and German
fascism and perhaps reading that very conception against the slogan "Du
bist nichts. Dein Volk ist alles."  The point is not that people are
simply nothing.  The point is that individuals come and go, whereas the
race, and hopefully the state are eternal.  It is, then, in this greater
organism that the life of the community really resides, and it is this
"greater" which the individual life serves. 

Because the life of the state is of greater importance than the life of
the individual, the state as the right to ask and expect the individual to
sacrifice his/her life for it.  And the right to ask for unquestioned
obedience in more minor matters as well.

 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. 

It is actually "das Volk" which is "all" in the German case, and the Nazi
state the fuehrer on the "spitze" was the expression of its collective
will.

And yes there was still need for all that talk about beautiful blonds and,
eventually in Italy, beautiful Italians.  Here is the last stanza of an
Italian fascist marching song:

       Sacrifice is beautiful!
       For you we will be heroes:
       Oh eternal Rome
       We are your sons.

The beautiful death of beautiful heros in the service of the
eternal state which is the true expression of national life.  It is harder
to inspire people to die for the state if you call death ugly and foster
a sense of self-interested individuality.

 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? 

As I say, the point is not that people don't exist. It is for whom and
what they exist.

I am not aware of a "dialectic" of master races. But fascism in Italy and
Germany was certainly founded upon the assumption that some races are
better than others, hence the interest in racial hygiene.  These are not
very romantic notions, as far as I can see.

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.  

Romanticism was not about being the right kind of person, was it? And I am
not sure it was about Glorius beautiful people taking over the world. 
This is really quite a long ways from Byron.  Or is it the celebration of
beauty in itself the connection with fascism?

> 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.

The problem I have with using Wagner to establish a connection between
romanticism and fascism is that Shelley and Keats and victor 
Hugo and Chateaubriand and Sir Walter Scott and Hoelderlin and many others
were also romantics. You are an art historian. Can you discern the
beginnings of fascism in Delacroix ?

Finding a late romantic who incorporates many things into his work
unavailble or uninteresting to earlier romantics and having little to do
with romanticism (e.g. antisemitism) and doing so at a time when
romanticism has become a dominant and conservative cultural trend, and 
then tracing fascism back to romanticsm via Hitler's interest in him . . .
well that raises more questions than it answers.

 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. 

Hitler did hate modern art, but he let his underlings take care of the
problem mostly on their own initiative, even before the seizure of state
power. When Wilhelm Frick became innenminister of Thueringen in 1930, he
cleared modernist works out of the Weimar Kunstmuseum. But as late as '33
and '34 there was still quite a tussle in  the Kulturkammer between
Goebbel's (who was sympathetic to some modernist
art) and the more conservative Alfred Rosenberg (founder of Der Kampfbund
fuer deutsche Kultur) which Rosenberg eventually won. Hitler viewed
modernism much as conservatives of earlier times viewed romanticism and as
the conservatives of today view postmodernism--as a threat to social
order and mental health.  

So I am wondering what makes you think I  think there is any special 
affinity between fascism and modernism.

 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.

 Does one choose a Turner or a Friedrich?  (And is there any connection
between romanticism in art and Picasso et. al.?   I do not have a problem
with the claim that romanticism leads to modernism in Art.)

I think what one really chooses here is very simplistic sentimental art.
Kitsch in fact.  One certainly doesn't want the kind of romantic art which
encourages solitary reflection.

Fascist propaganda wants art which can incorporate social/political ideals
in easily recognizable forms.  In the 20s and 30s, modernist art did not
serve this purpose very well.  Romantic art would not have served this
purpose very well in 1820, but it might after it had been around long
enough to become part of the dominant tradition which modernists were
reacting against.  A contemporary fascism might be able to use modernist
techniques which have become "naturalized."

How fascist politicians used art and what types of art they found
usable was not simply a consequence of some ideological affinity with this
particular style or that, but a question of how well it helped make
fascist ideals seem graspable, familiar, and normal, how well it served to
integrate people into the machine and respond to its direction in terms of
group rather than individual identity.
 
> It's pretty much a given that the roots of Naziism can be traced back to 
> Romanticism. 

The only the "given" seems to be that out of a multitude of historical
sources--including Christianity and modern
anthropology--an artistic movement many of whose proponents celebrated
individual expression, artistic experimentation and innovation, and
democracy, is being singled out as a primary source of political movement
which suppressed individual expression, as well as artistic
experimentation, and was profoundly anti-democratic.  So the connection
between romanticism and fascism seems as selective as it is tenous.

But I'd be interested in your alternative theory. I can't for 
> the life of me see much influence coming from, say, neoclassicism. 

In a nutshell, marry traditional European conservatism with love of
technology, toss in a great deal of social disruption to include not only
war but the rapid commercialization of society, and the stage is set for a
political movement which restores the secure sense of identity once
derived from the now dissolving traditional social hierarchies by erecting
new ones based on race and nationality, which modernizes the army and
moves women back into the home. One might draw some elements of
romanticism into this process as one might draw some science and some
traditional religion.
But this would be romanticism and science etc. being integrated with a
traditional cultural conservatism, now being updated to make it more
servicable in a world where your nation can't be very powerful without
embracing some aspects of modernity, like factory production and machine
guns.  It would not be fascism growing out of romanticism.

I don't consider you especially conservative, Pat. So I am not aiming my
comment at you when I say  that the connection between
romanticism and fascism seems to me largely a creation of post war
conservatives deflecting attention from their own common ground with
the social conservatism of fascism, and disturbed by present forms
individual expression, artistic innovation and agitation for democracy
which clearly do have roots in romanticism and which fascists clearly
opposed.


hh
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