[Erste Fassung:]
What National Socialism Has Done to the Arts
By talking about the legacy of National Socialism within the artistic life of Europe I do not intend to dwell on Nazi terror, or the annihilation of many artists and intellectuals in the conquered countries, nor on the administrative measures by which the Nazi regime has put every cultural activity into the service of the totalitarian setup. What we are concerned with is the after-effect of the Fascist era and its significance for America rather than the actions and crimes of the regime itself. Our attention is focussed on those traces of the Nazi spirit which threaten to survive or to resurrect at a given opportunity. In order to understand these traces we have to cope with what might be called the spirit of Fascism, the structural changes which it has brought about throughout European society rather than with administrative measures which may be remedied. It should be said, however, that there is one aspect in crude reality which is beyond repair, namely the mass murder of intellectuals perpetrated by the Nazis, particularly in such countries as Poland. We do not yet know the extent to which intellectual and artistic groups in great parts of Europe have been liquidated. We do know, however, that the systematic drive carried out by the regime against all potential centers of intellectual resistance will leave its imprint upon the future. It is likely to result in a vacuum the impact of which on the whole cultural life cannot be foreseen. Though I am fully conscious, however, that, what National Socialism has done to art, is above all murder, I shall discuss today some less obvious aspects of the situation which seem to me of particular relevance, since they did not result from arbitrary actions of political gangsters but rather from developmental tendencies which are so deep-lying, that we may say that they have not only been brought about by National Socialism but are among its causes as well. In order not to lose ourselves in too vast a field I shall concentrate on the fate of music which I had an opportunity to study most closely. I wish to emphasize, however, that music serves here merely as an example for much broader sociological aspects, not as an end in itself.
The idea that there are certain cultural trends which both belong to the presuppositions and to the effects of Fascism dictates the topics with which I have to deal. I shall first say something about the climate for Fascism in Germany as it showed itself throughout musical life in pre-Hitler days and I then shall point to some of the more obstinate effects of Hitlerism throughout the musical sphere. I am under the impression that we shall be able to understand the structural relationship between Fascism and culture the better the more deeply we are aware of the cultural roots of some of the most terrifying anti-cultural phenomena of our time. It would be naive to assume that the indisputable destruction of German musical culture has been brought about solely by a kind of political invasion from the outside, by mere force and violence. A severe crisis, economic no less than spiritual, prevailed before Hitler seized power. Hitler was, in music as well as in innumerable other aspects, merely the final executor of tendencies that had developed within the womb of German society.
However, one can very well differentiate between artistic and philosophical phenomena which tend toward Fascism by them-selves, and others which were claimed by the Nazis more or less arbitrarily, mainly on account of their prestige value. Moreover, one can clearly distinguish between names to which the Nazis paid only lip service, such as Goethe and Beethoven, and others who represent ideas which are the lifeblood of the Fascist movement, mostly comparatively obscure figures such as Ernst Moritz Arndt or Paul de la Garde.
Nobody can escape the awareness of the deep interconnection between Richard Wagner and German supra-nationalism in its most destructive form. It may be good to recollect that there is an immediate link between him and official Nazi ideology. Wagner's standard-bearer and son-in-law, the Germanized Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain, was one of the first writers who combined aggressive pan-Germanism, racism, the belief in the absolute superiority of German culture, – or you may rather say of German Kultur – and militant anti-Semitism. The Nazi bogus philosopher Alfred Rosenberg has confessedly borrowed most of his theses from Chamberlain's Grundlagen des 19. Jahrhunderts. The book had the blessing of the Bayreuth circle and Chamberlain, as an old man, welcomed enthusiastically the National Socialist movement.
The pedigree Wagner-Chamberlain-Rosenberg is more than just historical accident. Not only can we discover many elements of rubber-stamped Nazi doctrine in Wagner's theoretical writings, but we can also spot them, which is more important, throughout Wagner's works in more or less flimsy allegorical disguise. The whole plot of Wagner's Ring suggests some kind of a gigantic Nazi frame-up, with Siegfried as an innocent, lovable Teutonic hero who, just by chance, conquers the world and ultimately falls victim to the Jewish conspiracy of the dark dwarfs and those who trust their counsel.
Incidentally, it is ironical enough and not without deeper significance that even the downfall of Hitler is presaged in this metaphysical master plan. We may well say that the whole pan-German movement, consummated by Nazis, bore within itself an inkling of the doom it spelled, not only upon its foes but also upon itself. This inkling is not of an entirely irrational nature, but is tinged with an insight, however inarticulate it may have been, into the ultimate hopelessness of German imperialism within the given constellations of world power politics. No clear-sighted observer of the early days of Nazism in Germany can have failed to notice an element of uncertainty and even despair underneath the drunkenness of victories celebrated before they were won. It is quite possible that the ruthlessness and cruelty of the Nazi regime, so utterly ununderstandable to other nations is partly determined by this deep sense of futility of the whole adventure. The Hitlerian statement that if his regime should ever collapse he would slam the door so that the whole world could hear it, is indicative of something much farther reaching than it seems to express. When we speak of the destructiveness of the German mind we have to understand this not merely psychologically but also politically, in terms of the desperate character of the whole gamble. The Germans permanently anticipated, as it were, the revenge for their own downfall. This may suffice as an example for speculations on the innermost secrets of Nazi mentality and Nazi reality as suggested by the Wagnerian work.
A minute musical analysis of Wagner's works yields insight into the repressive, compulsory, blind and ultimately anti-individual way of his composing in a very concrete and tangible sense. His music itself speaks the language of Fascism, quite apart from plots and bombastic words.
Yet, we should not overrate the importance of Wagner as a formative element of Fascism. Apart from the fact that his work contains forces entirely antagonistic to those which I mentioned, his actual influence in Germany was definitely on the decline. True, he helped to prepare the climate for Fascism with the generation of our parents. The imagery of his works doubtlessly soaked through innumerable channels into the unconscious of most Germans. However, his work itself had largely ceased to be a living force. This holds for the artists as well as for the public. Since about 1910, at the latest, there started a revolt of all composers of any independence and talent against Wagnerism and all it entailed. One may easily regard anti-Wagnerism as the common denominator of all the different schools that have sprung into existence since the beginning of this century. Concomitantly, Wagnerian philosophy lost its hold on the intellectuals. But what happened with the audience at large is perhaps even more significant. The lack of knowledge of the Wagnerian work among the younger generation in Germany was simply astonishing. The spiritual demands of the Weltanschauungsmusik, the exacting length of the Musikdrama, the spirit of high-fallutin' symbolism so incompatible with the positivist matter-of-factness spreading over the youth of the whole world – all this helped to bring Wagner into almost complete oblivion. His old Germans became associated with the idea of the »beaver« game. I can give you an example.
In the winter term of 1932/33, immediately before Hitler took over, I had to conduct at Frankfurt University a seminar on Hanslick's treatise On the Musically Beautiful – which is essentially a defense of musical formalism against the doctrine of Wagner and the programmatic school. Although the seminar was focused on philosophical issues, the participants, about thirty, were mostly musicologists. In the first meeting I asked who was capable of writing the Siegfried motif, the most famous of all Wagnerian leitmotifs, on the blackboard. Nobody was.
This little event is symptomatic not only of the oblivion into which Wagner had fallen but of a much broader issue, which has something to do with the rise of Hitlerism and will by no means have been settled by his defeat. You may call it the decultivation of the German middle classes, demonstrated in the field of music but noticeable in every aspect of German life.
During the 19th century there existed certain groups which, without being professional musicians or artists, were in real contact with music and the arts, were moved by the ideas expressed by music, and were capable of a subtle and discriminating understanding. The attitude of writers such as Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard or Nietzsche toward music was not understandable without the existence of such a nucleus of musically truly cultured non-musicians. This nucleus has disappeared. Musical knowledge and understanding has become the privilege of experts and professionals.
I cannot go into the reasons for this process which is deeply connected with certain changes undergone by the whole German middle class. On the basis of their own material interests, they became more and more alienated from the same culture which their fathers and grandfathers had brought about. It is this decultivation, this loss of any life relationship with what is supposed to be the tradition of great German culture, upheld merely as an empty claim that has contributed more to the Fascist climate than the allegiance to even so nationalistic and chauvinistic an author as Richard Wagner.
We should be quite clear with regard to what we mean by this process of decultivation. It is not simply lack of knowledge or erudition, although the processes in question tend also to lower all acquaintance with the manifestations of culture in a most elementary sense. Nor is it the ever-increasing aloofness of artistic products from the empirical life of society, a process that can be dated back to the time when art lost its locus within the order of the all-embracing Catholic Church. I refer to something much more specific. It may be called the neutralization of culture in general and of the arts in particular.
Since philosophy in the broadest sense, the general consciousness of the people, has been brought more and more under the sway of science and technical civilization, the relationship between art and truth has been profoundly affected. There is no longer any unifying common focus between knowledge or science on the one hand and art on the other, as there is no common focus between science and philosophy or religion. Dr. Horkheimer has pointed this out in his lecture. What has been called the »idea« of arts during the age of great speculative philosophy has come to be regarded as an obsolescent metaphysical prejudice. Instead of being a decisive means to express fundamentals about human existence and human society, art has assumed the function of a realm of consumer goods among others, measured only according to what people »can get out of it«, the amount of gratification or pleasure it provides them with or, to a certain extent, its historical or educational value. This does not merely pertain to the products of today's cultural industry which are conceived and produced in terms of consumer goods anyway, but this generally also affects the present attitude towards traditional works. They are, and were long before the rise of Fascism, in a certain way »on exhibition«, things to look at, maybe to admire, maybe to enjoy, perhaps even emotional stimuli, but they became within the general consciousness of the consuming audiences, more or less deprived of any intrinsic and compelling meaning of their own.
This has sucked their life blood away even if their façade was still intact in German opera houses, concert halls and art galleries. Their own essence was gradually lost, and they were experienced in terms of the want of entertainment which they had satisfied only incidentally. While the public apparently became their master who has the choice among the infinite variety of cultural goods, the public actually was the victim of this whole process since the works became mute to the listener and lost any deeper hold on his experience, his development and his philosophy. Ultimately consumption of the art became a mere appendage to the business interests of those who were in command of the market.
We can, therefore, not blame the masses for the process of decultivation, the broadest pattern of which I have tried to indicate. The loss of knowledge and interest in the products of art which may ultimately lead to a completely barbarian severance between serious artistic production and universal tastes in not a matter of degeneration or bad will but is the almost unavoidable consequence of the relegation of art into the realm of pure embellishment brought about by the technological development itself.
This process, however, does not only imply a crisis of the general relationship between arts and audience and concomitantly of art itself which is condemned to an ever more threatening isolation, but it also has much more immediate social consequences. For the idea of compelling and objective truth, however differentiated its artistic and philosophical expression might have been, is inseparably bound up with the idea of humanism. German humanism was the most substantial counter-tendency against violent nationalism. This holds good for music above all. One may say that the cultural impact of music in Germany was the equivalent of the humanistic tradition in great French literature.
Humanistic philosophy permeates Beethoven's whole work and determines even the most subtle details of his musicianship. The lack of experience of this humanistic spirit – and here I mean experience in a deeper sense than the listening over the air to some standard performance of a standard work – reflects, viewed in broad social terms, a vacuum ready to absorb the arbitrarily super-imposed doctrines of totalitarianism. The German boy of our age who has no longer heard, as his father might have, the Kreutzersonata played by friends of his parents, and who never listened passionately and surreptitiously when he was supposed to go to bed, does not merely miss a piece of information or something which might be recognized as being educational. The fact that he has never been swept away emotionally by the tragic forces of this music bereaves him somehow of the very life phenomenon of the humane. It is this lack of experience of the imagery of real art, partly substituted and parodied by the ready-made stereotypes of the amusement industry, which is at least one of the formative elements of that cynicism that has finally transformed the Germans, Beethoven's own people, into Hitler's own people.
This is not to say that musical culture in Germany simply died away. It survived within some artists, and even during the first years of Hitlerism the average level of performance was often astonishingly high. But musical culture became under Hitler what it had started to become long before, a museum piece of an export article, somewhat reminiscent of the cultural function of the Renaissance architecture in today's Italy. The tie between the idea of humanism, of music as an art, and the actual outward and inward life of the people, was definitely broken.
This is the most essential characteristic of the musical climate for Fascism in pre-Hitler Germany. It is certain to increase, not only in Germany, dangerously with the impoverishment of the European continent after the present war.
I wish to emphasize that the process in question does not merely engulf the attitude of the masses toward art, but artistic production per se and its inherent values. If we take a quick glance at the most successful German post-Wagnerian composer – as a matter of fact the only one whose fame is internationally established – Richard Strauss, there is clear evidence that the link with German humanism, in the sense I have discussed it right now, has ceased to exist. The fact that Richard Strauss at one time attempted to translate a philosophical work, Nietzsche's Zarathustra, into program music, is no proof to the contrary. One may rather say that philosophy, as well as religion or as the l'art pour l'art doctrine of symbolism, is for sale in Strauss' music, and that the very way it is treated as a subject matter destroys it as the true life basis of the works which so glibly deal with all kinds of philosophical ideals and values. Everything becomes a cultural good to be looked at, to be bought, to be enjoyed as a stimulus for the nerves of the big but tired businessman. This holds for the whole range of Strauss' œuvre: the Archaic Greece of Electra and the smart pervertedness of Salomé, the second-hand Goethe edition of the Frau ohne Schatten, and the rococo of the Rosenkavalier which proved to be so convenient for the taste of the German industrial upper-class who got out of this work a mirrored reflection which made them look as if they were a legitimate aristocracy.
What remains, apart from such stimuli made to order of the quickly changing tastes of those German layers with whom Strauss identified himself, is a kind of cult of the élan vital, which has become, in the Schwung of this music, almost synonymous with the spirit of success, recklessness and expansionism fitting only too well with imperialist Germany from Emperor Wilhelm to Hitler. If complete cynicism and relativism are among the foremost characteristics of Fascism, these characteristics come clearly to the fore in an author who is apparently so faithful a child of the liberal era as Richard Strauss. To be sure, his managerial broad-mindedness is quite irreconcilable with the narrow and petty bourgeois fanaticism of the Nazi movement. Yet he only put the seal under the secret text of his life-work when he grudgingly compromised with the Nazi government.
It is this spirit of pseudo-hedonistic complacency and shallow showmanship – in spite of all the virtuosity of the composer – against which everything rebelled that was productive and responsible in German musicianship. But it is also this very rebellion by which the great music which Germany has produced during this century, and of which the life-work of Arnold Schoenberg is representative, became definitely and radically antagonistic to the audience and to the whole sphere of commercialized musical life, of the official German Musikleben. It has often been alleged, and also repeated in this country, that it was a kind of guilt or an expression of snobbishness, of the ivory tower idea, that the real musical avantgarde in Germany lost more and more its touch with the audience. The work of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern never became familiar to the non-musicians to any extent comparable with Wagner or even Strauss.
In a deeper sense, however, the avantgarde represented the true societal interests against blindness, spite and conventionalism of the actual audience. The musical discord, which became the symbol of so-called Kulturbolschewismus, and which is the conspicuous identification mark of the musical avantgarde, the supposed spirit of negativism and destruction, kept faith to Beethoven's humanism by expressing in an undiluted way the sufferings, the anguish, the fear, under which we live today long before the political crisis arose, instead of covering it up by idle comfort. It thus has maintained the link between music and philosophical truth. This does not only refer to the expressive sincerity of artists such as Schoenberg, but also to their purely musical qualities, their severe and undisguised construction shunning all ornamentation, embellishment, everything which is not strictly necessary. We know today how deeply the often denounced subjectivism of the so-called atonal avantgarde was bound up from the beginning with functionalism, with those tendencies within art which try to regain its real dignity by purifying it from all the remnants of romanticism which today are nothing but empty pretenses.
This is perhaps the appropriate moment to illustrate by a very specific example the danger of a survival of the Nazi spirit after its defeat. I mentioned before the idea of Kulturbolschewismus which served as a means to denounce every artistic impulse which threatened to shatter the conventional belief in the good and natural order of things. Today we find the heritage of this denunciatory notion among some of the sincerest foes of the Hitlerian system. The world has become so ugly and terrifying, so runs the argument, that art should no longer dwell upon distorted forms, discords and everything branded as being destructive, but should return to the realm of beauty and harmony. The world of destruction, terror and sadism is the world of Hitler. And art should show its opposition to it by going back to its traditional ideals.
The amazing similarity of such enunciations with those of the jailers would not be a counter-argument in itself, but it is highly indicative of the perseverance of the Nazi frame of mind, a perseverance which is not merely due to the minds of the intellectuals but to the situation as such. What is wrong about the argument is not that it sounds Hitlerian, but that it is infantile and expresses a general reversion of thinking which goes infinitely beyond the sphere of the arts – and hatred of thinking, hostility against the development of independent thought is what makes for Fascism.
The infantile twist is the forthright identification of ugly and beautiful in art with ugly and beautiful in reality, an identification in the style of the Hays Office which regards every unpolished villain on the screen as an encouragement of robbery on the street. Thinking is endangered of losing the power of discriminating between imagery and reality. Goethe, who is supposed to have been a classicist, as well as Hegel, the conservative, knew that speaking out the negative, facing catastrophe and calling it by its name, has something wholesome and helpful in itself which could never be achieved by the pretense of a harmony borrowed from the surface phenomena and leaving the essence untouched.
It is just this taboo of expressing the essence, the depth of things, this compulsion of keeping to the visible, the fact, the datum and accepting it unquestioningly which has survived as one of the most sinister cultural heritages of the Fascist era, and there is real danger of a kind of pink pseudo-realism sweeping the world after this war, which may be more efficient but which is certainly not fundamentally superior to the art exhibitions commandeered by the Nazis.
Art should put against those restorative tendencies, even if they are clothed in terms of Parisian neo-classicism, the word of an Anglo-Saxon philosopher who certainly cannot be blamed for Kulturbolschewismus, namely Francis Bradley: »If everything is bad, it may be good to know the worst.«
Simultaneously however, we should not underrate the issue of aloofness and non-conformity of music, and of arts in general, with regard to its political importance. For this aloofness did not only keep it away from the market but also created a kind of resentment which belongs to the most significant phenomena of the German pre-Fascist cultural climate and which has its strong counterpart in anti-intellectualism and anti-highbrowism all over the world.
This resentment as well as the musical decultivation of the German middle classes resulted in certain ill-defined collectivistic tendencies of the pre-Fascist era. They found their quasi-positive expression in the so-called musical folk and youth movement. During the Third Reich, this movement came into a certain antagonism with the Party and seems to have been abolished or absorbed by the Hitler Youth. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that this movement had a strong affinity to the spirit of Nazism. No need to stress such obvious aspects as the connection between this musical collectivism and the Nazi folk ideology. But there are less obvious features to which I should like to draw your attention.
There is a strong repressive trend throughout this musical collectivism, a hatred against the individual, the supposedly refined and sophisticated. This hatred is an expression of envy of those whose individuality could not truly develop, rather than a desire for a true solidarity of men which would pre-suppose those very individual qualities which are taboo to the agitators of musical collectivism. There is, moreover, the wish for simplicity at any price, the contempt of the métier, the unwillingness to learn anything that requires persistent intellectual efforts – a kind of glorification of the supposedly plain, average man which may be transformed into a weapon against anyone and anything that does not conform to his standards.
There is, above all, the display of an aggressive spirit of community as an end in itself, played up artificially so as not to allow any questioning of its real meaning. The idea of collectivity is made a fetish, glorified as such, and only loosely connected with concrete social contents which may easily be changed with every turn of Realpolitik. This last element is perhaps the most important one. It bears witness to the calculated, synthetic nature of this supposed folk music. The more it pretends to be the expression of »we the people«, the more certain we may be that it is actually dictated by very particularistic clique interests, intolerant, aggressive and greedy for power.
I have so far discussed underlying tendencies of German culture as manifested in the field of music which prepared the climate for Fascism or rather were indicative of the same social forces which ultimately made for political Fascism too. I dwelt on these aspects because we have reason to believe that it is they which are likely to persist, though in many ways modified, after Hitler's defeat. As far as the actual musical situation under Hitler is concerned, I confine myself to some brief remarks.
It would be erroneous to assume that there ever sprung into life a specific musical Nazi culture. What was profoundly changed by the system was the function of music which now openly became a means to an end, a propagandistic device or an ideological export article among many others. However, any attempts to create a music, intrinsically National Socialist by order, were limited to the most fanatic groups of the Nazi movement and never got hold of any responsible artist, nor of the bulk of the population, just as official Nazi poetry never became really popular.
As to the production of the younger generation of more or less fervent believers in the Nazi ideology a number of new names appeared but what they actually achieved largely amounted to a feeble and diluted imitation of some of the better known composers of the Weimar era, particularly of those collectivist composers who had exercised a certain appeal to larger audiences, such as Hindemith or Kurt Weill. The latter's Jewish decent was no obstacle to one of the more successful Nazi opera composers, Mr. Wagner-Régeny, who copied Weill's style with all its mannerisms almost entirely.
The most important characteristic of musical life under Hitler seems to me a complete stagnation, a »freezing« of all musical styles of composing and performing and of all standards of criticism, comparable to the freezing of wages under Hitler. Throughout cultural life the Nazis developed a kind of double-edged policy. On the one hand they raged against modernism and Kulturbolschewismus, on the other hand they disavowed what they themselves called fellow travellers, Mitläufer, that is to say those artists who tried to coordinate themselves quickly to the catchwords of the Nazi ideology without enjoying the privilege of being Party old-timers. Thus the compliant musicians and, above all, the composers, were left some-what confused. Musical stagnation as well as that of art as a whole did not remain unnoticed by the more intelligent Nazis and even Herr Rosenberg, who generally had to take an attitude of official optimism once suggested the idea that there was no time for great artistic production today and that the energies formerly invested in the arts were now properly absorbed by technical and military ventures. This amounts to a forthright admission of artistic bankruptcy. Subsequently, the restrictions put upon composing were somewhat lifted in order to raise the artistic standards. As soon, however, as the Party allowed any bolder work to make its public appearance, the official Nazi critics spoke threateningly of Kulturbolschewismus. Thus an atmosphere of total insecurity was brought about, comparable to the strange amalgamation of strictly enforced laws and arbitrary illegality so characteristic of the Third Reich. It exercized a paralyzing effect. The best a German artist could hope for was escape into what has been properly called innere Emigration, internal emigration. Whereas German artistic tradition had evaporated and artistic pioneering had been eliminated at the surface, the Nazis failed completely in building up even a façade of a musical culture of their own. The same people who always had blamed intellectual cliques for modernism in the arts, remained themselves a clique whose folk ideas proved to be even more distant from the life of the people than the most esoteric products of expressionism and surrealism. Paradoxical as it sounds, the Germans were more willing to fight Hitler's battles than to listen to the plays and operas of his lackeys. When the war catastrophe put an end to the remnants of public German musical life, it merely executed a judgment that was silently spoken since the Hitler gang had established its dictatorship over culture.
What then are we going to expect as an aftermath of the trends which I tried to point out to you? I do not intend to dwell on the question whether economic conditions in Europe as a whole and particularly in Central Europe will allow any artistic culture or whether the apathy of the population after the war will result in their becoming entirely disinterested in the arts. I do not think that the greatest danger lies here. There is no direct correlation between material wealth and artistic production and one might easily imagine situations where material wealth and the tremendous machinery of cultural industry may be a threat to artistic spontaneity rather than an enhancement of it. The present stage of technical civilization may call for a very ascetic art developed in the loopholes of poverty and isolation, as counter-balance against the business culture which tends to cover the whole world. Instead of dwelling on the crude economic issues, I want to finish this lecture with an attempt to briefly formulate four of the deeper-going tendencies towards a survival of the Fascist spirit in the arts.
(1) The propagandistic aspect of all the arts which has been emphasized by the Nazis and which has destroyed almost completely artistic autonomy is not likely to disappear automatically. To be sure, European art after this war will not be allowed to serve the purpose of Fascist propaganda and the freedom of artistic creation will be restored at least formally. What is likely to remain, however, is the prevailing idea that art is essentially a force of manipulation, something that is to be directed this or the other way, that has to follow a set ideological pattern. The very fact that everything, that carries with itself associations of Fascism, however faint they may be, must be eradicated, is a symptom of an almost inescapable danger of artistic control. What threatens to develop in Europe as well as in the rest of the world may be called the end of the artistic subject. The artist is no longer called upon in order to express independently his experiences, visions and ideas, but has come to understand himself as a sort of a functionary who has to fulfill a social and productive duty. It is possible that this very fact destroys the true function of the arts. Certainly, the idea of the artist blindly following his intuition without thinking in technical terms and without conscientious work on his material is a romantic notion. Every true work of art has, what one might call malevolently a manipulative element about itself. But it makes all the difference whether this manipulative element remains a means of realizing the essence of the work, or whether it is put into the service of molding public opinion. As an aftermath of Fascism the latter seems to become more and more emphasized, not only because of external pressure put upon the artist but because the artists themselves nourish the illusion that, by surrendering to the calls made upon them and becoming functionaries or employees, they could escape their isolation and regain contact with broad social tendencies. But art does not fulfill its function in society by acting as a social functionary. Everything will depend on whether there will be loopholes enough left to the artists in order to dodge this evermore threatening danger. It should be added, cautiously, that the consciousness of this danger today seems to increase.
(2) The aspect of being a functionary and expressing himself according to the wants and necessities of powerful social groups and tendencies is an aspect mainly affecting the artist. There is a no less dangerous tendency with regard to the attitude of the public. The foremost cultural organization of the Nazis bore the title »Kraft durch Freude« (»Strength Through Joy«). This barbarian name, which defines the arts, as Dr. Horkheimer says in one of his studies, in terms of massage, is significant of something which probably will be alive long after the Philistines of Kraft durch Freude will no longer command any official organization. Music, art and literature tend to become recreational activities, the means to help the tired masses to gain new strength and to get away from the drudgery of their practical existence. Fascism has taken up consciously this trend which automatically came to the fore all over the world long ago. The misery of the European post-war world as well as the vacuum left after the collapse of Nazi ideology is likely to strengthen rather than to weaken this tendency. What I envisage here is that the arts in Europe as far as they have contact with the broad masses, above all moving pictures, radio and popular literature, will indulge in a kind of streamlining in order to please the customer, a sort of pseudo-Americanization with poorer means and less efficiency, which even before Hitler could be noticed in European capitals such as Berlin and, to a certain extent, also Paris. The idea of being up-to-date by giving the people what they are supposed to want or rather what amounts to the line of least resistance against big business, is likely to triumph everywhere.
(3) The trend toward collectivism for its own sake so heavily emphasized by the Nazis is likewise apt to survive within their foes. The more sacrifices the resistance forces and underground movements had to make, the more likely there are to arise demands for popular appealing art, intrinsically incompatible with the developmental phase reached by autonomous art itself. We must protect ourselves against the repressive implications of such a call for subordination and obedience of the individual to the demands of the majority and the so-called plain people, if we should not experience a revival of Nazi tendencies under an entirely different political label.
(4) There is a last danger apparently contradicting the ones I so far pointed out, but nevertheless threatening enough. I may call it the danger of the transformation of European culture into a kind of National Park, a realm tolerated and even admired, but mainly in terms of its quaintness, its being different from the general standards of technological civilization, but by this very act of tolerance being subject to its norms. Whereas we have to fear on the one side the danger of standardization and manipulation of European culture, we have to be equally on our guard against the danger of its artificial preservation, its being put on exhibition, its being enjoyed for the sake of its uniqueness rather than for any inherent qualities. What happened to certain artists of the Boulevard Montparnasse, whose colorful appearance made them lovely to look at, but at the same time put upon them the stigma of being fools, may happen to European culture as a whole. It may share the fate of old European style furniture or of European titles.
All these dangers can be met only by a strength of resistance surpassing anything non-conformist artists ever had to muster before. They must guard themselves against the leveling trend of the machinery as well as against adaptation to the market by outdated, and hence fashionable provincialism, and even by spectacular non-adaptation. Who really wants to be an artist today should neither be a commercial designer, in the broadest sense, nor a stubborn, blind specialist. His relationship to technological civilization is utterly complicated. While resisting its standardizing impact, he cannot dodge the deep and shocking experiences brought about by this civilization upon every living being. He must be in complete command of the most advanced means of artistic construction. He thus has to be both an exponent and a sworn enemy of the prevailing historical tendency. There is no recipe how to achieve this. The only thing to stick to are those inherent qualities of the work itself mentioned before. To the artist, they appear mainly in terms of inner consistency, the uncompromising realization of basic intentions. Faithful pursuit of such »realization« is not mere formalism. It works as the only means of maintaining, or regaining, that relationship between essential philosophical truth and art, or science, the abolition of which is at the hub of the Fascist spirit – provided the basic intention itself is true in terms of the underlying essential. An artist who still deserves the name should proclaim nothing, not even humanism. He should not yield to any pressure of the ever more overwhelming social organizations of our time but should express, in full command of meaning and potentialities of today's processes of rationalization, that human existence led under its command is not a human one. The humane survives today only where it is ready to challenge, by its very appearance and its determined irreconcilability, the dictate of the present man-made but merciless world.