Page 33 - Studio International - April 1970

demning Weimar versions of either. While it
abhorred Expressionism, its rationalized totali-
tarianism was a spiritual Gesamtkunstwerk;
while it deprecated capitalism, its myth was
played out in a business-like way.
Thus, if we consider 'degeneration' not as an
aspect of cultural corruption, but as an
extreme of the polarization of art into the
over- and under-stated, then what the Nazis
made and built occupies a position not oppo-
site but similar to that of developed Weimar
art. In these terms, neither is degenerate, both
puritanical and primitivist. This is not to
suggest that the one bore the other, rather
that Nazism inherited certain principles and
techniques of myth-making from the earlier
revolution, and similarly rationalized this
myth until the environmental structure itself,
the big-business power state, encompassed
and substantiated it. What characterizes
Nazi art and the Nazi state is not so much its
content but the unnerving efficiency of its
presentation.14 The cult of force had begun
with the communist revolutions and had
effected a sensitivity towards communication,
to language and its functioning, to the art of
reaching a mass audience. The elementarist
symbology of 20s' art with its 'universalist'
pretensions is but part of its influence; and
the metamorphosis of the spiritual Gemein-
schaft of 1917-22 into the metropolitan
Gesellschaft of the mid- and later 20s served to
show that the precision of mass production
may 'realize' the dream. But, as Ernst
Fischer says, 'there is no humanitas ex machina
any more than there is a deus ex machina', and,
despite its social aspirations, the modernist
environment of the 20s was a dehumanized
one. Nazism, however, looked back and
realized the revolutionary social mystification
in a far more thorough way for its new start.
Hence the early flirtation with Expressionism,
hence 'the struggle for a German rebirth is a
struggle for the assertion of the German hero
ideal against the democratic shopkeeper
ideal' (Rosenberg), hence the condemnation
of the Intelligenzbestie, and hence Goebbels's
praise of Battleship Potemkin and his assertion
that the Nazis needed such films. But, as
Siegfried Kracauer has pointed out, such
Nazi films as Der Triumph des Willens are as
far from Eisenstein as the Nazi revolution Although the Nazi assumption of revolution-
from the Soviet one. In Potemkin, the collective ary or capitalist content in the 'urban' style
is composed of real people; in Riefenstahl's of 20s' 'new architecture' prevented its con-
film it's just an emblem. But the past is used tinuance, the metropolitan ideal itself did not
for new ends : the endless movement recalls disappear; from from it: in the projects com-
the dynamism of earlier revolutionary art, the missioned by Hitler we discover that certain
distinctly aesthetic use of people and banners premises of 20s' architectural conjecture are
derives from Metropolis and from Weimar significantly extended though their neo-
formalism. Kracauer: 'Vaguely reminiscent classical veneer disguises this fact. Predictably,
of abstract paintings, these shots reveal the Hitler (who, we remember, liked to pose as an
propagandist function pure forms may as- authority on architecture) was interested
sume'. That pure forms could so hold this kind principally in building which could hold a
of content is the heritage of the force of powerful ideological content expressive of his
Weimar symbology. personal authority; and this meant that he
Flak is the decoration of our time. commissioned centralized urban projects
Hitler, 1941. rather than decentralized rural ones (this was
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