Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (23 page)

Indeed, it was the institutionalization of modernism which appeared so novel in Weimar and gave it its peculiar strength. Over the whole range of the arts, Weimar was less hostile to modernism than any other society or political system. The leading German museums began to buy modern paintings and sculpture, just as the opera houses patronized atonality. Otto Dix was made an art-professor in Berlin, Klee in Düsseldorf, Kokoschka in Dresden. Equally important in making modernism acceptable was the work of the art theorists and historians, like Carl Einstein, W.R.Worringer and Max Dvorák, who placed Abstraction and Expressionism in the context of the European art tradition. As a result, Berlin rivalled and even surpassed Paris as an exhibition centre for modern painting. The gallery run by Herwath Walden and his wife Else Lasker-Schüler, who also published the magazine
Der Sturm
, was more enterprising than any on the Left Bank, showing Leger, Chagall, Klee, Kurt Schwitters, Moholy-Nagy and Campendonck. The
Neue Sachlichkeit
, or New Realism, which displaced the dying Expressionism in 1923, attracted more interest than the Paris movements.
²⁶

There was, in fact, a modernistic cultural paramountcy in Weimar Germany. This in itself was highly provocative to the Easterners. They called it
Kulturbolschewismus.
Throughout the war the German ultra-patriotic press had warned that defeat would bring the triumph of Western ‘decadent’ art, literature and philosophy, as though Lloyd George and Clemenceau could not wait to get to Berlin to ram Cubism down German throats. Now it had actually happened! Weimar was the great battleground in which modernism and traditionalism fought for supremacy in Europe and the world, because in Weimar the new had the institutions, or some of them, on its side. The law, too: the Weimar censorship law, though still strict, was probably the least repressive in Europe. Films like
The Blue Angel
could not be shown in Paris. Stage and night-club shows in Berlin were the least inhibited of any major capital. Plays, novels and even paintings touched on such themes as homosexuality, sadomasochism, transvestism and incest; and it was in Germany that Freud’s writings were most fully absorbed by the intelligentsia and penetrated the widest range of artistic expression.

The Left intelligentsia often sought deliberately to incite ‘right-thinking’
Germany to fury. They had been smothered so long beneath the conventional wisdom of army, church, court and academia; now it was the turn of the outsiders who had, in a curious and quite unprecedented way, become the insiders of Weimar society. In the
Weltbühne
, the smartest and most telling of the new journals, sexual freedom and pacifism were exalted, the army, the state, the university, the Church and, above all, the comfortable, industrious middle classes, were savaged and ridiculed. It featured the writings of Kurt Tucholsky, a satirist whom many compared to Heine, and whose acid pen jabbed more frequently and successfully beneath the skin of the Easterners than any other writer – the verbal equivalent of George Grosz’s fearsome caricatures. He wrote: ‘There is no secret of the German Army I would not hand over readily to a foreign power.’
²⁷
Tucholsky was wonderfully gifted. He intended to give pain, to arouse hatred and fury. He succeeded.

This cultural trench warfare, waged without reference to any Geneva Convention, merciless in its spite, animosity and cruelty, was calculated to arouse the atavism of the Easterners. Their approach to the public realm was paranoid. The paranoia had to some extent been deliberately manufactured by Bismarck. But long before 1914 it had become instinctive and habitual, with the Reich the object of world-wide conspiracies, political, economic, military and cultural. The catastrophe of the war, far from exorcizing the fantasies, seemed to confirm them. And now here was Germany, noble, helpless and suffering, stricken in defeat and jeeringly tormented by cosmopolitan riff-raff who appeared to control all access to the platforms of the arts and, by secret conspiracy, were systematically replacing German
Kultur
by their own, accursed
Zivtlisation.
The grievance was increasingly resented throughout the 1920s and strikingly summed up in a book called
Kurfürstendamm
written by Friedrich Hussong, and published a few weeks after the Nazis came to power:

A miracle has taken place. They are no longer here …. They claimed they were the German
Geist
, German culture, the German present and future. They represented Germany to the world, they spoke in its name …. Everything else was mistaken, inferior, regrettable kitsch, odious philistinism …. They always sat in the front row. They awarded knighthoods of the spirit and of Europeanism. What they did not permit did not exist…. They ‘made’ themselves and others. Whoever served them was sure to succeed. He appeared on their stages, wrote in their journals, was advertised all over the world; his commodity was recommended whether it was cheese or relativity, powder or
Zeittheater
, patent medicines or human rights, democracy or bolshevism, propaganda for abortion or against the legal system, rotten Negro music or dancing in the nude. In brief, there never was a more impudent dictatorship than that of the democratic intelligentsia and the
Zivilisations-literaten.
²⁸

Of course underlying and reinforcing the paranoia was the belief that Weimar culture was inspired and controlled by Jews. Indeed, was not the entire regime a
Judenrepublik?
There was very little basis for this last doxology, resting as it did on the contradictory theories that Jews dominated both Bolshevism and the international capitalist network. The Jews, it is true, had been prominent in the first Communist movements. But in Russia they lost ground steadily once the Bolsheviks came to power, and by 1925 the regime was already anti-Semitic. In Germany also the Jews, though instrumental in creating the Communist Party (
KPD
), were quickly weeded out once it was organized as a mass party. By the 1932 elections, when it put up 500 candidates, not one was Jewish.
²⁹
Nor, at the other end of the spectrum, were the Jews particularly important in German finance and industry. The belief rested on-the mysterious connection between Bismarck and his financial adviser, Gerson von Bleichröder, the Jew who organized the Rothschilds and other banking houses to provide the finance for Germany’s wars.
³⁰
But in the 1920s Jews were rarely involved in government finance. Jewish businessmen kept out of politics. Big business was represented by Alfred Hugenberg and the German Nationalist People’s Party, which was anti-Semitic. Jews were very active at the foundation of Weimar, but after 1920 one of the few Jews to hold high office was Walther Rathenau and he was murdered two years later.

In culture however it was a different matter. There is nothing more galling than a cultural tyranny, real or imaginary, and in Weimar culture ‘they’ could plausibly be identified with the Jews. The most hated of them, Tucholsky, was a Jew. So were other important critics and opinion formers, like Maximilian Harden, Theodor Wolff, Theodor Lessing, Ernst Bloch and Felix Salten. Nearly all the best film-directors were Jewish, and about half the most successful playwrights, such as Sternheim and Schnitzler. The Jews were dominant in light entertainment and still more in theatre criticism, a very sore point among the Easterners. There were many brilliant and much publicized Jewish performers: Elizabeth Bergner, Erna Sack, Peter Lorre, Richard Tauber, Conrad Veidt and Fritz Kortner, for instance. Jews owned important newspapers, such as Frankfurt’s
Zeitung
, the
Berliner Tageblatt
and the
Vossiscbe Zeitung.
They ran the most influential art galleries. They were particularly strong in publishing, which (next to big city department stores) was probably the area of commerce in which Jews came closest to predominance. The best liberal publishers, such as Malik Verlag, Kurt Wolff, the
Cassirers, Georg Bondi, Erich Reiss and S. Fischer, were owned or run by Jews. There were a number of prominent and highly successful Jewish novelists: Hermann Broch, Alfred Döblin, Franz Werfel, Arnold Zweig, Vicki Baum, Lion Feuchtwanger, Bruno Frank, Alfred Neumann and Ernst Weiss, as well as Franz Kafka, whom the intelligentsia rated alongside Proust and Joyce and who was an object of peculiar detestation among the Easterners. In every department of the arts, be it architecture, sculpture, painting or music, where change had been most sudden and repugnant to conservative tastes, Jews had been active in the transformation, though rarely in control. The one exception, perhaps, was music, where Schoenberg was accused of ‘assassinating’ the German tradition; but even here, his far more successful and innovatory pupil, Berg, was an Aryan Catholic. However, it is undoubtedly true to say that Weimar culture would have been quite different, and infinitely poorer, without its Jewish element, and there was certainly enough evidence to make a theory of Jewish cultural conspiracy seem plausible.
³¹

This was the principal reason why anti-Semitism made such astonishing headway in Weimar Germany. Until the Republic, anti-Semitism was not a disease to which Germany was thought to be especially prone. Russia was the land of the pogrom; Paris was the city of the anti-Semitic intelligentsia. Anti-Semitism seems to have made its appearance in Germany in the 1870s and 1880s, at a time when the determinist type of social philosopher was using Darwin’s principle of Natural Selection to evolve ‘laws’ to explain the colossal changes brought about by industrialism, the rise of megalopolis and the alienation of huge, rootless proletariats. Christianity was content with a solitary hate-figure to explain evil: Satan. But modern secular faiths needed human devils, and whole categories of them. The enemy, to be plausible, had to be an entire class or race.

Marx’s invention of the ‘bourgeoisie’ was the most comprehensive of these hate-theories and it has continued to provide a foundation for all paranoid revolutionary movements, whether fascist-nationalist or Communist-internationalist. Modern theoretical anti-Semitism was a derivative of Marxism, involving a selection (for reasons of national, political or economic convenience) of a particular section of the bourgeoisie as the subject of attack. It was a more obviously emotional matter than analysis purely by class, which is why Lenin used the slogan that ‘Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools’. But in terms of rationality there was little to choose between the two. Lenin was saying, in effect, that it was the entire bourgeoisie, not just Jewry, which was to blame for the ills of mankind. And it is significant that all Marxist regimes, based as they are on paranoid explanations of human behaviour, degenerate
sooner or later into anti-Semitism. The new anti-Semitism, in short, was part of the sinister drift away from the apportionment of individual responsibility towards the notion of collective guilt – the revival, in modern guise, of one of the most primitive and barbarous, even bestial, of instincts. It is very curious that, when the new anti-Semitism made its appearance in Germany, among those who attacked it was Nietzsche, always on the lookout for secular, pseudo-rational substitutes for the genuine religious impulse. He denounced ‘these latest speculators in idealism, the anti-Semites … who endeavour to stir up all the bovine elements of the nation by a misuse of that cheapest of propaganda tricks, a moral attitude.’
³²

But if modern anti-Semitism was by no means a specifically German phenomenon, there were powerful forces which favoured its growth there. The modern German nation was, in one sense, the creation of Prussian militarism. In another, it was the national expression of the German romantic movement, with its stress upon the
Volk
, its mythology and its natural setting in the German landscape, especially its dark, mysterious forests. The German
Volk
movement dated from Napoleonic times and was burning ‘alien’ and ‘foreign’ books, which corrupted ‘
Volk
culture’, as early as 1817. Indeed it was from the
Volk
movement that Marx took his concept of ‘alienation’ in industrial capitalism. A
Volk
had a soul, which was derived from its natural habitat. As the historical novelist Otto Gemlin put it, in an article in
Die Tat
, organ of the Volk-romantic movement, ‘For each people and each race, the countryside becomes its own peculiar landscape’.
³³
If the landscape was destroyed, or the
Volk
divorced from it, the soul dies. The Jews were not a
Volk
because they had lost their soul: they lacked ‘rootedness’. This contrast was worked out with great ingenuity by a Bavarian professor of antiquities, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, in a series of volumes called
Land und Leute (Places and People)
, published in the 1850s and 1860s.
³⁴
The true basis of the
Volk
was the peasant. There could of course be workers, but they had to be ‘artisans’, organized in local guilds. The proletariat, on the other hand, was the creation of the Jews. Having no landscape of their own, they destroyed that of others, causing millions of people to be uprooted and herded into giant cities, the nearest they possessed to a ‘landscape’ of their own. ‘The dominance of the big city’, wrote Riehl, ‘will be the equivalent to the dominance of the proletariat’; moreover, the big cities would link hands across the world, forming a ‘world bourgeois’ and a ‘world proletariat’ conspiring to destroy everything that had a soul, was ‘natural’, especially the German landscape and its peasantry.
³⁵

The
Volk
movement spawned a crop of anti-Semitic ‘peasant’ novels, of which the most notorious was Herman Löns’s
Der Wehrwolf
(1910), set in the Thirty Years’ War, and showing the
peasants turning on their oppressors from the towns like wolves: ‘What meaning does civilization have? A thin veneer beneath which nature courses, waiting until a crack appears and it can burst into the open.’ ‘Cities are the tomb of Germanism.’ ‘Berlin is the domain of the Jews.’ Jews functioned among the peasants as money-lenders, cattle-dealers and middlemen, and the first organized political anti-Semitism surfaced in the peasant parties and the
Bund der Landwirte
, or Farmers’ Union. Hitler was an avid reader of ‘peasant novels’, especially the works of Dieter Eckhart, who adapted
Peer Gynt
into German, and of Wilhelm von Polenz, who also identified the Jews with the cruelty and alienation of modern industrial society.