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The Glitter and Angst of Berlin

1. 37.1 How did artists critique life in Berlin in the 1920s?

At the end of World War I, the Weimar Republic became successor to the German Empire, with Berlin remaining as its capital (map 37.1). Two years later, in 1920, the Greater Berlin Act united numerous suburbs, villages, and estates around Berlin into a greatly expanded city with Berlin as its administrative center. The population of the expanded city was around 4 million. As a result, Berlin was Germany’s largest city. It was the center not only of German cultural and intellectual life but also that of Eastern Europe, a city to which artists and writers were drawn by the very liberalism and collapse of traditional values that Stefan Zweig bemoaned. The poet and playwright Carl Zuckmeyer (1896–1977) described the decadent glitter of the city’s brothels and nightclubs in sexually frank terms:

People discussed Berlin … as if Berlin were a highly desirable woman, whose coldness and capriciousness were widely known; the less chance anyone had to win her, the more they decried her. We called her proud, snobbish, nouveau riche, uncultured, crude. But secretly everyone looked upon her as the goal of their desires. Some saw her as hefty, full-breasted, in lace underwear, others as a mere wisp of a thing, with boyish legs in black silk stockings. The daring saw both aspects, and her very capacity for cruelty made them the more aggressive. All wanted to have her, she enticed all.

Here was a city of pleasures that one could not resist, yet its attractions were informed by a deeply political conscience. German communists shuttled back and forth between Moscow and Berlin, bringing with them Lenin’s views on culture (see Chapter 35). They scoffed at the politics of the Weimar Republic, which seemed farcical to them. (In the 15 years of its life, there were 17 different governments as the economy plunged into chaos.) Political street fights were common. In Berlin, artists and intellectuals, workers and businessmen wandered through a maze of competing political possibilities—all of them more or less strident.

The painter Georg Grosz (1893–1959) would parody this world in his 1926 The Pillars of Society (fig. 37.2). The title refers to three major divisions of society: the military, the clergy, and above all, the middle class. All varieties of German politics are Grosz’s target. Standing at the bar, sword in one hand, beer in the other, is a middle-class National Socialist (identifiable by the swastika on his tie), a warhorse rising out of his open skull. Behind him, the German flag in his hand, is a Social Democrat, his skull likewise open, displaying his party’s slogan—“Socialism is work”—as he stands idly at the bar. Beside him is a journalist, chamberpot on his head, quill and pencil in hand, apparently ready to demonstrate to the National Socialist that the pen is mightier than the sword. A clergyman, his eyes closed, turns as if in praise of the fiery streets visible out the door even as soldiers commit violence behind his back. Grosz’s vision is of a society at the edge of chaos and doom, led by brainless politicians, incompetent journalists, an angry middle class, a blind clergy, and a vindictive military. Such a vision, shared by many, created a certain feeling of angst in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany, a feeling of nervous anxiety and dread that would manifest itself in fiction, the theater, and the arts.

Kafka’s Nightmare Worlds

One of the many Eastern Europeans drawn to Berlin—perhaps for its angst as well as its glitter—was the Jewish Czech-born author Franz Kafka (1883–1924), who wrote in German. He came to Berlin in 1923 only to leave a year later, just before dying from complications of tuberculosis. His fellow Prague native and friend Max Brod (1884–1968) made sure that Kafka’s unpublished works found their way to press in Germany.

Kafka was something of a tortured soul, and the characters in his works of fiction typically find themselves caught in inexplicable circumstances that bear all the markings of their own neuroses. Berliners identified with these characters immediately. His novel The Trial, left unfinished but published in Berlin in 1925, opens with this sentence: “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.” The story is at once an indictment of modern bureaucracy and a classic study in paranoia. Never informed of what he has been accused, Josef K. can only address the empty court with a virtually paranoid sense of his own impotence (Reading 37.1):

READING 37.1

from Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925)

There can be no doubt that behind all the actions of this court of justice, that is to say in my case, behind my arrest and today’s interrogation, there is a great organization at work. An organization which not only employs corrupt warders, oafish Inspectors, and Examining Magistrates of whom the best that can be said is that they recognize their own limitations, but also has at its disposal a judicial hierarchy of high, indeed of the highest rank, with an indispensable and numerous retinue of servants, clerks, police, and other assistants, perhaps even hangmen, I do not shrink from that word. And the significance of this great organization, gentlemen? It consists in this, that innocent persons are accused of guilt, and senseless proceedings are put in motion against them.

Embodied in this excerpt and in the entire novel is the clash between state politics and individual liberty that fueled Berlin life.

In Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis, first published in 1915—one of the few works he published during his lifetime—Gregor Samsa similarly awakes to a stunning predicament: Overnight he has been transformed into a gigantic insect. The story is narrated in a direct, matter-of-fact style that seems at odds with its fantastic plot. While Kafka never questions the fact of Samsa’s transformation, which leads inevitably to his death, we as readers understand that the story is something of a parable for the modern individual’s alienation from his or her own humanity, as well as from society. The story’s opening paragraphs are given here (Reading 37.2).

READING 37.2 from Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (1915)

Gregor’s predicament is not unlike that of a person suffering from a severe disability, but it also suggests the deep-seated sense of alienation of the modern consciousness. For Gregor’s metamorphosis is inexplicable and unexplained. It is simply his condition: dreadful, doomed, and oddly funny—a condition with which many in Berlin identified. Brecht and the Berlin Stage

In 1924, Bertolt Brecht (1898–1954), a young playwright from Munich, arrived in Berlin. He had already achieved a certain level of fame among intellectuals of his own generation for his deeply cynical and nihilistic play Drums in the Night (1918). It is the story of a young woman, Anna Balicke, who believes her love, Andreas, has died in the war and who is about to marry a wealthy war materials manufacturer when Andreas returns. It encapsulates the feelings of a generation of soldiers who felt that they had fought for nothing while a greedy older generation profited from their sacrifice.

Drums in the Night is set against the backdrop of the communist-inspired Spartakusbund (“Spartacus League”) uprising of January 1919 in Germany. (The bund took its name from Spartacus, leader of the largest slave rebellion in the Roman Republic.) It was the last act of a postwar revolution that had begun the previous November when sailors in the German navy refused to sacrifice themselves in a pointless final battle with the British Royal Navy. Quickly supported by workers across Germany, the league protested in the streets under the slogan, “Frieden” und “Brot” (“Peace” and “Bread”). So massive was the protest that it forced Kaiser Wilhelm II to abdicate in favor of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) under the leadership of Friedrich Ebert (1871–1925). But when 500,000 people surged into the streets of Berlin on January 7, 1919, occupying buildings, Ebert ordered the anti-Republican paramilitary organization known as the Freikorps, which had kept its weapons and equipment after the war, to attack the workers. The Freikorps quickly retook the city, killing many workers and innocent civilians even as they tried to surrender.

These events inspired Brecht to turn to Marxism, which he began to study intensely. The first major hit to result from this study was a collaboration with composer Kurt Weill (1900–50) on the “scenic cantata” Mahagonny-Songspiel, which premiered in Baden Baden in 1927. Consisting of a series of songs, taking earlier Brecht poems for their lyrics, the success of the 40-minute musical paved the way for a much larger production the next year in Berlin of The Threepenny Opera, an updating of John Gay’s eighteenth-century play The Beggar’s Opera (see discussion of opera in Chapter 25). When it premiered at Berlin’s Schiffbauerdamm Theater in 1928, The Threepenny Opera was a huge success. It is not, in fact, an opera but a work of musical theater focusing on the working class of Victorian London, who are as organized and well connected in their shady businesses as any bourgeois banker or corporation president. Its hero, Macheath, or Mackie Messer (Mack the Knife), is a criminal sentenced to hang at the instigation of his lover Polly’s father, Mr. Peachum, an entrepreneur of the crassest kind. Mr. Peachum is boss of London’s beggars, whom he equips and trains in return for a cut of whatever they can beg. At the last moment Macheath is unexpectedly saved by a royal pardon and is granted a castle and a pension as an unjust reward for his life of crime.

The play is Brecht’s socialist critique of capitalism, but aside from its political message, it embodies a revolutionary approach to theater based on alienation. It rejects the traditional relationship between play and audience, in which the viewer is invited to identify with the plight of the main character and imaginatively enter the world of the play’s illusion. Brecht wanted his audience to maintain a detached relationship with the characters in the play and to view them critically. He believed they should always be aware that they were watching a play, not real life. Brecht called his new approach to the stage epic theater , which he later explained as follows (Reading 37.3):

READING 37.3

from Bertolt Brecht, “Theater for Pleasure or Theater for Imagination” (ca. 1935)

The spectator was no longer in any way allowed to submit to an experience uncritically (and without practical consequences) by means of simple empathy with the characters in a play. The production took the subject matter and the incidents shown and put them through a process of alienation: the alienation that is necessary to all understanding. When something seems “the most obvious thing in the world” it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up.

What is “natural” must have the force of what is startling. This is the only way to expose the laws of cause and effect. People’s activity must simultaneously be so and be capable of being different.

It was all a great change.

The dramatic theater’s spectator says: Yes, I have felt like that too—Just like me—It’s only natural—It’ll never change—The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are inescapable—That’s great art; it all seems the most obvious thing in the world— I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh.

The epic theater’s spectator says: I’d never have thought it—That’s not the way—That’s extraordinary, hardly believable—It’s got to stop—The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are unnecessary—That’s great art; nothing obvious in it—I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh.

Brecht realizes this alienation effect, as he called it, in many ways. First, the scenes do not flow continuously one to the next; rather, the narrative jumps around. Second, actors make it clear that they are, indeed, acting. Third, there is no curtain; stage sets are visible from the moment the audience enters the theater, and stage machinery is entirely visible. Fourth, although the play’s opening song, “Mack the Knife,” immediately follows the overture in a highly traditional manner, the other songs are purposefully designed to interrupt, not further, the action.

“Mack the Knife,” like the rest of the score, is strongly influenced by what the Germans of the day conceived of as jazz, music largely based on the foxtrot and other popular dance music, with some parodies of “Classical” genres. In fact, the original production specified a 15-piece jazz combo. The play opens, then, with a cabaret number, introduced in the original score by a harmonium, that celebrates the dark underworld of murder and mayhem that lies beneath the surface of London life, jarring its audience out of complacency. Brecht and the Berlin Stage

READING 37.3

from Bertolt Brecht, “Theater for Pleasure or Theater for Imagination” (ca. 1935)

It was all a great change.

“Mack the Knife,” like the rest of the score, is strongly influenced by what the Germans of the day conceived of as jazz, music largely based on the foxtrot and other popular dance music, with some parodies of “Classical” genres. In fact, the original production specified a 15-piece jazz combo. The play opens, then, with a cabaret number, introduced in the original score by a harmonium, that celebrates the dark underworld of murder and mayhem that lies beneath the surface of London life, jarring its audience out of complacency.

The Rise of Fascism

1. 37.2 What forces led to the rise of fascism and how did it affect the arts?

In response to the exciting but disturbing freedom so evident in Berlin’s urban art world and nightlife, European conservatives longed to return to a premodern, essentially rural past. In Germany, bourgeois youth thronged to the Wandervogel (literally, “freebirds” or “hikers”) movement, joining together around campfires in the mountains to play the guitar and sing in an effort to reinvent a lost German romantic ideal. They longed for the sense of order and cultural preeminence that had been destroyed by Germany’s defeat in World War I. They longed to be “whole” again, a longing that to many was geographical as well as psychological because the country had been stripped of the territories of Alsace-Lorraine to the west and Silesia to the east.

Modernity itself, which after all had brought them the war, was their enemy. It was in the city of Weimar, where the nineteenth-century Romantics Goethe and Schiller had lived, that the National Assembly convened to draft a new constitution at the end of World War I, lending the new republic its name even as Berlin remained the German capital (see map 37.1). But the politics of the Weimar Republic were anything but comfortable. As historian Peter Gay has put it, “The hunger for wholeness was awash with hate: the political, and sometimes the private, world of its chief spokesmen was a paranoid world, filled with enemies: the dehumanizing machine, capitalist materialism, godless rationalism, rootless society, cosmopolitan Jews, and that great all-devouring monster, the city.” Out of this hate, the authoritarian political ideology known as fascism was born. Fascism arose across Europe after World War I. It was the manifestation of mass movements that subordinated individual interests to the needs of the state as they sought to forge a sense of national unity based on ethnic, cultural, and, usually, racial identity. The German fascists led the way.

Hitler in Germany

Late in 1923, Adolf Hitler, the son of an Austrian customs official, staged an unsuccessful putsch, or revolt, at a Munich beer hall. In his youth, Hitler had wanted to be an artist and had served in the German army in World War I, where he was awarded the Iron Cross for bravery but never rose above the rank of private. He was strongly affected by the German defeat, which led him to join the National Socialist (Nazi) Party. He was accompanied in his revolt by fellow “storm troopers,” the private soldiers of the Nazi Party noted for their brown shirts and vigilante tactics. Local authorities killed 16 Nazis and arrested Hitler. He used his trial to attract national attention, condemning the Versailles Treaty, Jews, and the national economy, which was suffering from astronomical inflation as paper money became essentially worthless. Convicted and sentenced to five years in jail, he spent the few months that he actually served writing the racist tract Mein Kampf (My Struggle), published in 1925. In it he argued for the superiority of the German race, which he wrongly described as “Aryan” in the belief Western languages and civilizations could be traced back to the same Aryan nomads who invaded India in 1500 bce and that these nomads were themselves descendants of pure, white Nordic stock. In his mind, the Aryan race was distinct, especially, from Semitic peoples (Reading 37.4):

READING 37.4

from Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1925)

Every manifestation of human culture, every product of art, science and technical skill, which we see before our eyes today, is almost exclusively the product of Aryan creative power. … On this planet of ours human culture and civilization are indissolubly bound up with the presence of the Aryan. If he should be exterminated or subjugated, then the dark shroud of a new barbarian era would enfold the earth.

Anti-Semitism

Hitler felt that the forces of modernity, specifically under the leadership of Jewish intellectuals, were determined to exterminate the Aryan race. Fearmongering was the rhetorical bread and butter he used to drive others to his view:

[A] Jewish youth lies in wait for hours on end satanically glaring at and spying on the unconscious girl whom he plans to seduce, adulterating her blood with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate.

The collapse of world economies in the Great Depression, a direct result of the crash of the New York stock market on October 29, 1929, fueled middle-class fears. As far as Hitler was concerned, Jewish economic interests were responsible for the crash. By 1932, more than 6 million Germans were unemployed, and thousands of them joined the Nazi storm troopers. Their ranks rose from 100,000 in 1930 to over 1 million in 1933.

Artists and intellectuals responded to this anti-Semitic challenge. Some of the most extraordinary examples are the posters of John Heartfield (1891–1968). Heartfield had anglicized his name from Helmut Herzfeld to antagonize Germans who, as a result of World War I, almost reveled in Anglophobia. He had satirized the Weimar Republic from the outset, but he savagely attacked Hitler in political photomontages—collages composed of multiple photographs—many published in the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, a widely distributed workers’ newspaper that had 500,000 readers in 1931. Heartfield clearly understood the ability of photomontage to bring together images of a vastly different scale in a single work with an immense impact. In Der Sinn des Hitlergrusses: Kleiner Mann bittet um große Gaben. Motto: Millionen stehen hinter mir! (The Meaning of the Hitler Salute: Little Man Asks for Big Gifts. Motto: Millions Stand Behind Me!), Heartfield exposes Hitler’s reliance on fat, wealthy German industrialists—whom the readers of Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung despised— suggesting that the famous Nazi salute is, in reality, a plea for money (fig. 37.4).

Fig. 37.4

John Heartfield, DER SINN DES HITLERGRUSSES: KLEINER MANN BITTET UM GROßE GABEN. MOTTO: MILLIONEN STEHEN HINTER MIR!

(Title translated: THE MEANING OF THE HITLER SALUTE: LITTLE MAN ASKS FOR BIG GIFTS. MOTTO: MILLIONS STAND BEHIND ME!) 1932. Photo-mechanical reproduction. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1987.1125.8).

After the National Socialists took power in 1933, Heartfield fled to Czechoslovakia, where he continued to create photomontages for Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung. He did not return to Germany until after World War II.

Many workers were sympathetic to communism. But if they were initially leery of Hitler, enough of them had been won over by the end of January 1933 to elect him Chancellor (prime minister) of Germany. This election ended the Weimar Republic and inaugurated the Third Reich (1933–45), Hitler’s name for the totalitarian and nationalistic dictatorship he led. When, on February 27, 1933, a mentally ill Dutch communist set fire to the Reichstag, the seat of the German government in Berlin, Hitler invoked an act that had been written into the original Weimar Constitution, allowing the president to rule by decree in an emergency. (He convinced the president to sign the decree.) By the next day, he had arrested 4,000 members of the Communist Party. Communism was, after all, the creation of yet another German Jew, Karl Marx. So, from Hitler’s paranoid point of view, the destruction of the German state was part and parcel of communism’s international conspiracy.

The Nazis urged German citizens to boycott Jewish businesses, and they expelled Jews from the civil service. Finally, in September 1935, with the passage of the so-called Nuremberg Laws, anti-Semitism became official German policy. A Jew was defined as anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent, and any such person had his or her German citizenship revoked. Intermarriage and extramarital relationships between Jews and non-Jews were forbidden. Jews were prohibited from writing, publishing, making art, giving concerts, acting on stage or screen, teaching, working in a bank or hospital, and selling books. In this atmosphere of hatred, it is little wonder that, in November 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish boy of 17, would take it upon himself to kill the secretary of the German embassy in Paris, driven mad by the persecution of his parents in Germany. And it is even less wonder that mobs throughout Germany and parts of Austria, egged on by the Nazis, responded, on what has become known as the Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”), by burning and looting Jewish shops and synagogues, invading Jews’ homes, beating them, and stealing their possessions.

The Bauhaus and De Stijl

The impact on the arts of Hitler’s rise to power is nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in the history of the Bauhaus (from the German verb bauen, “to build”), the art school created by architect Walter Gropius (1883–1969) in Weimar in 1919. Its aim, as Gropius wrote in the Bauhaus manifesto, was to

conceive and create the new building of the future, which will combine everything—architecture and sculpture and painting—in a single form which will one day rise towards the heavens from the hand of a million workers as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith.

To this end, Gropius recruited the most outstanding faculty he could find. Among them were the Expressionist painters Wassily Kandinsky (see Chapter 34) and Paul Klee (1879–1940), the designer and architect Marcel Breuer (1902–81), the painter and color theorist Josef Albers (1888–1976), the graphic designer Herbert Bayer (1900–85), and later the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969).

The Bauhaus aesthetic drew on developments from across Europe—the Cubism of Picasso and Braque (see Chapter 34), the geometric simplicity of Kasimir Malevich and the Russian Constructivists (see Chapter 35), and especially the Dutch Modernist movement known as De Stijl, literally “the style.”

The De Stijl movement was led by the painter Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) and the architect, painter, and theorist Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931), who sought to create a new, “purely plastic work of art” of total abstraction. It completely rejected literal reality as experienced by the senses. Instead it reduced creative terms to the bare minimum: the straight line, the right angle, the three primary colors (red, yellow, and blue), and the three basic noncolors (black, gray, and white). Mondrian believed that the grid, a network of regularly spaced lines that cross one another at right angles, represented a cosmic interaction between the masculine and spiritual (vertical) and the feminine and material (horizontal). By the early 1920s, he had extended this belief to include a color/noncolor interaction. More important, he eliminated the traditional figure/ground relation of representational painting, where the blank white canvas is considered the painting’s “ground.” In Van Doesburg’s cover for one of a series of books published by the Bauhaus in the late 1920s (fig. 37.5), modeled after many of Mondrian’s paintings of the period, the white square and rectangle at the bottom appear to be on exactly the same plane as the colored planes above them.

Fig. 37.5

Theo van Doesburg, COVER OF GRUNDBEGRIFFE DER NEUEN GESTALTENDEN KUNST

(Title translated: BASIC CONCEPTS OF THE NEW CREATIVE ART). Sixth in a series of Bauhaus books, published 1925–30. Color lithograph. Private collection.

According to Mondrian, “each thing represents the whole on a smaller scale; the structure of the microcosm resembles that of the macrocosm.” This book cover, then, is meant to suggest the structure of what Mondrian called the “Great Whole.”

Credit: Private Collection/Joerg Hejkal/Bridgeman Images

Like the Bauhaus theorists, and despite his own interest in painting, Mondrian claimed that the culmination of art rested in architecture. The principles of De Stijl, he wrote, govern “the interior as well as the exterior of the building.” Gerrit Rietveld’s Schröder House, built in Utrecht, Holland, in 1924, has been called “a cardboard Mondrian” (fig. 37.6). To a certain extent this is true, but in other ways it is the exact opposite of his dogmatically flat canvasses, as if Mondrian’s surface has been stretched out into three-dimensional space. The house is a cubelike form interrupted by the planar projections of its interior walls. All the walls of the upper floor can be removed, sliding back into recesses and transforming a series of small rooms into a single space (fig. 37.7). In other words, the space is fluid and open, waiting to be composed by its inhabitants. Built-in and movable furniture of Rietveld’s design is geometric and abstract in concept. The predominant colors are white and gray, highlighted by selective use of primary colors and black lines. According to Van Doesburg, it demonstrated that “the work of art is a metaphor of the universe obtained with artistic means.”

Fig. 37.6

Gerrit Rietveld, SCHRÖDER HOUSE

Utrecht, the Netherlands. 1924.

Credit: VIEW Pictures Ltd/Alamy

Fig. 37.7

Gerrit Rietveld, INTERIOR, SCHRÖDER HOUSE, WITH “RED-BLUE” CHAIR

Utrecht, the Netherlands. 1924.

Rietveld explained the openness of the top floor, seen above: “It was of course extremely difficult to achieve all this in spite of the building regulations and that’s why the interior of the downstairs part of the house is somewhat traditional, I mean with fixed walls. But upstairs we simply called it an ‘attic’ and that’s where we actually made the house we wanted.” Note the famous Red-Blue Chair, designed by Rietveld in 1918, when he was still working as a cabinetmaker.

L’Esprit Nouveau and the Rise of the International Style

Equally influential was the architecture of Frenchman Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (1887–1965), known as Le Corbusier, who founded the magazine and movement known as L’Esprit Nouveau (“The New Spirit”) after World War I. Le Corbusier’s importance rested on his belief in the possibility of creating low-cost, easily replicable, but essentially superior housing for everyone. In order to cope with the massive destruction of property in the war, Le Corbusier proposed what he called the “domino” system of architecture (fig. 37.8), a basic building prototype for mass production and apartment living that he would continue to develop well into the 1950s (see Continuing Presence of the Past, below). The structural frame of this building was of reinforced concrete supported by steel pillars. The lack of supporting walls turned the interior into an open, free-flowing, and highly adaptable space that could serve as a dwelling for a single family or be replicated again and again to form apartment units or industrial and office space. In a 1923 article called “Five Points of a New Architecture,” Le Corbusier insisted that (1) the house should be raised on columns to provide for privacy, with only an entrance on the ground level; (2) it should have a flat roof, to be used as a roof garden; (3) it should have an open floor plan; (4) the exterior curtain walls should be freely composed; and (5) the windows should be horizontal ribbons of glass.

Calling his homes “machines for living in,” Le Corbusier employed those five principles to design the Villa Savoye in Poissy, France, west of Paris (fig. 37.9). The entry is set back, beneath the main living space on the second floor, which is supported by steel columns. Rounded windbreaks shelter a roof garden. The combination of rectangle, square, and circle creates a sense of geometric simplicity. As Le Corbusier had put it in his 1925 Towards a New Architecture: “Primary forms are beautiful forms because they can be clearly appreciatedThis is the new architecture Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and Philip Johnson labeled the International Style in the same 1932 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in which they had included the work of Frank Lloyd Wright (see Chapter 36). The show also featured the work of Le Corbusier and two Bauhaus architects, Gropius and Mies van der Rohe.

Nazi pressure had forced the Bauhaus out of Weimar in 1925, when the community withdrew its financial support due to the school’s perceived leftist bent. The school moved to Dessau, closer to Berlin, where Gropius designed a new building (fig. 37.10). Although its look is familiar enough today—an indication of just how influential it would become—the building was revolutionary at the time. It was essentially a skeleton of reinforced concrete with a skin of transparent glass. As Gropius himself explained:

One of the outstanding achievements of the new constructional technique has been the abolition of the separating function of the wall. Instead of making the walls the element of support, as in a brick-built house, our new space-saving construction transfers the whole load of the structure to a steel or concrete framework. Thus the role of the walls becomes restricted to that of mere screens stretched between the upright columns of this framework to keep out rain, cold, and noise. … This, in turn, naturally leads to a progressively bolder (i.e. wider) opening up of the wall surfaces, which allows rooms to be much better lit. It is, therefore, only logical that the old type of window—a hole that had to be hollowed out of the full thickness of a supporting wall—should be giving place more and more to the continuous horizontal casement, subdivided by thin steel mullions, characteristic of the New Architecture.

.” Gropius stepped down as director of the Bauhaus in 1928. He was replaced by Hannes Meyer, a communist architect who saw nothing wrong with teaching Marxist doctrine in the classroom and who deemphasized fine art in favor of functional goods to benefit the working class. Meyer’s communist politics made the Bauhaus an easy target for the Nazis. Even after Mies van der Rohe replaced Meyer in 1930, the Nazis proposed demolishing Gropius’s “decadently modern” building. Although the plan was rejected, the school in Dessau was closed in October 1932 and then reopened by Mies in Berlin as a private institution. Finally, on April 11, 1933, Gestapo (secret state police) trucks appeared at the door. They padlocked the school, and it never reopened. The Degenerate Art Exhibition

To the Nazis, the Bauhaus represented everything that was wrong with modernism—its inspiration by foreigners (especially Russians such as Kandinsky), its rejection of traditional values, and its willingness to “taint” art with (leftist) politics. Between the Bauhaus’s closing and 1937, virtually all avant-garde artists in Germany were removed from teaching positions and their works confiscated by the state. On July 19, 1937, many of these same works were among the over 600 displayed in the exhibition of Degenerate Art in Munich, organized at Hitler’s insistence to demonstrate the mental and moral degeneracy of modernist art. Over 2 million people—nearly 20,000 a day—visited the show before it closed in November, and it traveled to other German cities for three years.

In the first room, religious art was chosen that, according to the catalog, illustrated the “insolent mockery of the Divine” that had been championed by the Weimar Republic. It featured a nine-painting cycle by Emile Nolde (see Chapter 34), who was, ironically, a member of the Nazi Party and so believed himself to be immune from persecution. In the second gallery, Jewish art was pilloried. In the third gallery, Dada and abstract painting were attacked, and Expressionist nudes were labeled “An insult to German womanhood.” In another gallery, Expressionist still lifes were introduced as “Nature as seen by sick minds.” After the exhibition, the Commission for the Disposal of Products of Degenerate Art arranged for those pieces with the highest value in the international art market to be sold at auction in Lucerne, Switzerland. However, most of the confiscated works—1,004 oil paintings and 3,825 works on paper—were burned in the yard of the Berlin Fire Brigade on March 20, 1939.

The Art of Propaganda

The Degenerate Art show was carefully calculated to create public outrage. It coincided with the first of eight Great German Art exhibitions, which opened the day before, on July 18, 1937. Hitler spoke for an hour and a half on the nature and function of art. A pageant with more than 6,000 participants depicting 2,000 years of German culture followed the speech. It was all part of a concentrated effort by the Nazis to control culture by controlling what people saw and heard.

Radio played an enormous role. The Nazis understood that radio was replacing the newspaper as the primary means of mass communication. Since they controlled all German radio stations, they could make effective use of it. Addressing a group of German broadcasters, Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945), Hitler’s Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, emphasized the medium’s importance:

I consider radio to be the most modern and the most crucial instrument that exists for influencing the masses. I also believe—one should not say that out loud—that radio will in the end replace the press. … First principle: At all costs avoid being boring. I put that before everything. … The correct attitudes must be conveyed but that does not mean they must be boring. … By means of this instrument you are the creators of public opinion. If you carry this out well we shall win over the people and if you do it badly in the end the people will once more desert us.

Hitler’s extraordinary oratorical skills were perfectly suited to the radio. Loudspeakers were set up throughout the nation so that everyone might hear his broadcasts. “Without the loudspeaker,” Hitler wrote in 1938, “we would never have conquered Germany.”

Film was likewise understood to be an important propaganda tool. In 1933, Hitler invited the talented director Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003) to make a film of the 1934 Nazi rally in Nuremberg, providing her with a staff of more than 100 people, 30 cameras, special elevators, ramps, and tracks. The result was Triumph of the Will, a film that does not so much politicize art as aestheticize politics. Riefenstahl portrays Hitler as at once hero and father figure, lending him and his Nazi Party a sense of grandeur and magnificence. March music dominates the score. The regularity of its beat mirrors the regularity and order of Hitler’s storm troopers and suggests military strength and the order and stability that the Nazi regime promised to bring to the German people.

With Hitler’s approval, Riefenstahl was appointed by the International Olympic Committee to film the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Her two-part film, Olympia, was less political than Triumph of the Will and emphasized the beauty of the human body—albeit, decidedly white and “Aryan” human bodies. For the Games, Hitler inaugurated the tradition of runners carrying the Olympic torch from Athens to the Olympic venue, suggesting that Hitler’s Germany was the modern successor to Classical Greece, and Riefenstahl’s film begins with a 20-minute prelude filmed at the Parthenon and featuring Greek sculptures of original Olympic athletes which she then transforms, through montage, into live bodies both male and female—all of them nearly nude (fig. 37.11). The film was designed to demonstrate that Germans were, first and foremost, a beautiful people, but also fair and friendly competitors capable of cheering even the black American runner, Jesse Owens. Hitler, of course, hoped that German athletes would win many prizes, thus demonstrating Aryan superiority.

Fig. 37.11

Leni Riefenstahl, STILL FROM OLYMPIA

1936.

Riefenstahl herself appeared briefly nude in the film among a group of nude dancers on a beach on the Baltic Sea.

Credit: akg-images

Stalin in Russia

Nazism was not the only totalitarian ideology to achieve political power in the aftermath of World War I. The consolidation of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia after World War I produced the longest-lasting totalitarian government. In the power vacuum that followed Lenin’s death in 1924, two factions emerged in the Communist Party. Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) led one of them and Joseph Stalin (1878–1953) headed the other. Their rivalry took the form of a debate over the speed of industrialization of the Russian economy. Trotsky’s faction favored rapid industrialization through the collectivization of agriculture; Stalin’s faction pressed for relatively slow industrialization and the continuation of Lenin’s tolerance of a modest degree of free enterprise in which peasant farmers were allowed to sell their produce for profit. Stalin was a master at manipulating the party bureaucracy, and by 1927, he had succeeded in expelling Trotsky from the party and sending him into exile, first to Siberia and then later to Mexico. Trotsky was murdered in Mexico in 1940, probably by one of Stalin’s agents.

The Collectivization of Agriculture

Once Stalin took power, he behaved very much the way Trotsky had advocated. In 1928, he decided to collectivize agriculture, consolidating individual land holdings into cooperative farms under the control of the government. This alleviated food shortages in the cities, produced enough for export, and freed the peasant labor force for work in the factories. At the same time, he inaugurated a series of five-year plans for the rapid industrialization of the economy. Finally, he accepted Trotsky’s position that terror was a necessity of revolution. Stalin blamed the few prosperous peasant farmers, or kulaks , for the economic ills of the country.

The kulaks represented less than 5 percent of the rural population, but they did not want to collectivize and were unhappy that there were so few goods to purchase with their cash. In protest, they withheld grain from the market. “Now,” Stalin proclaimed, “we are able to carry on a determined offensive against the kulaks, to break their resistance, to eliminate them as a class.” Before long, anyone who opposed Stalin was considered a kulak, and between 1929 and 1933, his regime killed as many as 10 million peasants and sent millions of others to forced labor on collective farms and gulags , labor camps. The peasants retaliated by killing over 100 million horses and cattle, causing a severe meat shortage. But Stalin persevered, not least of all because his plan for rapid industrialization was working. Soviet industrial production rose 400 percent between 1928 and 1940, making Russia’s economy by far the fastest-growing in the world at the time.

The Rise of Social Realism in Art and Music

Stalin’s five-year economic plans were supported by a series of propaganda posters that appeared across the country, such as The Development of Transportation, The Five-Year Plan by Gustav Klucis (1895–1944) (fig. 37.12). Klucis’s poster is an example of social realism, the style of Russian art that followed Constructivism in the early 1920s (see Chapter 35). Klucis was himself a Constructivist, but like his fellow Constructivists, he was drawn to the necessity of communicating clearly with the largely illiterate peasant class. So he, like they, turned to graphic design and photomontage, a technique that seemed at once modern and Realist in the tradition of the great Russian Realists of the nineteenth century, especially the revered Travelers (see Chapter 31). In doing so, he sacrificed abstraction in favor of an unwavering political commitment.

As early as 1921, the Soviet government had urged Russian artists to give up their avant-garde experiments on the grounds that abstraction was unintelligible to the masses. Other groups argued that it was necessary to concentrate on themes such as the daily life of the workers and the peasants. By 1934, the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers officially proclaimed all expressions of “modernism” decadent and called upon Soviet artists to create “a true, historically concrete portrayal of reality in its revolutionary development.” Social realism was from that time on the official state style, and in literature, music, and the visual arts, all other styles were banned.

The Soviet authorities brought all musical activities under their control by a decree in 1932 and attacked Russian avant-garde composers in the same way they had attacked artists. They accused Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) and Dimitri Shostakovich (1906–75) of writing music that was “too formalistic” and “too technically complicated”—and thus “alien to the Soviet people.” The party Central Committee pressured both men to apologize publicly for the error of their ways. Prokofiev’s very accessible symphonic fairy tale of 1936, Peter and the Wolf, is most likely an attempt to appease the Soviet authorities. Two years earlier, in 1934, the Soviet press had hailed Shostakovich’s four-act opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District as a model of social realism. The opera was meant to be the first part of a trilogy dealing with Russian womanhood. It featured not only modernist dissonance but also themes of adultery, murder, and suicide. Two years later, in 1936, after Stalin had seen it himself and decided that the themes did not live up to the standards of official Soviet art, the newspaper Pravda condemned it as “Chaos, Not Music,” and the opera was dropped from the repertory. Shostakovich repented by composing his 1937 Symphony No. 5, subtitled “A Soviet Artist’s Response to Just Criticism.”

In its relative lack of dissonance, Symphony No. 5 appeared to conform more closely to the ideals of social realism, but the piece is actually a monument to musical irony. Everything about it is a repudiation of Stalin and the Soviet authorities. The first movement opens with a cry of despair that, after a fairly long development, gives way to a march that is meant to evoke Stalinist authority. The party Central Committee was able to hear this passage as a sign of Shostakovich’s capitulation, but Shostakovich hoped that his audience would understand the goose-stepping march as hopelessly shallow. The third movement is a profound work of mourning. If the Central Committee took it as an apology, Shostakovich meant it as a memorial to those lost in the gulags. The final, fourth movement, overtly a celebration of Soviet triumph, is instead a parody of celebration (Listening Guide 37.1). In his memoirs, smuggled out of Russia after his death, Shostakovich explained what he had in mind:

What exultation could there be? I think it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat. … It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying “Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,” and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, “Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.” What kind of apotheosis is that? You have to be a complete oaf not to hear that.

Some music historians doubt the authenticity of this autobiography, but, in truth, the fourth movement is brassy and bombastic, its chords continually rising into an almost shrill hysteria. About seven minutes into the movement, the percussion beats out the rhythms of a militaristic march, asserting a kind of totalitarian control over the symphony. At the end, the percussion seems almost threatening as it insists on its controlling authority.

Listening Guide 37.1

Dimitri Shostakovich, SYMPHONY NO. 5, FOURTH MOVEMENT

Mussolini in Italy

One of the most important differences between Stalin’s totalitarian state and the totalitarian regimes in the rest of Europe is that the latter all arose out of a vigorously anti-Marxist point of view and fear of the Soviet state. By 1920, the Communist Party in Russia had made it clear that it intended to spread its doctrines across Europe. “The Communist International has declared,” it announced, “a decisive war against the entire bourgeois world.” Such pronouncements nourished a climate of fear among middle-class small-business owners, property owners, and small farmers, which opportunistic leaders could easily exploit.

Italy’s Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) was one such leader. After World War I, Italy was in disarray. Peasants seized uncultivated land, workers went on strike and occupied factories, and many felt that a communist revolution was imminent. In the face of inaction by the government of King Victor Emmanuel III, Mussolini and his followers formed local terrorist squads, called Black Shirts because they always dressed in shirts of that color. These squads beat up and even murdered socialist and communist leaders, attacked strikers and farm workers, and systematically intimidated the political left.

By 1921, Mussolini’s Fascist Party had hundreds of thousands of supporters, and when in October 1922 they marched on Rome, Victor Emmanuel III appointed Mussolini Prime Minister in order to appease them. In November, the king and Parliament granted Mussolini dictatorial powers for one year in order to produce order in the country. By 1926, Mussolini had managed to outlaw all opposition political parties, deny all labor unions the right to strike, and organize major industries into 22 corporations that encompassed the entire economy. Although the king remained nominal ruler, Mussolini had established a single-party totalitarian state, declaring himself Il Duce, “the leader.”

Of all the fascist leaders of Europe, Mussolini was the most supportive of modernist architecture. “In five years’ time,” Mussolini proclaimed in 1925, echoing the popes in the fifteenth century, “Rome must astonish the peoples of the world. It must appear vast, orderly and powerful as it was in the days of Augustus.” It took another ten years for Mussolini’s vision to begin to take shape. In 1936, Mussolini won the right to host the next World Exhibition in Rome, scheduled for 1941, but delayed until 1942 in order to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Mussolini’s rule. The plan was to build a vast fairground outside the city walls above the Tiber on the road to Rome’s port at Ostia. The architect Marcello Piacentini (1881–1960) was asked to coordinate the development of the site, which was envisioned as becoming a permanent new quarter of the city. Piacentini’s plan emphasized the monumental aspects of the new quarter, which came to be known as EUR, the acronym of Esposizione Universale Roma, the World Exposition in Rome. Among the first buildings finished was the Palazzo degli Uffici, the “Building of Offices,” the administrative headquarters for the fair (fig. 37.13)—most of the other buildings proposed by Piacentini would not be completed until after World War II. But Piacentini’s sense of what a fascist architecture might be is readily apparent. The EUR district was laid out according to the urban-planning techniques of the Roman Republic, and that sense of order and geometric regularity is repeated in the facade of the Palazzo degli Uffici. The facade itself is travertine, a white limestone chosen to imitate the marble of ancient Rome. The scale is enormous, suggesting the imperial power of the fascist state. Franco in Spain

The fascist ideologies that dominated Germany and Italy spread to Spain by the mid-1930s. Spain was in political turmoil. A free election in 1931 had resulted in a victory for Republican democrats and the declaration of the Second Republic of Spain. Support for the monarchy collapsed, and King Alfonso XIII, who had called for the elections hoping to establish a constitutional monarchy, left the country without abdicating. This gave conservatives the hope that the monarchy might one day be restored. A strong anarchist movement soon developed, however, resulting in major uprisings, strikes—and full jails. In February 1936, the Spanish Popular Front, a coalition of Republicans, communists, and anarchists that promised amnesty to all those previously imprisoned, was elected to office. This dismayed the Falange (“Phalanx”), a right-wing fascist organization with a private army much like Hitler’s, and which had the sympathy of the Spanish army stationed in Morocco. In July, the Falange retaliated, the army in Morocco rebelled, and General Francisco Franco (1892–1975) led it into Spain from Morocco in a coup d’état against the Popular Front government.

In the civil war that ensued, Germany and Italy supported Franco’s right-wing Nationalists, while the Soviet Union and Mexico sent equipment and advisors to the leftist Republicans. The United States remained neutral, but liberals from across Europe and America, including Ernest Hemingway, joined the Republican side, fighting side by side with the Spanish.

Hitler conceived of the conflict as a dress rehearsal for the larger European conflict he was already preparing. He was especially interested in testing the Luftwaffe, his air force. Planes were soon sent on forays across the country in what the German military called “total war,” a war not just between armies but between whole peoples. This allowed for the bombing of civilians, as in the famous incident of Guernica, in the Basque region of Spain, which inspired Spanish-born artist Pablo Picasso to produce a painterly act of searing rage from his base in Paris (see Closer Look).

The Spanish Civil War extended from 1936 to 1939 and tore the country apart (map 37.2). With the help of the Falangists, Franco was able to overcome the Republicans, first capturing Madrid in March 1939 and then, a few weeks later, Barcelona. He ruled Spain in a totalitarian manner until 1975.

Revolution in Mexico

1. 37.3 How did artists respond to the Mexican Revolution?

Armed conflict had begun in Mexico in 1910, when Francisco I. Madero (1873–1913), a respectable upper-class politician, led the overthrow of Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz (1830–1915). In trying to modernize Mexico, Díaz had turned over large landholdings to foreign investors from the United States and Britain to the dismay of many, including Madero. But Madero quickly lost control of events, and Díaz’s supporters soon deposed and executed him. This inaugurated a period of intense bloodshed during which some 900,000 Mexicans (of a population of about 15 million) lost their lives.

Guerrilla groups led in southern Mexico by Emiliano Zapata (1879–1919) and in northern Mexico by Doroteo Arango Arámbula (1878–1923), better known as Pancho Villa, demanded “land, liberty, and justice” for Mexico’s peasant population. Their primary purpose was to give back to the people land that the Díaz government had deeded to foreign investors. Technically, the Mexican Revolution ended in 1921 with the formation of the reformist government of Álvaro Obregón (1880–1928), but bloodshed continued through the 1920s. Zapata and Villa were assassinated, as was Obregón himself. Peace was not finally restored until the administration of Lázaro Cárdenas (1895–1970) in 1934, when the reforms of the 1917 Constitution of Mexico were finally implemented.

The Mexican Mural Movement

The Mexican Revolution fueled a wave of intense nationalism to which artists responded by creating art that, from their point of view, was true to the aspirations of the people of Mexico. When the government initiated a massive building campaign, a new school of muralists arose to decorate these buildings. It was led by Diego Rivera (1886–1957), David Siqueiros (1896–1974), and José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949).

Rivera had lived in Europe from 1907 to 1921, mostly in Paris, where he had developed a Picasso-inspired Cubist technique. But responding to the revolution—and the need to address the Mexican people in clear and concise terms—he transformed his style by using a much more realist and accessible imagery, focused on Mexican political and social life. He shared the style with the other muralists as well. The large fresco Sugar Cane depicts the plight of the Mexican worker before the revolution (fig. 37.14). Armed overseers hired by foreign landowners, including one lounging on a hammock in the shade with his dogs, force the peasants to work. But in the foreground, Rivera celebrates the dignity of the Mexican peasants, as they collect coconuts from a palm. Their rounded forms echo one another to create a feeling of balance and harmony.

From 1930 to 1934, Rivera received a series of commissions in the United States. They included one from Edsel B. Ford and the Detroit Institute of Arts to create a series of frescoes for the museum’s Garden Court on the subject of Detroit Industry, and another from the Rockefellers to create a lobby fresco entitled Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to a New and Better Future for the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center in New York. When Rivera included a portrait of communist leader Lenin in the lobby painting, Nelson A. Rockefeller insisted that he remove it. Rivera refused, and Rockefeller, after paying Rivera his commission, had the painting destroyed.

Rivera reproduced the fresco soon after in Mexico City and called it Man, Controller of the Universe (fig. 37.15). At the center, Man stands below a telescope with a microscope in his hand. Two ellipses of light emanate from him, one depicting the cosmos, the other the microscopic world. Beneath him is the earth, with plants growing in abundance, the products of scientific advancements in agriculture. To the right, between healthy microbes and a starry cosmos, is Lenin, holding the hands of workers of different cultures. On the left, between microscopic renderings of syphilis and other diseases and a warring cosmos, is New York society, including Nelson Rockefeller enjoying a cocktail. At the top left, armed figures wearing gas masks and marching in military formation evoke World War I, while at the upper right, workers wearing communist red scarves raise their voices in solidarity. Man must steer his course between the evils of capitalism and the virtues of communism, Rivera appears to be saying.

The Private World of Frida Kahlo

Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo (1907–54), was also an artist. Although she was as political as her husband, her paintings document her personal tragedy. Already crippled by a bout of polio in childhood, she was injured severely in 1925 at the age of 18 when a tram hit the bus in which she was riding home from school. A metal handrail pierced her body through, her spine and pelvis were broken, and so were her right leg and foot. Her long recuperation was not completely successful, requiring some 30 operations and eventually the amputation of her right leg. In the hospital, she began painting, using a small lap easel, and somewhat miraculously regained the ability to walk.

A close friend introduced Kahlo to Diego Rivera, and in 1929, they were married. In addition to leftist political views, they shared a love for Mexican culture—Frida often dressed in traditional Mexican costume—and a passion for art. But they were also a study in contrasts, Kahlo small and slender, barely 5 feet tall, Rivera much taller, of considerable girth, and 20 years her senior. Frida’s father remarked, “It was like the marriage between an elephant and a dove.” Their stormy relationship survived infidelities, the pressures of Rivera’s career—her work clearly played second fiddle to his murals—a divorce and remarriage, and Kahlo’s ongoing poor health.

Kahlo’s paintings—mostly self-portraits—bear witness to the trials of her health and marriage. “I have suffered two grave accidents in my life,” she once said, “one in which a street car ran me over; the other accident is Diego.” Many of the self-portraits are violent, showing, for instance, in The Broken Column (fig. 37.16), her body pierced with nails and ripped open from neck to navel to expose her spine as a broken stone column. Kahlo’s work not only evokes her intense personal struggle, but also sets that struggle in an almost mythic or heroic universal struggle for survival.

Kahlo and Rivera traveled to the United States and France, where Kahlo met luminaries from the worlds of art and politics. Surrealist André Breton was especially attracted to her work. Although grateful for Breton’s attention, she was quick to emphasize that she was by no means a Surrealist herself. “I never painted my dreams,” she said. “I painted my own reality.” The Great Depression in America

1. 37.4 How did the WPA impact the arts?

After World War I, American money had flowed into Europe, mostly in the form of short-term loans, but by 1928, most of it was withdrawn and placed in the booming New York stock market, jeopardizing European economies. Investors borrowed freely from banks and overinvested in stocks. When the market crashed on October 29, 1929, investors lost huge amounts of money and could not repay their loans. Across the country, one bank after another closed its doors, savings were lost, businesses failed, and unemployment grew. Nearly 16 million men were out of work by the early 1930s, about one-third of the national workforce. Franklin Roosevelt’s election as president in 1932 was understood as a mandate for the federal government to bring its resources to bear against what became known as the Great Depression.

The Road to Recovery: The New Deal

Roosevelt quickly implemented a host of measures that came to be known as the New Deal . To safeguard bank deposits, he created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The National Recovery Act regulated industrial competition and ensured the right of workers to organize and bargain. The 1935 Social Security Act provided for unemployment insurance and old-age pensions. New-home construction was encouraged by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. The 1933 Civil Works Administration created 4 million make-work jobs on public projects for persons on relief in an effort to help them contribute to economic recovery by increasing their purchasing power. The program continued when it was replaced by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) two years later.

The WPA peaked at about 3.5 million people employed, but over its lifespan, it helped about 8.5 million people get back to work. The WPA’s workforce constructed 116,000 buildings, 78,000 bridges, and 651,000 miles of road, and improved 800 airports. But its most important contributions to American culture were the Federal Art Project, the Federal Writers’ Project, the Federal Theater Project, and the Federal Music Project. Through the WPA, artists produced nearly 10,000 drawings, paintings, and sculptures, and decorated many public buildings (especially post offices) with murals. Theater performances under the project averaged 4,000 a month. Writers were employed to create a series of state and regional guidebooks, and musicians found work in newly created orchestras. The Mural Movement

The WPA mural project was led in large part by the example of Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), who between 1930 and 1936 created four enormous murals that required about 7,000 square feet of canvas and included more than 1,000 figures. They are America Today (for the New School of Social Research in New York, 1930), The Arts of Life in America (for the Whitney Studio Club in New York, 1932), A Social History of Indiana (for the Indiana pavilion at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair), and A Social History of Missouri (for the House Lounge in the Missouri State Capitol Building, Jefferson City, 1936). For the last of these, Benton was paid $16,000 over two years—a handsome sum at the time—and offered a position at the Kansas City Art Institute. The north wall of the Capitol lounge depicts Missouri’s “Pioneer Days” and is highlighted by a depiction of Huckleberry Finn and Jim over the doorway. The east wall, the right half of which is illustrated here, is dedicated to “Politics, Farming, and Law in Missouri” (fig. 37.17

). The south wall celebrates the state’s two great cities, “St. Louis and Kansas City,” including the lover’s quarrel of the 1880s immortalized in the popular song “Frankie and Johnny.” Benton worked in egg tempera, a medium seldom used on such a large scale since the Renaissance. He liked the medium’s bright, clear colors and the fact that the paint dried quickly.

The Music Project: Aaron Copland’s American Music

The Depression had an enormous impact on the music industry. Thousands of musicians lost their jobs as orchestras and opera companies closed their doors, hotels and restaurants eliminated orchestras, and music education disappeared from school and university budgets. Even worse, the introduction of sound to motion pictures, discussed later in this chapter, meant that movie theater after movie theater dismissed the orchestras that had accompanied silent films. By 1933, two-thirds of the national membership of the American Federation of Musicians was unemployed. The WPA’s Federal Music Project addressed this situation, organizing orchestras around the country.

When the project first began, there were only 11 recognized symphony orchestras in the United States. At the peak of the WPA, 34 more new orchestras had been created, and thousands of Americans were attending concerts. From October 1935 to May 1, 1937, almost 60 million people listened to 81,000 separate performances of WPA musical events. And through the Composers’ Forum Laboratory, new music was created and performed.

One of the beneficiaries of this support was composer Aaron Copland (1900–90). Copland had begun his career deeply influenced by European modernism, particularly the work of Arnold Schoenberg (see Chapter 34), but he became increasingly interested in folk music. This interest began in the fall of 1926, when he met Mexican composer Carlos Chávez (1899–1978), who was rooming with Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo (1899–1991) in a tenement on Fourteenth Street in New York and who introduced him as well to Diego Rivera. Writing about Chávez in 1928, Copland declared that the composer’s “use of folk material in its relation to nationalism” constituted a major strain of modern music, one that he himself would soon begin to pursue.

In the early 1930s, Copland composed El Salón México, based on Mexican folk music he had heard when visiting Chávez in Mexico. Soon after this, he began to use purely American themes and material, including New England hymns, folk songs, and jazz, particularly in his work for the ballet: Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942), and Appalachian Spring (1944).

Copland composed Appalachian Spring for dancer and choreographer Martha Graham (1894–1991). Copland simply called it “Ballet for Martha,” but Graham renamed it when she decided to set the ballet in the Pennsylvania hill country early in the nineteenth century. In Graham’s dance, a young woman and her fiancé both express their excitement and joy at the prospect of their upcoming marriage and their sober apprehension of the responsibilities that their new life demands. While an older neighbor conveys a mood of confidence and satisfaction, a religious revivalist reminds the new bride and groom of their tenuous place in God’s cosmos. At the end, the couple have evidently grown into their new life as they come to live in their new house. Copland’s score for this concluding section is built around a single Shaker hymn, “Simple Gifts,” which serves as the basis for a stirring set of variations that occur just before the final slow coda (Listening Guide 37.2). The orchestral version of Appalachian Spring, actually a suite, was extremely popular and demonstrated that Copland had found a truly American style.

The Dust Bowl in Film and Literature

Copland was not the only American composer who was moved by the Depression to pursue distinctly American themes. Virgil Thomson (1895–1989), who like Copland had studied in Paris, was hired in 1936 by the Resettlement Administration to score two documentary films directed by Pare Lorentz (1905–92) in order to raise awareness about the New Deal. The Plow That Broke the Plains is about the devastation of the almost-ten-year drought that struck the American Midwest, particularly the southern Great Plains, and turned the region into a virtual dust bowl. The River celebrates the accomplishments of the Tennessee Valley Authority to harness water for electrical energy.

Thomson’s score for The Plow That Broke the Plains consists of six movements that follow the transition from fertile plain to Dust Bowl: Prelude, Pastorale (Grass) (Track 37.3), Cattle, Blues (Speculation), Drought, and Devastation. Thomson spent considerable time researching the rural music of the Great Plains. He also incorporated military marches, gunfire, and the sound of rolling tanks into the score to accompany a film sequence of farmers plowing the land. In doing so he addressed musically a theme ignored in the narration: the contribution of agriculture to the war effort.

Listen to the Track 37.3

Virgil Thomson, PASTORALE (GRASS)

Lorentz shot The Plow That Broke the Plains in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, and Texas, and was able to capture extraordinary dust-storm sequences and the pathos of those caught in their wake. The film’s public premier was at the Mayflower Hotel in New York on May 10, 1936, at an evening sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art. The event also featured several foreign documentaries, including portions of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. Although The Plow was critically acclaimed, none of the Hollywood studios would agree to distribute it commercially because, they claimed, it was strictly government propaganda. But the movie was shown at independent theaters with great success, and its popularity soon changed the distributors’ minds. When The River was released in 1937, Paramount jumped to distribute it. The script was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1938.

The great novel of the Dust Bowl years was The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1902–68). Published in 1939, its interplay between panoramic interludes and close-up accounts of a family’s cross-country journey was inspired by Lorentz’s films. Steinbeck even worked briefly with Lorentz on the documentary The Fight for Life, about a maternity ward in Chicago, the year after The Grapes of Wrath was published. The title of Steinbeck’s novel comes from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored, He has loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword His truth is marching on.

This mention of “grapes of wrath,” as Steinbeck knew, was a reference back to the Bible: “And the angel thrust his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of the wrath of God” (Rev. 14:19).

In a style so realistically detailed that it might be called cinematic, Steinbeck tells the story of the Oklahoma Joads, who lose their tenant farm and join thousands of others traveling to California on Route 66, the main migrant road. Their motivation is summarized in a handbill that they find on the road: "PEA PICKERS WANTED IN CALIFORNIA. GOOD WAGES ALL SEASON. 800 PICKERS WANTED." Things in California do not turn out as planned—thousands of workers turn up for the few available jobs, and food is scarce: “In the souls of the people,” Steinbeck writes, “the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.” Steinbeck’s Joads are stoically heroic (especially Ma Joad) but also deeply perceptive about the social injustices that pervade the America they encounter in their journey. The novel is an outcry against the injustice encountered by all migrant workers in the Great Depression. Photography and the American Scene

One of the important cultural contributions of the New Deal was the photographic documentation of the plight of poor farmers and migrant workers during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The head of the FSA’s photographic project, Roy Stryker, found in the work his team of 15 photographers created the same stoic heroism that Steinbeck had portrayed in the Joad family: “You could look at the people and see fear and sadness and desperation,” Stryker wrote. “But you saw something else, too. A determination that not even the Depression could kill. The photographers saw it—documented it.”

This is certainly the quality that Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) captures in Migrant Mother, a portrait of Native American Florence Owens Thompson and three of her children in a pea-pickers’ camp (fig. 37.18). Stryker said of this image: “When Dorothea took that picture, that was the ultimate. She never surpassed it. To me it was the picture of Farm Security. She has all the suffering of mankind in her, but all the perseverance too. A restraint and a strange courage.” In the 1940s, Lange’s documentary work included photo essays of the Japanese internment camps as well as a series focusing on World War II factory workers. She later was the first woman awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and spent nearly ten years making photo essays for Life and other magazines.

Sound and Language

Sound also changed the nature of acting in the cinema. Before sound, communication with the audience depended on facial expression and physical gesture, often exaggerated. Now actors had to rely on speech to communicate, and many silent-era stars simply lacked a compelling voice. Foreign actors were especially affected—Greta Garbo, with her deeply sonorous and melancholy voice (“I vhant to be alone”), was one of the few foreign stars to make the transition successfully, except for English actors. Dialogue writing had never been important before, but now playwrights became an instrumental force in movie production. Most important, sound brought foreign languages into the theaters—English into European theaters, and various European languages into each other’s and American theaters. At first, some producers tried to produce their films in several languages, but this proved too expensive.

In Europe, English-language films were commonly produced using dubbing (shorthand for “vocal doubling”), with native speakers synchronizing new dialogue to the lip movements of the actor. In the United States, where a large part of the audience for foreign films was made up of immigrants who spoke the foreign language, English-language text was more commonly scrolled across the bottom of the screen as subtitles. Interestingly, subtitles tend to announce the “foreignness” of a film, while dubbing suppresses it, so dubbing played a major role in the “Americanization” of world cultures.

The Jazz Singer: The First Feature-Length Talkie

Sound came to the feature-length motion picture on October 6, 1927, when Warner Bros. Studio premiered The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson (1886–1950) (fig. 37.21). The first words of synchronous speech were Jolson’s prophetic statement, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothing yet.” The Jazz Singer is the story of a cantor’s son, Jakie Rabinowitz, who longs to play jazz (calling himself Jack Robin) rather than follow his family’s footsteps into the synagogue. Jakie/Jack falls in love with a woman outside his own faith, performs in minstrel-style blackface makeup, and otherwise challenges every notion of ethnic identity. The film contained only two dialogue scenes (in other respects it was a silent-era feature), but its success lay as much in this story line as in its introduction of sound. Audiences everywhere recognized it as an “American”—as opposed to an ethnic—tale.

The Blue Angel

One of the most interesting early experiments with sound was the two-language production Der blaue Engel/The Blue Angel, directed by Josef von Sternberg (1894–1969). Sternberg had emigrated from Germany to the United States at the turn of the century, and through the 1920s he had gradually worked his way up the directorial ladder in Hollywood. In 1930, Paramount hired him to go to Germany to direct a co-production in both German and English with UFA (Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft), one of the largest studios in Europe. Marlene Dietrich (1901–92) starred in the film as the nightclub performer Lola Lola opposite Emil Jannings as Professor Rath, a sexually repressed instructor at a boys’ school whom Lola Lola seduces by exploiting his self-loathing (fig. 37.22). Dietrich’s portrayal of a temptress secured her fame. Sternberg would bring her back to Hollywood, where he would feature her in the role of the vamp who sexually humiliates her masochistic male counterpart in six more films over the next five years. The films clearly demonstrate how thoroughly Freudian psychology had taken hold of the popular imagination.

Disney’s Color Animation

Between 1928 and 1937, Disney Studios, headed by Walt Disney (1901–66), created over 100 animated cartoons, most starring Mickey Mouse but depending, for variety and development, on Mickey’s entourage of sidekicks, particularly Pluto, Goofy, and Donald Duck. At least as important technically, however, were Disney’s so-called Silly Symphonies, with scores that are masterpieces of parody, subjecting Classical music—from opera to the piano concerto—to the good-natured fun of the cartoon medium. In essence, Disney’s animation gave rise to the art of postsynchronization, in which sound is added as a separate step after the creation of the visual film. Actors became increasingly adept at speaking lines mouthed by cartoon characters, and musical scores could be adapted to fit the action.

Disney studios began work on its first feature-length Technicolor animation, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in 1934. Over 300 animators, designers, and background artists worked on the film, with Disney hiring animators away from other studios and training many other artists who had never worked at animation before. The film took three years to finish and premiered in December 1937. It was an instant success, and Disney immediately set his team to work on three more features: Bambi, Pinocchio, and Fantasia. The last of these animated Classical music in order to introduce young people to the various Classical forms. The didactic nature of Fantasia is unique in the annals of cartoon animation.

1939: The Great Year

As the nation recovered from its economic downturn, and audiences were able to afford to go to the movies more often, Hollywood responded by making more and better films. In 1939, Hollywood created more film classics than at any time before or since. Among these are Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Drums Along the Mohawk, Wuthering Heights, Of Mice and Men, Gone with the Wind, and The Wizard of Oz, to name just a few.

The Wizard of Oz

The most expensive film MGM made in 1939, The Wizard of Oz was in fact MGM’s most expensive film of the decade—costing $2.77 million to produce (fig. 37.23). It starred Judy Garland (1922–69), by then well known by movie audiences for her work with Mickey Rooney (1920–2014) in his string of box-office hits in the role of “Andy Hardy.” The film begins in the black-and-white “reality” of Kansas. It switches to color when Dorothy and her dog Toto arrive in Oz after being transported there by a tornado. The sudden intrusion of color announced to the audience that Oz was the stuff of fantasy. Despite grossing over $3 million, The Wizard of Oz lost nearly $1 million, owing to higher-than-usual marketing costs.

Although the film launched Garland into stardom, virtually guaranteeing future income from her performances, it also taught the studio an important corporate lesson. Having paired Garland with Rooney once again in a series of remakes of Broadway musicals, beginning with Babes in Arms, the studio reaped similar or larger grosses with much less expenditure. The formula for studio success was clear: the economical production of star-driven vehicles with recyclable narrative traits. In this rested both Hollywood’s financial success and its artistic limitations.

Gone with the Wind

The most ambitious project of 1939 was Gone with the Wind, produced by David O. Selznick (1902–65) and based on the Civil War novel by Margaret Mitchell (1900–49). Arguably the first true “blockbuster,” its running time was 3 hours 42 minutes, plus an intermission, keeping audiences in theaters for over 4 hours. They came to see English actress Vivien Leigh in the role of Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara, for Selznick had made sure everyone knew that America’s biggest stars had all auditioned for the part, including Katharine Hepburn, Susan Hayward, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Lana Turner, Mae West, Tallulah Bankhead, and Lucille Ball. Errol Flynn, Ronald Colman, and Gary Cooper were also considered for Clark Gable’s role as the Southern gunrunner Rhett Butler. Selznick spent an unheard-of $4 million to produce the film, but he was rewarded when it became the highest-grossing film ever—$400 million in lifetime box-office gross receipts. Finally, audiences were stunned by its sweeping Technicolor, a technology to which producer Selznick was more fully committed than any other Hollywood producer.

The film was not easy to make. Selznick went through three directors during production, with Victor Fleming, who was responsible for about half the film and had just finished directing The Wizard of Oz, finally getting credit. As usual in Hollywood, a number of writers had a hand in the script. There were over 50 speaking roles and 2,400 extras. The subject matter was controversial—the fate of Birth of a Nation weighed on Selznick’s mind—and the film was carefully scripted to avoid racial caricature. Indeed, Hattie McDaniel, who played the house servant Mammy in the film, would become the first African American to win an Academy Award (as Best Supporting Actress).

Much of the film’s success can be attributed to art director William Cameron Menzies, whose reputation had been established years before when he designed the sets for The Thief of Bagdad (see fig. 36.26). Menzies worked on visualizing the film for two years before production began, creating storyboards to indicate camera locations for the sets. This allowed the determination of camera angles, locations, lighting, and even the editing sequence well in advance of actual shooting. His panoramic overviews, for which the camera had to pull back above a huge railway platform full of wounded Confederate soldiers, required the building of a crane, and they became famous as a technical accomplishment. For the film’s burning-of-Atlanta scene, Menzies’s storyboard shows seven shots, beginning and ending with a panoramic overview, with cuts to close-ups of both Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara fully indicated (figs. 37.24 and 37.25).

Orson Welles and Citizen Kane

One of the most cinematographically inventive films of the postwar era was the 1940 Citizen Kane, directed by Orson Welles (1915–85). The story is presented in a series of flashbacks as told to a journalist who is seeking to unravel the mystery of why media baron Charles Foster Kane (generally understood as a character based on actual newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst) spoke the single word “Rosebud” on his deathbed. So the story is nonlinear, fragmented into different voices and different points of view, and its various perspectives carry over into the film’s unorthodox construction.

Welles had made history—and a large reputation—in 1938 when his Halloween radio dramatization of H.G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds convinced many listeners that Martians had actually invaded New Jersey. RKO gave him unprecedented freedom to make Citizen Kane in any manner he chose. Working as writer, director, producer, and actor simultaneously—and collaborating with cinematographer Gregg Toland on almost every shot—Welles produced a film unprecedented in its fresh look. In fact, he insisted that Toland experiment with almost every shot. Toland employed a special deep-focus lens that maintains focus from foreground to background in the deep space of the sets, in order to highlight multiple planes of action in the same shot (fig. 37.26). These shots were often lit with chiaroscuro lighting , a term borrowed from Renaissance painting to describe pools of light illuminating parts of an otherwise dark set. Toland also had the sets constructed in such a way that he could shoot from well above or well below the action.

Citizen Kane marked the end of the great era of the American motion picture. By 1945, with World War II in full swing, Hollywood production had fallen by more than 40 percent. Great films would continue to be made—the 1943 war film Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Swedish star Ingrid Bergman, was everyone’s favorite wartime movie. After the war, however, the population began to shift to the suburbs, increasingly engaging in outdoor leisure activities, and television began to replace film as the primary delivery system of the moving image. As a result, motion-picture attendance began a slow decline. The War in the Pacific

Meanwhile, in the Pacific, Japan was emboldened by the war in Europe to step up its imperial policy of controlling Asia. It had initiated this policy as early as 1931 with an invasion of Manchuria, followed by the conquest of Shanghai in 1932 and the invasion of the rest of China in 1937. By 1941, Japan had occupied Indochina, and when the United States in response froze Japanese assets in the United States and cut off oil supplies, Japan responded by attacking Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the chief American naval base in the Pacific, on December 7, 1941. The surprise attack destroyed 188 aircraft, 5 battleships, 1 minelayer, and 3 destroyers, and left 2,333 dead and 1,139 wounded. The next day, the United States declared war on Japan, and Germany and Italy, with whom Japan had joined in an alliance known as the Axis, declared war on the United States. During the war, the American government interned thousands of Japanese and Japanese Americans (many of whom were U.S. citizens) living in California, Oregon, and Washington on the theory that they might be dangerous. (In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation that officially apologized for this act of racism.) Racism and consciousness of ethnic identity flourished in the American armed forces as well.

Six months later, the U.S. Navy began to recover from the Pearl Harbor air strike and moved on the Japanese, who had meanwhile captured Guam, Wake Island, and the Philippines (map 37.5). A decisive naval battle in the Coral Sea, in which the Americans sank many Japanese ships, was followed by a victory at Midway Island and the landing of American Marines at Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands. This turned the tide and enabled the United States to concentrate more fully on Europe.

The Allied Victory

Even as Russian forces were pushing westward, driving the Germans back through the Ukraine, Hungary, and Poland, Allied forces—largely troops from the United States and Great Britain—attacked the Germans on the Normandy coast on June 6, 1944, known as D-Day. Two months later, the Allies landed in southern France and advanced northward with little resistance. By the beginning of September, they had pushed back the Germans to their own border and had liberated France.

In December 1944, an increasingly desperate Hitler, his oil refineries decimated by Allied air strikes, launched a counterattack on Antwerp, the Allies’ port of supply, through the Ardennes Forest of Belgium. Surprise and weather almost won him the day, as the Germans pushed forward into the Allied lines—hence the name, the Battle of the Bulge—but he was turned back. By March, the Allies had crossed the Rhine, and the Russians, the eastern arm of the Allied offensive, had approached the outskirts of Berlin. On May 1, 1945, Hitler and his intimates, recognizing that the war was lost, committed suicide in an underground bunker in Berlin. On May 8, the war in Europe came to an official end.

Meanwhile, in the Pacific, American troops had advanced as far north as Iwo Jima and the southern Japanese island of Okinawa, but the Japanese steadfastly refused to surrender. Faced with the possibility that an invasion of Japan itself might cost 1 million American lives, the Americans made the decision to drop the newly developed atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Two days later, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria. The next day, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The power of the atomic bomb, which devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, convinced Japan to surrender on August 14, 1945. Decolonization and Liberation

The war was felt far beyond the Pacific and European theaters, in the many nations subject to colonial rule. The war had drawn the military forces of the colonial powers back to Europe, and in their absence, indigenous nationalist movements arose in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The American president Franklin D. Roosevelt felt especially strongly that it was hypocritical to fight tyranny in Europe and then tolerate colonial dominance in the rest of the world. His moral position was strengthened by the realization that American economic interests were far more likely to thrive in a decolonized world. Furthermore, the founding of the United Nations in 1945 guaranteed that the argument against colonization would find a public forum.

In Southeast Asia, the French had occupied Indochina (Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam) since the late nineteenth century. But as early as 1930, Ho Chi Minh (1892–1969) had transformed a nationalist movement resisting French rule into the Indochina Communist Party. During World War II, Ho Chi Minh led the military campaign against the invading Japanese and the pro-Vichy colonial French government allied with the Japanese. He established himself as the major anticolonial player in the region. When, in 1945, he declared Vietnam an independent state, civil war erupted. It ended with the artificial division of Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel of northern latitude, with Ho Chi Minh in control north of that line and centered in Hanoi, and the French in charge south of that line and centered in Saigon (see map 37.5).

Meanwhile, France had to deal with growing unrest in North Africa. It had maintained a strong base in Algeria since the early nineteenth century, and during World War II, the antifascist government of Free France had headquartered there (see map 37.3). But at the end of the war, violence broke out between French and European settlers, comprising about 1 million people, and a much larger population of Algerian Muslim nationalists who quickly demanded independence. The postwar French Republic, however, declared Algeria an integral part of France. Guerrilla resistance to the French began in 1954, led by the National Liberation Front (FLN), and lasted until 1962, during which time hundreds of thousands of Muslim and European Algerians were killed. Finally, in 1962, French president Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) called for a referendum in Algeria on independence. It passed overwhelmingly. Algeria became independent on July 3, 1962.

Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) led the anticolonial movement in India. While studying law in England, he had learned the concept of passive resistance from reading American writer Henry David Thoreau (see Chapter 29). Gandhi had worked for 20 years as an advocate for Indian immigrants in South Africa, and after returning to India in 1915, he began a long campaign against the British government. He was repeatedly arrested, and during his imprisonments, he engaged in long hunger strikes, bringing himself to the brink of death on more than one occasion. Gandhi’s campaign of nonviolence finally convinced the British to leave India, which they did in 1947, partitioning the country into two parts, India and Pakistan. This partition acknowledged the desire of the Muslim population within India to form their own distinctly Muslim state.

Almost simultaneously, Burma and Sri Lanka became independent, the Dutch were forced out of Indonesia, and the British packed up and left Palestine, which they had occupied since the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1918. The British left behind a murderous conflict between Arab nationalists and Jews whom they had helped to install in the new country of Israel. In the following decade, the British withdrew from Ghana, Nigeria, Cyprus, Kenya, and Aden (now part of Yemen), sometimes at their own choosing, sometimes under pressure from militant nationalists. The British never resisted decolonization militarily, but this was not the case with France. Bearing Witness: Reactions to the War

The human cost of World War II was enormous. Somewhere in the vicinity of 17 million soldiers had died, and at least that many civilians had been caught up in the fighting. Hitler had exterminated 6 million Jews, and 5 million others (Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals and the handicapped) and millions of other people had died of disease, hunger, and other causes. The final toll was more than 50 million dead.

It was what Hitler had done to the Jews that most troubled Western consciousness and a large body of literature and film grew out of the events as survivors began to tell their stories to the world. Italian chemist Primo Levi’s memoir, If This Is a Man (also known as Survival at Auschwitz), is the wrenching story of a man attempting to fathom why he survived the death camp. Levi would go on to write stories and novels for the rest of his life that he himself described as “accounts of atrocities.” American cartoonist Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, in which Jews are depicted as mice, Germans as cats, and Americans as dogs, recounts his parents’ experiences as Jews in Poland before the war and at Auschwitz during the war. Paris-based documentary filmmaker Claude Lanzmann’s 9½-hour Shoah (a Hebrew word meaning “catastrophe”) is a series of deeply moving testimonies about the Holocaust drawn from survivors, those who stood by without doing anything, and the perpetrators themselves.

Wiesel’s Night

One of the most important memoirs to come out of the Holocaust is Night by Elie Wiesel (1928–2016). “Auschwitz,” wrote Wiesel, “represents the negation and failure of human progress: it negates the human design and casts doubts on its validity.”

Wiesel was 16 years old in 1944 when he and his family were taken to Auschwitz, where he and his father were separated from his mother and younger sister. He never saw them again and learned later that they had died in the gas chambers. During the following year, Wiesel was moved to the concentration camps at Buna, Gleiwitz, and finally Buchenwald, where his father died from dysentery, starvation, exposure, and exhaustion, like the many whom Lee Miller had photographed when the camp was liberated in April 1945 (see fig. 37.28). The author of 36 works dealing with Judaism, the Holocaust, and the moral responsibility of all people to fight hatred, racism, and genocide, Wiesel’s powerful prose and commitment won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He recounts his first day at Auschwitz (Reading 37.5):

READING 37.5

from Elie Wiesel, Night (1958)

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.

Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.

Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

Wiesel subsequently led the way to the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Resnais’s Night and Fog

In 1955, the young French filmmaker Alain Resnais (1922–2014) startled the world with a 32-minute documentary about the Holocaust called Night and Fog. Combining contemporary footage of the eerily abandoned Auschwitz landscape with archival documentary footage recorded during the liberation, Resnais posed the question that desperately needed to be addressed: Who was responsible? The question stands for many more specific ones. Why did so many ordinary Germans passively stand by as Jews were hauled off to the camps? Why did the Soviets, as they moved into Poland, not halt it? Why had the Allies—and the United States in particular—not responded to the situation more quickly? And why had the Jews themselves not organized more active resistance in the camps? Resnais’s narrator, Michel Bouquet, himself a camp survivor, concludes with a dire warning. As the events of the Holocaust retreat into the past, it seems possible, he says, to hope again. It seems possible to believe that what happened in the camps was a one-time occurrence that will never be repeated. But, he insists, the Holocaust is symptomatic of humanity’s very indifference to suffering and pain. Its truth always surrounds us.

The Japanese Response

Japan was haunted for generations by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both cities were civilian sites that contributed almost nothing to the Japanese military effort, and President Truman’s motives for bombing them were unclear—to many Americans as well as the Japanese. Some argued that the bombings spared both the United States and the Japanese from a painful and devastating invasion and saved the lives of thousands of American soldiers if the war had continued. Others argued that the bombings were a means of forcing the question of the emperor’s fate, a major sticking point in peace negotiations before the bombs were dropped. Still others felt that the bombings were a just retribution for devastation at Pearl Harbor. Truman’s archives suggest that the president wanted to demonstrate U.S. military might to the Soviets, whom he recognized would be a threat to world stability after the war. There is probably some truth in all of these points, but none justified the bombings in the eyes of the Japanese.

One of the most powerful responses to the events is a series of photographs entitled 11:02—Nagasaki by Shomei Tomatsu (1930–2012). The series is dedicated to the enduring human tragedy wrought by the atomic bomb, not merely to depicting keloidal burns and physical deformities that radiation from the explosion wreaked upon its survivors (fig. 37.29). The images are metaphors for the process of Americanization that Japan underwent at the war’s conclusion. “If I were to characterize postwar Japan in one word,” Tomatsu would write in an essay entitled “Japan Under Occupation,” “I would answer without hesitation: ‘Americanization.’” His photographs of survivors propose that to become “Americanized” is not necessarily a good thing. It is to become scarred, mutilated, deformed.

One of the more interesting ways in which the Japanese came to deal with the atomic bomb and its aftermath was the creation, in 1954, of the movie monster known in this country as Godzilla, but in Japan as Gojira, a hybrid name which joins the Western word gorilla—in honor of the 1933 film King Kong—with the Japanese kujira, meaning “whale.” The radiation-breathing monster, born from the sea after an American test of an atomic bomb in the Pacific, was a creation of Toho Studios in Tokyo. This, the first of many Godzilla films, was directed by Ishiro Honda (1911–93). It was inspired by the success of the 1953 U.S. film titled The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, in which Rhedosaurus, a giant dinosaur, is awakened from eons of dormancy after an atomic bomb test in the northern polar ice cap. The dinosaur wreaks havoc on New York City, culminating in a showdown with military marksmen at Coney Island amusement park.

Godzilla became for the Japanese a vehicle through which they could confront the otherwise unspeakable significance of the atomic bomb. At the same time they could also shift blame for World War II from themselves to the Americans. Scenes of Tokyo devastated by the radiation-breathing monster leave little doubt as to the symbolic intent of the film. In its original form, the film remains a powerful indictment of the bomb, but that was not the version available in the United States until 2004. Gojira was acquired by U.S. distributors in 1956. They renamed it Godzilla: King of the Monsters and completely reedited it. Leaving only its monster scenes, they excised most of the human story, replacing it with scenes featuring a U.S. reporter (played by Raymond Burr, television’s Perry Mason) who has come to Tokyo to chronicle the devastation caused by “a force which up until a few days ago was entirely beyond the scope of man’s imagination.” But, of course, the film represents not the unknown but a force completely within the scope of human imagination—the bomb—a fact that today American audiences can finally appreciate.

ontinuity & Change: The Bauhaus in America

After the Bauhaus closed in April 1933, many of its teachers left Germany for the United States. By the early 1950s, they dominated American architecture and arts education. Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Gropius would go on to design the Harvard Graduate Center (1949–50) and Breuer the Whitney Museum of American Art (1966) in New York. Josef Albers would become head of the design department at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was appointed head of the architecture school at Chicago’s Armour Institute of Technology (later the Illinois Institute of Technology), where he was commissioned to design the new buildings for the campus.

These Bauhaus artists came into their own in America after World War II, when the nation’s economy was once again on the rebound. Their influence was nowhere more dramatically felt than in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building in New York, completed in 1958 on Park Avenue between 52nd and 53rd streets (fig. 37.30). Just ten blocks from the Chrysler Building, it set a new standard for skyscraper architecture. Mies van der Rohe had begun to experiment with designs for glass towers in the early 1920s, and by the time he joined with Philip Johnson on the Seagram Building, he had cultivated an aesthetic of refined austerity summed up by the phrase “less is more.”

he siting of the building, separated from the street by a 90-foot-wide plaza and bordered on either side by reflecting pools and ledges, used open space in a manner unprecedented in urban architecture, where every vertical foot above ground spells additional rent revenue. A curtain wall of dark, amber-tinted glass wraps the building and is interrupted by bronze-coated I-beams and by spandrels and mullions (the horizontal and vertical bands between the glass). Depending on the light, the reflective qualities of the glass make the skin appear bronze from one angle and almost pitch-black from another. At night, the building is entirely lit, creating a golden grid framed in black.

The Seagram Building gives the impression of a giant monolith set on a granite plinth—a sort of sacred homage to the modernist spirit. As one critic rhapsodized, “The commercial office building in this instance has been endowed with a monumentality without equal in the civic and religious architecture of our time.”

1. 37.4 Characterize the WPA’s impact on the arts.

The collapse of the stock market in 1929 led to severe economic depression in the United States which President Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to remedy, in part, by the Works Progress Administration. The WPA funded painting projects (especially murals in public buildings, a project inspired by the example of muralist Thomas Hart Benton) and performances by musicians and theater companies, and employed writers to create a series of state and regional guidebooks. The effects of the Depression were heightened by drought in the Great Plains. In what ways can the creative works produced under the WPA and other New Deal agencies be viewed as propaganda? How does it differ from Hitler’s propaganda?