Hitler’s “perfect German woman”

riefhitler — Leni Riefenstahl and friend

Last week we began looking at several German cultural figures who served as useful stooges for the Third Reich. Better known than any of these stories of Nazi collaboration is that of Leni Riefenstahl, director of the films Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938). She may well have been the greatest female film director of all time, but to hear her name is to think, first and last, of Hitler – for unlike, say, Walter Gropius or Richard Strauss, she was actually an intimate friend of the Führer’s, and her famous Nazi-era films were the products of direct consultation with him and were produced under his government’s auspices.

“My perfect German woman,” he called her. She socialized with him frequently. “At times,” writes Jonathan Petropoulos in Artists under Hitler, “they dined together several times a week.” Repeatedly, she articulated her passionate support for him in private notes and telegrams cheering his military victories. (In one of them, addressing him as “my Führer,” she gushed: “You exceed anything the human imagination has the power to conceive, achieving deeds without parallel in the history of mankind.”)

Riefenstahl was a demanding woman, and whenever one Nazi functionary or another rejected her demands, Hitler came through. Denied by Goebbels a request for additional funds to complete Olympia, she turned – successfully – to her beloved Führer. In 1939, he even approved of plans to build Riefenstahl her own massive film studio, a project that failed to come to fruition only because of the war. Riefenstahl wielded remarkable power: at her word, the Jewish wife of Olympia‘s production designer was saved from the death camps. Also at her word, a recalcitrant extra on her her film Tiefland was sent to the concentration camp at Ravensbrück. (Other extras on that film were gypsies who, after doing their job onscreen, were murdered at Auschwitz.)

Interrogated by Allied officials after the war, Riefenstahl repeatedly contradicted herself. She was tried by four different denazification courts; ultimately, in 1952, she was exonerated on charges of collaboration. She went on to make National Geographic-type films about the Nuba trime in Sudan and about undersea life, and, as Petropoulos puts it, “battled for respectability,” desperate to be seen not as a Nazi propagandist and former pal of Hitler’s but as a great cinematic artist. Many famous people obliged her. During the 1970s, she chummed around with such pop-culture heroes of the day as Mick and Bianca Jagger, Andy Warhol, and photographer Helmut Newton.

Decades after the war, public curiosity about Riefenstahl remained so intense that her 1993 memoirs made the New York Times bestseller list; a 1994 documentary about her life, which challenged her own self-exculpating account of her relationship to the Nazi regime, also gained widespread attention. She finally died in 2003 at the age of 101. Petropoulos notes the influence of her two famous Nazi films on pop culture: George Lucas borrowed from her in Star Wars; Olympia became a model for TV sports coverage around the world; the impact of her production design can be observed in the staging of concerts by such artists as Michael Jackson, David Bowie, and Jagger. In addition, Petropoulos might have pointed out that a great many music videos, by performers ranging from Madonna to the Pet Shop Boys, feature imagery right out of Triumph out of the Will.

Nor does Petropoulos mention another development – namely, the decades-long effort by major Hollywood players to make a Riefenstahl bio. We’ll look at that effort tomorrow.

Posted on July 13, 2016June 14, 2016 by usefulstooges 0

Jewels in the Nazi crown

Last week we explored the disquieting lives of four men – Walter Gropius, Paul Hildemith, Gottfried Benn, and Ernst Barlach – all of them giants of the imaginative arts who, when Hitler came to power, readily bowed and scraped to the moral pygmies of the new regime. Historian Jonathan Petropoulos’s accounts, in a recent book, of how these and other prominent artists chose to be collaborators rather than émigrés make for a remarkable document in the modern history of useful stoogery. Today we’ll look at a couple more of these stooges.

None of the cultural figures we’ve examined so far were card-carrying Nazis. Emil Nolde was. He joined the Danish Nazi Party way back in 1920, after his native southern Schleswig, formerly part of Prussia, was ceded to Denmark in a post-armistice plebiscite. He was an outspoken anti-Semite from early on, but his prejudice against Jews grew even stronger over the years. He also sincerely admired Hitler. “The Führer,” he told a friend in a 1933 letter, “is great and noble in his aspirations and a genial man of deeds.” In 1938, he wrote to Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, that he was “convinced of the world importance of National Socialism.” In short, he was no hypocritical suck-up – he was a true believer.

Vierwaldstätter See. Um 1930 — Nolde’s The Sea (1930)

Even so, like many of the other figures profiled in Petropoulos’s book, he had to struggle to win the Nazis’ hearts. In a 1934 autobiographical volume he proclaimed his belief in Nordic superiority; in the same year he signed a declaration of loyalty to Hitler. Still, the regime couldn’t figure out whether to give him the official seal of approval or not. Goebbels wondered in his diary: “Is Nolde a Bolshevik or a painter?” Nolde sent Goebbels several letters pleading for recognition, assuring him: “My art is German, powerful, austere, and profound.” Yet until the very last days of the Nazi era, he continued to received mixed signals from officials. (A major blow came in 1937 when his work was included in the “Degenerate Art Exhibition.”) Unlike Barlach, however, he at least survived the war, and, like many other artists who’d been unrepentant Nazis and Nazi collaborators, was quickly rehabilitated afterwards. He even won a major prize at the 1952 Venice Biennale – a remarkable achievement so soon after the Nazi nightmare.

On to Richard Strauss, the composer of Also Sprach Zarathustra (1896), famously used on the soundtrack of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and of the operas Der Rosenkavalier (1910) and Ariadne auf Naxos (1912). By the time Hitler came along, Strauss was pushing seventy, was one of the most respected composers on earth, and was a cultural treasure whom the Nazis wanted to identify with their regime (even though Hitler personally considered him second-rate). When Goebbels named Strauss president of the Reich Chamber of Music in 1933, Strauss accepted without hesitation, having earlier described Goebbels in a letter as “very art-inspired and sensitive.” Within a few months he’d dedicated a song, “Das Bächlein,” to Goebbels.

Trouble came, however, in 1935, when a letter Strauss had dispatched to Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, then living in Switzerland, was intercepted by the Nazis. In it, Strauss repudiated anti-Semitism and, although the Nazis had forbidden such a collaboration, expressed a wish to continue working with Zweig, who’d written the libretto of his opera Die schweigsame Frau. The letter found its way to Hitler himself, who forced Strauss to resign from his position at the Reich Chamber of Music – in response to which Strauss sent the Führer the most sycophantic of missives, which closed with an assurance of his “deepest veneration.”

Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, during a speach in September 1934. — Joseph Goebbels, 1934

Though he lost his official post, Strauss kept his career. He was even commissioned to compose the Olympic hymn for the 1936 Berlin games; its performance at the opening ceremonies by the Berlin Philharmonic, the National Socialist Symphony Orchestra, and a 1000-voice chorus, all under the direction of Strauss himself, was featured in Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary Olympia. On his eightieth birthday, Strauss received congratulatory telegrams from both Hitler and Goebbels, and Ariadne auf Naxos was specially staged in Vienna.

To the end, then, Richard Strauss continued to be a jewel in the Nazi crown – a distinction that kept his Jewish daughter-in-law from being swept up in the Holocaust, but that was insufficient to enable him to save her grandmother and two dozen other relatives, all of whom were murdered in the death camps. The American troops who arrested Strauss at the end of the war treated him with “utmost respect,” writes Petropoulos, and his rehabilitation was even swifter than that of many others: only two years after V-E Day, he was fêted at a Strauss Festival at Royal Albert Hall in London, where he received a standing ovation.

Posted on July 11, 2016July 6, 2016 by usefulstooges 0

Creating art, worshiping power

During the last couple of days we’ve been pondering the lives of men who were among the most gifted artists of the last century – and who kowtowed to Adolf Hitler himself. We’re indebted throughout to Jonathan Petropoulos’s eye-opening accounts of these men’s shameless stoogery in his recent book Artists under Hitler.

Yesterday we saw that architect Walter Gropius and composer Paul Hindemith, while not Nazis themselves, strove to win the hearts and minds of Nazi leaders in hopes that they’d be granted the extraordinary privilege of becoming artistic faces of the Third Reich. Today we’ll move on – first of all – to expressionist poet-physician Gottfried Benn. He wasn’t a Nazi either, strictly speaking – he never joined the party – but he did welcome the rise of Hitler, whom he saw as a “transformative” figure (well, he was right there), and hoped that the dictator shared his own view that there was no contradiction whatsoever between Nazism and expressionism. In an address given shortly after the Nazis took charge, Benn maintained that as an German intellectual he was obliged to “stand in a positive relation to the new state.”

Thomas_Mann_1947 — Good guy: Thomas Mann

What did he mean by this? Well, for one thing he meant that he felt compelled to renounce anti-Nazi cultural figures (among them Thomas Mann) who’d fled the country and resigned from the Prussian Academy of the Arts. This mass exile left vacant the position of head of the Academy’s poetry section, to which Benn was now elected. When Mann’s son Klaus publicly criticized Benn for his “repudiation of civilization” and “worship of brute power,” Benn delivered another speech, in which he asserted that Germans living under Hitler were “better off now than ever before” and painted Mann and other prominent émigrés as hedonists who were lolling about on Riviera beaches when they could, and should, be serving the Führer’s “new vision of the birth of man.”

Pretty revolting stuff. Yet by late 1934, having lost his Academy post and also his enthusiasm for Nazi ideology, Benn essentially dropped out of the art world and became an army doctor. Up to the end of the war, maintaining a mostly low profile, he privately deplored the ideology and objectives of the Third Reich yet publicly wore its uniform. His job enabled him to observe junior Wehrmacht officers at close quarters, and what he saw disturbed him greatly: though he assumed that their parents must have been cultured, these young men’s formative years in the Hitler Youth, he recognized, had turned them into monsters whose goal was to “destroy…the continent.”

After the war, Benn was quickly rehabilitated. He won literary prizes in what was now West Germany and gained new readers, and even disciples, around the world. In his last years (he died in 1956), he was universally admired for having turned against the Nazis early on; the truth, however, was the Nazis, by removing him from his position at the Academy, had turned on him first.

Benn’s fellow expressionist Ernst Barlach was both a writer and an artist. Petropoulos describes him, rather bemusingly, as “empathetic and soulful.” He had no illusions about the Nazis, but clearly strove for their acceptance. Like Gropius, he had his own family tree drawn up to prove he was 100% Aryan. When criticized by the art editor of the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, he got upset, as if a Nazi’s ideologically based judgment of an artwork had any validity or deserved any respect. When Hitler decided to call himself Führer, Barlach enthusiastically signed a petition giving him a thumbs-up. And when the Nazis banned a book of his drawings, he sent Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, a groveling letter begging him to reverse the ban.

But it was no use. In 1935, the SS newspaper condemned Barlach’s work as “alien.” Around Germany, works by him were dismantled, removed from display, melted down, cut into pieces, discarded. This official rejection destroyed his health, and in 1938, aged 68, he died, apparently starved for want of Nazi love.

Posted on July 8, 2016July 6, 2016 by usefulstooges 0

Those wannabe Nazi courtiers

Yesterday, drawing on Jonathan Petropoulos’s fascinating book Artists under Hitler, we began taking a look at various German cultural figures who, during the Nazi era, chose not to flee their country and instead tried to find a modus vivendi with Hitler. In other words, useful stooges.

WalterGropius-1919 — Walter Gropius in 1919

Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus and one of the greatest architects of the twentieth century, was one of these. No, he was not a Nazi. “He detested their intolerance,” Petropoulos emphasizes. On the other hand, he was very proud of his German identity and – viewing himself as a man who was “above politics” – he believed he possessed “qualities that would enable him to flourish in the Third Reich.” Without complaint, he supplied Nazi authorities with copies of his family tree to document his pure “Aryan” heritage so he could join official arts groups.

Try though he did, however, Gropius couldn’t get a professional foothold under the new regime. He entered a design competition for the Nazis’ new Reichsbank, but lost. He entered another design for a recreational facility called the Houses of German Work – complete with four high-flying swastika banners – and lost again.

gropiusbank — Gropius’s design for the Reichsbank

Working closely with the Reich Propaganda Ministry, he did help plan an ideology-drenched exhibition called “German People – German Work.” But all in all, his career prospects proved to be lousier in Germany than they were abroad. So in the mid 1930s, he spent a good deal of time in Britain, where he worked with an English colleague on a building for a college in Cambridgeshire and designed lamps and wastepaper baskets for a furniture company. Later in the decade, he accepted an invitation from Harvard to serve as chairman of that institution’s department of architecture.

panam — The PanAm (now MetLife) building

During these first years in the U.S., Gropius refused to involve himself in anti-Nazi causes. When the war began, however, he chose to stay in America, and in 1944 became a citizen. He went on to design New York’s iconic Pan Am (now MetLife) Building and many other notable structures. He became, in short, an iconic American architect, whose attempts to ingratiate himself with the Nazis were dropped down the memory hole. Like several of the other stooges whose lives Petropoulos recounts, Gropius was spared the kind of postwar ignominy experienced by (say) Albert Speer only because he couldn’t secure enough decent work in his homeland to make it worth staying there.

Paul Hindemith was as important to modern music as Gropius was to modern architecture. Even more so, perhaps: by the time the Nazis came along, he’d been serving for some time as a sort of cultural ambassador for his homeland around the Western world, especially in America. As Petropoulos puts it, Hindemith hoped the Nazis would look upon his “sterling and increasingly global reputation,” as well as upon his background as a World War I veteran, and see him as a potential ornament to the Third Reich.

paul-hindermith_2750503b — Paul Hindemith

Like Gropius, Hindemith was no Nazi. Since he had a half-Jewish wife and Jewish friends, it could be argued that he wasn’t anti-Semitic either (although he never opened his mouth to protest the official abuse of his Jewish colleagues). In any event, he did what he thought necessary to advance his career under the Nazis. He signed a personal oath of allegiance to Hitler; he publicly badmouthed fellow modernist composers who were out of favor with the regime; and he trimmed his sails musically (retreating from modernism back into German Romanticism and post-Romanticism) to please his new masters.

And yet none of it worked. Why? Quite simply, Hitler disliked his music. For a time, thanks largely to the support of Wilhelm Furtwängler, the revered conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, Hindemith was able to keep staging his works. But Furtwängler’s support only kept Hindemith afloat for so long; after his inclusion in the Nazis’ 1938 “Degenerate Music Exhibition” made it clear that he wasn’t welcome in the new Germany, he and his wife finally decamped for Switzerland and then, in 1940, relocated to the U.S., where he taught at Yale for thirteen years. In a letter he wrote on the ship to New York, he said that if only he had “the prospect of a somewhat secure existence,” he’d gladly return to Hitler’s Reich. The reason for his departure, then, wasn’t at all ideological. As with Gropius, however, his timely getaway ensured that he was one German artist who, after the war, escaped the taint of collaboration.

Posted on July 7, 2016July 6, 2016 by usefulstooges 0

The ones who stayed

Marlene-Dietrich-tux-vogue-13mar14-pr_b — Marlene Dietrich

When we think of top-flight German creative and intellectual types during the Nazi era, we tend to focus on the ones who understood exactly what Adolf Hitler was about, didn’t like it at all, and got out while the getting was good.

Whole books have been written about the tsunami of actors, artists, authors, architects, composers, and scientists that flowed from Europe to America during the 1930s. Among them were such luminaries as the novelist Thomas Mann, the playwright Bertolt Brecht, the film director Fritz Lang, the composer Arnold Schoenberg, the philosopher Theodor Adorno, and the actress Marlene Dietrich. Not to mention Albert Einstein himself.

But there’s another group of German cultural eminences who (with a couple of notable exceptions) have received considerably less attention. We’re referring to the ones who chose to stay and work in Nazi Germany. Jonathan Petropoulos puts it this way in his recent book Artists under Hitler:Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany:

Jonathan Petropoulos

The German émigré community during the Third Reich represented the greatest assemblage of cultural talent ever to leave a country. Yet the image of virtuous émigrés has long overshadowed the fact that a wide array of cultural figures who were trained or who worked in a modernist tradition attempted to find a place in Hitler’s Reich.

As Petropoulos notes, no two of these figures had the same politics going into the Nazi era. Some of them actually believed in Nazism to various extents, although several of them changed their minds at one or another point in the 1930s. Others were amoral careerists – former liberals or Communists who didn’t see a professional future for themselves abroad and bought into Nazism in order to preserve their careers.

We’ll spend the next few days looking at some of these cultural figures – gifted Germans who, faced with a choice of escaping to New York or knuckling under to one of the most loathsome monsters in human history, somehow decided (at least for a time) that it was a good idea to do the latter.

Kirchner_1919_portrait — Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in 1919

Petropoulos, a professor of European history at Claremont McKenna College, devotes whole chapters to ten major names. But he also mentions several other stooges in passing. For example, Fritz Ertl studied architecture at the Bauhaus, went on to become a Waffen-SS officer, and ended up putting his skills to work by helping design the death camp at Auschwitz, and, later, the gates at Buchenwald. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a founder of Die Brücke – the famous group of expressionist artists whose work is represented in the world’s best modern-art museums – protested a 1933 effort by the Nazis to remove him from the Prussian Academy of the Arts by professing that he was “neither a Jew nor a Social Democrat” and had struggled to create “a new, strong, and authentic German art.”

Then there’s architect Oskar Schlemmer, who, after hearing that somebody had identified him as Jewish, was quick to assure a Nazi official that he could prove his “Christian-Protestant” background going back to the seventeenth century; when he was removed from his academic post, he shared his frustration with a friend: “I myself feel pure and that my art corresponds to National Socialist principles.” The great soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf certainly felt that way: she joined “at least three different Nazi organizations” (in addition to the Party itself), had “a close personal relationship with Goebbels,” performed for SS troops in Poland (where they were busy murdering local civilians), and probably had an SS officer for a lover. (She went on to perform at the Metropolitan Opera in 1964 and to be awarded the title Dame Commander by Queen Elizabeth II.) And Emil Jannings, who in 1927 had won the first Oscar for Best Actor (for The Way of All Flesh), appeared in Nazi propaganda films and was designated a “state artist” by Goebbels.

As for the people to whom Petropoulos devotes entire chapters – among them such eminent figures as Walter Gropius, Paul Hindemith, and Richard Strauss – well, we’ll start in on them tomorrow. These are stories well worth knowing about men who, while freighted with artistic genius, utterly lacked the moral compass of people like Mann and Dietrich, who recognized that the only proper reaction to Hitler was to reject him, flee him, and – when the war finally came – take part in the fight against him.

Posted on July 6, 2016July 6, 2016 by usefulstooges 0

Useful Stooges