NP? new book review re Nazi aesthetics

[pynchonoid]

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,813733,00.html

Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics
by Frederic Spotts
499pp, Hutchinson £25

"In his 1938 essay "Bruder Hitler", Thomas Mann felt
obliged to recognise that Hitler was in some real
sense an artist, and in a well-known aphorism Walter
Benjamin said that fascism aestheticises politics.
These two insights form a starting point for Frederic
Spotts's remarkable new book." [...] 

It would scarcely be exaggerating to call the Third
Reich one vast performance, epitomised by the
awe-inspiring if spine-chilling Nuremberg rallies,
those epic son-et-lumière shows with their immense
choreography - what Goebbels called "a via triumphalis
of living bodies". They were more than the usual
circuses that tyrannies provide for the masses. As
Spotts says, their ultimate purpose "was to fill a
void at the centre of National Socialism... unlike
Marxism, it offered little that was concrete enough to
get hold of. What Hitler provided was ritual in place
of belief, or ritual as belief." The form was the
content, the medium was the message. [...] 

If the artistic yearnings of all those Nazi poets and
painters manqués cast a bleak light on the redemptive
power of art, or any idea that the sublime and the
beautiful will make us better people, there is another
bleak side to the story in the behaviour of the German
"arts community", especially musicians. Some went into
exile, either involuntarily or because they would not
serve the regime, but far more did not. There were
musicians who divorced Jewish spouses to keep their
jobs, while great names like Strauss, Pfitzner and
Furtwängler chose to endorse the regime.

It may be thought that the Germans had never properly
understood what the Ring actually teaches about
hubristic power-worship and the annihilation of love.
As it was, "the final and most curious aspect of
Hitler's Wagnermania" was that after Stalingrad he
couldn't bear to listen to that music any more, and
turned to Lehár for consolation. Meantime concerts of
high standard continued, until what Spotts calls the
most grotesque episode in musical history. On April 13
1945, the Berlin Philharmonic played Bruckner's
Fourth, as a recognised sign that the Third Reich was
reaching its own last bars. At the exits, members of
the Hitler Youth handed out free cyanide capsules.
Unimaginable wickedness and horror ended to the sound
of sublime music. "







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