Artists under Hitler

[matthew cissell]

Orff, Speer, Riefenstahl... ah yes the question of cultural producers and
regimes. How criminally complicit were they, should we disdain their work?
Answers can always be found but the question is how acuurate they are. Are
some to be damned and others given a reprieve? Kai is right about the need
to look closely; this book seems to do so but only by focusing on those
that colaborated. Perhaps it would be better to look at those who started
in similar positions and then moved apart. For example. Ernst Toller, Ernst
Junger and Max Weber had shared similar sentiments at the outset of WWI but
that changed over time.

   For my part it is not the anti-semitism that people claim to see in
Heidegger or Schmitt, it is what they were willing to construct and be a
part of that is so terribly awful. The same is true of the legal architects
of the Bush-Cheney doctrine; it is not only their murderous indifference to
those that they clearly see as not like them (Muslims, etc) which is
heinous, but the fact that they are willing to take everyone to hell based
on that.

  We could also look at the left side of the ideological spectrum and count
the intellectuals that at first cheered the Soviet Union (w/ Stalin at the
helm) and then later Mao and his red book. Some, like Merleau Ponty, had
abandoned the Communist party even as others decided to double down.

 And so it goes

    Toby Keith raised his hand for idiocy.

   Let this warning stand: "Don't lend your hand to raise no flag atop no
ship of fools."

ciao
otis

On Mon, Feb 9, 2015 at 10:26 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
> In* Gravity's Rainbow* we meet Carl Orff and his *Carmina Burana* (1937).
>
> "Just offshore, underwater, run miles of secret piping, oil ready at a
> valve-twist to be released and roast German invaders who belong back in
> dreams already old ... fuel waiting hypergolic ignition that will not come
> unless now as some as some junior-bureaucratic rag or May uprising of the
> spirit, to Bavarian tunesmith Carl Orff's lively
>
> O, O, O,
> To-tus flore-o!
> Iam amore virginali
> Totus ardeo ...
>
> all this fortress coast alight, Portsmouth to Dungeness, blazing for the
> love of spring." (p. 237)
>
> There is an interesting continuity in Orff's career. He composed music for
> the Olympic Games in Germany twice! 1936 ("Einzug und Reigen der Kinder")
> and 1972 ("Gruß der Jugend").
>
> The question why and how artists did live and work in the Third Reich is
> very relevant. When I read the review of the book in question, I have
> doubts whether answers can really be found there, though.
>
> And the philosophers? As Jacob Taubes said: "Irgendetwas verstehe ich von
> dem Nationalsozialismus nicht, wenn ich nicht verstehen kann, wieso Schmitt
> und Heidegger überhaupt von ihm angezogen werden." (Ad Carl Schmitt.
> Gegenstrebige Fügung. Berlin 1987, p. 48). About: 'There's something I do
> not get about National Socialism when I cannot understand why Schmitt and
> Heidegger are attracted by it at all.' Mostly this question is answered by
> merely ideology-critical means. As if modernity was a one size fits all
> T-shirt or something ... It's understandable that people shy away from the
> antisemitism that can be found in Schmitt's and Heidegger's writings from
> the 1930s and early 1940s. But without going into these writings you will
> never understand what the German experience of modernity is (or at least:
> was) about. After 1945 (West)Germany got americanized like no other
> European country. Which has advantages and disadvantages. Among the latter
> ones is the severe break of cultural continuity. And if you were socialized
> into the US colony called (West)Germany, like I was, it takes you years
> even to realize that very fact ...
>
>
> On 08.02.2015 15:09, Dave Monroe wrote:
>
> http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300197471
> http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/strange-bedfellows-modernists-nazis/
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20150209/0bf26bd8/attachment.html>