Artists under Hitler

[Dave Monroe]

Thanks, Matthew, Kai, I have a copy of the book on the way, will report back.

On Mon, Feb 9, 2015 at 4:19 AM, matthew cissell <mccissell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>>
>>
>>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l