Fascist Politics as a Total Work of Art: Tendencies of the Aesthetization of Political Life in National Socialism

Abstract

Fascism is totalitarian because it subjugates all areas of life, both public and private, through the use of terror. The realms of culture and art are no exceptions. Murder and torture in concentration camps, the exiling of more than a thousand German writers, professional proscription, regulation of artists' and publishers' organizations, book burning these are merely the most conspicuous examples of fascist controls. In Brecht's words, after 1933 anything which wants to be considered 'literature' can only be printed outside Germany, and, almost without exception, can only be read outside Germany. 1 Extreme opposition to art is, however, merely the practical result of the Third Reich's politics of repression. On the one hand, we find the destruction and outlawing of communist, democratic, liberal, Jewish, decadent culture; on the other, the generalized demand for national socialist, aryan, Germanic, heroic art. The external pomp to which Hitler could point when presenting himself and the Third Reich as the most generous patrons of art in history was nevertheless unable to compensate for the glaring weaknesses in the quality of national socialist art and culture. A world-view (Weltanschauung) which was only an eclectic synthesis of all reactionary tendencies 2 and a mass movement which ultimately led to the stabilizing of the capitalist social structure and to the elimination of all opposition could not engender new, revolutionary art and literature. In their speeches fascist leaders had to conceal the failure of their literary and artistic politics and their own disappointment at that failure. Academic publications of the Third Reich feature for the most part stereotyped endings which praise the young troops but must look (in vain) to the future for a true poet of the Party. It becomes increasingly obvious