- 09 Dec 2008 15:32
#1719758
Joachim C Fest the best author on the Third Reich lays the blame where few liberals dare to do, he quotes the Jewish novelist, playwright, and poet Franz Werfel, who also went into exile, who unambiguously acknowledges the responsibility which he and his his own generation of artists and extremist, he even castigated himself for his arrogance: "Applauded by the laughter of a few philistines, we stoked the inferno in which mankind is now frying"
Between Heaven and Earth - Page 250 by Franz Werfel
Franz Werfel, once a member of the Expressionist avant-garde, wrote shortly before his death in Hollywood in August 1945, one of the most succinct characterizations of the age to which Hitler finaly took power
Between Heaven and Earth - Page 250 by Franz Werfel
Franz Werfel, once a member of the Expressionist avant-garde, wrote shortly before his death in Hollywood in August 1945, one of the most succinct characterizations of the age to which Hitler finaly took power
The Face Of The Third Reich
by Joachim C Fest
'Perhaps the most important recent addition to the literature on the Third Reich'—Hannah Arendt
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboa ... chap20.htm
The Intellectuals And National Socialism
Part 3 — Functionaries Of Totalitarian Rule
I don't want any intellectuals!— Adolf Hitler
In every spiritual attitude a political attitude is latent. —Thomas Mann
The aim of this first period was defined by Reich Minister Frick in the words: 'An end must be put once and for all to this spirit of subversion that has gnawed for long enough at Germany's heart.' Chief among the measures adopted to this end were the mass introduction of new professors into the universities, the suppression of unwanted artists by forcibly preventing them from working and legally banning their work, and the most spectacular gesture of resolute hostility to the intellect: the burning of some 20,000 so-called un-German writings in the public squares of German university towns to the accompaniment of SA and SS bands playing 'patriotic airs'.
Almost more staggering were the countless half-pacts with the National Socialist leaders, the attitude of those prepared to back any theoretical anti-intellectualism, who evidently persuaded themselves that barbarism was divisible and finally saw in National Socialism the degeneration of their folk, anti-rational ideals of a rebirth of the soul or whatever it might be. These were people like the literary historian and poet Ernst Bertrand who, during the first days of May 1933, set out to remove from the lists of works to be burnt the books of his personal friends Thomas Mann and Friedrich Gundolf, and after succeeding in this wrote happily that now he could 'participate in the solemn auto-da-fe' and actually had a poem to the flames, specially written for the occasion, read out in public.
Within those weeks no fewer than 250 writers left Germany, giving the cue for a process of unparalleled cultural wastage whose after-effects can still be felt. Others withdrew and fell silent out of disgust and helpless anger. But the nationalist intoxication swept away such feelings, and where official intellectuals did not avert their eyes in embarrassment from the many tragedies of the outlawed and expelled, they mocked them in the full consciousness of their fine illusions. 'If the fulminations of world opinion strike us because we have ostensibly betrayed freedom, we can only smile wryly as they do who know the facts,' Wilhelm Schafer declared in a speech in Berlin under the self-confidently ironic title 'Germany's Relapse into the Middle Ages'. And while Rudolf G. Binding in his 'A German's Answer to the World' defended the expulsions on the grounds of the national interest and stated: 'Germany this Germany — was born of the furious longing, the inner obsession, the bloody agonies of wanting Germany: at any price, at the price of every downfall,'
Finally, any inquiry into the causes and responsibility for the failure of the educated classes continually leads back to that crisis of consciousness whose protracted preparatory phase reached its climax in the infectious spiritual climate of the 1920s. Every intellectual knows an occasional temptation to fall for the charlatan; in each there lives an urge to the Black Mass, a desire to 'turn the world of the spirit upside down with an intellectual gesture, to interchange the signs that mark its whole system of relationships, as the practical joker switches all the shoes outside the doors of hotel rooms during the night'.
But when the charlatans and 'practical jokers' suddenly appear in droves and, not with the gesture of ironic detachment but the mien of dark wisdom, as though they were continually holding anguished converse with angels, then everything points to one of those crises of the spirit that precede politico-moral catastrophes. A culture whose mouthpieces, to the applause of the majority, had long since become the spokesmen for the defamation and negation of everything upon which this culture rested could no longer credibly oppose its own destruction. The Expressionist poet Hanns Johst, later President of the Reich Chamber of Writers, went to the heart of this crisis when he made the hero of one of his dramas say that he released the safety catch of his Browning as soon as he heard the word 'culture'; fundamentally, everyone did. F. G. Junger wrote: 'Every new screw in the machine-gun, every improvement in gas warfare, is more important than the League of Nations.'
Symptoms of the same condition showed in the contempt for man seen in literature and art, the brutality of style and expression which ran parallel with the mania for twilight and darkness, the delight in barbarism, downfall, myth and cynicism which were not confined to the political right. Looking back, as one who was for a time part of all this, Franz Werfel confessed in terms that are probably not universally valid but certainly largely apply to the situation at that time: 'There is no more consuming, impudent, mocking, more devil-possessed arrogance than that of the avant-garde artist and radical intellectual who are bursting with the vain hankering to be deep and obscure and difficult and to inflict pain. To the accompaniment of the amusedly indignant laughter of a few philistines we inconspicuously heated up the hell in which mankind is now frying.'
Keyed as they were to a mood of downfall and destruction, artists, writers and intellectuals as a whole failed to see that the culture which they were slandering included everything upon which their existence as artists, writers and intellectuals rested, and many eventually acclaimed the victory of National Socialism precisely because of the possibilities of barbarism and chaos which it brought with it — to the terror, as they thought, only of a 'cowardly and well-fed bourgeoisie'.
The guilt of intellectual radicalism in helping to bring about National Socialism lies in the way it prepared public opinion for the regime's excessive claims in all fields, in its expulsion of reason, its devaluation of the image of man, its scorn for all those who still recognised truths or moral standards and its consistent denunciation of all ethical principles, these being presented under the guise of a fresh, undismayed, undeluded feeling for life. This is an incontestable fact, regardless of such questions as whether an intellectual attitude can be held responsible for what happens when that same attitude is fraudulently distorted and actually put into practice. 'Everything romantic stands in the service of other, unromantic energies,' wrote Carl Schmitt in 1925, involuntarily giving himself away.
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