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44 german fascism and the contested terrain of culture 44 2 German Fascism and the Contested Terrain of Culture G oethe made Faust into a cosmopolitan figure, a representative, as the Hungarian critic Georg Lukács writes, of the “destiny of mankind”;Thomas Mann, in his epic struggle with Nazism, brings him back to his German roots in the folktale. Doctor Faustus, written while Mann was in exile in California between 1943 and 1946, is the most sophisticated embodiment of the fight over German culture that took place during the first half of the twentieth century. Nazism’s rise was not built on mere thuggery: its mythic aggrandizement and distortion of the German cultural past were calculated to enhance its appeal. The struggle for the hearts and minds of the German population included, in the early stages, racial interpretations of German fairy tales; academic writings in the fields of anthropology, history, linguistics, and philosophy that “proved” German superiority (with willful distortions, such as the idea that Germans, not modern Greeks, were the true descendants of classical Greece); and arguments about the “destiny” of Germany as world leader.1 After Hitler assumed power, the cultural flank was expanded to include education (the rewriting of textbooks and the reorganization of university professorships to reflect the new racial theories), the arts (the creation of various ministerial branches, under the directorship of Joseph Goebbels, to oversee artistic activity), and the press (the forcing of dissident publications underground and the imposition of restrictions on all printed material). Moreover, Hitler’s Reich did not stop at control and prohibition: it became actively involved in all aspects of the cultural sphere, including literature, theater, filmmaking, and art patronage and exhibition. One immediate effect was the exclusion of Jews from public participation in culture. Those who had the foresight to emigrate included Jews and dissidents such as the physicist Albert Einstein; philosophers Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno; filmmakers Fritz Lang and William Wyler; artists Max 45 german fascism and the contested terrain of culture Ernst and John Heartfield (who anglicized his name from the German Herzfelde); musicians Bruno Walter, Arnold Schönberg, and Kurt Weill; as well as literary figures Bertolt Brecht, Stefan Zweig, and Thomas Mann. After first fleeing to Switzerland in 1933, Mann came to the United States in 1938. In 1941, he went to California, where he joined a society of exiles that has been nicknamed “Weimar in Hollywood.”2 “Taking Back” the German Legacy: Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus Doctor Faustus, the novel that Mann wrote in exile, is an apocalyptic work that recounts two disasters occurring in parallel fashion on different temporal planes. The narrator, classical philologist Serenus Zeitbloom, is living through the last years of the Reich in retirement, after having withdrawn from his teaching post in protest over Nazi policies. Rather than being a spokesman for Mann and the exile community, he embodies the contradictory position of those intellectuals who stayed in Germany during the war, full of misgivings and without wholehearted participation in the Reich’s cultural affairs. As Germany’s two war fronts gradually crumble, he cheers on Nazism’s opponents, while at the same time grieving for the end of the Germany he knew and with which he identified. Mann has given us, in the person of Zeitbloom, a portrait of “Spenglerian man,” convinced of Germany’s greatness but appalled at the Fascist exploitation of national sentiment.3 Too timid to assert himself against the rising intellectual tide of racism and nationalism in the intellectual salons, Zeitbloom is reduced to being the passive spectator of a cultural shift he registers with pessimism and consternation. The second temporal plane is that of the biographical account he writes of his childhood friend, the composer Adrian Leverkühn. Here, too, is the story of a catastrophe: the artist, inhibited by his own coldness and lack of emotion, is drawn to extremes that ultimately provoke his downfall. His sexual intercourse with a diseased prostitute, arising from the uncontrollable eruption of powerfully repressed sexual instincts, at once liberates his powers of artistic creation and afflicts him with the incurable illness that seals his doom twenty-four years later. His fate convinces Leverkühn that he has made a pact with the devil. Zeitbloom is appalled to find, among his friend’s posthumous papers, the transcript of a long conversation between the composer and a mysterious Mephistophelean figure (perhaps, Zeitbloom supposes, only the product of his friend’s diseased imagination). [18.116.40.177...

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