Anti-Nazi Modernism: The Challenges of Resistance in 1930s Fiction

Chapter 1. Spectacular Nazism and Subversive Performances

23 The entire educational system, the theatre, the cinema, literature, the Press, and the wireless—all these will be used as a means to this end and valued accordingly. They must all serve for the maintenance of the eternal values present in the essential character of our people. —adolf hitler, speech given on march 23, 1933 The masses have never thirsted after truth. . . . Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim. —gustave le bon, THE CROWD (1903); referred to by sigmund freud, GROUP PSYCHOLOGY AND THE ANALYSIS OF THE EGO (1921) In Eric Rentschler’s 1996 collection of essays on German cinema, filmmaker Wim Wenders comments, “Never before and in no other country have images and language been abused so unscrupulously as here, never before and nowhere else have they been debased so deeply as vehicles to transmit lies” (Ministry of Illusion, 128).1 In the past two decades, considerable scholarly attention has been focused on the way Nazi Germany exploited images and visual culture to captivate the public and rally people to the National Socialist cause. It is well understood that Nazism could not have garnered as much support from the Spectacular Nazism and Subversive Performances chapter 1 24 chapter 1 public as it did by political arguments alone or by fear and policing.2 In 1933 social critic Frederick Schuman observed that it was the “meetings, parades, flags, music” that lent Nazism its allure and made it so appealing : “There was a hypnotic oratory, great drama, tremendous excitement and exaltation” (The Nazi Dictatorship, 77). As Schuman comments on his impressions of the 1927 Nuremberg convention, Hitler was “the symbol artist par excellence. . . . He was an actor and stage director, as well as scene-painter, costumer, and property man. The pageantry of the great parades and mass meetings was his” (82). Aside from the colorful rallies and family events, the Nazi Party used the newest forms of technology —radio, cinema, newsreels, photography—to transform ideology into enthralling and mesmerizing modes of entertainment. To quote Rentschler, “The Third Reich [was] a grand production, the world war a continuing movie of the week” (222). For many modernist writers, Hitler and the Nazi Party’s reliance on image, illusion, spectacle, and propaganda threatened to eclipse their own roles as artists and fiction-makers. In “The Artist and Politics” Woolf remarks that the artist must become involved in politics because “two causes of supreme importance to him are in peril. The first is his own survival; the other is the survival of his art” (M, 182). But how can the artist’s work become a site of political struggle against the perilous effects of the Nazi spectacle? What does this struggle look like? Is it possible to convince a public to resist Nazism and its ideology without resorting to the very same rhetorical strategies used in its propaganda? This chapter attempts to probe some of these questions by examining both the ethics and aesthetics of these writers’ resistance to the Nazi spectacle in fiction. Later, I examine how Woolf’s Between the Acts, Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, and Barnes’s Nightwood challenge aspects of Nazi culture through metaphors taken from photography, film, theater, and cultural performances. Before I launch into an analysis of the texts, however , I will outline some of the ideological and political aspects of the “spectacle” to explain how it functioned in the 1930s and how it is then reproduced and challenged in anti-Nazi fiction. The Politics of the Spectacle The exploitation of mass spectacle for political purposes, unsurprisingly, has historical precedents to its use by the Nazi Party. The lavish, dra- spectacular nazism 25 matic, and public nature of a spectacle and its particular impact on a community of viewers had potential to lend significance to the notion of “spectacle” in social and political thought. Among the first to politicize the word spectacle is, notably, Friedrich Nietzsche. In The Birth of Tragedy in the Spirit of Music, Nietzsche discusses spectacle and spectatorship in relation to politics and antiquity when describing ancient Greek theater. He uses the term “spectacle” in a discussion of whether life can be represented in art, basing his main conceit on an analysis of the role of the Chorus in ancient Greece. Nietzsche contends that although commentators generally view the Chorus as an “ideal spectator ,” mirroring the mood or will...