Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  If Hitler did delay publication because of the effect Mythus might have on Catholics, he was being no more than realistic. The Vatican was incensed by its argument and, in 1934, placed it on the Index of Prohibited Books. Cardinal Schulte, archbishop of Cologne, set up a ‘Defence Staff of seven young priests, who worked round the clock to list the many errors in the text. These were published in a series of anonymous pamphlets printed simultaneously in five different cities to evade the Gestapo. The most brutal use of the book was as a tool to expose priests: Catholic Nazis were ordered to refer to the Mythus in the confessional, and then denounce any priest who was so duped into criticising the ideology of the NSDAP.129 For a time it seems that Rosenberg truly believed that a new religion was coming into being – he told Hermann Goring as much in August 1939. Within a month, however, Germany was at war, and after that the impact of the Mythus was patchy. Rosenberg himself remained popular with Hitler, and when the war began, he was given his own unit, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, or ERR, charged with looting art.

  Although they were incoherent and arbitrary, Art and Race and the Mythus were linked by the fact that each attacked the intellectual and cultural life of Germany. Whatever their shortcomings and failings, however crude and tendentious, they represented an attempt by the Nazis to focus on thought beyond the confines of party politics. In publicising such views, the Nazis now left no doubt as to what they thought was wrong with German civilisation.

  With many people so worried about the direction civilisation was taking, with evidence for such a dire fate being adduced on all sides, it is perhaps not surprising that such a period, such a mood, produced one of the great works of literature of the century. One could argue that John Steinbeck was the chronicler of unemployment in the 1930s, that Christopher Isherwood’s novels about Berlin served as an antidote to the sinister absurdities of the Mythus. But the worries and the bleak mood went far wider than unemployment and Germany, and this pessimism was clearly captured by someone else – by Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World.

  Seven years younger than his brother Julian, the eminent biologist, Aldous Huxley was born in 1894.130 His poor eyesight exempted him from service in World War I and he spent the time working on Lady Ottoline Morrell’s farm near Oxford, where he met Lytton Strachey, T. S. Eliot, Mark Gertler, Middleton Murry, D. H. Lawrence, and Bertrand Russell. (Eliot said Huxley showed him some early verse, which he was ‘unable to show any enthusiasm for.’)131 Very well read and deeply sceptical, Huxley had written four books by the early 1930s, including the novels Crome Yellow and Antic Hay.132 Brave New World, published in 1932, is a dystopian novel, a pessimistic taste of the possible horrific consequences of twentieth-century thought. It is, at one level, science fiction. But Brave New World was also designed to be a cautionary tale; if Freud, in Civilisation and Its Discontents, explored the superego as the basis of a new ethics, Huxley described a new ethic itself – in which the new psychology was as much to blame as anything.133

  Huxley’s targets in the book are primarily biology, genetics, behavioural psychology, and mechanisation. Brave New World is set well into the future, in AF 632, AF standing for After Ford (which would make it around 2545 AD). Technology has moved on, and a technique known as Bokanovsky’s Process enables one ovary in certain circumstances to produce sixteen thousand persons, perfect for Mendelian mathematics, the basis for a new society in which vast numbers of people are, even more than now, all the same. There are neo-Pavlovian infant-conditioning methods (books and flowers are linked with noxious shocks), and a ‘sleep-teaching process by which infants acquire, among other things, the rudiments of class-consciousness.’134 Sex is strictly controlled: women are allowed a pregnancy substitute, and there are bandolier-containers, known as Malthusian belts, which carry not bullets but contraceptives. Polygamy is the accepted norm, monogamy a disgrace. The family, and parenthood, are obsolete. It has become ‘improper’ to want to spend time alone, to fall in love, and to read books for pleasure. In a chilling echo of the Mythus (Huxley’s book was published in the same year), the Christian cross has been abolished by the simple expedient of having its head removed to form the letter T, after the ‘model B Ford.’ Organised religion has been replaced by ‘Solidarity Services.’ The book solemnly informs us that this new world resulted from a nine-year war in which biological weapons wrought such devastation that ‘a world-wide federation and foolproof control of the people were the only acceptable alternative.’ Huxley is specific about the eugenics that help exercise this foolproof control, showing how eggs are graded (alphas to epsilons) and then immersed in ‘a warm bouillon containing free-swimming spermatozoa.’ We encounter half-familiar organisations such as the ‘Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre.’ Some of the characters – Mustapha Mond, the Resident Controller for Western Europe, and Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne – remind us of what the new world has lost from the past and what the society has chosen to remember. Huxley is also careful to show that snobbery and jealousy still exist, as does loneliness, ‘despite all attempts to eradicate such feelings.’135

  This sounds heavy-handed in summary, but Huxley is a funny writer. His vision of the future is not wholly bad – the elite still enjoy life, as elites tend to do.’136 And it is this which links Huxley to Freud, where this chapter began. Freud’s view was that a better understanding of the superego, by psychoanalysis, would ultimately lead to a better understanding of ethics, and more ethical behaviour. Huxley was more sceptical, and he had more in common with Russell. He thought there were no absolutes of good and bad, and that man must continually renew his political institutions in the light of new knowledge, to create the best society possible. The society of Brave New World may seem horrible to us, but it doesn’t seem all that horrible to the people in the story, who know nothing else, just as the Dobu, or the Arapesh, or the Kwakiutl, know nothing else beyond their societies, and are happy enough. To get the world you want, Huxley affirms, you have to fight for it. And, by implication, if your world is collapsing, you aren’t fighting hard enough. That was where, in 1932, he was most prescient of all, in suggesting that there was a fight coming.

  17

  INQUISITION

  On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Barely six weeks later, on 11 March, he established the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, with Joseph Goebbels as minister.1 This was a name straight out of Brave New World, and between them Hitler and Goebbels would soon wreak havoc on the cultural life of Germany on a scale never seen before. Their brutal actions did not come out of the blue. Hitler had always been very clear that when the Nazi Party formed a government, there would be ‘accounts’ to settle with a wide range of enemies. Foremost among those he singled out were artists. In 1930, in a letter to Goebbels, he assured the future minister that when the party came to power, it would not simply become a ‘debating society’ so far as art was concerned. The party’s policies, laid out in the manifesto as early as 1920, called for ‘a struggle’ against the ‘tendencies in the arts and literature which exercise a disintegrating influence on the life of the people.’2

  The first blacklist of artists was published on 15 March. George Grosz, visiting the United States, was stripped of his German citizenship. The Bauhaus was closed. Max Liebermann (then aged eighty-eight) and Käthe Kollwitz (sixty-six), Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix and Oskar Schlemmer were all dismissed from their posts as teachers in art schools. So swift were these actions that the sackings had to be made legal retroactively by a law that wasn’t passed until 7 April 1933.3 In the same month the first exhibition defaming modern art – called Chamber of Horrors – was held in Nuremberg, then travelled to Dresden and Dessau.4 A week before Hitler became chancellor, Ernst Barlach had been rash enough to describe him on radio as ‘the lurking destroyer of others’ and called National Socialism ‘the secret death of mankind.’5 Now, in retribution, the local Nazis called for the artist’s Magdeburg Memorial to be removed from the
cathedral there, and no sooner had this demand been voiced than the work was shipped to Berlin ‘for storage.’6 Der Sturm, the magazine that had done so much to promote modern art in Germany, was shut down, and so were Die Aktion and Kunst und Kunstler (Art and Artists). Herwarth Walden, publisher of Der Sturm, escaped to the Soviet Union, where he died in 1941.7 The collagist John Heartfield fled to Prague.

  In 1933 modern artists made several attempts to align themselves with the Nazis, but Goebbels would have none of it, and the exhibitions were forced to close. For a time he and Rosenberg competed for the right to set policy in the cultural/intellectual sphere, but the propaganda minister was a superb organiser and sidelined his rival as soon as an official Chamber for Arts and Culture came into being under Goebbels’s control. The powers of the chamber were formidable – each and every artist was forced to join a government-sponsored professional body, and unless artists registered, they were forbidden from exhibiting in museums or from receiving commissions. Goebbels also stipulated that there were to be no public exhibitions of art without official approval.8 In a speech to the party’s annual meeting in September 1934, Hitler emphasised ‘two cultural dangers’ that threatened National Socialism. On the one hand, there were the modernists, the ‘spoilers of art’ – identified specifically as ‘the cubists, futurists and Dadaists.’ What he and the German people wanted, he said, was a German art that was ‘clear,’ ‘without contortion’ and ‘without ambiguity.’ Art was not ‘auxiliary to politics,’ he said. It must become a ‘functioning part’ of the Nazi political program.9 The speech was an important moment for those artists who had not yet been dismissed from their positions or had their art taken off display. Goebbels, who had shown some sympathy for people like Emil Nolde and Ernst Barlach, quickly hardened his opinions. Confiscations recommenced, and another raft of painters and sculptors was dismissed from teaching or museum positions. Hans Grundig was forbidden to paint. Books by or about modern artists also became targets. Copies of the catalogue of Klee’s drawings, published in 1934, were seized even before they arrived in the shops. Two years later a catalogue of the works of Franz Marc was seized (Marc had been dead nearly twenty years), as was a volume of Barlach’s drawings – labelled a danger to ‘public safety, peace and order.’ The book was later pulped by the Gestapo.10 In May 1936 all artists registered with the Reichskammer had to prove their Aryan ancestry. In October 1936 the National Gallery in Berlin was instructed to close its modern art galleries, and in November Goebbels outlawed all ‘unofficial art criticism.’ From then on, only the reporting of art events was allowed.

  Some artists tried to protest. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, as he was forced out of the Prussian Academy, insisted that he was ‘neither a Jew nor a social democrat’. ‘For thirty years I have struggled for a new, strong, and true German art and will continue to do so for as long as I live.’11 Max Pechstein could not believe what was happening to him, and reminded the Gestapo that he had fought for Germany on the western front in World War I, that one of his sons was a member of the SA, and another was in the Hitler Youth. Emil Nolde, an enthusiastic supporter of the party from the early 1920s, criticised the ‘daubings’ of some of his colleagues, whom he described as ‘half-breeds, bastards and mulattoes’ in his autobiography, Years of Struggle, published in 1934.12 That year he wrote directly to Goebbels, insisting that his own art was ‘vigorous, durable, ardent and German.’ Goebbels wasn’t listening; in June 1937, 1,052 of Nolde’s works were confiscated.13 Oskar Schlemmer stood up for artists when they were attacked by Gottfried Benn in The New State and the Intellectuals, which was a highly charged defence of the Nazis and an intemperate attack on their perceived enemies. Schlemmer’s argument was that the artists identified by Benn as ‘decadent’ were nothing of the sort and that the real decadence lay in the ‘second-raters’ who were replacing their betters with, as he put it, ‘kitsch.’14 Such protests went nowhere. Hitler’s mind had been made up long ago, and he wasn’t about to change it. Indeed, these artists were lucky not to have provoked reprisals. All that was left for them was to protest in their art. Otto Dix was one of those who led the way, portraying Hitler as ‘Envy’ in his 1933 picture The Seven Deadly Sins. (He meant, of course, that Hitler, the failed artist, envied real ones.) Max Beckmann caricatured the chancellor as a ‘Verführer,’ a seducer. When informed that he had been expelled from the Prussian Academy, Max Liebermann, the most popular living painter in pre-World War I Germany, remarked tartly, ‘I couldn’t possibly eat as much as I would like to puke.’15

  Many artists eventually took the option of emigration and exile.16 Kurt Schwitters went to Norway, Paul Klee to Switzerland, Lyonel Feininger to the United States, Max Beckmann to the Netherlands, Heinrich Campendonck to Belgium and then to Holland, Ludwig Meidner to England, and Max Liebermann to Palestine. Liebermann had loved Germany; it had been good to him before World War I, and he had met, and painted, some of its most illustrious figures. And yet, shortly before his death in 1935, he sadly concluded that there was only one choice for young German artists who were Jewish: ‘There is no other salvation than emigration to Palestine, where they can grow up as free people and escape the dangers of remaining refugees.’17

  For the most part, one would think that science – especially the ‘hard’ sciences of physics, chemistry, mathematics and geology – would be unaffected by political regimes. It is, after all, generally agreed that research into the fundamental building blocks of nature is as free from political overtones as intellectual work can be. But in Nazi Germany nothing could be taken for granted.

  The persecution of Albert Einstein began early. He came under attack largely because of the international acclaim he received after Arthur Eddington’s announcement, in November 1919, that he had obtained experimental confirmation for the predictions of general relativity theory. The venom came from both political and scientific extremists. He had some support – for example, the German ambassador in London in 1920 warned his Foreign Office privately in a report that ‘Professor Einstein is just at this time a cultural factor of first rank…. We should not drive such a man out of Germany with whom we can carry on real cultural propaganda.’ Yet two years later, following the political assassination of Walther Rathenau, the foreign minister, unconfirmed reports leaked out that Einstein was also on the list of intended victims.18

  When the Nazis finally achieved power, ten years later, action was not long delayed. In January 1933 Einstein was away from Berlin on a visit to the United States. He was then fifty-four, and although he found his fame burdensome, preferring to bury himself in his work on general relativity theory and cosmology, he also realised that he couldn’t altogether avoid being a public figure. So he made a point of announcing that he would not return to his positions at the university in Berlin and the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft as long as the Nazis were in charge.19 The Nazis repaid the compliment by freezing his bank account, searching his house for weapons allegedly hidden there by Communists, and publicly burning copies of a popular book of his on relativity. Later in the spring, the regime issued a catalogue of ‘state enemies.’ It had been carefully edited to show the most unflattering photographs of the Nazis’ opponents, with a brief text underneath each one. Einstein’s picture headed the list, and below his photograph was the text, ‘Not yet hanged.’20

  In September Einstein was in Oxford, shortly before he was scheduled to return to the teaching position he had at Caltech, the California Institute of Technology. It was by no means clear then where he would settle. He told a reporter that he felt he was European and that, whatever might happen in the short term, he would eventually return. Meanwhile, ‘in a fit of absent mindedness,’ he had accepted professorships in Spain, France, Belgium, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and at the newly formed Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton. In Britain there were plans to give him an appointment at Oxford, and a bill was before the House of Commons to give him the status of a naturalised citizen.21 By the early 1930s, however
, America was no longer a backwater in physics. It was beginning to generate its own Ph.D.s (1,300 in the 1920s), who were carrying on Einstein’s work. Also, he liked America, and he needed no further inducements to leave after Hitler became chancellor. He didn’t go to Caltech, however, but to Princeton. In 1929 the American educationalist Abraham Flexner had succeeded in raising money to build an advanced research institute at Princeton, New Jersey. Five million dollars had been pledged by Louis Bamberger and his sister Caroline Fuld, a successful business family from New Jersey.22 The basic idea was to establish a centre for the advanced study of science where eminent figures could work in a peaceful and productive environment, free of any teaching burden. Flexner had stayed with Einstein at Caputh, his home, and there, as they walked by the lake, Einstein’s enthusiasm for Princeton grew still more. They even got as far as talking money. Asked what he wished to be paid, Einstein hesitated: ‘Three thousand dollars a year? Could I live on less?’ ‘You couldn’t live on that,’ Flexner said promptly, and suggested he should sort it out with Mrs Einstein. In no time, Flexner and Elsa had arrived at a figure of $16,000 per annum.23 This was a notable coup for Flexner. When the news was released, at a stroke he had dramatically increased the profile of his project. Inside Germany, reactions were somewhat different. One newspaper ran the headline: ‘GOOD NEWS FROM EINSTEIN – HE IS NOT COMING BACK.’ Not everyone in America wanted Einstein. The National Patriotic Council complained he was a Bolshevik who espoused ‘worthless theories.’ The American Women’s League also branded him a Communist, clamouring for the State Department to refuse Einstein an entry permit. They were ignored.24 Einstein might be the most famous physicist to leave Germany, but he was by no means the only one. Roughly one hundred world-class colleagues found refuge in the United States between 1933 and 1941.25