Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  And none will hear the postman’s knock

  Without a quickening of the heart.

  For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?12

  It would take a war for the British to see the propaganda value of film. By then, however, Germany had been living with propaganda for nearly a decade – Hitler moved in on the filmmakers as soon as he moved in on the artists. One of the first initiatives of Joseph Goebbels, when he was appointed propaganda minister, was to call together Germany’s most prominent filmmakers and show them Eisenstein’s Potemkin, his 1925 masterpiece that commemorated the revolution, and which was both a work of art and a piece of propaganda. ‘Gentlemen,’ Goebbels announced when the lights came on, ‘that’s an idea of what I want from you.’13 The minister wasn’t looking for obvious propaganda; he was clever and knew better. But the films he wanted must glorify the Reich: there was to be no argument about that. At the same time, he insisted that every cinema must include in its program a government-sponsored newsreel and, on occasions, a short documentary. By the outbreak of war, Goebbels’s newsreels could be as long as forty minutes, but it was the documentaries that had most effect. Technically brilliant, they were masterminded by Leni Riefenstahl, an undistinguished actress in the Weimar years who had reinvented herself as a director and editor. Any summary of these films sounds boring – party meetings, Göring’s new air force, the land army, the Olympic Games. It was the method of presentation, Riefenstahl’s directorial skills, that made them memorable. The best was Triumph of the Will (1937), at three hours hardly short as Goebbels had stipulated, but then it was commissioned by the Führer himself as a record of the first party convention at Nuremberg. To judge by what was captured on camera – the parades, the oratory, the drilling of the troops, the vast numbers of people engrossed in sports or simply being fed – there were almost as many people behind the cameras as in front of them. In fact, sixteen cameras crews were involved.14 When it was shown, after two years of editing, Triumph of the Will had a mesmerising effect on some people.15 The endless torchlit parades, one speaker after another shouting into the microphone, the massive regularity of Brownshirts and Blackshirts absorbed in the rhetoric and then bellowing ‘Sieg Heil’ in unison, were hypnotic.16

  Almost as clever was the film Olympia, which Goebbels ordered to be made about the 1936 Olympic Games, staged in Berlin. It was there that the modern Olympic Games emerged, thanks to the Nazis. The games had been restarted in 1896 in Athens, but it was not until the Los Angeles games in 1932 that Negroes first excelled. Germany won few medals, disappointing to all but the National Socialists, who had opposed participation in the games on the grounds that they were cosmopolitan, and ‘racially inclusive.’ This made it all the more dramatic, then, that the 1936 games were to be held in Germany.17

  After taking power, the Nazis glorified sport as a noble ideal, a stabilising force in the modern state. Despite its racially inclusive nature, therefore, Hitler and Goebbels saw the 1936 games as a perfect way to show off the Third Reich, to display to the world its achievements and high ideals – and to teach its rivals a lesson. Jews had been excluded from sports clubs in Nazi Germany, which provoked an Olympic boycott in the United States. But that soon faded when the Germans assured everyone that all would be welcome. Hitler and Goebbels set about making the games a spectacle. Berlin streets were renamed after foreign athletes for the duration of the games, and the main stadium was erected specially for the occasion by Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect. The Nazis initiated the ‘torch run,’ whereby a flaming torch was carried by a succession of runners from Greece to Berlin, arriving in time to open the games in style.18

  For Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the games, Olympia, she had the use of eighty cameramen and crew, and virtually unlimited state funds.19 She shot 1.3 million feet of film and eventually produced, in 1938, a two-part, six-hour film with sound tracks in German, English, French, and Italian. As one critic wrote, ‘Riefenstahl’s film accepted and hardened all the synthetic myths about the modern Olympic Games. She intertwined symbols of Greek antiquity with motifs of industrial society’s sports theater. She ennobled good losers, supreme winners, and dwelled on fine musculature, particularly that of Jesse Owens,’ the Negro athlete from the United States who, to Hitler’s extreme displeasure, won four gold medals.20 ‘Riefenstahl was the first cinematographer to use slow-motion filming and radical cutting to reveal the intensity of effort required for supreme athletic performance. Some of Olympia’s sections, most particularly the one dealing with platform diving, are unsurpassingly beautiful.’21*

  After the war had started, Goebbels used all the powers at his command to make the most of propaganda. Cameramen accompanied the Stuka bombers and Panzer divisions as they knifed through Poland – but these documentaries were not only used for audiences back home. Specially edited versions were shown to government officials in Denmark, Holland, Belgium and Romania to underline ‘the futility of resistance.’22 Goebbels liked to say that ‘pictures don’t lie.’ He must have kept his fingers crossed when he said it.

  Stalin was not far behind Goebbels in his instinctive understanding of the link between film and propaganda. One of the aims of the first Five-Year Plan was to increase the amount of projection equipment throughout Russia. Between 1929 and 1932, the number of projectors trebled to 27,000, ‘drastically altering the status of the film in the Soviet Union.’23 What the party officials said they wanted from this new industry was ‘socialist realism,’ but it was really propaganda.

  The tone was set in 1934 with Chapayev, directed by two brothers, Sergei and Grigori Vassiliev. This was a clever, funny, and romantic film about a Red guerrilla leader during Russia’s civil war, an ordinary peasant who led his people to victory then became ‘a well-disciplined Bolshevik.’ At the same time it managed to be human by not hiding the hero’s faults.24 Chapayev became the model for most Russian films up to World War II. We Are from Kronstadt (1936), Baltic Deputy (1937), and the Maxim trilogy (1938–40) all featured revolutionary heroes who become good Bolsheviks.25 In contrast, films about contemporary life were conspicuous by their absence and it is not hard to see why. ‘Socialist realism,’ as it is commonly understood, would have involved social criticism – a very dangerous enterprise in Stalinist Russia. One development that was allowed was the making of historical films, showing life in prerevolutionary Russia as not wholly bad. This idea had its roots in Stalin’s growing belief, in the mid-1930s, that worldwide revolution would never happen and that Germany was emerging as the greatest threat to the Soviet Union. Directors were allowed to tell stories about Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, and others, so long as these figures had contributed to the unification of Russia.26 Soon, however, nationalism was not enough to meet Stalin’s propaganda needs. With the growing tension between Germany and Russia, films with an even stronger message were wanted. In Alexander Nevsky (1938), Serge Eisenstein argued that the eponymous hero had led the Russians to victory over the Teutonic knights of the thirteenth century, and they could repeat the feat if called upon to do so. At the end, Nevsky speaks directly to the camera: ‘Those who come to us with sword in hand will perish by the sword.’27 Other films were more explicit: Soldiers of the Marshes (1938) and The Oppenheim Family (1939) showed the harsh realities of Germany’s anti-Semitism and the desperate conditions inside the concentration camps.28 The trouble with propaganda, of course, is that it can never escape politics. When Molotov signed the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact in August 1939, all anti-German films were suddenly banned.

  A different view of film was provided in 1936 in Walter Benjamin’s celebrated essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ published in the newly founded Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Journal for Social Research), put out by the exiled Frankfurt Institute. Benjamin, born in Berlin in 1892, the son of a Jewish auctioneer and art dealer, was a radical intellectual, a ‘cultural Zionist’ as he described himself (meaning he was an advocate of Jewish liberal values in European
culture) who earned his living as a historian, philosopher, art and literary critic, and journalist.

  Of a slightly mystical bent, Benjamin spent World War I in medical exile in Switzerland, afterward forming friendships with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the sculptress Julia Cohn, Bertolt Brecht, and the founders of the Frankfurt School. In a series of essays and books – Elective Affinities, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, and ‘The Politicisation of the Intelligentsia’ – he compared and contrasted traditional and new art forms, anticipating in a general way the ideas of Raymond Williams, Andy Warhol, and Marshall McLuhan.29 In the most celebrated, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ written when he was already in exile, he advanced his theory of ‘non-auratic’ art.30 According to Benjamin, art from antiquity to the present has its origin in religion, and even secular work kept to itself an ‘aura,’ the possibility that it was a glimpse of the divine, however distant that glimpse might be. As Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, and José Ortega y Gasset had said, this implied a crucial difference between the artist and the non-artist, the intellectual and the proletariat. In the era of mechanical reproduction, however, and especially in film – a group rather than an individual activity – this tradition, and the distance between artists and nonartists, breaks down. Art can no longer appeal to the divine; there is a new freedom between the classes, no distinction between author and public, the latter ready to become the former if given the chance. For Benjamin the change is a good thing: in an age of mechanical reproduction the public are less an agglomeration of isolated souls, and film in particular, in offering mass entertainment, can address the psychological problems of society. As a result, social revolution might be possible without violence.31 Benjamin’s arguments, written by a liberal intellectual in exile, may be contrasted with Goebbels’s. Both understood the political power of film. Goebbels appreciated its force as a political instrument in the short run; but Benjamin was one of the first to see that the very nature of art was changing, that part of its meaning was draining away. He had identified a phase in cultural evolution that would accelerate in the second half of the century.

  In 1929 the Museum of Modern Art had opened in New York, its first exhibition devoted to Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, and Vincent van Gogh. Arguably more influential, however, was an exhibition about architecture since 1920, held at the same museum in 1932. This was where the terms ‘international style’ or ‘international modern style’ were first coined. In New York at that time the new buildings attracting attention were the Chrysler headquarters (1930) and the Rockefeder Center (1931–9). Neither was in the international style, but it was the Manhattan designs that were the anachronisms. In the twentieth century, the international style would prove more influential than any other form of architecture. This was because it was more than just a style, but rather a whole way of conceiving buildings. Its aims were first clearly set out at the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), meeting during a cruise between Marseilles and Athens in 1933.32 There, CIAM issued a dogmatic manifesto, known as the Athens Charter, which insisted on the importance of city planning, of ‘functional zoning’, and of high-rise, widely spaced apartment blocks. The moving spirit behind this approach was a forty-six-year-old Swiss, christened CharlesEdouard Jeanneret but known since 1920 as Le Corbusier. Walter Gropius, Alvar Aalto (a Finn), Philip Johnson (the curator of the MoMA show, who coined the term International Style), and even Frank Lloyd Wright shared Le Corbusier’s passion for new materials and clean straight lines in their search for a more democratic form of their art. But Le Corbusier was the most innovative, and the most combative.33

  Le Corbusier studied art and architecture in Paris in the early years of the century, much influenced by John Ruskin and the social ideals of the Arts and Crafts Movement. He worked in Peter Behrens’s office in Berlin in 1910–11 and was affected by Wright and by the Bauhaus, many of whose aims he shared, and who produced similar buildings.34 After World War I, Le Corbusier’s schemes for new architecture gradually became more radical. First came his ‘Citrohan’ houses, a variation of Citroën, suggesting that houses were as up-to-date as cars. These houses abolished conventional walls and were raised on stilts or piloti.35 In 1925, at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels, in Paris, he designed a stark white house with a tree growing out of it. The house was part of a plan voisin (neighbourhood plan) that envisaged demolishing much of central Paris and replacing it with eighteen huge skyscrapers.36 Le Corbusier’s distinctive international style finally found expression in the Villa Savoye at Passy (1929–32) and in his Swiss pavilion at University City, near Paris (1930—32). These were both plain white rectangular slabs, raised off the ground.37 Here, and in the Salvation Army Hostel, also in Paris (1929— 33), Le Corbusier sought to achieve a simplicity and a purity, combining classical antiquity and modernity with the ‘fundamentals’ of new science.38 He said he wanted to celebrate what he called ‘the white world’: precise materials, clarity of vision, space, and air, as against the ‘brown world’ of cluttered, closed, muddled design and thinking.39 It was a noble aim, publicly acknowledged when he was given the commission to design the Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux for the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1937 (where Picasso’s Guernica was shown).

  Unfortunately, there were serious problems with Le Corbusier’s approach. The available materials didn’t do justice to his vision. Plain white surfaces soon stained, or cracked, or peeled. People didn’t like living or working inside such buildings, especially minimalist apartment blocks.40 The white world of the international movement would dominate the immediate post-World War II landscape, with its passion for planning. In many ways it was a disaster.

  It is common now to speak of an ‘Auden generation’ of poets, which included Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis, John Betjeman and, sometimes, Louis MacNeice. Not all of them spoke in an identical ‘Audenesque’ voice – nonetheless, Audenesque entered the language.

  Born in 1907, Wystan Hugh Auden grew up in Birmingham (though he went to school in Norfolk), a middle-class boy fascinated by mythology and by the industrial landscape of the Midlands – railways, gasworks, the factories and machinery associated with the motor trade.41 He went to Oxford to read biology, and although he soon changed to English, he always remained interested in science, and psychoanalysis especially. One of the reasons he changed to English was because he already knew that he wanted to be a poet.42 His first verse was published in 1928, by Stephen Spender, whom he met at Oxford, who had his own hand press. T. S. Eliot, by then an editor at Faber & Faber, had previously rejected one collection of Auden’s poems, but the firm published a new set in 1930.43 The collection showed that at twenty-three Auden had achieved a striking originality in both voice and technique. His background in the already decaying industrial heartland of Britain, and his interest in science and psychology, helped him to an original vocabulary, set in contemporary and realistic locations. At the same time he dislocated his syntax, juxtaposing images in deliberately jarring ways, reminiscent of the arrhythmia of machines. There was something familiar, almost ordinary, about the way many lines ended.

  The dogs are barking, the crops are growing,

  But nobody knows how the wind is blowing:

  Gosh, to look at we’re no great catch;

  History seems to have struck a bad patch.44

  Or:

  Brothers, who when the sirens roar

  From office, shop and factory pour

  ‘Neath evening sky;

  By cops directed to the fog

  Of talkie-houses for a drug,

  Or down canals to find a hug

  Until you die.45

  Reading Auden is strangely calming, as though a ‘stranger were making our acquaintance,’ perhaps because, in the changing insecure world of the 1930s, his familiar, clear images were something to hold on to.46 He was not averse to drawing his ideas from sociology and the sort of informatio
n gleaned from surveys carried out by Gallup, which started its polling activities in America in 1935 and opened an office in Britain a year later.47 Auden’s later poems, as Bernard Bergonzi has observed, had a more political edge, but it was ready the new ‘palette’ he discovered that characterised the Auden style, appropriating the rhythms of jazz, Hollywood musicals, and popular songs (now infinitely more popular than hitherto because of the radio), and peppering his lines with references to film stars such Garbo or Dietrich.

  The soldier loves his rifle,

  The scholar loves his books,

  The farmer loves his horses,

  The fdm star loves her looks.

  There’s love the whole world over

  Wherever you may be;

  Some lose their rest for gay Mae West,

  But you’re my cup of tea.48

  Auden was quickly imitated, but the quality and intensity of his own poetry fell off at the end of the 1930s, after one of his finest works, Spain. Auden was in Spain in January 1937, not to take part as a combatant in the civil war, as so many prominent intellectuals did, but to drive an ambulance for the Republican side, though that didn’t happen. While there he came across the desperate infighting among the different Republican factions, and he was shocked by their cruelty to the priests. Despite these misgivings, he still thought a fascist victory needed to be prevented, and on his return to Britain he wrote Spain, which was completed in less than a month.49 His main concern is liberalism, what it is and whether it can survive.