by Philipp Blom
And there were more direct ways of creating a supposed genetic utopia. In Germany, the state-administered Lebensborn (Spring of Life) organization, founded in 1935, set about producing the new Aryans of Hitler’s dreams by selecting men and women who met the approved racial criteria for a future Germanic people to produce babies for Führer and Volk. Prospective mothers with the requisite blond hair were brought together in an institutional setting with handsome young men of apparently Aryan stock; the children they bore were then integrated into a strict system of National Socialist education. In 1936 this scheme was only in its infancy, but by the end of the war some fifteen thousand children, the toddling exponents of the new master race, would have been born and schooled in what German critics called “Hitler’s chicken farms.”
The Victor by the German sculptor Arnold Breker, a perfect example of the Nazi idea of the New Man.
The official image of the new race lay in the willing hands of Arno Breker, a talented sculptor who had begun his career in Paris, where he had been friendly with important artists including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Aristide Maillol. Breker had returned to Germany in 1934, limiting his gifts to the production of images of heroic nudity. Breker’s uninspired expanses of fleshy pomposity were soon adorning public buildings, and Hitler showed himself highly pleased with the tight muscles, high foreheads, firm loins, and visionary poses of the sculpted Aryan giants. What little grace they possessed, however, was owing not to the racial superiority of their models but to Breker’s thorough knowledge of the sculpture of antiquity, which he continued to copy, and unwittingly satirize, throughout his career.
Breker was by no means alone in taking his inspiration from Greek and Roman art. After the Great War, the once vigorous cubist movement had abruptly faltered, as if the artists had lost both nerve and appetite for presenting splintered bodies and disintegrated selves. Picasso, both reflector and initiator of artistic currents, had begun to paint in a neoclassical manner as early as 1918, and others were soon to follow. In Russia, the young Sergey Prokofiev premiered his Classical Symphony in the same year; in Paris, Jean Cocteau was using a similarly simplified neoclassical idiom for his drawings and stage designs; and Igor Stravinsky turned from the extravagant modernity of his Sacre du Printemps to tame variations on eighteenth-century Italian musical forms. A pall had fallen over the seemingly boundless experimentation of the art world, and many artists joined the great Western project of making humans whole again, rescuing the New Man from the shell-shocked ruins of the old.
There were countercurrents, of course. German expressionists such as George Grosz and Otto Dix had sought to portray precisely the grotesque ugliness of a sick civilization—but their distorted faces and obscene tableaux were themselves indictments of the society producing such aberrations, the flipside of hope. The surrealists in Paris had produced an anti-art that claimed to be not interested in beauty, but as André Breton’s later political engagement showed, this was also intended to attack the society that had produced the war and its crushed victims. A vision of a New Man lurked behind these movements, too.
Nobody was a more ardent, even idolatrous admirer of the resurrected classical body than the director of the official film of the Berlin Olympics, Leni Riefenstahl, who had already produced a dramatic and highly propagandistic account of the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg. In both films, Riefenstahl’s introduction gives the clearest indication of the intention behind the images. Her documentary Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) started with shots of the plane taking the “greatest leader of all time” to a huge rally and showed the Führer descending on Germany from the clouds, like a latter-day god, albeit in a Junkers plane. Riefenstahl’s Olympic film begins in ancient Greece, with the camera almost caressing the sculptures. Then, as if by magic, the marble figure of a discus thrower comes to life, hurling the discus into an unknown future. More athletes appear, their heroic exercises culminating in the harmonious movements of a series of runners carrying the blazing Olympic torch directly from Athens to Berlin, with the last man in the long relay running straight into the stadium and lighting the torch in honor of the Games.
Gum-Chewing Supermen
THE CULT OF THE NEW MAN was not only a strong voice calling for the future but also a voice rejecting the recent past. It was a headlong flight into an imaginary, timeless, perfect realm in which all dirt, sickness, disorder, and degeneration would be overcome and replaced by hygiene, health, and wholeness. Depending on its author’s imagination, it was to be decorated either with sturdy oaks and classical ruins or with a blaze of electric light, glistening machines, and a vast ballet of mechanical perfection. In its emphasis on bodies that were to be both beautiful and strong, it was also a response to the shuddering wrecks of shell-shocked men fresh from the trenches, and to the pitiful sight of amputated veterans, to the ruins of once proud men now seen, in Germany as throughout Europe, workless and begging in the streets.
Even before 1914 there had been warning voices announcing that human bodies could no longer compete with machines, and the experience of industrial warfare had rammed this insight home. Humanity, it seemed, was no match for the technology it had created, and like the sorcerer’s apprentice, it would lose control over the world. The dream of the New Man, a superman transcending all limitations, was the answer to a cultural fear that was deeply rooted in all industrialized nations.
In 1936, as Germany celebrated health, physical beauty, and sporting prowess amid the insignia and fanfares of fascism, the development appeared to have come full circle. Not everyone, however, was ready to bow before Nietzschean heroes or utopian demigods. Sailing to Europe in the same year, the American diplomat George Kennan found that he was sharing the passage from New York with the supposed flower of American youth. Unimpressed by the Olympians and their small-town ways, he commented amusedly: “The ship was carrying the American Olympic team to Germany for the games that were to take place there that summer. For a week we dodged the motions of gum-chewing supermen with crew cuts, and a variety of hefty amazons, as they practiced their particular skills on deck.”8
·1937·
War Within a War
Everybody saw Spain as the epitome of the particular conflict with which they were concerned. It was for this reason that the writers of the Western world became so emotionally involved in the Spanish conflict. For myself, and a great number of people like me, it became the great symbol of the struggle between Democracy and Fascism everywhere.
Jason Gurney, Crusade in Spain, 1974
We are faced with a conspiracy, with a group of people who intended to mount a coup against the state . . . a fairly complex conspiracy linking the conspirator with foreign, fascist powers. How can one ask for formal proof under such circumstances?
Andrey Vyshinsky, chief prosecutor of the Moscow show trials, 1937
WITH ITS DOMED TOWER ON THE ROOF, THE TELEPHONE EXCHANGE commands the elegant expanse of the Plaza de Cataluña, one of the main squares of Barcelona. In early May 1937, with the country in the grip of civil war, the capital of the newly autonomous region of Catalonia was in the hands of Republican troops loyal to the elected government. Not far from the city, Republican troops were locked in vicious fighting with the rebel Nationalist troops. The front line was at Zaragoza, far enough away not to threaten the lives of those inside the city. Nevertheless, the atmosphere was so tense that the regional government, the Generalitat, had forbidden the traditional communist parade on May 1, fearing that a procession of thousands of armed men in the streets might ignite the already volatile situation. For within Barcelona itself, communists, Marxists, and anarchists were all struggling against one another for power and influence. “The storm clouds are hanging, more and more threateningly, over Barcelona,” declared Solidaridad Obrera, a locally printed anarchist paper that at the time boasted the largest newspaper circulation in Spain.1
Street battles between communists and anarchists in Barcelona, 1936.
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br /> On May 3, three trucks pulled up in front of the telephone exchange. Under orders from Eusebi Rodriguez Salas, the commissioner for public order, armed militiamen dismounted and began to surround the building. When they called for the anarchist staff inside to surrender, they were greeted by a hail of bullets. They took cover, but the city’s fragile peace was now shattered.
George Orwell, in Barcelona as a member of the International Brigades on leave from the front, witnessed the fighting: “That afternoon, between three and four, I was half-way down the Ramblas when I heard several rifle-shots behind me. I turned round and saw some youths, with rifles in their hands and the red and black handkerchiefs of the Anarchists round their throats, edging up a side-street that ran off the Ramblas northward. They were evidently exchanging shots with someone in a tall octagonal tower—a church, I think—that commanded the side-street. I thought instantly: ‘It’s started!’”2
As word about the attack on the telephone exchange spread through the city, barricades made of ripped-out paving stones, sandbags, and large pieces of furniture were thrown up in the streets. In the course of the following week, with snipers on the roofs, house-to-house shootouts, and running battles, some four hundred people were killed. The Republican side of the civil war was beginning to consume itself.
A Country Falls Apart
COMPARED TO OTHER EVENTS of this terrible war—famous battles, obscure massacres, and routine executions—this week in May seemed not much more than a skirmish. In the cruelty and hopeless drudgery of a war in which victims were usually counted in the thousands, four hundred lives was an almost insignificant loss.
The war had begun in 1936 when a group of generals, led by Francisco Franco, staged a military coup against the elected government of Republican prime minister Manuel Azaña. Though seriously destabilizing the government, the generals had failed to assume power directly, and a brutal civil war was unleashed. The roots of the ensuing bitter conflict reached back centuries into Spanish history. The country was internally divided into different regions, each with its own traditions and dialect or even language, and all united only by the overwhelming presence of the Catholic Church. The Enlightenment appeared to have passed by Spain, which was cut off physically by the Pyrenees and mentally by the church itself from the winds of change sweeping down from northern Europe.
No other European country was marked by such wide cultural divides. The sophisticated cities housed seminal intellectuals and artists such as the cultural philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, the novelist and philosopher Miguel Unamuno, the poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca and his close friend, painter Salvador Dalí, and architect Antoni Gaudí. But away from the cities, as Piers Brendon describes, “men used Stone Age harrows, sickles which had not changed since the Bronze Age, threshing-boards like those described in the Old Testament, ploughs such as were depicted on ancient Greek vases. Peasants might wear black corduroy suits but they had an essentially medieval mentality: some feared witchcraft, others thought that Protestants had tails.”3 It did not help that the priests in some villages actively prevented children from learning to read, fearing that they might become infected by the habit of independent thinking.
Even in 1930, the population of Spain was still largely rural; a landmass more than twice the size of Britain counted substantially fewer railways and overland streets. Millions still lived in “sleepy pueblos whose sordid, zigzag streets were flanked by grey adobe houses, most of them flea-ridden hovels where the floors were beaten earth, the windows were black holes and the rooms reeked of smoke and dung.”4 Within the cities, however, there was a culture of fierce opposition to the deep and obscurantist conservatism of the church, to the landowners, and to the aristocracy. In the industrial slums and the poor suburbs of Madrid and Barcelona, anarchists were preaching their radical gospel against all authority. In spite of their hatred of the priests, they were in their way no less Catholic, believing in an austere creed of abstinence from drinking, smoking, sexual indulgence, and bullfighting.
Warding off the perceived dangers of anarchism and communism, the Spanish army understood itself not as a force protecting the country from enemies beyond its borders but as an occupying force within the country itself. Its priority of defending the ancient social hierarchy and the unquestioned domination of the church was reflected in its organization. Eight hundred generals commanded a force that possessed no tanks, no fighter planes, and just one bomber; the common soldiers, equipped with long-outdated weapons, frequently deserted. The ammunition in the country’s armories would have been exhausted after twenty-four hours of warfare.
Preferring the apparent safety of dictatorship to the vagaries of parliamentary democracy, King Alfonso XIII had supported a military coup led by General Miguel Primo de Rivera in 1923. Under the slogan “Country, religion, monarchy,” Primo de Rivera had so badly mismanaged the government that Republican parties carried the election of 1931 in a landslide, prompting the king to flee without even bothering to abdicate. The new government instituted a hugely ambitious program of reform, including the introduction of secular schools, the scaling back of the army and officer corps, an expropriation of church property, and comprehensive land reform. The country’s new constitution granted freedom of speech and association to all Spaniards, and introduced female suffrage.
This sweeping transformation was fiercely opposed by those who lost influence and power because of it, and by those who believed that the secular government was robbing Spain of its very soul. At the center of this opposition was the former director of the military academy of Zaragoza, Francisco Franco Bahamonde. When in 1931 his academy was closed down by the minister of war (later prime minister), the bookish Manuel Azaña, Franco had found himself faced with the prospect of demotion to the rank of colonel.
El Caudillo
SMALLISH, POTBELLIED, and prematurely balding, General Franco was hardly of heroic appearance, but his puritanical devotion to his work and his utter fearlessness in battle had earned him the respect of his comrades in arms. He had risen to the rank of general in 1926, the youngest man of that rank in Europe since Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1934, Franco had given the country a foretaste of what was to come. Elections in 1933 had returned a right-wing government, who suspended the social reforms of the previous Azaña administration. In response, the coal miners of Asturias, in the north of the country, initiated a major strike, which resulted in the occupation of the regional capital, Oviedo, by an army of some thirty thousand workers. They vented their fury by attacking priests and nuns and by burning down churches and the university.
Franco was ordered to put down the revolt. Unwilling to risk the inexperienced and potentially disloyal Spanish regular forces, he called instead on Spain’s hardened colonial troops. Using Moroccan units and the Spanish Foreign Legion, he unleashed an orgy of bloodshed. In response to the killing of thirty-three priests and some three hundred soldiers, the Moroccans and legionnaires were given leave to rape, pillage, and loot for days; they killed some two thousand people and imprisoned an estimated twenty thousand to forty thousand. In the ferocity of their reprisals, they destroyed much of the city of Oviedo.
By February 1936, a corruption scandal had brought the right-wing government down, and Azaña was back in power, if very insecurely, as president of the republic. Franco was dispatched to the Canary Islands to serve as military commander there, a posting he regarded as tantamount to banishment. Right-wing forces, led by Emilio Mola, once director-general of security and now also “banished” to the post of military governor of monarchist Pamplona, had determined to mount a coup against the left-wing government; though privately making fun of Franco’s “feminine voice [and] clammy handshake,” they were keen for the experienced general to join them.5 The coup was planned for July 18; on July 12, the leader of the right-wing opposition, José Calvo Sotelo, was murdered by government Assault Guards. This finally persuaded Franco to join the conspiracy, and at the same time it allowed the rebels to present
their military coup as an act of disinterested patriotism.
Expecting a swift return to authoritarian rule, the conspirators were surprised by the stiff resistance put up by anarchists, socialists, communists, and others. While cities in the deeply Catholic and monarchist south and west of the country quickly declared for the rebels, Madrid, the autonomous region of Catalonia, the Basque country, and the regions along the Mediterranean coast held firm to left-wing Republican ideals. One communist member of parliament, the fiery Dolores Ibárruri, known as “La Pasionaria,” provided them all with a common battle cry echoing that of the French general Robert Nivelle at the Battle of Verdun in 1916: “No pasarán!—They shall not pass!” she declared.
Failing to take the government by force, the rebels, or Nationalists, as they now called themselves, had to capture the country city by city and village by village. Spain was descending into civil war. The following weeks and months saw escalating bloodshed around the country as the victors of battles on both sides settled scores. Republican-held Madrid was invaded by rebel forces. Amid the confusing jigsaw of barricades and pitched battles, the Popular Front administration issued fifty thousand rifles to trade unionist fighters, only to find that a mere five thousand were equipped with the bolts necessary for firing them: the remaining bolts were still in storage in the city’s vast Montaña Barracks, now captured by the rebels. In a massive assault, regular troops loyal to the government, together with left-wing fighting units, stormed the barracks and massacred almost all defenders. On August 22, Republican fighters put down a riot by Falangist (right-wing) prisoners in the city’s Model Prison, executing thirty inmates, among them former rightist government ministers.