The German Genius

superior culture is built upon cruelty”). Another cult, the cult of the will (of the successful will, of course), had arisen, supported by “everyone in Germany since Hegel” and by many in France “since de Maistre.” 33
    All this, said Benda, was in the ascendancy, whereas the passion of the learned to understand , the desire to be universal or objective, had, since Nietzsche and Sorel, been derided. Several French writers had insisted, he said, that people interested in purely intellectual things were “inferior to soldiers…A whole literature has assiduously proclaimed the superiority of instinct, the unconscious, intuition, the will (in the German sense, i.e., as opposed to the intelligence) and has proclaimed it in the name of the practical spirit, because the instinct and not the intelligence knows what we ought to do—as individuals, as a nation, as a class—to secure our own advantage.” 34 For him, this all amounted to a “prodigious” decline in morality, a “sort of (very Germanic) intellectual sadism.” 35
    He concluded that the battle was over. “Today…humanity is national. The layman has won…The man of science, the artist, the philosopher are attached to the nation as much as the day-labourer and the merchant. Those who make the world’s values, make them for a nation…All Europe, including Erasmus, has followed Luther.” Then, in Chapter 5 (and remember this was first published in 1927), “This humanity is heading for the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world, whether it is a war of nations, or a war of classes.” 36
    These are not all of Benda’s arguments and I have made the book seem to be more about Germany than it was. 37 He was no less harsh in his treatment of the French than of the Germans, but this makes his arguments less nationalistic than would have otherwise been the case, and therefore more equable. Nonetheless, Benda made it clear he thought this “treason” had originated in Germany and spread to other countries, notably France, from there. Several of his points—the divinization of politics, the elevation of the will, the understanding of war as an instrument of morality, not utility, the downplaying of objectivity—had an uncomfortable resonance with what came later.

S ONGS OF THE R EICH: H ITLER AND THE “S PIRITUALIZATION OF THE S TRUGGLE”
     

Nazi Aesthetics: The “Brown Shift”
     
    O n January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Six weeks later, on March 15, the first blacklist of artists was published. 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. A few weeks later the first exhibition defaming modern art—called “Chamber of Horrors”—was held in Nuremberg, then traveled to Dresden and Dessau. These facts and events, and many others like them, are well known now, but they still have the power to shock. Four days before these dismissals took place, the Reich’s Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda was announced, with Joseph Goebbels as minister.
    These brutal actions did not come out of the blue, however. Hitler had always been clear that if and when the Nazi Party formed a government, there would be “accounts to settle” with a wide range of enemies. Artists were foremost among these “enemies.” In a 1930 letter to Goebbels, he insisted that when the party came to power, it would not be simply 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.” 1
    Some artists—like many scientists, philosophers, and musicians—seeing which way the wind was blowing, attempted to align themselves with the Nazis, but Goebbels was having none of it. For a time he and Alfred Rosenberg competed for the right to set policy in the cultural/ intellectual sphere, but the propaganda minister sidelined his rival as soon as an official Chamber for Arts and Culture came into being under his control. Its powers were formidable—every artist was forced to join a government-sponsored professional body, and unless they registered, they were