Entartete Kunst. Literally, Degenerate Art, a term invented by the Nazis to describe literally all modern art, and especially modern art by Jews. Like this song by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, What Keeps Mankind Alive, sung by Tom Waits.
This week's diary will be an amazing mishmosh of things leftover from my Expressionism diary. I shall try to connect the dots between German Expressionism, Der Neue Sachlichkeit, horror films, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, Communists and Jews (and Communist Jews! oh my), socialist realism, the Weimar Republic, banned music, Hitler, the burning of the Reichstag, the Holocaust, the Hollywood Blacklist, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Sputnik (Woof woof!).
And since I haven't written a jack shit word of any of yet, and it now being 10am, it should be a real tour de force! A multimedia extravaganza with pop music, jazz, paintings, a little classical music, and even NSFW strippers, I kid you not!
Where last we left off, Arnold Schoenberg was wowing us with atonal and serial music, music that abandoned traditional concepts of music theory, and we said that this new style was part of the German Expressionism movement. Expressionism, though, encompassed more than just music, something we didn't have time to get into last week. (I originally planned to cram all this into that one diary, hoo boy, me so dumb.)
Schoenberg was actually a talented painter as well as musician.
Red Gaze, self portrait by Arnold Schoenberg.
/Hatred, by Arnold Schoenberg
Vision, by Arnold Schoenberg
I'd like you to get a feel for Expressionism as a movement, not just for Schoenberg, his music or his paintings. There is a deeper psychological subtext to Expressionism in its evocations of the subconscious, anxiety, alienation, the irrational. Remember that at that time in history, Freud and his theories of the unconscious and dream interpretation were coming into vogue; they had a profound impact on the culture of the time. Expressionism sought to plumb the depths of the id, that which was unutterable.
Schoenberg was a prophet of the Expressionist movement and an important contributor to the Expressionist fanzine rag, The Blue Rider. Schoenberg was also godfather to the Second Viennese School, which basically meant the followers and students of his atonal musical style, a style which he saw as an inevitable part of musical progress.
One of those fellow Expressionists was Alban Berg. Avert your eyes from any naked boobies.
The finale of Woyzeck, by Alban Berg
Listening to that, I feel like I hear strains of Mahler, the late Romantic composer that Schoenberg and Berg admired and knew personally. Mahler's music may have been tonal, at times straining at the edges of tonality, but his music was precursor to Expressionism in its dark portrayal of human anxiety and despair, something new in music at the time.
Another Schoenberg follower was composer Hanns Eisler. We'll get to him later; in fact we'll end the diary with a short piece of his.
The influence of Expressionism quickly showed up in film, including some of the earliest silent films like Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Image from German film, the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
Or we can fast forward a few years to probably the most famous horror film of all time, James Whale's Expressionist classic, Frankenstein. Frankenstein is something of a stock Halloween joke to modern audiences, but the original 1931 film was carefully crafted by Whale. It's worth watching again with fresh eyes, next time you catch it staying up late. The use of shadows, the camera angles, the smoke, the crazy Tesla coil special effects...
And lingering scenes like the gravedigger scene that grab our notice by their unusual length and focus. In the linked video (embeds disabled), a gravedigger digs a hole for 51 seconds with only a tolling bell for accompaniment. It's an unusual filmmaking choice but one that is all the more disturbing for its unusual length. (The story that accompanies the clip in the Youtube comments is a gem, too).
Between the world wars, in Germany, Expressionist filmmakers like Fritz Lang were breaking ground with films like Metropolis(1927) and M (1931). There are no special effects in M, which tells the story of a serial child killer (Peter Lorre), who is ultimately captured by the city's criminal underground in order to keep the police off their backs. Lorre is later put on trial in the sewers by these same criminals in a grotesque parody of the justice system, with a prosecutor, defense attorney, and jury made up of murderers and thieves.
Pay attention to Lorre's face as he struggles with his impulses and his nervous whistling tic.
Years later, Lorre told the story about how he received a fan letter from Adolf Hitler. From Snopes:
The story goes that after seeing Peter Lorre's performance as the compulsive child killer in Fritz Lang's M, an enamored Adolf Hitler wired the actor from Berlin, inviting him to "join the glorious film industry here."
"Thanks," responded Lorre from his new bungalow in Hollywood, "but I'm afraid there's room in Europe for only one mass murderer of my ability and yours." An apocryphal bit of Hollywood PR? Probably.
Yeah, apocryphal, especially since Lorre was a Jew and was best friends with some of the most hated "degenerate" artists in Germany, including Bertolt Brecht, whom we will get too shortly. And Lorre was a drunken confabulator, too, so, grain of salt and all that. Kudos to Lorre, even if it's a whopper... especially if it's a whopper.
I'm only three degrees of separation from Peter Lorre! My dad spent time in the same sanitarium with him. Oh, how fame rubs off on us all. Of course, this puts me only four degrees of separation from Hitler, were the story true. And Bob Denver's only five degrees from Hitler!
Bertolt Brecht
Der Neue Sachlichkeit
The New Objectivity (rough translation of the above), was an offshoot of Expressionism in the Weimar Republic. Although it was a lot of the same people doing things a little bit differently, it usually is lumped in with Expressionism. Playwright, poet, impresario Bertolt Brecht was the spoke in that wheel, one degree of separation from a host of important artists in the cultural world of the Weimar Republic. Brecht believed:
Brecht thought the audience required an emotional distance to reflect on what is being presented in critical and objective ways, rather than being taken out of themselves as conventional entertainment attempts to do.
Brechtian art was colder, satirical, and political. Perhaps Brechtian is the wrong word, because the trend was already there without him. Take, for instance, the paintings of Expressionist (and "degenerate") Otto Dix:
War Cripples(1920) by Otto Dix
War Cripples is typical of much of Dix's work which focused on the grim aftermath of World War I. Rather than glorifying the sacrifices of German soldiers, Dix laid them bare and at times mocked them. His work includes many paintings of dismembered corpses on the battlefield, dead bodies acrawl with maggots, more amputees in mundane daily pursuits (something that was quite common to see on any German street at that time). You can see how disturbing this would be to certain people who might not just see it as disrespectful but might see it as unsuitable for a warrior people.
The Brecht-Weill collaboration
Otto Dix was part of a left-wing Expressionist group formed in 1918 called Novembergruppe that emphasized the use of art to transform society and to oppose war. A fellow member of Novembergruppe was the young composer Kurt Weill.
Ah, the lines start to converge, now, eh? We started the diary with a song, music by Weill, lyrics by Bertolt Brecht. Indeed, this diary started out as a transparent excuse to indulge in Kurt Weill music. I've sworn to refrain from posting any Doors music clips, (Doors? they ask -- you'll see) but feel free to do so in the comments.
Weill started out his career as a classical composer, his early style influenced by a mixture of Mahler, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. For instance, his Concerto for Violin and Wind Instruments. Rough listening. I bought his Symphony #1 years ago and was not personally very impressed with it, either. With Weill needing money, though, and with him being encouraged by Brecht to compose something more populist, he turned to composing music for theater and cabaret, usually with Brecht as his lyricist. Their collaborations became emblematic for the pop culture of the Weimar Republic.
We heard their song, What Mankind Needs, at the top. Here is Alabama Song from Mahoganny, sung by David Johansen.
In the real play, Mahoganny, it's sung by a troupe of prostitutes stuck in the desert. It's so hot, they have to take off their clothes! As often happens with Weill's music, it ends up with women in lingerie. (But I still prefer the Johansen cover, above.)
Brecht and Weill's most successful collaboration was The Threepenny opera, with Weill's wife, Lotte Lenya playing the lead for decades to come, even after they left Germany.
Here's the classic (and rather bloodthirsty) Pirate Jenny song from Three Penny Opera in a cute cabaret performance. A lowly mopwoman's dream of revenge.
I had fun surfing through dozens of Pirate Jenny covers before picking that one. I think it was the drunken look.
Here's Mack the Knife sung by Weill's wife, Lotte Lenya.
Lotte Lenya was more famous than Weill in many respects because of her Broadway success. She won a Tony award in 1957 for her Broadway performance of the Three Penny Opera. In English, of course, and with a translation that was watered down to remove some of the more visceral aspects of the song. I can't find a single good English version that I like on Youtube, so I'll skip that. I like the Lenya German version just because it sets my nerves on edge to hear it. That raspy, cutting voice gives me a certain "The Gestapo's at the door!" feeling. But I'm sure that's just me.
Despite the Tony's, you may be more familiar with Lotte Lenya as James Bond villain Rosa Klebs in From Russia with Love, the one with stiletto heels that had REAL STILETTOS in them. Admittedly, she'd lost some of her special Kraft-Ebbing sex appeal by then. Later on, Lenya (as Klebs) was parodied as Frau Farbissina in Austin Powers.
Here is the Pimp's Ballad from The Threepenny Opera(1929), Brecht-Weill, sung at the Tony Awards by Alan Cummings and Cyndi Lauper as Mack the Knife and Jenny. (And Lauper does a GREAT job, perfect for the Lenya role.)
We need more lingerie! you say. Okay, okay. Some of the best covers of Weill's songs on Youtube are done by a group called the Ixion Weimar Burlesque. Here is one of his French period songs from 1934, a tango, Youkali, lyrics by Magre. NSFW! (I warned you!)
The songs from Weill's French exile period, without Brecht, are less harmonically edgy than his Weimar period ones were, more pop, and even more erotic. Even without the fleshy strippers. Complainte de la Seine(1934) with lyrics by Magre.
There are a lot of other great Ixion Weimar Burlesque clips on Youtube. Knock yourselves out, dudes.
Another great song from Threepenny Opera (Brecht-Weill), The Cannon Song. Performed by Stan Ridgway.
Okay, okay. Just ONE more. Betty Carter's jazz cover of Lonely House(1946), music by Weill, lyrics by Langston Hughes, from the the 1946 Broadway "street opera," Street Scenes. Street Scenes won Kurt Weill a Tony.
Moving on... sigh...
Weill, like Dix and other members of Novembergruppe, was a pacifist, as was Brecht and many of Brecht's other satellites. To some nascent political groups (ahem) in Germany at that time, groups who believed that Germany had lost World War I because they were "stabbed in the back," mainly by intellectuals and Jews and Communists, (and many in Novembegruppe were proudly all three!) the anti-military, pacifist rhetoric did not pass unnoticed. It was disrespectful to their propaganda myth. Brecht's plays became frequent targets for attacks, nazis in attendance only to jeer and throw stink bombs in the audience. And those were the good ol' days!
Come January 1933, the fun pretty much died. From the Holocaust Museum:
In 1933, Nazi Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels began the synchronization of culture, by which the arts were brought in line with Nazi goals. The government purged cultural organizations of Jews and others alleged to be politically or artistically suspect. The works of leading German writers such as Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Alfred Kerr were consigned to flames in a book burning ceremony in Berlin.
Beginning in September 1933, a Reich Culture Chamber (composed of the Reich Film Chamber, Reich Music Chamber, Reich Theater Chamber, Reich Press Chamber, Reich Writing Chamber, Reich Chamber for Fine Arts, and the Reich Radio Chamber) supervised and regulated all facets of German culture. Nazi aesthetics emphasized the propagandistic value of art and glorified the peasantry, the "Aryan," and the heroism of war. This ideology stood in stark contrast to modern, innovative art, such as abstract painting, denounced as "Degenerate Art," as well as "art bolshevism" and "culture bolshevism." [...]
There is a wonderful movie, Max(2002), by Menno Meyjes, which illuminates the cultural/aesthetic clash via the apocryphal story that Adolf Hitler wanted to be an artist, a painter, but was discouraged or spurned by a Jewish art critic. Max is totally fictional, but it shows some keen insight. In the years after WWI, Max Rothman, the character (played by John Cusack, who took no salary for his role), a successful art entrepreneur, meets the young and personally tortured Hitler (Noah Taylor), and feels kinship with him as an artist and as a messed-up veteran of WWI and tries to take him under his artistic wing.
The trailer:
In one of the great scenes of the film, Max invites Hitler to see one of his performance art pieces, a staged work with a giant meat grinder into which dead soldiers are placed in the top and hamburger comes out the bottom. (Very Otto Dix in conception). Hitler becomes apoplectic. We see a joint dichotomy of aesthetics and politics.
Later in the film, Hitler shows Max some of his propaganda work for the early Nazi movement, and proclaims that this is his art, politics as art and art as politics.
One definition of art is that art is created purely by the intent of the artist. It's a rather dangerous thought.
On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag caught fire. Hitler blamed it on Bolshevik terrorists. (Many think he set it himself, but we don't know; it was convenient, though.) He used it as an excuse to seek emergency powers (the Enabling Act) that would supersede the German parliament, "temporarily" making him essentially dictator.
I know this is old history for many. You learned it in college, you read Shirer, you were a History major, whatever. I'd like to direct you, though, to another clip, God bless Youtube, of a CBS docudrama about this period, Hitler: Rise to Evil. If you never saw it, rent it or steal it. Most relevant to our discussion was this scene, recounting events from the Reichstag Fire up to the Enabling Act.
The film was shown only once on TV, and I don't believe it has been shown even once, since, even though it was an expensive, four hour drama critically praised. Possibly (probably) contributing to this was the criticism leveled at it that it was an attack on Bush. The executive producer, Ed Gernon, was fired for comparing it to Bush's War on Terror.
Dumbo briefly mounts a soapbox
Most dramas about the Third Reich focus on the crimes of the Reich itself. More important than that to future generations, though, I think, is how the Nazis ever got to the position where they could commit those crimes. We know what damage the fire did; it is more useful to know where the match was struck, where the fuel was, and who did nothing to stop it.
We know the Nazis harnessed rage in their service. And despite Gandhi, rage is a very powerful political motivator. Where was the rage against this when it was needed and when it could have been useful?
The fact is, Hitler wanted power, and nobody really tried hard enough to stop him from getting it. He and his movement were motivated actors. Although there was opposition to Hitler in Germany, the opposition at the top was feckless and half-hearted. They let him do it because it was easier than saying no. And I'm sure some assholes thought, "Hey, maybe, we'll gain a few moderate voters this way. It will all turn out for the best." Who could have possibly foreseen that things would just keep getting worse?
It was their job, and they didn't do it. The lesson I draw from this is, it's not adequate to support ineffectual leaders who through their own institutional inertia do not have the will to oppose when opposition is their job. Who could have foreseen?
From physics, from math, from systems analysis, we know systems that depend on negative feedback loops become chaotic when that feedback loop is broken.
Our own negative feedback loop is nearly broken right now, and by that I mean the Democratic Party in its opposition to the Republican Party. It's all wrong, and it's an institutional problem, at the top, in places where we cannot easily change things through one election cycle, if it can be done at all. The Democratic Party suffers from a fatal cultural inertia at the top.
Dumbo steps down. Back to Degenerate Art.
Hitler's speech of March 23, 1933, two months after assuming power. No link provided because I had to snag it from a Hitler site. See what I do for you guys?
Simultaneously with this political purification of our public life, the Government of the Reich will undertake a thorough moral purging of the body corporate of the nation. The entire educational system, the theater, the cinema, literature, the Press, and the wireless - all these will be used as 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. Art will always remain the expression and the reflection of the longings and the realities of an era. The neutral international attitude of aloofness is rapidly disappearing. Heroism is coming forward passionately and will in future shape and lead political destiny. It is the task of art to be the expression of this determining spirit of the age. Blood and race will once more become the source of artistic intuition....
See how early Hitler was involved in this. It's amazing. You would think with all the beans on his plate from his ascension to total power that there would be more immediate concerns than art. Sure, he might get around to this later, you would think, to purge elements that might be hostile to him. But here, as early as the VERY NEXT DAY after the passage of the Enabling Act (and what an appropriate name), Hitler announces his intention to clean up German culture by cleaning up the arts. Think about that, what a strange ordering of priorities.
Wikipedia on Degenerate Art
PURGE
Hitler's rise to power on January 31, 1933 was quickly followed by actions intended to cleanse the culture of degeneracy: book burnings were organized, artists and musicians were dismissed from teaching positions, and curators who had shown a partiality to modern art were replaced by Party members.[14] In September 1933 the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Culture Chamber) was established, with Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Reichminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda) in charge...
It goes on, later, to tell the fate of some of the banned artists, mostly writers and painters. Since this is a diary series devoted to classical music, ostensibly, we're more interested, for the moment, in... what happened to the musicians!
Erich Wolfgang Korngold, whose violin concerto we diaried a couple of months ago, here. fled to Hollywood and become an Oscar winning film composer, as did a number of great German and Austrian composers. What was Germany's loss was Hollywood's windfall. Filmmakers like Fritz Lang deserted Germany as well. Schoenberg ended up teaching music at UCLA. Bertholt Brecht, Kurt Weill, and Lotte Lenya headed first for France, and then, later, for Broadway. Discouraging for Schoenberg, some of his best atonal/serialist pupils, like Hanns Eisler, ended up writing pop music and (in Eisler's case) winning Oscars for film music.
I am not aware of any great German musicians that ended up in concentration camps, although I'm afraid to see what will be in comments, now. Most of the damage was cultural, the countries that gave the world Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms and Mahler having chosen to lobotomize itself. And to PRIORITIZE that lobotomy!
One of the saddest cases in the whole Entartete Kunst saga that I encountered was the one of composer Franz Schreker, who I had never heard of until Commonmass brought him up in comments a few months back. It's 6:10, and I'm close to winding this up, but let's get into this.
From Newsweek, "Degenerate Opera, Hear no Evil"
The story of Franz Schreker flips classical music's greatest cliché on its head. Instead of toiling in obscurity during his life and gaining fame only after death, the Austrian was a star as a young composer—before he was all but erased from history. In 1919, the influential critic Paul Bekker wrote that Schreker was the only operatic author with a claim to Wagner's exalted legacy. During Weimar-era Germany, Schreker's half-Romantic, half-avant-garde dramas sold tickets as reliably as those by any other living composer, aside from Richard Strauss. But with the rise of Hitler's cultural Gestapo, Schreker—whose father was Jewish and whose dramas were shot through with Freudian sexual anxiety—saw all his works banned as entartete, or "degenerate." In 1932, the same year the Nazis took a plurality in the Reichstag, he was hounded out of his prominent teaching post in Berlin. Then his curtain call at the premiere of his final opera was greeted with a chorus of anti-Semitic boos. A year later he died of a heart attack. In the decades after World War II, even Wagner, the Third Reich's favorite composer, was divested of his WWII-era baggage and made safe for the world's classical aficionados. But, on the reverse side of the Nazis' approval ledger, there has never been a fully staged production of any Schreker opera in North America.
Here is the piece by Schreker that moved me the most. Late Romantic in style, most like Mahler or early Schoenberg, the conclusion of his opera, Der ferne Klang. This is amazing stuff.
Out of time! I'll have to skip all the cool stuff about the HUAC Communist witch hunts. They had a blast. Weill denied everything. Brecht did, too, even though he was a committed Marxist of long standing, and succeeded. Hanns Eisler, named the "foremost communist" in the United States by the Communist Party, flipped everybody the bird and moved to East Germany.
Peter Lorre, that drunken confabulator, when asked by the HUAC to name any suspicious people he knew, claimed later that he didn't hesitate to name names. He named EVERYBODY he had ever known, exhaustively, including his mother and his schoolteachers. Which is one solution to the problem, eh?
NEXT WEEK: ProudToBeLiberal will be here to do a diary on Benjamin Britten's War Requiem. I will be back the week after that to do a diary on either Prokofiev or Shostakovich -- or both.
And a BIG thank you to Zenbassoon for posting last week's awesome diary on Percy Grainger!
Bit off more than I could chew that time, but what are you going to do, fire me? Ha. I need coffee...