Hitler's aesthetics - only for history lovers.

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This essay originated in a surprising little discovery I just made. Like everyone else who is interested in modern history, I knew that the Nazis had a marching song called the Horstwessellied, from an early militant who had died in a street riot. Recently I became curious to hear it

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I would say that there is a central difference between Communists and Nazis, and even between Nazis and Fascists, in this area. It is to a large extent a matter of personalities. Mussolini's Italy did produce its quota of aesthetic obscenities (just look at the dreadful brick cubes they plonked right in the middle of the archaeological area of central Rome), but for most of its time the Culture Ministry was in the hands of a man of taste and intellectual curiosity, Giuseppe Bottai, who promoted great architects like Nervi and painters such as Scipione and Balla, set up the Biennale of Venice, and was in general a supporter of what might be called a moderate and tasteful modernity.

The case of Bolshevism/Communism is more interesting. It is more than mere ideological blindness that has made so many major modern artists in every area instinctively Communistic, or rather Bolshevistic; it is even more than the well-documented manipulations of Lenin's great German proconsul, Willi Muenzenberg. The first generation of Bolsheviks were murderers, but they were cosmopolitan, educated murderers, with an up-to-date taste and an if anything excessive belief in the value of modernity and innovation for their own sakes. The early, Bolshevik period of Soviet history was the age of Majakovsky, of the great abstract painters, of Prokoviev and the young Shostakovich. I have just come across an account of the kind of atmosphere that prevailed in Lenin's time, by an inventor of genius - Lev Sergeyevich Theremin - who became himself a particularly tragic victim of Stalin's repression:

Theremin: In the Soviet Union at that time everyone was interested in new things, in particular all the new uses of electricity: for agriculture, for mechanical uses, for transport, for communication. And so then, at that time, when everyone was interested in these fields, I decided to create a musical use for electricity. I made a few first apparatuses that were made [based on principles of] the human interference of radio waves in space, at first used in [electronic] security systems, then applied to musical purposes. I made it, and I showed it at that time to the leaders. There was a big electronics conference in Moscow, and I showed my instruments there. It made a big splash. It was written up in the literature and the newspapers, of which we had many at that time, and many doors were opened [for me then] in the Soviet Union. And so Vladimir Il'yich Lenin, the leader of our state, learned that I had shown an interested thing at this conference, and he wanted to get acquainted with it himself. So they asked me to come with my apparatus, with my musical instrument, to his office, to show him. And I did so.