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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[bufo_viridis]

Few random thoughts.

Hitler's taste in films was similar: if I remember Speer correctly, he preferred light comedies, nothing deep or disturbing. Or thought provoing for that matter. He was, it seems, generally rather shallow personality.

There's not bad book on the subject: Art and propaganda in the twentieth century :the political image in the age of mass culture by Toby Clark, New York: Harry N. Abrams,1997; I've only looked through it and read a few chapters for the paper I was writing by then. Bt made a good impression on me.
The author notes great similarity between Nazi and Comunist state-sponsored (or state-allowed art, as it basically came to the same). Most important characteristic of both was the extreme conservatism, particularly noticeably among commies, 'cause the claim to be a "vanguard", revolutionary etc. Yet what advance they made they retreated back to late 19th cent. realism and academism. Very much the same with Nazi; main difference is, Communists preferred realism (as a style :)) the subject was invaraibly

Continued...

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Mattis: What did Lenin think of it?

Theremin: I brought my apparatus and set it up in his large office in the Kremlin. He was not yet there because he was in a meeting. I waited with Fotiva, his secretary, who was a good pianist, a graduate of the conservatory. She said that a little piano would be brought into the office, and that she would accompany me on the music that I would play. So we prepared, and about an hour and a half later Vladimir Il'yich Lenin came with those people with whom he had been in conference in the Kremlin. He was very gracious; I was very pleased to meet him, and then I showed him the signaling system of my instrument, which I played by moving my hands in the air, and which was called at that time the thereminvox. I played a piece [of music]. After I played the piece they applauded, including Vladimir Il'yich [Lenin], who had been watching very attentively during my playing. I played Glinka's "Skylark", which he loved very much, and Vladimir Il'yich said, after all this applause, that I should show him, and

and continued....

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Stalin stood out among the Bolsheviks. His oratory, according to early witnesses, savoured of the Orthodox seminary in which he had been educated, and his manners were much worse than those of his cosmopolitan colleagues. And he was raising a new generation not only of party members but more importantly of party apparatchiks, in his own image. Just as Hitler influenced the aesthetic and spiritual climate of his country not only by official statements but through the dozens of unofficial channels opened by the fact that he was the man who hired and fired, who chose people and gave them direction, the same was true for Stalin. The ignorance and arrogance of the "truly proletarian" commissars that he promoted started becoming a factor long before the Terror. 1927 is the defining year: the year in which Theramin left and Mayakovsky's magazine Lef was restarted as Novy Lef, "with an emphasis on documentary fact" - that is, along an already proto-Stalinist line. This is long before the purges and the Terror; Mayakovsky's own suicide,

P.S.:

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Sorry - the comment at the bottom is the first that ought to be read.

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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