Seeing Red
Art and Politics in the Weimar Period, 1917-1933.
by John Willett.
Pantheon. 272 pp. Illustrated. $17.95.
John Willett, once an editor of the London Times Literary Supplement, is a Brecht scholar of whom one has the right to expect something of interest on the subject of this book—and, indeed, the book has been in general well received by the reviewers. On first leafing through it to look at the pictures, I was delighted to rediscover some old friends from my own days in the German Communist party (KPD), some leaflets and magazines I had helped distribute, some posters and movies I had admired. But I also was amazed to find three views of Lenin, and one each of Stalin, Bukharin, Lunacharsky (the Soviet cultural commissar), Rykov (one-time president of the RSFSR), Radek, and numerous other Russian personalities such as Meyerhold, Stravinsky, Tatlin, Shostakovich, Rodchenko, Mayakovsky; furthermore, Russian posters and stills from films, agitprop groups, etc.
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Somewhat incredulous to find all this in a book on Weimar, I looked once more at the title page and found a subtitle, “The New Sobriety,” but still no reference to the Soviet Union. Going back to the pictures, I inspected a little more closely the captions of those that seemed to be legitimate in a book about Weimar culture, and here is what I found: Ernst Glaeser (author of a second-rate anti-war novel who at the time was popular on the Left) photographed, where?—in Kharkov; a still from a film made by the German director Georg Pabst but scripted by whom?—Ilya Ehrenburg; Brecht, photographed in, you guessed it, Moscow, “at the world premiere of his film Kühle Wampe”—poor me, I thought I had been at the first showing in Berlin.
Willett’s bias appears even in the calendar of events accompanying his text. Lenin’s death and Martinet’s expulsion from the French Communist party are recorded as landmarks; so are Chiang Kaishek’s break with the Communists, Jaroslav Hasek’s joining the Fifth Red Army (though not the appearance of Schwejk), and the first issue of the propaganda magazine, Soviet Russia Illustrated—no doubt decisive events in the development of Weimar culture! All in all, in Willett’s view, the great thing that happened in the 1920’s was the absorption in Germany of Russian influence.
For Willett, politics means Communist politics, and indeed we are not spared the factional quarrels in Moscow over Proletkult, RAPP (the orthodox arts council), and Socialist Realism, nor the repercussions of this infighting among Hungarian and German Communists. Interesting as all this may be in a history of Communist antics it is regrettable that we never learn anything on such important questions as: What makes artists and writers align themselves with political movements? What kind of influence did writers exert on the political ideas of their readers? Are there any correspondences between artistic and political styles? Is avant-gardism in the arts necessarily related to progressive politics? And vice versa: Has a revolutionary movement any obligation to the arts in general or to any particular movement in the arts? Do party-oriented book guilds and publishing houses influence writers? Willett does not even have the foggiest notion that there are such questions. The principles by which he separates his good guys from his bad guys are utterly opaque. In his simplistic view, “what is missing in the arts . . . is a sense of direction which is political in the widest sense, based on the creative artist’s conscious involvement with a new society”—which of course was Russia. On this view, artists who were for the Soviet Union were progressive until the Soviet Union itself betrayed the cause—one does not learn how.
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The truth is otherwise. A number of progressive artists in Weimar Germany did incline to the Left or, more precisely, to some kind of anarchism or radicalism; others, like Ernst Jünger, Gottfried Benn, Emil Nolde, Ernst von Salomon, inclined to the Nazis. Although many considered the Communists their allies in their own fight for freedom, it is not the case, as Willett claims, that the majority of those who were artistically advanced also were sympathizers of the Soviet Union. Russophilia had, rather, been the property of the anti-rationalist Right (the translator of Dostoevsky, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, was also the one who coined the term “Third Reich”); only in the 1930’s did it become compulsory for the Left as a gesture of desperation, when the Soviet Union appeared to be the main bulwark of anti-fascism.
The major contribution of the Russians to “Weimar culture” was their films. But these seem to contradict Willett’s thesis about the “new sobriety.” According to this thesis, which is certainly original, one of the things that attracted the German Left to the Russians was the need of both German and Russian societies in the 1920’s to turn to “reconstruction and sobriety” and the need for these “constructivist” tendencies to find expression in a new style, which Willett identifies with Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus. There was, indeed, a low-powered effort in the Weimar establishment, and especially in Social-Democratic Prussia, to find a new style for the Republic—but about this interesting struggle Willett does not breathe a word. Even the name of the Reich Art Custodian—a new office created to promote modern ideas—appears only accidentally, on a list of persons attending the opening of the Bauhaus. Nor does Willett use all available information on the extent of Hugenberg’s nefarious film and press empire.
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Willett tries to derive the Bauhaus from Russian constructivism, but in reality the main idea of the Bauhaus was a straight, though more radical, development of the pre-Weimar Werkbund movement, which championed workmanlike, modern design in industrial goods and put German industry in the 1920’s far ahead of all competitors. In his text and even more in the illustrations, Willett does emphasize the main achievement of the era—the steadfast advances of city planning and urban renewal under the leadership of Social-Democratic mayors, the state-sponsored innovations in education and in the theater, the movement for modern design in household utensils. But here, too, he underplays conservative architects like Poelzig and Mendelssohn who were part of this movement no less than their leftist colleagues. It certainly would be a mistake to identify modernism in the arts and garden-city developments with political leftism.
Yet in one sense the confusion is understandable, since the reactionaries, who had never been reconciled to the Weimar Republic, branded every new movement in the arts as “bolshevist”; when Hitler came to power, he clung to reactionary ideologies and traditionalist styles even though they visibly clashed with the modernist-technocratic features of his regime. The tragedy of the Weimar Republic was precisely this paradox: that it was never allowed to seem what it was. With an Imperial Marshal for President, to those on the Left it seemed to be more conservative than it was; but its advanced styles in the arts, which really were up-to-date “Americanism” and adequate expressions of its bourgeois establishment, appeared to rightists as “cultural bolshevism.” On the other hand, avant-gardism had been embraced by left-wing artists and intellectuals who mistook their own liberal-democratic impulses for socialist or Communist. This, however, had been the irony of German politics for more than two generations: that the conservatives were reactionary, the liberals did what the conservatives ought to have done, the Social Democrats tried to do what the liberals had failed to do, and the Communist vanguard propagated social and cultural policies which the Social Democrats had to embrace as their own.
