Hitler-loving intellectuals
- Periodista:
- Gustavo Javier Encina
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Hitler frequenting a highbrow salon? It sounds preposterous, but it did happen. A new book, Salón Deutschland, looks into this in satisfying detail – although, as we shall see, from a restricted angle of inquiry. Right in his first paragraph, author Wolfgang Martynkewicz poses the expectable question about the salon’s luminaries – “How is it possible that (people) with such intellectual and artistic capacity should fall for the fascination of totalitarianism?” One reason the question still matters greatly is that it could obviously extend to other countries, eras, and varieties of extreme illiberalism. So, how does Martynkewicz handle it?
The facts: the salon in question had existed in Munich, Nazism’s heartland, since 1899. It was hosted by a very wealthy (and “impeccably Aryan”) couple, Hugo and Elsa Bruckmann. It was really run by Elsa, one ancestor of whom had been a Byzantine emperor, and who never allowed anyone to forget it. Many of the biggest names in German letters and thinking were her habitual guests, and in these pages we, too, mingle with them.
The statement that Hitler became a visitor does need two qualifications. He didn’t go for an exchange of ideas but to lecture and harangue; and the Bruckmanns, early devotees of his, invited him mainly to introduce him to big industrialists and others who might be of use to him. The attachment was mutual. When Hugo B. turned 75, Hitler appeared with a big bunch of flowers, and when Elsa B. turned 80, he sent her a present although it was March 1945 – with the Allies already on German soil on both sides. (This time his offering was a quarter kilo of tea, half a kilo of flour and so on).
Initially, the salon’s habitués had been varied – Jews and anti-Semites were included – but with some shared characteristics which may perhaps be summarized as follows: they were social and cultural snobs, were wonderfully subtle analysts, and preferred to think only in lofty abstractions, like “new man” or “absolute life.”
Still in his first paragraph, the otherwise methodical and exhaustive Martynkewicz does a strange thing. He affirms that with regard to the intellectuals’ embrace of totalitarianism, “one cannot resort to explanations based on naiveté, innocence or the indolent taste for subjection.” Then, he never mentions these hypotheses again. That isn’t fair play: even though he may be right, he needs to prove it. The last of those three conjectures, in particular, contains some a priori plausibility; why “cannot” one resort to it?
There are other possibilities, too, that he might have considered. Here are some: eggheads may have hopped aboard out of fear, to advance their careers, to settle old vendettas, or because they thought (like initially non-Nazi rightwing politicians) that they could control the monster. Or a mix of ingredients. It’s an empirical fact that intellect and trained sensibility often don’t make people any less gullible in other areas of life; this is a field for investigation, as is the human mind’s under-reported capacity to come to genuinely believe in something and simultaneously know it to be untrue (as seen, e.g., among Old Bolsheviks under Stalin).
Martynkewicz doesn’t go into any of it. Instead, he sets out to show that those German luminaries were fertile ground for something dark and awful because their own ideas had long been a reactionary brew of mystical, anti-civilization (pro-“authenticity”) fatuousness, plus a horror of uncertainty or disorder and a hunger for utopias, hierarchy and leadership. (The latter was in the air; Discépolo’s tango Cambalache, of 1935, was also explicitly a cry for hierarchy). Salón Deutschland bases its demonstration on the thinkers’ books, conferences, letters and diaries. We see their ideas evolving – yet they always remain within that overall trend.
An author shouldn’t be faulted for not choosing a different subject from the one he did. Martynkewicz didn’t set out to present a general theory on the intelligentsia and the dark side, but a study of the thinking in vogue in one specific case. And he handles his material splendidly (although there’s no index!) This book belongs on the shelf near Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler, the 1947 classic which reached similar conclusions not about Germany’s elite thinkers but about its popular films.
Still – it would have been interesting to hear a thought or two, from an author as knowledgeable as Martynkewicz, on why he is sure no role was played by other factors than that group culture he dissects.
A notable point is raised in a recent book on a related subject, Alan Riding’s And the Show Went On ¬– Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris. It is that after a bad regime collapses, the writers, journalists and artists who threw in their lot with it tend to be judged more harshly “than, say, many industrialists who had profited from doing business” with it. One journalist is quoted: “Does one reproach the workers at Renault for making tanks for the Wehrmacht? Wasn’t a tank more useful to the Fritz than an item in (the journal) Le Petit Parisien?”
Yes, maybe it’s unfair. But it always happens; intellectual collaborators learned it the hard way then, and it retains its interest.