You are officially done with half of your first year in college!

Seeing and Hearing in the Third Reich

3. Due 8:15, Wednesday, February 13. Where is political art happening today? Find a political image--in print media or on the web--that is relevant to the 2008 presidential campaign. This can include moving images--from YouTube or MySpace or other places on the web. You can send me the image, print out a copy, or send me the url for the YouTube or MySpace. Make sure you use your uci.edu account and identify yourself as a student in the Core Course. IMPORTANT: If you send me a Word file, do not send a .docx file. You have a more recent version of Word than I do, and I won't be able to open it. Save your file in a .doc format.

 

Are you a Humanities major? Consider applying for the Humanities Internship Program. This program will place you in an internship where you'll earn at least $10/Hr, you'll get meaningful job experience, you'll add a nice line to your resume, and you'll be able to explore what career opportunities are open to Humanities majors. Requirements and application can be found at http://www.humanities.uci.edu/intern/how-to-apply.html. Deadline for application is April 10. For more information contact Ms. Raschel Greenberg in the Humanities Undergraduate Counseling Office (Humanities Instructional Building.

 

Important Note: I emphasized that historians often need to know languages other than English. They do. But you don't in order to write a really good research paper in the spring on places where people don't speak English. You will find that there are TONS of translated primary sources and secondary sources in English, and there will be much for you to work with. If you wanted to go on to study a specific country at the post-graduate level, then you'd need the language. For the project you'll do in the spring, you can absolutely, positively work with materials in translation. And in the next two lectures, I will talk about Russia. I don't read Russia, but I will be using scholarly work by people who do.

 

Screenings of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District:


Mon, Feb 11, 2:00-5:00 HH 262 (max cap 82)
Mon, Feb 11, 4:00-7:00 HH 178 (max cap 139)
Tue, Feb 12, 3:00-6:00 HH 254 (max cap 50)
Tue, Feb 12, 7:30-10:20pm HH 254 (max cap 50)
Wed, Feb 13, 2:00-5:00, HSLH 100A (max cap 343)
Thu, Feb 14, 2:00-5:00, HH 108 (max cap 25) (Make a date for Valentine's Day!)
Fri, Feb 15, 2:00-5:00, HSLH 100A (max cap 343)

This week, we shift gears. We move to the Soviet Union and opera. In preparation, BEFORE you see the production video of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District:

1. Download the study questions and read them carefully.
2. Read the libretto--in the CR--BEFORE you go to see the film. Get a mental picture of the opera's action in your mind BEFORE you see how the director presents it in the production you'll see.
3. Apply the skills you've acquired with the Midsummer Night's Dream assignment and think critically about the staging decisions the director has made. What works? What doesn't? What would you do differently?
4. If you have never seen an opera before, don't make this your first and last. I have chosen Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District because it raises very interesting questions about whether makers are always doers. But both the brutality of the story and the music that accompanies it are exceptional. If Shostakovich isn't your cup of tea, make sure to give opera a second chance. And I'll follow Shostakovich with Gerorge Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, pure "ear candy" after Shostakovich.

 

Some professorial (not parental) warnings about Shostakovich and Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District :

1. If Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District had an MPAA Rating, it would probably be R. There are scenes of violence and sexuality that may be disturbing to some viewers. When you watch the film of the staged production, consider the questions I've asked above. In addition, ask yourself why Shostakovich would choose to portray such violence and sexuality. What aesthetic choices did Shostakovich make? Why do you think he made them?

(Sex is hardly new in the course: What was Bottom dreaming about? What of Chloris into Flora and all of that hot air? What of Venus as the union of sea and sky and that bubbling foam (I won't be forgetting that soon)? How about the repressed sex in Jane Austen? Or how about Toni Morrisson? And what of the "desexualized sensuality" of the Nazi aesthetic. The Core Course has asked you more than once to think about how to represent sex and sexuality. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District is one more example.)

2. And apply the skills you've acquired. The production video of the opera you will see is one interpretation of what Shostakovich "made." I had three options (real world constraints of what's available on video):

  • Opera as movie with a much younger Katerina (dubbed), hottie Sergei (also dubbed), not a staged production. I wanted you to see a staged production so you could think about the differences between what you can do in a film and what you can do on a stage.
  • Opera on stage, but set in Soviet Russia under Stalin's rule, villagers in Red Army uniforms, a staging intended to make Shostakovich's opera a critique of Stalinism (an interpretation I think is hard to substantiate).
  • Opera set on stage but in no specific time or place. This is the one you'll see.

You have thought a lot about staging decisions in your papers on Midsummer Night's Dream. What decisions has Martin Kušej, the director, made? What interpretation does he present?

NOTE: I would stage it very, very differently. By thinking critically about Kušej's interpretation, I was better formulate and articulate my own interpretation. And in my second lecture on Shostakovich, I'll take you through the steps that get me to that interpretation. Take Kušej as a point of reference. You may love his decisions, but you don't have to. And arguing with him will allow you to reach your own conclusions about what Shostakovich sought to achieve. (And in the second year of this HCC cycle, I'm asking for a budget of $8 Million to produce Lady Macbeth the right way.)

 

And for those of you wondering about Professor Lupton... After today, she will have sat out 5/9 of her sentence. She applied for early release, but the parole board determined that she had refused to sing the "Internationale" and she was way offkey on the "Song of the United Front." She also has little progress with the complete works of Aristotle. This is a joke.

 

Not a pop quiz

Got Opera?

Why are aesthetics so important to the Nazis?

Aesthetics The study of the feelings, concepts, and judgment arising from our appreciation of the arts or of the wider class of objects considered moving, or beautiful, or sublime. Aesthetic theory concerns itself with questions such as: what is a work of art? What makes a work of art successful? Can art be a vehicle of truth? Does art work by expressing the feelings of the artist, communicating feeling, arousing feeling, purging or symbolizing feeling?... Does the perception of beauty have connections with moral virtue, and with seeing something universal or essential, and is the importance of aesthetic education and practice associated with this? What is the role of the imagination in the production or appreciation of art? Are aesthetic judgments capable of improvement and training, and thence of some kind of objectivity?

Source: Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, on-line at your library.

 

And how do they communicate their idea of the right sort of aesthetic?

Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment headed by Joseph Goebbels

·          

    • The modernity of the Nazis: The utopian project of shaping the right kind of citizen for the right kind of society
    • Propaganda: "from the Latin, propagare, first used by Pope Gregory XV in 1622 when he created a commission of cardinals, the Congregatio de propaganda, charged with spreading the Christian gospel among the heathen."
    • Enlightenment Legacies
    • Belief in the ability of humans to create a perfect society
    • The state should educate its citizens, and laws are part of education.
    • Characteristic of the modernity of the Nazi regime
    • The state should express and reinforce the common mores of the people (gesundes Volksempfinden, the "common sensibility of the people")

Research Alert: Goebbels is quite a maker. Maybe it'd be interesting to looking into the ways in which Nazi art communicated Nazi propaganda.

Thesis: The Nazis believed that it would be possible to shape how Germans both perceived reality and led their lives by controlling the images they could see and the music they could hear. Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda was also a ministry of Enlightenment, created to communicate ideology through aesthetics. Nazi culture embodied a set of unwritten laws that echoed and reinforced the legal prescriptions of the "racial state." However, a study of Nazi cultural policy also indicates that it is not easy to regulate imagination and desire. In ways that the Nazis could not control, beauty remained "in the eye of the beholder."

NOTE: Readings are scholarly articles that were written for an exhibition catalogue. Look at how Barron and Mosse use footnotes. They are writing for a general public. How successful are they? What do the assume on the part of their readers? What kind of glossary would you need to accompany this article? As you read how other scholars write, think about how you want to address a larger public in your writing. Good writers are critical readers. We learn from what others do well... and from what they do poorly. We don't have to duplicate their mistakes.

Next lecture, we go to the opera. If you are interested in this quite amazing multi-media art form, considering seeing a simulcast production, live from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, this winter or spring. For more information, to go Got Opera?

What the Nazis Don't Like: Rejecting Weimar

  • Aesthetic Revolutions Before World War I (1914-1918)
    • Expressionism: Go for the emotion behind the reality
    •  

Expressionism in the fine arts developed from the Symbolist and expressive trends in European art at the end of the 19th century. The period of ‘classical Expressionism’ began in 1905, with the foundation of the group die Brücke, and ended c. 1920. Although in part an artistic reaction both to academic art and to Impressionism, the movement should be understood as a form of ‘new Humanism’, which sought to communicate man’s spiritual life. It reflected the deep intellectual unrest c. 1900, reflected in contemporary literary sources, about the destruction of the traditional relationship of trust between man and the world. This was set against 19th-century notions of reality. Art took on a new and crucially different role, no longer being used, as previously, to reproduce that which was visible, but rather to ‘make things visible’ (Paul Klee). The motivating forces or ‘inner communication’ were considered to be the only concepts worth portraying. A young generation of artists believed that the traditional artistic medium was inadequate to enable them to do this. In order to communicate the human spiritual condition the Expressionists made use of new, strong, assertive forms, often violently distorted, symbolic colours and suggestive lines. Their work also showed an interest in Primitivism. (This definition brought to you by the Grove Dictionary of Art, available to you for free on the homepage of the UCI library.)

Franz Marc, Cow, 1911

Max Pechstein, Indian and Woman, 1911

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Two Women on the Street (1914)

What's different about Weimar?

    • Pre-war developments are made explicitly political by experience of war and postwar upheaval
      • Art that is openly anti-war
        • Anti-war expressionism: Kirchner, Self-portrait as soldier

        • Otto Dix, War Cripples

 

        • Käthe Kollwitz, The Mothers

      • Art that is openly critical of the consequences of war
      • Art that is explicitly political and critical of bourgeois society
        • George Grosz, Pillars of Society

        • John Heartfield, The Hitler Greeting

    • Research alert: Moeller really hasn't said much about Kollwitz. Maybe she'd be working looking into. Or how about Otto Dix? Another communist sympathizer?
    •  

 

  • Other art forms break with the past
    • Experimentation at the movies: Fritz Lang's Metropolis

    • New forms of music in the concert hall (But rejecting one form of musical organization doesn't mean there is no organization at all)
    •  

atonality in music, systematic avoidance of harmonic or melodic reference to tonal centers (see key). The term is used to designate a method of composition in which the composer has deliberately rejected the principle of tonality. Tonality is a form of musical organization that involves a clear distinction between consonance and dissonance, a definite classification of harmonic results as more and less dissonant, and arrangement of tones in a scale that contains common harmonic and melodic functions and goal points. The gradual rejection of this principle has been apparent since the later 19th cent., when greatly increased use of chromatic harmonies in the music of Liszt, Wagner, and Richard Strauss and the use of nonfunctional harmonies in the music of Debussy almost completely obscured whatever basic tonalities were present in their music.
The abandonment of tonality in the early 20th cent. by Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Ives, and many other composers was the next logical step in the evolution of musical style. To compensate for this lack of one principle of order, another had to be substituted. The most successful one proposed thus far is that of dodecaphony, or twelve-tone music (see serial music). Atonality is also used by some to designate all music that has discarded the earlier principle of tonality, whether organized in some other way or not. Others use it only for works such as Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, in which notes and harmonies are used in a free, nonsystematic manner. By the close of the 20th cent., atonal music has become a part of the classical repertoire. However, some critics feel that this music’s austerity and rigor lessen its expressive potential, and it has failed to attract a large audience.
See R. Reti, Tonality in Modern Music (1962); G. George, Tonality and Musical Structure (1970); G. Perle, Serial Composition and Atonality (3d ed. 1972); A. Forte, The Structure of Atonal Music (1973).

This definition brought to you by Bartleby.Com, a compendium of reference resources that is available to you from the "Dictionaries, Languages Translators, Quotes" reference page of the UCI library.

(And for even more, you could use a truly extraordinary resource, New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians, 2nd edition, and you'll find the link on the same Dictionaries page cited above.)

Research alert: So we heard about Kuhle Wampe, but what about Brecht's theater? What do Three Penny Opera and Mack the Knife have to do with Weimar politics?


The Nazi Alternative

  • Goebbels defines the problem
  •  

"While National Socialism brought about a new version and formulation of European culture, Bolshevism is the declaration of war by Jewish-led international subhumans against culture itself. It is not only anti-bourgeois, it is anti-cultural. It means, in the final consequence, the absolute destruction of all economic, social, state, cultural, and civilizing advances made by western civilization for the benefit of a rootless and nomadic international clique of conspirators, who have found their representation in Jewry." (For this, a brief article on Nazi Culture, and fascinating film clips of Goebbels' speech and the 1933 burning of books, look at what you can find at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Go to the learning center, type Goebbels Book Burning in the search engine.)

  • But if that's the problem, what's the solution?
  • What I won't talk about here, book-burning
  • Banning sexually explicit images
  • And political attacks on SPD municipal governments that have supported avant garde artists
  • And the goal: An art that supports racial and gender conceptions that are the foundation of the Nazi state
  • Nazi laws discriminate against those deemed genetically unfit and homosexual men who opt out of reproduction
  • Nazi laws favor those who can establish their genetic credentials, are heterosexual, and reproduce
  • Culture as central to promoting conceptions of race and gender

Examples of how the Nazis translate theory into artistic practice

Film and the Political Spectacle

  • Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will

  • 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg
    • Creating images of order against a background of violence
    • Completely staged event (two times)
    • Riefenstahl has huge production crew: 30 cameras, 120 assistants, new photographic techniques including wide-angle photography and telephoto lenses
    • Transfiguration of reality in the form of a documentary (compare with representations of Festivals from French Revolution)
    • Winner of German National Film Prize (1935); Gold Medal of the Venice Film Festival (1935); Grand Priz, Paris Film Festival (1937)
  • Other propaganda movies: Jud Süss, Ich klage an (I accuse)

  • But also films that are fun (always with a subtext) like Glückskinder (Lucky Kids)
  • Living in Nazi Germany doesn't mean you have no fun (if you're the "right" sort of German).

Research alert: So the Nazis made film? Hmm... wonder if there are any in our library. And that Leni Riefenstahl who made Triumph of the Will... what's the deal with her? And want to check out some of the films Moeller showed in a German history lecture class?


Regimenting Sound

  • Getting rid of Weimar and displaying what music is "degenerate"
  •  

Degenerate: Having lost the qualities proper to the race or kind; having declined from a higher to a lower type; hence, declined in character or qualities; debased, degraded. (OED definition)

  • Application of the language of medicine to artistic production, another part of Nazi racial politics
  • Attack on cultural institutions in Weimar, Socialists have misused taxpayer Reichsmarks
  • Empowering an army of scholars, scientists, and professors to distinguish what's good from what's bad
  • Exhibitions of Entartete Musik parallel exhibitions of Entartete Kunst (see Meyer for full discussion)
  • What are you supposed to hear?
    • Returning to the harmony, banishing dissonance
    • Which of these invocations of the countryside do you think you could have heard? This "happy togetherness of the people of the countryside or this cheery invocation of a rural landscape.
    • Can you hear the difference between the "real" German, Ludwig van Beethoven (third movement of his Symphony No. 6) and Gustav Mahler, another German (third movement of his Symphony No. 1)?
    • And what's wrong with this... (Felix Mendelssohn's occasional music to Midsummer Night's Dream. Did the Nazis dislike Shakespeare? Weddings?)
    • Or this? "The Marriage of Figaro"
    • We know you couldn't hear the "Lavender Song" or Brecht, but why this (where you can hear about how Elizabeth doesn't like the new fashion of long skirts because she has such great legs), but not this? (Comedian Harmonists, singing, "Veronika, Lenz has arrived, the girls are singing tralala" [the rest of the lyrics are of an equally subversive nature, there is, for example, mention of asparagus, a dangerously phallic symbol?])
    • African American music is gone, but a proper German jazz is all right (and it does exist, you get to dance and tap your feet if you're the "right" sort of German music)

Research alert: What about classical music under the Nazis? What kinds of classical music did they promote? The the composer Richard Strauss was the head of the Nazi office for music, but by 1933 he'd been dismissed because of his association with a Jewish librettist.And what about Richard Wagner? Why did Hitler like him so much?


Regimenting Vision

  • What's degenerate?
  • From Barron:
    • "Cosmopolitan" or "Bolshevik"
    • Museum directors who have misspent the people's money
    • No Marxists
    • No boxlike structures (remember the Bauhaus?)
    • No sculptures that don't represent the right sorts of German bodies
  • Precursors to Entartete Kunst: Purging public museums, creation of "Cabinets of Horror" (and more work for the "ethnocrats")
  • 112 artists, including Otto Dix, Erich Heckel, Max Pechstein, and many, many more
  • Barron: "By staging Entartete Kunst they [the Nazis] were able to appeal to the majority of the German people who must have considered most modernist art incomprehensible and elitist. To all modernists, not just those represented in Entartete Kunst, the Nazis sent a message that such art would no longer be tolerated in Germany, an official position that, thanks to the cleverly manipulated complicity of the German people, had the force of a popular mandate."(CR, 115-6)

Hitler at the opening of the House of German Art:

“it is clear that the eye of some men portrays things otherwise than as they are, that there really ar men who on principle feel meadows to be blue, the heaven green, clouds suplhur-yellow, or, as perhaps they prefer to say, ‘experience’ them thus. I need not ask whether they really do see or feel things in this way, but in the name of the German people I have only to prevent these miserable unfortunates, who clearly suffer from defects of vision, attempting with violence to persuade contemporaries by their chatter that these faults of observation are indeed realities or from presenting them as ‘art.’ There are only two possibilities here. Either these ‘artists’ do really see things in this way and believe in what they represent. Then one has only to ask how the defect in vision arose, and if it is hereditary the Minister for the Interior will have to see to it that so ghastly a defect of vision shall not be allowed to perpetuate itself. If if they do not believe in the reality of such impressions but seek on other grounds to burden the nation with this humbug, then it is a matter for a criminal court.” (CR, 133)

Hitler: "an art which cannot count on the readiest and most intimate agreement of the great mass of the people, an art which must rely upon the support of small cliques, is intolerable. Such an art only tries to confuse, instead of gladly reinforcing, the sure and healthy instinct of a people. The artist cannot stand aloof from his people."

      • Accompanied by the "Day of German Art"
        • Huge events, 400-800,000 visitors
      • The right sort of men
      • The right sort of women
      • The right sort of families
      • The right sort of Führer
      • And the right sort of female bodies

Tallying the Losses

  • Many artists, writers, and intellectuals read the handwriting on the wall and get out and many, many more lose their jobs
    • Reminds us that it was possible to make choices

Resisting Regimentation?

  • What do we mean by resistance?

Resistance
1. a. The act, on the part of persons, of resisting, opposing, or withstanding.
c. Organized covert opposition to an occupying or ruling power; spec. (usu. with def. article and capital initial)
Passive Resistance
Simple refusal to comply with some demand, without active opposition, now mostly used of refusal to comply with demands or legal requirements imposed by a government or other authority.
Definitions from the OED
What definition would you provide?

    • Can there be cultural resistance?
      • "Swing Kids" and listening to Glenn Miller's "In the Mood" on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
    • Can you regiment desire and imagination? Can you resist by not seeing what the Nazis want you to see?
      • Why do Germans flock to the exhibition of Degenerate Art?
      • What do Germans see at the Exhibition of German Art?
        • Mosse: "The men and women in Nazi painting and sculpture... embodied the proper morality and sexual behavior. Beauty without sensuality was demanded of artists and sculptors. a beauty that had to reflect the generally accepted moral standards that the Nazis championed as their own. For it was the strength and appeal of National Socialism that it did not invent anything new in its effort at self-representation but simply appropriated long-standing popular tradition and taste."(CR, 120)
        • Respectability and morality are key parts of Nazi politics
        • German masculinity

(But what if you don't see "an abstract, smooth, almost transparent nakedness and a frozen posture" (Mosse, CR, 126 and what if you don't share Himmler's hatred of male homosexuals)

      • Desexualized German womanhood but what if your tastes head not to this:

What if what attracts you is not the "fleshy and often full-bosomed nudes, who left nothing to the imagination" but the "chaste German maiden with blonde plaits" (Mosse, CR, 127)

(But what if you don't see the "beautiful as a reflection of the eternal and immutable, revealing it as something pure and removed from all materialism and sensuality." (Mosse, CR, 127)

      • And a closing thought: Both Barron and Mosse suggest that what we can learn about Nazi cultural politics is relevant to our understanding of battles over artistic expression in the present. What do you think? Are there parallels?
  • Research alert: Mosse refers to the controversy surround Robert Mapplethorpe. Who is Mapplethorpe? What was the controversy? What was the opposition of the artistic production of this "maker" in the United States?