Failures
of Epistemology
During
the Holocaust the greater part of Jewish cultural heritage was destroyed:
religious objects were melted down and Jewish books were burnt or sent for
pulp. Only a sample of Jewish culture
was preserved by the Nazis for their own ‘scientific’ purposes.[1]
Thus
the whole problem of what the Nazis did to disrupt and distort the art
establishment in Europe involved more than just the murder or coercion into
exile of artists, dealers, collectors and directors and more than the
destruction and plunder of objets d’art.
They were looking to destroy Jewish civilization, religious and secular,
separate and assimilated, as a living, growing enterprise.[2] Their efforts involved the interference with
the ideals, principles, and practices of recording, evaluating and teaching of
art, that is, with ideas and their institutionalization. As we remarked earlier, it would be
relatively easy to rectify the current situation—the gaps in knowledge, the
emplacement of distortions and denials—if all it took was recognition of Nazi
guilt and the culpability of collaborators, return of stolen property,
compensation of destroyed collections, and correction of names and dates in
formal histories of art.
However,
two other factors complicate the situation.
Among these I will not even consider such matters as physiological memory
loss, personal confusions over identification of what was plundered or
destroyed, and problems associated with chains of purportedly (and perhaps even
technically) good-faith sales between the original act of confiscation and
current claims for return or reparations.[3] First, the same process of obfuscation and
duplicity, including continuing thefts and destructions, continued long after
the Second World War ended in 1945; hence there are more gaps and more layers
of disinformation to be filled and disentangled, with often major institutions
and respected individuals to be dealt with today. Second, the corruption of taste, historical
paradigm, philosophical and aesthetic rationalizations based on partial truths
and misunderstood procedures of logic began before the Nazis came to power and
these problems were exacerbated by the period of National Socialist rule, so
that correction and adjustment of ideas about epistemology, artistic theory and
lines of influence and reception of these intellectual factors require long and
careful study and re-valuation.[4]
James Conion
sets out seven ways in which the Nazi regime interfered with the dynamic
development of the arts, particularly music, that had reached an explosive
flowering in the first twenty-five or thirty years of the twentieth century in
German-speaking lands.[5] This scholar is one of the few to examine and
speculate on the implications of the break occasioned by such large-scale
murder, forced exile, expropriation and misattributions. What he generalizes about the musical
cultures of Germany and Austria can be expanded to the other arts and to other
parts of the Nazi conquered and occupied lands.
These seven ways can be listed below, and then readers may go to Conion to
see them elaborated in order to show the impact of such transformations on
actual products and events:
1.
Environment: the rise of the
totalitarian and racist policies of
the Nazi party after World War I and their implementation in the 1930s and
1940s changed the entire atmosphere in which music was composed, performed, and
valued.
2.
Murder: through massive killing of
Jewish artists, performers, conductors, critics and audiences a rift was torn
between the previous generations of creative people and of patrons of the arts
and the generations attempting to reconstitute the traditions and institutional
cultures of those who survived.
3.
Uprooting: intimidation, fear and forced
exile broke up the connections between formal and informal groupings of artists
and the people who subsidize, encourage and appreciate art, making it
impossible to maintain continuity of development.
4.
Scattering: those directly threatened by
the Nazi racist policies and those who departed on principle so as not to
collude with the horrors of the Holocaust went to new lands, benefitting to
some extent the cultures they entered, forming new alliances; but even when
these artists and entrepreneurs who supported the arts found themselves unable
to pick up the threads of their lives and cultural interests, they tended to
help create new audiences and new generations of students.
5.
Damaging
Tradition:
whatever benefits may have accrued to the new lands where the artists and
collectors and patrons fled, the continuity of culture in German-speaking lands
was broken, with experience lost, understanding distorted by obscene and
grotesque interpretations, and loss of many compositions, works of art, and
schools of thought—both literally as conservatories and other training
establishments and metaphorically as groups of masters and disciples, friends
and colleagues, creators and patrons.
6.
Loss
of Caretakers:
while new generations always produce smaller groups of innovators and radical
opponents of conservative ideas and ways of producing art, without the dynamic
interaction between an avant-garde and a body of caretakers of traditions the growth
and development of the arts could not proceed.
7.
Obliteration
of Memory: it
doesn’t take very long for new people to grow up without an awareness of what
constituted the living past if they do not have personal memories, do not meet
respected persons who were in touch with and therefore able to pass on
experiences of the culture prior to the disruption, and can only learn from
textbooks full of gaps and distortions.
But because the
Nazis not only engaged in murder and destruction of life and property but also
thought of themselves as building up a new world order, with a new kind of
Aryan youth and a cleansed and purified body of culture, we need to examine
what it is that they believed they were creating. It is, in a sense, easier to see the actual
facts of their mass murders, disruption of national growth, and destruction and
dispersal of art works. It is much
harder to see the effects in terms of our knowledge of the past when we try to
look through the confusion and smoked-over gaps of denial and make-believe.
[1]
Wesley A Fischer,
“Introduction” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, an exhibit based the
account given by Col. Seymour J. Pomeranze who was in charge of the US book
restitution project at the Offenbach Archival Depot in Germany, online at http://www.ushmm.org museum/exhibit/online/oad/body (seen 17/10/2011).
[2] They wished to remember it as a
relic of the past in their new museum of Judaism, but it would be on their own
racial terms: an exhibition of empty signs and futile hopes.
[3] To show how mad and absurd these
racial questions could be, Walter Laqueur reports on the case of Leo Bech. Bech was “a world-famous conductor who, owing
to the intervention of Goering was permitted to emigrate from Riga to Sweden in
the middle of the war.” Even more crazy
is this story about Goebbels: “While there was no mole rabid anti-Semite than
Goebbels in his later years. When he was told that an enthusiastic racial
researcher had established beyond any shadow of doubt that the great-great-grandfather
of of Johann Strauss had been a Hungarian Jew, he ordered the evidence
suppressed: ‘For if we go on like this, all we shall be left with of our
racially pure cultural heritage will be Alfred Rosenberg (his pet aversion
among fellow Nazi leaders) and this may not be enough” from ”Hitler’s Jews: Max
Von Oppenheim and the Myth of German Jewish Guilt” Tablet Magazine (21 August 20913) online at
http:www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/141788/hitler-jews-oppenheim?all=1;
extract from Lacqueur’s forthcoming “Optimism in Politics: Reflections on
Contemporary History” in Transaction
(2014).
[4] All this is now complicated by
wave after wave of contemporary anti-Semitism disguised more or less subtly as
anti-Zionism, corroborated by politically-correct self-hate and personal guilt
by Jews who regret the foundation of Israel, dissociate themselves from
“religious” Jews (taking a small minority of ultra-Orthodox fanatics as typical
of traditional rabbinical culture), and accept art face value
politically-motivated Islamicist claims to superiority, supercessionism and
replacement theology.
[v]
James Conion, “Between Two
Wars, Between Two Worlds” The Oral
Foundation; originally published in Opera
Magazine (April 2009) online at http://orelfoundation.org/index.php/ journalArticle/between_two_wars_
between (seen
134/10/2011).
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