Freikorps Music
Rolando Kumar
The period between 1917 and 1933 in Germany, Austria, and most other countries of Central Europe seems today like some terrible subsidence of history, a grand canyon. At the bottom of this canyon we see a life going on that was particularly active in literature and all the arts. Centered on Berlin it radiates outward over the rest of Germany during the years of the Weimar Republic.
Mr. Willett guides us through all this, supplying us with a cultural map of middle Europe in the 1920s. He has made charts of the main artistic movements, together with their political links. He gives a chronological table listing the background of political events and developments in art and architecture, theater and film, music, ballet and opera, writing and publishing.
The Russian revolution was a very palpable specter haunting the Germany of postwar revolution and chaos, the Weimar Republic, the period of inflation, outbursts and skirmishes of revolution and counterrevolution in Berlin and Munich. Lenin and the Bolshevik leaders looked to Germany as the place where their own revolution in an industrially backward land of peasants would be fulfilled along the prophesied Marxist lines: the collapse of the capitalist imperialist society, the taking over of industry by the industrial proletariat.
Russia itself was in so intense a state of ferment that the ideas of leaders, the revolutionary masses, the agitation of soldiers and sailors and workers in factories all seemed scenarios for the Expressionist theater of later German producers of plays by Georg Kaiser, Ernst Toller, and Brecht. The idea of a conductor directing a concert of which the instruments were factory whistles seems perfectly appropriate to this period: whistles ushering in the dawn of the Soviet industrial revolution. At the same time the esoteric art of Suprematists like Malevitch and the constructivist Rodchenko did not seem alien to mass culture. It has the look of forms enfolded in machined acorns that might burst into a mighty technical forest. And however much the work of individuals, such creations were also the products of movements, with the now very visible pathos of the politics of art yearning toward the politics of revolution.
Since we now have no culture whatever, merely a civilization, I am convinced that for all its evil concomitants Bolshevism is probably the only way of creating the preconditions for a new culture in the foreseeable future.
After the rightest Kapp Putsch of 1920 against the Republic, students from the Bauhaus attended the burials and some socialist workers shouted leftist slogans. Gropius did not attend this ceremony but designed a very beautiful monument for the workers who had been killed. But the Bauhaus was by no means just leftist. It reflected all the tendencies of the democracy of the Weimar Republic, including mysticism and vegetarianism. Oskar Schlemmer, director of the wallpaper workshop, noted in 1921:
I would be glad if this book persuaded readers of two things: first that the arts are very closely interwoven with socio-political influences and ideas, and secondly that this is not to be regretted but can at times so stimulate the artists concerned as to produce results that from any point of view are highly original.
At first this reads as though it meant that Grosz is a greater artist than Picasso because he was more deeply immersed in events and Picasso less than Grosz because he led a more sheltered life. But on examination it turns out that all that Mr. Willett is saying is that if you happen to be sensitive to the wind-tunnel of the fifteen years of the Weimar Republic you will find Grosz more rewarding than Picasso. It is as though one were to say that if one is interested in insane asylums one will find Van Gogh more rewarding than Czanne.
I am baffled by this conclusion. It seems to me enough that Mr. Willett has produced extensive evidence of the tremendous energies that certain German artists put into work of great interest, done at a time when it was impossible for them not to be immersed in the destructive element of Germany at that time. The question whether such immersion makes for greater art than that of masters for whom their life is their art remains unanswered. To attempt to answer it one would perhaps have to go deeper into the history of German art than is possible in a discussion of work produced during the years of the Weimar Republic. Then one might note that there is something traditional both about German Expressionism and German objectivity: that Mathias Grnewald is on the Expressionist side and that there is much sobriety in Drer. During some periods of German history, at least, German painters have seemed more likely to be brought back to a reality consisting of the subject observed in all its horror and boredom than the French, who use the subject as the starting point beyond which they explore the values of the medium which is the paint.
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