by attributing it to imaginary machinations of the most helpless among the ethnic groups who compose the German people—the Jews, especially as under the Weimar Constitution, the enrichtment of German business and culture by Jews made Jews conspicuous in German life. The Jews are there-upon accused, not of having contributed to the enrichment of Germany, but of having appropriated what properly belongs to the Germans. It is as if Heifetz. were accused of having robbed Heuser of musical talent, because he is a greater performer of Bach, Brahms and Beethoven.
Once this delusion starts, it culminates in general homicidal mania. Purge the German soul of its Jewish contamination. Drive the Jews out of the German body politic, then Heuser will be a greater violinist than Heifetz, and the true glory of the Aryan-German will shine forth invincibly in war, in business, in politics, in religion, in science and in art!
HITLERISM AS GROUP MANIA
That all this is in direct contradiction to anthropology, history, economics, psychology, aesthetics and other social sciences is irrelevant. We are not confronted by Hitlerism with an analysis of real causes. Hitlerism offers us only the systematic delusions of a group paranoia. They are delusions which have been a long time developing and which have been nourished by the consequences of the iniquitous peace-treaty in German economic and emotional life; and by the rather stupid cunning of great bankers and industrialists of Germany who financed Hitler and his paranoic creed in order to break the German trades-unions which had gained so much strength under the Republic.
That they themselves can escape the workings of the paranoic frenzy they paid for is beyond reason. So far, Hitler and his gang have been gratifying their homicidal mania on the Jews. Their blood “purification” is now being extended to boxing, horse-racing, the Christian religion, and the fine arts.
No less a person than that paramount Aryan-German philosopher, scientist and aesthetician, Dr. Paul Goebbels, Nazi director of the government department of popular enlightenment and propaganda, provides a typical example of the systematic paranoid delusion extended to the arts.
THE GOEBBELS “ARGUMENT”
Wilhelm Fuertwaengler, the “Aryan” conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, protested against the exclusion of the Jews from music. The high well-born Goebbels wrote him a letter. In effect the letter said that the arts must conform to the will of the people—for “people” we must read “Nazis.” Now, heretofore, art has been poisoned by alien contamination, degraded by “alien experimental mania,” although the people don’t like experiments. The result is, fame and fortune have come to outsiders, while “during the last fourteen years really German artists have often been condemned to complete silence.” The arts must be purged of the alien contagion. Aryan artists who support the Nazis “will in return receive from them the warmest furtherance and support.”
Anybody who has the slightest familiarity with the history of art and artists will recognize at once how delusory this doctrine is.
The life of every artist of any consequence shows that, first and foremost, he follows his own vision and utters his own heart. The sources of his “inspiration” may be manifold, and “the people” may be one among them. But as a rule the artist begins as a minority of one and only after a long, often a bitter, struggle, is he accepted by the “people”. In point of fact, it is the artist who is the inspiration of “the people”, not the people of the artist. The mad Hitler is a case in point.
THE ARTIST AND HIS SOURCES
Moreover, so long as the artist is isolated and lives in a “pure” racial environment, he can at best only repeat the past. He can contribute nothing to the future. The great periods of the arts of Egypt, Greece, Rome, Byzantium; of Mediaeval, Renaissance and Modern Europe, are periods of the widest mixtures and contacts of artists and arts.
Shakespeare would be trivial and puny without his French, Italian, Greek and Latin sources. Take away from Goethe his experiences in Italy, his classical background and his contact with the French enlightenment, and what is left of him? Take from Michaelangelo the sculptures of antiquity, or from Erasmus the ancient humanities, and they are reduced to nearly nothing. Did Conrad the Pole; Rosetti the Italian; Shaw the Irishman, impoverish English literature by their contributions? The closer you come to the racially “pure”, pure “Aryan” or even pure Jew, in the arts, the closer you come to the barbarous, the infantile, the stupid and the formless.
THE JEWS MET THE TEST
Finally, if it is true that in Germany “outsiders” have been preferred to “Germans” in music and literature and painting and sculpture, and if it is true that the artist gets his inspiration from the people and expresses the people’s will, it must follow that the “outsiders”, with their “Jewish blood”, created works of art which expressed the heart and mind of the German people, while the “Germans” did not.
For no artist can do more than submit his work to his public. If the public does these things, it is because the public wants to, because the public finds in the work the expression of its own heart and mind. If the German public preferred the work of Jews, it is because that work was closer to their hearts than the work of Germans.
However, the systematic delusions of a mind like Goebbels’ are not amenable to experience or reason. All one can hope is that events will soon liberate the unhappy German masses from the madness which is alienating from them the sympathy of the world and bringing back the horror and distrust of War days.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
