by Philipp Blom
Croce’s strong sense of civic duty had compelled him to abandon his philosophical work temporarily to go into politics. As a senator in Rome, he had made himself unpopular with his opposition to Italy’s participation in the First World War, and afterward, as minister for education from 1920 to 1921, he had attempted to reform the country’s ramshackle and church-dominated education system. During the chaos of the postwar years, he had begun to regard Mussolini’s Fascists as the only force capable of restoring a measure of order to the country, though Croce stated clearly at the outset that Fascism “cannot and must not be anything but a passing phase in the restoration of a strictly liberal system.”9
The turning point for Croce’s flirtation with Fascism had come in 1924, with the murder of the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti. After making several courageous speeches in the Chamber of Deputies protesting the rise of Fascist power, Matteotti had been abducted and stabbed multiple times with a carpenter’s file. His assassins, five well-known Fascists, received light sentences and were soon pardoned by the pliant king, Vittorio Emanuele III. Croce, still a liberal senator, was disgusted; he turned his back on his former allies, including his close friend Giovanni Gentile, a philosopher with whom he had worked in the past and who had thrown in his lot with Mussolini. Croce returned to Naples, refusing any further involvement in politics.
When in 1925 Gentile published a “Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals,” which was signed by, among others, writer and politician Gabriele D’Annunzio, writer and diplomat Curzio Malaparte, futurist movement founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and the great Sicilian dramatist Luigi Pirandello, Croce drafted a countermanifesto repudiating Fascism in the name of humanity: “We cannot sympathize with this chaotic and elusive ‘religion’ and abandon our old faith: the faith that for two centuries and a half has been the soul of Italy and which rose again from modern Italy; the faith that is made up out of a love of truth, a longing for justice, a generous human and civic sense, a zeal for intellectual and moral education and a commitment to freedom, the strength and guarantor of all progress.”10
Croce, by now openly condemning Fascism as a “moral malady,” was too famous to be assassinated, but the state had other means of silencing him. During the more than twenty years that Mussolini was in power, Croce’s books were not published, nor was his name mentioned in academic or general publications. His Naples home, a meeting place for dissident intellectuals from all over the country, was “searched” by uniformed Fascists, who were careful to create a maximum of chaos and destruction in his library. But the philosopher refused to be intimidated. When Il Duce embarked on his ill-begotten and bloody invasion of Abyssinia, the senator-for-life at once returned his sign of office, the senatorial medal.
It is true, of course, that Italy was not Germany, where from the beginning the regime was highly organized and much more bloodthirsty. Opposition to the Nazi regime was much more tightly circumscribed; no public figure in Germany could have published a signed manifesto against Fascism and survived. Short of absolute heroism, a refusal to participate remained the only moral alternative for those who did not wish to emigrate. Croce’s stance, however, did demonstrate that it was possible to maintain intellectual integrity.
Hitler and Hollywood
EVEN BEYOND GERMANY, the reach of Nazi cultural influence was unexpectedly wide. As historian Ben Urwand has documented in The Collaboration (2013), it extended into and even partly controlled the production of and also the scripts for many Hollywood movies.
The exile stories of great German-speaking film directors and actors such as Billy Wilder, Erich von Stroheim, Marlene Dietrich, Hedy Lamarr, Paul Henreid, Ernst Lubitsch, and Fritz Lang are well known, as is the Führer’s famous fondness for light fare from across the Atlantic. Apparently he enjoyed nothing more than to relax from his superhuman historic task by spending an evening watching Laurel and Hardy, Mickey Mouse, or Greta Garbo—though he is known to have drawn the line at Tarzan, Hollywood’s own version of a primitive superman.
The extent of the cooperation between the great studios and the government in Berlin before the Second World War, however, has long been underestimated. Unwilling to lose the lucrative German market, which had been opening up to Hollywood productions after the commercial disaster of Lang’s Metropolis, the studio bosses decided to pay the Reich’s vice consul in Los Angeles, Georg Gyssling, a particular courtesy. He was invited to preview their releases in private and to suggest cuts and alterations as he saw fit, effectively giving the Nazi government a veto over what emerged from Hollywood’s burgeoning film industry.
Unsurprisingly, the Berlin propagandists were highly pleased with films such as Gabriel over the White House (1933), Mutiny on the Bounty, and The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (both 1935), all of which demonstrated the need for a strong leader, in a setting of swashbuckling and humor that only Hollywood could produce. Films critical of the Nazis, such as The Mad Dog of Europe, a 1933 project by Herman Mankiewicz, or It Can’t Happen Here, a screenplay by Sidney Howard following a Sinclair Lewis novel, were quietly scuppered by Gyssling and the studio executives. In the latter case, it was Will Hays of the Hays office, Hollywood’s own watchdog for decency and good taste, who notified Louis B. Mayer, boss of the MGM studio and himself Jewish, that the film might displease “certain foreign governments.” Mayer took the hint. The film was not produced.
Two movies in particular framed the transatlantic collaboration, one of them even predating the Nazi ascent to power in Germany. All Quiet on the Western Front had been produced in Hollywood in 1930 and had experienced a tumultuous release in Germany. In response to this, the pioneering filmmaker Carl Laemmle Sr., a German émigré himself and also Jewish, agreed to make significant cuts in the work, in order to facilitate a potentially lucrative rerelease in his former home country.
In a blatant pandering to Nazi propaganda, in 1934 20th Century Fox made The House of Rothschild, depicting the head of the famous family as a money-grubbing, power-hungry caricature who might have stepped straight out of the classic anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The production was so effective that the Nazis would use it as direct inspiration for their notorious propaganda movie The Eternal Jew (1940). But the original Hollywood film so alarmed officials of the American Jewish Anti-Defamation League that they persuaded studio executives to refrain in the future from including obviously Jewish characters in their films. The unintended result was that for the remainder of the 1930s, the persecution of Jews and their desperate plight in Europe were to remain almost completely absent from Hollywood films—not only those screened in Germany but also those seen all over the world, from Idaho to Shanghai.
Fatal Poetry
CULTURAL PROPAGANDA and cultural oppression were equally a feature of the other great totalitarian power of the time: the USSR. Following the great creative surge of the 1920s overseen by Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Soviet people’s commissar for enlightenment, Stalin’s administration had put an end to almost all artistic experimentation and freedom, ruthlessly streamlining cultural production in a manner very similar to that of the Nazi Gleichschaltung. “The socialist proletariat must promote the principle of Party literature,” Lenin had demanded as far back as 1905. With the energy of constructivism, supremacism, and other modernist artistic movements proving too great to control, in 1929 the Soviet hierarchy asserted its authority. Henceforth, creative freedom would follow the definition of novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, winner of the Stalin Prize and later Nobel laureate. “I write at the bidding of my heart,” said Sholokhov, “and my heart belongs to the Party.”11
Most writers who refused to toe the new Party line of socialist realism, rejecting its endless panegyrics of proletarian heroism and paeans to Comrade First Secretary Stalin, the Driver of the Locomotive of History, were very quickly silenced. The futurist poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky, who was once the poster child of revolutionary art but who later despaired of the increasing censorship and ever mo
re labyrinthine cultural bureaucracy, had shot himself in 1930. By the early 1930s, those resistant to the regime, such as the prose writer Isaac Babel and the poet Anna Akhmatova, found themselves effectively unable to publish; Babel would later be executed as a supposed spy.
The Kiev novelist and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov chose to work in secret on his great novel, The Master and Margarita, at the same time producing politically acceptable pieces for the stage. Boris Pasternak was forced to make radical changes to his poetry and to his prose style, in order to escape the perilous label of “bourgeois reactionary.” Arrests, interrogations, and arbitrary sentences could strike anyone at any moment. Maxim Gorky alone possessed such iconic status as a writer and as a political figure that Stalin did not touch him—at least not openly. Always critical of the regime, and a frequent defender of other writers, Gorky died in unclear circumstances in 1936; it is thought he may have been murdered on Stalin’s orders.
Mug shot: The poet Osip Mandelstam photographed by the NKVD.
One recklessly brave writer who did try to express his outrage in his art was to pay for his courage with his life. Toward the end of 1933, the forty-two-year-old poet Osip Mandelstam wrote a short work entitled, in a reference to Stalin’s origins in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia, “The Kremlin Highlander.” In the poem, later to become famous as “The Stalin Epigram,” Mandelstam describes his disgust for the great “Engineer of Human Souls”:
Ten fat maggots his fingers,
his words drop like weights
his moustache is laughing with the antennae of cockroaches
the shaft of his boots glistens majestically
a thin-necked brood of bosses surrounds him
he toys with servile half-men
they whistle, meow and wail
he alone beats time with a hammer
Decrees are issued like horseshoes
one in the groin, one to the forehead, the eye—the grave
Executions taste like raspberries on his tongue
and his Ossetian chest swells with satisfaction.12
Mandelstam read this poem only to close and like-minded friends such as Boris Pasternak. But Pasternak, who immediately declared that he had heard nothing and that indeed Mandelstam had recited nothing, warned nonetheless that in Stalin’s Russia even the tree branches had ears. Pasternak was right. Mandelstam was arrested on a warrant signed by the chief of the NKVD, Genrikh Yagoda, and interrogated. Pasternak tried to intervene on Mandelstam’s behalf, appealing to Nikolai Bukharin, editor of the prestigious daily Izvestia and one of the few highly placed functionaries thought to be sympathetic to intellectual dissent.
Pasternak hoped that Bukharin might raise the issue at the highest level. A few days later, the telephone rang at his apartment and a voice informed him that “Comrade Stalin wants to talk to you.” After a short pause, another voice began, and the poet realized that he was indeed speaking to Stalin, who went on to ask him what was being said about him and Mandelstam in literary circles. Beside himself with fear, Pasternak tried to distance himself from his friend and colleague, saying that as far as he was aware there were no longer any literary circles in Russia, that Mandelstam’s views of poetry were very different from his, and that nobody was saying anything at all about the hostile poem. Stalin listened in complete silence. When Pasternak staggered to a halt Stalin said simply: “I see. You’re not able to stick up for a comrade,” and with that the dictator hung up.13
Despite Pasternak’s anxious claim, there were some literary circles still left in the capital, and Mandelstam’s arrest was followed by a swift crackdown on their members. The poet himself was exiled, together with his wife, to the provincial city of Cherdyn in the northern Urals; this fate was widely considered to be an extraordinary stroke of good luck, explicable only by leniency on Stalin’s part. Others did not fare so well. His trusted friend Anna Akhmatova had also been present at the reading of “The Kremlin Highlander.” Akhmatova’s first husband had been executed by the Bolsheviks in 1921; now her common-law husband, the art historian Nikolay Punin, and her twenty-one-year-old son Lev were also arrested and accused of counterrevolutionary activities. They were both released eventually, only to be rearrested later; though Lev was to survive, Punin would die in the gulag.
To channel and steer the course of literature in the USSR, in 1932 the Soviet authorities had created their own equivalent of the Reichsschrifttumskammer (National Bureau of Literature), the Sojus Pissatelei SSSR, or Soviet Writers’ Union. It was presided over by Maxim Gorky. In the swelteringly hot August of 1934, the organization hosted a writers’ congress, to which it also invited foreign authors known for their communist sympathies, including the German expressionist poet Johannes Becher and French men of letters such as André Malraux, Paul Nizan, and Louis Aragon. Another invitee, Klaus Mann, wrote enthusiastically: “The writers’ congress demonstrates one thing: the vital connection existing here between the literary producer and his clients, the readers, between writer and public, between literature and the people. . . . The great deed of a new social order . . . creates a mood of huge optimism among the Russian writers.”14
In hindsight, Mann’s naiveté appears grating, but others were similarly enthusiastic, and their attitude must also be contextualized by taking into account the German “pogrom of the intellect” one year earlier. The Soviet authorities were careful not to restrict the freedom of expression of their foreign guests, and many writers who had had to flee their homes and abandon their livelihoods believed they had found a literary paradise, as was apparent in the address given by the German socialist realist writer Willi Bredel, formerly president of the Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts) in Berlin, who only months before had managed to escape from a German concentration camp and fled to Moscow: “I bring you warm, fraternal greetings from the anti-Fascists in the concentration camps and the prisons of Germany. . . . We will not rest until Fascism lies on the ground smashed, and Germany belongs to the working people; until the German worker, heir to classical philosophy and literature, makes Germany once again a great nation of science and the arts, a people of poets and thinkers.”15
·1934·
Thank You, Jeeves
I was a shade perturbed. Nothing to signify, really, but still just a spot concerned. As I sat in the old flat, idly touching the strings of my banjolele, an instrument to which I had become greatly addicted of late, you couldn’t have said that the brow was actually furrowed, and yet, on the other hand, you couldn’t have stated absolutely that it wasn’t. Perhaps the word “pensive” about covers it. It seemed to me that a situation fraught with embarrassing potentialities had arisen.
“Jeeves,” I said, “do you know what?”
“No, sir.”
P. G. Wodehouse, Thank You, Jeeves, 1934
BERTIE WOOSTER WAS, ONCE AGAIN, IN A SPOT OF BOTHER. THIS WAS nothing particularly remarkable for an affable upper-class twit who was liable to get himself in a bit of a squeeze, a natural consequence of drinking too much and thinking too little. But fortunately for him and the rest of humanity, there was Jeeves, his superhuman butler, always at hand with a discreet bit of advice, a crucial piece of information, and a concoction guaranteed to kill hangovers.
P. G. Wodehouse’s Thank You, Jeeves, the first full-length Bertie Wooster novel, was published in March 1934. Fittingly, the author himself called his novels “musical comedies without music.” The fictional eccentrics populating his novels had made him wealthy, so wealthy indeed that the creator of quintessentially British characters such as Bertie, his frightful aunts, his uncle Lord Elmsworth, and his pal Gussie Fink-Nottle was now living in France in order to escape double taxation in his birthplace, Britain, and in the United States, his primary residence during his adult years.
Perhaps it was this prolonged absence from Britain that made Wodehouse’s books such perfect time capsules, for despite the fact that he continued writing into the 1970s, the social and emotional world of his fictional characters w
as anchored firmly in the 1920s. Wodehouse had spent his childhood at a series of English boarding schools, where he had been deposited by his father, a judge working abroad in the colonial service.
The lightness of the Bertie Wooster universe was the secret to the popularity of the stories and novels, which poured from Wodehouse’s typewriter at a prodigious rate. It was a time hungry for musical comedies, with or without music. In mid-1930s Britain, there was little else to laugh about. In the midst of the Great Depression, life had not been so grim for many Britons since Victorian times.
A Different Reality
BRITAIN HAD FINANCED THE WAR by liquidating foreign investments, increasing taxes, and borrowing, with the result that the national debt increased twelvefold, to £8 billion ($634 billion in today’s money). This in turn had forced the Conservative government under prime minister Stanley Baldwin to raise taxes yet again in order to service the debt. In 1929, the electorate had reacted by voting in a Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald.
Traditionally strongly export-oriented, the British economy had suffered enormously from the interruption to world trade brought on by the Great War, as well as from the destruction of some 40 percent of its merchant navy by German submarines and from the generally weak world market after 1918. Its heavy industries, such as coal and steel, and also much of its manufacturing sector, especially for cotton products, which before the war had clothed half the world, were largely operating with outdated methods and machinery. Indeed, those industries were themselves old-fashioned. Even before the war, Germany and the United States had overtaken Britain in newer industries such as chemicals, electrical machinery, and precision tools.
In many ways, the war had accelerated a crisis that had already been looming before 1914, with Britain relying on the captive markets of its empire to support industries that were increasingly less competitive on the world stage. But its reach was wide, and its position had still been strong. With the sluggish demand that followed the war, however, the economy had gradually foundered. By 1930, textile production, which formerly had represented almost half of all exports, was down by two-thirds; shipbuilding, traditionally the economic engine of the Tyne and Clyde region, had collapsed to 7 percent of its prewar level; coal production was down by 20 percent. Even the prestigious Cunard shipping line was not faring well: on December 10, 1931, a notice had been nailed to the factory gates of John Brown’s shipyard, where the latest Cunard liner was being built, that read simply: “The services of all employees . . . will terminate at noon today,” putting three thousand men out of work and affecting a further ten thousand engaged in subsidiary labor. To many workers, the former workshop of the world was beginning to look like a poorhouse.
