The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  The historian J. H. Plumb has said that one of the great unsung achievements of the twentieth century has been the education of vast numbers of people. Government-funded schools and universities led the way here, but the various forms of new media, many of which started in the 1920s, have also played their part. The term middlebrow may be intended as an insult by some, but for millions, like the readers of Time or those listening in to the BBC, it was more a question of wising up than dumbing down.

  13

  HEROES’ TWILIGHT

  In February 1920 a horror film was released in Berlin that was, in the words of one critic, ‘uncanny, demonic, cruel, “Gothic”,’ a Frankenstein-type story filled with bizarre lighting and dark, distorted sets.1 Considered by many to be the first ‘art film,’ The Cabinet of Dr Caligari was a huge success, so popular in Paris that it played in the same theatre every day between 1920 and 1927.2 But the film was more than a record breaker. As the historian of interwar Germany Peter Gay writes, ‘With its nightmarish plot, its Expressionist sets, its murky atmosphere, Caligari continues to embody the Weimar spirit to posterity as palpably as Gropius’s buildings, Kandinsky’s abstractions, Grosz’s cartoons, and Marlene Dietrich’s legs … But Caligari, decisive for the history of film, is also instructive for the history of Weimar…. There was more at stake here than a strange script or novelties of lighting.’3

  Following World War I, as we have seen, Germany was turned almost overnight into a republic. Berlin remained the capital but Weimar was chosen as the seat of the assembly after a constitutional conference had been held there to decide the form the new republic would take, because of its immaculate reputation (Goethe, Schiller), and because of worries that the violence in Berlin and Munich would escalate if either of those cities were selected. The Weimar Republic lasted for fourteen years until Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, a tumultuous interregnum between disasters which astonishingly managed to produce a distinctive culture that was both brilliant and characterised by its own style of thought, the very antithesis of Middletown.

  The period can be conveniently divided into three clear phases.4 From the end of 1918 to 1924, ‘with its revolution, civil war, foreign occupation, and fantastic inflation, [there] was a time of experimentation in the arts; Expressionism dominated politics as much as painting or the stage.’5 This was followed, from 1924 to 1929, by a period of economic stability, a relief from political violence, and increasing prosperity reflected in the arts by the Neue Sachlichkeit, the ‘new objectivity,’ a movement whose aims were matter-of-factness, even sobriety. Finally, the period 1929 to 1933 saw a return to political violence, rising unemployment, and authoritarian government by decree; the arts were cowed into silence, and replaced by propagandistic Kitsch.6

  *

  Caligari was a collaboration between two men, Hans Janowitz, a Czech, and Carl Meyer, an Austrian, who had met in Berlin in 1919.7 Their work was not only fiercely antiwar but also explored what expressionism could do in the cinema. The film features the mad Dr Caligari, a fairground vaudeville act who entertains with his somnambulist, Cesare. Outside the fair, however, there is a second string to the story, and it is far darker. Wherever Caligari goes, death is never far behind. Anyone who crosses him ends up dead. The story proper starts after Caligari kills two students – or thinks that he has. In fact, one survives, and it is this survivor, Francis, who begins to investigate. Nosing around, he discovers Cesare asleep in a box. But the killings continue, and when Francis returns to the sleeping Cesare, he realises this time that the ‘person’ motionless in the box is merely a dummy. It dawns on Francis, and the police, whose help he has now enlisted, that the sleepwalking Cesare is unconsciously obeying Caligari’s instructions, killing on his behalf without understanding what he has done. Realising he has been discovered, Caligari flees into an insane asylum. But this is more than it seems, for Francis now finds out that Caligari is also the director of the asylum. Shocking as this is, there is no escape for Caligari, and when his double life is exposed, far from being cathartic, he loses all self-control and ends up in a straitjacket.8

  This was the original story of Caligari, but before the film appeared it went through a drastic metamorphosis. Janowitz and Meyer had intended their story to be a powerful polemic against military obedience and assumed that when the script was accepted by Erich Pommer, one of the most successful producers of the day, he would not change it in any way.9 However, Pommer and the director, Robert Wiene, actually turned the story inside out, rearranging it so that it is Francis and his girlfriend who are mad. The ideas of abduction and murder are now no more than their delusions, and the director of the asylum is in reality a benign doctor who cures Francis of his evil thoughts. Janowitz and Meyer were furious. Pommers version of the story was the opposite of theirs. The criticism of blind obedience had disappeared and, even worse, authority was shown as kindly, even safe. It was a travesty.10

  The irony was that Pommer’s version was a great success, commercially and artistically, and film historians have often wondered whether the original version would have done as well. And perhaps there is a fundamental point here. Though the plot was changed, the style of telling the story was not – it was still expressionistic. Expressionism was a force, an impulse to revolution and change. But, like the psychoanalytic theory on which it was based, it was not fully worked out. The expressionist Novembergruppe, founded in December 1918, was a revolutionary alliance of all the artists who wanted to see change – Emil Nolde, Walter Gropius, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Alban Berg, and Paul Hindemith. But revolution needed more than an engine; it needed direction. Expressionism never provided that. And perhaps in the end its lack of direction was one of those factors that enabled Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. He hated expressionism as much as he hated anything.11

  But it would be wrong to see Weimar as a temporary way station on the path to Hitler. It certainly did not see itself in that light, and it boasted many solid achievements. Not the least of these was the establishment of some very prestigious academic institutions, still centres of excellence even today. These included the Psychoanalytic Institute in Berlin – home to Franz Alexander, Karen Horney, Otto Fenichel, Melanie Klein, and Wilhelm Reich – and the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, which had more than two thousand students by the last year of the republic: the teachers here included Sigmund Neumann, Franz Neumann, and Hajo Holborn. And then there was the Warburg Institute of Art History.

  In 1920 the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer paid a visit to the Warburg art historical library in Hamburg. He had just been appointed to the chair in philosophy at the new university in Hamburg and knew that some of the scholars at the library shared his interests. He was shown around by Fritz Saxl, then in charge. The library was the fantastic fruit of a lifetime’s collecting by Aby Warburg, a rich, scholarly, and ‘intermittently psychotic individual’ who, not unlike T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, was obsessed by classical antiquity and the extent to which its ideas and values could be perpetuated in the modern world.12 The charm and value of the library was not just that Warburg had been able to afford thousands of rare volumes on many recondite topics, but the careful way he had put them together to illuminate one another: thus art, religion, and philosophy were mixed up with history, mathematics, and anthropology. For Warburg, Following James Frazer, philosophy was inseparable from study of the ‘primitive mind.’ The Warburg Institute has been the home of many important art historical studies throughout the century, but it started in Weimar Germany, where among the papers published under its auspices were Erwin Panofsky’s Idea, Dürers ‘Melancolia 1,’ Hercules am Scheidewege and Percy Schramm’s Kaiser, Rom und Renovatio. Panofsky’s way of reading paintings, his ‘iconological method,’ as it was called, would prove hugely influential after World War II.13

  Europeans had been fascinated by the rise of the skyscraper in America, but it was difficult to adapt on the eastern side of the Atlantic: the old cities of France, Italy, and Germany were all in p
lace, and too beautiful to allow the distortion that very tall buildings threatened.14 But the new materials of the twentieth century, which helped the birth of the skyscraper, were very seductive and proved popular in Europe, especially steel, reinforced concrete, and sheet glass. The latter in particular transformed the appearance of buildings and the experience of being inside a structure. With its different colours, reflectivity, and transparency, glass was a flexible, expressive skin for buildings constructed in steel. In the end, glass and steel had a bigger effect on European architects than concrete did, and especially on three architects who worked together in the studio of the leading industrial designer in Germany, Peter Behrens (1868– 1940). These were Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier. Each would make his mark, but the first was Gropius. It was Gropius who founded the Bauhaus.

  It is not difficult to see why Gropius should have taken the lead. Influenced by Marx and by William Morris, he always believed, contrary to Adolf Loos, that craftsmanship was as important as ‘higher’ art. He had also learned from Behrens, whose firm was one of the first to develop the modern ‘design package,’ providing AEG with a corporate style that they used for everything, from letterheads and arc lamps to the company’s buildings themselves. Therefore, when the Grand Ducal Academy of Art, which was founded in the mid-eighteenth century, was merged with the Weimar Arts and Crafts School, established in 1902, he was an obvious choice as director. The fused structure was given the name Staatliche Bauhaus, with Bauhaus — literally, ‘house for building’ – chosen because it echoed the Bauhütten, mediaeval lodges where those constructing the great cathedrals were housed.15

  The early years of the Bauhaus, in Weimar, were troubled. The government of Thuringia, where Weimar was located, was very right-wing, and the school’s collectivist approach, the rebelliousness of its students, and the style of its first head teacher, Johannes Itten, a quarrelsome mystic-religious, proved very unpopular.16 The school’s budget was cut, forcing its removal to Dessau, which had a more congenial administration.17 This change in location seems to have brought about a change in Gropius himself. He produced a second manifesto, in which he announced that the school would concern itself with practical questions of the modern world – mass housing, industrial design, typography, and the ‘development of prototypes.’ The obsession with wood was abandoned: Gropius’s design for the school’s new building was entirely of steel, glass, and concrete, to underline the school’s partnership with industry. Inside the place, Gropius vowed, students and staff would explore a ‘positive attitude to the living environment of vehicles and machines … avoiding all romantic embellishment and whimsy.’18

  After a lost war and an enormous rise in inflation, there was no social priority of greater importance in Weimar Germany than mass housing. And so Bauhaus architects were among those who developed what became a familiar form of social housing, the Siedlung or ‘settlement.’ This was introduced to the world iein 1927, at the Stuttgart trade fair exhibition. Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, J. P. Oud, and Bruno Taut all designed buildings for the Weissenhof (White House) Siedlung, ‘and twenty thousand people came every day to marvel at the flat roofs, white walls, strip windows and pilotis of what Rohe called “the great struggle for a new way of life.” ’19 Although the Siedlungen were undoubtedly better than the nineteenth-century slums they were intended to replace, the lasting influence of the Bauhaus has been in the area of applied design.20 The Bauhaus philosophy, ‘that it is far harder to design a first-rate teapot than paint a second-rate picture,’ has found wide acceptance – folding beds, built-in cupboards, stackable chairs and tables, designed with mass-production processes in mind and with an understanding of the buildings these objects were to be used in.21

  The catastrophe of World War I, followed by the famine, unemployment, and inflation of the postwar years, for many people confirmed Marx’s theory that capitalism would eventually collapse under the weight of its own ‘insoluble contradictions’. However, it soon became clear that it wasn’t communism that was appearing from the rubble, but fascism. Some Marxists were so disillusioned by this that they abandoned Marxism altogether. Others remained convinced of the theory, despite the evidence. But there was a third group, people in between, who wished to remain Marxists but felt that Marxist theory needed reconstructing if it was to remain credible. This group assembled in Frankfurt in the late 1920s and made a name for itself as the Frankfurt School, with its own institute in the city. Thanks to the Nazis, the institute didn’t stay long, but the name stuck.22

  The three best-known members of the Frankfurt School were Theodor Adorno, a man who ‘seemed equally at home in philosophy, sociology and music,’ Max Horkheimer, a philosopher and sociologist, less innovative than Adorno but perhaps more dependable, and the political theorist Herbert Marcuse, who in time would become the most famous of all. Horkheimer was the director of the institute. In addition to being a philosopher and sociologist, he was also a financial wizard, who brilliantly manipulated the investments of the institute, both in Germany and afterward in the United States. According to Marcuse, nothing that was written by the Frankfurt School was published without previous discussion with him. Adorno was the early star. According to Marcuse, ‘When he talked it could be printed without any changes.’ In addition there was Leo Lowenthal, the literary critic of the school, Franz Neumann, a legal philosopher, and Friedrich Pollock, who was one of those who argued – against Marx and to Lenin’s fury – that there were no compelling internal reasons why capitalism should collapse.23

  In its early years the school was known for its revival of the concept of alienation. This, a term originally coined by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, was taken up and refined by Marx but, for half a century, from the 1870s, ignored by philosophers. ‘According to Marx, “alienation” was a socio-economic concept.’24 Basically, Marcuse said, alienation meant that under capitalism men and women could not, in their work, fulfil their own needs. The capitalist mode of production was at fault here, and alienation could only be abolished by radically changing this mode of production. The Frankfurt School, however, developed this idea so that it became above all a psychological entity, and one, moreover, that was not necessarily, or primarily, due to the capitalist mode of production. Alienation, for the Frankfurt School, was more a product of all of modern life. This view shaped the school’s second and perhaps most enduring preoccupation: the attempted marriage of Freudianism and Marxism.25 Marcuse took the lead to begin with, though Erich Fromm wrote several books on the subject later. Marcuse regarded Freudianism and Marxism as two sides of the same coin. According to him, Freud’s unconscious primary drives, in particular the life instinct and the death instinct, are embedded within a social framework that determines how they show themselves. Freud had argued that repression necessarily increases with the progress of civilisation; therefore aggressiveness must be produced and released in ever greater quantities. And so, just as Marx had predicted that revolution was inevitable, a dislocation that capitalism must bring on itself, so, in Marcuse’s hands, Freudianism produced a parallel, more personal backdrop to this scenario, accounting for a buildup of destructiveness – self-destruction and the destruction of others.26

  The third contribution of the Frankfurt School was a more general analysis of social change and progress, the introduction of an interdisciplinary approach – sociology, psychology, philosophy – to examine what the school regarded as the vital question of the day: ‘What precisely has gone wrong in Western civilisation, that at the very height of technical progress we see the negation of human progress: dehumanisation, brutalisation, revival of torture as a “normal” means of interrogation, the destructive development of nuclear energy, the poisoning of the biosphere, and so on? How has this happened?’27 To try to answer this question, they looked back as far as the Enlightenment, and then traced events and ideas forward to the twentieth century. They claimed to discern a ‘dialectic,�
� an interplay between progressive and repressive periods in the West. Moreover, each repressive period was usually greater than the one before, owing to the growth of technology under capitalism, to the point where, in the late 1920s, ‘the incredible social wealth that had been assembled in Western civilisation, mainly as the achievement of Capitalism, was increasingly used for preventing rather than constructing a more decent and human society.’28 The school saw fascism as a natural development in the long history of capitalism after the Enlightenment, and in the late 1920s earned the respect of colleagues with its predictions that fascism would grow. The Frankfurt School’s scholarship most often took the form of close readings of original material, from which views uncontaminated by previous analyses were formed. This proved very creative in terms of the new understanding it produced, and the Frankfurt method became known as critical theory.29 Adorno was also interested in aesthetics, and he had his own socialist view of the arts. He felt that there are insights and truths that can be expressed only in an artistic form, and that therefore the aesthetic experience is another variety of liberation, to put alongside the psychological and political, which should be available to as many people as possible.