Modernism/modernity

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Only a few weeks before the German capitulation, Joseph Goebbels used the premiere of the feature film Kolberg in April 1945 as an opportunity to hammer home the credo of his unique approach to politics once more. ¹ “Gentlemen, in one hundred years’ time they will be showing a fine color film of the terrible days we are living through. Wouldn’t you like to play a part in that film? Hold out now, so that 100 years hence the audience will not hoot and whistle when you appear on screen.” ² Informed by Walter Benjamin’s famous thesis that “the logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life,” generations of critics have read remarks such as these as self-explanatory testimonies to the Nazis’ theatrical blurring of boundaries between reality and fiction, appearance and essence. ³ Aesthetic resources, following such readings, transformed the Nazi state into a Wagnerian total work of art, a carefully choreographed spectacle of ethereal bodies and geometrical shapes. Nazi art not only helped posit a deceptive identity of art and life, image and original, but also glorified gestures of surrender and idealized figurations of death. Nazi aesthetics taught us how to hold out—manly and heroically—in the face of total destruction. It reshaped common ideas of beauty in order to render aesthetic pleasure a direct extension of political terror: a form of violence in the service of future warfare.

But Nazi rule and society, as seen from the perspective of contemporary historiography, were of course much less homogenous [End Page 51] than Benjamin’s aestheticization thesis would suggest. Not all the pleasures and aesthetic materials that circulated under fascism took the form of masochistic feasts of submission, and we therefore—as so many historians have pointed out—can no longer take for granted the fact that popular attitudes towards the Third Reich coincided with what we see in historical images of cheering crowds, images dexterously designed and mass circulated by Goebbels’s media industry. More recent research, which has mapped the topographies of popular culture during the National Socialist period, instead suggests that large sections of the population led a double life: delivering vows of political loyalty in public rituals and pursuing apolitical leisure activities in the niches of private life. ⁴ Contrary to the regime’s rhetoric of political coordination and total mobilization, the Third Reich not only promised new career opportunities but also new tactics of diversion and commodity consumption. Apart from short periods of political euphoria, the allure of racing cars, radios, Coca-Cola, swing, and Hollywood-style comedies—rather than the choreography of Riefenstahl’s spectacles—provided the stuff dreams were made of. Instead of bracketing Nazi mass culture as kitschy or trivial, we need to face and think through the fact that the popular, as Eric Rentschler argues, “played a prominent and ubiquitous role in everyday life, in cinemas, radio programs, dance halls, advertisements, tourist offerings, and the latest consumer items.” ⁵

Very well aware of the fact that over-politicization might quickly lead to apathy, the Nazi government endorsed seemingly unpolitical spaces of private commodity consumption so as to reinforce political conformity. At variance with the strict demands of ideological correctness, American-style consumerism in Nazi society delineated an ideal stage for what Theodor W. Adorno in his analysis of American mass culture considered pseudo-individualization—the “halo of free choice” on the basis of standardization itself. ⁶ Unlike the homogenizing rituals on the Nuremberg rally grounds, the commodity spectacles of Nazi mass culture entertained the individual with the utopian illusion that certain spaces remained beyond control, beyond politics, beyond the effects of coordination. By satisfying the popular demand for material and cultural commodity items, the agents of power were able to undermine articulations of solidarity that had the capicity to contest Nazi politics. The cult of private consumption impaired alternative definitions of German identity and solidarity coupled to notions of individual autonomy and emancipation. While hoping to remake the Third Reich as a national family, the Nazi culture industry domesticated un-German sights and sounds in order to set individuals apart against one another and...