Totalitarian culture: the encounter in Paris.

TOTALITARIAN CULTURE: THE ENCOUNTER IN PARIS 

GRANTED, aside from the records of their deeds, the philosophical similarities between Nazism and Communism are not always easy to see. The skeptical, Enlightenment rhetoric of the Communists and the Romantic, neo-pagan rhetoric of the Nazis seem like irreconcilable opposites. But when the two great totalitarian ideologies are expressed visually--through architecture, sculpture, painting--their real similarities are strikingly revealed. The Communist and Nazi aesthetics merge in style, and the mirrors of Nazi and Soviet art reflect the same image.

Two years before the signing of the Stalin-Hitler pact--and the beginning of the Second World War--the world had an opportunity to see this clearly, almost comically, though almost no one seemed to notice at the time. The event was the International Exhibition of Arts and Sciences staged in Paris in 1937, and the two totalitarian systems, both claiming the dominant role in the world, met for the first time face to face.

Opened by the president of France, the exhibition included 240 pavilions from 42 countries. Both the Soviet Union and Germany attached immense significance to this opportunity to demonstrate to the world, in the words of Reich's Commissar Dr. Ruppel, "the projects and designs of the Fuhrer's great constructions which are destined to change the character of German life," or, as Soviet Commissar B. Ternovets put it, "to express the idea of . . . powerful growth, of the invincible movement of the Soviet Union along the path of conquests and victories."

The Soviet pavilion, planned as a synthesis of architecture, sculpture, and the other arts, was a streamlined building 525 feet long, facing west, with a tower crowning its western facade. The pillars of the tower, 115 feet high, emphasized the building's forward and upward sweep. The tower also served as a pedestal for a gigantic group sculpture by Vera Mukhina--Factory Worker and Woman Collective Farmer: two enormous figures, caught up in the general movement of the building from east to west and carrying in their raised hands a hammer and sickle, the symbol of the Soviet state. In a specially issued brochure, the designers of the pavilion explained that "the style of the Soviet pavilion bears the definite imprint of the artistic method we call Socialist Realism."

Socialist Realism of course had already been exhibited in the West many times. But if, before 1937, Soviet Socialist Realism had looked rather lonely at international exhibitions, at the Paris Exhibition it found a worthy partner: the art of the Fuhrer's Principles," the aesthetic doctrine of Nazism as drawn from Hitler's statements on cultural topics. Erected directly across from the Soviet pavilion, the Nazi pavilion, also exactly 525 feet long, was also topped by an upward-reaching tower. In this case, the tower was crowned with an eagle gripping the swastika, the symbol of the Nazi state. At the foot of his tower, the architect, Albert Speer, had placed two 23-foot-tall figures of the group sculpture Comradeliness, by Josef Thorak. The Nazi pavilion was the most expensive at the exhibition. More than a thousand train cars had been needed to carry ten thousand tons of material from Berlin to Paris. The pavilion was to represent "a piece of sacred German earth" and so had been built "exclusively from German iron and stone." It too had been planned as a synthesis of architecture, sculpture, and the other arts. Speer describes in his memoirs how the design was born:

While looking over the site in Paris, I by chance stumbled into a room containing the secret sketch of the Soviet pavillion. A sculptured pair of figures 33 feet tall, on a high platform, were striding triumphantly toward the German pavillion. I therefore designed a cubic mass, also elevated on stout pillars . . . from the cornice of my tower an eagle with the swastika in its claws looked down on the Russian sculptures. I received a gold medal for the building; so did my Soviet colleagues.

If the architecture of the Soviet and Nazi pavillions was similar, the sculptures adorning them could have been created by the same hand. "Powerful figures standing side by side and full of strength . . . marching in step, united by a common will, moving forward, sure of themselves and sure of victory." "Moving forward with the same powerful movement . . . long powerful strides . . . the bold youthful faces of these people looking bravely into the distance, into the sun and wind." These are the nearly interchangeable descriptions (one from the Nazi art magazine Kunst im Dritten Reich and the other from the soviet art magazine Iskusstvo) of the Thorak and Mukhina sculptures adorning the two towers. The similarities in the work of Vera Mukhina and Josef Thorak--among the most famous and influential sculptors in their respective countries--were not random. In them, for the first time, a completely new aesthetic doctrine revealed itself: the doctrine of totalitarian culture.

This doctrine was destined before long to subjugate the cultural life of a considerable part of the globe--from Poland to France, during the German occupation in the Thirties; from Eastern Europe to Mainland China, North Korea, Cuba, and elsewhere later on. In countries with utterly different historical and cultural traditions (China and Cuba, Bulgaria and Korea) absolutely similar monuments, paintings, novels, symphonies, and films would soon begin to appear. In its style and language, and especially in the function it would be required to perform in the life of societies, all this cultural output would differ drastically from anything ever created before in the realm of culture.

The totalitarian state transforms culture into a gigantic machine with the control level firmly in the hands of the dictator; it ideologizes it from top to bottom and subordinates it to the goals of political struggle, leaving it no other meaning or content. This stripping away of any non-ideological purpose or content largely explains the stunning consistency of totalitarian art.

In a totalitarian society, art always serves the purpose of "covering up the deficit." The more fiercely famine in the Soviet Union mowed down millions of peasants, the more abundantly, in the pictures of Socialist Realists, was food piled up on the tables in collective farms, and the more joyously bloomed the smiles on the faces of tractor drivers and milkmaids. "Living has become better; living has become happier," proclaimed Stalin in the deadly year of 1937.

In Nazi and Soviet art, labor was presented as the most valued civic virtue. In endlessly replicated Soviet and Nazi paintings the bright blue sky above the construction site blossoms with the fireworks of welding, and enthusiastic young men ad women in workers' overalls lay down ro after row of the bricks of a new happy life. At the same time, in real life, both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were busy constructing forced-labor camps. "In our Soviet art, labor, the most human of all man's activities, reveals its beautiful poetic nature," wrote a Soviet art critic. In totalitarian art people do not just work, they fight for the plan, for victory. Soviet paintings and monuments also depicted "such crucially important themes as the theme of the struggle fr peace, the theme of the Socialist family, school, friendship, love." A Nazi critic produced a similar list: "Paintings of youth batallions, reapers in the fields . . . heroic workers next to red-hot steel furnaces, and flotillas ready to sail . . . our readiness to affirm the world of today and out struggle toward still greater achievements have given birth to completely new themes in art."

One of the most important components of totalitarian culture is the cult of the leader. The concept of the decisive role of the individual in history is naturally suited to the ideology of National Socialism, but it appears to contradict the very essence of Marxist determinism. Nevertheless, the deification of the leader lies at the heart of both systems.

At first the two cultures refused to recognize themselves in one another. Thus, Nazi critics denounced the style of the Soviet pavilion as "barbaric formalism draped in the mantle of Classicism," and the soviet press called the Nazi style "a camouflage for the discord of real social relationships." Soon, however, events promped a recognition of the truth.

The political rapprochement of the Stalin-Hitler pact and the joint invasion of Poland paved the way for raprochement in culture. The Friendship Treaty included a paragraph about a cultural exchange between the two countries. In Berlin, plays and films based on Russian classics began to appear. In Moscow, E isenstein staged an extravagant production of a Wagner opera in the Bolshoi Theater. Albert Speer (who by that time had risen to the position of Armaments Minister) writes in his memoirs that at the beginning of October 1939, the German ambassador to Moscow, von Schulenburg, informed Hitler that Stalin was personally interested in German architectural projects. An extensive exhibition of Nazi architecture was displayed at the Kremlin. "Soon," Speer writes, "[von Schulenburg] informed me that Stalin liked my designs." Who knows, if not for the war, Muscovites might have been gazing at official portraits of Hitler in museums in Moscow, and Berliners at stylistically identical portraits of Stalin in Berlin.