Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

17

INQUISITION

On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Barely six weeks later, on 11 March, he established the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, with Joseph Goebbels as minister.¹ This was a name straight out of Brave New World, and between them Hitler and Goebbels would soon wreak havoc on the cultural life of Germany on a scale never seen before. Their brutal actions did not come out of the blue. Hitler had always been very clear that when the Nazi Party formed a government, there would be ‘accounts’ to settle with a wide range of enemies. Foremost among those he singled out were artists. In 1930, in a letter to Goebbels, he assured the future minister that when the party came to power, it would not simply become a ‘debating society’ so far as art was concerned. The party’s policies, laid out in the manifesto as early as 1920, called for ‘a struggle’ against the ‘tendencies in the arts and literature which exercise a disintegrating influence on the life of the people.’²

The first blacklist of artists was published on 15 March. George Grosz, visiting the United States, was stripped of his German citizenship. The Bauhaus was closed. Max Liebermann (then aged eighty-eight) and Käthe Kollwitz (sixty-six), Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix and Oskar Schlemmer were all dismissed from their posts as teachers in art schools. So swift were these actions that the sackings had to be made legal retroactively by a law that wasn’t passed until 7 April 1933.³ In the same month the first exhibition defaming modern art – called Chamber of Horrors – was held in Nuremberg, then travelled to Dresden and Dessau.⁴ A week before Hitler became chancellor, Ernst Barlach had been rash enough to describe him on radio as ‘the lurking destroyer of others’ and called National Socialism ‘the secret death of mankind.’⁵ Now, in retribution, the local Nazis called for the artist’s Magdeburg Memorial to be removed from the cathedral there, and no sooner had this demand been voiced than the work was shipped to Berlin ‘for storage.’⁶ Der Sturm, the magazine that had done so much to promote modern art in Germany, was shut down, and so were Die Aktion and Kunst und Kunstler (Art and Artists). Herwarth Walden, publisher of Der Sturm, escaped to the Soviet Union, where he died in 1941.⁷ The collagist John Heartfield fled to Prague.

In 1933 modern artists made several attempts to align themselves with the Nazis, but Goebbels would have none of it, and the exhibitions were forced to close. For a time he and Rosenberg competed for the right to set policy in the cultural/intellectual sphere, but the propaganda minister was a superb organiser and sidelined his rival as soon as an official Chamber for Arts and Culture came into being under Goebbels’s control. The powers of the chamber were formidable – each and every artist was forced to join a government-sponsored professional body, and unless artists registered, they were forbidden from exhibiting in museums or from receiving commissions. Goebbels also stipulated that there were to be no public exhibitions of art without official approval.⁸ In a speech to the party’s annual meeting in September 1934, Hitler emphasised ‘two cultural dangers’ that threatened National Socialism. On the one hand, there were the modernists, the ‘spoilers of art’ – identified specifically as ‘the cubists, futurists and Dadaists.’ What he and the German people wanted, he said, was a German art that was ‘clear,’ ‘without contortion’ and ‘without ambiguity.’ Art was not ‘auxiliary to politics,’ he said. It must become a ‘functioning part’ of the Nazi political program.⁹ The speech was an important moment for those artists who had not yet been dismissed from their positions or had their art taken off display. Goebbels, who had shown some sympathy for people like Emil Nolde and Ernst Barlach, quickly hardened his opinions. Confiscations recommenced, and another raft of painters and sculptors was dismissed from teaching or museum positions. Hans Grundig was forbidden to paint. Books by or about modern artists also became targets. Copies of the catalogue of Klee’s drawings, published in 1934, were seized even before they arrived in the shops. Two years later a catalogue of the works of Franz Marc was seized (Marc had been dead nearly twenty years), as was a volume of Barlach’s drawings – labelled a danger to ‘public safety, peace and order.’ The book was later pulped by the Gestapo.¹⁰ In May 1936 all artists registered with the Reichskammer had to prove their Aryan ancestry. In October 1936 the National Gallery in Berlin was instructed to close its modern art galleries, and in November Goebbels outlawed all ‘unofficial art criticism.’ From then on, only the reporting of art events was allowed.

Some artists tried to protest. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, as he was forced out of the Prussian Academy, insisted that he was ‘neither a Jew nor a social democrat’. ‘For thirty years I have struggled for a new, strong, and true German art and will continue to do so for as long as I live.’¹¹ Max Pechstein could not believe what was happening to him, and reminded the Gestapo that he had fought for Germany on the western front in World War I, that one of his sons was a member of the SA, and another was in the Hitler Youth. Emil Nolde, an enthusiastic supporter of the party from the early 1920s, criticised the ‘daubings’ of some of his colleagues, whom he described as ‘half-breeds, bastards and mulattoes’ in his autobiography, Years of Struggle, published in 1934.¹² That year he wrote directly to Goebbels, insisting that his own art was ‘vigorous, durable, ardent and German.’ Goebbels wasn’t listening; in June 1937, 1,052 of Nolde’s works were confiscated.¹³ Oskar Schlemmer stood up for artists when they were attacked by Gottfried Benn in The New State and the Intellectuals, which was a highly charged defence of the Nazis and an intemperate attack on their perceived enemies. Schlemmer’s argument was that the artists identified by Benn as ‘decadent’ were nothing of the sort and that the real decadence lay in the ‘second-raters’ who were replacing their betters with, as he put it, ‘kitsch.’¹⁴ Such protests went nowhere. Hitler’s mind had been made up long ago, and he wasn’t about to change it. Indeed, these artists were lucky not to have provoked reprisals. All that was left for them was to protest in their art. Otto Dix was one of those who led the way, portraying Hitler as ‘Envy’ in his 1933 picture The Seven Deadly Sins. (He meant, of course, that Hitler, the failed artist, envied real ones.) Max Beckmann caricatured the chancellor as a ‘Verführer,’ a seducer. When informed that he had been expelled from the Prussian Academy, Max Liebermann, the most popular living painter in pre-World War I Germany, remarked tartly, ‘I couldn’t possibly eat as much as I would like to puke.’¹⁵

Many artists eventually took the option of emigration and exile.¹⁶ Kurt Schwitters went to Norway, Paul Klee to Switzerland, Lyonel Feininger to the United States, Max Beckmann to the Netherlands, Heinrich Campendonck to Belgium and then to Holland, Ludwig Meidner to England, and Max Liebermann to Palestine. Liebermann had loved Germany; it had been good to him before World War I, and he had met, and painted, some of its most illustrious figures. And yet, shortly before his death in 1935, he sadly concluded that there was only one choice for young German artists who were Jewish: ‘There is no other salvation than emigration to Palestine, where they can grow up as free people and escape the dangers of remaining refugees.’¹⁷

For the most part, one would think that science – especially the ‘hard’ sciences of physics, chemistry, mathematics and geology – would be unaffected by political regimes. It is, after all, generally agreed that research into the fundamental building blocks of nature is as free from political overtones as intellectual work can be. But in Nazi Germany nothing could be taken for granted.

The persecution of Albert Einstein began early. He came under attack largely because of the international acclaim he received after Arthur Eddington’s announcement, in November 1919, that he had obtained experimental confirmation for the predictions of general relativity theory. The venom came from both political and scientific extremists. He had some support – for example, the German ambassador in London in 1920 warned his Foreign Office privately in a report that ‘Professor Einstein is just at this time a cultural factor of first rank…. We should not drive such a man out of Germany with whom we can carry on real cultural propaganda.’ Yet two years later, following the political assassination of Walther Rathenau, the foreign minister, unconfirmed reports leaked out that Einstein was also on the list of intended victims.¹⁸

When the Nazis finally achieved power, ten years later, action was not long delayed. In January 1933 Einstein was away from Berlin on a visit to the United States. He was then fifty-four, and although he found his fame burdensome, preferring to bury himself in his work on general relativity theory and cosmology, he also realised that he couldn’t altogether avoid being a public figure. So he made a point of announcing that he would not return to his positions at the university in Berlin and the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft as long as the Nazis were in charge.¹⁹ The Nazis repaid the compliment by freezing his bank account, searching his house for weapons allegedly hidden there by Communists, and publicly burning copies of a popular book of his on relativity. Later in the spring, the regime issued a catalogue of ‘state enemies.’ It had been carefully edited to show the most unflattering photographs of the Nazis’ opponents, with a brief text underneath each one. Einstein’s picture headed the list, and below his photograph was the text, ‘Not yet hanged.’²⁰

In September Einstein was in Oxford, shortly before he was scheduled to return to the teaching position he had at Caltech, the California Institute of Technology. It was by no means clear then where he would settle. He told a reporter that he felt he was European and that, whatever might happen in the short term, he would eventually return. Meanwhile, ‘in a fit of absent mindedness,’ he had accepted professorships in Spain, France, Belgium, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and at the newly formed Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton. In Britain there were plans to give him an appointment at Oxford, and a bill was before the House of Commons to give him the status of a naturalised citizen.²¹ By the early 1930s, however, America was no longer a backwater in physics. It was beginning to generate its own Ph.D.s (1,300 in the 1920s), who were carrying on Einstein’s work. Also, he liked America, and he needed no further inducements to leave after Hitler became chancellor. He didn’t go to Caltech, however, but to Princeton. In 1929 the American educationalist Abraham Flexner had succeeded in raising money to build an advanced research institute at Princeton, New Jersey. Five million dollars had been pledged by Louis Bamberger and his sister Caroline Fuld, a successful business family from New Jersey.²² The basic idea was to establish a centre for the advanced study of science where eminent figures could work in a peaceful and productive environment, free of any teaching burden. Flexner had stayed with Einstein at Caputh, his home, and there, as they walked by the lake, Einstein’s enthusiasm for Princeton grew still more. They even got as far as talking money. Asked what he wished to be paid, Einstein hesitated: ‘Three thousand dollars a year? Could I live on less?’ ‘You couldn’t live on that,’ Flexner said promptly, and suggested he should sort it out with Mrs Einstein. In no time, Flexner and Elsa had arrived at a figure of $16,000 per annum.²³ This was a notable coup for Flexner. When the news was released, at a stroke he had dramatically increased the profile of his project. Inside Germany, reactions were somewhat different. One newspaper ran the headline: ‘GOOD NEWS FROM EINSTEIN – HE IS NOT COMING BACK.’ Not everyone in America wanted Einstein. The National Patriotic Council complained he was a Bolshevik who espoused ‘worthless theories.’ The American Women’s League also branded him a Communist, clamouring for the State Department to refuse Einstein an entry permit. They were ignored.²⁴ Einstein might be the most famous physicist to leave Germany, but he was by no means the only one. Roughly one hundred world-class colleagues found refuge in the United States between 1933 and 1941.²⁵

For scientists only slightly less famous than Einstein, the attitude of the Nazis could pose serious problems, offering fewer chances of a safe haven abroad. Karl von Frisch was the first zoologist to discover ‘the language of the bees,’ by means of which bees informed other bees about food sources, through dances on the honeycomb. ‘A round dance indicated a source of nectar, while a tail-wagging dance indicated pollen.’ Von Frisch’s experiments caught the imagination of the public, and his popular books were best-sellers. This cut little ice with the Nazis, who under the Civil Service Law of April 1933 still required Von Frisch to provide proof of his Aryan descent. The sticking point was his maternal grandmother, and it was possible, he admitted, that she was ‘non-Aryan.’ A virulent campaign was therefore conducted against von Frisch in the student newspaper at Munich University, and he survived only because there was in Germany an outbreak of nosema, a bee disease, killing several hundred thousand bee colonies in 1941. This seriously damaged fruit growing and dislocated agricultural ecology. At that stage Germany had to grow its own food, and the Reich government concluded that von Frisch was the best man to rescue the situation.²⁶

According to recent research about 13 percent of biologists were dismissed between 1933 and the outbreak of war, four-fifths of them for ‘racial’ reasons. About three-quarters of those who lost their jobs emigrated, the expelled biologists on average proving considerably more successful than their colleagues who remained in Germany. The subject suffered most in two areas: the molecular genetics of bacteria, and phages (viruses that prey on bacteria). This had less to do with the quality of scientists who remained than with the fact that the scientific advances in these areas were chiefly made in the United States, and the normal dialogue between colleagues simply did not take place, neither in the late 1930s, nor throughout the war, nor for a considerable period afterward.²⁷

In 1925 Walter Gropius and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy had moved the Bauhaus from Thuringia when the right-wing authorities there cut its budget, and transferred to Dessau. In the Saxony-Anhalt state elections of May 1932, however, the Nazis gained a majority, and their election manifesto included a demand for ‘the cancellation of all expenditures for the Bauhaus’ and ranted against ‘Jewish Bauhaus culture.’²⁸ The new administration made good its promise, and in September the Bauhaus was closed. Bravely, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe moved on to the Steglitz suburb of Berlin, running the Bauhaus as a private school without state or municipal support. But money wasn’t the real problem, and on 11 April 1933 the Bauhaus was surrounded by police and storm troopers. Students were detained, files seized, and the building sealed. Police guards prevented entry for months. When the Bauhaus had closed in Dessau, there had at least been protests in the press. Now, in Berlin, there was a press campaign against the Bauhaus, which was dismissed as a ‘germ cell of Bolshevik subversion,’ sponsored by the ‘patrons and popes of the Arty German Empire of the Jewish nation.’²⁹ Attempts were made to reopen the school; the Nazis actually had a policy for this, called Gleichschaltung – assimilation into the status quo.³⁰ In the case of the Bauhaus, Mies was told that this would require the dismissal of, among others, Wassily Kandinsky. In the end, the differences between Mies and the Nazi authorities could not be reconciled, and the Bauhaus closed for good in Germany. It was more than just anti-Semitism. In trying to marry classical tradition to modern ideas, the Bauhaus stood for everything the Nazis loathed.

Those who went into exile included some of the most prominent Bauhaus teachers. Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Josef Albers, Marcel Breuer and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, all members of the inner circle, left Germany in either 1933–4 or 1937–8. Most went because their careers were stalled rather than because their lives were threatened, though the weaver Otti Berger was murdered at Auschwitz.³¹ Gropius moved to Britain in 1934, but only after he had received official permission. In Britain he avoided any contact with the politically active German artists who were also there at the time (known as the Oskar-Kokoschka-Bund). When he was made professor at Harvard in 1937, the news received favourable coverage in the German papers.³² In America Gropius soon became a highly respected authority on modernism, but he still eschewed politics. Art historians have been unable to trace any public statement of his about events in Nazi Germany – not even the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition (see below), held in the very year of his appointment, and in which practically all of his Bauhaus artist colleagues and friends were vilely defamed.

The closure of the Warburg Institute in Hamburg actually preceded that of the Bauhaus. Aby Warburg died in 1929, but in 1931, fearing that a Jewish-founded institute would become a target for the Nazis if they came to power, his friends took the precaution of moving the books and the institute itself to the safety of Britain, to become the Graduate Art History Department of the University of London. Later in the 1930s, one of the Warburg’s most illustrious disciples, Erwin Panofsky, who had written his famous study of perspective at the institute in Hamburg, also left Germany. He was dismissed in 1933, and he too was hired by Abraham Flexner at Princeton.

Most members of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research were not only Jewish but openly Marxist. According to Martin Jay, in his history of the Institute, its endowment was moved out of Germany in 1931, to Holland, thanks to the foresight of the director, Max Horkheimer. Foreign branches of the school had already been set up, in Geneva, Paris, and London (the latter at the London School of Economics). Shortly after Hitler assumed power, Horkheimer left his house in the Kronberg suburb of Frankfurt and installed himself and his wife in a hotel near the main railway station. During February 1933 he gave up his classes on logic and turned instead to politics, especially the meaning of freedom. A month later, he quietly crossed the border into Switzerland, only days before the institute was closed down for ‘tendencies hostile to the state.’³³ The building on Victoria-Allee was confiscated, as was the library of 60,000 volumes. A few days after he had escaped, Horkheimer was formally dismissed, together with Paul Tillich and Karl Mannheim. By then almost all the senior staff had fled. Horkheimer and his deputy, Friedrich Pollock, went to Geneva, and so did Erich Fromm. Offers of employment were received from France, initiated by Henri Bergson and Raymond Aron. Theodor Adorno meanwhile went to Merton College, Oxford, where he remained from 1934 to 1937. Sidney Webb, R. H. Tawney, Morris Ginsberg and Harold Laski all helped preserve the London branch until 1936. Geneva, however, gradually became less hospitable. According to Pollock, ‘fascism also makes great progress in Switzerland.’ He and Horkheimer made visits to London and New York to sound out the possibility of transferring there. They received a much more optimistic reception at Columbia University than from William Beveridge at the LSE, and so, by the middle of 1934, the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research was reconstituted in its new home at 429 West 117th Street. It remained there until 1950, during which time much of its more influential work was carried out. The combination of German analysis and U.S. empirical methods helped give sociology its postwar flavour.³⁴

The migration of the philosophers of the Vienna Circle was perhaps less traumatic than with other academics. Thanks to the pragmatic tradition in America, not a few scholars there were very sympathetic to what the logical positivists were saying, and several of the circle crossed the Atlantic in the late 1920s or early 1930s to lecture and meet similar-minded colleagues. They were aided by a group known as Unity in Science, which consisted of philosophers and scientists searching for the constancies from one discipline to another. This international group held meetings all over Europe and North America. Then, in 1936, A.J. Ayer, the British philosopher, published Language, Truth and Logic, a brilliantly lucid account of logical positivism that popularised its ideas still more in America, making the members of the circle especially welcome on the other side of the ocean. Herbert Feigl was the first to go, to Iowa in 1931; Rudolf Carnap went to Chicago in 1936, taking Carl Hempel and Olaf Helmer with him. Hans Reichenbach followed, in 1938, establishing himself at UCLA. A little later, Kurt Godei accepted a research position at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton and so joined Einstein and Erwin Panofsky.³⁵

The Nazis had always viewed psychoanalysis as a ‘Jewish science.’ Even so, it was a rude shock when, in October 1933, the discipline was banned from the Congress of Psychology in Leipzig. Psychoanalysts in Germany were forced to look elsewhere for work. For some Freud’s hometown, Vienna, provided a refuge for a few years, but most went to the United States. American psychologists were not especially favourable to Freudian theory – William James and pragmatism were still influential. But the American Psychological Association did set up a Committee on Displaced Foreign Psychologists and by 1940 was in touch with 269 leading professionals (not all psychoanalysts), 134 of whom had already arrived in America: Karen Horney, Bruno Bettelheim, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, and David Rapaport among them.³⁶

Freud was eighty-two and far from well when, in March 1938, Austria was declared part of the Reich. Several sets of friends feared for him, in particular Ernest Jones in London. Even President Roosevelt asked to be kept informed. William Bullitt, U.S. ambassador to Paris, was instructed to keep an eye on ‘the Freud situation,’ and he ensured that staff from the consul general in Vienna showed ‘a friendly interest’ in the Freuds.³⁷ Ernest Jones hurried to Vienna, having taken soundings in Britain about the possibility of Freud settling in London, but when he arrived Jones found Freud unwilling to move. He was only persuaded by the fact that his children would have more of a future abroad.³⁸

Before Freud could leave, his ‘case’ was referred as high as Himmler, and it seems it was only the close interest of President Roosevelt that guaranteed his ultimate safety, but not before Freud’s daughter Anna was arrested and removed for a day’s interrogation. The Nazis took care that Freud settled all his debts before leaving and sent through the exit visas one at a time, with Freud’s own arriving last. Until that moment he worried that the family might be split up.³⁹ When his papers did at last arrive, the Gestapo also brought with them a document, which he was forced to sign, which affirmed that he had been properly treated. He signed, but added, ‘I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone.’ He left, via the Orient Express, for Paris, before going on to London. A member of the American legation was instructed to go with him, to ensure Freud’s safety.⁴⁰ In London, Freud stayed first at 39 Elsworthy Road in Hampstead. He was visited by Stefan Zweig, Salvador Dalí, Bronislaw Malinowski, Chaim Weizmann, and the secretaries of the Royal Society, who brought the society’s Charter Book for him to sign, an honour previously bestowed only on the king.

Within a month of his arrival Freud began work on Moses and Monotheism, which he first conceived as an historical novel. In this book Freud claimed that the biblical Moses was an amalgam of two historical personages, an Egyptian and a Jew, and that the Egyptian, autocratic Moses had been murdered, a crime that lay at the root of Jewish guilt, which had been handed down. He thought the early Jews a barbarous people who worshipped a god of ‘volcanoes and wildernesses,’ and who, in their practice of circumcision, inspired in gentiles a fear of castration, the root cause of anti-Semitism.⁴¹ It is difficult not to see the book as a reply to Hitler, almost a turning of the other cheek. The real significance of the book was its timing; Freud turned his back on Judaism (intellectually, if not emotionally) at Judaism’s darkest hour. He was hinting that the Jews’ separateness was psychologically profound, and partly their own fault. Freud didn’t agree with the Führer that the Jews were evil, but he did admit they were flawed.⁴² Many Jewish scholars implored him not to publish the book, on the grounds that it was historically inaccurate as much as because it would offend politico/religious sensibilities. But he went ahead.

It was not a fitting epitaph. At the end of 1938, and early 1939, new lumps appeared in Freud’s mouth and throat. His Viennese doctor had obtained special permission to treat Freud without British qualifications, but there was little to be done. Freud died in September 1939, three weeks after war was declared.

As a young philosophy student of eighteen, Hannah Arendt arrived in Marburg in 1924 to study under Martin Heidegger, then arguably the most famous living philosopher in Europe and in the final process of completing his most important work, Being and Time, which appeared three years later. When Arendt first met Heidegger, he was thirty-five and married, with two young children. Born a Catholic and intended for the priesthood, he developed into an extremely charismatic lecturer – his classes were complicated and dazzling intellectual displays. Students found his approach bewitching, but those who couldn’t cope with the intellectual fireworks often despaired. At least one committed suicide.

Arendt came from a very different background – an elegant, cosmopolitan, totally assimilated Jewish family in Königsberg. Both her father and grandfather had died when she was young, and her mother travelled a great deal, so the young Hannah constantly worried that she would not return. Then her mother remarried, to a man Hannah never warmed to; nor did she take to the two stepsisters she acquired as a result of this union. When she arrived in Marburg, she was therefore intense but emotionally insecure, very much in need of love, protection and guidance.⁴³ Marburg was then a small university town, staid, respectable, quiet. For a professor to risk his position in such an environment with one of his young students says a lot about the passions that Hannah’s arrival had aroused in him. Two months after she started attending his classes, he invited her to his study to discuss his work. Within another two weeks they had become lovers. Heidegger was transformed by Hannah. She was totally different from the ‘Teutonic Brunhildas’ he was used to, and one of the brightest students he had ever known.⁴⁴ Instead of being a rather morose, even sullen man, he became much more outgoing, writing Hannah passionate poetry. For months they indulged in clandestine meetings with an elaborate code of lights in Heidegger’s house to indicate when it was safe to meet, and where. Working on Being and Time was an intense emotional experience for both of them, and Hannah adored being part of such an important philosophical project. After the initial passion, both realised it would be better if Hannah left Marburg, and she transferred to Heidelberg, where she studied under Karl Jaspers, a friend of Heidegger. But Hannah and Heidegger continued to correspond, and to meet, sharing their love for Beethoven and Bach, Rainer Maria Rilke and Thomas Mann, with an abandon that neither had known before. They met in a series of small German or Swiss towns where Heidegger had devised excuses to visit.⁴⁵

After she had finished her Ph.D., Hannah moved to Berlin and married a man whom, although he was Jewish, she did not love. For her, it was a survival device. He too was a philosopher, but not as dedicated as she, and he became a journalist. They moved in a left-wing circle, and among their close friends was the playwright Bertolt Brecht and the philosopher—social scientists from the Frankfurt School – Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm. Hannah still corresponded with Heidegger. Then, in 1933, after the Nazis took power, Hannah and Heidegger’s lives turned dramatically in different directions. He was made rector of Freiburg University, and rumours soon reached her that he was refusing to recommend Jews for positions and even turning his back on them. She wrote to him, and he replied immediately, ‘furiously’ denying the charge.⁴⁶ She put it out of her head. Her left-wing husband decided he should leave Germany for Paris. Soon after, at Heidegger’s rectorial address, he made a very anti-Semitic and pro-Hitler speech, which was reported all over the world.⁴⁷ Hannah was deeply upset and very confused by Martin’s behavior. To make matters worse, Bertolt Brecht was being persecuted as a Communist and forced to flee the country. He left behind most of his personal possessions, including his address book, which contained Hannah’s name and phone number. She was arrested, and spent eight days in jail being interrogated. Her husband was already in Paris; Martin could have helped her; he didn’t.⁴⁸

As soon as Hannah was released from jail, she left Germany and settled in Paris. From then on her world and Heidegger’s were about as different as could be. As a Jew in exile, homeless, careerless, cut off from her family and all that she had known, for Arendt the late 1930s and early 1940s were a desperately tragic time. She joined a Jewish organisation, Youth Aliyah, which trained students who wanted to move to the Holy Land. She visited Palestine but didn’t like it and wasn’t a Zionist. Yet she needed a job and wished to help her people.⁴⁹

Heidegger’s life was very different. He played a crucial role in Germany. As a philosopher, he gave his weight to the Third Reich, helping develop its thinking, which grounded Nazism in history and the German sense of self. In this he had the support of Goebbels and Himmler.⁵⁰ As an academic figure he played a leading role in the reorganisation of the universities, the chief ‘policy’ under this scheme being the removal of all Jews. Through Heidegger’s agency both Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology and his own professor, and Karl Jaspers, who had a Jewish wife, were forced out of their university posts. Hannah later wrote that ‘Martin murdered Edmund.’ When Being and Time was republished in 1937, the dedication to Husserl had been removed.⁵¹ Heidegger allowed both himself and his philosophy to become part of the Nazi state ideological apparatus. He changed his thinking to extol war (this happened when his rectorial address was republished in 1937). He argued that the Nazis were not Nietzschean enough, not enough concerned with great men and struggle. He played a part in linking biology to history by drawing parallels between modern Germany and ancient Greece, in its obsession with sport and physical purity.

The encounter between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger was revealing not just in itself but also for the way it showed that intellectuals were not only victims of Hitler’s inquisition; they helped perpetrate it too.

This is an area of prewar and wartime activity that has only become crystal clear since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which made many more archives available to scholars. Among the scientists who are now known to have conducted unethical research (to put it no stronger) are Konrad Lorenz, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1973, Hans Nachtsheim, a member of the notorious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology and Human Genetics in Berlin, and Heinz Brucher at the Ahnenerbe Institute for Plant Genetics at Lannach.

Lorenz’s most well known work before the war was in helping to found ethology, the comparative study of animal and human behaviour, where he discovered an activity he named ‘imprinting.’ In his most famous experiment he found that young goslings fixated on whatever image they first encountered at a certain stage of their development. With many of the birds it was Lorenz himself, and the photographs of the professor walking on campus, followed by a line of young birds, proved very popular in the media. Imprinting was theoretically important for showing a link between Gestalt and instinct. Lorenz had read Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West and was not unsympathetic to the Nazis.⁵² In that climate, he began to conceive of imprinting as a disorder of the domestication of animals, and drew a parallel between that and civilisation in humans: in both cases, he thought, there was degeneration. In September 1940, at the instigation of the Party and over the objections of the faculty, he became professor and director of the Institute for Comparative Psychology at the University of Königsberg, a government-sponsored position, and from then until 1943 Lorenz’s studies were all designed to reinforce Nazi ideology.⁵³ He claimed, for instance, that people could be classified into those of ‘full value’ (vollwertig) and those of ‘inferior value’ (minderwertig). Inferior people included the ‘defective type’ (Ausfalltypus), created by the evolutionary conditions of big cities, where breeding conditions paralleled the ‘domesticated animal that can be bred in the dirtiest stable and with any sexual partner.’ For Lorenz, any policy that reduced ‘the ethically inferior,’ or ‘elements afflicted with defects,’ was legitimate.⁵⁴

The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology and Human Genetics (KWI) was founded in 1927 at Berlin-Dahlem, on the occasion of the Fifth International Congress for Genetics, held in the German capital. The institute, and the congress, were both designed to gain international recognition for the study of human inheritance in Germany because, like other scientists, its biologists had been boycotted by scholars from other countries after World War I.⁵⁵ The first director of the institute was Eugen Fischer, the leading German anthropologist, and he grouped around him a number of scientists who became infamous. They included Kurt Gottschaldt, who ran hereditary pathology; Wolfgang Abel, racial science; Fritz Lenz, racial hygiene; and Hans Nachtsheim, in charge of the department of experimental hereditary pathology. Nearly all the scientists at the KWI supported the racial-political goals of the Nazis and were involved in their practical implementation – for example, by drawing up expert opinions on ‘racial membership’ in connection with the Nuremberg laws. There were also extensive links between the institute’s doctors and Josef Mengele in Auschwitz. The institute itself was dissolved by the Allies after the war.⁵⁶

Nachtsheim studied epilepsy, which he suspected was caused by lack of oxygen to the brain. Since the very young react more overtly to oxygen deficiency than adults, it became ‘necessary’ to experiment on children aged five to six. In order to determine which of these children (if any) suffered from epilepsy, they were all forced to inhale an oxygen mixture that corresponded to a high altitude – say, 4,000 metres (roughly 13,000 feet). This was enough to kill some children, but if epilepsy did result, the children could be lawfully sterilised. These were not völkisch brutes carrying out such experiments, but educated men.⁵⁷

*

Using newly opened archives in Berlin and Potsdam, Ute Deichmann has shown the full extent to which Heinrich Himmler (1900–45) largely shaped the goals of the science policy of the SS as well as the practical content of the scientific and medical research it initiated. He grew up in a strict Catholic home and, even as a child, took an interest in warfare and agriculture, notably animal and plant breeding. He also developed an early interest in alternative forms of medicine, in particular homeopathy. A superstitious man, he shared with Hitler a firm belief in the superior racial value of the Germanic people. It was Himmlers Institute for Practical Research in Military Science, within the framework of another SS branch, Das Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage), which set about clarifying the ‘Jewish question’ anthropologically and biologically. Himmler played a decisive role in the establishment of Das Ahnenerbe in 1935 and was the first curator. A detailed analysis of SS research authorised by Das Ahnenerbe shows that Himmler’s central concern was the study of the history of, threat to, and preservation of the Nordic race, ‘the race he regarded as the bearer of the highest civilisation and culture.’⁵⁸

At the Institute for Practical Research in Military Science, experiments were carried out on cooling, using inmates from Dachau. The ostensible reason for this research was to study the effects of recovery of humans who suffered frostbite, and to examine how well humans adapted to the cold. Some 8,300 inmates died during the course of these experiments. Second, were the experiments on yellow cross, otherwise known as mustard gas. So many people were killed in this experiment that after a while no more ‘volunteers’ could be found with the promise of being released afterward. August Hirt, who carried out these ‘investigations’, was allowed to murder 115 Jewish inmates of Auschwitz at his own discretion to establish ‘a typology of jewish skeletons.’ (He committed suicide in 1945.)⁵⁹ No less brutal was the Ahnenerbe’s Institute for Plant Generics at Lannach, near Graz, and in particular the work of Heinz Brücher. Brücher had the distinction of having an entire commando unit at his disposal. During the German invasion of Russia, this unit stole Nikolai Vavilov’s collection of seeds (see below, page 319). The aim here was to find hardy strains of wheat so as to be able to provide enough food for the German people in the ever-expanding Reich. Brücher and his unit also went on expeditions to areas like Tibet, carrying out ethnological as well as plant studies, which show that they were thinking far ahead, identifying remote areas where ‘inferior’ peoples would be forced to produce these foods, or else to make way for others who would.⁶⁰

On 2 May 1938, Hitler signed his will. In it he ordered that, upon his death, his body was to be taken to Munich – to lie in state in the Feldherrnhalle and then to be buried nearby. More than any other place, even more than Linz, Munich was home to him. In Mein Kampf, Hitler had described the city as ‘this metropolis of German art,’ adding that ‘one does not know German art if one has not seen Munich.’ It was here that the climax of his quarrel with the artists took place in I937.⁶¹

On 18 July that year, Hitler opened the House of German Art in Munich, nearly 900 paintings and pieces of sculpture by such Nazi favourites as Arno Breker, Josef Thorak and Adolf Ziegler. There were portraits of Hitler as well as Hermann Hoyer’s In the Beginning Was the Word, a nostalgic view of the Führer consulting his ‘colleagues’ during the early days of the Nazi Party.⁶² One critic, mindful that speculative criticism was now outlawed, and only reporting allowed, disguised his criticism in reportage: ‘Every single painting on display projected either soulful elevation or challenging heroism … the impression of an intact life from which the stresses and problems of modern existence were entirely absent – and there was one glaringly obvious omission – not a single canvas depicted urban and industrial life.’⁶³

On the day that the exhibition opened, Hitler delivered a ninety-minute speech, a measure of the importance he attached to the occasion. During the course of his remarks he reassured Germany that ‘cultural collapse’ had been arrested and the vigorous classical-Teutonic tradition revived. He repeated many of his by now well known views on modern art, which he depicted this time as ‘slime and ordure’ heaped on Germany. But he had more to offer than usual. Art was very different from fashion, he insisted: ‘Every year something new. One day Impressionism, then Futurism, Cubism, and maybe even Dadaism.’ No, he insisted, art ‘is not founded on time, but only on peoples. It is therefore imperative that the artist erect a monument not to a time but to his people.’⁶⁴ Race – the blood – was all, Hitler said, and art must respect that. Germany, he insisted, ‘demands … an art that reflects our growing racial unification and, thus, the portrayal of a well-rounded, total character.’ What did it mean to be German? It meant, he said, ‘to be clear.’ Other races might have other aesthetic longings, but ‘this deep, inner yearning for a German art that expresses this law of clarity has always been alive in our people.’ Art is for the people, and the artists must present what the people see – ‘not blue meallows, green skies, sulphur-yellow clouds, and so on.’ There can be no place for ‘pitiful unfortunates, who obviously suffer from some eye disease.’⁶⁵ Warming to his theme, he promised to wage ‘an unrelenting war of purification against the last elements of putrefaction in our culture,’ so that ‘all these cliques of chatterers, dilettantes and art forgers will be eliminated.’⁶⁶

Of course, art criticism was not the only form of criticism outlawed in Germany; speeches by the Führer were apt to get an easy ride, too. This time, however, there was criticism of a sort, albeit in a heavily disguised way. For the very next day, 19 July, in the Municipal Archaeological Institute, across town in Munich, the exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) opened.⁶⁷ This was a quite different show, almost an antishow. It displayed works by 112 German and non-German artists. There were twenty-seven Noldes, eight Dixes, thirteen Heckels, sixty-one Schmidt-Rottluffs, seventeen Klees, and thirty-two Kirchners, plus works by Gauguin, Picasso, and others. The paintings and sculptures had been plundered from museums all over Germany.⁶⁸ This exhibition surely ranks as the most infamous ever held. It not only broke new ground in its theme – freely vilifying some of the greatest painters of the century – but it also set new standards in the display of art. Even the Führer himself was taken aback by the way in which some of the exhibits were presented. Paintings and sculptures were juxtaposed at random making them appear bizarre and strange. Sarcastic labels, which ran around, over, and under the pictures, were designed to provoke ridicule. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Peasants at Midday, for example, was labelled, ‘German Peasants as Seen by the Yids.’ Max Ernst’s The Creation of Eve; or, The Fair Gardener was labelled, ‘An Insult to German Womanhood.’ Ernst Barlach’s statue The Reunion, which showed the recognition of Christ by Saint Thomas, was labelled, ‘Two Monkeys in Nightshirts.’⁶⁹

If Hitler and Ziegler thought they had killed off modern art, they were mistaken. Over the four months that Entartete Kunst remained in Munich, more than two million people visited the Archaeological Institute, far more than the thin crowds that attended the House of German Art.⁷⁰ This was small consolation for the artists, many of whom found the show heartbreaking. Emil Nolde wrote yet again to Goebbels, more than a trace of desperation in his demand that ‘the defamation against me cease.’ Max Beckmann was more realistic, and on the day the show opened, he took himself off into exile. Lyonel Feininger, born in New York of German parents but living in Europe since 1887, fell back on his American passport and sailed for the New World.

After it closed in Munich Entartete Kunst travelled to Berlin and a host of other German cities. Yet another retroactive law, the degenerate art law of May 1938, was passed, enabling the government to seize ‘degenerate art’ in museums without compensation. Some of the pictures were sold for derisory sums at a special auction held at the Fischer gallery in Lucerne; there were even some pictures that the Nazis decided were too offensive to exist – approximately 4,000 of these were simply burned in a huge bonfire, held on Kopernikerstrasse in Berlin in March 1938.⁷¹ The exhibition was a one-off, mercifully, but the House of German Art became an annual fixture, at least until 1944. Here the sort of art that Hitler liked – pastoral scenes, military portraits, mountainscapes similar to those he himself had painted when he was younger—hardly changed from year to year.⁷² Hitler’s assault on painters and sculptors has received more attention from historians, but his actions against musicians were no less severe. Here too there was an initial tussle between Goebbels and Rosenberg; the modernist repertoire was purged from early on in 1933, with ‘degenerate’ composers like Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Ernst Toch, and conductors who included Otto Klemperer and Hermann Scherchen expelled. An Entartete Musik exhibition was held in Dusseldorf in May 1938. This was the brainchild of Adolf Ziegler, and a major feature was photographs of composers – Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Webern – who were considered to have a destructive influence on German music. Jazz was treated less harshly. Goebbels realised how popular it was with the masses and that its curtailment might lose the Nazis much sympathy, so it could be performed, provided it was German musicians who were playing. Opera, on the other hand, came under strict Nazi control, with the ‘safer’ works of Wagner, Verdi, Puccini, and Mozart dominating the repertoire as modernist works were discouraged or banned outright.⁷³

If Alfred Rosenberg, on behalf of the Nazis, was to create a new National Socialist religion, as he hoped, then such religions as existed had to be destroyed. More than anyone else, Protestant or Catholic, one man realised this and the dangers it posed: Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The son of a psychiatrist, Bonhoeffer was born in 1906 in Breslau, the brother in a set of nonidentical twins, the sixth and seventh in a family of eight. His father was one of the leaders of the opposition to Freud. He was taken aback when his son felt called to the church but, as a liberal, raised no objection.

Bonhoeffer had an academic bent and High Church leanings. Although he was a Protestant, he liked the confessional nature of Catholicism and was much influenced by Heidegger and existentialism, but in a negative sense. One of the most influential theologians of the century, he wrote his major books in the 1930s, during the Nazi era – The Communion of Saints (1930), Act and Being (1931), and The Cost of Discipleship (1937) – though Ethics (1940—4, never completed) and Letters and Papers from Prison (1942) – also became famous. As the second title hints, Bonhoeffer agreed with Heidegger that it was necessary to act in order to be, but he did not think that man was alone in this world or faced with the necessarily stark realities that Heidegger identified. It was clear to Bonhoeffer that community was the answer to the solitariness bemoaned by so many modern philosophers, and that the natural community was the church.⁷⁴ Community life was therefore, in theory at least, far more rewarding than atomised society, but it did involve certain sacrifices if it was to work. These sacrifices, he said, were exactly the same as those demanded by Christ, on behalf of God: obedience, discipline, even suffering on occasion.⁷⁵ And so the church, rather than God, became for Bonhoeffer the main focus of attention and thought. Operating within the church – as a body that had existed for centuries, since Jesus himself – teaches us how to behave; and this is where ethics fitted in. This community, of saints and others, teaches us how to think, how to advance theology: in this context we pray, a religious existential act by means of which we hope to become more like Christ.⁷⁶

It was no accident that Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on community, obedience, and discipline should become central theological issues at a time when the Nazis were coming to power, and stressing just these qualities. Bonhoeffer saw immediately the dangers that the Nazis posed, not just to society at large but specifically so far as the church was concerned. On 1 February 1933, the very day after Hitler took power, Bonhoeffer broadcast a contentious speech over Berlin radio. It was entitled ‘The Younger Generation’s Changed Views of the Concept of Führer,’ and it was so directly confrontational that it was cut off before he had a chance to finish. In it he argued that modern society was so complex that a cult of youth was exactly what was not needed, that there was a false generation gap being created by the Hitler Youth movement, and that parents and youth needed to work together, so that the energies of youth could be tempered by the experience of age. He was in effect arguing that the Nazis had whipped up the fervour of the youth because mature adults could see through the bombastic and empty claims of Hitler and the other leaders.⁷⁷ This speech reflected Bonhoeffer’s beliefs and attitude but, as Mary Bosanquet, his biographer, makes clear, it also highlighted his courage. From then on, he was one of those who repeatedly attacked efforts by the state to take over the church, and the functions of the church. The church, he said, was founded on confession, man’s relation with God, not with the state. He showed further courage by opposing the ‘Aryan’ clause when it was introduced the following month, and arguing that it was a Christian duty to care for the Jews. This made him so unpopular with the authorities that in summer 1933 he accepted an invitation to become a pastor of a German parish in London. He stayed until April 1935, when he returned to take charge of a seminary at Finkelwalde. While there he published The Cost of Discipleship (1937), his first book to attract widespread attention.⁷⁸ One of its themes was a comparison of spiritual community and psychological manipulation. In other words, he was contrasting the ideas of the church and Rosenberg’s notions in the Mythus and, by extension, Hitler’s techniques in eliciting support. Finkelwalde was closed by Himmler in that same year, the seminarians sequestered, and later in the war sent to the front, where twenty-one died. Bonhoeffer was left untouched but not allowed to teach or publish. In the summer of 1939 he was invited to America by the theologian Reinhald Niebuhr, but no sooner had he arrived in New York, in June, than he realised his mistake and returned to Germany, taking one of the last ships before war broke out.⁷⁹

Unable to take part in ordinary life, Bonhoeffer joined the underground. His brother-in-law worked in military intelligence under Admiral Canaris, and in 1940 Bonhoeffer was given the task of holding clandestine meetings with Allied contacts in neutral countries like Sweden and Switzerland, to see what the attitude would be if Hitler were assassinated.⁸⁰ Nothing came of these encounters, though the group around Canaris continued to work toward the first plot to kill the Führer, in Smolensk in 1943. This failed, as did the attempt in the summer of 1944, and in April 1945 Bonhoeffer was arrested and held in Tegel military prison in Berlin. From here he sent out letters and other writings, which were published in 1951 as Letters and Papers from Prison.⁸¹ The Gestapo had never been absolutely sure how close Bonhoeffer was to the German underground, but after the second attempt on Hitler’s life failed, on 20 July 1944, files were found at Zossen which confirmed the link between the Abwehr and the Allies. As a result Bonhoeffer was transferred to the Gestapo prison on Prinz-Albert-Strasse and then, in February 1945, sent to Buchenwald. It was a slow journey, with the Reich collapsing, and before he reached the camp, Bonhoeffer’s party was overtaken by emissaries from Hitler. Trapped in his Bunker, the Führer was determined that no one involved in the plot to kill him should survive the war. Bonhoeffer received a court-martial during the night of 8—9 April and was hanged, naked, early the next morning.⁸²

Hitler had devised a system to persecute and destroy millions, but Bonhoeffer’s death was one of the last he ordered personally. He hated God even more than he hated artists.

In 1938 a young (twenty-year-old) Russian writer, or would-be writer, sent an account of his experiences in Kolyma, the vast, inaccessible region of Siberia that contained the worst camps of the Gulag, to the Union of Writers in Moscow. Or he thought he had. Ivan Vasilievich Okunev’s report, written in a simple school notebook, never went anywhere. It was kept by the KGB in his file until it was found in the early 1990s by Vitali Shentalinsky, a fellow writer and poet who, after years of trying, finally managed to persuade the Russian authorities to divulge the KGB’s ‘literary archive.’ His tenacity was well rewarded.⁸³

Okunev had been arrested and sent to the Gulag because he had allowed his (internal) passport to lapse. That is all. He was put to work in a mine, as a result of which, after several weeks, the sleeves of his coat became torn. One day the camp director announced that if anyone had any complaints, they should say so before that day’s shift began. Okunev and another man explained about their sleeves, and two others said they needed new gloves. Everyone else was sent off to the mines, but the four who had raised their hands were sent instead to the punishment block. There they were sprayed with water for twenty minutes. As it was December, in Siberia, the temperature was fifty degrees below zero, and the water froze on Okunev and the others, so that the four men became united as one solid block of ice. They were cut apart with an axe, but since they couldn’t walk – their clothes being frozen solid – they were kicked over and rolled in the snow back to the hut where they slept. As he fell, Okunev hit his face on the frozen ground and lost two teeth. At the hut, he was left to thaw out near the stove. Next morning, when he woke, his clothes were still wet and he had pneumonia, from which he took a month to recover. Two of the others who had formed the same block of ice with him didn’t make it.⁸⁴

Okunev was lucky, if you call surviving in such conditions lucky. It is now known that up to 1,500 writers perished under the Soviet system, mainly in the late 1930s. Many others were driven into exile. As Robert Conquest has pointed out, The Penguin Book of Russian Verse, published in 1962, shows that since the revolution, poets who lived in exile survived to an average age of seventy-two, whereas for those who remained in or returned to the Soviet Union, it was forty-five. Many scientists were also sent into exile, imprisoned, or shot. At the same time, Stalin realised that, in order to produce more food, more machinery, and as the 1930s wore on, better weapons, he needed scientists. Great pressure was therefore put on scientists to accede to Marxist ideology, even if that meant ignoring inconvenient results. Special camps were developed for scientists, called sharashki, where they were better fed than other prisoners, while forced to work on scientific problems.

This Russian inquisition did not arrive overnight. In summer 1918, when the civil war started, all non-Bolshevik publications were banned. However, with the New Economic Policy, unveiled in 1922, the Communist Party (as the Bolsheviks were now called) allowed a curious form of mixed economy, in which private entrepreneurs and co-operatives were established. As a result, several pre-revolutionary publishers re-emerged, but also more than a hundred literary cooperatives, some of which, like RAPP (the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), became quite powerful. In literature the 1920s were an uneasy time. Several writers went into exile, but as yet there was no firm distinction between what was and was not acceptable as literature. The mind of the leadership was clearly on more pressing things than writing, though two new journals, Krasnaya nov (1921) and Novy mir (1925), were under the control of hard-line Marxists. Certain writers, like Osip Mandelstam and Nikolay Klyuev, already found it difficult to be published. In 1936, a decade later, no fewer than 108 newspapers and 162 periodicals were still being published, in the Russian language, outside the Soviet Union.⁸⁵

Science had been ‘nationalised’ by the Bolsheviks in 1917, thus becoming the property of the state.⁸⁶ To begin with, according to Nikolai Krementsov, in his history of Stalinist science, many scientists had not objected because under the tsars Russian science, though expanding slowly, lagged well behind its counterparts in other European countries. For the Bolsheviks, science was expected to play an important role in a technocratic future, and during the civil war scientists were given several privileges, including enlarged food rations (paiki) and exemption from military service. In 1919 there was a special decree ‘to improve the living conditions for scholars.’ During the early 1920s international currency was made available for scientists to buy foreign equipment and to make specially sanctioned ‘expeditions’ abroad. In 1925 the Lenin Prize for scientific research was established. Scientists occupied places on the highest councils, and under their guidance numerous institutes were opened, such as the X Ray Institute, the Soil Institute, the Optical Institute, and the Institute of Experimental Biology, a large outfit that housed departments of cytology, genetics, eugenics, zoo-psychology, hydrology, histology, and embryology.⁸⁷ This modern approach was also reflected in the publication of the first Great Soviet Encyclopedia, and the period saw the great flowering of ‘Soviet physics,’ in particular the Leningrad Physico-Technical Laboratory, when relations with the West were good.⁸⁸ Science was no longer bourgeois.

In the mid-1920s, however, a change began to be seen in science in the language used. A new lexicon, and a new style – far more polemical – started to surface, even in the journals. Professional societies like the Society of Mathematician-Materialists and the Society of Marxist-Agrarians began to appear. Books with tides such as Psychology, Reflexology and Marxism (1925) were published, and the journal of the Communist Academy, Under the Banner of Marxism, carried a series of articles by accomplished scientists which nonetheless argued that the results of experiments had nothing to do with their interpretation. Specifically Communist universities were formed, along with an Institute of Red Professors, the aim of both being ‘to create a new, Communist intelligentsia.’⁸⁹ In May 1928, at the Eighth Congress of the Union of Communist Youth – the Komsomol – Stalin indicated that he was ready for a new phase in Soviet life. In a speech he said, ‘A new fortress stands before us. This fortress is called science, with its numerous fields of knowledge. We must seize this fortress at any cost. Young people must seize this fortress, if they want to be builders of a new life, if they want truly to replace the old guard…. A mass attack of the revolutionary youth on science is what we need now, comrades.’⁹⁰

A year later, what Stalin called Velikii Perelom (the Great Break, or Great Leap Forward) was launched. All private initiative was crushed, market forces removed, and the peasantry collectivised. On Stalin’s orders, the state exercised from now on a total monopoly over resources and production. In science there was a period of ‘sharpened class struggle,’ in effect the first arrests, exiles, and show trials, but also the intervention of party cadres into agriculture. This was disastrous and led directly to the famines of 1931–3. Science was expanded (by about 50 percent) under the first Five-Year Plan, which was the main plank under the Great Break, but it was as much a political move as an intellectual one. Party activists took over all the new establishments and also infiltrated those that already existed, including the Academy of Sciences.⁹¹ Even Ivan Pavlov, the great psychologist and a Nobel Prize winner in physiology, was shadowed continually (he was eighty), and the ‘Great Proletarian Writer,’ Maxim Gorky, a friend of Stalin, was put in charge of genetics and medical research.⁹² Later, in July 1936, entire areas of psychology and pedagogy were abolished; the Academy of Sciences, originally a club for award-winning scholars, was forced to become the administrative head of more than a hundred laboratories, observatories, and other research institutions, though of course by then the academy was stuffed with ‘red directors’ at the highest levels. ‘Cadres decide everything’ was the official slogan: Kadry reshaiut vse. A circle of physicists-mathematicians-materialists was established. ‘It sought to apply Marxist methodology to mathematics and physics.’⁹³ The Nomenklatura was a list of posts that could not be occupied (or, indeed, vacated) without permission of the appropriate party committee, the higher the post, the higher the committee that had to authorise appointment: the president of the Academy, for instance, had to be authorised by the Politburo.⁹⁴ At the same time, foreign contacts were discouraged; there was careful screening of scientists who applied to travel and of foreign scientists who wished to come to Russia. A special agency, Glavlit, censored all publications, even scientific ones, sometimes removing ‘harmful’ literature from libraries.⁹⁵

By now, some scientists had learned to live with the system, liberally sprinkling the introductions to their publications with appropriate quotations from approved writers, like Marx, before getting on with the main business of the paper. Beginning in December 1930, Stalin charged the discipline of philosophy with the task of combating traditional notions and with developing Lenin’s philosophy. This policy was launched through the Institute of Red Professors of Philosophy and Natural Sciences. The idea behind it was that science had a ‘class nature’ and must be made more ‘proletarian.’⁹⁶ There was also a campaign to make science more ‘practical.’ Applied science was lauded over basic research. ‘Militant’ scientists criticised their less militant (but often more talented) colleagues and engaged them in public discussions where these colleagues were forced to admit previous ‘errors.’ By the mid-1930s, therefore, Soviet science had changed completely in character. It was now run by party bureaucrats and, insofar as this was possible, organised along lines in keeping with the tenets of Marxism and Leninism. Naturally, this led to absurdities.⁹⁷ The most notorious occurred in the discipline of genetics. Genetics had not existed in Russia prior to the revolution, but in the 1920s it began to flourish. In 1921 a Bureau of Eugenics was created, though in Russia this was predominantly concerned with plant breeding, and in 1922 one of T. H. Morgan’s aides had visited Russia and brought valuable Drosophila stocks. Morgan, William Bateson, and Hugo de Vries were all elected foreign members of the Academy of Sciences in 1923 and I924.⁹⁸

In the latter half of the 1920s, however, the situation became more complex and sinister. In the immediate postrevolutionary climate in Russia, Darwinism was at first seen as aiding Marxism in creating a new socialist society. But genetics, besides explaining how societies evolve, inevitably drew attention to the fact that many characteristics are inherited. This was inconvenient for the Bolsheviks, and geneticists who espoused this view were suppressed in 1930, along with the Russian Eugenics Society. In the Soviet context, with the country’s food problems, its vast expanses of land, and its inhospitable extremes of climate, genetics was potentially of enormous importance in developing strains of wheat, for example, that gave higher yields and/or grew on previously inhospitable land. The key figure here in the late 1920s and early 1930s was Nikolai Vavilov, one of the three scientists who had helped establish the science in the early 1920s, who was close to many foreign geneticists such as T. H. Morgan in the United States and C. D. Darlington in Great Britain. But this, of course, was a ‘traditional’ way of thinking. In the early 1930s a new name began to be heard in Russian genetics circles – Trofim Lysenko.⁹⁹

Born in 1898 into a peasant family, Lysenko had no formal academic training, and in fact research was never his strong point; instead he became noted for a number of polemical papers about the role of genetics in Soviet society, in particular what genetics research ought to show. This was exactly what the party bosses wanted to hear – it was, after all, extremely ‘practical’ – and in 1934 Lysenko was appointed scientific chief of the Odessa Institute of Genetics and Breeding and ‘elected’ to membership of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.¹⁰⁰ Lysenko’s doctrine, termed ‘agrobiology,’ was an amalgam of physiology, cytology, genetics, and evolutionary theory in which the new element was his concept of vernalisation. Vernalisation relates to the way plant seeds respond to the temperature of the seasons; Lysenko argued that if temperature could be manipulated, plants would ‘think’ that spring and summer had come early, and produce their harvest sooner rather than later. The question was – did it work? And second, with agriculture used as metaphor, vernalisation showed that what a plant produced was at least partly due to the way it was treated, and therefore not entirely due to its genetic component. To Marxists, this showed that surroundings – and by extension society, upbringing, education, in the human context – were as important, if not more important, than genetics. Throughout the early 1930s, in his Bulletin of Vernalization and in press campaigns organised for him by party friends, Lysenko conducted a noisy assault on his rivals.¹⁰¹ This culminated in 1935, when Vavilov was dismissed from the presidency of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, the most prestigious position in plant breeding and genetics, and replaced by a party hack. At the same time, Lysenko was appointed as a member of the same academy. The changing landscape was clear.¹⁰²

Vavilov did not go without a fight, and the academy held a discussion of Lysenko’s controversial views, at which it was outlined how unusual and unreliable they were.¹⁰³ Lysenko dismissed the very idea of the gene as a physical unit of heredity, claimed that Mendel was wrong and insisted that environmental conditions could directly influence the ‘heredity’ of organisms.¹⁰⁴ The scientists on Vavilov’s side argued that the results of Lysenko’s experiments were of dubious validity, had never been replicated or sustained by further experimentation, and flew in the face of research in other countries. The people on Lysenko’s side, says Krementsov, accused their opponents of being ‘fascists’ and ‘anti-Darwinists,’ and pointed to the link between German biologists and the Nazis’ ideas of a master race. At that stage, the academy actually seems to have been more favourable to Vavilov than to Lysenko, at least to the extent of not accepting the latter’s results, and ordering more research. An International Genetics Conference was scheduled for Moscow in 1938, when Vavilov’s allies felt sure that contact with foreign geneticists would kill off Lysenkoism for all time. Then came the Great Terror.

Nine leading geneticists were arrested and shot in 1937 (though in all eighty-three biologists were killed, and twenty-two physicists).¹⁰⁵ The geneticists’ crime was to hold to a view that the gene was the unit of heredity and to be suspicious of Lysenko’s officially approved notion of vernalisation. The institutes these geneticists headed either faded away or were taken over by acolytes of Lysenko. He himself assumed the role previously occupied by Vavilov, as president of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, but he was also promoted further, to become a member of the USSR Supreme Soviet. Still, Lysenko did not have things all his own way. In 1939 Vavilov and other colleagues who had escaped the Terror, which ended in March that year, sent a joint six-page letter to Andrei Zhdanov, secretary of the Central Committee and of the Leningrad City Party, arguing for traditional genetics over Lysenkoism. (Zhdanov and his son were both chemists.)¹⁰⁶ They were fortified by the recent award of a Nobel Prize to T. H. Morgan, in 1933.¹⁰⁷ Their letter stressed the ‘careerism’ of Lysenko and his associates, the unreliability of his results, and the incompatibility of his ideas with both Darwinism and the international consensus in genetics. The letter received serious attention, and the Party Secretariat – which included Stalin – decided to let the philosophers judge. This meeting took place on 7–14 October 1939 at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow. All four ‘judges’ were graduates of the Institute of Red Professors.

Fifty-three academics of one kind or another took part in the discussions. Formally, the dialogue, as identified by the philosophers in their invitation, was ‘to define the Marxist-Leninist line of work in the field of genetics and breeding, which must mobilise all workers in this field in the general struggle for the development of socialist agriculture and the real development of the theory of Darwinism.’ At one level the discussion was familiar. The Lysenkoists accused their opponents of work that was ‘impractical’ because it involved the fruit fly, whereas theirs used tomatoes, potatoes, and other useful plants and animals. The Lysenkoists no longer argued that the rival camp were ‘fascists,’ however. By October 1939 Russia had signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact, and such a reference would have been highly inappropriate. For their part, the geneticists pointed to the unreliability of Lysenko’s results, arguing that his hasty theoretical conclusions would simply lead to disaster for Soviet agriculture when they were found not to produce the predicted results. At another level, however, the debate was over Darwinism. By now, in Soviet Russia, Marxism and Darwinism had become blended.¹⁰⁸ The inevitability of biological evolution was assumed by Marxists to be paralleled in the sociological field, which naturally made the USSR the most highly ‘evolved’ society, the pinnacle that all others would reach eventually.

In their judgement, the philosophers found that Lysenko had transgressed some rules of Soviet bureaucracy, but they agreed with him that formal genetics was ‘anti-Darwinian’ and its methods ‘impractical.’ The Leningrad Letter, as it was called, had changed nothing. The lesser role of the formal geneticists was still allowed, but Lysenko had not been damaged and still occupied all the positions he had before the letter was written. Indeed, that position was soon consolidated; in the summer of 1940 Vavilov was arrested by the secret police as a British spy. What seems to have triggered this was his correspondence with the British geneticist C. D. Darlington, who arranged to have one of Vavilov’s publications translated into English. It was not hard for the secret police to fabricate charges or secure a ‘confession’ about how Vavilov had provided the British with important details about Russian genetics research, which could have affected her ability to feed herself.¹⁰⁹

Vavilov died in prison, and with him a huge part of Russian genetics. He was perhaps the most important scientist to succumb to the Great Terror, but genetics/agriculture was not the only discipline that was devastated: psychology and other areas of biology were also deeply affected. Vavilov was probably mourned more outside Russia than within, and is still remembered today as a great scientist. Lysenko remained where he was.¹¹⁰

On 20 June 1936 Maxim Gorky died at his dacha, in Gorki, just outside Moscow. He was, at the time of his death, probably the most well-known writer in Russia, a novelist, a playwright, and a poet, though he had first become famous as a short-story writer in the 1890s. He had participated in the 1905 revolution, joined the Bolsheviks, but from 1906 to 1913 had lived in Capri.¹¹¹ His novel The Mother (1906) is generally regarded as the pioneer of socialist realism; it was written in the United States while he was fund-raising for the Bolsheviks. A friend of Lenin, he was in favour of the 1917 revolution and afterward founded the newspaper Novaya zhizm. He left Russia again in the early 1920s, as a protest against the treatment of intellectuals, but Stalin persuaded him back in 1933.

To those who knew the sixty-two-year-old writer and his poor health, his death was not a surprise, but wild rumours immediately began to circulate. One version had it that he had been killed by Genrikh Yagoda, the bureaucrat in charge of the Writers’ Union, because he intended to denounce Stalin to André Gide, the French author (and someone who had retracted his earlier enthusiasm for Soviet Russia). Another rumour had it that Gorky had been administered ‘heart stimulants in large quantities,’ including camphor, caffeine, and cardiosal. According to this version, the ultimate culprits were ‘Rightists and Trotskyites’ funded by foreign governments, intent on destabilising Russian society by the murder of public figures.¹¹² When Vitaly Shentalinsky was given access to the KGB literary archive in the 1990s, he found the Gorky file. This contained two versions of Gorky’s own death, the ‘official’ one and the authentic one. What does seem at least theoretically possible is that the murder of Gorky’s son in 1934 was designed to break the father, psychologically speaking. Even this is not entirely convincing because Gorky was not an enemy of the regime. As an old friend of Lenin, he may have felt he had to tread carefully where Stalin was concerned, and certainly, as time went by, a coldness developed between Stalin and Gorky. But as the KGB’s file makes clear, Stalin visited the writer twice during his last illness. Gorky’s death was natural.¹¹³

The rumours surrounding his death nevertheless underline the unhappy atmosphere in which writers and other artists, no less than scientists, lived. In the decade between the Great Break and World War II, literature in Russia went through three distinct phases, though this owed more to attempts by the authorities to coerce writers than to any aesthetic innovations. The first phase, from 1929 to 1932, saw the rise of proletarian writers, who followed Stalin rather than Lenin. This movement was led by RAPP, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, infiltrated by a new breed of author who began a campaign against the older literary types, who held to the view that the writer, like all intellectuals, should remain ‘outside society, the better to be able to criticise it.’ RAPP therefore attacked ‘psychologism’ on the grounds that a concern with individual motives for action was ‘bourgeois.’ RAPP also took exception to writing in which the peasants were portrayed in anything other than a flattering light.¹¹⁴ The peasants were noble, not envious; and the kulaks warranted no sympathy. RAPP took part in the establishment of ‘Writers’ Brigades,’ whose job it was to describe what the party bureaucrats were doing, collectivisation in particular. Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Mayakovsky were all criticised by RAPP.¹¹⁵ From 1932 to 1935 the pendulum swung back. Anyone with any sense could see that under the RAPP system, people with little or no talent were hounding much better writers into silence. The new approach granted authors special privileges – dachas, rest homes, sanitaria, foreign travel – but they were also required to join a new organisation: RAPP was abolished, to be replaced by the Writers’ Union. This was more than just a union, however. It epitomised a compulsory orthodoxy: socialist realism. It was the introduction of this dogma that caused Gorky to be called home.

Socialist realism was a trinity. First, it was required to appeal to the newly educated masses and to be didactic, ‘showing real events in their revolutionary context.’¹¹⁶ Second, writing should not be ‘too abstract’, it had to be ‘a guide to action,’ and involve a ‘celebratory’ tone, since that made it ‘worthy of the great epoch in socialism.’ Third, socialist realism should show Partiinost, or ‘party-mindedness,’ an echo of ‘Cadres decide everything’ in the scientific field.¹¹⁷ Gorky, for one, realised that great literature was unlikely to be produced under such circumstances. Certain ponderous projects, such as a vast history of the civil war, a history of factories, and a literature of the famine, were worth doing, but they were bound to be stolid, rather than imaginative.¹¹⁸ Gorky’s main aim, therefore, was to ensure that Soviet literature was not reduced to banal propaganda. The high point of socialist realism was the infamous First Congress of Soviet Writers, which met in the Hall of Columns in Moscow in 1935. For the congress, the hall was decorated with huge portraits of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Pushkin, and Tolstoy – none of these immortals, so it seemed, was bourgeois. Delegations of workers and peasants, carrying tools, trooped through the proceedings to remind Soviet delegates of their ‘social responsibilities.’¹¹⁹ Gorky gave an ambiguous address. He underlined his sympathies with the emerging talents of Russia, which the revolution had uncovered, and he went out of his way to criticise bureaucrats who, he said, could never know what it was like to be a writer. This barb was, however, directed as much at the bureaucracy of the Writers’ Union itself as at other civil servants. He was implying that socialist realism had to be real, as well as socialist – the same point that Vavilov was fighting in biology. As it turned out, all the proposals the congress gave rise to were overtaken by the Great Terror. That same year a score of writers was shot in Ukraine, after the murder of Kirov. At the same time, libraries were told to remove the works of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and others. Most chilling of all, Stalin began to take a personal interest in literature. There were phone calls to individual writers, like Pasternak, verdicts on specific works (approval for Quiet Flows the Don, disapproval for Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District). Stalin even read L. M. Leonov’s Russian Forest, correcting it with a red pencil.¹²⁰

Stalin’s involvement with Osip Mandelstam was much more dramatic. Mandelstam’s file was another of those discovered in the KGB archive by Vitaly Shentalinsky, and the most moving. Mandelstam was arrested twice, in 1934 and 1938. The second time he was seized while Anna Akhmatova was in his flat (she had just arrived from Leningrad).¹²¹ Mandelstam was later interrogated by Nikolay Shivarov, in particular about certain poems he had written, including one about Stalin.

Question: ‘Do you recognise yourself guilty of composing works of a counter-revolutionary character?’

Answer. ‘I am the author of the following poem of a counter-revolutionary nature:

We live without sensing the country beneath us,

At ten paces, our speech has no sound

And when there’s the will to half-open our mouths

The Kremlin crag-dweller bars the way.

Fat fingers as oily as maggots,

Words sure as forty-pound weights,

With his leather-clad gleaming calves

And his large laughing cockroach eyes.

And around him a rabble of thin-necked bosses,

He toys with the service of such semi-humans.

They whistle, they meouw, and they whine:

He alone merely jabs with his finger and barks,

Tossing out decree after decree like horseshoes —

Right in the eye, in the face, the brow or the groin.

Not one shooting but swells his gang’s pleasure,

And the broad breast o f the Ossetian.’

There was also a poem about a terrible famine in Ukraine. As a result, Mandelstam was sent into exile for three years; it might have been worse had not Stalin taken a personal interest and told his captors to ‘isolate but preserve’ him.¹²² Mandelstam was accused again in 1938, under the same law as before. ‘This time the sentence was to “isolate” but not necessarily “preserve.” ‘¹²³ Mandelstam, who had not been back from his first exile for very long, was already thin and emaciated, and the authorities, Stalin included, knew that he would never survive five years (for a second offence) in a camp. Sentence was passed in August; by December, in the transit camp, he had not even the strength to get up off his bed boards. He collapsed on 26 December and died the next day. The file says that a board was tied to his leg, with his number chalked on it. Then the corpse was thrown onto a cart and taken to a common grave. His wife Nadezhda only found out he had died on 5 February 1939, six weeks later, when a money order she had sent to him was returned ‘because of the death of the addressee.’¹²⁴

Isaac Babel, a celebrated short story writer whose best-known works include Red Cavalry (1926) and Odessa Tales (1927), an account of his civil war experience, was never a party member; he was also Jewish. Appalled at what was happening in Russia, he wrote little in the 1930s (and came under attack for it). Nonetheless, he was arrested in May 1939 and not seen again. Throughout the 1940s his wife was told periodically, ‘He is alive, well and being held in the camps.’¹²⁵ In 1947 she was officially told that Isaac would be released in 1948. Not until March 1955 was she told that her husband had died ‘while serving his sentence,’ on 17 March 1941. Even that was wrong. The KGB file makes it clear he was shot on 27 January 1940.

The period 1937–8 became known among intellectuals as the era of Yezhov-shchina (Yezhov’s misrule), after N. I. Yezhov, boss of the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB. The term was originally coined by Boris Pasternak, who had always referred to shigalyovshchina, recalling Shigalyov in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, a book that features a dystopia in which denunciation and surveillance are paramount. Writers, artists, and scholars killed in the Great Terror included the philosopher Jan Sten, who had taught Stalin; Leopold Averbaakh, Ivan Katayev, Alexander Chayanov, Boris Guber, Pavel Florensky, Klychkov Lelevich, Vladimir Kirshans, Ivan Mikhailovich Bespalov, Vsevelod Meyerhold, Benedikt Livshits, the historian of futurism, and Prince Dmitry Sviatopolk-Mirsky.¹²⁶ Estimates for the number of writers who died during the Terror range from 600 to 1,300 to 1,500. Even the lower figure was a third of the membership of the Writers’ Union.¹²⁷

The result of all this brutality, obsession with control, and paranoia was sterility. Socialist realism failed, though this was never admitted in Stalin’s lifetime. The literature of the period – the history of factories, for example – is not read, if it is read at all, for pleasure or enlightenment, but only for its grim historical interest. What happened in literature was a parallel of what was happening in psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and biology. In retrospect, the best epitaph came from a real writer, Vladimir Mayakovsky. In an early futurist poem, one of the characters visits the hairdresser. When asked what he wants, he replies simply: ‘Please, trim my ears.’¹²⁸