Notes and Images, Deluge 14-16

• The first and the last bauhaus memory
• And with the beginning of the Great Depression: Foreign Credits. Trade statistics...Employment / unemployment statistics
• Grosz unemployed a job line ; the personal cost ; standing in line
• Murder they wrote...murder one and two and three
• Anti-Nazi propaganda and another and again and another; pro Nazi and another. Four heroes; Hitler and the working classes; as new beginning; the savior
• More on Nazi propaganda. Posters. Criticism: one, two, three, four, five and six
• In the midst of the failure to form a stable government (5 elections in this year!), there was increasing violence in the streets, threats of military dictatorships, general strikes and civil war.

  Hindenberg re-elected over Hitler, but only with the support of those for whom he had contempt, namely the Social Democrats and the moderate centrist parties [359].

• Hitler appointed and the cultural purge begins almost immediately. Not so much against jews, but against independent minded intelligentsia 385. Read also on book; invitation from the ASUO; and the result: burning. and another in Munich.

  Fackel

  Read on 390. on the collapse.

  NOTE: both the Nazis and their enemies believed that each was promoting 'the good life' and 'civility'; the difference is that the first began from the perspective of being 'enlightened' [knowledge of the way the world should be] and the other from the perspective that in the here and now all one can do is find procedures to the 'more perfect union' .

Note esp. the role of patronage and the arts:

who is supporting art in all its forms? Proletarians? Middle Class? Wealthy playboys? And where is the money coming from?

who is the audience for the achievements? working class? the elite? entrepreneurs? That is, was their a golden age for the intellectual elite? for the working class? for the middle class? which groups embraced the offerings of music? physics? psychiatry? architecture and design? of theater? And who pushed back?

bear in mind too that tho some German intellectuals and creative artists succeeded dramatically in exile [Gropius, Schönberg, Mies, Schumpeter, Habeler] also composers [Loewe, Hammerstein] and film-makers [Billy Wilder: from the late 1930s to the early 1960s, 'Billy Wilder dominated Hollywood’s Golden Age. With over fifty films and six Academy Awards to his credit, he is one of Hollywood’s all-time greatest directors, producers and screenwriters'.] Others especially writers ["Weimar on the Pacific", Thomas Mann, Remarque, Stefan Georg, Walter Benjamin, etc.] did not.

Consider the forces at work in Berlin:

Provocation / endemic violence in the urban setting --roots in WW1, trench warfare, civil war, street fighting, a dysfunctional judiciary and political system. Were Germans ready to tolerate Babylon Berlin? were the churches? was the middle class?

1. Outrage and reaction --based on... People cared enough to fight about ...well, there were a lot of things to fight about. Politics, music, theater, architecture, etc.
2. Suggests: Public toleration of significant departure from cultural norms:
   1. conscious program of official toleration of broad civic rights; but unofficial intolerance of leftist.
   2. public financial support for a wide variety of cultural events
   3. lack of central control, and
3. Financial support/wealth... yes, but based on massive borrowing primarily from American banks.
4. Leads to: creative innovation? Yes, but perhaps also to narcissism/self-indulgence or nihilism?

Does a high level of creativity require and a high level of anger at the status quo, the ancien regime? But what about the role of the "middle" in the process?