00:00:09.920Whether we like it or not, we're in bid with the right.
00:00:13.740So, Adrienne, today we are back with another installment of the series that we call Project0.82
00:00:21.6401933, where you take me through month by month the first year of the Nazis' time and power.
00:00:30.000And we are all the way up to September. How do you feel?
00:00:35.600I mean, it's September 2025. How am I going to feel?
00:00:38.460People keep commenting on how relevant this series is, and like, I really wish that I didn't agree.
00:00:44.280I really wish that we would be like, oh, well, what an interesting exercise, but thank goodness it didn't turn out to be super relevant.0.58
00:00:51.580There's things that I see that are diverging, right?0.95
00:00:54.680Like, today we are going to talk, as we have a couple times before, about the Nazi seizure of cultural institutions.
00:01:03.200And I will note that we are recording the same week that Jimmy Kimmel got pushed off the air and then ushered back onto the air after backlash.0.50
00:01:12.760So, like, we still have something that Germany already sort of doesn't have, which is a bourgeois that can assert their, like, purchasing power and affect policy change that way.
00:01:23.400Like, that is something that still exists here that doesn't seem to really be in effect in Germany, at least not through the story that you've been telling me.
00:01:33.060Just yesterday, a general, Ben Hodges, tweeted apparently,
00:01:37.140July 1935, German generals were called to a surprise assembly in Berlin and informed that their previous oath to the Weimar Constitution was void and that they would be required to swear a personal oath to the Fuhrer.
00:01:46.640And one Pete Hexeth, who is currently assembling all the generals in very much a similar way, which got General Ben Hodges to tweet that, replied with, cool story, General.
00:01:59.360I agree with you. There are divergences and there are differences opening up, and I think people ought to be paying attention to those. And certainly if our comparison is making you more likely to think what is happening inevitable, we very much don't want to generate that impression.
00:02:16.000At the same time, we've just come off the podcaster Charlie Kirk getting what can only be described as the horse vessel treatment by people who either are listeners of this podcast or have read the same books we researched.
00:02:28.520And it's kind of creepy to watch people kind of speed run or try to speed run the story we're trying to tell here.
00:02:34.720This is something that I don't actually think that we've talked about much together off mic, but I have made this remark to other people and I've overheard you making it to other people, which is that the Trump administration seems to be trying, at least some of them seem to be trying to evoke the Nazis on purpose.
00:02:51.780Right. And it is difficult to tell to what degree that is like a sincere and like fulsome ideological commitment.
00:03:01.880Like, yes, we think the Nazis had good ideas and to what degree it is meant to provoke a sense of inevitability, a sense of terror in their opposition.
00:03:10.420Right. Like the similarity of some of this stuff is really uncanny.
00:03:13.800Right. In a way that makes it seem like it's maybe kind of on purpose.
00:03:16.860And it wouldn't shock me if one day we learned that, you know, Stephen Miller spent a lot of this past year sort of like fluttering his fingers together like Mr. Burns and trying to make himself seem as Goebbels-like as possible.
00:03:30.400Yeah, it wouldn't be shocking to find out that he's been audio booking the Ian Kershaw Hitler biographies like, you know, for years now.
00:03:38.320Right. I mean, like people noted the invocation of the Reichstag moment where it's like, wait, who do you think you are in this story, right?
00:03:44.680They were like, this is the Reichstag fire moment.
00:04:13.460Maybe there's something I'm missing, but my sense is that, you know, listeners might be able to listen to the September episode thinking, well, gee, at least we're not there yet.
00:04:25.640October will be all about the economy, farmers, the autobahn, unemployment, and so on.
00:04:32.020Although some of that stuff actually happens in September, but I kind of didn't know how to sprinkle it in today.
00:04:36.500We always sort of tend to focus on certain things, and so I thought this one would be about culture.
00:04:42.520This is about the cultural politics of Nazism and of anti-Nazism, and you'll see why I center it on that.
00:04:49.320We've seen the Nazis interfere with the cultural sphere quite a lot, but mostly by, like, firing people and replacing people, kind of part of the Gleichschiedung, part of the synchronization of the civil service, because a lot of cultural institutions were run by the government.0.58
00:05:03.040By September, we get a sense of what Nazi cultural politics really looks like.0.68
00:05:08.020And the results are famous, like, infamous.
00:05:11.060Like, this is where we sort of meet a lot of the image and myth makers that have shaped our literal image of the Nazis, like what we picture when we close our eyes, when we hear Nazi rally, for instance, until today, right?
00:05:24.980But at the same time, I think it's important to note that when I say sort of the cultural field, it's a little bit different what I mean by that than what we might think of in the United States, or at least I hope you'll agree with me that it's a little bit different.
00:05:38.200I should mention that I used to teach a class at Stanford called Germany in Five Words, and the first word was culture.
00:05:45.000I no longer offer it, but the wager of the class essentially was that each of these keywords were sort of untranslatable,
00:05:52.980or that in rendering them in English, you were kind of missing a certain part of it.
00:05:57.180And culture, or culture, as the Germans put it, is one of these.
00:06:00.700I know the word culture in English, and I bandy it about a lot, talking about popular practices, talking about media products, talking about traditions and the ways that ideas get disseminated to a popular audience, right?
00:06:17.180Kultur in German means something a little different. Could you go into that difference for me?
00:06:22.220Yeah, so for one thing, it has an antonym, at least in the 19th century, and then that still sort of governs how people think about it in 1933. It is about a set of practices, but also a specifically binding set of local practices. That is to say, you know, German culture as a thing that like binds people together, right?
00:06:45.320The opposite of that is, in the 19th century, the idea of civilization, right?
00:06:49.820There are a lot of right-wing thinkers, including the young Thomas Mann, who traffics in this extensively in his Reflections of a Non-Political Man in 1918, where he says, well, you know, there are countries that have a civilization, the French, right?
00:07:03.700Everyone looks at French, what we call French culture, and they want to learn it, and they want to adapt it, right?
00:07:10.860They want to learn the cooking, they want to learn the fashion, et cetera, et cetera.
00:07:13.520And then he says there's culture, which you really can't do that with.
00:07:17.320It comes out of a particular rootedness in the soil and the people.
00:07:21.080And you can sort of try and explain it to people, but you have to explain it.
00:07:24.300Like, they're not going to instinctively get it.
00:07:25.920It's an instinctive thing rather than a rational thing.0.60
00:07:28.300I'm starting to understand why this concept was appealing to the Nazis, right?0.63
00:07:31.940There's a sense of rootedness, a sense of place that I think translates very easily to a sense of race and belonging and non-belonging.0.74
00:07:40.200At the same time, the Nazis are not alone in this.
00:07:42.780This is the point that a lot of our friends and critics that we basically have been tracing for the last eight months will agree with the Nazis and be like, yeah, like German culture really is somehow rooted in the German nation, which makes it really hard to figure out how to how to immigrate, for instance.0.62
00:08:00.220Right. You can imagine how the question of like, is this intelligible to outsiders is pretty key if you're like, well, I'm I happen to work on cultural things in Germany and now I got to flee.
00:08:13.940What's this going to be like? Right. Do I genuinely think I can carry this with me or am I basically going to be like, you had to have been there, guys.
00:08:20.960I'm sorry. Just believe me that this is not going to land for you.
00:08:25.040I don't know how unique this is to Germany, but there is a sense you do encounter from Germans, including those who flee the Nazi regime, that they've, like, lost a part of themselves that is kind of, like, untranslatable by having to leave, right?
00:08:39.000This is something Hannah Arendt talks about, actually, in one of my favorite interviews with her.
00:08:44.420Somebody asked her, this is in, like, the 1970s, this is a famous interview with Hannah Arendt.
00:08:55.040And she goes on and says, I have thoughts in German that I cannot have in English.
00:08:59.260And that is a problem of emigration that I think is maybe particularly potent for the kinds of people that the Nazis were targeting, right?
00:09:09.200Like the artists, the intellectuals, the people who are members of these sort of cosmopolitan urban classes.
00:09:14.880Yeah. I mean, one reason that we've already alluded to in previous episodes of the podcast why this fixation on culture as the unifying instance in Germany was so important was because you couldn't do it through religion, right? A lot of cultural practices in other European countries, but also a lot of North American countries, get routed through religious practice. In Germany, as we saw, that is uniquely fraught. They had literally murdered each other over that stuff. So you don't want to go there.
00:09:42.200Yeah, you can't be like, you know, as Germans, we really believe in the literal incarnation of Christ in the host, you know, because then half of the Germans are going to be like, wait, what the fuck?0.99
00:10:02.240Let's scan the Christ stuff and just talk about Beethoven a little bit.0.62
00:10:05.600If only they had kept it to the Beethoven.0.50
00:10:07.720Yeah. And this is really important, especially for a lot of Jewish Germans, right? Whether or not they had converted, they knew that there were other German citizens who did not take them as co-equal German citizens. One way to show that you were part of the group was to over-identify with the culture, right?
00:10:27.800So I'm seeing this sense of culture as being simultaneously something that allows ethnic minorities within Germany to assimilate and to have a sense of authentic German-ness, and also the kind of thing that I'm guessing the Nazis are going to try and define them out of.0.69
00:10:44.460That's right. I mean, the 19th century is rife with brilliant Jewish Germans who excel, who create some of the most famous products of what we think of today as German culture, right?
00:11:08.840Like, we had Wagner, we'll be like, well, Mendelssohn doesn't really get it because, like, he has learned intellectually what he should be feeling, right?0.57
00:11:15.260And it's like, okay, you can just say Jewish.0.80
00:11:17.360Okay, so this is an attempt to make the sort of like shared cultural practices and shared cultural world into like an exclusive ethnic prerogative that cannot be authentically participated in by those not sharing in sort of like the blood affinity.0.67
00:11:35.740And this is maybe a little bit too cynical, but a lot of people made their money representing German culture abroad.
00:11:41.960Like, if you were in the classical music field, it was pretty important to you that people in New Zealand, like, thought that German culture was for everyone, because, like, that's the only way you were going to get to play it and get paid money for it.
00:11:52.840For other things, it's a lot more complicated, right?
00:11:55.620That's going to run as a theme through today's episode, this kind of question of, is this inclusionary and bridge building, or is it really exclusionary and basically a stand-in for racial categories?
00:12:05.900And you can imagine that someone like Klemperer versus someone like Hitler, right, like have radically different answers to that question.
00:12:13.680I'm also wondering how this word culture and this debate about what it really means, how did that change after the war?0.67
00:12:20.980Because I'm guessing that after World War II, when the Germans are doing this like very conspicuous, I think, to foreigners sort of reckoning with the Holocaust and with the Nazi regime, I'm guessing that this all can kind of turn on its head, right?0.53
00:12:36.880What if we are not, you know, uniquely sophisticated or uniquely intelligent or sort of like uniquely elegant thinkers, which is how I think of, you know, the German self-conception?0.57
00:12:46.800What if we are, in fact, sort of like uniquely evil?
00:13:26.460But the question of, like, is there something in German culture?
00:13:29.780I mean, we're not quite at, you know, the post-war question, which is really how could, not how could Hitler come to power, but how could the Holocaust happen?0.97
00:13:38.820Like, that is still in the future.0.98
00:13:40.840But still, the idea that the nation of Beethoven and Goethe somehow elected this fucking oaf, right?0.98
00:13:47.320Like, that's something that these people have to grapple with.0.98
00:13:50.360And they have to be kind of a little biased in their answers, right?
00:13:56.120Because if there's something uniquely bad about German culture, meanwhile, you're trying to leave the country knowing only that, right?
00:14:03.520Like, you're kind of degrading the only thing you have possibly to trade on, right?
00:14:07.700So you have to be like, no, no, no, no, that doesn't mean that at all, right?0.69
00:14:10.420And a lot of the emigres will give talks being like, you know, Wagner is totally innocent of the Nazi appropriation.
00:14:17.100And it's like, well, people are welcome to listen to those episodes.
00:14:41.120There are people who want to tell you that, you know, the United States is only this deriving impulse to maintain and reaffirm hierarchies and that that is the truest thing about us, right?
00:14:53.580Like chattel slavery is this original sin and that, you know, everything else on top of it is sort of like denial or window dressing.
00:15:00.000And then there are those people who want to tell you, like, no, American history in America is the struggle to achieve the liberal enlightenment promises of the Declaration in like a rigorous and meaningful way.
00:15:15.920and it's a struggle for equality and, you know, the real America is in the civil rights movement
00:15:22.800or like the abolition movement or like the feminist movement
00:15:27.120and that like anything else is kind of window dressing on that.
00:15:30.300And both of these are kind of dishonest accounts, right?
00:15:32.560Because it's a lot of different people struggling and feeling all these various different kinds of contentions
00:15:39.200over the meaning of both this place and of its traditions.
00:15:42.460Yeah, and the question, of course, raises itself all the more forcefully in a pre-global age, where the question is, well, what does this transplantation look like? There's a bunch of people transplanting themselves from Germany. And the question is like, well, does this translate? So, Viktor Klemperer, our listeners will be familiar with Viktor Klemperer, but maybe you will reintroduce him to listeners who, for some reason, decided to join in Episode 7. Welcome.
00:16:08.120better late than never we're happy to have you victor is a really wonderful source for us he was
00:16:15.220ethnically jewish although he had also been baptized as a christian he's a very like beloved
00:16:20.900source for historians of this era because in addition to being a like comparative literature
00:16:26.780professor he was a compulsive diarist and he was kind of like a politically conservative guy at
00:16:32.420least at the start but he had like this really kind of fascinating contempt for the nazis in
00:16:37.740particular. And so he is recording quite meticulously the changes in his world and the
00:16:43.660changes to political life and what this, like, affective experience of the Nazi regime is in
00:16:48.660real time, which makes him very, very useful. Yeah. And so on September 17th, this guy,0.60
00:16:53.120Victor Klemperer, notes the following about himself and his wife, named Eva, in his diary.0.83
00:16:58.560We two, Eva and I, suffer immensely because Germany violates all justice and all culture0.86
00:17:33.160And he makes that remark, though, in the context of his first friends and colleagues kind of coming through Dresden, where he lives, on their way to emigrate.
00:17:42.740So these are usually fellow academics who one is going to take a visiting gig in Istanbul, and the other is moving to Haifa.
00:17:52.020And Klembara is kind of dismissive of these two people in a way that I thought was kind of interesting.
00:17:56.760He sort of scoffs at Haifa as like a new colony.
00:17:59.460Like, why would you transplant yourself from this soil you're rooted in, right, this cultural soil you're rooted in, to this new colony where you don't belong, right?
00:18:08.500It seems to be his idea, which is really fascinating if you think about it.0.72
00:18:12.300He seems to agree with the Nazis on the idea that, like, well, culture is really about the situatedness in Germany and, like, you're not going to be able to take it with you, right?0.75
00:18:21.520Yeah, but he disagrees because he applies that situatedness to Jews, right?
00:18:25.400He's like, this is something that is constitutive of who these German Jews are, and they're not going to be able to be themselves in this other place.1.00
00:18:33.320Exactly. And so this is the kind of question that we're going to look into.0.99
00:18:36.780Like, how do the Nazis use culture to kind of institute a new sense of belonging and unity, while also excluding a whole bunch of people, right?
00:18:48.620That, like, often were some of the greatest practitioners of the very cultural arts that they were supposedly championing, right?0.99
00:18:55.400Unlike our fascists of 2025 who just don't give a shit about culture, like the Nazis did.0.99
00:19:20.220It's just that like the kind of culture that they're paying attention to is like really degraded.
00:19:25.220Like a lot of our civic life, they're playing it out on this mode of consumption and sort of commercial imagery rather than in like sort of the fine arts.
00:19:34.980Yeah, I mean, I guess this is maybe where I'm just at heart a German intellectual in the mode of Klemperer because I would not consider a yellow M&M or, you know, a Cracker Barrel logo part of anyone's culture.0.51
00:19:48.080This is me being the American. I'm like chomping a hot dog and like saluting for the national anthem. I'm like, no, the Cracker Barrel logo is crucial to my people.
00:20:48.040These were—one of them is a failed painter, right?
00:20:50.680Like, these are people who think they're all about the arts.
00:20:53.880Like, some of their first public works projects are art museums and stuff like that, right?
00:20:58.880Like, times have moved on in some way, but, like, it's very noticeable.
00:21:03.200Maybe the difference we're teasing out here is that, you know, what Trump is presiding over, both with Doge and with these, like, mass disinvestments from things like the National Humanities Foundation, is that there's a libertarian-style disinvestment.
00:21:17.140And, like, flight from the institutions and gutting out of the institutions, whereas the Nazis didn't want those institutions, like, gutted out and their resources removed from them.
00:21:26.740They wanted, in fact, to be in control and to have the gravitas and the status that came with sort of, like, cultural elitism as well.
00:21:34.580Yeah, and I mean, in the end, it often amounted to a degradation, but they didn't think of it that way, right?
00:21:39.320It was not a deliberate kind of gleeful degradation, as you had with something like the judicial system, where they were like, oh, yeah, no, the judge decided, and the judge is independent, ha, ha, ha, right?
00:21:50.200Like, they really did believe in Bayreuth.
00:21:52.720They did believe, I think, in art museums, et cetera, et cetera.0.99
00:21:56.640And part of that is just they emerged from the same cultural background as someone like Victor Klemperer and Thomas Mann, except that they, you know, are just a lot dumber.0.99
00:22:04.780So let's get into one of the big cultural events of the Nazis' first year in power, which is also going to lead us to one of our little pet assholes for this month.0.98
00:22:19.760Yeah, you're going to meet the whole range of new assholes here.0.95
00:22:34.780So, what happens on September 1st?0.98
00:22:43.760So, September 1st, the Nazi party holds its rally in Nuremberg, which becomes sort of this annual thing.
00:22:51.640And Goebbels decides that this needs to be commemorated in images.
00:22:56.340And he turns to a young actress and director named Leni Riefenstahl to film the entire rally.
00:23:42.860This isn't about filming a Hitler speech.
00:23:45.180Hitler is not in the eventual film that she'll deliver that much.
00:23:49.880And certainly its sequels, the two other sequels that she'll make to this movie, will have everything but basically Hitler in it.
00:23:57.300But there's a kind of aesthetic ambition.
00:23:59.480Like, Riefenstahl is an ambitious filmmaker in a way that, you know, if you had just a news crew here, like, they've taken over the news, right?
00:24:06.060They could just be like, send a news crew here.
00:26:18.740But, I mean, this is something that maybe we haven't talked about because we haven't talked about the big Nazi biographies of 1933 that much.
00:26:27.120I don't really want to do like, you know, here's what Goebbels was like.0.76
00:27:44.500So they also live long lives after the war, which has got to be an interesting place in the Germany of, you know, the 1980s and 90s to still have Albert Speer and Lenny Riefenstahl kicking around.
00:27:56.740Yeah, they blazed right through it. It was fine.
00:28:00.920You're like, don't worry, they die peacefully and in their beds.
00:28:28.440Sent her to a boarding school in the Hatz Mountains, which is this very rural, very picturesque part of Germany.0.93
00:28:33.520We need to do, at some point, like, an episode on those, like, elite girls boarding schools in the Alps, which is a whole dark, weird, sort of psychosexually charged gender world.0.99
00:30:14.940I'm just like—but their art is so bad, and they're so reflexive and just repetitive.
00:30:21.120But, like, the idea that, like, civilization was destroying modern humanity was something that left-wingers and right-wingers could almost agree on or where you kind of could watch someone's stuff and not realize that they were a huge right-winger, right?
00:30:34.900Like, they were—you could meet a communist who was like, women should be allowed to sleep with whoever, and kids should run around naked, and people should just work whatever they feel like, right?
00:30:50.160Like, so it's a place where, like, you know, you can have these kind of painters, these kind of dancers, these film directors, et cetera, et cetera, meet, and some of them were super left-wing, some of them were super right-wing, and then some, like, we just don't know, right?
00:31:05.600Like, to give you one example, Mournau, the great film director has this whole movie about, like, a South Sea atoll and, like, the natives there and, like, how they get corrupted by civilization, et cetera, et cetera.
00:31:17.180And, like, all his movies are kind of these kind of, like, noble, savage, kind of proto-fascist treatises. Fritz Lang is, like, a weirdly sort of anti-urbanist guy. But obviously, like, once these people arrive in Hollywood, they're like, oh, yeah, no, I'm not a Nazi. And they weren't. But, like, they kind of spoke the Nazi's language, right? Like, so there is this kind of weird, this weird overlap going on.
00:31:40.380I don't know. I think like when you're looking at somebody's art, like from experience, I think when you're looking at somebody's art or you're reading somebody's writing and you're like, this is giving me a right wing vibe. I tend to try and encourage people to listen to that impulse. Right. It's not coming from nowhere.
00:32:02.240But so this is what I was getting at earlier when I said that, like, the Nazis are just a lot more enmeshed in the cultural politics of their day, also as fans. Like, I think Fritz Lang tells the story, which might be apocryphal, that basically Goebbels invites him and is like, hey, would you mind filming one of our rallies? And Lang is like, I'm outie. And he basically, like, gets a ticket that day.
00:32:23.240So, like, there is this thing where, like, the Nazis are in many ways sort of like a Theodor Adorno or Thomas Mann and Joseph Goebbels might on some arts be like, oh, yeah, that is very interesting.
00:33:39.960Like, there's a bizarre kind of, like,
00:33:41.980let's all pull through kind of movie called Kohlberg
00:33:44.480about an East Prussian town that gets besieged by the French.
00:33:48.540He deputizes like 10,000 Wehrmacht soldiers to film this thing in like late 1944.
00:33:55.320It's like, I don't know, Joseph Goebbels, if you value your life, is that the thing you want to spend 10,000 German troops on?
00:34:02.180But like, no, he really thinks in images.
00:34:04.940Some of that is very canny and very forward-looking.
00:34:07.840But some of it is also this is a guy who believes in this stuff, in the power of images, in the power of culture in a way that, you know, I think you're right that Donald Trump really doesn't.
00:34:19.080That sounds almost a little compulsive also, right?
00:34:21.580Like if you are under bombardment from the allies and you're going in to get the shot, that speaks to me to something a little pathological.
00:34:30.960Like, actually, when you're describing that, I'm thinking of Trump when he got shot, raising his fist up in the air because he knew immediately that he wanted the photo.
00:34:39.400He's not thinking, oh, my God, I just confronted mortality.
00:35:13.480But anyway, so is this how they encounter Riefenstahl, the Nazi regimes?
00:35:18.000Are they, like, are they fans of her work?
00:35:20.100Because she's just a dancer at this point?
00:35:21.780Yeah, so dance is a funny art in the 1930s.
00:35:24.840And here I want to be very careful because there's been a lot of great work and historical work done on art in the Weimar Republic, some by my very good friend Kate Elswit.
00:35:35.640And I don't want to get that wrong, but my impression is that, like, Germany is super important in the dance world.
00:35:40.840A lot of dance is very expressionistic or absurdist or sort of trying to push towards ecstasy.
00:35:46.800Valeska Geert, I think, did a dance that was supposed to represent basically an orgasm.
00:35:51.680And the Nazis had some problems with this, but not the ones that you might think, right?0.63
00:35:57.820They were fine with ecstasy and orgasms, and tightly controlled bodies, like, at peak performance was obviously something they kind of liked.0.63
00:37:02.300They basically think, like, it shouldn't be fully exportable.
00:37:05.300They had a kind of particular hatred for things that they thought of not so much as imports into Germany, but as, like, something anyone could do.
00:37:13.600Very unfairly, they thought of jazz this way.
00:37:16.220They were very, very dismissive of jazz influences.
00:37:19.120Well, it's an American black art form, yeah.
00:39:51.340This is why Germans love nudism so much still.0.90
00:39:53.420This comes out of the early 1900s, and the Nazis were fully on board with that.0.94
00:39:58.720Right. This is a song I play about the United States right all the time, right? This is not an anti-sex philosophy.0.80
00:40:04.600This is a group of people with strong normative ideas about sex, but they actually are like quite enthusiastic about the sex that they enjoy.
00:40:11.820Exactly. Anyway, so she starts in this documentary, and from that she gets slotted into another kind of right-wing filmic obsession, which is the mountain film.
00:40:24.060So this is going back to her, you know, open-air theater when she snuck out of boarding school days.
00:40:30.180Exactly. And this is funny, whereas a lot of the, like, let's get into nature and get naked kind of stuff really could cut across the entire political spectrum,
00:40:38.280The mountain film had clear, far-right kind of leanings.0.99
00:40:42.660It was one of those Weimar cultural products that you watch today, and you're like, oh, yeah, like, everyone in this is a fucking Nazi.0.95
00:40:49.200So when you say the mountain film, could you tell me a little bit about, like, the genre conventions?0.97
00:40:54.220So this would be something—I mean, like, stop me if you get a sense of why this might be something the Nazis like.
00:40:59.620This is about, you know, taciturn men and beautiful women who have to survive in the difficult terrain of the High Alps or in the Himalayas or whatever.0.65
00:41:10.800It's all about self-sacrifice. It's all about overcoming nature. It's all about struggle and death and physical tests, overcoming the weak and niggling kind of strictures of civilization and how really the only way to test your true mettle is by getting above 3,000 meters and just like let your lungs get shredded and like get into an avalanche or whatever, right?
00:41:37.640Yeah, that sounds like Nazi stuff.0.82
00:41:39.020Yeah. And this is where she cuts her teeth. So she co-starred with a guy named Luis Trenka, who did a bunch of these. And he was like friends with Mussolini and Hitler. So like, not subtle where his sympathies lay. Who made a ton of these mountain films in the 1920s and 30s.1.00
00:41:54.460Her first mountain film was The Holy Mountain of 1926, directed by this guy named Arnold Funk.
00:42:03.180She was this kind of nature child dancer who dances in this beguiling way for a mountain climber.
00:42:09.480And she has a pretty successful career as an actress, but lots of mountain films, including The White Hell of Pitzpalü, which I must admit I've never seen, the other ones I have, and The Blue Light.
00:42:19.620What she did on those mountain sets was learn how to get a good shot.
00:42:24.460She's very fascinated with the craft of filmmaking, learns how to use cameras and shoot a scene, learns blocking in a way, frankly, that I think if she had done this stuff in Hollywood, she wouldn't have.
00:42:35.920A lot of these mountain films are, in fact, shot in nature.
00:42:39.280This is something that Weimar Cinema did more than Hollywood or a lot of German expressionist film had been very, very deliberate.
00:42:46.100And, hey, we're putting theater on screen.
00:42:53.120So she's shooting with natural light. Yeah. And she's got these aspirations to capture like transcendent beauty of the body and sort of like natural authenticity. And these, you know, like heights of the spirit. Right. Like now we should probably say that not in a like you have to hand it to Lenny Riefenstahl kind of way, but she is sort of generally agreed upon by historians of film to be really like a pathbreaker in the form. Right.
00:43:20.740So what is it that Leni Riefenstahl is really good at?1.00
00:43:23.960Well, she's very good at using the actual material in front of her.0.98
00:43:29.480Like, she stages relentlessly, even in nature.
00:43:32.480She's not a documentary filmmaker in that way.
00:43:34.260But that was common in documentary filmmaking at the time.
00:43:37.460If you think of something like The Man from Iran or Nanook of the North, it's very clear a lot of that was staged, too.
00:45:43.640It manipulates images. It sort of abstracts from the individual body towards a greater whole.
00:45:50.120And you can imagine why someone like Goebbels wanted that and why someone like Hitler would want that.
00:45:55.140But it is sort of like the moment we kind of get the pictorial language that we would later associate with fascism, right?
00:46:02.940I have the suspicion that when we say, oh, that looks just like a Nazi party rally, what we're really saying is, hey, that looks like a clip from Leni Riefenstahl, right?
00:46:10.680Like, I bet you they were very different to stand through.
00:46:13.320I guess I should have asked my relatives who were at some, but like, you know, they somehow never talked about it.
00:46:21.160But yeah, so my impression is like it would have been very different to be part of this.
00:46:25.200What she captured was kind of an almost impossible image of this totality and reflecting that back, even at people who may have been there.
00:46:35.120I bet you that these things were kind of messy, right?
00:46:37.420Like hundreds of thousands of people constantly marching, like sound amplification technology was terrible.
00:46:43.780It seems very likely that like what we get on screen is the real thing, is the thing that people were supposed to be impressed by.
00:46:51.180The actual image itself was paramount.
00:46:54.500The thing that people were doing was just to produce the image, right?
00:46:57.440And so this is sort of the beginning of the Riefenstahl career that Susan Sontag, friend of the pod, will later thematize in the 1970s in a wonderful essay that we've already talked about on this pod in a very early episode called Fascinating Fascism.
00:47:13.280Do you remember this essay? Do you remember what it's on?
00:47:15.160It's on Riefenstahl's oeuvre and also on sort of other appropriations of fascist aesthetics, right?
00:47:21.260She talks about like the use of Nazi uniforms and like BDSM as well.
00:47:25.800Yeah. So she is reacting to an art show.
00:47:29.460Riefenstahl, after the war, didn't make movies anymore, for obvious reasons, she became a photographer.
00:47:34.780And she had this show in New York of photographs of the Sudanese tribe called the Nuba.
00:47:40.580And there was this kind of facile thing where it's like, oh, here's a woman who was famously associated with white supremacism, you know, making these pictures of black people, right?
00:47:51.300And Susan Sontag here is like, I hate to tell you, Lainey's up to her old tricks.1.00
00:47:55.780This stuff is just as fascist as the other shit.0.98
00:47:58.960She says, quote, what is distinctive about the fascist vision of the old idea of the noble savage is its contempt for all that is reflective, critical, and pluralistic.0.99
00:48:09.280And if you think back to Riefenstahl's approach to dance, you think about her approach to mountain film, it's exactly this.
00:48:16.040Sontag sort of gets the ultimate read on Reef & Style by saying, like, this is this woman's great theme in life.
00:48:22.760It is to turn off your brain, to leap into the unknown, to test your mettle, and to become part of something bigger, whether that's the ocean or, you know, the Nazi party or the mountain or whatever, like, is basically the main through line of this woman's oeuvre.
00:48:42.940She's had one idea exactly in her life, and this is it, right?0.85
00:48:47.120And it's a fascist idea, Sontag thinks, and I think she's right.
00:48:58.920So if the Nazis sort of start stretching their hands out after institutions of power and image making and start thinking about, like, what are we actually for aesthetically?0.61
00:49:08.760What do we want the Third Reich to look like?0.59
00:49:11.040One way you can think about what Riefenstahl, Hitler, and Goebbels are up to, right?0.72
00:49:15.160They're trying to figure out, like, what is our branding going to look like?
00:50:57.780But, like, this is interesting to me that he reads it so carefully, right?
00:51:00.960There's a degree of, like, fascination.
00:51:04.060Is it the fascination of, like, looking at a car wreck on the side of the road?
00:51:07.760Or is there, you know, something maybe a little more, I guess, sophisticated in Mann's approach to reading this Nazi material?
00:51:17.580So I think he has a couple of things going on.
00:51:19.280On the one hand, he's still trying to understand what exactly happened.
00:51:23.420He's also trying to understand who these people are.0.78
00:51:27.040And at the same time, what you don't get with Mann and some of the other emigres as well is to be like, these people are nothing like me.0.59
00:51:35.220He does seem to think that he has a shared cultural foundation with them.
00:51:38.680In later years, he'll write a pretty famous essay called Brother Hitler.
00:51:42.640Like, he's like, I recognize this guy.
00:51:46.840Like, I understand where this guy comes from.
00:51:48.400And he will always, in his American speeches, in his speeches to other Germans, which will be distributed through the BBC,0.96
00:51:55.460He would, in Pacific Palisades, record these speeches, which would be pressed on record in his house, sent, I think, to London by airmail, and then played by the BBC to basically tell Germans, like, you have made a deal with the devil, kill him now, or you will be destroyed and you will deserve it.0.95
00:52:14.840Right. I mean, like really, really amazing stuff.0.79
00:52:17.280But the position that he takes again and again is, I know you and I know him because I recognize myself in you and in him.
00:52:26.640So it's not quite that he's like, I have nothing to say to these people.
00:52:30.860You know, this is a man who himself was kind of a folkish right winger who seemed to think that like German culture, like, oh, you just can't explain it to an outsider.
00:52:39.120And like, you know, had sort of slightly anti-Semitic sides as well.
00:52:44.020Yeah, you know, weird, yeah. And that's part of it, that he's like, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. He's not like, Jesus Christ, get a load of these assholes. He's like, yeah, I can see who this appeals to. That's not me, but I need to understand who these people are.1.00
00:52:58.520I don't know. Like, have you ever had the impulse watching Donald Trump to, like, identify his woundedness or his, like, defensiveness or his denial as, like, a warped or exaggerated version of something you've done?
00:53:12.280And I'm like, oh, yeah, like the impulse to tell a transparent but self-exonerating lie.
00:53:18.980I haven't done it on television, but like I can understand a little more of Donald Trump's psyche than I think it like exactly flatters me to be able to understand.
00:53:31.520For me, I think it's his, the lying, the flop sweat, drenched bullshitting.0.98
00:53:36.600I'm like, I have never found anyone more recognizable in my entire life, right?0.99
00:53:40.160But, like, just, like, the way he, like, gets a question, like, you can see the panic behind the pancake makeup, and you're, like, oh, he's thinking furious, like, oh, fuck, I've never heard of any of this.0.61
00:53:50.260And he's, like, yeah, and you're, like, and then, like, his satisfaction at having given this, like, D-minus answer, and he's, like, nailed it again, Donald.0.53
00:54:15.320And there's also a sense with Donald Trump that, like, I don't feel like I've known anybody quite as well as I know Donald Trump because his psyche is on such a relentless display and has been now for a decade, right?
00:54:33.080But that also means that there's, like, no capacity to surprise anymore.0.98
00:54:37.700Like, everything he does, I'm like, oh, fucking, of course he did that.0.96
00:54:40.080You know, even if it hadn't occurred to me in retrospect, I'm never like, wow, how out of character.0.98
00:54:45.160I'm like, yes, I can reverse engineer exactly his line of thinking, exactly his motivations, exactly the justification he's going to deploy.
00:54:53.440Like, it's never out of pattern, right?
00:54:56.620Yeah, exactly the psycho demon staffer who, like, he talked to right before saying that into cameras.
00:55:02.360Yes, exactly. And I wonder if Thomas Mann is at that point with Hitler yet, or if it's still a little bit of a curio for him.
00:55:11.400I think it's the latter. So he's not quite there yet, partly because, of course, Hitler had withheld himself pretty cannily during the years of his rise. He was not present in people's lives other than as this picture for much of the late 1920s. And some of that is just a media environment, too, right? Like the chance of seeing one of these speeches if you weren't seeking them out was something that didn't really happen to people.
00:55:36.320In reading through this Fanconian Nazi newspaper,
00:55:39.020he comes across a speech of Hitler's that's reproduced in full.
00:56:01.840But also, like, a truly curious figure.
00:56:04.180This is about a man who has just about ruined Thomas Mann's life, right, who he knows will destroy this country that he loves.0.76
00:56:11.240But as he would often when speaking about Hitler in the coming years, Mann's tone is ultimately pitying.0.72
00:56:17.900He says, quote, the thoughts he strung together on this topic helplessly, repetitively, with constant lapses and in a pitiful style are those of a helpless, striving first grade student.0.99
00:56:30.880This answers a question that I have had about Hitler, which is, does he sound stupid in German? Because Donald Trump sounds like embarrassingly stupid in English to an English speaker. But I think the image of Hitler in translation is often of fearsome confidence and competence, right? Is that how it is in the original?1.00
00:56:51.260No, I mean, it's hard with all this historic distance to know how he worked. And we should say that everyone, I mean, listen to FDR fireside chats, right? Like rhetorical styles have obviously evolved once cameras and microphones started capturing them.
00:57:06.960At the same time, I can say he does not sound fully in control of himself. He's not rhetorically brilliant in any way. There's a kind of sudden obviousness to what he's doing and saying. It kind of feels like, I don't know, like a guy who would give a speech in front of, you know, a bunch of veterans or whatever, right?
00:57:27.100It feels like, you don't feel like you're in the hands of a master manipulator.
00:57:32.420I've always found that image of him very hard to match with what I've actually heard.
00:57:35.760In the speeches, Mann is right about the repetitiveness and the lapses.
00:57:40.840Some of that, again, is like he has to shout at the top of his lungs.
00:57:44.160He doesn't read off a paper or a prompter, right?
00:57:47.940So there is an element here of helplessness, I think, that Mann is cuing into.
00:57:54.960And then there's also the gestures that to us just, I mean, that's the thing, gestures evolve and our gestures are so strongly identified with the televisual medium.
00:58:04.280Hitler was among the first politicians to use that medium effectively.
00:58:08.340He did a lot of, like, listeners can't see the gesture that I am making into my Zoom camera, but like Hitler, when he's not making the Nazi salute, he does a lot of like fast reaching into the air and then grabbing back.0.85
00:58:21.400And it's like, you know, Obama did the like thumb and forefinger, like pinch, like, let me be clear, you know, and Hitler goes like, yeah, it's like, it's almost like a cheerleader move.0.60
00:58:35.120He also does this kind of, at least in the beginning, I think he does this interesting thing where he sort of screws his hand up, which I think American politicians avoid because it looks fey and a little swish, to be honest, right?0.93
00:58:48.640Like, he also sometimes, like, when he's, like, really coming from the heart, he'll, again, listeners can see this, but I hope I can describe it as I do it.0.81
00:58:56.980He'll put his fists sort of in front of his chest and then kind of push them outwards.
00:59:01.820Yeah, like, the back of his hands together.
01:00:29.800At the same time, it was cannily staged.
01:00:31.500He did take acting lessons with a screen actor, I believe, in the 20s.
01:00:37.040Like, a lot of this stuff is probably second nature at this point in 1933, meaning what looks like this guy doesn't have full control over himself, which is what Charlie Chaplin will parody so beautifully in The Great Dictator, unlike what Chaplin seems to think it is,
01:00:53.800is actually a pretty carefully choreographed performance of unhingedness and of desublimation in some way,0.75
01:01:03.500as opposed to someone genuinely fucking going off.
01:01:07.920It's not meant to convey sort of the disconnect from reality,0.88
01:01:15.260but in fact like an overwhelm of authenticity that can no longer be contained, right?
01:01:20.000He just feels so passionately that his passion, his beliefs are bursting forth out of his body.
01:01:26.100Yeah, and I think it's supposed to kind of mimic something that's happening in some listeners, right?
01:01:30.980He's staging the kind of abreactive process that he wants to effect in his listeners,
01:01:37.080but he kind of becomes there standing like the matador and like a bullfight or whatever,
01:01:40.980who like stands in for the people in the audience.
01:01:45.700It's interesting to think about Chaplin in this regard, who obviously, like, becomes fascinated with Hitler because they look a lot alike, but whose parody entirely relies on the idea that this guy doesn't have any control of himself.
01:01:58.820And yet, I think Chaplin and Hitler were closer than they thought, in the sense that they were both really good screen actors who knew how to direct themselves, basically.
01:02:07.740Be like, no, that's not my good angle, right?
01:02:10.660And if anyone wants to read more about that, I once wrote a long article about Chaplin's Hitler performances.
01:02:16.700It's an academic article, which I'll link to in the show notes.
01:03:56.460After 1945, it's people who lived through 1933. Mann, Adorno, Klemper, Arendt, right? It's going to be people who lived through 1933 who are going to shape what we understand Nazism to have been. Its origins, its psychic qualities, etc., etc., right?
01:04:15.640So I do think that's really, really important that we're already kind of seeing the beginning of a post-war analysis of this phenomenon among these people who are right now just like for the first time catching their breath after fleeing.
01:04:45.640As a next date I wanted to point to is actually something that Mann anticipates in his diary entry that I quoted, which is something that happens on September 22nd.
01:04:57.380Like, we get exile culture starting to form outside of Germany, and we get Nazi cultural politics and Nazi culture sort of forming inside of Germany.
01:05:08.020Mann writes of Hitler in that same speech, the same thing that we actually kind of remarked on, on that speech of Hitler's right after he gets appointed chancellor.
01:05:15.340Remember that I was like, I didn't know it was going to be that much about, like, the press and, like, the movies being bad and, like, literature.
01:05:23.960I'm like, I thought it was going to be, like, taxes and, like, the farmers, coal miners or whatever.
01:05:28.920No, like, Hitler, like, is fixated on cultural issues.
01:05:33.540Mann writes, there's no doubt that unlike people like Göring and Ruhm, Hitler is not concerned with the war, but with German culture.
01:05:41.800Now, we might be like, Thomas, I think he might also be preoccupied with the war.
01:05:46.780But at the same time, like, I think he's just reacting to that one speech.
01:05:49.940He's basically saying, like, I thought it was going to be like about like, oh, we're going to undo Versailles and we're going to like invade France.
01:05:55.800But instead he's like, movies are bad.
01:06:26.020And to some extent, this is borne out.
01:06:28.000So in September, the planning ramps up for the Haus der Kunst.
01:06:32.240This is a massive art gallery in Munich, one of the first monumental buildings specifically commissioned by the new regime.
01:06:39.220We'll talk about this in October, but the regime was largely kind of just reaping the dividends of Weimar projects.0.68
01:06:45.920Like Hitler would be like at an Autobahn opening, be like, I will forever be associated with the Autobahn.0.78
01:06:50.600Well, if an Autobahn gets built in 1933, the planning stages are 10 years behind, right?0.73
01:06:55.960Like, so he's just kind of taking credit the same way that like Republicans will take credit for like stuff from the Inflation Reduction Act right now.
01:07:02.880Right. But like the Haus der Kunst in Munich is a Nazi project. And they're starting to fast track that and be like, no, this is ours. And it's an art gallery. And then a law announced on September 22nd establishes the Reichskulturkammer, which is this massive centralized and fully Nazified organization for all of the arts, right? Dance, decorative arts, painting, theater, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?0.86
01:07:35.200The president was Goebbels himself, because, you know, if you want it done right.
01:07:39.680And it's his big bid to really pump some money into the arts.
01:07:45.220And I think there are two things that are important about the Reichskulturkammer.
01:07:48.500One is, we have to be clear that this was a kind of art subvention system,
01:07:55.820really of a par with what we would get in Western democracy,
01:07:59.240really quite, they're spending quite a bit of money.
01:08:01.580And the second thing we have to emphasize is that the art that comes out of it is uniformly god-awful, right?0.77
01:08:08.600For the next 12 years, the RKK mostly makes obvious just how hollow and how inert and how pedestrian the Nazis' ideas of art were.0.75
01:08:19.380Because under its auspices, a bunch of mediocrities and has-beens can sort of stew endlessly about the kind of art they detested while producing very little of lasting value of their own.0.58
01:08:31.580I thought I might introduce you to one such figure, and no one has to remember this guy at all.
01:08:35.640In fact, if you forget about him the moment you move on to your next podcast, I will be pleased.
01:08:41.340You should all feel proud of yourselves.
01:08:43.900A mediocrity. Do not remember this man.
01:08:46.920Franz Friedrich Blunk is this mediocre writer well past his prime by the time 1933 rolls around.
01:08:53.660He joins the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1933, which means he's taking the spot of someone who got thrown out for being Jewish and or left-wing, right?
01:09:04.520A month later, he takes on the vice presidency of that organization, again, replacing someone who had resisted the Nazis, right?
01:09:10.800This is where Mann's brother Heinrich has just been kicked out.
01:09:14.180I don't know who the vice president was, but he took over him.0.95
01:09:16.780So, right, like, he's rising through the ranks because a bunch of people who know their shit in the arts are like, yeah, I'm out, you guys.1.00
01:09:24.920In October, he will join 87 other writers in publicly pledging fealty to Adolf Hitler.0.99
01:09:31.520Before long, he runs the literature section of the RKK.
01:09:35.880And in the following years, Blunk's career has all the hallmarks of a Nazi artist, and I use artist in a pretty loose sense here, biography.
01:09:45.640He's extraordinarily productive, writing 97 books during the Third Reich, exactly zero of which appear to be worth reading.
01:09:52.740Yeah, this is a thing, the, like, extremely prolific but absolutely talentless and, like, ultimately very repetitive writer.
01:10:01.600Like, I think we touch on this with Phyllis a lot, too, like, in our Schlafly episodes.0.57
01:10:05.160It's just somebody who produces reams and reams and reams of the same dumbass thing over and over again.0.74
01:10:12.680Yeah, the Nazis created a platform for it called the Reichskulturkammer.0.96
01:10:16.620We created a platform for it called Substack.1.00
01:10:21.640I got to get off that fucking thing.0.98
01:10:23.220Anyway, yeah, and throughout it all, he fully accommodated himself to what Klemperer calls LTI, right?0.99
01:10:32.460For instance, one of the things that the Nazis had these people do was go abroad and be like, you've been lied to.
01:10:37.820The same thing that Orbán's Hungary does now, you know.0.56
01:10:40.560Like Shen Yun. Like, actually, China was beautiful before communism.
01:10:44.940Or, I guess, Putin-affiliated artists who are like, I was able to walk around just fine.
01:10:49.380It's like, yeah, you're a Ukrainian 12-year-old?
01:10:51.660Because, like, I don't think we were saying that, like, Anna Netrebko is having problems.
01:10:55.680I think we're, like, a little offended for the Ukrainians you're naming right now.
01:10:59.480So, for instance, he does this lecture in London.
01:11:02.740And there are, right, Nazi organizations abroad.
01:11:04.800There are German immigrant communities that welcome this stuff, including in the United States, right, the German-American Bund.
01:11:10.560But there's also like homegrown fascists that are Nazi sympathetic in places like the UK and the US.
01:11:17.080Yeah. I don't know where these guys would have spoken. I think because it's culture, it would have been more like their cultural institutes or whatever. And there he says, true poetic activity is freer in the Third Reich than it has ever been before.
01:11:32.740Yeah, because they've unleashed the spirit of authenticity that's just been, you know, so suppressed by the cosmopolitans and the modernity and the internationalists, right?
01:11:43.140This is just like the sense of like an authentic spirit.
01:11:47.160And they always talk in these like vague, almost like new agey woo-woo terms.
01:11:58.560And it's like, define your terms because you're never specifying what you're talking about.
01:12:03.520Exactly. And I think the way everyone on the conservative right and among their reactionary centrist enablers agrees that our universities have somehow fallen short of some standard that they never bothered to articulate and can't describe, it's a similar kind of thing.
01:12:19.680Like you get this kind of cultural pessimist idea, but really what it is, is resentment mongering, right?
01:12:24.880Like, what he's saying is, like, Alfred Dublin, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Leon Feuchtwanger had more readers on the technicality that wrote better books.0.96
01:12:33.740And I'm butthurt about this, and I, like, need to make it their fucking problem, right?0.94
01:12:38.340Which is the same way that all these fucking failures in the Trump administration, like, that's how they look at the universities.0.98
01:12:44.420It's like, no, it's not your woke professor that's the reason that you got to be in that class.1.00
01:12:49.040It's that you are a garbage human with garbage thoughts and a substack.1.00
01:12:53.900Yeah, there's like a needful aspiration for the recognition of the hated and exiled other.1.00
01:12:59.620You see this a lot in our conservatives, too.
01:13:01.600And it's like, well, if you hate us so much, why don't you leave us alone?
01:13:04.900Why do you need my approval on top of everything else?
01:13:07.600Why do you need me to debate you and be owned?
01:13:10.800You know, like it reminds me of like post-separation abuse a little bit.1.00
01:13:14.460Like, well, you said she's a lying bitch and you threw her out of your house.1.00
01:13:18.180But why are you now showing up at her job?1.00
01:13:20.420You know, there's an affinity there that is sort of like malignant.
01:13:23.900Yeah, and I do think that, like, Mann is getting at something like that with his striving first grade student remark. He's like, these people want something from me. Like, they say they're done with me. Germany is done with me. And then they also, like, they're not happy. The recognition they're getting, they don't want from people they don't want it from, right?
01:13:40.760They are bigger believers in the world they're trying to destroy than one might assume from the way they talk about it and the way they're going about dismantling it.0.98
01:13:49.940But yeah, so that is September 1933, a moment when German culture finds itself at a crossroads and everyone's trying to figure out what the fuck German culture is.0.96
01:13:58.820And there's fights over it and the Nazis are producing a whole lot of bad stuff.
01:14:02.800You know, right now we're in a moment in America where like it's not really possible to have meaningful like political struggle, let alone like class struggle. Right. So it's all getting sublimated into the arts and into even like consumption and the weird signifiers attached to like what you buy and consume.
01:14:19.900And it's just a very fraught battleground in part because the other avenues for this kind of expression have been foreclosed, but also because I think it is it is meaningful in its own right.
01:14:29.380That's the thing that I wanted to drive home, that like, in some way, the image of this era, both among its critics and those who feel like they want to bring it back or whatever, is already here, right?
01:14:42.260Like, the analysis of fascism has drawn on these people that we're reading and their analyses of this year.
01:14:48.840And similarly, our understanding of what Nazi Germany looked like, when we were like, oh, this isn't really Nazi Germany, like when we are trying to compare these two pictures, we are looking at pictures that probably in March of 1933 would not have been true, but now in September 1933, we get them.
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01:15:15.020our episodes are produced and edited by mark yoshizumi and katie lao our title music is by katie lao