Wasn’t it DH Lawrence who said that dancing is making love to music? These guys rock.
Salon Kitty was a real brothel in Berlin. The SD really did use it for espionage. Minister Goebbels was especially fond of the girls’ lesbian sex shows which in other contexts could get women sent to a concentration camp.
Lesbianism wasn’t particularly punished in Nazi Germany. It was discouraged, and you certainly could be arrested for it, but it wasn’t considered anywhere near as bad as male homosexuality.
If that’s the criterion, The Producers did it better.
Of course, one might be tempted to interpret all those uniforms and shiny boots and Sam Browne belts and goose-stepping formations as a fetishistic sublimation of homoerotic impulses.
But that’s just armchair psychology. I have no idea what a psychiatrist would say about it.
Homoerotic fetishism is in the eye, or possibly some other organ, of the beholder.
I suspect that the Nazi regime (like most authoritarian regimes) liked to project a “pure” facade-beneath which was rampant corruption. Take Air Marshall Goering-he was a pervert and lecher.
I don’t know about Hitler-he seemed asexual.
But most pof the high-ranking nazis has a lot of skeletons in their closets.
I dunno about that, but he was definitely a drug addict, a thief, and an all-around voluptuary.
Why were the Nazis so opposed to the Bauhaus? I mean, a group of artists and archietcts-how does that threaten anybody? I recall that the Nazis forced the school to shut doe\wn, and most of the faculty left the country.
You mean like Hitler and Speer?
I still haven’t figured out why they hated the Jews. Were there a lot of Jewish Bauhaus artists?
IIRC, there were other genres of art they weren’t find of either. Socialist Realism – you know, the proud fatory worker stuff – and I think officially they frowned on impressionism, but I think Goering stole a bunch of it anyway. They were against ‘decadent’ artm whatever that means.
Because Modernist architecture is Jewish cosmopolitan Bolshevik decadence and a threat to authentic German art.
Interestingly, a lot of those architects ended up here, which is why Tel Aviv features one of the finest collections of Bauhaus buildings in the world.
Pruitanical? Goebbels used his position as propaganda minister to boink every UFA starlet he could, even though he had a wife and six kids.
IRT Hitler’s dislike of Modernism; I can’t be too jugdemental. As a middle-age white guy, Hip-Hop came around in my life at about the same time that Modernism did in Hitler’s, and like a lot of middle-age white guys it strikes me as a bunch of self-important, ignorant louts taking a shit on the lid of the treasure chest of 4,000 years of human culture instead of opening it and using it as a resouce. But that doesn’t mean I’d deny them a livelyhood if I had the power to do so.
Well, Tel Aviv IS a Jewish cosmopolitan city.
Because Hitler was an artist. (That’s the difference between Hitler and, say, Franco, who has been described as “a cop, not an artist.”) You must understand, like all forms of totalitarianism, Nazism claimed authority over not only government and economy, but society and culture, bringing all together in lines with a unifying vision. And Hitler favored a heroic, uplifting, style of art, and was down on abstract art, expressionism, everything he regarded as “Degenerate Art.” “Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized,” said Hitler.
As for Nazi architecture, James Howard Kunstler in The City in Mind, chapter on Berlin, states:
Bauhaus architecture, on the other hand, was purely mechanistic and functionalistic, sending a message that architecture should send no message; that would not do.
The linkage between radical German nationalism and radical antisemitism went back to the early 19th Century. (See Wagner’s “Judaism in Music,” 1850). 19th-Century nationalism in general was bound up with the idea of every “race” or “nation” being a hereditary group with its own Volksgeist or “race spirit.” It was a mystical idea, and Nazi ideology was expressly based on it. See the documentary [German nationalism in the 19th Century took a particularly xenophobic form, thanks in part to Bismarck. Also from The City in Mind:
The Jews, of course, were alien, rootless, cosmopolitan, etc. – the “mushroom of humanity,” as Hitler called them, springing up everywhere overnight with no deep roots in the soil. They were not German, not even European, in origin, and no matter how long they lived in one place in Europe they could never truly belong there, never be part of the race-community.
There were older reasons. In medieval Europe, in most times and most places, Jews could not own land, could not even work land as peasants or serfs. There was no clear distinction, then and there, between owning land and ruling it – to own land was to have political authority over those who lived on it – so Jewish landowners, even serfs with subtenants, might conceivable rule over Christians, which was unacceptable. Nor could Jews serve in most military forces. Nor, of course, in the Church. In short, all respectable, honorable places in European society were denied to them.
But Jews were allowed to be merchants, artisans, and professionals. Also collection agents, factors, and tax-collectors for Gentile landlords and royalty. Also moneylenders, because the medieval Church, following St. Thomas Aquinas’ Christianization of the philosophy of Aristotle, held with Aristotle that interest on money is somehow unnatural, gold being an inanimate substance that does not grow; so Christians were forbidden to engage in “usury,” defined as charging any interest at all on a loan; but Jews could. Naturally, they developed into a mercantile culture, becoming sharp traders, and valuing money because it was the only thing of any value they could have. “The American nation makes the Negro clean its boots, and then proves the inferiority of the Negro from the fact that he is a bootblack,” said George Bernard Shaw. In the same way, Europeans, having forced Jews into such roles and livelihoods, came to view Jews as bloodsucking merchants, moneylenders and thieves by their hereditary nature. See the Nazi propaganda film, [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcyCHV4bALg]Der Ewige Jude](]Occult History of the Third Reich.[/url) (The Eternal Jew.)
From the common working person’s point of view, Jews were exploiters because they represented the exploitation they could see. A Russian peasant might say, “Every kopeck I earn goes into the pocket of some damned Jew!” Ignoring that the Jewish factor to whom he paid his rents had to remit nearly all of it to a Gentile landlord, the Jewish shopkeeper had to buy from Gentile-owned factories, etc. As George Orwell wrote in his 1945 essay “Antisemitism in Britain:”
Before the Enlightenment, anti-Jewish prejudice – Judenhaas, “Jew Hate,” in German – was mostly religious. That went back at least to Martin Luther – “Trust no fox upon his green heath, nor a Jew upon his plighted word.” From that point of view, a converted Jew stopped being a Jew. There were myths and conspiracy theories about Jews, but they took the form of the blood libel, or Jews poisoning wells to cause plagues – preposterous, but at any rate things not completely impossible when attributed to a poor and powerless minority.
In the late 18th Century came a gradual Jewish emancipation throughout Europe, the abolition of the outmoded medieval restrictions on them. One side effect of this was that, to some minds, it now made it possible to conceive of the Jews as powerful. A lot of conspiracy theorizing emerged in the wake of the French Revolution – see Abbe Barruel – and this synergized with anti-Jewish feeling to form a new racial and conspiratorial “anti-semitism” (a phrase coined by Wilhelm Marr at the foundation of the Anti-Semitic League in 1879).
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Combined with all of the above was the rise of Communist and Socialist movements. A purportedly rationalistic creed proclaiming the international identity of the working class was, of course, directly at odds with mystic German nationalism. And Marx was a (non-practicing) Jew, and many prominent socialists in Europe, such as Trotsky, were Jews, and many rank-and-file socialist revolutionaries were Jews – it’s not hard to see how a despised minority would be attracted to a doctrine that promised equality for all. The best lie is one with a kernel of truth in it, and the best of all is one the liar sincerely believes. The idea of an “International Jewish-Communist Conspiracy” was utter nonsense, but Hitler and many leading Nazis earnestly believed in it. In fact, they believed Jews were to blame for Communism and for Capitalism. National Socialism was supposed to be an alternative to both.
Long before Hitler came to power, his principal war aim was to destroy the nations of Poland and Russia – not simply to destroy Soviet Communism; not simply to conquer Poland and Russia and exploit them like a colony in Africa; but to destroy them utterly as nations, and build a greater Germany on their bones, thus transforming Germany into a continental power to rival the United States. All this is well-documented from Hitler’s own words.
From Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties, by Paul Johnson, Chapter 10, “The End of Old Europe”:
Same book, Chapter 11, “The Watershed Year”:
Pride goeth.
Of course, whether the Nazis were “Puritans” depends on how you define the term. When Cromwell’s Puritans took over England, they chopped down village maypoles, forbade the celebration of Christmas, came down on everything they regarded as heathen or pre-Christian. The Nazis, OTOH, were openly leery of Christianity, and reached back to pre-Christian Teutonic mythology and religion – as they imagined it. Certainly the idea of worshipping a German or Aryan “race spirit” would have utterly perplexed Hermann the Cheruscan. Nevertheless, the Nazis, especially the SS and the Hitler Youth, played up runic symbols, Norse/Germanic gods, etc. Himmler’s SS headquarters at Wewelsburg Castle was essentially a neopagan cult center.
Jeez, did I push the wrong button. 