The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture 9780674973985

Citation preview

THE NAZI- FASCIST NEW ORDER FOR EU RO PEAN CULTURE

The Nazi-Fascist New Order for

European Culture Benjamin G. Martin

Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2016

Copyright © 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Martin, Benjamin George, author. Title: The Nazi-fascist new order for European culture / Benjamin G. Martin. Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016013875 | ISBN 9780674545748 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: National socialism and intellectuals. | Nazi propaganda. | Fascist propaganda. | Europe—Civilization—20th century. Classification: LCC DD256.6 .M37 2016 | DDC 940.53/4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016013875

For Johanna

Contents

Introduction A New Cultural Order for Europe

1

1.

Creating Cultural Networks

12

2.

Cooperation or Capitulation?

3.

The European Character of the German–Italian Axis

4.

A Radicalized, “Pure” Inter-Nationalism

5.

New Orders in Berlin and Rome

6.

European Culture under German Hegemony

7.

The Uses and Disadvantages of a völkisch European Culture 224

44

109

149 180

Conclusion International Culture as an Ideological Battleground

Abbreviations Notes

279

283

Acknowledgments Index

353

349

74

263

THE NAZI- FASCIST NEW ORDER FOR EU RO PEAN CULTURE

INTRODUCTION

A New Cultural Order for Europe

After Hitler’s crushing victory over France in June 1940, the Nazi leadership planned a radical reorganization of Europe. At a secret meeting of German officials in Berlin on July 18, Joseph Goebbels’s close collaborator, Leopold Gutterer, outlined the Propaganda Ministry’s vision of the future. “Germany,” he announced, “will take over the new ordering of Europe, especially its political leadership” and “will give new stimulus to the decayed economic situation.” This, his listeners knew, was the “New Order” in Europe (Neuordnung Europas) that was already the subject of intense speculation across the continent. With France crushed, Britain apparently close to defeat, and neither the United States nor the Soviet Union yet involved in the conflict, Hitler’s Germany appeared already to have won the war, and was in a position to dictate the New Order that would define the peace. Economists reignited long-standing visions of an integrated European economy, perhaps with a single currency. Jurists and political theorists outlined schemes for a European “Great Space,” unified by an expanded German Reich and cordoned off by a “European Monroe Doctrine.” But a political or economic New Order, Gutterer explained, would not be enough. To achieve real, lasting hegemony, Germany would also need to “be leading in the cultural-political field,” seizing this position from France. Hitler’s empire in Europe required a New Order for European culture. This book tells the story of how Nazi Germany, in close cooperation with fascist Italy and with the collaboration of intellectuals and officials from across the continent, created a cultural new order in Europe. Beginning already in 1934, Germans and Italians reshaped the forums and institutions 



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

through which continental cultural elites interacted, recast the legal and economic structures that controlled the transnational market in cultural goods, and redefined ideological attitudes about what “European culture” was or should be. This project—what might be called the soft power of Nazi and fascist imperialism—formed an important element of both regimes’ efforts to achieve hegemony in Europe. It succeeded in mobilizing supporters across the continent. It lasted nearly as long as Hitler’s regime, collapsing only when the Allies’ military victories made it impossible to proceed. Reworking institutions and ideas in the fields of film, classical music, and literature, the Nazi-fascist cultural New Order marked a crucial episode in the history of the idea, and the reality, of European culture. ◆

◆

◆

The belief that a multinational, imperial order required a cultural order was not new. Ideological and concrete means by which to acculturate the periphery to the tastes and values of the imperial center have been standard elements of imperial projects for centuries. One thinks of the way Louis XIV made cultural prestige central to France’s European hegemony, of the reach of London’s standard of “civilization” in supporting the British Empire’s world system, or indeed of the role of “soft power” in sustaining the global leadership of the United States. But in the early twentieth century, questions of culture were connected to the problem of international order in a uniquely powerful way. This was so because, in the aftermath of World War I, revolutionary changes in Europe’s political and economic systems coincided with radical transformations in the structures of its cultural life. Empires fell, new states were born, and continental Europe began its ill-fated experiment with liberal democracy and the collective security promised by the League of Nations. The world economic system that had propelled Europe through the nineteenth century gave way to a new global economic order that shunted the continent from center to periphery. At the same time, the European worlds of art, music, and letters were convulsed by technological, social, and stylistic changes. European elites’ demands for stronger national cultural identity seemed affirmed by U.S. President Wilson’s call for a world order built on national self-determination. But telegraph, radio, and the movies made a mockery of national borders; cultural consumers, offered new choices, were revealing a taste for things foreign; and modernist trends in the arts were rejecting national traditions in favor of “international styles.”

I NT RODUC T I ON



These developments raised difficult questions about the place of national cultural identities and traditions in a Europe shaken by simultaneous and overlapping processes of both nationalization and internationalization. In the decades between the world wars, these issues were debated in the shadow of the era’s great battle of ideologies, as liberalism, communism, and fascism competed to offer a convincing model of modernity. In this context, it was understood that any vision of international political, legal, or economic order must be accompanied by an international vision of cultural order. “Order,” though, means at least two things. One of its meanings is organization. This was the concern of those liberal intellectuals and statesmen who promoted a new international order through ambitious visions of crossborder intellectual cooperation or “cultural internationalism” in the 1920s. Emblematic was the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC), founded in Geneva by the League of Nations in 1922 to help forge peace and cooperation among states by promoting exchanges among scientists and men of letters, advancing “international education,” and leading efforts to organize intellectuals (or “intellectual workers”) as a social group in the new international landscape. But “order” also means hierarchy or rank. And it was the hierarchical aspects of international cultural life that commanded the attention of Nazis and Italian fascists in the 1930s. For the Nazis, “cultural internationalism” could be understood only as an adjunct of the hated Versailles system, designed to benefit the hegemony of the Western powers by permanently enshrining Germany’s humiliation at the end of World War I. The very word “international” served Nazis mostly as a term of abuse, linked in the Nazi worldview to communism and “international Jewry.” Above all, conservative German intellectuals had not forgotten how the French and their allies, having labeled Germans barbarians during the war, had made the exclusion of German scholars a fundamental organizing principle of the postwar system of scholarly, scientific, and cultural institutions. Hitler withdrew Germany from the League of Nations on October 19, 1933. Italy had been among the war’s victors, and Mussolini, in power since 1922, kept his country in the League of Nations until the end of 1937. But by the mid-1930s, as Italians confidently promoted fascism as the solution to Europe’s economic and political crises, state officials and pro-fascist intellectuals shared the Germans’ perception that liberal internationalism served the hegemonic interests of the Western powers. The postwar order prevented Italy from expanding in the



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

Mediterranean and held the continent hostage to the supposedly bankrupt values of nineteenth-century liberalism. The basis for the partnership between Nazi Germany and fascist Italy that emerged in 1936 rested, even more than on their anticommunism, on the shared desire to upend the liberal international order. This common enemy, shared by Hitler’s vision of an expanded German Reich, dominant on the continent and hungry for Lebensraum (living space) in the east, and by Mussolini’s dream of a revived Roman Empire in the Mediterranean, formed the basis of the “Italo- German revolutionary alliance against the West.” Even before that alliance was sealed as the “Rome-Berlin Axis” in 1936, German and Italian cultural officials had begun to see each other as partners in a common project of cultural revisionism, forging a revolutionary alliance against the hegemony of the liberal-democratic vision of European civilization. The core of this campaign was a sustained effort to remake the international structures of European cultural life, creating a rival network of institutions and individuals from across Europe in a radical right-wing form of international cultural cooperation. Beginning in the mid-1930s and accelerating during the war, Nazi leaders created transnational organizations for European filmmakers, writers, composers, and other intellectuals under the aegis of a German-led European empire. Supported by Mussolini and Hitler’s Axis partnership, Germans and Italians used these institutions successfully to rally intellectuals and cultural producers from across the continent around an ultraconservative, nationalist vision of European culture by addressing the practical interests and most deeply held values of national elites throughout Europe. The Nazi-fascist New Order in culture was “new,” then, in the sense that it aimed to replace the international cultural and intellectual system created after 1919 by the victors of the First World War. According to its supporters, however, the Axis’s cultural New Order would be new simply by bringing organization and hierarchy to discipline the chaos that had characterized Europe’s cultural life since World War I. For conservatives, the signs of this chaos were everywhere. Modernist styles in art, music, and literature rejected age-old standards of taste. An emerging popular culture sent young Europeans flocking to Hollywood movies and jazz dances, embracing the vagaries of fashion over the rootedness of tradition. Chaos, moreover, pervaded

I NT RODUC T I ON



the economic realities of cultural producers. Bourgeois men of letters, their savings wiped out by inflation, resented being made into producers in a competitive market. Composers and performing musicians found their livelihoods threatened by new recording and broadcasting technologies. Europe’s film industries, already overwhelmed by the success of Hollywood movies on the continent, struggled to respond to the arrival of sound film at the end of the 1920s. Leading figures in many cultural fields concluded that the free-market liberalism typical of the 1920s was profoundly inappropriate to cultural life. More and more cultural producers questioned the value of the autonomy promised them by liberal democracy and looked to the state to rescue culture from market forces and to defend their interests. These were the concerns that Mussolini’s and Hitler’s dictatorships addressed through the institutions they created to orga nize, regiment, and patronize cultural life in Italy and Germany. Institutions like Goebbels’s Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer) and Italy’s Fascist Confederation of Professionals and Artists (Confederazione fascista dei professionisti e degli artisti) operated not only through repression and censorship, but also by channeling patronage to members and representing their professional interests. These institutions enjoyed the cooperation of leading cultural figures in Germany and Italy because they responded to the long-standing belief that the state should play a stronger role in promoting and defending national cultures in the face of the rapid internationalization and modernization of cultural life. The problem of how a national culture could survive in the face of international trends was, of course, not unique to Italy or Germany. The issue was most acute in Europe’s smaller nations, such as Finland or Romania, already at the periphery of continental cultural networks, where the project of forging (or “defending”) a national culture was a burning issue of the age. By the mid-1930s, conservatives discerned a European-wide field of struggle, pitting the creative forces committed to nationalism against various internationalisms—liberal, communist, American, or Jewish—that seemed destructive of every thing conservatives held dear. The continental scope of these concerns offered international political opportunities. Already in 1926, Hitler had concluded in Mein Kampf that a lasting victory for radical conservative nationalism could only come when the ultranationalist, völkisch worldview was just as “centrally organized and directed” as was the “international



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

worldview” led by organized Marxism. Germany’s path to European hegemony lay, that is, not only in rearmament and expansion, but also in forging an international cultural coalition in defense of nationalist values. In power, Hitler did not concern himself with matters of cultural organizing. But Goebbels—in charge of Nazi propaganda but also of German music, film, literature, and the fine arts— did. Building such a coalition was the goal of the organizations at the heart of this study: the Union of National Writers (founded in 1934), the Permanent Council for International Cooperation among Composers (1934), the International Film Chamber (1935), and the European Writers Union (1941). Combining a celebration of Europe’s high-cultural values and achievements with a nationalist and anti-Semitic vision of Europe as composed of “pure” national traditions, these and other institutions enacted a cultural model calibrated to appeal to the concerns of conservative elites across the continent. Ironically, these institutions were built on practices of the kind associated with precisely the internationalism that Nazis and fascists rejected. Founding multilateral institutions with regular conferences, subcommittees, and multi-language journals, Nazis and fascists deftly deployed what have been called “the mechanics of internationalism” for political ends antithetical to the internationalist spirit. Gaining control over these mechanics promised to grant an expansionist, imperialist Germany access to a valuable tool with which to penetrate other nations’ cultural markets, influence their cultural policies, and steer their citizens’ attitudes and values to a new moral vision. Such organizations promised hegemony for Hitler’s Reich, serving Germany’s ambitions in peace and, eventually, in war. These institutions mirrored darkly the concerns with international order that had motivated the intellectuals associated with the League of Nations in the 1920s, but with crucial differences. Like the ICIC, Axis leaders organized intellectuals across borders, forged transnational networks, and promoted the economic interests of certain classes of artists and writers through copyright reform. Cultural officials in Germany and Italy shared with cultural internationalists grand visions of all-encompassing schemes for the organization of knowledge and planned massive congresses in countless fields of culture and scholarship. Unlike liberal internationalists, however, the Axis bodies based their work first and foremost on national allegiance. It has become commonplace to note that internationalism and nationalism are not opposites, but dialectically related terms that only make sense as a pair. But

I NT RODUC T I ON



the totalitarian internationalism of the Nazi-fascist Axis offered the specter of something else: a model of transnational cooperation based on the values of the most intense, aggressive, and racist national spirit. An equally important difference was the Axis’s emphasis on Europe as opposed to a world order. League supporters and cultural internationalists, although dominated by men (and a few women) from Europe, operated in and defended an implicitly global space of the “half-liberal, half-imperialist order” of the early twentieth century, whose economic capital was London and whose cultural capital was Paris. But in the 1930s that order appeared doomed. Instead, as economists and some political theorists perceived, the world was breaking into blocs. Britain withdrew to its empire, locking in access to resources and markets through treaties and tariff s. The United States fell back on its massive domestic market, secured thorough protectionist mea sures. Nazi Germany, lacking an empire or a large domestic market, responded to global economic crisis by imposing controls on currency exchange and erecting a continent-wide system of barter trade. The basis was thereby laid for an autarchic European bloc, that is, a self-sufficient economic entity. The pro-Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt influentially outlined a future order dominated by a small group of “Great Spaces.” It was against this background that Nazis and fascists cooperated in cultural institutions which, even when they used the word “international” in their names, pursued Europeanist aims. They gathered almost exclusively European participants, streamlined and standardized intra-European exchanges, and enacted protectionist mea sures against non-European agents. They articulated a matching set of cultural ideas, aggressively promoting a self-styled European cinema and European literature. Th is was a cultural order designed to correspond to and support a future European “great space,” integrated and autarchic, suggesting a harmony of interests among its members while ultimately serving Germany’s domination of the continent. As given form by Axis-led institutions, “European culture” played a major role in the practical and ideological construction of an imperial space of political domination and economic exploitation. Mobilizing culture in an explicitly “European” form, moreover, allowed Nazis and fascists to draw on the deep resonance that the idea of Europe had for cultural elites from Norway to Bulgaria. The interwar decades, precisely because they saw a crisis of European civilization, witnessed an unparalleled outpouring of concern with the meaning and value of Europe’s



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

cultural identity. As the continent’s global hegemony was challenged by new powers—the United States and the USSR—which had mastered technology and yet appeared beholden to materialist and mercantile values, many European intellectuals emphasized the continent’s distinct and specific culture over the purportedly universal contributions of European civilization. Such ideas offered an opening to Italian fascists, who began in the early 1930s to present Italy as uniquely able to lead Europe because of its brilliant Roman and Renaissance legacy and fascism’s supposedly more spiritual sense of Europe’s meaning and ideals. The Western democracies, by contrast, were stuck in a moribund ideology and in hock to the United States, their flaccid liberalism polluted by American materialism. These powers, unable to master the crises of laissez-faire capitalism and liberal democracy, could clearly not hope to lead a renewal of Europe’s soul. Such ideas were likewise grist for the mill of conservative German intellectuals, who had long insisted on the superiority of Germany’s vision of culture, the transcendent but nationally rooted idea of Kultur, over the superficial, rootless Zivilisation of France and Great Britain. Hitler showed only contempt for Europeanism in all its forms. But the cultural operatives under Goebbels understood that the idea of Europe— linked to German notions of Kultur and divorced from the universalist ideals of democracy and individual rights—possessed real mobilizing power. Victor Klemperer, the German-Jewish philologist who chronicled life in Nazi Germany in his well-known diary, noted the special meaning of “Europe” in the distinctive language of National Socialism. While the Europe of a humanistic intellectual like Paul Valéry was an intangible spiritual inheritance, “detached from its original space, indeed from any space at all,” the Europe referred to by wartime Nazism was, argued Klemperer, “completely spatial and material.” But it was precisely this spatial and material idea of Europe that served the Nazis as a powerful cultural concept, using “Europe” to refer to the cultures of the specific peoples of this specific space. It represented the cultural side of what has been called Hitler’s “Europe of Race and Space.” Or, with reference to the dichotomy between Kultur and Zivilisation, it served a vision of a grounded, organic European culture, rather than an abstract and rootless European civilization. This model of European culture was a central element of Nazi-sponsored cultural organizations, and a critical part of their appeal.

I NT RODUC T I ON



The Nazi-fascist effort to create a cultural new order was one of many twentieth-century efforts to derive political advantage from control over international networks. Transnational networks offer a rich and dynamic source of hegemonic power for those forces able to lead or dominate them, in particular by giving such networks fixed organizational form. Opportunities to seize such a role abounded amid the extraordinary proliferation of transnational networks after World War I, encouraged by the internationalization of capital, improvements in communication technologies, and the blossoming of radical visions of alternative futures opened up by the collapse of the prewar order. A great feature of twentieth-century internationalism was the struggle among competing political forces to place themselves at the head of these networks, seeking the novel form of hegemony that rests on the ability to organize and speak for the international community. This form of hegemony was the goal of the French officials who sponsored the foundation in Paris of an International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation, supporting the work of Geneva’s ICIC while reaffirming Paris’s position at the heart of global intellectual life. Such hegemony was sought out by the Soviet planners who rallied foreign intellectuals in the cultural unions of the Third International. It led smaller states like the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland to buttress their standing by leading networks that linked the values of scientific objectivity to those of political neutrality. By the late 1930s, the prospect of this type of hegemony attracted that nexus of American philanthropic foundations and State Department officials who would make international institution-building a keystone of American “soft power” after World War II. The Nazi-fascist campaign to create international networks and institutions must be understood alongside these projects. But the form of power it sought was rooted in a particular form of cultural hegemony. The Nazifascist Axis ruled Europe through economic exploitation and brutal violence. Yet as Germans and Italians worked to take over and reorder cinema, classical music, and literature into pan-European form, they seem to have appreciated that cultural fields have their own rules. The specific type of prestige internal to each cultural field, its “cultural capital,” could not simply be overwhelmed by political power, bought off with money, or crushed by violence. They were likewise only too aware that each cultural field was arranged hierarchically in ways that granted some countries a great deal more power



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

to create, accumulate, and allocate cultural capital than others. Part of what Goebbels and his Italian counterparts hoped that Axis-led European organizations would do was to seize the power to assign cultural capital and then transfer this capital to the political field, endowing the Nazi-fascist Axis with a special kind of legitimacy: the soft power of European cultural prestige. That operation only worked if the institutions in fact managed to assemble and channel cultural capital in a convincing fashion. This meant, in turn, granting those institutions at least the appearance of a measure of autonomy from the state, since a distinctive feature of the arts in modern European society has been the development of forms of prestige that are internal to each cultural field and inversely related to state sanction, popular acclaim, or commercial success. The autonomy offered to artists and intellectuals by the Nazi-fascist New Order was a sham, undermined by the grasping state control that German and Italian officials pursued with growing brutality over time. In the end, the inability to maintain this fiction was the true Achilles heel of the entire project. ◆

◆

◆

The cultural fields of interwar cinema, classical music, and literature are vastly rich and complex, each rooted in a long history and the subject of a highly developed specialist literature. The story of the Nazi-fascist penetration of any one of these fields would have been more than enough for a book. But it is only by addressing several of these fields alongside one another that we can appreciate the true scope of the cultural New Order, both as a project and as a short-lived but transformative experience. Likewise, the degree to which Hitler’s Third Reich dominated the effort to forge a cultural New Order might suggest a focus only on Germany. But the Germans did not—indeed could not—pursue this project alone. A European project required European allies, and no ally was more important than fascist Italy. Charting the Axis project from both perspectives reveals discrepancies between the project’s lofty rhetoric (usually articulated by the Germans) and its cynical realities (more often experienced and commented upon by the Italians). Above all, it shows that the effort to forge a New Order in European culture was more than simply a German idea. To be sure, the Nazi and fascist regimes were separated by substantial ideological differences, not least in the area of cultural politics. While Nazi Germany violently rejected “degenerate” modernism in the arts, fascist Italy cultivated and spon-

I NT RODUC T I ON



sored many forms of modernism, including futurist painting and twelve-tone music, until the end. While purging German cultural life of Jews was among Nazism’s principal goals, Italian fascism did not initially emphasize anti-Semitism, although the regime adopted it with alacrity in 1938. The Nazi attack on the Christian church was strongly opposed by many Italian intellectuals, whose fascism was permeated by their conservative Catholicism. More deeply, Italians and Germans had been engaged in a cultural competition that stretched back centuries. But what divided the two regimes was overshadowed by what united them: their revisionist desire to smash the existing international order and unleash mighty projects of national-imperialist expansion. Italian intellectuals and fascist officials eagerly cooperated with the Germans’ European initiatives in order to pursue Italy’s ongoing project of “cultural revisionism”— hoping to give Rome the position of intellectual and cultural centrality they believed it deserved. The Italians’ refusal to relinquish that ambition meant that the Italian– German relationship combined substantial collaboration with vigorous competition at every stage, even after Italy’s position of autonomy vis-à-vis Germany crumbled along with Italy’s economy, its international standing, and, from 1940, its fortunes in the war. But the decrease in Italy’s ability to exercise hard power convinced key figures in the fascist regime to invest even more energy and resources in the country’s soft power— and that meant staying close to Germany so that Italy could take up a powerful position in the New Order to emerge at war’s end. Buoyed by an unshakable sense of their ancient cultural superiority, Italian leaders continued to hope to emerge from the war as a contemporary Greece to Germany’s new Rome. To tell this story from the perspective of Rome as well as Berlin serves a broader ambition: to understand the historical experience of the New Order in its European dimension. For the story of the Nazi-fascist effort to create a cultural New Order—in which some of the highest achievements of the human spirit were put to the ser vice of totalitarianism, economic exploitation, and genocide—is, alas, deeply European.

■

1 Creating Cultural Networks

Late in 1933, Nazi Germany withdrew from the International PEN Club. Founded in London in 1921, the PEN Club embodied the cosmopolitan, liberal values for which it is still famous today: respect for freedom of expression, tolerance of religious and national differences, and above all internationalism. Declaring that “literature . . . knows no frontiers,” its charter envisioned international exchange among writers defending “the patrimony of humanity at large,” and intellectuals rising above national prejudice, using “what influence they have in favour of good understanding and mutual respect between nations.” Nazi Germany’s rejection of these values could not have been clearer. Since Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933, the Nazis had purged the PEN Club’s German section of Jewish and leftist German writers. These included some of Germany’s most prominent authors—including the section’s president, the distinguished critic Alfred Kerr, the expressionist poet Ernst Toller, the novelist Alfred Döblin (author of the iconic Berlin Alexanderplatz), and Thomas Mann, the Nobel laureate novelist widely viewed as Germany’s greatest living writer— all of whom fled Germany that year. May 1933 had seen the infamous book burnings, at which works by several former PEN members were thrown onto the bonfires. The section was handed over to two close collaborators of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, and packed with “nationally minded”—that is, non-Jewish and politically compliant—writers. Nazism rejected cosmopolitanism for aggressive nationalism, replaced humanitarianism with biological racism and antiSemitism, and believed the state had the right and obligation to control cul

C RE AT I NG C ULT URA L NE T WO R K S



ture, using censorship and coercion to defend national traditions from their purported domestic and external enemies. After the international PEN Club denounced the German section’s behavior, the German PEN Club section was dissolved in November 1933. But rather than simply retreat into nationalist isolation, pro-Nazi writers responded to Germany’s exit from the PEN Club by immediately founding a rival international literary institution: the Union of National Writers. Its president was the novelist and playwright Hanns Johst, a Nazi Party member whose 1933 play Schlageter is the source of the infamous line, “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I release the catch on my Browning.” Its vice president was Gottfried Benn, the widely respected modernist poet who shocked many of his readers when he publicly embraced National Socialism in a 1933 radio broadcast. Both writers were among the eighty-eight German authors who had signed a public oath of loyalty to Hitler in October 1933. They celebrated Nazi ultranationalism as an opportunity, as Benn declared, for the modern intellectual to achieve “sacrifice and self-surrender to the totality, the state, the race, the immanent.” Yet in March 1934, they launched their new international union with an appeal “to the writers of all nations!” whom they called on to join the new Germany in “the intellectual reordering of Europe.” That same month, the Union of National Writers celebrated its first international ally at a grand banquet in Berlin, where Benn welcomed as guest of honor the Italian futurist writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. This banquet was the Union’s first and last major event, and the institution rapidly faded from view. Later in 1934 Goebbels turned abruptly against literary modernism, and Benn was hounded into internal exile. But the Union of National Writers merits our attention because it represented an early, unsuccessful version of what was to become a major campaign: the effort by Nazi intellectuals and state officials to counter the liberal vision of European civilization promoted by institutions like the PEN Club by creating rival international institutions that promoted a radical-conservative, nationalist vision of Eu ropean culture in support of Germany’s claim to continental hegemony. The Union of National Writers evinced several important features of that broader campaign. Benn and Johst’s effort to create an international union reflected the determination among Nazi elites to engage with the world of international cultural exchange, but on Germany’s own, avowedly nationalist, terms. A sign of this determination was the creation in 1934 of an institution called the



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

German Central Conference Office (Deutsche Kongress-Zentrale, or DKZ). Founded to organize conferences in medicine and the natural sciences, the DKZ later expanded its activities to cover the coordination of all national and international scholarly or cultural conferences held in Germany, as well as all German participation in international scholarly conferences held abroad. Its goal was to send disciplined, pro-Nazi delegations abroad and to bring as many international events as possible to Germany based on the belief that transnational networks in culture and science—the symbol of which was the international conference—were a crucial source of modern power. In the bitter aftermath of World War I, key German politicians concluded their nation had lost the war not least because of its failure to control the networks of international academic and cultural exchange that had grown so explosively since the late nineteenth century. For Hitler’s resurgent Germany to seize control over these networks was not merely a matter of cultural pride. It was a crucial ingredient for success in Germany’s ongoing struggle against the Western powers on what one Nazi theorist called the “third front.” On this third front—following the battlefront and the home front—the struggle for international opinion raged. German state officials and German intellectuals, by no means only convinced Nazis, were in agreement that their nation must regain the rightful position of leadership she had held in these networks before World War I. Like the DKZ, the Union of National Writers emphasized organization, seeking to change the literary politics of the day by creating an international institution. But Johst and Benn’s project also revealed the specific ideological means through which Nazis would propose their own, rival model for the international organization of culture: through the effort to create an international organization based on the values of radical nationalism. The union’s apparently ironic ideological emphasis on the nation in fact laid the groundwork for a new kind of cultural hegemony in Europe for Germany. It positioned Germany as the natural defender of national traditions against the cultural threats of cosmopolitanism and the economic threats of the internationalization of cultural markets. This vision was the core of the “intellectual reordering of Europe” called for by Johst and Benn’s 1934 appeal to foreign writers. Such a reordering was the only appropriate response, the two writers averred, to what they saw as the true core of the interwar crisis of European civilization: the fact that “all of our fatherlands [are] equally threatened with dissolution from without and from within.”

C RE AT I NG C ULT URA L NE T WO R K S



The notion that European civilization was in crisis was a great theme of the interwar period, shared by intellectuals across the political spectrum. But unlike liberals who denounced the rise of nationalist passions in the 1930s as a threat to the continent’s culture, Johst and Benn celebrated nationalism not as Europe’s disease, but its cure: “In the threatened condition in which Occidental culture finds itself, no intellectual reordering of Europe can take place, no style can be formed, no literature can rise up from such dissolved elements, indeed no history can come from this continent at all, unless the high concept of the Fatherland—as genealogical fact, moral legacy, and linguistic Mysterium—forms the highest, most guiding concept of the future.” This was an idea with real potential. Across Europe, conservative writers could be found who shared the view that the distinctive feature of the age was the struggle of the national spirit to affirm itself against the tide of modernity. The Union of National Writers’ emphasis on the cultural value of the national was thus a potentially effective means of reaching out internationally. Indeed, the union’s effort at international outreach exemplified a broader effort of Nazi Germany’s emerging cultural apparatus in the mid-1930s to locate and cultivate allies abroad. Germany expanded binational friendship clubs, funded transnational youth exchanges, signed bilateral cultural treaties, sponsored foreign writers’ stays in Germany, and hosted foreign performers on its concert stages. A key potential ally for the Nazis’ cultural outreach was fascist Italy, a country that was ideologically kindred and held deep cultural resources. Marinetti’s presence in Berlin in March 1934 suggested the prospect of a rightist cultural alliance that was exciting for those pro-Nazi German intellectuals and state officials who hoped to lead Germany out of its isolation and toward the position of continental leadership they believed it deserved. Marinetti was no doubt pleased to be fêted in Berlin. The poet and provocateur had been well known in European literary circles since the publication of his Manifesto of Futurism in 1909. Now a member of Italy’s Royal Academy and regular confidante of Mussolini, the fifty-eight-year-old poet was used to being treated as an important figure. As president of Italy’s PEN Club section, he had led a group of writers who voiced sympathy for the Nazified delegation during the showdown over the Germans’ participation in the PEN Club in 1933. The Union of National Writers’ ideological message was tailor-made for Marinetti, a nationalist of unsurpassed verbal violence



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

who had insisted that “the word ITALY must take precedence over the word LIBERTY” since 1911. But Marinetti attended the banquet only because he was in Berlin already for an unrelated art show. The notion that he might pull Italy out of PEN’s network of prominent writers in order to join Benn’s alternative international seems not to have crossed Marinetti’s mind. The stakes of Italy’s own pursuit of power and prestige on the international literary circuit were too high for that. Participating in PEN was one of many ways in which Italy pursued its own bid for power by laying up resources of cultural hegemony. After Mussolini, reversing his earlier insistence that fascism was “not an article for export,” declared in 1930 that fascism was “universal,” Italian intellectuals used a range of transnational networks to promote fascism as the answer to the political, economic, social, and cultural aspects of Europe’s interwar crisis. By 1934, that campaign—an effort to advance Italian fascist hegemony from within the existing liberal international order—was going rather well. Since the onset of the depression, fascist Italy had scored substantial success with a tripartite campaign to promote fascist ideology, mobilize the “soft power” of Italian culture, and lay claim to a central role for Italy in Europe’s expanding networks of cultural exchange. The regime promoted a fascist model of workers’ leisure policy at the International Labor Organization, and promoted fascist legal innovations at the Rome offices of the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (Unidroit). The Italians rallied like-minded radical rightists at a 1934 meeting of a would-be “fascist international” at Montreux, Switzerland, hosted by the Action Committees for the Universality of Rome (CAUR). Italian organizers brought the international art world to Venice for the prestigious Biennale art fair, which was nationalized in 1930, and assembled Europe’s leading composers and performers at new international music festivals. The Italians led efforts to organize key aspects of international exchange in classical music performance and in the film industry, and the regime’s Royal Academy hosted a major international congress on the idea of Europe in Rome in 1932. Fascist regime representatives engaged with the cultural activities of the League of Nations, taking an active (if controversial) role in the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation. Mussolini’s Justice Minister Alfredo Rocco sat on the board of the Paris-based International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC), and Rocco’s deputy presided over Italy’s National Commission for Intellectual Cooperation in Rome. The irony of the

C RE AT I NG C ULT URA L NE T WO R K S



Italians’ use of the international networks of the League of Nations to promote fascism was not lost on observers at the time, who worried nonetheless that the fascists’ ploy—undermining liberalism from within liberalism’s own international networks—was working. In 1934, then, there was no reason for Marinetti, or any representative of fascist Italy, to kowtow to the upstart Nazis. But 1934 was the year that Italians would become unable to ignore the disruptive force of the Nazis’ sudden entrance onto the European scene. Hitler’s seizure of power challenged Italy’s claim to be Europe’s most powerful fascist nation. At the Montreux conference of fascist movements, for example, what was planned as a triumphant expression of Italian leadership was derailed by bitter conflicts over whether or not to embrace anti-Semitism of the kind advanced by the Nazis, who thus overshadowed the event without even attending it. Seeking to retain their leadership as the cutting-edge country for right-wing alternatives to liberalism, Italian regime officials redoubled their efforts to craft a specifically Italian and fascist cultural vision for export. But Germany would soon challenge the Italian fascists in cultural areas where they had been striving for several years to secure a leading role, including classical music and cinema. While the Union of National Writers fell into oblivion, the broader effort it suggested was just beginning. As the Nazis prepared to launch their bid for cultural leadership in Europe, Mussolini’s Italy represented an essential partner for Germany’s ambitions, and much depended on how Italy would respond. The first field in which Italy— and the rest of Europe—was confronted by a powerful German initiative was in the area of the pan-European organization of classical music. ◆

◆

◆

It was in Italy that Richard Strauss first aired the idea. In Florence in May 1933 to conduct at the city’s newly founded opera festival Maggio Musicale, the sixty-eight-year-old German composer held meetings with Italian composers and fascist music officials. They agreed that the circuit of international festivals that had come to play such an important role in European musical life needed a change. The heart of the problem was the outsized role of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). Since its foundation in 1922, the ISCM had become a power ful force in European music. Its festivals promoted avant-garde music—featuring premieres of pathbreaking works by composers like Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Anton Webern—and were known for their



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

elite, cosmopolitan audiences. Important figures in Italian musical life had already registered their dissatisfaction with this situation. Composer and festival director Mario Labroca complained in 1930 that the ISCM festivals “intentionally gathered together the most tendentiously modern [music] that every nation produced: a method which excluded, without creating any scale of merit, music and musicians who are distinctively original but far from the movement of the avant-garde.” Indeed, the ISCM, as Strauss explained in Florence, “was all too exclusively modernist to be able to fulfill a real mission in the matter of musical exchange for a broader public.” Chatting with the Swedish composer Kurt Atterberg in the Piazza della Signoria, Florence’s central square, Strauss recounted that in his meeting with Italian colleagues he had decided to create “something new”—a rival international organization devoted to musical exchange among nations but in a more conservative spirit, rejecting the focus on the avant-garde to feature “such music as could be expected to arouse a broader public interest.” By the end of that year, Strauss would be in a powerful position to act on this vision. Hitler had taken power in January, and in November his Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels offered Strauss the position of president of the Reich Music Chamber (Reichsmusikkammer, RMK), a new, national-level, state-sponsored body designed to unify and renew German music in the spirit of the National Socialist revolution. Strauss accepted, becoming also chairman of the German Composers’ Union (Berufsstand deutscher Komponisten). And in the early days of 1934, a select group of European composers received what must have been a thrilling letter: an invitation to an all-expenses-paid visit to Berlin to attend the first German Composers’ Conference in February 1934, signed by none other than Richard Strauss. A titan of twentieth-century music, Strauss was known to composers across Europe and the world for his groundbreaking tone poems, such as Don Juan (1888), and operas, including Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909), works that earned him the title “leader of the moderns.” These works had since become classics that were performed across the continent and minutely studied by a generation of younger European composers. Writing not only as a great composer but also as a representative of the Nazi state, Strauss invited foreign composers to be present for his first public appearance in his new role under Hitler’s regime. There Strauss declaimed on the regeneration of German music and struck many predictably nationalist notes of early pro-

C RE AT I NG C ULT URA L NE T WO R K S



Richard Strauss addresses German composers and foreign guests at the German Composers Meeting, Berlin, February 18, 1934. (Richard- Strauss-Institut, Garmisch-Partenkirchen)

Nazi rhetoric. But he also presented his vision of a new international organization. Having won a positive reception for his idea, and with support from Goebbels, Strauss invited a larger group of foreign composers to attend the annual festival of the German Music Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein) in Wiesbaden in June 1934. The assembled composers— fourteen men representing thirteen countries— signed a joint declaration in French calling for “international cooperation among composers” in order to defend their “professional interests” and to promote “the most highly developed artistic exchange from nation to nation.” Such were the origins of the Permanent Council for International Cooperation among Composers (Ständinger Rat für die internationale Zusammenarbeit der Komponisten), known generally by its French name, Conseil permanent pour la coopération internationale des compositeurs. Strauss’s mandate as head of the Reich Music Chamber was to oversee the National Socialist reordering, or “coordination” (Gleichschaltung), of German musical life. Founded as part of the Reich Chamber of Culture, alongside Chambers of Literature, Theater, the Visual Arts, Press, Radio, and



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

Film, Strauss’s Reich Music Chamber would fulfill the vision Hitler had outlined at the September 1933 Nazi Party Congress on Culture. There Hitler promised that the Nazi state would take a much more active role in cultural matters than had the Weimar Republic, outlined his understanding of art as the expression of “hereditary racial bloodstock,” and called on “the artists to play their part in proudly defending the German Volk with their German art.” In this spirit, the Reich Chamber of Culture undertook a historically unprecedented effort “to lead the complete cultural life of a great nation and to fill it with a unitary spirit of responsibility toward the people’s community [Volksgemeinschaft].” National Socialism was unleashing a radical antidemocratic assault on Germany’s cultural life, but this revolution would be achieved through systematic, bureaucratic means. Its watchword was “organization.” The Reich Music Chamber promised a self-regulating guild of musicians under the protection of the state, while embracing a nationalist, culturally conservative vision of German music. Both the organizational and the musical elements of this vision appealed beyond convinced National Socialists to address the cultural tastes, social values, and economic interests of many conservatives, including Strauss himself. As an enthusiastic Strauss declared at the institution’s official opening in Berlin in February 1934, creating an institution like the Music Chamber “has for decades been the ultimate dream and goal of all German musicians.” Of course, not all German musicians were welcome to participate. The Nazis’ April 1933 “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Ser vice,” which barred Jews from public-sector employment, was already being used to drive Jewish musicians from the country’s many state- and city-supported orchestras and opera houses. The influential modernist Austrian and Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg, forced from his post at Berlin’s Academy of the Arts, was one of many politically or “racially” persecuted composers and performers who fled into exile. But the Nazification and “coordination” of German musical life was not only a domestic matter. It also meant extracting Germany from the pernicious world of interwar musical cosmopolitanism. As in other cultural fields, Nazi musical reform was guided by the racist distinction between “pure,” national (arteigene) and “alien” (artfremde) art. One of the great crimes of musical modernism, by this logic, was its importation of racially foreign styles and rhythms into the spiritual body of German music, and its apparent denial of national style in favor of international compositional

C RE AT I NG C ULT URA L NE T WO R K S



trends. “The platitude that art in particular is international,” Hitler thundered at the 1933 Nazi Party rally on culture, “is vacuous and idiotic,” since it failed to acknowledge “the underlying racial predetermination of style.” If one organization embodied all that Nazis and musical conservatives rejected in interwar musical life, it was the International Society for Contemporary Music. Already in the 1920s, the institution had attracted the ire of nationalists, who accused it in particular of promoting atonal and twelve-tone music, scorned by many conservatives and anti-Semites for its connection to Jewish composers like Arnold Schoenberg, who, as a radical atonal composer and a Jew, was the bête noir of German-speaking antimodernist circles. Not all of the music promoted by the ISCM was rejected in Nazi Germany. (Nor indeed were all musical modernists opposed to Nazism.) What was particularly unacceptable about the ISCM was its embrace of the pacifist, cosmopolitan ethos of the 1920s, offering what one supporter called “a League of Nations of music.” Its organizational form was itself a provocation. The ISCM disregarded the race and religion of its participants and abstained from politics; its members included Jews and prominent left-wing musical agitators like Hanns Eisler. It was wholly in keeping with the Nazification of German musical life that in 1933 the regime closed down the ISCM’s German section, the Society for New Music (Gesellschaft für neue Musik). By inviting foreign composers to Berlin in February 1934, Strauss moved immediately to link his domestic mandate with his international concerns, by acting on the idea he had first broached in Florence: founding a rival international organization, an anti-ISCM. The goals of the Permanent Council for International Cooperation among Composers, although not reflected by the institution’s anodyne name, were quickly identified by one of the foreign invitees to the February meeting in Berlin, Swedish composer Kurt Atterberg. The two metaphorical banners flying over Germany’s convocation of foreign composers, he wrote, were “international exchange of folkish music,” and “droit moral.” The Germans sought to bring together composers whose interest in national and folk traditions put them at odds with the international avant-garde and with the emerging mass culture, and to promote reform of national and international copyright law so as to ensure composers’ moral right (droit moral ), the legal ability to assert control over the way their works were used. These two goals were of deep personal concern to Strauss. The spread of a mass culture characterized by light entertainment music, including



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

operetta but also the operas of Gounod and Puccini, to say nothing of jazz, filled him with disgust. Accepting Goebbels’s offer to lead the Reich Music Chamber was a way of pursuing what Strauss called “our ultimate goal: to once again establish an intimate relationship between the German Volk and its music” such as had existed in earlier ages, before “the overall cultural, economic, and technical development of the past forty to fifty years” brought about the “estrangement of the German Volk as a whole from the fine art of music.” Although the very leader of the musical avant-garde before World War I, Strauss had been left behind by modernist trends in contemporary music, and he viewed the decline in the appreciation of his own work as indicative of a broader decline in German music. Strauss used his powers in the Reich Music Chamber to prevent, rather than encourage, an absolute ban on atonal compositions. But the restoration of Germany’s musical life that he envisioned would naturally include a return to prominence for his own work. Strauss had been passionate about improving copyright protection for composers since the turn of the century. He played a leading role in the fi rst movement of composers for copyright reform in 1898, and took up the leadership of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein in 1901 and of Germany’s new composers’ association, the Genossenschaft deutscher Tonsetzer, in 1903. Strauss maintained an avid interest in this issue after World War I, when new problems threatened the economic security of the composer of classical music. The rapid internationalization of the musical marketplace— including sales of sheet music, performances, and the already transatlantic recording industry— created confusion about the different lengths of copyright and competition among competing royalties agencies. New entertainment technologies raised the issue of the composer’s moral rights with particular urgency, as recordings of a composer’s music were often used without permission in phonograph records, radio, and cinema. Composers were eager to defend their interests in this new environment, and it was imperative that they do so on an international basis. Cooperating with the Nazis seemed to Strauss to offer the opportunity to pursue both of these long-standing projects—reuniting the Volk with its own national art music and protecting the legal and economic interests of the composers of that music—with help from power ful state institutions. By creating the Permanent Council, Strauss sought to extend both projects beyond Germany’s borders. At his side in this effort was Strauss’s longtime collaborator Julius Kopsch,

C RE AT I NG C ULT URA L NE T WO R K S



the composer and lawyer who now served as the Propaganda Ministry’s inhouse copyright expert. Signaling the importance of copyright matters to the mission of the Permanent Council, Strauss appointed Kopsch the council’s first general secretary. Strauss’s concerns dovetailed with the interests of the emerging culturalpolitical apparatus under Joseph Goebbels, who wanted to assert control over musical life in Germany and to project German power internationally. Famous before 1933 for his vitriolic speeches, his eye for spectacle, and his taste for violence, Goebbels in power showed his appreciation for quieter means of seizing control over culture: reordering its organizational structures and recasting its economics. Even before creating the Reich Chamber of Culture, Goebbels oversaw the foundation of a new body for the management of artists’ royalties, known as STAGMA (State-Approved Society for the Utilization of Musical Performance Rights, Staatlich genehmigte Gesellschaft zur Verwertung musikalischer Auff ührungsrechte), in the summer of 1933. Upon becoming president of the Music Chamber, Strauss moved to bring STAGMA under his control, hoping to ensure composers’ control over the important matter of their royalties. Goebbels allowed this, although his staff drafted the institution’s bylaws and the minister personally retained the final say over all payment decisions. For him, STAGMA streamlined Germany’s music business, brought foreign hard currency into the country, and enhanced the state’s powers of censorship. Later, it gave the regime a tool by which to expropriate the earnings of Jewish composers whom the regime had purged. Royalties for performances of their works streamed into STAGMA’s Berlin office, but from 1936 on the agency refused to make payouts to “nonAryan” or politically dissident composers. The issue of restoring tonal, late-Romantic styles of music to prominence was of less interest to Goebbels, who was more interested in visual media than in music. In December 1934, however, just as the Permanent Council was starting out, in an infamous speech in Berlin’s Sportpalast, Goebbels attacked the modernist composer Paul Hindemith, without naming him, as an “atonal noise maker.” Goebbels had felt compelled to take this stand in order to quell the embarrassing public debate between the circle of radical cultural warriors around party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, who attacked Hindemith, and the famous conductor and vice president of the Reich Music Chamber Wilhelm Furtwängler, who defended him. For his part, Strauss signed a telegram to Goebbels after his speech congratulating him on his



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

stand against atonal “noise.” In fact, the Nazis never did articulate a coherent line on musical aesthetics. But Strauss was welcome to use the hostility of conservative composers across Europe toward avant-garde styles to rally foreigners to the Permanent Council. And indeed the metaphorical banners that Atterberg had seen flying over the gathering in Berlin—for folkish music and droit moral—were held aloft with vigor by the members of the group present at the June 1934 meeting in Wiesbaden. Most were united by an attraction to national—as opposed to cosmopolitan and avant-garde—musical composition. But they were selected not primarily for their music. Only a few had enjoyed any substantial international success, and, with some notable exceptions, few of them composed works that are performed or recorded today. Rather, they were composer-organizers, invited in their capacity as representatives of composers’ organizations in their home countries. British composer Maurice Besly, who had studied piano and composition at Leipzig but also trained as a lawyer, served as director of Britain’s Performing Rights Society. Peder Gram, composer of symphonies in the late romantic style, was chairman of the Danish Composers’ Society (1931–1937) and of the Society for the Publication of Danish Music (1931–1938), head of Denmark’s composers’ rights society KODA (1930–1937), and president of the Nordic Union for Composers’ Rights. The Belgian-Flemish composer Emiel Hullebroeck was a leading figure in the Romantic-nationalist movement for the composition and compilation of Flemish folk songs, and in the 1920s had led the creation of a Flemish body for composers’ royalties. The Icelandic representative Jón Leifs began his career writing piano arrangements of Icelandic folk songs, which he had recorded on visits to the countryside. His mighty interwar orchestral pieces included an “Iceland overture” and “Iceland cantata,” as well as musical treatments of the island’s ancient sagas. He was also a cofounder in 1928 of Iceland’s first ever body for the protection of artistic copyright and served as its first secretary. The French composer Carol-Bérard had gained notoriety for composing a symphony that incorporated industrial noises, but his real prominence was as vice president of the French composers’ union (Union syndicale des compositeurs de musique). Polish composer Ludomir Różycki composed operas and songs in a late romantic style, most famously in his popular 1921 ballet on the Polish folktale Pan Twardowski, and was cofounder and first president of the Union of Polish Composers. Czech composer Jaroslav Křička, known for his adaptations of folk songs,

C RE AT I NG C ULT URA L NE T WO R K S



was director of Prague’s conservatory. In this group, the Swedish composer Kurt Atterberg was among the most prominent. A composer of symphonies and chamber music that offered a folkloristic take on the late romantic tradition, Atterberg had gained international attention in 1928 when his Sixth Symphony won the Columbia Gramophone Company’s worldwide competition seeking a completion to Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. In Berlin and Wiesbaden, Atterberg was present above all in his capacity as cofounder and head of the Society of Swedish Composers and chairman of Sweden’s performing rights society STIM, which he had helped create in 1924. When Atterberg received his invitation from Strauss to the February 1934 meeting in Berlin, Atterberg was already planning to travel to Warsaw to represent STIM at the international meeting of the newly founded International Confederation of Authors and Composers Societies (Confédération international des sociétés d’auteurs et compositeurs, CISAC). The Germans timed the meeting in Wiesbaden to take place just before the Warsaw conference, which, they knew, most of these composers would attend. In getting these figures to stop first in Berlin, Strauss and his supporters in the Nazi regime were interested less in listening to one another’s music than in assembling musical officials who could help bring about structural changes in European musical life, while positioning Nazi Germany as a leader in the field. In particular, the Germans gathered foreigners in order to present Germany’s new royalties agency STAGMA to the rest of Europe as a new model. Its implicit rival was the oldest and most prominent rights body, the Frenchled music copyright organization Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique (SACEM). Based in Paris with branch offices across Europe, this private organization had secured artists their royalties since 1851. For composers from Europe’s smaller countries, SACEM’s branch offices were their first and only access to copyright protection. Without it, composers found that their works could be copied, sold, and performed without paying a cent to the composer and with total legal impunity. But because it collected and then redistributed all funds from Paris, SACEM was believed to favor its French members over foreigners, and was increasingly seen as hostile to smaller countries’ national interests, if not indeed as violating their sovereignty. At Berlin, Strauss presented the Nazi form of state-guaranteed protection as a rival model, and cooperation among such national organizations as a better means of supporting all nations’ cultural interests.



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

The STAGMA model was, moreover, expressive of National Socialist ideology. While the question of the author’s moral rights was for Strauss a matter of the dignity of the artist, for the regime the issue carried a powerful ideological charge. In the early years of Hitler’s rule, pro-Nazi German jurists offered many proposals for the reform of copyright law, outlining a kind of third way between Western liberalism and Eastern communism. France’s liberal and individualistic view of moral rights reflected the decadent, outdated vision of the artist as a “self-centered, socially irresponsible bohemian.” The collectivist Soviet position, by contrast, subjugated the creative individual’s rights to the desires of the masses. A Nazi understanding of droit moral would “balance the interests of creator and community” in a manner that reflected the Nazis’ cult of the creative genius, but also their nationalist and racist insistence that all creative expression must be rooted in the Volk. In that spirit, ensuring such an understanding of the author’s moral rights seemed part of the broader struggle against the commodification of culture, which Nazis attacked as Jewish, materialistic, and un-Germanic, and against Soviet collectivized culture. Addressing foreign composers in Berlin and Wiesbaden, Strauss effectively promoted these radical ideas in the decidedly non-radical setting of an international gathering of composers. His Permanent Council promoted the idea that nationalist cultural renewal could be pursued through, rather than in opposition to, international cooperation. ◆

◆

◆

Italy’s representative at the founding meetings of the Permanent Council was the composer Adriano Lualdi. An accomplished conductor, music critic for the Giornale d’Italia, and member of Italy’s parliament, the forty-nineyear-old Lualdi was an authoritative representative of fascist Italy’s musical world. Like some of the other composer-organizers present in Berlin and Wiesbaden, he was a composer of traditionalist and overtly “national” music. Like many of them, he had enjoyed modest success as a composer since World War I, although his work is virtually forgotten today. Unlike the others, however, he spoke on behalf of the state in Europe that had taken the leading role in the domestic and international organization of the classical music world. For Nazi Germany was not the first country to seek to present an alternative to the dominance of liberal ideologies, and Western powers, in the organization of classical music. Long before Hitler took power, Mussolini’s regime founded orchestras, commissioned works, reformed Italy’s conserva-

C RE AT I NG C ULT URA L NE T WO R K S



tories, and organized a centralized, state-sponsored system of local, regional, and national music festivals. The regime forced Italian musical life into national-level, state-controlled institutions, including the National Fascist Union of Musicians (Sindacato nazionale fascista dei musicisti) and the National Fascist Association of Concert Societies (Associazione nazionale fascista degli enti e società di concerti), a corporate employers’ body representing all concert-giving entities in Italy. Concerned with regulating and reforming copyright law, fascist Italy had enshrined the author’s moral rights in its groundbreaking copyright law of 1925. The fascists nationalized Italy’s authors’ rights society, SIAE (Società italiana degli autori ed editori), which was founded in 1882. In a signal of fascism’s understanding of the relationship between author, the market, and the state, SIAE was placed under the control of the same man Mussolini would later tap to lead Italy’s Ministry for Press and Propaganda, Dino Alfieri. These reforms applied the ideology of fascist corporatism to the cultural sphere. Corporatism envisioned the nation as constituted not by free and potentially competing individuals, nor by classes in a Marxist sense, but by national-level social and professional sectors or guilds (corporazioni). Building on traditions in Catholic conservative social thought, corporatism promised an organic social order that would resolve the conflict between individual and society, and capital and labor, and more powerfully fuse the nation with the state. As implemented from 1926, this meant allowing only one stateapproved union per professional category, crushing labor activism by barring all strikes and lockouts, and bringing workers and employers together in state-controlled corporations. The smooth relations within these bodies would be guaranteed by what Mussolini in 1926 called the “fascist national corporate state,” a state that “focuses, controls, harmonizes, and tempers the interests of all social classes in such a way as to protect them in equal measure.” Fascist corporatist doctrine seemed to win confirmation from Pope Pius XI in his 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno and was central to fascism’s claim to offer a “third way.” As Mussolini declared in 1933, it “surpasses socialism and surpasses liberalism; it creates a new synthesis.” In the early 1930s, in keeping with Mussolini’s newfound interest in promoting fascist solutions to Europe’s crisis, the regime began to extend its domestic reforms to the international stage. “Corporativist development,” the idea’s leading Italian theorist declared in 1932, “does not and cannot stop at the



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

nation’s frontiers without contradicting its very nature. Instead, the move must be made from national to international corporations in which all nations find ideal conditions for economic and spiritual development.” In this expansionist spirit, Italy led the single most important effort hitherto to create a pan-European corporatist infrastructure for international classical musical exchange. This was the International Concert Federation, founded in 1929 by Count Enrico di San Martino e Valperga, head of Rome’s Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Italy’s most prestigious conservatory and home to the country’s first permanent symphony orchestra. This federation sought to replicate on the European level the fascist-corporatist streamlining of performance arrangements that the count had successfully pioneered in Italy through an institution called the National Concert Union (Unione nazionale dei concerti). This nationwide professional association of concert-holding entities was just the kind of collective, national-level unit envisioned by fascist leaders, who nationalized it in 1928. Count San Martino’s international extension of these ideas enjoyed early success. At the International Concert Federation’s meetings in Brussels (1929 and 1932), Rome (1931), and Paris (1933), delegates from up to sixteen countries discussed copyright, per formance rights, taxation and royalties, the regulation of radio broadcasts of music, international music competitions, and the creation of international musical archives. The institution attracted the interest of the ISCM’s president, the English musicologist Edward J. Dent, who sought out collaboration with the Italians’ new initiative in October 1930. Fascists applied corporatist ideology internationally with even greater success in the realm of copyright reform. Italian jurists had already succeeded in making their 1925 copyright law the basis for reforms of the Berne Convention adopted at an international conference in Rome in 1928. In November 1933 the fascist employers’ organization Confindustria convened in Rome the world’s first international congress of the music recording industry, at which Italian jurists oversaw the foundation of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the international recording industry lobby organization that still exists today. There Italian jurists and fascist officials began a multiyear effort to resolve the complex issues surrounding copyright in musical recordings in a way that would reflect fascist corporatist ideology— and benefit the record industry at the expense of musicians.

C RE AT I NG C ULT URA L NE T WO R K S



Building on this initial success, at the 1935 conference of the International Federation of Authors and Composers Societies (CISAC) in Seville, fascist Undersecretary of Press and Propaganda Dino Alfieri convinced the rest of the members to support his call for an international conference between national authors’ societies and the IFPI as well as similar international bodies in the film industry and radio to discuss legal, contract, and organizational questions. Alfieri thereby undertook what a prominent fascist copyright jurist—writing in Germany’s leading copyright law journal— called “a truly, specifically corporative initiative on the international level.” A trained lawyer with a background in Italy’s nationalist movement, Alfieri had served as undersecretary in the Ministry of Corporations and had made a name for himself in the fascist regime’s cultural politics as lead organizer of the grand Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution of 1932. The reform that Alfieri had in mind, a large-scale, multinational, and collective regulation of the rights of producers and performers, would be corporatist in that it would defend private property but would do so through state-regulated, sector-wide agreements. Th is blend would achieve fascism’s self-declared middle way between the selfish individualism of liberal capitalism and the anti-individualist tyranny of communism. Alfieri’s meeting, scheduled for December 1935 in Rome, did not end up taking place. But the Italians’ angling for a leadership role in CISAC paid off that year, when Dino Alfieri was made the organization’s honorary president. These efforts were typical of Italy’s pursuit of European hegemony in ideological and cultural fields in the early 1930s. The success these efforts enjoyed was likewise representative of the positive attention that Italy’s broader cultural and ideological campaign was able to command. But the growing international prominence of Nazi Germany presented the Italians with a challenge. Was Germany a like-minded collaborator or a powerful competitor? The birth of the Reich Chamber of Culture (RKK), the creation of the state-led artists’ rights body STAGMA, and the emergence of National Socialist proposals for copyright reform were clearly modeled on Italian fascist precedents. What the RKK called “corporatist development” (berufsständische Aufbau) echoed core ideas of Italian fascist corporativismo. Both movements proposed corporatist models as a “third way” response to the demand, widespread among artists in the early 1930s, that the realm of culture must be protected from economic liberalism, as well as



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

defended from the leveling forces of communism. But which regime would be more successful in proposing its model internationally? When Lualdi accepted Strauss’s 1934 invitations to Berlin and Wiesbaden, it was surely with a mandate to see what Hitler’s Germany was seeking to achieve in the field. At the same time, Lualdi must have been attracted to a grouping that embraced his own aggressive musical conservatism. Lualdi had helped set the politicized tone of Italy’s own bitter debate over modern music back in 1917. Then, the young composer led a struggle in the pages of Italy’s leading music journals against the “international” tendencies of the post-Puccini school of Italian composers, interested in nonvocal composition and open to European influences, known as the “generation of 1880”—including Gian Francesco Malipiero, Ottorino Respighi, Ildebrando Pizzetti, Franco Alfano, and Alfredo Casella. Active as a music critic throughout the 1920s, when he also became an avid fascist, Lualdi reserved particular venom for those Italian composers who were inspired by atonal, twelve-tone, or other “foreign” compositional innovations. Only a musical renewal based on the “rediscovery of our classics” would be appropriate to the Italy of Mussolini. Composers who embraced such a return to national traditions, including many of his fellow foreign guests, highlighted a broader European rejection of avantgarde styles that had begun after World War I and that the French playwright Jean Cocteau famously called the “return to order.” But Lualdi’s conservative and ultranationalist musical vision did not go unchallenged in Italy. For if Lualdi spoke for those who called for Italy to find “musical renewal” in its own tradition, another group sought to renew Italian music by deprovincializing it, bringing in foreign composers and new works. The leading figure of this group was Alfredo Casella. Born into a family of musicians in Turin in 1883, Casella had lived from the age of thirteen in Paris, where he had been sent to study piano and composition. Back in Italy after the outbreak of the First World War, Casella displayed a commitment to the newest and most daring elements of modern composition, as well as a fervent Italian nationalism. These tendencies came together in the work that established his reputation (and notoriety) in Italy: his Elegia eroica, a passionate orchestral work that used dissonant chords and aggressive rhythms to honor the memory of an anonymous fallen soldier. The work’s January 21, 1917, premiere in Rome led to “as tumultuous a gathering as the one that marked the first performance of Igor Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps in Paris,” according to one critic.

C RE AT I NG C ULT URA L NE T WO R K S



Strengthened by this early succès de scandale, Casella pursued a busy set of initiatives that mixed nationalist and pro-fascist politics with modernist aesthetics, in particular through organizational efforts to bring Italy into the European musical avant-garde, and the avant-garde into Italy. In 1924, he accompanied Arnold Schoenberg on his first tour of Italy, exposing Italian audiences to the atonal challenges of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, conducted by the composer himself. Casella also almost single-handedly led Italy’s participation in the International Society for Contemporary Music. Along with Francesco Malipiero and the novelist, poet, and nationalist ideologue Gabriele D’Annunzio, Casella in 1923 created a Corporation for New Music (Corporazione delle nuove musiche) to serve as the Italian section of the ISCM. A canny fund-raiser, Casella secured state fi nancing— and Mussolini’s patronage—for ISCM festivals in Venice (1925), Siena (1928), and Florence (1934). There was not, for Casella, any inconsistency between his radical nationalism and his efforts to interact with stylistic novelties from abroad. Instead, Casella joined the group of younger Italian intellectuals in many fields who believed that for Italy to be a truly European country it must keep up with the “European” standard. And there was a long way to go. “Regarding modern music,” he wrote in 1923, “it is painful for an Italian who travels the world to be forced to affirm that Italy holds the last place. We are talking just this year about letting the Roman audience hear Stravinsky’s grandiose Sacre that Paris and London were discussing already in 1913.” Lualdi was not personally hostile to Casella, and he was willing to acknowledge the critique, widespread in Italy since the early decades of the century, that Italian music was in need of renewal. But the answer was certainly not to imitate the music of Schoenberg. Lualdi attacked his music in the press as “a crime” (“What Schoenberg has done in Pierrot Lunaire is antimusical; that it is ‘logical’ does not matter; on the contrary, it aggravates the crime”). Lualdi laced his critique with a strong dose of anti-Semitism, celebrating the Italian public’s “innate religious sense,” which instinctively rejected the “atheistic” art of Jews like Schoenberg. When Lualdi did have a kind word for Casella it was to offer backhanded praise for the way his “amico Alfredo” had abandoned Schoenbergian serialism for a recognizably Italian national style since his 1923 piece Tre canzoni trecentesche. Although Lualdi might have liked to clamp down on certain avant-garde styles, Mussolini’s regime lent support to various styles in contemporary composition, echoing the strategy of “aesthetic pluralism” that characterized



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

fascist patronage of the visual arts. Mussolini particularly encouraged the international music festivals that flourished in the 1930s. Regardless of the type of music they advanced, the regime embraced these events as opportunities for high-cultural propaganda at which “the new Italy” could appear a leading force in the latest European cultural trends. As Casella wrote in a flattering letter to Mussolini, soliciting money for the 1928 ISCM festival in Sienna, the Duce understood “in a particular way how every aspect of our new national life must appear in the eyes of foreigners.” Through such tactics, Casella garnered official support for his effort to win the battle for the future of Italian music, strengthening his position in Italy by mobilizing networks of allies outside of Italy. With the foundation of the Permanent Council, Lualdi and the many conservative composers and critics he spoke for also had access to international allies. Lualdi was not drawn in by any par ticu lar admiration for Strauss. On the contrary: by his own account, Lualdi’s musical awakening had come when he fled Rome’s Liceo Santa Cecilia, where students and teachers alike were “drunk on Strauss and Debussy,” to study in Venice. There he found “new, more worthy idols” in Italy’s own musical tradition, replacing Strauss’s Salome, “which at that time was everywhere über alles,” with Verdi’s Falstaff.  But when he received Strauss’s invitation in 1934, Lualdi was quick to recognize the potential of an international congress of musical conservatives for advancing ideas he had long held dear. His first move, however, would be to insist on Italy’s equality with Germany as a leader in this field. When Lualdi addressed the assembled composers in Berlin in 1934, he claimed that Italy had been “the first nation to set a stop to certain artistic forms of extremism from which now the whole world was moving away.” At the meeting in Wiesbaden, eager to secure a leading role for Italy in the new institution, Lualdi convinced his fellow composers to hold the Permanent Council’s next meeting in Venice during the upcoming Biennale music festival. ◆

◆

◆

By the time Strauss and other Permanent Council delegates arrived in Venice on September 10, 1934, the Biennale had been drawing the international art world to Venice since 1895. Beginning in 1930, the organizers sought to expand the event’s reach by adding festivals for music, decorative arts, theater, and cinema. The Biennale’s president, Venetian industrialist Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, used every means to promote a dynamic, cos-

C RE AT I NG C ULT URA L NE T WO R K S



mopolitan image for Venice as the political and economic hub of the Adriatic and launching point for a new age of Italian influence in the Mediterranean. With its expanding industrial port across the lagoon at Porto Marghera, the new bridge that allowed visitors to arrive by car, and its stylish art deco airport on the Lido, Volpi’s Venice embodied the mixture of tradition and progress that regime supporters claimed as a distinctive feature of fascist modernity. Helping Venice emerge from its long-standing stagnation also polished his own image as cultured capitalist and latter-day doge. The Biennale’s general secretary, the sculptor and art impresario Antonio Maraini, was a fervent nationalist who worked closely with the regime’s propaganda office to organize exhibitions of Italian art abroad as tools of cultural diplomacy. Eager to kick-start the high-end tourism that had sagged since the beginning of the depression, Italy’s hotel-owner consortium CIGA (Compagnia italiana grandi alberghi)— also led by Volpi—was a keen sponsor of these events. Lualdi had been president of the Biennale’s music festival since its foundation in 1930. From the start, he used the festival to promote Italy’s claim to be the leader of the European musical “return to order.” Distinguishing his event from the avant-garde festivals at Donaueschingen and BadenBaden, Lualdi declared that Venice would be open to international trends but would reserve the “right to bar entry to contraband merchandise and not make itself an accomplice to the importation of certain artistic poisons and psychoactive drugs [stupefacenti] that have made a killing on the other side of the Alps.” Assembling the delegates of the newly created Permanent Council in Venice would help affirm the city as the natural meeting place for an international coalition of musical nationalists, and Italy as a European leader in striking a balance between musical modernity and tradition. Moving swiftly to enshrine Venice’s centrality in the new organization, Lualdi welcomed the delegates to Venice’s Palazzo Ducale on September 11, 1934, with a stern speech emphasizing fascist Italy’s commitment to deeds rather than mere words, and a proposal to set up an international archive for contemporary music in Venice. But while the Italians played host, the Germans presided over the consolidation and expansion of their new initiative. Richard Strauss led three days of closed-door meetings attended by representatives of Austria, Belgium, Britain, Czechoslova kia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, and Poland, as well as two new members. Representing Norway was Sverre Hagerup-Bull, the



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

composer, music writer, and lawyer who served from 1932 to 1938 as director of Norway’s composers’ rights society (Norsk Komponistforenings Internasjonale Musikkbyrå, today’s TONO). Spain was represented by Madrid Conservatory musicologist and composer José Forns, whose Historia de la música was standard reading in conservatories across Spain and Latin America. A trained lawyer, he was also a leading defender of the legal rights of Spanish composers. In the meantime, composers from Holland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia had also asked to join the Council. Germany was now represented also by Emil von Reznicek, the seventy-four-year-old Austrianborn composer of late romantic operas and orchestral works, who had worked with Strauss in the German composers’ society some thirty years earlier. The meeting’s outcomes were unveiled on September 14 in Venice’s storied academy of arts and sciences, the Ateneo Veneto, at a solemn closing ceremony and press conference. Here the Permanent Council’s General Secretary Julius Kopsch announced that Strauss had named three vice presidents: Adriano Lualdi, the distinguished French composer Albert Roussel, and, in a major coup for the fledgling organization, the world-famous Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. (Neither Roussel nor Sibelius was in attendance, but Roussel had accepted this honor in advance.) In a victory for Italy, the delegates accepted Lualdi’s proposal for an archive of contemporary music in Venice and agreed to found an archive elsewhere for “folk music of all nations.” The Italians could be pleased that the Permanent Council’s cooperation among national composers’ organizations would embody what the international press recognized as a “corporatist principle.” The success of this German-led institution in Italy did not signify any broader Italian– German understanding, however. Political circumstances made that highly unlikely. Instead, the 1934 Biennale took place during a low point in relations between Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, touched off by the assassination in July of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss by Austrian National Socialists who called for the dissolution of Austria into Hitler’s Reich. Mussolini had nurtured Dollfuss as a protégé and considered an independent Austria a vital buffer between Italy and Germany. He had declared his commitment to Austria’s independence at his first meeting with Hitler, held near Venice only one month earlier, in June 1934. Mussolini responded to Dollfuss’s murder by moving troops to Italy’s border with Austria to demonstrate his determination to defend the country from Hitler’s ambitions. On September 14, as delegates of the Permanent

C RE AT I NG C ULT URA L NE T WO R K S



Council held their press conference, Mussolini arrived in Venice, but ignored the city’s prominent German guests. He came to the city, rather, to attend the Vienna Philharmonic’s performance of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, honoring a promise he had made to Dollfuss and reaffirming “the bonds of art and friendship that firmly unite Austria and Italy.” Quite apart from these political issues, however, the distance between Germany and Italy was underscored by the conflict that emerged over the music performed at the Venetian festival. Now in its third edition, Venice’s Biennale di musica offered what Lualdi was proud to call “a music festival of Italian and fascist character,” marked by “breadth of the criteria that inspire its choice of works and invitations to composers; for the Latin sense of balance that informs its programming; and for its jealous self-defense from servitude to any clientele or clique.” For all his antimodernist bluster, Lualdi’s festival sought to split the difference between wholly conservative concert programming, on the one hand, and, on the other, strictly modernist festivals of avant-garde works of the type associated with the ISCM. Planned in cooperation with a committee that included Casella and Malipiero but also the archconservative head of the National Fascist Musicians’ Union, Giuseppe Mulè, Lualdi’s Biennale mixed the work of contemporary composers with classic repertory by Mozart, Beethoven, and Verdi. The program, approved almost a year in advance by Mussolini himself, mixed elite concerts with mass events that took up Mussolini’s 1931 call for the nation’s cultural elites to move “towards the people.” Wednesday, September 12 featured a “Concert for the People” (Concerto per il Popolo), an outdoor performance in the Piazza San Marco of Verdi’s Requiem, featuring as soloist the worldfamous tenor Beniamino Gigli. The elite concerts, held at Venice’s famed La Fenice opera house, demonstrated fascist Italy’s openness to European trends by featuring new works by several of the continent’s most important modernist composers, including Alban Berg, Arthur Honegger, Ernst Krenek, Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, and Karol Szymanowski. But the programming at Venice that Lualdi saw as embodying a “Latin sense of balance,” the German delegation derided in politicized and racist terms. Reporting back to Berlin, Permanent Council general secretary Julius Kopsch complained that the Venice festival was “still dominated by the musical-Bolshevik propaganda . . . and to a large extent [the festival] took up works of this character (by [Ernst] Krenek, by Alban Berg, by Darius Milhaud, and Wladimir Vogel) in the program.” His evaluation was



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

supported by Herbert Gerigk, the passionate racist culture warrior who covered music for the publications of ideologue Alfred Rosenberg and for the Nazi party daily Völkischer Beobachter. Gerigk railed against the presence on the festival program of “atonality,” “jazz imitations,” and “Unmusik,” and scorned the presence in the audience of “those rootless intellectuals who, among us [in Germany] the national revolution has chased away.” Indeed, the cosmopolitan flair of the event in Venice could not have failed to strike the German guests. On September 11, 1934, Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, British composer Constant Lambert, and Ildebrando Pizzetti all conducted their own works in a single concert. In the audience in Venice’s Teatro La Fenice sat the controversial Viennese modernist Alban Berg, whose concert aria Der Wein was performed on the same program, scoring a critical success. Also present was Richard Strauss, although he stormed out in disgust during Lambert’s piano concerto. But it was not only the Germans who complained. The French delegation, led by composer Carol-Bérard, was likewise upset that Darius Milhaud, who was Jewish, was selected to represent contemporary French music. Energized by their hostility to the Italians’ concert programming, the composers agreed in Venice to a German proposal designed fundamentally to redefine the international music festival for an age of nationalism. A festival could be acknowledged as “international” if at least half of the works performed were by composers from outside the host nation. Delegates from each country would submit to the Permanent Council’s general secretary lists of musical compositions that they approved as nationally representative. Then the organizer of an international festival would have to assemble the “international” half of the program exclusively by selecting works from this list, “in consultation with the President and the general secretary.” Designed to give each country the right to control how its own national culture would be represented abroad, this system should simply and effectively block “the internationalistic tendencies” in music. Presented at the conference’s final meeting, this new system was immediately celebrated in the Nazi press. For Gerigk, the use of these approved lists of works showed that an unhappy “age in the history of music festivals has concluded,” as “Richard Strauss has revolutionized the artistic thought of the world.” Even the manner in which these decisions were taken reflected the Germans’ effort to impose a Nazi model of cultural organization on the classical music world. Kopsch reported to Goebbels with pride that the institution

C RE AT I NG C ULT URA L NE T WO R K S



in fact had no written statutes, and that Strauss had been named—not democratically elected—as president. Unlike the ISCM, which worked on liberal democratic principles, the Permanent Council functioned on the basis of the Führerprinzip—the antidemocratic “leader principle” that was a central article of National Socialist faith— and its decisions “move in the direction of National Socialist cultural development.” But this particular feature of the Permanent Council did not last long. Later in 1934, Strauss and Julius Kopsch entered into a bitter personal feud, and Kopsch was driven from his post as the body’s general secretary. After Kopsch’s departure, Strauss, guided by Propaganda Ministry officials, developed a policy of careful outreach to foreigners, internationalizing the organization while attenuating its explicitly National Socialist character. The new general secretary, the Swedish composer Kurt Atterberg, saw to the preparation of a set of statutes for the Permanent Council, and led it to adopt democratic organizational rules. Strauss had believed that “it is important for our prestige that the whole upper leadership remain in German hands.” But when the Permanent Council’s non-German members expressed interest in granting the position to Atterberg, the Propaganda Ministry prevailed upon Strauss to accept the “German-friendly” composer’s candidacy. This, an official explained, was “the proper solution . . . for tactical, as well as foreign policy and simply objective reasons.” The choice of Atterberg, head of Sweden’s musical rights society STIM, also ensured continuity in the newly founded institution’s pursuit of copyright reform. Strauss’s choices for the council’s three vice presidents had likewise been guided by instructions from the Propaganda Ministry, which insisted that the new organization achieve a high level of international prestige, especially if the Permanent Council was not going to appear a second-class institution compared to its implicit rival, the International Society for Contemporary Music. With international success in mind, the council welcomed representatives of democracies and of countries Nazi Germany would soon undermine or attack, like Austria, Czechoslova kia, and Poland. Nazi officials agreed not to object to the fact that several composers who participated in the Permanent Council did so while retaining their membership in the International Society for Contemporary Music. Thus reorga nized, the Permanent Council served the promotion of German cultural hegemony and propagandistic outreach toward many countries at the same time, including the Western democracies. This effort was



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

in evidence already at the Permanent Council’s first music festival of its own, the Internationaler Tonkünstlerfest in Hamburg, June 1–7, 1935. There Strauss and Propaganda Ministry officials held intensive, behind-the-scenes discussions about which composers should receive the city’s Brahms-Medal (“for services to the musical life of Hamburg”), which had been awarded to Strauss himself the year before. Following the conservative-nationalist pattern established when the award was first given, in 1928, to the Wagner conductor and outspoken anti-Semite Karl Muck, the Brahms-Medaille was normally awarded to German or Austrian composers and conductors embracing traditionalist musical styles and conservative politics. But Strauss, focused on the success of the Permanent Council among its international members, objected that giving the prize only to German and Austrian composers “could endanger the entire success of the international music festival.” He proposed that the officeholders of the Permanent Council each also receive the award: that is, Atterberg and the three vice presidents, Albert Roussel, Jean Sibelius, and Lualdi. The Propaganda Ministry accepted this idea, but then informed Strauss at the last minute that it would be wise “on the basis of current foreign policy considerations” also to give a prize to an Englishman. This would have to be Permanent Council member Herbert Bedford, who did not, however, hold any office in the institution. So Strauss was ordered, two days before the festival’s opening, to appoint Bradford vice general secretary. No fewer than ten gold Brahms-Medals were distributed to a somewhat surprised group of German and European composers. Strauss’s effort, in cooperation with the Propaganda Ministry, to present the institution in a depoliticized manner survived even the political crisis that led Goebbels to dismiss Strauss from the presidency of the Reich Music Chamber in July 1935. This episode, related to Strauss’s artistic collaboration with the Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, is a well-known element of the long debate over Strauss’s cooperation with the Nazis. But Strauss’s fall from grace with the Nazi leadership did not affect his role in the Permanent Council. Strauss continued as president, and was present a few months later for the institution’s next festival and meeting in Vichy, France. He would not miss an event that he had worked hard to bring into being. As he had written to a colleague in December 1934, “This first French, not atonal, international music festival is incredibly important. It is the crowning of the efforts that Minister Dr. Goebbels has also approved. It is the first step in

C RE AT I NG C ULT URA L NE T WO R K S



smoothing the path [to international success] for those of our German composers who thus far have not been performed abroad.” The September 1935 festival in Vichy, with concerts in the city’s art nouveau casino and receptions at Vichy’s golf club “Le Sporting,” recreated a decidedly pre–World War I cosmopolitan European sensibility. The program, arranged by Albert Roussel and fellow French composer Gustave Samazeuilh, featured works by seventy composers representing fifteen countries. It included ten orchestra concerts, two chamber music recitals, and no fewer than twelve opera and ballet evenings, including Verdi’s La forza del destino and Strauss’s Salome, with the composer himself conducting. The only apparent politics were the reassuring politics of German–French reconciliation, which the Parisian daily Le Figaro highlighted in its coverage of the festival. In Vichy, Strauss also conducted two works by French-Jewish composer Paul Dukas, whose recent death was solemnly marked during the festival. In this way, Strauss served as an authoritative, prestigious, and conservative representative of German musical greatness, whose distance from the Nazi regime—signaled by performing the work of a Jewish composer—made him more effective in his international role. At the same time, the Vichy event aggressively positioned itself against the rival internationalism of the ISCM. The festival in Vichy was timed to conflict with the ISCM’s festival in Prague and made sure to outclass that event in terms of scale. Some ISCM members, refusing to be fooled by the Permanent Council’s classy and apolitical self-presentation at Vichy, sought to expose the organization as a Nazi ideological stalking horse. The Austrian composer Ernst Krenek, who had enjoyed European-wide success with his 1927 jazz-influenced opera Jonny spielt auf!, mocked the Permanent Council as the “Blubo-Internationale” (for “Blut und Boden,” blood and soil). Austrian pro-modernist critic Paul Stefan demanded that the ISCM take a hard line against composers who dallied with the “racist and reactionary” Permanent Council by barring the performance of their works at future ISCM events. These critiques had a point, but they overstated the importance of ideological or aesthetic considerations in attracting the Permanent Council’s members. What was decisive for many of them was the organization’s promise to make headway on legal and economic issues affecting the livelihoods of composers. During the council’s 1935 festival, in a private room in Vichy’s



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

palatial Casino, the French composer and Permanent Council Vice President Albert Roussel led five working sessions in which the composers— Atterberg, Carol-Bérard, Forns, Gram, Hullebroeck, Lualdi, Reznicek, the British composer Herbert Bedford, and, from the second meeting onward, Strauss— agreed to develop a regulated plan for the exchange across borders of musical works and advanced the plan for an international music archive in Venice. French composer Carol-Bérard pushed for the creation of an international music library in Paris. Strauss insisted that the Permanent Council demand higher standards for the education of music teachers across Europe. But the real focus of the meetings was on the revision of copyright law, in par ticu lar regarding the composer’s moral rights. The composers agreed, after some debate, on a joint resolution calling on each delegate to demand an official position from his own national government on the issue. Each country should furthermore be encouraged to create a commission, composed of artists and jurists, which would work closely with the Permanent Council on the defense of droit moral. Roussel, a subtle, sophisticated composer and a man of open socialist sympathies who later led France’s leftoriented Popular Music Federation (Fédération Musicale Populaire), could hardly be called a “blood and soil” composer. But his concerns with music’s international conditions led him to work closely with the Germans on this event. Lualdi recalled later that Strauss showed more passion and physicality regarding copyright issues than he had at the podium as he conducted the previous evening’s performance of Salome: “When he refers to the daily profanations committed against outstanding works and musicians, which remain unpunished because no one takes up the defense of the author who is absent, or dead, or without heirs, the right arm and hand of the great Richard violently cut through the air. His fist bangs on the table with a crisp sound; his bright eyes have the shine of steel. None of us had seen anything of the kind when he conducted Salome in the theater.” Strauss’s passion reflected the fact that droit moral was much more than an economic issue. In addition to ensuring that composers earned money for their works, reforms were intended as a form of defense against “vandalism” of works of music by those who would, for example, use music in an inappropriate film or make a jazz version of a classical work. Officials in Berlin followed these developments closely and with satisfaction. The issue of the “moral right” of the author or composer was tied to the issue of what the Berne convention called “the au-

C RE AT I NG C ULT URA L NE T WO R K S



The Permanent Council for International Cooperation among Composers meets in Vichy, September 1935. From left to right: Carol-Bérard, Albert Roussel, Adriano Lualdi, Richard Strauss, Emil von Reznicek, Kurt Atterberg, Herbert Bedford, José Forns, Emiel Hullebroeck, and Peder Gram. (Richard- Strauss-Institut, Garmisch-Partenkirchen)

thor’s honor or reputation.” And “honor,” as observers noted already in the 1930s, was a key legal concept for Nazi jurists, who called for a move away from a static, legalistic vision of international order to one based on “moral concepts, such as those of honor, respect and mutual confidence.” In this way, the matter of droit moral was, according to Paul Graener, Strauss’s successor as head of the German Composers’ Union, “of the greatest importance for our foreign relations.” ◆

◆

◆

Lualdi could take pleasure in the ratification of his proposal for an archive of contemporary music to be based in Venice. Yet, as he returned to Italy from the concerts and meetings in Vichy, it must have been apparent that through the Permanent Council the Germans had effectively seized the initiative in a field in which, only a few years before, the Italians seemed poised to lead. Indeed, although the Permanent Council’s aesthetic choices led some observers to perceive it as the anti-ISCM, its pan-European orga nizational



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

ambitions revealed that it was really a rival to the Italian-led International Concert Federation (ICF). San Martino’s organization had addressed virtually every issue taken up by the Permanent Council, including its signature emphasis on copyright. At the ICF’s May 1933 meeting in Paris, its members reviewed the status of copyright law in each participating country and gathered proposals to advance to CISAC. But by the summer of 1934 that effort to forge international cooperation on a fascist-corporatist model had run aground, undermined by Europe’s economic crisis and a lack of support from the fascist regime or other governments. Just as its president, Count San Martino, decided to cancel the federation’s upcoming conference, Lualdi was on his way to Wiesbaden to cofound the Permanent Council. Sensing a chance to restart his plans with German backing, San Martino reached out to Nazi officials in August 1935 to try to revive the federation in a more modest form. But German authorities politely squelched the idea. Noting the recent establishment of the Permanent Council, a representative of the Reich Music Chamber told San Martino that he did not believe Germany could support “two organizations pursuing the same ends.” The ends were indeed largely the same. The difference was that while San Martino’s Federation sought to build links among concert halls, promoters, and conservatories—138 musical institutions in twenty-nine countries— Strauss’s Permanent Council created a network of composer-organizers who could address aesthetic as well as organizational goals. The Permanent Council’s long-term vision was to be not a body of individual composers, but an organization of national composers’ organizations. This would create a body with potential power far greater than its small number of members suggested. At the same time, its members’ status as composers made the demand for European-wide reform appear to come from the artistic sphere. The degree to which Strauss’s institution served the goals and interests of National Socialist foreign cultural policy was thereby obscured. Even as Lualdi represented Italy at the Permanent Council’s music festival in Vichy, Alfredo Casella led a delegation to the ISCM’s 1935 festival in Prague that included prominent young talents Luigi Dallapiccola and Goffredo Petrassi. Upon returning to Italy, Casella enthused about the greatness of avant-garde works heard at the festival, including Schoenberg’s Variations (op. 31), Berg’s Lulu, and Leoš Janáček’s Jenufa. Casella even saw to it that the prominent journal Italia letteraria reprint the ISCM’s Prague resolution, which responded to the foundation of the Permanent Council by reaf-

C RE AT I NG C ULT URA L NE T WO R K S



firming “the capital importance of the liberty of the composer” and the organization’s openness to all living composers who shared its spirit, “without distinction of nationality, of race or of confession.” The fact that in fascist Italy there was still room for critiques like Casella’s was only one of the important differences between fascist Italy and Nazi Germany at this point. In the fluid political landscape of 1935, fascist Italy’s cultural outreach to Europe was by no means aligned with Nazi Germany. In that year, Italian officials signed cultural treaties with Austria and Hungary reaffirming Italy’s leading role in the Danube basin and courted French elite opinion with a massive exhibition of Italian painting masterpieces in Paris. Much of this activity was designed to block Germany’s advance into areas where the Italians aspired to lead. But Lualdi’s experience with the Permanent Council suggested a new possibility. Perhaps the Italians would do better to pursue their goals of cultural revisionism in Europe with, rather than against, Hitler’s Germany. In 1935, under rapidly changing political circumstances, this same question would arise for the leaders of Italy’s film industry, as well.

■

2 Cooperation or Capitulation?

Guests at the 1935 Venice Film Festival might be forgiven for failing to appreciate what was probably the event’s most fateful moment. This was not the spectacular arrival by airplane of Italy’s dapper minister for press and propaganda, Galeazzo Ciano, the presence of international stars like Josephine Baker, or the screening of the first film in Technicolor, Becky Sharp. It took place not at the outdoor screenings on the terrace of the Hotel Excelsior, nor at the prize ceremony at festival’s end, nor during the various deal-making sessions that unfolded by the beach on the Lido. Rather, as is often the case at film festivals, the most decisive event occurred behind the scenes. It came when representatives of the film industries of eleven European countries signed on to a new, German-led international cinema organization. This organization was unveiled to the public at the festival’s inaugural session, on the evening of August 10 in the newly renovated festival headquarters in Palazzetto Bevilaqua-La Masa. Here Giuseppe Volpi, president of the Venice Biennale, introduced the foreign delegates, representing France, Germany, Poland, and Hungary, who would serve on the festival’s prize jury. After the other delegates praised the festival and expressed their admiration for Mussolini, Fritz Scheuermann, the jurist whom Goebbels had made president of Germany’s Reich Film Chamber, announced that Venice would also host a meeting of what he presented to the audience as the International Film Chamber (IFC). Once the delegates had signed the statues that would bring it into being, the IFC, he declared, intended to make of Venice “its distinctive manifestation.”



C OOP E RAT I ON OR C A P I T UL ATION ?



Assembling delegates from across Europe to create this International Film Chamber was a cultural and diplomatic coup for the Nazi regime. First proposed only three months earlier at the lavish International Film Congress that Goebbels’s Reich Film Chamber had hosted in Berlin, the IFC represented the achievement of a goal that German film industry leaders had pursued since the 1920s. It promised finally to establish a permanent institution for promoting pan-European film exchange that would help create a large and unified European market for these films, while consolidating the leadership of Germany, home of the continent’s largest and most powerful film industry. It was the largest-scale and most spectacular of Nazi Germany’s various efforts to use cultural exchange to end Germany’s isolation and instead promote the Reich’s claim to continental leadership. That this new body would choose the Venice Biennale Film Festival as its meeting point was a happy development for that event’s Italian backers. Since the festival’s foundation in 1932, its organizers had hoped to make Venice a hub of the networks of European cinema, supporting a broader effort to claim for Italy a position of leadership in the most dynamic medium of the age. They jealously guarded the festival’s unique status against potential rivals. Scheuermann’s promise to make Venice the showcase of the IFC seemed to promote both goals. How the Italians and Germans arrived at this point was a story that bore striking parallels to the development of the Permanent Council. Even more so than music, film was a cultural field undergoing radical internationalization and technological transformation. Here too, fascist Italy had taken a leading role in the early 1930s, pursuing Italian leadership and promoting fascist ideology through efforts to give the field organizational form. Here too, Germany’s larger-scale pan-European initiative eventually forced the Italians to respond and regroup, linking their efforts to the Germans’ while maintaining Italy’s own ambitions for leadership. The question for the leaders of Italy’s cinema industry was whether it was possible to cooperate with the Germans’ European institutions without capitulating to German leadership. In cinema, the stakes surrounding this question were high. Because film received so much attention from both states, questions of film policy brought the two regimes into direct contact. Cinema was an international economic, cultural, and political battleground in which power, prestige, and a great deal of money were at stake. When Germany’s and Italy’s separate efforts to



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

organize and lead European cinema life came into contact, they responded not just to the circumstances of the mid-1930s, but to a complex set of developments that had rocked European cinema for over a decade. ◆

◆

◆

In the mid-1930s, European cinema was in crisis. Economically, European cinema suffered from a fundamental structural problem: its biggest competitors, the major Hollywood studios, could cover their costs in America’s vast home market, and then export their films for low rental rates and turn large profits. By contrast, none of Europe’s national cinemas had a home market big enough to keep up with the rise in production costs. Germany’s market, Europe’s largest in 1930, had not quite one-quarter as many movie theaters as the United States. This situation put Hollywood in a position to impose its product on European countries. By the late 1920s, Hollywood movies dominated markets across the continent, accounting in 1928 for 54 percent of all films shown in France, 72 percent in Britain, and 80 percent in Italy. Faced with less expensive imports, many of Europe’s great filmmaking nations had virtually ceased producing films altogether, and industry leaders turned their attention to the more lucrative business of distributing and exhibiting American movies. Culturally, the predominance of American cinema in Europe was the cause of confusion and anxiety. European filmmakers and intellectuals resented the extraordinary success of Hollywood on their terrain. Conservatives fretted that American cinema was penetrating the especially susceptible minds of young people and women and thereby undermining national traditions and destabilizing social hierarchies. Critics on the left were distressed by Hollywood’s glorification of capitalist values and its validation of escapism. Hollywood was widely viewed as the tip of the spear of an “Americanism” that, as one German critic complained in 1929, “will be the end of everything as we have known it.” By that year, the introduction of sound film and the onset of the Depression radically raised the stakes. But even before then, the status of the cinema in Europe gained in urgency because it seemed to embody the broader crisis of European civilization that obsessed intellectuals in the interwar period. Politically, European cinema’s losing struggle with Hollywood had important implications. Cinema’s reach was broad, deep, and popular. In the age of mass politics, it promised an extraordinary tool. This is what Lenin recognized in 1922 when he declared, “of all the arts for us the most important

C OOP E RAT I ON OR C A P I T UL ATION ?



is cinema” and called for radical state intervention into cinema. (Mussolini would not launch his similar slogan, “cinema is the strongest weapon,” until 1936. ) Recognizing the medium’s power, Imperial Germany’s Supreme Army Command had created a seminationalized film conglomerate during World War I, the first incarnation of Germany’s UFA (Universum Film AG) film studio. But state and military control over the studio collapsed, along with the German Empire, at the end of the war. In the 1920s, the extraordinary success of American movies in European countries seriously challenged the claim of European states to exercise sovereign control over the cultural lives of their citizens. These economic, cultural, and political problems were all exacerbated by the addition of sound to motion pictures at the end of the decade. Across Europe, the 1930s saw a search for ways to meet the public’s demand for entertainment in this new medium while preserving elite groups’ understanding of national cultural traditions, and the social hierarchies they represented, by developing a cinema that would be both broadly popular and distinctly national. Many of the problems that Hollywood embodied in the European mind were in fact typical phenomena of economic, cultural, and political modernity. The small craft atelier threatened by the vertically integrated conglomerate, the age-old values and local identities threatened by mass-produced commercial cultural products, the challenge to political elites by the acceleration of cross-border cultural flows— all of these were general features of European modernity, which were not exclusive to cinema and which could not be blamed on American movies alone. But Hollywood was more than a scapegoat. The economic dominance of American cinema really did mean that, for most European nations, the development of a small-scale national mode of expression in this new and powerful art form was effectively impossible. National elites across Europe had reasons to perceive this inability as a serious problem. Film clearly had great potential power to help educate and nationalize their masses, especially in countries with low rates of literacy. Insofar as Hollywood’s penetration of European markets blocked national elites from controlling the promise and the threat of cinema, it denied them a mighty tool for exercising control over their nations’ transitions to social and cultural modernity. The main weapons employed in the 1920s to protect domestic producers were high import duties on American films and quota schemes. In Germany, quota laws that tied the import of Hollywood movies to American firms’



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

willingness to distribute German films helped keep American product to a relatively modest 40 percent of all films shown in Germany. But this system could not offer a model since it required large-scale success in exporting films, which was beyond the reach of all but a few European countries. Moreover, the quotas and tariffs demanded by film producers were highly unpopular with film distributors and cinema owners (known in the industry as “exhibitors”), who suffered from the reduction of American films and the audiences for them. In 1920s Italy, the only important cinema industrialist was the distributor and cinema chain owner Stefano Pittaluga, whose business relied on the steady flow of Hollywood movies. Any anti-Hollywood protectionism designed to promote domestic production, he warned in 1924, “would immediately provoke reprisals” from the United States. In that case, “we could find ourselves without any raw materials”—that is, Hollywood movies—“at all.” Ultimately, even if the tensions internal to each national market could be resolved, no single European film industry could hope to challenge these trends on its own. Serious observers acknowledged that any response to the transnational penetration of Hollywood, even one designed to defend national traditions or the cultural sovereignty of national states, would itself need to be international, or better still, “European.” A key problem, of course, was that there was no such thing as a European cinema. Rather, there were many national cinemas, each with a different language, limited resources, and a comparatively tiny home market. What would it take to create a European cinema in economic terms? What would that mean in cultural terms? And what political or ideological character would such cooperation require? In the 1920s, two international responses were proposed, one led by the cinema industries, the other by European intellectuals. The first of these was what came to be known as “Film Europe.” This was a call for greater intraEuropean exchange in order to create a continent-wide home market big enough to cover production costs, thus giving European producers a chance to respond to the challenge of “Film America.” Film Europe began to take real if modest form in the mid-1920s through a web of binational mutual distribution agreements among Europe’s biggest studios. The center of this web was Berlin—or more precisely Babelsberg, home of Germany’s UFA studio conglomerate. Europe’s largest studio, with its vertically integrated distribution network, chain of theaters, and legacy of state support dating back to World War I, UFA was an important part of what made Germany uniquely able to resist the total takeover of its domestic market by the Amer-

C OOP E RAT I ON OR C A P I T UL ATION ?



ican studios. Pleased with its strengths, yet keenly aware that “it is nevertheless impossible for us to cover the costs of first-rate performances (not to mention securing a return on investment) through domestic sales,” the German trade press enthusiastically promoted a “European Monroe doctrine” in film. Cross-border distribution deals were central to this ambition, as “it will be possible to cover production costs and make a profit only through European solidarity.” One such deal, a 1924 agreement between UFA and the French Établissements Aubert, was enough to prompt the French, too, to celebrate “a new era in European cooperation against American domination.” By 1927, the Italian film press likewise observed the “methodical and preordained efforts of the German [film] industry to place itself at the head of a European cinematic movement to counterbalance American competition,” something confi rmed by the joint distribution agreement between UFA and Italy’s Istituto LUCE signed the following year. Such cross-border deals were complemented by transnational cooperation in other sectors of the film economy—for example, through the foundation in 1928 of an International Union of Theater Owners. Most importantly, Film Europe called for a new kind of “European” film to counter Hollywood. In 1924, Erich Pommer, the renowned UFA producer, called on his counterparts “to create ‘European films,’ which will no longer be French, English, Italian or German films; entirely ‘continental’ films, expanding out into all Europe and amortizing their enormous costs.” This cosmopolitan vision of a “European fi lm” retained its attractive force even after Pommer himself joined the flow of European talent to Hollywood. But these ideas were easier to imagine than to realize. Even the mighty UFA was plagued by financial troubles and dependent upon American capital. Elsewhere in Europe, small, underfinanced studios needed far more than a few distribution agreements to survive the cutthroat competition within and between national markets. Europe’s studios lacked steady distribution networks and failed to create a stable structure for communication among themselves. Above all, European industry representatives failed to create a permanent international institution—a European counterpart to the mighty Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, or MPPDA—to guide their work. To complicate things further, the production of bordercrossing European films was rendered vastly more difficult by the introduction of sound at the end of the decade. Sound divided and restricted the potential export market for European films, especially those from smaller language



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

groups. European producers tried various solutions, including the production of multiple versions in multiple languages, none of which proved commercially viable. The American studios, on the other hand, by 1931 essentially overcame the language issue through the mixture of technically accomplished dubbing and subtitles. Already hobbled by these difficulties, Film Europe was effectively killed off by the onset of the global economic crisis in 1929. The second international response to the crisis of European cinema came from the intellectuals, philanthropists, and statesmen linked to the League of Nations, in particular the League’s International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC). Founded in 1922 under the leadership of figures such as the French philosopher Henri Bergson and Polish Nobel laureate Marie Curie, the ICIC was characterized by a high-minded effort to promote international peace through elite intellectual exchange. Its sophisticated, cosmopolitan tone was set by activities like the 1932 celebration of the centenary of the death of Goethe, attended by Thomas Mann, Salvador de Madariaga, and Paul Valéry, or the famous exchange of letters between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, published in 1933 as Why War?  In 1924, a report on “cultural film problems” in the international field by the French literary scholar Julien Luchaire persuaded the committee to add cinema to its remit. In characteristic fashion, it did this by calling for a major international conference in Paris. Opening on September 27, 1926, the First International Motion-Picture Congress was an outstanding example of 1920s European “cultural internationalism.” It shared that movement’s cosmopolitan character, its anticommercial ethos, and its somewhat unrealistic level of ambition. The 532 delegates in attendance included many of the great filmmakers of the age, including René Clair, Carmine Gallone, Abel Gance, G. W. Pabst, Jean Renoir, and cinema’s purported founder, Louis Lumière. Also present were representatives of thirteen international organizations, including the Red Cross, the International Labor Office, and the Save the Children Fund, as well as women’s groups, religious organizations, and others concerned about cinema’s power and enthusiastic about its potential for promoting peace, education, and international understanding—not, that is, for making money. The conference passed resolutions calling on fi lmmakers “to utilise the resources of the cinema to the fullest possible extent to bring about international peace and universal progress” and to avoid provoking or offending au-

C OOP E RAT I ON OR C A P I T UL ATION ?



diences’ national pride by “presenting foreign nations or races in a degrading or ridiculous light on screen.” Delegates raised the prospect of “an International Bureau of the motionpicture connected with the League of Nations,” and appointed a committee, composed exclusively of Europeans, charged with creating such a body. The most radical proponents of this conference hoped that cinema would be fundamentally reconceived, not as a commercial good, but as a kind of internationalized public utility, and put to work for the common good of humanity. The conference captured the characteristic 1920s enthusiasm for internationalist solutions to cultural issues of all sorts and embraced its global rhetoric, rather than focusing on Europe alone. At the same time, the Parisbased International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation co-organized the 1926 Paris conference with the French cinema union (Chambre Syndicale Française de la Cinématographie), suggesting the prospect of broader cooperation between liberal intellectuals and the cultural industries. This moment of interest in pan-European cinema organization at Paris did not go unnoticed across the Atlantic. The Hollywood press interpreted the event as an expression of the “commercial envy” of a Europe “wrought up over America’s domination in world markets.” The Hollywood studios successfully lobbied to limit the scope of the event to cultural questions and refused to send even unofficial representatives. The Americans’ refusal to participate was one of several factors that made it impossible for the League to deliver on its ambitious and idealistic resolutions. Another was that the cooperation between internationalist intellectuals and film industry representatives seen at the 1926 Paris International Film Congress quickly ran aground. Future League-sponsored events, like the 1927 European Congress on Educational Film in Basel, lacked connections to the film industries. The second International Film Congress, which took place in Berlin in September 1928, intended to follow up on Paris, ended up an industry-only event after the IIIC members, frustrated by the industrialists’ insistence on commercial interests, had all resigned from its planning committee. By the decade’s end, the effort to use the League to respond to the crisis of European cinema had largely collapsed, caught off guard by the advent of sound cinema, stung by the Depression, and undermined by the rise of nationalist movements in Europe. Both liberal internationalism and cross-border capitalist cooperation in Europe had identified and pursued three goals: the creation of a powerful



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

international film organization; the development of European networks for communication and distribution, so as to effectively integrate and broaden the European market for European-made films; and the articulation of a rhetoric surrounding European film that could help clarify its role, function, and identity. Should cinema be treated as a tool for mass public education, a commercial commodity, or an artistic object? And which of these understandings might best distinguish the European product from its American competition? Achieving these goals would require cooperation across borders among industry executives and political officials, but also cooperation within the cinema industries among producers, distributors, and exhibitors, and finally cooperation between the film industry and intellectuals. In the 1930s, promising efforts to meet these goals emerged from a new source: Europe’s fascist dictatorships. ◆

◆

◆

One aspect of cinema on which nearly all commentators agreed was its educational potential. It was under this uplifting and relatively uncontroversial heading that fascist Italy made its first move in the field of international cinema. In 1927, Mussolini proposed to the League of Nations that Italy host a new International Institute for Educational Cinematography (Istituto internazionale di cinematografia educativa, known by its Italian acronym ICE). Founded in Rome on November 5, 1928, in a building Mussolini personally made available on the grounds of his own Villa Torlonia, this institute worked under a mandate from the League of Nations to promote the international exchange of fi lms deemed to have educational or scientific value. Italy’s film industry was in disarray in 1928. But educational cinema was a field in which the fascists could make a claim to leadership, based on the achievements of Italy’s state-led body for educational and propaganda films, the Istituto LUCE. Since its foundation in 1924, LUCE (the acronym means “light”) had produced scores of educational films on topics including agricultural techniques, national history, personal hygiene, and touristic celebrations of Italy’s cities and regions, as well as more explicit works of political propaganda that celebrated the achievements of fascism and the charisma of the Duce. These films, and from 1927 a weekly newsreel, were shown at thousands of screenings across the country. All Italian cinemas were required by law to show LUCE’s films, while the institute’s own cinemobili—trucks fitted out with projection equipment—brought films to some of the peninsula’s most

C OOP E RAT I ON OR C A P I T UL ATION ?



isolated areas. In the meantime, LUCE also made a name on the international scene. The institute’s founding director, former journalist and fi lm producer Luciano De Feo, promoted LUCE’s achievements at the Leaguesponsored cinema conferences in Paris (1926) and Basel (1927) with notable success. Delegates at the Basel conference passed a resolution recommending LUCE as a model institution, chose Rome to host the next international conference, and named De Feo president of the coordinating commission. Italy’s proposal, a few months later, to found an International Institute for Educational Cinematography sought to build on this international acknowledgment and solidify Italian leadership in the field. Objections to the plan were raised especially in rival centers Paris and Basel, where some wondered aloud whether a nationalist dictatorship should host an institution devoted to internationalist education. Mussolini effectively silenced those objections by offering to finance the institution entirely. Tapped by the Duce to lead the institute, De Feo pursued a busy program of international cooperation, in the spirit of elitist reformism that characterized the League’s cultural work. From July 1929 the ICE’s journal, the International Review of Educational Cinematography, offered articles in five languages on documentaries, “social propaganda,” and religion in film. The institute published books on topics like The Cinema and Health, The Cinema and the Teaching of Languages, and The Cinema and Scientific Organizations of Labour. Its signature legal achievement was the passage of a 1933 Convention for Facilitating the Circulation of Educational Films, which exempted some “teaching films” from customs duties. Insofar as international efforts to define film as artistic or educational were perceived as inherently hostile to the American position that film should be treated as a commercial product, the ICE took up an implicitly European position vis-à-vis Hollywood. But De Feo’s institute was not pursuing the kind of pan-European industry cooperation envisioned by supporters of Film Europe. Nor did its achievements satisfy those who had hoped that a League body would lead a more aggressive campaign for a noncommercial, international, and educational cinema. Their complaints were directed less at the ICE’s fascist character than against De Feo’s cozy relationship with the Hollywood studios. Rather than the thorn in Hollywood’s side imagined by League reformers, De Feo’s ICE welcomed representatives of the U.S. cinema industry to the institute’s board, and helped the MPPDA avoid a definition of “educational fi lms” that could have proved damaging to Hollywood



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

interests. Th is cooperation reflected the fact that Italy’s fi lm elite was not interested in leading an anticommercialist struggle against Hollywood. Provoking conflict with the Americans would not enhance the gains in prestige and control that came from hosting and running the ICE, and fascist leaders at this stage generally did not see Hollywood films as threatening to fascism’s ideological goals. Those goals were on display in April 1934, as Mussolini personally welcomed over 400 delegates from forty-five countries to the ICE’s International Conference on Teaching and Educational Cinematography, where delegates were exposed to signal achievements of the fascist regime. A visit to the imposing Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution in Rome was followed on April 21 by a visit to the model “new towns” Littoria and Sabaudia in the reclaimed lands of the Pontine Marshes south of the capital. The event concluded on April 25 with a reception in Palazzo Venezia hosted by the Duce himself. The Italians balanced the open politicization of this event with careful respect for the playbook of cultural internationalism: the ICE quickly published the conference proceedings, over 200 contributions, in two thick volumes. Th is approach was quite successful. League officials and the French committee of the ICE celebrated the 1934 event as the best and most fruitful of its kind. This was typical of the Italians’ careful, and rather subversive, use of the agencies of the League of Nations to promote fascism on the international scene. Through events like these, the institute successfully linked all three strands of the fascist international cultural politics of the early 1930s. It promoted fascist ideology, celebrated Italy’s high-culture prestige, and represented a systematic effort to make Italy an unavoidable, power ful node in the networks of international intellectual and cultural life. The ICE’s pursuit of the last of these three goals had been considerably advanced in 1932, when De Feo undertook what was by far the most important legacy of his work with the ICE: the founding of a major international fi lm festival in Venice, to be linked to that city’s prestigious art fair, the Biennale. The paternity of the legendary “Exhibition of Cinematic Art” at Venice is disputed, but it is clear that De Feo was among its founders and was certainly the most important organizer in the festival’s first years. Working with virtually no oversight from the Biennale’s President Count Volpi, from its General Secretary Antonio Maraini, or from the fascist regime, De Feo used

C OOP E RAT I ON OR C A P I T UL ATION ?



his international network from the ICE to manage contacts with Italian and foreign production companies, set the program, and select the films. De Feo’s role meant that the Venice Film Festival grew out of Italy’s participation in the world of international cultural cooperation, with which the festival shared leaders, institutions, and goals. The festival’s earliest editions presented Italy as a leader in international cinema, but not by promoting Italy’s own films, which were few and poor in 1932. That year saw only one Italian feature in the competition, as opposed to four German fi lms, six French, and eleven American. Rather, the festival was an effort, like the ICE itself, to seize leadership in a field by organizing the field, enshrining a hegemonic position for Italy by making Venice into a hub of cinema-related commercial, artistic, and intellectual exchange. The festival’s second edition, in 1934, which enjoyed the official patronage of Mussolini, was in the ser vice of De Feo’s outsized ambitions in precisely this way. Alongside the fi lm screenings, the 1934 festival also featured an international conference of film writers and directors organized by Italy’s National Fascist Corporation of Intellectuals (Confederazione nazionale fascista degli intellettuali). Film distributors from around the world were invited to attend. In this way, De Feo wrote to Mussolini, “alongside the artistic celebration, Venice will emerge as the world center of agreements for the exchange of films.” Carefully timed to precede the fall releases of new movies, the Biennale would thus become an obligatory part of the fi lm world’s annual calendar. Festival organizers announced their plan to create an international cinema archive to conserve the best films shown at the festival. This would make Venice a center of film preservation, which was another widely discussed goal in international cinema circles. In 1934 the festival assigned prizes for the first time, building on the Biennale’s prestige as a site for the determination of value in the visual arts to claim the authority to assign value in the field of cinema. Like Lualdi’s efforts to use the music Biennale to establish Italian primacy, De Feo’s goals meshed well with the expansionist economic, political, and ideological ambitions of the Biennale’s leaders, Giuseppe Volpi and Antonio Maraini. The luxury hotel-owner consortium CIGA acted as a leading sponsor of the event, even giving its own prize. Although it built on the networks and achievements of the ICE, the film Biennale struck a rather different tone from the institute’s academic-type conferences. Instead of working groups and draft resolutions, Venice featured



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

premieres, autograph signings, and an audience poll, all framed by a glamorous setting on the Lido, a top destination for the beau monde of high-end international tourism. But amid the glamour and entertainment, the festival carefully nourished a crucial message: that cinema was an art. This was the central claim of the Venice festival—pointedly entitled “Exposition of Cinematic Art”— and was, of course, the point of placing the festival under the rubric of the Biennale. Bringing film into the company of painting and sculpture declared its right to be counted with them and share in their prestige. Taking a strong stand on the hotly debated and controversial issue of cinema’s status as art placed the festival in a dynamic, forward-looking position, earning it the devotion of the young film enthusiasts who helped make Venice a key site for the formation of a generation of European critics and cineastes. Treating cinema as art likewise bolstered the film festival’s claim to international primacy, supporting the festival’s unabashed goal: to establish for Venice “an absolute global leadership without equals and without rivals.” Rival festivals were emerging at the same time, but these, Maraini insisted, lacking any connection to the fine arts, could not offer “those titles, those criteria, those guarantees from the artistic point of view that only the Biennale possesses.” The festival’s artistic pedigree in turn distinguished the prizes it granted from those of its most important competitor, Hollywood’s Academy Awards. By stressing the vision of cinema as art, De Feo linked the festival to the work of his Institute for Educational Cinematography in a manner that also promoted elements of fascist political ideology. Entertainment cinema, De Feo insisted in a 1932 report to the League of Nations, must be understood as a means of educating the masses, citing Aristotle’s claim that “dramatic artists” must educate adults just as schoolteachers educate children. This argument tapped into a widespread concern that cinema was, in fact, having the opposite effect. Critics across Europe complained that the poor quality of cinema was degrading the public, not elevating it. Film leaders, as well as religious and political leaders, broadly agreed that the answer was to raise the level of “quality,” but puzzled over how to do this. Fascist Italy proposed to do this by associating cinema to the arts. An artistic cinema would be an educational cinema, making of the “tenth muse” what De Feo declared she could be: “a marvelous and incomparable means for elevating the spirit and refining the taste of the masses.”

C OOP E RAT I ON OR C A P I T UL ATION ?



Th is argument implied that cinema’s awesome power over the masses would be subjected to elite control. The ICE promoted a paternalist role for a taste-making state, and warmly approved of censorship guidelines like those administered in Hollywood from 1934 by the famous Hays Office. But at Venice, fascist Italy did not exercise ham-fisted state censorship. On the contrary, the film festival proudly showed only unedited, original-language editions. The festival thereby appealed to the liberal concern with freedom of artistic expression while supporting broadly held bourgeois, class-bound views on cinema and on culture in general. The festival—so successful that it was now made annual— showed that fascism could fuse modernity with tradition, cinema with the fine arts, mass culture with elite-led mass education. At Venice in 1934, Mussolini’s Italy was succeeding in its effort to pitch a distinct, novel, fascist civilization that could claim to resolve core problems of Europe’s contemporary crisis, problems that had revealed liberalism’s exhaustion and lack of ideas. Building on the festival’s success, De Feo solidified the ICE’s international network and used it for diplomatic outreach. He oversaw the foundation, by December, of twenty national committees (or affi liated institutions) of the ICE around the world. After the ItaloFrench rapprochement of January 1935, the ICE cultivated the French in particular, for example, at the grand celebration of the fortieth anniversary of cinema, in Rome in March 1935, celebrating the achievements of French film pioneer Louis Lumière. The Venice Film Festival was made to serve Italy’s international ambitions in new ways when the fascist regime began a major effort to revitalize the nation’s entertainment film industry in September 1934. Newly alive to the power of cinema and inspired by the worldwide depression to intervene directly in its economy, Mussolini created a new Directorate General for Cinema (Direzione Generale per la Cinematografia), run by the fascist journalist Luigi Freddi under Galeazzo Ciano’s Secretariat of Press and Propaganda. Italy’s state holding company IRI (Istituto per la ricostruzione industriale, Institute for Industrial Reconstruction), created in January 1933 to respond to the collapse of Italy’s banks, acquired Rome’s greatest fi lm studio, the then-bankrupt Cines, and oversaw its subsidized sale to the industrialist Carlo Roncoroni. At the same time it nationalized the former holdings of the cinema entrepreneur Stefano Pittaluga. IRI assigned its distribution network to the state-run newsreel agency Istituto LUCE, and its



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

International cinema as cultural diplomacy: Louis Lumière (center) and France’s ambassador to Italy (r.) visit the International Institute of Educational Cinematography, Rome, March 20, 1935. Their hosts include Luigi Freddi (third from l.), Luciano De Feo (fourth from l.), and Undersecretary for Press and Propaganda Galeazzo Ciano (second from r.). (Istituto LUCE- Cinecittà)

chain of cinemas to the new, state-owned National Agency of Cinema industries, ENIC (Ente Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche). The fascists did not nationalize the industry, however. Rather, Freddi’s vision was of strong state institutions supporting private enterprise, but resolving the conflicts and confusions of laissez-faire capitalism by imposing fascist corporatism on the cultural industries. The state-run Corporation for the Performing Arts (Corporazione dello spettacolo), founded in February 1934, brought together all professionals active in filmmaking—actors, producers, theater owners, copyright lawyers, film technicians, musicians—into a single body devoted to the purportedly single interest of a national and fascist cinema. The group surrounding Freddi, a fascist journalist of long standing with roots in street-fighting squadrismo as well as in the futurist movement, had no connection to the League of Nations. They came to the issues of cinema with a hard-headed emphasis on the economic restructuring of a failing industry, and an ideological commitment to making cinema “contribute via its potent means of suggestion to the aims of the [fascist] State.” But they

C OOP E RAT I ON OR C A P I T UL ATION ?



did not neglect the potential of the Venice Film Festival as a means to expand Italian cinema’s international reach. Penetrating foreign markets was, Freddi believed, a prerequisite for Italian film’s economic revival. This view was echoed by the thirty-five-year-old fi lm theorist Luigi Chiarini, who headed the Experimental Center for Cinema (Centro Sperimentale Cinematografico), the film school created in 1935 to forge a new class of specially trained film professionals. As part of his effort to promote an Italian film culture— complete with institutions, journals of film studies, and archives for film preservation—on a par with that found elsewhere in Europe, Chiarini argued that Italy must create a national cinema, defined as an art, at the high level of quality demanded by fascism. But “no artistic progress is possible without a strong, healthy, and intelligent industrial framework,” and “this implies a broadening of the current Italian market, and thus the possibility to export [fi lms].”  Under Freddi’s Directorate General for Cinema, the Venice Film festival would serve as an ideal venue for presenting Italy’s revived cinema production to an elite international audience— and for displaying the successes of the fascist corporatist model of state intervention into the cultural industries. But the international cinema scene of 1935 was jolted by the emergence of potent new challenges to the Italians’ efforts. In February, the Soviets opened the first Moscow International Film Festival. This high-profile event, in which Stalin invested substantial energy and money, featured prominent international guests and a jury headed by Sergei Eisenstein, the pathbreaking director of Battleship Potemkin (1925). The festival, a classic piece of the Soviets’ own form of cultural internationalism, took place in the enthusiastic atmosphere of the year that has been called “the highest point of cultural fraternization and enthusiasm abroad for the Soviet Union.” Among the films awarded a prize was René Clair’s The Last Millionaire (1934), a slapstick satire mocking the whims and stupidity of an imagined fascist dictator (that had been banned in Italy and Germany). Ironically, however, in pursuit of his own cultural revolution, Stalin had eviscerated Russian cinema since 1928. Imports were slashed, and while 147 films had been made in the USSR in 1930, by 1933 that number was down to thirty-five— consisting largely of “factory and tractor” films. Appearances to the contrary, by 1935 Stalin had already ensured that the USSR, although a stylistic pioneer, would remain an insignificant presence in organizing world cinema. The Moscow Film Festival was not to be repeated until 1959.



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

Only a few months later, however, another international film conference would require a more sustained Italian response. In April 1935 Nazi Germany launched its bid for leadership in European film in spectacular fashion by inviting delegates from around the world to an “International Film Congress” in Berlin. Italy’s cinema leaders— a delegation led by Roncoroni and including De Feo— accepted their invitations and boarded the train to Berlin. They were among more than 2,000 foreigners who decided to make the trip, eager to see what Germany—home of Europe’s largest film industry, and the only one with any record of success in resisting Hollywood domination—had to offer. ◆

◆

◆

One of Hitler’s signal actions after assuming power in 1933 was to pull Germany out of the League of Nations. This move, in October, accompanying Germany’s simultaneous withdrawal from the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva, was a fateful step. It set Germany on the path of rearmament and undermined all interwar efforts to promote international peace. It likewise signified Germany’s sudden exit from the world of international cultural cooperation overseen by League institutions. In December came the order to cease engagement with the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, on which Germany had earlier been represented by no less a figure than Albert Einstein, while the German diplomat Albert DufourFeronc had led the Intellectual Cooperation Section of the League Secretariat. Nazi intellectuals and propagandists heaped scorn on all things “international” and articulated the völkisch, nationalist, and racist vision of cultural and intellectual life which dictated Germany’s exit from the international sphere. As Nazi philosopher Ernst Krieck declared in 1933, “we recognize henceforth no spirit, no culture and no education that does not stand in the ser vice of the self-perfection of the German people and derive its meaning from there.” Visitors arriving in Berlin for the opening of the International Film Congress on April 25, 1935, however, encountered very little of this rhetoric. Instead, foreign guests were greeted by all the touchstones of interwar internationalism. Delegates from across Europe and around the world assembled in hotels and ballrooms, networked at lavish dinners and receptions, and split off into a numbered set of committees and subcommittees for working meetings, at which they drafted and then democratically voted on various resolutions, to be published at the meeting’s end. In the cavernous restaurant

C OOP E RAT I ON OR C A P I T UL ATION ?



Nazi internationalism, 1935: Flags of the world adorn the Kroll Opera House, site of the International Film Congress, Berlin, April 1935. (Ullstein/IBL Bildbyrå)

Rheingold, decorated for the occasion with the flags of all participating nations and a sea of flowers, delegates spent the congress’s first evening listening to speeches declaring film to be “an instrument of peace” and “a cultural object with high idealistic tasks to fulfill,” followed by musical performances by local talent and foreign guests. The standard internationalist rhetoric about film’s power to create peace and international understanding was given graphic form in the conference logo: the earth ringed around by a strip of celluloid film. Hitler’s Berlin was made to appear not as the dangerous core of a new threat to European peace, but rather as a vital center of international cooperation. At the same time, the staff of Goebbels’s Reich Film Chamber carefully orchestrated every aspect of the congress to support Germany’s claim to be international film’s new leader. A series of events highlighted the wealth, technological sophistication, cultural depth, and glamour of the German film industry. Between working sessions in the Reichstag and Kroll Opera House, delegates could peruse an exhibition of German cameras, projectors,



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

and sound equipment from firms including AEG, Siemens, and Zeiss. Later, a fleet of buses ferried some 1,800 delegates to Babelsberg for a tour of UFA’s imposing studio complex, led by studio General Director Ludwig Klitsch. To highlight the regime’s commitment to the much-discussed issue of film preservation, over 300 foreign delegates were taken on a tour of the newly founded Reich Film Archive, housed in the offices of the KaiserWilhelm-Gesellschaft, Germany’s prestigious science foundation. One of the first state-sponsored film archives in the world, the archive had already collected some 1,500 films since opening in February 1935. On Saturday night, April 27, a tuxedoed Goebbels mobilized the glamour of the “UFAstyle” as he welcomed guests to a formal ball in the Marble Hall near the Berlin Zoo. Here German movie stars, directors, and celebrities, including Willy Fritsch, Carola Höhn, and boxing champion Max Schmeling, were joined by foreign stars including Czech beauty Lida Baarová and Shanghai starlet Butterfly Wu (Hu Die). The festivities were mixed with an appeal to Germany’s high-cultural legacy, as works by Strauss and Brahms were performed at the congress’s final gathering. The culmination of the congress was an address by Goebbels, followed, on Thursday May 2, by a private audience with Hitler for international delegation leaders. Mixing appeals to peace and international cooperation with demonstrations of German wealth, discipline, and power was typical of the early phase of Nazi self-presentation on the global stage. This strategy, reinforced by Hitler’s speeches stressing Germany’s commitment to peace, reached a high point at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Although the Nazis had earlier derided the games as “Jewish international enterprises,” the regime invested massively, and with great success, in making the Berlin Olympics a display of German power and of Germany’s good faith participation in the international sport community. Yet the International Film Congress sought to do far more than produce a one-time event of cultural propaganda like the Berlin Olympics. Rather, it marked the opening ceremonies of a major campaign to relaunch Film Europe, with Nazi Germany at its head. The Nazis took the medium of film very seriously. Hitler’s evenings were structured around his nightly film screening; Goebbels’s own obsessive concern with the movies is recorded in countless entries to his diaries. Convinced of film’s special power to mobilize political sentiments, Goebbels had used the occasion of a film screening to launch the Nazis’ assault on the culture and politics of the Weimar Republic. He targeted the December 1930

C OOP E RAT I ON OR C A P I T UL ATION ?



showings of Universal Pictures’ All Quiet on the Western Front at Berlin’s Mozartsaal cinema to stage a clamorous scene of shouting and fisticuffs. Once the Nazis had come to power, Goebbels immediately turned the tools of his newly founded Propaganda Ministry on the cinema. A series of measures quickly gave him a high level of control over all aspects of the film industry in Germany. The Film Credit Bank, founded in June 1933, allowed the Propaganda Ministry to steer film production by offering advantageous, government-backed financing to struggling producers. The Reich Cinema Law of February 1934 gave Goebbels mighty powers of censorship, as well as the chance to offer tax exemptions to films whose makers voluntarily anticipated the regime’s wishes. In 1936, Goebbels began the virtual nationalization of German cinema, as the regime, through a trust company, quietly acquired controlling shares in the UFA and Tobis conglomerates and used these to consolidate the industry into fewer and fewer hands. The industry as a whole was unified— and purged of Jews—by the Reich Film Chamber. Founded already in July 1933, months before the foundation of the Reich Chamber of Culture, the Reich Film Chamber built on an existing trade organization to force together institutions representing capital and labor in each film industry sector into one body under the presidency of an inconspicuous lawyer-bureaucrat named Fritz Scheuermann. But Goebbels and his staff knew, like German cinema magnates before them, that the success of such domestic measures depended on access to markets beyond Germany’s borders. Already at the September 1934 meeting of the Reich Film Chamber, chamber President Fritz Scheuermann told the press that while National Socialism was “not an item for export,” “the German film,” on the other hand, must become one, creating “its international significance and recognition as a work of art.” This point would soon be rendered more urgent as the decline in exports, caused in part by antiNazi boycotts around Europe and in the United States, coupled with a rapid rise in production costs, led to an industry-wide slump in 1936–1937. Taking measures to expand Germany’s export market would be one of the regime’s urgent responses. But Goebbels and the Reich Film Chamber staffers did not need to wait for this crisis to know that the core issue, now as in the 1920s, was how to forge a European market for German exports. Some of the old ways of expanding Germany’s export market—by improving the quality and exportability of German fi lms, for example—were pursued again, now with state backing. At the 1935 International Film Congress,



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

however, Nazi authorities signaled a new strategy. Rather than change the product to meet the demands of Europe’s multiple film markets, the way forward was to create a single, integrated European market through political power and manipulation. Just how the Germans planned to do this became clear toward the end of the 1935 International Film Congress, as the German hosts led delegates in creating a whole set of international organizations for cooperation in various sectors of the industry. One session revived the moribund International Union of Theater Owners, founded in 1928 but inactive since 1932, and secured its presidency for the head of Germany’s recently Nazified cinema-owner’s association (Reichsverband deutscher Filmtheater), Fritz Bertram. Another committee approved the creation of a new clearinghouse for the international distribution of film news and images (Internationales filmtechnisches Pressebüro) to be based in Berlin. A new permanent international commission for the reform of music royalties and film law would be based in Paris for the time being. A new International Film Art Syndicate (Internationale Filmkunst Syndikat) would facilitate artistic exchange among several Northern European countries. The rhetoric was implicitly global and the congress featured representatives from India, China, and Japan. But the composition of the congress’s general commission— sixty-six men representing twenty-two European nations— showed the degree to which the event’s aims were above all continental. In making these proposals, the Nazis took up the organizational and economic concerns of the 1920s supporters of Film Europe and echoed the internationalist rhetoric and style of the international film meetings of the League of Nations. Addressing the “Cinema Owners of Europe!” Fritz Bertram explicitly positioned the 1935 event as the natural heir of the process begun at the League’s 1926 International Film Congress in Paris. Hitler himself, in his official welcome message, expressed the hope that the “high cultural mission of film” would guide the congress to “deepen mutual understanding among nations.” Invocations of film’s role in promoting peace resonated throughout the congress’s sessions. At one of these, the Germans achieved the passage of a resolution calling on the press of all nations to take into account “the spirit of international understanding” by not discussing or supporting any films “that tend to provoke misunderstandings among the Nations and to endanger peace in the world.” By this resolution the Nazis meant to lead other

C OOP E RAT I ON OR C A P I T UL ATION ?



nations to join Germany in banning any film that challenged Nazi ideology. Couched in internationalist rhetoric, this camouflaged demand would be fully in line with the spirit of 1920s fi lm internationalism. Even while the film congress deployed traditional rhetoric highlighting film’s peace-building character, it departed radically from 1920s cultural internationalism in two key ways. In sharp contrast to the frock-coated liberalism of earlier events, here uniformed Nazi officials impressed upon the assembled foreigners the force of the state. “The New Germany has undertaken a reorganization of every area of film,” Reich Film Chamber Vice President Arnold Raether explained at the congress’s opening session, and the events that followed missed no opportunity to highlight the benefits and model character of the regime’s interventions into the German film industry. Second, and more radically, Goebbels offered a new message: nationalism, not the search for a cosmopolitan film style, produced higher-quality cinema, was more likely to succeed abroad, and promoted peace and international understanding. “Every nation,” he philosophized, “makes art from its own style and own view. Even the greats of the arts are in the end children of their nations. . . . Goethe and Wagner, Shakespeare and Byron, Moliére and Corneille have become global cultural property because, in the end and in the deepest sense they were the best German, Englishmen, and Frenchmen.” Films that embraced this kind of nationalism would “not separate, but bind,” serving as a “cultural bridge among nations.” ◆

◆

◆

This, then, was the Nazis’ offer: a revived Film Europe, addressing the concerns of the industry and the values of internationally minded bourgeois Europeans, through a new role for the state and a Europeanism that celebrated rather than threatened national traditions. At the congress’s final working session, Fritz Scheuermann pulled these strands together in a proposal to create a permanent body to guide and unify these efforts: the International Film Chamber. This would be a standing institution for contact and cooperation among all film industry sectors, at last creating the kind of comprehensive European film institution that had been called for in both commercial industry and League-internationalist circles in the 1920s. Convinced of the obvious appeal of his proposal, Scheuermann waited until the congress’s final session to present it. But his proposal unleashed a heated debate that pushed the session well past its allotted two hours. There was, as ever, broad

Goebbels addresses delegates to the International Film Congress, Berlin, April 1935. (SZ-Photo/IBL Bildbyrå)

C OOP E RAT I ON OR C A P I T UL ATION ?



agreement that such an institution was needed, but this soon gave way to intense disagreements over how it should be organized and what it should address, not least between the Germans and the country that had invested most in film’s international organization, fascist Italy. A view of the debate that ensued comes from the Swedish delegation member Sven Nygren. As managing director of Sweden’s Association of Cinema Owners, he reported to his colleagues back in Stockholm that among the thorniest questions was the Germans’ proposal that the IFC deal with all branches of cinema, including educational documentaries, or Kulturfilm. Luciano De Feo objected, arguing in a “Vesuvius-crackling speech” that his own International Institute for Educational Cinema (ICE) already addressed this issue. Scheuermann’s response, Nygren reported, made it clear “what the International Film Chamber meant for Germany, and one understood that Germany wanted to see it through at any price.” Scheuermann calmly pointed out that the ICE was a League of Nations body, but that Germany was no longer a member of the League. After he and De Feo spoke privately, De Feo found himself forced to acknowledge “that it was impossible to avoid Germany in educational cinema cooperation,” and gave Italy’s approval to IFC involvement on educational film issues, in spite of the obvious damage this would do to the significance of his own ICE. With the debate having delayed lunch by over two hours, delegates passed a resolution agreeing on the desirability of an institution like the IFC. Details would be hammered out at a smaller meeting, to which only those nations “in which all branches of fi lm activity are represented” were invited. In the meantime, future transnational work would be facilitated if European countries followed the congress’s resolution urging all nations to found a unified national film body on the model of Germany’s Reich Film Chamber. The goal, as with the Permanent Council for International Cooperation among Composers, was an institution of national institutions. Those countries that did not yet have one should create one soon. The follow-up meeting took place in Munich in July. There, among representatives of eleven nations, it was again the Italians who derailed the definitive approval of the IFC, as De Feo insisted that the institution only recognize delegates who explicitly represented their national governments—something that few film industry representatives from liberal-democratic countries could do. Scheuermann rejected such a demand for state recognition as it would



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

radically limit the number of countries able to participate—something De Feo may indeed have had in mind. A decision was again postponed to another meeting, this time to be hosted by the Italians, in conjunction with De Feo’s own greatest achievement: the Venice Film Festival. Venice’s Hotel Excelsior, with its gardens and terraces opening onto the beach on the Lido, had hosted the outdoor evening screenings of the Film Festival since its premiere in 1932. On August 22, 1935, representatives of Germany, England, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslova kia, Austria, Switzerland, and Sweden gathered there to finalize a statute for the IFC. Here, Italians and Germans found the agreement that thus far had eluded them. Having tried again— and failed again—to ensure that the proposed IFC would relinquish educational cinema issues to Rome’s International Institute, De Feo now agreed instead to found a new body, the Federation for Educational Cinema, under the IFC’s umbrella and with no connection to the League of Nations. This organization, likewise to be based in Rome and led by De Feo, would hopefully allow Italy to maintain primacy in this field, but eliminated the troublesome linkage to the “Versailles system” that Nazi Germany could not accept. Indeed, De Feo agreed to work closely with Goebbels’s leading fi lm official, Arnold Raether, the head of the Propaganda Ministry’s film division and Reich Film Chamber vice president, on the preparation of this new institution’s by-laws. In return, Scheuermann promoted a resolution, passed at the Venice meeting, which acknowledged “that fi lm, because of the Biennale’s initiative, has officially been made equal with the other genres of art,” and declared that the IFC would only support other film festivals “under the exclusive condition that these do not negatively affect” the Venice festival. With these issues settled, the German film press celebrated. The foundation of the IFC was “a colossal prestige-success” that marked a fundamental change in the film world’s attitude toward Hitler’s Germany. Anti-German hostility had “given way to a new spirit: one speaks no longer of boycotts, but of collaboration.” They had reason to be pleased. At the 1935 Biennale, the Germans managed to use the Italians’ event as an international stage on which to continue the roll-out of Germany’s bid to lead a revived and strengthened Film Europe in line with National Socialist ideology. Germany cut an impressive figure at Venice, screening six documentaries and eight features, including the foreign premiere of Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s groundbreaking art-documentary on the 1934 Nazi party rally in

C OOP E RAT I ON OR C A P I T UL ATION ?



Nuremberg. In a special program booklet distributed at the screening, Scheuermann reassured the international audience that “National Socialism is, by the Führer’s word, not an article for export. Therefore Germany does not show this film abroad. The only exception is here and now . . . where it is a matter of the artistic development of film and of the recognition of film’s unique qualities, in peaceful competition among nations.” (The Venice daily Il Gazzetino complained, “the film is very long” and contained “too many speeches that most of the viewers could not understand,” but acknowledged that these viewers applauded enthusiastically. The film also won the Istituto LUCE’s prize for best documentary.) The film’s militarist image of Germany as a land of stalwart young men was counterbalanced, moreover, by the presence in Venice of German star Lilian Harvey, the “sweetest girl in the world,” who was back in Europe and under contract with UFA after several years in Hollywood. Germany’s claim to European cinematic leadership penetrated even the internationalist infrastructure the Italians had created around the festival. The multilanguage journal of De Feo’s International Institute for Educational Cinema, Intercine, was an ideal if somewhat ironic venue for this message. In the special double issue published for the 1935 film festival, Arnold Raether laid out the case for the IFC in French, English, and German. The Nazis’ structural reforms of the German film industry offered a model for all, because film was simply too important to leave to market forces alone. Only a state-led film industry, led by men “who have not lost their connection to the nation [Volk],” could free film’s artistic strivings from the “purely business-oriented interests” of producers and thus “reshape the taste of the broad masses, so that in a few years a [purely commercial] film product with no spiritual background will have no justification for its existence.” In language just coded enough to be acceptable, Raether argued that Germany’s model— state-supported corporatism to create a national industry and antiSemitism and anti-Communism to purge that industry of Jews and others without a “connection to the Volk”— could deliver where liberalism had failed. It granted elite control over popular taste and quelled concerns about cinema’s crassly commercial character by enriching it with national, “spiritual” significance. In fact, the Germans celebrated a bit too soon. Sweden’s last-minute objections to the IFC statutes meant that the body’s statutes were not finally signed until still another meeting, this time in Paris in November 1935.



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

But these were details. Already at Venice it was clear that Scheuermann’s work had paid off. Film Europe was back, in a new institution that met the Nazi film leadership’s core desires: its rhetoric was artistic and cultural, its profile business-industrial, its scope and composition European, and its leadership German. Although the Dutch and the British refused to join, the participation of countries from Belgium to Hungary revealed a Europe ready to accept German leadership. This willingness to work with Germany showed in turn, as Scheuermann explained later to an elite German audience, that “the main psychological barriers” to the expansion of German cinema in Europe “have been overcome.” ◆

◆

◆

How could the Italians make sense of their country’s participation in this German-led project as anything other than a capitulation? In August 1935, prominent Italian fi lm journalist Filippo Sacchi negotiated precisely this issue in presenting the International Film Chamber for the readers of the leading daily Corriere della Sera. “The proposal,” he wrote, “is German.” So too were the interests it promoted. “Justly worried about the fall in their exports,” the Germans saw in the IFC “another means to help Germany exit its cinematographic isolation.” Still, once the Italians had helped tone down those elements of the proposal that were too harshly anti-American, and those that too obviously promoted German interests—“(and God knows there were some!)”—the IFC offered a body that was “truly international and inhabitable by all.” Sacchi gave voice to the optimistic view that the Italians would be able to keep their fingers in all pies at once, winning Nazi protection for the Venice Film Festival while still defending Italian leadership in the field of educational cinema. This converted the Germans’ power grab into an unthreatening, “truly international” institution, so as to avoid an open confrontation with Hollywood that the fascist state did not want and that Italy’s weak film industry could ill afford. The Italian response to the IFC was in this sense typical. It revealed an Italy eager to be involved in— and derive benefit from—the Germans’ revisionist projects, while also keen to defend the positions of leadership and international influence that Italians had worked hard to achieve. But already on the evening of August 10, 1935, the start of that year’s festival, various signs suggested some of the difficulties the Italians would have in maintaining this careful balance. The opening night feature was Carmine Gallone’s Casta Diva, a romantic costume drama based on the life of

C OOP E RAT I ON OR C A P I T UL ATION ?



the nineteenth-century opera composer Vincenzo Bellini. This lavish production was meant to mark Italy’s comeback as a major film-producing nation, led by Luigi Freddi’s new Directorate General for Cinema. Awarded the Coppa Mussolini for best Italian film, Casta Diva was celebrated as “a technically and artistically perfect work, of a taste and a harmony that are typically Italian, that grant it a sure and noble international significance.” The fascist party daily Il Popolo d’Italia likewise celebrated the film as “italianissimo.” In fact, the film rather highlighted the dependence of Italy’s cinematic revival on the talents of German-speaking Central European Jews, recently forced out of Germany by Nazi racist persecution. The Italian production company created to finance this film, Alleanza Cinematografica Italiana, was a new venture by producers Arnold Pressburger and Gregor Rabinovitch, whose Berlin-based Cine-Allianz was in the process of being seized and “aryanized” by the Reich Film Chamber. Eager to support the production of Italian films with European appeal (and improved chances abroad) Luigi Freddi placed the production of the film under the protection of his directorate and underwrote the creation of the new Italian-based production company. Vittorio Mussolini, the Duce’s son, sat on its board. Pressburger and Rabinovitch reassembled in Rome the Central European team they had worked with on Leise flehen meine Lieder (Willi Forst, 1933)— a classic Musikfilm based on the life of Franz Schubert— including the same screenwriter, director of photography, music composer, and star, the Hungarian-born soprano Marta Eggerth. Casta Diva’s director, at least, was Italian: Carmine Gallone— a director who, like so many Italian filmmakers, had spent the 1920s working in Germany. There he had directed the first German-language talkie, Das Land ohne Frauen (1929), coproduced by Pressburger. There is something deeply ironic in the fact that the Italians sought to “Europeanize” Italian film in two ways that were so essentially incompatible— that is, seeking outlets to Europe by joining the Nazi-led International Film Chamber, and making Italian films of “European”-level export quality by signing up Jewish talent that the Nazis had driven out of Germany. At Venice this irony was muted, however. The Italians suppressed the behind-the-scenes role of German émigrés in Casta Diva. Moreover, the Italian film world did not see joining the IFC as marking a decisive swing into Germany’s orbit. Another more immediate tension was revealed in the short film shown to the well-dressed audience in the garden of the Hotel Excelsior just before



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

Casta Diva was to begin. This was a newsreel, produced by the Istituto LUCE, offering facts and figures about “Abyssinia”—that is, the independent state of Ethiopia, which Mussolini hoped to add to Italy’s colonial holdings in eastern Africa. The film illustrated, as a leading Italian journal reported, “the conditions of Abyssinia from the point of view of the population and the level of civilization reached, or, to be more precise, the degree of incivility in which that country finds itself.” Believing that an expanding colonial empire was a necessary part of Italy’s future as a great power, Mussolini had by this time already decided to invade Ethiopia. His massive build-up of arms in the neighboring Italian colony of Eritrea, and provocative border skirmishes with Ethiopian forces, alarmed international observers. The British decision to send warships into the Mediterranean to threaten Mussolini in September 1935 had helped rally Italian public opinion behind the Duce. This film, LUCE’s first major propaganda effort in support of Mussolini’s imperial ambitions, presented to an elite international audience “a true cinematic compendium of the arguments adopted by the regime to motivate the war,” including references to Italy’s Roman legacy of “civilizing conquest,” and to modern Italy’s unfair treatment by the “richer and more sterile” nations of Western Europe at the end of World War I. But when the invasion began in October 1935 it precipitated an international political crisis. Britain, motivated not least by outraged public opinion at home, led the League of Nations to impose economic sanctions against Italy. At the vote in Geneva, Italy found itself isolated, supported only by Austria, Hungary, and Albania. Thus opened a crucial period of political transition and international realignment for Italy in Europe. It began the process of alienation from the Western powers and flirtation with Nazi Germany that would lead to alliance with Hitler in 1936 and to Italy’s exit from the League by the end of 1937. Attentive as ever to political changes, two weeks after the 1935 Venice Film Festival, Luciano De Feo accepted a posting as director of a new “Photocinema division for Italian Africa.” His International Institute for Educational Cinema (ICE) had after all been the biggest loser in Italy’s agreement to join the nascent IFC. By agreeing to work with Nazi officials to head up a new (but as yet nonexistent) Federation for Educational Cinema, De Feo had effectively given up on the League of Nations institution he had founded and led. Indeed, although it was not formally dissolved until 1937, the ICE ceased its international activities at this point. Instead, by late September

C OOP E RAT I ON OR C A P I T UL ATION ?



1935, De Feo was in Asmara, capital of Italian Eritrea, making plans for the cinematic documentation of the invasion. As the film historian Silvio Celli writes, “De Feo’s break with the ideals and the politics of the League of Nations . . . could not have been sharper.” As fascist Italy began to burn its bridges to the West, more such transitions would soon follow. In the meantime, the way was open for the Venice Film Festival, now linked to Berlin through the International Film Chamber, to become a showcase of a new European power bloc: the Rome–Berlin Axis.

■

3 The European Character of the German–Italian Axis

On November 1, 1936, Mussolini announced the birth of the “Rome– Berlin Axis.” This announcement marked the culmination of a process of behind-the-scenes negotiations between representatives of Hitler and Mussolini that had begun in the summer of 1935. Both dictators sought an ally to help them escape their international isolation and to offer cover for their expansionist projects. The turning point had come in December 1935, when Italy’s military campaign in Ethiopia ran into unexpected trouble and Mussolini, hoping to distract and divide the British and French, reached out to Hitler’s Germany in an effort to redraw the balance of forces in Europe. The Italians abruptly called off their earlier diplomatic overtures to the French and the Soviets, and Mussolini let Hitler know that he would not object if a formally independent Austria were in reality to become a German satellite. German–Italian rapprochement accelerated in the summer of 1936 with the outbreak of Spain’s civil war, as Italian and German intelligence officials coordinated their support for Francisco Franco’s nationalist rebellion against Spain’s democratic republic. For Hitler, peeling Italy away from her ties to France and Britain marked a victory in his effort to undermine unified European opposition to German plans for war and conquest. But it was not only in the realms of diplomacy and Realpolitik that Mussolini’s declaration marked the launch of a new force on the European scene. The Rome–Berlin Axis represented a rival ideological alternative to the hegemony of the Western democracies. In its authoritarian politics, state-steered 

T H E E U R O P E A N C HA RA C T E R OF T HE GE RMAN – ITALIAN AXIS



economics, and bilateral, personalized international relations, the Axis posed a blunt challenge to the West’s liberal democracy, laissez-faire capitalism, and commitment to collective security through the League of Nations. For its most enthusiastic supporters, the Axis represented a historic breakthrough of continent-wide significance. As a group of Italian academic, political, and business elites wrote to regime officials in July 1936, “we are heading truly and finally towards a new Europe, where the good weather and bad weather will no longer be organized in London and Paris.” To take advantage of the changed climate, they proposed a new international magazine with a title that summarized their ambitions: Europa nuova. The emergence of Mussolini and Hitler’s partnership was accompanied by a dramatic upswing in German–Italian cultural cooperation and exchange. Officials of the two regimes arranged exchanges among students, artists, scholars, scientists, lawyers, doctors, and musicians. Film studios began a series of Italian– German coproductions. The very highest levels of both countries’ musical establishments exchanged visits. In 1937, Herbert von Karajan led Germany’s Reich Symphony Orchestra on an Italian tour, while the orchestra of Rome’s Accademia di Santa Cecilia performed a program of German and Italian composers in Berlin. Milan’s La Scala Opera—including the orchestra, the choir, all the sets, and star soloists including Beniamino Gigli, Gina Cigna, and Ebe Stignani—gave concerts in Munich and Berlin led by the internationally renowned conductor Victor de Sabata. Hitler himself was present for the performances of La Bohème and Aida. Berlin’s German-Italian Society (Deutsch-italienische Gesellschaft) sponsored student exchanges, ran Italian language courses, and engaged Germany’s urban bourgeoisie in the Axis through a continuous series of lectures, readings, and recitals of classical music. Its imposing offices, near Berlin’s elegant Kurfürstendamm, reflected the support the society enjoyed from the aristocracy—Prince Philipp von Hessen, the German sonin-law of Italy’s King Vittorio Emmanuale III, was the society’s honorary president— and from German big business, represented by the society’s president, Siemens industrialist Ludwig von Winterfeld. In Milan, the Italo– German Cultural Association (Associazione Italo-Germanica di Cultura) hosted lectures on art history and receptions for German political figures in elegant new offices on via Fatebenefratelli in central Milan. It was led from 1937 by Giovanni Treccani degli Alfieri, the Milanese textile magnate and patron of nationalist cultural projects, most notably the Enciclopedia



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

Italiana, overseen by the pro-fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile. The files of Mussolini’s secretariat were filled with requests from private citizens, generally academics or medical and scientific professionals, to travel to Germany to give lectures and take part in conferences. The cultural division (Kulturabteilung) of Germany’s Foreign Ministry was similarly bombarded with travel requests. By November 1937, on the occasion of a major exhibition of Italian art in Berlin, a correspondent from the Times of London gave all this a name: the “cultural Axis.” Such exchanges supported the emerging political partnership between the two dictatorships. Concerts, art shows, and scholarly exchanges convinced German and Italian elites to overlook their ideological differences, encouraged them to overcome historic mistrust between the two peoples, and gave the two regimes’ cooperation an apparently higher meaning. But they did more than this. Officially opening the exhibition “Italian Art: From 1800 to the Present” at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin on November 1, 1937, Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaff e and self-styled patron of the arts, interpreted the event’s deeper significance as a clash of civilizations. Unlike their materialist rivals, fascist Italy and Nazi Germany “considered cultural questions to be as important as political and economic questions.” This was not only a message to Germans and Italians. It was a message to Europe, announcing that Germany and Italy would work together to challenge the hegemony of the liberal West on the terrain of European culture. That challenge came across at the Venice Film Festival in 1936. Like earlier editions, the festival featured evening after evening of films in their original languages, as some 50,000 visitors, including around sixty foreign journalists and about the same number of studio representatives, took part in the event’s conspicuously polyglot atmosphere. The newly created prize jury, drawn largely from members of the International Film Chamber (IFC), included leading film figures from France, Hungary, Germany, Poland, and Italy, as well as non-IFC member Britain. Delegates from all twelve participating nations—including Will H. Hays, president of the powerful Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America—had cooperated in selecting the films for presentation at the festival. But the political undertones had changed a good deal from only one year before. As foreigners gathered for the opening on August 10, Germany and Italy were in a new position of strength and of coordination. Mussolini had defeated Ethiopia and declared an empire in May 1936. In July he scored a major diplomatic

T H E E U R O P E A N C HA RA C T E R OF T HE GE RMAN – ITALIAN AXIS



victory when a humbled British government—unwilling to go to war for Ethiopia— backed down and led the League of Nations to abandon its sanctions against Italy. Germany, profiting from the shake-up Mussolini caused, had remilitarized the Rhineland in March, meeting no resistance from the French or the British, whose bitter disagreements and poor coordination were evident to all. Both regimes were victorious and emboldened. In this climate, visitors to the festival could scarcely miss the significance of the arrival in Venice of the guest of honor, Joseph Goebbels. Posing for photographs alongside his Italian counterpart Dino Alfieri, recently appointed minister for press and propaganda, Goebbels’s visit unveiled the emerging German–Italian partnership to an international audience and helped establish the Venice Film Festival as a signature moment of the cultural Axis. Goebbels found much to be pleased with regarding the success of German movies in Venice. Already at the center of worldwide attention because of the Olympic Games taking place that summer in Berlin, Germany displayed its cultural muscle at Venice through the large number of German films, several of which won prizes. The German delegation astonished viewers in Venice by screening a rough edit of Leni Reifenstahl’s Olympia, her famous documentary on the Berlin Olympics, only one day after the games’ conclusion in Berlin. Goebbels was less enchanted by the conspicuous cosmopolitanism he encountered in Venice. As the Minister noted laconically in his diary: “Quite international public; not for me.” But this cosmopolitan atmosphere was central to the way the film festival helped grant a European character to the Axis’s cultural cooperation. Basking in the glamour of German film and the historic beauty of Venice, Goebbels’s and Alfieri’s presence at this event presented a compelling vision of Germany and Italy’s film cooperation as an “axis” around which a European cinema could rally in subtle but clear contrast to Hollywood. Welcoming guests to Venice in 1936, Count Volpi stressed the festival’s “recognition of film as fine art,” which was emphasized by its inclusion among the other arts at the Biennale and by its setting in Venice, “cradle of one of the most powerful and characteristic civilizations that have ever set their stamp on the aesthetic creation of the human spirit.” This setting lent the festival “a value that would be impossible in any other place.” As Germany and Italy presented their cultural partnership to the world in 1936, they did so against a backdrop that Americans were welcome to enjoy. Press tycoon William Randolph Hearst and his mistress, the actress



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

Marion Davies, were seen on the Lido that summer. But its historical setting and self-consciously European high-cultural elegance pointedly offered a setting Hollywood could not match. Classical music was a favored field for cultural exchanges between Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy that offered ideal terrain for the two nations to affirm their European leadership. A high-profi le example took place in May 1937, when the composer Adriano Lualdi traveled to Dresden, Germany, to conduct a performance of Italian works, including his own overture to Le Furie d’Arlecchino and Gian Francesco Malipiero’s first symphony. The Austrian conductor Karl Böhm, recently installed in Dresden as head of that city’s renowned Semper Oper, led performances of Verdi’s Macbeth and of Richard Straus’s Elektra. When Lualdi, an official of the fascist state, and Böhm, an outspoken supporter of the Nazis who had been active before 1933 in the radical-conservative Fighting League for German Culture (Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur), led concerts attended by Italian and German officials, the smartly dressed audiences in Dresden partook of another symbolic expression of German–Italian cultural harmony and Nazifascist ideological alignment. Th is audience’s presence strengthened the impression of the two dictators’ shared commitment to preserving a conservative vision of bourgeois cultural values. But, as at Venice, the affirmation in Dresden of German–Italian and Nazifascist cooperation took place in the context of a multinational, pan-European setting. These concerts were part of the Fourth International Musikfest of the Permanent Council for International Cooperation among Composers, which featured performances of works by thirty-five composers from eighteen European nations. Lualdi’s and Malipiero’s pieces shared space on an eclectic program that included recent works by relatively prominent figures of late romantic music like the Swedish composer Hugo Alfvén and the Austrian Joseph Marx, as well as the third symphony by the less well-known Finnish composer Leevi Madetoja. No mere celebration of musical conservatism, the Dresden Musikfest featured a performance of the boldly modernist Fourth String Quartet (1929) by Hungary’s most important composer of the twentieth century, Béla Bartók, and the premiere of the Symphonic Variations by the thirty-year-old rising star of Dutch contemporary music, Henk Badings. All of this took place in the incomparable setting offered by Dresden, Germany’s “Florence on the Elbe,” famed—before its destruction in 1945—for its beautiful churches, palaces, and the imposing Semper Oper itself.

T H E E U R O P E A N C HA RA C T E R OF T HE GE RMAN – ITALIAN AXIS



European antifascists in the mid-1930s—most famously at the June 1935 International Writers’ Conference for the Defense of Culture in Paris—had been crying out for a defense of Europe, and a “defense of culture” as such, from the threat of Nazism and fascism. But at Dresden and Venice, their angry words were far away. Instead, guests received the opposite impression. These festivals positioned the Nazi-fascist Axis as a great promoter of culture, whether popular cinema or refined chamber music, and as a dynamic force for transnational cultural exchange—not only between Italy and Germany, but among all the nations of Europe. From 1936 the work of the Permanent Council, along with that of the International Film Chamber, made an even stronger point: the German–Italian cultural Axis was not the enemy of European culture, but might well be its salvation. Galeazzo Ciano, the Duce’s son-in-law whom he made foreign minister in connection with Mussolini’s pivot toward Germany, explained this to reporters in October 1936 after the meeting with German officials that sealed the new partnership. The true basis of German–Italian cooperation, he said, was the two regimes’ shared determination to defend “the sacred inheritance of European culture.” Such a claim is easy today to dismiss as empty propaganda. But how contemporaries evaluated this claim depended on what they thought “European culture” was and what they judged to be the greatest threats to it. In 1936 and 1937, the Nazi-fascist cultural Axis was able to make a claim to lead the defense of European culture that a wide range of filmmakers, composers, and intellectuals—as well as festival audiences—found compelling. Axis leaders rarely defined “European culture” explicitly. Nonetheless, at screenings, recitals, and speeches like those in Venice and Dresden, Germans and Italians proposed a vision of culture rooted in two key themes: nationalism and antimaterialism. True culture was expressive of and rooted in a national tradition, and such cultural expression gave voice to idealistic, even heroic values, wholly unconnected to the base, materialist concerns of the market. Attentive observers would have noticed the connection of these themes to the German concept of Kultur, which had played such a politicized role in German cultural propaganda during the First World War. But these ideas were not unique to Germany. They formed, rather, a broadly shared basis of bourgeois cultural values across Europe and, in the second half of the 1930s, their stock was rising. In a climate of political tension and economic protectionism, European bourgeois elites increasingly embraced conservative nationalism, rejecting the cosmopolitan mood of the 1920s. As these



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

elites perceived their traditions and values squeezed between the threat of Bolshevism on one side and vapid consumerist Americanism on the other, antimaterialism was increasingly seen as a defining feature of Europe’s distinctive identity. This vision of culture was at the heart of a central rhetorical claim of the German–Italian Axis: that Hitler and Mussolini’s partnership represented the pursuit of “Germany and Italy’s European Mission.” This was the title of a 1937 address by Germany’s ambassador to Italy, the cultivated aristocrat Ulrich von Hassell. As Hassell explained, this “European mission” was a high-minded defense of idealist cultural traditions against the threat of brutish materialism from East and West. Of all Europe’s nations, Germany and Italy were those “most strongly steeped in a European synthesis”: the synthesis of Latin and Germanic traditions which had allowed figures like Dante and Goethe “to speak a language that is familiar to all Europeans, and thus to become guardians of a common European cultural heritage.” On this basis, the Axis was uniquely able to lead the “defense of pure Europeanness” against non-European “poison” of various kinds. Hassell’s geocultural positioning of the cultural Axis in Europe would prove to be of lasting utility, both to Italian fascist officials—who saw to the speech’s publication and distribution— and to the Nazis, who would continue to deploy this rhetoric even long after Hassell, a traditional conservative with cool relations with the Nazi regime, had been purged from his diplomatic post. Italian pro-fascist intellectuals embraced a similar vision of culture. In the current “Crisis of the West,” wrote a prominent pro-regime publicist in 1937, Italy and Germany were called to continental leadership “not only by their current politics, but also by the great traditions of their civilizations, which, through different paths, are essentially the great ‘civilizations of the spirit.’ ” Because Italy and Germany’s “spiritual” antimaterialism was rooted in the values of nationalism, the nations’ partnership represented what fascist propagandists began to call “the true Europe.” By that they meant not the Europe “of mendacious parliaments and fatuous delegates in Geneva, but the true Europe, made up of the resurgent consciences of [Europe’s] peoples.” On the basis of this ultranationalist definition of Europe as a collection of “resurgent” peoples, fascists and Nazis claimed that it was through their par ticular nationalisms that they were most European. Utterances of this kind almost succeeded in masking the deep disagreements on cultural issues that existed between the two regimes. One impor-

T H E E U R O P E A N C HA RA C T E R OF T HE GE RMAN – ITALIAN AXIS



tant such disagreement was that between the fascist regime’s continued support for futurist painting and the Nazis’ infamous assault on “Degenerate Art.” This ensured that the 1937 exhibition of Italian painting in Berlin—in spite of Goering’s enthusiastic opening speech—was a diplomatic failure. As Italy’s ambassador to Berlin reported, Hitler left the exhibition on December 10 in furious silence: “I have come to know that [his] impressions were not, I repeat not, generally favorable,” apparently because of the Führer’s “extreme diffidence . . . towards any art defined as ‘modern.’ ” After reading this report, Mussolini scribbled a one-word comment: “fiasco.” Differences of this kind, as well as serious conflicts over the status of the Catholic Church in Germany and Italy, and over the status and treatment of Jews, have led some historians to dismiss the cultural and intellectual cooperation of the Axis powers as the window dressing of a shallow political partnership, more of a Kulturkampf than a cultural alliance. But the range and depth of cooperation between Nazi Germany and fascist Italy argues against this. Officials from the two regimes worked together in such fields as law, agricultural policy, colonial settlement building, advertising, and the reform of workers’ leisure policy. Nazis and fascists cooperated in joint efforts to penetrate and transform existing international institutions in some of these fields, like the International Criminal Police Commission. In other domains, they launched international conferences and organizations of their own. At the World Leisure Conference in Hamburg in July 1936, the two regimes proposed a Nazi-fascist ideological rival to the liberal socialism of the International Labor Organization for representatives of seventeen European countries. Italians worked closely with Germany’s newly founded International Central Office for “Joy and Work” (Internationales Zentralbüro “Freude und Arbeit”). These efforts make it clear that the Axis’s Europeanist claims were not just for show. Through their cooperation in multinational institutions, Italians and Germans were building the networks and organizations that would offer the basis for a “totalitarian international,” a European hegemonic system of substantial ambition. The two regimes extended these ambitions to the cultural fields through the work of the Permanent Council and of the International Film Chamber. From 1936, reinforced by the cultural Axis and drawing on widely shared bourgeois-conservative visions of European culture, both institutions consolidated, expanded, and achieved significant successes. The meetings and



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

festivals of the International Film Chamber and the Permanent Council helped broadcast the Axis’s self-styled “European” character. In turn, both institutions drew strength and legitimacy from that same idea. ◆

◆

◆

Since the Permanent Council’s festival and meeting in Vichy in 1935, the organization had continued its activities with a festival in Stockholm in February 1936 and an expanding series of exchange concerts. These were coordinated by General Secretary Kurt Atterberg and by Germany’s delegate Emil von Reznicek, who had managed much of the organizational work of the council’s events since 1935. Born in Vienna in 1860, Reznicek had achieved success before 1900 for his operas, symphonies, and chamber music rooted in the tonal traditions of late romantic style with an often witty edge. Like many of the composers involved in the Permanent Council, his prominence had declined since World War I, and he had retired from his teaching position in Berlin in 1926. Now seventy-five years old, he had been reenergized since his long-time friend Strauss invited him to join him in creating the Permanent Council. As Strauss withdrew from an active role in the organization, Reznicek increased his own. At the organization’s Stockholm meeting, Reznicek ran the working sessions, which Strauss did not attend. In April 1936, over dinner at his Berlin home, Reznicek convinced Reich Chamber of Culture codirector Hans Hinkel to cover the Permanent Council’s modest expenses, while leaving the institution free to operate without official interference. In exchange, Reznicek agreed that the council’s festivals would program works only by such German composers as the Reich Music Chamber had approved. As for the foreign composers, Reznicek would strive to avoid the work of Jews and atonal modernists, although, Hinkel conceded, exceptions might sometimes have to be made for the sake of appearances. What motivated Reznicek was the prospect of a powerful, organized defense of tonal, “national” music on the international scene. At the Stockholm meeting, Reznicek oversaw the passage of a resolution declaring that the Permanent Council’s primary task, along with the protection of composers’ legal rights, was “the promotion of musical exchange among the Nations with particular consideration for the representative, national works of living composers, without regard to any particular [stylistic] orientation or one-sided tendencies.” This statement was worded so as to suggest that it was not the Permanent Council, but rather pro-avant-garde organizations like the Inter-

T H E E U R O P E A N C HA RA C T E R OF T HE GE RMAN – ITALIAN AXIS



national Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), that made narrowminded, tendentious musical demands of their members. What could be more reasonable than that nations should be represented by “representative, national works”? This demand was one way that Reznicek’s collaboration with the Permanent Council dramatically increased the performance of his music in the 1930s. In private settings, Reznicek was a scathing critic of the Nazis. As his wife was half Jewish, he had reason to fear them as well. His daughter Felicitas, who served as the Permanent Council’s unofficial secretary, made contact with anti-Hitler networks in 1937, and would conduct espionage for Britain’s MI6 during World War II. Nonetheless, the Permanent Council’s commitment to “representative, national” music redounded to the benefit of a German–Italian claim to European cultural hegemony. In part, it did this by offering a reassuring impression of a cultured Germany at a time when the regime was in fact preparing for imperialist war. More specifically, the Permanent Council supported the cultural claims of the Axis through its ideologically charged understanding of what good music was. This was a vision of music as necessarily expressive of a nation, rooted in the traditions of a particular Volk. The criteria for selection of the works featured in the council’s May 1937 music festival in Dresden was not that their composers be strictly antimodernist, nor that they be pro-Nazi. The composers—a highly heterogeneous group including Malipiero, Bartók, Bulgaria’s most important composer Pancho Vladigerov, and of course Richard Strauss—were selected, rather, because they composed art music that was considered by the festival organizers to draw on national and folk traditions. It was an “international” music festival, but one featuring only national music—music by which each composer truly represented one of the eighteen “European Musiknationen.” Tapping a deep vein of dissatisfaction in Europe’s classical music world with the perceived reign of international modernism, the festival’s national emphasis helped position the Axis, and especially Germany, as the generous defender of Europe’s national and regional traditions. For Nazi music journalists, this nationalist emphasis trumped even considerations of prestige. Few of the composers represented at the 1937 festival were as well known as Bartók or Strauss. Most of them, as the Permanent Council’s critics keenly noted, were second- and third-tier figures. But according to the journal Die Musik, a publication linked to Nazi ideologue



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

Alfred Rosenberg, that was as it should be. Pieces by composers who were not well known internationally, but were popular domestically, were valuable in that they gave a representative, “typical” impression of the music of that country. The council’s festival celebrated “works which unjustly enjoy a relatively modest attention, in spite of the fact that they are beloved and appreciated in their homeland, where precisely they are able completely to find their meaning.” To arrange for the performance of such national works at an international festival was to make a strong statement about the proper relationship between international recognition and the value of a musical work. If the Permanent Council’s festival made this statement implicitly, Die Musik rendered it explicit: “It is well known that it says nothing against the status of a work of art if this work does not find great resonance abroad. Just as little does the international success of a work say anything accurate or reliable about its true value in the völkisch culture of its homeland. . . . The signs of genius are linked not so much to their international effect and recognition, as to their national significance.” The article proceeded to highlight the national qualities of each piece in sentimental and stereotypical ways: the Italian composer Adriano Lualdi’s overture to Le furie d’Arlecchino was marked by “Southern liveliness and impetuosity” [südliche Lebendichkeit und Spritzigkeit], while the Yugoslav composer Bozidar Kunc’s work was “fiery.” The Permanent Council gave form to its vision of European music as national music through a program of binational exchanges. Council-sponsored “international exchange concerts,” of which at least thirteen took place by 1940, were designed to promote the performance of member nations’ “national” music beyond state borders. European spa towns, including Vichy, Wiesbaden, and Karlsbad, competed to offer elegant settings for these events. Radio Paris offered to broadcast a “Concert of the Permanent Council,” devoted to a particular member nation, every second month. Moreover, the council did not merely encourage a more “national” form of musical exchange, it created rules designed to enforce it. The first of the resolutions taken at the group’s 1936 meeting, in Stockholm, declared that works by a composer from a particular country could only be performed at the institution’s concerts if those works had been suggested by, or explicitly agreed upon, by the delegate of the country in question. This agreement, solidifying the festival model first discussed at Venice in 1934, envisioned a panEuropean system of national control over which compositions would be

T H E E U R O P E A N C HA RA C T E R OF T HE GE RMAN – ITALIAN AXIS



allowed to represent each nation internationally. In this sense, it echoed the mode of musical exchange developed at about the same time between Germany and Italy. In December 1936, Italy’s director general for theater and the head of the Reich Music Chamber’s Foreign Section agreed to coordinate cross-border tours of orchestras and other musical groups directly between the two regimes, rather than through commercial agents. Like the council’s model, such an arrangement would block the cosmopolitan mechanisms of critical acclaim or market forces by which certain works enjoyed great international diff usion, while many “national” works and their composers remained invisible. The Permanent Council was not alone in promoting this nationalist musical model in Germany. In the climate of Nazi Germany’s mid-1930s alliance-building efforts, local organizers in Baden-Baden saw a chance to revive the city’s famous International Festival of Contemporary Music on a new basis. Each spring from 1936 to 1939, they wooed top-level European composers to the festival, which showcased a Nazi Germany that was open to modern (but not atonal) music from a wide range of European (but not Jewish) composers. Its depoliticized setting drew on the cosmopolitan bourgeois Gemütlichkeit of the famous spa town, which, in 1936 at least, “still benefitted from its republican aura of serious music composed by the avantgarde.” Indeed, that tradition came through in the choice to perform works of several modernist composers. To explain why such challenging music was acceptable in Hitler’s New Germany, though, festival boosters emphasized the national quality of each composer above all. Stravinsky’s music, while hard on some conservatives’ ears, was defended as “fundamentally Russian,” while Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, performed at this festival in 1937, was held to display “the most convincing national character.” The 1937 festival featured several composers already associated with the Permanent Council, including Kurt Atterberg, Yjvö Kilpinen, Alfredo Casella, and Francesco Malipiero. The fascist journal Il musicista enthused that, with the composers themselves present for the performances, “the elegant spa town will be for a few days a center of European musical life.” The Nazi music press also ascribed a European quality to the event, where “European” meant national and free of Jews. In contrast to the “dime-adozen Jewish-influenced concerts disguised as international” typical of the 1920s, the 1936 festival was an “amicable cultural competition among nations.” Celebrating the following year’s festival of “European Music in



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

Baden,” this same critic compared this event to the “International Music Exhibitions” that took place in Frankfurt before 1933, where “art was writ small and business writ large.” “In Baden-Baden,” by contrast, “music was made for music’s sake . . . the atmosphere of this music festival was healthy and positive.” Such rhetoric reinforced the association of Jews and bourgeois capitalism with liberal European internationalism. The European cooperation gathered around the Axis appeared by contrast as a “healthy and positive” alternative to a commercial and cosmopolitan system that had been decadent and corrupt. ◆

◆

◆

The oppositions between the healthy-idealistic-national and the decadentmaterialist-international (and Jewish), constituted a “völkisch” musical vision. Promoting “pure” national music and rejecting international modernism fit with the definition of völkisch offered, for example, by the 1940 edition of the authoritative Volks-Brockhaus encyclopedia: “National with emphasis on the values of race and Volkstum.” (Volkstum, only poorly translatable as “nationhood,” was a highly charged concept referring to the deepest spirit and character of a people in its organic, historical continuity.) Hitler in Mein Kampf had identified the “international worldview” as the opposite of the völkische Weltanschauung. And indeed, for the Permanent Council the notion of “international music”—a music open to cross-cultural influences, and expressing a modern, cosmopolitan, and denationalized individuality—was repugnant and dangerous. A völkisch view of music had been highly politicized in Germany in just such terms long before Hitler came to power. In 1920, the German composer Hans Pfitzner had asserted that Europe was threatened by “atonal chaos” (representing “an artistic parallel to Bolshevism”) and by “the jazz-fox-trot flood” (representing “the musical expression of Americanism”). Both trends were driven by a “subversive internationalism . . . intent on dissolving not only governments but also the innermost life of the people whose hearts it poisons,” in which, he declared, the Jews clearly played an important role. This was only Pfitzner’s latest installment in a debate he had launched in 1917 with his conservative attack on the dangers of musical futurism— a debate that could be mapped onto the geopolitical rivalries of the 1930s. But while the völkisch idea is rooted in specific German traditions, the broader vision of musical conflict it expressed was by no means unique to Germany. Italy’s musical life had been divided by a complex conflict between

T H E E U R O P E A N C HA RA C T E R OF T HE GE RMAN – ITALIAN AXIS



nationalism and cosmopolitanism at least since a young nationalist critic launched a scathing attack on Italy’s world-famous opera composer Giacomo Puccini for embodying “decadence . . . , cynical commercialism . . . and the whole triumphant vogue for internationalism” in 1912. Adriano Lualdi, active as a critic since 1917, defended Puccini, interpreting his success abroad as a kind of imperialist victory for the Fatherland. But Lualdi played the same nationalist card in his own campaign against the “international” tendencies of the Italian modernist composers, interested in nonvocal composition and open to European influences, known as the generation of 1880. By 1928, Lualdi needed no inspiration from Pfitzner to interpret the rest of Europe’s interwar musical landscape as a struggle for the survival of national traditions under attack from an aggressive internationalism. “The emergence of a real and proper International of the arts” Lualdi declared, was responsible for the three worst musical trends of the age. First was the insistence, purportedly typical of the French composers known as Les Six, on a music that eliminates expression. Second came the atonality of Schoenberg and his circle. Third was the style of neoclassicism associated with Stravinsky and his imitators, a trend that was similar to atonality in that it “renders unrecognizable the nationality of its followers.” Behind all three of these tendencies, Lualdi concluded, were Jews, whose “revolutionary artistic extremism” could be compared to the (similarly Jewish) phenomenon of Russian Bolshevism. The Jewish role in contemporary music, Lualdi declared, was “an awesome phenomenon, of international character, which has its generals in Vienna, Berlin, [and] Paris, and a few illustrious lieutenants in Italy.” Facilitated by the weakness and confusion of younger non-Jewish composers, this murky, Jewish-led musical International had “greatly impoverished and vitiated the music of several [European] nations.” The degree to which composers embraced their national traditions served Lualdi in turn as a yardstick with which to evaluate contemporary music. In his 1929 overview of the European musical scene, Lualdi praised composers like Paul Hindemith, Ralph Vaughan Williams, the Russians Alexander Scriabin and Igor Stravinsky, the Hungarians Béla Bártok and Zoltán Kodály, and the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla. This list includes pathbreaking modernist composers whose works were as far from Lualdi’s own traditionalism as can be imagined. But for Lualdi, these composers’ experimentation with tonality and rhythm was irrelevant because they all drew on material from their own national traditions. The



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

limits of acceptable musical creativity in mid-twentieth-century Europe were drawn by whether or not composers, as Lualdi wrote of de Falla, “keep faith with the spirits of their land.” This set of ideas constituted an important basis for Italian– German cultural cooperation in the age of the Axis. Such ideas offered a basis for an appeal to much of the rest of Europe, as well. Suspicion of the interwar vogue for international and cosmopolitan stylistic trends extended far beyond Italy and Germany. The habit of seeing composers as national representatives was widespread and deeply rooted, held in common across Europe by music critics, audiences, and many composers themselves. By the 1930s, the search for a nationally distinctive style in music, often drawing on folk music elements from one’s own national territory, had been a feature of classical music composition across the continent for at least a hundred years. But in the interwar period, musical nationalism was ascendant. Indeed, by the time the Nazis were attacking the kind of musical modernism associated with atonality and serial techniques, these styles had already been abandoned by many younger composers for forays into national folk music traditions or other forms deemed more likely to connect with their audiences. By reconnecting with national, regional, and local traditions of folk music, composers across Europe sought “new forms of balance between the originally national [Volkhaftem] and the surpassingly spiritual [Geistigem].” This is a quotation from the Nazi journal Die Musik, describing Bartók’s second string quartet, but such descriptions could be found in any number of places. As one music historian has noted, “the tonally oriented, nationally tinged styles adopted by a broad range of composers in the 1930s made feasible Germany’s attempt, after the isolation of the early Nazi years, to reenter the wider world of modern music.” That attempt was aided in turn by the fact that most of the composers involved in the Permanent Council had studied in Germany, where they could imbibe ideas about nationalism and music developed by German romantic thinkers like Herder and popularized (and rendered sharply anti-Semitic) by Wagner. Such visions of the role of music in expressing a people’s true inner identity took on heightened political relevance in the 1930s, when a return to nature, authenticity, and the common people was prized by conservatives in revolt against the urbanizing, materialist world. The embrace of the national was by no means only the preserve of reactionaries. In 1932, the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams asked, “Should music be national?” and answered with a vigorous “yes.” In a series

T H E E U R O P E A N C HA RA C T E R OF T HE GE RMAN – ITALIAN AXIS



of lectures at Bryn Mawr College, Vaughan Williams argued that “the composer who tries to be cosmopolitan from the outset” was insincere and bound for local and international failure, since “the greatest artist belongs to his country as much as the humblest singer in a remote village.” Rather, he concluded, “it is because Palestrina and Verdi are essentially Italian and because Bach, Beethoven and Wagner are essentially German that their message transcends their frontiers.” Vaughan Williams was a convinced antifascist who later worked to help Jewish musicians flee Germany. But these words, spoken in a very different spirit and context, would have gone over well at any Permanent Council meeting. The broad currency of such ideas was the basis on which the Permanent Council operated, since it offered a offered a point of contact between National Socialist racist and anti-Semitic beliefs and more mainstream musical nationalism, as long as the most aggressive elements of Nazi racism were toned down. When Kurt Atterberg reported in Sweden on his participation in Permanent Council events in Germany, he translated völkisch, with its racist connotations, as the rather more benign folklig, meaning “popular” or “folksy.” But in Sweden, too, conservatives embraced the defense of folklig musik “as a remedy against ‘foreign mass culture’ and an effective protection for the ‘preservation of Swedishness.’ ” This concern with national styles in music was particularly powerful outside of the hegemonic centers of classical music—that is, almost everywhere besides Germany. Because German music had so dominated the nineteenth century, composers in less musically prominent countries were faced with a dilemma. Such composers had to choose whether to seek international success by adopting styles approved by critics and conductors in the hegemonic musical centers—thus risking isolation at home—or to develop musical forms that were somehow clearly national. For this reason, “regional composers” had a particular investment in developing a national style, often by turning to folk materials, or by emphasizing local, regional, and rural traditions. The Permanent Council’s celebration of “national music,” and its creation of structures to promote and defend it, appealed to (and sought to mobilize) such regional composers. A hero to this group in the mid-twentieth century was the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, whom Strauss had named as one of the Permanent Council’s vice presidents. Elevated into a national hero at home, Sibelius had been celebrated abroad for decades by composers and critics who saw regionalist and nationalist music as an antidote to the



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

ills of a cosmopolitan and urban modernity. “Your music and the unique nimbus around it,” declared Yugoslavia’s Permanent Council representative Boris Papandopulo to the composer in December 1935, “are deeply rooted in the soil of your people, illustrious maestro, and are surrounded by its mysticism.” By the same token, the Finnish composer’s music was derided by elite critics who deplored what they saw as his shallow sentimentality. The way Sibelius attracted popular and nationalistically inflected adulation along with elite scorn made him a natural choice as a vice president of the Permanent Council, especially now that Goebbels had chased the former tastemakers into exile. In 1936, he virtually banned music and art criticism as such by prohibiting all but “reports” on concerts and works. Although Italian composers were loath to admit it, even Italy, with its mighty musical traditions, was also a peripheral, “small” nation on Europe’s musical scene. Italian composers had been eager to demonstrate their participation on the European level without being forced into the imitation of foreign modes that Lualdi and others perceived as humiliating. Musicians and composers in this position were naturally attracted to a new institution that would allow for international exchange among national composers who had felt themselves excluded previously. They were now inspired by what one musicologist has called “co-nationalism”: the sense of common cause among representatives of peripheral nationalities, “held together by an oppositional off-mainstream nationalistic feeling.” It is not surprising that such co-nationalism appealed to composers on the periphery of European musical life, however defined. What is more surprising is that Germany could position itself as the leader of this movement of national-regional composers. For many composers, after all, the search for a national musical voice was an effort to escape the mighty influence of the German– Austrian tradition. In fact, the German bid for leadership needed to achieve two aims that were in tension: mobilize the oppositional energies and ressentiment of the European periphery, while still exploiting the cultural capital of Germany’s powerful tradition. A vision of music as necessarily national helped resolve that tension. In this way, the Permanent Council and like-minded critics successfully took the older concern—that Teutonic tradition was crushing the national expression of small nations— and turned it on its head. Now it was what Lualdi called the “international in the arts”— encouraged by critics in Paris and Vienna, nurtured by the ISCM, and purportedly led by Jews—that was to be blamed for sup-

T H E E U R O P E A N C HA RA C T E R OF T HE GE RMAN – ITALIAN AXIS



pressing national styles. Germany, by contrast, was no longer the shadow from which the national composer needed to escape, but rather the protector of previously marginal national and regional forms of musical expression. ◆

◆

◆

But conservative nationalist ideology was only one source of the Permanent Council’s appeal. The other was its promise to take action on matters of the legal and economic organization of musical life that were intensely important to composers across Europe. “Regional” or “small-nation” composers had been buffeted with particular violence by the economic transformations of musical life of the 1920s, and this made them even more eager to find support for stronger copyright protection and improved access to royalties. Following on the pattern set at the institution’s 1935 festival in Vichy, each of the Permanent Council’s festivals included several days of closed-door meetings at which the composers, usually representing composers’ unions or authors’ rights societies in their home countries, planned concrete steps to reorder classical music life in Europe. At the 1936 meeting in Stockholm, for example, delegates agreed to pressure the Swedish and British governments to insist that the Berne Convention be amended to protect works for fifty rather than thirty years after a composer’s death. With the emergence of the German–Italian cultural Axis, the Permanent Council’s engagement with the issue of composers’ rights was incorporated into a broader, even more ambitious plan. Beginning in 1936, Germans and Italians launched a coordinated effort to seize the leadership of the International Federation of Authors and Composers Societies (CISAC), and mobilized colleagues from the Permanent Council to do so. Founded in 1934, CISAC sought to create a global system for the cross-border flow of royalties payments. Dino Alfieri, now Mussolini’s minister for press and propaganda, had been elected its president in 1935. Germany’s Nazified rights society STAGMA, aware that deriving profit from musical per formance rights required international cooperation, and eager to host another international congress that would affirm Germany’s restored centrality in European affairs, succeeded in bringing CISAC’s 1936 conference to Berlin. There, in September, among delegates from across the continent, STAGMA pursued the goal outlined in its members’ magazine: “that Germany abroad take the place among the cultural nations [Kulturnationen] that corresponds to her leading significance.” Seizing the opportunity to impress foreign officials, Propaganda Ministry State Secretary Walther Funk gave a speech outlining



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

the virtues of National Socialist cultural policy. Goebbels addressed the conference’s closing session. The Italians meanwhile were determined to use CISAC’s conference to assert Italian leadership over this important field. Alfieri led a powerful delegation that included Eduardo Piola Caselli, the jurist responsible for drawing up a reform of artistic copyright in the spirit of fascist corporatist doctrine, and the playwright and novelist Luigi Pirandello, winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize in literature, who had earlier served as president of Italy’s Playwrights Union, a predecessor to Italy’s rights body SIAE. The conference was a resounding success for both regimes. In Berlin, Alfieri presided over important extensions of CISAC’s activities, all dominated by leading figures from the legal and political leadership of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. A new Legislation Commission was led by Piola Caselli. The unit charged with overseeing rights of mechanical reproduction, including recorded music, was led by Leo Ritter, the head of STAGMA, who was elected one of CISAC’s four vice presidents. A new international federation of authors’ societies was headed by Emilio Bodrero, the fascist official who had succeeded Alfieri as head of SIAE. Nearly all of these commissions included members of the Permanent Council, including Emiel Hullebroeck, Peder Gram, Sverre Hagerup-Bull, and its General Secretary Kurt Atterberg, who was made one of the confederation’s vice presidents. Presiding over the sessions in Berlin, Alfieri announced that Italy had recently proposed to the governments of France and Germany a new way to expedite the crossborder payment of royalties, exempting these from the strict rules many countries enforced regarding international currency transfers. Understood as the first step to a broader international agreement, this proposal was presented as one of many ways that the Rome–Berlin Axis was taking the lead in creating pan-European solutions to continent-wide problems. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) sent no representative to Berlin. In an open letter published on the cover of Film Daily, its general director declared that he would not set foot in Hitler’s Germany where there was no racial or religious equality. But few joined the Americans in this stand. At Berlin, even as CISAC marked its new German–Italian leadership, Alfieri welcomed thirteen new rights societies to the institution, and its new international federation of writers’ societies succeeded in drawing in France’s authors’ organization, the storied Société des gens de lettres, founded by Honoré de Balzac and other prominent French

T H E E U R O P E A N C HA RA C T E R OF T HE GE RMAN – ITALIAN AXIS



The copyright Axis: Nazi-fascist alignment at the Ninth Conference of the International Confederation of Authors and Composers Rights Societies (CISAC), Berlin, October 1936. Alfieri (center, with sash) led a delegation including Nobel laureate for literature Luigi Pirandello (third from r.) and Nicola de Pirro, director general for theater and music in Italy’s Ministry of Press and Propaganda (second from r.). Goebbels (fourth from r.) led a group including president of the Reich Literature Chamber Hanns Johst (fifth from l.) and president of the Reich Film Chamber Oswald Lehnich (fourth from l.). (Ullstein/IBL Bildbyrå)

writers in 1838. For the Germans and Italians, the sense of victory flowed over into the event’s lavish receptions at Berlin’s Hotel Kaiserhof, where the tuxedoclad Goebbels could be seen playfully autographing Alfieri’s shirt cuff. ◆

◆

◆

By the time Lualdi headed to Dresden for the Permanent Council’s next music festival in May 1937, Italian– German musical-political cooperation supported a project of European scope. But did it serve Italy’s interests? On one level, the Germans’ Permanent Council was succeeding where the Italians’ International Concert Federation, led in the early 1930s by the Roman musical impresario Count San Martino, had failed. Germany’s leading role was clear at the council’s business meeting in Dresden. There, Strauss presided over a session in which Hugo Rasch, managing director of STAGMA and a



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

High spirits at the CISAC conference: Goebbels playfully autographs Alfieri’s cuffs, Berlin, October 1936. Looking on, from left: Margareta Atterberg, Magda Goebbels, and Propaganda Ministry adviser Frederick Willis. (Ullstein/IBL Bildbyrå)

long-time Strauss loyalist, lectured the delegates on the subject of droit moral. Eager to solidify France’s place in the organization, French delegate CarolBérard offered Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale as a site for an International Music Library under the auspices of the Permanent Council. But if Italian musical leaders were distressed by having lost the initiative to the Germans, they did not show it. San Martino worked closely with Nazi officials to coordinate a major German tour of Rome’s Orchestra dell’Augusteo in the autumn of 1937. The organizational work of the Permanent Council, and the German–Italian penetration of the international rights organization CISAC, allowed Italian jurists to continue to pursue their effort to present Mussolini’s Italy as the European leader on issues of copyright and authors’ rights. Lualdi, who had seen his own vision of a modern but “balanced” international musical festival rejected by the Germans at Venice in 1934, embraced the nationalist model developed by the Permanent Council while using its festivals to line up conducting engagements.

T H E E U R O P E A N C HA RA C T E R OF T HE GE RMAN – ITALIAN AXIS



At the same time, the joint pursuit of international aims with the Germans did not, at this point, mean the Nazification of Italian musical life. Between 1933 and 1938 many musicians fleeing racist and political persecution in Germany featured prominently on Italian concert stages. At the 1937 Maggio Musicale festival in Florence, Carl Ebert, a political refugee from Nazi Germany, was director of the production of Verdi’s Luisa Miller with which the festival opened. The 1936–1937 chamber music series included performances by anti-Nazi exile violinist Adolf Busch and by leading Jewish performers who were in the process of scattering around Europe, including cellist Emanuel Feuermann and pianists Artur Rubinstein, Artur Schnabel, and Rudolf Serkin. The 1937 meeting of the Permanent Council in Dresden concluded with a formal farewell dinner at the city’s Hotel Bellevue, attended by the delegates, the Italian consul general, and local German political figures and their wives. Here delegates raised enthusiastic toasts to their German hosts. Lualdi expressed “thanks and appreciation . . . to Dresden, to Germany,” and to his fellow composer Reznicek. His toast was surpassed by the even more enthusiastic and more political statements of Finnish representative Yrjö Kilpinen, who declared that the festival and “every thing that Germany has done for the life of music” had newly demonstrated “what significance Germany has for the cultural life of Europe.” Icelandic composer Jón Leifs, glass in hand, simply declared, “Germany is the heart of Europe.” On a broader level, the Permanent Council reinforced claims and projects pursued by the Italians and Germans together, most of which—as Lualdi had declared in Berlin in 1934—Italy had originated. As Lualdi heard here, however, it was Germany that got all the credit. ◆

◆

◆

Like the Permanent Council, the International Film Chamber in 1936 and 1937 supported and was supported by the image and reality of Germany and Italy’s cultural Axis. The growing fi lm cooperation between the two countries, including distribution agreements, coproductions, and political coordination, bolstered the Chamber’s practical organizational work. The impression of the Axis as a European alternative, with a rival vision of culture and a dynamic will to put that vision into practice, underscored the IFC’s own Europeanist claims. Yet, even as the two dictatorships moved toward one another politically in 1936, it was not obvious that such close German–Italian film cooperation



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

would emerge. Since being appointed head of Italy’s Directorate General for Cinema in 1934, Luigi Freddi had closely observed the Nazis’ reforms of German cinema and he was not impressed. In a report submitted to fascism’s propaganda chief Dino Alfieri in August 1936, he offered his impressions from a recent visit to Berlin. He had met with Reich Film Chamber President Oswald Lehnich, the economist and SS member who succeeded Scheuermann in that post in October 1935, and with the chiefs of all the major German studios, including UFA and Tobis. The “blind and authoritarian coercion” and “Prussian crudeness” of the Nazis’ reform of the German film industry had undermined a cinema which, “until three years ago, constituted, after the American, the strongest [film] industry in the world.” The violence of the Nazis’ attacks on the Jews in German cinema had thrown its economic system into chaos, while the regime’s arrogant insistence on filling key film policy positions with inexperienced political hacks added to the confusion. What was good about the Nazis’ film reform had been copied from “the Italian model.” What was bad about it underscored Freddi’s uneasy feelings about the country as a whole: “I had the impression that Germany was an enormous avalanche that rumbles toward, or against, no one knows quite what goal.” Nonetheless, “this is the moment,” Freddi concluded, for Italy to initiate “practical and concrete cooperation” with the Germans. As part of his effort to revive an Italian national cinema, Freddi hoped to redress the longstanding imbalance between Germany’s success in exporting to Italy and Italy’s poor record of placing films in Germany. More broadly, “the Germans need us from a spiritual and sometimes also technical point of view, while we need them to broaden the income possibilities of the Italian film, which the domestic market does not cover sufficiently.” Similar calculations were made in Berlin, where Goebbels and the staff of the Reich Film Chamber had decided to resolve the German fi lm industry’s financial problems by gaining access to new markets for the sale and distribution of their own films. On the basis of these meetings, Italy and Germany signed a bilateral film accord at Munich in 1937. Building on long-standing commercial and personal connections, German and Italian production companies undertook a wave of coproductions, resulting in dual-language movies fi lmed with German and Italian stars and distributed in both countries. Some of this cooperation underscored the regimes’ new political relationship through pro-

T H E E U R O P E A N C HA RA C T E R OF T HE GE RMAN – ITALIAN AXIS



paganda films like Condottieri (1937), a patriotic historical drama filmed in German and Italian versions at studios in Berlin and Rome. But just as representative of the style of the cultural Axis— and more representative of the European ambitions of the studios and the two regimes—were nonpolitical movies aimed at international audiences. Giuseppe Verdi (1938), a musical biography of the composer directed by Italian director Carmine Gallone, featured the French star Gaby Morlay and the Moldovan-born soprano Maria Cebotari, one of the great singers of the age, who performed with Berlin’s Staatsoper. In Our Little Wife (Unsere kleine Frau/Mia moglie si diverte, 1938), Italian producer Alberto Giacalone and German director Paul Verhoeven led Hungarian-born star Käthe von Nagy alongside German and Italian actors in a film version of a 1916 comic play by the American Avery Hopwood, produced in Rome by a subsidiary of the Berlin-based Itala-Film and distributed by Germany’s Tobis. Like the vast majority of films produced in the two dictatorships, these were generally devoid of overt political content, but were not for that reason without political significance. What could support the Axis’s claim to leadership better than crafting solid European entertainment that could score European-wide success? A German–Italian film bloc had already been presented to the world at the 1936 Venice Biennale, through Goebbels’s highly publicized visit. Images of Goebbels and Alfieri, engaged, for example, in apparently intense discussion on Count Volpi’s yacht, with the iconic sight of the Piazza San Marco in the background, suggested to a broad public a personalized, intimate, and sophisticated form of binational cultural cooperation. For leaders in Europe’s film industries, Goebbels’ visit only confirmed the emergence of a consolidated Film Europe under clear German–Italian leadership, one that assembled annually at the Italians’ Venice Film Festival and was given form by the Germans’ International Film Chamber. For by 1936, the festival and the Chamber were deeply intertwined. Now enjoying recognition from the fascist state as the only festival of its kind and restructured as an autonomous agency, the Venice Film Festival included a prize jury featuring the IFC representatives from France, Poland, and Hungary in addition to the IFC’s general secretary, the thirty-nine-year-old managing director of the Reich Film Chamber and long-standing Nazi Party member Karl Melzer. Volpi published a welcome to the festival that specifically praised Germany’s outstanding role in that year’s festival and credited the IFC with helping



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

to give Venice “such widespread international appreciation.” This text appeared in Inter-Film, the new multilanguage journal of the IFC, which its German leaders chose to launch at Venice. When the IFC’s executive committee met in Venice on August 20, it included representatives of Austria, Czechoslova kia, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland. Strengthened by the emerging German–Italian partnership, the IFC was ready in earnest to consolidate the institution and implement its proposals for a European-wide reorganization of cinema. Oswald Lehnich, who took over the presidency when Goebbels made him head of the Reich Film Chamber in October 1935, led the organization to take practical steps to facilitate exchange among Europe’s film industries. Already in 1935, IFC had drafted plans for an office to coordinate international fi lm distribution, a bank for coordinating currency exchanges, and an international court of arbitration to settle disputes. At Venice in 1936, the consolidated IFC began to put some of these plans into action. The IFC’s secretariat, housed in the offices of the Reich Film Chamber on Berlin’s Bendlerstrasse, would collect documents, books, and legal texts submitted by members for its newly founded archive. A Committee for Matters of Film Economics, charged with the task of “removing impediments to the international distribution of films,” pursued its mandate by creating a study commission led from 1937 by Wilhelm Meydam, UFA’s vice president for distribution. Among the impediments to be removed was the confusing diversity of technological standards across Europe. Eager to secure European-wide regulations that promoted the interests of German firms, the Reich Film Chamber used IFC meetings and publications to promote European-wide standardization of new technologies like color film. Leading these efforts was Walter Rahts, a chemist at Germany’s mighty Agfa, then Europe’s largest producer of camera and movie film. He already served as president of the commission on film in the International Federation of the National Standardizing Associations, the forerunner of today’s world industrial standards body ISO. A particular area of focus was the coordination of European states’ copyright practices with regard to film. At Venice, the IFC created an International Copyright Commission (Urheberrechts-Ausschuß, or Commission du droit d’auteur international). Led by Raymond Lussiez, the head of France’s exhibitors’ association, this commission met in Brussels in March 1936 and again in Warsaw in November. There delegates discussed suggestions for the

Consolidating a cultural Axis: Joseph Goebbels and Dino Alfieri in conversation on Count Volpi’s yacht during the Venice Film Festival, August 1936. (Ullstein/IBL Bildbyrå)



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

revision of the Berne Convention and prepared a comprehensive program for further work on the issue. At Warsaw, IFC representatives met with the Polish jurist whose 1936 book on the special legal problems of copyright in films had stimulated broad discussion in the industry— and whose detailed, technical discussion of the topic had been featured in the very first issue of Inter-Film. IFC President Lehnich announced in Warsaw that the IFC had already opened discussions with CISAC on reform proposals. By March 1937, the members of what the IFC now renamed the Film Law Commission outlined principles for the pursuit of copyright reform and began collecting copyright contracts from various member nations so as to prepare a standard, IFC-approved model contract. On this commission Lussiez was now joined by two vice presidents: the Italian lawyer Luigi Biamonti and the German jurist Georg Roeber, both leading experts in copyright law, and both closely tied to their respective governments. If the IFC’s first concern was how to ease the movement of films among participating nations, its second goal was to block the circulation of films judged to provoke nationalist or political hostility, so-called “incitement movies” (Hetz-Filme). This issue, stressed already at the 1935 International Film Congress in Berlin, was the subject of a striking resolution taken by the IFC’s executive committee at Venice in August 1936. Each member nation would be able to complain to the IFC about film projects, still in their planning stages, which appeared to “serve the creation of enmity among nations or the denigration of national dignity.” The IFC then had the power to examine the case and, if it found there to be “an injury to the bases of international understanding,” would register an official protest with the governments of the member countries producing the film as well as those of any other states where the film was shown. This was a transparent effort to block the appearance— and ideally even the production—of any films with an anti-Nazi message. Such measures, one Italian film journalist wrote, were to be welcomed as part of a broader attack on “films made to advance the Jewish-liberal-communist-Masonic campaign that many nations calmly tolerate.” Films like the Soviet antiracist comedy Circus or Jean Renoir’s pacifist classic Grand Illusion “were certainly not made for pacifist propaganda nor for the reciprocal understanding among peoples, being decidedly aimed against par ticu lar nations and extremely offensive to these.” In naming these particular films, this Italian critic showed an important goal of Axis film cooperation: blocking the international success of the antifascist cinema

T H E E U R O P E A N C HA RA C T E R OF T HE GE RMAN – ITALIAN AXIS



of the Popular Front, the coalition of socialists, communists, and radicals that had won France’s May 1936 elections. But the principle that films must not offend a country’s “national honor” was not unique to Nazism or fascism. On the contrary, it was solidly established around the international movie world. The League of Nations– sponsored Film Congress of 1926 called on filmmakers to avoid offending national sensibilities. The text of Hollywood’s Production Code included a section on “National Feelings,” which demanded that “the history, institutions, prominent people, and citizenry of all nations shall be represented fairly.” In the 1930s, Joseph Breen, the chief censor at the Production Code Administration in Hollywood, regularly blocked films on this basis. Moreover, if measures against offending other nations’ honor had the effect of keeping all political critique off the silver screen, few in the movie business in Europe or in the United States were likely to object: political cinema was widely seen as “bad for business.” The IFC found help in this effort from the International Federation of Cinema Journalism (Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinematographique, Fipresci), which had signed on to the IFC’s declaration against “incitement films” already in 1935. This support only grew as the IFC drew Fipresci wholly into its orbit. The journalists’ organization coordinated its meetings with those of the IFC from 1936, and in January 1937, Fipresci’s members resolved to locate the organization’s headquarters in Berlin and to make German its official language. A major message of the IFC’s meetings and publications was that Rome and Berlin had the answers to Europe’s cinema troubles. All of the IFC’s measures deployed models developed on the domestic level by fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. In Inter-Film, Axis officials bragged about the successes of their national film policies in the journal’s English-, French-, German-, and Italian-language editions. In 1937, for example, Eitel Monaco, head of Italy’s National Fascist Federation of the Entertainment Industries, bragged of Italy’s pioneering role in creating standardized model contracts to regulate the dealings between film distributors and cinemas, a network of courts of arbitration, new laws to block “damaging competition” by limiting the opening of new cinemas, state financing of new productions, and quotas promoting the exhibition of “national cinema” on Italian screens. The core element of Italy’s cinema system, he argued, was its link between state encouragement and the prudent self-regulation of industry-wide corporate bodies, able to take such uniform measures on a national level. This was



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

fascist corporatism in action, and the IFC promised to replicate the successes achieved in Italy and Germany by applying this model to the rest of Europe. But the Axis powers’ greatest European victory with the IFC came when Germany was able to hand over the body’s presidency to a power that was decidedly not part of any pro-fascist alliance: France. The French took over the presidency of the IFC with some fanfare at what was probably the IFC’s prewar high point, the International Film Conference in Paris in July 1937. Attended by nearly 400 delegates representing sixteen nations, this event marked the IFC’s arrival as a truly European institution. The six-day congress brought together the IFC’s various commissions, as well as meetings of the International Federation of Cinema Owners, Fipresci, and the international body for newsreel producers, the Union International de la Presse Filmée. Its events were held amidst the Parisian cosmopolitanism of the massive Universal Exposition that dominated the city that summer. Films were shown in a special pavilion in the gardens at the base of the Eiffel Tower, and delegates were treated to fireworks on the Seine, a daytrip to Versailles, and a gala film evening in the Marignan-Pathé cinema. France showed off its own technical achievements with a projection of Jean Tedesco’s Au fil de l’eau on an enormous 60 by 10 meter screen in the Palais de la lumière, as well as by taking the entire Congress out to Le Havre so that delegates could enjoy a grand opening ceremony on board the SS Normandie, the world’s fastest and largest transatlantic ocean liner. Against this festive backdrop, Lehnich passed the presidency of the IFC to French producer Georges Lourau, while Paris became the seat of the institution. The new vice presidents included the Czech film magnate Milos Havel, Polish director Ryszard Ordynski, and, from Italy and Germany, two far more powerful figures: the producer Carlo Roncoroni, owner of the mighty Cinecittà studio complex which Mussolini had inaugurated in April 1937, and Reich Film Chamber President Oswald Lehnich. Indeed, behind this European appearance rested a strong basis of German and Italian influence and control. The congress was organized by France’s newly founded General Confederation of Cinema (Confédération générale de la cinématographie), an industry-sponsored organization that emulated the Italian and German model of a single umbrella institution by bringing together “syndicates” for film production, distribution, and exhibition. Created by commercial film industry leaders during the period of Popular

T H E E U R O P E A N C HA RA C T E R OF T HE GE RMAN – ITALIAN AXIS



Front government, this confederation was designed to head off the left-wing demand to nationalize cinema “at the ser vice of the people.” The IFC quickly welcomed the confederation as France’s official representative. The IFC’s move to Paris had been coordinated by a committee in which the relatively inconspicuous Lourau was joined by the IFC’s general secretary (and Nazi Propaganda Ministry insider) Karl Melzer and Italian regime official Eitel Monaco. A German–Italian–French trio likewise dominated the IFC’s Film Law Commission. The new “Commission for artistic and cultural questions,” created at the Paris meeting, was led by Luciano De Feo, the head of Italy’s now-defunct International Institute for Educational Cinematography. Linking up the IFC to the Axis’s ongoing effort to dominate European copyright issues, German and Italian representatives arranged a joint session of the IFC with the international authors’ rights body CISAC. Above all, however, moving the IFC to Paris served the broader German effort to woo French cinema into an intimate, and subordinate, form of binational cinema cooperation. France’s film industry, economically weak and divided among many small producers, was already dominated by Germany’s much larger and better-financed film industry, on which French producers routinely relied for funding. Granting France the institution’s presidency supported the German penetration of France’s economically weak film industry as well as the Nazis’ broader cultural-political charm offensive toward France. Georges Lourau’s own position in French film, after all, was as director of the French affiliate of a German firm, the powerful Tobis-Klangfilm. Even once the International Film Chamber was based in Paris, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America defined it as “a European bloc that has Germany at its head— officially or not— and is directed against American films,” and refused to attend the 1937 Film Congress. The American trade paper Motion Picture Herald likewise warned that Italy and Germany’s cooperation in cinema served a broader plan, spearheaded by Goebbels, to create a major, anti-American, international bloc. Not attending the 1937 Film Congress—just as the American industry had boycotted the 1935 gathering in Berlin—was, moreover, a way of retaliating for French measures, like quotas and import taxes on already-dubbed U.S. films, designed to stem the flow of Hollywood films. But painting the IFC as an aggressive conspiracy was rendered difficult by its seemingly peaceful ambitions and its depoliticized tone. Vulnerable to pressure from the leading Hollywood studios, IFC members carefully



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

avoided portraying their cooperation as explicitly anti-American. In his first speech as IFC president, Lourau promised to maintain the body’s “universal character,” while France’s Minister of Education Jean Zay echoed the IFC’s rhetoric, carried over from the 1920s, presenting film as a tool for peace and mutual understanding. Instead, through their boycott, the Americans effectively acknowledged the success of Germany, now supported by its alliance with Italy, in creating “a European bloc” that really could claim to represent Europe. The only notable exceptions were the Dutch and the British, who had attended the 1935 Berlin conference but stayed away from the 1937 event. As the IFC’s Film Europe gathered again two months later for the 1937 Venice Film Festival, this vision of peaceful, pan-European cooperation was carefully blended with the presentation of the leading role for the Nazi-fascist Axis. Writing in a leading Italian film magazine’s special Biennale edition, the Nazi Party’s film chief insisted on the “competence and objectivity” of the festival’s IFC-led selection committee, even while he reminded readers that “it was precisely Germany and Italy who recognized that there is no cultural expression of our time with such strong possibilities to unite the people and to propagate useful knowledge like this young expression of art: film.” It was “because National Socialist Germany knows perfectly the value of film as a messenger of peace among peoples and as a means of connection among cultures” that Germany was working with other nations’ film leaders “(but especially with the Italians)” to create “a solid European cinematographic structure.” Along with the emphasis on international understanding and peace went the effort to depoliticize and decommercialize the festival’s image. Volpi reasserted the festival’s insistence that while cinema blended art and industry, “art is the vital substance of film.” The Nazi film press promised that, at Venice, “any political influence is deliberately excluded.” The IFC’s success in becoming a truly European institution was in evidence at Venice, while the film festival was itself likewise Europeanized by its deepening links to the IFC. At the festival’s inauguration on August 10, against the sleek modernist backdrop of the newly completed Palazzo del Cinema, Count Volpi and Minister Alfieri were now joined by IFC President Lourau. IFC members again led the prize jury. The festival brought together the leading figures of Europe’s film industries, many of which had by now met the IFC’s demand to reorganize in a nationalized, corporatist form. Poland’s representative Ryszard Ordynski spoke for the Supreme Council of the Film Industry in Poland, a Warsaw-based body created in

T H E E U R O P E A N C HA RA C T E R OF T HE GE RMAN – ITALIAN AXIS



1934 to bring together Poland’s national associations of film producers, theater owners, and movie distributors. Sweden’s representative Olof Andersson, head of the leading studio and cinema chain Svensk filmindustri, had made sure that the country’s Film and Cinema Society changed its name to Sweden’s Cinema and Film Chamber (Sveriges Biograf- och Filmkammare) just two weeks after the 1935 film congress in Berlin suggested that all participants create film chambers on the German model. As ever, Venice itself played a crucial role in setting the scene. The mixture of historic beauty with up-to-date glamour, the sophisticated and cosmopolitan European atmosphere, and the vision of a European cinema culture of highminded values, tainted neither by commercialism nor by materialist politicking, helped create what has been called the Biennale’s “mythical Europeanism.” ◆

◆

◆

The cultural Axis did have something mythical about it—both in the sense that it seemed grand and historic, and in the sense that it was not quite real. Until the end of 1937, the cultural Axis played a role similar to the “mythical” function that the historian D. C. Watt identified as a defining feature of Hitler and Mussolini’s political partnership. “The significance of the Axis,” according to Watt, “lay in its not being an alliance. It gave the illusion of alliance without necessitating the coordination of policies necessary to preserve a reality.” Maintaining this “illusion of alliance” had certain advantages on the international stage. It allowed the Germans to argue that their aggressive pursuit of expansionist, ultranationalist goals was really an effort to create a new order in Europe, which another major European power also supported, even while it left Hitler free to prepare for war without so much as informing the Italians of his true intentions. It allowed the Italians to use the partnership to enhance, rather than limit, Italy’s diplomatic freedom of movement, exploiting the position of power that came from appearing to be the mediator between Hitler and the West. Th is was the role Mussolini played at the infamous Munich conference in 1938, at which the Western powers accommodated Hitler’s demands on Czechoslova kia. This was a role Italian officials hoped to play in cultural politics, too. Where else but at Venice did Germany, Hollywood, and the rest of the film world meet? Where else but in Mussolini’s Italy could the Nazi music writer Herbert Gerigk find himself at the same International Congress on Music as Ernst Krenek, Paul Hindemith, and Darius Milhaud?



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

The illusion of alliance was powerful internationally as a tool for each regime’s pursuit of cultural hegemony because it aligned the continent’s most dynamic and disruptive political forces while mobilizing the strengths of two of the continent’s most prestigious— and purportedly most “European”— cultural traditions. The danger of this form of cultural power was clear to antifascists. Speakers at the Second International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, assembled in the midst of Spain’s civil war in July 1937, vigorously denied that Nazi-fascism and “culture” could have anything in common. But as some antifascist intellectuals acknowledged, the ease with which the two regimes mobilized Germany and Italy’s cultural prestige undermined that argument and was part of what made their antidemocratic Axis so dangerous. Addressing an American audience in 1937, the distinguished Spanish liberal and Europeanist Salvador de Madariaga warned of this aspect of the Axis’s challenge to the West: “In two of the nations which for centuries have been of the most brilliant and the most profound contributors to civilization, schools of political thought have turned up which deny all we believe. There they are, in the midst of Europe, holding these views—at any rate officially . . . and the prestige of their cultures is having a powerful effect on the public opinion of the others and making them shake in their convictions.” Nonetheless, Madariaga, like most interwar liberals, insisted that there could be no meaningful international cooperation among nationalists. For that reason, he could not see that it was not only the two regimes’ prestige, rooted in the past, that was powerful, but also their vision of the future: an alternative scenario for European cultural development characterized by strong national cultures protected by authoritarian states. That future vision was a crucial, non-mythical element of the cultural Axis. The two regimes offered a model of state intervention into questions of culture that appeared to offer a powerful alternative to liberalism and a bulwark against communism. As Italian and German leaders said, theirs was a vision of the state’s role in the nation’s cultural life that was fundamentally unlike that of laissez-faire liberalism. That system, they claimed, allowed culture to fall under the control of capitalists, foreigners, and Jews, concerned not with the high values of culture nor with culture’s ser vice to the nation or Volk, but only with money. “Only if art is anchored in the people’s steadfast roots [im Volkhaften], could the people live in and with the arts,” explained Propaganda Ministry State Secretary Walther Funk to the composers at Wiesbaden in 1934; “under these conditions the state is willing to take

T H E E U R O P E A N C HA RA C T E R OF T HE GE RMAN – ITALIAN AXIS



over and perform the duties of a patron to the artist.” Both regimes demonstrated this vision in deeds, through corporatist-style interventions that were noted with interest abroad. A 1937 article in the British journal Musical Times enthused over fascist Italy’s innovations. Foreigners observed with jealousy the Nazi state’s rescue of the Berlin Philharmonic and the state support for orchestras, composers, and retired musicians that “Aryans” in the German music world enjoyed under Hitler. In film, too, the two regimes’ form of state intervention into cultural matters through national-level corporatist institutions served film organizers as the model for reordering cinema in France, Poland, and Sweden. At the heart of the project of the Permanent Council and of the IFC was the effort to expand out to the international scene the kind of state-led corporatist solutions to the problems of modern cultural life that Germany and Italy had pioneered on the domestic level. At the heart of the project’s success was the fact that such solutions appealed to a wide range of cultural figures across Europe. Composers and filmmakers from other countries could use their participation in the Axis’s new international cultural networks to strengthen their own positions at home. They saw a means by which to escape from the wild 1920s, when market forces and sudden trends seemed to undermine rich traditions and deeply rooted notions of taste and quality. At this point, Nazi and fascist officials carefully made these solutions look compatible with a gradual, peaceful process of transformation. But when the Italian film official Luigi Freddi visited German cinema officials back in August 1936, he had already sensed that they were not. “I had the precise feeling of an imminent disaster hanging over the destiny of Europe,” he reported, arising from “the confl ict between two principles”— that represented by fascism and Nazism on one hand, and that represented by the Western democracies on the other. A sense of impending danger for Europe was easy to perceive in 1936. When Freddi arrived in Berlin, the Spanish Civil War had been raging for several months. By year’s end, Mussolini had directed Italian forces to bomb Spanish cities and launched the first wave of what would end up being over 50,000 Italian troops sent to support Franco’s war on Spain’s democracy. Hitler soon joined in, supporting Franco while testing his weaponry through bombing raids on civilians, including the infamous strike on Guernica in April 1937. The fighting that had begun in Spain seemed unlikely to end there. “The European war is being prepared,” warned the Italian socialist



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

Carlo Rosselli from exile in Paris. “We have arrived at the moment in which the two worlds in conflict, the world of liberty and the world of authority, are about to face off against each other, arms in hand.” And yet in May, one month after the horrors of Guernica, composers enjoyed the elegant Europeanism of the Permanent Council’s Musikfest in Dresden. In July, film officials from Republican France shared a stage with counterparts from National Socialist Germany and fascist Italy to celebrate their pan-European cooperation at the Congress of the International Film Chamber in Paris. Such events succeeded in suggesting, to those willing to believe it, that the Rome–Berlin Axis could offer a healthy dose of authority without depriving Europe of its liberty. Instead, they offered a vision of how state authority could liberate a Europe defined by a culture of national rootedness and idealistic distance from commercialism. The way these institutions reached out to the Western powers also gave observers hope, perhaps especially in France, that Hitler’s Germany could be appeased and war avoided. But speaking to his counterparts in Berlin, Freddi understood that Nazism and fascism’s coordinated assault on Europe’s interwar cultural order could not ultimately coexist with liberal democracy. The logic of National Socialism and fascism, even in cultural politics, meant war.

■

4 A Radicalized, “Pure” Inter-Nationalism

The year 1938 saw a profound radicalization in Germany and Italy. Both regimes consolidated control at home and mobilized their economies and societies for imperialist war. In Germany, Hitler purged the remnants of preNazi power structures from Germany’s military, foreign policy, and economic leadership. Late in 1937, he had removed the conservative banker Hjalmar Schacht from the leadership of the Finance Ministry, rejecting Schacht’s focus on Germany’s export economy for Hermann Goering’s exclusive focus on the Four Year Plan for military buildup. In February 1938, he took personal control over the entire German military. That same month, he turned the Foreign Ministry over to his sycophantic foreign policy adviser Joachim von Ribbentrop, sacking the conservative aristocrat Konstantin von Neurath. With these changes in place, Hitler launched his aggressive, expansionist foreign policy. In March came Germany’s annexation of Austria, the so-called Anschluß. By September he succeeded in dismembering Czechoslova kia at the infamous Munich conference. The Night of Broken Glass, November 9, 1938, saw an open assault on Germany’s Jews. In Italy, 1938 saw the completion of Mussolini’s pivot away from the Western powers that had begun during the political crisis over the 1935 invasion of Ethiopia. In November 1937 Italy had joined Germany and Japan in the so-called Anti-Comintern Pact. In December, the Duce announced Italy’s exit from the League of Nations. Italy’s embrace of anti-Jewish legislation in October 1938 eliminated any remaining ambiguity about where 



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

Italy stood in the fraught political and ideological landscape of late-1930s Europe. On the home front, the conquest of empire in Ethiopia had stimulated a new wave of radicalization. In an effort to further consolidate his power vis-à-vis Italy’s king, in March 1938 Mussolini appointed himself to the newly created post of “First Marshal of the Empire.” The call for economic autarky, introduced in 1936 as a response to the League of Nations’ sanctions, now became a permanent call for a self-sufficient national economy, based on state intervention to promote rapid industrial and military development. In 1939, the last vestiges of parliamentary government were swept away by reorganizing Italy’s parliament as the Chamber of Fasci and Corporations, making corporatism (at least in theory) the very basis of the ever-stronger state. In both countries, these political, economic, and foreign policy measures were accompanied by a radicalization of cultural policy, as intellectuals and artists were mobilized for a new climate of war. Hitler’s culture speeches, at the Party Rally in Nuremberg on September 7, 1937, and at the opening in Munich of the Degenerate Art exhibition in July, demanded war on the “whole flood of mire and rubbish” promoted by National Socialism’s cultural enemies and promised a state-led campaign for “a German art that reflects the ever-increasing racial homogeneity” of the German Volk. Muscling out his rivals in the regime, after 1936 Goebbels had taken up a position as enforcer of National Socialist orthodoxy in the arts, deploying the Reich Chamber of Culture to censor and ban particular artists and works and launching the campaign against “degenerate” art and music, theater and dance. Now Goebbels accelerated the purge of Jews from German cultural life. He entrusted the task to his lieutenant Hans Hinkel, whose anti-Jewish portfolio was elevated into its own division at the Propaganda Ministry in April 1938. Energized by the conquest of Ethiopia and the declaration of empire, from 1936 Italy’s regime fostered a culture to match its imperial ambitions. The Ministry of Press and Propaganda was transformed in 1937 into the larger and more powerful Ministry of Popular Culture. Under Dino Alfieri, this ministry tightened censorship and enforced Mussolini’s antibourgeois “reform of custom,” which sought to ban practices like shaking hands (to be replaced by the straight-armed fascist salute), use of the formal verb form Lei (to be replaced the “more Italian” voi), and the too frequent use of foreign words. The attack on Italy’s Jews was understood as part of this broader ef-

A RA DI C A L I Z E D, “P URE ” I NT E R- NATION ALISM



fort to use cultural reform to produce a tougher race of Italians, ready for future imperial responsibilities. Moving away from the open engagement with foreign cultures of the early 1930s, these policies answered the call, made in the authoritative journal Critica fascista in April 1938, to “bring the Italian race back to its authentic origins, freeing it from all pollution.” In September 1938, Mussolini’s Minister of National Education Giuseppe Bottai brought these themes together in an address at the Venice Biennale, where he outlined a new, radicalized, and racist vision of the national culture. But neither regime turned inward. Instead, the year 1938 saw an expansion and radicalization of the two regimes’ efforts to create a cultural New Order in Europe that would serve their aggressive ambitions. Germany’s Foreign Ministry politicized and activated its Department for Cultural Affairs. Shortly after withdrawing from the League of Nations, Italy’s Foreign Ministry replaced the now-defunct National Commission of Intellectual Cooperation with a new National Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (Istituto nazionale per le relazioni culturali con l’estero, or IRCE). Its mandate was to broadcast Italian culture abroad and to highlight the foreign cultures’ debt to the universal, hegemonic traditions of Rome. The two regimes signaled their resolve to link these efforts on November 23, 1938, when Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano and German ambassador Hans Georg von Mackensen signed an ambitious, large-scale cultural treaty. The German-Italian Cultural Accord of 1938 promoted German and Italian language instruction, scholarly cooperation, and university exchanges, regulated the status of German schools in Italy and Italian schools in Germany, established a new Italian cultural institute in Berlin, and created a standing committee of German and Italian cultural officials to monitor the progress of the various initiatives. It obligated both regimes to inform the other country’s foreign ministry about all cultural events, and allowed each state to select the teachers of their language in the other country. It increased both regimes’ powers to control culture in their own territories, and to exercise control over how, and by whom, their national cultures were presented abroad. That second element was of particular concern to Nazi Foreign Ministry officials. One of their main goals with the accord was quickly achieved as German Jews and other émigrés who had fled the Reich since 1933 were hounded from their professional positions in Italy. Yet, the accord bore broader international significance. It helped clarify a European map of ideological struggle, with fascism and Nazism together



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

as a nationalist, racist bloc against both the liberal-democratic and capitalist powers of the West and the Bolshevik alternative in the East. In this way, it sharpened the Axis’s bid for European leadership. From 1938, a more compact, more radical Nazi-fascist bloc articulated a model of transnational cooperation within a vision of European culture in a more ideologically coherent, and more oppositional, fashion. This vision supported the increasingly open manner in which the two regimes’ leaders positioned themselves as natural leaders of an alternative international order. In 1939, the English scholar of international relations E. H. Carr, fresh from a decade with the British Foreign Ser vice, noted the change in tone coming from Rome and Berlin. Hitler, Carr observed, speculated in 1939 that the AntiComintern Pact might be a basis for an international anti-Soviet system, Italian officials spoke of the Axis as a driving force for “European solidarity,” and Goebbels in April 1939 declared that “Europe in its entirety is adopting a new order and a new orientation under the intellectual leadership of National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy.” Such declarations, Carr argued, did not reflect a “change of heart” away from the two dictatorships’ vociferous rejection of the interwar international order. They were symptoms, rather, “of the fact that Germany and Italy felt themselves to be approaching the time when they might become strong enough to espouse internationalism.” After the awkward international response to Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia had fatally undermined the League of Nations, and after Hitler’s ability to seize Austria and the Czech lands revealed France and Britain’s lack of resolve to defend the Versailles settlement, the prospect of a new international order was real. Part of the rival, antiliberal and anti– socialist internationalism Nazi and fascist leaders began now to articulate was a vision of international cultural order. This vision was embodied in the Cultural Accord, enacted at countless events of German–Italian cultural cooperation, and given form in the activities of Axis-led international bodies such as the Permanent Council for International Cooperation among Composers and the International Film Chamber. What could it mean for two ultranationalist and racist regimes to propose an international cultural order? In the early 1930s, fascist Italy’s answer to that tension had been to affirm the “universal” status of fascism, rooted in the legacy of ancient and Catholic Rome, as a centerpiece around which radical conservative movements could gather. The Nazis’ answer, ever since the foundation of the Union of National Writers in 1934, had been to pro-

A RA DI C A L I Z E D, “P URE ” I NT E R- NATION ALISM



mote an international of nationalists. That the tension between these visions remained unresolved had been evident at the film and music festivals promoted by the cultural Axis in 1936 and 1937, where Germans and Italians tried both to stake nationalist claims and to maintain a cosmopolitan tone. With the 1938 Cultural Accord, Axis leaders came together around a model of cultural exchange that aimed explicitly to resolve that tension. In the process, they drew a firmer line against their ideological rivals and developed a model that addressed the concerns of ner vous and disaffected intellectuals and cultural leaders in countries across Europe. ◆

◆

◆

Against the background of the two regimes’ clearer ideological alignment, Germans and Italians presented their 1938 Cultural Accord not simply as an important step for their binational relations, but as an agreement of an essentially new kind, one that offered a model for the rest of Europe. The Frankfurter Zeitung announced that the Cultural Accord was a “Magna Carta” for a new type of cultural relations, while the Reichswart declared that the agreement bore the promise of “a gradual cultural union among all European nations that have purified themselves of the Jewish element.” Italy’s Gazzetta del popolo celebrated the agreement’s European significance: “Italy and Germany achieve today a complete alignment of their cultural patrimonies and create, alongside the political Axis, an Axis of culture. . . . The two totalitarian states appear today before Europe as a bloc of spirits, of wills, of arms, and of doctrine.” It was not only Axis propagandists who saw the 1938 accord as something new. A 1938 study commissioned by the League of Nations analyzed the binational treaties addressing intellectual and cultural exchange that European states had signed since 1919, in order to chart the history of this “quite new phenomenon in international life and in relations among peoples.”  France had invented the binational accord intellectuel as a means of solidifying French influence among the new nation-states that emerged after the Great War in Central and Southeastern Europe. But in 1935, the editors explained, Italy’s treaties with Hungary and Austria had pioneered a novel type of agreement, which should be distinguished from its predecessors by being called “cultural” rather than “intellectual.” This was more than politicized wordplay. As one Brussels-based liberal jurist explained, the French “intellectual” agreements facilitated exchange on the basis of a belief in the universality of science and scholarship. The “cultural” agreements of the



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

Italian type, on the other hand, promoted precisely those activities that would celebrate “particularistic” national elements. For example, the foundation of national cultural institutes, a distinctive feature of Italy’s 1935 agreements, sought not to establish common ground in a universalist pursuit of science. Their aim was the promotion of Italy’s national culture, including especially its language, in the host country. Nazi Germany drew on the Italian model in its 1936 cultural treaty with Hungary— Germany’s first such agreement— and closely followed Italy’s earlier treaties in drafting its 1938 accord with Italy. Behind the scenes, Italy and Germany’s negotiations were long and difficult. The whole project was nearly scuttled when Hitler insisted on an investigation to determine whether the rumor was true that Italy’s Education Minister Giuseppe Bottai was Jewish. (He was not.) But when the German-Italian Cultural Accord was presented to the world in November 1938, it was the most prominent example yet of this innovation in interwar diplomacy and a powerful tool for the Axis’s European outreach. Fascist Italy’s cultural leaders quickly used the agreement to advance a vision of a new, nationalist approach to international relations. “Cultural accords,” explained Alessandro Pavolini, head of Italy’s newly founded National Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (IRCE), “are a novelty of modern diplomacy, and it is significant that the richest in content of all cultural accords signed in the history of diplomacy hitherto is indeed the one that has been concluded between the powers of the Axis.” Pavolini made these comments in Berlin, at the January 1939 inauguration of a new Nazi-fascist intellectual venture called the German-Italian Scholarship Foundation. Here he offered the clearest outline of the broader ideology of cultural exchange that lay behind the 1938 accord: a model that can be described as “inter-nationalism.” Inter-nationalism allowed “pure” nations, represented by powerful, state-run institutions, to interact profitably with one another without submitting to any new, hybrid, “international culture.” Italy and Germany’s relationship, as formalized in the Cultural Accord of November 1938, was the model. The counter-model, or enemy, was also quite clear: “We know very well,” he asserted, “that in the cultural movement of our time there is an entire current of intellectuals— among whom the Jews are naturally in large numbers—who strive as much as possible to free themselves from any national characteristic and who, in art and science, do not speak the language of their race, but a kind of world-Esperanto. We move energetically against such currents however. Cultural interaction, for us, does not mean spiritual degeneration.”

A RA DI C A L I Z E D, “P URE ” I NT E R- NATION ALISM



Instead, the best way to improve relations among nations was to highlight each nation’s unique character, emphasizing difference rather than similarity. This method was analogous, Pavolini suggested, to the kind of simple truthfulness to oneself on which human friendships are based: “Only when one remains sincere and true to oneself, can two individuals establish a true and lasting friendship, and have a full understanding of one another. The same applies also to national individualities in the field of culture. The more a culture remains true to its own historical and natural genius, the easier it will be for it to work together with other cultures, which are likewise pure.” By promoting transnational cultural exchange according to these new internationalist principles, the Axis offered a solution to what Pavolini called the “European question.” The Axis would be “the spine of the renewed Europe, the ray of light towards its spiritual reinvigoration, [and] the bulwark for the defense of its culture.” Th is new vision of international cultural exchange was calibrated to counter the dominant liberal and universalist vision of European civilization that pro-regime Italian and German intellectuals in the mid-1930s sought to overcome and vanquish. At the same time, it responded to the concerns of intellectuals across the continent for whom the relationship of their national culture to European culture was a pressing problem. Alessandro Pavolini was an ideal messenger for this vision. Born in Florence in 1903, Pavolini was raised in a home of cultural sophistication and of substantial wealth and social connections. His father, Paolo Emilio Pavolini, was professor of linguistics at the University of Florence. His elder brother Corrado was a prominent theater critic and dramaturge. Alessandro excelled at Florence’s prestigious Liceo Michelangelo and had become a star of the city’s literary salons and journals already in his teens. There he had imbibed the mix of antidemocratic politics and antipositivist theories that had made Florence the most dynamic city in Italian cultural life in the early twentieth century. With his martial bearing and social sophistication, a squad leader in the 1925 wave of fascist violence and the author of several novels, Pavolini represented the ideal of the fascist intellectual—as ready with a pistol as with a pen. He rose quickly in the fascist hierarchy: by the age of thirtyone, he had been made federal secretary of the Fascist Party in the province of Florence, a member of the party’s national directory, a member of Italy’s parliament, and head of the Fascist Confederation of Professionals and Artists (Confederazione fascista dei professionisti e degli artisti), while directing



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

the fascist literary review Il Bargello and organizing the first Littorali Games of Culture and Art in 1934, a national cultural competition among Italy’s most talented university students. But Pavolini’s par ticu lar virtue, as a messenger of inter-nationalism in 1939, was that his distinguished record mixed fascism’s nationalist chauvinism and its internationalist cultural ambitions in about equal measure. Although he was a violent and intransigent fascist and nationalist, his work as head of the international music festival Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, founded in 1933, earned the ire of Italian cultural isolationists for inviting foreign modernist directors Max Reinhardt and Jacques Copeau to participate. He had published short stories in the prestigious Florentine literary review Solaria, which was explicitly committed to the formation of a “European literature” in Italy from its foundation in 1926 until its suppression by fascist censors in 1936. Despite these deviations, Pavolini was called to Rome in January 1938 to take up the presidency of the new international institution that Mussolini created to mark the regime’s transition to a radicalized foreign cultural policy: the National Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, IRCE. Under Pavolini’s guidance, IRCE reconfigured Italian cultural diplomacy away from the multilateralism of the League of Nations toward a system of bilateral ties, especially cultivating the relationship with Nazi Germany. At his side, as the institution’s managing director, was Luciano De Feo, founder of the International Institute for Educational Cinematography, which, as a League institution, had now likewise been shut down. Repudiating the earlier openness of the ICE, the two led IRCE’s campaign against Italy’s Jews. Shortly after the publication of Italy’s “Manifesto on Race” on July 14, 1938, IRCE took steps to prevent Jewish Italians from representing the country internationally, requiring that all Italians participating in international conferences provide assurances of their belonging to the “Italian race” before being allowed to travel. Speaking in Berlin in 1939 before a crowd of German political, business, and university leaders, Pavolini elevated IRCE’s work to the level of a model of international order. The inter-nationalism of the German–Italian cultural axis would promote exchange and European harmony while assuaging concerns about the “contamination” of traditional national identities. Th is would offer “cultural interaction,” in Pavolini’s phrase, without “spiritual degeneration.”

A RA DI C A L I Z E D, “P URE ” I NT E R- NATION ALISM



Pavolini’s inter-nationalist vision was broadly shared by leaders in the Nazi foreign relations establishment, who celebrated the ideal of what they called “cultural contact” (kulturelle Begegnung). Developed before 1933 by Heidelberg University political scientist Arnold Bergstraesser, this model called for contact between clearly defined and self-conscious nations, through which each would develop a stronger sense of its own national particularities. Its supporters saw advantages for Germany in a cultural politics that sought to clarify differences between cultures, rather than stressing their similar participation in universal categories. After 1933, the “half-Jewish” Bergstraesser fled Germany for the University of Chicago. But a version of his model was promoted during the Nazi period, especially by the young political scientist Herbert Scurla. While working for the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Reich Education Ministry, Scurla blended ideas taken from Bergstraesser with key concepts from Nazi völkisch ideology. From these he created an anti-cosmopolitan ideology of international cultural exchange that enjoyed considerable success in the Nazi regime’s various competing institutions of cultural outreach. It appealed to the völkisch ideas of the most ideologically radical Nazis, but also to the conservative nationalism of the majority of Germany’s professors and university students, as well as to the broader desire among educated elites for Germany to reclaim cultural and intellectual leadership on the world stage. More broadly, Scurla’s model of “cultural contact” corresponded to the sense of the deep divide between French civilization and German Kultur that educated Germans had inherited from World War I. Scurla argued that the French model of international cultural relations, rooted in the universalist and enlightened French concept of civilisation, sought to transform the cultures with which it interacted, and was thus inevitably missionary and propagandistic. The opposite of French Kulturpropaganda was Germany’s Kulturpolitik. Built on the understanding of Kultur as rooted in a particular people’s history, land, and race, Kulturpolitik described the Germans’ efforts to teach others about Germany and to learn about other cultures in order to understand themselves. Scurla’s ideas found philosophical support in the arguments of pro-Nazi scholars who drew on Herder and Hegel to contrast the German embrace of the diversity of traditions, each expressing a unique Volksgeist, to France’s static, artificial understanding of a single European civilization. Scurla’s presentation of the difference between French and



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

German cultural policies thus buttressed the claim that German leadership in Europe would be deeply different from that of the West. As Karl Epting, the Exchange Ser vice’s representative in Paris, argued in a 1939 book, Germany’s cultural policy sought not to spread National Socialist ideology to the world, but “rather to reconstruct that free, creative, and fructifying exchange in the life of nations, which was lost because of the Enlightenment and the century of the French Revolution.” In the hands of someone like Epting this was blatant propaganda. But the cultural vision he invoked had deep roots and powerful appeal. As part of their cultural-political outreach to the Italians, Nazi leaders began in the late 1930s to extend this vision of Kultur to include Italy. Speaking in Berlin at the same January 1939 event as Pavolini, Reich Education Minister Bernhard Rust argued that Germany and Italy, as “late nations,” having achieved political unity only in the mid-nineteenth century, shared a similar destiny that was essentially unlike that of the Western democracies. “While we [Italians and Germans] fought for our unity,” Rust recounted, “England and France were able to seize the moment over there when there was a world to divide up. When we appeared as peoples, we found this division essentially completed.” But Germany and Italy’s cultural greatness entitled them to demand economic and political justice from the greedy and undeserving Western powers. Rust called on the great German poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller to help illustrate his point, quoting from Schiller’s 1795 poem “The Division of the Earth,” and offering a stark political reading of it. Paraphrasing the story recounted in the poem, Rust read: “ ‘Take up the world!’, Zeus called from his heights to the people. And then the division proceeds, and at the end comes the poet, the writer, [who] would like his portion, too. He hears then in answer, that is now no longer possible, and [instead] the view to the heavens is opened to him.” This much is a faithful rendition of the poem, in which Schiller established the typically German Romantic distinction between worldly wealth and the higher riches of the spirit—“the view to the heavens”—which belonged uniquely to the poet. Rust meant to suggest that Germany and Italy, with their “unprecedented cultural achievements,” were analogous to the poet, while France and England corresponded to the hunters, merchants, and woodsmen who had succeeded in dividing up the world’s riches before the poet arrived, but who lacked the

A RA DI C A L I Z E D, “P URE ” I NT E R- NATION ALISM



rich insight, unsullied by material wealth, that Zeus had granted to the poet alone. “But now,” Rust declared, turning abruptly from Schiller to the present day, “there is the difference that leaders responsible for the prosperity of their peoples cannot be satisfied with that, but must, rather, give the world, too, to their people and seek their share.” In this way, Rust positioned Germany and Italy on the same side of an intra-European clash of civilizations, presenting the Axis nations as the core of a new, alternative European order, led not by its richest countries, but by its most cultured ones. None of Rust’s listeners could have missed the way he mobilized the classic opposition between culture and civilization, or rather between transcendent Kultur and materialist Zivilisation. What was new here was that Italy was invited to stand with Germany as a core member of this Europe of Kultur— and that the Italians seemed to accept the Germans’ invitation. In the late 1930s, pro-fascist Italian intellectuals articulated their understanding of Europe’s crisis in terms that echoed key elements of the German concept of Kultur. This geocultural positioning of Italy alongside Germany and against the West was not as strange as it appeared to some. Since the early 1930s, Italian intellectuals had undertaken a sustained reevaluation of Italy’s cultural relationship to Western Europe. In the process, they reconfigured the meaning of the concept used to identify Italy’s specific form of culture, civiltà. During World War I, Italian propagandists had joined their French allies in drawing a distinction between the idea of “culture” particular to Germany, rooted in mystical visions of the Volk, and the universal Civilization, rooted in Latin tradition and defended by the Entente, of which the Italians were a part. They thus used the Italian word civiltà in a manner parallel to the French civilisation. But in the 1930s, pro-fascist intellectuals who rejected the crisis-wracked and seemingly decadent civilization of the Western European democracies developed the notion of a distinctive fascist civiltà. Drawn against the background of what the historian Renzo De Felice has called Mussolini’s “ever more accentuated tendency to see all problems as manifestations of the crisis of Western culture and in the perspective of the ‘mission’ that Italy had to fulfill to renew that civilization,” the concept of a nuova civiltà fascista presented fascism not as a conservative scheme to save the civilization of Western Europe, but rather as a revolutionary effort to replace it with a novel entity, destined to change the social,



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

spiritual, and cultural life of modern man through its universal political and social ideology. The new civilization of fascism would surpass the spent force of democracy and overcome what Mussolini called “super-capitalism” by affirming the fascists’ “heroic conception of life”—the vitalist celebration of the power of the will that Mussolini contrasted to the pusillanimous materialism of “the bourgeois spirit.” By the end of the 1930s, the very word that Italians had used during the First World War as a synonym for the liberal, humanitarian “civilization” of Western Europe was now redefined as its antagonistic opposite: an ultranationalist, racist, and irrationalist model of culture. That many Italians presented fascist civiltà as “universal,” heir to the spirit of ancient and Catholic Rome, did not make it any less opposed to the Enlightenment universalism of the Anglo–French tradition. This recasting of civiltà did not eliminate all differences between the Italians and their German allies. But for those fascist intellectuals who had spent the past several years sharpening the antagonism between Italy’s civiltà and the democratic-liberal “civilization” of the West, Germany seemed a natural partner. The context against which the Rome–Berlin Axis was constructed, explained the Italian legal scholar Carlo Costamagna in 1938, was the collapse of the three pillars of nineteenth-century European civilization: parliamentarism, capitalism, and internationalism. For Costamagna, an admirer of the pro-Nazi German jurist Carl Schmitt, Italy’s partnership with Germany represented a return to “that primordial conception”—the principle of national community—that marked out the two nations’ historic vocation. “The German people and the Italian people, who always had a fundamental function in the formation and in the conservation of European unity” were now called on “to refound the system of our civiltà.” On the basis of arguments like these, it now became a standard trope of Axis rhetoric to present the Italian– German relationship as offering a model alternative to internationalism of either the liberal-cosmopolitan or the Bolshevik type. Speaking at the headquarters of the Italian-German Cultural Association in Milan on May 3, 1940, the head of the Nazi sports organization (Reichssportführer) Hans von Tschammer und Osten, who had recently been made president of the Berlin-based German-Italian Society, insisted that Italy and Germany’s alliance did not intend to create “a super-national collective, however articulated.” Rather, “fascism and National Socialism recognize themselves in a historic breakthrough to national and völkisch autonomy.”

A RA DI C A L I Z E D, “P URE ” I NT E R- NATION ALISM



In fact, the Axis effort to articulate a distinct inter-nationalist cultural model in opposition to its ideological and political rivals relied on a reductive caricature of its rivals’ views. Throughout the interwar period, intellectuals committed variously to liberalism, socialism, and fascism engaged with the ever-changing place of local, regional, and national cultures in what was evidently an emerging global order. Acutely aware of the influences on cultural life of the expansion of mass communications and the internationalization of cultural markets, supporters of all three ideologies developed normative proposals that addressed the problems of the age in a manner consistent with their values. Each hoped to demonstrate that their ideological system offered the best basis for a national culture’s development under the conditions of globalizing modernity by striking a balance between the national and the international. Self-described internationalists among European liberals had been thinking about these issues for decades, and with particular urgency since the end of the Great War. At a symposium on “The Problem of Nationality” at Oxford in September 1920, the anthropologist Marcel Mauss proposed to define internationalism “as distinct both from nationalism, which isolates the nation, and ‘Utopian’ cosmopolitanism, which negates it.” Leading figures at the League’s International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation embraced a vision of international cooperation that they insisted was compatible with their (sometimes aggressive) nationalism. “An international mind,” declared Nitobe Inazo, the Japa nese statesman who was among the committee’s founders, “is not the antonym of a national mind. Nor is it a synonym for a cosmopolitan mind, which lacks a national basis. The international mind is the expansion of the national.” Leftist intellectuals sought to couple the defense of national traditions with international socialism. The prominent French communist writer Louis Aragon, addressing writers from fourteen countries in July 1937 at the Second International Writers’ Congress in Paris, called for “the creation of a culture [that will be] truly human, because it will be national in form, and socialist in content.” Under Stalin, the Soviet Union began to highlight and indeed enforce the national particularities of its peoples, celebrating itself as “the world’s first state to institutionalize ethnoterritorial federalism.” But liberals and socialists alike had a hard time making the case for themselves as the defenders of national cultures. Liberal internationalists were generally on the defensive in an age marked by the crisis of laissez-faire



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

capitalism, the evident failures of the League of Nations, and the weakness of the liberal democracies in the face of Mussolini’s and Hitler’s provocations. Winning a broad hearing for the effort to blend international socialism with cultural nationalism was a tall order even before the collapse of France’s Popular Front government in 1937 and Franco’s victory in Spain in 1939 seemed to close off the last chances for new progressive cultural networks. Antifascist intellectuals were gradually forced to acknowledge the power that the Axis derived from promoting international cooperation among nationalists, even if that very idea appeared contradictory to them. Looking back on the interwar years from exile in the United States, the French political theorist Yves Simon saw this clearly: The international community of which Hitler was the head was not a strongly orga nized community like the Th ird International, a community openly headed and subsidized from abroad. It was a subtle and fluid body, whose activity was often inconspicuous, whose real purposes were unknown to many of its members, whose limits were vague. Anybody could join it without registering at any office. The National Socialist State could do what the Soviets could not afford to do. It could win the more or less unconscious support of reputedly patriotic people; if not their support, their sympathy; if not their sympathy, their irresolution.”

Among the most powerful supports of this Nazi-led international community was the web of institutions and relationships led not by Hitler but by Goebbels, dealing not with politics but with culture. The Permanent Council for International Cooperation among Composers and the International Film Chamber had been “inter-nationalist” from the start. Anti-cosmopolitan ideals guided their activities, dictated their institutional form, and were central to their appeal. From 1938, both institutions were made to perform a complex mix of tasks: to support the Nazis’ effort to rally allies more tightly around Germany in preparation for war, while continuing to project a peaceful, nonthreatening image of Hitler’s Germany as a country that embraced and defended high culture. One way to do this was to apply the anti-cosmopolitan ideology of inter-nationalism to the workings of the Permanent Council and the International Film Chamber in a stricter fashion. This produced a more sharply defined model of European culture, cast in increasingly open opposition to the “Western Civilization”

A RA DI C A L I Z E D, “P URE ” I NT E R- NATION ALISM



of Europe’s liberal democracies and the United States. At the same time, this more aggressive posture spelled trouble for the Italians’ effort to use these institutions to pursue their own hegemonic ambitions. ◆

◆

◆

In January 1938, the Nazi journal Die Musik lectured its readers on the importance of continuing the attack on Judaism in music. The Jews might be gone from the orchestras, but Germany was “still at the beginning of that cultural process of recasting that the Führer inaugurated with his great speeches on culture at the Reich Party Day in Nuremberg and at the Day of German Art in Munich.” Indeed, Hitler’s “culture speeches” sent a signal, spread throughout the German cultural world through articles like this one in Die Musik, to accelerate and radicalize the National Socialist reworking of German culture. To this end, Goebbels convened a massive gathering of German musicians and composers, the first Reich Music Days (Reichsmusiktage), in Düsseldorf in May 1938. Like the annual Reich Theater Festival Week since 1934, and the Greater German Writers’ Meeting, first assembled in Weimar in October 1938, the Music Days created an annual event at which Goebbels could assemble and mobilize an entire sector of German cultural life. In Düsseldorf, Richard Strauss opened the proceedings with a per formance of his Festliches Präludium. Goebbels then took up the task. He celebrated Nazism’s achievements since 1933 in having driven away “the pathological manifestations of musical Jewish intellectualism” and sought to consolidate the party’s gains by elaborating “Ten Principles of German Music Creativity.” Having secured its music, Germany might now, he suggested, be ready to lead an anti-Jewish musical movement that “meant more than only a national work of reform.” “Perhaps,” he mused, “there actually begins from here the salvation of Western music from impending downfall.” Several parallel events underlined the scope of Goebbels’s ambitions. At the musicology conference that met at the same time in Düsseldorf, scholars discussed “music and race” in and beyond Germany, reinforcing the penetration of cultural discourses with biological racism. The Degenerate Music Exhibition had opened in Düsseldorf’s Kunstpalast a few days earlier. Like the Degenerate Art exhibition that had opened in Munich in 1937, this exhibition brought together examples of modernist art music and jazz with texts and images claiming to demonstrate this music’s essentially Jewish and black character and demarcating “what was and is diseased, unhealthy, and



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

highly dangerous in our music and that for this reason must be eliminated.” The exhibition featured a list of composers who were particularly to be shamed and blacklisted for their “international-Jewish entanglement” at pre1933 music festivals in Germany. Yet on the very day Goebbels gave his address in Düsseldorf, Germany was pursuing its own international entanglements, as the Permanent Council for International Cooperation among Composers held its International Music Festival in Stuttgart on May 15–23, 1938. As the Nazi musical press enthusiastically reported, this event partook of the period’s spirit of radicalization by reflecting the Nazi-fascist, inter-nationalist vision of European cultural exchange. Stuttgart’s “European music festival” distinguished itself from “this summer’s round robin of music festivals” by the broad level of international participation—featuring representatives of some twenty nations—and by the distinctive manner in which the works were selected. Each nation’s delegate had presented a small selection of nationally representative pieces from which the festival’s organizer, the German delegate Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek, made his choices. The International Society for Contemporary Music—whose 1938 festival would take place in London in June—appointed an international jury to select works for per formance. The Permanent Council, by contrast, maintained the system of nationally approved lists, first developed in 1935, from which a kind of festival-Führer, in this case the seventy-eight-year-old Reznicek, made an ideologically correct selection. The program Reznicek assembled was strictly free of Jewish composers or musicians. But the festival was other wise far from the vulgar, aggressive anti-Semitic attacks that poisoned the air in Düsseldorf. Instead, audiences in Stuttgart’s Württemburgische Staatstheater heard a broadly European program, in which the first place was assigned to Germany and Italy. The Italian delegation, led by Adriano Lualdi, included Alfredo Casella and Gian Francesco Malipiero, each of whom conducted one of his own compositions. Hans Pfitzner conducted his Duo for Violin, Cello, and Orchestra, leading a German contingent that included Max Trapp’s Cello Concerto and the symphonic poem Vita Somnium by composer and director of Berlin’s Singakademie Georg Schumann. Also featured was a work by Ernst Geutebrück, the composer-administrator who was distinguished mostly for having overseen the anti-Jewish purge of the key institutions of Austrian musical life. Indeed, the composers Reznicek was able to assemble were generally not of high caliber. But they represented the council’s European ambitions.

A RA DI C A L I Z E D, “P URE ” I NT E R- NATION ALISM



The Bulgarian Pancho Vladigerov was soloist in his Third Piano Concerto. Sweden sent the cofounder of its composers’ union, Ture Rangström, and the composer Nathanael Broman, head of music programming for Swedish radio. The event completed its European representation with works by several highly important composers who were not present. The Wendling Quartet performed Karol Szymanowski’s String Quartet in C Major. French music was represented by Jacques Ibert’s Concertino for Alto Saxophone and Eleven Instruments and by a special performance of Albert Roussel’s Symphony No. 3 as a tribute to the life of the French composer who had represented France in the Permanent Council until his death in August 1937. The impact of this model of European musical cooperation outside Germany was in evidence just six months later at the Permanent Council’s next major event, on November 20–26, 1938, in Brussels. Under the patronage of the king of Belgium and a comité d’ honneur that included Belgian Prime Minister Paul-Henri Spaak, this week-long “Festival internationale de la musique” celebrated the completion of the Belgian national broadcasting company’s sleek, art deco headquarters, the Maison de la radio. When the building hosted the festival’s gala concert on November 20, it was a perfect demonstration of the Permanent Council in action. Reznicek opened the program, leading the Belgian radio orchestra in a performance of his most successful piece, the overture to his opera Donna Diana (1894). He was followed to the podium by a series of composer-conductors from across Europe: Norway’s Arne Eggen, the Belgian Joseph Jongen, and the Greek composer Petros Petridis, each leading one of his own works. Eggen was a successful composer of songs in a national-romantic style and was also president of Norway’s composers’ union (Norsk Komponistforening) and a cofounder and former president of the country’s performing rights society, TONO. The director of the Brussels conservatory, Jongen was widely recognized as Belgium’s greatest composer, whose works, assimilating influences from nineteenth-century German and French masters as well as from traditional Walloon folksong, were frequently performed in Paris and Berlin. A leading innovator in the emergence of a Greek national school of contemporary classical music, Petridis linked elements of Byzantine chant to modernist trends he had studied in Paris. He also now represented Greece on the Permanent Council. Adriano Lualdi was on hand to conduct works by the young Italian composers Jacopo Napoli and Barbara Giuranna, Kurt Atterberg led a performance of the “Summer’s Evening” movement of his



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

Third Symphony, and the program concluded with the Third Symphony of that towering exemplar of Europe’s national composers (and Permanent Council vice president), Jean Sibelius. This was only the beginning of seven days of concerts, including also operas and chamber music, featuring pieces by a European-wide selection of composers. These included active members of the Permanent Council, such as British composer Herbert Bedford, the Bulgarian Pancho Vladigerov, and the Icelandic representative Jón Leifs, but also several leading figures of interwar musical life who were not present and who had no connection to the council: Isaac Albeniz (Spain), Karol Szymanowski (Poland), Leoš Janáček (Czechoslova kia), Ernst von Dohnányi (Hungary), Ralph Vaughan Williams (Britain), Arthur Honneger (Switzerland), and Jacques Ibert (France). This European panorama of national and regional composers was wholly consonant with the kind of inter-nationalism that had just been codified in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany’s Cultural Accord. The event’s internationalism extended even to the layout of the program booklet, printed in French and Flemish in stylish, modern fonts, and in which glossy headshots of all the composers were captioned with the composer’s country of origin written in that composer’s native language (España, Sverige, and so on), even calling Belgium Belgique or Belgie for the Walloon and Flemish composers, respectively. But these choices did not reflect instructions from Berlin. The concert was produced by an all-Belgian executive committee that included the leading figures of Belgian classical musical life, from the national broadcaster to the head of Brussels’ Société Philharmonique, along with Belgium’s representative on the Permanent Council, Emiel Hullebroeck. Indeed, the most striking feature of the event was the very fact that Belgian officialdom chose to entrust the Permanent Council, which progressives had for years branded as a reactionary nest of “blood and soil” composers, to mount this show of force of regional composers as the best, most European way to inaugurate Belgium’s cutting-edge broadcasting headquarters. The Nazi music writer Herbert Gerigk, who covered the event for Die Musik, was pleased with what he heard. Among the musical selections, the styles of romanticism “and a moderated modernism” dominated. That the festival enjoyed the support of Belgium’s major music institutions was notable, moreover, since “the Permanent Council has been judenfrei since its foundation in 1934 and in Belgium today the Jew still plays a notable role, particularly in the musical field.”

A RA DI C A L I Z E D, “P URE ” I NT E R- NATION ALISM



A hint of the festival’s political significance for Belgian– German relations came with the two opening events. At the “popular concert” on Friday, November 18, several works by young Belgian composers were followed by a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, led by Désiré Defauw, the head of Belgium’s new National Orchestra, who would later lead the symphony orchestras of Chicago and Montreal. At the all-Wagner program on Sunday afternoon, Brussels’s Société Philharmonique performed excerpts from Tannhäuser, Parsifal, and Die Meistersinger. Germany was represented officially by Ambassador Vicco von Bülow-Schwante, a committed Nazi and passionate anti-Semite who had worked to spread National Socialist ideology abroad through a special division of the German Foreign Ministry, the Sonderreferat Deutschland, before taking up the ambassador’s post in Brussels in October 1938. Having invested no effort himself, he could at this festival enjoy the spectacle of a large-scale public event, organized and paid for by the Belgians, at which Nazi Germany—having just annexed Austria, peeled the Sudetenland away from Czechoslova kia, and unleashed the violence of the Night of Broken Glass— could take pride of place in an eminently dignified cultural gathering that gave concrete form to a nationalistconservative vision of European culture to which Nazis and their allies could fully subscribe. Belgian composer Emiel Hullebroeck, who coordinated the council’s role in this event, succeeded Kurt Atterberg as the council’s secretary general late in 1938. He brought to the organization his long-standing nationalist concern with folk music and his administrative experience as a cofounder of the Flemish authors’ rights society (Nationale Vereniging voor Auteursrechten), founded in 1922 to break the monopoly in Belgium of the Paris-based authors’ rights society SACEM. It is unclear if there was a business meeting of the Permanent Council in Brussels. Richard Strauss did not attend, and generally the pace of reform regarding the issue that most motivated him, copyright reform, had slowed markedly since he had achieved many of his goals. Goebbels saw to Germany’s ratifying the Berne Convention in October 1933, and in 1934 Germany followed Italy and Austria in extending the term of copyright protection from thirty to fifty years. In 1939, Nazi legal officials finally prepared a draft law overhauling German copyright, which in typical Nazi language redefined the author or composer’s “moral right” as “composer’s honor” (Urheberehre), but this was not made into law. By then, Strauss’s distance from the regime had deepened considerably.



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

Although he had lent his international prestige to the regime by conducting his Olympische Hymne at the 1936 Olympics, the July 1938 premiere of his opera Friedenstag was widely understood as a pacifist rebuke to Nazi militarism and brutality. The Propaganda Ministry’s early interest in the Permanent Council had begun to wane by the late 1930s. The body was managed by its Belgian secretary general and by the German delegate Emil von Reznicek and his daughter, Felicitas, both of whom privately scorned the Nazis. They kept the ministry abreast of the council’s activities, but ran it with very little oversight from the regime. But in this form, the Brussels festival indicated, the Permanent Council was remarkably self-sustaining and continued, albeit perhaps in spite of its leaders’ intentions, to support an important element of German “soft power” in the run-up to war. ◆

◆

◆

Italy’s commitment, from 1938 on, to a radicalized, racist, and internationalist Europeanism brought an end to the regime’s carefully balanced efforts to position Italy as a leading force in European classical music. In the mid-1930s, these efforts had focused on multiple strategies, balancing opposed tendencies and maintaining political contradictions unresolved. Alfredo Casella led strong Italian delegations to the avant-garde festivals of the ISCM, even as Adriano Lualdi promoted Italy’s involvement in the Permanent Council. At the same time, the two men worked together on the board of the Venice music Biennale, which, like Florence’s Maggio Musicale, brought together musicians and musical tendencies rarely to be found on the same bill elsewhere. Italy’s festival circuit in the mid-1930s had benefited from the participation of many German Jews and political émigrés who were no longer permitted to perform in Germany. A turning point occurred in February 1938, however, when the Maggio’s director Mario Labroca told German opera director Carl Ebert that he would not be welcome to return to the festival (where he had appeared in 1933 and 1937) to direct Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, as had been planned. Th is year’s festival would be attended by Hitler— and the Führer was not to be put in the awkward position of attending a concert put on by a German-Jewish émigré. Similarly, while the 1937 International Musical Congress in Florence had been attended by Jewish and non-Jewish modernists Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith, Ernst Krenek, Alfred Einstein, and Ernst Toch, none of these figures was invited to participate in 1938.

A RA DI C A L I Z E D, “P URE ” I NT E R- NATION ALISM



As Italy’s foremost representative of international musical trends, Casella had been under attack by Italy’s most chauvinist musical nationalists for years, yet had always managed to maintain a stable position in the regime’s musical networks. Picked to direct the 1937 Venice music Biennale, he had assembled an ambitious and self-consciously cosmopolitan program featuring works by Milhaud, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev and the Italian premieres of works by Bartók and Schoenberg. According to one witness, the Schoenberg piece could not be heard, as a group of hecklers “turned the concert hall into a battlefield.” The new climate created by the regime’s growing closeness to Germany strengthened Casella’s enemies. Feeling the political wind at their backs, a group of self-described “national” composers used the October 1937 meeting of the National Syndicate of Musicians to mount an attack on Italy’s purportedly “international” composers, including Casella. The Roman daily Il Tevere— known for its anti-Jewish and pro-Nazi sympathies—followed up by launching vigorous anti-Semitic attacks on Casella and even his wife, who was French and Jewish. Referring to Casella’s move to Rome during World War I after his many years in Paris, the journal claimed Casella had returned to Italy “with the precise task to conquer this great musical market for the Jewish cause,” which he did by promoting modernism, “this Jewish musical art, which has neither fatherland nor flag.” This arch-nationalist and now anti-Semitic position was supported as well by the fascist musicians’ union (Sindacato nazionale fascista dei musicisti). In August 1937, the union’s journal devoted its cover and first pages to a translation of Hitler’s signal speech on art and culture given at the July 18 inauguration of the House of German Art in Munich, accompanied by an approving, enthusiastic commentary by the right-wing composer and critic Alberto Ghislanzoni. At higher levels, however, the Italian fascist regime still sought to maintain the appearance of a commitment to fascism’s “aesthetic pluralism” under the politically acceptable but culturally vague umbrella of italianità. The National Directorate of the Fascist Union of Musicians encouraged Italian composers to “draw their aspirations and aesthetic laws from the sources and from the genius of their race,” but officially concluded that every style, “pursued with sincerity and in the spirit of a modern sensibility, has the right of citizenship” in Mussolini’s Italy. But in dealing with Germany the Italians were careful to respect the Nazis’ aesthetic strictures. For their 1937 tour of



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

Germany, the Orchestra of Rome’s Accademia di Santa Cecilia carefully removed from the program two works originally planned: L’apprenti sorcier by Paul Dukas, who was Jewish, and Alfredo Casella’s Introduzione, aria e toccata (op. 55), probably less because of the music itself than because of Casella’s association with the ISCM. Casella was likewise removed from the leadership of the music Biennale. The 1938 edition was directed instead by the young Goff redo Petrassi, a gifted composer and darling of the fascist patronage system who had been made superintendent at Venice’s La Fenice Theater at the age of thirty-three. Under Petrassi, the 1938 Venice Biennale Music Festival was a lower-profile and less controversial event, with features that seemed to confirm the victory in Italy of positions long pursued in Nazi Germany. The ubiquitous Herbert Gerigk, covering the festival for Die Musik, was pleased to see that Italy was coming around to Germany’s positions on matters of musical style and on the Jewish question. Venice’s sixth music festival, taking place “for the first time without Jews,” was “surprisingly productive, because most of the works performed maintained a healthy line.” That “healthy line” demonstrated “a general turn toward naturalness and melodiousness [Wohlklang], which to some extent offered a practical confirmation of the great culture speech that the Führer gave in Nuremberg.” Italy had clearly moved away from its past as a country “that praised [musical] progress at all costs,” a change Gerigk found confirmed in Casella’s new Sonata a tre (op. 62), which was not atonal but rather stood roughly “on the level of German romanticism.” Gerigk even had praise for Paul Hindemith’s new orchestral suite Nobilissima visione, which the composer himself conducted, and which showed a “compositional technique . . . that in no way recalls the time of errors” of the composer’s earlier, more experimental works. Modernist music, including atonal and twelve-tone compositions, did not disappear from Mussolini’s Italy. But the political implications of the Axis partnership, and the desire to participate in Nazi Germany’s international networks, meant that the regime’s permissive attitude to Italian composers’ external relations must be brought to an end. In March 1939, Alessandro Pavolini, now Italy’s minister of popular culture, forced Casella to communicate Italy’s official withdrawal from the ISCM. Italian composers would still find support from the regime in pursuing European recognition, and in bringing European music to Italy. But such international contacts would

A RA DI C A L I Z E D, “P URE ” I NT E R- NATION ALISM



need to meet the standard of Axis inter-nationalism and pass through the regime’s system of political alliances—that is, ultimately, through Germany. Lualdi traveled to Frankfurt in June 1939 for the council’s next International Music Festival. There he encountered an event that revealed the tensions in German cultural policy on the eve of World War II. Meeting from June 15 to 24, 1939, this festival included many of the usual foreign attendees and Permanent Council members, including Petros Petridis and Jón Leifs, and the works performed represented Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia. The state of Czechoslova kia had been cleared from the map in March 1939, so Permanent Council member Jaroslav Křička’s Piano Trio (op. 38) now represented the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The highest-profile guest was the Hungarian composer Ernst von Dohnányi, who was at the piano for a performance of his Piano Quintet (op. 26) on Monday evening, June 20. The program also included Richard Strauss’s latest opera Daphne, which had premiered only eight months earlier. But compared to earlier events, the profile of this festival was rather lower. The main novelty was that the German organizers now surrounded the foreign compositions with works by German (and, until recently, Austrian) composers, some modestly successful and several quite unknown, whose late-Romantic style, or pro-Nazi politics—as well as their “Aryan” ancestry—made them acceptable representatives of Hitler’s Reich. Performances by Frankfurt’s Radio Orchestra were conducted by Otto Frickhoeffer, an inconspicuous figure who had earned his leadership spot through his Nazi political connections. The festival featured a good deal of national music, inspired by folk melodies. German tenor Heinz Marten sang a group of Country Scenes composed on the basis of folk songs by Polish composer Czesław Marek, who accompanied at the piano. Lualdi conducted a performance of his own Samnium, Suite on Three Peasant Themes (op. 8). But audiences still heard music with a strong debt to jazz and nonEuropean rhythms, including Constant Lambert’s The Rio Grande and Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto, performed by the French soloist Yvonne Lefébure, one of France’s most prominent pianists. Inviting a French pianist to bring Ravel’s jazzy musical innovations to life in Germany in 1939 seemed to conflict with the aggressive, chauvinist “blood and soil” tone of Nazi Germany’s domestic music policy at this point. But



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

Nazi music policy, in addition to its general inconsistency, was characterized by a disconnect between its domestic and international approaches. The aggressive race-baiting typified by the poster for the Degenerate Music exhibition—featuring a stereotyped black man playing the saxophone and wearing a Star of David, to portray jazz as irredeemably black and Jewish—was not for international consumption. The poster for the Permanent Council’s 1939 festival, by contrast, featured an image of a harp set against a starry sky. A split between domestic and international approaches was likewise reflected in the state support enjoyed by the Berlin Philharmonic. Although key Nazi ideologues saw the symphony orchestra as an outmoded, bourgeois institution with nothing to contribute to the creation of a völkisch mass culture, Goebbels rescued the Berlin Philharmonic from financial ruin and sent it on tours abroad, now as the Reichsorchester, in order to mobilize the prestige of Germany’s musical tradition while demonstrating the regime’s commitment to high culture. Similarly, while on the domestic level the Reich Music Chamber in 1937 created a new music censorship office “for the protection of the cultural life of the German people from the influence of undesirable and damaging music,” on the international level “German music” was expanding. Hitler’s Anschluß of Austria into the German Reich brought the institutions of that country’s legendary musical life, already heavily Nazified by Austria’s own National Socialists, under centralized political control. The consequences were rapid and brutal. Austria’s section in the International Society for Contemporary Music was dissolved. The once progressive Salzburg Festival was stripped of its defining traditions, purged (like all other musical institutions) of Jews, and used as a forum for the Nazis’ racist assault on modernist visual art when the Degenerate Art exhibition opened there in September 1938. The head of Austria’s musical royalties agency AKM was arrested and sent to Dachau and the organization was dissolved into Germany’s state-led copyright body STAGMA. The Austrian section of the Permanent Council was likewise dissolved. German nationalists believed in any case that Austrian music was really German, a blurring exemplified by the fact that the German representative in the Permanent Council had always been the Vienna-born composer Reznicek. Musicologists supportive of the Anschluß eagerly offered music-historical evidence of the historically rooted, organic reality of what was now called “Greater Germany” (Großdeutschland ).

A RA DI C A L I Z E D, “P URE ” I NT E R- NATION ALISM



The inoffensive style of Nazi-sponsored musical exchange: Poster advertising the Permanent Council’s 1939 International Music Festival in Frankfurt. (Artist, Erich Fornoff. Reproduction courtesy of Guido Tön.)

This swallowing up of the very idea of Austrian music was the first step in a process whereby pro-Nazi musicologists helped “validate political developments with historical evidence of German presence in the musical life of neighboring territories.” The next stop was the Czech lands, about which German scholars and propagandists eagerly demonstrated that “even the most admirable products of Czech nationalism were of German origin.” Under the protection of Hitler’s Reich, the propagandists insisted, the friendly (if subordinate) relations of Czech culture to German culture could resume,



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

now that the Czechs had been liberated from the damaging trends of the interwar decades. The effort to forge an autonomous Czech culture was deemed artificial and influenced by Jewish internationalism and Americanism. German “protection” relied on repressive measures like banning some pieces by Smetana and Dvořák, as well as all singing in public, so as to block the performance of culturally and politically significant Czech folk songs. Immediately upon the invasion of Poland in September 1939, German musicologists denied any evidence of Polish musical creativity by celebrating the “German spirit in Polish music.” When the Reich Chambers of Culture expanded into the newly annexed portions of western Poland, it was with instructions not to admit any ethnic Poles to the organization. In the Generalgouvernement of occupied southern Poland, Goebbels and the newly installed Nazi overlord Hans Frank agreed in October 1939 on a plan for the systematic destruction of all institutions of Polish national culture. The Nazis’ musical Europe, it now turned out, did not include all the countries that had been invited to participate in it as recently as June 1939. At this point, then, a key feature of the Nazis’ European cultural policy came into focus—namely, the starkly contrasting treatment reserved for different European nations. The Czechs and Poles, in different ways, felt the force of German cultural imperialism. But for the parts of Europe not slated for repression, the rhetoric of inter-nationalism helped outline a new set of relationships between Germany and other national cultures. It claimed to help make them aware of and embrace their own national and racial qualities. In an October 1938 report on musical life in Holland, one German musicologist celebrated the good work the German-Dutch Society (Deutsch-Niederländische Gesellschaft) was doing to “spread awareness of the respective ways of life and original racial identity” of the Dutch and the Germans. An article on Romania’s musical culture argued that Romanian music was at a crossroads, barred from a healthy national development by an “urban Zivilisation [that] is still essentially built on a French model (often quite unawares) and damages in an unbelievable way the true Romanian Volkskultur.” With its racist model of nationally rooted Kultur, Germany promised to rescue Europe’s national musical traditions so as to rally composers, musicians, critics, and audiences around a future of German cultural hegemony. Germany’s mission to pursue the “salvation of Western music,” which Goebbels hinted at in his speech at the 1938 Reich Music Days, was coming into focus.

A RA DI C A L I Z E D, “P URE ” I NT E R- NATION ALISM

◆

◆



◆

In the field of cinema, the German–Italian cultural Axis had managed before 1938 to negotiate the tensions between Nazism and fascism’s visions of culture and to make their cultural Axis partnership seem compatible with panEuropean cooperation, good taste, and sound business sense. But at the 1938 Venice Film Festival the split between the Axis and the West burst into view, taking the International Film Chamber down in the process. Things began normally enough. The event followed in most respects the patterns established at earlier editions, but on an even grander scale. Eighty-three production companies, representing nineteen nations, showed their wares to a total audience, over the festival’s twenty-three days, of some 50,000 spectators, including seventy-five foreign journalists and celebrities like Douglas Fairbanks, the famous socialite and Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, and the queen of Spain. Films ranged from Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia to Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, alongside feature films from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Sweden, as well as from India, Japan, and Mexico. The French delegation put on a special retrospective of classic works of France’s silent cinema, accompanied by music by Bartók, Milhaud, Satie, and Stravinsky. The festival’s large prize jury reflected the International Film Chamber’s consolidation and the festival’s increasingly global reach. Brazil was represented by that country’s great cinematic pioneer, Humberto Mauro, who was joined by representatives of Mexico, Japan, and South Africa. The United States sent Harold L. Smith, a vice consul at the American embassy in Paris, who represented the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) in Europe. The jury’s European representation was dominated by IFC representatives. IFC President Georges Lourau and two vice presidents—the Czech film magnate Milos Havel and Olof Andersson, head of Sweden’s fi lm chamber and CEO of the country’s most power ful studio, Svensk filmindustri—were joined by seasoned jury members and IFC delegates like Louis Villani (Hungary) and Ryszard Ordynski (Poland). France was represented on the jury again by René Jeanne, the French film writer who was now also secretary general of the international copyright body CISAC; Britain by Neville Kearney, head of the film division of the trade association Federation of British Industries. The role of the cultural Axis was confirmed by the presence on the jury not only of Italy’s Director General for Cinema Luigi Freddi and Reich Film Chamber President Oswald



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

The cinema Axis on the verge of crisis: Director Leni Riefenstahl in conversation with Dino Alfieri, Venice Film Festival, August 1938. (La Biennale di Venezia— Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee/Foto Giacomelli, Venice)

Lehnich, but also of two more members “specially designated” by festival president Giuseppe Volpi: Giacomo Paolucci de Calboli Barone, president of Italy’s film news and propaganda unit Istituto LUCE, and Karl Melzer, the managing director of the Reich Film Chamber and former secretary general of the IFC. The Italian film journals celebrated the festival’s “idyllic atmosphere, where the judgments were impartial, the applause sincere, the few whistles well deserved, [and where] the public, more cosmopolitan than ever, behaved itself very well.” But even before the festival opened, it was clear that the radicalization of the cultural Axis would have important implications for the festival. By June, changes were announced to the festival’s statutes (regolamento) that reflected the application of a stricter form of inter-nationalism to the Biennale. The International Film Chamber had been stressing the idea of inter-nationalism in cinema ever since Goebbels first launched Germany’s Film Europe campaign at the 1935 International Film Congress in Berlin. A resolution passed at that congress called on all participating nations to form a national-level, “unified

A RA DI C A L I Z E D, “P URE ” I NT E R- NATION ALISM



organization (film chamber)” on the Italian or German model, which “makes possible a balance of interests among cinema owners, distributors, and producers.” In his address in Berlin, Goebbels instructed the assembled delegates that “every nation makes art from its own style, its own view” and suggested that this paid off: “International significance is achieved by the art that is nationally bound and völkisch in its origin.” Nazi film officials repeated this message with great consistency. In 1937, the head of the Propaganda Ministry’s Film Division, writing in a leading Italian film monthly, insisted that “if a film wants to cooperate in the mutual understanding among peoples it will have to . . . show clearly its own originality that derives from the culture it represents, free from any watering down that seeks to render it commercially international.” At the Paris congress the German film press praised the IFC for replacing an outmoded type of internationalism with “a new Film-supranationalism [Filmübernationalismus].” The Italians had been keen supporters of the inter-nationalist line. In 1937, Alfieri inaugurated the Venice festival with an appeal to all nations to “intensify and improve their own [film] production according to the tradition, the spirit, the aspirations that each of these has,” revealing “the characteristics of each people.” In earlier years, nonetheless, the festival’s program of fi lms had been chosen by a selection jury according to standards of artistic and technical quality that were held to be universal. What the Biennale’s General Secretary Antonio Maraini called “those titles, those criteria, those guarantees from the artistic point of view that only the Biennale possesses,” were fundamental to the way the Venice Film Festival associated cinema with the fine arts, offering privileged status to this new and dubious art form. On the other hand, a jury operating on this basis could not guarantee more screen time for particular nations. In 1937, this jury’s role was weakened. Under pressure from the IFC, the festival’s statutes were amended to allow each participating country to preselect its submissions. A new quota system determined that the festival would feature eight films from big film-producing countries, and no more than four from small ones. But this was not enough for Goebbels. Supplied by Reich Film Chamber President Oswald Lehnich with regular updates from Venice, the propaganda minister fumed at the success of French fi lms at the 1937 festival—when the French lineup included Jean Renoir’s antiwar Grand Illusion and Julien Duvivier’s melancholy Un carnet de bal, which won best foreign picture— and suspected that this reflected some renewed Italian–French rapprochement. “The statutes of



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

the Biennale must be changed,” he concluded. “Other wise we withdraw.” In December 1937, Goebbels instructed Ambassador von Hassell to discuss the matter with Minister of Popular Culture Dino Alfieri, while Lehnich, although no longer IFC president, took it upon himself to send the Italians suggested revisions to the festival’s statutes. Under such pressure, in 1938 the festival’s Italian organizers took the logical next step and simply abolished the selection jury altogether. Instead, officials from each country’s national film chamber would choose the films by which it wanted to be represented. A detailed scheme determined how many films each nation could present at Venice based on the size (rather than the quality) of its annual film production. Eliminating the selection jury signaled that a fi lm festival in the spirit of Axis inter-nationalism had no room for supranational notions of “quality.” Who was better qualified to decide what films best represented a nation than that nation itself (as represented by a powerful centralized state cultural apparatus)? With this change, the Germans succeeded in transforming the Venice Film Festival into a fully inter-nationalist operation, dominated by an organizational model that allowed for national control, along the same lines as the Permanent Council. This development was encouraged by the IFC’s French leadership, which had joined the Germans in proposing changes to the festival’s statutes. IFC President Georges Lourau claimed the new rules would give the event “a substantial moral benefit and enhanced authority.” IFC Secretary General Marcel Aboucaya likewise found the changes to the festival’s statutes to be “perfectly judicious: “On the whole, the regulations [of the festival] now have the character that we wanted to see it acquire, that of a great exposition of the classic type, and no longer simply a large-scale local event.” He meant that this change made the festival more like an international fair of the nineteenth-century type, in which nations presented their wares to the world in national pavilions. In the tense political climate of 1938, an arrangement where each state chose how to represent itself, sidestepping any effort to agree on matters of quality, was the last best hope for maintaining cultural cooperation— and hopefully peace—with Hitler’s Germany. The festival’s new inter-nationalist structure pleased its international backers, but it excited the anger of the Italian cineaste and critical community. To let foreign officials select the films with no oversight from an expert jury, complained the prestigious journal Bianco e nero, was to “submit artistic criteria to commercial factors.” Thus even as the IFC claimed to

A RA DI C A L I Z E D, “P URE ” I NT E R- NATION ALISM



rescue film from being made a commercial commodity by the Americans (and Jews), in fact the institution’s role at Venice was to heighten film’s quality as a national commodity, and to undermine the status of the festival as a place for artistic value judgment and taste making. The prestige of the festival rested on the claim that, while sponsored by the fascist regime, it treated cinema as art, in a lofty sphere far above commercial or political considerations. Eliminating the selection jury subjected the art of cinema to direct political control, and as these critics intuited, the loss of autonomy meant a loss of prestige. The autonomy and prestige of the festival were threatened, too, by Europe’s increasingly tense political atmosphere. In 1937, the Paris-based International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation published a collection of essays on the topic of “the intellectual role of the cinema.” This had been commissioned in 1934 in the cooperative atmosphere that followed that year’s Conference on Educational Cinema in Rome, hosted by Italy’s International Institute for Educational Cinema (ICE), which was likewise linked to the League of Nations. But much had changed since then. By the time the book containing these essays was published late in 1937, it gave eloquent testimony to the harsh intra-European political and ideological divisions that had come to dominate the scene. The book’s French contributors in particular expressed open hostility to the cinemas of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and praised the artistry and spirit of Hollywood, presented not as a threat to European traditions, but as an antidote to fascism. “Mickey [Mouse],” the French film critic Alexandre Arnoux opined, “fights in his way against the marches, the rallies, [and] the mass prisons” of the fascist powers. Readers of this volume received a strong impression of a growing split in Film Eu rope between Germany and Italy, on one side, and on the other a Western-oriented France and other countries “like ours,” as another French contributor wrote, “where there still is freedom of expression.” Italy’s leading film intellectuals responded in kind. Luigi Chiarini, director of Italy’s state-sponsored Experimental Center for Cinematography (Centro sperimentale di cinematografia), noted Europe’s “red-hot climate” in 1937 and eagerly inflamed it. He praised the political profile of Italy and Germany’s films and attacked France and Britain’s Venice festival entries for revealing “disorder, confusion, and intellectualism” among France’s youth, the “wavering typical of parliamentary democracies,” and the hy pocrisy of nations that produced politically aggressive fi lms like Jean Renoir’s



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

Grand Illusion, “even if they later are scandalized and shout about others’ propaganda.” The sense of intra-European division was confirmed just a few months later, when the International Institute for Educational Cinematography in Rome was shut down, responding to Italy’s exit from the League of Nations, which Mussolini announced on December 11, 1937. Founder and director Luciano De Feo’s last great project with the institute, the ambitious effort to prepare a massive Encyclopedia of Cinema, building on cooperation with an international team of prominent filmmakers and intellectuals, was likewise scrapped. (The manuscript, some 4,000 pages of text and 15,000 illustrations, appears to have been lost.) The project’s most prominent collaborator, the German-Jewish film critic Rudolf Arnheim, who had worked in Rome since fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933, left Italy in response to the introduction of anti-Jewish laws in 1938. In 1938, Bianco e nero, the scholarly journal of Chiarini’s Centro, embraced the turn to anti-Semitism, exhorting Italy’s filmmakers to “spread among the people a more mature awareness of the blood.” As Italy’s cinema intellectuals aligned themselves with Nazi Germany, a key change that year in Italy’s film policy likewise drew a sharper line against Hollywood. The “Alfieri law” of June 6, 1938, created a state monopoly with the sole right to buy and distribute foreign fi lms in Italy, leading Hollywood’s four biggest studios to withdraw angrily from the Italian market. Italy’s new posture was matched by a more aggressive stance from Berlin. German fi lm officials had spent the mid-1930s working hard to counter the impression that Germany was in conflict with its neighbors or with Hollywood. From 1938, however, the regime largely abandoned the peaceful, internationalist rhetoric of the first years of the International Film Chamber. With the IFC passed to the French, who did not organize any meetings in 1938 or 1939, the Nazi film apparatus invested little energy in that institution. Berlin now worked instead on consolidating and expanding Film Germany itself. Responding to the serious drop in profits German cinema suffered in 1936–1937, Goebbels used masked buyouts of Germany’s major producers to effectively nationalize and streamline the industry around the increasingly dominant UFA studios, while maintaining the appearance of capitalist autonomy. Ticket sales were driven up by a mass mobilization of German fi lm-going led by the party and its workers’ leisure organization “Strength through Joy.” This consolidated national industry was enriched

A RA DI C A L I Z E D, “P URE ” I NT E R- NATION ALISM



and expanded through the seizures of cinemas, studios, and other assets from their Jewish owners in Austria and the former Czechoslova kia, while territorial gains meant substantial growth for Germany’s home market. The relationship of the German–Italian film Axis to Hollywood followed suit and was also changing fast. The major American studios had always been hostile to the International Film Chamber and its vision of a pan-European bloc, but had continued to do brisk business in Germany, tailoring films so as not to run afoul of the Germans’ stand against so-called “incitement films” (Hetz-Filme). Italy was another solid export market. As late as September 1937, the Hollywood producer Hal Roach could still think it a clever investment to escort Vittorio Mussolini, the Duce’s twenty-year-old son and would-be movie magnate, on a lavish tour of Hollywood designed to culminate in a major transatlantic partnership. But on October 5, 1937, President Roosevelt spoke out against “aggressor nations” whose “international lawlessness has reached a stage where the very foundations of civilization are threatened.” Roach, stung also by attacks from Hollywood progressives, moved quickly to distance himself from the Duce’s son, who was unceremoniously sent home. Vittorio Mussolini had earlier called on Italian producers to emulate Hollywood’s brisk narrative style and rejected “European” cinema as ponderous and artificial. Now, when the 1938 Alfieri law radically reduced the number of Hollywood fi lms circulating in Italy, Vittorio Mussolini celebrated this as a welcome attack on Hollywood’s “Jewish-communist center.” The hardening of sides in the lead-up to the 1938 Venice Film Festival was real, but it was also only part of the story. The French film industry as a whole was tightly enmeshed in Eu ropean networks of coproduction, financing, and distribution, especially with Germany and Italy, which continued to accumulate commercial power in 1938 and 1939. Italy and Germany’s film industry leaders were still working together and also competing fiercely in their efforts to expand their film networks in Europe. Foreign directors were welcomed to shoot at Italy’s top-of-the-line Cinecittà studios, French–Italian coproductions continued at a busy pace, and foreign writers were responsible for a striking number of the scripts of Italy’s “national” fi lms. Germany’s studios delivered expensive, well-crafted, and export-friendly entertainment movies featuring the many foreign stars and technicians who were making Berlin the cosmopolitan capital of European film. But, as the delegates, directors, and stars gathered on Venice’s



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

Lido in August 1938, the political temperature was rising. It was only a matter of time before such tensions were to complicate the smooth operations of the festival and of the IFC. Passions erupted in the meeting of the prize committee, when the first prize Coppa Mussolini went jointly to the Italian feature Luciano Serra, pilota, and to Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl’s epic celebration of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. In this way, the festival confirmed the joint leadership of Film Europe by the two national industries that had provided the IFC’s organizational model, the power of which was confirmed by these expensive, large-scale blockbusters. But at a fiery, five-hour-long meeting of the prize jury on August 31, 1938, the British and Americans declared their outrage and quit the festival, claiming that the voting procedures had been violated. Harold Smith, the MPPDA’s man in Paris, argued that Olympia should have been classed as a documentary, and not allowed to compete against the year’s clear favorite, Walt Disney’s Snow White. The French, in fact, supported Olympia, apparently having made an agreement with the German delegation in exchange for supporting the French for various technical prizes. But France’s delegates shared the outrage of the Americans and British at the festival’s evident Nazi-fascist politicization. Just which line had been crossed was spelled out by leading French fi lm critic Guillaume-Michel Coissac. Coissac acknowledged the appeal of the IFC’s insistence on cinema’s national character. Those who claim that cinema, to be an art form, must be “international, if not universal” misunderstand that there is “nothing more natural or more praiseworthy” than when “film represents the character, the spirit, the taste, the particular gifts of a country.” Alas, he complained, the 1938 Venice Biennale did not merely promote the “national” film. Rather, “abandoning its original program and promise, [the festival] has become, under deceitful appearances of eclecticism and impartiality, a true political manifestation.” The Italians struggled to hold together their festival in the aftermath of the Olympia debacle. Festival director Ottavio Croze traveled to Paris and London to woo the French and the British back to Venice. British representative Neville Kearney demanded special favors for distribution of British films on the Italian market, and agreed to British participation once the Italians promised these. But the French and the Americans, also courted by Count Volpi, could not be moved. The tense international atmosphere was no doubt behind the Italians’ decision to postpone the IFC’s next Interna-

A RA DI C A L I Z E D, “P URE ” I NT E R- NATION ALISM



tional Film Congress, which had been scheduled to take place in Rome in May 1939. To make matters worse, in a fateful development for Venice’s future, the French had begun to plan a rival festival, in a Riviera resort town called Cannes. The first Festival International du Cinéma at Cannes presented itself explicitly as the festival of the democratic, transatlantic fi lm world— gathering “those countries which, in art no less than in politics, are not ready to bow down to tyranny”—and rivaling the Nazi-fascist European film bloc represented at Venice. As the date of its planned opening in September 1939 approached, a special issue of Cinémonde produced for the festival included a paean to the glories of Anglo-American cinema, a transparent effort to apologize for having dallied with the German–Italian IFC, and a somewhat abject plea to be allowed to return to the American-led transatlantic film international. With Cannes, the French would contribute a piece of upscale European cachet to rival that of Venice. Welcoming foreign guests to “these jousts of liberty” in its own awkward English, Cinémonde called for “honour to the English and the American and all the members of the great material and moral brotherhood of the english [sic] language . . . because their language, the almost universal language of the movie-picture, has, up to now, preached indulgence, tolerance, and peace. German and Italian pictures are war-makers in the ser vice of a power and whose field of action, if you look at it in a higher point of view, is limited to a totalitarian mixture of politics, in a limited region.” French cinema had been reliant on Germany’s fi lm industry through the 1930s and had invested seriously in the prospect of pan-European cooperation offered by the IFC. Now, on the eve of war, the French turned away from the long-standing dream of Film Europe, and began instead to lay the groundwork for a renegotiated Western European relationship with Hollywood, of which the new festival at Cannes would serve as symbol and showcase. In fact, the guests who had gathered on the French Riviera by September 1, 1939, quickly scattered when their radios crackled with the news that Hitler’s invasion of Poland had plunged the continent back into war. The festival was canceled and would not start again until 1946. The most striking feature of the 1939 Venice Film Festival, which had begun on August 8, was the total absence, for the first time in the festival’s history, of Hollywood movies. (Some Hollywood glamour was nonetheless provided by the presence in Venice of Mary Pickford and the star



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

couples Cary Grant and Phyllis Brooks, and Tyrone Power and the French starlet Annabella.) But this only rendered the festival’s European significance that much clearer. The event’s appeal was highlighted by the fact that the French, for all their pro-American declarations, could not quite stay away from Venice and the Italo-Franco-German cooperation that the festival had embodied. While no official representatives sat on the 1939 jury, Paris still sent five French features to the competition, only two fewer than Germany. Much of the rest of the IFC’s Film Europe was also back on the Lido, where films were screened from Belgium, Bohemia, Hungary, Romania, Sweden, and Switzerland, from non-IFC members Britain and the Netherlands, as well as from Argentina, Japan, South Africa, and Uruguay. Sweden’s film leader Olof Andersson, interviewed on the terrace of the Excelsior Hotel, shared his impression that Italy and Germany were making “decisive progress.” While Sweden still imported many films from the United States, “in Sweden too we are beginning to grow tired of American films; the public finds them too empty, too conventional. . . . Now, in fact, we are beginning to import more often from Germany.” Presiding over it all was the German–Italian Axis. The two nations had the largest number of fi lms, with many expensive, large-scale features. German director Carl Froelich, newly installed as president of the Reich Film Chamber, was there to present the premiere of his recent Es war eine rauschende Ballnacht (It Was a Gay Ballnight, 1939), a historical musical based on the life of Piotr Tchaikovsky, starring Germany’s highest-paid star, the dreamy-eyed Swedish actress and singer Zarah Leander. Mario Camerini presented I grandi magazzini (Department Store), a romantic comedy set in a consumerist fantasy of a gleaming white and ultramodern department store. The cultural Axis also offered up some conspicuously binational coproductions, like Castelli in aria/Ins blaue Leben (Castles in the Air, Augusto Genina, 1939), starring UFA’s leading lady Lilian Harvey and the Italian heartthrob (and future neorealist director) Vittorio de Sica. And on August 8, 1939, Goebbels and a huge entourage, including Reich Press Chief Otto Dietrich and representatives of every branch of the Propaganda Ministry, thundered into Venice and overwhelmed the proceedings. For two days, Venice celebrated the propaganda minister and the German–Italian partnership with a dizzying program of concerts, receptions, a gondola ride down the Grand Canal draped on all sides with swastikas, a regatta of 400 traditional bragozzi fishing boats, a tour of the exhibition of the paintings of Paolo

A RA DI C A L I Z E D, “P URE ” I NT E R- NATION ALISM



Veronese, a giant torchlit rally on the Piazza San Marco, fireworks, and drinks until late into the night. But after Goebbels left Venice, the remaining weeks of the festival were thrown into confusion by the threat of impending war. Attendance was poor because, according to the Italians, the organizers of Cannes had spread false rumors that the Biennale would be canceled, or would include only Germany, Italy, and satellite countries. Several nearly empty screenings marked an ignominious end to a trying event. On August 31, the jury members voted unanimously to suspend the meeting on prizes, scheduled for September 1. Only in December did the Biennale publish a list of prizewinners, in which the prize for best foreign fi lm was quietly dropped. Instead, the Italians awarded “the Cups of the Biennale” equally to La Fin de jour (France), Robert Koch (Germany), The Four Feathers (Britain), and collectively to the Swedish and Japanese selections— a last effort to keep the Biennale somehow above the deep chasm between the Axis and the West. In a grim report prepared in November 1939, festival director Ottavio Croze complained about the damage the year’s events had done to the event’s finances. He blamed the arrival of Goebbels and Alfieri for the opening night ticket sales being low, as so many seats in the Palazzo del Cinema had to be given for free. To face the challenges of the future, above all the competition from Cannes, he requested that the annual budget be more than doubled. For the Venice Film Festival, then, cooperation with Nazi Germany and the IFC came at a high price—in money, but also in international reach and artistic prestige. Goebbels, on the other hand, had a fine time. Although he complained about the crowds of “loungers and international do-nothings,” he celebrated the screening of Robert Koch (1939) as a “triumph for Germany.” He was impressed with Count Volpi’s tour of the new industrial facilities at Porto Marghera, and after a late-night concert on the Piazza San Marco, at which a dense crowd applauded him and sang fascist anthems, he felt convinced that “the Axis is now also anchored in the two peoples.” His visit to Venice achieved some very concrete results as well. In May 1939, Mussolini and Hitler had signed the so-called Pact of Steel, a binding military alliance that solidified the previously loose relationship of the Rome–Berlin Axis. Now, in August, German and Italian cultural officials tightened up the country’s cultural cooperation, creating more stringent and specific agreements even than those reached in the 1938 Cultural Accord. Here, after what Goebbels described as “heated debates on the beach,” his and Alfieri’s teams reached



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

new agreements on cooperation in cinema, press, and propaganda. The cultural Axis’s peacetime efforts to take up the leadership of European film were over; the wartime efforts could now begin. ◆

◆

◆

The German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, began a new European war. Britain and France declared war on Germany in response, and the conflict between the democracies and the German–Italian Axis was now out in the open. But the Italian half of the Axis did not in fact enter the military conflict at this point. In military terms, the outbreak of hostilities caught Italy off guard and unprepared. Strained militarily and economically by his military adventures in Ethiopia and Spain, Mussolini had presented Hitler with a list of raw materials Italy would need in order to participate in the conflict in 1939, hoping for, and getting, Hitler’s permission to stay out of the conflict for the time being. On the cultural plane, however, many of Italy’s pro-regime intellectuals greeted the outbreak of war with optimism and enthusiasm. Already in November 1939 the journal Critica fascista, run by Minister of National Education Giuseppe Bottai, labeled the conflict a European civil war that promised to remake the continent into “a new world.” Italy’s ability to conduct an autonomous cultural politics toward the rest of Europe had already been compromised by the country’s collaboration with Germans. The intellectuals whom Bottai had gathered around this journal, however, saw the war as opening a new era of possibility. They evinced no doubt that the continent’s future would be marked by a form of European integration guided by the principles of Italian fascism. Camillo Pellizzi, president of Italy’s National Institute of Fascist Culture, declared that Italy had been chosen by God to solve the problems of European integration. The war was a chance to relaunch the universally applicable aspects of Italian fascist doctrine on the European stage, starting with the socioeconomic model of fascist corporatism. “The corporatist myth,” Bottai wrote in an unsigned editorial, could “give meaning to the war. It alone can, if actualized, give an order to the postwar.” Some of these same intellectuals participated eagerly in exchanges with Germany, while others helped convince educated Italian audiences of Italy and Germany’s deep cultural connection and the Axis’s shared European vocation. At the same time, Bottai’s journal presented Italy’s aims in the conflict as purely Italian and imperialist. A war against France and Britain for control of the Mediterranean would be “the final war for the freedom of the Italian people. For the

A RA DI C A L I Z E D, “P URE ” I NT E R- NATION ALISM



freedom and independence of its Empire.” In the first months of the war, from September 1939 until Italy invaded France on June 10, 1940, how fascist Italy would balance these aims—its fight for its Mediterranean empire, for the spiritual hegemony of Rome, and for “a new Europe” alongside Germany—was very much an open question. Observing the scene from Berlin, the managing director of the GermanItalian Scholarship Foundation, Dr. Carl Düssel, recognized immediately that the idea of the European nature of the German–Italian cultural bond could be useful for Germany’s bid for continental hegemony. Moving quickly, Düssel met with staff at the German Foreign Ministry on September 30 to ask for support for a new publication series to be called Neues Europa. In the proposal he sent a week later, Düssel suggested a series of short books in which German and Italian authors would present the case for continental European community in opposition to Britain by using the kind of cultural and ideological arguments already developed about the Rome–Berlin Axis. “The consciousness is dawning,” he declared confidently, “of a continental European community of destiny.” Germany and Italy naturally stood at the forefront of this community, because “National Socialism and fascism signify the breakthrough to the spiritual and political self-consciousness and self-determination [Selbstbesinnung und Selbstbestimmung] of continental Europe against what has until now been the disastrous predominance of England.” Italy played no role in Hitler’s victory over Poland. But emphasizing Italy’s leading European role “suits not only mindfulness of the sensitivity of the Italian friend—all the more urgent given Germany’s growing superiority in power—but also makes it easier for third party nations to understand that it is not a matter of the export of National Socialism or of Fascism, but a matter of a continental-European movement of renewal, which expresses itself in various, nationally conditioned forms.” “In any case,” Düssel concluded, “the idea of a continental European community of destiny is ideal for the flexible support of German Europapolitik.” Düssel pursued this program in a 1940 book entitled Europe and the Axis, which went to at least three editions. His approach, which mobilized the Germans’ ties to Italy to lend credibility to their Europeanist claims, and to soothe their increasingly anxious Italian allies, would play a prominent role in Nazi cultural propaganda later in the war, especially after Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941. But Düssel’s 1939 proposal was rejected. It came at a time in the war when the Foreign Ministry was not yet concerned



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

with offering cultural justifications for the war, much less for a postwar order. Instead, as victory in Poland was followed in the spring of 1940 by victory in the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and France, the Nazi leadership—and not only the Foreign Ministry—grew excited about effecting a complete, radical reorganization of cultural life in Europe, but lost interest in many of the initiatives and institutions that had occupied German energies in the 1930s. This was Germany’s moment, and the Italians’ visions of cultural primacy were wholly irrelevant to the Germans’ calculations. The project of creating a cultural new order was entering into a new and highly unpredictable phase.

■

5 New Orders in Berlin and Rome

Rome’s Villa Massimo al Laterno was adorned in the 1820s with a fresco cycle by the German expatriate painters known as the Nazarenes. In the 1930s, the building found itself at the heart of German power in Rome, not far from the Reich embassy in the Villa Wolkonsky and adjacent to the modern office block in Via Tasso that housed the embassy’s cultural division and the SS liaison to the Italian police. On November 28, 1940, the palazzo hosted Ludwig Siebert, the president of Germany’s national institution for cultural promotion abroad, the Deutsche Akademie, as he delivered a speech explaining the position of the German–Italian Axis in the ongoing war. Siebert, a radical National Socialist who had served as prime minister of Bavaria since 1933, celebrated Hitler’s astonishing victories in the spring of 1940—when Germany conquered Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and, with a speed that shocked the world, France. But he insisted that the goals of the Axis transcended mere military or political objectives. More deeply, the Axis sought “the reordering of the world with regard to culture, to make it such that after the war there may develop a new culture.” Siebert’s reference to “reordering” (Neuordnung) was typical of the heated speculation touched off by the fall of France regarding the shape of the socalled “New Order” in Europe. Economists and journalists exchanged proposals for a continental remaking of the economy, in particular after Reich Economics Minister Walther Funk held an international press conference on the subject on July 25, 1940. There he outlined a restructured, unified European economy under German leadership. This intensified an already ongoing debate over the prospects for a coordinated European Großraumswirtschaft 



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

(large-space economy), perhaps to feature a unified currency and continentwide protectionist measures, to be run from Germany. Jurists and political theorists debated the proper political, legal, and racial bases for a unified European political system, whether through some form of Großraum, a “European Monroe Doctrine,” or a modernized and expanded vision of empire, or Reich. The Nazi theorists and officials who envisioned and organized the Holocaust saw their work as part of such a project. For SS head Heinrich Himmler, his July 19, 1942, order demanding “the evacuation of the entire Jewish population” of German-occupied Poland was to be understood “in the spirit of the reordering [Neuordnung] of Europe.” When he spoke in Rome in 1940, Siebert was extending such speculation about the shape and character of the New Order to the cultural sphere. He was not alone in doing so. When German tanks rolled into Paris in June 1940, intellectuals across the continent immediately understood the defeat of France to be an event of fundamental significance for European cultural life. Writing in a prisoner of war camp, French historian Marc Bloch famously read the collapse of his nation’s armed forces as an indictment of the society and the values of the Third Republic as a whole. From the Berlin offices of Alfred Rosenberg’s office for Nazi ideology, chief press officer KarlHeinz Rüdiger argued that France’s defeat marked nothing less than “The End of the French Claim to Culture.” Fascist Italy’s most important intellectual journals joined the Axis partner in assigning philosophical significance to France’s defeat. The political and legal monthly Lo stato announced, “it is the civilization that emerged from the Enlightenment, from the French Revolution, from the declarations of rights, that is in ruins.” Critica fascista saw in France’s defeat the definitive crisis of “the romantic-liberal concept of the individual, that emphasizes personal autonomy in every activity.” What Rüdiger called “the end of French Europe” seemed to open the way for alternative visions of European order, and Axis officials were quick to respond by positioning the German–Italian Axis as the core of a new European cultural system. France would assume what Italy’s Minister of National Education Giuseppe Bottai called “the position which it deserves, of a secondtier nation, morally, politically, and economically subordinate to the designs of the victors, who have demonstrated through the force of arms the force of their disciplining and dominating spirit.” Then, after defeating the “plutocratic Democracies,” explained Siebert in Rome, Italy and Germany

NE W ORDE RS I N BE RL I N A ND RO ME



together would drive “the creation of a true Western cultural community.” The “heroes of German and Italian culture, like Dante, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Verdi, like Goethe, Schiller, Humboldt, Albrecht Dürer, Nietzsche, Kant, and Richard Wagner,” offered evidence that Germans and Italians could base a new cultural order on the “fecundity . . . and the universality of our reciprocal relations.” Those relations were strengthened by a new burst of German–Italian cultural exchange. In 1940 the German-Italian Society of Berlin (DeutschItalienische Gesellschaft), now led by Reichssportführer Hans von Tschammer und Osten, opened branch offices in every major city in the Reich and nearly doubled its membership. Its sister institution was the ItaloGermanic Cultural Association (Associazione Italo-Germanica di cultura), led since October 1939 by newly appointed Minister of Popu lar Culture Alessandro Pavolini, who succeeded Dino Alfieri in the post when Mussolini made Alfieri Italy’s ambassador in Berlin. Under Pavolini’s oversight, the association founded offices in Bergamo, Ferrara, Genoa, Milan, Naples, Padua, Rome, Turin, Trieste, Venice, and Verona, while its membership shot from around 2,000 in 1939 to over 10,000 by the end of 1941. The concerts, lectures, and film screenings run by these institutions offered a model for a pan-European expansion of Nazi-fascist inter-nationalism. According to the National Socialist Monthly (Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte), the party journal that presented Nazi ideology in upscale, semi-scholarly guise, they demonstrated that Italian– German cooperation was already beginning to create “a new Europe . . . a Europe of national-feeling peoples, [each] stronger in its community, and more aware of its specificity.” Opening the autumn season of the Italo-Germanic Cultural Association in Rome on October 1, 1941, Pavolini clarified this program by casting the Axis’s mode of exchange as a truly European alternative to the defunct cosmopolitan internationalism of the West: To set out, in the realm of culture, to create the new Europe, does not mean to tend—according to the old mentality of international intellectuals— toward some common and imprecise quid, which blurs the contours of the basic civilizations and bleaches their diverse and complementary spirits. It means, on the contrary, to liberate the most glorious cultures of Europe, Romanità and Germanism, the two ideal entities that have the name Germany



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

and Italy, from the leveling contaminations, from cosmopolitan confusions; and, restoring them to their perennial and pure youth, to make of them the two columns of a construction oriented toward the millennium.

By 1941, the vision of culture that undergirded the Axis’s inter-nationalist claim to European leadership was wholly penetrated by racism, in Italy as well as Germany. Participants at a 1941 German–Italian conference of university students learned, for example, that France had been able to fulfill a European function because it combined the racial heritage of the Germanic and the Roman. But it had lost its European role when racial mixing violated and annulled that equilibrium. “The European function of the Axis,” by contrast, “derived from the coexistence and the alignment (and not from the confusion, which would sooner or later mean the destruction) of the two racial and national elements; from the tension that, through the genius of the Duce and the Führer, has been established between the two poles of the Axis.” Amid this heated talk of New Orders, and with this charged reinterpretation of German–Italian cooperation in place, it looked as if the Rome–Berlin Axis was poised to seize cultural leadership by replacing the international bodies of the old, liberal order with structures that built on the networks and institutions of Axis cooperation. After the “First Italian- German University Conference” met in Bologna in October 1940, one Italian journalist argued enthusiastically that while this meeting had included “for now only Italian and German students, . . . these Conferences should constitute or substitute a new international university organization, of the type of the now defunct Confédération internationale des étudiants, of French inspiration.” This vision was apparently in line with the Axis plans of the 1930s, but it was not to be. Alternatively, one might have expected the European Axis powers to quickly mobilize the networks they had built in the 1930s through the International Film Chamber and the Permanent Council for International Cooperation among Composers. But the International Film Chamber, effectively defunct since 1939, remained silent throughout 1940. It made no appearance at Venice, where a hastily arranged “Italo-German Cinema Festival” took place on September 1–8, 1940. Moved for budget and military reasons from its glamorous seat on the Lido to the Cinema San Marco in central Venice, the festival screened nineteen feature films for a jury composed only of Germans and Italians. Movie celebrities in attendance this year

NE W ORDE RS I N BE RL I N A ND RO ME



included Ferdinand Marian, Kristina Söderbaum, and director Veit Harlan, in Venice for the premiere of Harlan’s anti-Semitic blockbuster Jud Süß. The Permanent Council maintained the silence that had fallen on the institution since the conclusion of its June 1939 Musikfest in Frankfurt. The Italians were to have hosted the following International Musical Congress in Naples in the autumn of 1940, timed to coincide with the celebration of Italy’s colonial achievements at the massive Exhibition of the Overseas (Mostra d’Oltremare). But by September 1940, with the exhibition canceled because of the war, organizers felt forced to “indefinitely postpone” the event. In music, as in other fields, close German–Italian cooperation expanded in 1940, but such cooperation was not the basis on which the Germans envisioned creating a cultural new order. For in invading and occupying Brussels and Paris, the Germans had come upon a prize that offered a far more exciting prospect for the future than anything the Italians could offer. The two cities hosted the offices of nearly all the major international organizations—in science and medicine, culture and the arts. They were home as well to the most important umbrella organizations—the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation (the executive agency of the Geneva-based International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation) and its coordination committee for international associations (Comité d’Entente des Grandes Associations Internationales), both in Paris, and the Union of International Associations in Brussels— which orga nized the emerging global network among international organizations. Each such office had files, documents, libraries, and indexes of participants from around Europe and the globe. Both cities lay at the mercy of triumphant German arms. Rather than simply destroy this material, leading figures in Germany’s Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Education, and the Propaganda Ministry saw an extraordinary opportunity. These materials, they knew, were the very infrastructure of liberal cultural internationalism, on which Germany could build a cultural and intellectual New Order of breathtaking scale and ambition. “ ‘International order’ and ‘international solidarity,’ ” observed the British scholar E. H. Carr in 1939, “will always be slogans of those who feel strong enough to impose them on others.” With continental Europe effectively under Hitler’s control, the time had come for Germany to impose its vision of international cultural order. Clearest in his goals was Goebbels. At a Propaganda Ministry conference on June 27, 1940, Goebbels told his collaborators that Germany would now



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

seize the cultural power and position that France had held for the last 150 years. Berlin would take the position of Paris, which would assume “the role and significance of a provincial town.” The role and significance that Berlin would take over from Paris was its centrality—its role as nexus of the web of international relations, obvious point of contact and gathering for European elites, and heart of European culture. Leading the charge for Goebbels was the German Central Conference Office (Deutsche KongressZentrale, or DKZ). By late July, its director, the SS officer Karl Schweig, was in Paris. There, in the company of an armed Gestapo officer, he began systematically visiting international organizations, inspecting their holdings and leaving their doors sealed so that the DKZ’s agents could later seize and cart off these institutions’ documents. The competition from rival Nazi power centers was immediate and intense. In the summer and fall of 1940, the German Foreign Ministry and the Reich Education Ministry also sent officials to occupy buildings, seize archives, and prepare for the takeover and relocation to Germany of several of the most prominent institutions of early-twentieth-century cultural internationalism. But beneath the tense rivalry, in par ticu lar the bitter and highly personal conflict between Goebbels and Ribbentrop, officials of all three ministries shared the goal of building a German-controlled system of international cultural institutions, based in Berlin, to be built on the ruins of the institutions of the interwar international system. They agreed that a restructuring of the institutions through which European scholars, intellectuals, and artists interacted could be a vital part of the German-dominated New Order, bringing to fruition plans that some of their staffers had pursued without interruption since the end of World War I. The Italians would naturally have their place in this New Order, but officials from all three ministries tacitly agreed that this new system must be led by Germany, and Germany alone. Italian officials appear to have known almost nothing about the Germans’ seizures of documents and institutions in Paris and Brussels and even less about their ambitions for the postwar order. But the fascist leadership, from Mussolini downward, were painfully aware of the new power balance between the regimes. Weakened and financially strapped by the wars in Ethiopia and Spain, Mussolini joined Hitler’s war against France only in June, once it was clear that the French were headed for defeat. Even then, Italian forces struggled to overcome the forces they met in southern France. Italy’s role in

NE W ORDE RS I N BE RL I N A ND RO ME



the European war would clearly be as a second-tier ally to Hitler. Nonetheless, Italy’s imperialists saw Germany’s new military and political dominance on the continent as a disappointment, but also as an opportunity. With Britain and France convulsed by Germany, Italy would be able to expand and consolidate its empire in the Mediterranean at those two powers’ expense. Germany’s successes similarly gave rise to feverish planning among Italy’s imperialist cultural organizers. With France defeated and the very leadership of European culture up for grabs, it seemed clear that this was a historic moment for Italy to present itself as the leading imperial power in the cultural and intellectual sphere. They planned, in essence, to use German military dominance to secure a leading role for Italy in the postwar New Order. This group hoped the New Order would in fact consist of two new orders, a German-led sphere of influence in continental Eu rope and an Italian one in the Mediterranean, to be achieved through cultural expansion in the Balkans and Mediterranean in support of Italian economic and political dominance. These ideas found their concrete expression in the rapidly shifting plans for the 1942 Universal Exposition in Rome. The Italian imperialists’ plans were opposed by a group of fascist Europeanists, who believed that the appropriate response to Germany’s crushing dominance was for Italy to position itself as Germany’s closest collaborator in a new and more integrated European cultural, political, and economic order, rather than as a parallel empire. The dominant figure in this group was Italy’s influential minister of national education, Giuseppe Bottai. But his efforts would likewise be affected by the moves the Germans were making in Paris and Brussels. ◆

◆

◆

The leadership of the DKZ greeted the fall of France by immediately beginning to develop plans that would place Germany at the top of a reorganized world of international cultural exchange, with the DKZ at the top among German institutions. Founded in 1934, the DKZ was the subagency of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry responsible for managing the participation of German scholars in international conferences and institutions, first in the natural sciences, later in all fields. Its president was Propaganda Ministry State Secretary and SS Oberführer Leopold Gutterer, one of Goebbels’s closest collaborators. Its first four years of activity had reflected the peacetime strategies of the Reich, suggesting a “New Germany” that was proud but eager to cooperate in the international community. Since 1938, when



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

the thirty-three-year-old Propaganda Ministry official and SS officer Karl Schweig took over as the institution’s managing director, the DKZ had developed into a powerful tool for the pursuit of the goals of Nazi foreign cultural policy. With Gutterer’s blessing, Schweig used his contacts with the SS and its Security Ser vice (Sicherheitsdienst, SD), as well as a new agreement with the Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question, to turn the DKZ into a more aggressive machine, one that sought actively to undermine the liberal and “Jewish” international system. International conferences as such were not the problem, the DKZ explained to German scholars in a confidential 1939 handbook, just their domination by France and its ideological allies. Backed up by the “power, influence, and world prestige” the country had enjoyed since Hitler’s seizure of power, “Germany may now lay claim, proportionate to its scientific, cultural, economic, and political significance, to a leading role, if not the leading role, in the world of international conferences.” Seizing this role was the DKZ’s “fundamental program and goal.” In the summer of 1940, as German tanks rolled into Belgium and France, the hour of the DKZ had struck. On July 18, 1940, DKZ President Gutterer presented the organization’s “future tasks” at its annual general meeting in Berlin. Speaking before representatives of all Reich ministries and other state and party officials, business leaders, and university professors— a total of seventy-two people— Gutterer presented his agency’s vision of the cultural new order in Europe. With his access to Goebbels, Gutterer was in a position to declaim on this subject with authority, and his audience knew it. It was here that Gutterer announced that Germany would lead “the reordering of Europe” (Neuordnung Europas). France had ruled Europe’s cultural scene “for a long time now without inner justification,” up until the beginning of the current war. This meant that “the liberalistic fundamentals of the French Revolution that spiritually ruled the nineteenth century were determinant in the international cooperation of scholarly and economic organizations in Germany. Paris and Brussels were the central points.” Now, however, as the DKZ’s just released annual report explained, “the growth of Germany’s world-political influence” meant that the DKZ should strive not only “to host conferences in Germany, but also to place their organizers, the leadership of the large, important international federations, under German leadership—or at least to tie them to German influence.” For this task, the DKZ must have “exact knowledge of the powers of the enemy,” which

NE W ORDE RS I N BE RL I N A ND RO ME



would be achieved through the systematic seizure and examination of the prodigious archives of international organizations in Brussels and Paris. Work on this project had already begun, Gutterer confided: “I can here secretly share with you, that I have taken the necessary steps to secure the material of the organizations [in Paris and Brussels] for our coming work. At the end of the war the work of the DKZ will experience unprecedented growth, and great tasks will be assigned to it. The politically centralized power will also relocate spiritual, cultural, and scholarly life to Berlin. Germany will be the central point in all fields of knowledge. If we didn’t have the DKZ already, we’d need to make it now.” Having let his audience in on the secret of the DKZ’s future plans, he left them with a rousing call to arms, asking the “ladies and gentlemen, who represent Ministries, Party, economy and science, to tackle these tasks together with us, in order to reach the hidden, beautiful goal.” Not one month had passed since the fall of France, but this goal was clear: a total reorganization of international intellectual and cultural exchange with Germany at its head—or rather at its center— designed to use German military dominance to create a lasting New Order of culture. Two weeks after this speech, Gutterer’s deputy Karl Schweig was in Paris, identifying documentation and preparing their relocation to Berlin. By the time Schweig arrived in Paris, representatives of other Nazi agencies were already competing with Goebbels to seize control over the ruins of interwar liberal internationalism. Bernhard Rust, head of Hitler’s Reich Education Ministry (Reichserziehungsministerium, or REM), had often been sidelined in the vicious competition among ministries that characterized Hitler’s regime. He was determined not to be left out of these important developments. One ministry representative was in the audience for Gutterer’s presentation of the DKZ’s plans on July 18. He rushed to warn his superiors about the Propaganda Ministry’s plans to dominate the international reorganization of scholarly and cultural organizations, urging them to insist on the ministry’s right to be the leading government agency in this sphere. Eager to defend its control over the university world, the ministry released an order reminding German scholars and scientists that Rust’s staff was responsible for scholarly activity and that “all assignments, suggestions, and wishes related to the world of international scholarly conferences and institutions are to be directed here.” The REM quickly sent its own functionary to Paris to assert the ministry’s claim to the documentation of international



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

scholarly organizations with seats in France or Belgium. But by the time he arrived, he faced competition not only from the DKZ, but also from the Foreign Ministry. The Foreign Ministry’s cultural division had been interested in the future of Paris and Brussels’ international organizations from the first days of July. Only two weeks after the fall of France, officials ordered a trusted expert, Dr. Karl Kerkhof, to prepare an overview of all international cultural organizations in the areas of France and Belgium that the German army had occupied only days before. Kerkhof quickly submitted a ten-page report on the history and current status of Europe’s institutions for international cultural, scholarly, and scientific exchange. “The circumstances are favorable,” he concluded, “for a new regulation of the scholarly realm under German leadership.” In turning to Kerkhof, the Foreign Ministry was calling upon an experienced and committed cultural warrior. Born in 1877, Kerkhof had made his career in the government offices responsible for the international communication of German scientific achievements during the years when German scholars took a commanding position in the rapidly growing world of international institutions of scientific exchange and standardization. He was thus a firsthand observer of the dramatic manner in which Germany was shut out of that world during and after the First World War. Germany’s exclusion from the international scholarly community gave Kerkhof the issue to which he was to devote the rest of his professional life: the struggle to avenge German scholarship against the punishment meted out to it by the victors of the First World War—what Kerkhof had dubbed the “War against German Scholarship.” In July 1940, Kerkhof, now sixty-three years old and an adviser to the Foreign Ministry, saw in Hitler’s conquest of France an opportunity for that revenge. Kerkhof proposed that Germany forge a new central institution in Berlin to coordinate international scholarly and intellectual exchange by reconstituting the International Association of Academies. This was the international scholarly body, founded by several national scholarly and scientific academies in Wiesbaden in 1899, in which German institutions had played a leading role until it was dissolved by its British and French members after World War I. Alternatively, he suggested, the national research councils of Germany and Italy could be brought together, along with those of other allied countries, into a new international umbrella organization. In either case, a new German-led institution should replace the cultural institutions

NE W ORDE RS I N BE RL I N A ND RO ME



of the League of Nations, but build on their work. “For this purpose,” Kerkhof concluded, “the archives, libraries, etc. of the Institute internationale de cooperation intellectuelle in Paris and the Institut internationale de documentation in Brussels should also be secured.” Kerkhof had long been convinced that the French, ever since the first international conference for telegraphy in Paris in 1865, had sought to use international scientific and technological cooperation “to systematically suppress German scholarship, which had risen to ever greater significance in these institutions.” After the end of the war, it would be time at last for “a new organization of scholarly cooperation.” Even before Kerkhof’s report arrived in Berlin, a group of officials from the Cultural Division of the German Foreign Ministry had begun pursuing a related but different approach to creating a German-led new cultural order. These officials— a group of well-connected German Francophiles led by future German ambassador in Paris Otto Abetz and including Karl Epting, future director of the German Institute in Paris—moved immediately to seize the office of the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation in Paris. But this office, in Paris’s Palais Royal, would not be destroyed or relocated. Rather, the institute and its rich documentation would be used to replace, but mirror, the cultural structures of the League of Nations, but now on the basis of German–French collaboration as the core of a new European cultural order. Supportive of the idea, Ribbentrop nominated a special Reichskommissar for intellectual cooperation on August 14. Fritz Berber, University of Berlin professor of international law and one of Ribbentrop’s expert advisers on France, arrived in Paris on August 24, 1940, to take up this position. In September 1940 Berber opened official negotiations over the institute’s future place in the new European order in Wiesbaden, as part of the work in that city of the Franco-German Armistice Commission. Here, León Bérard, a founder of the IIIC whom Deputy Prime Minister Pierre Laval had handpicked as France’s representative, agreed to the Germans’ new model: the IIIC would remain in Paris and preserve its international character, but, officially disassociated from the League of Nations, the institute would cut ties with its parent organization, the Genevabased International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, and answer instead to a new office in Berlin or elsewhere in the Reich, the form, location, and leadership of which were to be determined by the German government. According to Bérard’s notes on this meeting, Berber made it clear



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

that this arrangement represented an “enormous gesture.” After all, the Tripartite Pact of September 27, 1940, between Germany, Italy, and Japan was a sign of a “profound political transformation,” in light of which “the place for an International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation is no longer in Paris, it is in Berlin or in Rome.” Berber also reminded Bérard of France’s moral debt to Germany— after World War I, “Germany had been excluded from the spiritual life of nations and barred from all intellectual collaboration with other peoples”—but assured Bérard that Germany did not intend to repeat “that tragic deed.” Instead, Berber expressed the view of his Francophile clique at the Foreign Ministry, outlining for Bérard his vision of the new Europe: “there are two countries,” Berber said, “that should march as equals at the first level with regard to matters of the spirit: yours and ours.” This spirit of Franco-German collaboration was to be embodied in the institute’s new management council, composed of two German and two French representatives. These developments went far enough to be outlined in the French press, and their implications for German power were widely appreciated. As one concerned American observer noted in 1942, with the IIIC Germany would have in its hands “an institution whose international character furnishes a marvelous camouflage for its propaganda and marvelous possibilities for its cultural expansion.” Goebbels’s representatives keenly competed with Ribbentrop’s agents over many things, but not over the future of the IIIC. For while Foreign Ministry officials schemed in occupied Paris, the DKZ’s Karl Schweig had moved on to Brussels. And it was in Brussels that he struck gold. There, in over one hundred rooms of the Palais du Cinquantenaire, lay the archive and library of the Union des Associations Internationales (Union of International Associations, or UIA). A kind of clearinghouse for documentation relating to international organizations, this institution had been collecting publications, conference proceedings, correspondence with scholars, and other forms of data on international conferences and institutions since its foundation in 1910. Divided into a museum, archive, and library, all of these materials were cata logued in a sophisticated fashion by the institution’s cofounder, the pioneer of modern information science Paul Otlet. By the end of August 1940, with help from the Gestapo, Schweig had officially seized the institution’s vast library and correspondence and begun the transport of some five tons of these materials to Berlin. In November, Schweig took over as the Union’s new “Commissary Administrator.” By the end of that year, he had devel-

NE W ORDE RS I N BE RL I N A ND RO ME



oped a detailed plan to make the union serve the creation of a new order of international life under German dominance and to convert the DKZ itself from a modest domestic agency to a mighty international body. For an institution meant to serve the creation of a Nazi-controlled, German-centered cultural system, the Union of International Associations presented an unlikely pedigree. Its founders, bibliographer Paul Otlet and the Belgian senator, professor of international law, and renowned pacifist Henri La Fontaine, were committed internationalists. Together they founded the International Institute of Bibliography in 1895, and in 1907 La Fontaine assumed the presidency of the Permanent International Peace Bureau in Bern, Switzerland. Founded in 1907 with the participation of institutions from forty-five nations, and funded until 1924 by the Carnegie Foundation, the Union had been designed to coordinate international intellectual, scholarly, and cultural organizations in the spirit of pacifist internationalism. By the end of its first year of existence the union included 125 organizations. From 1912 it published a journal giving form to the vision of “international life” of its title, La vie internationale. These heady beginnings yielded modest results. In the aftermath of World War I, Otlet and La Fontaine lobbied the League of Nations, to which Otlet was a Belgian delegate, to adopt their UIA as an official League body. But the League spurned the union, instead founding the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation in 1924, which was designed in part to block the more radical internationalism of Otlet’s and La Fontaine’s visionary proposals. The initial promise of the union never recovered from this setback. It was further undermined in 1934, when the Belgian government withdrew its financial support and many of the union’s member organizations abandoned it. Thus the Union of International Associations was active but of marginal significance when German troops entered Brussels in May 1940. It was a relic of an internationalism that had not survived the First World War, much less the conflict-ridden interwar years, and had come to be the personal endeavor of the increasingly eccentric Otlet. Nonetheless, the DKZ saw the institution as rich with potential and enthused in particular about its treasures of information: “reports on world conferences including discussions and resolutions, the yearbook of international life, monographs which summarize the results of all investigations of international societies . . . and information on the broad field of international life with all its political, spiritual, intellectual, and economic effects.” “Without a serious study of these proceedings,” the DKZ’s



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

The unlikely basis for the “New Order of International Organizations”: The Brussels office of the Union of International Associations, circa 1910. (Courtesy of Collections Mundaneum, Mons, Belgium)

annual report insisted, “a reordering in the long view cannot be realized.” (Much of the rest of Otlet’s vast collections, some sixty-three tons of books, papers, and other materials, was destroyed as the Palais Mondial was emptied in December 1940 to make room for a Nazi art exhibition.) With such a “reordering” of Europe firmly in mind, Schweig thus developed a two-part plan for the union’s future. First, placed under the leadership of the DKZ, purged of the uncooperative Paul Otlet, and denuded of its library and archive, the UIA continued to exist. From new offices on Brussels’s rue Ducale and a branch office in Paris, a largely local staff divided into six suboffices supported the DKZ’s long-term restructuring of the world of international organizations. Most immediately, the UIA gathered information, and lots of it, using research, questionnaires, and interrogations to build on and update Otlet’s cata logue of data on international institu-

NE W ORDE RS I N BE RL I N A ND RO ME



tions. In the short term, this would allow the DKZ to prepare a new Handbook of International Federations and Institutions (Handbuch der internationalen Verbände und Institutionen) designed to replace the Handbook of International Organisations that had been published by the League of Nations. The UIA thus served German espionage, not least by masking the role of Germany in gathering all this information. In the longer term, the intense work of preparing the DKZ’s rival Handbook embodied the organization’s broader aim: a radical streamlining of the very nature of international cooperation, replacing the chaotic variety of structures and types of associations with one standardized type so as to create a network of relationships that could be overseen, and controlled, from one central vantage point. Staffers crafted a classification system that standardized the admission of new organizations to the union. They crafted a uniform, standardized format for international conferences. Another team penned studies of particular institutions’ “influence on the economic and social life of various countries” in order to demonstrate the vitality and importance of international organizations as such. DKZ lawyers devised a generic juridical basis for international organizations that could later be enshrined, in standardized legal language, in the statutes of all such organizations. A final suboffice managed the union’s documentation and eventual publications. These publications, like the rest of the UIA’s activities, were not publicly linked to the Nazi regime. As Schweig later explained, “a camouflage office of the Reich, working in an important sector, can achieve results of a quite different order from those attainable by an official policy agency.” In the second, even more ambitious part of the plan, Schweig and his collaborators planned for the postwar future, when such “camouflage” of German dominance would no longer be required. After the war, building on materials seized from the UIA, the DKZ itself would be converted into a new “International Office for Conferences and Organizations,” based in Berlin. In a secret memorandum of April 1941, Schweig offered a detailed vision of how such an institution could “achieve the great task of the reordering of international unions and organizations,” giving rise to a New Order in which Germany would hold a “monopoly as regards leadership and direction.” Th is new International Office could be founded at a great “World Congress of International Institutions” in Berlin, for which the DKZ would also produce “a permanent exhibition about all of human history under German leadership.” The DKZ had imagined a “beneficial relocation



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

of the bureaus of international organizations” already in July 1940. Now Schweig simply fi xed that long-standing goal on the specific institutional framework of the UIA. Schweig locked the UIA into this planned postwar reorganization through a contractual agreement signed by Otlet’s more pliable successor. “Fundamental for the reshaping of the Union” the agreement stipulated, “is the reordering of Europe [Neuordnung Europas], that emanates from the Axis powers.” The union’s first task was the integration of continental European international organizations “in all fields and subject areas.” The incorporation of “extra-European countries can follow later.” In this way, Schweig hoped to use the UIA to radically enhance the status of the DKZ itself, converting it from a national-level administrative center to a mighty international institution with special powers and rights. Complaining that the DKZ, in its present form, lacked the scale or authority to seize the opportunities of this heady moment, Schweig even proposed that the postwar International Office be assigned extraterritoriality and diplomatic status for its leaders. Back in Berlin, Wilhelm Haegert, head of the Propaganda Division of Goebbels’s ministry, shared Schweig’s enthusiastic assessment and urged Goebbels to support “a refoundation of the ‘Union’ under German leadership and with its seat in Germany.” Although aware of the institution’s current weakness, Haegert saw a reconfigured, German-controlled Union of International Associations as an ideal tool for the pursuit of Germany’s long-standing goals of cultural revisionism. “I refer in particular,” he wrote, “to the cultural–propagandistic significance and to the position of primacy which would thus be achieved in the field of international conferences and organizations, which has been struggled for in vain for years.” Just as important, wrote Haegert, his eye on the Propaganda Ministry’s rivals within the Nazi regime, was the way that through this plan “an important field of activity will be annexed to our ministry, and this [field] will be highlighted vis-à-vis other [state and party] offices.” With support from the Propaganda Ministry, and from the SD and German occupation authorities in Belgium, Schweig’s plan moved ahead quickly. Money, trains, and staff were found to collect, dust off, pack, and move what the DKZ calculated were 17,000,000 pieces of documentation and 270,000 volumes of conference proceedings—perhaps as much as 600 tons of materials. Once in Berlin, an office of experts in foreign languages was put to work translating and evaluating the documentation,

NE W ORDE RS I N BE RL I N A ND RO ME



which itself occupied three floors of the DKZ’s offices. In April 1941, shortly after Schweig submitted his plan, Gutterer decided the time was right to let the Propaganda Ministry’s rivals in on it. He wrote his counterparts at the Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of Education that “preparatory work is under way to move the seat of the Union of International Associations from Brussels to Germany, and to transform it here into an International Office for Conferences and Organizations.” Here, a real New Order of European cultural internationalism was emerging: an administrative entity, answering to the Nazi state, with no self-regulating input from scholars or artists themselves— and no input from the Germans’ erstwhile allies, the Italians. ◆

◆

◆

In Rome, meanwhile, key regime cultural organizers and many Italian intellectuals were busily developing their own visions of a cultural new order. Enthusiastic about the opportunities the Germans’ war seemed to offer, these men worked on ways to use the Germans’ victories to support Italy’s culturalpolitical goals, believing that the apparently imminent victory of the Axis would strengthen Italy’s effort to position Rome as the spiritual center of the “new fascist civilization” promised by Mussolini since the mid-1930s. This made sense, according to enthusiastic pro-fascist intellectuals, because Hitler’s military victory over France “has not brought to Paris only the imperial eagle” of German domination. Rather, “it has brought, above all, the banners of a revolution, and this revolution is not only German but is also Italian; that is, it incarnates the thought, the will, and the interests of a European bloc of 120 million men.” Germany was the brawn of this “European bloc,” but Italy was its brains. The most important organizational effort to change Italy’s place on the European cultural scene was the plan for a Universal Exposition in Rome, the Esposizione Universale Roma 1942, known as E’42 and later EUR. First developed in 1935, the plan envisioned the construction of national pavilions from all over the world, with areas for the display of works of cultural, industrial, and technological production from each participating foreign country, as well as various colonial pavilions. At the same time, the event would, over the course of the year—the twentieth anniversary of the rise to power of fascism—host hundreds of international scientific and cultural conferences on the most varied topics. By September 1939, the Italians had formally invited seventy-seven countries to participate, of which thirty-two



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

had accepted, including Germany, Britain, France, Belgium, Spain, Hungary, Romania, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, China, Japan, Iran, and the United States. The plan to hold an international conference to gather the world in Rome might have appeared to be jeopardized by the Germans’ war. But Vittorio Cini, the Venetian shipping magnate whom Mussolini had made head of the E’42 organizing institution in 1936, viewed Germany’s conquests as offering exciting opportunities for Italy’s leadership claims. Cini was a modernizer who worked with fellow Venetian entrepreneur Giuseppe Volpi to develop Venice’s industrial Port Marghera and moved easily among Italy’s economic and political elite. In December, he led an enthusiastic effort to reconceptualize the event as an inaugural celebration of the “new order” in which Italy would affirm its own distinct position of leadership alongside of but in contrast to Germany. The stakes in reformulating E’42 were high. This event had been at the center of the fascist vision of Italy’s place in the international cultural world since Mussolini first approved the idea in May 1935, just days after his declaration of empire. Launched in the climate of hubris following Italy’s victory in Ethiopia, the E’42 envisioned what one historian has called “perhaps the most extravagant, certainly the most ambitious initiative of its kind in this century,” through which Italy would “demonstrate its cultural claim to primacy and its future as an imperial world power.” The scale of the event’s ambitions, celebrating the new vitality of fascism while simultaneously positioning Mussolini’s Italy as the true heir of classical and Catholic Rome, was communicated by the massive architectural and urban planning project designed to host the event. The wide avenues and neoclassical buildings would celebrate Mussolini’s new Italian–Roman empire through the construction of a new urban area that would begin a mighty drive to connect Rome to the sea, modernize and expand the city, and showcase the classicizing, neo-Roman architectural modernism that the Duce favored. The exhibitions would highlight fascism’s claim to offer leadership rooted in the historical tradition, ethical values, and high ideals of Italian civiltà, in pointed opposition to the spiritually pusillanimous materialism of the Western European democracies and of the United States. “Instead of a pure and simple race among products and systems of production,” Cini had proposed in 1937, the event should “rise to the level of a competition of civilizations.”  Th is focus on culture would “differentiate it from the other

NE W ORDE RS I N BE RL I N A ND RO ME



[expositions], especially the American ones, that have sought and will seek to dazzle the world with the vastness of their proportions, the exaltation of mechanical achievements, and the mirage of material happiness.” After World War II it was commonly argued that Mussolini’s closeness with Hitler, the anti-Jewish laws, and the outbreak of war prompted the intellectual classes to abandon the regime. But Cini’s effort to position Italy’s civiltà as a global rival to the West successfully rallied an impressive list of Italy’s leading lights around this pro-regime, pro-imperialist project. The buildings and the urban layout were designed by Italy’s most important architects and urban planners, including Giuseppe Pagano, Luigi Piccinato, Edmondo Rossi, and E’42 architectural superintendent Marcello Piacentini. Regime philosopher Giovanni Gentile was joined by the talented young scholars Federico Chabod and Delio Cantimori—who would go on to be two of postwar Italy’s most important historians—in designing the content of the “Exhibition of Italian Civilization.” The exposition’s claims to Italian hegemony were broadcast internationally in the pages of its large-format, full-color, bimonthly magazine, Civiltà. Directed by Royal Academy President Luigi Federzoni, and edited by prominent literary critic and essayist Emilio Cecchi, Civiltà enjoyed the participation of other Royal Academicians and writers whom Federzoni invited from the prestigious Nuova Antologia, of which he was also the director, including many figures distant from the regime. With its lavish color photo layouts, articles on high-cultural topics, and translated summaries of all articles into German, French, English, and Spanish, the journal Civiltà aimed to present an attractive, refined, and upscale vision of Italian culture to an international audience. In these ways, E’42 linked three distinct projects: mobilizing the nation’s intellectuals on the home front, firming up Italy’s Mediterranean empire, and projecting Italian cultural power internationally. Success on these three fronts would produce a revitalized Italy—tougher, more compact, respected abroad, and ready to take up the status as great power that had eluded it in the past. But this careful blending of domestic and international goals would only work if the world answered Rome’s call. So E’42’s organizers convened a vast array of international conferences and meetings of international organizations in Rome in connection with the exposition. Pursuit of this massive organizational campaign had accelerated after Italy’s withdrawal from the League and its cultural organizations in November 1937. The National Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (IRCE), founded in 1937 to replace



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

Italy’s Commission for Intellectual Cooperation, devoted most of its energies to planning this component of E’42. By the end of 1939, Luciano De Feo, having transferred his canny organizing skills from the now-defunct International Center for Educational Cinematography to IRCE, had secured 150 international meetings, conferences, and conventions for E’42— “without, obviously, making use of the institutions of the League.”  Such planning, taken over by Italy’s Royal Academy in December 1939, continued in the early months of the war. By May 1940, organizers had “acquired” another ninety-one congresses, eighty-seven others were certain but still required final confirmation, and ninety-six more were under study. This extraordinary list of events—424 in total— covered virtually every area of cultural, scientific, and scholarly endeavor, including international congresses on philosophy, criminal police, Roman law, art history, sociology, and cinematography, as well as large-scale international meetings on radio, fashion, advertising, Thomistic studies, “the Christian family,” genetics, eugenics, and venereal disease. Bringing the world to Rome would affirm the primacy of an Italianfascist vision of modernity. It would give form to Mussolini’s vision of fascism as a new civilization, or nuova civiltà, destined to give back a collective sense of life to modern man, individualized and weakened by modern industrial society. A large influx of visitors would help restore Italy’s foreign currency reserves, which Mussolini had depleted through war in Ethiopia and Spain and the pursuit of economic autarky. Above all, Cini’s design for E’42 would allow Italy to stake a claim in competition with Nazi Germany’s bid for European leadership. The exposition’s massive show of cultural force—pointedly entitled “the Olympiad of Civilizations”—would offer an analogue, in the realm of cultural and intellectual life, to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, where the Nazis had likewise used an event of international cooperation to celebrate the power and dynamism of an expansionist regime. This was an Olympic competition that Italy, of course, was primed to win. By December 1940, there were serious reasons to doubt the enthusiastic visions for Italy’s imperial future that Cini and others had developed on the war’s eve. Mussolini’s invasion of France in June was an embarrassment, and the invasion of Greece in October 1940 was a fiasco. An unexpectedly powerful Greek counterattack had forced Italian forces into a chaotic retreat into Albania already by November. That same month British forces con-

NE W ORDE RS I N BE RL I N A ND RO ME



Big plans for Rome’s role as cultural capital of the New Order: E’42 president Vittorio Cini (third from r.) shows a model of the Universal Exposition grounds to a delegation from Belgium, February 22, 1940. (Istituto LUCE- Cinecittà)

firmed their domination of the Mediterranean by destroying Italian battleships that were still at anchor in Taranto, and in December repulsed the Italians’ effort to seize Egypt for Mussolini’s revived Roman Empire. And yet, evidently confident that Germany’s military successes on the continent more than made up for Italy’s failures in the Mediterranean, in December 1940 Cini submitted to Mussolini a revised program for E’42 that radiated confidence in the Axis’s ability to score a lasting victory in the intra-European clash of civilizations. Axis victory could come as soon as 1941, Cini calculated, so it was reasonable to plan the Universal Exposition for 1944. At that point, the event “will consecrate the beginning of the new European life,” marked by “the passage between two civilizations. England and France, who for centuries had secured for themselves the economic and to a large degree spiritual dominion of the world, will be replaced by the two nations [that will have] emerged victorious from the war. A new economy, a new morality, a new culture (that will of course draw on the perennial sources of human civilization



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

of Rome, associated to the rigorous German method), will give to the world a configuration profoundly different from the one erased by the revolution now underway.” With the Western powers defeated, “the Exposition will come down above all to a great, courteous competition between the two hegemonic Empires and . . . the world will be spectator to this competition.” It would thus be more important than ever to use the event to show the world that Italy, not Germany, was the intellectual source of the principal ideas of the New Order: “if the Exposition had reason to be before the war,” Cini wrote, “it will have even greater reason afterwards.” Only a few small changes were needed. To begin with, the title “EUR” (for Esposizione Universale Roma) should be followed by the subtitle Novus Ordo. Rendering the “New Order” in Latin would establish a Roman–Italian claim to this phrase, which most Europeans saw quite correctly as a basically German idea—the Neuordnung invoked by Reich Economics Minister Funk and created by Hitler’s armies. Under this Latin title, every element of the revised exposition would be charged with demonstrating “this truth: that the triumph of the present war is principally Italian, because the idea that is affirmed through the war is Italian, the idea, that is, of a higher justice among peoples according to the Mussolinian formula.” Each exhibit would promote the international applicability of fascist innovations. The “City of Corporatist Economy” would document the successes of Italian fascist corporatism, economic autarky, and social insurance programs, as a model for a selfsufficient European economic bloc. The Exhibition of Italian Civilization would emphasize Italy’s model contributions to legal thought, from the Twelve Tables of ancient Rome to fascism’s signature legislative achievements such as the 1927 Charter of Labor and the reforms to the Italian civil code that would be adopted as the Codice Mussolini in 1942. Such an exhibit could surpass the legal exhibitions at Munich (1936) and Leipzig (1938), where the Nazis had sought “to glorify German law.” The prospect that Rome would host the world’s first major international event after the Axis’s victory stimulated Cini to grand visions. If, he mused, the 1944 Olympic Games could be transferred to Rome as well, the EUR could link “the ‘Olympiad of the Civilizations’—of eminently political and spiritual character—and the Olympiad of Sport, grand spectacle of youthful force and drive.” Cini’s vision for the conference as “a great, courteous competition between the two hegemonic Empires” reflected the optimistic view of those who saw Hitler’s creation of a continental European empire as creating an opportu-

NE W ORDE RS I N BE RL I N A ND RO ME



nity to expand Mussolini’s Balkan–Mediterranean empire. Typically, Cini, whose political and economic careers had meshed in his support for Italian penetration in the eastern Mediterranean, called for a large section on Italian shipping in his 1940 proposal. Much of the fascist political leadership— Mussolini, Foreign Minister Ciano, and Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs Bastianini, as well as key Italian military leaders— shared this bi-imperial vision of the future. Such visions of an autonomous Italian empire, and Cini’s enthusiastic plan to use the Germans’ victory as an occasion to affirm Italy’s intellectual primacy, reflected a rather delusional understanding of the Nazis’ plans for Europe’s future. But German leaders were content to nurture this misunderstanding. German officials accepted their invitation to E’42 in October 1938, and in February 1939 Hitler appointed Dr. Ernst W. Maiwald as special Reichskommissar to coordinate Germany’s participation in the event and enlisted celebrated regime architect Albert Speer to design Germany’s pavilion. Maiwald was a member of the Ad Council for the German Economy (Werberat der deutschen Wirtschaft) and had managed Germany’s imposing selfpresentation at the 1937 Universal Exposition in Paris, for which Speer designed Germany’s fearsome neoclassical pavilion. Hitler met with Maiwald and Speer at the Führer’s mountain retreat at Obersalzberg in February 1939 to discuss plans. A few days later Speer and Maiwald were in Rome to tour the exposition grounds. When other nations stopped their preparations for the conference in 1940, the Germans continued theirs on a grand scale. That summer, the German Central Conference Office (DKZ) publicly promoted E’42, calling for “frictionless cooperation with the Italian organizations” and looking forward to the event as the moment when “for the first time . . . the world of international conferences and institutions will show its new face.” As late as October 1941 Heinrich Glasmeier, general director of Germany’s Reich Broadcasting Company (Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft), visited the exhibition grounds. Examining the site, he enthusiastically suggested that the exposition be laid out in such a way as to accommodate the transmission of events on television, which would have replaced radio within five years of the end of the war. This activity was largely for show, however. Already in January 1941, responding to a query from Goebbels on how planning for E’42 should proceed, Hitler had expressed doubt that the event would ever take place and ordered the matter to be handled “hesitatingly,” but without interrupting German preparations for it, in order not to alarm the Italians.



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

By then, German agencies like the DKZ, their ambitions heightened by the war and by access to the materials seized in Paris and Brussels, were developing their own plans for a major international conference to inaugurate the postwar order, but in Berlin, not Rome. In fact, Germany’s war had already begun to undermine the Italians’ plans. The communication of foreign institutions with E’42 slowed dramatically after September 1939, and came to a complete halt by May 1940. “It was not easy,” as IRCE Director Luciano de Feo later explained, “to appeal to the collaboration of spirits in a moment in which these same spirits were troubled by . . . the red-hot tendencies one saw in international life.” The first issue of the exhibition’s official journal Civiltà appeared in April 1940. In the large-format, beautifully made magazine, richly illustrated with tasteful full-color photographs of the exhibition grounds, Italy’s Royal Academy President Luigi Federzoni welcomed the world to the “grand congress of Nations, which will present in Rome a never before equaled panoramic synthesis of all forms of spiritual, moral, economic, artistic, scientific, [and] technical progress of human society in every age and in every country.” By then, however, the fractious but still intact international world of the 1930s, to which Italy had hoped to present itself through E’42, had been shattered by Hitler’s war. ◆

◆

◆

These facts did not dissuade either Cini or those officials and intellectuals who shared his hope that German victory would open the way for a great Italian colonial and intellectual victory in the postwar New Order. One influential official who could not share their imperialist enthusiasm was Minister of National Education Giuseppe Bottai. From his vantage point as a leading fascist official, a frequent traveler to Germany, and one of Mussolini’s closest advisors, Bottai had quickly concluded that the Italian imperialists’ hopes for a new order composed of two empires were illusory and dangerous. What the war did suggest, instead, was something new: the prospect of a form of European unity. In August 1940, Bottai presented this argument to Mussolini. Those Italian journalists, intellectuals, and politicos who called for an autonomous Italian empire alongside the German one—who envisioned the new order as a bi-imperial arrangement— entirely misread the Germans and misunderstood the war’s truly revolutionary opportunities. In fact, pursuing such a system could only lead to disaster for Italy. “On the basis of an initial diffi-

NE W ORDE RS I N BE RL I N A ND RO ME



dence toward Germany and of terror of her predominance,” these Italian commentators hoped for “a victory of the Axis in the sense of the constitution of two separate spheres of influence, of two relatively autarchic economic units, of two autonomies, that is, that would allow Italy to pursue a future political maneuver that could eventually be anti-German.” But “to circumscribe the German sphere of influence in a new form of European balance of power means to strengthen [Germany’s] racism in its most materialistic sense and its imperialism in the sense of the greatest arrogance.” Outlining an alarming vision of the consequences of a postwar order based on two empires, Bottai declared, “a circumscribed Germany” would not be able to resist subordinating or invading its neighbors, “not to want to arrive, sooner or later, to the Mediterranean through Trieste, not to move toward an ever greater influence in that sea,” or even worse. “And this necessity, intrinsic to [Germany’s] imperialism— common to every imperialism, but all the stronger the more it is linked to racist pride—will be aggravated by the full awareness the Germans will have of our own diffidence and of our [antiGerman] program.” Instead, Italy should draw Germany into a system of intra-European relations based on collaboration, because “once the concept of collaboration is accepted, the form and the results of this depend on the collaborators.” In this light, Bottai asked Mussolini for permission to promote the development among Italian intellectuals of new “European” plans and ideas. This was to serve domestically as a means of rallying Italian intellectuals, particularly those younger students, scholars, and writers, who he feared had grown disaffected with the regime. As Bottai was well aware, many Italians did not share Cini’s enthusiasm for a bi-imperial new order. From the first, the fall of France had been a deeply upsetting event for many Italian intellectuals—including some in positions of power—who were shaken by the defeat of the country that had been so important to their own cultural formation and worried about its consequences for European culture. Camillo Pellizzi, president of the National Institute of Fascist Culture (Istituto Nazionale di Cultura Fascista), gave voice to these doubts in March 1941 with a kind of eulogy for the recently deceased culture of Western Europe: “It is the Occidentalizing culture of the last two or three centuries that is collapsing, Franco-British culture, protestant and rationalist, individualist and analytical, utilitarian and aestheticizing; a great culture, and great, tragic, ruinous appears its collapse. What will take its place?” Drawing Italian



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

intellectuals into a debate on Europe’s future was a way of tackling that diffidence and the lack of national self-confidence it reflected. Internationally, the development of a clearer Italian “revolutionary” and “European” vision was, Bottai believed, vital in order to position Italy as a leader in a postwar European order: “And to do this we must exit immediately from our disorientation, get to work, and present ourselves alongside Germany, or rather above all to Germany, with clear ideas of a broad resonance.” Italy could still use the Germans’ war to pursue the goals of Italian expansion and fascist revolution, but this must happen on the basis of “maximum loyalty with the Germans. Only on the basis of loyalty can one construct a revolutionary program and conduct international propaganda for it.” Bottai was a veteran of Italy’s arditi shock troops and a former futurist who had “staked out a place within the dictatorship as the premier patron of all things modern: corporativism, some forms of artistic modernism, youth, and, later, anti-Semitism.” In 1940, he aligned himself with the “revolutionary” fascist intellectuals who saw the war as an opportunity for radical social, political, and cultural change. The path to that change, they concluded, went through Europe, and Europe, in 1940, meant collaboration with Germany. With Mussolini’s decidedly lukewarm blessing, Bottai took steps to stimulate a debate on the themes of European political and social reorganization and of European culture, in the journals under his control, Critica fascista and the new Primato, a journal whose title, meaning “primacy,” recalled a foundational text of Italian nationalism, Vincenzo Gioberti’s 1843 tract “On the Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians.” In fact, Bottai had already begun. In October 1939, advertisements for the new journal proclaimed that the war that had just begun would give birth to “the new Europe,” so that the title “Primato”— evoking “the primacy . . . of Italian and fascist civiltà”— embodied the high stakes of the conflict for Italy’s future role in Europe. In this way, Bottai opened up an alternative to the cultural-organizational visions of Italy’s imperialists. This alternative suddenly gained in importance with Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941. Germany’s military moves once again undermined the Italians’ ambitions, forcing Italian cultural organizers to revise their plans. On June 30, 1941, just over a week after Hitler had thus dramatically expanded the scope of the war, E’42 organizer Vittorio Cini sent Mussolini new options for the reconfiguration of Rome’s Universal Exposition that were

NE W ORDE RS I N BE RL I N A ND RO ME



considerably less optimistic than those of his memo of December 1940. Hitler’s war in the east had now made international collaboration of the kind Cini had imagined impossible, not only materially and logistically, but in a more profound sense: the conflict had become a “war without quarter . . . that will leave great wounds to heal, profound abysses to bridge.” Under these circumstances, the event might need simply to be canceled, but Cini warned Mussolini of the “political repercussions— both at home and abroad—of such a negative decision.” Instead, it might be possible to “alter the original character of the Exposition and convene one that would be ‘National,’ or ‘of the Axis,’ or ‘Continental,’ to celebrate the Victory, the new order installed in the world, [and] the new Roma mussoliniana.” But at this point, in spite of Cini’s efforts, planning for E’42 came to an end. The quiet abandonment of what had been a massive, ambitious effort to position Rome at the center of a reordered cultural world reflected a basic truth: the Italians’ pursuit of heightened international resonance through cooperation with the Germans had backfired, undermining efforts to present Italy internationally and leaving Rome isolated. Still, many Italian imperialists failed to develop Cini’s appreciation for the degree to which the political and military premises of their earlier hopes had been undermined. In spite of its increasingly surreal character, the hope that German power could be made to serve the Italian empire lived on among Italian politicians, military leaders, and intellectuals, who continued to speculate about the future of Italy’s spazio vitale (“vital space,” Italian for Lebensraum) in an autonomous “Mediterranean new order” long after the political-military situation had rendered these ideas totally illusory. But the collapse of E’42’s imperialist-internationalist vision left the stage open for those fascist Europeanists who saw collaboration with Germany as the best way to pursue the project of Italian expansion abroad and revolutionary change at home. By the summer of 1941, fascist Italy’s cultural officialdom— including Bottai’s Ministry of National Education but also Alessandro Pavolini’s Ministry of Popular Culture, the National Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (IRCE), and Italy’s Royal Academy—was dominated by figures who were eager to engage Italy’s German ally in projects of “Europeanist” collaboration. These figures were no less convinced than Cini had been that Rome, rather than Berlin, must be the New Order’s true intellectual and spiritual leader. But the polestar of this project, they concluded, must be “Europe.”



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

◆

◆

◆

Among Nazi leaders, interest in leading any such European project had been decidedly low in the heady days of spring 1940. Goebbels admitted as much in a confidential statement to the German press corps that April. “If anyone asks how do you conceive the new Europe,” he explained, “we have to reply that we don’t know. Of course we have some ideas about it. But if we were to put them into words it would immediately create more enemies for us.” That silence reflected the absolute nationalist egoism that guided Nazi foreign policy in all areas, including culture. That did not change. But by the summer of 1941, the official reticence to take up the language of Europe was beginning to give way in response to changing political and military circumstances. The German Foreign Ministry’s effort to reorga nize the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation under the sign of Franco-German collaboration came to an abrupt end on December 13, 1940, when Marshal Pétain ordered the arrest of pro-collaborationist Deputy Prime Minister Pierre Laval. This political shift scuttled the efforts of the Foreign Ministry’s Francophile clique to build a new international system on Franco- German collaboration. Germany withdrew from all negotiations at Wiesbaden that went beyond the immediate framework of the armistice, and German delegate Berber abandoned his work on the institute. Abetz’s efforts to promote the German–French relationship as the heart of the “New Europe” had already run into powerful official resistance in Berlin. Nazi officials continued assiduously to cultivate French artists and intellectuals, but the effort to convert the Parisian institutions of interwar “intellectual cooperation” into the basis of a cultural new order was not taken up again. The Reich Education Ministry, likewise citing the “changed political situation in France,” abandoned its efforts to create a new coordinating institution of international cultural exchange in Berlin. Unable to lead or control this process, ministry officials insisted instead that they had not really been interested in the first place. Addressing a group of German university professors in January 1941, ministry adviser Herbert Scurla argued that the Reich’s position in international intellectual life depended upon German scholarly achievement, “not on a power-political seizure of influence over the organizational apparatus. . . . Thus the most important task in the present is not the creation of new international organizations or the takeover of existing institutions.” More essential were the kind of smallscale academic exchanges at which the Education Ministry excelled. (None-

NE W ORDE RS I N BE RL I N A ND RO ME



theless, Education Ministry staffers continued to pay close attention to developments in this field.) By June 1941, the Foreign Ministry’s other set of plans, proposed by advisor Karl Kerkhof, also ran aground. Kerkhof abandoned his dream of a Berlin-based international cultural order built on the stolen archives of defunct international institutions, through which a grateful Europe would readily acknowledge Germany’s “objectively justified” leadership. Kerkhof now conceded that the “hostile attitude towards German science abroad has taken on such dimensions that in many cases people will not recognize a leading position for Germany in the scientific field out of free will.” Radicalized by the war, Kerkhof called on the ministry to lock in German influence through unequal bilateral treaties, bringing the coercive power of Hitler’s new political order to bear on the creation of a new cultural and intellectual order. The institution with the power to create that order would not be the Foreign Ministry, however, but the German Central Conference Office (DKZ). While its competitors’ plans collapsed, the DKZ’s planned relocation of the Union of International Associations to Berlin accelerated, while the DKZ itself went from strength to strength. In July 1941, Hitler explicitly underwrote the organization’s plans. Hans Lammers, the powerful head of Hitler’s Reich Chancellery, informed all branches of the regime that “through the military and political changes of the last two years the possibility and necessity have arisen to newly regulate the world of international conferences and institutions, and, where possible to move the seats of international unions to Germany,” and ordered all Reich offices to inform the Propaganda Ministry of all international conferences or meetings during their planning phase, so as to facilitate the DKZ’s efforts. Goebbels then brought his ministry’s power to bear more directly over the institution through an administrative reorganization in September 1941. At this point, pleased with the DKZ’s work, its “excellent staff,” and the confirmation it had earned from Hitler, Goebbels enthused in his diary about his “generous expansion” of the institution, which offered “the best podium for the coming work in this field after the war.” But political and military developments meant that the DKZ too needed to recalibrate its efforts. Although the lull in fighting in the winter of 1940– 1941 was the high point of speculation about a German-led New Order, it seemed increasingly clear by the spring of 1941 that the war would not be



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

over as soon as had seemed likely in the thrilling days following the fall of France. Already in July 1940, Hitler had told his closest advisers that he planned to invade the Soviet Union. By the end of the year, German air losses over London had forced Hitler to call off the planned invasion of Britain. Instead, Goebbels’s agents, including the DKZ’s director Karl Schweig, were faced with a new challenge: how to pursue the long-term goal of organizing European culture under German hegemony while also rallying support for the ongoing conduct of the war. Schweig’s plans for the reorganization of the Union of International Associations revealed the new direction emerging from Goebbels’s ministry. Germany must begin to reorganize European cultural exchange at once, rather than after the victory, and to do so in an explicitly European form. Abandoning his earlier plans to launch the Nazified UIA at a giant postwar conference, by October 1941 Schweig repackaged the DKZ’s project under a new name: “the New Order of International Organizations in the New Europe.” Animated by the same spirit, in the spring of 1941 another Goebbels agency, the Reich Chamber of Culture, launched its own wildly ambitious plan for a European cultural New Order that could begin to mobilize foreign intellectuals and cultural leaders while the war was still underway. In May 1941, Goebbels’s lieutenant Leopold Gutterer contacted all branches of the Reich Chamber of Culture as well as the Propaganda Ministry’s offices in occupied Europe to solicit their views of a bold new proposal: “an organizational amalgamation . . . between the Reich Chamber of Culture and foreign cultural organizations as well as leading personalities of [foreign countries’] cultural life.” The ministry was considering forging such a union “in the form of an international Kulturkammer,” and requested names of relevant institutions and individuals whom the ministry could begin contacting “without delay.” Representatives of several Nazi agencies eagerly responded to Gutterer’s call. The Propaganda Ministry’s Theater Division submitted the names of figures in Belgium, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Italy who could serve as good contacts. Ministry offices in Oslo and The Hague sent in lists of names, while another ministry suboffice submitted a detailed report on musical life in Bulgaria, identifying several “German-friendly” individuals as possible contacts. The Netherlands seemed particularly promising for integration into a German-led international Kulturkammer. In June 1941, plans were afoot to create a Dutch Chamber of Culture, to be built on the German model and

NE W ORDE RS I N BE RL I N A ND RO ME



led by the collaborationist Professor Tobie Goedewaagen, who was already head of the Dutch Department for Popular Education and Arts (Departement van Volksvoorlichting en Kunsten). The Concertgebouw conductor Willem Mengelberg also volunteered a list of contacts. Dutch authorities did indeed found a Nederlandsche Kultuurkamer in November 1941. Like its German model, it included nationwide corporatist organizations for film, music, literature, and other arts. If every European country’s cultural life were similarly organized, incorporating these under a German-led “international” umbrella organization would have been relatively straightforward. This was, of course, not the case. But many countries did have national bodies for particular cultural fields. If these could be organized, Germany could proceed to create several pan-European “chambers of culture,” bringing European culture under German leadership in one field after another. One division of Goebbels’s cultural apparatus was already working in this direction. On June 18, 1941, the Reich Film Chamber answered Gutterer’s inquiry by explaining that they had already invited filmmakers from across Europe to Berlin for a grand meeting in July. There they would relaunch the International Film Chamber. With a shift in tactics, although not in strategy, the next phase of the Nazi effort to reorder European culture had begun. Like the Italian institutions under Bottai and Pavolini, although for different reasons, the cultural organizers under Goebbels had concluded that the best way to pursue cultural hegemony was to return to the themes developed in German–Italian cooperation during the 1930s: an emphasis on the leading role of the Rome–Berlin cultural Axis and a heavy deployment of the idea of Europe anchored in pan-European organizations that gave inter-nationalist form to specific cultural fields. Now, however, the Reich’s unrivaled military power meant that the Germans could actually create through force the New Order they had only begun to build in the 1930s. Under Goebbels’s leadership, and in response to the changing circumstances of the war, the issue of a cultural New Order now transformed into a matter of even greater complexity: the question of European culture.

■

6 European Culture under German Hegemony

“Not as a German, but as a European!” This was the way Joseph Goebbels presented himself to the representatives of continental Europe’s film industries gathered in the grand auditorium of the Reich Propaganda Ministry building in Berlin on July 21, 1941. Their meeting with the propaganda minister came at the end of a weeklong stay in Berlin, during which delegates from seventeen European nations officially refounded the International Film Chamber. One month into the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Nazi film leaders could celebrate that a revived IFC would “serve, in common constructive work with the national film industries, the international reordering [Neuordnung] and understanding among peoples.” The chamber reaffirmed the centrality to the New Order of the German–Italian cultural Axis as Count Giuseppe Volpi, Venetian magnate and president of the Venice Biennale, was made the IFC’s new president. Vice presidents, including the head of Sweden’s film chamber, Olof Andersson, Hungarian Culture and Education Ministry representative László Balogh, Spanish representative Antonio Pacheco Picazo, director of the Film Division of the Romanian Propaganda Ministry Mihai V. Puscariu, and Reich Film Chamber president and prominent director Carl Froelich reflected the hierarchies of the “New Europe.” The institution embraced, more clearly than ever before, a lofty mission: the advancement of a distinctly “European cinema,” at the service of the values of European culture. By reviving this institution, Goebbels signaled a change of direction in his efforts to make culture serve the Nazi empire. While still envisioning large

E U RO P E A N C ULT URE UNDE R GE RM AN H EGEMON Y



scale reorganization of the international cultural order to follow the war, Goebbels’s staff now began to create or revive pan-European institutions. The years 1941–1942 saw the revival also of the Permanent Council for International Cooperation among Composers and the creation of the Union of National Journalists’ Associations and the European Writers Union. From now on, with help from the Italians and from cultural leaders across the continent, Goebbels would make European culture—rallied at congresses and organized into institutions—into a fundamental part of the soft power of Hitler’s empire. Why not wait? Why invest manpower and money in gathering intellectuals and cultural organizers in Europe’s finest hotels to discuss cinema, music, and literature while Germany was unleashing history’s largest military campaign? Why continue it when German cities were being struck nightly by allied bombers? Part of the answer is that Goebbels and his staff clearly believed that European-branded international cultural institutions could furnish orga nizational tools for lasting German influence in the postwar New Order, while also rallying elites— fi lmmakers, but also writers, composers, journalists, and others—for the ongoing war effort by invoking heady visions of European culture with new vigor. “European” cultural bodies supported a new wave of war propaganda that presented a supposedly united European front against the Bolshevik enemy. But even a devoted propagandist like Goebbels did not believe such efforts would play any decisive role in helping Germany win the war. Nor, when he began planning the revival of the IFC in the spring of 1941, was he in any way concerned that Germany might actually need help from European allies. The key reason to organize European culture, and to do so right now, was to forge the imperial tools that would ready Germany for its next clash: a geopolitical and economic struggle with the United States. Speaking candidly to a select group of German film industry professionals in Berlin on February 24, 1942, Goebbels made this point clear as he announced the creation of the giant UFI concern (UFA-Film-Gesellschaft), with which the Nazi regime centralized control over Germany’s film industry. This new tool was designed to consolidate control over European cinema, but not as an end in itself. “Unknown to the public,” he confided, “we are now building a film market in Europe so that when the decisive hour comes after the war we can confidently take up the struggle with America. . . . For this purpose I must naturally centralize resources, for it is just as necessary in the development of films as in the military and other economic sectors.”



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

Goebbels was not talking only about movies. The broader point was his belief, shared by Hitler and other Nazi leaders, that the future world order would be dominated by continental-scale politico-economic blocs, what in wartime economic discussions were called “great spaces” (Großräume). Germany must create one or be the victim of one. As the economic historian Adam Tooze has argued, the National Socialists’ assault on the Soviet Union, “even though it satisfied deep imperatives of Nazi ideology . . . was a means to the end of consolidating Germany’s position for the ultimate confrontation with the Western powers.” Forging an autarchic European empire would equip the Third Reich with the resource and market base necessary to allow it to confront its future economic rival. The race against the Americans’ pace of industrial development helped drive the breakneck speed with which the Germans pursued their imperial agenda. But as Goebbels explained, the problems associated with creating an integrated European economic space under German control “do not just apply to the chemical industry, coal mining, or the iron and steel industry. It goes without saying that we cannot rule Europe economically if we do not also make ourselves supreme in the cultural field. Cultural hegemony, however, can only be achieved with the help of a large number of technical aids. And, in this respect, film is one of our major resources.” To make the fullest use of this resource required organizing it domestically, by creating the UFI juggernaut. It also required organizing it internationally, through measures designed to build an integrated European film market. This was the mandate of the International Film Chamber. Goebbels’s ambition to organize a battle-ready European market to serve Germany’s future struggles did not stop with film. Looking closely at the International Film Chamber’s wartime activity reveals that it was supported by an emerging network of Nazi-led international institutions, interwoven into a set of largely behind-the-scenes efforts to recast the bases of Europe’s cultural markets into a unitary form that Germany could derive advantage from and more easily control. Over time, those same efforts were also applied to classical music, through the revival of the Permanent Council, and to other cultural fields. Building international institutions naturally required cooperation from non-Germans, including in particular from the Italians. Rallying foreign collaborators would seem to present no great challenge. The European cultural

E U RO P E A N C ULT URE UNDE R GE RM AN H EGEMON Y



vision that Nazi institutions promoted—an integrated, protected European space in which national cultures, purged of Jews and unified by their states, would be able to flourish in a manner acceptable to conservative elites—had proven its popularity already in the interwar period. With much of Europe under Hitler’s control, the Germans could lead this campaign from an unparalleled position of strength. Yet organizing European culture meant, in practice, dealing with individual European cultural producers and organizers, with their varying concerns and personalities. And while the idea of a new culture for the “New Europe” attracted interest across the continent, the demands, objections, and ambitions of Germany’s collaborators—not least the Italians—made this project rather more trying than the Germans expected. ◆

◆

◆

Goebbels was far from alone in applying European slogans and a continental vision to large-scale projects of international cultural organization. German elites in an astonishing range of fields seized the moment of German dominance and apparent European unity to try to lock in German control on a continental level. The sheer number of international and “European” events organized by Nazi agencies in 1941 and 1942 gave rise to what one historian has accurately called a “conference and convention mania.” How could these European conferences and organizations be reconciled with Hitler’s ruthless, racist imperialism? Could such events represent anything other than the cynical and empty deployment of the inspiring word “Europe”? One answer to these questions, a document offering an early and particularly clear articulation of a Nazi Europeanism, arrived on the desk of the Foreign Ministry just days after Hitler had unleashed his invasion of the Soviet Union. Foreign Ministry official Dr. Alfred Knapp proposed another new plan for the postwar reorganization of the world of international cultural and scientific institutions, similar in some respects to the plans that had busied the ministry in the summer of 1940, just after the fall of France. Unlike those, however, Knapp’s blueprint for German hegemony sought to take advantage of the great theme stimulating so much interest across the continent: the idea of European unity. Knapp asked the Foreign Ministry to consider “whether, following the Führer’s declaration ‘Europe for the Europeans,’ the concept of international institutions should not be fundamentally replaced by the concept of European ones,” and proposed the



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

foundation of a single, centralized, German-dominated international institution to be called the League of the Peoples of Europe (Bund der Völker Europas). As the founder and first director of the German Central Conference Office (DKZ), Knapp knew a great deal about the international networks of intellectual and cultural life. But what captured Knapp’s imagination was the new language that Hitler deployed when, on June 11, 1940, he demanded a “Europe for the Europeans.” This emphasis on “Europe,” Knapp believed, was the winning formula for German hegemony. Hitler had made this comment in an interview with an American journalist, adapting this inverted Monroe doctrine to Europe more in order to appeal to American isolationists, who he hoped might keep the United States out of the war, than to address Europeans. Hitler said nothing in this interview about new forms of international organization, and almost nothing about Europe at all. He had no intention of promoting Europeanism. On the contrary, a few months later he ordered Goebbels to curb discussions in the German press of the Reich’s “European” mission. “We are fighting primarily not for a New Order in Europe,” the Propaganda Ministry instructed the German press corps in November 1940, “but for the defense and security of our life interests.” Given Hitler’s opposition to any proposals for the postwar era that hinted at the least degree of equality among European states, Knapp’s proposal had no chance of success. But the German Office of Information (Deutsche Informationsstelle), a propaganda-publishing outfit under the Foreign Ministry, seized on the potential appeal outside of Germany of the Führer’s phrase. They made “Europe for the Europeans” the title of a booklet, published in several languages, that brought the interview to a wide international audience. Knapp went a step further, outlining in great detail how that phrase could be given institutional form by a radical move from the implicitly global cultural internationalism of the 1920s to a strictly regional cultural Europeanism. No mere rhetorical gesture, this structural change would be a great improvement over French-led interwar internationalism in that “for the future the overbearing interference of the Americans in Europe’s affairs would be made impossible.” Knapp’s Europeanist proposal, with its grandiose scale and its implicitly egalitarian tone, had no chance of success. But by the spring of 1941, the main idea behind it was already being taken up independently by a range of different Nazi power centers. A new continental European law (Kontinentalrecht) was the topic on April 3–5, 1941, when Hitler’s head jurist and now

E U RO P E A N C ULT URE UNDE R GE RM AN H EGEMON Y



governor-general of occupied Poland Hans Frank assembled fi fty lawyers from Europe and Japan in Berlin for an International Jurists Conference, which saw the foundation of the International Law Chamber (Internationale Rechtskammer). A European Youth Federation featuring representatives of the national-fascist youth organizations of fourteen nations was founded in Vienna during an international gathering on September 14–18, 1942, at the invitation of Vienna Gauleiter and Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach. In June 1942, at the invitation of the Greater German Chess Federation (Großdeutsche Schachbund) and with the support of Reich Marshall Hermann Goering, representatives of fourteen European nations gathered in Salzburg to found a European Chess Federation. With a German president and Italian vice president, the Europäische Schachbund was inaugurated in late September 1942 at a grand and solemn ceremony at the Künstlerhaus in Munich, with diplomatic representatives of all the countries concerned and representatives of the German state, Nazi Party, and armed forces. Italy’s consul in Munich reported to Rome that “the German government intends to give great force to the movement of propaganda for chess as an element of culture and of cohesion among the nations of Europe,” especially among youth, in the army, and among women. In October 1941, Berlin hosted an “International Women’s Meeting,” featuring representatives of ten European nations and Japan. A European radio began to emerge in 1941, as Germany’s Foreign Ministry consolidated continental control over radio broadcasting through a new pan-European institution called Interradio. Run from studios in Berlin, Interradio’s stations included Radio Belgrade, which, with its polyglot multinational staff and international listenership across Europe, “rapidly acquired the flavour of a ‘European’ station.” It also created one of the war’s pan-European cultural experiences, making Lale Andersen’s recording of “Lili Marlene,” played every evening at 9:55 p.m., into Europe’s iconic song of World War II. Nazi agencies created or reorganized European international institutions in fields outside the cultural realm as well. In April 1942, officials met in Berlin to discuss the foundation of a European Academy of Colonial Sciences (Europäische kolonialwissenschaftliche Akademie), designed to replace the Anglo-French– dominated Institut colonial international. At a European Postal Conference in Berlin in October 1942, delegates agreed to the creation of the European Post and Telegraph Union (Europäischen Post- und Fernmeldeverein). The International Forestry Center (Internationale Forstzentrale,



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

or Centre Internationale de Sylviculture), founded in 1939, held a 1943 conference on the “European lumber balance.” Pro-Nazi German scholars worked to pull together new, German-led international institutions for geographers, historians, and mathematicians. Europeanist energies flowed through many other fields in Germany, even when these did not succeed in creating institutions. The Nazi journal Internationale Zeitschrift für Erziehung (International Education Review), edited by the National Socialist Nietzsche scholar Alfred Bäumler, began in 1941 to publish in multiple languages and in 1942 featured special issues in which representatives of Germany, Italy, Finland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovakia, Sweden, Bulgaria, and Romania discussed a New Order of “national and political education in Europe.” Robert Ley’s German Labor Front, the country’s Nazi-corporatist labor union, began in 1941 to publish Neue Internationale Rundschau der Arbeit (New International Labor Review), part of a major push to impose a National Socialist model of social and labor relations in the New Order. The Reich Education Ministry’s wartime mobilization of the German humanities (Kriegseinsatz der Geisteswissenschaften) worked with University of Kiel philosopher Ferdinand Weinhandl to promote an international conference on “Europe and German Philosophy” in Nuremberg in October 1942, which led to a publication series of the same name. By the spring of 1943, the Propaganda Ministry’s ambitious staff art historian Rolf Hetsch had won Goebbels’s approval to lead work on a massive Encyclopedia of the European Visual Arts. This would engage scholars from other European countries to write forty of its planned fifty volumes, while still making clear “the dominance of the Greater German Reich in the European cultural space.” The rhetoric of these initiatives was in line with the regime’s growing deployment of Europeanist themes in its international propaganda. In January 1941, Reich Press Chief Otto Dietrich outlined “the Spiritual Bases of the New Europe” in a major address in Prague that was quickly published in eight Western European languages. Recapitulating core themes from the German–Italian cultural cooperation of the 1930s, Dietrich announced that “a revolution has taken place, not only in political and social life, but also in thought. It comes from the two great culture-nations of the continent, Germany and Italy, and it will be fruitful for other nations in so far as they serve themselves of it.” The kernel of this “Copernican revolution of the spirit” was the discovery “that the world does not revolve around the individual

E U RO P E A N C ULT URE UNDE R GE RM AN H EGEMON Y



but around the community, the Volk, by whose destiny the individual is carried.” Dietrich, who had published a book on the philosophy of National Socialism in 1935, tied the opposition between these ideas to an intraEuropean geographic divide: the defunct ideology of liberal individualism was derived from the English idea of freedom and the French idea of equality, while the new communitarianism was the product of Germany and Italy. By applying the German–Italian communitarian vision to the continent as a whole, the Axis would transform Europe into a “racially articulated, but organically bound order of peoples.” The Germans’ attention to the theme of Europe increased with Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. At Goebbels’s secret daily press briefi ng on June 27, 1941, he instructed the German press to articulate the changed meaning of the war in continental and cultural terms: “Europe marches against the common enemy in unique solidarity and rises up against the oppressor of all human culture and civilization. This birth hour of the new Europe takes place without demand or coercion from Germany.” During a visit to Rome in October, Reich Economics Minister Walther Funk repeated his rosy predictions for the continent’s postwar economic future, but now spoke of “Europe” where a year before he had named only the German Reich. “A united Europe,” he announced, “based on social justice and cultural development . . . is the goal of Germany and Italy.” And in November 1941, Foreign Minister Ribbentrop made the renewal of the Anti-Comintern Pact (first signed in 1936 but defunct since the Hitler– Stalin pact of August 1939) into the basis of a new “European” anti-Soviet alliance. The signing ceremony on November 25, 1941, including representatives of Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Romania, Slovakia, and Spain (as well as Japan and its mainland puppet states), was billed as the “First European Congress.” Visiting Berlin in October 1941, Italian Foreign Minister Ciano was struck by the change. “The slogan in vogue,” he reported to Mussolini, “is ‘European solidarity.’ ” He was also quick to adopt it. In Berlin again a month later to sign the revived Anti-Comintern Pact, Ciano declared that the “antiBolshevik war” was “the sign of the spiritual revival of Europe.” Back in Italy, publicists and intellectuals contributed to a wave of books, articles, and pamphlets arguing that Italy and Germany’s cultural legacies were uniquely constitutive of Europe. This outpouring of texts reflected the genuine concerns of many Italian intellectuals, who made all things European a major



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

theme in the fascist regime’s literary and intellectual journals. Such interest in the prospect of a “new Europe” was paralleled among intellectuals and cultural figures in many European countries. But it was not rhetoric or speculation that impressed diplomatic observers, so much as the ambition, scale, and concrete reality of Germany’s European campaign in international organizations. On September 9, 1942, a Swiss diplomat in Berlin reported to his government that the Germans’ extraordinary series of international conferences revealed their strong “determination to impose a European order precisely in [international] association circles . . . with no intention whatsoever of abandoning the international . . . ties.” Just a few days earlier, Dino Alfieri, the former minister of popular culture who was now Mussolini’s ambassador in Berlin, felt so overwhelmed by the Reich’s constant creation of international institutions that he officially complained about this to the German Foreign Ministry. He suggested postponing such activities until after the war. Foreign Ministry State Secretary Weizsäcker replied that, to his knowledge, waiting until war’s end to create such institutions was precisely what Germany was doing, with a few exceptions like the European Postal Union. Weizsäcker was wrong about this. But Alfieri was complaining to the wrong ministry. By 1941, the Foreign Ministry had largely abandoned its efforts in this field. For while Hitler tolerated some Europeanist talk, he moved sharply against any activities that appeared to offer a vision of the postwar political or economic future that offered specifics or appeared to make promises. Even in March 1943, with Germany’s war effort in increasingly desperate straits, Hitler refused to consider the “Declaration on Europe” that Ribbentrop’s staff prepared. Weizsäcker noted in his diary, “the Führer is saying confidentially that the reason we must not enter into discussions about the ‘New Order’ in Europe is that the neighboring countries are all our enemies. We must get all we can out of them, but can and should promise them nothing.” But where Hitler was concerned that discussions of a future political or economic order might limit Germany’s freedom of maneuver, he evidently did not think that cultural outreach—even if it also encouraged non-German hopes for a “European” future—would similarly tie his hands. This meant that the Nazi leader with the greatest degree of freedom to communicate a reassuring vision of Europe’s postwar future was Goebbels. From mid-1941 he was able to do so from an unmatched position of power. The propaganda

E U RO P E A N C ULT URE UNDE R GE RM AN H EGEMON Y



minister’s efforts to conduct international cultural policy had met constant, bitter resistance from Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry, which, reasonably enough, claimed primacy in that field for its own Cultural Division. But Ribbentrop’s influence with Hitler fell rapidly after Hitler’s decision to invade the USSR. That invasion underscored Ribbentrop’s failure to create a broad Western European anti-Soviet bloc, leaving Germany to conduct a two-front war virtually alone. There was, as far as Hitler was concerned, no more foreign policy to be conducted. By September 1941, Goebbels gloated in his diary about the new possibilities open to him, given the Foreign Ministry’s “so extraordinarily weak position just now.” The propaganda minister was free to undertake a kind of ersatz foreign policy, which compensated for Hitler’s refusal to offer even the most basic assurances about the future status of Europe’s nations by using cultural organizations to outline a reassuring vision of a European New Order in which each nation would have its rightful place. In the following years, Goebbels carefully guarded his freedom of movement in this area. Even when, in November 1942, Hitler forbade “the planning, preparation and execution of demonstrations of a European or international kind,” the decree specifically exempted Goebbels’s right to hold such events in the German Reich. Energized and freed up by these developments, and with extraordinary political and economic resources at their disposal, the sprawling network of institutions under Goebbels’s control, including the Reich Chambers of Culture, the DKZ, the German copyright body STAGMA, and various wings of the Propaganda Ministry, undertook vast, coordinated efforts to reorder cultural fields into the international institutional form they saw as appropriate to the New Europe under Germany’s control. Goebbels launched these efforts in the cultural field in which he had invested the most energy since 1933, cinema. ◆

◆

◆

The July 1941 refounding of the International Film Chamber in Berlin was a rather different affair from the International Film Congress at which the body had first been proposed in 1935. That huge gathering of representatives of all of the film world’s many branches was replaced by a smaller assembly of powerful delegations, each of which was understood to speak for an entire national industry. The exhibitions, screenings, and white-tie balls of 1935 were replaced by a series of long working sessions. While those earlier events had aimed to introduce the film world to Germany’s claim to leadership, this one



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

bluntly assumed Germany’s dominant role. And although the word “international” was maintained in the institution’s name, its rhetorical and practical focus was now more than ever on “European film.” As delegates gathered for the opening session on July 16, 1941, cinema leaders who had participated in the IFC throughout the 1930s, such as Italy’s film boss Luigi Freddi and Sweden’s Olof Andersson, could see the inclusions and exclusions of the New Europe the Germans assembled in Berlin. New faces included representatives from Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey, as well as delegations from newly created Nazi puppet states Slovakia and Croatia. The Czech film magnate Milos Havel, formerly a vice president of the IFC, was there, but now as a member of a delegation representing the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, led by a German. The Netherlands had steered clear of the IFC throughout the 1930s. Now occupied by German troops, the country sent a substantial delegation, including representatives of the Dutch propaganda ministry and the head of the Dutch Film Union (Nederlandsche Bioscoopbond). Other occupied countries, including Belgium, Denmark, and Norway, likewise sent their leading fi lm industry figures. Even more striking were the absences. Austria and Luxembourg had been annexed to the Reich. Greece was no longer represented and Yugoslavia was replaced by Croatia alone. Poland was simply gone. By July 1941, Poland’s cinema had been crushed. German officials had seized all equipment related to film production or exhibition, along with movie theaters, which were reordered into a racist three-tiered system: “for Germans only,” “for Poles only,” and some “mixed” theaters at which Poles and Germans attended separate screenings at separate times. The former head of Poland’s national cinema council, the long-standing IFC and Venice jury member Ryszard Ordynski, who was Jewish (his parents had named him David Blumenfeld), had managed to board the SS Washington leaving Le Verdon, France, for New York on June 8, 1940. Most notable perhaps was that France—the last country to hold the presidency of the IFC—was not represented at all. Even while Nazi officials and local collaborators were busily reordering French cinema, no French representatives would be invited to play any role in the new, wartime IFC. This composition of participants reflected the political, military, and economic domination of the European continent now enjoyed by Nazi Germany. Hitler’s military victories set the tone, but the Reich’s leadership was

E U RO P E A N C ULT URE UNDE R GE RM AN H EGEMON Y



not only a matter of violence. Germany had long been Europe’s leading film nation, and by 1941 its position was truly dominant. The basic economic problem that had always dogged German cinema, how to cover the rising costs of production, had been effectively solved through the expansion of Germany’s domestic market through the Reich’s territorial annexations. Expanding cinema audiences in Germany and its occupied territories brought in growing profits, while the German industry was streamlined through the process of state consolidation that had begun in 1936 and would culminate with the creation of UFI in 1942. A new generation of film experts was being trained at the German Film Academy (Deutsche Filmakademie), created in March 1938 in Babelsberg, next to UFA’s mighty studio complex. Much talent had of course been lost to Hollywood, but UFA’s “Hollywood on the Spree” had been able to draw foreign actors and technicians into German productions, making Berlin the capital of a new, multinational central European film culture. The great breakthrough that Hitler’s military victories did promise was the prospect that Hitler’s “New Europe” could impose a continent-wide embargo, closing off the continent to Hollywood, and allowing German film to take its place. “We can view Europe today as our export zone,” Goebbels told the staff of the Reich Film Chamber on February 15, 1941. “The Americans have disappeared as competition.” This was not quite true. Hollywood still entertained audiences in several countries, including Hungary, Sweden, and even Italy. But the prospect had already spurred Goebbels to action. A ban on American movies was enforced in Germany’s occupied territories in August 1940, and in Germany itself since early 1941. To take up the slack resulting from the exclusion of Hollywood, Goebbels oversaw the creation of a vast, pan-European infrastructure for the distribution and exhibition of German movies. If buying up all of Germany’s private producers were not enough, “I will buy cinemas in every country where I can,” gloated Goebbels on May 9, 1941. “We must completely dominate Europe filmically [ filmisch] after the war.” These cinemas were supplied by a mighty new distributor, Transit-Film. Founded in November 1940, and brought under the control of the UFI conglomerate in March 1942, Transit-Film established centralized control over all German-dominated regional distributors and oversaw a robust export business. To keep audiences coming, Goebbels sought to improve the quality and attractiveness of German films, focusing in particular on raising production standards in order to be able to appeal to



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

foreign audiences used to Hollywood productions. UFI would make this possible by centralizing production, administration, and finance in Germany’s industry. Altogether, such measures served the creation of a lasting German empire in Europe. “The [German] film shown abroad,” Goebbels maintained, “is one of our most effective weapons of propaganda.” But not even Goebbels imagined that European audiences would agree to live on German films alone. German studios could in any case not hope to make enough movies to satisfy continental demand by themselves, and Goebbels was eager for Germany to focus resources on making only highquality products that could compete with Hollywood. Thus the Germandominated market of Goebbels’s dreams turned out to require not merely passive acquiescence from the rest of Europe. It required national film industries’ active engagement in creating integrated continental market structures and in producing the rest of the movies that would occupy the screen time freed up by the embargo on Hollywood. Addressing the delegates of the revived IFC in Berlin in July 1941, Goebbels could thus present German domination as a boon to the continent’s struggling national film industries. “Do not believe,” he implored, “that I pursue anything like the intention of hindering the sometimes modest beginnings of film art and film production in small countries. Germany, I can openly state, cannot by a long shot produce as many films as Europe needs, and it should not do so either. Germany sees rather as its goal to make fewer, but better films. There remains then enough room for all other countries, so that each can see its possibilities of development as guaranteed therein.” Creating imperial soft power required allies and Goebbels saw that international organizations like the IFC were an ideal way to assemble, mobilize, and motivate them. The first ally to be brought on board was Italy. Minister of Popular Culture Alessandro Pavolini had discussed with Goebbels since at least June 1940 how Germany and Italy could work together to bring about “a new economic and cultural order in the domain of cinematography in Europe.” When, in March 1941, Goebbels prepared to show the Italians the new draft statute he had had prepared for the revived IFC, he anticipated some difficulty. “We must pull the whole thing to Berlin,” he noted in his diary, “even if the Italians make a fuss. We are Europe’s great film power [Filmgroßmacht Europas].” When Goebbels presented the plan to Italian Ambassador Dino Alfieri on July 18, 1941, Wehrmacht troops had advanced an astonishing 500

E U RO P E A N C ULT URE UNDE R GE RM AN H EGEMON Y



kilometers into Soviet territory and the future seemed to belong to Germany. Alfieri was eager for Italy to participate in the IFC but was quick to make demands. He agreed to locate the IFC’s seat in Berlin but insisted in exchange on an Italian as the body’s president, suggesting Pavolini. Goebbels accepted the deal but argued that choosing Pavolini “would make for too strong a demonstration of the organization’s political character.” Count Volpi, known internationally as the president of the Venice Biennale, was the better choice. A “rather clueless” Alfieri welcomed the suggestion, Goebbels recorded in his diary, “because [the Italians] are hoping thereby to interest Volpi, with his massive financial means, in Italian film also economically. For us it is only to the good. Volpi is no expert in the film field. He will be easily neutralized by the General Secretary,” a position Goebbels planned to assign to long-time Reich Film Chamber staffer Karl Melzer. With the Italians appeased, gathering the rest of Europe was no trouble. Every country the Germans had invited sent a high-level delegation to Berlin. In his welcoming address to the delegates on July 16, Carl Froelich, the film director whom Goebbels had made head of the Reich Film Chamber in 1939, reveled in this fact. In this setting, the successful director and powerful official could confidently declare that this gathering of experts “from all the countries of Europe” constituted a “working community that is called upon and entitled to give the International Film Chamber a new form and a new content,” offering up its own valuable “contribution to the building of the new Europe.” Just what that new form and content were to be was laid out by the man who would be the IFC’s dominant figure for the remainder of its history, Karl Melzer. A forty-four-year-old SS officer who had worked in the film division of Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry since 1933, Melzer had played a leading role in the ministry’s international film politics since 1935, when he organized the International Film Congress in Berlin. As managing director, and since 1939 vice president of the Reich Film Chamber, Melzer had developed clear ideas about how an integrated European cinema ought to be organized. The first step was to reshape the IFC itself, rendering it both more powerful and easier for the Germans to control. Its new statute, signed on July 18, 1941, established that each member nation must be represented by its “central film organization,” empowered by its government “explicitly or tacitly” to join the IFC. Seeking to create an international cultural institution able to



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

wield the coercive powers of its participating states, the Germans originally demanded that each delegation enjoy explicit state approval. (The possibility of “tacit” state approval was added on the request of Sweden’s Olof Andersson, who was eager to gain access to this European network but knew that Sweden’s cautious Foreign Ministry would never approve a direct request to join.) Rejecting any notion of equality among its members, the statute established that decisions would be taken through a system that distributed votes “in proportion to the significance of the film economy of each country.” It granted much power to the institution’s general secretary— a position crafted with Karl Melzer in mind— and located the body’s permanent seat in Berlin. As Carl Froelich later explained, the goal was “to keep the organization as small as possible,” with a general council, composed of national delegations of no more than five to ten individuals per country, which would in turn entrust important questions directly to the IFC’s even smaller Presidium. In this way, Melzer elaborated, the IFC’s form of organization would “link the advantages of modern, unbureaucratic, and central administration and leadership with the advantages of decentralized specialist governing bodies.” In the context of the broader cultural politics of the new European order, the IFC’s pan-European cultural technocracy would thereby offer “a model international organization.” The most powerful structures created by the IFC’s new statute were the organization’s several “sections,” or subcommittees, the leadership positions in which were assigned to trusted staffers from the Reich Film Chamber and leading figures from fascist Italy’s state-led fi lm establishment. The three most important sections were those designed to address the three major areas of cinema life: production, distribution, and exhibition. These would lead the concrete work on the “urgent tasks” that Melzer enumerated in Berlin: organizing the European market so as to secure the provision of films, blocking “film inflation” through measures designed to steer demand, regulating ticket prices, standardizing film technology across the continent, supporting technical developments like color film and television, and promoting more intensive advertising and closer cooperation with press and radio. This array of economic and technological measures—“ordering,” “regulating,” and “steering”—were complemented, finally, by two measures “in the political field”: a ban on the distribution and even production of films “that oppose the spirit of the European New Order,” and the “exclusion of unde-

E U RO P E A N C ULT URE UNDE R GE RM AN H EGEMON Y



sired elements”— Melzer’s oblique but unmistakable reference to the continent-wide purge of Jews from Europe’s film industries. The most pressing of these issues were the remit of the IFC’s Section for Distribution, Import and Export. This was led by Günther Schwarz, a longtime staffer of the Reich Film Chamber who also worked for Cautio Treuhand, the giant holding company through which Goebbels consolidated control over the German film industry. The section’s vice chair was the Italian producer Michele Scalera, a Neapolitan property developer with close ties to the fascist regime, who, along with his brother Salvatore, had founded Scalera Film in 1938 in order to take advantage of the newly promising profit opportunities that film offered after the Alfieri law. At the section’s first working meeting, held in conjunction with the 1941 Venice Film Festival on September 8, 1941, Schwarz outlined a demanding agenda. The immediate question was how to run a profitable cinema operation on the basis of a total number of available films that had been substantially reduced by the slowdown in European production at the start of the war and, above all, because of the ban on Hollywood movies in Germany and its occupied territories. This lower number of films need not be a problem, Schwartz assured the delegates, as long as the quantity of available supply was made use of thoroughly and rationally. The section’s chief task, then, was the “regulation of market supply,” implementing continent-wide measures designed to regulate demand and increase the “exploitation” (Auswertung) of the available movies, by coercive pressure if necessary. Schwarz’s section demanded, for example, the implementation of a European standard film program— one newsreel, one feature, and one documentary (or Kulturfilm)—that would not exceed two hours. Double features must be eliminated by April 1, 1942. Members were to prepare lists of the first-run theaters in their countries, so that IFC officials in Berlin could consider which of these should be shut down. The remaining theaters would be required to make do with fewer films per year by extending their runs, whether or not these were particularly popular. Listening skeptically to Schwartz’s presentation in Venice was Eitel Monaco, the business-minded lawyer who had succeeded Luigi Freddi as head of fascist Italy’s Directorate General for Cinema. He objected that the length of a run was a question of quality, and could not possibly be the subject of a “rigid regulation.” Schwarz countered that theater owners must be made



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

aware that for the future they must expect a limited, regulated supply of new films, and it was simply their obligation to accommodate to the new reality. The days of handling one’s fi lm supply in so “irrational” a manner were over. Schwarz thereby effectively articulated the broader vision the Germans imprinted upon the wartime IFC: a wholly regulated, centrally planned, European film economy, informed by a deeper, ideologically driven category shift in how film as such should be understood: “no longer an item of international trade, but a national cultural good.” Film, by this definition, would need to be handled by the state, not by market forces, on the basis of political and cultural considerations, not popular demand. The flip side of the distribution section’s efforts to integrate the European market internally was its attempts to close it externally. That meant driving American film from the continent. At the IFC’s November 1941 meeting in Munich, needing to appeal to representatives of those European countries where Hollywood fi lms were still circulating, Schwarz and Melzer approached this issue by pressing delegates to pass a resolution banning socalled “incitement films” (Hetz-Filme). This revived the old, widely accepted demand, typical also of interwar film internationalism, but with two crucial additions. First, Melzer Europeanized the category of “incitement films” to include movies that are likely to “play European countries off against one another, to disturb European solidarity, or to wound the affected country in its national feeling.” Second, all IFC member nations must ban all productions by any studio deemed to have produced even one such “incitement film.” The Danes and Belgians reacted with alarm, recognizing that such a rule would force them to eliminate most American productions, break existing contracts, and suffer substantial economic losses. Melzer promised to find “transitional arrangements” to limit such losses but was unyielding on the broader point. “After the war,” he reassured the delegates, “business will again be done with the Americans,” but on a new and equal basis. For that, “Europe must stand united before America.” He found support for this position from the director of Slovakia’s Film Office, Pavel Čambala, for whom the principle of European solidarity demanded nothing less. But in December 1941, less than two weeks after delegates left Munich, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the United States, and the IFC quickly dropped its roundabout efforts to justify an anti-Hollywood embargo. Instead, at a hastily planned meeting in March 1942, Schwarz and Melzer unveiled the new demand: a total ban on screening Hollywood

E U RO P E A N C ULT URE UNDE R GE RM AN H EGEMON Y



movies, to be enforced “with hard consistency” through draconian penalties for noncompliance. The offending country’s films would be barred from distribution to the rest of the IFC members, and no European films would be made available to that country’s markets. Most threateningly, the IFC would cut off deliveries of film stock, a rare and expensive commodity that few countries in Europe had the technical facilities to produce. At the same meeting, distribution master Schwarz brought the good news. His calculations showed that in the 1942–1943 season European studios would produce some 475 films, meaning that European demand (now appropriately reduced and regulated) could indeed be met entirely with European supply. European autarky was at hand. The question now was simply to ensure that the appropriate films were distributed to the appropriate audiences, something the IFC could manage centrally. To that end, Schwarz circulated a quite extraordinary questionnaire, asking each delegate to explain on the spot what genre of films audiences in his country preferred, whether they preferred dubbing or subtitles, and what proportion of his country’s annual film demand should be covered from which of the IFC’s member nations. Answers to these questions would allow the New Europe’s film leaders, some fifteen men, to coordinate a kind of continent-wide planned economy of cinema. Most of the delegates welcomed the Germans’ new proposals, and offered detailed, cooperative answers to Schwarz’s questions. The Dutch, explained H. J. D. Daudey, director of the collaborationist Dutch cinema chain Nebimij, preferred comedies to costume dramas, and could accept all foreign fi lms dubbed into German, except for those from France. Most Dutchmen “do not want to hear [French superstar] Danielle Darrieux speak German.” The Finns, according to representative W. Dahl, preferred “more serious films” and musicals, rejected overtly political movies, and hoped for sixty to seventy German, twenty Swedish, and twenty-five French films, with the rest to be covered by other European countries, although “with Italian and Hungarian films no good profits have been made so far.” These delegates’ cooperative attitude had solid economic bases. As the Croatian, Finnish, and Dutch representatives pointed out, a great deal of money could be made with a smaller number of films once the American competition had been removed. Their countries had seen no decline in audience numbers, and profits were higher than ever. Danish delegate Leif Gamborg objected, however. The distinguished forty-four-year-old attorney and head of Denmark’s Association of Film



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

Distributors was unimpressed with Schwarz’s numbers, since “it was not the number of films that was decisive, but rather their economic success . . . and it must be doubted that European films can offer an economic replacement for the North American film.” He was equally scornful about Schwarz’s questionnaire. What was essential for success was “not the genre of the films, but their quality.” His concerns were drowned out by the enthusiasm of those delegates who wanted the Germans to do even more to centralize and streamline this European cinematic new order. One group called for a kind of European cinema warehouse in Berlin, where a copy of each of the new season’s productions would be available under one roof. By the meeting’s end, the delegates signed a declaration establishing as fact the IFC’s claim that Europe’s cinema demand could indeed be met by European supply, and agreeing to purge their markets of American movies by December 31, 1942, or submit to IFC punishment. But Gamborg’s question raised a real problem. How could a national film authority simply insist on a new set of movies if audiences did not like them, were not used to them, or— above all—if the movies were no good? When the IFC held its next meeting in Rome in April 1942, Melzer’s answer was to turn the IFC’s focus from Europe’s distributors to its exhibitors. Today’s European cinema owner bore a great responsibility: “He must handle the European film more carefully than he ever did the American film. He must give it preferential placement in European theaters. He must tirelessly and consistently lead the European film audience to the European film through skillful and forceful advertising.” Melzer seemed to be answering Gamborg’s objection directly: the new European audience could be made to like these movies, as long as the cinema owner of the new Europe was “inwardly convinced . . . of the quality and the strengths of the European fi lm.” Filling cinema owners with this conviction was the task of the IFC’s Cinema Management Section, led by the Belgian film official Camille Dammann. But by the summer of 1942, even IFC leaders began to acknowledge that such measures could only go so far, if, as Gamborg had suggested, Europe’s movies themselves could not satisfy European audiences. Reevaluating the numbers, Schwarz had concluded that Europe actually had an excess of film supply, “twice as high as the needs of [IFC member] countries can bear.” The problem, he scolded delegates at a July 1942 meeting of the Cinema Management Section in Brussels’ Hotel Metropole, was that Europe’s production consisted of “too many little, not exportable films.” Having evalu-

E U RO P E A N C ULT URE UNDE R GE RM AN H EGEMON Y



Nazi-Fascist “Film Europe” in action: International Film Chamber General Secretary Karl Melzer berates delegates at IFC general meeting in Rome’s Cinecittà studios, April 1942. (Istituto LUCE- Cinecittà)

ated the content of over 400 films from across the continent, Schwarz fumed that Europe’s national industries were not producing “a sufficient member of big, exportable fi lms, that in the long view—that is, even after the war— can guarantee a high level of European film.” The task of promoting the birth of the new kind of European film that would meet these demands fell to the IFC’s Production Section. Its leader was Luigi Freddi, the former head of Mussolini’s Directorate General for Cinema, who now ran Italy’s mighty studios at Cinecittà, the nationalized distributor ENIC, and the newly founded national fi lm production firm, Cines. Supremely confident of the superiority of his opinions and generally suspicious of the Germans, Freddi nonetheless shared with the IFC’s German leaders the view that industrial organization was the determining factor in quality film production. The goal of this section was ostensibly to apply that insight on a European level, so as to enable Europe’s smaller nations to produce films that were good enough to attract audiences in multiple national



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

markets. As Freddi put it in his rousing opening address at the Production Section’s first meeting, on September 8, 1941, in Venice’s Ca’ Giustinian, the section would strive “to reach the highest goals of the IFC: that is, the creation of a true European film industry, that is solid and mature in its spiritual, technical, and economic values.” Responding to the delegates’ enthusiastic interest, Freddi and Schwarz cochaired a session at the following IFC meeting in Munich. There Schwarz proposed that the IFC might serve as financial guarantor for smaller nations’ productions, and Freddi founded a five-man working group to develop a pan-European financing scheme, although this was slow to produce results. But at the IFC’s meeting in Venice 1942, now that “a satisfying balance between supply and demand has been established,” Melzer was ready to roll out production as the IFC’s third and final area of focus. This took the form of a package of measures through which Italy and Germany would support Europe’s smaller national cinemas’ effort to produce “European” films. The IFC would “take over the initiative to produce high-level quality fi lms [Qualitätsfilmen]” with the smaller nations, European stipends would bring young talent from the small nations to study at Berlin and Rome, and pan-European technical standardization would help smaller nations reach the European level. One crucial question remained: what was the “European film”? ◆

◆

◆

A first war time wave of unrestrained rhetoric on the topic of “European cinema” crested during the Ninth Venice Film Festival in September 1941. Making a major comeback after the scaled-down 1940 event, this year’s festival again served as a showcase for the revived IFC. Fifteen nations presented thirty feature films and fifty-eight documentaries. Festival administrators estimated that 50,000 people attended these screenings, including 250 journalists and around 500 film industry representatives, including producers, distributors, actors, and directors. The restored international atmosphere reminded one Italian film writer of the festival’s great days between 1935 and 1937. One difference was that the white dinner jackets of the thirties had been replaced by the gray-green fatigues worn at the many screenings reserved for soldiers. Another difference was the absence in 1941 of any trace of Hollywood. But the handwringing that had been occasioned by the Americans’ refusal to attend in 1939 was replaced in 1941 with celebration. The festival’s presentation of “Film Europe without Hollywood,” gloated one German

E U RO P E A N C ULT URE UNDE R GE RM AN H EGEMON Y



newspaper, inaugurated a new era of “the independence of European film.” Festival head and IFC President Giuseppe Volpi, speaking with aggressive tones he had never before used at the festival’s public gatherings, declared in his opening address that Hollywood’s former dominance in Europe “could no longer be tolerated in a Europe awakened to new life, with a new continental consciousness, under the renewing and creative will of the politics of the Axis.” Goebbels had already struck this theme at the refounding of the IFC in July 1941, when he called for an end to the “scandalous situation” that Europe, “the first cultural continent,” should be dependent in so important a field as film on North America, “a continent that only to a limited degree even possesses a culture of its own.” If Europe’s deep cultural superiority had not yet expressed itself on the silver screen, that was the fault of the organizational deficiencies of the continent’s national cinemas. To address those deficiencies was, as Volpi later explained, precisely the IFC’s goal: “to establish common guidelines for the art, technique, and economy of film so that the European film-world can create . . . a production that will distinguish itself from that of all other countries of the world, a production that is worthy of Europe’s high cultural traditions.” In the meantime, the German press celebrated the 1941 Venice festival as already marking a shift from an American to a European understanding of cinema, a historic transition “From Commodity to Artwork.” This vision of European cinema as an art cinema, expressive of the supposedly higher, more cultural nature of Europe itself, mobilized a well-established set of contrasts between the United States and Europe, according to which America’s culture was superficial, banal, tasteless, and above all commercialized and mass-oriented, while Europe’s was sophisticated, deep, motivated by idealistic rather than commercial values, and rooted in old and rich national traditions. This was nothing new. German cinema leaders in particular had made such arguments since the 1920s, calling on filmmakers’ “selfconfidence to create in European cinema a cultural factor which can make good the ravages wrought by the average American film’s lack of taste.” Now, translating such arguments into the language of Axis anti-Semitism, a pro-fascist Italian film journalist like Sisto Favre could greet the exclusion of Hollywood from Europe as marking the victory of the Axis over “the demo-plutocratic and Jewish organization, which had made of the cinema an instrument of invasion, of penetration, [and] of moral and social corruption.” Instead, the creation of a paternalist, state-guided film industry in



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

an autarchic Film Europe allowed him to look forward to a cinema marked by “the imprimatur of European civility, disinfected from Jewish poison.” The key word in the IFC’s official rhetoric that summed up these ideas was “quality.” This term, linked to the opposition between art and commerce, in turn evoked the classic dichotomy between Kultur and civilization. Writing in Interfilm, Melzer argued that “a European fi lm of high artistic value” would “contribute to the European audience freeing itself from the imaginings of the American civilization that seeks to make the world happy, and finding its way back to a European bearing that rests on a centuries-old Kultur.” In keeping with the belief that all true culture must express the spirit of a particular Volk, the IFC’s definition of European cinema insisted on film’s national character. Volpi celebrated the fact that the IFC’s continentwide coordination of the national industries would be able to give European film production “a unitary character” in ends and means, but not in cultural content. “On the contrary,” the IFC would strive “to highlight [Europe’s] various national and artistic characteristics.” This inter-nationalist vision had been stressed since the IFC’s refounding. Then Karl Melzer had explained that the revived organization would not promote “the production of international films. A production must remain nationally bound, since only the consistent national emphasis of a film makes it strong and interesting.” Reich Film Chamber President Carl Froelich echoed this idea in even simpler terms. “The good film,” he offered, is generally “a national film,” so that “it leads nowhere to tune a film to the key of so-called international taste.” Linking this ethical appeal to the film industry’s bottom line, IFC leaders insisted, moreover, that emphasizing national particularity was the key to success in an internationalized market. Alessandro Pavolini—who had defined fascist Italy’s embrace of inter-nationalism in 1939—made the case for this view at the IFC’s April 1942 gathering in Rome: “absolutely national films, with authors and artists and subjects that are a typical expression of the race . . . beyond fulfilling an irreplaceable function in the Fatherland, often also constitute, for foreign countries, the genuine revelation of a determined atmosphere, of a given mentality. Often a film is international on the strength of being national.” On this basis, Pavolini launched the call that summed up the IFC’s ambitions: “Today the program is: European cinema for Europe!” ◆

◆

◆

The fi lm scholar Andrew Higson has noted that the concept of national cinema has most often been “used prescriptively rather than descriptively,

E U RO P E A N C ULT URE UNDE R GE RM AN H EGEMON Y



citing what ought to be the national cinema, rather than describing the actual cinematic experience of popular audiences.” Exactly this can be said of the uses of the concept of “European cinema” during World War II. Melzer admitted as much. Presenting Italy and Germany’s package of measures to boost small nations’ production at Budapest in November 1942, Melzer concluded: “The concept of European film will then already in a foreseeable future no longer be a phantom, but a fact.” Was the “European film” of the Nazi New Order anything more than a phantom? The experiences of the members of the IFC’s Production Section—which included representatives from Norway, Belgium, Croatia, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, and Italy— offer some answers to that question. Their rather different experiences of the IFC’s role in their countries show that the IFC’s European vision had strong appeal to film leaders across the continent, who took advantage of the disappearance of American films and improved access to a European market to build up their national industries, some with substantial success. At the same time, the IFC’s talk of European cooperation was undermined at every turn by the Nazis’ rapacious and jealous attitude to their new Film Europe. Norwegian journalist and director Leif Sinding, one of the few experienced film producers and directors in the country, moved quickly to seize the opportunity the German-led new order seemed to present to drive through major reforms of film life in Norway. His goal was to stimulate domestic production in a country whose first and only film studio, the municipally owned Norsk Film, had only opened in 1935. Working closely with the Nazi commissar for film and theater, and wielding the decisions of the International Film Chamber as support, by 1942 Sinding had succeeded in creating an Axis-style centralized fi lm industry. Norway now had a State Film Directorate (with Sinding as director) in firm control over Norsk Film’s studios near Oslo, where the production of newsreels, documentaries, and features was supported by new film taxes, and could begin producing for export into the IFC’s new Film Europe. But while the eight feature films produced during the occupation may have been national, they were hardly of the “European” quality Melzer called for. The most prominent political feature, Young Wills (Unge viljer, 1943), a romance that portrayed Norway’s purported national regeneration under Quisling, elicited such hatred from Norwegian filmgoers that on at least one occasion the audience was literally made to watch the film at gunpoint. (Sinding, sensing trouble, had tried to



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

block this film’s production.) More fondly remembered is The Lost SausageMaker (Den forsvunne pølsemaker, 1941) a screwball comedy with a swinging soundtrack featuring two popular Oslo stage comedians. The collaboration experience was not without its benefits, however. After the war the Germans left behind a film production fund of 10.5 million Norwegian crowns and a suite of newsreel equipment that remained in use until the 1960s. Belgian producer and director Jan Vanderheyden similarly used his contacts with the Germans to try to forge a national—that is, Flemish— cinema. In addition to serving on the IFC’s Production Section, Vanderheyden led Belgium’s Film Guild, the new Axis-style corporatist body into which Belgian cinema was forcibly organized by 1943, and was the leading producer of Flemish-language films during the German occupation. At the IFC’s 1941 meeting in Munich, Vanderheyden spoke up eagerly in favor of supporting fledgling national industries. The plan was “so obviously to be welcomed that the IFC should move as soon as possible to produce such a [national] film,” so as to create a concrete example for the future. He may have had one of his own Flemish-language comedies in mind. But while he managed to put out four of the six fi lms produced in Belgium under the occupation, Vanderheyden did so without support from the IFC or from the film division of the Wehrmacht’s Propaganda Division, which showed no interest in promoting the birth of a Belgium (or Flemish) national cinema. Belgium, a small country wholly under military occupation, unlike the Reich Protectorate established in Norway, evidently did not qualify for such support. The newly founded Croatian state was represented on the IFC’s Production Section by Marijan Mikac, a young formerly avant-garde writer who had gained insider knowledge of the film business while working in Zagreb for the distribution wings of 20th Century Fox and Paramount in the 1930s. Shortly after the foundation of the Croatian state in April 1941, he played a leading role in Croatia’s drive to quickly develop a film infrastructure on the Axis model. A Film Directorship was founded within the country’s National Secretariat for Public Enlightenment, a Censorship Commission was set up, cinemas and production companies were seized from Jews and Serbs, and American films were banned. As head of the Film Directorship, Mikac led the foundation in 1942 of Croatia Film (Hravatski slikopis), which by 1944 had completed Croatia’s first-ever feature film, Lisinski. This dramatization of the life of the early-nineteenth-century composer Vatroslav Lisinski

E U RO P E A N C ULT URE UNDE R GE RM AN H EGEMON Y



was directed by Oktavijan Miletić, who had already directed three Kulturfilme on Croatian history and customs for Germany’s Tobis. Original music for the film was composed by Boris Papandopulo, the Croatian composer who represented Yugoslavia in the Permanent Council for International Cooperation among Composers in the 1930s. For Croatia, then, the IFC seemed to deliver on its promises, supporting the country’s entrance into the cinema age and the creation of a völkisch national culture. Slovakia’s delegate, Pavel Cambala, head of Bratislava’s newly founded Nástup-Film, lacked the equipment to produce any features. But with German help he oversaw the production of Slovakian-language newsreels as well as nationalist propaganda and documentary shorts. These celebrated the beauties of the landscape and local cultural traditions, even capturing the traditional costumes of Slovak wedding ceremonies in German-produced Agfacolor in one 1944 documentary. It may have been his awareness of the difficulties in starting up national production that led Romania’s chief IFC delegate Mihai Puscariu to express less interest in support for a wholly national product than in gaining IFC support for dual-language–version coproductions “with one of the bigger production countries.” In the end, Romania’s film industry got both. A specially constituted Italo-Romanian production company hired Italy’s Carmine Gallone to direct a Romanian cast and crew in Odessa in Flames (1942). This feature links a Moldovan family’s plight at the hands of the Soviet invaders to the recent history of the Romanian and German storming of Odessa in October 1941. The film turned the appalling battle for Odessa, which concluded with the mass murder of Odessa’s Jewish population, into a heartwarming tale of family reunification that won a prize at the 1942 Venice Biennale. In 1943, Romania’s own National Cinema Office (ONC) was able to use state funds to complete the country’s breakthrough sound feature, Stormy Night (O noapte furtunoasă), in which the French-trained director Jean Georgescu brought to life the play of the same name by Romania’s great nineteenth-century playwright Ion Luca Caragiale. Hungary’s representative on the Production Section was Janos Bingert, head of Hunnia Film Studio in Budapest. Presiding over a period of rapid growth for Hungarian fi lm, Bingert was eager to lock in the access to foreign markets required to support the enormous costs associated with producing high-quality films. In December 1940, German officials had promised the Hungarians a share of the Balkan market that Germany planned to



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

conquer. Four German–Hungarian coproductions in 1941–1942, financed from Berlin but filmed in Budapest and including the Maria Rökk vehicle Dance with the Emperor (Tanz mit dem Kaiser, 1941), seemed a promising start. But Hungary, the only IFC member besides Italy and Germany that already produced a substantial number of movies, soon found the IFC to be rather less helpful than advertised. The IFC set quotas on the export of Hungarian films to the rest of Europe, forced these films into Transit Film’s German-controlled distribution networks, and kept their distribution at numbers far lower than Hungarian officials felt their national cinema deserved. Already frustrated by these obstacles, Hungary’s delegation ran afoul of the IFC’s German leaders regarding the required ban on Hollywood fi lms. At the April 1942 meeting in Rome, the Hungarian delegation’s pointed objection to the ban was greeted with approval from the other delegates. But the Hungarians were the first to taste the sting of the IFC’s coercive powers. The Germans cut off Hungary’s supply of film stock, and the Hungarians capitulated, announcing a total ban on American films in December 1942. Embittered, Bingert and his Hungarian colleagues had come to see the IFC as a tool of the Germans’ “imperialist” ambitions. (For his part, Melzer had described Bingert back in 1936 as “quite a sly fox, who must be met with the strongest distrust.”) Luigi Freddi was head of the IFC’s Production Section, and apparently an enthusiastic supporter of the IFC’s work. From its first wartime meeting in Berlin in July 1941 to the final general meeting in Budapest in November 1942, he played a central role in Italy’s keen participation in the Germans’ wartime Film Europe. The Italians sent large, powerful delegations to the IFC’s meetings abroad and hosted four of them in Italy. In May 1942, Italian fi lm professionals were taken on a trip to the three capitals of German cinema— Munich, Vienna, and Berlin—for a two-week junket. Italy’s cinema journalists penned illustrated booklets praising Germany’s leadership in Europe’s struggle against Hollywood (while claiming credit for Italy for having led the charge with the 1938 Alfieri law). The organizers of the Venice Film Festival worked hard to accommodate the IFC and its German backers. At great expense, festival director Ottavio Croze arranged for a major renovation of the Ca’ Giustinian, a historic palazzo on the Grand Canal, to accommodate the IFC and the Reich Film Chamber during their visit to Venice in 1941. At the meetings held there, the Italians agreed to

E U RO P E A N C ULT URE UNDE R GE RM AN H EGEMON Y



new language in the festival’s statute, which finally made official the Biennale’s status as the IFC’s exclusive and official festival. These efforts reflected the Italians’ eagerness to use German power for Italian ends. Croze and Volpi positioned the Venice festival at the heart of the new European film system, while Freddi promoted the export of Italian films into a European market that German arms now protected from American competition. But like his Hungarian counterpart, Freddi also had reasons for growing increasingly dissatisfied with the IFC. During the war, Italy did manage to increase its penetration of foreign cinema markets, particularly in Southeastern Europe. But the gains that Italian film made abroad were the product of Freddi’s sharp-elbowed efforts to compete with the Germans rather than of cooperation with them, in or outside of the IFC. Ignoring the IFC’s quota systems, Freddi had overseen the purchase of prominent cinemas in Athens, Budapest, Sofia, and Zagreb. Italian firms like Scalera Film and Lux bought up shares in French studios and undertook coproductions with French, Hungarian, and Romanian partners. Freddi’s strong state-held production company, under the storied brand name Cines, used Italy’s nationalized studios at Cinecittà to make technically accomplished films and Italy’s monopoly distributor ENIC to put these before foreign audiences. These efforts won a place for Italian cinema on foreign screens that marked a big improvement over the past, but still cut a relatively modest figure. Nonetheless, Italy’s cinema expansionism was more than enough to aggravate Goebbels. “The Italians,” he grumbled in his diary already in June 1941, “are creating every sort of difficulty for us. They want a piece of the pie at all costs; on this subject there is no reasoning with them.” The promise of the IFC, to create an integrated, protected Film Europe in which each nation could produce a distinctive national cinema, had not been an outright lie. Goebbels really did need the rest of Europe to produce films. At the same time, he would brook no competition that might threaten his desire, recorded in his diary in May 1942, to “take a similar course in our film policy as pursued by the Americans on the North American and South American continents. We must become the dominant film power in Europe. Films produced by other states should be allowed to have only local and limited character.” Germany alone must produce the blockbusters that would take the place formerly occupied by Hollywood. And Germany alone



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

must hold the reins to the new international infrastructure that would make lasting German power possible. ◆

◆

◆

The International Film Chamber was only one part of that emerging infrastructure. It was supported by a growing and increasingly interconnected network of Nazi institutions, all seeking to create an integrated European cultural space under German control. The restructuring of the IFC overlapped with and was assisted by the ongoing effort to overhaul the entire system of international organizations undertaken by the German Central Conference Office (Deutsche Kongress-Zentrale, DKZ). In October 1941 DKZ director Karl Schweig gave an explicitly European cast to his project to make the Brussels-based Union of International Associations into the center of a German-led “New Order of International Organizations in the New Europe.” Building on what he correctly perceived to be the growing role of international nongovernmental organizations in vast domains of modern life, Schweig envisioned a New Order in which these organizations’ nongovernmental character would be systematically eliminated as each national delegation was brought under state control. Germany would then construct a New Order of cross-border cultural and intellectual exchange on the basis of a web of bi-national agreements. The loose, multiple, and overlapping networks of international connections would be replaced by a single system, centered in Berlin, where it could be observed and steered by the Nazi state. To strengthen this project’s legal basis, Schweig began at this stage to collaborate closely with another of the Nazis’ new continental ventures, the International Law Chamber (ILC). Schweig and the ILC’s chief jurist developed a fully fledged law of international institutions, laid out in a three-volume, multi-language series of publications. ILC lawyers also helped Schweig defend the DKZ’s leadership against attacks from the German Foreign Ministry. Ribbentrop’s lieutenants dismissed the Schwieg’s restructured UIA as an insignificant, inappropriate basis for a postwar New Order, while Foreign Ministry jurists conducted a sophisticated struggle over the legal definition of international institutions in order to support Ribbentrop’s own claims to primacy in this field. With Goebbels’s support, however, the DKZ forged ahead, applying its new legal forms to various fields, publishing a multi-language bulletin, and collecting information on international institutions across the continent for inclusion in the DKZ’s Hand-

E U RO P E A N C ULT URE UNDE R GE RM AN H EGEMON Y



Nazi internationalism gives form to Hitler’s Europe: The 1943 Bulletin of the Union of International Associations, now under the control of the German Central Conference Office (DKZ). (Courtesy of Union of International Associations, Brussels)

book of International Federations and Associations, on which work continued at a busy pace. In its revived, wartime form, the International Film Chamber precisely embodied the DKZ’s Nazi inter-nationalist model. Melzer’s invitation to the July 1941 conference was directed to governments and demanded that these should send representatives with plenipotentiary powers, thus applying a standard normally used only for diplomatic conferences. The IFC’s revised statute, prepared in Berlin months before the conference, likewise reflected core elements of Schweig’s vision as codified by the International Law Chamber. Th is was what Melzer was referring to when, in Berlin in July 1941, he called the refounded IFC “an exemplary international organization.” Cooperation between the two institutions, which Melzer had suggested in Venice in September 1941, came to pass in August 1942, when the Slovakian mountain resort town Strbské Pleso hosted a joint meeting of the Law Section of the International Film Chamber and the Film Law



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

Section of the International Law Chamber. The cooperation between these two agencies addressed the pan-European harmonization of law related to entertainment taxes, standardized transnational contracts, and royalty payments. Sessions were led by the German jurist Georg Roeber. A copyright expert who had led the International Film Chamber’s legal section already in the 1930s, he now held positions in both institutions and edited the leading German journal on intellectual property law. Delegates drew up legal opinions to be presented for implementation to the governments of IFC member countries, planned pan-European publications on film law to promote continental integration around a German-Italian standard, and set up a system of constant communication among film law rapporteurs in each country to facilitate centralized oversight of the implementation of the IFC’s recommendations. Although film was a young field, Roeber concluded, still “nationally and internationally only in the beginnings of an order,” it could now celebrate having “two international organizations that address its concerns.” But to create a truly integrated European film market required the harmonization of the continent’s copyright regimes. And here the International Film Chamber gained support from yet another German–Italian “European” institution: the Union of European Copyright Societies. Founded in October 1942, this grew out of the long experience of German–Italian cooperation in the International Confederation of Authors and Composers Societies (Confédération international des sociétés d’auteurs et compositeurs, CISAC). Germany’s authors’ rights society STAGMA and Italy’s SIAE had already angled their way into positions of leadership in CISAC in the later 1930s. The high point of the Axis’s efforts to penetrate CISAC had come in 1936, when the body held its annual conference in Berlin under the presidency of Italian propaganda official Dino Alfieri. Goebbels’s man at STAGMA, the well-traveled polyglot and enthusiastic National Socialist Leo Ritter, was elected one of CISAC’s four vice presidents. A few years later, Alfieri’s successor as CISAC president was to be none other than Richard Strauss. Strauss was assisted by Secretary General René Jeanne, a French film writer who was no stranger to the German–Italian–French cultural cooperation of the later 1930s, having served on the juries of the Venice Film Festival in 1937 and 1938. With the outbreak of the war, and Jeanne’s angry resignation in March 1940, the Germans and Italians were free to begin a more overt takeover of international cooperation in the copyright field. Strauss appointed

E U RO P E A N C ULT URE UNDE R GE RM AN H EGEMON Y



the Italian jurist Ugo Gheraldi to take Jeanne’s place, and STAGMA and SIAE positioned themselves as the basis for a European group that could carry on work even while the war made it impossible for CISAC to assemble all its members. In December 1941, CISAC’s European members agreed to relocate the secretariat of CISAC from Paris to Berlin, where Gheraldi took up his work at new offices— a move overseen (and paid for) by STAGMA. The Italians moved quickly to make this reconfigured CISAC work for the promotion of Italy’s interests. At the June 19–21, 1941, meeting of CISAC’s legislative commission in Rome, Italian jurists proudly unveiled Italy’s copyright reform law of April 22, 1941. Unlike Nazi Germany, where no copyright reform had in fact been passed, Mussolini’s Italy had a major legislative achievement to point to, and its lead author, Eduardo Piola Caselli, eagerly presented Italy’s reform as offering “new international principles for the protection of authors’ rights.” But maintaining a kind of rump version of CISAC did not satisfy the Germans’ ambitions. By April 1942, after consultations with the Italians, Ritter was ready to inform Richard Strauss about the radical new plan: “we are about to put the Confederation [CISAC], which is international in the prewar sense and includes the British and North American copyright societies, somewhat on ice, while we foster a Union of European [authors’] societies under the leadership of Germany (and Italy) that is healthy [lebensfähig] and adapted to the current circumstances.” This new arrangement was made official in October 1942. At a conference that month in Berlin, representatives of authors’ societies from Italy, Belgium, France, Hungary, the Netherlands, Romania, several Scandinavian countries, and Switzerland unanimously accepted the joint German–Italian proposal to found the Union of European Copyright Associations (Vereinigung der europäischen Urheberrechtsgesellschaften, VEU), with a permanent seat in Berlin. The president of Italy’s copyright society SIAE, the novelist, publicist, and fascist official Giorgio Maria Sangiorgi, was voted this new body’s president for one year. The more power ful position of permanent general secretary went to the German STAGMA officer Clemens Graf von Westfalen, echoing the invidious German–Italian division of labor established in the International Film Chamber. As Ritter explained in a celebratory publication, this new European institution would meet one of STAGMA’s great wartime goals: “to prepare already now the future continental cooperation in the cultural-economic and copyright fields.”



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

What was the goal of German-dominated “continental cooperation” in these fields? The VEU brought a crucial aspect of the economics of modern cultural life under German control, making Berlin the economic capital of European culture. International control over copyright and royalties systems would break the leading role of France’s SACEM and grant the Germans continent-wide powers of censorship. Already in the late 1930s, the Germans and Italians had used their leading position in CISAC to enshrine a “principle of nationality,” whereby a composer must be represented by the national rights body of the country of which he was a citizen. As émigré composers found out, this regulation could be used to cut them off from their royalties. For example, STAGMA chief Leo Ritter had tried to bully the highly successful Austrian operetta composer and recent émigré Robert Stolz into returning to Vienna by noting that Stolz was, since the Anschluß, a German citizen. On the basis of the principle of copyright nationality, either Stolz could join STAGMA or have no protection of his rights at all. British friends came to Stolz’s aid by inviting him to join Britain’s Performing Rights Society, which vociferously defended the individual composer’s right to choose representation regardless of nationality. A Nazi-fascist Union of European Copyright Associations would be able to block such moves in the future through an absolute application of the nationality rule. The organization thereby took advantage of the economic realities of modern musical life to create a pan-European system of control. The days of the cosmopolitan, denationalized European artist-exile were over, since the cultural New Order would make that way of life economically impossible. Art would be national, or it would not be. The issue of copyright in film was of particular interest to the new union. For that, it turned naturally to the International Film Chamber. In April 1943, VEU President Sangiorgi and Leo Ritter met with IFC General Secretary Karl Melzer in Rome along with Italian film officials and jurists. Film was on the agenda at the VEU’s general meeting in Madrid in May 1943, and was the topic of a follow-up meeting of a special Film Copyright Commission, bringing together seven representatives of the VEU with as many from the IFC, scheduled to take place in Venice in September 1943. The Italians adjusted quickly to this European institution. Here, just as they had through CISAC, they sought to promote their pioneering 1941 copyright reform law as the new European standard.

E U RO P E A N C ULT URE UNDE R GE RM AN H EGEMON Y



By 1943, then, the International Film Chamber was working closely with the DKZ, the International Law Chamber, and the Union of European Copyright Societies, revealing the degree to which these institutions served a single project: an effort to create an integrated European cultural market that corresponded to and supported the autarchic political-economic “great space” (Großraum) envisioned by Nazi leaders as the defining feature of the New Order. Clearly, the “conference and convention mania” of 1941 and 1942 was doing far more than producing propagandistic talk about “European solidarity.” It was laying the institutional bases for a continental structure of control that would help to legitimate German dominance and render permanent Hitler’s antidemocratic reconstitution of Eu ropean life. The supports of this structure were, ironically, international organizations, but ones that had been reorga nized to embody the Nazis’ statist, anti-cosmopolitan, and inter-nationalist vision of cultural relations among peoples. In the film world, creating a structure, like the wartime IFC, that corresponded to the DKZ’s New Order of international institutions could build on the fact that many countries already had state film bodies or hastened to create them. But if the Axis were to extend its model to other cultural fields, it would need to begin by creating ser viceable international organizations, not what Ritter called “international in the pre-war sense,” but cast in the new, Nazi-fascist model. In the field of classical music there was no such panEuropean institution of the new type. There was, however, an obvious place to start. ◆

◆

◆

In Vienna, a giant, European-themed “Mozart Week” was held from November 28 to December 5, 1941, to honor the 150th anniversary of the composer’s death. Representatives of seventeen European nations laid wreaths on the square in front of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, while composers, music critics, and state officials from across the continent heard performances of six Mozart operas, as well as the Requiem conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. Foreign delegates at this event were evidently so impressed by the level of state support for classical music and musicians in Hitler’s Germany that several of the foreign guests declared that all European nations should create similar institutions on the German model. A rumor quickly spread that a “European Composers’ Union” had been founded in Vienna, and ner vous



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

officials of the Propaganda Ministry soon contacted the DKZ to confirm whether this was true. It was not. The German-led institution that might have arranged such an event—the Permanent Council for International Exchange among Composers—had in fact been inactive since its last conference and festival in Frankfurt in June 1939. Events planned for 1940 had been canceled at the outbreak of the war. This rumor reached the Propaganda Ministry in January 1942 at what was, from the Germans’ point of view, a propitious time. The Reich Chamber of Culture had already shown interest in organizing classical music as part of an International Chamber of Culture. Although that plan was not to bear fruit, the idea was still alive enough for the Propaganda Ministry’s foreign division to continue proposing names of possible collaborators. Moreover, it was in these first months of 1942 that Leo Ritter and his staff at STAGMA were developing their plan for the Union of European Copyright Societies. What could be more logical than to respond to this evident European interest by simply reviving the Permanent Council? Building on the web of personal contacts established in the 1930s, it could prove an effective and quickly restarted basis for the kind of pan-European penetration sought by the Propaganda Ministry. Led again by Richard Strauss, it would offer a natural institutional link to STAGMA’s European copyright work. For these goals to have most effect, it would need only to be recast according to the organizational principles of the DKZ’s so-called “new order of international organizations.” DKZ officials already had a copy of the Permanent Council’s 1935 statutes on file, collected for the DKZ’s Handbook of International Federations and Associations, so they knew what changes needed to be made. Indeed, the Propaganda Ministry had already begun exploring the prospects for restarting the Permanent Council. One guest at Vienna’s Mozart Week was Emil von Reznicek, the composer who had served as Germany’s delegate to the Permanent Council through the 1930s. He had come to Vienna with instructions from the ministry to sound out non-German Permanent Council members about their attitude to reviving the organization with a revised statute. But when Reznicek himself raised objections to a reorganization that would bring the council under direct state control, he was quickly sidelined. Instead, in February 1942, STAGMA’s Leo Ritter initiated the process by contacting the former general secretary of the Permanent Council, Belgian composer and composers’ rights leader Emiel Hullebroeck. Ritter informed him of the plan to create a European copyright body, and

E U RO P E A N C ULT URE UNDE R GE RM AN H EGEMON Y



the two discussed an appropriate date for refounding the Permanent Council. Hullebroeck suggested the convenient solution of restarting the council at the European copyright conference, but Ritter disagreed. Wary of appearing to sully classical music with baser concerns, he understood the value of keeping the musical institution at a certain distance from a purely legal and economic event. In March 1942, with Goebbels’s express approval, invitations to a meeting in Berlin were sent out to a selection of composers and conservatory directors from all the conquered, allied, and neutral countries of the New Europe, and to most of the earlier delegates—although not to those from Britain or France, nor from nations that had been marked for repression, like the Poles or the Czechs. The text of this invitation specifically invoked the desire, “expressed by the European composers gathered at Vienna’s Mozart Week, to intensify and place on a broader basis the work of the Permanent Council.” Internal Propaganda Ministry correspondence, however, explained that the main goal in doing this just then, and of doing it quickly, was “in order to suggest to the delegates a change of statutes that takes into account the currently valid guidelines for the creation of international organizations.” The Nazis’ New Order for European culture was coming to the world of classical music, and the first step was to create an institution that was up to the task. Swedish composer Kurt Atterberg was among the thirty-seven musical representatives from eighteen European nations who checked into Berlin’s Hotel Kaiserhof on June 13, 1942. But having rushed to Berlin on short notice, he and fellow delegates simply waited around in the hotel, while the Germans addressed their first order of business: coming to a private, preliminary agreement on the council’s revised statute with the Italians. Reaching this agreement took far longer than expected. Italy’s delegation, led now not by Adriano Lualdi but by the Ministry of Popu lar Culture’s powerful director general for theater and music, Nicola De Pirro, categorically refused to accept one of the central elements of the Germans’ proposal: that the council’s permanent seat be located in Berlin. After placating the Italians by agreeing that the organization’s seat would rotate between Berlin and Rome, the German hosts called a second preliminary meeting, this time with those delegates who, having represented their countries in the Permanent Council in the 1930s, were entitled to vote on changes to the existing statute. With Reznicek and Hullebroeck home because of illness and Lualdi



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

also absent, this group included only Atterberg (Sweden), José Forns (Spain), Peder Gram (Norway), Yrjö Kilpinen (Finland), and Jón Leifs (Iceland). Welcoming these delegates on June 14, 1942, was Richard Strauss. By 1942, the composer had become even more estranged from the National Socialist hierarchy than he had been after being purged from the Reich Music Chamber in 1935. A low point had been reached in February 1941, when Goebbels screamed at and humiliated the once mighty Strauss in front of a group of composers and officials for having dared to challenge Goebbels’s authority to change the distribution of music royalties. But Goebbels still believed that Strauss was “our greatest and most valuable, most representative musician,” and made sure that foreign composers’ point of contact with Nazi Germany—whether through STAGMA or through a revived Permanent Council—would be Richard Strauss. Strauss, in turn, had grim new reasons to lend his prestige to Goebbels’s efforts. Fearful for the safety of his Jewish daughter-in-law and officially “half-Jewish” grandchildren, Strauss had moved in 1941 from his home in Bavaria to Vienna, where he sought out the protection of Vienna Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach, flattering the Nazi official’s pretensions to being a great cultural patron. If Strauss’s presence at this meeting in Berlin was a reassuring sign of continuity, two new faces alerted the delegates that the Germans had something in mind beyond simply reviving the institution in its original form. One, assisting Strauss, was Gerhart von Westerman, managing director (Intendant) of the Berlin Philharmonic since 1939. The other new face was none other than Karl Schweig, head of the DKZ and administrator of the Union of International Associations. True to the masking tactic Goebbels had employed since the mid-1930s, Strauss presented the meeting as an organic outgrowth of the musical world, a response to the desires that “European composers” had expressed at Vienna. But since “our Association is currently a wholly loose structure with no legal basis,” Strauss explained, Dr. Schweig had kindly joined the meeting in order to explain the “small corrections” that would now be applied to the statute. “To our great surprise,” Atterberg later wrote, Schweig unveiled a new set of by-laws for the institution “that none of us knew of.” Designed to make the Permanent Council into an international organization of the new type, its features included a permanent seat and office; explicit responsibility for international economic issues related to music; a demand that delegates should officially represent their states; and a reapportionment of seats,

E U RO P E A N C ULT URE UNDE R GE RM AN H EGEMON Y



whereby two seats would go to Spain and Finland, and three each to Italy and Germany, instead of one to each country as had been the case before the war. All of these were features familiar from the new statute imposed on the International Film Chamber in 1941. Finally, remolded in this way, the body would be given an appropriate new name: the International Federation of Composers (Internationaler Verband der Komponisten). The preprepared text of the speech Strauss was to deliver at this meeting readied him for a short session: “Does anyone have any objections to the supplemented version? I note—no one. I thank you, gentlemen.” Things did not go as planned. As the meeting’s detailed minutes show, Atterberg and his colleagues objected to every one of these novelties. They rejected the document’s focus on economic questions. They rejected the demand that each delegate represent his state, with Atterberg pointedly noting that “in our democratic countries . . . the state has nothing to do with matters of relevance to composers.” They rejected the new name, insisting that at the very most, the new “International Federation of Composers” come after the traditional “Permanent Council.” The delegates reacted most sharply to the suggestion that Italy and Germany should have more votes than other countries. Hoping to see a freely interacting Europe again in the future, they agreed to the proposal only on condition that France also be assigned three votes upon its eventual return to the institution. To ensure this, Kilpinen and Forns were willing to relinquish the extra delegates that the draft statute had assigned to Finland and Spain. Finally, they rejected the suggestion of a permanent seat. Such a measure could only create trouble, Atterberg noted: “You have it already with the Italians.” Spanish composer José Forns disliked even the solution that Strauss had just painstakingly hashed out with the Italian delegation. Rotating the institution’s seat between Berlin and Rome, he opined, would permanently inscribe the politicized bad feelings of the war years into the institution’s structure and impede France’s return to the council. “But there is no international institution without an office,” Schweig objected, and “without a permanent official seat, the organization does not exist as an international association and will also not be mentioned in the [DKZ’s] international Handbook.” Unmoved, the Norwegian composer Peder Gram insisted that all institutional reforms were beside the point, since what made a musical organization powerful was its prestige in purely musical terms: “I do not believe that the Council can gain in power just because the delegates



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

are named by their states; no, each delegate must be suggested by the members as an outstanding composer, that is important. And if we are in this Handbook or not, that is quite unimportant. And then, that one country should have so many delegates and another only so many, that does not suit us either. We are simply free composers; we have our president, which means that his name and his authority suffice.” Seeing the meeting begin to head off the rails and eager to avoid trouble, Strauss pleaded with his fellow composers to sympathize with his situation and simply go along with the proposed changes: “The circumstances for us now are such that we have to make certain concessions and must take the wishes of the government into account. That is true for us in Germany as much as for the Italians. We cannot ignore the wishes of our governments. . . . I cannot go for example to Dr. Goebbels and say: ‘The Council has decided this or that.’ He will then simply answer me: ‘I do not recognize the Permanent Council at all.’ ” In any case, Strauss argued, the changes proposed by the Italian and German governments were “of a more or less formal nature,” and would not change the institution’s character. Westerman, on the other hand, had heard enough. He berated the foreign composers with an unvarnished declaration of the stakes of the moment, along with a remarkably clear explanation of the true goals behind the institutional reorganization of international cultural institutions like the Permanent Council. “We stand today,” he thundered, “in a wholly New Order of Europe. We must draw the consequences of these circumstances. This New Order in Europe demands indeed also that all of cultural life be brought into harmony with political life. For us, that is for Italy, Spain, and Germany, there are no longer any such free associations as the Permanent Council was thus far.” This, he explained, was why the Germans insisted on direct state linkages for international cultural policy: “We have no power of penetration, which for us is important and essential, unless we are anchored in state institutions.” Eventually, a compromise was reached whereby the Germans accommodated several of the delegates’ concerns. The statute’s final language allowed for exceptions to the demand for state recognition, stipulated that the institution’s seat would rotate between Rome and Berlin only as long as the war lasted, and promised three seats also to France, but only after the war. The institution’s name would remain as it was, but with “International Federation of Composers” appended as a subtitle. Reporting on this meeting to

E U RO P E A N C ULT URE UNDE R GE RM AN H EGEMON Y



his fellow composers back in Stockholm, Atterberg proudly recounted, “We Nordic delegates soon managed to dismiss the most irrelevant suggestions, and the changes that remained . . . were completely insignificant.” But here Atterberg revealed how little he understood—or was willing to present at home— about the real purpose and outcome of the meeting. The institution had been revived and its statute revised with the core of the Nazis’ proposed reforms intact, giving the institution an official, interstate character under Italian– German leadership. When the entire group of composers could at last be assembled, on June 15, 1942, it appeared that revising the statute had been the main point of bringing the composers together at all. After the new compromise version was read out loud (in French), and several more changes were accepted, the meeting turned to a relatively brief discussion of what musical events each member country could hold in the Permanent Council’s name in the coming year. These would of necessity be relatively modest events, Westerman acknowledged, as large-scale music festivals were understood to be impossible during the war. One got the impression that by the time this topic was raised, the Germans had already achieved all they wanted with this gathering. The Italians had not. While most countries proposed a few exchange concerts, some perhaps to be broadcast by radio, the Italian delegation announced a mighty series of events, including symphony and opera programs devoted to the composers of other Permanent Council member nations in Rome and Milan, the continuation of the International Music conference in Florence, and at least one concert on behalf of the council in Venice. The Italian delegation was clearly eager to stake out a leading position in this new musical Europe. This was signaled as well by the composition of the delegation itself, which included the prominent modernist composers Francesco Malipiero, Ildebrando Pizzetti, and Goffredo Petrassi, who was named the council’s secretary. Viewed today as one of the most significant Italian composers of the twentieth century, the thirty-eight-year-old Petrassi had left his position leading Venice’s La Fenice opera house in 1940 to teach composition in Rome, but he remained a powerful figure in the web of personal and political connections that shaped musical life in fascist Italy. He served, along with Lualdi, Dallapiccola, and Alfredo Casella, on the commission tasked by Education Minister Bottai with achieving “autarky in musical education” by purging all foreign works from musical teaching materials used in Italy. (Exceptions were to be made for a few student classics like Bach’s



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

Well-Tempered Clavier or Chopin’s Études). Yet, as ever, this chauvinism on the domestic scene was paralleled by eager European outreach. In a September 1942 address on “International Relations in the Field of Music,” given in his new capacity as representative of the revived Permanent Council, Petrassi praised Mussolini’s regime for protecting the musical avant-garde, and celebrated Italy’s leading continental role. No nation could match the “extraordinary spectacle of a prodigious rebirth of the arts,” marked by “such a broadly European consciousness,” offered by wartime Italy. Short-lived though it was, the wartime incarnation of the Permanent Council offered another example of the way Italian intellectuals actively participated in Naziled wartime cultural institutions in order to pursue Italy’s own claims to European hegemony. When Goebbels received the composers on June 17, he was satisfied with the outcome of the meeting, not least with regard to the strained relationship with the Italians. “We succeeded at these talks,” he noted in his diary, “in again pushing through Richard Strauss as president for five years. The Italians had earlier made grand claims, but they retreated somewhat under our pressure.” The National Socialist music establishment soon laid down its own, official version of what happened at Berlin. Readers of the Propaganda Ministry’s 1943 “German Music Yearbook” learned that through statutory changes led by Germany and Italy the Permanent Council had indeed been transformed into the International Composers’ Federation (Internationale Komponisten-Verband), representing the “most essential landmark of cooperation among musical-creative powers in the New Europe.” Unlike the multinational exchanges of the old Europe, moreover, the cooperation promoted by this federation rejected the notion of music as an “international language.” It was “no play with words” to describe the works of timeless masters like Mozart not as international, but “supranational” [übernational ], able to enrich and be enriched by other traditions, but ultimately expressive of the composer’s national identity, rooted in his Volk. This vision of an inter-nationalist musical Europe was updated and mobilized for war also by aiming it more squarely against Germany’s (and thus, supposedly, Europe’s) enemies. A German music journalist could claim in 1941 that Hitler’s invasion of Belgium had liberated traditional Flemish music from the suppression it had suffered at the hands of “an international Parisian music establishment” supported by Jews and French-speaking intellectuals in Brussels. The old belief in music’s universal, nonnational

E U RO P E A N C ULT URE UNDE R GE RM AN H EGEMON Y



character lived on among Germany’s Anglo-American enemies. But they needed to invoke this bankrupt vision of music “to justify the fact that even in wartime their concert programs must be composed in the main of works by German masters.” The revival of the Permanent Council advanced a vision of European music in which what was European was precisely the commitment to national traditions, which Europe’s enemies either lacked or sought to subvert. Ultimately, however, questions of musical content were evidently of less interest to the Germans than those of organization. What musicologist Pamela Potter has noted regarding National Socialist music policy in Germany can be extended to Europe as a whole: that “the greatest impact of Nazism on music” was not to be found in the regime’s inconsistent application of a set of vague musical principles. It lay, rather, “in more tangible policy measures of the Hitler regime: reforming musical professions, restructuring musical organizations and purging German musical life of Jews and political opponents.” It lay, that is, in a state-driven restructuring of the cultural sphere, first in Germany, then in Europe. ◆

◆

◆

Why should much of the rest of Europe have supported what seems so obviously to have been a ploy for German domination? A few years after the end of World War II, Italian film boss Luigi Freddi addressed this question as he recalled the attitudes he had encountered in the Europe he knew best, “from Bratislava to Budapest, from Bucharest to Sofi a, from Athens to Tirana”—places he had visited not least through his work with the International Film Chamber. In all these cities, he recalled, government leaders and public opinion alike shared “an unexpressed fear for what the future, especially the spiritual future, could be in the case of a German victory, which at that moment was not a hypothesis but a more or less welcome certainty. And so each of these countries tried to begin to construct certain defenses, above all in the ethical and cultural fields.” These worries explained “the concern in every sector to create structures that could somehow survive,” including state-led efforts to strengthen national film industries. The point was to find one’s place in Hitler’s New Europe, taking advantage of the moment’s opportunities, like Germany’s apparent support for national film industries, composers’ bodies, or authors’ rights societies, in order to create national structures that could be robust enough to defend those national cultures, including from Germany.



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

Although Freddi did not admit this, his description of these smaller countries’ fears was not far off the mark of the Italians’ motivations, as well. The Italians too were concerned to secure a prominent place in the New Order, to seize the moment to forge a powerful national industry, and to use Germany’s military conquests (and anti-Hollywood embargo) to expand Italian film outward into areas over which Italy claimed imperialist influence, especially Southeastern Europe. Italians could likewise embrace the rhetoric of a Europe of nations. Cultural nationalism was after all the ideological fundament of Italy’s educated classes, even those opposed to fascism. The many essays by Italian intellectuals invoking the distinct, “complementary” nature of Italy and Germany’s cultural traditions embraced Axis internationalism alongside the German ally, while at the same time highlighting and defending Italy’s own claims to autonomy and influence in Europe. But as the war continued, such declarations served mostly to reveal the Italians’ growing fear that the new European cultural order was being created not on any German–Italian “European” basis, but simply on the basis of total German dominance. More and more Italian intellectuals openly nurtured doubts about this form of inter-nationalist Europeanism. What did a völkisch vision of European culture, emphasizing the closed-off, racially distinct quality of its national cultures, have to offer a country like Italy, that had always derived prestige from the border-crossing influence of its cultural achievements? Small but telling signs of this dissatisfaction emerged at the 1942 Venice Film Festival. Most of the screenings were of German movies, and Goebbels again attended in person, joining Pavolini for a joint inauguration of the festival. In a glossy number of the magazine Der Deutsche Film, Goebbels’s powerful deputy inside UFA, Reichsfilmintendant Fritz Hippler, introduced the German films of the 1942–1943 season with a promise: “At the end of this war after our victory, great new forms of community will exist in which men will not only create better social conditions, but also higher cultural values.” Unimpressed, Italy’s film critics noted that the outcome of these cultural values was a new provincialism. One reviewer dryly observed that while visitors to earlier editions of the festival had witnessed “appearances of Marlene Dietrich and the Duchess of Windsor,” the 1942 edition’s attendees could “now say that we are familiar with the rural and coastal life of Portugal, Spain, Finland, Sweden, and Hungary.” The inter-nationalist character of European culture under German hegemony solved certain problems, but it created new ones. How could the

E U RO P E A N C ULT URE UNDE R GE RM AN H EGEMON Y



Germans appeal to the concerns of Europe’s periphery of small states without eroding the cultural prestige that the new European institutions were designed to create? Th is question came to the fore in what was perhaps the boldest aspect of the Nazis’ wartime cultural campaign: the effort to define and control “European literature.”

■

7 The Uses and Disadvantages of a völkisch European Culture

Compared to film or classical music, literature was a particularly thorny cultural field for the Nazis. With its book-burnings and the emigration of high-profile writers from Germany after 1933, Nazi Germany had been the bugbear, rather than the organizer, of international literary gatherings in interwar Europe. Attacks on Nazism and fascism rang out at events like the International Congresses for the Defense of Culture in 1935 and 1937, the 1937 meeting of the International PEN Club, and the 1937 conference on “The Future of Letters,” organized by Paul Valéry at the behest of the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation. Literature as such seemed to be dominated by the ideological left. Literary writers dominated the Parisbased Association for the Defense of Culture, created in 1936 to continue the work of the Moscow-sponsored International Union of Revolutionary Writers. Literature was the branch of cultural life on which the Soviets lavished most attention in their cultural outreach abroad. Building on long traditions in the socialist movement, Moscow made the written word “central to the Soviet Union’s claim for international dominance.” The authors promoted by the Nazi regime were no match, in terms of international prestige, for the renowned German novelists and poets who had fled, nor for the international group of prominent writers who took up outspoken opposition to Nazism and fascism. The export of German literature in translation had collapsed. The regime’s own international literary institution, the Union of National Writers, had disappeared rapidly after its foundation in 1934. After 

U S E S A ND DI S A DVA NTA GE S OF A V ÖL KISCH CU LTU RE



that, it was no surprise that Goebbels laid greater emphasis on an International Film Congress in 1935 than on international literary outreach. Nevertheless, throughout the later 1930s the Nazis assiduously cultivated writers across Europe through their network of binational cultural associations, by courting Scandinavian writers through the Nordic Society, and by hosting foreigners at the “Writers’ Home” on Germany’s Baltic coast. Germany’s Foreign Ministry promoted literature exchanges through treaties that the Reich signed with foreign states, including the German-Italian Cultural Accord of 1938. At the center of Nazi Germany’s web of international literary connections was Hans Friedrich Blunck. The jurist and novelist, who had been president of the Reich Literature Chamber (Reichsschrifttumskammer, RSK) from 1933 to 1935, traveled across Europe throughout the 1930s to promote the literature of National Socialist Germany. In 1936 he had founded and led the so-called Foundation for German Foreign Work (Stiftung des deutschen Auslandswerks), which used cultural connections to conduct a form of soft diplomacy for Hitler’s Reich. In the spring of 1941, the RSK asked Blunck for his advice regarding the idea of a German-led International Chamber of Culture. The RSK was busily collecting suggestions and potential contacts for this project, as the Propaganda Ministry had demanded of all the Reich Chambers of Culture. Blunck doubted the feasibility of such a large-scale initiative. But, recalling his own earlier efforts, after Germany’s 1934 exit from the PEN Club, to advance Nazi interests through personal contacts with foreign writers, he suggested a German-led “Friendship Club of Literature” (Freundschaftsclub des Schrifttums), with local committees in each participating country. This would offer a better, more manageable means of mobilizing literature to serve Germany’s imperial interests. The literature of Nazi Germany had friends abroad, and much could be gained from organizing and mobilizing them. As Blunck knew, moreover, by 1941 the conditions for the success of such an effort had improved radically since the mid-1930s. Nazism’s literary enemies had been imprisoned, murdered, or chased from the continent. Paris, the great center of antifascist literary life, had fallen to German occupation. By the late 1930s, the Soviets’ ambitious effort to lead an antifascist literary international had collapsed amid Stalin’s purges and the turn toward Russian nationalism. Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry had already come to the same conclusion. The ministry’s Literature Division (Schrifttumsabteilung) had seized control of policy matters related to books and publishing from the RSK three



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

years earlier. On June 16, 1941, a representative of one of the Division’s suboffices, the Promotion and Advisory Office for German Literature (Werbeund Beratungsamt für das deutsche Schrifttum), was dispatched to Weimar, the small but iconic city in the Thuringian woods that, as the home of Goethe and Schiller, was the very symbol of the “classical” golden age of German literature. Each autumn since 1935 the city had hosted the national book fair called the Week of the German Book and, since 1938, the Greater German Writers’ Meeting (Großdeutsche Dichtertreffen), a giant literary conference at which Goebbels mobilized the city’s rich symbolism to rally German writers around the Nazi regime. But the 1941 rally would be different, as the ministry representative explained in June to the city’s mayor, a transport official, and representatives of seven Weimar hotels. In addition to some 350 Germans, this year’s meeting would include fifty foreign writers, brought to Weimar from across Europe at the ministry’s expense. There, after being impressed by Nazi Germany’s commitment to the high-minded values of literature— even in the midst of war— and inspired by the living legacy of Weimar, these writers would be invited to participate in a new, panEuropean literary organization. The time had come to try again to seize a hegemonic role in European literary life, and to do so by creating yet another international cultural institution. Only a few days after this meeting in Weimar, Germany invaded the USSR. But this expansion of the conflict only raised the significance of the plan, now attuned to the Propaganda Ministry’s growing emphasis on the idea of Europe. Throughout October, a small group of foreign writers were led across the Reich on an all-expenses-paid study tour of the New Germany. And on October 24, 1941, thirty-seven writers from fifteen European countries gathered in Weimar as guests of the Propaganda Ministry’s Literature Division. Representatives of Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Norway, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland concluded their stay with an enthusiastic agreement to a proposal the Germans had worked out long in advance: to create a European Writers Union (Europäischer Schriftsteller-Vereinigung, ESV). Officially founded at a smaller meeting in March the following year, the union held another conference, this time including forty-seven non-German writers, in Weimar in October 1942. Th is institution and its conferences marked a high point in the Nazi effort to redefine European culture in the ser vice of Hitler’s empire. They made a powerful impression

U S E S A ND DI S A DVA NTA GE S OF A V ÖL KISCH CU LTU RE



on their non-German participants, and the inter-nationalist, völkisch model of European literature the Union embodied spoke powerfully to many of these writers’ values and interests. But the institution’s meetings would also reveal the limits of that effort—particularly in the eyes of the Germans’ Italian allies— and witness the beginning of its collapse. ◆

◆

◆

Celebrating the foundation of the European Writers Union as another example of the lively extent of German cultural life even in the midst of the war, Propaganda Ministry State Secretary Leopold Gutterer told a German audience in 1942 that the new union “will serve the preservation of GermanicEuropean culture and the extermination [Ausrottung] of the culturedestroying powers of Jewry, of Bolshevism, and of Plutocracy.” According to the union’s charter, however, signed at the March 1942 meeting, its mission, “in a time when the culture of Europe is threatened,” was “to make possible contact and the unmediated exchange of ideas among European writers; to cultivate constant indirect contact through book and journal; [and] to support the external life-conditions [of writers] through international agreements.” This gentler tone—promising to facilitate cross-national exchange and defend professional interests while mobilizing unimpeachably internationalist language familiar from any number of interwar organizations—was one of several ways in which this new organization was a typical creature of Goebbels’s wartime cultural Europeanism. The institution’s statutes structured the European Writers Union in ways that paralleled similar German-led efforts to seize institutional control over continental cultural life. Its permanent seat was in Weimar, Germany, where it was officially registered with the legal status of a corporate body. Its president, the novelist Hans Carossa, and its general secretary, the young publicist and novelist Carl Rothe, were both German. Its non-German membership reflected the Nazis’ political and racial New Order. Writers represented Germany’s allies and satellites from Scandinavia to the Balkans, but no British, Czech, Polish, or Russian writers were present, and no Jews from any country. The Germans invited state officials from each participating country to select a delegation of between five and eight writers for the October 1941 meeting and, for the March 1942 meeting, to nominate one official “permanent delegate” to represent each country. Once approved by union President Carossa, this delegate, whom the Germans insisted be a state-recognized national representative, would nominate further members



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

for that country’s national section (Landesgruppe). Each section was linked to the ESV through a binational agreement with Germany. The union’s General Secretary Carl Rothe traveled across the continent to oversee the creation of the union’s national sections, which in several cases included many more writers than those who attended the conferences in Weimar. The role of the Italians in the European Writers Union, formally at least, resembled the other cases as well. An Italian writer, the essayist and novelist Giovanni Papini, was made one of the organization’s vice presidents. At the same time that the Axis partner was granted this prominent position, the Germans were motivated to create this institution in the first place by competition with their Italian allies. According to RSK director Wilhelm Ihde, it was crucial that Germany’s effort to create a European “counter-movement or union against the PEN-Club” proceed quickly, “as one day it is to be expected that the Italians . . . will come out with such a union.” Making sure that Germany dominated the union likewise served the German publishing industry’s efforts to dominate the European market. In 1940, the city of Leipzig, whose annual fair had long been a nodal point of the continental European book trade, had planned to launch a new bid to be the very center of European print culture with a mighty exhibition to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Gutenberg’s invention of the movable type printing press. The outbreak of the war reduced this massive plan to a modest Gutenberg Commemoration, but the continental scale of the industry’s ambitions remained. In June 1941, the chairman of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association (Börsenverein des deutschen Buchhandels) declared to the association’s members that the “European political New Order [Neuordnung]” demanded a unitary, German-dominated “book order” (Buchordnung). As a first step, all new production must be shifted to the Antiqua typeface. Readers outside Germany could not read the gothic, traditionally “Germanic” typeface Fraktur, and this was keeping German books from competing in Western and Northern Europe. Propaganda Ministry officials organized German book exhibitions in cities across the continent and enthused about the role of “the German book in the reconstruction of Europe.” These continental ambitions were facilitated by the emergence of a giant, centralized, state-controlled book publishing apparatus, led by the party’s central publishing house under Nazi press boss Max Amann—a move with strong parallels to the development at the same time of the UFI film conglomerate. The European Writers Union intersected

U S E S A ND DI S A DVA NTA GE S OF A V ÖL KISCH CU LTU RE



with this drive to seize a dominant position for Germany in the economics of European literary life. Representatives of Germany’s largest publishers were invited to attend the union’s meetings and mingle with the visiting European writers. The Propaganda Ministry rewarded ESV participants by giving their works preferred status for translation and publication in Germany, and punished those who refused to collaborate by barring new translations of their works. Altogether, then, the European Writers Union followed a well-established model. Like the International Film Chamber and the Permanent Council, it was a small, highly centralized and German-based institution, with small, easily controlled meetings. Its strong powers over larger national bodies in each participating country, however, granted Germany capillary reach into the organization of a sphere of cultural life in other nations. These similarities are all the more striking because the Propaganda Ministry’s Literature Division had conceived of and founded the Writers Union without consulting the lawyers and planners of Karl Schweig’s German Central Conference Office (DKZ). DKZ officials only learned of the union’s October 1941 foundation when it was reported in German newspapers. They had to ask union President Carossa to fill in one of the DKZ’s standard questionnaires, so that Germany’s latest international organization could be included in the DKZ’s forthcoming Handbook of International Federations and Associations. Schweig’s expert on the New Order of international institutions, the International Law Chamber jurist Helmut Aschenbrenner, complained to Schweig that this writer’s body could have used the DKZ’s expert guidance. Having also read of the European Writers Union in the newspaper, Aschenbrenner was particularly annoyed at the new institution’s decision to call itself “European,” rather than “international.” This choice was a sign of “a very unhealthy development, in particular in so far as here a German claim to leadership, which could encompass the world, is limited to Europe.” The creation of “European” organizations seemed to him a reckless gesture that would surely “provoke the creation of American and Asian regional associations,” whose members would be harder to bring under German control after the victory. Aschenbrenner was an expert in his legal field, but here he misunderstood the situation. This Writers Union’s “European” character was not some organizational mistake, but the institution’s ideological core, reflecting considerations specific not to the field of international institutions, but to that of



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

literature. Unlike the International Film Chamber or the Permanent Council for International Cooperation among Composers, a new multinational organization for writers could not simply reactivate a mission or a membership from the 1930s. Nor could it build on strong right-wing literary networks that predated the Nazis’ rise to power. On the contrary, all existing international writers’ organizations embraced liberal, socialist, or communist political visions. This had been the case ever since the birth of the first international writers’ association, Clarté, founded in 1919 by the French socialist writer Henri Barbusse. It was true of Europe’s most prominent bodies, like the PEN Club, the Soviet-sponsored International Union of Revolutionary Writers, or the Association for the Defense of Culture. Their commitment to internationalism, communicated, for example, by the title of the state-sponsored Soviet journal International Literature, reflected their political values. In order to propose a form of transnational literary exchange on a rightwing political basis, Goebbels’s agents had to reject the concept of an “international” literary union, with its potentially global and therefore troublesome, leftist-democratic implications. Instead, they proposed a body for European literature, one rooted in geographical and racist specificity, able to be defined against non-European enemies and thereby to serve as a vessel for an ultranationalist and antidemocratic vision of culture. The task of the European Writers Union was to articulate and give organizational form not to “international” or “world” literature, but to a literature that matched Hitler’s empire: nationally rooted, autarchic, hierarchical, and European. The Germans’ effort to create a “European” literary institution was probably the first of its kind. But the idea of European literature was hardly a blank slate. It was, on the contrary, a notion rich in literary, political, and ethical implications. For National Socialists to seize the mantle of European literature required in particular a radical inversion of the meanings the concept had acquired during the great age of literary Europeanism that followed World War I. In the interwar decades, continent-wide commemorations of great writers, like those for Dante in 1921 or Goethe in 1932, as well as a spate of literary biographies, helped firm up an elite canon of European, as opposed to merely national, writers. Newly intense work on translation in the 1920s brought about an “internationalization of the European literary space.” In the interwar period’s increasingly confusing market of cultural goods, marked by

U S E S A ND DI S A DVA NTA GE S OF A V ÖL KISCH CU LTU RE



modernist experimentation as well as mass magazines, the label “European” was parsimoniously deployed by powerful critics as a mark of literary distinction. “The European writer,” declared the prominent French translator and critic Valery Larbaud in 1925, “is one who is read by the elite of his country and by the elites of other countries. Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust, Pirandello, etc., are European writers. Authors whose works are popular in their native countries but which are not read by the elites of their countries are . . . let us say, national writers.” The flip side of this coin was a condescending attitude toward merely “national” literature among those, like Larbaud, who were in a position to determine which books and writers would enjoy international success: “All that which is ‘national’ is silly, archaic, disreputably patriotic. . . . It served a purpose under certain circumstances, but that time has passed. There is now a country of Europe.” As these words suggest, this definition of European literature was ideologically charged, with a clear link to liberal politics and to the rationalist, cosmopolitan, and individualist values of the Enlightenment. It was also powerful. Critics like Larbaud, associated with the widely influential Nouvelle Revue française, were part of the Parisian literary establishment that determined, through translations, reviews, and prizes, which works would achieve international success and which authors would earn “European” status. Their ability to do so built on the continent-wide prestige of what literary scholars call the French model of literature, which assigned literary value based on a text’s faithfulness to purportedly timeless, universal standards of taste. But by the later 1930s, Paris’s literary hegemony was in decline and its vision of European literature had entered into crisis. Its cosmopolitanism was drowned out by that decade’s strident nationalism. Its star fell along with the political and economic liberalism to which it was linked. Its openly elitist emphasis on communication among urban intellectuals seemed out of phase with the great popular mobilizations—the packed dance halls, party rallies, and general strikes—that characterized the 1930s and that stimulated the minds of intellectuals on the left and the right. Its emphasis on modernism was left behind by the 1930s embrace of literary realism. These changes made it easier for critics of this vision of European literature to come to the fore. And such critics were many. Conservatives and nationalists had never accepted the literary hierarchy determined in Paris. By presenting as “European” only works that enjoyed success on the international literary market, that model denied the title of European literature to most of the literature



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

written in Europe. Its praise for modernist experimentation denied prestige to the realist novels that nationalists saw as the very fundament of their effort to forge a distinctive national literature. For critics, especially those on the periphery of Paris-centered literary networks, it was easy to see that this cosmopolitan vision of European literature reinforced the hegemony of Paris. For the radical anti-Semitic nationalists who gained ground across Europe in the late 1930s, this literary Paris represented the same forces that the Bulgarian writer Fani Popova-Mutafova, who attended the Weimar conferences in 1941 and 1942, called “the Parisian Jewish-Masonic clique,” responsible for “the lies and cruelty of the peacediktat” of Versailles. According to the scholar of German literature and pro-Nazi publicist Erwin Wäsche, these political-literary forces had much to answer for. Conservative writers across Europe had struggled since World War I to offer a “truly poetic word” in the face of a chaotic world. “But these writers, filled with a European sense of responsibility, who represented the slumbering consciences of their peoples, were condemned to a catacombexistence” by an international literary hierarchy that instead celebrated less “authentic” works by the powerful writers of the Versailles order (SystemGrössen). In the German-led New Order, this situation would be reversed, and this, Wäsche argued, was the meaning of assembling writers in Weimar. The formerly power ful “international clique . . . of scribblers” had been chased from the continent. And while the straggling remnants of a “dying European intellectualism” met at the PEN Club’s International Congress in London in September 1941, “fourteen nations, represented by the voices of their poets, offered . . . a spontaneous declaration of faith to the Reich as the appointed guardian and shaper of the European New Order.” Weimar had witnessed nothing less than a total reordering of the hierarchies of literary taste and value in Europe away from a cosmopolitan international literature, to a “spiritual deployment of the nations” of Europe, to be effected through the institutional means of the European Writers Union. A European literature of nations, liberated from the international forces that had nearly strangled conservative cultural expressions in the years of liberal hegemony: this was the literary New Order promised in Weimar. And it was a promise that Germany could make with credibility. For while Nazi Germany’s ability to declaim on the future of European letters in 1941 rested on the Reich’s military dominance, Germans could claim credit for the one great challenger to the Parisian-centered notion of European literature and

U S E S A ND DI S A DVA NTA GE S OF A V ÖL KISCH CU LTU RE



the “French model” of literature it embodied. Th is rival model was the national-romantic, or “German” model of literature. Drawing on the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder’s “identification of language with nation and of poetry with ‘the genius of the people,’ ” this model located the value of a literary work in its faithful expression of a par ticu lar national spirit, rather than in its adherence to supposedly universal and timeless standards of taste. In the nineteenth century, Herder’s ideas had spread across Europe, offering the basis for a “new form of literary legitimacy that . . . stood in contrast to that of the French universalist model.” Discord among supporters of literary nationalism—illustrated in Germany by the way conflicts over literary modernism felled the Union of National Writers in 1934—had always doomed efforts to articulate a coherent “national” model of literature. In 1941, however, literary debate in Germany was silenced, the prestige of the French model was in ruins, and Europe lay at Germany’s feet. Goebbels and his staff were ready to make a racist, anti-Semitic version of this “German”-national understanding of literature into the ideological basis of a New Order of European literature. ◆

◆

◆

On the morning of Friday, October 24, 1941, Wilhelm Haegert, the thirtyfour-year-old head of the Literature Division of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, gave the opening address of the Greater German Writers Meeting’s first “working session,” and offered a particular welcome to Germany’s European guests: “While in the East the German and allied armies strike the lethal enemy of European culture, here in Weimar, this sacred site of the German spirit, an intellectual selection of all European nations has come together, in order to lay the foundations for the coming common work.” Haegert then read out the names of each foreign participant, beginning with the Italians. As he did so, Haegert mapped out the new literary Europe. Unsurprisingly, this literary geography corresponded to the political map of Hitler’s European empire. It included representatives of the newly founded puppet states Croatia and Slovakia and excluded the literatures of wartime enemies, like Britain and Russia, and those of peoples with no place in the racial New Order, like the Poles, the Czechs, or Jews from any country. It corresponded to Hitler’s New Order in ideological terms, too, with several guests whose sole distinction was their loyalty to their country’s local proNazi or collaborationist literary organizations, as well as some of Europe’s most prominent fascist intellectuals. Long a leading voice of French radical



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

conservative thought, the French novelist and poet Pierre Drieu la Rochelle had called for European unity since the 1920s and had embraced National Socialism as the basis for a European renewal already in 1934. After the fall of France, he accepted the editorship of Paris’s iconic Nouvelle Revue française from the city’s Nazi occupiers, and outlined Germany’s European vocation for the journal’s readers. French essayist Robert Brasillach, one of the most widely read literary critics in 1930s Paris, ran the collaborationist newspaper Je suis partout, the voice of Paris’s fascist, anti-Semitic, and later proNazi intelligentsia. The writer and critic Ernesto Giménez Caballero was Spain’s leading right-wing intellectual, whose passionate and eccentric support for Franco’s regime called for Spain to undertake a national, and later global, regeneration on the basis of a Catholic-fascist universalism. The European Writers Union, he would later declare, realized the pan-European fascist vision that he had already outlined in Rome at Mussolini’s 1932 conference on Europe. More importantly, the list of foreign writers present in Weimar gave form to a model of literary Europe directly at odds with the Parisian-cosmopolitan vision of European literature. The continent’s northern and southeastern literary peripheries were uncommonly well represented, with several writers each from Norway and Finland, Romania and Bulgaria. These countries, and others besides, were represented, moreover, by avowedly “national” writers— authors whose work eschewed urban, “international” modernism, instead using realist literary styles to forge self-consciously national narratives that were often set in a rural village or farm. Milo Urban, who directed the Slovakian nationalist journal Gardista, had distinguished himself through the success of his novel The Living Whip (1927), which narrated the positive rejuvenation of a Slovakian peasant village through the experience of the First World War. The Flemish dramatist and poet Felix Timmermans was well known for the children’s book The Christ Child in Flanders (1917), which celebrated the love of nature and uncomplicated religiosity of peasant and small town life. The Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, winner of the 1920 Nobel Prize for Literature, was renowned across Europe for fiction that evoked a life of simplicity and closeness to nature, like his hugely successful Growth of the Soil (1917), and for his outspoken hostility to the modern West’s commercialism and obsession with technology. Hamsun declared his support for the Writers Union in a telegram, which was read aloud to the participants and made much of in the German press.

U S E S A ND DI S A DVA NTA GE S OF A V ÖL KISCH CU LTU RE



Several of the writers expressed their cultural nationalism through a focus on the deeply meaningful relationships between people and particular regional landscapes, including the Dutch author Pieter Sybesma, French novelist Jacques Chardonne, Transylvanian-Hungarian novelist Joszef Nyirö, or Norwegian Lars Hansen, whose travel literature set amid the harsh beauty of the North Pole sold well in Germany. Highlighting such writers capitalized on the broad interest in literary regionalism during the 1930s and 1940s among authors and critics who embraced attention to the particularity of place as an antidote to the purportedly rootless decadence of urban modernity. The literary styles represented by this group showed how different the European Writers Union was to be from the Nazi-led Union of National Writers of 1934. At that earlier union’s grand banquet in March 1934, Gottfried Benn had praised the Italian futurist Marinetti for having punctured the “rotten and leathery mass of the bourgeois novel” through modernist experimentation. In 1941, the Propaganda Ministry’s effort to rally European writers recognized the essential nation-building role of literary realism in nearly all of the continent’s literatures. Modernist challengers to that style of writing were kept far away. This focus on rural and regional themes did not mean that the writers were all provincials, however. Several were multilingual urban intellectuals who nonetheless combined their cosmopolitan role as scholars and translators with the most aggressive nationalism. The Finnish poet and right-wing nationalist Veikko Antero Koskenniemi, who in 1940 penned new lyrics for the hymn in Sibelius’s Finlandia, had translated Balzac and Goethe into Finnish. The Bulgarian historical novelist Fani Popova-Mutafova was a leading figure in interwar Bulgaria’s intellectual life who spoke French, Russian, Italian, and German. Antun Bonifačić, cultural director of the foreign office of Croatia’s Ustasha regime, had studied at the Sorbonne and published a book on Paul Valéry. The coming together of these writers in Weimar in October 1941 represented, as ministry official Wilhelm Haegert explained to them on the evening of their arrival in the city, “a manifestation of the new European spirit, of which the German Reich is the bearer and asserter.” Over the following days, this first gathering of European writers in wartime Germany dazzled its foreign participants with a mighty display of German wealth, organization, sophistication, and literary distinction designed to support the Reich’s claim to lead the cultural reorganization of the continent. To



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

strengthen this claim, all things German were carefully cast in a European light, starting with Weimar itself. “Just as,” Haegert intoned, “there once flowed from Weimar the rivulets of the German spirit which were to come together to form such a mighty river, so today from Weimar radiates the spiritual power of the Europe unified by Germany.” The city, where Goethe wrote Faust and received Napoleon, lent itself well to this task. Weimar’s modest scale, charming wood houses, and elegant baroque libraries evoked a Germany of quiet cultivation and aesthetic refinement. Through its connection to the indisputably European figure of Goethe, the city’s name held powerful emotional resonance for many non-German writers long before it was linked to Germany’s ill-fated democratic republic, which had been founded there in 1919. Erasing the city’s democratic and avant-garde legacy— Weimar had, for example, been the home of the first incarnation of the famous Bauhaus art school— Goebbels had deployed the city’s traditionalist cultural cachet throughout the 1930s. Key events of the regime’s literary politics, including the annual German Writers Meeting, met in leafy and urGerman Weimar rather than in gritty, cosmopolitan, and “Jewish” Berlin. In 1941, Goebbels extended this politics of symbolic appropriation to a European level. A high point of this effort came on Sunday, October 26, at the tomb of Goethe and Schiller. As the Danish nature writer Sven Fleuron later reported, “We stood in the chapel in a half circle around the tombs, Reichsminister Dr. Goebbels in our midst. Not a word was spoken. Two enormous laurel wreaths were lowered onto the sarcophagi. The national salute followed, a minute-long silence— and the simple but gripping ceremony was over.” That evening the writers were taken to see a performance of Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris in Weimar’s Nationaltheater. Claiming Goethe as an expression of the racial superiority of the German Volk was a standard element of the Nazi mobilization of the German literary legacy. But the regime had always rejected the European significance that had been ascribed to Goethe in the 1930s, when liberal intellectuals from across the continent celebrated the poet as embodying “a spiritual vision, European and/or global, of universal literature.” In 1939, the Propaganda Ministry had ordered its newspaper service to avoid the phrase “Goethe, der Europäer.” Now, however, Goebbels was ready to recast Goethe as a symbol of the Nazis’ alternative, inter-nationalist Europeanism. Explicitly countering cosmopolitan interpretations, the writers were told at one Weimar session that Goethe

U S E S A ND DI S A DVA NTA GE S OF A V ÖL KISCH CU LTU RE



knew well that a man achieved “personality” only through “ser vice to his Volk.” In these ways, Weimar and Goethe were presented as embodiments of the distinctive German concept of Kultur. While the cosmopolitan literary world that centered on Paris could only be marked by the glittering but superficial values of Zivilisation, the European literature that gathered in Weimar would be characterized by spiritual depth, antimaterialist idealism, and national rootedness. But at the October 1941 gathering in Weimar, Kultur, too, was Europeanized. Opening the Week of the German Book on October 26, Goebbels used the concept of Kultur not to define Germany’s specificity in contrast to Western Europe, but to articulate a European cultural bloc, led and defended by the German–Italian Axis, in opposition to a Zivilisation that he ascribed to the continent’s non-European enemies: “Once again the oldest and most valuable culture-nations [Kulturvölker] of the European continent have stepped forward to defend . . . an ancient cultural legacy [Kulturerbe]. . . . What, in contrast, does the vacuous and insipid prattle of uncultivated [ungebildeter] writers mean, who defend a sterile Zivilisation, which is not worth living, much less dying for?” Goebbels invited his foreign guests to see their own national traditions as part of a single European legacy that must be defended from its culturally hollow but technologically powerful non-European enemies: Americanism, Bolshevism, and the (supposedly non-European) Jews. When a group of the foreign writers posed to have their picture taken beneath Weimar’s famous statue of Goethe and Schiller, they created an embodiment of this Nazified model of European culture, mobilized for racist war while deriving legitimacy from the prestige of the finest achievements of the German literary tradition. But what place could Europe’s various literatures hope to occupy in a new cultural Europe so totally dominated by Germany? On Friday, October 24, the conference’s organizers dispatched the North German dialect poet Moritz Jahn to address precisely this issue. He did so by mobilizing Germany’s status as heir to the national-romantic model of literature associated with Herder. “The German,” he explained, “is in a real sense a Philolog, a friend of language . . . it has never been in his nature and will never be in his nature to put down or suppress a foreign language.” As evidence, Jahn pointed to the Reich’s protection of Germany’s regional dialects, which showed that Hitler’s Germany understood that “the destruction of the dialects would mean



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

European literature in the shadow of German Kultur: Participants in the 1941 European Writers Conference gathered in front of the Goethe and Schiller Monument, Weimar, October 1941. From l.: Arturo Farinelli, Alfredo Acito, Fani Popova-Mutafova, Propaganda Ministry representative Wilhelm Haegert, Pieter Sybesma, Kaare Bjoergen, Svend Fleuron, Einar Hovald, and Antun Bonifačić. (SZ-Photo/IBL Bildbyrå)

a new, fateful victory for civilization over nature.” Jahn thus reassured the foreign writers about their future in the European New Order. “We know,” he said, “that your work must be and is based on particular national [völkisch] and individual bases.” But the defense of Europe’s multinational cultural diversity required European imperial political unity under Hitler, since only Germany could repel the Bolshevik onslaught and defeat the true enemy of Europe’s characteristic cultural diversity: plutocratic capitalism, behind which stood “the determining, direction-giving role of Jewry . . . in all countries.” Between the conference’s lectures and meetings, the foreign participants were treated to an array of other entertainments, including lavish meals at Weimar’s famous Hotel Elephant, tea at the Tiefurt Mansion, a chamber music concert in the Wittumspalais, and, on the meeting’s last evening, a

U S E S A ND DI S A DVA NTA GE S OF A V ÖL KISCH CU LTU RE



reception hosted by Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel in Weimar’s City Palace. Arranging these luxuries in the midst of war showcased Germany’s wealth and organizational capacity. More importantly, the meals and receptions forged a new, multinational space of pan-European sociability, purged of snobby French critics, literary leftists, and Jews, overseen by handsome, smartly uniformed German officials, and lubricated by ample wine and beer. These events thereby lent credence to the Nazi claim to be creating a new cultural order that was European, rather than only German, in spirit. The upscale tone of these entertainments flattered the foreign writers’ sense of their own value and suggested German respect for their status as bourgeois intellectuals. As a whole, the program in Weimar thus suggested that the New European writer could retain the rootedness in the Volk typical of the national writer while enjoying access to the cosmopolitan networks of the European, “international” writer. Writers could surrender their autonomy, but still enjoy its advantages. ◆

◆

◆

Appreciating that literary prestige depends on the appearance of relative autonomy from political control, Goebbels’s agents worked hard to grant the appearance of autonomy to every step of the creation of the European Writers Union. Creating a German-dominated institution had motivated the Propaganda Ministry to invite foreigners to the German Writers’ Meeting to begin with. But ministry officials orchestrated the meetings so as to make the idea for a Writers Union appear to be the spontaneous suggestion of the foreign guests. The union’s financing came from the Propaganda Ministry but was funneled through apparently voluntary donations from German writers. There was a “pressing propagandistic interest,” Literature Division staffer Paul Hövel noted, “not to allow the Ministry to be in evidence in this important federation,” since “doubtless a backlash could be expected if it were to come out that the Ministry financed the whole project.” The choice of the German novelist Hans Carossa as the union’s president, apparently the spontaneous suggestion of the foreign writers, had likewise been arranged in advance. As Carossa recalled in his postwar memoir, he was approached almost immediately upon his arrival in Weimar by Propaganda Ministry officials who, in a “half insistent, half threatening manner,” offered him the presidency of the organization before it had even been created. A sixty-three-year-old novelist who lived in rural Bavaria, where he maintained a practice as a family doctor, Carossa was an ideal choice to embody the

The bourgeois sociability of Nazi Europeanism: Fani Popova-Mutafova and German novelist Joachim von der Goltz take tea at the Tiefurt Mansion near Weimar, October 1941. At rear table: Ernesto Giménez Caballero (with glasses) and Alfredo Acito. (Photo by Hanns Tschira for Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, November 1, 1941. Ullstein/IBL Bildbyrå.)

U S E S A ND DI S A DVA NTA GE S OF A V ÖL KISCH CU LTU RE



nonthreatening and depoliticized image the Writers Union sought to project. He had enjoyed international success with works whose classical style, inspired by Goethe, reflected a quiet, religious, nature-loving humanism that rejected the modernist experimentation and literary politicization of the age. It was widely known, moreover, that in 1933 Carossa had turned down his admission to the Nazified Prussian Writers’ Academy and had never joined the Nazi Party. But as Carossa later understood, he, “as an unpolitical man, was precisely the most suitable for the political goal that they had in mind.” The Propaganda Ministry pursued the same goal in choosing the forty-oneyear-old publicist and novelist Carl Rothe as the union’s general secretary. With his well-tailored suits and excellent English and French, Rothe gave the institution a young and sophisticated face. Crucially, while he had demonstrated his loyalty to the National Socialist literary apparatus with a lecture on “Overcoming the Western Spirit” at the 1940 German Writers’ Meeting, he was also not a party member. These efforts did not succeed in masking the political significance of the events in Weimar. The French delegation, for example, was greeted back in Paris by the furious hostility of the city’s clandestine pro-Resistance press, which addressed the delegation’s members directly. “You knew,” declared the literary writer and resistant Jacques Decour, “in departing for Germany, exactly what you were doing. You knew that Hitlerite Germany seeks the annihilation of French culture . . . ; you knew— since the Hitlerite leadership makes no mystery of it—that the ‘New Order’ reserves for Paris the role of an obscure provincial town, that Berlin dreams of becoming the intellectual capital of an enslaved Europe.” The Nazis’ European claims on Weimar elicited only Decour’s disgust: “Goebbels in Weimar is Mephisto playing the role of Faust.” Captured by French police in February 1942, Decour was handed over to German occupation authorities, who executed him. From an NBC recording studio in Los Angeles, where he could not be silenced by a bullet, Thomas Mann also scorned Carossa and the non-German “Quislingwriters and literary cooperation-stooges” in one of his German-language radio broadcasts for the BBC in August 1942. “Like this writers’ conference,” he declared, “Hitler-Europe is a macabre farce, completely and utterly: the most heinous perversion and violation of a great idea.”  Such condemnations were irrelevant to Goebbels, who celebrated the October 1941 conference as another cultural-political victory. The atmosphere of the gathering had been friendly and festive, and Weimar’s suggestive,



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

European setting had clearly made a strong impression. “The French,” he recorded in his diary, “even cried.” The Writers Union’s potential was exciting: “Every great writer in Europe has a great circle of followers, and one must win them over through the writer.” He believed, moreover, that “just now the mood is extraordinarily open; the point then is: strike the iron while it’s hot!” Moving quickly, the Propaganda Ministry asked officials in each participating country to nominate one representative for a follow-up meeting in Weimar in March 1942. There the delegates signed the European Writers Union’s carefully pre-prepared statutes. These gave the organization a structure that embodied the model of a völkisch, inter-nationalist European literature centered around Germany. Each national section would choose which writers should represent their nations in the literary Europe that would rally each October in Weimar. There, cooperative writers would be favored with publishing opportunities and translation contracts, while those who refused union membership would be barred from Europe’s new, German-centered literary network. The union thereby stripped the decision about which writers and styles qualified as “European” from the hands of the Parisian literary elite and the workings of transnational market forces and assigned it to the national literary and political elites who ran each national section. In a manner parallel to the selection processes of the Venice Film Festival after 1938, the choice of composers for the festivals of the Permanent Council, or the enforcement of the nationality principle in the newly founded Union of European Copyright Societies in 1942, the structures of the European Writers Union thereby promoted the dream of a European literature in which every writer was rooted in a particular nation. The cosmopolitan expatriate, that archetypal figure of the modernist writer, would be rendered impossible. Gone too would be the kind of modern literature for which, as the literary scholar Franco Moretti writes of James Joyce’s Ulysses, “national boundaries have lost all explanatory power.” No respectable international institution was without a journal, and the Propaganda Ministry’s next step was to create one. Eager not to lose time, ministry officials simply retooled an existing literary review, the prestigious Munich-based Die Literatur. Launched in May 1942 under the editorship of a Propaganda Ministry official, Europäische Literatur featured essays by many of the union’s non-German members recounting their travels in the Reich and photographs documenting the pan-European sociability of the

U S E S A ND DI S A DVA NTA GE S OF A V ÖL KISCH CU LTU RE



Writers’ Conferences. Die Literatur’s densely packed pages of text in Fraktur were abandoned for an airy, modernized look with internationally readable Latin fonts and tasteful illustrations. The journal maintained a scholarly profile by carrying articles that addressed the central concerns of the emerging field of comparative literature studies. Celebrating “the old German tradition of being, on the basis of its own creative powers, a connector among European neighbors,” each issue included an “Overview in Europe,” featuring short reports on literary or publishing events in each member state, laid out on the page so that each nation was assigned a space more or less equal to the others, with Germany first and Italy second. Even so, ministry staffer Paul Hövel still felt the need to reaffirm that the Writers Union, “in which the best pens of all nations of Europe have found one another, has nothing to do with Paneuropean fantasies of the old style, just as little with the desire of writers to walk among the armchair politicians, and nothing in the least to do with a PEN-Club of another sign.” This vision of a literary Europe of nations, as opposed to a denationalized literary international, had real attractive force. Goebbels had seen this for himself in October 1941. His mockery then of the PEN Club—as a gang of losers (Penn-Klub, making a pun on the German word Penner, or bum) that “no longer has the right to speak for intellectual Europe”—was rather crass. But such attacks, he knew, appealed to writers who saw that organization as representing the liberal and cosmopolitan literary system from which they had been excluded. Joszef Nyirö, the Transylvanian-Hungarian short-story writer and novelist who represented Hungary in the Writers Union, was one of several ESV members who interpreted Europe’s recent history in terms of a clash of literary models. These models mapped onto the opposing sides in the worldwide political and economic struggle. During the interwar period, he reflected bitterly, “the world view, the international dogmas, the false humanism, [and] the materialistic and Masonic forms of life . . . were smuggled in among our ranks by the purposeful, sly, and tirelessly persevering liberal press and ‘literature’ ” in the ser vice of “the wanton imperialism of international plutocracy.” The European Writers Union, he enthused, recognized that “the national and racially-bound” were always “the true kernel of all literatures.” The union’s birth marked “the decisive steps toward the creation of a new spiritual community in Europe.” But not all participants were equally impressed by the Germans’ vision for a new



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

European literature. The Germans’ closest allies would prove a particular source of trouble. ◆

◆

◆

Italian officials first heard of the idea of inviting foreign writers to Weimar in April 1941. In August, the German Embassy in Rome asked the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to suggest between five and eight authors to attend the October 1941 gathering in Weimar, all of whom would also be invited on the study-tour. No mention was made of the plan to found a European Writers Union. Italian authorities worked seriously on the matter, in a debate over whom to send that involved the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Popular Culture, and National Education, Mussolini’s Presidency of the Council of Ministers, the National Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (IRCE), the Fascist Confederation of Professionals and Artists, and the Italian Royal Academy. In spite of these efforts, the selected authors nearly all declined to attend. In the end, only two Italians attended the conference, neither of whom was a literary writer at all. These were the eminent comparative literature scholar Arturo Farinelli and Alfredo Acito, an inconspicuous jurist who had penned several books on fascist political doctrine. Dino Alfieri, Italy’s ambassador in Berlin, was outraged. The former minister of popular culture had personally overseen the great expansion of German–Italian cultural exchange after 1935. In 1941, he continued to believe that it was vital that Italy seize a prominent role in the Germans’ international initiatives—precisely so as to defend Italy’s own claims to leadership in the new Europe. In a testy message to Rome, he reported that the event in Weimar “shed new light . . . on the effort that [Germany] is making to predispose, even now, all the bases for a lively rebirth, immediately at war’s end, of German and European culture in the spirit of the Axis and of the new continental order.” He complained, with diplomatic understatement, “the Italian representation at an event of such great resonance could have been more numerous and important.” When the request came from the Germans in February 1942 for a permanent Italian delegate to the union’s leadership committee— a “writer of the first order” whom the German embassy specifically asked not be Farinelli—fascist cultural authorities again responded with alacrity. The Germans were especially interested in Riccardo Bacchelli, the author of a recent survey of modern German literature. After Bacchelli refused, Minister of Popular Culture Alessandro Pavolini himself decided on Florentine writer

U S E S A ND DI S A DVA NTA GE S OF A V ÖL KISCH CU LTU RE



Giovanni Papini. Papini also initially refused, citing his poor German and his deteriorating eyesight. But with Mussolini himself inveighing on the subject, Pavolini cajoled and insisted until Papini agreed. As Pavolini’s chief of cabinet jotted by hand on one of the relevant documents, “This conference is an important thing. The Duce insists that we send a big name. I won’t tell you what it cost to get Papini to agree!” As he left for Germany by train on the morning of March 24, 1941, Giovanni Papini embodied a complex but in some ways typical Italian intellectual itinerary vis-à-vis Germany and Europe. In the early years of the twentieth century Papini had been one of the brightest stars among the group of young nationalist and modernist intellectuals in Florence. A cofounder of such important journals as Leonardo, Il Regno, and the legendary La Voce, Papini led an angry effort to shake up what he saw as Italy’s sleepy and backward intellectual life through nationalism, futurism, and above all through a cosmopolitan attention to modernist intellectual currents outside of Italy. Drawn in particular to the avant-garde cultural model of France—Papini’s articles introduced the thought of Henri Bergson to Italy—he was a radical proponent of Italian intervention on the side of the Entente in World War I. Writing in the futurist cultural review Lacerba in August 1914, he interpreted the war as a conflict that “pits one type of civilization against another,” and stated his opposition to the Germans in terms so harsh that Italian officials censored the journal. Papini’s writings opposed “Western Europe” (including Italy) to Germany’s Mitteleuropa and echoed the French in drawing a distinction between German “culture” and universal human Civilization, rooted in Latin tradition and defended by the Entente, using the Italian word civiltà in a manner parallel to the French civilisation. Papini’s conversion to Catholicism in 1918 and his postwar disillusionment with politics made him an ambivalent supporter of fascism in the early 1920s, when he achieved international success with his Story of Christ (1921). But he had grown closer to the regime, accepting an appointment to Italy’s Royal Academy in 1937 and playing a leading role in the circle of pro-fascist Catholic intellectuals at the journal Frontespizio. By 1940, Papini had abandoned his earlier assaults on German culture to support Mussolini’s war alongside Germany, on the basis of what he now saw as a shared ideological distance from Western Europe. Now the Rome–Berlin Axis, rather than Paris, represented modernity in a struggle against the past. In a 1941 book, Papini presented Italy and Germany’s war as a “holy and decisive” struggle,



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

waged on behalf of a fascist vision of the twentieth century against the persistent dominance of “that eighteenth century that gave rise to so-called modern civilization, and that completed deeds opposed to Italy, done outside of her, and against her.” In this way the war was “one of the first tests of our European mission.” Positioning Italy with Germany against the “socalled modern civilization” of the West was typical of the way that leading Italian intellectuals, increasingly alienated from Western civilization, had redefined the concept of civiltà in terms close to the German concept of Kultur. Nonetheless, while Papini’s Catholic nationalism could find points of contact with Nazi hostility to “the West,” it was rooted in a deep belief in Italy’s cultural superiority and claim to hegemony. In 1937, Papini had explained to readers of Frontespizio that fascist Italy was uniquely qualified to lead the process of European spiritual unification that the continent desperately needed. He drew here on the long-standing nationalist tradition that saw Italy’s Roman and Catholic legacy as the true core of European civilization. Such ideas were on Papini’s mind in Weimar in March 1942 as he prepared to address his fellow foreign delegates, one each from thirteen other European countries. Papini reminded them that during at least five centuries “the literature to which I belong . . . was the light of the world,” while twice in its history, from Caesar to Tacitus and again from Dante to Tasso, “Italian literature has known primacy and hegemony among all the literatures of Europe.” On this basis he insisted on a position of equality for Italy in the New Order in terms that threw down an unmistakable challenge to his German hosts. “We all desire,” he declared, “that there emerge from this war, with victory, the unity of the continent. But we cannot achieve the true unity of Europe if we do not prepare even now the spiritual unity of our peoples—a unity that must not and cannot mean the oppression of one culture over the others, but, following the same watchword of politics and of the economy, comprehension and collaboration. Not an overbearing sun, but concord among the stars of the first greatness.” Papini’s insistence on Italy’s right to be considered one of Europe’s leading “stars” should not be confused with resistance to or rejection of the Germans’ European project. Papini worked to ensure Italy’s serious, high-level participation in the Writers Union. At the sessions in Weimar’s Hotel Elephant from March 25 to 28, 1942, Papini contributed to the event’s atmosphere, according to Ambassador Alfieri, “of cordiality, and, it may even be said, of

U S E S A ND DI S A DVA NTA GE S OF A V ÖL KISCH CU LTU RE



reciprocal camaraderie among the participants.” In addition to writers who had attended the October 1941 meeting, like Fani Popova-Mutafova, Ernesto Giménez Caballero, and the successful Swiss novelist John Knittel, this group now included the Danish dramatist and critic Svend Borberg, the Croatian writer of humorous tales of farm and village Slavko Kolar, and the Romanian novelist Liviu Rebreanu. An author of psychological realist works set amid the struggles of rural life, Rebreanu is counted among the most important novelists in the Romanian tradition, and was president of the Society of Romanian Writers and head of the National Theater in Bucharest. Carossa, Papini wrote in his diary, “is a man of heart, and a poet. We understood each other immediately.” Papini accepted his appointment as the institution’s vice president and appeared with Carossa in photographs in the pages of Europäische Literatur. He served in this way as a symbol of Italy’s commitment to its cultural and political relationship with Germany. His prominence likewise supported the Germans’ insistence on Italy’s special status, which was a regular feature of the Nazi cultural journals devoted to spreading the regime’s Europeanist message, including Europäische Literatur, but also Europäische Revue, Berlin-Rom-Tokio, Goebbels’ upscale weekly Das Reich, and Rosenberg’s Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte. Having Papini at Carossa’s side—as in the photograph in Europäische Literatur— suggested an equal relationship between the European Axis powers that served to moderate the appearance of German dominance. Not satisfied with the position assigned to Italy, however, Papini angled to strengthen Italy’s stature vis-à-vis the Germans by assembling allies within the very structures of the Writers Union. During the March 1942 meeting, Papini suggested the nomination of a second vice president. According to Alfieri’s report, Papini aimed to broaden the union’s leadership to include “another great European literature like the French or the Spanish.” The proposal passed, however, only with the German amendment that the position go to Finnish representative Veikko Antero Koskenniemi— a move Alfieri interpreted as an effort to impede the formation of a Latin bloc that might gain too much influence. Unfazed by this setback, and evidently energized by the trip to Weimar he had initially sought to avoid, Papini returned home convinced that Italy must participate in the institution at the highest level. Papini had two long conversations about Germany with Mussolini in Rome on April 8 and 9, 1942. Meeting with Luciano De Feo, the former film official who now



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

directed Italy’s National Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (IRCE), Papini requested that a five-member panel be constituted to assist him in selecting the Italian authors to admit to the union, as well as a German-speaking secretary to work for him for several hours each week. He demanded that he be allowed to discuss the criteria for selection with the minister of popular culture himself. De Feo lent Papini his eager support. De Feo had been pursuing Italy’s international cultural ambitions, while carefully navigating those of the Germans, since his days as head of the International Institute for Educational Cinematography in the early 1930s. Papini, he wrote to the Ministry of Popular Culture, “is of the opinion, and I agree with him, . . . that it is important to give a high profile character to the Italian participation [in the union] in order to be able to have a decisive influence on the spirit and on the directives of the Association.” De Feo here expressed the logic behind Papini’s apparently contradictory efforts— eagerly cooperating with the Nazis while defending an unwavering belief in Italy’s cultural superiority. Those efforts faithfully reflected the belief, embraced by a range of regime officials, that close cooperation with the Germans’ European initiatives was the only way to achieve Italy’s rightful place in the New Order. The most important figure to espouse this view was Giuseppe Bottai, the cultivated editor of fascism’s leading intellectual review, Critica fascista, and, since 1936, minister of national education. He had been calling since 1940 for Italy to “get to work, and present ourselves alongside Germany, or rather above all to Germany, with clear ideas of a broad resonance.” One piece of that effort had been the foundation of the journal Primato, the very title of which evoked the long tradition of Italian claims to primacy in Europe, on the basis of traditions which, while national and Italian, made decidedly universalist claims: Latin antiquity, the Catholic Church, and the supposedly universally applicable ideological innovations of Italian fascism. Eager to claim Papini as an ally in this project, in 1942, Bottai used the occasion of Papini’s speech in Weimar to call for a new European order of “cultural collaboration based on . . . respect for the single national cultures and on a gradual and spontaneous integration among them.” Such a demand was, on the face of it, no different from the Germans’ invocations at Weimar of the renationalized literature that would flourish in Hitler’s New Europe. But the ideological basis for Bottai’s call for a Europe of nations was categorically different from Nazi inter-nationalism. Bottai made this clear through a short but revealing discussion of his understanding of the sym-

U S E S A ND DI S A DVA NTA GE S OF A V ÖL KISCH CU LTU RE



bolic significance of the city of Weimar itself: “Weimar is, even for Germany, the center of an essentially European spirit; from Weimar resounded voices that truly knew how to speak a language not only or strictly German, but European and human, comprehensive and comprehensible to all. Goethe, Herder, and Schiller were the protagonists not only of a Germanic Sturm und Drang, but of a romantic revolution of the spirit: and these very men dreamed of a broad European cosmopolitanism and admired, alongside the history of other countries, also and above all that of classical antiquity.” For Bottai, any notion of European culture must obviously be rooted in the classical culture of Mediterranean antiquity. Using the Germans’ own symbols to challenge Nazi hegemonic claims, Bottai argued that Weimar’s legacy of “a broad European cosmopolitanism” meant that “Weimar refers also . . . to something that does not die: to a problem of a spiritual order that cannot be resolved in terms of pure power and that is nonetheless essential for the installation of a new order: and Rome . . . has always known how to unite to its individuality a sense of comprehension and of universality which, from the cultural plane, reflects on the political one.” Bottai’s claim about the meaning of Weimar’s mighty trio of Goethe, Herder, and Schiller went directly against the way Nazi intellectuals had been systematically recasting these writers as figures of German intellectual and racial greatness. Herder in particular was celebrated precisely for his break with classicism, whereby he had made possible Germany’s breakthrough to national cultural autonomy. In Herder’s late works, as völkisch literary historian Josef Nadler had established in 1935, “the Eastern German cultural sphere frees itself from its classical-ancient protective coating [Hilfschicht] and bursts its shell toward autonomous life.” It was in this sense that Herder was celebrated as the father of Nazi inter-nationalism, with its call for relations among “pure” national traditions, each systematically purged of its cosmopolitan excrescences. Bottai was well aware of some Nazi intellectuals’ aggressive rejection of the Latin classical tradition. Indeed this is part of what motivated Bottai’s drive to find new ways to promote the classical cultural legacy within a European vision which would serve Italy’s claims to cultural leadership. In private, Bottai and his collaborators made such claims quite bluntly. In May 1942, the same month his “Weimar” article appeared, Bottai arranged for Mussolini to receive the Italian-born, German-trained philosopher Ernesto Grassi. Grassi warned the Duce that the Germans were attempting “to



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

remake themselves on the model of a Nordic culture, but a Nordic culture does not exist. The act of birth of the Germans was written by a Latin, Tacitus. . . . For those people, without territorial or spiritual boundaries, our culture is necessary, as a form, a limit. Left to themselves they are capable of nothing but collective dreams.” But even as Bottai and his circle watched the Germans, Nazi officials were carefully watching them. In March 1942, while Papini was visiting Weimar, an SS staffer at Reinhard Heydrich’s Reich Security Head Office submitted a twenty-four-page report sounding the alarm on “Italy’s cultural-political efforts.” This report, the result of the German secret police’s ongoing observation of Rome’s “Kulturpropaganda,” warned that the Italians were pursuing “cultural-political claims with unlimited openness. The point of departure for all these efforts is the tradition of the ancient Roman Empire and of humanism.” Based on a wide reading of recent Italian journals and books on the German–Italian relationship and the New Order—including works by Bottai, Grassi, and Papini, listed in the report’s twenty-one-page appendix—this report quite correctly summed up the view of Italian cultural organizers that “Italy, on the basis of the ancient and Roman cultural tradition, is the first cultural nation of Europe.” The Italians were “already drawing up their own specifically Italian program for the European New Order. The relationship to Germany is seen thus, that in the new Europe Germany should be the bearer of political-military power and Italy the defender of cultural and intellectual tradition.” More worrying still was the fact that the Italians’ invocation of “the Roman, Latin, and Catholic bases of European culture,” had particularly power ful appeal in Western and Southeastern Europe, where these concepts “rest on common traditions, and also cater to the existing opposition to Germany.” This was only one of several such reports making similar observations about Italy’s hegemonic efforts to make ideological inroads abroad through cinema, international law, philosophy, and other fields. Some proponents of National Socialism’s völksich-racist revolution worked hard to block the penetration of Italian fascist ideological influence in Germany. Concern about such penetration came to a head when the philosopher Martin Heidegger planned to publish an essay on “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” in a forthcoming philosophy yearbook edited by his former student Ernesto Grassi. This raised the ire of Nazi Party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg’s agency for the ideological supervision of German academic life, part

U S E S A ND DI S A DVA NTA GE S OF A V ÖL KISCH CU LTU RE



of the so-called Rosenberg Office (Amt Rosenberg). Goebbels’s ministry must block this publication, an Amt Rosenberg official argued in June 1942, because Germany supported only the National Socialist concept of “political Humanism.” This was the view, advanced in 1937 by racist theorist and Nordicist ideologue Hans F. K. Günther, that a sound German engagement with classical antiquity must be based on the essential racial relationship that existed between the Germans and the great “Indo-Germanic” peoples of antiquity. The Amt Rosenberg could not stand for any publications, even by someone as renowned as Heidegger, proposing “contemporary Humanism.” As Rosenberg’s journal Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte had recently explained, “contemporary Humanism,” was “the recollection of the literature of the peoples of classical antiquity, charged with contemporary significance.” This was appropriate for Italy because of the Italians’ “organic” historical and racial relationship to Rome. But it must for that reason be confined to Italy, the Rosenberg Office insisted: “Heidegger’s tendency to support Grassi’s efforts to bring contemporary Humanism into the German intellectual world will only bring confusion.” Blocking Heidegger’s article was part of a broader intra-German struggle in 1940–1941, which pitted supporters of Nordic racist ideology, like Rosenberg, against representatives of a kind of “hellenic” National Socialism who saw in the war a chance for a renewal of classical ideals. More broadly, however, Rosenberg’s acolytes saw cutting off the brand of Italian fascist humanism that Grassi, with support from Bottai, was seeking to spread in Germany as a necessary element of an international campaign to make National Socialism’s antihumanist vision of culture hegemonic in Europe. It was crucial to strike down any effort to position classical humanism as the basis for a European cultural identity. For even a fascist, radical-conservative celebration of ancient Rome clashed with the Nazi vision of absolute German hegemony, since it proposed a non-German cultural legacy, namely GrecoLatin antiquity, as a universally valid basis for European cultural identification and spiritual revival. To label this kind of humanism “Italian,” narrowly specific to one nation rather than in any way universal or European, was a way to limit its power. In the end, Rosenberg was unable to have his way regarding Heidegger’s article. After Mussolini instructed Ambassador Alfieri to intervene with Goebbels, the propaganda minister allowed the journal to appear as planned, with Heidegger’s contribution. Goebbels was, as usual, able to prevail over



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

Rosenberg. Indeed, Rosenberg had planned several international, “European” events of his own. But these were all canceled, and his ur-Germanic vision of Europe was carefully kept out of the international organizations under Goebbels’s control. In December 1942, the Italians were even able to score what Bottai, writing in his diary, called “a little victory over the Rosenbergs: the real one, and his imitators at home [in Italy],” with the opening in Berlin of an Italian cultural institute specifically devoted to fascist humanism. Fulfilling a prevision of the 1938 German-Italian Cultural Accord, the Institute “Studia Humanitatis” was inaugurated on December 7, 1942, with a formal ceremony at the University of Berlin, followed by a reception in the Hotel Adlon, where Bottai and Grassi exchanged pleasantries with Reich Education Minister Bernhard Rust. The Heidegger episode illustrated the fear among some Nazis that Italian fascist universalism still offered a powerful competitor to German hegemony. The inauguration of an institute for Italian fascist humanism in the heart of German power showed however that the Nazi regime could tolerate the Italians’ ideas, as long as their dissemination was kept on a bilateral German–Italian level. One could humor the Italians while still preventing them from offering an autonomous claim to cultural leadership that could rival Germany’s. But if some in Germany were concerned that Italy might be winning the cultural war, few Italian observers were so sanguine about their own success. In his report on the March 1942 meeting of the European Writers Union, Alfieri acknowledged that writers from across Europe greeted the Germans’ claims to cultural hegemony with enthusiastic support. He reported with dismay that the Finnish-Swedish writer Örnulf Tigerstedt and the Romanian novelist Liviu Rebreanu together issued a statement declaring that “it falls to Germany, center of Europe, to lead Europe, which fights united for the triumph of German culture which will be European culture.” But for this very reason Ambassador Alfieri seconded Bottai’s call to combine keen collaboration with obstinate national self-affirmation. Reporting back to Rome after Papini’s stay in Weimar, Alfieri praised Papini’s speech as important and timely, because of “the constant effort—of which the recent gathering in Weimar is but one episode—with which Germany is working at the formation of a European cultural front, gravitating around Germanic culture.” “It is a good idea,” Alfieri suggested, “for us to insist at every occasion on the just affirmation of Latin culture, which does not exclude Germanic culture, but cedes nothing to it. Meanwhile it is opportune to note

U S E S A ND DI S A DVA NTA GE S OF A V ÖL KISCH CU LTU RE



Italian fascist humanism in Nazi Berlin: Giuseppe Bottai (l.) and Ernesto Grassi chat with Nazi Education Minister Bernhard Rust at Hotel Adlon, after inauguration of the Italian Cultural Institute “Studia Humanitatis,” Berlin, December 7, 1942. (Ullstein/IBL Bildbyrå)

that it is the Germans’ desire to base similar forms of international collaboration, like the European Writers Union, on the predominance of Germanic culture.” Precisely because of his mistrust of the Germans’ hegemonic ambitions, Alfieri insisted that Italy send a full-sized and first-rate delegation to the European Writers Union’s next meeting, in October 1942. ◆

◆

◆

The Italian delegation of nine writers that arrived in Weimar on October 7, 1942, was larger and of higher literary standing than that of a year earlier. The literary scholar Arturo Farinelli, selected by Royal Academy President Luigi Federzoni to lead the delegation, as Papini did not attend, was joined this time by two fellow Royal Academicians, the noted essayists Emilio Cecchi and Antonio Baldini, and by three younger writers, critic and translator Giaime Pintor, prominent neorealist novelist Elio Vittorini, and critic and literary journalist Enrico Falqui. The group also included three political operatives: Foreign Ministry staffer Mario Sertoli, who was also a journalist,



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

dramatist, and novelist; Giulio Cogni, one of the foremost exponents of Nazi-oriented racism in Italy, who worked as a translator at the German Embassy in Rome; and Alfredo Acito. Baldini and Cecchi, both over fifty years old, were conservative nationalists with close ties to the fascist regime and its cultural projects. Baldini edited the prominent Nuova Antologia, and although Cecchi had signed the “Manifesto of Antifascist Intellectuals” in 1925, he had since made peace with the regime, accepting membership in the Royal Academy and taking over the editorship of the high-profile journal Civiltà, designed to publicize the planned 1942 Universal Exhibition in Rome. Cecchi’s 1939 book Bitter America, a harsh look at the failings of American life, had recently been translated into German. Thirty-four-year-old Elio Vittorini, on the other hand, had recently offered a thinly veiled critique of the hero worship and militarism of the fascist dictatorship in his novel Conversation in Sicily, first published in serial form in 1938–1939. A leading representative of the interest among young Italian writers in American literature, Vittorini had published translations of Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Saroyan. Indeed, by 1942 Vittorini was in contact with communist resistance leaders, who apparently encouraged him to attend the Germans’ literary conference. (Vittorini’s was the only name asked for by the Germans to which Bottai had objected, although he was overruled in order to honor the Germans’ invitation.) Vittorini and Falqui had made a mark as organizers of younger Italian writers, coediting an important anthology in 1930. Twenty-three-year-old critic, poet, and translator Giaime Pintor was an officer on the Italian-French Armistice Commission, a frequent contributor to Bottai’s review Primato, and a well-regarded translator of Rilke. His and Vittorini’s presence at this Nazi event is particularly striking given both men’s iconic status today as heroes of Italy’s anti-Nazi resistance between 1943 and 1945. In Weimar, the Italians joined around forty writers from thirteen countries and over 250 German writers. This meeting, hewing closely to the model established in 1941, offered another five-day spectacle of GermanEuropean Kultur, featuring a visit to the Wartburg Castle, a performance of Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe, and a performance of Richard Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A Minor by renowned soloist Walter Gieseking under conductor Karl Böhm. It culminated again with Goebbels’s annual speech opening the Week of the German Book in the lavishly decorated Weimar Halle, before which Goebbels had laid his annual wreath at the tomb of Goethe and

U S E S A ND DI S A DVA NTA GE S OF A V ÖL KISCH CU LTU RE



Schiller. Nazi writers gave shrill speeches declaring, for example, Germany’s commitment to “save the historical leading culture of Europe— and Europe means Hellas and Rome, Potsdam and Weimar, it means Paris and Madrid and Helsinki—from the rage of the Asiatic hordes of the steppes.” This German-led European Kultur was again defined in contrast to the spiritual emptiness of the Axis’s non-European enemies. Now that the United States had entered the war, speakers laid new emphasis on the claim that the Bolshevik’s idea of “ ‘Kulturija,’ ” as the novelist and SS officer Edwin Erich Dwinger declared, “means fundamentally the same thing as Americanism, with its superficiality, shallowness, and bustle.” Wilhelm Haegert explained that the German people’s task in the war was “to defend European cultural values against Americanism and Bolshevism.” The Italian delegation likewise gave its outward support to this European vision. Farinelli, as Pintor later wrote, “magnificently uncombed, generous with words and hugs, ready to respond in any language to any allocution, was an exemplary leader and was one of the major successes of the conference.” Emilio Cecchi, selected by Royal Academy President Luigi Federzoni to give the delegation’s address on contemporary Italian literature, carefully followed the instructions he had been given by Federzoni, who had asked him to “highlight the original and at the same time, if I may say so, classical character of contemporary Italian literature, avoiding however . . . those particularist accentuations that our Teutonic friends found excessive in the speech given there last year by camerata Papini. It is understood that there will need to be a good initial or concluding reference to the state of war, to the faith in the common victory, to the defense of European civilization, etc.” Cecchi’s dry speech, which praised modern Italian as a language in which “tradition and modernity meet and temper one another” earned the approval of the union’s German overseers, who saw to its publication in Europäische Literatur. Privately, however, the Italian writers were scornful of the Germans’ European claims, and the European literature embodied by the writers gathered in Weimar elicited the Italians’ mockery and contempt. The Italians aside, Mario Sertoli complained in a report prepared for Minister of Popular Culture Pavolini, the conference “had the look of a folkloristic or ethnographic gathering, between Balkan and Scandinavian; a little world of the literary village, of country poets and provincial writers, a fair for the benefit of obscure men, or a festival of the ‘unknown writer.’ ” Pintor echoed this



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

harsh evaluation. In an unpublished manuscript prepared for (but rejected by) Primato, Pintor recalled looking around the banquet room of the Hotel Elephant on the conference’s first evening: “We had so many people around us that it was hard to understand whom we had to deal with. Only later the successive presentations permitted us to trace the boundaries in the complicated geography of the new Europe.” To Pintor’s disappointment, the new literary Europe turned out to be characterized by a “climate of cosmopolitan folklore”: “the fundamental tone was given by the people of the Balkans [balcanici] and the Scandinavians who filled three quarters of the seats with their women and their costumes, their beards and their Nobel prizes. Communicating with these people on a literary level was not easy.” He was even more blunt in a letter to his parents: “the European writers gathered in Weimar constituted the most numerous assemblage of idiots [cretini] that I have ever seen together, but the trip and the stay in Germany were equally interesting.” This scornful dismissal of the conference and its participants did not reflect any lack of interest among Italian writers in the problem of “European literature.” On the contrary, since World War I “Europe” had been a central term of debate in Italy’s literary scene. Baldini and Cecchi had made their name as cofounders of La Ronda, the influential journal that called in 1920 for a conservative return to Italian traditions, “convinced that only in this way can we create in Italy . . . a movement able to insert itself into a modern European literary civilization.” They pursued this conservative “return to order” by opening to Europe. Cecchi oversaw the publication of reviews and translations of foreign works, and in 1921 invited a prominent French modernist writer and critic to introduce Marcel Proust to Italian readers. Vittorini had been a frequent contributor to the legendary literary journal Solaria, which had followed the tentative Europeanism of La Ronda at the end of the 1920s with an impassioned cosmopolitanism. Solaria’s interest in literary trends from outside of Italy, expressed through a particular devotion to Paris’s influential Nouvelle Revue française, was such that Solaria’s own editor expressed concern about the dangers of becoming too close to the French-dominated world of international literary modernism. Italy’s younger writers, the editor complained, were “Joyce-ing, Proust-ing, Valérying . . . with a zeal that is beyond all necessity,” putting Solaria at risk of being reduced “to a colony of the NRF.” Falqui, as editor in chief of the Rome-based review L’Italia letteraria, similarly partook of the period’s ethos

U S E S A ND DI S A DVA NTA GE S OF A V ÖL KISCH CU LTU RE



of balancing fascist nationalism with a kind of cosmopolitan Europeanism. This attention to foreign literature—which also included a substantial engagement with American, German, and even Soviet writers—was encouraged and concretely supported with fellowships and prizes by fascist officials who, as the historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat has noted, “believed that Italian intellectuals needed to be acquainted with the newest tendencies in culture if they were to develop a superior version of modernity.” This Europeanist attitude had its enemies in Mussolini’s Italy. The journal Il Selvaggio, for example, promoted the style known as strapaese (“hypercountry”) in order to “defend with drawn sword,” as the journal proclaimed in 1927, “the rural and village character of the Italian people, [to be] a bulwark against the invasion of foreign fashions and ideas.” Such positions gained in power from 1936, when, in the chauvinist mood stimulated by Mussolini’s declaration of empire, the regime began to reverse its earlier policy of self-conscious cultural openness. Luigi Chiarini, the writer and film theorist who led the regime-sponsored Experimental Center for Cinematography, declared that year, “fascism refutes and rejects all literary movements of an international character.” By 1939, the potentially subversive fantasy of the United States built up by Italy’s many young enthusiasts of American literature received a semiofficial dressing down in Emilio Cecchi’s Bitter America. In 1941, Bottai’s Primato attacked the interest in American literature by comparing it to the worst kind of “europeismo”—that is, a humiliating obsession with copying trends from other national literatures. Only through a firmly nationalist stance could Italian writers “be truly European in the high and truly moral sense of the word.” By choosing the archnationalist and Catholic reactionary Papini to represent Italy, Minister of Popular Culture Pavolini emphasized this trend. So did Bottai’s unsuccessful effort to keep Vittorini—whose 1941 anthology of American writers had just been seized by fascist censors—from going to Weimar. But, as usual in fascist Italy, this transition to cultural autarky had not been total. Only in 1941 did the regime impose quotas on imported foreignlanguage books, which in any case did little to change educated Italians’ reading habits. In line with Bottai’s eagerness to rally, rather than alienate, Italy’s young intellectuals, even Vittorini’s Americana anthology was allowed to come out in 1942, now with a suitably anti-American preface by Emilio Cecchi. And at Weimar, rather than sending an exclusively strapaese contingent, or any of its politically reliable writers of popular fiction, Italian officials



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

sent several writers who would appear to be naturals for a European Writers Union, except for the fact that theirs was a literary Europeanism more or less of the French model—that is, cosmopolitan in orientation and up to date with international trends. Even the nationalists among them were urban sophisticates, essayists of the light touch and ironic tone, uninterested in producing the kind of rooted, national-regional literature celebrated at Weimar. As Pintor observed, “between Cecchi’s moderate speech and the following one, by a Norwegian writer who composed a kind of rhapsody on the history of his land and spoke of the runes and the skalds and of the future Norway as a great power of the spirit, the points of contact were minimal.” Had they talked candidly with some of the German writers, Pintor, Sertoli and the other Italians might have discovered that they shared a common assessment of the conference and its participants. In a private letter to Hans Carossa, the German poet Börries von Münchhausen declared, “I believe in a European literature as little as I do in a European hair color. Literature is after all language and can therefore never be supra-state, [or] international.” What connection could possibly exist, he sarcastically asked, between Goethe and “the Croatian and Slovakian poets, on whom the previous issue of Europäische Literatur reports so lovingly”? Carossa, who had not attended the October 1942 conference, replied: “I subscribe to what you say about the concept of ‘European literature’ word for word.” But the Italians seem to have interacted fairly little with their German hosts, who met separately from the foreigners except at a few ceremonial occasions. The Italian writer most eager to interact with the Germans was Giaime Pintor, the young translator and critic who was deeply engaged with the German literary tradition. A devotee of Rilke rather than of the NRF, he found the French delegation—Jacques Chardonne, Drieu la Rochelle, André Fraigneau, Georges Blond, as well as novelist and critic André Thérive, a fighter for the purity of the French language in the 1920s who now wrote for the collaborationist Pariser Zeitung—to be composed of “vivacious and on the whole civilized people, even if of a civilization more of custom that of culture.” Pintor had at any rate already concluded, in an article in Primato, that French culture appeared “poor, weak, and corrupt before the true forces that fight in Europe, before a single Russian or German soldier fallen on the Eastern fields for the defense of an order that might serve a future Europe.” Here, then, was an Italian writer to whom the German’s selfpresentation might have appealed. But just the opposite was the case.

U S E S A ND DI S A DVA NTA GE S OF A V ÖL KISCH CU LTU RE



Although some 250 German writers were in Weimar, there were “few to whom it was right to attribute any literary value.” Neither of the two major writers Pintor would have liked to meet, Hans Carossa and Ernst Jünger, whose 1941 novel On the Marble Cliff s Pintor had reviewed for Primato, had come to Weimar. As Pintor might have anticipated, the “dogmatic prejudices” and “provincial atmosphere” of German literature under Nazism, which Pintor himself had noted in a review for Primato, had left Germany with little of interest to offer to a reader like him in 1942. Pintor’s doubts underscore the difficulties inherent in the Germans’ effort to derive prestige from an inter-nationalist European literary model designed to appeal mainly to writers hitherto excluded from the transnational circuits of European literary exchange. Like his fellow Italian writers, he was not willing to adopt the Nazi-Herderian focus on a writer’s national or völkisch function in assessing the value of a writer. He held fast to a standard of literary quality that was international, rather than inter-national. Making the best of the conference, he enjoyed the musical performances and looked on with a mixture of bemusement and alarm as, on the conference’s final day, “the humble and democratic tone of the sessions in the hotel gave way to the most rigid totalitarian style” when Goebbels took the stage of the Weimar Halle— decorated for the occasion with the event’s symbol, a giant book and sword—to deliver his closing address. ◆

◆

◆

By then, however, quite apart from what the Italians thought of the “European literature” the Germans had assembled, Italian observers noted during the October 1942 meeting that Germany’s ability to maintain its claims to dominance was wavering under the strains of the war. Sertoli reported to Rome that at one meal the Germans served only soup, “strained potatoes, diluted in plain water with traces of margarine.” This he took to be a sign of a growing disorganization that, he charged, was “serious in a country whose power is based on order.” The conference itself was marked “by an apathetic and sleepy atmosphere,” as “the audience napped or yawned” while Erich Edwin Dwinger sought to rally them with his fiery speech on “Bolshevism as a Threat to World Culture.” The event’s German hosts themselves seemed distracted. Shaken by its setbacks on the Eastern Front, “Germany, for the first time since she entered the battlefield, offers signs of confusion and uncertainty.” When during a meeting of the foreign delegations Hungarian writer Joszef Nyirö asked the Nazi authorities whether Jews might be allowed



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

Book and sword: Goebbels inaugurates the Week of the German Book, Weimar, October 11, 1942. (Ullstein/IBL Bildbyrå)

to be members of Hungary’s national group, “given the importance these [writers] have in the country’s contemporary literature,” the Germans, Sertoli reported incredulously, replied “with the weakest reaction, almost not noticing the blow, declaring that the question would be examined.” The Germans, Sertoli concluded, were simply not up to the international task they had set themselves. Equipped by his experience as both a writer

U S E S A ND DI S A DVA NTA GE S OF A V ÖL KISCH CU LTU RE



and an official of the Ministry of Popular Culture, Sertoli was in a unique position to understand and evaluate the Germans’ broader effort to reorder European cultural life through international institutions. Referring both to the relocation to Berlin of prewar “super-academies” like the Union of International Associations, and to the creation of new bodies like the Writers Union, he concluded his report to Pavolini with an overall indictment of the Germans’ pursuit of this project—but not of the project itself: In the certainty of reforming the world, Germany has been in a hurry to centralize many international institutes and initiatives [which] already had blossomed elsewhere with quite different means, men, preparation, and taste. I am not saying that many institutions of French or Swiss stamp should not have been rejuvenated. But in fields like the arts, letters, journalism, etc., in which Germany has never enjoyed a position of primacy, she could have delegated to other countries, which have longer traditions in these fields, the task of supplanting France, which at least knew the art of hosting.

Sertoli continued to embrace the Germans’ goal of “supplanting France” in European cultural life. But, like many Italian leaders, he believed this goal would have been better pursued through a kind of national division of labor, in which German arms would run the war, but “other countries”—meaning above all Italy—would manage the creation of the New Order in European culture. The skepticism and scorn that characterized the Italians’ responses at Weimar set the tone for official policy in Italy. Although Papini had called for an Italian national group within the European Writers Union, this was never created. And while the German press rang out with celebrations of the Union’s 1942 conference, the Italian press ignored the event almost completely. The morning after the conclusion of the October 1942 conference, before returning to Italy, Pintor had a chance to stroll through Weimar with Elio Vittorini. The two friends walked through the city center, quiet and unadorned after the conclusion of the week’s events. As Pintor recalled, the two talked “about those subjects that a conference on European literature cannot face: about literature as an honest vocation, and above all about Europe: something that seemed to us too great and uncertain and afflicted for three-hundred gentlemen gathered in Weimar in October 1942 to be able to speak in its name.”



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

Indeed, the European Writers Union would be unable to speak in Europe’s name for very long. Another conference was planned for September 1943. Carossa and Koskenniemi would give the keynote addresses, and delegates would enjoy a tour of Goethe’s house or of the Goethe-Schiller Archive and several musical performances, “probably Beethoven’s violin concerto and Brahms’ first symphony.” General Secretary Carl Rothe continued to travel around Europe on the ESV’s behalf, meeting with various national sections as late as 1944. The union also continued to enjoy the support of many of its participants. French novelist Jacques Chardonne was so impressed at the 1941 and 1942 conferences by “that Germanic spirit, feudal and religious, which nothing purely material can satisfy” that in 1943 he urged Marshal Pétain to enter the war alongside Germany. The Romanian novelist Liviu Rebreanu, who had attended the meetings of March and October 1942, worked closely with Rothe to launch a Romanian national section. But by August 1943, planning for the 1943 conference was abandoned. The Red Army’s advance brought to an end the Propaganda Ministry’s effort to force an answer to the question of what a European literature might be. “The situation two years ago when we started our little society,” Rothe wrote to Carossa in January 1944, “has become completely different.” Then, Rothe could still placate foreign writers’ insistent questions about the future of the new Europe with reference to Germany’s military might. “Today,” he conceded, “that does not work anymore.” Goebbels knew that brute force alone could not give Germany the kind of power over the literary field that he desired. That was what the European Writers Union was designed to achieve. Rothe, for his part, saw equally clearly that without brute force, the Nazi vision of a German-led European literature had no chance of success.

CONCLUSION

International Culture as an Ideological Battleground By June 1943, the tide of World War II had turned decisively against the Axis. The Wehrmacht’s Sixth Army had been defeated at Sta lingrad in February, German and Italian forces had been driven from North Africa in May, and the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s industrial heartland, was under almost nightly attack from allied bombers. Nazi atrocities continued unabated. In May the Warsaw Ghetto uprising had been crushed, on June 11 Himmler ordered the final “liquidation” of all remaining Jewish ghettos in Germanoccupied Poland, and the construction of several new gas chambers was being completed at Auschwitz. Meanwhile, on June 22, 1943, the Union of National Journalists’ Organizations gathered 380 representatives from twenty-one countries in Vienna for the organization’s second annual meeting. On Wednesday afternoon, June 23, attendees were treated to an appearance by one of Europe’s greatest living writers, Norwegian Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun. Hamsun—a deeply “national” writer well known for his bitter aversion to the purported soullessness of Anglo-American modernity— stood in Vienna as a living symbol of the European culture that the Axis claimed to defend. He was willing if not enthusiastic to play this role. Having recently suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, he spoke with difficulty. “It’s all the same what happens to me now. I am 84,” he wrote to his daughter from Berlin. “I’m on my way to a congress in Vienna; they put pressure on me to represent Norway by my name, but I would rather be at home.” On stage in Vienna, he spoke only briefly, referring the audience to the printed text of his address, translated for the occasion 



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

“A sort of saint of Germanism, or rather of the new Europe.” Norwegian Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun, in Vienna for the second annual meeting of the Union of National Journalists’ Organizations, greeted by Reich Press Chief Otto Dietrich, June 23, 1943. (SZ-Photo/IBL Bildbyrå)

into several languages. Nonetheless, as the Italian journalist Giovanni Ansaldo recorded in his diary, Hamsun left the stage “amid demonstrations of veneration, as if he were a sort of saint of Germanism, or rather of the new Europe.” Ansaldo was among the sixty or so Italian journalists whom Alessandro Pavolini, Italy’s minister of popular culture, sent to participate in this conference. Ansaldo had written for the liberal anti-fascist press in the early 1920s, and had spent time in prison and in isolation (confino) on the island of Lipari. But after a rehabilitation that included volunteering for military ser vice in 1935, Ansaldo came to be a close personal confidant and adviser to Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, who made him editor of Il Telegrafo, a Genoa daily that Ciano owned. Ansaldo thus enjoyed close connections to the fascist leadership, but retained, in his diary at least, a sharp eye for the failings and hypocrisies of Mussolini’s Italy. Ansaldo speculated that Minister Pavolini had decided not to attend the conference after learning that France would be represented, but for the same reason insisted upon a

C ONC L US I ON



large Italian delegation. “Why?” Ansaldo asked rhetorically: “Who knows! Perhaps the [Italian] government, not being able to send divisions to the Eastern Front, wants to demonstrate Italian power with a numerous representation of journalists? It’s possible.” Ansaldo’s sense of the ironies of Hitler’s Europe was equally acute. After the conference’s first session, Ansaldo dismissed the event as “one of the usual managed events of German propaganda, one of the typical ‘mobilizations’ of the satellites, vassals, and those occupied by Germany, held in order to make the world understand that Germany has with it the solidarity and sympathy of all of Europe. In the crowd of participants there is thus an abundance of certain badly squared faces of Croats, of Slovaks, of Bulgarians, in which one reads with the naked eye their farmers’ background and their fundamental bestiality. European journalists, these! Yes, through a geographic convention.” Ansaldo was likewise scornful of what he understood to be the Germans’ effort to deploy the legacy of German Kultur: “The clumsiness of the staging is underlined by two pieces of classical music played at the beginning and at the end of the ceremony; a Hitlerian invention to demonstrate to the world that Germany is a Kulturland.” Reich Press Chief Otto Dietrich’s speech on June 24 offered what Ansaldo called a “soup of commonplaces on the gifts of Europe to civilization: D’Annunzio, Beethoven, Dante, all a minestrone. How clumsy they are in this effort to spiritually mobilize Europe in their favor!” The Germans’ deployment of Hamsun, finally, Ansaldo saw as characteristic of the Nazi European cultural project as a whole. The Germans, “this nation of armored children . . . began the war crying that they have the power, and that the destiny of the world will be decided by this power of theirs; and now that things, on the level of power, are not going well for them, they pull this Scandinavian relic out of its wrapping, dust it off nicely, and have the nerve to use it for their scheme . . . on the level of the spirit!” It was not true that the Germans only appropriated symbols of European culture once the war was going poorly for them. The Union of National Journalists’ Organizations had been doing so since its foundation in Vienna in December 1941, which had been planned by German and Italian officials since at least the autumn of 1940, at the pinnacle of enthusiasm for the apparently imminent New Order. Using structures that paralleled those of the International Film Chamber, it pursued a serious, concrete plan to organize Europe’s journalists into national bodies, each of which signed the union’s



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

statutes, obligating them to a journalism that was “national, honest and uninfluenced by material interests.” “These principles,” declared the union’s general secretary, “do not permit the accession of Jews.” Using the same language deployed to describe the Permanent Council for International Cooperation among Composers, Nazi publicists celebrated the way this “European new order of the press” was characterized not by the internationalism of old but by an “organically matured supra-nationalism” (Übernationalismus). Like those other institutions, the union benefited from the close support of the Italians, who provided the institution’s vice president, and who hosted the organization’s first conference in Venice in 1942, where Pavolini addressed the delegates. At its headquarters in Vienna, the union ran an Institute for Research and Advancement of the International Press, which published its own book series. In all these ways, the Union of National Journalists’ Associations was part of the hegemonic European project that the two regimes had pursued together since 1935: to rework the system of international institutions in the fields of culture and communications, supported by the mobilization of a nationalist, anti-Semitic vision of European culture. Its name even echoed that of the Nazis’ first, short-lived attempt to rally European intellectuals in an international organization: the Union of National Writers of 1934. When Hamsun took the stage in Vienna in 1943, it was not a new Nazi trick. It was another example of the Nazi-fascist hegemonic project that has been the subject of this book. By 1943, that project had demonstrated that cultural internationalism was not the exclusive property of the liberal West or the communist East. A “European” international cultural order, founded on principles at odds with those of its ideological rivals, had become a reality, given form in conferences, institutions, and publications that brought together elites from every corner of continental Europe. It was, to be sure, a reality rich in contradictions. Based on the principle not of equality but of hegemony, enshrining the racist dominance of Europe in the world and of Germany in Europe, this was an internationalism at odds with the values we associate with that word. In place of values like mutual respect among peoples, cooperation, and peace, it served racism, exploitation, and genocide. Above all, it was an internationalism at the ser vice of the most extreme nationalism. But these contradictions were less unique than they may appear. As the political scientist Fred Halliday has noted, “for those who benefit from it, hegemonic internationalism is not, of course, incompatible with nationalism but is an ex-



C ONC L US I ON

tension of it.” Racism, exploitation, and genocide also characterized the “hegemonic internationalism” of Europe’s overseas empires, whose brutal settler colonialism inspired Hitler’s visions of Germany’s racial expansion in the East. The interwar period saw not merely a contest between internationalism and nationalism, but rather a struggle among competing visions of international order, each of which was hegemonic in ambition. In a sense, this is inevitable. All systems of international cultural exchange— all cultural internationalisms—reflect and produce relations of power. There has been no way of arranging the flow of ideas and cultural goods across borders that did not also imply the unequal accumulation and application of “soft power.” The system’s dominant language must be one rather than another, the cities that serve as its nodal points will be in certain countries rather than others, the political and economic ideology it supports will be one rather than another. For a brief but important period in the 1930s and 1940s, locating the centers of European culture in Hitler’s Berlin and Mussolini’s Rome was more appealing to a good number of European elites than having them in Paris or London, New York or Moscow. ◆

◆

◆

The Nazi-fascist European project was not yet over in June 1943. But Ansaldo’s scathing critique of the 1943 conference of European journalists illustrates the degree to which the project was failing even before the Axis’s military defeat made it impossible. Taken together, the stories of the International Film Chamber, the Permanent Council, and the European Writers Union show that the broader European project of which they were a part was hamstrung by internal contradictions. The project aimed to secure prestige for the Axis regimes by associating them with European high culture of a more or less traditional, bourgeois type. That meant embracing core bourgeois cultural values of the nineteenth century, like the sharp division between the arts and politics and between the arts and commerce. Both of these divides evoked the classic dichotomy between a purportedly aesthetic idealism and its materialist rivals. The effort to derive advantage from these ideas was illustrated by the Italians’ insistence on the category of art at the Venice Film Festival, or by Goebbels’s concern to keep himself and other political functionaries removed from the visible leadership positions in Nazi-sponsored cultural institutions. Of course, that effort stood in tension with Nazi and fascist boasting about the totalitarian party-state’s new role in guiding national and European cultural



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

renewal. But this was a tension that many European intellectuals and cultural leaders were willing to live with, as it seemed to offer several things they valued: social status as artists, rootedness in the nation, and support from the state. Moreover, many of them shared the view that the old order, the interwar liberal-capitalist system of international cultural exchange, had been politicized and coercive in its own way as well. Ultimately, however, the brutality of the Nazis’ European empire undermined such distinctions and precautions. As the war progressed, the Nazis failed to disguise their heavyhanded insistence on maintaining total control, behaving like a hostile rival even with their erstwhile allies and making obvious their exploitation of cultural life for repressive and rapacious political and economic goals. Insofar as a culture of the “New Europe” began to emerge, it was clearly stripped of its relative autonomy from political and economic power. And without autonomy, culture can grant no prestige. The Axis’s European cultural institutions gave “European culture” concrete form in pursuit of a particular kind of soft power. But the prestige that the cultural New Order sought was undermined by the perception that its core policies were protectionist measures that simply favored mediocrity. Economic protectionism had its supporters and detractors in the interwar years, but coercive measures to protect cultural products were judged by a different and more demanding standard. The wide collaboration Axis cultural institutions enjoyed shows that many interwar-period intellectuals and cultural producers welcomed the use of state power to favor particular artistic styles, to blockade the continent against Hollywood movies, to expropriate and exile Jews from the cultural fields, to ban arts criticism at home, and to smash the power of Viennese music critics or Parisian literary critics abroad. But as the pro-fascist but internationalist composer Alberto Casella warned as early as 1933, protectionist measures always risked appearing to be “the initiative of failed composers or mediocre performers.” The short-term gains brought about by such protectionism were threatened by the long-term loss of cultural prestige that such measures seemed to bring about. The Axis’s New Order sought to rally European intellectuals around an “inter-nationalist” vision of European literature, music, and cinema, overturning the cosmopolitan aesthetic criteria on which the judgment of artistic quality in these fields had been based. But the scorn of Italian observers at the presumed “European” character of the cultural producers whom the Germans gathered together was symptomatic of the difficulty of deriving cul-

C ONC L US I ON



tural prestige from a völkisch model of European culture. To link rural, provincial, and dialect writers to the idea of Europe flew in the face of that concept’s identification with urban ideals of sophistication. The very terms “civilized” and “polite” are, after all, derived from Latin and Greek words meaning “city.” To insist on absolute national purity ignored the essentially interconnected quality of the continent’s urban cultures. It denied in particular what many educated Europeans saw as the most important elements of Europe’s cultural legacy and interconnection: Catholic Christianity and Mediterranean classical antiquity. Inter-nationalism had powerful appeal, but traditional criteria for assigning cultural prestige died hard, even (or perhaps especially) among the Nazis’ Italian allies. Moreover, the implicitly egalitarian tone of the inter-nationalist ideal was crassly undermined by the Germans’ racist belief in their own absolute superiority—something that became ever more aggressive late in the war, as the Nazi empire’s food requisitioning and brutal war against the partisan resistance turned many former nationalist collaborators into bitter enemies. By 1943, in the eyes of someone like Ansaldo at Vienna, the Nazis’ mobilization of European culture was so transparently politicized, so wholly at the service of a vision of total German domination, so dependent on participants whose “farmer’s background” shone through, so reliant on Nazi violence (and now with a shrill tone that revealed the Nazis’ fear that they could not in fact prevail through violence alone), that its effort to amass prestige backfired. Its “minestrone” of cultural references instead became ridiculous. Indeed, the cultural New Order had begun to backfire in myriad ways. The Nazi attack on modernist music served to establish that music’s progressive political credentials and would help to improve its public visibility after World War II. Nazi-imposed exile and persecution of political dissidents and Jews drove so much European musical, literary, and filmic talent to the United States that it vastly enriched America’s cultural life while ensuring that Europe’s postwar culture would be transatlantic as never before. Instead of driving Hollywood’s “commercial” product from Europe’s “cultural” shores, the International Film Chamber’s anti–United States embargo allowed Hollywood films, the survivors of vigorous market competition, to claim a kind of moral high ground over a Nazi–European cinema that relied on protectionist measures. The Nazi-fascist effort to shape and control cultural markets ended up granting credibility to the very system of transnational capitalist cultural exchange that the New Order had sought to



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

smash. This dealt a lasting blow to the legitimacy of efforts to defend national and regional cultural traditions against global market forces, even efforts having nothing to do with Nazism or fascism. ◆

◆

◆

Alas, the failure of the Nazi-fascist European cultural project did not mean the end of the nightmare that their New Order had become. Just one month after the journalists’ conference in Vienna, Italy’s role in that New Order underwent a dramatic change. On July 25, 1943, Mussolini was toppled from power, as Italy’s king reasserted his long-dormant authority and made Marshal Pietro Badoglio head of government. By September the king’s Italy was a cobelligerent with the Allies, now an enemy of Hitler’s Europe. In Germanoccupied northern Italy, however—where Hitler established Mussolini as head of the so-called Italian Social Republic, commonly known as the Republic of Salò—European-themed German–Italian cultural collaboration continued. This was centered, as ever, in Venice, now firmly under the shadow of German domination. On February 17, 1944, German and Italian officials gathered in the Abbazia San Gregorio, at the mouth of the Grand Canal, to inaugurate the Venetian branch of the German Institute (Deutsches Institut Venedig). After a per formance of string quartets by Paisiello and Haydn, Nazi and fascist officials intoned Italy and Germany’s ongoing common struggle to defend Europe’s cultural heritage from Anglo-American destruction. In fact, the opening of the German Institute, whereby Venice took its place in the European-wide network of such institutes the Germans had already founded, marked the degree to which Italy was now the target of Germany’s cultural propaganda, rather than cocreator of an Axis appeal to the rest of Europe. Across the Grand Canal, Ca’ Giustinian, the elegant palazzo that Biennale officials had renovated for use by the International Film Chamber at the time of the 1941 Film Festival, now served as the Venetian seat of the Wehrmacht’s Propaganda Division and of the fascist republic’s secret police and National Republican Guard. Eager to carve out even a modest zone of autonomy, the republic’s Ministry of Popular Culture worked with Luigi Freddi, still head of Italy’s state film institutions, to establish a northern beachhead for Italian filmmaking. Using film equipment hastily evacuated from Rome’s Cinecittà, Freddi’s state film company Cines opened a new studio in the Biennale’s Italian and Dutch pavilions, where he oversaw the production of eight new films. But the retreat to Venice did not protect the fascists and Nazis from the war they had



C ONC L US I ON

unleashed. On July 26, 1944, local anti-fascist partisans delivered a bomb to Ca’ Giustinian, disguised as a package for the building’s German occupants. The tremendous blast blew a hole in the wall and killed thirteen. In reprisal, thirteen partisans were selected from the local prison, made to stand on the ruins from the explosion, and shot. The fifteenth-century palazzo, lavishly renovated to host Italy’s partners at the festival of European film art, was a blood-soaked ruin. In the nineteenth century, when Ca’ Giustinian was a luxurious hotel that hosted figures like the composer Giuseppe Verdi, the British painter J. M. W. Turner, and the French novelist Marcel Proust, the building had been known as the Grand Hotel Europa. ◆

◆

◆

“Europa!,” cried Thomas Mann in his August 1942 radio broadcast to German listeners. National Socialism, which, like a King Midas in reverse, befouled every thing it touched, was now “really about to spoil for us even the idea of ‘Europe,’ ” polluting and violating this idea “like no other.” For the Nazis to speak of Europe was particularly disgusting, Mann declared, because their “New Order” expressed the opposite of the true meaning of Europe, which “was, in the hearts of the best, an idea of freedom, of the honor of nations, of sympathy and of human cooperation.” Mann’s vision of the meaning of Europe is stirring and arouses our sympathy. For whether or not one shares his belief that the continent’s very name holds an ethical charge, Mann’s “Europe” builds on broader ideas about the humane values that most of us like to think are somehow inherent in culture. Such ideas echo in the outrage of the historian Jens Petersen, when he defines the 1938 Italian-German Cultural Accord as “an accord against culture.” But the evidence from the Nazi-fascist effort to reorder European culture leads to much less heartening conclusions. It suggests that there is nothing necessarily positive or progressive about the idea of European culture. “What was Europe before this war?” asked the thirty-seven-year-old Finnish novelist and playwright Arvi Kivimaa in 1941, the same year he attended the gathering of European writers in Weimar: “A continent that was growing ever weaker, scheming, exploited by misused freedom, splintered by artificial border fortifications, pleasure seeking, and faithless. In its cultural life Europe had many virtuosi, but few great artists. Her thinkers were sickened by trendy pessimism and did not recognize where the cause of the illness lay. The great, simple, basic virtues could not operate in the life of nations as is essential according to the eternal order of things.” Kivimaa had an



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

idea of Europe, too, and it was one in line with, rather than opposed to, his aggressive nationalism. For him, only a radical-conservative cultural New Order could resolve these crises and return Europe to greatness. He was one of the many writers, filmmakers, and composers who were willing to embrace core elements of the Nazi-fascist vision: that culture should be regulated by the state, rather than the market; that violence was a wholly appropriate tool with which to reshape cultural life; that Europe’s high-cultural legacy distinguished Europe from both the United States and the Soviet Union; and that the principle of nationality lay in “the eternal order of things,” and justified the most radical measures taken in its defense. Taking advantage of European civilization’s moment of crisis, the International Film Chamber, the Permanent Council, and the European Writers Union called on this set of ideas about European culture in order to take control of cultural fields by giving them continental European form. The effort enjoyed the success it did because these ideas were deeply rooted, widely held, and seemed to many a plausible basis for the continent’s future. ◆

◆

◆

Whatever Europe’s cultural future, the progress of the war soon made clear that it would not be led by Germany or Italy. In May 1945, with Berlin in ruins, Goebbels chose to die, committing suicide along with his wife after killing their six children, rather than face a postwar era. In April, Alessandro Pavolini had chosen to take on a desperate shootout with partisans, after which he was captured and executed. Pavolini’s dead body, hanging upside down in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto alongside those of Mussolini, the Duce’s mistress Clara Petacci, and two other fascist officials, ended up part of an iconic image of the horrifying end to fascist Italy’s bid for a leading role in Europe. After 1945, those who had helped create the Nazi-fascist cultural New Order met various fates. Some were made to pay for their collaboration. Swedish composer Kurt Atterberg, the former general secretary of the Permanent Council, was socially isolated after the war for his cooperation with Nazi Germany. Eager to clear his name, he invited Sweden’s Royal Academy of Music to conduct an investigation. It cleared him of wrongdoing and allowed him to keep his official positions, but the cloud of suspicion remained. Norwegian film boss Leif Sinding’s work with the Germans, including that with the International Film Chamber, earned him four years of hard labor. Bulgarian novelist Fani Popova-Mutafova, who attended the conferences

C ONC L US I ON



of the European Writers Union, was tried and sentenced to several months prison time and a ban on publishing that lasted into the 1960s. The French writer Robert Brasillach’s participation in the 1941 Writers’ Conference was a prominent piece of evidence against him in his postwar trial for collaboration, at which he was sentenced to death. But most of the project’s collaborators, and many of its German and Italian leaders, maintained more or less prominent positions in the world of international cultural organizing. Nicola de Pirro, who struggled at Berlin in 1942 to assert Italy’s leading role when the Permanent Council for International Cooperation among Composers was converted into a state-run Nazi-fascist institution, was appointed general secretary for entertainment (Segretario generale dello spettacolo) in the government of Christian Democrat Alcide De Gasperi in 1948. Eitel Monaco, who had overseen fascist cinema’s cooperation with the International Film Chamber as head of Italy’s Directorate General for Cinema (but who hid in Rome in 1943 rather than follow Mussolini to Venice), served as president of Italy’s postwar cinema cartel ANICA from 1944 until 1971, using his position to promote panEuropean cooperation. The German Central Conference Office’s Karl Schweig, who drove the Nazi takeover of the Union of International Associations, shared his expertise in a 1957 handbook entitled How Do I Organize an International Conference? which a New York publisher put out in English translation in 1966. Günther Schwarz, who bullied Europe’s film industry leaders to follow the rules of the International Film Chamber during the war, served after 1945 as Germany’s representative in the International Federation of Film Producers Associations (FIAPF). There he played a leading role in getting international recognition for the Berlin Film Festival by stressing its “democratic” character and presenting it as a “working festival,” as opposed to the empty glamour of Venice and Cannes. The conductors who lent their talents to the Nazis’ Europeanist self-presentation, like Karl Böhm, Wilhelm Furtwängler, and Herbert von Karajan, all took up leading places in Europe’s postwar classical music world. Nazi collaborationist composer Werner Egk was cofounder in 1954 and first president of the revived German Composers’ Association (Deutscher Komponistenverband) and president of the German composers’ rights society GEMA. In 1976 he was elected president of the international copyright body CISAC. Georg Roeber, the German jurist who oversaw war time cooperation between the International Law Chamber and the International Film Chamber, was editor of Germany’s



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU RO PEAN CU LTU RE

leading journal for film and media copyright law (UFITA) from its 1954 refounding until his retirement in 1989. Goffredo Petrassi, who purged the Jews from Venice’s La Fenice opera house and served the Nazified Permanent Council during the war, was made president of the Permanent Council’s liberal rival, the International Society for Contemporary Music, in 1954. Arvi Kivimaa, the Finnish playwright who despaired of Europe’s cultural decadence and represented Finland in the European Writers Union, served in the 1960s as president of UNESCO’s International Theater Institute, where he helped create World Theater Day. These supporters of Hitler’s cultural New Order made a relatively smooth transition to the American-led international cultural order of the postwar West. Some of them loaned their international expertise to support that new system’s soft power. This meant abandoning the radical, nationalist goals of interwar cultural revisionism, of course. Those who continued to promote mea sures for the affirmation or defense of national and regional cultural identities against the tide of internationalizing modernity now did so in a muted tone and with reduced ambitions. For the following several decades, “Europe” would generally no longer be a guiding category for such efforts. With the continent split by the Cold War and attention turned to national political, economic, and cultural reconstruction, the problem of “European culture” receded from the position of intense focus it had inspired in the 1930s and during the war. The Nazi-fascist mobilization of the concept no doubt contributed to that. “The word Europe,” the French philosopher JeanPaul Sartre remarked in 1947, conveyed “the sound of the boots of Nazi Germany” and “an odor of servitude and Germanism.” ◆

◆

◆

But one of these postwar fates illustrates how some of the most complex cultural issues raised by the Nazi-fascist cultural New Order returned to prominence after the end of the Cold War. Joszef Nyirö, the Transylvanian novelist who represented Hungary in the European Writers Union, fled Hungary at war’s end and spent the rest of his life in Spain, where he died in 1953. Largely forgotten for decades, he made posthumous international headlines in May 2012 when a group of Hungarian activists and political figures had Nyirö’s ashes exhumed and began to bring them from Madrid to the Transylvanian town of his birth. The town, located in the part of the pre–World War I Kingdom of Hungary assigned to Romania in 1919, is

C ONC L US I ON



called Odorheiu Secuiesc in Romanian but is known as Székelyudvarhely to the ethnic Hungarians who continue to make up the majority of its inhabitants today. Since 1990, Nyirö’s portrayals of the life of Székely village men and women had enjoyed a return to prominence in Hungary, including a hotly contested effort to place his books on the national school curriculum. But the funeral was blocked by Romanian officials who refused to let the train carrying Nyirö’s remains enter the country. Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta saw fit to weigh in, refusing “commemorations and anniversaries for people who were known for anti-Romanian, anti-Semite and profascist behavior.” Undeterred, supporters held a ceremony in Nyirö’s honor in his hometown, although without his ashes, attended by Hungarian State Secretary for Culture Géza Szőcs (himself a poet from Romania’s ethnic Hungarian minority and president of Hungary’s section of the PEN Club) and the speaker of Hungary’s parliament Lázló Kövér. Nyirö’s rehabilitation so outraged Elie Wiesel, the Hungarian-born Nobel laureate and author of the Holocaust memoir Night, that he returned the Grand Cross Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary, which he had been awarded in 2004. (In his response to Wiesel, Kövér insisted that Nyirö’s literary works deserved national recognition in isolation from the writer’s “negligible but doubtlessly tragically mistaken political activities.”) Nyirö’s new prominence reflected the power of conservative politics in Hungary since the 2010 election of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, but the issue was not limited to Hungary. The new nationalism that emerged in the 1990s stimulated interest in “national writers” in many European countries, raising the political stakes of literary choices and identities. It was no coincidence, then, that the post– Cold War decades also saw an explosion of interest in grappling with the question of defining European culture. In 2003 writers from thirty-three European countries gathered at Hamburg’s Literaturhaus for a conference on the question, “What is European about the literatures of Europe?” One answer to this question came from the event’s co-organizer, the German author and translator Ursula Keller, who indentified the continent’s “real wealth” as “the incredible value of the variety and diversity of its cultures and languages, and of its ways of living and thinking. What could better resist the destructive force of a global mass culture that dispenses with difference than the natural cultural wealth and historical diversity of this patchwork continent?” Here was a twenty-first-century



T H E NA Z I - FA S C I S T NE W ORDE R F OR EU R O PEAN CU LTU RE

vision of literary Europe, which, if it could balance its unity against its diversity, could serve the world as a bulwark of resistance against the hegemony of a model of mass culture associated with the United States. If this sounds familiar, so, too, do some of the less upbeat things that the writers at the conference had to say. Post-Yugoslav novelist Dubravka Ugrešić suggested that the hierarchical structures of Europe’s literary market reduced writers from Europe’s eastern periphery to a self-orientalizing invocation of national stereotypes, and thus the inevitable production of kitsch, since that was what the (Western European) market wanted. Her article is called “European Literature as a Eurovision Song Contest”— a good twenty-firstcentury means of illustrating this classic European problem. The broader dangers reflected by Europe’s new (old) literary tensions were laid out by the Spanish novelist Eugenio Fuentes, who warned that the idea of Europe held “both promises and threats.” For while Europe “is promising for many people because being part of it ensures they have a stake in [its] progress and security. . . . It is threatening for others because they feel that the European Union constitutes a rejection of every thing traditional, rural, and manual in favor of things new, urban, and technological. Thus a polarization is emerging between the opposed yearnings of escapism and permanence; Europeans are split between loyalty to their roots and the temptations of a multicultural population.” This sense of polarization only grew in the following decade. By 2014, the success of the far right in elections to the European Parliament allowed a coalition of nationalist political parties to form a European parliamentary group, a kind of multinational ideological bloc that grants its members subsidies and guaranteed seats on EU Parliamentary committees. Led by Marine Le Pen of France’s Front National, this group included representatives of the Dutch Party for Freedom, led by the conservative and anti-immigrant firebrand Geert Wilders, of Italy’s Northern League, the far-right Freedom Party of Austria, and the Polish Congress of the New Right. It called itself the “Europe of Nations and Freedom.” Th is inter-nationalist Europe was united in its perception that the national required defense from the bordercrossing forces of globalizing modernity, including migrants to Europe. The essential political conflict in contemporary France, declared National Front leader Marine Le Pen in December 2015, was no longer between right and left, but between “globalists and patriots, with the globalists working toward the dilution of France in a giant global magma.” The cultural landscape of

C ONC L US I ON



2015 was so unlike that of the 1930s and 1940s as to make comparison difficult and analogies often far-fetched. It is nonetheless striking to observe how, in an age of crisis and uncertainty, appeals to a European international of nationalists emerged with remarkable speed. The persistence of these issues suggests that it will not do to dismiss the cultural New Order as merely a cynical sideshow to the horrors of World War II. It suggests that it is no longer tenable for histories of the idea of Europe to jump from the 1920s to 1945 with little more than a dismissive reference to the Nazis’ European-themed propaganda. For with all its contradictions, the vision of a radical right-wing Europe of nations stimulated genuine interest because it seemed to address real issues. What is the place of national and regional cultural particularity in a globalizing world? What is the appropriate role of the state in protecting cultural traditions from transnational market forces? Which cultural concepts or political alignments offer a means of responding to these challenges? The notion that the idea of Europe could resolve these questions was always doubtful. “Europe” can mean many different things, and although inspiring exceptions can be found, the idea of European culture has, more often than not, served an aggressive, exclusionary function for conservative elites. To register this fact does not require us to accept that it must play that role in the future. On the contrary, a richer historical understanding of the high stakes of the international organization of culture can suggest the opposite conclusion: that the political values implicit in our cultural systems, as well as the ethical content of “European culture,” are not dictated by history, but are a matter of choice that lies with us.

Abbreviations

ACS

Archivio centrale dello stato, Rome

ANL

Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome

ANSC

Accademia Nazionale Santa Cecilia, Rome

ASAC

Archivio storico delle arti contemporanee, Venice

BA

Bundesarchiv-Lichterfelde, Berlin

CIGA

Compagnia italiana grandi alberghi / Italian Major Hoteliers’ League

CISAC

Confédération International des Sociétés des auteurs et compositeurs / International Confederation of Authors and Composers Societies

DKZ

Deutsche Kongress-Zentrale / German Central Conference Office

E’42

Esposizione universale 1942 / Universal Exposition, Rome 1942

ENIC

Ente Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche / National Agency of Cinema Industries

ESV

Europäische Schriftsteller-Vereinigung / European Writers Union

EUR

Esposizione universale 1942 / Universal Exposition, Rome 1942

Fipresci

Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinematographique / International Federation of Film Critics





A BBRE V I AT I ONS

HIA

Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, CA

ICE

Istituto internazionale per la cinematografia educativa / International Institute for Educational Cinematography, Rome

ICF

International Concert Federation

ICIC

International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, Geneva

IFC

International Film Chamber

IFPI

International Federation of the Phonographic Industry

IIIC

International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation, Paris

ILC

International Law Chamber

IRCE

Istituto nazionale per le relazioni culturali con l’estero / National Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations

ISCM

International Society for Contemporary Music

ISO

International Orga nization for Standardization

MCP

Ministero della Cultura Popolare / Ministry of Popular Culture

MPPDA

Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America

PA AA

Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, Berlin

PCM

Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri / Office of the President of the Council of Ministers

REM

Reichserziehungsministerium / Reich Education Ministry

RFK

Reichsfilmkammer / Reich Film Chamber

RKK

Reichskulturkammer / Reich Chamber of Culture

RMK

Reichsmusikkammer / Reich Film Chamber

RMVP

Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda / Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda

RSK

Reichsschrifttumskammer / Reich Literature Chamber

SACEM

Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique / Society of Authors, Composers, and Publishers of Music, Paris

SIAE

Società italiana degli autori ed editori / Italian Society of Authors and Editors

A BBRE V I AT I ONS



STAGMA Staatlich genehmigten Gesellschaft zur Verwertung musikalischer Auff ührungsrechte / State-Approved Society for the Utilization of Musical Performance Rights, Berlin UFA

Universum Film AG

UFI

Ufa-Film-Gesellschaft (from 1942)

UIA

Union of International Associations

VEU

Vereinigung der europäischen Urheberrechtsgesellschaften / Union of European Copyright Associations

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. Protokoll über die Generalversammlung der Deutschen Kongress-Zentrale, e.V. am 18. Juli 1940, in BA R 55/744, fiche 4, p. 175–178. 2. Michael L. Smith, “Introduction: European Unity and the Second World War,” in Making the New Europe: European Unity and the Second World War, ed. Michael L. Smith and Peter M. R. Stirk (London: Pinter, 1990), 1–17; Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Penguin, 2008), 385–393; Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (New York: Penguin, 2009), 102–126, 577–578. 3. For example, Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993); Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard of “Civilization” in International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004). 4. Emily S. Rosenberg, Transnational Currents in a Shrinking World: 1870–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 8. 5. Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 27. 6. Daniel Laqua, “Transnational Intellectual Cooperation, the League of Nations, and the Problem of Order,” Journal of Global History 6, no. 2 (2011): 223–247; Iriye, Cultural Internationalism. 7. Cornelia Schmitz-Berning, Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 322–325. 



NOT E S T O PA GE S 3–9

8. Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus, Deutsche Wissenschaft und internationale Zusammenarbeit 1914–1928: Ein Beitrag zum Studium kultureller Beziehungen in politischen Krisenzeiten (Geneva: University of Geneva, Institut universitaire de hautes études internationales, 1966); Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus, Les scientifiques et la paix: La communauté scientifique internationale au cours des années 20 (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1978). 9. MacGregor Knox, Common Destiny: Dictatorship, Foreign Policy and War in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 143. 10. Alan E. Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 17–20. 11. Quoted in Schmitz-Berning, Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus, 647. 12. Martin Geyer and Johannes Paulmann, eds., The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 13. Rosenberg, Transnational Currents, 8, 15, 59; Patricia Clavin, “Introduction: Conceptualising Internationalism between the World Wars,” in Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements Between the World Wars, ed. Daniel Laqua (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 3. 14. John Darwin, “Nationalism and Imperialism, c. 1880–1940,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism, ed. John Breuilly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 354; Tooze, Wages of Destruction. 15. Joseph W. Bendersky, Carl Schmitt, Theorist for the Reich (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 250–262; John P. McCormick, “Carl Schmitt’s Europe: Cultural, Imperial, and Spatial Proposals for European Integration, 1923– 1955,” in Darker Legacies of Law in Europe: The Shadow of National Socialism over Europe and Its Legal Traditions, ed. Christian Joerges and Navraj Singh Ghaleigh (Oxford: Hart, 2003), 133–141. 16. Jan Ifversen, “The Crisis of European Civilization. An Inter-War Diagnosis,” in Globalization and Civilizations, ed. Mehdi Mozaffari (London: Routledge, 2002), 153; Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), 109. 17. Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through TwentiethCentury Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 21; Carlo Curcio, Europa. Storia di un’ idea (Florence: Valecchi, 1958), 825–834. 18. Victor Klemperer, LTI. Notizbuch eines Philologen (Leipzig: Reclam, 1996), 206. 19. Birgit Kletzin, Europa aus Rasse und Raum: Die nationalsozialistische Idee der Neuen Ordnung (Münster: Lit, 2000). 20. Robert W. Cox, “Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method,” in Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations, ed. Stephen Gill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 49–66.

NOT E S T O PA GE S 9 –1 3



21. Werner Scholz, “Frankreichs Rolle bei der Schaff ung der Völkerbundkommission für Internationale Intellektuelle Zusammenarbeit 1919–1922,” Francia 21, no. 3 (1994): 145–158; Laqua, “Transnational Intellectual Cooperation,” 236. 22. Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 23. Rebecka Lettevall, Geert Somsen, and Sven Widmalm, eds., Neutrality in Twentieth- Century Europe: Intersections of Science, Culture, and Politics after the First World War (New York: Routledge, 2012). 24. Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Clavin, “Conceptualising Internationalism,” 7; Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (New York: Penguin, 2013), 191–193, 273–281. 25. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). See also James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 26. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 76. 27. This parallel is suggested in Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, 129. See also Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 172; Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Italian Fascists and National Socialists: The Dynamics of an Uneasy Relationship,” in Art, Culture, and Media under the Third Reich, ed. Richard A. Etlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 271. CHAPTER 1

■

CREATING CULTURAL NETWORKS

1. R. A. Wilford, “The PEN Club, 1930–1950,” Journal of Contemporary History 14, no. 1 (1979): 100. See also http://www.pen-international.org/pen-charter. 2. Jan-Pieter Barbian, Literaturpolitik im “Dritten Reich”: Institutionen, Kompetenzen, Betätigungsfelder, rev. ed. (Munich: dtv, 1995), 80–88; Jost Hermand, Die deutschen Dichterbünde: Von den Meistersingern bis zum PEN- Club (Cologne: Böhlau, 1998), 150–153; Helmut Peitsch, “Versuchte Gleichschaltung durch das NS-Regime, die Auflösung und Flucht ins Exil (1933–1945),” in Handbuch PEN: Geschichte und Gegenwart des deutschsprachigen Zentren, ed. Dorothée Bores and Sven Hanuschek (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 133–167. 3. Quoted in Ritchie Robertson, “From Naturalism to National Socialism (1890–1945),” in The Cambridge History of German Literature, ed. Helen WatanabeO’Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 387.



NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 3–15

4. Hanns Johst and Gottfried Benn, “An die Schriftsteller aller Länder! Aufruf der ‘Union Nationaler Schriftsteller,’ ” Völkischer Beobachter, March 1, 1934. Published in Joseph Wulf, Literatur und Dichtung im Dritten Reich. Eine Dokumentation (Gütersloh: S. Mohn, 1963), 86–87. 5. Robertson, “From Naturalism to National Socialism,” 387; Irene ChytraeusAuerbach, “Marinetti in Berlin,” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 2, no. 1 (June 2012): 133. Benn’s banquet address is published as Gottfried Benn, “Rede auf Marinetti (Rede beim Bankett der Union nationaler Schriftsteller in Berlin, am 29. März 1934),” in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Dieter Wellershoff, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 2003), 1042–1045. 6. Glenn R. Cuomo, “Purging an ‘Art-Bolshevist’: The Persecution of Gottfried Benn in the Years 1933–1938,” German Studies Review 9, no. 1 (February 1986): 85–105; Jonathan Petropoulos, Artists under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 125–128. 7. Madeleine Herren, “ ‘Outwardly . . . an Innocuous Conference Authority’: National Socialism and the Logistics of International Information Management,” German History 20, no. 1 (2002): 67–92. 8. Herbert Scurla, Die dritte Front. Geistige Grundlagen des Propagandakrieges der Westmächte (Berlin, 1940). 9. Johst and Benn, “An die Schriftsteller aller Länder!” See also Hans M. Elster, “Deutschlands Ruf an die nationalen Schriftsteller der Welt,” Der Angriff (24 November 1934). 10. Overviews of the vast literature on this topic are offered in: Jan Ifversen, “The Crisis of European Civilization. An Inter-War Diagnosis,” in Globalization and Civilizations, ed. Mehdi Mozaffari (London: Routledge, 2002), 151–177; Mark Hewitson and Matthew D’Auria, eds., Europe in Crisis: Intellectuals and the European Idea, 1917–1957 (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012); Vittorio Dini and Matthew D’Auria, eds., The Space of Crisis: Images and Ideas of Europe in the Age of Crisis, 1914–1945 (New York: Peter Lang, 2013). 11. Johst and Benn, “An die Schriftsteller aller Länder!” 12. Volkhard Laitenberger, “Organisations- und Strukturprobleme der auswärtigen Kulturpolitik und des akademischen Austauschs in den zwanziger und dreißiger Jahren,” in Deutsche auswärtige Kulturpolitik seit 1871: Geschichte und Struktur: Referate und Diskussionen eines interdisziplinären Symposions, ed. Kurt Düwell and Werner Link (Cologne: Böhlau, 1981), 72–95; Jan-Pieter Barbian, “ ‘Kulturwerte im Zeitkampf’: Die Kulturabkommen des ‘Dritten Reiches’ als Instrumente nationalsozialistischer Außenpolitik,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 74 (1992): 415–459; Tim Kirk, “New Cultural Orders: War and Cultural Politics in South-Eastern Europe,” Etudes Balkaniques, no. 4 (2008): 219–237; Marició Janué i Miret, “Imperialismus durch auswärtige Kulturpolitik: Die deutsch-spanische Gesellschaft als ‘Zwischenstaatlicher Verband’ unter dem Nationalsozialismus,” German Studies Review 31, no. 1 (2008): 109–132.

NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 6 –1 8



13. Ernest Ialongo, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: The Artist and His Politics (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015), 247, 48. 14. Beate Scholz, “Italienischer Faschismus als ‘Exportartikel’: Ideologische und organisatorische Ansätze zur Verbreitung des Faschismus im Ausland” (PhD diss., Universität Trier, 2001). 15. Daniela Liebscher, Freude und Arbeit: Zur internationalen Freizeit- und Sozialpolitik des faschistischen Italien und des NS-Regimes (Cologne: SH-Verlag, 2009); Alessandro Somma, I giuristi e l’Asse culturale Roma-Berlino: Economia e politica nel diritto fascista e nazionalsocialista (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2005). 16. Michael Arthur Ledeen, Universal Fascism: The Theory and Practice of the Fascist International, 1928–1936 (New York: H. Fertig, 1972); Scholz, “Italienischer Faschismus als ‘Exportartikel,’ ” 327–346; Marco Cuzzi, L’ internazionale delle camicie nere. I CAUR 1933–1939 (Milan: Mursia, 2005). 17. Marla S. Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Jan Andreas May, La Biennale di Venezia: Kontinuität und Wandel in der venezianischen Ausstellungspolitik 1895–1948 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2009); Fiamma Nicolodi, “Su alcuni aspetti dei festivals tra le due guerre,” in Musica italiana del primo novecento “la generazione dell’80”: Atti del convegno Firenze 9–10–11 maggio 1980, ed. Fiamma Nicolodi (Florence: Olschki, 1981), 161–166. 18. Atti del Convegno “Volta” 1932-XI della Reale Accademia d’Italia: Tema: L’Europa, 3 vols. (Rome: Reale Accademia d’Italia, 1933). 19. Intellectual Co-Operation Organisation: National Committees on Intellectual Co-Operation (Geneva: International Committee of Intellectual Co-Operation, League of Nations, 1937), 73–82; Jan Kolasa, International Intellectual Cooperation: The League Experience and the Beginnings of Unesco, Prace Wrocławskiego Towarzystwa Naukowego, Seria A, 81 (Wrocław, 1962), 32–38; Lorenzo Medici, Dalla propaganda alla cooperazione: La diplomazia culturale italiana nel secondo dopoguerra (1944–1950) (Padua: Wolters Kluwer Italia, 2009), 61. 20. Silvio Trentin, Le fascisme à Genève (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1932). 21. Scholz, “Italienischer Faschismus als ‘Exportartikel,’ ” 327–346. 22. Giorgio Petracchi, “Un modello di diplomazia culturale: l’Istituto italiano di cultura per l’Ungheria, 1935–1943,” Storia Contemporanea 24, no. 3 (1995): 385. 23. Quoted in Fiamma Nicolodi, “Su alcuni aspetti dei festivals tra le due guerre,” in Musica italiana del primo novecento “ la generazione dell’80”: Atti del convegno Firenze 9–10–11 maggio 1980, ed. Fiamma Nicolodi (Florence: Olschki, 1981), 163. 24. Kurt Atterberg, ed., Föreningen svenska tonsättare 25 år (Stockholm: Föreningen svenska tonsättare, 1943), 115. 25. Alex Ross, “Strauss’s Place in the Twentieth Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss, ed. Charles Youmans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 195–212.



NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 9–21

26. Petra Garberding, “ ‘We Take Care of the Artist’: The German Composers’ Meeting in Berlin, 1934,” Music and Politics 3, no. 2 (2009): 11. 27. 1934 declaration quoted in Petra Garberding, “Musiken som ett nationalsocialistiskt redskap? Kurt Atterberg och ‘Ständiger Rat für die internationale Zusamenarbeit der Komponisten,’ ” in Fruktan, fascination, frändskap: Det svenska musiklivet och nazismen, ed. Greger Andersson and Ursula Geisler (Malmö: Sekel, 2006), 98. On the Permanent Council see also Fred K. Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1989), 208–209; Gerhard Splitt, Richard Strauss 1933–1935: Ästhetik und Musikpolitik zu Beginn der nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1987), 174–180; Petra Garberding, Musik och politik i skuggan av nazismen: Kurt Atterberg och de svensk-tyska musikrelationerna (Lund: Sekel, 2007); Garberding, “ ‘We Take Care of the Artist’ ”; Petra Garberding, “Musik, Moral und Politik: Richard Strauss, Kurt Atterberg und der Ständige Rat für die internationale Zusammenarbeit der Komponisten,” in Richard Strauss im Europäischen Kontext: Richard Strauss-Jahrbuch 2011 (Vienna: Richard Strauss-Gesellschaft, 2011), 235–250. 28. Adolf Hitler, “Speech at the NSDAP Congress on Culture,” in The Third Reich Sourcebook, ed. Anson Rabinbach and Sander L. Gilman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 116, 120. 29. Karl Friedrich Schrieber, Die Reichskulturkammer: Organisation und Ziele der deutschen Kulturpolitik (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1934), 17. 30. Volker Dahm, “Anfänge und Ideologie der Reichskulturkammer: Die ‘Berufsgemeinschaft’ als Instrument kulturpolitischer Steuerung und sozialer Reglementierung,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 34, no. 1 (1986): 56–57. 31. Alan E. Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 17–26, 44–49. 32. Richard Strauss, “Speech at the Opening of the Reich Music Chamber,” in The Third Reich Sourcebook, ed. Anson Rabinbach and Sander L. Gilman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 529. 33. Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics, 105–106. 34. Joseph Wulf, Musik im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1963), 40–44. 35. Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics, 103. 36. Hitler, “Speech at the NSDAP Congress on Culture,” 116. 37. Anton Haefeli, Die Internationale Gesellschaft für neue Musik (IGNM): Ihre Geschichte von 1922 bis zur Gegenwart (Zürich: Atlantis Musikbuch-Verlag, 1982), 75; Paul Stefan, “Völkerbund der Musik,” in Atti del primo Congresso internazionale di musica, Firenze, 30 aprile–4 maggio 1933 (Florence: F. Le Monnier, 1935), 233–238. 38. Kurt Atterberg, “Droit moral och internationellt utbytte av folklig musik: Tyska tonsättares strävan,” Stockholms-Tidningen, March 10, 1934. Quoted in Garberding, “ ‘We Take Care of the Artist,’ ” 5.

NOT E S T O PA GE S 2 2 –2 4



39. Strauss, “Speech at the Opening of the Reich Music Chamber.” 40. Michael H. Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 216–217, 234; Michael Walter, “Strauss in the Th ird Reich,” in The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss, ed. Charles Youmans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 228. 41. Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era, 218–219; Scott Warfield, “Strauss and the Business of Music,” in The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss, ed. Charles Youmans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 252–254. 42. Donald Sassoon, The Culture of the Europeans: From 1800 to the Present (London: Harper Collins, 2006), 780. The relationship between copyright and broader changes in the economics of music is discussed in Albrecht Dümling, Musik hat ihren Wert: 100 Jahre musikalische Verwertungsgesellschaft in Deutschland (Regensburg: ConBrio, 2003); Rasmus Fleischer, Musikens politiska ekonomi: Lagstiftningen, ljudmedierna och försvaret av den levande musiken, 1925–2000 (Stockholm: Ink, 2012). 43. On Kopsch, see Ernst Klee, Das Kuturlexikon zum Dritten Reich: Wer war was vor und nach 1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2007), 330; Peter Baldwin, The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 175–176. 44. Dümling, Musik hat ihren Wert, 192–194; Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era, 229. 45. Michael H. Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 189–190. 46. Goebbels’s speech is largely reprinted in Curt Riess, Furtwängler: Musik und Politik (Bern: Alfred Scherz Verlag, 1953), 187–188. The Hindemith episode is narrated in Michael Kennedy, Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 289; Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era, 236–237. 47. Pamela Maxine Potter, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 17; Pamela M. Potter, “Nazism,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., vol. 17 (London: Macmillan, 2001), 722–724; Richard Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century: The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 755–756. 48. The founding members present in Wiesbaden in 1934 were Kurt Atterberg (Sweden), Friedrich Bayer (Austria), Maurice Besly (Great Britain), Carol-Bérard (France), Peder Gram (Denmark), Emiel Hullebroeck (Belgium), Yrjö Kilpinen (Finland), Jaroslav Křička (Czechoslova kia), Jón Leifs (Iceland), Adriano Lualdi (Italy), Nils O. Raasted (Denmark), Emil von Reznicek (Germany), Ludomir Różycki (Poland), Adolf Streuli (Switzerland). List from Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat, 209. 49. Niels Martin Jensen, “Peder Gram,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., vol. 10 (London: Macmillan, 2001), 274. 50. Jan Dewilde, “Emiel Hullebroeck,” in Muziekcentrum Vlaanderen (www .muziekcentrum.be/identity.php?ID =134519).



NOT E S T O PA GE S 2 4–28

51. Carl-Gunnar Åhlén, Jón Leifs: Kompositör i motvind (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2002), 218. 52. Michael Wittmann, Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek und der “Ständige Rat für die internationale Zusammenarbeit der Komponisten” (Wedemark: Musikverlag H. M. Fehrmann, 2015), 8. 53. Teresa Chylińska, “Ludomir Rózycki,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (London: Macmillan, 1992). 54. Josef Plavec and Eva Herrmannová, “Jaroslav Kricka,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., vol. 13 (London: Macmillan, 2001), 909. 55. Hans Åstrand and Bo Wallner, “Kurt (Magnus) Atterberg,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 2001), 148–149. 56. Atterberg, FST 25 år, 116. 57. Wittmann, Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek, 8. 58. Garberding, Musik och politik, 59–60; Staffan Albinsson, “The Advent of Performing Rights in Europe,” Music and Politics 6, no. 2 (2012): 15–16. 59. Dümling, Musik hat ihren Wert, 192–196. 60. Baldwin, Copyright Wars, 171–174, quotations from 173 and 172. 61. Ben Earle, Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 71–74. 62. Harvey Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy (Norton, 1988), 29–31; Maria Elena Moro, “L’Unione nazionale dei concerti: Profilo storico-giuridico della prima associazione italiana delle istituzioni dei concerti,” in Enrico di San Martino e la cultura musicale europea: Atti del convegno di studi, Roma, 11–13 maggio 2009, ed. Annalisa Bini (Rome: Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, 2012), 463–473. 63. Baldwin, Copyright Wars, 165. 64. Mussolini’s October 18, 1926, speech, quoted in Benito Mussolini, “Foundations and Doctrine of Fascism (1932),” in A Primer of Italian Fascism, ed. Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 66–67. 65. Benito Mussolini, Opera Omnia, ed. Edoardo Susmel and Duilio Susmel, vol. 26 (Florence: La Fenice, 1958), 95. 66. Ugo Spirito, “Corporatism as Absolute Liberalism and Absolute Socialism,” in A Primer of Italian Fascism, ed. Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 153. 67. Renamed “Associazione nazionale fascista degli enti e società di concerti,” the institution later served as the employers’ counterpart to the fascist musicians’ union (Sindacato Nazionale Fascista dei Musicisti) that was created in 1933. Annalisa Bini, “Enrico di San Martino e la Federazione internazionale dei concerti,” in Enrico di San Martino e la cultura musicale europea: Atti del convegno di studi, Roma, 11–13 maggio 2009, ed. Annalisa Bini (Rome: Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, 2012), 475–522; Moro, “L’Unione nazionale dei concerti,” 471.

NOT E S T O PA GE S 2 8 –3 2



68. Bini, “Enrico di San Martino e la Federazione internazionale dei concerti,” 481. 69. Baldwin, Copyright Wars, 165–168; Fleischer, Musikens politiska ekonomi, 225. 70. Valerio de Sanctis, “Die italienische Jurisprudenz der letzten beiden Jahre auf dem Gebiete des Urheberrechts,” Archiv für Urheber-, Film- und Theaterrecht 9 (1936): 186. 71. Rasmus Fleischer, “Protecting the Musicians and/or the Record Industry? On the History of ‘Neighbouring Rights’ and the Role of Fascist Italy,” Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Property 5, no. 3 (2015): 333–334, 336. 72. Gerhard Besier, “ ‘Berufsständische Ordnung’ und autoritäre Diktaturen: Zur politischen Umsetzung einer ‘klassenfreien’ katholischen Gesellschaftsordnung in den 20er und 30er Jahren des 20. Jahrhunderts,” Aufklärung und Kritik Sonderheft 9 (2004): 255–271. 73. Virgilio Bernardoni, “Adriano Lualdi,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 66 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2006), 228. 74. Adriano Lualdi, Viaggio musicale in Europa (Milan: Edizioni Alpes, 1929), 22. 75. Adriano Lualdi, Il rinnovamento musicale italiano, Quaderni dell’Istituto nazionale di fascista di cultura (vol. 3, no. 4–5) (Milan: Treves-Treccani-Tumminelli, 1931), 79. 76. Jean Cocteau, Le rappel à l’ordre (Paris: Stock, 1926). 77. Earle, Luigi Dallapiccola, 14–15; Francesco Parrino, “Between the AvantGarde and Fascist Modernism: Alfredo Casella’s Aesthetics and Politics” (PhD diss., Royal Holloway, University of London, 2007), 131–132. 78. Musical Quarterly’s 1920 review, quoted in Earle, Luigi Dallapiccola, 9. 79. Roberto Zanetti, La musica italiana nel novecento (Busto Arsizio: Bramante, 1985), 511. 80. Nicolodi, “Su alcuni aspetti,” 154–156, 160; Zanetti, La musica italiana nel novecento, 517–531. 81. Zanetti, La musica italiana nel novecento, 546; Mila De Santis, ed., Alfredo Casella e l’Europa: Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi, Siena 7–9 giugno 2001, vol. 44, Chigiana (Florence: Olschki, 2003). 82. Quoted in Zanetti, La musica italiana nel novecento, 505–506. 83. Lualdi’s 1923 review, quoted in ibid., 516. 84. Lualdi, Rinnovamento, 51. 85. Ibid., 66–68. 86. Alexandra Wilson, The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 192; Marla S. Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 5. 87. Quoted in Nicolodi, “Su alcuni aspetti,” 160. 88. Lualdi, Rinnovamento, 79. 89. Lualdi’s speech is paraphrased in “Notiziario,” Bollettino dei musicisti 1, no. 1–2 (April–May 1934-XII), 24.



NOT E S T O PA GE S 3 3–36

90. Sergio Romano, Giuseppe Volpi: Industria e finanza tra Giolitti e Mussolini (Milan: Bompiani, 1979), 198–200. On Maraini’s role, see Stone, The Patron State, 97–113; Benedetta Garzarelli, Parleremo al mondo intero: La propaganda del fascismo all’estero (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2004), 52. 91. Quoted in Nicolodi, “Su alcuni aspetti,” 162. 92. “Discorso Lualdi alla Ia Seduta del ‘Conseil permanent’ ” (September 11, 1934) in Archivio storico delle arti contemporanee (ASAC), Fondo storico, serie musica, busta 1. 93. Rune J. Andersen, “Sverre Hagerup-Bull,” Store norske leksikon, available at https://snl.no/Sverre _ Hagerup_ Bull. 94. José López-Calo, “Forns y Cuadras, José,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., vol. 9 (London: Macmillan, 2001), 99–100. 95. Splitt, Richard Strauss, 180. 96. Suzanne C. LeRoy Moulton-Gertig, “The Life and Works of Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek, 1860–1945” (PhD diss., University of Colorado, College of Music, 2007), 176. 97. Splitt, Richard Strauss, 181–182; “Notiziario,” Bollettino dei musicisti 1, no. 5–6 (September 1934): 147. 98. Splitt, Richard Strauss, 184–186; Ruth-Maria Gleissner, Der unpolitische Komponist als Politikum: Die Rezeption von Jean Sibelius im NS- Staat (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002), 124–126; Wittmann, Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek, 10. 99. “Importante asamblea de compositors en Venecia,” La Razon (Buenos Aires), September 23, 1934. 100. “Il Duce a Venezia per il Festival Musicale,” Corriere della Sera, September 14, 1934; “Il DUCE esalta i legami d’arte e d’amicizia che uniscono saldamente l’Austria e l’Italia,” Popolo di Sicilia, September 16, 1934; “Il Duce ha mantenuto la promessa fatta a Dolfuss: I rapporti culturali italo-austrici nelle dichiarazioni di Mussolini,” Giornale di Genova, September 16, 1934. 101. Adriano Lualdi, “Il III Festival Internazionale di Musica della Biennale d’Arte di Venezia,” Bollettino dei musicisti 1, no. 5–6 (September 1934): 140, 141. 102. Biennale di Venezia, IIIo Festival Internazionale di Musica, Programma ufficiale (Venice, 1934). G. B. Bianchetti (Mussolini’s cabinet chief), telegram to Lualdi, October 30, 1933, in ASAC, Fondo storico, serie musica, busta 1. 103. Kopsch to Goebbels, September 24, 1934, quoted in Garberding, “Musiken som ett nationalsocialistiskt redskap?” 99. 104. Gerigk, “Musikfestdämmerung,” Die Musik 27, 1 (1934): 45–48, quoted in Splitt, Richard Strauss, 183. 105. Earle, Luigi Dallapiccola, 72; Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, 749.

NOT E S T O PA GE S 3 6 –3 9



106. Reported in Kopsch to Goebbels, September 24, 1934, quoted in Splitt, Richard Strauss, 185. 107. Kopsch to Goebbels, September 24, 1934, quoted in ibid. 108. Quoted in ibid., 184. 109. Kopsch to Goebbels, September 24, 1934, in ibid., 185. 110. Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era, 233. 111. Strauss to Hugo Rasch, December 9, 1934, quoted in Splitt, Richard Strauss, 179. 112. Hugo Rasch to Strauss, December 12, 1934, quoted in Garberding, “Musik, Moral und Politik,” 241. 113. Gleissner, Der unpolitische Komponist, 153. 114. These included Strauss (whose membership in the ISCM was later withdrawn), Sibelius, Alfredo Casella, Gian Francesco Malipiero, Dutch composer Willem Pijper, and French composer Albert Roussel, who served as a vice president in the Permanent Council while a member of the board of the French ISCM section. Haefeli, Die Internationale Gesellschaft für neue Musik, 197, 215. 115. Quoted in Gleissner, Der unpolitische Komponist, 150. See Gleissner’s careful reconstruction of this episode, 150–152. 116. Pamela Potter, “Strauss and the National Socialists: The Debate and Its Relevance,” in Richard Strauss: New Perspectives on the Composer and His Work, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 95–96; Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era, 240–243; Walter, “Strauss in the Third Reich,” 237–238. 117. Strauss’s letter to Siegmund von Hausegger, December 31, 1934, quoted in Splitt, Richard Strauss, 155. 118. Differing accounts of the number of composers and countries represented are assessed in Anne C. Shreffler, “The International Society for Contemporary Music and Its Political Context (Prague, 1935),” in Music and International History in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jessica Gienow-Hecht (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015), 84, n. 34. 119. Carol-Bérard read this article aloud to the Permanent Council members during their meeting on September 3, 1935. See “Protokoll der 1. Sitzung,” sent with letter from Emil von Reznicek to Hans Hikel, Propagandaministerium, October 25, 1935, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde (BA), NS 32, 1450. 120. Kennedy, Richard Strauss, 307; Splitt, Richard Strauss, 156. 121. Quoted in Haefeli, Die Internationale Gesellschaft für neue Musik, 196, 215; Splitt, Richard Strauss, 176. The clash between the Vichy and Prague festivals is discussed in Shreffler, “The International Society for Contemporary Music and Its Political Context,” 69–70. 122. Quoted in Haefeli, Die Internationale Gesellschaft für neue Musik, 198. ISCM members who allowed their works to be performed at Permanent Council events



NOT E S T O PA GE S 4 0–46

included Marcel Poot, Jacques Ibert, Arthur Bliss, Henk Baldings, Karol Szymanowski, Conrad Beck, and Zoltán Kodály. Ibid., 418, n. 126. 123. Emil von Reznicek, report on the Vichy meeting, September 16, 1935, sent with letter of October 25, 1935, to Hans Hinkel, Propaganda Ministry, in BA NS 32, 1444–1458. 124. Jane F. Fulcher, The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France, 1914–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 211–215. 125. Adriano Lualdi, L’arte di dirigere l’orchestra: Antologia e guida (Milan: Hoepli, 1940), 118. 126. Garberding, Musik och politik, 67–68, 79. 127. J. H. Herz, “The National Socialist Doctrine of International Law and the Problems of International Organization,” Political Science Quarterly 54, no. 4 (December 1939): 548. See also Baldwin, Copyright Wars, 177. 128. Paul Graener to Hans Hinkel, November 30, 1935, quoted in Splitt, Richard Strauss, 179. 129. “Fédération international des concerts: Le IIme Conseil général à Paris, 15–20 Mai 1933,” Nuova italia musicale 6, no. 5 (May 1933): 11. 130. Letter from George Schumann (Sing-Akademie zu Berlin) to San Martino, October 10, 1935, in Accademia Nazionale Santa Cecilia (ANSC), Archivio, Postunitario (1935), 24/3/1 (“Germania”). 131. Alfredo Casella, “Il Festival musicale di Praga,” Italia letteraria, October 6, 1935, quoted in Fiamma Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista (Fiesole: Discanto, 1984), 266. 132. Petracchi, “Un modello di diplomazia culturale,” 384; Emily Braun, “The Visual Arts: Modernism and Fascism,” in Liberal and Fascist Italy, ed. Adrian Lyttelton, The Short Oxford History of Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 198. CHAPTER 2

■

COOPERATION OR CAPITULATION?

1. “Il Conte Ciano giunto in volo,” Corriere della Sera, August 11, 1935; reprinted in Adriano Aprà, Giuseppe Ghigi, and Patrizia Pistagnesi, eds., Cinquant’anni di cinema a Venezia (Venice: Biennale di Venezia, 1982), 59–61, here 60. 2. Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907–1934 (London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1985), 104–105. 3. Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through TwentiethCentury Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 305. On the crisis of interwar European cinema more broadly, see Victoria de Grazia, “Mass Culture and Sovereignty: The American Challenge to European Cinemas, 1920–1960,” Journal of Modern History 61 (1989): 53–87; Julian Petley, Capital and Culture: German Cinema 1933–45 (London: British Film Institute, 1979);

NOT E S T O PA GE S 4 6 –4 9



Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby, eds., “Film Europe” and “Film America”: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920–1939 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999). 4. Thompson, Exporting Entertainment, 124–136. 5. Günther Dehn, Proletarische Jugend (Berlin, 1929), 39; quoted in Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (London: Allen Lane, 1991), 178. Key German intellectuals’ thoughts on cinema are gathered in Anton Kaes, ed., Kino-Debatte: Texte zum Verhältnis von Literatur und Film 1909–1929 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1978). 6. For Lenin’s declaration, see Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896–1939 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988), 57. Mussolini’s was written on a giant billboard at the January 1936 groundbreaking ceremony for the Cinecittà studio complex. The relationship between the two is examined in Piero Garofalo, “Seeing Red: The Soviet Influence on Italian Cinema in the Thirties,” in Re-Viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922–1943, ed. Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 224. 7. de Grazia, “Mass Culture and Sovereignty.” 8. Sabine Hake, Popular Cinema of the Third Reich (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 14–15. 9. Thompson, Exporting Entertainment, chapters 4 and 5. 10. Ibid., 106–107. 11. Quoted in Steven Ricci, Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922– 1943 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 57. 12. “European Monroe Doctrine,” Lichtbild-Bühne 23 (March 1, 1924), translated and published in Higson and Maltby, “Film Europe” and “Film America,” 328, 330. 13. Thompson, Exporting Entertainment, 113. 14. Ernesto Cauda, “Il risveglio della cinematografia europea,” Cinematografo 1, no. 16 (October 2, 1927): 5. On this and other distribution agreements see Kristin Thompson, “The Rise and Fall of Film Europe,” in “Film Europe” and “Film America”: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920–1939, ed. Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), 62; Thompson, Exporting Entertainment, 116–117. 15. Quoted in Thompson, Exporting Entertainment, 113. 16. The effect of the interwar European studio landscape on responses to Hollywood is outlined in de Grazia, “Mass Culture and Sovereignty,” 61–68. 17. Andrew Higson, “Cultural Policy and Industrial Practice: Film Europe and the International Film Congresses of the 1920s,” in “Film Europe” and “Film America”: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920–1939, ed. Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), 129.



NOT E S T O PA GE S 5 0–53

18. Jan Distelmeyer, ed., Babylon in FilmEuropa: Mehrsprachen-Versionen der 1930er Jahre (Munich: Text+Kritik, 2005); Thompson, Exporting Entertainment, 163; Thompson, “Rise and Fall.” 19. Jean-Jacques Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée: La Société des nations et la coopération intellectuelle, 1919–1946 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999); Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, Why War?, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Co-Operation, League of Nations, 1933). 20. On the conference, see William Marston Seabury, Motion Picture Problems: The Cinema and the League of Nations (New York: Avondale Press, 1929), 147–161; Thompson, Exporting Entertainment, 114–116; Higson, “Cultural Policy and Industrial Practice,” 121–129; Richard Maltby, “The Cinema and the League of Nations,” in “Film Europe” and “Film America”: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920–1939, ed. Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1999), 82–116; de Grazia, Irresistible Empire, 307–308. 21. The conference’s resolutions are printed in Seabury, Motion Picture Problems, 357–382, here 358. 22. Ibid., 157–158. 23. Maltby, “The Cinema and the League of Nations,” 83. 24. Film Daily, September 30, 1926, quoted in Seabury, Motion Picture Problems, 154. 25. Higson, “Cultural Policy and Industrial Practice,” 125. On the 1927 conference in Basel, see Christel Taillibert, L’Institut international du cinématographe éducatif: Regards sur le rôle du cinéma éducatif dans la politique internationale du fascisme italien (Paris: Harmattan, 1999), 61–68. 26. Maltby, “The Cinema and the League of Nations,” 107. 27. Ibid., 82. On this central question, see Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema,” in The European Cinema Reader, ed. Catherine Fowler (London: Routledge, 2002). 28. The ICE is documented in Taillibert, L’Institut international du cinématographe éducatif; Maltby, “The Cinema and the League of Nations,” 95–107; Peter J. Bloom, French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 176–178. 29. Gabriele D’Autilia, “Istituto Luce,” in Dizionario del Fascismo, ed. Victoria de Grazia and Sergio Luzzatto, vol. 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 2002), 685. See also Mino Argentieri, L’occhio del regime: Informazione e propaganda nel cinema del fascismo (Florence: Vallecchi, 1979); Ernesto G. Laura, Le stagioni dell’aquila: Storia dell’Istituto Luce (Rome: Ente dello Spettacolo, 2000). 30. Silvio Celli, “Luciano De Feo,” in Storia del cinema italiano, ed. Orio Caldiron, vol. 5: 1934/1939 (Venice: Marsilio, 2006), 66. 31. Taillibert, L’Institut international du cinématographe éducatif, 66–67. 32. Ibid., 70–73; Maltby, “The Cinema and the League of Nations,” 96.

NOT E S T O PA GE S 5 3 –5 7



33. H. Wehberg, “Fate of an International Film Institute,” Public Opinion Quarterly 2, no. 3 (July 1938): 483–485. See complete listing in Taillibert, L’Institut international du cinématographe éducatif, 384–385. The social scientific credentials of the institute and its journal are discussed in Bloom, French Colonial Documentary, 176–178. 34. A. Nichtenhauser, “The Tasks of an International Film Institute,” Hollywood Quarterly 2, no. 1 (October 1946): 19–24; Taillibert, L’Institut international du cinématographe éducatif, 240–249. 35. de Grazia, Irresistible Empire, 308. 36. Maltby, “The Cinema and the League of Nations,” 97–98, 106. 37. Gian Piero Brunetta, Cent’anni di cinema italiano: 1. Dalle origini alla seconda guerra mondiale (Rome: Laterza, 1995), 168. 38. On the Congresso internazionale della cinematografia di educazione e di insegnamento (Rome, April 19–25, 1934) and its reception, see Taillibert, L’Institut international du cinématographe éducatif, 289–301; Christel Taillibert, “L’ICE e la politica estera del fascismo,” Bianco e nero no. 547 (2003): 112. 39. Cinema ed insegnamento (Rome, 1934) and Cinema ed educazione (Rome, 1934). 40. Taillibert, “L’ICE e la politica estera del fascismo,” 112. 41. Francesco Bono, “La mostra del cinema di Venezia: Nascita e sviluppo nell’anteguerra, 1932–1939,” Storia contemporanea 22, no. 3 (June 1991): 516–517. 42. Taillibert, L’Institut international du cinématographe éducatif, 262, n. 119. 43. Quoted in Bono, “La mostra del cinema,” 521. 44. Ibid., 526. 45. James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 51, 70–71. 46. Taillibert, L’Institut international du cinématographe éducatif, 261. 47. Marla Stone, “Challenging Cultural Categories: The Transformation of the Venice Biennale International Film Festival under Fascism,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 4, no. 2 (1999): 184–208. 48. Bono, “La mostra del cinema,” 523. 49. Brunetta, Cent’anni di cinema italiano, 184. 50. Maraini, letter of 1934, quoted in Bono, “La mostra del cinema,” 520. 51. Quoted in Ibid. 52. From ICE report, published in Société des Nations: Journal officiel (November 1932), quoted in Taillibert, L’Institut international du cinématographe éducatif, 254. 53. De Feo, report submitted to the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, July 1934, quoted in ibid., 256. 54. Ibid., 311–313. 55. Ibid., 147–148. 56. 40. anniversario della cinematografia (1895–1935): Roma 22 marzo 1935-Anno XIII E. F. (Rome: Sottosegretariato di Stato per la Stampa e la Propaganda, 1935).



NOT E S T O PA GE S 5 7–62

57. Bono, “La mostra del cinema,” 531. 58. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 88–92; Ricci, Cinema and Fascism, 66–67; de Grazia, Irresistible Empire, 316–319. On the Corporazione dello spettacolo, see Brunetta, Cent’anni di cinema italiano, 174. 59. Freddi, Il Cinema (1949), quoted in Ricci, Cinema and Fascism, 67. 60. Francesco Pitassio and Simone Venturini, “Building the Institution: Luigi Chiarini and Italian Film Culture in the 1930s,” in The Emergence of Film Culture: Knowledge Production, Institution Building and the Fate of the Avant- Garde in Europe, 1919–1945, ed. Malte Hagener (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014), 255–259. 61. Luigi Chiarini, Cinematografo (Rome: Cremonese, 1935), 15. Quoted in Gian Piero Brunetta, Intellettuali cinema e propaganda tra le due guerre (Bologna: Pàtron, 1972), 233. 62. Eberhard Nembach, Stalins Filmpolitik: Der Umbau der sowjetischen Filmindustrie 1929 bis 1938 (St. Augustin: Gardez!, 2001), 87; Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931– 1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 189. 63. Denise J. Youngblood, Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 32. 64. Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 94–95; Anique H. M. van Ginneken, Historical Dictionary of the League of Nations (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006), 107. 65. Quoted in Michael Grüttner, “Wissenschaft,” in Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus, ed. Wolfgang Benz, Hermann Graml, and Hermann Weiss (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1997), 141–142. 66. “Kongreß-Auftakt im Rheingold,” Lichtbild-Bühne, April 26, 1935. 67. See Der Internationale Filmkongress Berlin 1935: Seine Organisation und seine Ergebnisse/Le Congrès International du Film: Organisation et résultats (Berlin: Reichsfilmkammer, 1935); Yong Chan Choy, “Inszenierungen der völkischen Filmkultur im Nationalsozialismus: Der Internationale Filmkongress Berlin 1935” (PhD diss., Technische Universität, 2006). 68. “Rundgang durch die technische Kongreß-Ausstellung,” Lichtbild-Bühne, April 27, 1935. 69. “1800 in Neubabelsberg,” Film-Kurier, April 27, 1935; “Wochenschau des Kongresses,” Film-Kurier, May 4, 1935. 70. “Es wurde gute Arbeit geleistet,” Der Film, May 4, 1935. See also “Reichsfilmarchiv: Akademie der deutschen Filmkunst,” Film-Kurier, April 25, 1935, and “Ehrung der Pioniere: Film-Archiv als Kulturwert,” Film-Kurier, April 30, 1935. See also Rolf Aurich, “The German Reich Film Archive in an International Context,” in The Emergence of Film Culture: Knowledge Production, Institution Building and the Fate of

NOT E S T O PA GE S 6 2 –6 5



the Avant- Garde in Europe, 1919–1945, ed. Malte Hagener (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014), 306–337. 71. Barbara J. Keys, Globalizing Sport: National Rivalry and International Community in the 1930s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 136. Hitler’s “peace speeches” are gathered in Adolf Hitler, Des Führers Kampf um den Weltfrieden (Berlin: F. Eher Nachf., 1936). 72. This episode is recounted in David Clay Large, Berlin: A Modern History (Bath: Penguin, 2002), 239–240; Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 4; Ben Urwand, The Collaboration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 26–27. On Hitler’s “obsession with film,” see ibid., 10–14. Goebbels’s diary entries on film are analyzed in Felix Moeller, The Film Minister: Goebbels and the Cinema in the “Third Reich,” trans. Michael Robinson (London: Edition Axel Menges, 2000), 25–35. 73. David Welch and Roel Vande Winkel, “Europe’s New Hollywood? The German Film Industry Under Nazi Rule, 1933–45,” in Cinema and the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema, ed. Roel Vande Winkel and David Welch, rev. ed. (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 2–8, 15–18; Rainer Rother, “Nationalsozialismus und Film,” in Medien im Nationalsozialismus, ed. Bernd Heidenreich and Neitzel, Sönke (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2010), 128–133; Moeller, The Film Minister, 36–40. 74. Fritz Scheuermann as paraphrased in “Die Zukunft des Films,” Frankfurter Zeitung, September 21, 1934, quoted in Joseph Wulf, Theater und Film im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1966), 312. 75. de Grazia, Irresistible Empire, 322–323. 76. Internationale Filmkongress Berlin 1935, 15. The congress’s resolutions were also reported in “Die Resolutionen der IFK,” Film-Kurier, May 3, 1935; “Was in fünf Tagen erreicht wurde,” Lichtbild-Bühne, May 2, 1935. 77. The members of the General Commission—representing Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechoslova kia, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Luxemburg, Norway, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey— are listed in “Die Generalkommission des I.F.K.,” Film-Kurier, April 29, 1935. 78. Fritz Bertram, “Filmtheaterbesitzer Europas!” Lichtbild-Bühne, April 24–25, 1935. 79. “Der Führer grüßt den Kongreß,” Lichtbild-Bühne, April 29, 1935. 80. Internationale Filmkongress Berlin 1935, 22–23. 81. Raether’s speech is paraphrased in “Feierliche Kongreß-Eröffnung,” LichtbildBühne, April 26, 1935. 82. Joseph Goebbels, “Rede des Reichsministers Dr. Goebbels vor dem Internationalen Filmkongress am Dienstag, den 29. April 1935 in der Kroll-Oper,” 1935, 5, 8, DIF-Magazin/417, Deutsche Film Institut, Frankfurt.



NOT E S T O PA GE S 6 7–71

83. Sven Nygren, “Internationellt Filmår,” in Om Film: Svenska Filmsamfundets Årsbok 1935–36 (Stockholm: Zetterlund, 1936), 61–64. 84. Ibid., 61. 85. Internationale Filmkongress Berlin 1935, 21. These were France, England, Italy, Spain, Germany, Sweden, Czechoslova kia, Austria, Hungary, Poland, and Belgium; also invited to participate was a representative of De Feo’s International Institute for Educational Cinematography. 86. Ibid. 87. The conflict at this meeting, July 13–15, 1935, is documented in Nygren, “Internationellt Filmår,” 67–68. 88. Ibid., 70. Traces of this body—Federazione del film educativo or Internationale Lehrfilmverband— are few, but see Dino Alfieri, “La camera internazionale del film,” Lo schermo 1, no. 2 (September 1935): 16; “Die Filmkammer-Gründung in Venedig,” Lichtbild-Bühne, August 26, 1935; Flavia Paulon, 2000 film a Venezia: 1932– 1950 (Venice: Mostra internazionale d’arte cinematografica di Venezia, 1951), 30. 89. “Internationale Filmkammer: Ein Erfolg deutscher Initiative,” Film-Kurier, August 26, 1935. 90. “Die Filmkammer-Gründung in Venedig.” See also Choy, “Inszenierungen,” 196–197. 91. “Die Filmkammer-Gründung in Venedig”; “Internationale Filmkammer gegründet,” Der Film, August 24, 1935. 92. “Die Filmkammer-Gründung in Venedig.” 93. Il Gazzettino’s review is quoted in “Die Filmkammer-Gründung in Venedig.” The prize is listed in “Relazione per l’assegnazione dei premi” (August 1935), in Archivio storico delle arti contemporanee, Venice (ASAC), Serie Cinema, CM 3. 94. Paulon, 2000 film a Venezia, 29. 95. Arnold Raether, “Die Situation des deutschen Films,” Intercine 7, no. 8–9 (September 1935): 9, 8. 96. Jan Olsson, Svensk spelfilm under andra världskriget (Lund: Liber Läromedel, 1979), 28. 97. Scheuermann’s speech, at the November 28, 1935, meeting of the Berliner Freunde der Deutschen Akademie, quoted in Choy, “Inszenierungen,” 240. 98. Filippo Sacchi, “Corriere del festival,” in Corriere della Sera, August 24, 1935, reprinted in Aprà, Ghigi, and Pistagnesi, Cinquant’anni di cinema a Venezia, 66–68, here 66. Quoted in Mino Argentieri, L’asse cinematografico Roma-Berlino (Naples: Libreria Sapere, 1986), 33. 99. Filippo Sacchi, “Corriere del festival,” 66. 100. “Relazione per l’assegnazione dei premi” (August 1935), in ASAC, Serie Cinema, CM 3. 101. Francesco Bono, Casta diva & co.: Percorsi nel cinema italiano fra le due guerre (Viterbo: Sette città, 2004), 39–64.

NOT E S T O PA GE S 7 1 –7 5



102. Ibid., 49–50; Jan Distelmeyer, Alliierte für den Film: Arnold Pressburger, Gregor Rabinowitsch und die Cine-Allianz (Munich: Text+Kritik, 2004). 103. Bono, Casta diva & co., 53. 104. Ibid., 52–53. 105. Silvio Celli, “Le guerre del LUCE,” in Storia del cinema italiano, ed. Orio Caldiron, vol. 5: 1934/1939 (Venice: Marsilio, 2006), 64. Entitled “Politica,” part of Rivista LUCE, n. 5 (1935), this part of the film is missing from the official copy at the Archivio storico LUCE. Lo schermo (September 2, 1935), 18, quoted in ibid. 106. Jens Petersen, Hitler-Mussolini: Die Entstehung der Achse Berlin-Rom 1933– 1936 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1973), 462; Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il duce. I. Gli anni del consenso, 1929–1936 (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), 665 and 729; Patrick Bernhard, “Die ‘Kolonialachse’: Der NS-Staat und Italienisch-Afrika 1935 bis 1943,” in Die “Achse” im Krieg: Politik, Ideologie und Kriegführung 1939–1945, ed. Lutz Klinkhammer, Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi, and Thomas Schlemmer (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2010), 151. 107. Celli, “Luciano De Feo,” 67. CHAPTER 3

■

THE EUROPEAN CHARACTER OF THE GERMAN–ITALIAN AXIS

1. Brian R. Sullivan, “From Little Brother to Senior Partner: Fascist Italian Perceptions of the Nazis and of Hitler’s Regime, 1930–1936,” in Knowing Your Friends: Intelligence inside Alliances and Coalitions from 1914 to the Cold War, ed. Martin S. Alexander (London: Routledge, 1998), 85–108; Zara Steiner, The Triumph of the Dark: European International History 1933–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 129–135. 2. Europa Nuova proposal, dated July 27, 1936, in Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS), Ministero Cultura Popolare (MCP), Gabinetto, b. 140, f. “Giovane Europa.” 3. The comprehensive overview of these exchanges is Andrea Hoffend, Zwischen Kultur-Achse und Kulturkampf: Die Beziehungen zwischen “Drittem Reich” und faschistischem Italien in den Bereichen Medien, Kunst, Wissenschaft und Rassenfragen (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1998). See also Jens Petersen, “Vorspiel zu ‘Stahlpakt’ und Kriegsallianz: Das Deutsch-Italienische Kulturabkommen vom 23. November 1938,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 36, no. 1 (1988): 41–77; Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 140–141; Ruth BenGhiat, “Italian Fascists and National Socialists: The Dynamics of an Uneasy Relationship,” in Art, Culture, and Media under the Third Reich, ed. Richard A. Etlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 263–267. 4. Mino Argentieri, L’asse cinematografico Roma-Berlino (Naples: Libreria Sapere, 1986), 82–110; Hoffend, Zwischen Kultur-Achse und Kulturkampf, 153–188. 5. Hoffend, Zwischen Kultur-Achse und Kulturkampf, 238–256; Herbert Gerigk, “Die Mailänder Scala in Berlin,” Die Musik 29, no. 10 (July 1937): 725–726.



NOT E S T O PA GE S 7 5–81

6. See Tätigketisbericht 1938/39 der Deutsch-italienischen Gesellschaft e.V., Berlin, in Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde (BA) R 64 I, Nr. 12, and Hoffend, Zwischen Kultur-Achse und Kulturkampf, 139. 7. Associazione Italo-Germanica di Cultura, “Relazione,” May 31, 1938, in Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome (ACS), Ministero Cultura Popolare (MCP), Gabinetto, b. 59. 8. Petersen, “Vorspiel,” 48. 9. “Italian Pictures in Berlin,” The Times, November 1, 1937. 10. Ibid. 11. Argentieri, L’asse cinematografico, 37; Flavia Paulon, 2000 film a Venezia: 1932– 1950 (Venice: Mostra internazionale d’arte cinematografica di Venezia, 1951), 40. 12. Jan Andreas May, La Biennale di Venezia: Kontinuität und Wandel in der venezianischen Ausstellungspolitik 1895–1948 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2009), 172. 13. Goebbels’s diary entry of August 30, 1936, quoted in ibid., 173. 14. Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, “L’Exposition Internationale d’Art Cinématographique Venise 1936/Zur Internationalen Filmkunst-Ausstellung Venedig 1936,” Inter-Film 1 (August 1936): 3. 15. Richard Litterscheid, “Herrschau europäischer Musik: Das Internationale Musikfest des ‘Ständigen Rates’ in Dresden,” Die Musik 29, no. 10 (July 1937): 702–705. 16. Sandra Teroni and Wolfgang Klein, Pour la défense de la culture: Les textes du Congrès international des écrivains, Paris, juin 1935 (Dijon: Editions universitaires de Dijon, 2005). 17. Quoted in Jens Petersen, “L’accordo culturale fra l’Italia e la Germania del 23 novembre 1938,” in Fascismo e nazionalsocialismo, ed. Karl Dietrich Bracher and Leo Valiani, Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico 21 (Bologna: Mulino, 1986), 337. 18. Carlo Curcio, Europa: Storia di un’ idea (Florence: Valecchi, 1958), 825–834. 19. Ulrich von Hassell, Deutschland und Italiens europäische Sendung: Vortrag gehalten am 19. Januar 1937 in der Universität Köln, Veröffentlichungen des PetrarcaHauses, Vorträge, Zweite Reihe, 8 (Cologne: Kommissionsverlag DeutscheVerlagsanstalt, 1937), 15–16. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 10. 22. “Verteidigung reinen Europäertums.” Ibid., 12. 23. Valentino Piccoli, Italia e Germania contro il bolscevismo (Rome: Unione editoriale d’Italia, 1937), 13. 24. Ibid., 111. 25. Bernardo Attolico, Italian Embassy, Berlin, to Alfieri, MCP, December 14, 1937, in ACS MCP, DG Propaganda, busta 94, sottofascicolo 1.27.47, 1. The planning and reception of this exhibition is analyzed in Benedetta Garzarelli, Parleremo al mondo intero: La propaganda del fascismo all’estero (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2004), 209–224.

NOT E S T O PA GE S 8 1 –8 5



26. This is the argument of Hoffend, Zwischen Kultur-Achse und Kulturkampf. 27. Alessandro Somma, I giuristi e l’Asse culturale Roma-Berlino: Economia e politica nel diritto fascista e nazionalsocialista (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2005); Daniela Liebscher, Freude und Arbeit: Zur internationalen Freizeit- und Sozialpolitik des faschistischen Italien und des NS-Regimes (Cologne: SH-Verlag, 2009); Patrick Bernhard, “Repression Transnational: Die Polizeizusammenarbeit zwischen Drittem Reich und italienischem Faschismus, 1933–1943,” in Die Polizei im NS-Staat: Beiträge eines internationalen Symposiums an der deutschen Hochschule der Polizei in Münster, ed. Wolfgang Schulte (Frankfurt am Main, 2009), 407–424; Patrick Bernhard, “Die ‘Kolonialachse’: Der NS-Staat und Italienisch-Afrika 1935 bis 1943,” in Die “Achse” im Krieg: Politik, Ideologie und Kriegführung 1939–1945, ed. Lutz Klinkhammer, Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi, and Thomas Schlemmer (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2010), 147– 175; Patrick Bernhard, “Konzertierte Gegnerbekämpfung im Achsenbündnis: Die Polizei im Dritten Reich und im faschistischen Italien 1933 bis 1943,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 59, no. 2 (2011): 229–262; Bianca Gaudenzi, “Commercial Advertising in Germany and Italy, 1918–1943” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2011). 28. Liebscher, Freude und Arbeit, 476–485, 496–506. 29. Ibid., 22; Madeleine Herren, “Sozialpolitik und die Historisierung des Transnationalen,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 32, no. 4 (2006): 542–559. 30. Michael Wittmann, Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek und der “Ständige Rat für die internationale Zusammenarbeit der Komponisten” (Wedemark: Musikverlag H. M. Fehrmann, 2015), 14–15. 31. “Resolutionen” taken in Stockholm, February 24–27, 1936, sent by Emil von Reznicek to Hans Hinkel, Propaganda Ministry, March 16, 1936, in BA NS 32, 1392. 32. Felicitas von Reznicek, Gegen den Strom: Leben und Werk von E. N. von Reznicek (Zürich: Amalthea-Verlag, 1960), 185. 33. Wittmann, Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek, 6–8. 34. Litterscheid, “Herrschau europäischer Musik,” 703. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 705. Similar emphases in the German press coverage of the Permanent Council’s 1935 festival in Hamburg are noted in Petra Garberding, Musik och politik i skuggan av nazismen: Kurt Atterberg och de svensk-tyska musikrelationerna (Lund: Sekel, 2007), 108. 37. Garberding, Musik och politik, 81. The Permanent Council’s exchange concerts are listed in Kurt Atterberg, ed., Föreningen svenska tonsättare 25 år (Stockholm: Föreningen svenska tonsättare, 1943), 122. 38. “Richtlinien,” document sent with letter from E. von Reznicek to Hans Hinkel (RMVP), March 19, 1936, in BA NS 32/1382. 39. Hoffend, Zwischen Kultur-Achse und Kulturkampf, 244. 40. “Resolutionen,” sent with letter from E. von Reznicek to Hans Hinkel (RMVP), March 19, 1936; in BA NS 32/1382.



NOT E S T O PA GE S 8 5–88

41. Michael H. Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 7. 42. Joan Evans, “ ‘International with National Emphasis’: The Internationales Zeitgenössisches Musikfest in Baden-Baden, 1936–1939,” in Music and Nazism: Art under Tyranny, 1933–1945, ed. Michael H. Kater and Albrecht Riethmüller (Laaber: Laaber, 2003), 104, 106. 43. “L’Italia al Festival di musica di Baden-Baden,” Il musicista 4, no. 1 (January 1937): 14. 44. Friedrich Herzog, “Musik der Völker in Baden-Baden,” Die Musik 28 (1936): 781. Quoted in Evans, “ ‘International with National Emphasis,’ ” 103. 45. Friedrich W. Herzog, “Europäische Musik in Baden: Das II. Internationale zeitgenössische Musikfest in Baden-Baden,” Die Musik 29, no. 7 (April 1937): 495. 46. Cornelia Schmitz-Berning, Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 645–647. On Volkstum, Egbert Klautke, The Mind of the Nation: Volkerpsychologie in Germany, 1851–1955 (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013), 126–127. 47. Hans Pfitzner, “Die neue Ästhetik der musikalischen Impotenz: Ein Verwesungssymptom?” in Gesammelte Schriften, 3rd ed., vol. 2 (Augsburg: Benno FilserVerlag, 1926), 109–110. Quoted in Albrecht Dümling, “The Target of Racial Purity: The ‘Degenerate Music’ Exhibition in Düsseldorf, 1938,” in Art, Culture, and Media under the Third Reich, ed. Richard A. Etlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 45–46. 48. Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era, 149. 49. Fausto Torrefranca, Giacomo Puccini e l’opera internazionale (Turin: Bocca, 1912); Alexandra Wilson, The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 125–154. 50. Wilson, The Puccini Problem, 190; Virgilio Bernardoni, “Adriano Lualdi,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 66 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2006), 228. 51. Adriano Lualdi, Viaggio musicale in Europa (Milano: Edizioni Alpes, 1929), 21–25. 52. Ibid., 28. 53. Ibid., 428, 433, 17. 54. Ibid., 26. 55. Richard Taruskin, “Nationalism,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 2nd ed., vol. 17 (London: Macmillan, 2001), 689–706. 56. Leon Botstein, “Modernism,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., vol. 16 (London: Macmillan, 2001), 872; Evans, “ ‘International with National Emphasis,’ ” 104. 57. Litterscheid, “Herrschau europäischer Musik,” 705. 58. Evans, “ ‘International with National Emphasis,’ ” 108. The interwar period’s “neo-classical, pseudo-folkloristic tendency” is noted also in Tomi Mäkelä, “Towards

NOT E S T O PA GE S 8 9 –9 6



a Theory of Internationalism, Europeanism and ‘Co-Nationalism’ in 20th-Century Music,” in Music and Nationalism in 20th- Century Great Britain and Finland, ed. Tomi Mäkelä (Hamburg: Von Bockel, 1997), 14. 59. Ralph Vaughan Williams, National Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934), 4, 12–13, 15. David Manning, “The Public Figure: Vaughan Williams as Writer and Activist,” in The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams, ed. Alain Frogley and Aidan J. Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 231–248. 60. Petra Garberding, “ ‘We Take Care of the Artist’: The German Composers’ Meeting in Berlin, 1934,” Music and Politics 3, no. 2 (2009): 13. 61. This argument regarding literary writers is made in Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 180. 62. Quoted in Tomi Mäkelä, Jean Sibelius, trans. Steven Lindberg (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), 1. Mäkelä discusses the völkisch appropriation of Sibelius at 329–349. 63. Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), 157. See also Mäkelä, Jean Sibelius, 350–360. 64. Goebbels’s November 1936 ban on art and music criticism is printed in Joseph Wulf, ed., Die bildenden Künste im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1989), 128. 65. Mäkelä, “Towards a Theory,” 15. 66. Ross, The Rest Is Noise, 77. 67. “Richtlinien,” sent by Emil von Reznicek to Hans Hinkel, March 19, 1936; in BA NS 32/1385. 68. Stagma-Nachrichten (March 1935) quoted in Albrecht Dümling, Musik hat ihren Wert: 100 Jahre musikalische Verwertungsgesellschaft in Deutschland (Regensburg: ConBrio, 2003), 207. 69. “Notizie varie,” Bollettino dei musicisti 3, no. 12 (November 1936): 204–205; Dümling, Musik hat ihren Wert, 209. 70. Dümling, Musik hat ihren Wert, 210. 71. Felicitas von Reznicek to Hans Hinkel, June 7, 1937, in BA NS 32/1264. 72. ANSC-Archivio storico (AS) Post-unitario, 1937, 13/1 (“Giri di concerti i Germania e Svizzera”). Lualdi’s engagements are mentioned in a letter from Lualdi’s agent Beniamino Moltrasio to Guido Boni (June 24, 1935) in ANSC-AS Carteggio, 4/3-2255, Artisti: 4/327 Lualdi Adriano (1935). 73. Leonardo Pinzauti, Il Maggio musicale fiorentino dalla prima alla trentesima edizione (Florence: Vallecchi Editore, 1967), 264–266. 74. Felicitas von Reznicek to Hans Hinkel (RMVP), June 7, 1937; in BA NS 32/1270–1272. 75. Luigi Freddi, “Appunto per S. E. il Ministro,” August 8, 1936, in ACS MCP Gabinetto b. 95.



NOT E S T O PA GE S 9 6–101

76. Ibid. 77. Francesco Bono, “Tenor in doppelter Version: Beniamino Giglis Filme zwischen Berlin und Rom,” in Babylon in Film Europa: Mehrsprachen-Versionen der 1930er Jahre, ed. Jan Distelmeyer (Munich: Text+Kritik, 2006), 41; Argentieri, L’asse cinematografico, 82–149. 78. The political power of Nazi entertainment films is examined in Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 16–20. See also Linda Schulte-Sasse, Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien, Nazi Cinema as Enchantment: The Politics of Entertainment in the Third Reich (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004). 79. Volpi di Misurata, “L’Exposition Internationale,” 5. 80. Inter-Film, 2 (January 1937). 81. “Die Internationale Filmkammer zusammengetreten,” Völkischer Beobachter, November 10, 1935. 82. “Ergebnisse der Tagung des Exekutiv-Komitees in Venedig am 20. August 1936,” Inter-Film 2 (January 1937): 4; “Ergebnisse der Besprechungen der Studienkommission zur Erleichterung des Internationalen Filmaustausches,” Inter-Film 3 (July 1937): 4. On standardization, “Internationale Probleme der Filmtechnik,” Inter-Film 1 (1936): 17–18; Massimo Locatelli, “La Camera Internazionale del Film e il cinema italiano,” in Storia del cinema italiano, ed. Ernesto G. Laura, vol. 6: 1940/1944 (Venice and Rome: Marsilio, 2010), 426. 83. “Tagung der Urheberrechtskommission der Internationalen Filmkammer,” Inter-Film 2 (January 1937): 3; André Ruszkowski, L’Oeuvre cinématographique et les droits d’auteurs (Paris: Sirei, 1936); André Ruszkowski, “Le Grand Problème: Paternité du Film/Das grosse Problem der Urheberschaft am Film,” Inter-Film 1 (1936): 6–13. 84. “Tagung der Urheberrechtskommission”; “Ergebnisse der Pariser Beratungen der Filmrechtskommission,” Inter-Film 3 (July 1937): 5. 85. “Ergebnisse der Tagung des Exekutiv-Komitees in Venedig am 20. August 1936.” This mea sure is discussed (but misdated to 1937) in Argentieri, L’asse cinematografico, 42. 86. G. De Tomasi, “Le assisi politiche del film,” Lo schermo 3, no. 7 (July 1937): 25. 87. The resolution is printed in William Marston Seabury, Motion Picture Problems: The Cinema and the League of Nations (New York: Avondale Press, 1929), 358. 88. Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 43. 89. Ibid.; Argentieri, L’asse cinematografico, 42. 90. Jean Chataigner, “Objets et buts de la Fipresci et ses relations avec la Chambre Internationale du Film/Die Aufgaben der Fipresci und ihr Verhältnis zur Internationalen Filmkammer,” Inter-Film 1 (August 1936): 14–16; Locatelli, “La Camera Internazionale del Film,” 426.

NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 0 1 –105



91. Eitel Monaco, “Bericht über der korporativen Aufbau der italienischen Filmwirtschaft,” Inter-Film 2 (January 1937): 8–9. The journal appeared in four languages from volume 2, 1937. 92. “Die Filmwelt blickt nach Paris,” Lichtbild-Bühne, no. 138 (June 17, 1937); “Internationella Filmkongressen i Paris,” Biografbladet 18, no. 7–8 (August 1937): 24–25; “Das Programm des Internationalen Filmkongresses in Paris 1937,” Inter-Film 3 (July 1937): 7; Argentieri, L’asse cinematografico, 39. See also Yong Chan Choy, “Inszenierungen der völkischen Filmkultur im Nationalsozialismus: Der Internationale Filmkongress Berlin 1935” (PhD diss., Technische Universität, 2006), 252–253. 93. “Ergebnisse der gemeinsamen Tagung des Exekutiv-Komitees und Verwaltungsrates der Internationalen Filmkammer,” Inter-Film 3 (July 1937): 6; Colin G. Crisp, The Classic French Cinema, 1930–1960 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 37; John Trumpbour, Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European Strug gles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 260. 94. Karen A. Fiss, Grand Illusion: The Third Reich, the Paris Exposition, and the Cultural Seduction of France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 132–138 and 247, n. 59. 95. Quoted in Argentieri, L’asse cinematografico, 41. 96. “Amerika faselt von deutsch-italienisch-japanischer Film-Einheitsfront,” Der Film, June 12, 1937; De Tomasi, “Le assisi politiche del film.” 97. Fiss, Grand Illusion, 142. 98. Choy, “Inszenierungen,” 254. 99. Kurt Belling, “La V Mostra cinematografica e la Germania,” Lo schermo 3, no. 8 (August 1937): 24, 25. 100. “Im August in Venedig,” Lichtbild-Bühne, May 11, 1937. Volpi quoted in Filippo Sacchi, “Inaugurazione della Mostra,” Corriere della Sera, August 11, 1937. Reprinted in Adriano Aprà, Giuseppe Ghigi, and Patrizia Pistagnesi, eds., Cinquant’anni di cinema a Venezia (Venice: Biennale di Venezia, 1982), 83–85, here 84. 101. Sacchi, “Inaugurazione della Mostra”; Argentieri, L’asse cinematografico, 38. 102. Charles Ford and Robert Hammond, Polish Film: A Twentieth Century History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 68. 103. Jan Olsson, Svensk spelfilm under andra världskriget (Lund: Liber Läromedel, 1979), 27. 104. Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through TwentiethCentury Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 325. 105. D. C. Watt, “The Rome-Berlin Axis, 1936–1940: Myth and Reality,” Review of Politics 22, no. 4 (1960): 542. 106. “Il secondo congresso internazionale di musica a Firenze,” Il musicista, 4, no. 5 (May 1937), 87.



NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 0 6–111

107. R. S. Thornberry, “Writers Take Sides, Stalinists Take Control: The Second International Congress for the Defense of Culture (Spain 1937),” The Historian 62, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 589–605. 108. Salvador de Madariaga, Theory and Practice in International Relations, The William J. Cooper Foundation Lectures 1937, Swarthmore College (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 90. 109. Funk’s February 18, 1934, speech as paraphrased in Robert Oboussier, “Der schaffende Musiker im neuen Deutschland: Erster deutscher Komponistentag,” Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, February 19, 1934, quoted in Garberding, “ ‘We Take Care of the Artist,’ ” 8. 110. See Alan E. Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Pamela M. Potter, “Reichsmusikkammer,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., vol. 21 (London: Macmillan, 2001), 144–145. 111. Luigi Freddi, “Appunto per S. E. il Ministro,” August 8, 1936, in ACS MCP Gabinetto, busta 95. 112. Quoted in Federico Chabod, L’Italia contemporanea (1918–1948) (Turin: Einaudi, 1961), 95. 113. Fiss, Grand Illusion. CHAPTER 4

■

A RADICALIZED, “PURE” INTER-NATIONALISM

1. MacGregor Knox, “Conquest, Foreign and Domestic, in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany,” Journal of Modern History 56, no. 1 (1984): 1–57; MacGregor Knox, Hitler’s Italian Allies. Royal Armed Forces, Fascist Regime, and the War of 1940–1943 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 13. 2. Adolf Hitler, “Speech at the Opening of the Great German Art Exhibition (July 18, 1937),” in The Third Reich Sourcebook, ed. Anson Rabinbach and Sander L. Gilman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 494, 496. 3. Alan E. Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 139–146. 4. Wolfgang Benz, Organisationen, Institutionen, Bewegungen, vol. 5: Handbuch des Antisemitismus (Munich: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 527. 5. Quoted in Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 135. 6. Orazio Maione, I conservatori di musica durante il fascismo: La riforma del 1930, storia e documenti (Turin: EDT, 2005), 75; Phillip Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso: Fascismo e mass media (Rome: Laterza, 1975), 154.

NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 1 1 –116



7. Frank-Rutger Hausmann, “The ‘Third Front’: German Cultural Policy in Occupied Europe, 1940–45,” in German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing 1919–1945, ed. Ingo Haar and Michael Fahlbusch (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005), 217. 8. Francesca Cavarocchi, Avanguardie dello spirito: Il fascismo e la propaganda culturale all’estero (Rome: Carocci, 2010), 151–156. 9. Jens Petersen, “Vorspiel zu ‘Stahlpakt’ und Kriegsallianz: Das DeutschItalienische Kulturabkommen vom 23. November 1938,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 36, no. 1 (1988): 41–45. 10. Petersen, “Vorspiel”; Andrea Hoffend, Zwischen Kultur-Achse und Kulturkampf: Die Beziehungen zwischen “Drittem Reich” und faschistischem Italien in den Bereichen Medien, Kunst, Wissenschaft und Rassenfragen (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1998), 325–355. 11. Edward H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 87. 12. Quoted in Petersen, “Vorspiel,” 55. 13. Quoted in Jens Petersen, “L’accordo culturale fra l’Italia e la Germania del 23 novembre 1938,” in Fascismo e nazionalsocialismo, ed. Karl Dietrich Bracher and Leo Valiani, Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico 21 (Bologna: Mulino, 1986), 354. 14. Institut international de coopération intellectuelle, Recueil des accords intellectuels (Paris: Institut international de coopération intellectuelle, 1938), 1. 15. Ibid., 5. 16. J. Mirwart, “Les accords intellectuels,” Revue de droit international et de législation comparée 19 (1938): 138. 17. Jan-Pieter Barbian, “ ‘Kulturwerte im Zeitkampf’: Die Kulturabkommen des ‘Dritten Reiches’ als Instrumente nationalsozialistischer Außenpolitik,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 74 (1992): 420; Petersen, “Vorspiel,” 47. 18. Petersen, “Vorspiel,” 53–54. 19. Alessandro Pavolini, “Die Achse und die kulturellen Beziehungen,” in Eröff nungsfeier der Deutsch-Italienischen Studienstiftung: Text der Vorträge (Berlin, 1939), 6. A copy is in Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, Berlin (PA AA) R 61301. 20. Ibid., 8. 21. Ibid., 8–9, 10. 22. Walter L. Adamson, Avant- Garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 23. Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Staging Fascism: 18BL and the Theater of Masses for Masses (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 45. Additional biographical information from Edoardo Savino, La nazione operante: Albo d’oro del fascismo, profili e figure (Novara: Istituto Geografico De Agostini, 1937), 255; Mario Missori, Gerarchie e statuti del P.N.F.: Gran consiglio, direttorio nazionale, federazioni provinciali— quadri e biografie (Rome: Bonacci, 1986), 254–255.



NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 1 6–120

24. Schnapp, Staging Fascism, 47 and 200, n. 58. 25. Simona Foà, “Solaria,” in Dizionario della letteratura italiana del novecento, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), 521; Schnapp, Staging Fascism, 46. 26. Benedetta Garzarelli, Parleremo al mondo intero: La propaganda del fascismo all’estero (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2004), 232; Lorenzo Medici, Dalla propaganda alla cooperazione: La diplomazia culturale italiana nel secondo dopoguerra (1944–1950) (Padua: Wolters Kluwer Italia, 2009), 63–69. 27. Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome (ACS) Presidenza Consiglio dei Ministri (PCM) 1937–39, 14–3–5111.16. 28. Volkhard Laitenberger, Akademischer Austausch und auswärtige Kulturpolitik: Der Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (DAAD) 1923–1945 (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1976), 73–80, 142–146; Volkhard Laitenberger, “Theorie und Praxis der ‘Kulturellen Begegnung zwischen den Nationen’ in der deutschen auswärtigen Kulturpolitik der 30er Jahre,” Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch 31, no. 2 (1981): 196–206. 29. For example, Herbert Scurla, “Gedanken über das Verstehen zwischen den Völkern,” Hochschule und Ausland 12, no. 10 (1934): 1–11. 30. Tim Kirk, “New Cultural Orders: War and Cultural Politics in SouthEastern Europe,” Etudes Balkaniques, no. 4 (2008): 236. 31. Herbert Scurla, “Grundlagen und Methoden der französischen Kulturpropaganda,” Monatshefte für auswärtige Politik 4 (1937): 849–859. 32. Herman Gmelin, “Die Entwicklung des Kulturbegriffs in Deutschland und Frankreich,” Geist und Zeit 15, no. 11 (November 1937): 785–797. See Kirk, “New Cultural Orders,” 225–226. 33. Matthias Schwabe [pseudonym for Karl Epting], Die französische Kulturpropaganda (Berlin: Stubenrauch, 1939), quoted in Frank-Rutger Hausmann, “Auch im Krieg schweigen die Musen nicht”: Die Deutschen Wissenschaftlichen Institute im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), 31. 34. “Ansprache des Herrn Reichsministers Rust,” January 18, 1939, in PA AA R 61301. 35. Ibid. 36. Norbert Gloker, “Italienisch Civiltà, Cultura, Civilizzazione im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert,” in Kultur und Zivilisation, ed. Johann Knobloch et al., Europäische Schlüsselwörter. Wortvergleichende und wortgeschichtliche Studien (Munich: Max Hueber, 1967), 103–104, 133. 37. Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il duce: II. Lo Stato totalitario, 1936–1940 (Turin: Einaudi, 1981), 292. 38. Ibid., 297. See also Dino Cofrancesco, “Il mito europeo del fascismo (1939– 1945),” Storia Contemporanea 14, no. 1 (1983): 8–9. 39. Carlo Costamagna, “Il valore dell’Asse Roma-Berlino,” Lo stato, 1938, 287– 289. Reprinted in Alessandro Somma, I giuristi e l’Asse culturale Roma-Berlino. Eco-

NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 2 0 –123



nomia e politica nel diritto fascista e nazionalsocialista (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2005), 373–376. 40. Hans von Tschammer und Osten’s speech (undated), sent by the Vereinigung Zwischenstaatlicher Verbände und Einrichtungen to Fritz von Twardowski, head of the German Foreign Ministry’s Cultural Division, with letter of April 25, 1940, in PA AA R 61297. 41. Luke Bresky, “Marcel Mauss’s National Internationalism: An Approach to the Essai Sur Le Don,” Paroles Gelées 15, no. 2 (1997): 46. Mauss’s essay is in E. Halévy et al., “Symposium: The Problem of Nationality,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 20 (New Series) (1920): 237–265. 42. Quoted in Thomas W. Burkman, Japan and the League of Nations: Empire and World Order, 1914–1938 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008), 218. On this theme, see also Jessamyn R. Abel, The International Minimum: Creativity and Contradiction in Japan’s Global Engagement, 1933–1964 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2015). 43. Quoted in Eric Michaud, “Nationalisme et internationalisme,” in Anées 30 en Europe. Le temps menaçant, 1929–1939 (Paris: Paris Musées, Flammarion, 1997), 24. Italics in original. 44. Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (1994): 415. 45. Yves R. Simon, “The European Crisis and the Downfall of the French Republic,” Review of Politics 3, no. 1 (January 1941): 64. 46. Friedrich Brand, “Vom jüdischen Musikbetrieb zum Musikleben der Nation,” Die Musik 30, no. 4 (January 1938): 245. 47. Hitler’s “Kulturrede” of 7 September 1937, in Adolf Hitler, Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations 1932–1945, vol. 2: 1935–1938, ed. Max Domarus, trans. Mary Fran Gilbert (London: Tauris, 1992), 927. 48. Joseph Wulf, Th eater und Film im Dritten Reich: eine Dokumentation (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1966), 58–62; Joseph Wulf, Literatur und Dichtung im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1989), 285–288. 49. Quoted in Joseph Wulf, ed., Musik im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1989), 463, 464. Goebbels’ “Ten Principles” (“Zehn Grundsätze deutschen Musikschaffens,” June 1938) are reprinted in Albrecht Dümling, “The Target of Racial Purity: The ‘Degenerate Music’ Exhibition in Düsseldorf, 1938,” in Art, Culture, and Media under the Third Reich, ed. Richard A. Etlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 55. 50. Wulf, Musik, 464–465; Pamela Maxine Potter, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 78–79.



NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 2 4–128

51. Wulf, Musik, 471. Quotation from May 24, 1937, opening speech by exhibition curator Hans Severus Ziegler, quoted in Dümling, “The Target of Racial Purity,” 60. See also Albrecht Dümling and Peter Girth, eds., Entartete Musik: Dokumentation und Kommentar zur Düsseldorfer Ausstellung von 1938, 3rd ed. (Düsseldorf: Der kleine Verlag, 1993); Albrecht Dümling, ed., Banned by the Nazis: Entartete Musik. The Exhibition of Düsseldorf 1938/88 in Texts and Documents (London, 1995). 52. The ISCM’s 1938 jury included Ernest Ansermet, Johan Bentzon, Adrian Cedric Boult, Alois Hába, and Darius Milhaud. Anton Haefeli, Die Internationale Gesellschaft für neue Musik (IGNM): Ihre Geschichte von 1922 bis zur Gegenwart (Zürich: Atlantis Musikbuch-Verlag, 1982), 257, 496. 53. Lualdi conducted his Diavolo nel campanile, Malipiero his Il finto arlecchino, and Casella his Orfeo. 54. On Geutebrück, see “Universal Edition,” in Österreichisches Musiklexikon, available at: http://www.musiklexikon.ac.at; Albrecht Dümling, Musik hat ihren Wert: 100 Jahre musikalische Verwertungsgesellschaft in Deutschland (Regensburg: ConBrio, 2003), 234. 55. Herbert Gerigk, “Europäisches Musikfest in Stuttgart,” Die Musik 30, no. 10 (July 1938): 696–698. 56. “Festival internationale de la musique. Bruxelles, 20–26 novembre 1938,” in Hoover Institution Archives (HIA), Germany, DKZ, Box 176; “Notiziario,” Il musicista 6, no. 4 (January 1939): 66. 57. Ola Kai Ledang, “Eggen, Arne,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., vol. 7 (London: Macmillan, 2001), 910; John Scott Whiteley, “Jongen, Joseph,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., vol. 13 (London: Macmillan, 2001), 202–204; George Leotsakos, “Petridis, Petros,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., vol. 19 (London: Macmillan, 2001), 508–509. 58. Herbert Gerigk, “Das Internationale Musikfest in Belgien,” Die Musik 31, no. 3 (December 1938): 201, 200. 59. Eckart Conze et al., Das Amt und die Vergangenheit: Deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der Bundesrepublik (Munich: Karl Blessing Verlag, 2010), 42–51. 60. Jan Dewilde, “Emiel Hullebroeck,” in Muziekcentrum Vlaanderen, available at www.muziekcentrum.be/identity.php?ID =134519. 61. Peter Baldwin, The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 178, 184, 177. 62. Pamela M. Potter, “Strauss’s ‘Friedenstag’: A Pacifist Attempt at Political Resistance,” Musical Quarterly 69, no. 3 (1983): 408–424. 63. Petra Garberding, “Musik, Moral und Politik: Richard Strauss, Kurt Atterberg und der Ständige Rat für die internationale Zusammenarbeit der Komponisten,” in Richard Strauss im Europäischen Kontext: Richard Strauss-Jahrbuch 2011 (Vienna: Richard Strauss-Gesellschaft, 2011), 243.

NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 2 8 –132



64. Gundula Kreuzer, Verdi and the Germans: From Unification to the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 191–192. 65. Hoffend, Zwischen Kultur-Achse und Kulturkampf, 251. 66. Fiamma Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista (Fiesole: Discanto, 1984), 261; Ben Earle, Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 72. 67. Quoted in Hoffend, Zwischen Kultur-Achse und Kulturkampf, 251. 68. F. Santoliquido, “La piovra musicale ebraica,” Il Tevere, December 15, 1937. Quoted in Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti, 263. 69. Alberto Ghislanzoni, “Il discorso del Cancelliere Hitler sull’arte moderna,” Il musicista 4, no. 8 (August 1937): 125–129. Cited in Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti, 261–262. 70. Marla S. Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 5–6; Alexandra Wilson, The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 192. 71. “Riunione del Direttorio Nazionale,” Il musicista 5, no. 4–5 (1938): 76. Quoted and translated in Earle, Luigi Dallapiccola, 69. 72. Dukas’s and Casella’s works appear on an undated draft program in Accademia Nazionale Santa Cecilia-Archivio Storico (ANSC-AS), Post-unitario, 1937, 13/1 (“Giri di concerti i Germania e Svizzera”). 73. Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti, 261; Ente autonomo del Teatro La Fenice, VI Festival internazionale di musica contemporanea della Biennale d’arte. Programma ufficiale (Venice, 1938). The Biennale di Musica Festival Programs are available at www .labiennale.org/doc _ files/80292.pdf. 74. Herbert Gerigk, “Das internationale Musikfest in Venedig,” Die Musik 31, no. 1 (October 1938): 53, 55, 57. 75. Earle, Luigi Dallapiccola, 135–136, 189. 76. Casella’s letters communicating Italy’s exit to ISCM President Edward J. Dent, carefully edited by the fascist regime’s director general for the theater, Nicola de Pirro, are reprinted in Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti, 266–268. 77. Hans Meissner, ed., Internationales Musikfest des “Ständigen Rates für die internationale Zusammenarbeit der Komponisten”: 15.–24. Juni 1939, Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt am Main: H. Schaefer, 1939). 78. “Otto Frickhoeffer, Chefdirigent 1947–1945,” from the website of Hessische Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester: http://www.hr-online.de/website/rubriken/kultur/index .jsp?rubrik =50672&key =standard _document _858284. 79. Pamela Potter, “The Nazi ‘Seizure’ of the Berlin Philharmonic, or the Decline of a Bourgeois Musical Institution,” in National Socialist Cultural Policy, ed. Glenn R. Cuomo (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 57–58. 80. “Anordnung über unerwünschte und schädliche Musik,” December 18, 1937, in Wulf, Musik, 362.



NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 3 2–137

81. Haefeli, Die Internationale Gesellschaft für neue Musik, 621. 82. Ernst Hintermeier and Gerhard Walterskirchen, “Salzburg,” in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2nd ed., vol. Sachteil 8 (Stuttgart: Bärenreiter-Metzler, 1998), 883. 83. Dümling, Musik hat ihren Wert, 232. 84. Pamela M. Potter, “Musicology under Hitler: New Sources in Context,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 49, no. 1 (1996): 87–89. 85. Ibid., 87. 86. Alan E. Steinweis, “German Cultural Imperialism in Czechoslova kia and Poland, 1938–1945,” International History Review 13, no. 3 (August 1, 1991): 471. 87. Ibid., 471, 474. 88. Potter, “Musicology under Hitler,” 90; Steinweis, “German Cultural Imperialism,” 475, 478. 89. Gottfried Schweizer, “Hollands Musikleben,” Die Musik 31, no. 1 (October 1938): 11; Ludwig Schmidts, “Die Musikkultur in Rumänien,” Die Musik 31, no. 1 (October 1938): 23. 90. Flavia Paulon, 2000 film a Venezia. 1932–1950 (Venice: Mostra internazionale d’arte cinematografica di Venezia, 1951), 59–69. 91. “Gazzettino,” August 5, 1938, in Archivio storico delle arti contemporanee, Venice (ASAC) Serie Cinema, CM 7. On Kearney, see John Trumpbour, Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European Strug gles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 142. 92. G. V. Sampieri, “Venezia, sesta edizione,” Lo schermo 4, no. 9 (September 1938): 14. 93. Der Internationale Filmkongress Berlin 1935. Seine Organisation und seine Ergebnisse/Le Congrès International du Film. Organisation et résultats (Berlin: Reichsfilmkammer, 1935), 21. 94. Ibid., 11. 95. Kurt Belling, “La V Mostra cinematografica e la Germania,” Lo schermo 3, no. 8 (August 1937): 25. 96. Der Film, March 5, 1938, quoted in Yong Chan Choy, “Inszenierungen der völkischen Filmkultur im Nationalsozialismus: Der Internationale Filmkongress Berlin 1935” (PhD diss., Technische Universität, 2006), 256. 97. Alfieri’s speech is paraphrased in Filippo Sacchi, “Inaugurazione della Mostra,” Corriere della sera (August 11, 1937), printed in Adriano Aprà, Giuseppe Ghigi, and Patrizia Pistagnesi, eds., Cinquant’anni di cinema a Venezia (Venice: Biennale di Venezia, 1982), 85. 98. Quoted in Francesco Bono, “La mostra del cinema di Venezia: Nascita e sviluppo nell’anteguerra, 1932–1939,” Storia contemporanea 22, no. 3 (June 1991): 520. 99. Ibid., 542–543.

NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 3 8 –141



100. Goebbels diary entry of September 5, 1937, quoted in Jan Andreas May, La Biennale di Venezia: Kontinuität und Wandel in der venezianischen Ausstellungspolitik 1895–1948 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2009), 177. 101. Ibid., 178. 102. Bono, “La mostra del cinema,” 543. 103. Lourau to Volpi, February 23, 1938, and Aboucaya to Croze, February 23, 1938, in ASAC, Serie Cinema, CM 7. 104. “La sesta Mostra d’arte cinematografica di Venezia,” Bianco e nero, September 1938. Quoted in Bono, “La mostra del cinema,” 543. 105. Alexandre Arnoux in Le rôle intellectuel du cinéma (Paris: Societé des Nations, Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, 1937), 165. 106. Marcel Aboucaya in ibid., 261. 107. Luigi Chiarini, “Incontro di civiltà cinematografica a Venezia,” Lo schermo 3, no. 8 (August 1937): 14. 108. Christel Taillibert, L’Institut international du cinématographe éducatif: Regards sur le rôle du cinéma éducatif dans la politique internationale du fascisme italien (Paris: Harmattan, 1999), 343. 109. Giulio Cogni’s January 1938 article is quoted in Mino Argentieri, “Il cinema e l’antisemitismo,” in Storia del cinema italiano, ed. Ernesto G. Laura, vol. 6: 1940/44 (Venice: Marsilio, 2010), 435. 110. Mino Argentieri, L’asse cinematografico Roma-Berlino (Naples: Libreria Sapere, 1986), 10–14; Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 139; Steven Ricci, Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922–1943 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 68. 111. Klaus Kreimeier, The Ufa Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918–1945 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1996), 221–228; David Welch and Roel Vande Winkel, “Europe’s New Hollywood? The German Film Industry under Nazi Rule, 1933–45,” in Cinema and the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema, ed. Roel Vande Winkel and David Welch, rev. ed. (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 15–18. 112. Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through TwentiethCentury Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 322. 113. Kreimeier, Ufa Story, 274, 336–338; Ivan Klimes, “A Dangerous Neighbourhood: German Cinema in the Czechoslovak Region, 1933–45,” in Cinema and the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema, ed. David Welch and Roel Vande Winkel, rev. ed. (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 112–129; Robert von Dassanowsky, “Between Resistance and Collaboration: Austrian Cinema and Nazism before and during the Annexation, 1933–45,” in Cinema and the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema, ed. David Welch and Roel Vande Winkel, rev. ed. (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 58–71.



NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 4 1–145

114. Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 40–77. 115. Quoted in ibid., 135. Doherty discusses the Roach–Mussolini misadventure in ibid., 122–136. 116. Quoted in Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 139. Vittorio Mussolini, “Emancipazione del cinema italiano,” Cinema 1, no. 6 (September 25, 1936): 213–215. 117. Argentieri, L’asse cinematografico, 119–121; Karen A. Fiss, Grand Illusion: The Third Reich, the Paris Exposition, and the Cultural Seduction of France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 132–138. 118. Jean A. Gili, “European Co-Productions and Artistic Collaborations: The Italian Response to the Hollywood Studio System,” in The Italian Cinema Book, ed. Peter Bondanella (London: Palgrave Macmillan for British Film Institute, 2014), 212–213; Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 140. 119. Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); de Grazia, Irresistible Empire, 330. 120. Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler, 301. 121. Flavia Paulon, La dogaressa contestata: La favolosa storia di della Mostra di Venezia: Dalle regine alla contestazione (Venice, 1971), 50. 122. G. Michel Coissac, “Nationalisme et internationalisme,” Le Cinéopse, October 1938. Quoted in Taillibert, L’Institut international du cinématographe éducatif, 316. 123. “Relazione sulla VII. Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica 8–31 Agosto 1939 XVII” (Venice, October 31, 1939), in ASAC, Serie Cinema, CM 8. 124. Giuseppe Volpi to Will Hays, May 7, 1939, and Hays’s response (May 22, 1939), in ASAC, Serie Cinema, CM 8. 125. “Auch internationaler Filmkongreß verschoben,” Lichtbild-Bühne, April 27, 1939; Choy, “Inszenierungen,” 256. 126. Jean-Michel Pagés, “Welcome to Free Nations,” Cinémonde, August 30, 1939, reproduced in Claude-Jean Philippe, Cannes: Le Festival (Paris: Fernand Nathan and Sipa-Press, 1987), 6. See also Marijke de Valck, Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 48. 127. Paulon, La dogaressa contestata, 51. 128. Argentieri, L’asse cinematografico, 48. 129. Emilio Ceretti, “Personaggi al Lido,” Cinema 4, no. 2 (September 10, 1939): 164. 130. The program of Goebbels’s visit (August 8–10, 1939) is in ACS MCP Gabinetto, b. 64, f. 381. See also the newsreels Giornale Luce B1565 and B1568 (August 16, 1939). 131. Prize list, December 28, 1939, in ASAC, Serie cinema, CM 8. See also Argentieri, L’asse cinematografico, 46. 132. Ottavio Croze, “Relazione sulla VII. Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica 8–31 Agosto 1939 XVII” (Venice, November 14, 1939), in ASAC, Serie cinema, CM 8.

NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 4 5 –150



133. Goebbels diary entry of August 10, 1939, quoted in May, La Biennale di Venezia, 191–192. 134. Goebbels diary entry of August 9, 1939, quoted in ibid., 191. On the accords see “Goebbels e Alfieri a Venezia,” Corriere della sera, August 9, 1939; “Goebbels e Alfieri tracciano il programma della collaborazione culturale italo-tedesca,” Corriere della Sera, August 10, 1939. The text of the film agreement (“Accordo cinematografico italo-tedesco, stipulato a Venezia il 13 agosto 1939-XVII”) is in ACS MCP, Gabinetto b. 95. The press side of this agreement is discussed in Mauro Forno, La stampa del ventennio: Strutture e trasformazioni nello stato totalitario (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore, 2005), 181–183. 135. Aldo Airoldi, “Verso un mondo nuovo,” Critica fascista 13, no. 1 (November 1, 1939). 136. Camillo Pellizzi, “Problemi dell’integrazionismo europeo,” Critica fascista 18, no. 10 (March 15, 1940): 164–166. 137. “Il mito corporativo,” Critica fascista 18, no. 13 (May 1, 1940): 211. 138. Speeches on this subject from leading figures, including Mariano d’Amelio, Giovanni Gentile, Guido Manacorda, Carlo Morandi, Fausto Torrefranca, Ugo Spirito, and Bottai, are in Romanità e germanesimo, ed. Jolanda de Blasi (Florence: Sansoni, 1941). 139. “Guerra di liberazione,” Critica fascista 18, no. 14 (May 15, 1940): 227. 140. Carl Düssel to German Foreign Ministry (Auswärtiges Amt, Legationsrat von Stolzman), October 7, 1939, in PA AA R 61301. 141. Carl Düssel, Europa und die Achse: Die kontinentaleuropäische Frage als Kehrseite britischer Politik, 3rd ed. (Essen: Essener Verlagsanstalt, 1942), 56–57. CHAPTER 5

■

NEW ORDERS IN BERLIN AND ROME

1. Ludwig Siebert, I compiti dell’Accademia Germanica: Conferenza tenuta dal Presidente dell’Accademia Germanica Ludwig Siebert, Primo Ministro di Baviera, nella Villa Massimo al Laterano, Roma. Giovedì 28 Novembre 1940 (Rome, 1940), 2. 2. Funk’s July 25, 1940, press conference is published in Walter Lipgens, Documents on the History of European Integration, vol. 1: Continental plans for European union 1939–45 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1985), 65–71. On the debate over an economic New Order, see Jean Freymond, Le IIIe Reich et la réorganisation économique de l’Europe 1940–42: Origines et projets (Leiden: Sithoff, 1974); Alan S. Milward, The New Order and the French Economy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970); Alan S. Milward, War, Economy and Society, 1939–1945 (London: Allen Lane, 1977); Richard J. Overy, “The Economy of the German ‘New Order,’ ” in Die “Neuordnung Europas”: NSWirtschaftspolitik in den besetzten Gebieten, ed. Richard J. Overy, Gerhard Otto, and Johannes Houwink ten Cate (Berlin: Metropol, 1997), 11–28; Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (New York: Penguin, 2009), 121–126; Adam



NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 5 0–152

Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Penguin, 2008), 385–393. 3. Lothar Gruchmann, Nationalsozialistische Grossraumordnung: Die Konstruktion einer “ deutschen Monroe-Doktrin” (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1962); Michael Salewski, “National Socialist Ideas on Europe,” in Documents on the History of European Integration, ed. Walter Lipgens (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1985), 37–54; Mathias Schmoeckel, Die Großraumtheorie: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Völkerrechtswissenschaft im Dritten Reich, insbesondere der Kriegszeit (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1994); Ulrich Herbert, Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989 (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz, 1996); Birgit Kletzin, Europa aus Rasse und Raum: Die nationalsozialistische Idee der Neuen Ordnung (Münster: Lit, 2000), 126–156; Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, 103–120, 223–256. 4. Quoted in Cornelia Schmitz-Berning, Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 427. On the place of the “Final Solution” in the New Order see Mazower, Hitler’s Empire; Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 5. Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940 (London: Oxford University Press, 1949). 6. Karl-Heinz Rüdiger, “Das Ende des französischen Kulturanspruches,” Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte, no. 125 (August 1940): 507. 7. “Quel che finisce,” Lo stato 11, no. 7 (July 1940): 348. 8. Ferrante Azzali, “Fine di una cultura,” Critica fascista 19, no. 4 (December 15, 1940): 63–64. 9. Critica fascista, 18, no. 19 (August 1, 1940). 10. Siebert, Compiti dell’Accademia Germanica, 6, 3. Italics in original. 11. Andrea Hoffend, Zwischen Kultur-Achse und Kulturkampf: Die Beziehungen zwischen “Drittem Reich” und faschistischem Italien in den Bereichen Medien, Kunst, Wissenschaft und Rassenfragen (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1998), 141. 12. Associazione Italo-Germanica di cultura to Pavolini, 16 August 1941, in Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome (ACS), Ministero della Cultura Popolare (MCP), Gabinetto, b. 59. See also Ibid., 150. 13. Karl-Heinz Rüdiger, “Das faschistische Lebensstil,” Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte, no. 124 (July 1940): 401. 14. Undated typescript of speech in ACS MCP, Gabinetto, b. 59, and in draft form in ACS MCP, Gabinetto, b. 103. Pavolini’s speech was discussed in “Latinität und Germanentum,” Kölnische Zeitung, October 3, 1941. 15. F. M. Pacces, “Incontro sul piano assiale,” Critica fascista 20, no. 3 (December 1, 1941): 35. 16. Luigi Fabbrini, “Il ‘nuovo ordine’ nei contributi del Io Convegno Universitario italo-tedesco,” Economia 26, no. 5–6 (December 1940): 232–237. Italics in original.

NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 5 3 –159



17. Flavia Paulon, 2000 film a Venezia. 1932–1950 (Venice: Mostra internazionale d’arte cinematografica di Venezia, 1951), 85; Mino Argentieri, L’asse cinematografico Roma-Berlino (Naples: Libreria Sapere, 1986), 48. 18. Naples Prefect (Benigni) to Presidenza Consiglio Ministri (PCM), September 13, 1940, in ACS PCM 1940–43, 14-3-673. 19. Edward H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 87. 20. Willi A. Boelcke, ed., “Wollt Ihr den totalen Krieg?” Die geheimen GoebbelsKonferenzen 1939–1943 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1967), 74. 21. Madeleine Herren, “ ‘Outwardly . . . an Innocuous Conference Authority’: National Socialism and the Logistics of International Information Management,” German History 20, no. 1 (2002): 81–82. 22. Hans Umbreit, “Der Kampf um die Vormachtstellung in Westeuropa,” in Die Errichtung der Hegemonie auf dem europäischen Kontinent, ed. Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, vol. 2: Das Deutsche Reich und das zweite Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1979), 319–327. 23. Herren, “ ‘Outwardly . . . ,’ ” 78–79. 24. Deutsche Kongreß-Zentrale, “Richtlinien für die Leiter deutscher Abordnungen zu Kongressen im Ausland,” n.d. 1939, 3. A copy of this document, dated April 28, 1939, and flagged for “strictly confidential handling,” is in Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde (BA), R 43 II/1418a. 25. Protokoll über die Generalversammlung der Deutschen Kongress-Zentrale, e.V. am 18. Juli 1940, in BA R 55/744, fiche 4, p. 175–178. 26. Deutsche Kongreß-Zentrale, Jahresbericht der Deutschen Kongreß-Zentrale e.V. 1939/40 (Berlin: Deutschen Kongreß-Zentrale e.V., 1940), 13. 27. Protokoll . . . 18. Juli 1940, BA R 55/744, fiche 4, pp. 175–178. 28. Ibid. 29. Vermerk, August 8, 1940, in BA R 4901/2729. 30. Erlaß WS 548/40; see BA R 4901/2729. 31. A copy of Kerkhof’s report, dated July 22, 1940, was sent to the Reich Education Ministry (Reichserziehungsministerium, REM) with a letter dated March 24, 1941. BA R 4901/2729, fiche 97–106. Underlining in original. 32. Karl Kerkhof, Der Krieg gegen die deutsche Wissenschaft: Eine Zusammenstellung von Kongressberichten und Zeitungsmeldungen (Wittenberg: Herrosé & Ziemsen, 1922). On Kerkhof: Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus, Les scientifiques et la paix: La communauté scientifique internationale au cours des années 20 (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1978), 239–250. 33. Kerkhof, Report of July 22, 1940. BA R 4901/2729. 34. Karl Kerkhof, “Das Versailler Diktat und die deutsche Wissenschaft: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der internationalen Organisationen,” Monatshefte für Auswärtige Politik 11 (November 1940): 1, 15.



NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 5 9–163

35. Victor Yves Ghébali, La France en guerre et les organisations internationales, 1939–1945 (Paris: Mouton, 1969), 78–83; Eckard Michels, Das Deutsche Institut in Paris 1940–1944: Ein Beitrag zu den deutsch-französischen Kulturbeziehungen und zur auswärtigen Kulturpolitik des Dritten Reiches (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1993), 86–89; JeanJacques Renoliet, “L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle (1919–1940)” (Paris: Université de Paris I, 1995), 152–154. 36. La Délégation Française auprès la Commission Allemande d’Armistice: Recueil de Documents publié par le Gouvernement Français, vol. 3 (Paris: Alfred Costes, 1952), 258–265. 37. Ibid., 3:259. 38. Bertram Pickard, The Geneva Institutions Today: Some Account of the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization (Philadelphia: Peace Section of the American Friends Ser vice Committee, 1942), 7. Quoted in Ghébali, La France en guerre, 79. 39. Herren, “ ‘Outwardly . . . ,’ ” 82. Schweig’s takeover of the UIA is documented in Wilhelm Haegert, Leiter Pro[paganda], to Goebbels, January 8, 1941; and Karl Schweig and C. L. Van Loock to Gutterer (DKZ), January 28, 1941, both in BA R 55/744. 40. On the early history of the UIA, see G. Lorphèvre, “Paul Otlet,” in Biographie Nationale (Brussels: Académie Royale, 1964), 545–558; W. Boyd Rayward, trans., Mundaneum: Archives of Knowledge, Occasional Papers, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 215 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2010), 27–28; Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (New York: Penguin, 2013), 106–109; Alex Wright, Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 105. Today’s UIA offers a historical timeline at http://www.uia.org/history. Schweig’s own understanding of the institution’s history is presented in Karl F. Schweig and C. L. Van Loock, “Reorganisation der Union des Associations Internationales unter deutscher Führung” (January 28, 1941) in BA R 55/744. 41. Werner Scholz, “Frankreichs Rolle bei der Schaff ung der Völkerbundkommission für Internationale Intellektuelle Zusammenarbeit 1919–1922,” Francia 21, no. 3 (1994): 145–158. 42. Deutsche Kongreß-Zentrale, Jahresbericht der Deutschen Kongreß-Zentrale e.V. 1940/41 (Berlin: Deutsche Kongress-Zentrale e.V., 1941), 22. 43. Wright, Cataloging the World, 11. 44. Herren, “ ‘Outwardly . . . ,’ ” 82–83. Schweig and Van Loock, “Reorganisation.” 45. Examples of the DKZ’s questionnaires to international institutions are in Hoover Institution Archive (HIA), Germany, DKZ, Box 58. 46. Rapport 1940–1941: Union des Associations Internationales (Brussels, n.d. [1941]), 14–16. HIA, Germany, DKZ, Box 319. See Herren, “ ‘Outwardly . . . ,’ ” 85. 47. Quoted in Herren, “ ‘Outwardly . . . ,’ ” 84.

NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 6 3 –167



48. This “Amt für Internationale Kongresse und Organisationen” is presented in Karl F. Schweig, “Denkschrift zur Reorganisation der Union des Associations Internationales in Brüssel” (undated), in HIA, Germany, DKZ, Box 367. Schweig sent a copy to the Propaganda Ministry’s finance office (RMVP Haushaltsabteilung) on April 10, 1941: BA R 55/744. See also ibid., 84–85. 49. Schweig, “Denkschrift.” 50. Deutsche Kongreß-Zentrale, Jahresbericht 1939/40, 13. 51. Schweig and Van Loock, “Reorganisation.” 52. Herren, “ ‘Outwardly . . . ,’ ” 84. 53. Wilhelm Haegert, Leiter Pro[paganda], to Goebbels, January 8, 1941, BA R 55/744. 54. “Voranschlag der Kosten für die Ablösung und Übernahme der Internationale Union der Verbände in Brüssel,” undated [1941], in HIA, Germany, DKZ, Box 317, folder 2. 55. Ibid. UIA documents dating back to 1919, accompanied by explanations and translations into German, are in HIA, Germany, DKZ, Box 316. 56. Gutterer (RMVP) to REM, April 26, 1941. BA R 4901/3052; Gutterer (RMVP) to Auswärtiges Amt, April 26, 1941. HIA, Germany, DKZ, Box 317. 57. Concetto Pettinato, La Francia vinta (Milan: Istituto per gli studi di politica internazionale, 1941), 17. 58. On E’42, see Tullio Gregory and Achille Tartaro, eds., E 42: Utopia e scenario del regime, I: Ideologia e programma dell’Olimpiade delle Civiltà (Venice: Marsilio, 1987); Maurizio Calvesi, Enrico Guidoni, and Simonetta Lux, eds., E 42: Utopia e scenario del regime, II: Urbanistica, architettura, arte e decorazione (Venice: Marsilio, 1987); Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 255. 59. Gigliola Fioravanti, “L’Olimpiade delle Civiltà: Programmi, strutture, organizzazione,” in E 42: Utopia e scenario del regime, I: Ideologia e programma dell’Olimpiade delle Civiltà, ed. Tullio Gregory and Achille Tartaro (Venice: Marsilio, 1987), 99. 60. Jens Petersen, “Die zeitgeschichtlich wichtigen Archive in Italien: Ein Überblick,” Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 69 (1989): 327. Quoted in Hoffend, Zwischen Kultur-Achse und Kulturkampf, 59–60. See also Giordano Bruno Guerri, Giuseppe Bottai, un fascista critico: Ideologia e azione del gerarca che avrebbe voluto portare l’ intelligenza nel fascismo e il fascismo alla liberalizzazione (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976), 148. 61. Vittorio Cini, “E 42—Programma di Massima,” June 1937. ACS EUR, Gab., b. 53, fasc. 214, s.fasc. 6, ins. 1; partly published in Gregory and Tartaro, E 42, I, 153–156. 62. Cini (1937), in ibid., 154. 63. Eugenio Garin, “La civiltà italiana nell’Esposizione del 1942,” in E 42: Utopia e scenario del regime, I: Ideologia e programma dell’Olimpiade delle Civiltà, ed. Tullio Gregory and Achille Tartaro (Venice: Marsilio, 1987), 16.



NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 6 7–171

64. Maurizio Reberschak, “Vittorio Cini,” in Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1981), 630. 65. Chabod and Cantimori’s 1939 proposals are reproduced in Renzo De Felice, “Gli storici italiani nel periodo fascista,” in Federico Chabod e la “nuova storiografia” italiana dal primo al secondo dopoguerra (1919–1950), ed. Brunello Vigezzi (Milan: Jaca Book, 1983), 610–616. 66. Civiltà. Rivista bimestrale della Esposizione Universale di Roma (Milan: Bompiani), 1 (April 21, 1940)–11 (October 21, 1942). 67. Garin, “La civiltà italiana nell’Esposizione del 1942,” 8, n. 17. 68. Luciano De Feo, “IRCE, Relazione su congressi” (December 13, 1941), sent with letter from De Feo to Comm. Innocenti, Seg Gen dell’E’42, December 13, 1941. ACS EUR, Gab., b. 53, fasc. 214, s.fasc. 9, ins. 4. 69. “Rapporto sull’attività dell’Ente e del Commissariato Generale al 31 Dicembre 1939-XVIII.” ACS EUR, Gab., b. 51, fasc. 214, s.fasc. 3. Also in ACS PCM 1937–39, 14-1-200-6-2. 70. De Feo to Comm. Innocenti (Seg Gen dell’E’42), 13 December 1941. ACS EUR, Gab., b. 53, fasc. 214, s.fasc. 9, ins. 4; Annuario della Reale Accademia d’Italia, 1937–1940 (Rome: Reale Accademia d’Italia, 1941), 347. 71. Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il duce, II: Lo Stato totalitario, 1936–1940 (Turin: Einaudi, 1981), 320. 72. MacGregor Knox, Hitler’s Italian Allies. Royal Armed Forces, Fascist Regime, and the War of 1940–1943 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 17–18. 73. Vittorio Cini, “Revisione del ‘Programma di massima’ del 1937,” December 1940, sent to Mussolini with letter dated December 12, 1940. ACS PCM 1937–1939, 14/1.200.6.3. Reprinted in Gregory and Tartaro, E 42, I, 166–170. 74. Cini (1940), 5. In ibid., 167. 75. Cini (1940), 2. In ibid., 166. 76. Ibid. 77. Cini (1940), 6, 9, 17. Ibid., 167–168, 170. 78. Cini (1940), 4. Ibid., 167. On Italy’s imperialist intellectuals, see Dino Cofrancesco, “Il mito europeo del fascismo (1939–1945),” Storia Contemporanea 14, no. 1 (1983): 13; Emilio Gentile, La grande Italia: Ascesa e declino del mito della nazione nel ventesimo secolo (Milan: Mondadori, 1997), 181–185; Davide Rodogno, Il nuovo ordine mediterraneo: Le politiche di ocupazione dell’Italia fascista in Europa (1940–1943) (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003), 72–100. 79. Cini (1940), 9–10; in Gregory and Tartaro, E 42, I, 168. 80. Ministero degli Affari esteri (MAE, AG 1) to Commissario Generale, E’42, Roma, October 25, 1938. ACS EUR, b. 984, f. 9767: Servizio Organizzazione Mostre, Titolo OA, Partecipazione Stati Esteri, sottof. 27, Germania. On Hitler’s meeting with Speer and Maiwald: Mackensen (DBR) to Cini, February 8, 1939, in same file. Maiwald’s 1939 correspondence with Cini is in ACS EUR, b. 984, f. 9767.

NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 7 1 –177



81. Deutsche Kongreß-Zentrale, Jahresbericht 1939/40, 13. 82. Capo Ufficio Monotti, October 16, 1941, report on visit of Heinrich Glasmeyer [sic] to the EUR site. ACS, EUR, busta 984, f. 9767: Servizio Organizzazione Mostre, Titolo OA, Partecipazione Stati Esteri, sottof. 27, Germania. 83. Reichsminister und Chef der Reichskanzlei Lammers to Goebbels, January 31, 1940. BA R 43 II/340, fiche 3. 84. De Feo to Comm. Innocenti, Seg Gen dell’E’42, December 13, 1941. ACS EUR, Gab., b. 53, fasc. 214, s.fasc. 9, ins. 4. The 1939 slowdown is reported in “Rapporto sull’attività dell’Ente e del Commissariato Generale al 31 Dicembre 1939-XVIII,” in ACS EUR, Gab., b. 51, fasc. 214, s.fasc. 3. Also in ACS PCM 1937–39, 14-1-200-6-2. 85. Luigi Federzoni, “Civiltà,” Civiltà 1, no. 1 (April 21, 1940): 7. 86. Bottai to Mussolini, August 12, 1940, printed in Giuseppe Bottai, Diario 1935–1944, ed. Giordano Bruno Guerri (Milan: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1989), 506–510. Signed by Bottai, this letter was written by the philosopher Ugo Spirito; a carbon copy of his original letter to Bottai of July 20, 1940, is in the Archivio della Fondazione Spirito, Rome, Archivio Spirito, fasc. Guerra Rivoluzionaria. On Spirito’s role see Gaetano Rasi’s introduction to Ugo Spirito, Guerra rivoluzionaria (Rome: Fondazione Ugo Spirito, 1989), 16–17; Gabriele Turi, “Le istituzioni culturali del regime fascista durante la seconda guerra mondiale,” Italia Contemporanea 32, no. 138 (1980): 3–23. 87. Bottai, Diario 1935–1944, 509. 88. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 183–187. 89. Camillo Pellizzi, “Le università e la cultura,” Primato, March 1, 1940, 5. 90. Bottai, Diario 1935–1944, 507, 509. 91. Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 22. 92. Cofrancesco, “Mito europeo,” 24–34; Gentile, Grande Italia, 188–203. 93. Mussolini’s approval, given on August 13, 1940, is recorded in Bottai, Diario 1935–1944, 221–222. 94. Critica fascista 17, no. 23 (October 1, 1939): 364. 95. Cini, Promemoria per il Duce, June 30, 1941. ACS, Carte Cini, Cartelle E’42. Published in Gregory and Tartaro, E 42, I, 171–173. 96. Rodogno, Il nuovo ordine mediterraneo, 73–74, 96. 97. J. Noakes and G. Pridham, eds., Nazism 1919–1945, vol. 3: Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001), 292. 98. Renoliet, “L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle,” 154–155. 99. Salewski, “National Socialist Ideas on Europe,” 46; Otto Abetz, Das off ene Problem: Ein Rückblick auf zwei Jahrzehnte deutscher Frankreichpolitik (Cologne: Greven, 1951), 199–210. 100. Vermerk, REM, signed by Herbert Scurla, January 21, 1941. BA R 4901/2842. 101. Vermerk, April 7, 1941. BA R 4901/2729, p. 87.



NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 7 7–183

102. Kerkhof to Ministerialdirektor Mentzel, REM, June 14, 1941. A copy of this is included with Kerkhof to Dr. Klett, DAAD, August 4, 1941. BA R 4901/2729. 103. Lammers (Reichskanzlei) to Herren Reichsminister, Herren Reichsstatthalter, Landesregierungen, July 5, 1941. BA R 43 II/1418 a. 104. Herren, “ ‘Outwardly . . . ,’ ” 87–88. 105. Entry of September 18, 1941, Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher: Sämtliche Fragmente. T. 2, Diktate 1941–1945, Bd 1, Juli– September 1941, ed. Elke Fröhlich (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1996), 448. 106. Deutsche Kongreß-Zentrale, Jahresbericht 1940/41, 27. 107. Leopold Gutterer to the Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer), May 21, 1941; Gutterer to Propaganda Ministry’s representatives in occupied Norway and the Netherlands (Hauptabteilung Volksaufklärung und Propaganda beim Reichskommissar für die besetzten norwegischen Gebiete in Oslo, and beim Reichskommissar für die besetzten niederländischen Gebiete, Den Haag), May 21, 1941, both in BA R 55/20162. 108. RMVP Leiter T to RMVP, Leiter R, June 7, 1941, in BA R 55/20162, 306. 109. Report, sent with letter from Kirchner (Reichspropagandaamt Ausland) to RMVP, January 2, 1942, in BA R 55/1465. 110. RMVP Kanzlei to RMVP Abteilung T, June 25, 1941, in BA R 55/20162. 111. Gerhard Hirschfeld, “Nazi Propaganda in Occupied Western Europe: The Case of the Netherlands,” in Nazi Propaganda: The Power and the Limitations, ed. David Welch (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 151–155. 112. The Reich Film Chamber’s response (June 18, 1941) is mentioned and paraphrased in RMVP Kanzlei to RMVP Abteilung T, June 25, 1941, in BA R 55/20162. CHAPTER 6

■

EUROPEAN CULTURE UNDER GERMAN HEGEMONY

1. IFK, Tagung der Internationalen Filmkammer, Berlin 16.–21. Juli 1941 (Berlin, 1941), 58. 2. Ibid., 39, 45; Mino Argentieri, L’asse cinematografico Roma-Berlino (Naples: Libreria Sapere, 1986), 51. 3. Goebbels’s speech of February 24, 1942, quoted in Marcus S. Phillips, “The German Film Industry and the New Order,” in The Shaping of the Nazi State, ed. P. D. Stachura (London: Croom Helm, 1978), 265. On UFI, see also Klaus Kreimeier, The Ufa Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company, 1918–1945 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1996), 320–321. 4. Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Penguin, 2008), 430. 5. Quoted in Phillips, “The German Film Industry and the New Order,” 263. 6. Robert Edwin Herzstein, When Nazi Dreams Come True: The Third Reich’s Internal Strug gle over the Future of Europe after a German Victory: A Look at the Nazi Mentality, 1939–45 (London: Abacus, 1982), 159.

NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 8 4 –186



7. Dr. Alfred Knapp to Konsul Granow, AA, Abt. Kult (Cultural Division of German Foreign Ministry), June 24, 1941, in Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde (BA) R 4901/2729. On Knapp’s earlier work for the DKZ see Madeleine Herren, “ ‘Outwardly . . . an Innocuous Conference Authority’: National Socialism and the Logistics of International Information Management,” German History 20, no. 1 (2002): 75–78. 8. Klaus P. Fischer, Hitler and America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 121–122. 9. Paul Kluke, “Nationalsozialistische Europäideologie,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 3, no. 3 (1955): 259. 10. Adolf Hitler, Europa den Europäern: Adolf Hitler zur Weltlage während des Frankreichfeldzuges: Ein Interview mit Karl von Wiegand Führerhauptquartier, 11. Juni 1940 (Berlin: Deutsche Informationsstelle, 1940). On the Deutsche Informationsstelle, Eckard Michels, Das Deutsche Institut in Paris 1940–1944: Ein Beitrag zu den deutsch-französischen Kulturbeziehungen und zur auswärtigen Kulturpolitik des Dritten Reiches (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1993), 37. 11. Knapp to Granow, June 24, 1941, 3. 12. Helmut Pfeiffer, Tagungsbericht der Internationalen Juristenbesprechung in Berlin vom 3. bis 5. April 1941, aus Anlaß der Gründung der Internationale Rechtskammer (Berlin: Deutscher Rechstverlag, 1941). 13. Report of September 23, 1942, from the Italian Consulate in Munich to Italy’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ministero degli affari esteri, MAE); quoted in MAE, D.I.E., Uff. I, to Ministero della cultura popolar (MCP), Direzione Generale Scambi Culturali, November 2, 1942, in Archivio centrale dello stato, Rome (ACS) MCP DGP, busta 105, Sottof. 24.8.14. See also Herzstein, When Nazi Dreams Come True, 160. 14. Internationales Frauentreff en in Berlin Vom 7. Bis 11. Oktober 1941. (Munich: Obpacher, 1941). 15. Horst J. P. Bergmeier and Rainer E. Lotz, Hitler’s Airwaves: The Inside Story of Nazi Radio Broadcasting and Propaganda Swing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 189. 16. Patrick Bernhard, “Die ‘Kolonialachse’: Der NS-Staat und ItalienischAfrika 1935 bis 1943,” in Die “Achse” im Krieg: Politik, Ideologie und Kriegführung 1939–1945, ed. Lutz Klinkhammer, Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi, and Thomas Schlemmer (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2010), 153. “Der erste Europäische Postkongreß und seine Ergebnisse,” Postarchiv: Zeitschrift für das gesamte Post- und Fernmeldewesen 70, no. 6 (December 1942). The European Forestry Conference is covered in “VIII. Komiteesitzung der Internationale Forstzentrale vom 31. August bis 4. September 1943 in Strbske Pleso (Slovakei),” Forstwissenschaftliches Centralblatt 66, no. 1 (1944): 72. On the International Forestry Center, see Heinrich Rubner, Deutsche Forstgeschichte, 1933–1945: Forstwirtschaft, Jagd und Umwelt im NS- Staat (St. Katharinen: Scripta Mercaturae Verlag, 1985), 141–158. German war time efforts to orga nize Eu ropean



NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 8 6–188

scholars are documented in Frank-Rutger Hausmann, “Deutsche Geisteswissenschaft” im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Die “Aktion Ritterbusch” (1940–1945), 3rd ed., revised (Heidelberg: Synchron Wissenschaftsverl. der Autoren, 2007); Karl Dietrich Erdmann, Die Ökumene der Historiker: Geschichte der Internationalen Historikerkongresse und des Comité International des Science Historiques (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987), 256; Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze, “Faschistische Pläne zur ‘Neuordnung’ der europäischen Wissenschaft: Das Beispiel Mathematik,” NTM- Schriftenreihe für die Geschichte der Naturwissenschaft, Technik und Medizin, no. 2 (1986): 1–17. 17. “Nationale und politische Erziehung in Europa,” special issue of Internationale Zeitschrift für Erziehung 9, 4/5 (Autumn 1942). 18. Martin H. Geyer, “Social Rights and Citizenship during World War II,” in Two Cultures of Rights: The Quest for Inclusion and Participation in Modern America and Germany, ed. Manfred Berg and Martin H. Geyer, Publications of the German Historical Institute (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 143–166. 19. Weinhandl to Reich Education Ministry, December 22, 1942, in BA R 4901/2941; Hausmann, “Deutsche Geisteswissenschaft” im Zweiten Weltkrieg, 218–219. Publications included Theodor Haering, Die deutsche und die europäische Philosophie: Über die Grundlagen und der Art ihrer Beziehung (Stuttgart-Berlin: Kohlhammer, 1943); and Ferdinand Weinhandl, Europa und die deutsche Philosophie (StuttgartBerlin: Kohlhammer, 1943). 20. Quoted in Christian Fuhrmeister, “Dr. iur. Dr. phil. Rolf Hetsch, ‘einziger zünftiger Kunsthistoriker’ im Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda,” in Führerauftrag Monumentalmalerei: Eine Photokampagne 1943–1945, ed. Christian Fuhrmeister and Iris Lauterbach (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006), 115. 21. Otto Dietrich, Die geistige Grundlagen des neuen Europa (Berlin: Zentralverlag des NSDAP, Franz Eher Nachf., 1941), 11. 22. Ibid., 12, 30. 23. Willi A. Boelcke, ed., “Wollt Ihr den totalen Krieg?” Die geheimen GoebbelsKonferenzen 1939–1943 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1967), 182. 24. Pietro Pastorelli, L’Esaurimento dell’ iniziativa dell’Asse (Milan: Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale, 1967), 160–161. 25. Ibid., 166–167. 26. Quoted in Ibid., 163, 166–167. 27. Dino Cofrancesco, “Il mito europeo del fascismo (1939–1945),” Storia Contemporanea 14, no. 1 (1983): 5–45; Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922– 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 183–187. On such speculations in France, see Bernard Bruneteau, “L’Europe nouvelle de Hitler”: Une illusion des intellectuels de la France de Vichy (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 2003). 28. Quoted in Madeleine Herren, “ ‘Neither This Way nor Any Other’: Swiss Internationalism during the Second World War,” in Switzerland and the Second World War, ed. Georg Kreis (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 181.

NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 8 8 –192



29. Weizsäcker file note, September 4, 1942, Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes (PA AA) R 29837, fiche 1575. 30. Weizsäcker’s May 2, 1943, diary entry, quoted in Michael Salewski, “National Socialist Ideas on Europe,” in Documents on the History of European Integration, ed. Walter Lipgens (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1985), 50, n. 80. 31. Goebbels’s diary entry of September 23, 1941, quoted in Peter Longerich, Propagandisten im Krieg (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 1987), 142. 32. Walter Lipgens, Documents on the History of European Integration, vol. 1: Continental Plans for European Union 1939–45 (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1985), 108–109. 33. The delegations, totaling seventy men, represented Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany, Bohemia and Moravia, Finland, Holland, Italy, Croatia, Norway, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and Hungary. IFK, Tagung der IFK, Berlin, 13–18. 34. Kreimeier, Ufa Story, 334–335. 35. Biography of Ordynski on website of Polish Film Academy, available at http://www. akademiapolskiegofilmu .pl /pl / historia -polskiego -filmu /rezyserzy /ryszard-ordynski/73. His ship passage is documented at http://gayhistory.wikidot .com/ryszard-ordynski. 36. See Evelyn Ehrlich, Cinema of Paradox: French Filmmaking under the German Occupation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Brett Bowles, “The Attempted Nazification of French Cinema, 1934–44,” in Cinema and the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema, ed. Roel Vande Winkel and David Welch, rev. ed. (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 136–145. 37. Kreimeier, Ufa Story, 334. 38. Deutsche Filmakademie mit dem Arbeitsinstitut für Kulturfilmschaff en (Babelsberg Ufastadt [Berlin]: Deutsche Filmakademie, 1938). 39. Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through TwentiethCentury Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 330. 40. Quoted in Ernst Offermanns, Internationalität und europäischer Hegemonialanspruch des Spielfilms der NS-Zeit (Hamburg: Verlag Dr. Kovac, 2001), 73. 41. David Welch and Roel Vande Winkel, “Europe’s New Hollywood? The German Film Industry under Nazi Rule, 1933–45,” in Cinema and the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema, ed. Roel Vande Winkel and David Welch, rev. ed. (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 18. 42. Entry of May 9, 1941, in Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher: Sämtliche Fragmente. T. 1, Aufzeichnungen 1923–1941, Bd 9: Dezember 1940– Juli 1941, ed. Elke Fröhlich (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1998), 300. 43. de Grazia, Irresistible Empire, 330–331. 44. Phillips, “The German Film Industry and the New Order,” 262. 45. Entry of April 15, 1941, in Goebbels, Tagebücher T. 1, Bd 9, 248.



NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 9 2–197

46. Phillips, “The German Film Industry and the New Order,” 264–265. 47. IFK, Tagung der IFK, Berlin, 11–12. 48. The June 25, 1940, report on Pavolini’s visit is quoted in Aristotle A. Kallis, “A War within the War: Italy, Film, Propaganda and the Quest for Cultural Hegemony in Europe (1933–43),” in Cinema and the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema, ed. Roel Vande Winkel and David Welch, rev. ed. (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 178. 49. Goebbels, Tagebücher T. 1, Bd 9, 184. 50. Entry of July 18, 1941, in Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher: Sämtliche Fragmente. T. 2, Diktate 1941–1945, Bd 1: Juli– September 1941, ed. Elke Fröhlich (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1996), 89. 51. IFK, Tagung der IFK, Berlin, 21. 52. Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde (BA), SSO (former Berlin Document Center), Melzer, Karl. See also Der Internationale Filmkongress Berlin 1935: Seine Organisation und seine Ergebnisse/Le Congrès International du Film: Organisation et résultats (Berlin: Reichsfilmkammer, 1935), 3. 53. IFK, Tagung der IFK, Berlin, 59; Jan Olsson, Svensk spelfilm under andra världskriget (Lund: Liber Läromedel, 1979), 45. 54. See text of the “Satzung” in IFK, Tagung der IFK, Berlin, 58–67. 55. IFK, Tagung der Internationalen Filmkammer: München 24.–27. November 1941 ([Berlin], 1941), 13. 56. IFK, Tagung der IFK, Berlin, 28. 57. The IFC’s other Sektionen included Film Theater Management, Film Technology, and a section for Educational, Cultural, and Documentary Films. Members are listed in Interfilm 3 (November 1942): 22–23. 58. IFK, Tagung der IFK, Berlin, 27. 59. Günther Schwarz to Universum-Film G.m.b.H., July 3, 1945, in BA RK U79 (former Berlin document center), fiche 2772. 60. Marco Scollo Lavizzari, “Scalera Film,” in Enciclopedia del cinema (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2004). 61. IFK, Tagung der Internationalen Filmkammer: Venedig 6.–9. September 1941 ([Berlin], 1941), 31, 38. 62. IFK, Tagung der IFK, München, 26–27; Argentieri, L’asse cinematografico, 55. 63. IFK, Tagung der IFK, München, 30. 64. Ibid., 28–29. 65. IFK, Tagung der IFK, Venedig, 31. 66. IFK, Tagung der IFK, München, 33. 67. Ibid. 68. IFK, Tagungen der Internationalen Filmkammer (Berlin: Internationale Filmkammer, 1942), 13–14.

NOT E S T O PA GE S 1 9 7 –202



69. Ibid., 12. These statistics appeared also in Interfilm 3 (1942): 20. Reichsfilmintendant Fritz Hippler repeated them in the Italian magazine Cinema, September 25, 1942, and in Fritz Hippler, “Probleme des europäischen Films,” Film-Kurier, October 16, 1942. 70. IFK, Tagungen der IFK (1942), 14. 71. Ibid., 23–25. 72. Ibid., 12, 22. Knud Waaben, “Gamborg, Leif,” in Dansk Biografisk Leksikon, 3rd ed., vol. 5 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1980), 101. 73. IFK, Tagungen der IFK (1942), 15–16. 74. Ibid., 44. 75. IFK, Tagungen der Internationalen Filmkammer (Berlin, 1943), 9–10. 76. IFK, Tagung der IFK, Venedig, 27. 77. IFK, Tagung der IFK, München, 22–24. 78. IFK, Tagungen der IFK (1943), 73. 79. IFK, Tagung der Internationalen Filmkammer: Budapest 29. November–3. Dezember 1942 (Berlin, 1942), 13. 80. Ottavio Croze, “Promemoria” (undated [1941]), in Archivio storico delle arti contemporanee (ASAC), Fondo Storico, Serie Cinema, CM 10. 81. Sandro de Feo, in Il messaggero, August 31, 1941, quoted in Michelangelo Antonioni, “Per una storia della mostra (1),” Cinema 6, no. 2 (September 10, 1941): 153. 82. “Film-Europa ohne Hollywood,” Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, September 17, 1941. 83. IFK, Tagung der IFK, Venedig, 22. 84. IFK, Tagung der IFK, Berlin, 11. 85. IFK, Tagungen der IFK (1942), 42. 86. D. Schmidt, “Von der Handelsware zum Kunstwerk: Zur 9. Internationale Filmkunstschau in Venedig,” Hamburger Tageblatt, August 24, 1941. 87. Felix Henseleit, “A European Front,” Reichsfilmblatt 10, no. 6 (March 1926): 3–5, trans. Thomas J. Saunders, in Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby, eds., “Film Europe” and “Film America”: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920–1939 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), 334. 88. Sisto Favre, “Alla luce di Venezia,” Lo schermo 7, no. 9 (September 1941): 8. 89. Sisto Favre, “La nuova cinematografia,” Lo schermo 7, no. 8 (August 1941). Quoted in Argentieri, L’asse cinematografico, 16. 90. Karl Melzer, “Europäische Filmversorgung im Zeichen der Qualität,” Interfilm 1, no. 3 (November 1942): 25. 91. IFK, Tagung der IFK, Berlin, 26, 21. 92. Pavolini’s closing speech, April 10, 1942, is in ACS MCP Gab., b. 103; published in Film 5, no. 16 (April 18, 1942) and in German translation in IFK, Tagungen der IFK (1942), 36–37.



NOT E S T O PA GE S 2 0 3–206

93. Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema,” in The European Cinema Reader, ed. Catherine Fowler (London: Routledge, 2002), 133. 94. IFK, Tagung der IFK, Budapest, 13, 22. 95. Bjørn Sørenssen, “From Will to Reality—Norwegian Film during the Nazi Occupation, 1940–45,” in Cinema and the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema, ed. Roel Vande Winkel and David Welch, rev. ed. (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 222–229. 96. Roel Vande Winkel, “German Influence on Belgian Cinema, 1933–45: From Low-Profile Presence to Downright Colonisation,” in Cinema and the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema, ed. Roel Vande Winkel and David Welch, rev. ed. (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 79. 97. IFK, Tagung der IFK, München, 23. 98. Vande Winkel, “German Influence on Belgian Cinema,” 82. 99. Daniel Rafaelić, “The Influence of German Cinema on Newly Established Croatian Cinematography, 1941–45,” in Cinema and the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema, ed. Roel Vande Winkel and David Welch, rev. ed. (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 100, 107. 100. Tim Kirk, “Film and Politics in South-East Europe: Germany as ‘Leading Cultural Nation,’ 1933–45,” in Cinema and the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema, ed. Roel Vande Winkel and David Welch, rev. ed. (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 247. 101. IFK, Tagung der IFK, München, 23. 102. Dominique Nasta, “Cinema rumeno,” in Storia del cinema mondiale, III: L’Europa: Le cinematografie nazionali, ed. Gian Piero Brunetta, vol. 2 (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), 1472–1473. 103. Argentieri, L’asse cinematografico, 74–75. 104. David S. Frey, “Competitor or Compatriot? Hungarian Film in the Shadow of the Swastika, 1933–44,” in Cinema and the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema, ed. Roel Vande Winkel and David Welch, rev. ed. (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 163. 105. Ibid., 165. 106. David S. Frey, “National Cinema, World Stage: A History of Hungary’s Second Film Industry, 1929–44” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2003), 409–415. 107. Frey, “Hungarian Film,” 170, n. 25. 108. Melzer to Hans Hinkel, December 14, 1936, in BA, RKK Personnel file on Karl Melzer, RK (former BDC) J0072, 593. 109. Deutschlandreise italienischer Filmschaff ender/Viaggio per Germania d’Artisti italiani del film (n.d. [1942]), in Deutsches Filminstitut, Library and Text Archive, Frankfurt (DIF-Frankfurt), Magazin/418. French cinema stars had been on a similar trip just one month earlier; see Karen A. Fiss, Grand Illusion: The Third Reich, the

NOT E S T O PA GE S 2 0 6 –210



Paris Exposition, and the Cultural Seduction of France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 206–207. 110. For example, J. Ribolzi, Vita del cinema tedesco (Milan: Nuova Aurora, 1943). 111. Ottavio Croze, “Contributo straordinario per la Mostra inter. d’Arte cinematografica 1941,” sent to D. G. per la Cinematografia, MCP, Rome, July 10, 1941. ASAC, Fondo Storico, Serie Cinema, CM 10. 112. Kallis, “A War within the War,” 183. 113. Luigi Freddi, Il cinema: Il governo dell’ immagine (Rome: Centro sperimentale di cinematografia, 1994), 303; Argentieri, L’asse cinematografico, 121–126. 114. Freddi, Il cinema, 311–314; Francesco Bono, “Verso un gruppo di Stato: Cinecittà, ENIC e Cines,” in Storia del cinema italiano, ed. Ernesto G. Laura, vol. 6: 1940/44 (Venice: Marsilio, 2010), 365–382; Riccardo Redi, La Cines: Storia di una casa di produzione italiana (Rome: CNC Edizioni, 1991). 115. Kallis, “A War within the War,” 181; Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 219–220. 116. Goebbels’s diary entry, June 13, 1941, quoted in Ben-Ghiat, Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema, 220. 117. Goebbels’s diary entry, May 19, 1942, quoted in Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 216. 118. Deutsche Kongreß-Zentrale, Jahresbericht der Deutschen Kongreß-Zentrale e.V. 1940/41 (Berlin: Deutsche Kongress-Zentrale e.V., 1941), 27. 119. Helmut Aschenbrenner, Archiv für das Recht der Internationalen Organisationen. Archive for the Law of International Institutions. Archives de droit des Associations internationales, vol. 1 (Bremen: Geist, 1940); Hans Frank and Karl F. Schweig, eds., Archiv für das Recht der Internationalen Organisationen. Archive for the Law of International Institutions. Archives de droit des Associations internationales. Archivio per il diritto di organizzazione internazionale, vol. 2 (Bremen: Geist, 1941); vol. 3 (Bremen: Geist, 1942). 120. Auswärtiges Amt to RMVP, May 13, 1941. Hoover Institution Archive (HIA), Germany, DKZ, Box 317; Herren, “ ‘Outwardly . . . ,’ ” 86–87. 121. Herren, “ ‘Neither This Way nor Any Other’: Swiss Internationalism,” 180. 122. IFK, Tagung der IFK, Berlin, 28. 123. IFK, Tagung der IFK, Venedig, 14; IFK, Tagungen der IFK (1943), 38–69. 124. See for example, Georg Roeber, “Zwischenstaatliche Zusammenhänge im Filmrecht,” Der deutsche Film 6, no. 4/5 (November 1941): 43. Roeber edited UFITA: Archiv für Urheber-, Film- und Theaterrecht from 1942. 125. IFK, Tagungen der IFK (1943), 75. 126. Ibid., 43, 47. 127. Albrecht Dümling, Musik hat ihren Wert: 100 Jahre musikalische Verwertungsgesellschaft in Deutschland (Regensburg: ConBrio, 2003), 206–210.



NOT E S T O PA GE S 2 1 1–215

128. Ibid., 238. See also Leo Ritter, “Die Arbeit der STAGMA im Kriege,” in Jahrbuch der deutschen Musik: Im Auftrage der Abteilung Musik des Reichsministeriums für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1943), 87–88. 129. Ugo Gheraldi, “Les reunions confederales,” Inter-Auteurs 12, no. 97 (August 1941): 6–7. 130. Leo Ritter’s April 25, 1942, letter to Strauss, quoted in Dümling, Musik hat ihren Wert, 238. Ritter’s February 1942 meeting with SIAE’s leadership is described in Leo Ritter to Emiel Hullebroeck, February 14, 1942, in HIA, Germany, DKZ, Box 176. 131. Ritter, “Die Arbeit der STAGMA im Kriege,” 88. 132. Karin Ploog, Als die Noten laufen lernten . . . : Geschichte und Geschichten der U-Musik bis 1945, vol. 2 (Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2015), 70. 133. Reports on all three events are in ACS PCM 1940–43, 14-3-9461. On the 1943 Madrid meeting see also Dümling, Musik hat ihren Wert, 238. 134. The importance of the 1941 Italian reform for copyright in fi lm is discussed in Peter Baldwin, The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 190–191. 135. Erik Levi, Mozart and the Nazis. How the Third Reich Abused a Cultural Icon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 168–182. 136. Schee (DKZ) to Dr. Gast (RMVP), January 26, 1942, in HIA, Germany, DKZ, Box 93. See also Herzstein, When Nazi Dreams Come True, 159. 137. Reichspropagandaamt-Ausland (Kirsch) to RMVP (Abteilung A and R), January 2, 1942, in Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde, R 55/1465. 138. The DKZ’s request for information on the Permanent Council, sent to Emil von Reznicek on November 6, 1941, Reznicek’s responses, and two copies of the prewar statutes are in HIA, Germany, DKZ, Box 176. 139. Michael Wittmann, Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek und der “Ständige Rat für die internationale Zusammenarbeit der Komponisten” (Wedemark: Musikverlag H. M. Fehrmann, 2015), 17–18. Thanks to Michael Wittmann for generous answers to my questions about his research. 140. Leo Ritter to Emiel Hullebroeck, February 14, 1942, in HIA, Germany, DKZ, Box 176. 141. The list of invitees, prepared by the Propaganda Ministry, is in Claus (RMVP) to DKZ, March 17, 1942, in HIA, Germany, DKZ, Box 176. 142. Typescript of Strauss’s speech, June 14, 1942; Claus (RMVP) to DKZ, March 17, 1942. Both in HIA, Germany, DKZ, Box 176. 143. Kurt Atterberg, ed., Föreningen svenska tonsättare 25 år (Stockholm: Föreningen svenska tonsättare, 1943), 137. 144. “Protokoll über die Sitzung der alten Delegierten des Ständigen Rates für die Internationale Zusammenarbeit der Komponisten im Hotel Der Kaiserhof, Berlin, am 14. Juni 1942.” Riksarkivet Arninge, Sweden (RA-Arninge), Föreningen svenska

NOT E S T O PA GE S 2 1 6 –221



tonsättare (FST), A2, 8 (1942), attachment to Styrelseprotokoll nr. 6 (304), August 19, 1942. Many thanks to Petra Garberding for making this document available to me. 145. Michael H. Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 251–252. 146. Goebbels’s diary entry of December 5, 1941, quoted in ibid., 250. 147. Undated typescript of Strauss’s speech at the June 14, 1942, meeting in Berlin, in HIA, Germany, DKZ, Box 176. 148. Amended draft statute, RA-Arninge, FST, A2. Strauss’s speech (undated typescript), HIA, Germany, DKZ, Box 176. 149. “Protokoll . . . 14. Juni 1942,” RA-Arninge, FST, A2. The following quotations come from this document. 150. Ibid. Quoted in Petra Garberding, “Musiken som ett nationalsocialistiskt redskap? Kurt Atterberg och ‘Ständiger Rat für die internationale Zusamenarbeit der Komponisten,’ ” in Fruktan, fascination, frändskap: Det svenska musiklivet och nazismen, ed. Greger Andersson and Ursula Geisler (Malmö: Sekel, 2006), 109, n. 73. 151. Atterberg, FST 25 år, 137–138. 152. Fred K. Prieberg, Musik im NS- Staat, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1989), 210. 153. “Protokoll über die Sitzung des Ständigen Rates für die Internationale Zusammenarbeit der Komponisten am 15. Juni 1942 im Hotel Kaiserhof zu Berlin,” in Riksarkivet-Arninge, Föreningen svenska tonsättare (FST), A2, 8 (1942). 154. Guido Salvetti, “Il ruolo ‘pubblico’ di Goffredo Petrassi negli anni del fascismo,” in Musicologia come pretesto: Scritti in memoria di Emilia Zanetti, ed. Tiziana Affortunato (Rome: Istituto italiano per la storia della musica, 2010), 458–461; Fiamma Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista (Fiesole: Discanto, 1984), 198–199. 155. Goffredo Petrassi, “Relazioni internationali nel campo della musica,” Il musicista (January 1943): 5. Quoted in Nicolodi, Musica e musicisti, 291. 156. Goebbels diary entry, June 17, 1942, in Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher: Sämtliche Fragmente. T. 2, Diktate 1941–1945, Bd 4: April– Juni 1942, ed. Elke Fröhlich (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1995), 545. 157. Waldemar Rosen, “Deutschland im europäischen Musikaustausch,” in Jahrbuch der deutschen Musik: Im Auftrage der Abteilung Musik des Reichsministeriums für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, ed. Helmut von Hase (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1943), 70, 64. 158. Nikolaus Spanuth, “Deutsche Musik im besetzten Gebiet,” Zeitschrift für Musik, July 1941, 459–460. Quoted in Joseph Wulf, ed., Musik im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1989), 294–295. 159. Rosen, “Deutschland im europäischen Musikaustausch,” 64. 160. Pamela M. Potter, “Nazism,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., vol. 17 (London: Macmillan, 2001), 722. 161. Freddi, Il cinema, 308.



NOT E S T O PA GE S 2 2 2–225

162. Daniela Coli, “Intellettuali, fascismo e idea di ‘Nazione,’ ” Storia Contemporanea 19, no. 5 (October 1988): 935–945. 163. For example, Balbino Giuliano, Latinità e Germanesimo (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1940); Mario Missiroli, Italia e Germania nelle relazioni culturali (Rome: Stab. tip. F. Canella, 1941). 164. Jens Petersen, “Vorspiel zu ‘Stahlpakt’ und Kriegsallianz: Das deutschitalienische Kulturabkommen vom 23. November 1938,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 36, no. 1 (1988): 72; Monica Fioravanzo, “Die Europakonzeptionen von Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus (1939–1945),” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 58, no. 4 (2010): 531–533. 165. Marla Stone, “The Last Film Festival: The Venice Biennale Goes to War,” in Re-Viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922–1943, ed. Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 293–314. 166. Fritz Hippler, “Venedig und das europäischen Filmschaffen,” Der deutsche Film: Zeitschrift für Filmkunst und Filmwirtschaft Sonderheft zur X. Internationalen Filmkunstausstellung 1942 (August 1942): 2. 167. Maria del Corso, “Fine della mostra,” Mediterraneo, September 19, 1942. Quoted in Stone, “Last Film Festival,” 298. CHAPTER 7

■

THE USES AND DISADVANTAGES OF

A VÖLKISCH EUROPEAN CULTURE

1. Sandra Teroni and Wolfgang Klein, Pour la défense de la culture: Les textes du Congrès international des écrivains, Paris, juin 1935 (Dijon: Editions universitaires de Dijon, 2005); Luis Mario Schneider, II Congreso Internacional de Escritores Antifascistas (1937): Inteligencia y guerra civil en España, vol. 1 (Barcelona: Laia, 1978); Luis Mario Schneider and Manuel Aznar Soler, eds., II Congreso Internacional de Escritores Antifascistas (1937): Ponencias, documentos, testimonios, vol. 2 (Barcelona: Laia, 1979); Ernest Ialongo, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: The Artist and His Politics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 250–251; Masaharu Anesaki, ed., Le destin prochain des lettres, Entretiens 8 (Paris: Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, 1938). 2. Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 10, 177. 3. H.-J. Lutzhöft, Der Nordische Gedanke in Deutschland 1920–1940 (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1971); Frank-Rutger Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter, tage nicht! Die Europäische Schriftsteller-Vereinigung in Weimar 1941–1948 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2004), 28. 4. Jan-Pieter Barbian, Literaturpolitik im “Dritten Reich”: Institutionen, Kompetenzen, Betätigungsfelder, rev. ed. (Munich: dtv, 1995), 653–661.

NOT E S T O PA GE S 2 2 5 –229



5. Ibid., 432–433; W. Scott Hoerle, Hans Friedrich Blunck: Poet and Nazi Collaborator, 1888–1961 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003), 171–193. 6. Blunck to Reich Literature Chamber Managing Director (Geschäftsführer) Wilhelm Ihde, June 14, 1941, in Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfeld (BA) R 56 I/191, Bl. 141–143. Jan-Pieter Barbian, Literaturpolitik im “Dritten Reich”: Institutionen, Kompetenzen, Betätigungsfelder (Frankfurt am Main: Buchhändler Vereinigung, 1993), 192, n. 136; Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter, 29–30. 7. Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome, 308. 8. Barbian, Literaturpolitik, 1995, 626–640. A helpful overview of the institutions of Nazi literature policy in Jan-Pieter Barbian, The Politics of Literature in Nazi Germany: Books in the Media Dictatorship (Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2013), 59–147. 9. Stadtarchiv Weimar, 16 108-02/12 3. 10. A nearly exhaustive collection of source materials on the ESV is in Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter. See also Barbian, Literaturpolitik, 1995, 436–450; Werner Mittenzwei, Der Untergang einer Akademie oder Die Mentalität des ewigen Deutschen: Der Einfluss der nationalkonservativen Dichter an der Preussischen Akademie der Künste 1918 bis 1947 (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1992), 446–457. 11. Gutterer’s August 4, 1942, speech in Salzburg is paraphrased in “Deutsches Kulturschaffen im Krieg,” Berliner Börsenzeitung (August 5, 1942); a copy is in Bundearchiv-Lichterfelde (BA) R 56 I/132. 12. Gründungsurkunde der Europäischen Schriftstellervereinigung, March 27, 1942. BA R 56 I/102; reprinted in Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter, 68. A photograph of the signed original charter was published in Europäische Literatur 1, no. 2 (June 1942): 12. 13. The March 27, 1942, registration of the union as an eigetragener Verein is in Thüringisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar, Land Thüringen, Amtsgericht Weimar, 47. 14. Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter, 66, 71–72. 15. Ibid., 293, n. 311; 310–312. 16. Wilhelm Ihde, Geschäftsführer, Reichsschrifttumskammer, to Hans Friedrich Blunck, June 11, 1941, quoted in Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter, 29, n. 24. 17. Hainer Michalske, Die Gutenberg-Reichsausstellung 1940: Ein Beitrag zur nationalsozialistischen Kulturpolitik (Stuttgart: Steiner-Verlag, 2007). 18. Otto Seifert, Die große Säuberung des Schrifttums: Der Börsenverein der deutschen Buchhändler zu Leipzig 1933–1945 (Schkeuditz: GNN Verlag, 2000), 199–200. 19. Paul Hövel “Das deutsche Buch im Neuaufbau Europas,” in Börsenblatt des deutschen Buchhandels, May 10, 1941, cited in Barbian, Literaturpolitik, 1995, 668. 20. Ibid., 694–703. 21. Barbian, Literaturpolitik, 1995, 445–446; Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter, 73–80. 22. DKZ to Hans Carossa, October 28, 1941, and Carossa’s response (January 25, 1942) are both in Hoover Institution Archive (HIA), Germany, DKZ, Box 274.



NOT E S T O PA GE S 2 2 9–234

23. Helmuth Aschenbrenner to Karl Schweig, DKZ, December 7, 1941, in HIA, Germany, DKZ, Box 274. 24. Michael Denning, “The Novelists’ International,” in The Novel: History, Geography, and Culture, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 708–709. See also: R. A. Wilford, “The PEN Club, 1930–1950,” Journal of Contemporary History 14, no. 1 (1979): 99–116; Roger Shattuck, “Having Congress: The Shame of the Thirties,” Partisan Review 51 (1984): 393–416. 25. Denis Pernot, “Consciences critiques de la littérature européenne (1919– 1945),” in Précis de littérature européenne, ed. Béatrice Didier (Paris: Editions universitaires de France, 1998), 393–396, here 395. 26. Franco Moretti, “Modern European Literature: A Geographical Sketch,” New Left Review, no. 206 (August 1994): 103–104. 27. Valéry Larbaud, Ce vice impuni, la lecture . . . : Domaine anglais (Paris: Albert Messein, 1925), 407–408. Quoted in Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 110. 28. Quoted in Casanova, World Republic of Letters, 87. 29. Adrian Marino, “Histoire de l’idée de ‘littérature européenne’ et des études européennes,” in Précis de littérature européenne, ed. Béatrice Didier (Paris: Editions universitaires de France, 1998), 16. 30. Moretti, “Modern European Literature,” 93–95, 100; Casanova, World Republic of Letters, 155. An argument against this view of Paris’s centrality is in Donald Sassoon, The Culture of the Europeans: From 1800 to the Present (London: Harper Collins, 2006), 642. 31. The “French model” of literature is discussed in Moretti, “Modern European Literature,” 93–95; Casanova, World Republic of Letters, 67–73, 87; Roberto Maria Dainotto, Europe (In Theory) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 87–101. 32. Moretti, “Modern European Literature,” 97. 33. Fanny Popowa-Mutafowa, “Bulgarien und das neue Europa,” Wille und Macht: Führerorgan der nationalsozialistischen Jugend 10, no. 9 (September 1942): 14. Quoted in Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter, 340. 34. Erwin Wäsche, “Bündnis des Geistes: Zum Zusammenschluss europäischer Dichter in Weimar,” Brüsseler Zeitung, October 1941. A copy is in HIA, Germany, DKZ, Box 274. 35. Casanova, World Republic of Letters, 104–105. 36. Ibid., 75. 37. On the interwar debate between cosmopolitan and chauvinist visions of German national literature, see Mittenzwei, Der Untergang einer Akademie, 95–130. 38. Wilhelm Haegert, “Zum Dichtertreffen 1941,” in Die Dichtung im kommenden Europa: Weimarer Reden 1941 (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1942), 6. 39. On Drieu’s Europeanism see Carl Hamilton Pegg, Evolution of the European Idea, 1914–1932 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 24; Pierre

NOT E S T O PA GE S 2 3 4 –236



Drieu la Rochelle, “L’Allemagne européenne,” Nouvelle Revue française, January 1, 1942, 104–112. On Brasillach: Alice Kaplan, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). On GiménezCaballero: Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter, 226–238. 40. On Urban, see Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter, 309–310. On Timmermans: Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens, World Authors, 1900–1950 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1996), 2652. On Hamsun: Robert Ferguson, Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun (London: Hutchinson, 1987); Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter, 259–280. 41. Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter, 243, 284–285, 316–320. 42. Roberto Maria Dainotto, Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 10–11. See also Xosé Manoel Núñez and Maiken Umbach, “Hijacked Heimats: National Appropriations of Local and Regional Identities in Germany and Spain, 1930–1945,” European Review of History 15, no. 3 (2008): 295–316. 43. Gottfried Benn, “Rede auf Marinetti (Rede beim Bankett der Union nationaler Schriftsteller in Berlin, am 29. März 1934),” in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Dieter Wellershoff, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 2003), 1043. 44. On Koskenniemi, see www.kirjasto.sci.fi/koskenni.htm, and Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter, 292. On Popova-Mutafova: Krassimira Daskalova, “Fani PopovaMutafova,” Gender and History 14, no. 2 (August 2002): 321–339. On Bonifačić: Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter, 313. 45. As quoted by Ambassador Alfieri in report, November 15, 1941; in Mirella Serri, Il breve viaggio: Giaime Pintor nella Weimar nazista (Venice: Marsilio, 2002), 204. 46. Barbian, Literaturpolitik, 1995, 626–640. On the Nazi manipulation of Weimar’s classical legacy, see Peter Merseburger, Mythos Weimar: Zwischen Geist und Macht (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1998), 342–359; Lothar Ehrlich, Jürgen John, and Justus H. Ulbricht, eds., Das Dritte Weimar: Klassik und Kultur im Nationalsozialismus (Cologne: Böhlau, 1999); Volker Mauersberger, Hitler in Weimar: Der Fall einer deutschen Kulturstadt (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1999). 47. Svend Fleuron, “Ich sah Deutschland,” Europäische Literatur 1, no. 1 (May 1942): 4. 48. Karl Robert Mandelkow, Goethe in Deutschland: Rezeptionsgeschichte eines Klassikers (Munich: Beck, 1980), 72–77; Karl Robert Mandelkow, ed., Goethe im Urteil seiner Kritiker: Dokumente zur Wirkungsgeschichte Goethes in Deutschland. T. 4, 1918–1982 (Munich: Beck, 1984). 49. Pernot, “Consciences critiques,” 395; Mandelkow, Goethe in Deutschland, 72–77; Paul Michael Lützeler, “Europäischer Kosmopolitismus und Weltliteratur: Goethe und Europa—Europa und Goethe,” in Kontinentalisierung: Das Europa der Schriftsteller, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2007), 101–102. 50. Lützeler, “Europäischer Kosmopolitismus und Weltliteratur,” 102.



NOT E S T O PA GE S 2 3 7–243

51. Rudolf Erckmann, “Die Aufgabe des Deutschen Dichtertreffens 1941,” in Die Dichtung im kommenden Europa: Weimarer Reden 1941 (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1942), 17. 52. Joseph Goebbels, Das eherne Herz. Reden und Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1941/42 (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Franz Eher Nachf., 1943), 64–65. 53. Moritz Jahn, “Zukunftsaufgaben der europäischen Literaturen,” in Die Dichtung in kommenden Europa: Weimarer Reden 1941 (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1942), 56–57, 60. 54. The 1941 conference program is printed in Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter, 130–131. 55. The Hotel Elephant’s invoices for drinks served at the writers conferences of 1940 and 1942 are in Stadtarchiv Weimar, 16 108-02/12, 1–2 and 4. 56. Barbian, Literaturpolitik, 1995, 442. 57. Quoted in ibid., 445, n. 127. 58. Quoted in François Dufay, Die Herbstreise: Französische Schriftsteller im Oktober 1941 in Deutschland. Ein Bericht, trans. Tobias Scheffel (Berlin: Siedler, 2001), 93. 59. Barbian, Literaturpolitik, 1995, 442–443. See, however, the critical assessment of Carossa’s collaborationist behavior in Mittenzwei, Der Untergang einer Akademie, 449–451. 60. Quoted in Barbian, Literaturpolitik, 1995, 443, n. 118. 61. Carl Rothe, “Die Überwindung westlerischen Geistes durch die deutsche Dichtung,” in Die Dichtung im Kampf des Reiches: Weimarer Reden 1940 (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1941), 77–97; Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter, 59–65. 62. L’Université libre, December 16, 1941, quoted in François Dufay, Le voyage d’automne: Octobre 1941, des écrivains français en Allemagne. Recit (Paris: Plon, 2000), 168–169. 63. Thomas Mann, Deutsche Hörer! 55 Radiosendungen nach Deutschland, 2nd ed. (Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer Verlag, 1945), 69. Quoted in Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter, 82. 64. Diary entry October 27, 1941, in Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher: Sämtliche Fragmente. T. 2, Diktate 1941–1945, Bd 2, Oktober– Dezember 1941, ed. Elke Frölich (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1996), 189. French novelist Jacques Chardonne’s tears are reported also in Arvi Kivimaa, Europäische Dichterreise durch Deutschland: Reiseeindrücke eines finnischen Schriftstellers in Deutschland (Berlin: Karl H. Bischoff, 1944), 112–113. 65. Diary entry October 26, 1941, in Goebbels, Tagebücher T. 2, B. 2, 186. 66. Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter, 293, n. 311, 310–312. 67. Ibid., 73; Barbian, Literaturpolitik, 1995, 445–446. 68. Moretti, “Modern European Literature,” 106. 69. For example: Fleuron, “Ich sah Deutschland”; Liviu Rebreanu, “Rumänische Heimat,” Europäische Literatur 1, no. 1 (May 1942): 7–8; Arvi Kivimaa, “Finnische

NOT E S T O PA GE S 2 4 3 –246



Betrachtung,” Europäische Literatur 1, no. 4 (August 1942): 7–8. Photos of participants in the March 1942 meeting ran in Europäische Literatur 1, no. 1 (May 1942): 10–11, and 1, 2 (June 1942), 21. 70. Oliver Lubrich, “Comparative Literature—In, from and beyond Germany,” Comparative Critical Studies 3, no. 1–2 (2006): 53. 71. Europäische Literatur, 1, no. 1 (May 1942): 3. 72. Paul Hövel, “Europäische Dichter in Weimar,” Europäische Literatur 1, no. 7 (November 1942): 8. 73. Diary entry October 27, 1941, in Goebbels, Tagebücher T. 2, B. 2, 190. 74. Joszef Nyirö, “Siebenbürgen und die ungarischen Dichtung,” Ungarn: Monatschrift für deutsch-ungarischen Kulturaustausch 3, no. 8 (August 1942): 465. 75. Ibid., 465, 467. 76. Italian Foreign Ministry to MinCulPop, August 6, 1941, in Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS), Ministero Cultura Popolare (MCP) Gabinetto b. 68, f. 446, sottof. 1. The German Embassy’s invitation is quoted in Ministero degli Affari Esteri (MAE), Affari Generali I, to MCP, and copied to Ministero Educazione Nazionale, August 6, 1941, in ACS MCP Gabinetto b. 68, f. 446, sottof. 1. 77. Italian archival material on the event (from ACS MCP Gabinetto b. 68, f. 446, sottof. 1) is published in Serri, Il breve viaggio, 199–246. Documents from the debate over which writers to send to Weimar are in ibid., 199–203. 78. Serri, Il breve viaggio, 148. 79. On Farinelli, see Frank-Rutger Hausmann, “Arturo Farinelli e il mondo germanofono,” in I Lettori d’ italiano in Germania: Convegno di Weimar, 27–29 aprile 1995, ed. D. Giovanardi and H. Stammerjohann (Tübingen: Narr, 1996), 69–79. On Acito: Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter, 204. 80. Alfieri to MAE and MCP, November 15, 1941, in ACS MCP, Gabinetto, b. 68; published in Serri, Breve viaggio, 204–207, here 204. 81. Luciano De Feo (IRCE) to MCP, February 9, 1942; in Serri, Il breve viaggio, 207–208. De Feo reported Bacchelli’s refusal in letter to MCP, Gabinetto, of March 2, 1942. Pavolini’s choice is documented in Luciano (MCP) to De Feo (IRCE), March 9, 1942. De Feo to MCP, February 9, 1942; in ibid., 207–209. 82. Handwritten addendum to Luciano (MCP) to Marchese Blasco Lanza D’Ajeta, Capo Gabinetto MAE, March 18, 1942; in Serri, Il breve viaggio, 211. 83. Giovanni Papini, “Il dovere dell’Italia,” in Lacerba (August 15, 1914), quoted in Walter L. Adamson, Avant- Garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 193–194. 84. Giovanni Papini, L’Europa occidentale contro la Mitteleuropa (Florence: Libreria della Voce, 1918). 85. See Giovanni Papini, Italia mia, 2nd ed. (Florence: Vallecchi, 1941). Quotation from an MCP report on the book, March 6, 1941, in ACS MCP, Gab. b. 71.



NOT E S T O PA GE S 2 4 6–250

86. “L’Italia e l’Europa,” Il Frontespizio (November 1937); republished in Giovanni Papini, Tutte le opere, vol. 8: Politica e civiltà (Milan: Mondadori, 1963), 468–473. 87. Mario Puppo, “L’idea di Europa dai romantici a Croce,” in L’Unità d’Europa: Aspetti e problemi nel mondo culturale italiano e nel mondo culturale tedesco dell’età contemporanea: Atti del XV convegno internazionale di studi italo-tedeschi Merano, 10–15 aprile 1978 (Merano: Istituto culturale italo-tedesco, 1978), 191. 88. An undated text of Papini’s speech is in ACS MCP, b. 68. Philosopher Francesco Orestano’s prominent declarations in 1942 about Europe’s true Latin and Christian essence are discussed in Monica Fioravanzo, “Die Europakonzeptionen von Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus (1939–1945),” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 58, no. 4 (2010): 526–528. 89. On Borberg, see Gero von Wilpert, Lexikon der Weltliteratur, vol. 1: Biographisch-bibliographisches Handwörterbuch, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1988), 194. On Kolar, see Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter, 312, n. 360; Wilpert, Weltliteratur, vol. 1, 816. On Rebreanu, see ibid., 1253; Mihai D. Gheorghiu, “La construction littéraire d’une identité nationale: Le cas de l’écrivain roumain Liviu Rebreanu (1885–1944),” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 98, no. 1 (1993): 34–44. 90. Quoted in Roberto Ridolfi, Vita di Giovanni Papini, 2nd ed. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1987), 181. 91. Alfieri to Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAE) and Ministry of Popular Culture (MCP), March 31, 1942; in Serri, Il breve viaggio, 215. 92. Giuseppe Gabetti, “Probleme der italienischen und der deutschen Literatur,” Europäische Literatur 1, no. 2 (June 1942): 4–6. The November 1941 issue of Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte and the November 1942 edition of Europäische Revue were entirely devoted to Italy. 93. Alfieri to MAE and MCP, March 31, 1942, ACS MCP, Gab., b. 68; in Serri, Il breve viaggio, 216–217. 94. Ridolfi, Vita di Giovanni Papini, 181. 95. De Feo (IRCE) to Bernabei (Gabinetto MCP), April 7, 1942. ACS MCP Gabinetto, busta 68, f. 446; in ibid. 219. 96. Bottai’s August 12, 1940, letter to Mussolini, in Giuseppe Bottai, Diario 1935– 1944, ed. Giordano Bruno Guerri (Milan: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1989), 507. 97. “Weimar,” Primato 3, no. 9 (May 1, 1942): 1. 98. Quoted in Bernhard Becker, “Herder in der nationalsozialistischen Germanistik,” in Herder im “Dritten Reich,” ed. Jost Schneider (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1994), 150. 99. Entry May 31, 1942, in Bottai, Diario 1935–1944, 309. 100. SS-Brigadeführer [signature illegible], Office of the Chief of the SS security police (Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD) to Reichsleiter Philip Bouhler (Parteiamtliche Prüfungsstelle zum Schutze des NS-Schrifttums), [date illegible, probably March 1942], in BA NS 11/36. Underlining in original. 101. Ibid.

NOT E S T O PA GE S 2 5 0 –253



102. Other examples include: Hans Keller’s letter to Partieamtliche Prüfungsstelle des NS-Schrifttums (September 11, 1941) in BA NS 11/15; E. Peterich’s report to the German Foreign Ministry (September 1941), in PA AA DBR 1406c, Bd. 2; and the complaint, from the head of the Prussian Academy of Sciences to the Reich Education Ministry (July 29, 1942), about Italy’s efforts to control the Union Académique Internationale, in BA R 4901/3047. 103. Wolfgang Erxleben, Amt Rosenberg, to Propaganda Ministry, June 17, 1942, BA NS 15/209. On this “humanism controversy” see Victor Farías, Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 261–263; Luce Fontaine-De Visscher, “Un débat sur l’humanisme. Heidegger et E. Grassi,” Revue Philosophique de Louvain, August 1995, 285–330; Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 104–110; Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Italian Fascists and National Socialists: The Dynamics of an Uneasy Relationship,” in Art, Culture, and Media under the Third Reich, ed. Richard A. Etlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 274–275. 104. Wilhelm Brachmann, “Antike und Gegenwart: Ein Beitrag zum Problem des gegenwärtigen Humanismus in Deutschland und Italien,” Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte, no. 140 (November 1941): 926. See also Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie (Frankfurt: Campus, 1988), 268–272. 105. Erxleben, Amt Rosenberg, to Propaganda Ministry, June 17, 1942, BA NS 15/209. 106. Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe, 110. 107. Farías, Heidegger and Nazism, 263. 108. Robert Edwin Herzstein, When Nazi Dreams Come True: The Third Reich’s Internal Strug gle over the Future of Europe after a German Victory: A Look at the Nazi Mentality, 1939–45 (London: Abacus, 1982), 56; Andrea Hoffend, Zwischen KulturAchse und Kulturkampf: Die Beziehungen zwischen “Drittem Reich” und faschistischem Italien in den Bereichen Medien, Kunst, Wissenschaft und Rassenfragen (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1998), 419; Reinhard Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg und seine Gegner: Zum Machtkampf im nationalsozialistischen Herrschaftssystem (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1970), 236–250. 109. Entry of December 9, 1942, in Giuseppe Bottai, Vent’anni e un giorno (24 luglio 1943) (Milan: Garzanti, 1977), 238. Quoted in Andrea Hoffend, “ ‘Verteidigung des Humanismus’? Der italienische Faschismus vor der kulturellen Herausforderung durch den Nationalsozialismus,” in Faschismus und Gesellschaft in Italien: Staat, Wirtschaft, Kultur, ed. Jens Petersen and Wolfgang Schieder (Cologne: SH-Verlag, 1998), 177. 110. Ernesto Grassi, ed., Studia Humanitatis: Festschrift zur Eröff nung des Institutes (Berlin: Helmut Küpper, 1942); Hoffend, Zwischen Kultur-Achse und Kulturkampf, 423–424. 111. Alfieri, report of March 31; in Serri, Il breve viaggio, 216. 112. Alfieri to Bernabei (MCP), September 15, 1942, in ibid., 224.



NOT E S T O PA GE S 2 5 4–256

113. Ibid., 221–237. See also Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 179, 269, n. 28; Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter, 213–222. 114. Emilio Cecchi, America amara (Florence: Sansoni, 1939). 115. Guido Bonsaver, Elio Vittorini: The Writer and the Written (Leeds: Northern Universities Press, 2000); Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 191–194. 116. Bonsaver, Elio Vittorini, 80, n. 19. 117. Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 269, n. 28; Serri, Il breve viaggio, 230–231. 118. Enrico Falqui and Elio Vittorini, eds., Scrittori nuovi: Antologia italiana contemporanea (Lanciano: Carabba, 1930). 119. On Pintor, Serri, Il breve viaggio, 63–139, 177–195. For Serri’s controversial interpretation of the significance of Pintor’s trip to Weimar, see ibid., 19–21. 120. A list of foreign participants is in Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter, 38, n. 38. 121. “Dr. Goebbels empfängt die europäischen Dichter. Kranzniederlegung in der Fürstengruft in Weimar,” Frankfurter Zeitung, October 13, 1942. The October 1942 meeting’s activities are recorded in a program book (Stadtarchiv Weimar, 16 108-02/12 4) and in Hans Friedrich Blunck’s diary, sections of which are published in Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter, 45–48. 122. Quoted in Ernst Loewy, Literatur unterm Hakenkreuz: Das dritte Reich und seine Dichtung (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1966), 249–250. 123. Both quoted in Walter Horn, “Appell der geistigen Kräfte Europas: Das deutsche Dichtertreffen 1942 in Weimar,” N.S. Landpost, October 10, 1942. 124. Giaime Pintor, “Scrittori a Weimar,” in Il sangue d’Europa, ed. Valentino Gerrantana (Turin: Einaudi, 1950), 195. 125. Federzoni to Cecchi, September 8, 1942, in Accademia nazionale dei Lincei (ANL), Fondo Accademia d’Italia, Titolo XIII, b. 12, f. 12. 126. Emilio Cecchi, “Die zeitgenössische italienische Schrifttum,” Europäische Literatur, 1943. A draft of Cecchi’s speech, “Letteratura italiana contemporanea,” sent to Federzoni on October 2, 1942, is in ANL, Fondo Accademia d’Italia, XIV, busta 2, f. 8. 127. Mario Sertoli, “Relazione sul convegno della Unione Europea degli Scrittori in Weimar dal 7 al 15 ottobre corrente,” October 30, 1942, in ACS MCP, Gab. b. 68; reprinted in Serri, Il breve viaggio, 239–246, here 240. 128. Pintor, “Scrittori a Weimar,” 194, 195, 196. There were not in fact any Nobel laureates present. 129. Letter of October 16, 1942, in Giaime Pintor, Doppio diario, 1936–1943, ed. Mirella Serri (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), 173–174. 130. Quoted in Giuliana Bampi, “Indice ragionato del periodico ‘La Ronda’ (1919–1923)” (Tesi di laurea, University of Trent, 1997), 21. 131. Paul Morand, “A proposito di Marcel Proust,” La Ronda 3, no. 10 (1921): 702–706. Cecchi’s “sincere European opening” at La Ronda is described in Giorgio

NOT E S T O PA GE S 2 5 6 –261



Luti, La letteratura nel ventennio fascista: Cronache letterarie fra le due guerre 1920– 1940, 2nd ed. (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1972), 40. Felice Del Beccaro, “Cecchi, Emilio,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 23 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1979), 254. 132. Alberto Carocci, letters of April 1, 1930, and July 24, 1930, quoted in Giuseppe Langella, Da Firenze all’Europa: Studi sul Novecento letterario (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1989), 154, n. 34. See also Luti, La letteratura nel ventennio, 75–142. 133. Renato Bertacchini, “Falqui, Enrico,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 44 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1994), 498. 134. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Italian Fascism and the Aesthetics of the ‘Third Way,’ ” Journal of Contemporary History 31, no. 2 (April 1, 1996): 302. See also Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Fascism, Writing, and Memory: The Realist Aesthetic in Italy, 1930–1950,” Journal of Modern History 67, no. 3 (1995): 635. 135. Quoted in Walter L. Adamson, “The Culture of Italian Fascism and the Fascist Crisis of Modernity: The Case of Il Selvaggio,” Journal of Contemporary History 30, no. 4 (October 1995): 558. 136. Luigi Charini, Fascismo e letteratura (Rome: Istituto nazionale fascista di cultura, 1936), quoted Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 135. Ben-Ghiat discusses this transition in ibid., 135–137; Ben-Ghiat, “Fascism, Writing, and Memory,” 659. 137. Cecchi, America amara. 138. “Oltre il muro di casa,” Primato (January 15, 1941). 139. Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 175. 140. Pintor, “Scrittori a Weimar,” 196. The Norwegian was the novelist, playwright, and Nasjonal Samling member Karl Holter; see Sertoli’s report in Serri, Il breve viaggio, 242. 141. Börries Freiherr von Münchhausen to Carossa, May 18, 1943; Carossa to Börries von Münchhausen, May 24, 1943, quoted in Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter, 43 and 55, n. 78. 142. Pintor, “Scrittori a Weimar,” 195. 143. Giaime Pintor, “I rivoluzionari decadenti,” Primato 3, no. 9 (May 1, 1941). 144. Pintor, “Scrittori a Weimar,” 197. Pintor’s review of Jünger’s novel appeared as “Sulle scogliere di marmo,” Primato 3, 18 (September 15, 1942). 145. Giaime Pintor, “Gli scrittori tedeschi di Bonaventura Tecchi,” in Primato 2, no. 23 (December 1, 1941), reprinted in Giaime Pintor, Il Sangue d’Europa, ed. Valentino Gerrantana (Turin: Einaudi, 1950), 108–110. 146. Pintor, “Scrittori a Weimar,” 197. 147. Sertoli, “Relazione,” in Serri, Il breve viaggio, 244, 241. 148. Ibid., 240–241. 149. Rosselina Mariani, “I convegni di Weimar,” Storia Contemporanea 7, no. 2 (June 1976): 264. A selection of the German press coverage of the 1942 conference is in BA NS 5 VI/19160.



NOT E S T O PA GE S 2 6 1–266

150. Pintor, “Scrittori a Weimar,” 198. 151. Rudolf Erckmann, “Grossdeutsches Dichtertreffen und Tagung der Europäischen Schriftsteller-Vereinigung Weimar 1943” (July 29, 1943), in Stadtarchiv Weimar, 16 108-02/12 4. This file contains additional detailed plans for the 1943 conference, abandoned only in August 1943. 152. Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter, 71. 153. Jacques Chardonne, “The Heaven of Niefelheim,” in Travels in the Reich, 1933–1945: Foreign Authors Report from Germany, ed. Oliver Lubrich (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 266, 265. 154. Hausmann, Dichte, Dichter, 332–336. 155. Rothe’s January 12, 1944, letter to Carossa, printed in ibid., 71, n. 123. CONCLUSION

1. Werner Meyer, Europäisches Bekenntnis: Parolen und Gedanken über den Schicksalskampf des Kontinents. Dokumente zur 2. Internationalen Journalistentagung der Union Nationaler Journalistenverbände in Wien 1943 (Prague: Orbis, 1944). Number of participants from Giorgio Pini, Filo diretto con Palazzo Venezia, 2nd ed. (Bologna: FPE, 1967), 278. The event is discussed in Andrea Hoffend, Zwischen Kultur-Achse und Kulturkampf: Die Beziehungen zwischen “Drittem Reich” und faschistischem Italien in den Bereichen Medien, Kunst, Wissenschaft und Rassenfragen (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1998), 403; Robert Ferguson, Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun (London: Hutchinson, 1987), 370–373. 2. Knut Hamsun to Victoria [Hamsun] Charlesson, June 23, 1943, in Harald Naess and James McFarlane, eds., Knut Hamsun: Selected Letters (Norwich: Norvik Press, 1998), 226. 3. Entry of June 23, 1943, in Giovanni Ansaldo, Il giornalista di Ciano: Diari 1932–1943 (Bologna: Mulino, 2000), 344. 4. Entry of June 21, 1943, in ibid., 340. 5. Entries of June 22 and June 24, 1943, in ibid., 340, 345, 344. 6. The October 1940 meeting on this topic between Germany’s Reich League of the German Press (Reichsverband der deutschen Presse) and Italy’s National Fascist Syndicate of Journalists (Sindacato nazionale fascista dei giornalisti) is discussed in Hoffend, Zwischen Kultur-Achse und Kulturkampf, 403. 7. Dr. Maximilian Freiherr du Prel, “Nachwort,” in Journalismus ist eine Mission: Bericht vom ersten Kongress des Union Nationale Journalistenverbände, Venedig 1942 (Vienna: Terramare Institut, 1942), 199. 8. Quoted in Hoffend, Zwischen Kultur-Achse und Kulturkampf, 403. 9. Alessandro Pavolini, Ai Giornalisti dell’Ordine Nuovo (Discorso del Ministro della Cultura Popolare all’Unione Internazionale dei Giornalisti, Venezia, 12 aprile 1942-XX) ([Venice], 1942). A copy is in Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome (ACS)

NOT E S T O PA GE S 2 6 6 –271



MCP, Gabinetto, b. 103. In German translation in Journalismus ist eine Mission, 157–166. 10. Fritz Hausjell, “Franz Ronnebergers Wiener Jahre: Seine journalistische Tätigkeit und seiner Mitarbeit am ‘Institut zur Erforschung und Förderung des internationalen Pressenwesens der Union nationaler Journalistenverbände (UNJ)’ in Wien 1941–45,” in Die Spirale des Schweigens: Zum Umgang mit der nationalsozialistischen Zeitungswissenschaft, ed. Wolfgang Duchkowitsch, Fritz Hausjell, and Bernd Semrad (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2004). The book series (Schriftenreihe des Instituts zur Erforschung und Förderung des Internationalen Pressewesens der Union Nationaler Journalistenverbände) was published by Nuremberg’s Willmy Verlag in 1943 and 1944. 11. Fred Halliday, “Three Concepts of Internationalism,” International Aff airs 64, no. 3 (1988): 194. 12. Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (New York: Penguin, 2013), 154–188. 13. Alfredo Casella, “Scambi musicali,” in Atti del primo Congresso internazionale di musica, Firenze, 30 aprile–4 maggio 1933 (Florence: F. Le Monnier, 1935), 224. 14. Leon Botstein, “Modernism,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., vol. 16 (London: Macmillan, 2001), 872. 15. Th is argument is made in Victoria de Grazia, “European Cinema and the Idea of Europe, 1925–95,” in Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity: 1945–95, ed. G. Nowell-Smith and S. Ricci (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 26. 16. Frank-Rutger Hausmann, “Auch im Krieg schweigen die Musen nicht”: Die Deutschen Wissenschaftlichen Institute im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), 362. 17. Mario Isnenghi, “La cultura,” in Venezia, ed. Emilio Franzina (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1986), 459; Ernesto G. Laura, “La Cines nella Repubblica di Salò,” in La Cines: Storia di una casa di produzione italiana, ed. Riccardo Redi (Rome: CNC Edizioni, 1991), 112. 18. Isnenghi, “La cultura,” 459; R. J. B. Bosworth, Italian Venice: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 174. 19. Thomas Mann, Deutsche Hörer! 55 Radiosendungen nach Deutschland, 2nd ed. (Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer Verlag, 1945), 68, 69. 20. Jens Petersen, “Vorspiel zu ‘Stahlpakt’ und Kriegsallianz: Das DeutschItalienische Kulturabkommen vom 23. November 1938,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 36, no. 1 (1988): 77. Emphasis in original. 21. Arvi Kivimaa, “Finnische Betrachtung,” Europäische Literatur 1, no. 4 (August 1942): 7. This passage, quoted and translated from Kivimaa’s original Finnish text, is discussed in Hana Worthen, “Towards New Europe: Arvi Kivimaa, Kultur, and the Fictions of Humanism,” in Finland’s Holocaust: Silences of History, ed. Simo Muir and Hana Worthen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).



NOT E S T O PA GE S 2 7 3–275

22. Petra Garberding, Musik och politik i skuggan av nazismen: Kurt Atterberg och de svensk-tyska musikrelationerna (Lund: Sekel, 2007), 220–236. Trond Olav Svendsen, “Leif Sinding,” Norsk biografisk leksikon (https://nbl.snl.no/Leif_ Sinding). Krassimira Daskalova, “Fani Popova-Mutafova,” Gender and History 14, no. 2 (August 2002): 323; Alice Kaplan, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 153. 23. On de Pirro: Giacomo Lichtner, Fascism in Italian Cinema Since 1945: The Politics and Aesthetics of Memory (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 68. On Monaco: Barbara Corsi, “Monaco, Eitel,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 75 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2011). Karl Franz Schweig, Wie organisiere ich einen Kongress? Handbuch über die organisation internationaler Kongress und Tagungen: Kongreβ- und tagungstechnische Studien (Düsseldorf: Droste-Verlag, 1957); Karl Franz Schweig, The Organization of an International Congress (New York: ATPAC Tours, 1966). On Schwarz: Marijke de Valck, Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 54. On Egk: Michael H. Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 30. On Roeber: Peter Baldwin, The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 463, n. 52. On Petrassi: Raffaele Pozzi, “Petrassi, Goffredo,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 82 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2015). On Kivimaa, see www.world -theatre-day.org and Worthen, “Towards New Europe.” 24. Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1947 essay “What Is Literature?” quoted in Alain Finkielkraut, “What Is Europe?” The New York Review of Books, December 5, 1985. On the postwar decline in interest in “Europe” among European intellectuals see also Hartmut Kaelble, “Identification with Europe and Politicization of the EU Since the 1980s,” in European Identity, ed. Jeffrey T. Checkel and Peter J. Katzenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 194. 25. James Kirchick, “Transylvanian Drama over Fascist’s Ashes,” Forward, June 6, 2012; Zoltan Simon, “Hungary Lauds Hitler Ally Horthy as Orban Fails to Stop Hatred,” Bloomberg Businessweek, June 14, 2014; Krisztina Than, “Wiesel Raps Hungarian Past ‘Whitewash,’ ” Reuters, June 19, 2012; Ágnes Orzóy, “Eternal Ellipsis: Politics and Literature,” Hungarian Literature Online, available at: http://www.hlo .hu/news/politics _ and _ literature _in _ hungary. Wiesel’s letter is available at http:// hungarianspectrum.org/2012/06/18/elie-wiesels-letter-to-laszlo-kover/. Kövér’s reply: http://nol .hu / belfold / kover _ laszlo _valaszlevele _ elie _wieselnek _ nyiro _ nem _volt _fasiszta-1314760. 26. Andrew Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 98–118. 27. Ursula Keller and Ilma Rakuša, eds., Writing Europe: What Is European about the Literatures of Europe? Essays from 33 European Countries (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004), 6.

NOT E S T O PA GE 2 7 6



28. Dubravka Ugrešić, “European Literature as a Eurovision Song Contest,” in Writing Europe: What Is European about the Literatures of Europe? Essays from 33 European Countries, ed. Ursula Keller and Ilma Rakuša (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004), 325–334. 29. Eugenio Fuentes, “The Western Bloc,” in Writing Europe: What Is European about the Literatures of Europe? Essays from 33 European Countries, ed. Ursula Keller and Ilma Rakuša (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004), 121. 30. Adam Nossiter, “National Front Party in France Is Dealt a Setback in Regional Elections,” New York Times, December 13, 2015.

Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to thank the many individuals and institutions who helped me in the long process of researching and writing this book. Thanks go first of all to Victoria de Grazia of Columbia University. Her high standards, delight in the sources, and refusal to take shortcuts have challenged and inspired me; her sage advice and unwavering faith in my project have buoyed me. In New York I benefited also from the guidance of Volker Berghahn, Samuel Moyn, Jerrold Seigel, and Paolo Valesio, and from helpful suggestions from Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Silvana Patriarca. My research was only possible through the generous assistance of many archivists and librarians. Thanks are due to the staff of the Archivo centrale dello stato, Archivio storico del Ministero degli affari esteri, Archivo Storico dell’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, and the Archivio Storico dell’Accademia Nazionale Santa Cecilia, in Rome; the Archivio storico delle arti contemporanee in Venice; the Bundesarchiv-Lichterfelde and Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes in Berlin; the Library and Text Archive of the Deutsches Filminstitut in Frankfurt; the Stadtarchiv and Thüringisches Hauptstaatsarchiv in Weimar; and the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University. Thanks also to the dedicated librarians of the Biblioteca Nazionale, Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea, and 



A C KNOW L E DGM E NTS

the Biblioteca “Luigi Chiarini” of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome; the Staatsbibliothek and Universitätsbibliothek der Humboldt-Universität in Berlin; the Biblioteca Marciana and the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice; and the interlibrary loan staff at San Francisco State University. In Sweden, the National Library in Stockholm has been my bedrock, while the libraries of Uppsala University, the Riksdagsbibliotek, the Swedish Film Institute’s Filmbibliotek, and Stockholm’s Musik- och teaterbiblioteket offered outstanding scholarly environments and research assistance of the first order. Generous support for my research and writing came from the Berlin Program in Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, the Conference Group for Central European History, Stiftelsen Olle Engkvist Byggmästaren, and the Helge Ax:son Johnson Foundation. Thanks to Karl Staaffs Fond and Gertrude och Ivar Philipsons Stiftelse for supporting publication costs. At San Francisco State University my work on this book benefited from the support and encouragement of colleagues and friends in and beyond the History Department— particular thanks are due to Chris Chekuri, Sarah Curtis, and Katherine Gordy—as well as outstanding students, whose appreciation of the high stakes of cultural history has remained a source of inspiration long since I left San Francisco for Stockholm in 2010. I am grateful to my colleagues at Uppsala University, who welcomed me to Swedish academic life with patience and good will, including Lars M. Andersson, Annika Berg, Jenny Björklund, Orsi Husz, Matthew Kott, Frans Lundgren, Mats Persson, Oskar Pettersson, Sven Widmalm, Cecilia Wejryd, and Andreas Åkerlund. My far-flung colleagues in the Euroculture Program offered unflagging encouragement, while the program’s students have helpfully challenged and stimulated my thinking about the problem(s) of Europe. I owe particular thanks to Cameron Ross, whose steady hand on the tiller made it possible for me to combine the work of academic administration with the demands of writing. Many scholars have enriched this project, in particular at the conferences where I was fortunate to be able to present work in progress. Thanks for insightful questions and helpful suggestions from Peter Bearman, Russell Berman, Patrick Bernhard, Martin Baumeister, Annalisa Bini, Johannes Dafinger, Edward Dickinson, Jürgen Elvert, Tim Kirk, Lutz Klinkhammer, William McAllister, Lucy Riall, Michael Saler, and Reto Hoffman. Petra Garberding shared her contacts, insights, and archival photocopies regarding the Permanent Council for International Cooperation among Composers with truly humbling scholarly generosity. Nikolas Glover awakened me to the importance of historical irony. Mark Dean, passing through from Australia, sat at our kitchen table in Stockholm and showed me how to tell a story. Dominique Reill made helpful comments on a woefully rough early version

A C KNOW L E DGM E NT S



of the text. Magnus Rodell, who has read my writing and encouraged my work for longer than anyone should have to, has my particular gratitude. The decisive moment at which my research began to take form as a book took place during a weeklong working session with my father, Robert Martin, in a snowed-in summerhouse in Långsand, Sweden. Thanks to Angelique Ahmed and Daniel Hermansson for generously lending us the house. And thanks to you, Pop, for an act of intellectual camaraderie and fatherly love that I will never forget. Leon Botstein and Jaimey Fisher read the manuscript and made invaluable suggestions and corrections. Two anonymous readers for Harvard University Press helped me clarify my argument and greatly improved this book. Some of the themes in this book develop ideas I first presented in “ ‘European Cinema for Europe!’ The International Film Chamber, 1935–1942,” in Cinema and the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema, ed. David Welch and Roel Vande Winkel, rev. ed. (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 25–41; and “ ‘European Literature’ in the Nazi New Order: The Cultural Politics of the Eu ropean Writers’ Union, 1941–43,” Journal of Contemporary History 48, no. 3 (2013): 486–508. Thanks to the editors (and anonymous reviewers) of those publications for valuable feedback. All of these people have my sincere thanks; none of them bears any responsibility for the errors of fact and judgment that remain. Joyce Seltzer of Harvard University Press provided a level of demanding editorial attention and thoughtful support that I had not dared to hope for. This book is far better for her efforts and I (and the book’s readers!) owe her sincere thanks. I am grateful too for the professionalism of her colleagues Brian Distelberg, Kathleen Drummy, Stephanie Vyce, and Kathryn Walker. Friends near and far discussed the project with me, humored my enthusiasms and complaints, and offered encouragement and support. Here I want to mention in particular Andrea Branchi, Rachel Donadio, Michael Ebner, Erik Goldner, Tom Neumann, Ben Seigle, Daniel Stolzenberg, Caspar Trimmer, and Todd Weir. My parents followed every twist and turn of this project with curiosity and the accompanying emotional ups and downs with tireless support and love. They have my deepest gratitude. Thanks to Johanna for her love, for her faith in me, and for the mixture of forbearance and impatience that I needed to bring this book to completion. This book is dedicated to her. My love and thanks go finally to our wonderful sons, Felix and Ruben, whose vitality and creativity in our daily present ensured that I could never get lost in the past.

Index

Abetz, Otto, 159, 176 Aboucaya, Marcel, 138 Abyssinia. See Ethiopia Acito, Alfredo, 244, 254 Action Committees for the Universality of Rome (CAUR), 16 Aesthetic idealism, 267 Aesthetic pluralism, 31–32, 129 Alfieri, Dino, 27, 29, 77, 91, 92, 104, 110, 137, 151, 188, 210, 252; and revival of IFC, 192–193; on Weimar, 244 “Alfieri law,” 140, 141, 206 Amann, Max, 228 American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), 92 Amt Rosenberg, 251 Andersson, Olof, 105, 135, 144, 180, 190, 194 Ansaldo, Giovanni, 264–265, 267 Anti-Comintern Pact, 109, 112, 187 Anti-cosmopolitanism, 122 Antifascists, 79, 106 Antimaterialism, 79–80 Antiquity, classical, 250, 251

Aragon, Louis, 121 Aristotle, 56 Arnheim, Rudolf, 140 Arnoux, Alexandre, 139 Artists: autonomy offered to, 10; Degenerate Art exhibition, 110. See also Composers ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), 92 Aschenbrenner, Helmut, 229 Association for the Defense of Culture, 224, 230 Atterberg, Kurt, 21, 24, 25, 37, 82, 89, 92, 125, 215, 216, 217, 219, 272 Austria, 34, 74, 109, 112, 132–133 Autarky: call for, 110; in film, 197; in music, 219 Authors’ rights society, Flemish, 127 Authors’ rights society, Italian. See SIAE Authors’ societies, 29. See also European Writers Union; Union of National Writers; Writers’ organizations Autonomy, 10, 239, 241, 268 Axis. See Rome–Berlin Axis Axis, cultural. See Cultural Axis





I NDE X

Bacchelli, Riccardo, 244 Baden-Baden, 85–86 Baldini, Antonio, 253, 254, 256 Barbusse, Henri, 230 Belgium: musical festival in, 125–127; Flemish authors’ rights society, 127; German conquest of, 149, 153, 156; and German vision of international cultural order, 153; seizure of documents and institutions in, 154, 157–158, 160–165; film industry in, 204 Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, 257 Benn, Gottfried, 13, 14, 15, 235 Bérard, León, 159, 160 Berber, Fritz, 159–160, 176 Bergstraesser, Arnold, 117 Berlin Film Festival, 273 Berne Convention, 28, 40, 91, 127 Bertram, Fritz, 64 Biennale film festival. See Venice Film Festival Biennale music festival, 32–36, 129, 130 Bingert, Janos, 205 Bloch, Marc, 150 Blumenfeld, David, 190. See also Ordynski, Ryszard Blunck, Hans Friedrich, 225 Bodrero, Emilio, 92 Böhm, Karl, 78, 254, 273 Bonifačić, Antun, 235 Bottai, Giuseppe, 111, 114, 146, 150, 155, 172–173, 174, 175, 219, 248, 249, 250, 252, 257 Brahms-Medal, 38 Brasillach, Robert, 234, 273 Breen, Joseph, 101 British Empire, 2 Brussels. See Belgium Bülow-Schwante, Vicco von, 127 Ca’ Giustinian, 200, 206, 270–271 Cambala, Pavel, 205 Cannes, 143, 145, 273 Capitalism, 8, 120; Hollywood’s glorification of, 46; Axis’s challenge to, 75; Jews associated with, 86

Carol-Bérard, 36, 40, 94 Carossa, Hans, 227, 229, 239, 247, 258, 259, 262 Carr, E. H., 112, 153 Casella, Alfredo, 30–31, 32, 35, 42, 85, 124, 129, 130, 219, 268 Casta Diva (fi lm), 70–71 Catholic Church, 81 CAUR (Action Committees for the Universality of Rome), 16 Cecchi, Emilio, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257 Celli, Silvio, 73 Censorship, 57; of fi lm, 63, 100–101; in Italy, 110; in Germany, 132 Chardonne, Jacques, 235, 258, 262 Chess, 185 Chiarini, Luigi, 59, 139, 257 Ciano, Galeazzo, 44, 57, 79, 111, 171, 187, 264 CIGA (Compagnia italiana grandi alberghi), 33, 55 Cinema: Reich Film Chamber, 44, 63, 65, 68, 179; radical internationalization, 45; unified European market for, 45; power of, 46–47, 57; Mussolini on, 47; intraEuropean exchange, 48–50; European Monroe doctrine in, 49; International Motion-Picture Congress, Paris (1926), 50–51; educational potential, 52; film preservation, 55, 62; as art, 56, 63, 68, 77, 137, 139, 201–202; used to promote fascism, 56–57; International Film Congress, Berlin (1935), 60–73; Nazis’ concern with, 62–63; censorship, 63, 100–101; export markets, 63; Reich Cinema Law, 63; film law, 64; and nationalism, 65; comprehensive European film institution, 65–73; propaganda in, 72; German–Italian cooperation in, 75, 96–97; and copyright, 98, 100, 210–213; incitement movies, 100–101, 141, 196; and national sensibilities, 100–101; film policies, 101, 140–141, 206, 207; and corporatism, 101–102; General Confederation of Cinema, 102–103; as tool for peace, 104; reordering of, 107; and

I NDE X

cultural Axis, 135–146; intellectual role of, 139; and cultural hegemony, 182; in Poland, 190; Germany’s assumption of dominant role in, 190–191; Jews purged from, 195; dependence on Hollywood, 201. See also Film; Film festivals; Film industry; Hollywood; International Film Chamber Cinema, Belgian/Flemish, 204 Cinema, Croatian, 204–205 Cinema, Dutch, 197 Cinema, educational, 52, 53–57, 68; European Congress on Educational Film, Basel (1927), 51, 53; ICE, 52, 54–56, 67, 72, 139, 140; and IFC, 67, 72; Federation for Educational Cinema, 68, 72; Italian leadership in, 70 Cinema, European: lack of large home market, 46, 48; domestic producers, 48; responses to crisis of, 48–51; and introduction of sound, 49–50; advancement of, 180; control over, 181; German domination of, 192; planned economy of, 197; quality of, 198–200; meaning of, 200; as art, 201–202; and copyright, 210–212. See also Film Europe; International Film Chamber Cinema, French, 139–140; at Venice Film Festival, 137; reordering of, 190. See also Film industry, French Cinema, German: control of, 63; export market, 63; Triumph of the Will, 68–69; at Venice Film Festival, 77; attacks on Jews in, 96; Film Germany, 140–141; distribution of, 191; expansion of domestic market, 191; Transit-Film, 191; quality of, 191–192. See also Film industry, German Cinema, Hungarian, 205–206 Cinema, Italian: efforts to revive, 57–59; international reach of, 59; efforts to “Europeanize,” 71; Jews in, 71; propaganda, 72; film policies, 101–102; foreign markets for, 207; in Italian Social Republic, 270. See also Film industry, Italian; ICE; Istituto LUCE



Cinema, national, 202–207 Cinema, Norwegian, 203–204 Cinema, Romanian, 205 Cinema, Slovakian, 205 Cinema, Soviet, 59 Cini, Vittorio, 166, 168, 169, 170–171, 173, 174–175 CISAC (International Federation of Authors and Composers Societies), 25, 29, 91–94, 100, 103, 210–212, 273 Civilisation, 117, 119, 245 Civilization, 119–120, 202, 245 Civilization, European, 8; interwar crisis in, 14–15; crisis of, 46 Civiltà, 119–120, 166, 167, 174, 245, 246 Civiltà (journal), 172, 254 Clair, René, 59 Cogni, Giulio, 254 Coissac, Guillaume-Michel, 142 Collaboration, 173 Collaboration, Franco-German, 176 Collaborators, postwar fates of, 274–277 Communitarianism, 187 Compagnia italiana grandi alberghi (CIGA), 33, 35 Composers: German Composers’ Union, 18; rights of, 22, 34, 39–41, 91–94; and royalties, 23, 91, 92, 212; meeting in Wiesbaden (1934), 24–25; at Stockholm festival (1936), 83–84; at International Festival of Contemporary Music, Baden-Baden, 85–86; Les Six, 87; as national representatives, 88; appeal of national music to, 89–90; movement of national-regional composers, 90–91; at International Music Festival, Stuttgart (1938), 124–125, 131; at music festival in Brussels (1938), 125–127; International Federation of Composers, 217. See also Copyright; Music; Permanent Council for International Cooperation among Composers; specific composers Composers, Italian, 90



I NDE X

Composers, Jewish, 31 Co-nationalism, 90 Conferences, international: Germany’s desire to control, 14; in cultural new order, 156; data on, 160; format for, 163; E’42, 165–172; German plans for, 172. See also Institutions, cultural Cooperation, cultural: after World War I, 3–4; radical right-wing form of, 4; Germany’s exit from, 60. See also Cultural Axis Cooperation, international: Axis’s use of, 6–7; and nationalist cultural renewal, 26; German–Italian, 75–76, 77–78, 79; streamlining, 163. See also Cultural Axis Cooperation, musical, 125. See also Permanent Council for International Cooperation among Composers Copyright, 25–26, 40; STAGMA, 23, 25–26, 29, 91, 92, 95, 132, 189, 210–212, 214; CISAC, 25, 29, 91–94, 100, 103, 210–212, 273; and Nationalist Socialist ideology, 26; in Italy, 27; Berne Convention, 28, 40, 91, 127; ICF’s emphasis on, 42; efforts to present Italy as leader on, 95; and fi lm, 98, 100, 210–213; Axis’s efforts to dominate, 103; takeover of, 210; Union of European Copyright Associations, 210, 211–212, 213, 214; and nationality rule, 212; and reorga nization of Permanent Council, 214–221. See also Moral rights; Royalties Copyright reform, 28–29, 37, 211, 212, 217 Corporatism, 27–29, 42, 107; and copyright reform, 28–29; and music, 34; and cultural industries, 58; and cinema, 101–102 Cosmopolitanism, 121; extraction of Germany from, 20–21; at Venice Film Festival, 77; rejection of, 79; suspicion of, 88 Costamagna, Carlo, 120 Croatia, fi lm industry in, 204–205 Croze, Ottavio, 142, 145, 206, 207 Cultural Accord, 111–121, 126, 252, 271

Cultural agreements, Italian type, 113–114 Cultural Axis: and International Film Chamber, 95–105; mythical qualities of, 105; as alternative, 106; vision of future, 106; expansion of, 107; solutions to problems, 107; German-Italian Cultural Accord, 111–121, 252; and film, 135–146; radicalization of, 136; and Venice Film Festival, 144; centrality of New Order to, 180 “Cultural contact,” theory of, 117 Cultural cooperation: after World War I, 3–4; radical right-wing form of, 4; Germany’s exit from, 60. See also Cultural Axis Cultural exchange, 113–114, 151. See also Cooperation, cultural; Cultural Accord; Inter-nationalism Cultural life: and free market, 5; control over, 47; Nazi vision of, 60; vision of state’s role in, 106–107; organization of, 179; German efforts to seize control of, 227; evaluation of Germany’s efforts to reorder, 261. See also Cinema; Literature; Music Cultural life, German: National Socialism’s assault on, 20; censorship in, 132 Cultural nationalism, 235 Cultural new order, 159; creation of, 1–2; newness of, 4; Germany’s role in, 10; Italy’s role in, 10; scope of, 10–11; vision of, 150–172; and seizure of documents, 154, 157–158, 160–165, 177; plans for UIA’s role in, 160–165; plans for Universal Exposition in Rome, 165–172; German plans for international conferences, 172; Europe as focus of, 175; end of International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, 176–177; plans to launch during war, 178; fear of German dominance, 222; effects of, 269–270. See also Culture, Eu rope an; DKZ; New Order Cultural order: need for, 2, 3; and liberal democracy, 108; vision of, 112; “Euro-

I NDE X

pean,” 266; of postwar West, 274. See also Cultural new order Cultural outreach, 188 Cultural policy: radicalization of, 110; German-Italian Cultural Accord, 111–121; German insistence on state linkages, 218 Cultural policy, German, 131–134 Cultural relations, French model of, 117 Culture: and national identities, 2–3; recasting of economics of, 23; demands for protection of, 29–30; Axis’s challenge to Western hegemony, 76; defense of, 79; Axis’s vision of, 79–80; Axis’s disagreements on, 80–81; presentation of, 111; opposition with civilization, 119 Culture, European, 2; after World War I, 2, 4–5; nationalist vision of, 4; and idea of Europe, 7–8; model of, 122; debate over future of, 173–174; reason for reorganizing, 181; as soft power, 181; and struggle with U.S., 181; and war effort, 181; contrast with American, 201; German control of, 208–209; inter-nationalist character of, 222; völkisch vision of, 222; efforts to redefine in ser vice of Germany, 226–227; mobilization of, 237; Italy’s claim to leadership in, 246, 248–249, 250; classical legacy, 249; Hamsun as symbol of, 263–264; appropriation of symbols of, 265; difficulty of deriving cultural prestige from völkisch model of, 268–269; idea of, 271–272; after World War II, 274; function of idea of, 277 Culture, mass, 21–22 Culture, national: survival of, 5; defense of, 121, 221 Czechoslova kia, 105, 109, 112, 131, 133–134 Dallapiccola, Luigi, 42, 219 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 31 Daudey, H. J. D., 197 Decour, Jacques, 241 De Felice, Renzo, 119



De Feo, Luciano, 53, 54–56, 57, 67, 68, 69, 72, 73, 103, 116, 140, 168, 172, 247, 248 Degenerate Art exhibition, 110 Degenerate Music exhibition, 123–124, 132 Denmark, German conquest of, 149 Dent, Edward J., 28 De Pirro, Nicola, 215, 273 Depression, 57 Deutsche Kongress-Zentrale (DKZ, German Central Conference Office). See DKZ Dialects, protection of, 237 Dietrich, Otto, 144, 186–187, 265 “The Division of the Earth” (Schiller), 118 DKZ (Deutsche Kongress-Zentrale, German Central Conference Office), 14, 154, 155–157, 160–165, 172, 184, 189, 208; and cultural new order, 156–157, 177; restructuring of international organizations, 162; Handbook of International Federations and Associations, 163, 208, 209, 214, 217, 218, 229; promotion of E’42, 171; Hitler’s support for, 177; new order of international organizations, 178, 208, 214; defense of, 208; and creation of integrated European cultural market, 213 Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre, 234, 258 Droit moral. See Copyright; Moral rights Düssel, Carl, 147 Duvivier, Julien, 137 Dwinger, Edwin Erich, 255, 259 E’42, 165–172, 174–175 Ebert, Carl, 95 Economy, European: speculation over restructuring of, 149–150; predictions for, 187. See also New Order Economy, German, 109 Economy, Italian, 110 Eggen, Arne, 125 Egk, Werner, 273 Eisenstein, Sergei, 59 Eisler, Hanns, 21



I NDE X

Empire, Italian, 72, 171, 172, 174, 175. See also Ethiopia Encyclopedia of Cinema, 140 Epting, Karl, 118, 159 Eritrea, 72 Espionage, German, 163 ESV (European Writers Union, Europäischer Schriftsteller-Vereinigung). See European Writers Union Ethiopia, 72–73, 74, 76–77, 112 EUR, 165–172 Europäische Literatur, 242–243, 255 Europe: planned reorga nization of, 1; changes in economic system, 2–3; changes in political system, 2–3; idea of, 7–8, 272, 277; readiness to accept German leadership, 70; sense of impending danger for, 107–108; ideological struggle in, 111–112; misunderstanding of German plans for, 172–173; debate over future of, 173–174; Mann on, 271 European Congress on Educational Film, Basel (1927), 51, 53 Europe and the Axis (Düssel), 147 Europeanism, 8, 183–184, 185–188 European mission, 80 European Parliament, 276 European Union, 276 European Writers Union (Europäischer Schriftsteller-Vereinigung, ESV), 226, 227–230, 232, 234; Italian role in, 228; and appearance of autonomy, 239, 241; political goal, 241; potential, 242; statutes, 242; Papini at, 245–248; Italian participation in, 246–248; Italian delegation to, 253–254, 255–256, 257–258, 259; spectacle of Kultur at, 254–255; French delegation to, 258 “Europe for the Europeans” (Hitler), 184 Expression, freedom of, 57 Falqui, Enrico, 253, 254, 256 Farinelli, Arturo, 244, 253, 255

Fascism: promotion of, 16–17, 54, 56–57; corporatism, 27–28, 29, 34, 42, 58, 101–102, 107; and educational cinema, 53–57; universal status of, 112; and renewal of civilization, 119–120; solutions proposed by, 121; appearance of commitment to aesthetic pluralism, 129; and E’4 2, 166. See also Italy; Mussolini, Benito Fascist intellectuals, 115, 233 Fatherland, concept of, 15 Favre, Sisto, 201 Federation for Educational Cinema, 68, 72 Federzoni, Luigi, 167, 172, 253 Film. See Cinema; Film festivals; Film industry; Hollywood; International Film Chamber; Venice Film Festival Film Europe, 48, 53, 62, 64, 65, 68, 70, 97, 104, 136–137, 202, 203 Film festivals: Moscow International Film Festival, 59; Cannes (Festival International du Cinéma), 143, 145, 273; Italo-German Cinema Festival, 152–153; Berlin Film Festival, 273. See also Venice Film Festival Film Germany, 140–141 Film industry, American. See Hollywood Film industry, and Jews, 201–202 Film industry, European, 200. See also Cinema, European Film industry, French, 102–103, 141, 142, 143, 145. See also Cinema, French Film industry, German, 45, 48–49, 141; UFA, 47, 49, 63; bid for leadership in European fi lm production, 60–73; export market, 63; Tobis, 63; Nazi reform of, 96; efforts to access new markets, 96; UFI, 181, 182, 192; dominance of, 207. See also Cinema, German Film industry, Italian, 141; efforts to revive, 57–59, 96; Jews in, 71; participation in Film Europe, 206–207. See also Cinema, Italian Film law, 64, 100, 103 Film Law Commission, 100, 103

I NDE X

Film policies, 101, 140–141, 206, 207 Film preservation, 55, 62 Flemish authors’ rights society, 127 Fleuron, Sven, 236 Foreign Ministry, 158–159, 176 Foreign relations, Nazi, 117 Forns, José, 34, 216, 217 Four Year Plan, 109 Fraktur, 228, 243 France: as leader in cultural-political field, 1; view of moral rights, 26; German charm offensive toward, 103; lack of resolve, 112; division of world by, 118; fall of, 149, 150, 153, 155, 156, 165; racial mixing in, 152; and German vision of international cultural order, 153–154; moral debt to Germany, 160; Mussolini’s invasion of, 168; absence from IFC, 190; and revived Permanent Council, 217, 218; pro-resistance press, 241; National Front, 276 Franco, Francisco, 74, 107, 122 Frank, Hans, 134, 185 Freddi, Luigi, 57, 58, 71, 96, 107, 108, 135, 190, 199, 200, 206, 221, 270 Free market, and cultural life, 5 Froelich, Carl, 144, 180, 193, 194, 202 Fuentes, Eugenio, 276 Funk, Walther, 91, 106, 149, 187 Furtwängler, Wilhelm, 23, 273 Future: Hitler’s refusal to offer promises for, 188, 189; Goebbels on vision for, 188–189; fear for, 221–222 Gallone, Carmine, 70–71, 97, 205 Gamborg, Leif, 197–198 General Confederation of Cinema (Confédération générale de la cinématographie), 102–103 Gentile, Giovanni, 76, 167 Gerigk, Herbert, 36, 105, 126, 130 German Central Conference Office (Deutsche Kongress-Zentrale, DKZ). See DKZ



German Composers’ Union (Berufsstand deutscher Komponisten), 18 German Institute (Deutsches Institut), Venice, 270 German-Italian Cultural Accord, 111–121, 252, 271 German-Italian Society (Deutschitalienische Gesellschaft), 75, 151 German-Italian Scholarship Foundation, 114, 147 German Music Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein), 19 German Office of Information (Deutsche Informationsstelle), 184 Germany: humiliation after World War I, 3; relationship with Italy, 4, 10–11, 17, 34–35, 70, 74, 113; response to economic crisis, 7; bid for cultural leadership, 17; growing international prominence of, 29; claim to continental leadership, 45; efforts to use cultural exchange to end isolation, 45; bid for leadership in European fi lm production, 60–73; remilitarization of Rhineland, 77; as defender of national/regional traditions, 83; as leader of movement of national-regional composers, 90–91; mobilization for war, 109; radicalization in, 109, 110; cultural treaties, 114; exclusion from scholarly community, 158; bid for European leadership, 168; preparation for confrontation with Western powers, 181–182; power of, 207, 208, 259, 262. See also Goebbels, Joseph; Hitler, Adolf; Rome–Berlin Axis Gheraldi, Ugo, 211 Giménez Caballero, Ernesto, 234 Gioberti, Vincenzo, 174 Glasmeier, Heinrich, 171 Goebbels, Joseph, 176, 177; and cultural organizing, 6; and PEN Club, 12; turn against literary modernism, 13; attack on Hindemith, 23; desire to assert control over German musical life, 23; means of



I NDE X

Goebbels, Joseph (continued ) seizing control over culture, 23; concern with movies, 62; at International Film Congress, Berlin (1935), 62; on nationalism in cinema, 65; at 1936 Venice Film Festival, 77, 97–98; ban of music and art criticism, 90; at CISAC conference, Berlin (1936), 92; as enforcer of National Socialist orthodoxy in arts, 110; Reich Music Days, 123; on statutes of Venice Film Festival, 137–138; at 1939 Venice Film Festival, 144–145; vision of international cultural order, 153–154; conflict with Ribbentrop, 154; and question of European culture, 179; efforts to make culture serve Nazi empire, 180; selfpresentation as European, 180; on need to control culture, 181; on meaning of war, 187; on vision for Europe’s future, 188–189; efforts to reorder cultural institutions, 189; efforts to improve German film, 191, 192; and revival of IFC, 193; on dependence on Hollywood, 201; on fi lm policy, 207; relationship with Strauss, 216; politics of symbolic appropriation, 236; at Weimar meeting, 254; suicide of, 272. See also Reich Chamber of Culture Goedewaagen, Tobie, 179 Goering, Hermann, 76, 109 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 50, 80, 151, 230, 236–237, 249, 258, 262 Graener, Paul, 41 Gram, Peder, 92, 216, 217 Grand Illusion (film), 100, 137, 139–140 Grassi, Ernesto, 249, 250, 251 Great Britain, 7, 112, 118 “Great Spaces” (Großräume), 7, 182 Greece, Mussolini’s invasion of, 168 Guernica, 107 Günther, Hans F. K., 251 Gutterer, Leopold, 1, 155, 157, 227. See also DKZ

Haegert, Wilhelm, 164, 233, 235, 236 Hagerup-Bull, Sverre, 33–34, 92 Halliday, Fred, 266 Hamsun, Knut, 234, 263–264, 265, 266 Handbook of International Federations and Associations, 163, 208–209, 214, 217, 218, 229 Handbook of International Organisations, 163 Harvey, Lilian, 69, 144 Havel, Milos, 102, 135, 190 Hays, Will H., 76 Hegemonic project, Nazi-fascist, 266; failure of, 267, 270; internal contradictions in, 267–268 Hegemony, continental: German claims to, 13; Italy’s pursuit of, 29, 220; Knapp’s blueprint for, 183–184 Hegemony, cultural, 9; Italy’s efforts to establish, 16; German, promotion of, 37–38; and fi lm, 182 Heidegger, Martin, 250–251, 252 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 88, 117, 233, 237, 249 Hessen, Philipp von, 75 Higson, Andrew, 202 Himmler, Heinrich, 150 Hindemith, Paul, 17, 23, 87, 105, 128, 130 Hinkel, Hans, 82 Hippler, Fritz, 222 Hitler, Adolf: Mein Kampf, 5, 86; on need for völkisch worldview, 5–6; on need to defend nationalist values, 5–6; on art, 21; at International Film Congress, 62, 64; efforts to undermine unified opposition to Germany, 74; view of futurist painting, 81; on international worldview, 86; support for Franco, 107; and mobilization for war, 109; culture speeches, 110, 123, 129; and invasion of Soviet Union, 178; on “Europe for the Europeans,” 184; view of Europeanism, 184, 188; refusal to make promises, 188 Holland. See Netherlands Hollywood: dominance of, 4, 46, 47; quota on, 47–48; response to idea of interna-

I NDE X

tional bureau of motion picture, 51; De Feo’s relationship with, 53–54; and definition of educational films, 53–54; contrast with Axis’s cultural cooperation, 77, 78; censorship in, 101; MPPDA, 103, 135; boycott of International Film Congress, Paris (1937), 103–104; withdrawal from Italian market, 140; hostility to IFC, 141; relation to film Axis, 141; reaction to Venice Film Festival prizes, 142; relationship with Europe, 143; ban of, 191, 192, 196–197, 198, 201, 206, 269; absence from 1939 Venice Film Festival, 143–144; absence from 1941 Venice Film Festival, 200–201 Honor, as legal concept, 41 Hövel, Paul, 239, 243 Hullebroeck, Emiel, 24, 40, 92, 126, 127, 214–215 Humanism, contemporary, 251 Humanism, Italian fascist, 252 Hungary, 205–206, 274–275 ICE (International Institute for Educational Cinematography, Istituto internazionale di cinematografia educativa), 52, 54–56, 57, 67, 69, 72, 139, 140 ICF (International Concert Federation), 28, 42, 93 ICIC (International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation), 3, 6, 9, 50, 60, 121, 159–160 IFC (International Film Chamber). See International Film Chamber IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), 28, 29 IIIC (International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation), 9, 16, 51, 139, 153, 159–160, 161, 176–177, 224 Incitement movies, 100–101, 141, 196 Institutions, cultural: data on international conferences, 160; data on, 162–163; Handbook of International Federations and



Associations, 163, 208–209, 214, 217, 218, 229; Handbook of International Organisations, 163; plans for International Office for Conferences and Organizations, 163–165; collaboration, 268 Institutions, international, 178; Nazi efforts to create, 13–15; and radical nationalism, 14; seizure of, 154, 157–159, 160–165, 177; UIA, 160–163, 164, 177, 178, 208; building, 182–183; Germany’s Eu ropean campaign in, 187; German desire to control, 208–209. See also DKZ; Institutions, Nazi-led Institutions, Nazi-led, 182–183, 188, 189, 213–221, 248. See also European Writers Union Intellectual agreements: French invention of, 113. See also Cultural Accord Intellectuals, autonomy offered to, 10 Intellectuals, fascist, 115, 233 Intellectuals, Italian, 167, 173–174, 187, 222, 245, 246 Inter-Film, 98, 100, 101, 202 “International,” Nazi view of term, 3, 4 International Association of Academies, 158 International Chamber of Culture (Kulturkammer), plans for, 178–179, 214, 225 International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC), 3, 6, 9, 50, 60, 121, 159–160 International Composers’ Federation (Internationale Komponisten-Verband), 220 International Concert Federation (ICF), 28, 42, 93 International Congresses for the Defense of Culture, 224 International Federation of Authors and Composers Societies (CISAC), 25, 29, 91–94, 100, 103, 210–212, 273 International Federation of Cinema Journalism (Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinematographique, Fipresci), 101



I NDE X

International Federation of Composers (Internationaler Verband der Komponisten), 217 International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), 28 International Festival of Contemporary Music, 85–86 International Film Chamber (IFC), 65–73, 76, 97–98, 152, 182, 273; establishment of, 44–45; and educational cinema, 67, 72; opposition to, 67–68; Italy’s participation in, 70, 192–193; as salvation of culture, 79; and Axis’s European character, 81–82; and cultural Axis, 95–105; Europeanist claims, 95–105; and copyright, 98, 100, 212–213; Film Law Commission, 100, 103; blocking of incitement movies, 100–101; German/ Italian influence and control of, 102; International Film Conference, Paris (1937), 102; French presidency of, 102–103; relation with Hollywood, 103–104; inter-nationalism of, 122, 136–137; fall of, 135; and changes to Venice Film Festival’s statutes, 138; Hollywood’s hostility to, 141; insistence on fi lm’s national character, 142; refounding of, 179, 180, 189–209, 217; absences from, 190; in occupied countries, 190; questionnaire on fi lm preferences, 197–198; Cinema Management Section, 198; focus on distributors, 198; Production Section, 199–200, 203–207; goals of, 200, 201; pan-European financing scheme, 200, 203–207; and Venice Film Festival, 200; experiences of members, 203–207; viewed as tool of German imperialist ambitions, 206; and Nazi inter-nationalist model, 209; cooperation with International Law Chamber, 209–210. See also Film Europe; Melzer, Karl International Film Congress, Berlin (1935), 45, 51, 60–70, 225 International Institute for Educational Cinematography (ICE, Istituto inter-

nazionale di cinematografia educativa), 52, 54–56, 57, 67, 69, 72, 139, 140 International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC), 9, 16, 51, 139, 153, 159–160, 161, 176–177, 224 Internationalism, 3, 50; Italy’s view of, 3, 4; in music, 39; and ICE conference, 54; at International Film Congress, 60–67; at Venice Film Festival, 69; Jews associated with, 86; suspicion of, 88; Axis as alternative to, 120; defi ning, 121; vision of Eu ropean alternative to, 151–152; control over ruins of, 157; UIA, 160–163, 164–165; and writers’ organ izations, 230; and hegemonic project, 266 Internationalism, hegemonic, 266–267 Inter-nationalism, 114–127, 128, 136–137, 220, 269 International Labor Orga nization, 16 International Law Chamber, 185, 208, 209–210, 213, 229, 273 International Motion-Picture Congress, Paris (1926), 50–51 International Musical Congress, 128, 153 International Office for Conferences and Organizations, 163–165 International PEN Club, 12–13, 15, 16, 224, 228, 230, 232, 243 International relations, nationalist approach to, 114 International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), 17, 21, 28, 31, 32, 35, 37, 39, 42–43, 82–83, 128, 130 International Union of Theater Owners, 49 International worldview, Hitler on, 86 International Writers’ Congress, Paris (1937), 121 Interradio, 185–186 IRCE (National Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, Istituto nazionale per le relazioni culturali con l’estero), 111, 114, 116, 167–168, 175

I NDE X

ISCM (International Society for Contemporary Music), 17, 21, 28, 31, 32, 35, 37, 39, 42–43, 82–83, 128, 130 Istituto LUCE, 52–53, 57, 72 Italianità, 129 Italian Social Republic, 270 Italo-German Cinema Festival, 152–153 Italo-German Cultural Association (Associazione Italo-Germanica di Cultura), 75, 151 Italy: after World War I, 3; in League of Nations, 3; view of internationalism, 3, 4; relationship with Germany, 10–11, 17, 34–35, 70, 74, 113, 129; cultural revisionism project, 11; sense of cultural superiority, 11; soft power of, 11; promotion of copyright reform, 28; cultural outreach to Europe, 43; use of League of Nations agencies to promote fascism, 54; efforts to establish primacy in film/music, 55, 128; international realignment of, 72; withdrawal from League of Nations, 72, 167; invasion of Ethiopia, 74; sanctions against, 77; appearance as mediator between Hitler and West, 105; anti-Jewish legislation in, 109; radicalization in, 109–111, 128; calls to purify race, 111; cultural relationship to Western Europe, 119; attacks on Jews in, 128–129; and outbreak of hostilities, 146; aims in World War II, 146–147; plan to expand Mediterranean empire, 155; Universal Exposition, 155, 165–172; bid for European leadership, 168; failures in Mediterranean, 168–169; understanding of German plans, 171, 172–173; collaboration with Germany, 173, 175; alternative to cultural-organizational visions of, 174; claims to European hegemony, 220; as target of German propaganda, 270. See also Fascism; Mussolini, Benito; Rome–Berlin Axis Jahn, Moritz, 237 Jazz, 36, 40, 86, 123, 131–132



Jeanne, René, 135, 210 Jews: in PEN Club, 12; banned from public-sector employment, 20; purged from German musical life, 20; control of composers’ royalties, 23; in fi lm industry, 71, 96, 195, 201–202; disagreement over treatment of, 81; excluded from defi nition of Eu ropean, 85; associated with capitalism, 86; associated with internationalism, 86; role in contemporary music, 87; in Italian musical life, 95; Night of Broken Glass, 109; treatment of in Italy, 109, 110, 111, 116, 130, 140; purged from German cultural life, 110; IRCE’s campaign against, 116; in music, attack on, 123–124; in Belgian musical life, 126; eliminated from Biennale, 130; as enemy of cultural diversity, 238 Johst, Hanns, 13, 14, 15 Jongen, Joseph, 125 Journalism, 263–266, 267 Jünger, Ernst, 259 Karajan, Herbert von, 273 Kearney, Neville, 135, 142 Keller, Ursula, 275 Kerkhof, Karl, 158, 177 Kilpinen, Yrjö, 85, 95, 216, 217 Kivimaa, Arvi, 271, 274 Klemperer, Victor, 8 Knapp, Alfred, 183–184 Kopsch, Julius, 22–23, 35, 36, 37 Koskenniemi, Veikko Antero, 235, 247, 262 Kövér, Lázló, 275 Krenek, Ernst, 35, 39, 105, 128 Kultur, 117, 119, 134, 246; vs. Zivilisation, 8; concept of, 79, 237; extended vision of, 118–119; vs. civilization, 202, 245; Europeanization of, 237; display of at European Writers Union, 254–255; Nazi effort to deploy legacy of, 265 Kulturpolitik, 117



I NDE X

Labroca, Mario, 18 La Fontaine, Henri, 161 Lammers, Hans, 177 Larbaud, Valery, 231 Laval, Pierre, 176 Law, 184–185, 229; film law, 63, 64, 100, 103; International Law Chamber, 185, 208, 209–210, 213, 229, 273 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Ser vice, 20 League of Nations, 2, 112, 159; ICIC, 3, 6, 9, 50, 60, 121, 159–160; Italy in, 3; and cinema, 51; Germany’s withdrawal from, 60; Italy’s withdrawal from, 72, 167; Axis’s challenge to, 75; sanctions against Italy, 77 Lebensraum (living space), 4, 175 Lehnich, Oswald, 96, 98, 100, 102, 135–136, 137 Leifs, Jón, 24, 95, 126, 131, 216 Lenin, Vladimir, 46–47 Le Pen, Marine, 276 Liberal democracy, 8, 108 Liberalism, 106, 121 Liberty, and state authority, 108 Literary nationalism, 233 Literary New Order, 232 Literary realism, 235 Literature: PEN Club, 12–13, 15, 16, 224, 228, 230, 232, 243; Goebbels’s turn against literary modernism, 13; writers’ organizations, 13, 27, 29, 224, 230; authors’ rights societies, 27, 127; and attacks on Nazism and fascism, 224; and Soviet cultural outreach, 224; mobilization of, 225, 236; meeting at Weimar, 226, 234–239, 241–242; Week of the German Book, 226, 237, 254; German publishing industry, 228–229; French model of, 231, 233; literary realism, 231, 235; Paris’s hegemony in, 231–232; German model of, 233; map of new literary Europe, 233; and position in New Order, 237–238; and appearance of autonomy, 239, 241; clash

of literary models, 243; in Italy, 253–259; Literaturhaus, 275–276. See also CISAC; European Writers Union; Writers; Writers’ organizations Literature, American, 254, 257 Literature, European, 232; idea of, 230–233; visions of, 234; rooted in Volk, 239; and cosmopolitan expatriates, 242; and nationality, 242; völkisch model of, 242; Europäische Literatur, 242–243; views of, 255–257, 258; Nazi vision of, 262; power in, 262; twenty-first-century vision of, 275–276. See also European Writers Union Literature, national, 231 Literaturhaus, 275–276 Living space (Lebensraum), 4, 175 Louis XIV, 2 Lourau, Georges, 102, 103, 104, 135, 138 Lualdi, Adriano, 26, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 40, 41, 42, 55, 78, 84, 87, 90, 125, 128, 215, 219 Lussiez, Raymond, 98 Madariaga, Salvador de, 106 Maggio Musicale, 17, 116, 128 Maiwald, Ernst W., 171 Malipiero, Francesco, 30, 31, 35, 78, 83, 85, 124, 219 Mann, Thomas, 12, 50, 241, 271 Maraini, Antonio, 33, 54, 55, 56, 137 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 13, 15–16, 17, 235 Materialism, 8, 267 Mauro, Humberto, 135 Mauss, Marcel, 121 Mediterranean, Italy’s failures in, 168–169 Mein Kampf (Hitler), 5, 86 Melzer, Karl, 97, 103, 136, 193, 194, 195, 196, 198, 200, 202, 203, 206, 209, 212 Mengelberg, Willem, 179 Meydam, Wilhelm, 98 Mikac, Marijan, 204 Ministry of Popu lar Culture, 110 Modernism, literary, 13, 233 Modernism, musical, 20, 23, 30–32, 269

I NDE X

Modernity, 47; fusion with tradition, 57; Italian-fascist vision of, 168 Monaco, Eitel, 101, 103, 195, 273 Monroe doctrine, 49, 184 Montreux conference (1934), 16, 17 Moral rights, 22, 40–41. See also Copyright Moretti, Franco, 242 Moscow International Film Festival (1935), 59 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), 103, 135 Muck, Karl, 38 Mulè, Giuseppe, 35 Münchhausen, Börries von, 258 Music: ISCM, 17, 21, 28, 31, 32, 35, 37, 39, 42–43, 82–83, 128; international festivals, 17–18; Reich Music Chamber, 18, 19–20, 38, 82; vision of new international orga nization, 18, 19; modernism, 20, 23, 30–32, 269; extraction of Germany from cosmopolitanism in, 20–21; and mass culture, 21–22; CISAC, 25, 29, 91–94, 100, 103, 210–212; and corporatism, 28, 34; IFPI, 28, 29; International Concert Federation, 28, 42, 93; conservatism in, 30, 32; avant-garde, 31; Italy’s efforts to be leading force in, 33, 128; efforts to impose Nazi model of cultural orga nization on, 36–37; internationalism in, 39; German– Italian cooperation in, 75, 78; international modernism in, 83; völkisch vision of, 86; neoclassicism, 87; conflict between nationalism and cosmopolitanism in, 87–91; search for nationally distinctive style, 88; Reich Music Days, 123; attack on Judaism in, 123–124; Degenerate Music exhibition, 123–124, 132; International Musical Congress, 128, 153; jazz, 131–132; in Austria, 132–133; German mission to pursue salvation of, 134; creation of Nazi-led institutions for, 213–221; inter-nationalism in, 220. See also Composers; Copyright; Lualdi, Adriano; Music festivals; Permanent Council for



International Cooperation among Composers; Royalties; Strauss, Richard Music, atonal, 23–24, 86, 87 Music, Czech, 133–134 Music, national, 26, 82–84 Music, Polish, 134 Musical life, Belgian, 126 Musical life, Dutch, 134 Musical life, German: reordering of, 19–20; Jews driven from, 20; Goebbels’s desire to assert control over, 23; censorship in, 132 Musical life, Italian, 26–28, 30–32, 128; institutions, 27, 28, 129; debate over renewal in, 30–32; conflict in, 86–88; and relations with Germany, 93–95; Jews in, 95; refugees in, 95; alignment with German positions, 130; attack on Jews in, 130; autarky in, 219; and revived Permanent Council, 219 Musical life, Romanian, 134 Music festivals, 17–18; Maggio Musicale, 17, 116, 128; Biennale music festival, 32–36, 129, 130; redefined for age of nationalism, 36; Permanent Council’s, 38–41, 78–79, 82–84, 124–127, 131; in France, 38–41; ISCM’s, 42; Musikfest, 78–79; in Stockholm, 83–84; International Festival of Contemporary Music, 85–86; International Music Festival, 124–125, 131; in Brussels, 125–127 Music recording industry, international congress of, 28 Die Musik, 83–84, 88, 123, 126, 130 Mussolini, Benito: on corporatism, 27; strategy of aesthetic pluralism, 31–32; commitment to Austria’s independence, 34; at Biennale, 35; on cinema, 47; patronage of Venice Film Festival, 55; and establishment of Axis, 74; on painting, 81; at Munich conference, 105; support for Franco, 107; consolidation of power, 110; fall of, 270, 272. See also Fascism; Italy Mussolini, Vittorio, 71, 141



I NDE X

Nadler, Josef, 249 National Commission for Intellectual Cooperation (Italy), 16 National cultures: survival of, 5; defense of, 121, 221 National Front, 276 National Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (Istituto nazionale per le relazioni culturali con l’estero, IRCE), 111, 114, 116, 167–168, 175 Nationalism, 121; efforts to create institutions based on, 14; as means of outreach, 15; and fi lm, 65; in Axis’s vision of culture, 79–80; embrace of, 79–80; in music, 87–91; appeals to, 276–277 Nationalism, cultural, 222 National Socialism, 68, 69, 271 Nazi Party Congress on Culture, 20, 21 Nazis. See Germany; Goebbels, Joseph; Hitler, Adolf Neoclassicism, 87 Netherlands: musical life in, 134; German conquest of, 149; orga nization of cultural life in, 178–179; and IFC, 190; cinema in, 197 Networks, transnational, 14; control of, 9; Germany’s desire to control, 14; used to promote fascism, 16–17. See also Conferences, international; Institutions, international Neuordnung Europas. See New Order New Order, 1, 149–150, 155; extension to cultural sphere, 150–151; in Latin, 169; intellectual sources of, 170; Italy’s position in, 222, 246, 248; and internationalist vision, 268; Italy’s role in, 270; Mann on, 271; and return of Europe to greatness, 272. See also Cultural new order New order, bi-imperial, 173–174 “New Order of International Organizations in the New Europe,” 178, 208 Night of Broken Glass, 109

Norway: German conquest of, 149; fi lm industry in, 203–204 Nygren, Sven, 67 Nyirö, Joszef, 235, 243, 259, 274–275 Olympia (film), 77, 142 Olympic Games (1936), 62, 77, 168 Olympic Games (1944), 170 Order, meanings of, 3 Ordynski, Ryszard, 102, 104, 135, 190 Orga nization, 14; order as, 3; in film, 55 Organizations, international. See DKZ; Institutions, international; Institutions, Nazi-led Otlet, Paul, 160, 161, 162 Outreach, international: nationalism as means of, 15; Nazis’, 15; Soviet, 224 Pact of Steel, 145 Painting, futurist, 81 Paolucci de Calboli Barone, Giacomo, 136 Papandopulo, Boris, 90, 205 Papini, Giovanni, 228, 245–248, 250, 252, 253 Paris: seizure of documents and institutions in, 154; literary establishment, 231–232. See also France Paris International Film Congress (1926), 50, 51 Parliamentarism, 120 Pavolini, Alessandro, 114–115, 130, 151, 175, 192, 193, 202, 222, 244, 245, 257, 264, 272 Pearl Harbor, 196 Pellizzi, Camillo, 146, 173 PEN Club, 12–13, 15, 16, 224, 228, 230, 232, 243 Permanent Council for International Cooperation among Composers (Ständinger Rat für die internationale Zusammenarbeit der Komponisten), 6, 21, 22, 24, 26, 32, 33, 123–124, 152, 153; origins of, 19; founding meetings, 26, 32; meeting in Venice, 32–34, 36; eff orts to

I NDE X

impose Nazi model of cultural orga ni zation, 36–37; and copyright reform, 37; outreach to foreigners, 37; promotion of German cultural hegemony, 37–38; and Brahms-Medal, 38; festival in France, 38–41; attraction of, 39; and composers’ rights, 39–40, 91–94; meeting in Vichy, 39–40; pan-European organ i zational ambitions, 41–42; orga ni zation of national composers’ organ izations, 42; as rival to ICF, 42; ISCM’s response to foundation of, 42–43; Musikfest, Dresden (1937), 78–79; and Axis’s Eu ropean character, 81–82; defense of national music, 82; festival in Stockholm (1936), 82–84; support of Axis’s cultural claims, 83; rules for national form of musical exchange, 84–85; nationalist ideology of, 86–91; Sibelius on, 90; inter-nationalism of, 122–127; International Music Festival, Stuttgart (1938), 124–125, 131; selection of music for festival, 124–125; festival in Brussels (1938), 125–127; Italy’s involvement in, 128; reorga ni zation of, 214–221 Pétain, Philippe, 176 Petersen, Jens, 271 Petrassi, Goff redo, 42, 130, 219–220, 274 Petridis, Petros, 125 Pfitzner, Hans, 86, 87 Pintor, Giaime, 253, 254, 255–256, 258–259, 261 Piola Caselli, Eduardo, 92, 211 Pirandello, Luigi, 92, 231 Pittaluga, Stefano, 48, 57 Pius XI, 27 Pizzetti, Ildebrando, 30, 36, 219 Poland, 134, 263; invasion of, 143, 146; cinema in, 190 Political system, European: debate over, 150. See also New Order Pommer, Erich, 49



Popova-Mutafova, Fani, 232, 235, 272–273 Potter, Pamela, 221 Power, German: used for Italian ends, 207; and international infrastructure, 208; wavering of, 259; in literature, 262 Press, new order of, 266 Pressburger, Arnold, 71 Prestige, 9–10, 106, 139, 217, 222–223, 239, 259, 267–269 Print culture, 228–229 Propaganda: in cinema, 72; German, 265 Propaganda Ministry, 63, 189; planned reorga nization of Europe, 1; and Permanent Council, 37, 38; Literature Division, 225–226, 229, 233, 239; emphasis on idea of Europe, 226 Protectionism, 268, 269 Publishing industry, 228–229 Puscariu, Mihai, 205 Rabinovitch, Gregor, 71 Radicalization: in Germany, 109; in Italy, 109–110, 128; of cultural Axis, 136 Radio, European, 185–186 Raether, Arnold, 65, 68, 69 Rahts, Walter, 98 Rasch, Hugo, 93–94 Rebreanu, Liviu, 247, 252, 262 Record industry, 28 Reich Chamber of Culture (RKK), 5, 20, 29, 189. See also Goebbels, Joseph Reich Cinema Law, 63 Reich Education Ministry (Reichserziehungsministerium, REM), 157, 176 Reich Film Archive, 62 Reich Film Chamber, 44, 63, 65, 68, 179 Reich Literature Chamber (Reichsschrifttumskammer, RSK), 225, 228 Reich Music Chamber (Reichsmusikkammer, RMK), 18, 19–20, 38, 82 REM (Reich Education Ministry, Reichserziehungsministerium), 157, 176 Renoir, Jean, 100, 137, 139



I NDE X

Reznicek, Emil von, 34, 40, 82, 83, 124, 125, 128, 132, 214 Reznicek, Felicitas von, 83, 128 Rhineland, remilitarization of, 77 Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 109, 154, 159, 187, 189, 208 Riefenstahl, Leni, 68, 77, 142 Ritter, Leo, 92, 210, 211, 214 Roach, Hal, 141 Rocco, Alfredo, 16 Roeber, Georg, 210, 273 Romania, 134, 205, 274–275 Rome–Berlin Axis, 4, 149; rejection of internationalism, 6; and cultural hegemony, 9; establishment of, 74; as alternative to hegemony of Western democracies, 74–75, 95; as promoter of culture, 79; claims to defend culture, 80; European mission of, 80; depth of cooperation, 81; European character of, 81–82; as defender of national/regional traditions, 83; leadership by, 92; claim to leadership, 97; illusion of alliance in, 105–106; danger of, 106; as alternative international order, 112, 119; bid for European leadership, 112; as model of cultural exchange, 113; as alternative to internationalism, 120; context of, 120; and international cooperation among nationalists, 122; Pact of Steel, 145; goals of, 149; as core of new European cultural system, 150; inter-nationalist claim to European leadership, 152; vision of culture, 152; power balance in, 154–155; defeats of, 263 Roncoroni, Carlo, 57, 102 Rosenberg, Alfred, 23, 252 Rosselli, Carlo, 108 Rothe, Carl, 227, 228, 241, 262 Roussel, Albert, 34, 38, 39–40, 125 Royalties, 23, 64, 91, 92, 212. See also Copyright; STAGMA RSK (Reich Literature Chamber, Reichsschrifttumskammer), 225, 228

Rüdiger, Karl-Heinz, 150 Rust, Bernhard, 118–119, 157 Sacchi, Filippo, 70 Sangiorgi, Giorgio Maria, 211, 212 San Martino e Valperga, Enrico di, 28, 42 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 274 Scalera, Michele, 195 Schacht, Hjalmar, 109 Scheuermann, Fritz, 44, 45, 63, 65, 67 Schiller, Friedrich, 118, 236, 249, 254 Schirach, Baldur von, 185, 216 Schmitt, Carl, 7, 120 Schoenberg, Arnold, 20, 21, 31, 87 Scholarship: German, 158; Germany’s exclusion from, 160 Schwarz, Günther, 195–196, 197, 198, 200, 273 Schweig, Karl, 154, 156, 157, 160, 162, 163, 164, 178, 208, 216, 273 Scurla, Herbert, 117, 176 Self-sufficiency, 7. See also Autarky Sertoli, Mario, 253, 255, 259–261 SIAE (Società italiana degli autori ed editori, Italian Society of Authors and Editors), 27, 92, 210–211 Sibelius, Jean, 34, 38, 89–90, 126, 235 Siebert, Ludwig, 149, 150 Simon, Yves, 122 Sinding, Leif, 203, 272 Slovakia, fi lm industry in, 205 Smith, Harold, 135, 142 Socialism, 121 Soft power, 2, 9, 10, 11, 16, 181, 192 Soviet Union: position on moral rights, 26; Moscow International Film Festival, 59; invasion of, 174–175, 178, 187, 189, 226; cultural outreach, 224 Spain, 74, 107, 122 Spanish Civil War, 107 Speer, Albert, 171 STAGMA (State-Approved Society for the Utilization of Musical Performance

I NDE X

Rights, Staatlich genehmigte Gesellschaft zur Verwertung musikalischer Auff ührungsrechte), 23, 25–26, 29, 91, 92, 93, 132, 189, 210–212, 214 Stalin, Joseph, 59 STIM, 25, 37 Strapaese, 257 Strauss, Richard, 17–20, 21–24, 25, 26, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38, 82, 131; at Biennale, 36; dismissed from presidency of Reich Music Chamber, 38; relationship with Nazi regime, 38, 39, 127–128, 216; role in Permanent Council, 38; at festival in France, 39; on copyright issues, 40; as CISAC president, 210–211; and reorga ni zation of Permanent Council, 216, 218 Stravinsky, Igor, 17, 30, 31, 35, 36, 85, 87, 129, 135 Super-capitalism, 120 Supra-nationalism, 137, 220, 266 Sweden: defense of folklig musik in, 89; fi lm in, 144 Tigerstedt, Örnulf, 252 Timmermans, Felix, 234 Tobis, 63 Tobis-Klangfilm, 103 Tooze, Adam, 182 Totalitarian international, 81 Transit-Film, 191 Treccani degli Alfieri, Giovanni, 75 Tripartite Pact, 160 Triumph of the Will (film), 68–69 Tschammer und Osten, Hans von, 120, 151 UFA (Universum Film AG), 47, 48, 49, 63 UFI (UFA-Film-Gesellschaft), 181, 182, 192 Ugrešić, Dubravka, 276 UIA (Union des Associations Internationales, Union of International Associations), 160–164, 177, 178, 208 Un carnet de bal (fi lm), 137



Union des Associations Internationales (Union of International Associations, UIA), 160–164, 177, 178, 208 Union of European Copyright Associations (Vereinigung der europäischen Urheberrechtsgesellschaften, VEU), 210, 211–212, 213, 214 Union of National Journalists’ Organizations, 263–266, 267 Union of National Writers, 6, 13, 14, 15, 112, 224, 233, 266 United States: domestic market, 7; stand against Germany, 92; bombing of Pearl Harbor, 196; contrast with Europe, 201. See also Hollywood Universal Exposition in Rome (E’42, EUR), 155, 165–172 University orga nization, international, 152 Urban, Milo, 234 USSR. See Soviet Union Valéry, Paul, 8, 224, 235, 256 Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 88–89 Venice: image of, 33; Ca’ Giustinian, 200, 206, 270–271. See also Biennale music festival Venice Film Festival, 44, 55, 59, 70–72, 143–145, 205, 206, 207, 222, 273; German films at, 68–69, 77; Nazi protection for, 70; as showcase of Rome–Berlin Axis, 73; prize jury, 76; Goebbels at, 97–98; role of Axis in, 104; as European, 104–105; jury, 135–136; and split between Axis and West, 135–145; inter-nationalism at, 136–137, 138; selection jury, 137, 138–139; prestige of, 139; prizes, 142; Hollywood’s absence from, 143–144; European significance, 144; French films at, 144; and revived IFC, 200 Versailles system, 3 VEU (Union of European Copyright Associations, Vereinigung der europäischen Urheberrechtsgesellschaften), 210, 211–212, 213, 214



I NDE X

Vittorini, Elio, 253, 254, 257, 261 Volk, 26, 119 Völkisch worldview, 5–6, 117 Volkstum, 86 Volpi di Misurata, Giuseppe, 32–33, 44, 54, 55, 77, 97–98, 104, 136, 142, 145, 166, 180, 193, 201, 202, 207 Wäsche, Erwin, 232 Watt, D. C., 105 Week of the German Book, 226, 237, 254 Weimar, 226, 227, 233, 241; meeting in, 234–239, 244, 248, 271; Italian writers at, 244; significance of, 249. See also European Writers Union Westerman, Gerhart von, 216, 218, 219 Wiesel, Elie, 275 World Leisure Conference, Berlin (1936), 81

World War I, aftermath of, 2–4 World War II: German invasion of Poland, 146; and possibility, 146–147; and prospect for Eu ropean unity, 172–174; course of, 263; aftermath of, 272–275 Writers: Nazi cultivation of, 225; meeting in Weimar, 234–239, 244, 271; assessing value of, 259. See also European Writers Union; Literature Writers’ organizations, 13, 27, 29, 224, 230; Union of National Writers, 6, 13, 14, 15, 112, 224, 233, 266 Youth, 185 Zay, Jean, 104 Zivilisation, 8, 119, 134, 237