Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938

by Philipp Blom

The Bread Procurement Commission began making its dreaded rounds, pressuring farmers to join the collective by impounding their grain for the state.

not all farmers submitted to the pressure of the commissars and the army soldiers billeted in their houses. Ordered to give up their tools and deliver their animals to the local kolkhoz, they initially refused, then hid or destroyed their plows rather than see them taken away, and slaughtered their animals,

Stalin’s response had been coolly punitive. In the troublesome province, where agriculture had already been severely compromised by the deportation and execution of part of the farming population and by the destruction of livestock and machinery, he upped the quota of grain to be delivered to the central government from 30 percent to 44 percent of the harvest, a number deliberately set far above anything achievable.

The harvest quota was set according to unrealistically high estimates, and the demanded 44 percent of a hypothetical normal harvest exceeded the entire production of 1932,

Local Party officials were merciless in their execution of the orders from Moscow.

Search parties armed with long pikes went from farm to farm, looking everywhere for grain.

Villagers had to obtain passports to leave their villages and the collective farms they were working on, but these documents were never issued.

military roadblocks,

Grain continued to leave the republic, and the countryside was turned into “one vast Belsen,”...

During the famine, more than twenty-five hundred Ukrainian peasants were convicted of cannibalism by Soviet courts.

HOLODOMOR

means “death by hunger.”

The campaign of systematic starvation waged by Stalin on the rural population of Ukraine reached its climax in the spring of 1933,

Arthur Koestler spent three months in the city of Kharkiv during the famine and published his memories, in 1949, in The God That Failed, his account of his own communist dreams and their eventual betrayal.

Gareth Jones

managed to enter Ukraine to report on conditions there, one of only a handful of international visitors who succeeded in doing so.

Jones added that the most hated man in Ukraine was not Joseph Stalin but George Bernard Shaw, who after a recent carefully stage-managed trip to the region had let it be known that “there is no famine in the Ukraine,”

Édouard Herriot

The most important voice, however, was that of Walter Duranty, the Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times,

“You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,

Many leftist intellectuals and politicians wanted the Soviet experiment to succeed and wanted to believe that any news pointing toward the establishment of a cruel dictatorship was simply capitalist propaganda. Those on the right often enough defended the harsh treatment of striking workers at home and of colonial mutinies and were therefore hardly in a position to criticize Stalin for his policies. Thus a veil of silence was draped over one of the greatest crimes of the twentieth century.

In early 1933 Stalin began to fear that the collapse of several Soviet republics might destabilize the entire USSR.

Between January and July, 320,000 metric tons of grain were sent to Ukraine to end the famine. The distribution was organized strictly along “class principles.”

To make up for the shortage of agricultural workers, Soviet authorities simply rounded up people in the cities and sent them into the countryside,

Germany’s great book burning,

Only after the momentum for such an event had become too great to be ignored had he taken over its stage management. Goebbels distrusted grassroots initiatives,

The initiators of what was labeled the “Action Against the Un-German Spirit” were Nazi students,

In many cities, the event took on the character of a street party, complete with music and sausage sellers.

Seven of Germany’s ten bestselling authors were among those whose work went up in flames; they were consequently banned from publishing in Germany. Eventually, more than twelve thousand titles by some six hundred writers were to be banned.

The students’ initiative had profound consequences for the listed authors. For many of them, it meant professional ruin. Unable to publish and so to earn an income from their work, most were forced to leave Germany, if indeed they had not done so already. Some would never recover from the blow.

HUNDREDS OF CAREERS and private lives were broken or at least derailed in similar ways, and by no means only those of writers. In an ever-widening cultural campaign, the Nazis targeted prominent individuals in all arts and sciences and other socially influential fields, their goal nothing less than a total Gleichschaltung (compulsory coordination) of all German culture, high and low, including many aspects of ordinary daily life.

IN APRIL 1933 a new Law for the Reestablishment of the Status of Civil Servants facilitated the elimination of Jewish, leftist, and otherwise suspect state employees from ministries, city halls, courts of law, and university teaching and research posts.

In the famous university of Göttingen, which housed one of the finest scientific faculties in the country, two-thirds of the physicists and mathematicians either were sacked or resigned,

While the Gleichschaltung of all cultural and intellectual life disrupted the lives and careers of some of Germany’s most talented writers and scientists, it also created opportunities for others. The students who had so enthusiastically organized and participated in the book burning were next in line to fill many of the newly created academic vacancies, thus turning the sciences as well as the humanities into a purely German concern. There were even attempts to lay the theoretical groundwork for an ideologically pure German physics and mathematics that could function without the contributions of Jewish scientists.

Intellectuals and scientists who, like Heisenberg, opted to remain in Nazi Germany often went into what the writer Erich Kästner called “internal exile,” a kind of Siberia of the soul.

A more complex case is that of the great composer and conductor Richard Strauss.

career opportunities for ambitious young “Aryan” musicians such as the young conductor Herbert von Karajan,

Why did Strauss agree to enter into a pact with a power he knew to be diabolical?

The reason he himself lobbied for the position of president of the newly created Reichsmusikkammer was that he wanted to protect German music, and its musicians, many of them Jewish, against the worst of the barbarism. It is likely that these reasons were conflated and that Strauss was happy to accept the agreeable results for his own music that his public service brought in its train.

Strauss’s political career in Nazi Germany was as short-lived as it was ill-conceived.

philosopher Martin Heidegger was more genuinely engaged with National Socialist ideology.

His intellectual search for authenticity, often conducted in a secluded mountain hut, appeared to be mirrored in the Nazis’ demand for a return to a genuine peoplehood, a Volk of blood and soil, not manipulated by the soulless mechanisms of modernity. Unquestionably the philosopher’s infatuation with the black-shirted men of action was intensified by the fact that his partisanship—he joined the Nazi Party in 1933—did no harm to his career.

In that same year, he became chancellor of Freiburg University,

In his inaugural speech, he spoke of “the march that our people have started toward their future history” and “the power of the deepest conser...

One month later, in June 1933, Heidegger declared before a student organization that German research must not surrender to liberal cosmopolitanism. On the contrary: “We must fight against this in the spirit of National Socialism, which must not be suffocated by humanizing, Christian ideas.”

But relations with the Party leadership soon soured. They had been looking for a figurehead, not a meddling reformist

THE PHILOSOPHER HEIDEGGER was only one of scores of intellectuals who initially felt that fascism might be an answer to the seemingly intractable problems of a time that lacked strong political leadership, had no credible values and perspectives, and was struggling economically.

Benedetto Croce, reached a very different conclusion from Heidegger.

Croce, by now openly condemning Fascism as a “moral malady,” was too famous to be assassinated, but the state had other means of silencing him. During the more than twenty years that Mussolini was in power, Croce’s books were not published, nor was his name mentioned in academic or general publications. His Naples home, a meeting place for dissident intellectuals from all over the country, was “searched” by uniformed Fascists, who were careful to create a maximum of chaos and destruction in his library. But the philosopher refused to be intimidated.

EVEN BEYOND GERMANY, the reach of Nazi cultural influence was unexpectedly wide. As historian Ben Urwand has documented in The Collaboration (2013), it extended into and even partly controlled the production of and also the scripts for many Hollywood movies.