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

by Philipp Blom

In Germany, the state-administered Lebensborn (Spring of Life) organization, founded in 1935, set about producing the new Aryans of Hitler’s dreams by selecting men and women who met the approved racial criteria for a future Germanic people to produce babies for Führer and Volk.

The official image of the new race lay in the willing hands of Arno Breker,

Breker was by no means alone in taking his inspiration from Greek and Roman art.

as if the artists had lost both nerve and appetite for presenting splintered bodies and disintegrated selves.

Pic...

had begun to paint in a neoclas...

Prokofiev premiered his Classi...

Stravinsky turned from the extravagant modernity of his Sacre du Printemps to tame variations on eighteenth-century Italian musical forms.

A pall had fallen over the seemingly boundless experimentation of the art world, and many artists joined the great Western project of making humans whole again, rescuing the New Man from the shell-shocked ruins of the old. There were countercurrents, of course.

German expressionists such as George Grosz and Otto Dix had sought to portray precisely the grotesque u...

Nobody was a more ardent, even idolatrous admirer of the resurrected classical body than the director of the official film of the Berlin Olympics, Leni Riefenstahl,

THE CULT OF THE NEW MAN was not only a strong voice calling for the future but also a voice rejecting the recent past. It was a headlong flight into an imaginary, timeless, perfect realm in which all dirt, sickness, disorder, and degeneration would be overcome and replaced by hygiene, health, and wholeness. Depending on its author’s imagination, it was to be decorated either with sturdy oaks and classical ruins or with a blaze of electric light, glistening machines, and a vast ballet of mechanical perfection. In its emphasis on bodies that were to be both beautiful and strong, it was also a response to the shuddering wrecks of shell-shocked men fresh from the trenches, and to the pitiful sight of amputated veterans, to the ruins of once proud men now seen, in Germany as throughout Europe, workless and begging in the streets.

Even before 1914 there had been warning voices announcing that human bodies could no longer compete with machines, and the experience of industrial warfare had rammed this insight home.

The dream of the New Man, a superman transcending all limitations, was the answer to a cultural fear that was deeply rooted in all industrialized nations.

The roots of the ensuing bitter conflict reached back centuries into Spanish history.

The Enlightenment appeared to have passed by Spain,

No other European country was marked by such wide cultural divides.

Even in 1930, the population of Spain was still largely rural;

Within the cities, however, there was a culture of fierce opposition to the deep and obscurantist conservatism of the church, to the landowners, and to the aristocracy.

Warding off the perceived dangers of anarchism and communism, the Spanish army understood itself not as a force protecting the country from enemies beyond its borders but as an occupying force within the country itself.

Some thirty-eight thousand people, mostly civilians, were slaughtered by Republican forces during the first months of the civil war

Catholic clergy bore the brunt of the anger directed at the forces of the old order. Some 4,200 priests, 2,400 members of lower orders, and 283 nuns were killed, often with great cruelty.

Though widespread and often cruel, the violence inflicted by leftists was, on the whole, unplanned; it was carried out by mobs or by small groups acting on their own authority. On the Nationalist side, by contrast, the violence was part of a campaign of systematic terror, ordered from above. Vowing to “purge” Spain of all its internal enemies, Nationalist forces executed politicians, left-wing members of parliament, teachers, Freemasons, doctors, trade unionists, and sometimes people whose only crime was to be wearing glasses and thus to look like intellectuals.

The attempt to take Barcelona had failed. With the Nationalist threat within the city defeated, the mood turned from anxiety to chaotic celebration, and also to bloody vengeance.

first priority was to keep a united front against Franco, whose army had made substantial territorial gains throughout Spain. Yet in spite of this realization, in that same month the Communists chose to attack the anarchist-held telephone exchange, plunging the leftist-held city into a suicidal internal war. The reason for this disastrous move, which damaged the Republican cause profoundly, lay not in Barcelona, however, but in Moscow.

The Führer

discovered common ground with Franco: the threat of Bolshevism.

he resolved to send help.

Unternehmen Feuerzauber (Operation Fiery Magic)

As the fighting wore on, German and Italian involvement deepened and expanded, turning a military coup that might have fizzled out for lack of equipment and manpower into a prolonged and bloody civil war.

the Republican forces

desperately needed weapons, ammunition, supplies, training, and support.

government turned to France, Britain, and the United States.

Moved by the appeal and wanting to help, Blum hesitated nevertheless.

Paris had already witnessed violent riots, and right-wing and fascist forces at home were only waiting for an excuse to carry their anger into the streets again.

Blum had every reason to fear that open support for socialist and anarchist forces in neighboring Spain might be enough to spark serious unrest at home, or even to risk war with Italy and Germany. Faced with these high stakes, Blum sounded out the position of the British government on a visit to London and received a stern warning against intervention.

Her Majesty’s ministers, and indeed the greater part of the country’s social elite, were less afraid of a fascist Spain than of a communist state. Indeed, social agitation, hunger marches, and miners’ strikes had sharpened British suspicion of a communist takeover,

The strong establishment preference for Franco and his generals had another reason. As demonstrated by the brief career of Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts, there was considerable sympathy for fascist ideas inside the British elite. There were also significant British investments

and a sense of class solidarity

Sir Anthony Eden, to favor a policy of strict nonintervention. If Prime Minister Blum was willing to supply arms to the Republicans, he would be on his own, and would be answerable for the consequences.

Heartbroken and unsure what to do, Blum

set about securing a coalition of neutrality, effectively an arms embargo, that brought together the major democratic states, including the increasingly isolationist United States.

Led by the pro-Franco Hearst press and the Catholic lobby in Washington, popular opinion there was also...

newly formed Legion Condor, a covert German fighting unit operating in Spain and dressed in uniforms bearing no indication of belonging to the Third Reich.

The goal of the Legion Condor was not just to help Franco. German military planners were especially interested in assessing the effectiveness of new weaponry and strategies.

Guernica,

the planes appearing in the sky on this market day did not drop their loads on the factory or the bridge. Instead, they annihilated the town center in wave after wave of attacks.

a valuable opportunity to try out carpet bombing,

ABANDONED BY THEIR NEIGHBORS—callously in the case of Britain and against his own moral judgment by Blum—the Republican government made a last bid for survival by turning to the Soviet Union, only to find that Moscow, too, was ambivalent about helping its socialist brothers.

In the end a different consideration pushed Stalin to act in favor of the beleaguered republic. Soviet nonintervention created a power vacuum within the Communist International that could be filled by others, notably by his former archrival Leon Trotsky,