The total work of art and totalitarianism

I

It is therefore necessary to return to Wagner in order to trace, briefly and almost without commentary, the relationship he establishes between the people and the Gesamtkunstwerk. He himself seems not to have used the term Gesamtkunstwerk, which we generally translate as ‘total work of art’, more than two or three times. Wagner talks more generally of the Kunstwerk der Zukunft – ‘the art work of the future’ – projecting its realization into an indeterminate future, sometimes of the grosse, allgemeinsame Kunstwerk der Zukunft – ‘the great and universal artwork of the future’ – and, even more often, of the gemeinsame Kunstwerk der Zukunft – translated sometimes as ‘the collective work of art of the future’, sometimes as ‘the communal work of art of the future’, thus putting the emphasis in the first case on the collective realization of the work by the people, and in the second case on the work realized for the community of the people. But it is true that, since Wagner from the outset defines the work of art as ‘the representation of the living religion’ (Wagner, nd: GS 10, 70), it is the very life of the people which merges entirely with the work of art, whose origin, instrument and end it is. It is no less true, however, that the very notion of ‘the people’ – which will be my main guiding thread here – is considerably modified in the thought of Richard Wagner. I shall nevertheless retain just two elements of his variations, separated by an interval of 20 years, for their striking opposition to each other.

The first begins when, carried away by the winds of 1848, he writes, one after the other in the same year, 1849, Art and Revolution and then The Artwork of the Future, presenting ‘the work of art achieved’ as ‘the great and unique expression of a free and beautiful community’ and as the ‘vestment’ of its religion. But it was not, as we know, to restore ‘the great communal work of tragedy’ that had been the work of Athens. For if the Athenian state had dissolved into ‘a thousand egoistic directions’ at the same time as tragedy split up into the ‘elements of art that constituted it’, it was, explains Wagner, under the tremendous pressure of the ‘great revolution of humanity’, which had begun then, and now continued, overthrowing all barriers: those of class and those of nations. What had carried away, with a single blow, the Greek state and its beautiful work of art, dislocating at the same time its national religion, was nothing other than the universalism that Jesus the revolutionary was soon to spread, showing that ‘we, mankind, we are all equal and brothers’. It was therefore necessary to raise the altar of the future ‘to the two most sublime initiators of humanity’: Jesus – who revealed our equality and fraternity – and Apollo – who ‘was to place on this fraternal association the seal of power and beauty’ (Wagner, 1978: 48, 21, 65).

That is why Wagner appeals, against the Greek precedent, to that universality that the Revolution alone can promise: ‘If the Greek work of art contained the spirit of a beautiful nation, the work of art of the future contains the spirit of the whole of free humanity beyond all the limits of nationalities’. This is also why what he calls ‘the true nature of the great social movement’ of the current Revolution reveals itself, in ‘the anger of the most suffering part of our society’, as ‘the instinct to free oneself from the proletariat in order to raise oneself up to artistic humanity, to a free human dignity’ (Wagner, 1978: 49, 52–3).

Now this recurrent motif of a social ideology that will shape Europe for at least a century – to elevate work to the level of art – this motif implied for Wagner, in the wake of a shattered revolution, that art alone was capable of pursuing what the Revolution had not been able to achieve. His appeal to a suffering humanity was consequently an appeal for the union of the ‘social movement’ and ‘true art’, whose common aim was a ‘beautiful and powerful mankind’ (Wagner, 1978: 52).

You, my suffering brothers of all classes of human society who feel a dull anger smouldering in you, when you aspire to free yourselves from the slavery of money to become free men, understand our task and help us to raise Art up to its dignity, so that we can show that you can raise a trade to the loftiness of art, [and] the industrial serf to the rank of beautiful human being. (Wagner, 1978: 62–3)

In other words, Apollo will be able to rescue by realizing what Jesus merely offered as a kind of ‘utopia, a truly inaccessible ideal’ (1978: 58). That is why Wagner appeals – but against the utopia of Christianity and the Revolution – to the creative power of Apollo. For if Art could save the spirit of the Revolution, that was because it could constitute, by carrying it into effect, that people which Jesus and the Revolution had been unable to establish because they had made of it too ideal an object, ‘truly inaccessible’. Contrary to Christianity, Wagner will soon say, ‘art can do it, for, most appropriately, in our language, Art (die Kunst) derives from the word for power (koennen)’ (Wagner, nd: 10, 79).

Writing soon after The Artwork of the Future, Wagner puts the question: ‘What is the people (Volk)? Is it the “mankind in general” of Christianity? Or is it that group of citizens […] who have no possessions’, according to the definition given arbitrarily by politics. No, he replies, ‘the People is the sum of all those who feel a common need, a collective want’.

Who then, he asks further, ‘does not belong to the People, and who are its sworn foes?’ […] ‘All those’, he says, ‘who feel no want, [all those] whose life-spring places them in direct opposition to the common need’ (Wagner, 1982: 67–9). (It must be added that, in contradistinction to the jurist Carl Schmitt, who was to make the distinction friend-foe the true ‘criterion of the political’ – with which he inspired the Nazi ‘decisionism’ in carrying out the elimination of its designated enemies – Wagner added that the People would achieve redemption by being sufficient unto itself, but also redeeming at the same time its own enemies; Wagner, 1982: 77.) He also would conclude the chapter entitled ‘The People and Art’ with the words:

Together we shall be true men. Together we shall create the alliance of sacred distress, and the fraternal kiss which will seal this union, it will be the communal work of art of the future (das gemeinsame Kunstwerk der Zukunft). In it, our great benefactor and redeemer, the representative in the flesh of Necessity, the People, will no longer be something particular, different; for in this work of art we shall be one – […] happy men. (Wagner, 1982: 71)

Now begins ‘the history of absolute egoism’, ‘which can only be overcome’, says Wagner, with ‘the deliverance into communism’ (Wagner, 1982: 191–3). That is to say, clearly, that the price of the dissolution of the Athenian threefold model of art, religion and state had been, according to Wagner, the downfall of ‘beautiful union and communality’ and the entry into history – or if you prefer, entry into the political as the history of egoism. Thus the exit from the political and history was to be identified as ‘communism’, understood as the realization of the collective work of art, communal and total.

The second remark concerns the conditions making possible the work of art of the future. It is only when, says Wagner, each of the arts renounces its autonomy and egoism dissolves into the love of others, only when each one can only love itself in the others and thus disappear as an isolated art, that all together they create the perfect work of art: then ‘their death will immediately become the life of that work of art’. But he also adds, sketching one of those aporetic chiasms characteristic of German idealism, that these necessary conditions for the emergence of the total work of art can only exist in ‘perfect accord with the conditions of our life as a whole’:

It is only when the reigning religion of egoism, which has divided the whole of art into egotistical petty schools and genres, has been banished and wiped out mercilessly that the new religion can, of itself, make its entrance into life, and include in itself the conditions for the work of art of the future. (Wagner, 1982: 177)

But still: what will the People be that is capable of such a massive and simultaneous resurrection? For it is always the People – and not the artist, emphasizes Wagner – that ‘invents religions’ and constitutes ‘the effective power of the work of art’ (Wagner, 1982: 91, 72). This People, which is ‘the artist of the future’, will not consist of today’s artists, ‘vile schemers of modern art’, bound to all the egoisms of industry and fashion, nor of the populace, that ‘artificial product [of an] anti-natural culture’, that reflection of the hypocritical grimace of a state-controlled and criminal civilisation’ (Wagner, 1982: 244, 246–50). No, the People, the true People-artist, is also yet to come. And it too will arrive at one stroke, self-engendering in and through its art its organization and its new religion, in the instant when each of those who constitute it, accomplishing the end of history and of the political by dissolving their bonds with the powers of absolute egoism, will restore that bond of ‘love of self in the others’, that bond which will thereby define every past and future community, of men and of the arts, as a-historical, natural and non-political being.

I shall be extremely brief on the subject of the second leading idea in the thought of Wagner. It will suffice to recall that from the 1860s, and even more so after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, which is to say precisely during the elaboration and realization of the Bayreuth project that becomes the object of all his efforts, he sweeps aside all the ambiguities of his earlier writings. Now this period exactly coincides with that when Bismarck was unifying Germany, which he achieved through the foundation of the Second German Reich in 1871.

The founding of Bayreuth, writes Wagner after the creation of the Empire, ‘would be an admirable response […] to that German organisation which in our time is being formed and developed politically in a revived Germany; indeed, the active forces of that founding would always belong to the different parts of one whole’ (Wagner, 1928: 140). The People therefore was no longer to come, it was already there, politically united by Bismarck. As to the total work of art, once projected as the exit from history and the political, it could now be installed in history thanks to politics. Against the universalist utopia of Jesus and the Revolution, Bayreuth was to realize not at all the ‘communism’ of the whole of humanity but the imperialism of the singular genius of the German nation, imposing itself on a world dazzled by the power of its communal aesthetic.

Wagner had conceived Bayreuth, he explained, as an ‘enterprise organised from the beginning in a way that would permit him to expand it little by little’. Once it had become a ‘veritable artistic national institution’, it was to reveal the mystery that is the ‘true character of the German spirit’, just as Bismarck had the courage to ‘demonstrate to the whole world, through audacious action, the revealed mystery of the political strength of the nation’: ‘In future it will be necessary likewise to respect the German in his public art, not merely hold him in awe in the military sphere’. The German character, said Wagner, is constructed from the inside: ‘The eternal god is truly alive in him, before building the temple of his honour. And this temple will announce from the outside the inner spirit that animates it’ (Wagner, 1928: 11, 140, 144–6, 159). We know the consequences: the total work of art which, in 1849, was to be the living, universal religion of the future, was reduced to a living representation of a strictly national religion. Finished in 1874, Bayreuth became the temple where a political cult of the national genius of the Germans was established, a temple abolishing every distinction between Church and State until, with the coming of the Third Reich, the cult absorbed entirely the activity of the state and destroyed politics.

II

1919: Seventy years after Wagner had written Art and Revolution in order that art should further the stalled or abortive revolution, that is, substitute for it in the task of redemption, the architect Walter Gropius founded in March, only a few weeks after the crushing of the Spartacus revolution, the Bauhaus of the Weimar Republic. In the revolutionary fervour of the previous winter a Work Council for Art (Arbeitsrat fuer Kunst) had been established in Berlin, taking its name from the workers’ councils. Stating as its guiding principle that ‘art and the people must form a unity’, the Council, of which Gropius was co-director, declared that ‘art would no longer be for the pleasure of a few, but for the happiness and life of the masses. The union of the arts, under the aegis of a great architecture, that is our goal’. It envisaged as ‘its most important immediate task the elaboration of a vast project of utopian construction, which would be simultaneously an architectural, sculptural and pictorial project’ (Aron, 1965: 51–4).

Once again art was given the mission that revolution had been unable to complete: to secure the happiness and the very life of the masses. Through the important shifting of gravity towards architecture – as demonstrated by innumerable projects such as those by Wassily Buckhardt or Hans Scharoun – it was the first Wagnerian concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, realized by the people for the people, which was revived once more to bring forth ‘the beautiful community’. The concept had never ceased to be actual throughout Europe since the death of Wagner 35 years earlier, but it was essentially with regard to the union of the arts that the debate was conducted to decide if it was – aesthetically and technically – possible or impossible. Outside the nationalistic and anti-Semitic circles in Bayreuth, artists had almost forgotten the political nature of the Wagnerian project, until the revolutionary situation in Germany gave a new actuality to the Wagner of Art and Revolution. However, the utopian dimension of the revolution, which Wagner had condemned in the name of the capacity of art to further the community’s self-realization, was explicitly endorsed by the artistic avant-gardes during the very first years of the Republic.

Thus the history of the Bauhaus is divided neatly into distinct periods: a post-revolutionary utopian period in which the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk becomes the magic formula that is to herald the ‘union of art and the people’ to secure ‘the happiness and life of the masses’; and a second period, beginning at the turn of 1922–3, in which the necessity to produce explodes the concept and engenders a program of fragmentary versions of the utopia – which, however, immediately came into conflict with the utopia itself.

One month after the proclamation of the Weimar Republic, the appeal – in the form of a manifesto – that Gropius launched in April 1919 to announce the Bauhaus closed with the famous words:

Let us therefore build a new corporation of artisans, without that class distinction which erected a wall of disdain between artisans and artists. We must want, conceive and create together the new edifice of the future, which will gather together in a single form painting, sculpture and architecture and which, in the hands of millions of artisans, will one day soar heaven-ward, a crystal symbol of a new faith being announced. (Bauhaus, 1969: 13)

What remained, in all of this, of the first Wagnerian project, that of the collective art of the future constructed by the people for the people? For it is true that the unity of the arts was no longer identical to the unity of the people. Certainly the same appeal to the unity of the classes continued to exist – already symbolically effected by the union of artisans and artists within a corporation of builders. But there was no desire here to combat the new republican state, which had just conferred on the Bauhaus the status of a state institution. No, the total work of art was still to come: ‘The ultimate goal of the Bauhaus, though still far off’, the program of 1919 specified, ‘is the unitary work of art (das Einheitskunstwerk) – the great construction – in which there are no borders between monumental art and decorative art’ (Wingler, 1968: 40). In the new Republic of the arts, the program thus envisaged the abolition of the borders, not of the differences. In the same fashion the ‘great construction’ to come did not aim to produce a unified classless people but rather that unity of art and the people that the Workers Art Council had called for.

Moreover, the medieval model that the Bauhaus substituted for Wagner’s Athenian model also had a clear religious intention, evident in the image of the cathedral that served it as emblem. The ‘unitary work of art’ did not abolish the classes any more than the cathedral did in gathering the faithful together. But when Gropius asserted that the spiritual unity of the whole people was indispensable for artists, he wanted everyone to understand that the unitary work of art would ensure the spiritual unity of the people because the ‘great construction’ would be at the same time the institution of and the vestment of its mystic body.

It is hardly surprising that the modalities of such an incorporation of the people by art long remained vague and imprecise at the Bauhaus; not that they did not provide the subject of lively debate, in which the artists and the craftsmen were opposed to the proponents of functional prototypes of objects to be reproduced industrially. The conflict lasted up to the end of 1922 when Gropius launched his famous slogan ‘art and technology, a new unity’, abandoning most of the painters to their solitary dreams.

Up to this point the production of unique handmade objects corresponded to the image of the cathedral and to the model of the craft guild. However, the search for a compromise between the romanticism of the painters and the demands of standardization formulated by the architects and the designers soon resulted in the development of a sort of elementary formal vocabulary that was termed the ‘grammar of creation’ and conceived as the preparation, element by element, piece by piece, of the great total work of art to come, which would integrate in some way the multiplicity of feelings and emotions in a rational and homogeneous frame. The elements of this vocabulary were fixed: the blue Circle, the red Square and the yellow Triangle, combining elementary geometrical forms and primary colours, constituted a veritable sacred trilogy at the heart of the Bauhaus – understood as the indispensable foundation for the construction of any future totality. It was then in 1922 that Peter Keller, pupil of the painter Johannes Itten, constructed for all the painter’s apprentices a cradle in lacquered wood, bringing together all the building blocks of the totality to come and which one may imagine was intended to produce and shape all the newborn children of the Bauhaus as future ‘total beings’.

The programme of the 1923 Exhibition, which was to demonstrate the new direction of the institution, made one concession to the painters by stating that ‘the long term goal of the Bauhaus does not exclude the metaphysical edifice that will go beyond functional beauty to realize monumental beauty in a true total work of art’ (Aron, 1965: 121). Nevertheless, the concept of the ‘cathedral of the future’, retrospectively renamed ‘cathedral of socialism’, had in fact been put on ice because it was judged to be too vague, too purely ‘spiritual’ and too unproductive. The unproductive vagueness of the concept is strikingly illustrated by Paul Klee’s conclusion to his January 1924 lecture in Jena:

Sometimes I dream of a total work of art of such dimensions that it would embrace all spheres from element, figuration and content to style. This can only be a dream but it is good to imagine from time to time this possibility that is still vague at present.

We can’t overthrow everything. This work must be allowed to grow and mature – all the better, when its day comes. We are still searching for it. We have found some parts but not the whole. We still lack that ultimate force because we have nobody behind us, there is no people to carry us (uns trägt kein Volk). But we are seeking a people, that was where we started at the Bauhaus. We made a start with a community to which we give all that we have. We can do no more. (Klee, 1963: 131)

‘There is no people to carry us. But we are seeking a people’: if Paul Klee justified the persistent absence of the ‘spiritual’ Gesamtkunstwerk by the absence of the people, it was because he did not want to recognize that by making its mission ‘the spiritual unity of the people’ the Bauhaus had thereby assumed the task of shaping and educating a people – and that it had failed up to that point in this task.

I would like to call the new direction of the Bauhaus a turning towards the biological. This turning effected the passage from the total work of art, whose task was to give the whole people its spiritual unity through the shaping of the community as a single mass, to the total human being as the object of art – but a being conceived as biological unity, that is, as a unity of mind and body, grasped as an individual ‘type’, element of an ensemble that must be homogeneous if it is to be harmonious. And that meant that the synthesis of the arts would no longer be visible as such in the objectivation of a work external to humans but in the objectivation of human beings.

In place of a total work of art that realizes the unity of architecture, painting, sculpture, and other possible arts, the human being – conceived as the individual element of a living organic totality to come – was to be perfected in the art of marching, of sleeping, of eating, of sitting: in short, in the art of living communally, or in the art of being-in-common. Declaring that we need from now on ‘to realize a modern architectonic art, which must be total, like human nature’ (Gropius, 1969: 124), Gropius incorporated two disciplines that seemed to him indispensable to the education of students in the form of lecture series on biology and sociology.

The arrival of Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus in 1923 perfectly symbolized this change of direction. For him, there existed only art that ‘was rooted in biology’ (Moholy-Nagy, 1993: 77). Already in July 1922 he had described humans as ‘the synthesis of their entire functional apparatus’. Humans ‘achieve perfection from the moment that all their constituent apparatuses – from cells to the most complex organs – are perfected and purposefully employed to the limits of their capacities’ (Moholy-Nagy, 1993: 120). Two years later, he vigorously opposed the original ideology of the Bauhaus by condemning the inexistent utopia of the purely additive total work of art in the name of the need to create ‘the unity of life’:

What we need is not the total work of art, separated from the course of life, but the synthesis of all aspects of life, a ‘total work’ that embraces everything, cancels all separation, the crucible of all the various accomplishments that come from biological necessity and open up to a universal necessity […]

It is not by artificially erasing the limits of the different spheres of creation in order to merge them that we can make the unity of life appear. On the contrary, it is by conceiving and realizing each creation in terms of its particular capacity and attitude to produce a complete and full effect, to fashion life that we shall arrive at creating a unity […] for the general good and according to a maximal productivity. (pp. 78–9)

Among the many consequences of this Neue Gestaltung, of this ‘new giving of form’ to life, one was decisive. Since human needs and their biological structure were alike, ‘housing and furnishing therefore became a matter of public need’ for Gropius (1993: 38). With the result that the prime instance of private space, the home, fell from now on into the public domain: it now testified to a general idea of the political, that is, a ‘politics of life’ as conceived by Gropius, when he claimed that in principle Gestaltung or design formed ‘an integral part of the very matter of life’ (Gropius, 1969: 126). Thus design explicitly claimed the right to exercise what one would now call, with Michel Foucault, a form of ‘biopower’.

Gropius agreed with Moholy-Nagy that in order to ‘fashion life’ architects and designers needed to define ‘form-types’, which would supply the ‘standard’ responses to ‘need-types’. The elaboration of a ‘standard’ required an investigation of the entire history of the forms of the object in question, incorporating the best earlier forms while eliminating the personal content that the subjectivity of past creators had embedded in the elements and now judged to be ‘inessential and sterile’ (Gropius, 1969: 109). This was how the ‘impersonal standard’ was created that was called ‘norm’. Now, if such a rationalization could be thought of as a ‘purification’ by means of objects, of social relations themselves, it was because ‘the existence of norms’ (or of form-types) had always been, in Gropius’s eyes, ‘the criterion of a regulated and well organized society’, since their ‘repetition’ necessarily exercised ‘a stabilizing and civilizing influence on the human spirit’ (p. 109).

And since the ‘masters’ of the Bauhaus knew and taught that ‘spatial relations, proportions and colours control vital and real psychological functions’ (1969: 70), these standardized responses clearly constituted major determinants of the ‘biological’ life of the masses, regulating the life of their cells by dictating their standard gestures and habits. This was the means by which the Bauhaus dissolved human ties to traditional milieus by the creation of new ties between ‘life’ and the new responses.

A principle of adaptability followed from these requirements. Thus Marcel Breuer conceived furniture that was indefinitely reproducible and adaptable ‘to all rooms it is needed in, as it were a living being, a human, a flower’ (Bauhaus, 1969: 109). Herbert Bayer’s Universal Alphabet, designed by him in 1925–6, is perhaps the best example of how this standardization process demonstrated the general adaptability that aimed at ‘eliminating the subjective’ in Moholy-Nagy’s words. ‘This unified form’, as Herbert Bayer soberly observed, ‘can be applied to different uses’ (Bauhaus, 1969: 117). The perfect modularity of the alphabetic characters without capitals was intended to allow the total homogenization of texts, whatever their nature of function. And he had no doubt that in time the radical standardization of typography would lead to the standardization of thought: ‘As soon as we have achieved new characters as a result of the reorganization of typographical signs, then it will be necessary to reorganize language’ (Bauhaus, 1969: 117).

The shaping of the total human being, which had taken the place of the construction of the total work of art, also rediscovered – as if of necessity – the same aspirations to a temporal synthesis as that of Wagner, when he envisaged the total artwork of the future as bringing history to a conclusion in the creation of the eternal present of an ideal community. Similarly inspired, Marcel Breuer constructed a small photographic montage tracing the evolution of a form through successive rational purifications on the way to its proper perfection. He entitled it:

A Bauhaus film stretching over five years. Author: life asserting its rights. Operator Marcel Breuer, who recognizes these rights. It improves every year. Finally one sits on a construction of air. (Bauhaus, 1969: 111)

National Socialism would also search the totality of the history of forms in a similar fashion in the attempt to scientifically ground and legitimize its racism. With this goal in mind, it concentrated on human forms – and in the first place on those that ‘the genius of the race’, as they called it, had already traced over the centuries in works of art – in order to incorporate them into its own ‘ideal of racial beauty’.

Of course the biologism of the Bauhaus and that of the Nazis were absolutely different and need to be radically distinguished. That of the Bauhaus aimed at ‘the total human being’ in its principle of universality; that of the Nazis aimed at the racial community. Nevertheless, the one and the other assigned to art the same task of shaping the new man and to artistic objects and techniques the same function of transforming and regulating the social bond. But National Socialism was above all the regime that set out to transform the genetic memory of the German people, by means of the massive practice of artificial insemination and by countless experiments on genes and on viruses, and its nervous memory, through the manufacture of images of an ideal Germanic body, which it sought to distill from the artworks of the past in order to accomplish the ‘unconscious education’ of the Germans.

Here we must add that the interpretations of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Werner Hoffmann and Jean Clair of the National Socialist state as a total work of art are weak because they do not realize that neither art nor the state constituted an end in themselves. Hitler made this quite clear in Mein Kampf: the state, he said, is only a ‘means of arriving at a goal’, and this goal is ‘to maintain and encourage the development of a community of beings who are physically and morally of the same race (Art)’ (Hitler, 1940: 435, 433). And this is why his conception of a racist or völkisch state made the task of the statesmen, as seen by all its leaders, that of the artist – but not, as Syberberg thought, the ‘artist of the state’ or of the German landscape but the artist of the people or of the race. Once he had seized power, Hitler said again and again: ‘The greatest miracle of our epoch is probably that dwellings are being built, that factories are working once again, that roads are constructed and railway stations erected, but this above all, a new German man is arising’ (Pois, 1993: 127, emphasis added). He again repeated, before the workers assembled for the 1934 Nuremberg Congress, that what gave ‘the deepest meaning to the programme’ of the Party, was ‘the forming (Bildung) of a true community of the people and of belief in it’ (Hitler, 1935: 110). The true total work of art of National Socialism was undoubtedly the German people, whether termed ‘Aryan’ or the ‘Germano-Nordic race’.

That is the reason why the analysis of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe is more lucid and penetrating in that it was the community of the people, rather than the state, that was the object of the Nazi aspirations to a total work of art. We need to understand that National Socialism was the inheritor of a long tradition that wanted to shape through art the communal being as such of the city or of the people (Lacoue-Labarthe 1991a: 173), aiming not only at the ‘aestheticization of politics’ of which Walter Benjamin speaks but beyond that at ‘the identification of politics with aesthetics’ in the service of ‘producing politics as a work of art’ (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1991b: 47).

Nevertheless, I believe that this kind of interpretation owes too much to the German tradition of Bildung, that is, a process of education and shaping that is simultaneously political and aesthetic. It fails to recognize the essential fact that National Socialism saw its task as forming through art each individual element biologically, not politically, in order to make them conform to the demands of an ideal community that is racially homogeneous in all the elements of which it is composed. Just as Joseph Beuys would later declare that his ‘expanded concept of art’ made politics ‘obsolete’, National Socialism did not aim at the ‘identification’ of politics with aesthetics but in fact at the suppression and destruction of politics through art. A destruction of this kind had already been envisioned by Wagner, for whom ‘civilization [by which we should understand democracy] would melt away like a fog in the sun through music’ (Mann, 1975: 41), just as it had been by cultural pessimism, which preceded and accompanied the rise of National Socialism. Thus Thomas Mann could write during the First World War that Germany’s mission and task would never be to realize ideas in political form, because the ‘democratization of Germany’ would signify its de-Germanization and the dissolution of the ‘German spirit’ (Mann, 1975: 39, 66, 41).

We may therefore say with Lacoue-Labarthe that ‘the Nazi myth is the construction, shaping and production of the German people in, through and as a work of art’; but only as long as our perspective is that of the shaping of the people as a ‘political’ community. It is insufficient, however, to characterize National Socialism, which was not only interested in preserving the ‘German spirit’ but in the construction of a people, understood as a race, a people biologically homogeneous, for without that, Hitler said, Germany would fall back into politics and parliamentary democracy. As long as National Socialism is only defined as the ‘fusion of politics and art’ or as ‘the production of politics as work of art’, the fundamental destruction of parliamentary democracy by art has not been grasped: the aestheticization of politics is its negation.

For what art was tasked with destroying, in the völkisch or racist state, was not only all criticism and all possibilities of debate but equally the warm or affective bonds that attached all the members of the community to all that was ‘foreign’ to it. Hitler himself opposed to the critical consciousness carried by words the sovereignty of art that imposed silence. Speaking to the masses assembled for the 1935 Nuremberg Rally he stated: ‘Nothing is more suited to reducing the small-minded critic to silence than the eternal language of great art. Before its works, the centuries bow in respectful silence’ (Hinz, 1974: 151). In 1941 he reaffirmed that ‘beauty should exercise its rule over man, should hold him under its sway’ (Picker, 1969: 166).

As we know: the notion of the ‘community of the people’ or Volksgemeinschaft, devoid of all class separations, was the denial of all division in the social body, the very condition of democratic political life based on the conflict of opinions. And it was precisely because of the need to give body and substance to this myth of a seamless people’s community that art was invested with an unparalleled power. Art’s major role was not fully asserted until after the elimination of the revolutionary forces within the Party. After June 1934 Hitler announced that the Revolution was now over and that henceforth the form of German life has been determined for the next thousand years (Hitler, 1935: 28), inviting his listeners to imagine communal bonds so close that no conflict, no political games or uncertainty would ever again be possible. German life was to be like a total work of art that would both construct and maintain the bonds of the community, including the behaviour (Haltung) of each member. Goebbels stated the goal openly: ‘The German art of the coming decades […] will be the creation of duties and bonds, or it will not be’ (Priacel, 1935: 64–8).

In insisting on the art of constructing body types, models of a people’s community that is biologically homogeneous, these types, selected from the history of forms, taken from a supposed ‘Germen-Nordic’ art, had precisely the purpose of dissolving all the positive ties of the community’s members to what had been declared ‘alien to the race’ (artfremd), as against the reinforcement of ties to the objects identified as ‘belonging to the race’ (artgleich). […] That is why the condemnation, exclusion and destruction of supposedly ‘degenerate’ (artfremd) artworks had exactly the same function as the prohibition of sexual relations between members of the Volksgemeinschaft and anyone of ‘alien race’, to be excluded from the pure racial community to come.

Nevertheless, most of the racial ‘experts’ working for the National Socialists were well aware that these ‘types’ were fictitious products. ‘We don’t yet have any evidence for the reality of these “racial types” as a starting point’, one of them stated in 1929. A year later he denounced the comparison between a racially mixed present and a purer past (Massin, 1993: 197). In a manual of ‘racial hygiene’, which Hitler had read in prison, the geneticist F. Lenz had no qualms in stating that the beginning of all things is myth. He continued: ‘race is a myth, less a reality of the empirical world than an ideal to be accomplished’ (Massin, 1993: 246, emphasis added). Houston S Chamberlain, the son-in-law of Wagner and friend of Hitler, had earlier written: ‘Even if it were proven that there had never been an Aryan race in the past, we want there to be one in the future: for men of action, that is the decisive standpoint’ (Chamberlain, 1913: 362). Here we can see what racial science had in common with art: the conviction of the mythical character of the type and its definition as an ideal to be accomplished. These were ideas that belonged to the art and aesthetics of neoclassicism, based on the same principle of selection. In turn, the task of the artist approximated that of the scientist since they shared the same goal: to define and construct the ideal type and then reproduce it on a mass scale in order to realize the great total work of art of the community of the people, finally seamlessly united in all its parts because of its biological purity.

The realization of this task demanded not only the destruction of politics, understood as the exercise of criticism, but also, as we know, the destruction of human beings, cut off from all affective bonds thanks to art. And with the dissolution of old bonds and the creation of new, National Socialism accomplished its aim, so clearly identified by Hannah Arendt: to produce the ideal subject of totalitarianism who can no longer distinguish between fact and fiction.