Kulturbolschewismus

   The term "cultural Bolshevism" is difficult to disengage from the extreme Right, especially Nazism. It is tied to an anti-Communist notion that cultural and political subversion are intrinsically linked. According to Alfred Rosenberg,* as Bolshevism was the revolt of racially in-ferior elements against the rule of old elites, Kulturbolschewismus was an equiv-alent revolt in the cultural sphere. But this was not strictly a Nazi notion. Soon after deposing the Prussian government in July 1932, Franz von Papen* abol-ished the Education Ministry's Cultural Department, firing the directors of the-ater* and music* and thereby nullifying arts administration as instituted with the November Revolution.* Whether the perpetrators were Nazis or members of the conservative Right, they were guilty of grossly misreading Bolshevism. Erroneously convinced that the art of George Grosz* or the sarcasm of Bertolt Brecht* embodied Communist culture, the Right refused to recognize that the Communist attitude toward the arts paralleled its own. The elasticity of the term was developed in 1931 by Carl von Ossietzky*: Kulturbolschewismus is when Conductor Klemperer* takes tempi different from his colleague Furtwangler*; when a painter sweeps a color into his sunset not seen in Lower Pomerania; when one favors birth control; when one builds a house with a flat roof; when a Caesarean birth is shown on the screen; when one admires the performance of Charlie Chaplin and the mathematical wizardry of Albert Einstein.* This is called cultural Bolshe-vism and a personal favor rendered to Herr Stalin. (Deak)

   The Nazis' preoccupation with "perverted" art is well documented. As early as April 1933, four years before the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition at Munich's Haus der Deutschen Kunst, the NSDAP staged its defamatory ex-hibit Kulturbolschewistische Bilder (Images of Cultural Bolshevism) at Mann-heim's Kunsthalle. Featured, among others, were works by Grosz, Max Beckmann,* Otto Dix,* Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka,* and Emil Nolde.* Ultimately, the Nazi display of art, while reflecting twisted porno-graphic sensibilities, was an effort to demonstrate to Germans that Hitler* had saved society from Kulturbolschewismus.

   REFERENCES:Barron, "Degenerate Art";Deak, Weimar Germany's Left-Wing Intellec-tuals; Laqueur, Weimar; Willett, Art and Politics.