[This is Section 15 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
15. Censorship
What the Nazis established for the schools and universities they attempted to establish for German society at large, by means of sweeping government regulations on media and outright censorship. The world of schools and education was only an important microcosm of the Nazis’ plans for all of German society.
Joseph Goebbels, Germany’s new propaganda chief, put it this way: Any book or work of art “which acts subversively on our future or strikes at the root of German thought, the German home and the driving forces of our people” should be destroyed.
The great symbolic statement of what was to come occurred early in the Nazi regime—the May 10, 1933 book burnings, just a few months after the Nazis assumed power. In the Unter den Linden, an open square across from the University of Berlin, roughly 20,000 books were burned in a huge bonfire. Goebbels spoke at the event to 40,000 cheering spectators. Some of the authors whose books were destroyed were Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Jack London, Helen Keller, H. G. Wells, Sigmund Freud, Émile Zola, and Marcel Proust.
An important and sometimes overlooked fact about the book burnings is that they were not instigated by the Nazi government. Nor were they instigated by non-intellectual thugs. The book burnings were instigated by university students. The Nazi Party’s student organization conceived and carried out book burnings all across the country—book bonfires burned brightly that night in every German university city. The professors had taught their students well.
Goebbels’s official title was Minister of the Reich Chamber of Culture. The Reich Chamber of Culture controlled seven cultural spheres: fine arts, music, theater, literature, the press, radio, and films. This gave him power over all the major media in Germany and enabled him to use his formidable talent for propaganda effectively. He quickly established regulations that anyone working in any of those fields had to become a member of the Nazi party and join the respective chamber. The purpose of the regulations was, as Goebbels put it:
“In order to pursue a policy of German culture, it is necessary to gather together the creative artists in all spheres into a unified organization under the leadership of the Reich. The Reich must not only determine the lines of progress, mental and spiritual, but also lead and organize the professions.”[33]
In the realm of art, Hitler and Goebbels attempted to cleanse Germany of modern art and to replace it with “Germanic” art. Classical plays, music, and operas, as well as Hollywood B-movies were still allowed, but galleries exhibiting modern art were shut down.
Newspapers received close supervision. The Reich Press Law of 1933 prohibited editors of newspapers from marrying Jews, and required that editors meet daily with the Propaganda Ministry to ensure that no misleading stories were published. Essentially, this meant that the government told the newspapers what they could and could not print.
Likewise, radio was taken over in 1933 by another branch of the Propaganda Ministry, the Chamber of Radio.
The Chamber of Films took over the content of the film industry, though it left the production of films up to private firms.
In all areas of arts and culture, uncooperative editors, writers, and performers were ousted, or sent to prison or concentration camps, or sometimes killed. Those editors, writers, and performers who remained knew how they were to behave. German culture thus became an obedient tool of Nazi politics.
References
[33] Quoted in Shirer 1962, p. 241.
[Bibliography]
[This post can also be downloaded as a PDF at the Nietzsche and the Nazis page.]
Posted 2 months, 3 weeks ago at 2:39 pm. 2 comments
For my Introduction to Philosophy course, the final question on the final exam was:
In your judgment, what is the most dangerous book we read this semester? Present the book’s most important themes and explain why you think it is dangerous.
We read five major authors in the course: Plato’s Apology and Crito, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, Descartes’ Meditations, C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.
The fifteen students in the course responded this way:
None chose Socrates as the most dangerous.
One student voted Descartes’ Meditations as most dangerous, on the grounds that his radical doubt could be too unsettling to an unprepared mind, especially for those raised in conventional religious families.
Four students voted for Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents as the most dangerous book. Three cited his insulting dismissal of religion and one focused on his gloomy assessment of the human condition and his recommendation that we not aim for happiness in life but rather lower our sights.
Lewis’s Mere Christianity got four votes as most dangerous book. Three of the four students objected to Lewis’s relentlessly negative view of human nature, and the fourth added that he/she felt like Lewis was too bossily trying to impose his religious views on the rest of us.
Finally, Rand’s The Fountainhead was voted most dangerous by six students, for three different reasons. Three argued that the bad characters were presented so realistically that it would be too easy for readers to take the book the wrong way, i.e., as commending Keating’s or Wynand’s or Toohey’s paths as being the way of the world and so one might as well go along with it. Two argued that Rand’s insistence on independence, taken consistently, conflicts with religion. And one made a very brief argument that I didn’t understand and so don’t know how to state coherently here.
So I hereby declare The Fountainhead to be the Most Dangerous Book in Introduction to Philosophy, Rockford College, Fall Semester 2009.
Posted 2 months, 4 weeks ago at 3:06 pm. 2 comments
In my Introduction to Philosophy course we are reading Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. In Chapter 5, Freud makes the following strong claim about human nature:
“Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and kill him. Homo homini lupus [Man is a wolf to man]” (68).
Aggression, slavery, rape, theft, sadism, and murder as the center of human nature.
Freud is not making the innocuous claim that we can experience aggressive and anti-social urges. He is making the strong claim that such anti-social urges are inborn and dominant in us.
By contrast, Freud believes, our rational and cooperative capacities are much weaker: “instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable interests.” Consequently, mankind’s history is dominated by crime, war, and atrocity, and “civilized society is perpetually threatened with disintegration” (69). The modest successes of civilization are a tenuously fragile veneer over a mutually predatory intra-species conflict. “Who,” Freud asks, “in the face of all his experience of life and history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?”
I do; and there are lots of issues worth following up there, but in this post I want to make one sideways connection to another book we read in the course, C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.
Freud is an atheist who disparages the Christian tradition and Lewis is a theist who defends the Christian tradition, but they are in marked agreement in their assessment of human nature.
Go back to the Garden of Eden in the story of Genesis. God has created a place of ease and loveliness and left Adam and Eve free to enjoy it. In their first independent act, they steal from the Tree of Knowledge. In the next generation, Cain envies Abel and murders him. The book of Genesis carries on through several generations until the time of Noah, when “the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5).
God is so disgusted with what his creatures have wrought that he wipes them out (even the children) and starts over with Noah. But the humans pick right up where they left off and continue their wicked ways — more theft and murder and deceit and war and every form of nastiness. That is Original Sin: the innate badness in man dominates his existence.
Freud has a secular version of the same view of human nature.
As Lewis puts it in Mere Christianity in commenting directly on Freud’s views, “But psychoanalysis itself … is not in the least contradictory to Christianity” (p. 88). Lewis notes there are metaphysical differences between the Christians and the Freudians — the Christians add a God and a rather ineffectual immortal soul to their ontology — but their view of human nature in action is the same.
On this issue, the key divide is not between dualists and physicalists but between the pessimists (e.g., Freud, the Christians) and the optimists (e.g., Socrates, Rand) about the raw material of human nature.
Posted 3 months, 2 weeks ago at 3:22 pm. 1 comment
Traditional sex roles have it that the woman looks after the family hearth, tending the cooking and raising the children, while the man goes off to hunt and fight.
Many explanations can be offered for these assigned roles, but to my knowledge Sigmund Freud has the most, ummmmm, interesting explanation for why men are not in charge of keeping the fire going for cooking and warmth.
Freud notes that men like to put fires out — not by quenching them with water — but by urinating on them. Women, given their anatomy, would get pain rather than satisfaction from attempting to put out fires that way, so we can understand their disinclination — but what is it that draws men to the practice? Why is this urge so compelling in them?
I was oblivious to this phenomenon until I read Freud, and, for our joint edification, I now offer you his interpretation.
It turns out that the male psyche interprets the flames phallically — as thrusting upwards vigorously and persistently. And the male psyche is, consequently, homoerotically attracted to the thrusting flames. Hence, the practice of urinating on the flames is to engage in a homosexual duel with them.
I kid thee not. Check out the footnote on pp. 42-43 of this edition of Civilization and Its Discontents.
Since men cannot be trusted to control their sexual desires, they cannot be trusted with so important a job as keeping the family fires burning.
Consequently, women are the guardians and saviors of the family hearth.
[Don't think I'll invite Sigmund on my next camping trip.]
Posted 3 months, 2 weeks ago at 4:58 pm. 4 comments
At the Explaining Postmodernism page, Chapter Five of my book is now available online. The chapter traces the evolution of socialism from classical Marxism in the mid-nineteenth century through the post-World War II crisis of socialism that helped set the stage for postmodernism.
Here are the chapter’s sections and page numbers:
Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism [pdf]
Marx and waiting for Godot 135
Three failed predictions 136
Socialism needs an aristocracy: Lenin, Mao, and the lesson
of the German Social Democrats 138
Good news for socialism: depression and war 141
Bad news: liberal capitalism rebounds 143
Worse news: Khrushchev’s revelations and Hungary 146
Responding to the crisis: change socialism’s ethical standard 150
From need to equality 151
From Wealth is good to Wealth is bad 153
Responding to the crisis: change socialism’s epistemology 156
Marcuse and the Frankfurt School: Marx plus Freud,
or oppression plus repression 159
The rise and fall of Left terrorism 167
From the collapse of the New Left to postmodernism 171
Posted 5 months, 3 weeks ago at 11:43 am. 1 comment
This semester’s major authors and texts will be Plato’s Apology and Crito, Descartes’s Meditations, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and Rand’s The Fountainhead.
We will be covering those authors and their views in their own right and using them as launching points for discussion of issues such as the existence of God, free will and determinism, the mind-body problem, and the meaning of life.
We will also use a number of shorter pieces from Daniel Dennett, Martin Luther, John Steinbeck, Rupert Brooke, and others as supplements.
Here are PDF files of the three-page syllabus and schedule and the seventy-three-page supplemental Readings in Philosophy booklet I put together.
Posted 7 months ago at 8:49 am. Add a comment
