<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/29/germany-nazis-bauhaus-afd-design>
"The far right generally isn’t fond of modern art. There is nothing new in its
fear of the rejection of tradition. What is new is that today’s far-right
parties seem to see this threat not just in contemporary culture, but also in
modern art created a century ago.
In 1933, the Nazis brutally crushed the Bauhaus school, one of Germany’s most
important contributions to modern art and architecture. They saw its
internationalist outlook and its many foreign and Jewish members as
“un-German”; leftwingers were particularly attracted to the movement’s radical
rejection of local tradition in favour of universal styles. But the Nazis
failed to stop the design revolution it had unleashed. The minimalist and
functional principles of Bauhaus have found their way into our lives, inspiring
everything from Ikea furniture to prefabricated housebuilding. A recent
development in Germany, though, has revealed that the underlying culture war is
far from over.
The eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt, where the Bauhaus settled in 1925,
is planning to celebrate the centenary of its connection to the movement next
year. The local Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party responded with a motion
in the state parliament in Magdeburg entitled “The Aberration of Modernity”,
slamming the plans as a “one-sided glorification” of the Bauhaus legacy and
demanding a “critical analysis” instead. Last Friday, parliament debated the
motion and voted it down, shocked by its parallels with Nazi language.
AfD MPs are unlikely to care about this defeat. They made their point. They
called the sober Bauhaus architecture a “uniform mass” that “waters down
regional characteristics”. Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, culture spokesperson of
the AfD group, went further, saying that the Bauhaus had “artfully raped
[vergewaltigt] the human need for homeliness”. Such language speaks of visceral
fear of a supposedly “un-German” contamination of German tradition. Far-right
parties then and now view the modernity of the Bauhaus as a threat to
Germanness itself.
Today, this angst finds its most vocal expression in anti-immigration rhetoric.
For the AfD, this is not so much about public services or safety as it is about
allowing what it calls kulturfremde or “culturally alien” people into the
country. Their anxiety that German culture is undermined in the process seeps
into all policy areas. The old is ringfenced, the new rejected.
Tillschneider applies this concept widely: “Beer belongs to Germany,” he once
declared. “The oriental drug of cannabis makes you weak and sluggish – it’s an
immigrant drug! We don’t want it here!” While this may sound almost too absurd
to take seriously, AfD ambitions for culture policy are drastic. The party
rejects cultural diversity, envisioning a legally enforced German Leitkultur
(lead culture) to underpin education and art.
Currently, the German state subsidies enable cultural experimentation beyond
commercial viability – a principle that also made the Bauhaus possible. The AfD
wants to slash funding to “art that nobody is really interested in”, as
Tillschneider put it. The idea that the state should support only art it deems
worthy for the masses was also espoused by Hitler, who vowed that “works of art
which cannot be understood in themselves but need some pretentious instruction
book to justify their existence will never again find their way to the German
people”."
Via Christoph S.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
