Cultural Bolshevism

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Cultural Bolshevism (

modernist and progressive cultural movements. The term is closely related to the Jewish Bolshevism
conspiracy theory.

This first became an issue during the 1920s in

German nationalists as "cultural Bolsheviks". Nazi claims about attacks on conceptions of family, identity, music, art and intellectual life were generally referred to as Cultural Bolshevism, the Bolsheviks being the Marxist revolutionary movement in Russia.[2][3][4]

Cultural Marxism is a contemporary variant of the term which is used to refer to the far-right antisemitic Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory.[5] This variant of the term was used by far-right terrorist Anders Breivik in the introductory chapter of his manifesto.[6][7]

History

The development of

civilization appeared to be in dire peril.[8]

The

revolutionary ideals, to the extent that Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck confidently declared in 1920 that Dada was a "German Bolshevist affair".[9]

One of the first writers outside of Germany to associate Bolshevism as an art movement, a link to what would become

Cultural Marxism in the late 1990s, was Italian far-right author Julius Evola. Evola was a dadaist painter after the first World War, something which was considered decadent and subversive. In an article called Sui limiti del bolscevismo culturale, published in February 1938 in La Vita Italiana monthly magazine, he named the movement as "cultural Bolshevism" (bolscevismo culturale).[10]

The association of new art with Bolshevism circulated in

Hitler's rise to power, the Nazis denounced a number of contemporary styles as "cultural Bolshevism," notably abstract art and Bauhaus architecture. After seeing a colleague beaten by Nazi supporters for comments sympathetic to modern art, typographer Paul Renner published an essay against Nazi aesthetics titled "Kulturbolschewismus?" [11] Around the same time, Carl von Ossietzky
mocked the flexibility of the term in Nazi writings:

Cultural Bolshevism is when conductor

Stalin. It is also the democratic mentality of the brothers [Heinrich and Thomas] Mann, a piece of music by Hindemith or Weill, and is to be identified with the hysterical insistence of a madman for a law giving him permission to marry his own grandmother.[12]

Once in control of the government, the Nazis moved to suppress modern art styles and to promote art with national and racial themes.

Weimar-era
art personalities, including Renner, Huelsenbeck, and the Bauhaus designers, were marginalized.

See also

References

Notes

  1. ISBN 1-58567-345-5
    . pp. 18, 24.
  2. ^ Jay, Martin. "Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe". skidmore.edu. Salmagundi Magazine. Archived from the original on 24 November 2011.
  3. ^ Berkowitz, Bill (15 August 2003). "'Cultural Marxism' Catching On". Intelligence Report. Southern Poverty Law Center. Archived from the original on 30 September 2018. Retrieved 2 October 2018.
  4. ISBN 978-1-137-39619-8
    .
  5. ^ Sources:
  6. ^ "Scholars Respond to Breivik Manifesto" (Press release). National Association of Scholars. 28 July 2011. Archived from the original on 1 September 2011. Retrieved 28 July 2011.
  7. ^ Anne-Catherine Simon; Christoph Saiger; Helmar Dumbs (29 July 2011). "Die Welt, wie Anders B. Breivik sie sieht". Die Presse (in German).
  8. ISBN 0-8109-3401-9
    . p. 615.
  9. ISBN 978-1-78238-108-2
    .
  10. ISBN 978-88-89015-62-9
    .
  11. ISBN 978-3878778295
    .
  12. ^ von Ossietzky, Carl in Weltbühne ("World Stage") (21 April 1931) quoted in Deák, István Weimar Germany's Left-wing Intellectuals: A Political History of the Weltbühne and Its Circle. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1968. p.2
  13. ISBN 978-0-8047-4327-3
    .

Bibliography

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