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Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf – 2. Life-Writing

The Oxford World Classic edition of ‘Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf’, edited by David Bradshaw, brings together 30 of Woolf’s essays, reviews and miscellaneous prose pieces, and groups them under four headings:

  1. Reading and Writing
  2. Life-Writing
  3. Women and Fiction
  4. Looking On

Summarising each of the essays was taking so long that I broke my review up into parts, one for each section. This one addresses the four essays in the ‘Life-Writing’ i.e. biography section, being:

  1. The New Biography (1927) [review of Some People by Harold Nicholson]
  2. On Being Ill (1930) [fantasia]
  3. Leslie Stephen: The Philosopher at Home: A Daughter’s Memories (1932) [memoir of her father]
  4. The Art of Biography (1939) [specifically Lytton Strachey]

Woolf, her father and biography

Virginia’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen (1832 to 1904) was an English author, critic, historian and biographer. He was editor of the influential Cornhill Magazine. Virginia grew up in a house filled with books, and was given free rein to its large library with, crucially, the support and guidance of an extremely bookish parent. She grew up to believe and promote in all her essays the dazzlingly unoriginal idea that writing, literature and poetry, were the highest art and encapsulated indelible human truths. I wonder if anyone believes such a narrow simple-minded idea in our times. Literature quite obviously doesn’t represent any kind of truth. The case against it is similar to one of the arguments against the Bible being the word of God, simply that it expresses, with profound conviction, a vast array of completely contradictory and chaotic beliefs. In fact literature’s virtue is its lack of any one Great Truth, the whole point is its mad diversity and plurality.

The point is that young Virginia grew up in a hyper-bookish household, dominated by a hyper-bookish father, and went on to spend a career telling everyone that the most important thing in the world was books and writing, as the essays in the first two sections of this book demonstrate. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Anyway, in the early 1880s, the owner of the Cornhill magazine, the publisher George Smith, approached its editor, Stephen, to sound him out about creating an encyclopedia of notable people. This led to the creation of the Dictionary of National Biography or DNB, still with us 140 years later. Stephen was the dictionary’s founding editor, working on it from 1885 to 1891. His daughter, Virginia, was to give a special place to biography in the genres of writing. Her novel Orlando is a tribute to and critique of traditional biography. I was struck by how her powerful feminist polemic, Three Guineas, relies not on data, sociology or economics, but leans very heavy on the evidence of the innumerable literary biographies she’s read. Biography was very important to this daughter of the man who founded the country’s definitive encyclopedia of biography. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

When her father resigned as editor, he was replaced by Sidney Lee, Stephen’s assistant editor from the beginning of the project. Lee served until the first edition was completed in 1900, then returned to edit the first supplement which was published in 1912.

1. The New Biography (1927: 6 pages)

This is a book review of Some People by Harold Nicholson. It starts with a quote from Sidney Lee’s 1911 book, Principles of Biography, where he writes that:

The aim of biography is the truthful transmission of personality.

Almost any educated person could spot the flaws in this statement, starting with the idea that you can ever have a truthful transmission of anything, and going on to wonder whether the point of a biography is solely to convey personality. That’s a nice outcome but surely there are a lot of other aims as well, not least getting the facts right and setting the record straight about someone’s life.

Anyway, this quote allows Woolf to set up a dichotomy between truth and personality. On the first page she astonishes with an unironic and naive praise of The Truth, believing that such a thing exists.

There is a virtue in truth; it has an almost mystic power.

Here as in so many other places, Woolf shows herself a child of the deep Victorian era, whose intellectual traces lingered for a long time in the Stephen household, her attachment to Truth and Beauty deriving from Keats, Shelley, Coleridge and so on, nothing from the thinkers, writers and artists of her own time.

But partly it’s just a rhetorical device. She builds up Truth as a big concept so she can oppose it with Personality. According to her this emerged into the genre of biography with Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’. We hear and see Dr Johnson as no other figure before him. We hear him, we can argue with him.

Victorian biography contained more psychology, more delving into personality than its predecessors, but was constrained by the Victorian need to dwell on virtue and goodness. The result was huge biographies which resembled the Victorian tombs of Great Men lacking all sense of life and spontaneity.

But now, she claims, twentieth century biography represents a sea change, in two main ways. Modern biographies are no longer the ten volume tombstones of the Victorian era, but are short and swift. Alongside this, the biographer no longer considers themselves a lowly drudge beavering away in the footsteps of their giant subjects; the modern biographer considers themselves the equal of their subjects, and freely able to pass judgement on them.

And now, after this thoughtful if wrong-headed introduction, we come to the book under review, Some People by Harold Nicholson. Now Nicholson was a ridiculously over-talented posh man. He was a diplomat, politician, journalist, broadcaster, historian, biographer, diarist, novelist, lecturer, literary critic, essayist and gardener nowadays maybe mostly remembered for his candid, scandalous Diaries.

He had already written fairly conventional biographies of Byron and Tennyson when he produced Some People. It consists of nine chapters, each the biography of a different person but here’s the thing – all nine are imaginary. They are: being a sort of character sketch: Miss Plimsoll; J. D. Marstock; Lambert Orme; The Marquis de Chaumont; Jeanne de Henaut; Titty; Professor Malone; Arketall; Miriam Codd.

Nicholson joked that they were all entirely imaginary, abstract character sketches. But those in the know recognised some of them as combining traits from real living people, and a couple of them are straight portraits of real people just given fictional names.

As such it is a hybrid book, biographies, but of non-existent people, except they are real people, except they are treated as fictions.

It may be worth pointing out that Nicholson was married to the posh aristocrat Vita Sackville-West, with whom Woolf was having a lesbian affair. Woolf was especially interested in biography at this time because she was quickly writing her own fictional biography, Orlando, which was in the same ballpark as Some People and which is dedicated to Sackville-West. Orlando is in fact in many respects based on Vita, even including photos of her in the text and captioning them as portraits of Orlando.

Back to Nicholson, Woolf says his chief quality is his sense of humour. He laughs at his subjects and he laughs at himself. She makes the rather obvious point that the tenth subject who emerges from this sequence of nine portraits is the author himself, mentioned self-mockingly at various moments, and whose own life and opinions emerge from references scattered throughout the other sketches.

What makes all this new is ‘the lack of pose, humbug, solemnity’, ‘freedom from pose, from sentimentality, from illusion’. He has opened new ground by deploying the techniques of fiction to biography.

At the same time she points out its limitations, which that all the characters, deliciously mocked though they are, are small. They lack real depth or complexity and they can’t be allowed it or the delicate balancing act will be spoiled.

Caveat

As I wrote this out I thought, Hang on: surely a vast number of novels have been biographies of fictional people, starting with books like Moll Flanders or Tom Jones. When she says that Nicholson writes with delightful humour well, er, Henry Fielding, let alone Dickens, most of whose early novels purport to be biographies of named people (Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby). Fiction and biography have always been closely aligned, haven’t they? Maybe Nicholson just seemed so new by contrast with the long dark shadows of the vast and pious Victorian biographer? Or maybe what was novel in his work was the pretence that his people were real? To us nowadays what Woolf finds so exciting in this book sounds to us pretty commonplace.

Or maybe what excited her was that she, also, at this very time, was writing a fantasy biography, an experimental biography, an experiment mixing fact and fiction, so it chimed with her own intense interest in this zone. As in her important essays about fiction, she is working through her own ideas in public?

Or that she was having an affair with the author’s wife. The literary world, eh?

2. On Being Ill (1930: 10 pages)

Wikipedia says:

‘On Being Ill’ is an essay by Virginia Woolf, which seeks to establish illness as a serious subject of literature along the lines of love, jealousy and battle. Woolf writes about the isolation, loneliness, and vulnerability that disease may bring and how it can make even the maturest of adults feel like children again. The essay was written in 1925, when she was 42 years old, while she was in bed shortly after experiencing a nervous breakdown.

Like most of Woolf’s essays, its premise, discussion and conclusions feel highly questionable. Take for a start her claim that that no serious writer had previously written about illness. Wikipedia points out that even when she was writing (1930), she had Proust’s extensive descriptions of illness in In Search of Lost Time (1913 to 1927) not to mention Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) set in an Alpine sanatorium, to refer to.

But facts aren’t what Woolf is about, here as in most of her essays. She mainly wants to get on and write, in a heightened poetic style, about the basic conflict between the mind and the body. And so she claims that most literature is about the mind and little attention is given to the demands, especially when ill, of the body. Partly this is due to the poverty of the vocabulary surrounding illness:

The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him.

(Here, as everywhere, see how her mind, when considering almost any aspect of writing, immediately turns to Shakespeare as a reference point, something she does in virtually everything she wrote.)

Also, there’s the slight problem that her description of being ill bears no resemblance to actually being ill. I had flu for a week recently and Woolf’s extended and highly poetic fantasias about illness, fanciful and poetic though they are, bear no relation to the sense of exhaustion and lack of interest in anything at all which I experienced. Hers is a kind of over-literary person’s fantasy of what illness ought to be like.

In fact the whole text is really a fantasia, an imaginative extravaganza, often with no connection to the nominal subject. She describes how lying on a sick bed makes you look up into the sky and describes her impression of watching it for hours (the sky), how it continually changes like a vast open-air cinema. When I was lying sick in bed and looked up, I saw the ceiling.

Overwhelmed, as so often, by the intensity of her own sense impressions, Woolf shifts her attention to something smaller and closer to hand, roses in vases in her room. For some reason, this morphs into a fantasy about the heat death of the solar system, the sun going out and the earth being covered in ice. free-associating, she wonders whether there will be a heaven and immortality, and goes rambling on:

Surely, since men have been wishing all these ages, they will have wished something into existence; there will be some green isle for the mind to rest on even if the foot cannot plant itself there. The co-operative imagination of mankind must have drawn some firm outline.

But no. One opens the Morning Post and reads the Bishop of Lichfield on Heaven. One watches the church-goers file into those gallant temples where, on the bleakest day, in the wettest fields, lamps will be burning, bells will be ringing, and however the autumn leaves may shuffle and the winds sigh outside, hopes and desires will be changed to beliefs and certainties within.

Do they look serene? Are their eyes filled with the light of their supreme conviction? Would one of them dare leap straight into Heaven off Beachy Head? None but a simpleton would ask such questions; the little company of believers lags and drags and strays. The mother is worn; the father tired. As for imagining Heaven, they have no time.

Heaven-making must be left to the imagination of the poets. Without their help we can but trifle—imagine Pepys in Heaven, adumbrate little interviews with celebrated people on tufts of thyme, soon fall into gossip about such of our friends as have stayed in Hell, or, worse still, revert again to earth and choose, since there is no harm in choosing, to live over and over, now as man, now as woman, as sea-captain, or court lady, as Emperor or farmer’s wife, in splendid cities and on remote moors, at the time of Pericles or Arthur, Charlemagne or George the Fourth…

See what I mean by fantasia? There’s no point trying to process or assess this rationally: all you can do is relax and go with the flow of her rather delirious mind…

She eventually veers back into the world of sense when she makes the point that when we’re ill, the rational controlling mind is weakened and so, with your defences turned down, you respond more directly to sense impressions.

In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning, gather instinctively this that, and the other—a sound, a colour, here a stress, there a pause—which the poet, knowing words to be meagre in comparison with ideas, has strewn about his page to evoke…

Incomprehensibility has an enormous power over us in illness… In health, meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers over our senses. But in illness, with the police off duty, we creep beneath some obscure poem by Mallarmé or Donne…

This may or may not be true. When I had flu I was too ill to read anything, to do anything, to care about anything at all, even eating. So this seems to me yet another of her poetic fantasies, it is a bookish account of what being ill ought to be like. And how characteristic that her first example of the conscious mind lowering its guard and being more susceptible, is that it be more susceptible to poetry and the Great Classics of Poetry in particular.

This dogged return of so many essays to her obsession with Poetry made me reflect that, although Woolf’s best novels are really great, in all other respects her imagination was horribly constricted. Essay after essay after essay praises the same handful of Great English Poets and, above all, Shakespeare, again and again and again. It’s like listening to a tame parrot repeat its half dozen catchphrases all day long. And lo and behold, in the very next paragraph, here is the Bard of Avon, yet again.

Rashness is one of the properties of illness—outlaws that we are—and it is rashness that we need in reading Shakespeare. It is not that we should doze in reading him, but that, fully conscious and aware, his fame intimidates and bores, and all the views of all the critics dull in us that thunder-clap of conviction which, if an illusion, is still so helpful an illusion, so prodigious a pleasure, so keen a stimulus in reading the great. Shakespeare is getting flyblown; a paternal government might well forbid writing about him, as they put his monument at Stratford beyond the reach of scribbling fingers. With all this buzz of criticism about, one may hazard one’s conjectures privately, make one’s notes in the margin; but, knowing that someone has said it before, or said it better, the zest is gone. Illness, in its kingly sublimity, sweeps all that aside and leaves nothing but Shakespeare and oneself. What with his overweening power and our overweening arrogance, the barriers go down, the knots run smooth, the brain rings and resounds with Lear or Macbeth…

Is she seriously claiming that being ill helps you read Shakespeare better? This is not a sensible remark because it’s quite the opposite. You need your wits about you when reading such wonderfully complex, multi-levelled works – the multi-levelled complexity of plot, character, psychology and diction are key to the deep sensual but intellectual pleasure Shakespeare gives.

The last few pages of the essay follow through on Woolf’s idea that when you’re ill you’re not up to reading the Great Works of Literature and fancy something lighter. In Woolf’s case this is biography, which she goes out of her way, in essay after essay, to emphasise is not an art on the same level as writing a novel (see ‘The Art of Biography’, below).

At which point the essay takes an unexpected turn to look at a very specific author. The last couple of pages of this little essay stop being about illness at all and turn into praise for the Victorian writer, painter and raconteur, Augustus Hare (1834 to 1903). Specifically, it turns out Woolf is a big fan of Story of Two Noble Lives, Hare’s big biography of two sisters and artists, Countess Canning and the Marchioness of Waterford. Woolf gives us an extended summary of these ladies’ lives, of the extended Victorian families they lived in, of their marriages, children, careers and whatnot and then, after this brisk impressionistic summary of this now-obscure work, her favourite sick-time reading, the essay simply stops, leaving you puzzled and (pleasurably) disorientated.

Thoughts

1) Being ill is nothing like Woolf describes. This is just a literary fantasia.

2) Her obsession with Great English Literature and, above all, with Shakespeare Shakespeare Shakespeare, is enough to make you scream. English literature is huge and varied and strange but hardly any of this comes over from Woolf who makes everything, all English literature, sound like one thing, like the same, high-minded and lyrical seeking after Poetry.

3) It is symptomatic that she ends not with a novel but a biography. Biographies are easy to read, serious novels often very hard. Hence my mild criticism of the way so much of her powerful polemic Three Guineas was based on biography, anecdote and extensive newspaper cuttings rather than serious research into history or sociology. I knew medics and scientists at university who never read novels but loved a good biography. This is because reading a biography is easy, reading the biography of a writer is a lazy copout: at the risk of sounding schoolmasterish, you should always read the original works – because it’s there that the unexpected, the strange and the marvellous reside, not in biographical summaries, no matter how interesting.

4) Ten thousand critics have labelled Woolf a modernist but, in my opinion, underlying the technique of drifting, free-associating consciousness which she developed for her great novels, there actually lurks an extremely conservative, backwards-looking mentality. ‘Poetry, darling, seeking The Truth of Life. Keats and Shelley. And above all, the Master, Shakespeare!’ My reading of her novels and essays is that Woolf wasn’t the first of the moderns, she was the last of the Victorians who carried a kind of purified, quintessential Victorian aestheticism on into the troubled culture of the post-war era.

3. Leslie Stephen, The Philosopher at Home: A Daughter’s Memories (1932: 5 pages)

Woolf’s father was an eminent biographer, who helped found and develop the definitive encyclopedia of biographies of notable British people. He was also a noted essayist. And so she became… a noted essayist with a lifelong fascination in biography. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

This brief text isn’t anything like a biography or an obituary for her famous father. It’s more a eulogy but of a highly personal and limited nature. Woolf’s stock-in-trade wasn’t so much analysis but ‘memories’. Compare and contrast the way the supposed introduction to the book about the English Women’s Co-operative Guild (see my next blog post) is called ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’, and proceeds not by rational argument, not by logical structure, but through the highly personal medium of her own memories, dwelling on her own responses and feelings.

Back to this essay, it’s a relatively brief collection of memories of her famous father:

  • how Leslie Stephen’s adventurous days – as a rower, mountaineer and even author – were over before his children were old enough to know him
  • he liked to go on huge walks across the Cornish moors, rarely speaking more than a few words to anyone who accompanied him
  • he wrote lying almost horizontally in an old rocking chair, picking up and dropping source books as he needed them, with a thump which could be heard downstairs
  • he unconsciously doodled animals in the margins of his books as he read
  • he had a magical ability to make animal shapes out of sheets of plain paper
  • he didn’t speak much but even his briefest remarks were freighted with meaning
  • he disregarded conventional values, frequently embarrassing the family, such as when he wondered aloud whether people who had dropped in for tea were ever going to leave
  • he loved clear thinking and hated sentimentality
  • he hated wars
  • he was paranoid about running out of money and going bankrupt
  • he liked going for brisk walks from the family home at Hyde Park Gate, up to Kensington Gardens and round the Serpentine to the Marble Arch and back
  • his children regularly heard the story about him and his brother encountering Queen Victoria in the Park and bowing low to which the Queen curtseyed, and as a boy once seeing the great Duke of Wellington
  • he smoked a pipe continually
  • he worse clothes till they became shabby
  • like so many industrious Victorians, he hated idleness
  • he didn’t give his daughters higher education but when Vanessa expressed the wish to become a painter he promised to do everything in his power to help her
  • as for Virginia, he gave her free run of his large library when she was just 15 and taught her to be true to her own opinions, to be honest, never to pretend to admire something she didn’t

At the end is a flurry of tributes to him from the writers of his time. Woolf quotes a few lines by Thomas Hardy about Stephen. She quotes the novelist George Meredith saying her father was the only man worthy of her mother (who Meredith knew and admired).

You’ve heard of Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter? Well, this little sliver feels like Woolf’s Memories of a Dutiful Daughter. You’d never know from this pious recital, that she based the character of the occasionally malicious and hurtful Mr Ramsay in To The Lighthouse on her father. Scholars claim that Mr Ramsay is a much more subtle and nuanced depiction of some of her father’s complex and difficult character. By contrast, this reads like the official version.

4. The Art of Biography (1939)

Divided into four sections.

1.

On any given topic Woolf tends to revert to the same handful of ideas. Here she repeats the idea stated in ‘The New Biography’ that it was only in the 18th century that Westerners developed sufficient interest in other people to write really flavoursome biographies, with Boswell’s vast ‘Life of Johnson’ epitomising the new interest, while in the Victorian century biographies grew vast and ponderous and worthy.

Belleletterist writing often proceeds by asking rhetorical questions. Here she asks: Is biography an art? despite being well aware that ‘the question is foolish perhaps.’ In fact it’s such a fatuously pointless question that nobody cares about the answer and Woolf doesn’t answer it.

Instead she moves onto another question: Why do so few biographies endure? Because the novelist is free to write what they want, whereas the biographer is bound by friends and family, by legal restrictions, libel, slander and so on.

The novelist is free; the biographer is tied.

With the result that ‘the art of biography is the most restricted of all the arts.’

2.

She now goes on to discuss the significance of (her friend) Lytton Strachey, author of the volume ‘Eminent Victorians’ (1918), notorious in its day for its warts-and-all portrayal of four Victorian heroes: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Charles Gordon. (Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Leonard Woolf tells me that they weren’t just friends but that the flamboyantly gay Strachey actually proposed to Virginia only to be turned down, a season or so before his Cambridge friend, Leonard Woolf, proposed, and was accepted.)

She knows from personal acquaintance that Strachey wanted to be a writer but lacked the skills required for poetry or plays, whereas in 1918, after the immense disillusionment of the Great War, a new mood was abroad in biography. The plaster saints and stuffed effigies of the Victorian period were ripe for debunking and Strachey found his metier as a debunker and Eminent Victorians was his most famous debunking. That said, the examples Woolf gives of the controversial questions he raised seem ridiculously trivial.

Once more they were the centre of a buzz of discussion. Did Gordon really drink, or was that an invention? Had Florence Nightingale received the Order of Merit in her bedroom or in her sitting room?

Nowadays in our oversexed era, no biography can be published which doesn’t dwell at length on the subject’s sex life, whether they are abused as children or survived all the other horrors life can offer, a melodramatic concern which gave rise a generation ago to the mocking term misery porn. We’ve come a long way from politely wondering if a great military hero might have enjoyed a glass of wine too many.

Anyway, after this early success Strachey went on to write two massive and authoritative biographies of Britain’s queens, Queen Victoria (1921) and Queen Elizabeth I (1928). Woolf has an interesting point to make about these. Basically, the Victoria was a great success (winning prizes) while the Elizabeth was a relative failure. Why? Woolf thinks the answer tells us something about biography ‘as an art’, namely that when he wrote the Victoria he accepted the limitations of biography as a form, its need to stick to verifiable facts, documents, eye witness accounts and so on, and so he worked as a craftsman, assembling his materials. But when he wrote the Elizabeth he got cocky, he tried to make it a work of art, he wanted the book to have more of Woolf’s shibboleth, Poetry, ignored the form’s intrinsic limitations, and failed.

Strachey wanted to invent events and dialogue and motives, specifically in the mysterious relationship between Elizabeth and one of her favourite courtiers, the Earl of Essex. What he found out the hard way is that you can’t add fiction into biography in small doses. To work, fiction must have a free hand to develop character and plot. There was some obscurity in the Elizabeth-Essex relationship but not enough. Just as the fiction was getting going it bumped up against the documents and records we do have which contradicted it, blocked the flow of a narrative. Worse:

By fact in biography we mean facts that can be verified by other people besides the artist. If he invents facts as an artist invents them — facts that no one else can verify — and tries to combine them with facts of the other sort, they destroy each other. (p.120)

(All this prompts the obvious thought that in the 100 years since Strachey’s Elizabeth was published, thousands of writers have managed to write fictional books about historical characters i.e. which blend historical fact with fictional narratives, from Robert Graves to Hilary Mantel, so this last point doesn’t really stand.)

3.

But ‘the facts’ of biography change, they are coloured by changes of opinion by which she means social conventions or beliefs. To demonstrate this she chooses the subject of homosexuality, though she is not allowed to say so.

What was thought a sin is now known, by the light of facts won for us by the psychologists, to be perhaps a misfortune; perhaps a curiosity; perhaps neither one nor the other, but a trifling foible of no great importance one way or the other. The accent on sex has changed within living memory.

Maybe she chooses this particular topic among many other views which shifted with the end of the Victorian era, because Strachey was gay.

Anyway, given these ever-shifting social values, the biographer needs to keep on their toes, alert to the way that so-called biographical ‘facts’ are liable to change completely in a generation. This is why Woolf suggests chucking out the old conventional chapters in a conventional biography and rethinking it as more subtly psychological (like her novels).

Many of the old chapter headings — life at college, marriage, career—are shown to be very arbitrary and artificial distinctions. The real current of the hero’s existence took, very likely, a different course.

4.

Summing up, then, Woolf asserts that it’s exciting times for biographers as biography is poised to take significant new steps forward. But, in line with her obsessive need to rank literary genres, she persists in insisting that biography is an inferior type of writing.

It is a different life from the life of poetry and fiction — a life lived at a lower degree of tension. And for that reason its creations are not destined for the immortality which the artist now and then achieves for his creations. (p.122)

The great characters from fiction last forever. No biographer’s work will last forever. And so she comes round to answering the question she set herself at the start, whether biography is an art. No. No it isn’t.

The artist’s imagination at its most intense fires out what is perishable in fact; he builds with what is durable; but the biographer must accept the perishable, build with it, imbed it in the very fabric of his work. Much will perish; little will live. And thus we come to the conclusion, that he is a craftsman, not an artist; and his work is not a work of art, but something betwixt and between. (p.122)

So Woolf is very tough on biographers, then. According to her they are simply not in the top ranking. Oh well.

But she does throw biographers a consolation prize. This is that the Imagination needs a rest from time to time and biography provides good recreation. Their works make a good playground. A playground where, more importantly, the Creative Writer (the Important Writer, someone like Woolf) may find nuggets of fact, anecdotes or insights:

the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders

which may inspire the superior Creative Writer, which the superior Creative Writer may be able to incorporate into their Work of Art. And so all the biographer’s hard work will have been worthwhile. It would be entertaining to read professional biographer’s responses to this patronising, dismissive point of view.

Credit

‘Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf’ was published by Oxford World Classics in 2008. Most of the essays can be found online. David Bradshaw’s introduction can be read on Amazon.

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Posted by Simon on April 21, 2025

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The New Sobriety: Art and Politics in the Weimar Period 1917-33 by John Willett (1978)

Willett was born in 1917. He attended Winchester public school and then Christ Church, Oxford (the grandest and poshest of all the Oxford colleges). He was just beginning a career in set design when the Second World War came along. He served in British Intelligence. After the war he worked at the Manchester Guardian, before becoming assistant to the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, writing scores of reviews and articles, until he went freelance in 1967.

He had travelled to Germany just before the war and become fascinated by its culture. He met and befriended Bertolt Brecht whose plays he later translated into English. As a freelance writer Willett authored two books about the Weimar period. This is the first of the pair, published by the well-known art publisher Thames and Hudson. Like most T&H art books it has the advantage of lots of illustrations (216 in this case) and the disadvantage that most of them (in this case, all of them) are in black and white.

The New Sobriety is divided into 22 shortish chapters, followed by a 30-page-long, highly detailed Chronological Table, and a shorter bibliography. There’s also a couple of stylish one-page diagrams showing the interconnection of all the arts across Europe during the period.

Several points:

  • Though it has ‘Weimar’ in the title, the text is only partly about the Weimar Republic. It also contains lots about art in revolutionary Russia, as well as Switzerland and France. At this point you realise that the title says the Weimar Period.
  • The period covered is given as starting in 1917, but that’s not strictly true: the early chapters start with Expressionism and Fauvism and Futurism which were all established before 1910, followed by a section dealing with the original Swiss Dada, which started around 1915.

Cool and left wing

The real point to make about this book is that it reflects Willett’s own interest in the avant-garde movements all across Europe of the period, and especially in the politically committed ones. At several points he claims that all the different trends come together into a kind of Gestalt, to form the promise of a new ‘civilisation’.

It was during the second half of the 1920s that the threads which we have followed were drawn together to form something very like a new civilisation… (p.95)

The core of the book is a fantastically detailed account of the cross-fertilisation of trends in fine art, theatre, photography, graphic design, film and architecture between the Soviet Union and Weimar Germany.

In the introduction Willett confesses that he would love to see a really thorough study which related the arts to the main political and philosophical and cultural ideas of the era, but that he personally is not capable of it (p.11). Instead, his book will be:

a largely personal attempt to make sense of those mid-European works of art, in many fields and media, which came into being between the end of the First War and the start of Hitler’s dictatorship in 1933. It is neither an art-historical study of movements and artistic innovations, nor a general cultural history of the Weimar Republic, but a more selective account which picks up on those aspects of the period which the writer feels to be at once the most original and the most clearly interrelated, and tries to see how and why they came about. (p.10)

‘Selective’ and ‘interrelated’ – they’re the key ideas.

When I was a student I loved this book because it opened my eyes to the extraordinary range of new avant-garde movements of the period: Cubism, Futurism, Dada, Constructivism, Bauhaus, De Stijl, and then the burst of new ideas in theatre, graphic design, magazines, poetry and architecture which are still influential to this day.

Although Willett doesn’t come across as particularly left wing himself, the focus on the ‘radical’ innovations of Brecht and Piscator in Germany, or of Proletkult and Agitprop in Soviet Russia, give the whole book a fashionable, cool, left-wing vibe. And if you don’t know much about the period it is an eye-opening experience.

But now, as a middle-aged man, I have all kinds of reservations.

1. Willett’s account is biased and partial

As long as you remember that it is a ‘personal’ view, deliberately bringing together the most avant-garde artists of the time and showing the extraordinary interconnectedness (directors, playwrights, film-makers travelling back and forth between Germany and Russia, bringing with them new books, new magazines, new ideas) it is fine. But it isn’t the whole story. I’m glad I read Walter Laqueur’s account of Weimar culture just before this, because Laqueur’s account is much more complete and more balanced.

For example, Laqueur’s book included a lot about the right-wing thought of the period. It’s not that I’m sympathetic to those beliefs, but that otherwise the rise of Hitler seems inexplicable, like a tsunami coming out of nowhere. Laqueur’s book makes it very clear that all kinds of cultural and intellectual strongholds never ceased to be nationalistic, militaristic, anti-democratic and anti-the Weimar Republic.

Laqueur’s book also plays to my middle-aged and realistic (or tired and jaundiced) opinion that all these fancy left-wing experiments in theatre (in particular), the arty provocations by Dada, the experimental films and so on, were in fact only ever seen by a vanishingly small percentage of the population, and most of them were (ironically) wealthy and bourgeois enough to afford theatre tickets or know about avant-garde art exhibitions.

Laqueur makes the common-sense point that a lot of the books, plays and films which really characterise the period were the popular, accessible works which sold well at the time but have mostly sunk into oblivion. It’s only in retrospect and fired up by the political radicalism of the 1960s, that latterday academics and historians select from the wide range of intellectual and artistic activity of the period those strands which appeal to them in a more modern context.

2. Willett’s modernism versus Art Deco and Surrealism

You realise how selective and partial his point of view is on the rare occasions when the wider world intrudes. Because of Willett’s compelling enthusiasm for ‘the impersonal utilitarian design’ of the Bauhaus or Russian collectivism, because of his praise of Gropius or Le Corbusier, it is easy to forget that all these ideas were in a notable minority during the period.

Thus it came as a genuine shock to me when Willett devotes half a chapter to slagging off Art Deco and Surrealism, because I’d almost forgotten they existed during this period, so narrow is his focus.

It is amusing, and significant, how much he despises both of them. The chapter (18) is called ‘Retrograde symptoms: modishness in France’ and goes on to describe the ‘capitulation and compromise’ of the French avant-garde in the mid-1920s. 1925 in particular was ‘a year of retreat all down the line’, epitomised by the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes exhibition which gave its name to the style of applied arts of the period, Art Deco.

Willett is disgusted that dressmakers sat on the selecting committees ‘alongside obscure establishment architects and rubbishy artists like Jean-Gabriel Domergue’. Not a single German artist or designer was featured (it was a patriotic French affair after all) and Theo van Doesberg’s avant-garde movement, de Stijl, was not even represented in the Dutch stand.

Willet hates all this soft luxury Frenchy stuff, this ‘wishy-washy extremely mondain setting’ which was the milieu of gifted amateurs and dilettantes. It was a hateful commercialisation of cubism and fauvism, it was skin-deep modernism.

What took place here was a diffusing of the modern movement for the benefit not of the less well-off but of the luxury consumer. (p.170)

It’s only because I happen to have recently read Andrew Duncan’s encyclopedic book about Art Deco that I know that there was a vast, a truly huge world of visual arts completely separate from the avant-garde Willett is championing – a world of architects, designers and craftsmen who built buildings, designed the interiors of shops and homes, created fixtures and fittings, lamps and tables and chairs and beds and curtains and wallpapers, all in the luxury, colourful style we now refer to as Art Deco.

Thousands of people bought the stylish originals and millions of people bought the affordable copies of all kinds of objects in this style.

So who is right?

When I was a student I also was on the side of the radical left, excited by Willett’s portrait of a world of hard-headed, functional design in homes and household goods, of agit-prop theatre and experimental film, all designed to mobilise the workers to overthrow the ruling classes and create a perfect world. Indeed the same chapter which dismisses French culture and opens with photos of elegantly-titled French aristocratic connoisseurs and patrons, ends with a photo of a parade by the Communist Roterfront in 1926. That’s the real people, you see, that’s real commitment for you!

But therein lies the rub. The radical, anti-traditionalist, anti-bourgeois, up-the-workers movement in architecture, design, film and theatre which Willett loves did not usher in a new workers’ paradise, a new age of peace and equality – the exact opposite.

The sustained left-wing attacks on the status quo in Germany had the net effect of helping to undermine the Weimar Republic and making the advent of Hitler easier. All the funky film innovations of Eisenstein and the theatrical novelties of Meyerhold failed to create an educated, informed and critical working class in Russia, failed to establish new standards of political and social discourse – instead the extreme cliquishness of its exponents made it all the easier to round them up and control (or just execute) them, as Stalin slowly accumulated power from 1928 onwards.

Older and a bit less naive than I used to be, I am also more relaxed about political ‘commitment’. I have learned what I consider to be the big lesson in life which is that – There are a lot of people in the world. Which means a lot of people who disagree – profoundly and completely disagree – with your own beliefs, ideas and convictions. Disagree with everything you and all your friends and your favourite magazines and newspapers and TV shows and movies think. And that they have as much right to live and think and talk and meet and discuss their stuff, as you do. And so democracy is the permanently messy, impure task of creating a public, political, cultural and artistic space in which all kinds of beliefs and ideas can rub along.

Willett exemplifies what I take to be the central idea of Modernism: that there is only one narrative, one avant-garde, one movement: you have to be on the bus. He identifies his Weimar Germany-Soviet Russia axis as the movement. The French weren’t signed up to it. So he despises the French.

But we now, in 2018, live in a thoroughly post-Modernist world and the best explanation I’ve heard of the difference between modernism and post-modernism is that, in the latter, we no longer believe there is only one narrative, One Movement which you simply must, must, must belong to. There are thousands of movements. There are all types of music, looks, fashions and lifestyles.

Willett’s division of the cultural world of the 1920s into Modernist (his Bauhaus-Constructivist heroes) versus the Rest (wishy-washy, degenerate French fashion) itself seems part of the problem. It’s the same insistence on binary extremes which underlay the mentality of a Hitler or a Stalin (either you are for the Great Leader or against him). And it was the same need to push political opinions and movements to extremes which undermined the centre and led to dictatorship.

By contrast the fashionably arty French world (let alone the philistine, public school world of English culture) was simply more relaxed, less extreme. They had more shopping in them. The Art Deco world which Willett despises was the world of visual and applied art which most people, most shoppers, and most of the rich and the aspiring middle classes would have known about. (And I learned from Duncan’s book that Art Deco really was about shops, about Tiffany’s and Liberty’s and Lalique’s and the design and the shop windows of these top boutiques.)

On the evidence of Laqueur’s account of Weimar culture and Duncan’s account of the Art Deco world, I now see Willett’s world of Bauhaus and Constructivism – which I once considered the be-all and end-all of 1920s art – as only one strand, just one part of a much bigger artistic and decorative universe.

Same goes for Willett’s couple of pages about Surrealism. Boy, he despises those guys. Again it was a bit of a shock to snap out of Willett’s wonderworld of Bauhaus-Constructivism to remember that there was this whole separate and different art movement afoot. Reading Ruth Brandon’s book, Surreal Lives would lead you to believe that it, Surrealism, was the big anti-bourgeois artistic movement of the day. Yet, from Willett’s point of view, focused on the Germany-Russia axis, Surrealism comes over as pitifully superficial froggy play acting.

He says it was unclear throughout the 1920s whether Surrealism even existed outside a handful of books made with ‘automatic writing’. When Hans Arp or Max Ernst went over to the Surrealist camp their work had nothing to tell the German avant-garde. They were German, so it was more a case of the German avant-garde coming to the rescue of a pitifully under-resourced French movement.

There was in fact something slightly factitious about the very idea of Surrealist painting right up to the point when Dali arrived with his distinctively creepy academicism. (p.172)

Surrealism’s moving force, the dominating poet André Breton, is contrasted with Willett’s heroes.

Breton’s romantic irrationalism, his belief in mysterious forces and the quasi-mediumistic use of the imagination could scarcely have been more opposed to the open-eyed utilitarianism of the younger Germans, with their respect for objective facts. (p.172)

I was pleased to read that Willett, like me, finds the Surrealists ‘anti-bourgeois’ antics simply stupid schoolboy posturing.

As for his group’s aggressive public gestures, like Georges Sadoul’s insulting postcard to a Saint-Cyr colonel or the wanton breaking-up of a nightclub that dared to call itself after Les Chants de Maldoror, one of their cult books, these were bound to seem trivial to anyone who had experienced serious political violence. (p.172)

Although the Surrealists bandied around the term ‘revolution’ they didn’t know what it meant, they had no idea what it was like to live through the revolutionary turmoil of Soviet Russia or the troubled years 1918 to 1923 in post-war Germany which saw repeated attempts at communist coups in Munich and Berlin, accompanied by savage street fighting between left and right.

Although the Surrealists pretentiously incorporated the world ‘revolution’ into the title of their magazine, La Révolution surréaliste, none of them knew what a revolution really entailed, and

Breton, Aragon and Eluard remained none the less bourgeois in their life styles and their concern with bella figura. (p.172)

There were no massacres in the streets of comfortable Paris, and certainly nothing to disturb the salon of the Princess Edmond de Polignac, who subsidised the first performance of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex or to upset the Comtesse de Noailles, who commissioned Léger to decorate her villa at Hyères and later underwrote the ‘daring’ Surrealist film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, L’Age d’Or (1930).

In this, as in so many other things, French intellectuals come across as stylish poseurs performing for impeccably aristocratic patrons.

3. Willett’s account is clotted and cluttered

The text is clotted with names, absolutely stuffed. To give two symptoms, each chapter begins with a paragraph-long summary of its content, which is itself often quite exhausting to read; and then the text itself suffers from being rammed full of as many names as Willett can squeeze in.

Almost every sentence has at least one if not more subordinate clauses which add in details about the subject’s other activities, or another organisation they were part of, or a list of other people they were connected to, or examples of other artists doing the same kind of thing.

Here’s a typical chapter summary, of ‘Chapter 16 Theatre for the machine age: Piscator, Brecht, the Bauhaus, agitprop‘:

Middlebrow entertainment and the revaluation of the classics. The challenge of cinema. Piscator’s first political productions and his development of documentary theatre; splitting of the Volksbühne and formation of his own company; his historic productions of 1927-8 with their use of machinery and film. The new dramaturgy and the problem of suitable plays. Brecht’s reflection of technology, notably in Mann ist Mann; his collaboration with Kurt Weill and the success of the Threepenny Opera; epic theatre and the collective approach. Boom of ‘the theatre of the times’ in 1928-9. Experiments at the Bauhaus: Schlemmer, Moholy, Nagy, Gropius’s ‘Totaltheater’ etc;. The Communist agitprop movement. Parallel developments in Russia: Meyerhold, TRAM, Tretiakoff.

Quite tiring to read, isn’t it? And that’s before you get to the actual text itself.

So Eisenstein could legitimately adopt circus techniques, just as Grosz and Mehring could appear in cabaret and Brecht before leaving Munich worked on the stage and film sketches of that great comic Karl Valentin. In 1925 a certain Walter von Hollander proposed what he called ‘education by revue’, the recruiting of writers like Mehring, Tucholsky and Weinert to ‘fill the marvellous revue form with the wit and vigour of our time’. This form was itself a kind of montage, and Reinhardt seems to have planned a ‘Revue for the Ruhr’ to which Brecht would contribute – ‘A workers’ revue’ was the critic Herbert Ihering’s description – while Piscator too hoped to open his first season with his own company in 1927 by a revue drawing on the mixed talents of his new ‘dramaturgical collective’. This scheme came to nothing, though Piscator’s earlier ‘red Revue’ – the Revue roter Rummel of 1924 – became important for the travelling agit-prop groups which various communist bodies now began forming on the model of the Soviet ‘Blue Blouses’. (p.110)

Breathless long sentences packed with names and works ranging across places and people and theatres and countries, all about everything. This is because Willett is at pains to convey his one big idea – the astonishing interconnectedness of the world of the 1920s European avant-garde – at every possible opportunity, and so embodies it in the chapter summaries, in his diagrams of interconnectedness, extending it even down to the level of individual sentences.

The tendency to prose overstuffed with facts is not helped by another key aspect of the subject matter which was the proliferation of acronyms and initialisms. For example the tendency of left-wing organisations to endlessly fragment and reorganise, especially in Russia where, as revolutionary excitement slowly morphed into totalitarian bureaucracy, there was no stopping the endless setting up of organisations and departments.

Becher, Anor Gabór and the Young Communist functionary Alfred Kurella, who that autumn [of 1927] were part of a delegation to the tenth anniversary celebrations [of the October Revolution] in Moscow, also attended the IBRL’s foundation meeting and undertook to form a German section of the body. Simultaneously some of the surviving adherents of the earlier Red Group decided to set up a sister organisation which would correspond to the Association of Artists of the Russian Revolution, an essentially academic body now posing as Proletarian. Both plans materialised in the following year, when the new German Revolutionary Artists Association (or ARBKD) was founded in March and the Proletarian-Revolutionary Writers’ League (BPRS) in October. (p.173)

Every paragraph is like that.

4. Very historical

Willett’s approach is very historical. As a student I found it thrilling the way he relates the evolving ideas of his galaxy of avant-garde writers, artists and architects – Grosz and Dix, Gropius and Le Corbusier, Moholy-Nagy and Meyerhold, Rodchenko and Eistenstein, Piscator and Brecht – to the fast-changing political situations in Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia, which, being equally ignorant of, I also found a revelation.

Now, more familiar with this sorry history, I found the book a little obviously chronological. Thus:

  • Chapter six – Revolution and the arts: Germany 1918-20, from Arbeitsrat to Dada
  • Chapter seven – Paris postwar: Dada, Les Six, the Swedish ballet, Le Corbusier
  • Chapter eight – The crucial period 1921-3; international relations and development of the media; Lenin and the New Economic Policy; Stresemann and German stabilisation

It proceeds with very much the straightforward chronology of a school textbook.

5. Not very analytical

The helter-skelter of fraught political developments in both countries – the long lists of names, their interconnections emphasised at every opportunity – these give a tremendous sense of excitement to his account, a sense that scores of exciting artists were involved in all these fast-moving and radically experimental movements.

But, at the end of the day, I didn’t come away with any new ideas or sense of enlightenment. All the avant-garde artists he describes were responding to two basic impulses:

  1. The advent of the Machine Age (meaning gramophone, cars, airplanes, cruise ships, portable cameras, film) which prompted experiments in all the new media and the sense that all previous art was redundant.
  2. The Bolshevik Revolution – which inspired far-left opinions among the artists he deals with and inspired, most obviously, the agitprop experiments in Russia and Piscator and Brecht’s experiments in Germany – theatre in the round, with few if any props, the projection onto the walls of moving pictures or graphs or newspaper headlines – all designed to make the audience think (i.e. agree with the playwright and the director’s communist views).

But we sort of know about these already. From Peter Gay’s book, and then even more so Walter Laqueur’s book, I came away with a strong sense of the achievement and importance of particular individuals, and their distinctive ideas. Thomas Mann emerges as the representative novelist of the period and Laqueur’s book gives you a sense of the development of his political or social thought (the way he slowly came round to support the Republic) and of his works, especially the complex of currents found in his masterpiece, The Magic Mountain.

Willett just doesn’t give himself the space or time to do that. In the relentless blizzard of lists and connections only relatively superficial aspects of the countless works referenced are ever mentioned. Thus Piscator’s main theatrical innovation was to project moving pictures, graphs and statistics onto the backdrops of the stage, accompanying or counter-pointing the action. That’s it. We nowhere get a sense of the specific images or facts used in any one production, rather a quick list of the productions, of the involvement of Brecht or whoever in the writing, of Weill or Eisler in the music, before Willett is off comparing it with similar productions by Meyerhold in Moscow. Always he is hurrying off to make comparisons and links.

Thus there is:

6. Very little analysis of specific works

I think the book would have benefited from slowing down and studying half a dozen key works in a little more detail. Given the funky design of the book into pages with double columns of text, with each chapter introduced by a functionalist summary in bold black type, it wouldn’t have been going much further to insert page-long special features on, say, The Threepenny Opera (1928) or Le Corbusier’s Weissenhof Estate housing in Stuttgart (1927).

Just some concrete examples of what the style was about, how it worked, and what kind of legacy it left would have significantly lifted the book and left the reader with concrete, specific instances. As it is the blizzard of names, acronyms and historical events is overwhelming and, ultimately, numbing.

The Wall Street Crash leads to the end of the Weimar experiment

In the last chapters Willett, as per his basic chronological structure, deals with the end of the Weimar Republic.

America started it, by having the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. American banks were plunged into crisis and clawed back all their outstanding loans in order to stay solvent. Businesses all across America went bankrupt, but America had also been the main lender to the German government during the reconstruction years after the War.

It had been an American, Charles G. Dawes, who chaired the committee which came up with the Dawes Plan of 1924. This arranged for loans to be made to the German government, which it would invest to boost industry, which would increase the tax revenue, which it would then use to pay off the punishing reparations which France demanded at the end of the war. And these reparations France would use to pay off the large debts to America which France had incurred during the war.

It was the guarantee of American money which stabilised the German currency after the hyper-inflation crisis of 1923, and enabled the five years of economic and social stability which followed, 1924-29, the high point for Willett of the Republic’s artistic and cultural output. All funded, let it be remembered, by capitalist America’s money.

The Wall Street Crash ended that. American banks demanded their loans back. German industry collapsed. Unemployment shot up from a few hundred thousand to six million at the point where Hitler took power. Six million! People voted, logically enough, for the man who promised economic and national salvation.

In this respect, the failure of American capitalism, which the crash represented, directly led to the rise of Hitler, to the Second World War, to the invasion of Russia, the partition of Europe and the Cold War. No Wall Street Crash, none of that would have happened.

A closed worldview leads to failure

Anyway, given that all this is relatively well known (it was all taught to my kids for their history GCSEs) what Willett’s account brings out is the short-sighted stupidity of the Communist Party of Germany and their Soviet masters.

Right up till the end of the Weimar Republic, the Communists (the KPD) refused to co-operate with the more centrist socialists (the SPD) in forming a government, and often campaigned against them. Willett quotes a contemporary communist paper saying an SPD government and a disunited working class would be a vastly worse evil than a fascist government and a unified working class. Well, they got the fascist government they hoped for.

In fact, the communists wanted a Big Crisis to come because they were convinced that it would bring about the German Revolution (which would itself trigger revolution across Europe and the triumph of communism).

How could they have been so stupid?

Because they lived in a bubble of self-reaffirming views. I thought this passage was eerily relevant to discussions today about people’s use of the internet, about modern digital citizens tending to select the news media, journalism and art and movies and so on, which reinforce their views and convince them that everyone thinks like them.

To some extent the extreme unreality of this attitude, with its deceptive aura of do-or-die militancy, sprang from the old left-wing tendency to underrate the non-urban population, which is where the Nazis had so much of their strength. At the same time it reflects a certain social and cultural isolation which sprang from the KPD’s own successes. For the German Communists lived in a world of their own, where the party catered for every interest. Once committed to the movement you not only read AIZ and the party political press: your literary tastes were catered for by the Büchergilde Gutenberg and the Malik-Verlag and corrected by Die Linkskurve; your entertainment was provided by Piscator’s and other collectives, by the agitprop groups, the Soviet cinema, the Lehrstück and the music of Eisler and Weill; your ideology was formed by Radványi’s MASch or Marxist Workers’ School; your visual standards by Grosz and Kollwitz and the CIAM; your view of Russia by the IAH. If you were a photographer, you joined a Workers-Photographers’ group; if a sportsman, some kind of Workers’ Sports Association; whatever your special interests Münzenberg [the German communist publisher and propagandist] had a journal for you. You followed the same issues, you lobbied for the same causes. (p.204)

And you failed. Your cause failed and everyone you knew was arrested, murdered or fled abroad.

A worldview which is based on a self-confirming bubble of like-minded information is proto-totalitarian, inevitably seeks to ban or suppress any opposing points of view, and is doomed to fail in an ever-changing world where people with views unlike yours outnumber you.

A democratic culture is one where people acknowledge the utter difference of other people’s views, no matter how vile and distasteful, and commit to argument, debate and so on, but also to conceding the point where the opponents are, quite simply, in the majority. You can’t always win, no matter how God-given you think your views of the world. But you can’t even hope to win unless you concede that your opponents are people, too, with deeply held views. Just calling them ‘social-fascists’ (as the KPD called the SPD) or ‘racists’ or ‘sexists’ (as bienpensant liberals call anyone who opposes them today) won’t change anything. You don’t stand a chance of prevailing unless you listen to, learn from, and sympathise with, the beliefs of people you profoundly oppose.

A third of the German population voted for Hitler in 1932 and the majority switched to Führer worship once he came to power. The avant-garde artists Willett catalogues in such mind-numbing profusion pioneered techniques of design and architecture, theatre production and photography, which still seem astonishingly modern to us today. But theirs was an entirely urban movement created among a hard core of like-minded bohemians. They didn’t even reach out to university students (as Laqueur’s chapter on universities makes abundantly clear), let alone the majority of Germany’s population, which didn’t live in fashionable cities.

Over the three days it took to read this book, I’ve also read newspapers packed with stories about Donald Trump and listened to radio features about Trump’s first year in office, so it’s been difficult not to draw the obvious comparisons between Willett’s right-thinking urban artists who failed to stop Hitler and the American urban liberals who failed to stop Trump.

American liberals – middle class, mainly confined to the big cities, convinced of the rightness of their virtuous views on sexism and racism – snobbishly dismissing Trump as a flashy businessman with a weird haircut who never got a degree, throwing up their hands in horror at his racist, sexist remarks. And utterly failing to realise that these were all precisely the tokens which made him appeal to non-urban, non-university-educated, non-middle class, and economically suffering, small-town populations.

Also, as in Weimar, the left devoted so much energy to tearing itself apart – Hillary versus Sanders – that it only woke up to the threat from the right-wing contender too late.

Ditto Brexit in Britain. The liberal elite (Guardian, BBC) based in London just couldn’t believe it could happen, led as it was by obvious buffoons like Farage and Johnson, people who make ‘racist’, ‘sexist’ comments and so, therefore, obviously didn’t count and shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Because only people who talk like us, think like us, are politically correct like us, can possibly count or matter.

Well, they were proved wrong. In a democracy everyone’s vote counts as precisely ‘1’, no matter whether they’re a professor of gender studies at Cambridge (which had the highest Remain vote) or a drug dealer in Middlesborough (which had the highest Leave vote).

Dismissing Farage and Johnson as idiots, and anyone who voted Leave as a racist, was simply a way of avoiding looking into and trying to address the profound social and economic issues which drove the vote.

Well, the extremely clever sophisticates of Berlin also thought Hitler was a provincial bumpkin, a ludicrous loudmouth spouting absurd opinions about Jews which no sensible person could believe, who didn’t stand a chance of gaining power. And by focusing on the (ridiculous little) man they consistently failed to address the vast economic and social crisis which underpinned his support and brought him to power. Ditto Trump. Ditto Brexit.

Some optimists believe the reason for studying history is so we can learn from it. But my impression is that the key lesson of history is that – people never learn from history.

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Posted by Simon on January 27, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/01/27/the-new-sobriety-art-politics-weimar-republic-john-willett/

Weimar Culture by Peter Gay (1968)

The complex of feelings and responses I have called ‘the hunger for wholeness’ turns out on examination to be a great regression born of fear: fear of modernity. The abstractions that Tönnies and Hofmannsthal and the others manipulated – Volk, Führer, Organismus, Reich, Entscheidung, Gemeinschaft – reveal a desperate search for roots and for community, a vehement, often vicious repudiation of reason accompanied by the urge for direct action or for surrender to a charismatic leader. (Weimar Culture p.100)

It took me a while to figure out what this book was for, what it’s about. I had to read the first half twice before the penny dropped.

It’s a relatively short book, 150 pages in the old Pelican paperback edition which I’ve got, and is divided into six chapters, with a 20-page historical overview at the end. The need for this appendix highlights the main thing about the text: it is emphatically not a history of the Weimar Republic. It is not even, despite the title, a history of Weimar culture. It is a series of six essays showing how certain highly specific, and limited, aspects of Weimar culture helped to fatally undermine it.

The chapters are:

  1. The Trauma of Birth: from Weimar to Weimar
  2. The Community of Reason: Conciliators and Critics
  3. The Secret Germany: Poetry as Power
  4. The Hunger for Wholeness: Trials of Modernity
  5. The Revolt of the Son: Expressionist Years
  6. The Revenge of the Father: Rise and Fall of Objectivity

Analysis of chapter 2

To take a sample chapter, the ‘Community of Reason’ chapter is not about intellectual life as a whole in the Weimar republic: it focuses on the founding of several important institutes outside the established universities, including the German Academy for Politics (1920), the Warburg Institute (1921), The Institute for Social Research (1923) and the Psychoanalytic Institute in Berlin (1910). (Gay has a special interest in psychoanalysis and is the author of a major biography of Sigmund Freud.)

The stories behind each of these organisations is fairly interesting, in a gossipy sort of way (Warburg was a borderline psychotic, apparently), but it’s only at the end of the chapter that Gay makes his point, which is that – although these are the bodies which went into exile when the Nazis came to power and therefore had a large influence abroad – at home they were relatively little known and had little or no impact.

This point only really becomes obvious in the last few pages where he contrasts the modernising innovativeness of this handful of institutes with the prevailing worldview of most academics and further education institutions in the Weimar republic, which were incredibly conservative and close-minded. We tend to think of students as fairly radical and subversive. Not in Weimar Germany, apparently.

Gay describes a widespread phenomenon known as Vernunftrepublikaners or ‘rational republicans’. This was the label given to intellectuals who only reluctantly gave assent to the establishment of the Weimar Republic, who supported it with their heads, while their hearts and souls continued to lie elsewhere.

So the ‘Community of Reason’ chapter amounts to a gossipy surf through the sector, with a conclusion that the most interesting thinkers in this area were ineffectual or irrelevant, while the majority of academics and students remained resolutely against the new liberal government.

Analysis of chapter 3

The same sort of structure is used for chapter three, ‘The Secret Germany: Poetry as Power’.

This takes the form of a sequence of shortish sections each describing a German poet who lived during – or was revived during – the Weimar period, being: Stefan George (1868-1933), Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), the Romantic poet Hölderlin (1770-1840), Kleist (1777-1811) and the playwright Büchner (1813-1827).

The pen portraits of each writer read much like the short introductory essays you used to get in old-fashioned student introductions to literature, books with titles like ‘An introduction to German poetry’ – short intros with a smattering of biographical facts, some generalisations about the work of their circle (the George circle seems to have been a particular phenomenon of Weimar). But Gay doesn’t actually quote or analyse any of their poetry, so you are left none the wiser about their abilities or styles.

Again it is only at the end of the chapter that we come to the point: all these writers were emphatically anti-rational, their writings over and over emphasising the importance of spirit and sensibility, community and authenticity – in both the writers and the style of their critics and readers.

Rilke became the dubious beneficiary of German literary criticism, a kind of writing that was less a criticism than a celebration, intuitive in method and overblown in rhetoric, a making and staking of grandiose claims, a kind of writing mired in sensibility and pseudo-philosophical mystery-making. (p.54)

Gay finds in the popularity of living poets like Rilke and George, and in the revivals of Hölderlin and Kleist, a morbid obsession with death, unreason, an ‘exaltation of irrationality, a blissful death wish’ (p.66). The blurring of the dividing lines between passion and religion led to ‘shapeless but impassioned religiosity’. It fatally led to poets being placed above thinkers or, as in Heidegger’s case, thinking itself becoming a kind of poetry, a kind of rousing rhetoric. Obscure but impassioned, it paved the way for fanatic barbarism.

It was only by reading the opening chapters twice that I realised Gay’s intention is not at all to give a panoramic overview of Weimar culture. It is not even to explore particular sectors, like poetry or film. It is to build up a collective indictment of the way leading intellectuals, institutions, writers and poets, historians and philosophers, refused to embrace the values of modern urban democracy – and so paved the way for Nazism.

Martin Heidegger

Take the notorious Martin Heidegger, notorious because he was both one of the seismic philosophical presences of the century, and because he undoubtedly gave help and support to the Nazis. Difficult and obscure though his work is (and he wrote it using words and terminology which he invented solely for the purpose) its central themes are comprehensible enough: rejection of the city, of urban life, of business, of politics, of democracy. Embrace of primitive being, primal existence, preference for living (as Heidegger did) a primitive existence in a retired rural area, wearing peasant costume, thinking weighty troubled thoughts.

Gay gives a pen portrait of Heidegger not to offer any analysis of his work or importance as a philosopher, but to show that a direct line links him with the anti-Enlightenment Romanticism of Holderlin; to show how deep and powerful the anti-modern, anti-democratic spirit was in German cultural life.

As a tiny symptom of this prevailing mood Gay points out that the Nazi Party was, of course, a political party, but it always referred to itself as a movement, a mass movement of spiritual and cultural regeneration and purification. Something above party and politics.

And this rhetoric fell right into line with the rhetorics of poets like Hölderlin and philosophers like Heidegger.

What Heidegger did was to give philosophical seriousness, professorial respectability, to the love affair with unreason and death that dominated so many Germans in this hard time. (p.85)

Summary

So: I thought this book would be an introduction to the cultural life of the Weimar Republic, but it really, really isn’t. Much the reverse: Gay shows how intellectual trends like a yearning for the order and hierarchy of the old Empire, combined with a widespread revulsion against modern urban life, and the cult of nature, primitivism, the rejection of the intellect and worship of ‘authenticity’, ‘depth’ and rhetorical power – how all this created an intellectual and cultural environment which was tailor-made for the advent of Hitler, with his appeal to people’s deeper, more ‘authentic’ emotions, his dismissal of foreign democracy and decadent cosmopolitanism, his appeal to the ‘true’ German spirit, founded in blood and suffering – his demand for unquestioning devotion.

And the remaining chapters ram this message home.

There is a long section about German historians of the 1920s (of pretty limited interest to anyone who isn’t themselves a professional historian) which indicts them for tending to glorify great Leaders of the past (Frederick the Great) as embodying German values of Kultur, an idea which German intellectuals considered superior to the decadent tinsel of Paris culture, and to Britain’s shopkeeper mentality.

The Weimar years saw the tremendous growth of the ‘Wandervogel’, community groups for the young which promoted outdoor activities and folk culture. Although some were supposedly socialist, Gay emphasises that their politics was shallow: it was a great surf of emotional enthusiasm looking for a direction, for a Leader.

Later chapters deal, in the same brief manner, with a number of other cultural peaks. The famous film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, is taken as typical of the confusion of aims and objectives common among Expressionist artists and film-makers. They too wanted a return to nature, a breakthrough to a more spiritual world – and yet they specialised in conveying confusion, fear, ugliness and extreme emotions. These weren’t attitudes suited to the calm, business-like give and take of democratic politics.

Gay has a longish discussion of Thomas Mann’s most famous novel, The Magic Mountain, whose main thrust seems to be that the novel is a working-through of Mann’s conflicted emotions about culture and democracy. The characters of the novel, living high in an Alpine sanatorium for patients with tuberculosis, on the face of it want to recover and live — but there is a tugging undercurrent romanticising death, with characters romantically attracted to extinction, to vaporous fantasies about ceasing upon the midnight with no pain. Even for so sensible a figure as Mann, death is just so much more glamorous and interesting than humdrum existence.

In fact, Mann is taken as a paradigm of Weimar attitudes: he had written patriotic gush when Germany had entered the Great War, had slowly become disillusioned as the war ground on, had been one of the early ‘rational republicans’ giving reluctant support to the Republic and, by the end of the 20s, had come to appreciate its virtues and to be an active supporter of democracy.

But it was too little, too late. Gay shows how outnumbered he was.

Gay’s thesis

In each chapter, in each movement and sector he looks at, Gay discerns the same underlying pattern: worship or glorification of the irrational, savage criticism of urban life, of business, of politics. Grosz et al tend to be admired nowadays for their scathing satires on political corruption. Gay interprets them as banging another nail in the coffin, with their communist, anti-republican propaganda.

For a democracy to work a culture must believe in it, must want it. It must have enough functioning civil servants and politicians who believe in its structures and institutions, who support its values and ideas, to keep it working.

Gay singles out the second-phase Bauhaus under the influence of László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers from about 1925 onwards, determined to work with modern materials and confront modern design challenges, as an epitome of what should have been happening.

What Gropius taught, and what most Germans did not want to learn, was the lesson of Bacon and Descartes and the Enlightenment: that one must confront the world and dominate it, that the cure for the ills of modernity is more, and the right kind of modernity. (p.106)

But Gropius was opposed, even within his own school, by more radical voices, communists who wanted to overthrow the existing system. Meanwhile from the outside, the Bauhaus faced right-wing nationalist opposition throughout its existence and was, finally, closed down by the Nazis soon after they came to power.

Gay’s book shows how, from top to bottom, from university historians to avant-garde film-makers and artists, from arcane philosophers to youth movements, from its architects to many of its leading politicians, the majority of the Weimar Republic’s intellectuals despised it, hated its ‘shallow’ urban values, despised the business-like compromises and deals which democracy requires.

Being passionate artists or historians entranced with Germany’s military past or philosophers of ‘Authenticity’, they preferred passion, blood, Kultur, das Volk, intuition… almost anything except reason and moderation.

Basically, the book could have been better titled The Weimar Republic and its Enemies. Or maybe The Weimar Republic: The Enemies Within. Or The Intellectual Malaise of the Weimar Republic.

After Hitler came to power it was common for foreigners to say, ‘How can Hitler and his gang of thugs have taken over the country of Bach and Mozart?’

Gay’s book goes to show how little the people who said that understood the Germany of the 1920s and 30s. His book explains the failure of intellectuals not so much to oppose Hitler (there were plenty of communist intellectuals who wrote, painted or acted against Hitler) but to do the more practical and needful thing – to actively support the Weimar democracy.

His book shows how the lack of support, indeed the widespread lack of understanding of what is required for a functioning democracy, goes a long way to explaining why the Weimar republic collapsed: not enough influential people believed in it or wanted it. They didn’t necessarily support Hitler but – on the evidence Gay presents here – for all sorts of reasons, they actively opposed the republic and the spirit of modern, secular, urban democracy which it represented.

Gay’s authority

And Gay speaks with more than academic authority. Peter Joachim Fröhlich was born in Berlin in 1923, at the height of the hyper-inflation which racked the Weimar Republic in that year. In 1941 he emigrated to America where he changed his surname to Gay, a close translation of Fröhlich which means ‘cheerfully’.

Gay studied history at the university of Denver, gained a PhD at Columbia, and then taught at Yale University from 1969 until his retirement in 1993. He wrote 25 history books, several of them becoming bestsellers, including a massive biography of Sigmund Freud (1988), and this study of Weimar culture.

So Gay was German, his friends and family were German. He was an impressionable teenager in the world he’s describing, and he mentions that some of his conclusions are drawn from direct conversations with key players in Weimar – Hannah Arendt (formidable intellect in her own right and one-time partner of Martin Heidegger), Walter Gropius, first director of the Bauhaus, and so on.

Reading through Gay’s systematic indictment of the leading minds of the Weimar Republic, marvelling at all the ways that German intellectuals failed to support, or actively undermined, their nation’s first attempt at democracy, tends to:

  1. profoundly worry you about the German national character
  2. make you distrust carping, sneering, ‘subversive’ public intellectuals even more than you already did

As I read the very last page with its poetic oration for the exiles forced to flee the advent of Hitler, I had a thought which Gay doesn’t mention. Maybe all the famous exiles from Hitler’s Germany, from Einstein to Brecht, from Schoenberg to Koestler, from Kurt Weill to Billy Wilder – if, as Gay suggests, they simply weren’t capable of supporting a sensible modern culture, well then maybe they could only thrive abroad in the stable environment provided by capitalist, democratic America. They were quite literally not capable of running a country of their own.

Related reviews

The Weimar Republic – Art exhibitions

The Weimar Republic – Cultural history

German history

20th century German literature

3 Comments
by Simon on January 22, 2018  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Books, European History, History
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Posted by Simon on January 22, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/weimar-culture-peter-gay/