Sorin Vasilescu
The Totalitarian Architecture
Sorin Vasilescu
“The totalitarianism is an invisible structure, made of human anatomic elements, alive but rigid, each endowed with a function, with a role and a task; this huge collective organization makes possible a gigantic work profitability and the achievement of magnificent projects”.
Lewis Mumford
The concept of totalitarianism belongs to Mussolini who, in 1925 has begun to speak about the “totalitarian will” of the revolutionary Fascism. The philosopher Gentile has taken over the term, giving it a new significance, related to “The State” that, unlike the one of the bourgeois democracies, is not subject to “become estranged” from society. The dual significance of the Mussolini’s revolutionary totalitarianism and Gentile’s philosophic “state” concept has been taken over and adapted by Germans. Ernst Jünger, as well as Mussolini, has given this concept a dynamic significance, speaking of the “total war and total call to arms”, while the most well known German law theorist, Carl Schmidt, has developed this concept in a gentilian spiritualism by defining the fundamental political relationships between “friends and foes”, in which he inserts, as a historical antithesis to liberal State pluralism, the notion of “total identity between state and society”. The English - Saxon world, following the German - Soviet pact Ribbentrop-Molotov, has included bolshevism in the concept of totalitarianism.
There was made constantly and without any scientific base, a comparison which went to identify, to merge totalitarianism and Fascism. From the very beginning, both notions define a phenomenon which is negatively judged. It is almost impossible to treat them as neutral utilitarian instruments, lacking any political allusions. The great disputes associated with these two notions prove how closely history, politics and vocabulary are tight together and how difficult it is to give them a precise definition. In addition, the distinction between concept and theory is often extremely obscure. If by “theory” we understand a whole of statements linked together by induction and deduction relationships which have an explanatory ability and by “concept” there can be seen an abstract linguistic approach which does not have an independent status and which does not offer systematic explanations, if we speak of totalitarianism, we can do so only of a totalitarianism concept, as Friedrich does, and not of a genuine totalitarianism theory.
The concepts of totalitarianism and Fascism do not designate different regimes only, but also different “generic types”, as Ian Kershaw sustains. Only a comparative approach of the problem could clear up a lot of the two concepts” ambiguities, by defining a “model” of totalitarianism and the relationships between “source and influences”, between the fascist movements and the institutions of power. Basically, there are two ways of defining the general totalitarianism concept, which, until the other day seemed to be irreconcilable. The first way is the “left wing” approach, which derives from Marxism.
The Marxist analysts were starting from so called “scientific” theoretical premises, only that their application into theory was based upon an ambiguous concept definition and often, upon a near-tautology. The core of this position consists in supporting the thesis regarding the fact that right-wing dictatorships are “fundamentally different” from the left- wing ones, and the Communist terror is positive, being “oriented to society’s complete and radical transforming”, as the fascist and Nazi terror is negative, ignoring a priori the fact that both Fascism and Nazism were following the exact same goal: society’s total restructuring. “Not only have we chopped off heads, but we have also educated them”, Lenin cynically stated in 1920, talking to Klara Zetkin.
The second thesis, brought up lately also in the countries of the late “Socialist camp”, sustains the exact opposite, meaning that the right-wing totalitarianism is “fundamentally identical” to the left-wing one. The Marxist thesis concerning the fact that the Fascist and the Nazi totalitarianism has an inhuman and negative axiomatic substratum, while the left-wing totalitarianism also has an axiomatic “human and positive” substratum, cannot be convincing, because its argumentation is based, as Adam says, upon “a deduction made starting from future (which cannot be verified and distorted) and by projecting everything onto the present there results a logically unacceptable procedure”.
This would presume that form and contents can be dissociated, fact not accepted by the very materialist dialectics.
Totalitarianism may be also defined as a mutation pushed to the pathological limits, supervened at the reciprocal bi-univocal relationship between state and power, which leads to elimination of “individual” notion and replaces it with “masses”.
The masses are plebiscitary gathered around the sublimed state form which is the party, at its turn sublimed as the “leader”. The individual, arithmetically multiplied as masses, totally refuses any different forms of existence (material or spiritual) apart from those set and institutionalized by the regime, by politicizing all the aspects of social and spiritual existence. The masses become the atoms which gravitate around a unique nucleus formed by the Party - State - Leader triad.
One of the most valid definitions of totalitarianism is given by Lewis Mumford who, in his book The Myth of the Machine, states that totalitarianism is an “invisible structure, made of human anatomic elements, alive but rigid, each endowed with a function, with a role and a task; this huge collective organization makes possible a gigantic work profitability and the achievement of magnificent projects”.
In the totalitarian systemic world, art and especially architecture have as their main purpose the transformation of the arid and bare, prime matter which is the ideology into a restructured image repertoire which has to be able to generate myths destined to the society which it is to be understood as an abstract nucleuses entity formed by even more abstract atoms: people.
The illusory “new man” - the Fascist man, the Soviet man, the Nazi man - endowed with its own psychology, with new morals and ethics which are ideologically shaped, acting upon a program, was the unfulfilled ideal of Italian, Soviet or German totalitarianism. The new man of totalitarianism does not have to be merely the devoted and faithful Fascist, Communist or Nazi, but to own naturally the structural quality to be unable to consciously distinguish right from wrong, false from truth, reality from fiction. The new man has to own a new language by which he can talk not in order to say something in particular, but to achieve something precise. The new man’s
Turmbau der “Hohen Schule” der NSDAP am Chiemsee. Arh. Herman Giesler
semantics does not invent new concepts, but it gives back, as Hannah Arendt says, “ the original meaning to the words distorted for centuries by the capitalist and bourgeois society”.
Regarding the “new man”, Nikolai Buharin, who considered that notions as “people, freedom, welfare”, are nothing but empty, demagogic words with no real base, stated that “It is essential for us that all “intelligence” has a strict ideological formation. Yes, we shall produce intellectuals as rolling band products”.
Mussolini, due to his futurist structure, has considered the “new man concept” as a basic element of the fascist doctrine. Goebbels, who had an expressionist style, made prophecies regarding the imminent birth of the new man and Hitler stated that National-Socialism is “more than a religion, it is the wish to recreate the human species”. For the Soviet totalitarian world, the new man represented “the most important product of all times”.
One of the invariables in totalitarianism was the constant and systematic hate against religion in general and against Christianity in particular, although Berdiaev, the great philosopher exiled by Lenin, has noted the mystic character of totalitarianism, considering Bolshevism as a “distorted, upside down application of the Russian soul”, and the Bolsheviks as a “religious atheist sect which has grabbed the power”.
The Soviets had, despite their virulent anti-religious propaganda, the most mystic conception of the Party, the infallible Party: “At last, the Party is always right, because the Party is the only historical instrument given to the proletariat in order to solve its fundamental problems… because history did not create another way to understand what is right” (Trotsky: Stalinism, London 1982).
For the atheist Mussolini as well, who has signed with the Vatican a Concordat which is still valid, a fundamental document which totally separates the Church from the state, the Fascism, although it was considered a transitory moment in history, was bearing a certain mystic and religious structure and the cult to the country was transforming into the cult for Il Duce, which had a quasi religious nature, his thoughts, acts and image being sacred.
From the Nazi point of view, Hitler stated that “the humanism, the intangible principle of Christianity, manipulated for almost 2000 years, has become a dogma drifting away from reality. On the opposite, the National-Socialism, if it wants to reach its goals, has to let itself to be led by the most recent scientific research data…The Christian dogma is falling apart when confronted to technical progress. Myths are falling down one after another. All that is left to do is to prove that in nature there are no borders between organic and inorganic. When the understanding of the Universe shall be widely spread out, when the majority of people will know that stars are not sources of light but worlds maybe inhabited as our world is, then the Christian dogma will appear as absurd… The man who lives in union with nature is necessarily opposed to church and that is why churches are headed to destruction, because eventually science will win” (Hitler: Opinions upon war and peace, November 11th 1941).
Another invariable of totalitarianism is the concept of “masses”. In all regimes, as if not to contradict the term of “regime”, the post revolutionary period materializes a new myth, “the festive myth”, turned into mass rituals, which makes easy the passage from every day life to the sacred, causing profound mutations at the level of conscience and rational dialectics.
In the “totalitarian” world the masses are “eaten up” by space, giving to the individual the state and feeling of total integration in the masses which become the only dominating element capable of conferring a dimension to the recently achieved power. The individual sublimes into the masses, which are not to be confronted but to a single character which at the masses” scale becomes their only expression. This element of counter-weight might be identified only with Il Duce, the Führer or the leader of the unique party.
The Totalitarian Art
The origin and the goals of art in the totalitarian world are very clearly defined. The origin is definitely and necessarily the revolution. The goal of the totalitarian art may be synthetically deducted by Filonov’s phrase, in 1919: “We must organize art and make it, as the heavy industry and the Red Army, an efficient instrument serving a total state project”. Due to multiple causes, which have a more political than scientific substratum, when one analyzes the culture of a totalitarian state, there is the tendency to deny a priori the existence of a “totalitarian cultural phenomenon”. This position is motivated by considering as extra cultural elements the fact that the ideology generates themes and these themes give birth to a certain style.
The style is the one which makes totalitarianism, no matter if it is Italian, German or Soviet, to generate an art structurally different from the one of the bourgeois culture. Any comparisons to similar moments existing in the “democratic” cultures, any formal resemblance, are ignoring that major point and motivating that, after all, the Neo-Classicism which seems to be the main characteristic of totalitarian architecture has violently swept across the principal exponents of the Occidental democracies, it is ignored that there exists Neo-Classicism and other ways of Neo-Classicism. This means that there are no terms of comparison between an architecture created with elements of a speech which had a total coherence at its time and an architecture which clears the Neo-Classicism out of its every “ideological” contents and fills in the void with a new ideology, new themes and new style. This is the case of the Nazi and Stalinist architecture. The Italian fascist architecture operates with an other values, which have other significance. The Italian architecture did not appealed to Neo-Classicism in order to fulfil itself as a totalitarian architecture, but it has tried, within a certain political context, to define a new concept: the concept of Classicism. This concept, which in its essence has nothing in common with Neo-Classicism, is the natural side-product of any avant-garde current, only if it is capable to keep its dynamic and dialectic character, which is to be itself in order to become immediately something else, to do everything to stop the movement to grow self-sufficient, to become obsolete, to prevent it from becoming “classical”.
The style of the totalitarian art is generated by a structure which tries to determine the fusion of all elements into an “unique and magnificent temple, built for all the epochs and for all people”. The style of the totalitarian art is conditioned by the subordination of the whole artistic depersonalized production to an only goal, which has but political motives.
The style of the totalitarian art (understood not only as a sum of formal expedients but as an expression of an era) is addressed to posterity, while its speech is addressed to the contemporary. The speech of the totalitarian art is generally realistic, in order to create, with maximum efficiency and propagandistic finality, new popular myths, formally destined to educate masses, but in fact destined to “posses them, to subordinate them totally, namely in a totalitarian way. The speech of art has evolved in time, but it always did so within the limits imposed by a realism which was not a stylistic element but it was more the safest way to transmit an information which had to be decoded in a single manner, a sign of loyalty from the artist, a pledge of his participation to the collective feeling and thinking”.
Hitler, being completely pragmatic, has been indifferent to the real ideological fervency of artists. It was enough if these served the power. We must not ignore the fact that the most important personalities of the Third Reich were not even members of the National-Socialist party. In a society which magnifies the collective above the individual, the important thing is the created product, and an artist who does not belong to the party may be sometimes more useful at an ideological level, if he respects the totalitarian formal criteria, than a full of convictions Nazi or Bolshevik, like Nolde or Lissitski.
Military Academy “Frunze”, 1937. Arh. L.V Rundjev, V.O. Munz
The totalitarian art has a monolithic aspect, with all its different aspects subordinated to a single goal, in a strict hierarchy of values and it is similar to the religious art, in which the terrestrial has no meaning unless it is a reflex of the celestial. So, with all the similitude given by realism, the totalitarian art does not derive from the enlightenment Neo-Classicism of the 19th century, but from the mystic “golden age of cathedrals”.
The German and the Soviet totalitarianism, after forbidding and destroying the avant-garde, has tried to reach its ideals by creating a “new community”, in which society should to be organized upon a rational, materialist basis and should have a strict finality. From this point of view, despite its past ridden tendencies, the totalitarian art is the legitimate child of our era, even if it achieved in a distorting way a part of the avant-garde ideals and even if it created its monolith structure starting from the 19th century’s outlook rather than from the contemporary world. But one has to make clear delimitation between totalitarian arts. So, the Italian fascist art has aspired to an ideal stylistic model, in a modern speech, the Nazi art has come close to this model and the Stalinist realist socialism was about to reach it.
A fundamental invariant of the totalitarian art is the “total collectivism of art”. The art “belongs to the people”: the art is not collectively consumed, and often it is not the creation of only one artist but of a group, of a “brigade”, so art is a collectively created product, made for a collective.
Lenin acknowledged the importance of this aspect which may be considered one of the most important, stating in 1920 that “What matters it is not what art gives to some hundreds or even several thousands of members of a people of millions. The art belongs to the people. Its roots must spread as wide as possible, deep into the working masses. It has to be understood (understandable) and loved by them. It must unite the feeling, the thinking and the aspirations of these masses which it has to educate” (Klara Zetkin: Conversations with Lenin, Moscow, 1955).