Gods and Monsters

Erich Kurlander: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich

National Review, October 2, 2017

Adolf Hitler once argued that National Socialism represented “a cool and highly reasoned approach to reality based on the greatest of scientific knowledge and its spiritual expression.” If there are any people foolish enough still to fall for that, they will not enjoy this book. While the enthusiasm of some Nazi leaders, most notoriously Himmler, for the occult has been a staple of pop culture and the more disreputable corners of historical “investigation” for years, this volume shows that many others felt much the same way.

Kurlander depicts a Third Reich in which, despite uneven and often ambiguous efforts to rein them in, seers, magicians, and psychics flourished. Buddha was drafted into the master race, parapsychology “so long as it comported with ‘Nordic-Germanic feeling’” was recognized as legitimate, and the grounds were laid for an “Ario-Germanic” national religion as a syncretic (it wouldn’t all be Wotan) “substitute for Christianity.” Meanwhile, charlatan-historians and charlatan-folklorists hunted for proof that large swathes of Europe were part of an ancestral German homeland, charlatan-archeologists searched for evidence of “the Nordic origins of Asian civilization,” charlatan-doctors worked on monstrous human experiments, and charlatan-scientists struggled to develop weapons designed to draw on mysterious untapped electromagnetic forces. This arsenal was intended to include death rays, sound weapons, and anti-gravity devices — an absurdity and a waste made all the more grotesque by the contrast with the remarkably sophisticated technology successfully deployed by Germany during the war.

If the magical weapons proved harmless, the same cannot be said of the mix of superstition and pseudoscience that ran through the Nazis’ thinking about race, a mix that goes some way to accounting for both the intensity of their anti-Semitism and the meticulousness of the slaughter that followed. “Traditional” anti-Semitism rested on a distrust of difference reinforced by religious and then economic resentment. It generated exclusion, violence, and, as time went by, increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories. But the notion of Jews as perpetual enemies of an advanced “Aryan” race was a fairly new confection, dating back only to the mid 19th century.

Kurlander is an excellent guide to the complex and often conflicting “histories” of the Aryans’ origins, versions of which featured sex with angels, God-men from Tibet, a descent from heaven, moons made of ice crashing into the earth (the weirdly popular “World Ice Theory,” in which Hitler was one of numerous believers), and much more besides. These narratives also incorporated tales of a fall: The original Aryans had been scattered. Their racial integrity had been diluted by intermingling with “lesser breeds.” They had been preyed upon by — whom else? — the Jews, routinely smeared as parasitic and as a disease but also in terms that sometimes appeared to be more than metaphor: Hitler dubbed Jews the children of the devil and believed that forestalling the “Jewish apocalypse was our duty, our God-given mission.”

Kurlander contends that this supernatural dread was genuinely felt by “the Third Reich’s brain trust,” a claim that should be treated with some caution. When it comes to the supernatural, what people believe and what they say they believe are frequently very different — more so, indeed, than they might themselves understand.

When studying the translation of concepts of such malevolence into the deeds that became the Holocaust, it is easy to make the all too common mistake of treating the Nazis as a case apart, as an unparalleled eruption of evil. And, yes, there were aspects of the Third Reich — from the particular horrors it devised to an ideology that was as bizarre as it was sinister — that distinguished it from the other mass-murdering regimes of the last century. But take a step back and the similarities between National Socialism and its totalitarian counterparts on the left quickly become visible.

This is true of their shared “supernatural” dimension. All were essentially millenarian. Communist revolutionaries (nominally philosophical materialists despite a fundamentally mystical view of historical forces) would not have appreciated the connection, but it was there all right — the religious impulse is hard to discard — complete with the promise of a merciless sorting, after which the saved would march to a better world. Untethered to atheism, the Nazis could be more explicitly millenarian, referring to a “thousand-year” Reich. This number has, notes Kurlander (citing another author), “deep biblical overtones,” overtones to which he pays too little attention — a curious misstep in a history of this type, as is his relatively cursory handling of the Nazis’ knotty relationship with Christianity.

As Kurlander makes clear, the Nazis’ racial and occult obsessions did not come out of nowhere. The party that evolved into the National Socialists had roots in the Thule Society, a group formed in early 1918, focused on the occult, anti-Semitism, and, as Germany descended into defeat, politics. Its members sported a swastika in homage to the Aryans’ supposed Indo-European heritage — an important, if counterintuitive, theme that ran through much of esoteric German racism and was associated with the admiration for “Eastern” spirituality of the sort later felt by quite a few leading Nazis. The Thule Society (the name is a reference to a “Nordic” interpretation of the Atlantis myth) had in turn emerged out of a broader Germanic intellectual community that had wallowed in a swamp of Grenzwissenschaft (or “border science,” to give this nonsense — astrology, anthroposophy, “natural” medicine, parapsychology, radiesthesia, theosophy, and all the rest — a kinder name than it deserves), Aryan fantasy, and racial hysteria for decades.

There is no “right” side of history, no law that makes what we call progress inevitable. Other parts of Europe were also doing their bit to let the Enlightenment down. As Kurlander points out, it was a Frenchman, Arthur de Gobineau, who, writing some 40 years before the beginning of the Dreyfus Affair, did much to popularize the idea of a superior Aryan race. Anti-Semitism was far from being solely a Teutonic vice. Kurlander accepts that border science had scant respect for borders but maintains (without satisfactorily explaining why) that Germans were more despairing of the growing ascendancy of scientific materialism than most Europeans, and therefore more prone to succumb to the “re-enchantment” offered by border science. If that was true before 1914, it was even more so after a war that shattered any illusions about modernity — and a defeat that brought humiliation, chaos, and revolution in its wake. As Kurlander tells it, “hundreds of thousands of Germans and Austrians” bought “occult and New Age literature,” read “border scientific journals,” and participated in “astrological and theosophical societies, séances and spiritualist experiments.”

A key element in this collective derangement was the suspicion — still flourishing in the West today — that modern science had torn apart the harmony that had allegedly once existed between man, nature, and the divine, a breach that could be restored by a more spiritual, holistic approach. More often than not, the results — such as “biodynamic” agriculture (a more straightforwardly superstitious variant of organic farming) — were largely innocuous, but the fact that there was a biodynamic “plantation” on the grounds of Auschwitz is a reminder of where the retreat from reason can lead, a lesson that, judging by our own overly relaxed response to resurgent pseudoscience (the anti-vaxxers come to mind) or political attacks on the scientific method, has not been learned.

The dream of restoring a lost whole — even one that had never seen the light of day — was particularly toxic when applied to ethnicity. Imagining a heroic national past (even one with mythic or supernatural undertones) was not confined to Germans, nor was a sense of being a cut above other races, but in Germany, such prejudices were unusually intense. Kurlander never specifies quite why, but the comparatively late (1871) creation of a unified German state — a state then partly unraveled by the Treaty of Versailles — must have increased the pressure on Germans, including, in different ways, their kin in the multiethnic Austria-Hungary of Hitler’s youth or the truncated Austria that was left after World War I, to define who they were. Among the ways they responded was by emphasizing who was not German, most notably the Jews, reviled for the threat they were meant to represent to the unity of the Volk: They were an Other that could have no place in a nation that wished to survive as a nation.

Even if he might occasionally exaggerate the contribution of the specific outlandish beliefs he describes to the catastrophe that unfolded, Kurlander provides a careful, clear-headed, and exhaustive examination of a subject so lurid that it has probably scared away some of the serious research it merits. In remedying that, Kurlander offers a strikingly different and deeply disturbing perspective on the rise and subsequent trajectory of the Third Reich, and, most unsettling of all, on the numinous appeal of its Führer. Hitler both shared and channeled (some contemporaries referred to him as a medium) the discontents of a people so drastically detached from reality that they were seduced by a conjuring trick, albeit one in which the conjurer himself may well have believed. It was a dark magic so potent that it took an apocalypse to break the spell.

Masters of the Dark Arts

Igor Golomstock: Totalitarian Art

The Wall Street Journal, June  25, 2011

Marszalkowska 1, Warsaw, September 1988  © Andrew Stuttaford

Twentieth-century totalitarian art did not just gild the cage; it helped to build it. Paintings, movies, sculpture, architecture and festivals of choreographed joy were vital elements in the Nazi and Communist attempts to remake man. It is key to our understanding of the nightmare states that resulted, argues Igor Golomstock, and deserves to be classified as a distinctive artistic genre alongside Modernism, of which it was both byway and heir. Like Modernism, totalitarian art was intended to help sweep away what had gone before, but unlike Modernism it was prepared to steal from the past to do so. The style of the 19th-century "bourgeois" academy was thus conscripted into the service of Reich and eventually revolution, as hallmark, teacher and, to us, cliché.

In his newly updated (it was first published in 1990) "Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People's Republic of China," Mr. Golomstock convincingly demonstrates how the overlapping aesthetic values of these superficially disparate regimes underlined how much they had in common. This was never clearer than at the Paris exhibition of 1937.  In an unsettling preview of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the Eiffel Tower found itself squeezed between massive Nazi and Soviet pavilions. Conceived as fusions of sculpture and architecture, both were expressions of brute power that played Neanderthal tribute to ancient Rome and were guarded by giant images, of the master race on the one hand, the master class on the other.

The strongest sections of the book concern the Soviet Union, as one might expect from an author whose career included membership in the Union of Soviet Artists and direct encounters with Stalinist brutality. Mr. Golomstock's father was sent to the camps in 1934, and then, some years later, his mother, taking the young Igor with her, signed up to work as a doctor at Kolyma, one of the worst of the Gulag's outposts.

Mr. Golomstock tracks the way that the smash-it-all-up trial-and-error of late imperial Russia's avant-garde (experiments that were paralleled, revealingly enough, by Italy's proto-fascist Futurists) initially meshed with the ecstatic starting-from-scratch of the Bolshevik revolutionary intelligentsia.

The extraordinary artistic innovation of the early Soviet years was rapidly replaced, however, by the stodgy conservatism of high Stalinist culture. The revolutionary past was sanitized, then mythologized. The hardscrabble present was transformed into a time of abundance by what Mr. Golomstock marvelously calls the "magic mirror" of Socialist Realism. The didactic, neo-Victorian paintings, the monumental if clumsily neoclassical architecture and, after 1941, the numerous evocations of martial valor and national pride, were all manifestations of an ersatz traditionalism that resonated with a people exhausted by decades of upheaval and were, of course, perfectly suited to the maintenance of a tightly controlled, rigidly hierarchical new order.

That said, for all Mr. Golomstock's experience and erudition, he falls some way short of conveying the ambition, allure and, well, totality of totalitarianism's cultural projects. While his examination of Nazi art takes useful detours away from the time-worn trudge through lumpen Arcadias and leaden Valhallas to include discussion of the centralized (Soviet-style) control of artistic production, he devotes relatively little space to the party's sometimes brilliant manipulation of design, its use of spectacle—Albert Speer's cathedrals of light—or, even, the films of Leni Riefenstahl. The whole picture never quite comes into view, and it was the whole picture that was the point.

It is no less frustrating that Mr. Golomstock allocates such a small portion of his book to China, the third of the 20th century's great totalitarian empires—particularly as he does find room for an addendum on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a revoltingly bloody but basically traditional despotism that left little behind it of artistic interest to anyone other than connoisseurs of peculiarly servile kitsch. By contrast, as Mao's Cultural Revolution gathered pace from 1966 on, the mounting political hysteria was reflected, channeled and amplified in and by the arts in ways still terrifying today.

There were the dazibao, the giant-lettered, largely hand-made "big character" wall posters that signaled its beginning. There was the hectoring banality of revolutionary opera. And there were the images—sometimes reproduced in their millions—that both drew upon Socialist Realism and transcended it, a process that culminated in the depiction of Mao as essentially divine. As a demonstration of the fundamentally religious nature of communism, the deification of the Great Helmsman is hard to beat, and it represents the logical conclusion of totalitarian art. Unfortunately, you won't find any direct reference to it in Mr. Golomstock's fascinating, painstaking but ultimately incomplete book.

Hearts of Darkness

Robert Gellately: Lenin, Stalin and Hitler : The Age of Social Catastrophe

The New York Sun, September, 19, 2007

In the course of humanity's long, violent history, there was one brief, happy interlude, a decade or so on either side of 1900, when those fortunate enough to live in the more advanced parts of the planet were able to persuade themselves that barbarism had been banished from their culture, never to return. To those luckiest of men, the last true optimists, the barriers — psychological, political, and technological — that separated them from the savagery of the past were as reassuringly robust as the stout, solid bourgeois architecture then transforming their cities.

This self-satisfaction we now know was pure hubris, a lethal, beautiful, boastful illusion. Confronted in 1914 with the reality of industrialized warfare, that illusion died. As the war progressed, if one can use that word, the social and political restraints keeping man's atavistic ferocity at bay began to fray all across Europe, and nowhere more dangerously than in the Russian Empire. By 1917, this most backward, and therefore most fragile, of the continent's great powers was a society on the precipice. It only took the slightest of shoves, in the form of the Bolsheviks' opportunistic and initially bloodless coup, to topple it over into the abyss. The consequences were worldwide, appalling, and destructive on a scale that had never before been seen.

When in the subtitle of his new book, "Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler" (Knopf, 698 pages, $35), Professor Robert Gellately refers to an age of "social catastrophe," it is no exaggeration. But his use of that phrase also makes a more subtle point. The devastation of the era he describes (roughly 1914–45) went far beyond the physical, far beyond rubble, ruin, and mass graves. The very notion of society itself was torn apart. As for man's idea of himself, it had been changed forever, and not, in any sense, for the better. Man could now be certain that the barbarian within him would always be there, however advanced the civilization — tempting, terrifying and, given an opening, unstoppable.

While Mr. Gellately explicitly narrows the focus of his book to Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, its title still promises more than he manages to deliver. Rather than devoting himself to the wider implications of what he is discussing, Professor Gellately offers a conventional history within a largely conventional framework. For those in need of a serious, scholarly introduction to the subject, it's an excellent overview of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, but despite its great length — with footnotes the book runs to nearly 700 pages — an overview is all that it is. There's not a lot that's new about either the information or the arguments it contains.

Mr. Gellately worries that one aspect of his book may "disturb" some readers — the suggestion that Lenin was a monster to be ranked alongside Stalin and Hitler. As he himself might acknowledge, however, this insight is not particularly original: Historians Dmitri Volkogonov and Richard Pipes (to name but two he cites) have already covered much of this ground, and done so highly effectively. Nevertheless, despite their efforts and those of quite a few others, the real nature of Lenin's ideology remains poorly understood. In repeating the message that the story of Bolshevism is not one of good intentions gone awry, but of an evil that worked all too well, Professor Gellately is performing a very useful public service.

That the Bolsheviks were able to do what they did owed a great deal to the collapse not only of the old order, but of order itself. The rise of the Nazis was made possible by almost exactly the opposite, the desperation of a nation willing to try something, anything, to hang on to what it could of its former way of life. If that meant throwing democracy — and with it, the Jews — to the wolves, too bad.

Hitler's mandate was no blank check, however. As Professor Gellately explains in some of the most intriguing sections of his book, the prewar Third Reich was, in marked contrast with its Soviet rival, a "dictatorship by consent." Compared with what was going on in the USSR at the same time, the use of coercion was limited, largely predictable, and rarely truly murderous. The awful exception, of course, was the ever more hideous persecution of the Jews, but prior to 1939, even that was incremental, a slow-motion pogrom both camouflaged and reinforced by the language of bureaucracy and the law.

That Hitler found it necessary to proceed in this way was a paradox of his earliest years in power. The restoration of social calm was key to his popularity but difficult to reconcile with his long-term agenda of military adventure, unending conquest and relentless genocide. With the invasion of Poland, that paradox became an irrelevance, but neither the frenzy of war nor the intoxication of a victorious blitzkrieg, can fully explain the speed with which so many of the Wehrmacht's "ordinary men" either descended into barbarism or demonstrated their willingness to act as its accomplices. In some cases, it was merely a matter of days. That they did so was a sign that pointed the way to Auschwitz. It also suggested that, even before the tanks had begun to roll, the German people had already moved far, far down that most terrible of roads.

Disappointingly, Professor Gellately never fully succeeds in explaining what it took to make this possible. He takes refuge instead in the observation that, by the time World War II had concluded, it had "raised questions about the very meaning and future of Western civilization." That is right, so far as it goes, but it's too simplistic. The more troubling questions posed by that war are not limited to any one civilization: They concern the essential nature of mankind itself. And there's no comfort to be found in the answer, none at all.

Stumbling Down the Road to Hell

Ian Kershaw: Making Friends with Hitler

The New York Sun, December 2, 2004

Ian Kershaw is best known for "Hitler," his two-volume, definitive account of one of history's monsters. His new book, by contrast, deals with an irritating British nobleman who was at best a footnote, at worst a nonentity. In telling the strange, sad story of the lord who tried to befriend a fuhrer, Mr. Kershaw highlights the English ineptitude that was to prove so helpful to the German dictator throughout the 1930s. "Making Friends With Hitler" (The Penguin Press, 488 pages, $29.95) also comes with a disturbing contemporary resonance. In part it's a tale of people living in the comfort of Western democracy, but all too ready to excuse totalitarian savagery overseas in the interest of their own ideological obsessions. Those people still exist: Chomsky, Sarandon, Moore, take your pick.

The exhaustingly, and slightly repetitively, named Charles Stewart Henry Vane-Tempest-Stewart, the 7th Marquess of Londonderry, was born into immense wealth and an even larger sense of entitlement. He was also born too late. By the time he became a member of Parliament, the old aristocratic order was beginning to crumble, and by the time he returned home from the trenches of the World War I, Britain was only a few years from its first Labour government.

Oblivious or uncaring, this self-important but not very talented aristocrat still felt high office was his right. The viceroyalty of India eluded his grasp, but in the end perseverance, connections, and aggressive entertaining produced their reward: In effect, Londonderry catered his way into the Cabinet, becoming Britain's Air Minister in 1931. As was said, a touch acidly, about one of his earlier, equally dubious, promotions, it was not possible to "use a man's hospitality and not give him a job."

Maybe, but the early 1930s were not the best time to put a mediocrity into such a role. As minister in charge of the air force he had somehow to reconcile Britain's security requirements with increasingly assertive demands from Germany for strategic parity. All this at a time when most Britons were still calling for disarmament and the exchequer was short of spare cash.

It was a task for which Londonderry was neither intellectually nor temperamentally equipped. As Mr. Kershaw explains, "having imbibed the aristocratic values of Victorian and Edwardian England" he was "totally unprepared for the rough, tough, world of the 1930s ... where the mailed fist and political thuggery were what counted."

But if he was unprepared, so was his country, and that parallel, I suspect, was Mr. Kershaw's point in choosing to make this minor figure the focus of such a major study. Mr. Kershaw treats Londonderry as a symbol of the failures of Britain's governing class; the story of his undeserved rise and precipitate fall is used to tell the wider tale of his country's disastrous failure to head off Hitler.

The problem is that Londonderry was not a particularly representative figure. While his story (which Mr. Kershaw, as one would expect, tells well) is of interest, it is as a curiosity more than anything else - "Believe It or Not" rather than "The Gathering Storm." This is a book for readers who enjoy the byways and the detours of history, and the tales of those who can be found there.

Those wanting a general account of British foreign policy in that "low dishonest decade" should thus look elsewhere. They will be frustrated by the amount of time he spends with Londonderry, a man who lost what little significance he had when he was fired, somewhat unfairly, from government. He then compounded his unimportance by alienating many of the few who could be bothered to pay him any attention.

Had Londonderry gone quietly into retirement, Mr. Kershaw would not have much to say, but instead the fallen minister began the freelance diplomacy that shattered what was left of his reputation. In the hands of a lesser historian, these efforts, designed to promote a more friendly relationship between the Third Reich and Britain, could have been caricatured as the acts of a Nazi sympathizer, even a potential Quisling. Mr. Kershaw recognizes that Londonderry's motives were patriotic and basically well intentioned.

Friendship between Britain and Germany was, this veteran of the Somme believed, essential if the tragedy of another Great War was to be avoided. This was very different from supporting Hitler, or working to establish some sinister New Order in the sceptr'd isle. Even the photographs that illustrate this book under line the distance between Londonderry and the gangsters he was attempting to cultivate: We see him, Savile Row immaculate, posing with Hitler, being entertained by Goring, alongside his houseguest von Ribbentrop. In each picture, this British aristocrat seems guarded, a little uneasy, a thoroughly decent chap not altogether comfortable with the rough company he is keeping.

Certainly some of Londonderry's effusions about Hitler's "tremendous successes" make for very queasy reading. But, to put this into better context, Mr. Kershaw could have included some discussion of the useful idiots who were, at the same time, busy proclaiming the birth of a new civilization in Stalin's slaughterhouse Soviet Union. By comparison with such apologists, Londonderry was relatively restrained in the praise of his dictator. He shared with them, however, their determination to give evil the benefit of every doubt. And like them he lacked much empathy with those unfortunate enough to live under totalitarianism.

We see this most strikingly in Londonderry's underwhelming response to the plight of Germany's Jews. To be sure, he shared in the clubland anti-Semitism of many of his class, but this was a far cry from sympathy for Nazi cruelty. It appears to have been enough to let him regard Hitler's relentlessly grinding pogrom primarily as bad PR, an unnecessary obstacle to the necessary friendship between Britain and Germany. The idea that such horrors might have been evidence of a regime so pathological it could be no more trusted abroad than at home seem not to have occurred to him until too late.

Fortunately, there were others who did understand - none more so than his cousin, Winston Churchill. Relations between the two became, apparently, a little strained.

A Degenerate Exhibition

National Review, April 8, 1996

Worker & Kolkhoz Woman, Moscow, February 1991 © Andrew Stuttaford

London this season has been playing host to two thought-provoking exhibitions. The first, "Africa: The Art of a Continent," has been on display at the Royal Academy since October. Meanwhile, across the Thames, the Hayward Gallery's "Art and Power" attempts to cast a new light on an even darker continent—the totalitarian Europe of 1930-45. The latter exhibit opens promisingly enough, taking advantage of the Hayward's brutalist architecture with an eerily lit antechamber dominated by symbols and monuments of the departed dictators. Pharaonically sinister, the room is compelling, a guilty pleasure on a par with the best horror stories. Writing of fascism in 1936 the philosopher Walter Benjamin commented that mankind's "self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order." Unintentionally, perhaps, this room proves that point. It is the highlight of the exhibition.

Most of the rest is depressingly unimaginative, an uninspired display of the usual suspects. We see an avuncular Stalin and a pompous Hitler, but so what? The iconography essential for understanding such pictures is missing, and without it they become routine official portraits, no different really from the drab canvases to be found in many an American boardroom.

Unexplained too, is why much of the work on display should be seen as "totalitarian." Hitler's favorite painter, the leaden Adolf Ziegler, may show why he was known as the "master of the German pubic hair," but, at that time, his völkisch style would not have been out of place in many a European museum. In the Italian section, at least, there is some attempt at serious analysis. Embarrassingly, however, it comes from the Fascists, who were deeply divided on how to control art, if at all.

To be sure, many of the paintings on display are irritatingly didactic, but that is only to be expected. They date from the age of Eleanor Roosevelt, an era when the self-important were out of control. Aleksandr Monin's Shock Workers' Avenue may be a product of Stalin's Soviet Union, but it would not be out of place in any WPA-decorated post office. The allegedly totalitarian architecture too was hardly unusual. Across the world big government was dressing for success. In the 1930s that meant chunky statues and neo-classicism. It was true for Berlin, Rome, and Moscow, but it also held good for London and Washington.

These connections are never really explored, but that is hardly surprising. "Art and Power" is itself a bureaucratic product, sponsored by the Council of Europe to "remind" (rather unwisely, I think) Europeans of "their common history and cultural heritage." Far easier, therefore, for it to caricature totalitarian art as a simple blend of dull art and portentous buildings. Hitler's kitsch thus becomes just another round in the Manichean struggle between the figurative (bad) and the abstract (good).

In effect, then, this exhibition reflects the prejudices of a second-rate art faculty. Naturally enough, it also comes steeped in conventional, leftish pieties. No opportunity is missed to take a swipe at the fallen fascists, while the Soviet Union gets off comparatively lightly.

Some of the distortions are simply childish. An accompanying booklet tells us that 12 million Jews perished in the Holocaust, but fudges collectivization's death toll in the Soviet countryside. The Moscow Metro is singled out for praise, not least because it opened ahead of schedule. Making the trains run on time is clearly an achievement—so long, that is, as they are Soviet trains.

So far as the art is concerned the bias is more subtle. "Nazi" art is mainly represented by rural scenes, peasant girls, and Albert Speer, The relatively more cheerful eroticism of what might be called its "Vargas" school is absent. In marked contrast to the Soviet section little of the regime's perniciously effective posterwork is shown. No war paintings are on display—a curious omission, given that war was central both to the Nazis' dreams and to their destiny.

Space cannot have been a constraint, given the presence of a large section dedicated to the opposition to Hitler, itself rather strange in an exhibition allegedly devoted to totalitarian art. Was someone worried that the devil had the best tunes? There was no need. The "opposition" includes some of the most powerful works on display. Felix Nussbaum's concentration-camp paintings give the lie to Otto Dix's remark that "one cannot paint despair," while Ernst Barlach's The Terrible Year of 1937 speaks for itself.

Appropriately enough, the destruction of modern or "Jewish" art—and, all too often, artists—by the Nazis is highlighted. The destruction of religious art by the Soviets is ignored, however. The burned icons and vandalized churches may have ended a tradition stretching back a millennium, but apparently this is not an aspect of Europe's "common heritage" about which we need "reminding."

Naturally the Nazis' grotesque "Exhibition of Degenerate Art" (1937) comes under scrutiny, and it should. That attempt to put modern art into the pillory was a low point of totalitarian Philistinism. However, it was hardly unique. No comparison is made, for example, with the major Moscow and Leningrad exhibitions of 1932, with their one (very small) room for works by artists who "had been infected with all kinds of Formalist diseases and influenced by their bourgeois experiences."

To have made such a comparison would have been to dispel the atmosphere of cozy ambiguity that prevails in discussing the USSR. There is no separate section on the artistic opposition to Stalin. Emigré art is ignored. A wide range of artwork is displayed, but it is often difficult to discern whether it would have been approved or not. Perhaps deliberately, this creates an image of greater tolerance than there really was, particularly in a country where the state was, on the whole, the only client. Various "Stalins" are on display, but they are eclipsed by Rublyov's extraordinary portrait of a wily dictator reading Pravda, a sinister dog at his feet. Could this ever have been shown? We are never told. Rublyov knew. He kept the picture hidden and pursued a successful career as an official artist.

Instead we are given a simplistic picture of a USSR where political and artistic repression marched in lockstep. Modernism is crushed by socialist realism and, by implication, the bright promise of Lenin's revolution is betrayed. Rodchenko turns to painting clowns, while Malevich goes to jail accused of "Cézannism." In reality, of course, whatever the wonders of their art, these men had been paid propagandists for a Soviet regime that had been openly murderous from the outset.

Sadly, they did their work all too well. The Great Utopia still beckons. There has been no Soviet Nuremberg, no final reckoning with Communism. In Russia that failure may lead to disaster. In the West, it merely leads to misleading "reminders" of a "common European history" at the Hayward Gallery and a souvenir shop that sells postcards of Stalin. But not of Hitler. That would be in bad taste.