Here's the story:
(via BoingBoing)
Musician Bryan Ferry is sorry for praising the Nazi aesthetic. "My God, the Nazis knew how to put themselves in the limelight and present themselves," Ferry, who refers to his London studio as "Fuhrerbunker," told German Newspaper Welt am Sonntag. "I'm talking about Leni Riefenstahl's movies and Albert Speer's buildings and the mass parades and the flags - just amazing. Really beautiful." From The Guardian:
The singer, who is also a model for Marks and Spencer, issued a statement yesterday in which he said he was "deeply upset" by the negative publicity his remarks had caused. It added: "I apologise unreservedly for any offence caused by my comments on Nazi iconography, which were solely made from an art history perspective.
"I, like every right-minded individual, find the Nazi regime, and all it stood for, evil and abhorrent."
5 comments:
Tim,
I'm glad you brought this up. I saw this story earlier today and groaned, because I love Ferry's work with Roxy Music (easily one of the most underrated bands in terms of influencing other artists). My hope is that Ferry, rather than taking "the classic, aesthetic escape route," was instead doing something very much like what you describe in your questions: he was admiring something beautiful he saw in one aspect of a larger culture (Nazi Germany) that was itself abhorrent (a reaction much like the one Wysocki had in regards to the advert for the book of photographs from the Kinsey Institute). I would like to believe Ferry that he didn't mean that he admired the Nazis themselves. His clarification "was welcomed" by the same Jewish community you mention, according the full Reuters story:
"'We do welcome the fact that he has issued a swift comment that there was no intention to condone the Nazi regime,' said Jeremy Newmark, chief executive of the Jewish Leadership Council."
Something else in the full article interests me; here is how the article explains Riefenstahl and Speer, the two figures Ferry referenced explicitly:
"Riefenstahl was Adolf Hitler's official film maker who was both admired and condemned for her documentaries that pioneered film techniques but glorified Nazism. Speer was an architect who served under Hitler."
The article itself describes Reifenstahl's aesthetic as something that was "both admired and condemned" and it does so in matter-of-fact manner. This is, of course, absolutely the case. Triumph of the Will is screened by countless film studies classes year after year largely because of its aesthetics, not its ideology (though that can be a lesson in and of itself). As for Speer, his role in the Nazi regime is arguably the most complicated of any of the men tried at Nuremberg. Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is an absolutely brilliant analysis of this complexity (and her concept of the banality of evil compliments Wysocki's discussion of the Joel Katz's writing on Nazi memos and efficiancy, as does Wysocki's assertion that designs "shape and naturalize the necessity of... day-to-day worlds").
My point is that I think Ferry's is a fine test case for illustrating your question and for what Wysoki is arguing: he expressed admiration for an aesthetic separate from its culture, for form divorced from content. This of course is exactly what Wysoki critiques.
I'd also like to believe that Ferry was being honest, but I think the whole situation reveals the danger implicit in making certain "purely aesthetic" claims without almost simultaneously undercutting them through historical/cultural critique. There's almost no way to praise any aspect of Nazi Germany without raising the hackles of cultural sensitivity. I admit, even though I am not one who would conflate aesthetic evaluation with moral judgment, that Ferry's comments made me a little uneasy. But this is also likely because of the way the story was presented -- Ferry was initially depicted as some kind of eccentric, Nazi-sympathizer dwelling ominously in his "Fuhrerbunker." And his comments were presented out of context, which is always unfair. One cannot determine the precise meaning of a comment in isolation, especially when it has become pure text and lost the vocal/bodily cues that would suggest its actual meaning in the context of a lived conversation.
In any case, I agree with your analysis. Eichmann in Jerusalem occurred to me as well.
So how does this situation complicate the claim that form cannot be separated from content? Tim, you seem to separate the two by being able to not "conflate aesthetic evaluation with moral judgment." This attitude allows Ferry to see the Nazis from a "purely aesthetic" point of view and, as Court points out, college students to screen "Triumph of the Will" because of its aesthetics. Yet, it seems that beautifully composed racist, sexist, or otherwise hateful "alphabetical" arguments don't appear on college syllabi. There seems to be a contradiction here. And within the contradiction, I find just how strong images are in this culture.
I think that Nazism still holds an almost unique position in public discourse. As Tim says, "There's almost no way to praise any aspect of Nazi Germany without raising the hackles of cultural sensitivity." To even joke about it (as a form of catharsis, perhaps) is problematic. The Producers has went through three incarnations now, but when Mel Brooks (who's Jewish) first gave us "Springtime for Hitler," it was condemned by the likes of (critics) Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris and Renata Adler as being insensitive. A more personal example: I love The Big Lebowski, and one of my favorite lines from it is when Walter (of Polish descent and a "converted" Jew) reacts to The Dude telling him that he had been attacked by nihilists: "Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it's an ethos." But when I tell people that it's one of my favorite lines, I sometimes get uncomfortable responses.
There's still that concern, then, and there should be, in my opinion. The Holocaust was, as Elie Wiesel powerfully describes it in All Rivers Run to the Sea, “the black hole of history.” That hole--that space that Nazism and the Holocaust occupy--serves as boundary, a ne plus ultra, that marks for many of us "this far and no further." The problem, as Arendt points out, is how then do we talk about it?
Arendt's broad point is that the “banality of evil” that existed in Nazi Germany makes the matter (very) complex. As Arendt offers her account of the Eichmann trial she also discusses its implications. Among them for her is the assertion that its dangerous to simply dismiss Eichmann and the other Nazis as monsters: they are, in fact, human—and that they were capable of doing what they did to other humans, and that the horrors they committed were so routine, that the whole culture seemingly went "insane," that these acts of evil became banal.
For me the reactions to comments like Ferry's often mirror the reactions Arendt warns against. Arendt's point is that we have to understand and remember what we as a species are capable of doing to one another-—we have to come to terms with this horrible fact and never forget that what happened was due to human agency, not monstrosity, lest we are condemned to repeat the same mistakes. To reflexively condemn comments like Ferry's out-of-hand performs the same function as calling Eichmann a "monster. It's an understandable reaction, of course, but in a way it also elides the complexities of the matter at hand.
Post a Comment