Tgk1946's Blog

Snakecharmers in Texas (Clive James) p101-2

(Part Three: At the Other End of the Earth

On the Library Coffee-Table)

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The history of line printing by specialist printers is interesting to the antiquarian market: the history of fine printing by ordinary publishers would tell us a lot about modern Europe.

Nowadays there is still an astonishing number of German and Austrian small-format books done to the same high standard, or near it. But they tend not to be in the field of art history, from which the Jews, when they were driven out or worse, subtracted the necessary capacity to see what needed doing. By the time the Nazis in Vienna had got through rendering the city judenrein, there was not much left on Phaidon’s list fit even to steal. Durer was still all right. Not only did he date from a suitable epoch, but the book on him was written by an Aryan, Wilhelm Waetzoldt. Before the Anschluss, Waetzoldt’s Durer had already gone through four editions. The English version is easy to find second-hand. Like all the Phaidon quarto monographs it is well worth having, but in its original language it had a sinister career. Under the Third Reich the book achieved a fifth edition in 1942, printed from the same plates but published by Kanter-Verlag in K0nigsberg. There is a dedication, sad in every sense, to the author’s son-in-law, killed at Kalinin in October 1941. But the tragic element is in the author’s note thanking his new publishers because they have reconqueeod the book for Germany.

There is no point in getting on a high horse now. Zuruckerobern, ‘to reconquer’, is a terrible word for what really amounted to robbery with violence. But perhaps the author was just playing along. If the Thousand Year Reich had lasted longer than twelve years it would probably, like the Soviet Union, have demanded positive allegiance in every department of life, but as things were it was possible for an art historian to make a few token gestures and continue working, provided he stuck to a safely traditional subject. Though the annihilation of the Jews cauterised the brain of German art-scholarship, the corpse kept walking. Picking up copies of Third Reich art books second-hand can be a weird experience, not because they are different from what went before but because they are so like it. As Wolf Jobst Sedler pointed out in his excellent book of social commentary Behauptungen (Berlin, 1965), the really unsettling aspect of Nazi culture was the large areas of life that were left untouched, yet were made sinister by a new silence. Nazi radicalism was essentially retrogressive, even when viewed from the right-wing angle. The official party thinkers, such as they were, regarded even Fascism as international, avant-garde, and thus inherently Bolshevistic and un-German. Nazism left bourgeois life pretty much as it was, while depriving it of the self-generating critical element which had made it civilised. The result was a false normality worse than chaos. The awful fact of the train full of deportees leaving the station was made more awful by the train full of holidaymakers that left an hour afterwards.