very interesting stuff... oh, the sins of intellectual pride...
 

Gertrude Stein and Vichy: the Overlooked History
by Emily Greenhouse
The New Yorker
May 4, 2012

The seduction of nostalgia might also help to explain the Met’s peculiar omission of an important fact in the exhibition’s accompanying catalog and text. “The Steins Collect” leaves out any mention that Gertrude—easily the best-known of the collecting Steins, and a transgressive, lesbian Jewish writer famous in her own right—did work on behalf of France’s Vichy government, which collaborated with the occupying Nazi forces...

Many American visitors may not know of Stein’s affiliation with Bernard Faÿ, director of the Bibliothèque Nationale under the collaborationist Vichy government, whom Stein’s partner, Alice Toklas, called Stein’s “dearest friend during her life.” In 1941, at Faÿ’s suggestion, Stein agreed to translate a set of speeches by Marshal Philippe Pétain—a hundred eighty pages of explicitly anti-Semitic tirades—into English. (She hoped that they would be published in America, although they never were.) In her preface to the translation, she compared Pétain with George Washington as “first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of countrymen.” But enough people pointed out the exhibition’s exclusion of these crucial facts that several officials, including Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, requested that Stein’s collaborationist activities be addressed as part of the exhibition. The Met agreed on Wednesday to add a few sentences to the text on the wall, and to direct patrons to Barbara Will’s “Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma,” published last fall.

It would be easy to chalk up Stein’s endorsement of Pétain to her gratitude toward Faÿ, who shielded her from persecution during the war (Stein and Toklas, both Jews, stayed out of the capital and in the countryside throughout the fighting), or to her political cunning. But her enthusiasm for Pétain, who was responsible for the death and deportation of nearly eighty thousand French Jews, was nothing new. After she met Faÿ—the first professor of American studies in France and a friend of Pétain—in 1926, she increasingly warmed to his political thought, writing to him once that she “sees politics but from one angle, which is yours.” Stein felt it vital for artists to work in undisturbed serenity in a climate of political stability; on the day, in 1940, that France fell to the Nazis, she published a book in which she wrote, “I cannot write too much upon how necessary it is to be completely conservative that is particularly traditional in order to be free.” When Pétain came to power stressing honor and “peace” in “daily living,” and signed an armistice with Hitler, she exalted: Pétain has “achieved a miracle,” and enabled the French “to make France again.”

Barbara Will, a professor of English at Dartmouth, published her book about Stein’s propaganda work with Faÿ after the Steins exhibition had been launched in San Francisco. But Janet Malcolm’s “Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice,” which details the complex, even perverse undercurrents of the women’s romantic union and grippingly unveils the extent of their relationship with Faÿ, has been on bookstore shelves since 2007, and Alan Riding’s “And The Show Went On,” a thorough and disturbing examination of cultural life in Nazi-occupied Paris, was published the year prior to the exhibit. Besides, as Riding told me, Stein’s wartime activities had long been known.

I spoke to Barbara Will on Wednesday about the Met’s omission of Stein’s wartime collaboration. “In a sense,” she told me, “the curators dropped the ball by not recognizing and anticipating this response,” though she pointed out that the exhibit focusses on art collected before the First World War. Though, “if one asks how and why this art survived the war,” and “specifically, the art in Gertrude’s collection—then the issue of Gertrude Steins’s Vichy commitments becomes very important indeed. Why was Stein’s apartment, where most of the art was stored, left undisturbed during the war? The only firm answer we have—with documented proof—is that Bernard Faÿ kept his eye on the apartment and intervened when it looked like the seals on the doors were going to be broken and the Nazis were going to seize the art works.”

Stein died, in late July, 1946, shortly after a summer-vacation stay at Faÿ’s elegant country home, while he was in prison, awaiting trial for collaboration. (Eventually, Faÿ was sentenced to a lifetime of hard labor, but, disguised as a priest, managed to escape from a prison hospital to Switzerland, where he was pardoned in 1959). Stein was never prosecuted for her collaboration with the Vichy government, and her pro-Fascist ideology is often forgotten by those who hail her as a daring cultural progressive. The fact that Gertrude Stein was a Jew herself likely makes it trickier to lambaste her efforts in support of the Vichy regime. But Will voices the danger of what Fredric Jameson called the systematic “ ‘innocence’ of intellectuals” which, as she puts it, “gives a free pass to those whose work we admire, regardless of the context in which it was written or its ultimate aim.”

I asked Will whether genius could ever justify itself—surely we wouldn’t want to put away Degas’s whirling ballerinas, or stop reading Heidegger, Eliot, Pound, or even Céline, just because their prejudices were bigoted and their politics abhorrent. “ I think we do need to ask ourselves whether our writers and artists should be judged by higher ethical and moral standards,” she told me. “The cult of genius that has dominated our understanding of the artist / writer for at least two hundred years—and which Stein thoroughly subscribed to—may have encouraged a certain exculpability for anything done in the name of creative expression. But the Second World War, as intellectuals like Theodor Adorno and others pointed out, inexorably changed the terms of how we think about art and its role and meaning in society. It made the ethical dimensions of art and the artist much more urgent.”...
 

Kristallnacht: A Nationwide Pogrom, November 9-10, 1938
 

Food Fights
by Richard J. Evans
This article appears in the April 16, 2012 edition of The Nation.

Hitler managed to keep people at home in Germany reasonably well fed until the later stages of the war. Collingham reckons that around 40 percent of the bread and meat eaten by the armed forces and civilians in the Reich was produced in the occupied territories or by laborers deported from these countries to work on German farms. Her claim that “in Germany the population only began to experience hunger after May 1945,” however, rests on too easy an acceptance of postwar memories, when many Germans blamed the Allied occupation for failing to feed the German population. Food supplies in Germany had already begun to break down in the fall of 1944, as the armed forces lost control over Eastern Europe with the westward advance of the Red Army, and road and rail communications within Germany were being severely disrupted by Allied bombing. The Nazi regime cut domestic bread rations from 12,450 grams in May 1944 to 9,700 in August, 8,900 in December, and 3,600 in April 1945. The meat ration was reduced from 1,900 grams to 550 over the same period. Nobody could live on what they were officially allowed to buy; a huge black market, run by escaped foreign workers, emerged, with gangs engaged in regular shootouts with the Gestapo. The incidence of diseases like tuberculosis, boosted by malnutrition and debilitation, rose sharply in 1944. And indeed, Collingham concedes that there were “worsening food shortages in Germany’s cities until, in the last months before the Allied victory, the supply system broke down.”

If food shortages were bad in Germany, they were catastrophic in Eastern Europe. Germany, as Collingham notes, “exported wartime hunger to the countries it occupied.” Beginning with a “hunger plan” hatched by the leading civil servant in the Food Ministry, Herbert Backe, and expanding in scope and ambition into the “General Plan for the East,” devised at the behest of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, Nazi food policy envisaged the deliberate starvation of between 30 and 45 million Slavs (Collingham’s claim of 100 million seems exaggerated), its effects to be accelerated by denying them access to medical care. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, cities like Kharkov, bombed and blasted by air attacks and house-to-house fighting, were left without basic facilities such as water, sewerage, gas and electricity. The infrastructure was destroyed. The occupying German forces banned civilians from entering or leaving the city. The retreating Soviet forces had already implemented a scorched-earth policy, denying the incoming Germans food by burning or ruining all the warehouses stockpiled with grain, corn, flour and vegetables. Half the population was evacuated; those who remained were condemned by the Soviets as traitors. “There are no stores,” wrote a contemporary living in the city, “no markets, no shops of any kind…. The town is void of eatables like a desert.” By the end of 1942 a third of the remaining 450,000 inhabitants were dead, almost all of them from starvation. In Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg), besieged for more than two years by German forces under orders to starve the city out rather than take it by storm, with all the heavy military losses that would imply, at least a million people died of starvation, and there were widespread reports of people eating dead bodies in their desperation to stay alive...

 

German artist incurs backlash over Adolf Hitler toilet roll
by Sarah Deen
Metro
March 28, 2012

If you ever fancied the face of one of history's most notorious figures nestled between your buttocks then your prayers have been answered.

Cheeky Georg has been heavily criticised for his Adolf Hitler toilet paper, with naysayers declaring that it trivialises the crimes of the dictator and his Third Reich movement.

However, Georg, from Bunn, Germany, disagrees as he has been getting a considerable amount of interest, both at home and abroad.

He said: 'I am getting e-mails now and orders from as far afield as America and Australia.

'I'm just really pleased that my idea was so popular but I wish some people who are attacking me would loosen up a bit.'

Named "Draw Your Own Shitler", the bog roll depicts the Fuhrer's face without his trademark moustache — instead leaving a gap for the customer to 'add a brown one' of their own...