Deposition of a Rebel from the Cross

Since, in each case of my lantern slides this evening, the image is a species of ideological propaganda let us compare and contrast the exhibits for intended (or possibly unintended) effect. 

Exhibit 1: What do we see? The anti-englische propaganda is reproduced here from Sozialismus gegen Plutokratie ([National] Socialism vs. Plutocracy, 1940) a product of the ministry of Dr Goebbels, Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, who in his youth had considered the Catholic priesthood. Does it not resemble The Deposition of Christ from the Cross? (See Exhibit 2.)

Exhibit 1

A demonstrator is removed.

Note subliminal black armbands mourning the dead configured by the black-gloved hands of the British police officers. Inside those gloves we may imagine fists hardened in sacramental vinegar squeezed from a pugilist’s sponge.

We cannot escape the concordances that link the imagery with the conventions of devotional art that depict the Thirteenth Station of the Cross as the stark, unconscionable indignity of a man reduced to vermin to be rubbed out as Enemy of the State.

Exhibit 2

A demonstrator is removed.

The ‘Compare-and-contrast’ page-spread is a technique of Photojournalism stolen from the British Lilliput men’s magazine (founded 1937), which suggests a further level of propagandist subtlety, never mind the nostrums of Goebbels’s partner-in-crime, Reich Minister for Church Affairs, Hanns Kerrl, who in 1937 pronounced: ‘There has now risen a new authority as to what Christ and Christianity is. This new authority is Adolph Hitler.’

Exhibit 3

‘The Cruel Ones.’

 So . . . Wem gehört die Zukunft? Sozialismus gegen Plutokratie. (Who Owns the Future? [National] Socialism against Plutocracy.) Are the concordances I find imaginary or is there substance in my suspicions?  You can see here how page 74 (Exhibit 1) and facing page 75 (Exhibit 3) are images staged for contrast, side-by-side. So let us compare the diptych of ‘The Darling Bobbies [British policemen] lead an unemployed demonstrator away’ with its facing text of calculatedly nudge-nudge knowingness,‘The “cruel” SS helps two girls who want to see the Führer.’  The cynicism of Goebbels has the bitter taste of wine mixed with gall.

Certainly, a captive rebel – pinioned to evoke crucified limbs and hauled off to his Golgotha (‘Place of the Skull’) – can be considered to possess a sort of commonality with the ‘Death’s Head’ unit on the opposite page (their Totenkopf insignia may be discerned above their peaked caps) if we accept the birth of another myth . . . the apotheosis of their fair-headed Mädchen as goddesses destined to be the Aryan race’s progenitresses to magnify the thousand-year Reich.

Any resemblances end, however, when we compare the duty of unarmed policemen to serve British democracy – bound in law courts by oaths sworn to Almighty God – with the sacred oath of the pistol-packing praetorian guard, the dagger-wielding SS, who swore by God to render unconditional obedience to one god-like man, Adolf Hitler, the self-proclaimed Führer of the German Reich.

The contradistinction of the two cultures, as perceived by Dr Goebbels, may be examined on the double-page spread of  Exhibit 4 (pp. 18 and 19). Apparently, the combined might of the Eton and Harrow Officer Training Corps was no match for Hitler Youth on the march. (Winston Churchill was an Old Harrovian.)

Exhibit 4

 

Degenerate Art.

Yes, the sly subliminal imagery of Goebbelsian propaganda, intent on inversions of perception for the sake of the id-satisfying, sensation-seeking, cheap thrill, still remains the stock-in-trade of soi-disant shock-jock artists even today. Ironically, the Nazi Party’s 1937 exhibition of Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst), assembled to condemn ‘cultural degeneracy’, included any number of surrealists, whose founding credo also celebrated the freeing of the unconscious mind with (ostensibly) inconsequential juxterpositions of imagery devised to provoke a viscerality of response. And isn’t the visceral response of the herd the precise aim of propagandists the world over?

 

I append a centre-spread (Exhibit 5) published in my father’s rather frayed copy of Lilliput men’s magazine, a 1940 dyptych from the year of Dr Goebbels’s masterwork of parodic agitprop. 

 

Exhibit 5

 

Shellshocked chimpanzees.

Somehow, I am reminded of the words of the revered Russian WW2 photographer who was tempted to visit Berlin Zoo on May 2 1945 to view ‘. . . two dead SS men next to a cage of shellshocked chimpanzees. That might have made a picture, but I was after something bigger. I wanted the Reichstag.’

So, in event, Yevgeni Khaldei braved his way to the top of the Reichstag under fire to take the celebrated shot that made his name: the flying of the Red banner of the Hammer and Sickle over the smoking ruins of Berlin. (Maybe it’s instructive to note that Yevgeni’s first choice of subject was a surrealist incongruity that promised a self-indulgent viscerality of response, from which we might draw the conclusion that the lure of voyeuristic sensationalism is inescapably a refuge of meretricious art, yet a documentary photographer of true greatness, as a witness to a genocidal epoch, resists the cheap thrill.) 

 

Who Owns the Future? 1940

[National] Socialism against Plutocracy.

 

Sunday Best.

Yevgeny Khaldei, soviet photographer:  ‘ [In 1945] I was in Vienna.

We were closing on the square in front of the parliament. 

This senior Nazi had come with his family, all in their Sunday best.

He shot his wife and his son, but his daughter did not want to die.

So he pinned her on the bench and shot her.

Then he killed himself as we arrived.’

 

See also: Between life and death . . . January 14 1944 . . . Franz Lüdtke’s ‘Ostvisionen’ for Colonisation to the Baltic Coast.

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2018/02/between-life-and-death-january-14-1944.html 

and:

Rates of Exchange: ‘Ici. Français assassinés par les Boches.’

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2014/03/rates-of-exchange-ici-francais.html