On The Jungconservative Variant of Politics and Art

Ulus Baker
(Ünal Nalbantoğlu’yla birlikte verdiği Sociology of Fine Arts and Music
dersinin ders notları)

It is well known that totaliter regimes generally, and young

conservatives particularly, hate “cosmopolitanism” and fragmanted
society. The latter is the very source of fear of absence or loosing
identity. What conservative thinker, Moeller van der Bruck, said, I
think, could be thought with what Goebbels wrote in a letter: “we who
shape modern German politics feel ourselves to be artistic people,
entrusted with the great responsibility of forming out of the raw
material of the masses a solid, well- wrought structure of a Volk.”
(Buck- Morss 1992) And, these also can be thought with the expression
in Leni Riefenstahl’s film, which was produced for Nazi propaganda in
order to militarize the society for the aim of making war, as an
invitation to “mass sacrifice, destruction, murder and death”:
“Germany is Hitler and Hitler is Germany.” This evidently claims that
Hitler represents and also embodies German nation. It is the dream of
Total State linking total Weltanschauung and total domination. It needs
to construct, to product “the German people in, through, and as a work
of art;” the Nazi myth as Lacoue - Labarthe and Nancy call.

To be effective, myth needs two things one of which is “a total belief,

an immediate, unreserved adhesion to the dreamed figure,” the other
is the type as concrete -flesh and blood- form of identity purified by
removing all contradictory, treatening elements, i.e., race. The total
adhesion to the race would require to be represented as creative blood.
This briefly counts why art was exclusively placed in efforts to
construct a German nation.
Wagner’s performance to create a total work of art is a representative
of unification of German people. It was not only aesthetical but also
political performance setting an identification process into motion.
Music, theatre, drama, poetry are combined in order to create a total
environment and an illusion that “work of art is reality sui generis.”
This is the key to fascist aesthetics; individual is to see him/ herself as
part of the integral body- an aesthetic making perception
“anaesthetized.”(Buck- Morss 1992)

As Benjamin emphasizes, “all efforts to render politics aesthetic

culminate in one thing: war.” However, aestheticization of politics, as
seen in Nazism, also means “a fusion of politics and art, the production
of the political as work of art.” (Lacoue- Labarthe and Nancy 1990)