The fireworks of the Spring Festival in 2024 have not yet dispersed, and the warm sun of spring in the south has just risen. Turning the pages of "Literary Winter: Artists under Hitler in 1933" (hereinafter referred to as "Literary Winter"), my mind returned to the winter of 91 years ago, in Berlin, Germany, 7,355 kilometers away from Beijing, China, a political ** that shook democracy and freedom was erupting - the Nazi Party led by Adolf Hitler became the new ruling party in Germany. Against this backdrop, the German people, led by the literary and artistic circles, began to face a dilemma: should they continue to stay in Germany and cheer for the new regime, or should they leave their homeland and run for democracy and freedom?
In the book "Literary Winter", the famous German literary critic and writer Uwe Wittstock crawled out the authentic content from a large number of newspapers (such as "Foss**", "Frankfurt**", Berlin Morning Post, etc.), diaries, literary works, art archives, letters and other materials, and described in detail in the form of diaries and newsletters in the form of diaries and newsletters, with delicate strokes, Thomas Mann and Erzer who surrounded the Prussian Academy of Arts in a short period of seven weeks from January 28 to March 15, 1933Lasker-Schüller, Kaisui Kohlehuich, Erica Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Debrin, Riccarda Huch, George Grosz, Heinrich Mann, Klaus Mann, Gabriele Tejget, Martha Calleko, Nellie Sachs, Kaddyga Wadekind, Terezer Gizer, Helena Weigel, Vicky Baum, Ernst Toller, Miriam Sachs, Oscar Maria Graff, Gottfried Bain, Erich K. Maria Remarque (author of All Quiet on the Western Front), Count Harry Kessler, Karl Chukmeyer, Theodor Wolff, and many others hesitated in the midst of political repression and existential anxiety, and finally made the choice of compromise or obedience or resistance to exile.
Among them, I was impressed by the courage and self-confidence of several female artists in their struggle for democracy and freedom. The first was Készel Kohlerhuich, a gifted German expressionist printmaker and sculptor who was renowned in Europe and the United States, and was the first female member of the Prussian Academy to be admitted in more than a hundred years (joined in 1919). She lived in one of Berlin's poorest working-class neighborhoods, but at the age of 65 she was expelled from the Prussian Academy, losing her professorship and membership in the Academy. But she doesn't complain, because "social responsibility is always more important to her than freedom of accounting." Although she does not belong to any political party, her identification with left-wing ideas and their organization is unquestionable. ”
Riccarda Huhe, for example, is convinced that "the work of a writer requires a radical independence incompatible with membership in state institutions". Therefore, when the Nazis-controlled art academy wanted her to show her loyalty to the new regime and stay in the academy to continue to serve the "country", Riccarda Huhe, who was 68 years old at the time, fought for the departure of the academy without humility or arrogance, and in her article she expounded her "German faith" in a-for-tat confrontation with the Nazis: "I think it is almost natural for a German to have German feelings; However, there are different views on what Germany is and how it should be proved that it is a national character. I think that totalitarian, coercive, brutal means, slander against dissidents, and bragging about oneself are all unGerman and unreasonable. Although she retired from Berlin to quieter Heidelberg "during the war", she was absolutely unflinching and unafraid to defend civil liberties and human dignity. "Eventually," she survived the ** and the bombing. In Jena, her home became the center of meetings between Hitler's opponents. Two years after the end of the war, she also went to Berlin to collect material for a book about the German resistance to Hitler. "It is worthy of being an example for intellectuals to learn!
Another example is the 64-year-old Elzer Lasker-Schüller, who won the Kleist Prize for Literature, was targeted by the Nazis because of her Jewishness, "and they insulted her and pushed her until she fell to the ground." Once, when she fell, she bit her tongue so hard that she had to get a few stitches, becoming a poetess with her tongue sewn on. At the time, she was also facing financial difficulties and was betting her hopes on the successful premiere of her new play, Artur Arnonimus and His Fathers. Still, "while the Nazis were increasingly brazenly inciting hatred of Jews in Germany, Elzer Lasker-Schüller praised religious reconciliation in her plays." It just so happens that the title of the chapter is also "The Tongue Sewn", which reminds me of many people who previously wanted to speak but couldn't speak in some extreme social environment, and they have had their physical mouths sewn up by invisible sewing machines, which is both terrifying and powerless. Therefore, we need to cherish the right and environment of freedom of expression to prevent history from repeating itself.
Finally, there is Vicky Baum, the original author and screenwriter of the 5th Academy Award for Best Picture "The Grand Hotel" (1932), "a petite woman with big eyes, and one of the most high-profile star writers in [Germany]." "When she first started, she was not a writer, but a family. She discovered her literary talent by accident because she had written articles for her first husband, a journalist with writer's block, and then had him publish them under his own name. When she had a child with her second husband, Richard Wright, she put a career as a harp player on hold to concentrate on writing. Vicky Chem describes himself as a second-rate writer among first-rate writers. She writes so fast that she can write a long story in three months or even in a few weeks,** but "she has an astonishing sense of the characters of her time—men who have lost their support in the war and hid themselves behind a cold exterior, or young women who have struggled for a new life of independence and have been bruised by it." She always keeps up with the latest trends in her books. Therefore, "the Nazis considered her to be a typical Jewish 'asphalt writer' and must ban her from practice as soon as possible to prevent her superficial sensationalism from ruining German culture." For this reason, she left Germany and left for the United States, and did not attend the grand premiere of "Grand Hotel" at the Reichstag cinema on February 14, 1933. Wicky Baum invisibly expressed her dissatisfaction with the Nazi Party's control of the lifeblood of the German state.
In addition, the struggles of many artists are also on paper. In particular, in the chapter "Slamming the Door", in the face of the Nazis' attempt to control the entire German artist community by threatening to dissolve the Prussian Academy, Uwe Witstock summarizes the meeting in "absurd five acts", vividly portraying the personalities of the artists present at the time and their efforts to resist the Nazi leadership.
It only takes a period of annual leave for the *** to destroy democracy. Those who leave the country under the rule of law at the end of January will return to a ** country in 4 weeks. "This is the haze of history, and it is also a lesson that we who live in modern times must always be vigilant again, and hope that such a tragedy will never be repeated.
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