Huxley’s targets in the book are primarily biology, genetics, behavioural psychology, and mechanisation. Brave New World is set well into the future, in AF 632, AF standing for After Ford (which would make it around 2545 AD). Technology has moved on, and a technique known as Bokanovsky’s Process enables one ovary in certain circumstances to produce sixteen thousand persons, perfect for Mendelian mathematics, the basis for a new society in which vast numbers of people are, even more than now, all the same. There are neo-Pavlovian infant-conditioning methods (books and flowers are linked with noxious shocks), and a ‘sleep-teaching process by which infants acquire, among other things, the rudiments of class-consciousness.’134 Sex is strictly controlled: women are allowed a pregnancy substitute, and there are bandolier-containers, known as Malthusian belts, which carry not bullets but contraceptives. Polygamy is the accepted norm, monogamy a disgrace. The family, and parenthood, are obsolete. It has become ‘improper’ to want to spend time alone, to fall in love, and to read books for pleasure. In a chilling echo of the Mythus (Huxley’s book was published in the same year), the Christian cross has been abolished by the simple expedient of having its head removed to form the letter T, after the ‘model B Ford.’ Organised religion has been replaced by ‘Solidarity Services.’ The book solemnly informs us that this new world resulted from a nine-year war in which biological weapons wrought such devastation that ‘a world-wide federation and foolproof control of the people were the only acceptable alternative.’ Huxley is specific about the eugenics that help exercise this foolproof control, showing how eggs are graded (alphas to epsilons) and then immersed in ‘a warm bouillon containing free-swimming spermatozoa.’ We encounter half-familiar organisations such as the ‘Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre.’ Some of the characters – Mustapha Mond, the Resident Controller for Western Europe, and Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne – remind us of what the new world has lost from the past and what the society has chosen to remember. Huxley is also careful to show that snobbery and jealousy still exist, as does loneliness, ‘despite all attempts to eradicate such feelings.’135
This sounds heavy-handed in summary, but Huxley is a funny writer. His vision of the future is not wholly bad – the elite still enjoy life, as elites tend to do.’136 And it is this which links Huxley to Freud, where this chapter began. Freud’s view was that a better understanding of the superego, by psychoanalysis, would ultimately lead to a better understanding of ethics, and more ethical behaviour. Huxley was more sceptical, and he had more in common with Russell. He thought there were no absolutes of good and bad, and that man must continually renew his political institutions in the light of new knowledge, to create the best society possible. The society of Brave New World may seem horrible to us, but it doesn’t seem all that horrible to the people in the story, who know nothing else, just as the Dobu, or the Arapesh, or the Kwakiutl, know nothing else beyond their societies, and are happy enough. To get the world you want, Huxley affirms, you have to fight for it. And, by implication, if your world is collapsing, you aren’t fighting hard enough. That was where, in 1932, he was most prescient of all, in suggesting that there was a fight coming.
17
INQUISITION
On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Barely six weeks later, on 11 March, he established the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, with Joseph Goebbels as minister.1 This was a name straight out of Brave New World, and between them Hitler and Goebbels would soon wreak havoc on the cultural life of Germany on a scale never seen before. Their brutal actions did not come out of the blue. Hitler had always been very clear that when the Nazi Party formed a government, there would be ‘accounts’ to settle with a wide range of enemies. Foremost among those he singled out were artists. In 1930, in a letter to Goebbels, he assured the future minister that when the party came to power, it would not simply become a ‘debating society’ so far as art was concerned. The party’s policies, laid out in the manifesto as early as 1920, called for ‘a struggle’ against the ‘tendencies in the arts and literature which exercise a disintegrating influence on the life of the people.’2
The first blacklist of artists was published on 15 March. George Grosz, visiting the United States, was stripped of his German citizenship. The Bauhaus was closed. Max Liebermann (then aged eighty-eight) and Käthe Kollwitz (sixty-six), Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix and Oskar Schlemmer were all dismissed from their posts as teachers in art schools. So swift were these actions that the sackings had to be made legal retroactively by a law that wasn’t passed until 7 April 1933.3 In the same month the first exhibition defaming modern art – called Chamber of Horrors – was held in Nuremberg, then travelled to Dresden and Dessau.4 A week before Hitler became chancellor, Ernst Barlach had been rash enough to describe him on radio as ‘the lurking destroyer of others’ and called National Socialism ‘the secret death of mankind.’5 Now, in retribution, the local Nazis called for the artist’s Magdeburg Memorial to be removed from the cathedral there, and no sooner had this demand been voiced than the work was shipped to Berlin ‘for storage.’6 Der Sturm, the magazine that had done so much to promote modern art in Germany, was shut down, and so were Die Aktion and Kunst und Kunstler (Art and Artists). Herwarth Walden, publisher of Der Sturm, escaped to the Soviet Union, where he died in 1941.7 The collagist John Heartfield fled to Prague.
In 1933 modern artists made several attempts to align themselves with the Nazis, but Goebbels would have none of it, and the exhibitions were forced to close. For a time he and Rosenberg competed for the right to set policy in the cultural/intellectual sphere, but the propaganda minister was a superb organiser and sidelined his rival as soon as an official Chamber for Arts and Culture came into being under Goebbels’s control. The powers of the chamber were formidable – each and every artist was forced to join a government-sponsored professional body, and unless artists registered, they were forbidden from exhibiting in museums or from receiving commissions. Goebbels also stipulated that there were to be no public exhibitions of art without official approval.8 In a speech to the party’s annual meeting in September 1934, Hitler emphasised ‘two cultural dangers’ that threatened National Socialism. On the one hand, there were the modernists, the ‘spoilers of art’ – identified specifically as ‘the cubists, futurists and Dadaists.’ What he and the German people wanted, he said, was a German art that was ‘clear,’ ‘without contortion’ and ‘without ambiguity.’ Art was not ‘auxiliary to politics,’ he said. It must become a ‘functioning part’ of the Nazi political program.9 The speech was an important moment for those artists who had not yet been dismissed from their positions or had their art taken off display. Goebbels, who had shown some sympathy for people like Emil Nolde and Ernst Barlach, quickly hardened his opinions. Confiscations recommenced, and another raft of painters and sculptors was dismissed from teaching or museum positions. Hans Grundig was forbidden to paint. Books by or about modern artists also became targets. Copies of the catalogue of Klee’s drawings, published in 1934, were seized even before they arrived in the shops. Two years later a catalogue of the works of Franz Marc was seized (Marc had been dead nearly twenty years), as was a volume of Barlach’s drawings – labelled a danger to ‘public safety, peace and order.’ The book was later pulped by the Gestapo.10 In May 1936 all artists registered with the Reichskammer had to prove their Aryan ancestry. In October 1936 the National Gallery in Berlin was instructed to close its modern art galleries, and in November Goebbels outlawed all ‘unofficial art criticism.’ From then on, only the reporting of art events was allowed.