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.Rather, his commitment to a humanist perspective suffices to jus-tify the defence of the Faustian perspective that he lays out.Korff shumanist defence of this perspective indicates that the difficulty liesnot in the purported falsifications of Nazi Goethe scholars, but ratherin the problematic ethics of violence and tragedy embedded in Goethe stext.For only the basic form of this text and its structuring of moralpleasure can account not just for the broad popularity of the Nazi-promoting Faust interpretation offered by Schott but also for the domi-nance, first, of similar trends in Faust scholarship in the Nazi period102 David Panthat, though diverging from Schott s model,  were equally sympatheticto Fascist ideals but couched in a more sophisticated language ,64 and,second, a tradition of Goethe scholarship dating back at least to 1870which Schott and others like him could draw on to substantiate theirarguments.Play and tragedyKorff s work provides the most cogent example of how Goethe shumanism remained compatible with and even provided an impor-tant moral justification for Nazi ideas.Given the way in which thishumanist faith functioned, it did not even matter that Korff s workdoes not take any explicitly political positions.The rejection of politi-cal context itself fits into both the needs of a Nazi reception and theconstant shifting between ironic play and violence within Faust.Here,even Schwerte s critique of the Faust myth recapitulates the tendencyof the play s developmental ethic to shift back and forth between anindividualist-escapist and a nationalist-ideological one.Schwerte s pri-mary argument in favour of the benign character of Goethe s text isto blame the Nazi reception on the ideologization of poetic concepts,while the antidote to this ideological appropriation is  to hold thepoetic word within its formal borders.65 By imagining an enclosure ofthe work of art within a poetological space without social and politicalconsequences, Schwerte repeats a mistake that can be also be attrib-uted to the Bildungsbürgertum attitude of directors and managers suchas Hilpert and Gründgens, but not to Goethe or Goebbels.Neither ofthe latter, in their respective stagings of escapes into a Walpurgis Nightof theatrical illusion, ever imagined that the illusion would perma-nently prevent an awakening or a reckoning.Though the diversionis useful for allowing the spirit to rest and gather strength, the finalmoral and ideological conflict is still the main event, and the diver-sion only serves to make the necessary violence more palatable.Fromthis perspective, the insistence on the poetological purity of the textbecomes an escapist ruse that ultimately serves the very ideologicalends that are being downplayed.And, in fact, the case of Hans Schwerte is the best example for thetendency of the Bildungsbürgertum attitude to shift into the NationalSocialist one and back again in a kind of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde man-ner.For, as has become well known, Schwerte s career as a demaskerof Faustian ideology only began after he secretly gave up a career asHans Schneider, the Nazi SS officer working within Heinrich Himmler sThe Structure of Aesthetic Pleasure 103research project on  German ancestral heritage (Deutsches Ahnenerbe).66While, as Claus Leggewie has argued,67 there is no reason to doubt theauthenticity of his conversion from Nazi to Bildungsbürger in his Faustbook, there is reason to question the meaning of this conversion andthe extent to which it represented a real rupture rather than an under-lying continuity.For the Nazi ideological project that promoted anethic of individual striving that culminates in a people s freedom andthat trumps all other morals not only co-existed with but was activelylinked to a vision of art that could divert attention from the violenceengendered by the ideology.The structure of aesthetic pleasure in the Nazi period included both aserious acceptance of violence as the price for progress and an entertain-ment that diverted attention from the real price that was being paid.Inorder to arrive at this structure, the Nazis could build upon a tradi-tion of aesthetic experience and reception that was set up by Goethe sFaust and established in the history of its academic reception and thenrepeated in the actual theatrical performances.This conclusion shouldneither lead us to condemn Goethe s work as something proto-fascistnor somehow  normalize Nazism into a symptom of an inevitablebroader process of modernization.Rather, Faust s role in establishing astructure of aesthetic pleasure that fit Nazi ideological goals indicateshow Nazi ideology was compatible with the attempt to escape tradi-tional notions of sacrifice.If Goethe s work helped to reject a Christiannotion of sacrifice of individuals for the sake of spiritual ideals and toestablish the humanist idea that individuals should be defended againstsacrifice, it also was able to recognize that the pursuit of this idea hadits price.The larger tragedy of Faust seems to lie in just how high thisprice turned out to be.Notes1.J.Goebbels,  Reichsminister Dr.Goebbels vor den deutschen Theaterleitern: Wir halten der Kunst unsere Hand hin!  Völkischer Beobachter, 10 May 1933,7.English translation from E.Schulz Hostetter, The Berlin State Theater underthe Nazi Regime: A Study of the Administration, Key Productions, and CriticalResponses from 1933 1944 (Lewiston, 2004), 202.2.W.Grange,  Ordained Hands on the Altar of Art: Gründgens, Hilpert, andFehling in Berlin , in G.W.Gadberry (ed.) Theater in the Third Reich, thePrewar Years: Essays on Theater in Nazi Germany (Westport and London, 1995),78 79.3.W.Grange,  Ordained hands on the Altar of Art , 79 83.On the Fehlingepisode, see C.Riess, Gustaf Gründgens: Eine Biografie (Hamburg, 1965),212 214.104 David Pan4.Hostetter, 125.5. Berlin Staatstheater Repertories of Twelve Seasons (1932 1944), Hostetter,191 198.See also the catalogue of plays staged at the Deutsches Theater,Berlin under the direction of Heinz Hilpert from 28 August 1934 until hisforced resignation in August 1944, contained in Zentrales StaatsarchivPotsdam (ZSP), RfVuP Akte Nr.278, Bl.483, 484, 485, 486, 487; reprintedin J.Wardetzky, Theaterpolitik im faschistischen Deutschland: Studien undDokumente (Berlin, 1983), 357 360.E [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]