Endless repetition, for the Nazis repeat endlessly in their drive to one goal, shouting their slogans with all the inflections, teaching their mottoes in every class. Even the lesson in drawing, which used to be the gayest and most relaxed hour — what has happened to it?
Any issue of Art and Youth offers a lively picture of a Nazi drawing lesson. The May, 1937, issue begins with a “Family Tree of Instructors,” and a “Pedigree of Residences”!). The leading editorial is a long illustrated essay entitled Aerial Defense in the Drawing Class. Joseph Stuchler says: “The first thing we must demand of a task is its value in terms of national preparedness. It is characteristic of our epoch that the defense instincts ( Wehrhaftsinne ) of our youth are stimulated through the awakening of its will to bear weapons. In this sense, lessons of aerial defense in the drawing class meet with our educational objective!”
He goes on to describe classes in grammar school, keeping to his theme of “Aerial Defense.” He begins with the sixth grade (the German schools have nine classes, numbered Nine to One), and here he is referring to children of ten:
“Everything that moves, that is unusual, may be the object of portrayal. Thus, for example, an air-raid, the activity of weapons of defense, the searchlight, parachute jumping, explosions, burning houses, the fire department in action, helping the medical officers, the strange appearance of men in gas masks, to which, of course, we add the element of color. All this belongs to the life and experience of a ten-year-old boy. Motionless forms, such as, for example, the houses of a city, are no more than meaningless scenery, and as such can often be omitted altogether.”
For the fifth grade, more ambitious tasks!
“We proceed in our study of movement, and we portray the act of ‘falling out,’ with both arms stretched upward… also, we can depict the act of ‘falling backward unconscious,’ with the marked declivity of the whole body and of the arms in a backward motion: that is easy to reproduce. And now we observe the medical officers at work. The simple walk of the doctors and their aides as they transport a wounded man on his stretcher, as well as the simple pose of kneeling, ought not to be too difficult even for those pupils less gifted in drawing.”
The fourth grade is to draw a bomb-proof cellar; but to stress the dramatic impact of a bomb hitting near the cellar rather than the passive distress of the people huddled inside. “In this manner the teacher can awaken the imagination dormant in the child and make use of it in a manner helpful to our theme.”
The third grade is to draw an aerial attack upon a factory…. “In order to link this to the subject matter of the chemistry course, let us dwell upon the Haber-Bosch process” (forgetting that Haber was a Jew who died in exile) “in the greatest of all chemical factories the Badische Anilin und Soda-Fabrik…. This factory is a monument to German industry and German intelligence, startling lo the rest of the world, and of enormous material benefit to German industry. The envy of our enemies will be aroused by it as long as the factory continues to exist. To destroy it would be easy for the powerful aerial armaments of our enemies: it would take only a very few minutes! We leave it to each individual to picture for himself the misery, suffering, and cruel destruction which would result.”
This is the instruction of a country at war, in the grip of terror, surrounded by atrocity and a delusive enemy.
The bombproof cellar is set before the second grade in far more detail: “It is night. There is only a dim light, just sufficient to carry out the measures necessary for defense, but not sufficient to make it possible to read. A wounded man has just been brought in on a stretcher. His nose and mouth are bandaged and he seems to be asleep. A physician is doing his utmost for him. Beside him, on another stretcher, is another wounded man. There is a sheet thrown over his body. Perhaps he is sleeping forever. Another man is attempting to calm the women, who are always trying to meddle in the affairs of the busy men. There is no end to their everlasting questions as to how things stand…. In the corner there is a child asleep, with his wooden horse under his arm. Perhaps he is the happiest of them all.”
The highest class is to concentrate on gas masks. They are “eminently suitable for portrayal, since they simplify the more difficult form of the human head. Naturally the form of the skull is clearly recognizable as an ellipsoid. Then we concentrate our attention upon the interchangeable filters and the oxygen mask. Here the part meant to protect the nose is even more visible than in the case of the S. Mask. The entire suit of the volunteer, so made that he is protected against corroding gases, is very good for our purposes, being so very simple…. The sensitive mind of the young man is given a remarkable opportunity to set down the entire scale of possible movements, beginning with the nervous haste of those offering aid; through the weak collapse of some poor victim, in whose limbs a faint stream of life still trickles; and, finally, the rigor of death. We cannot and do not desire to train artists, just as we do not desire or attempt to train poets in our German classes. There is one thing rightfully demanded of a German composition: an avowal of the spiritual forces of reason, will, and emotion latent in man; and it is exactly the same thing that we demand of the instruction in drawing. Namely: the training of imitative power, the cultivation of the sense of beauty, and a single-minded point of view toward all that is false — these are the permanent values given Youth on its way through life.”
This close hardly seems possible, even to a person familiar with the methods of National Socialism. This twist, this whiplash, at the end of a corridor of bombproof cellars and scenes of torture! Things stand like this in Germany. And the “people” in their obedience have been assimilated by this machine.