Famed Architect Philip Johnson’s Hidden Nazi Past | Vanity Fair
It's a little hard these days imaging a gay rich American of the 1930's getting enamoured of Hitlerian fascism via Nietzsche, but as this rather fascinating article explains, it did indeed happen. (I suppose a similar thing can be said of upper class gay English academics and communism.)
Can't say I knew anything of the anti-Semitic conspiracy mongering of one Father Charles Edward Coughlin before I read this article, either.
This delivery of religion via media pop star has been a big thing in a America for a long time, hasn't it? (I wrote about it in my discussion of "Anything Goes", too.)
Nietzsche didn't approve of vulgar anti-semites.
ReplyDeleteGay Nazis aren't that hard to imagine though - remember Rohm etc. The night of the long knives was when the gay nazis got purged but they weren't anti-gay to start with.
I think there is something in the idea that societies and sub-groups that reverse a certain idea of masculinity end up not being averse to homosexuality e.g. the Spartans, the samurai, the Nazis, etc.
I assume you meant "revere" instead if "reverse" in the second paragraph, and yes, it seems a valid point. But while it may be that German gays could get ahead within (at least early) Nazism, my surprise is more that a well connected, rich gay outsider with a background in arts and high culture would be attracted to it too.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if it is patronising of gay men to suggest that the sharp uniforms and the Nazi emphasis on the body beautiful might have helped convince Johnson. (Yes, probably!)
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