The fact that Germany had produced a Beethoven, Russia a Tolstoy, Italy a Verdi, or Spain a Cervantes, was wholly irrelevant to the fact that all these countries experienced brutal dictatorships in the twentieth century. High cultural achievements across the centuries did not render a descent into political barbarism more inexplicable than their absence would have done; culture and politics simply do not impinge on each other in so simple and direct a manner. If the experience of the Third Reich teaches us anything, it is that a love of great music, great art and great literature does not provide people with any kind of moral or political immunization against violence, atrocity, or subservience to dictatorship.
From: Richard J. Evans’s The Coming of the Third Reich (2003).
“Duchamp Is Our Misfortune,” a comic strip by Art Spiegelman. From MetaMaus (Pantheon, 2011), and originally published in the New Yorker in 2002.
Biblioklept 