Many articles are coming out these days about the architect Phillip Johnson, who recently died. Mark Stevens has an article about the architect Phillip Johnson's youthful dalliance with Nazism in the New York Times of 31 January.
It seems that Johnson was indeed a Fascist, and that he did indeed believe in Nazism and admire Hitler. Many intellectuals of Johnson's generation went through phases during which they looked to totalitarian movements to solve the problems of their times. Most of them chose the totalitarian dictatorship of the left. They liked Stalin. The leftists generally grew out of it as they learned more about the millions whom Stalin had killed. Times change, and with them people. Stalinist Russia was not better than Nazi Germany. If repentant ex-Stalinists can be forgiven, then repentant ex-Fascists can also be forgiven - Ezra Pound referred to himself as "an absolute idiot" as he reflected on the propaganda he once broadcast for Mussolini on Italian radio.
The old Communist intellectuals in Europe and America were genuinely ignorant of Stalin's crimes. These crimes were not reported in Western newspapers; a year or two ago the New York Times ran an article about their own Moscow reporter who knew of the millions being murdered in Ukraine and elsewhere, but who decided that it was more important for the "Soviet experiment" to continue than for the world to know about the millions who died because of that experiment. People in New York, London, and Paris were therefore left ignorant of the crimes the Soviet government was committing against its citizens, and free to admire Utopia growing on the Volga. Western Communists can sincerely state that they did not know what was going on. The left of that generation has an alibi.
Phillip Johnson, however, could not plead innocent by reason of ignorance. He was with the German army when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. Stevens quotes a letter Johsnon wrote about it. "The German green uniforms made the place look gay and happy. There were not many Jews to be seen. We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle."
That is to say that watching a city being destroyed by men in sexy green uniforms was Johnson's idea of fun. This is not the same thing that attracted Marsden Hartley to German uniforms and the pageantry of pre-1914 Europe - the gloriously colorful horsemen guarding royal palaces in Berlin, whose exuberant uniforms served as raw material for Hartley's abstract paintings. Johnson preferred not the ceremonial aspect of military life - the gaudy parades - but rather killing, destroying, and burning cities. Most of the nineteenth century was a time of peace, when a stirring military spectacle meant exciting parades to be enjoyed; Johnson thought a stirring military spectacle was watching Warsaw burn, while thousands of its innhabitants burned to death. Hartley stopped painting this subject when it became ugly. Johnson liked the new way - he liked killing.
Johnson did not have the youthful political folly of a naive intellectual who thought that Nazism would produce peace and happinness, as the old Marxists thought Marxism would; he liked violence. Johnson liked voyeuristic sadism. He was not deceived about Nazism; he knew full well that Nazism meant attacking a small, weak country like Poland and bombing its capitol to ruins. Thousands of men, women, and children died to provide him with what he called "a stirring spectacle". Johnson watched the city burn with them in it, and he enjoyed it.
He mentions that "there were not many Jews around". Standing as he was among German soldiers in green uniforms, I am not surprised he happened to notice no Jews around. Johnson later designed a synagogue at no cost as penitence for the antisemitic attitudes Stevens quotes in his article. The Holocaust was the worst, but certainly not the only, German crime, Destroying Warsaw was also a grave crime against humanity, even as were the bombings of London and Rotterdam. Did Johnson donate plans for Polish buildings to replace those he enjoyed seeing burn?
The attraction of Nazism was not that it promised Utopia, but rather that it afforded its proponents an opportunity to be cruel. This kind of smashing and bashing is what attracts skinheads to Nazism today - they feel more fully alive when they beat people up. Phillip Johnson was not naive; he was vicious.
Here lies the distinction between those of Johnson's generation who were fooled by Communism, and those who liked Fascism.