Karajan’s Heidegger moment, perhaps.....I sure hope not, though.
Beethoven wrote the Eroica for Napoleon, and Shostakovich’s 5th is dedicated to the Russian communist revolution of 1917. Both are beautiful.
Ping.
Not being an English Lit major mind you but just my two cents of what I remember from my high school days, most of what these three wrote was crap. Pound most especially. Yeah, Mencken was a social critic but the love of fascism for failed artists(Hitler considered himself one) and writers who suck otherwise is that as long as they glorify the fascist leader, they’re a success and no one can criticize them in a fascist system.
With regard to truly creative artists, if I didn’t separate their work from their personalities, politics, whatever, I’ve have a small palette. Heck, Brecht angered Hitler and was close to being arrested when he escaped Germany but, on the other hand, he was a committed Marxist and returned to East Germany after the war.
As for actors and the like, they are pretty low on my list as far as talent goes and I have a hard time separating their talent from their personal life and beliefs.
He’s been dead for 23 years or so. Time to move on.
When he conducted the Horst Wessel Song in occupied Paris, that sealed my opinion of him.
You can’t judge the Thirties by what happened during the Forties. Let’s instead judge our own Communist sympathizers AFTER the horrors during the Thirties.
I have a discussion with myself similar to the one on this thread when I listen to the music of Richard Strauss. It is difficult to listen to his exquisite Three Last Songs while realizing he was something like the composer laureate of the Third Reich.
Pound, sure, and for decades afterwards. Eliot's sympathies were more with "right wing" intellectual movements than with actual fascist regimes.
Mencken was somewhat similar -- though less of a highbrow. He had contempt for the workings of democracy, but I don't think he was any more attracted to actual tyrannical regimes.
Nobody had a crystal ball and could see where things would end up, though. Mussolini, say, didn't become the "Mussolini" we've come to know and hate until after he'd been in power for some time. There were a lot of difficult decisions to make back then between alternatives that were both bad.
If you remember the Cold War years, the kind of bad and difficult choices we faced the interwar years weren't entirely different, though the alternatives were cruder and the naivete greater in the Twenties and Thirties than in the postwar years.