Must there always be a nasty edge to nationalism? We’ve
already had a Scottish writer using the categories 'settlers and colonialists' about the English in Scotland and
chuckling on a television interview over the reaction it caused. But artists
have a very bad record in this area and much greater figures than Alasdair Gray
have been guilty.
Wagner immediately comes to mind. He wrote a notorious essay
Judaism in Music
and after his death, he had the burden of being Hitler’s favourite
composer. It worked the other way for the Danish/German painter Emile Nolde.
His posthumous reputation was saved by his work being included in Hitler’s
Exhibition of Degenerate Painters. He was, in fact, a nasty northern
nationalist, a member of the Nazi Party expelled from the Berlin Secession for
anti-Semitism.
Some of the Russian nationalist composers known as the
Mighty Handful were also anti-Semitic and on occasion it got into their music.
It is difficult to see how music can show this vile prejudice, but apparently
the Goldenberg and Schumuyle movement from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an
Exhibition is an attempt. Simon Winder in his history of the Habsburgs,
Danubia, writes that Janacek ‘was a thoroughly unpleasant Slav nationalist of a
dotty kind’. Because of the settling of nationalist scores after the fall of
the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, Winder also suggests that Mahler, a
German-speaking Moravian and a Jew to boot, and Hugo Wolf, a German Slovenian,
were perhaps fortunate to die before the deluge.
There are a fair number of great writers from the past who
show a nationalist-hate side. Norway’s Nobel laureate, Knut Hamsun showed his
nasty northern nationalism in his obituary of Hitler, calling him ‘a reformist
character of the highest order (to whom) we his close followers bow at his
death’. He had previously given his Nobel prize money to Goebbels. France also
had a very unpleasant novelist of high literary quality, Céline, equally famous
for his disgusting anti-Semitic tracts. At least France has not seen fit to
name a public building after him. However, in the Norwegian village of Oppeid
there is a Knut Hamsun Centre, which has been described as a stunning piece of
concept architecture.
We can still to be shocked by what is unearthed about artists
we admire. The current Times Literary Supplement has a note about a collection
of Scottish war poems edited by David Goldie and Roderick Watson. J. C.
comments: “Unmentioned by the editors are the fanatical musings of Hugh
MacDiarmid, who wished good luck to Luftwaffe bombers circling over London in
the Blitz, and asked, ‘Is a Mussolini or a Hitler / Worse than a Bevin or a
Morrison?’ Who would have thought that for all his outrageousness, C. M. Grieve
could have been such a horrible N.N.N?
