The first-hand accounts of atrocities encountered under the Stalin and Hitler regimes were the most riveting for me in this unit. In Eugenia Ginzburg's Journey Into the Whirlwind, you can almost smell the fear as she awaits the interrogation and imprisonment she knows is coming- "The windows of our bedroom faced the street and cars drove past all the time. And how we listened in fear and trembling when it seemed...one... might be pulling up in front of our house" (Modern Europe 401).

It would be horrible to know that you are doomed, through no fault of your own, and that those who will deliver your fate don't even regard you as human. Primo Levi recounted, on the day that his group left for Auschwitz, "Dawn came on us like a betrayer... the new sun... an ally of our enemies to assist in our destruction... many things were then said and done among us; but of these it is better that there remain no memory (409, my italics). That last part struck me hard- their last moments together before boarding the train were so painful that Levi couldn't even write about them.

It is always interesting how artists respond to the political situations they are in the midst of. There were two movements in particular which I think did a remarkable job of reflecting these times after World War I and leading into WWII: the dadaists; and the modernist music composers.

Dadaism was a reaction against WWI and its aftermath- the artists were very cynical and pessimistic, and rather than attempt any lasting beauty in their art, they merely sought to criticize the societies that had cause the turmoil. In a way they were "anti-artists". Here is a representative work from Raoul Hausmann called ABCD.

Musical composers began a trend of what is known as atonal music; there was no dominant key, nothing for a listener to hear any familiarity in- although rigorously following certain formulas, to the untrained ear it sounded like "noise", or someone just randomly playing notes. These forms echoed the emptiness and bleakness of war and oppression. Here's a sample from Arnold Schoenberg:

https://youtu.be/_Bq4EykKzEg (Links to an external site.)

It is perhaps the highest compliment to both dadaism and Schoenberg that Adolf Hitler considered them "degenerate".