The Death and Life of the Total Work of Art – Henry van de Velde and the Legacy of a Modern Concept

ing by the extinction of its critical distance towards reality. What is striking in this
context is the fact that Rebentisch avoids using the term Gesamtkunstwerk, though
it contains a paradox crucial to any reflection on the relationship between art and
politics. On one side, it expresses the artist’s aspiration for total autonomy, while at
the same time fostering the dissolution of art itself. For once it has reached its point
of perfection, the Gesamtkunstwerk inevitably turns into a Gesamtwirklichkeit, as
Odo Marquard stated on the occasion of the legendary exhibition “Der Hang zum
Gesamtkunstwerk.” 10 Thus, it serves as a means to equate political differences in
favour of an all-embracing identity—represented, reproduced, and embodied by
an authoritative stage director as introduced in Craig’s theater reforms and Collin’s
dystopian novel.
Dictators and Artists
However, this phenomenon is by no means restricted to modern theater or dystopian
novels. Quite the contrary: reality is more telling in this respect than any fictional
story ever could be. From Italian fascism to the German National Socialists,
from Franco’s regime in Spain to Stalin’s Soviet Republic and current totalitarian
states, total design serves as a means to identify the will of the people with the will
of the dictator. For this purpose, numerous forms of manifestations and spectacles
are conceived that display reality as something supernatural. In 1936, for example,
Adolf Hitler commissioned Albert Speer to design a monumental light dome consisting
of 152 floodlights for the regime’s public functions at the Nazi party rally
grounds in Nürnberg (Figure 1); and with 200,000 participants, it must have had
an intimidating effect. But above all, it could be regarded as the realization of modern
art’s unfulfilled desire for a total work as it was imagined for instance in the
visionary monuments of early modernism. Well acquainted with the avant-garde’s
dream of a state run solely by the artist, modern dictators became anxious to introduce
themselves as artists. For instance, Hitler was frequently presented as an architect
addicted to the totalitarian design of the Third Reich (Figure 2). In a special
edition of the magazine Illustrierter Beobachter entitled “Adolf Hitler—A Man and
His People,” Hitler even acts as a trained architect, though he never was. 11 We see
him sitting or standing in front of a drawing table covered with a great number of
plans, while his assistants—Troost and Speer—are carefully listening to the leader’s
threatening promise: “Germany shall become more beautiful.”
However, taking this all into account, Walter Benjamin regarded fascism as a fatal
“aesthetization of political life.” 12 From here, it was only a short step to Adorno’s
general critique on the Gesamtkunstwerk. In “Die Kunst und die Künste” (Art and
16 From Total Design to Total Theory