Cultural Bolshevism

Cultural Bolshevism (German: Kulturbolschewismus), sometimes referred to specifically as "art Bolshevism" or "music Bolshevism", was a term widely used by critics in Nazi Germany to denounce modernist movements in the arts, particularly when seeking to discredit more nihilistic forms of expression. This first became an issue during the 1920s in Weimar Germany. German artists such as Max Ernst and Max Beckmann were denounced by Adolf Hitler, the Nazi Party and other right-wing nationalists as "cultural Bolsheviks". The propaganda term was used despite the fact that such art forms were disapproved of in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin as bourgeois, which instead favoured the more realist-orientated aesthetics of socialist realism.

The development of modern art at the beginning of the 20th century – but with roots going back to the 1860s – denoted a revolutionary divergence from traditional artistic values to ones based on the personal perceptions and feelings of the artists. This rejection of traditional authority – intimately linked to the Industrial Revolution and the advance of democracy as the preferred form of government – was exhilarating to some, but extremely threatening to others, as it took away the security they felt under the old order, and the very cohesiveness of Western culture and civilization appeared to be in peril.

The modernist break occurred at around the same time as the October Revolution in Russia, and it was perhaps natural that those who felt threatened by the new artistic viewpoint would associate it with the group that came out on top after that revolution, the Bolsheviks with their Marxist–Leninist political philosophy. In reality, the connection between the modernism and Bolshevism was extremely tenuous, and primarily a matter of both existing at the same unsettled time in European history. Still, some artists in Western Europe drew inspiration from revolutionary ideals, to the extent that Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck confidently declared in 1920 that Dada was a "German Bolshevist affair."

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