Recently I did some research into the Bonfire of the Vanities that occurred in Florence in the late 1400s. The first bonfire of the Vanities occurred on the 7th February 1497. The bonfire is a burning of objects which are condemned by authorities as having associations with sin. These objects included vanity items such as mirrors, cosmetics, fine dresses, playing cards and musical instruments. Other targets were books that were deemed immoral. These include works by Giovanni Boccaccio and manuscripts of secular songs.

These bonfires were orchestrated and led by Girolamo Savonarola, an Italian Dominican Friar active in Florence.

Savonarola wanted to destroy secular art and culture and became moral dictator of the city of Florence when the Medici were driven out in 1494. Sent to Florence originally a dozen years before, he made a reputation for austerity and learning. Savonarola’s opponents referred to him and his followers as ‘Snivellers’ and he grimly disapproved of jokes and frivolity, of poetry and inns, of sex, of gambling, of fine clothes and jewellery and luxury of every sort. He denounced the works of Boccaccio, nude paintings, pictures of pagan deities and the whole humanistic culture of the Italian Renaissance. He called for laws against vice and laxity. He put an end to the carnivals and festivals the Florentines traditionally enjoyed, substituting religious festivals instead, and employed street urchins as a junior gestapo to sniff out luxurious and suspect items. During the first  bonfire of the vanities in 1497 he had gaming tables and packs of cards, carnival masks, mirrors, ornaments, nude statues and supposedly indecent books and pictures burned in the street. The friar also disapproved of profiteering financiers and businessmen.

Savonarola made many powerful enemies. Among them was  pope Alexander VI who felt uncomfortable with the Dominican’s denunciation of the laxity and luxury of the Church and its leaders, and who eventually excommunicated the rigorous friar. In 1498 St Mark’s was attacked by a screaming mob and Savonarola was arrested by the Florentine authorities. He along with two friars were  tortured  and condemned as heretics.

On the morning of May 23rd, 1498  a crowd of Florentines gathered in the Piazza della Signoria, where a scaffold had been erected on a platform. Some of the crowd screamed abuse at Savonarola and his two companions, who were formally unfrocked and left in their under-tunics with bare feet and their hands tied. A priest standing near Savonarola asked what he felt his  martyrdom. He answered, ‘The Lord has suffered as much for me.’

The figure of Savonarola is an interesting figure in history. As I see it, he degraded peoples freedom to express themselves by burning objects that he saw as being vainglorious. In the foreword to Selected Writings of Girolamo Savonarola Religion and Politics, 1490 – 1498 Giuseppe Mazzotta, in the foreword, suggested that “Savonarola can be called a moral revolutionary. His vision is broad. Like the reformers who were to follow him, he attacked the dominant paradigms of social life” (Mazzotta, 2006). Savonarola effectively created  an early form of  Cult Of Personality.

Defining Cult of Personality

A cult of personality is created when an individual uses mass media, propaganda or other methords in order to create an idealized, worshipful image. The Sociologist Max Weber developed a ‘tripartite classification of authority.’ Weber defined three types of legitimate political leadership, domination and authority. In his essay The Three Types of Legitimate Rule he wrote about these types of domination. They are characterised as such:

1. Charismatic authority (Character, heroism, leadership, religious)
2. Traditional authority (Patriarchs, patrimonialism, feudalism)
3. Legal authority (modern law and state, bureaucracy)

The ‘cult of personality’ holds parallels with what Weber defined as ‘charismatic authority’. It relates to divinisation and the etymology of the word probably derives from England around 1800-1850. Then it had no political connotations but was related instead to ‘cult of genius’  ‘Cult of Personality’ and ‘personality cult’ were popularized by Nikita Khrushchev’s speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences which was given on the final day of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, February 25, 1956, which criticised the idealisation and worship of Josef Stalin.

How Cult Of Personality works with my initial show ideas

Most dictators had their own cult of personality with which they used in order to control culture and the media. It was also created because those leaders created a following that idealized and worshipped them. What I am looking for in performance is a link between Savonarola’s cult of personality to other prominent events and figures with which this way of ‘governing’ is applied to change and adapt popular opinion, as well as the diminishing of free speech, free thinking and expression of cultural identity.

From Savonarola, to Nazis and to Trump

As said, Savonarola, in my opinion, created an early form of Cult Of Personality through the  bonfire of the vanities. From researching the bonfires it led me to the book burnings that took place in Germany in 1933, orchestrated by the Nazis.

The Nazi book burnings was a campaign that was conducted by the German Student Union to burn books in Nazi Germany and Austria during the 1930s. The books that were targeted were considered subversive or they represented ideologies that were opposed to Nazism. In 1933 the German Student Union proclaimed action against the ‘Un-German Spirit’ which was to cleanse literature by fire – ‘Säuberung’. On the 8th of April, 1933, the Student Union drafted the Twelve Theses which called for the purging German literature of Jewish influence.

Against the un-German spirit!

1. Language and literature have their roots in the folk. It is the German Folk’s responsibility to assure that its language and literature are the pure and unadulterated expression of its Folk traditions.

2. At present there is a chasm between literature and German tradition. This situation is a disgrace.

3. Purity of language and literature is your responsibility! Your Folk has entrusted you with the duty of faithfully preserving your language.

4. Our most dangerous enemy is the Jew and those who are his slaves.

5. A Jew can only think Jewish. If he writes in German, he is lying. The German who writes in German, but thinks un-German, is a traitor! The student who speaks and writes un-German is, in addition, thoughtless and has abandoned his duties.

6. We want to eradicate lies, we want to denounce treason, we want institutions of discipline and political education for us the students, not mindlessness.

7. We want to regard the Jew as alien and we want to respect the traditions of the Volk.

Therefore, we demand of the censor:
Jewish writings are to be published in Hebrew
If they appear in German, they must be identified as translations.
Strongest actions against the abuse of the German script
German script is only available to Germans.
The un-German spirit is to be eradicated from public libraries

8. We demand of the German students the desire and capability for independent knowledge and decisions.

9. We demand of German students the desire and capability to maintain the purity of the German language.

10. We demand of German students the desire and capability to overcome Jewish intellectualism and the resulting liberal decay in the German spirit.

11. We demand the selection of students and professors in accordance with their reliability and commitment to the German spirit.

12. We demand that German universities be a stronghold of the German Folk tradition and a battleground reflecting the power of the German mind.

Between April and May the students burned around 25,000 ‘Un-German’ books. At meetings places, students threw the books into bonfires during ceremonies that included live music, singing, ‘fire oaths’ and incantations. Something no so dissimilar from the bonfire of the vanities.

Here is a video of Goebells’ speech to the students at the bonfire in 1933:

Here is the translation:

“The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism has come to an end and the German revolution has again opened the way for the true essence of being German. This revolution was not started at the top, it burst forth from the bottom, upwards. It is, therefore, in the very best sense of the word, the expression of the will of the Volk. There stands the working next to the bourgeois, student next to soldier and young worker, here stand the intellectuals next to the proletariat.

During the past fourteen years while you, students, had to suffer in silent shame the humiliations of the November Republic [i.e.: the Weimar Republic, transl. note], your libraries were inundated with the trash and filth of Jewish “asphalt” literati.

While scholarship gradually isolated itself from real life, the young Germany has re-established new conditions in our legal system and normalized our life.

The movement which in the past attacked the state has now penetrated the state, indeed even more so, it as become the state. And with that that German spirit has achieved quite different possibilities of effectiveness. Revolutionary elan and revolutionary energy which were experienced by German youth during the past years have now become the tempo and elan of the whole nation.

Revolutions that are genuine stop at no boundaries. No area must remain untouched. Just as it revolutionizes people it also revolutionizes things.

Therefore, you are doing the right thing as you, at this midnight hour, surrender to the flames the evil spirit of the past. There the intellectual basis of the November Republic is crushed to the ground. But from the rubble will arise victoriously the Phoenix of a new spirit, a spirit that we carry forth, that we nourish and to which we give decisive weight.

I believe that never before was a group of youthful students as justified as you are to be proud of your life, proud of your tasks and proud of your duty. Never before had young men the justification to exclaim with Ulrich von Hutteng [German author, 1488-1523, transl. note]: ‘Oh Century, Oh Sciences, it is a joy to be alive!’

Barriers that separated us are torn down. Volk has reunited with Volk. And if old people do not understand this — we young ones have already completed the process.

The old past lies in flames; the new times will arise from the flame that burns in our hearts. Wherever we stand together, wherever we march together, we want to dedicate ourselves to the Reich and its future.

As we did so often, while we were still fighting in the opposition, now that we hold the power, and with it the responsibility, we join together in the vow that we previously so often promised to the nightly sky: ‘illuminated by many flames let it be an oath! The Reich and the nation and our Fuhrer Adolf Hitler – Heil.”

Translated by Dr Roland Richter
(Richter, 2017)

This speech is fascinating and in rehearsal I attempted to blur this text along with the inauguration speech made by Donald Trump. Trump over his Presidential campaign and even during his current presidency has managed to create his own ‘cult of personality.’ This was generated through his online twitter presence for the majority. His tweets, which are on average 3 – 4 per day are seemingly very preachy in nature. They proclaim the ‘greatness’ of America, the ‘greatness’ of the lord and most importantly – ‘Let’s make America great again.’

More recently, Trump has spoken out against the media and has subsequently tried to control the media and what they say about not only Trump but his campaign. Last week, Trump was issuing a statement at the White House and journalists from the major news organisations was turned away by a spokesperson at the White House.

Furthermore, Trump issued a travel ban which aimed to ban Muslims coming into the country over a temporary period. This all helps to create the ‘cult of personality’ in a very subtle, less dictatorial way.

What I want to achieve in performance?

In my solo performance, I want to explore the relationship between Savonarola and the bonfire of the vanities in 1497 to the Nazi book burnings led by the German Student Union and Goebbels in 1933 and then looking at how these events relate to how we can understand Trump and his inauguration speech, and the diminishing of culture and freedom of speech in 2017. 

I would like the show to be minimalist but visceral. Despite it being minimal I’d like to explore a very surreal undertone. I am looking at Tim Crouch and Chris Goode as performance practitioners who I find their work interesting and inspiring. Crouch’s My Arm, to me, is a simple, minimal show. It has a surreal-like undertone. It questions authenticity, it features characters through the use of objects and yet Crouch remains, to a degree, himself. This is similar to An Oak Tree in which Crouch plays himself throughout. He engages with the audience in a very imaginative, very meta-theatrical way. The show itself is minimal. There is practically no set. Everything is established through words between him and the ‘Actor’.

I have been avoiding replicating Crouch’s style, and yet I find myself drawn to the delivery of An Oak Tree. Specifically, I love the way he engages with the audience and the way that he brought up an audience member to engage with him on stage. This is something that I find interesting, but might not explore in the show. However, I feel that the performance could lend itself towards a discussion between me as ‘The Performer’ to an audience member who is ‘The Participant’

These concepts will be broadened and explored further in a following blog post.

 

Bibliography

Borelli, A, Passaro, M.P, Beebe, D. (2006) Selected Writings of Girolamo Savonarola Religion and Politics, 1490 – 1498. Yale University.

History. (2017). Dr.Goebbels – 1933 , Speech to students against un-german books ,(HD) ,2.1.. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4Ewr6tWTmE [Accessed 8 Mar. 2017].

Richter, R. (2017). When Books Burn: Speeches, May 10, 1933. [online] Library.arizona.edu. Available at: http://www.library.arizona.edu/exhibits/burnedbooks/goebbels.htm [Accessed 8 Mar. 2017].