Fascism’s
Modernist Revolution: A New Paradigm for the Study of Right-wing Dictatorships
In:
Fascism
Author:
Roger Griffin
Online Publication Date: 27 Oct 2016
https://brill.com/view/journals/fasc/5/2/article-p105_2.xml?language=en
Abstract
This article
highlights the progress that has been made within fascist studies from seeing
‘fascist culture’ as an oxymoron, and assuming that it was driven by a profound
animus against modernity and aesthetic modernism, to wide acceptance that it
had its own revolutionary dynamic as a search for a Third Way between
liberalism and communism, and bid to establish an alternative, rooted modern
culture. Building logically on this growing consensus, the next stage is to a)
accept that modernism is legitimately extended to apply to radical
experimentation in society, economics, politics, and material culture; b)
realize that seen from this perspective each fascism was proposing its own
variant of modernism in both a socio-political and aesthetic sense, and that c)
right-wing regimes influenced by fascism produced their own experiments in
developing both a modern political regime and cultural modernism grounded in a
unique national history.
* This
article is a modified version of the English original of ‘La revolución
modernista del fascismo: un nuevo paradigma para el estudio de las dictaduras
de derechos,’ in Fascismo y modernism: Política y cultura en la Europa de
entreguerras (1919–1945), ed. Francisco Cobo, Miguel Á. Del Arco and Claudio
Hernández (Granada: Comares, 2016).
…
Eventually
one of the new points of view triumphs by solving some of the problems posed by
the anomalies. It will probably not solve all of the problems, nor is it likely
to be as well developed as the paradigm it promises to displace. Nevertheless,
the new paradigm works. It probably does not convert all of the proponents of
the now ‘classical’ paradigm. However, new people in the field tend to be
attracted to it, and stubborn devotees of the old paradigm will ultimately die
off and become part of history. 1
∵
Fascism
as an Anti-culture
Only twenty
five years ago a conference on the links between modernism and fascism in
Italy, Germany, and Spain such as the one held in April 2015 in Granada
University on the topic ‘Fascism and Modernism’ 2 would have been
inconceivable, except to a small band of scholars whose work was widely
regarded as aberrant. 3 Mussolini’s regime was still treated by most Italian
historians as sui generis, Nazism was denied fascist credentials by many
experts focussed on Germany’s Sonderweg to dictatorship, and Franco’s regime
was assumed to be both fascist and reactionary, rather than as only partially
fascist and hosting currents of revolutionary nationalism and modernization. As
for ‘modernism’, it was still firmly established within the Humanities as a
term applicable only to radical innovation and experimentation in painting,
literature and architecture, possible, if at all, in association with
‘progressive’ forms of politics, such as radical liberalism and communism. But
neither reformist socialism nor communism were seen as political ideologies
which were modernist in their own right. Since it was still axiomatically
assumed by a majority of historians and political scientists that reaction and
anti-modernity lay at the heart of fascism, a project to look for meaningful
affinities between modernism and fascism would have been dismissed as futile,
and certainly unfundable as a research or conference project. Within this
intellectual climate the idea of fascism itself being a modernist political
ideology sponsoring its own forms of modernist culture, both social and
artistic, was simply alien to the dominant paradigm.
The
prevailing logic of the time deterred scholars from looking beneath the surface
to discern a powerful revolutionary, futural dynamic behind fascism. After all,
how could a political force that represented ‘a terroristic form of
capitalism’, 4 ‘theoretical and practical resistance to transcendence’, 5 or a
‘form of ideology without the content’ 6 be considered capable of significant
cultural production, let alone a future-oriented, modernist one? The Marxist
intellectual Andrew Hewitt at least conceded that the relationship of modernism
to fascism merited an entire monograph, but within a few pages asks the reader
to accept blindly that fascism’s ‘aestheticization of politics was inscribed
from the very outset in the bourgeois construction of the public sphere’, and
hence formed an integral part of ‘capitalism’s libidinal project of
self-destruction’. Such a dual axiom (a non sequitur based on a long tradition
of fusing Marxism with Freudianism in a liaison dangereuse) precluded a priori
the possibility modernism and fascism had a natural or elective affinity. 7
Outside
Marxism, the closest fascism came to ‘modernism’ in received scholarly
understanding (and here the term was reduced to meaning little more than
‘embracing modernity’) was in the argument that it was driven by the
paradoxical need to achieve a high degree of technocratic and bureaucratic
modernity in order to return to a premodern state of society with anti-modern
goals and values which reversed centuries of humanistic (or more recent
Marxist) progress. Such a conviction led Henry Turner to coin the paradoxical
term ‘anti-modern modernism’. 8 Even Jeffrey Herf’s concession that the cult of
technological advance under Nazism could be seen as ‘reactionary modernism’
still stemmed from the premise that any evidence of fascist espousal of modern
technology or aesthetics conflicted with its atavistic, arch-conservative
longings for a pre-modern society and ethos. 9 He intended the two terms he had
conjoined within a forced marriage to point temporally in different directions.
As for Nazi
attitudes to culture, the campaign against ‘cultural Bolshevism’ which led to
the burning of ‘decadent’ books and contemporary art in state-organized
bonfires of the vanities, had convinced most historians that nothing produced
by the Nazis in the realm of art could ever be dissociated from nihilism and
genocide. Such a premise informs Peter Adams’ famous declaration that Nazi
culture cannot be judged by the criteria which apply to artistic production in
other regimes, and can ‘only be seen through lens of Auschwitz’. 10 Inspector
Morse in the British tv detective series set in Oxford revealed just how
entrenched such assumptions were in the popular imagination when, standing in
the famous quadrangle of the Bodleian Library, he deduced ‘What we are looking
for here is the sort of person that slashes pictures, takes a hammer to
Michelangelo’s statues, and a flamethrower to books; someone who hates art and
ideas so much that he wants to destroy them: a fascist.’ 11
Compared to
Nazism, which had quite reasonably on a common sense level become widely
associated with pathological vandalism and the wholesale looting of culture, 12
Fascism could not be accused of wanton iconoclasm and pillage. Instead, it was
simply assumed, often without discussion, to be an anti-culture, incapable of
genuine creativity. Mussolini’s determination to overcome socialism and
parliamentary democracy came to be interpreted as a radical rejection of
modernity and progress per se, despite the regime’s sustained embrace of modern
technologies, 13 modernist architectural forms, 14 vast schemes of urban
renewal, 15 major elements of a welfare state, 16 use of mass media, 17
imposing public works and advanced transport systems, 18 aviation, 19 and sport.
20 It even accommodated a small thriving scientific subculture dedicated to
eugenics, a deeply anti-egalitarian, but hardly an anti-modern movement. 21
There was also the highly conspicuous and stormy relationship between Fascism
and Futurism, the epitome of a future-embracing, technophile modernist movement
in the arts, yet even this was generally ignored as evidence of a Fascist
modernism, or explained away as based on Marinetti’s ingenuous misunderstanding
of Mussolini deeply anti-futural temperament. 22
In this
hostile academic Zeitgeist Emilio Gentile’s brilliant series of essays on
different aspects of Fascism’s quest to create an alternative to both liberal
capitalism and communism which appeared in English as The Struggle for
Modernity, 23 stood out more as a sore thumb than as a beacon in Fascist
studies. It had a minimal impact both inside and outside Italy on the academic
and public understanding of Mussolini’s regime, and simply ignored by a small
group of Anglo-American scholars who created a career for themselves as
self-ordained experts on fascism by recycling ignorant banalities about
Fascism’s ideological vacuity. Instead, the prevalent attitude of academics to
Fascist culture until the 1990s was summed up in Norberto Bobbio’s Profilo
ideologico del Novecento, where he asserted, somewhat paradoxically:
Despite the
lengths to which Fascists went to contrive a ‘Fascist culture’ and to try to
impose it in schools, journals, newspapers and newly created institutions,
Fascism … did not give birth to a culture of its own. Nor did it leave any
traces in the history of Italian culture, apart from rhetorical extravagance,
literary bombast and hastily improvised doctrines. This is not to say that
there was not an intense cultural life during the regime, which was anything
but ephemeral; but there was no culture. 24
This article
is thus addressed to those who still react with perplexity and even scornful
indignation when they see books with titles such as Modernism and Fascism,
Avant-Garde Fascism, or Fascism and modernism. Politics and culture in Interwar
Europe (1919–1945). It will attempt to convince them of three unspoken premises
of this title of this article (even if sceptics will be unlikely to read
further than the title). First, the concept ‘modernism’ must logically be
extended to embrace not just formal experimentalism in literature, art, and
architecture, but a wide range of experimental, innovative phenomena in the
spheres of intellectual and spiritual life, social reform, applied science, and
radical or revolutionary politics. Their common denominator is that in
different ways the projects and movements in question aimed to put an end to
what Spengler portrayed as ‘the decline of the West’, reverse what Max Weber
called the ‘disenchantment’ of modern society, 25 resolve what Sigmund Freud
described as ‘the discontents’ of civilization, 26 satisfy modern man’s (and
woman’s) search for a ‘soul’ explored by Carl Jung, 27 and remedy what
Heidegger interpreted as a loss of ‘being at home in the world’. 28
Second,
fascism is one such attempt at modernist societal renewal, in this case a
‘total’ regeneration claiming to restore magic, joy, a new spiritual ‘home’ and
a new phase of civilization inhabited by ‘new human beings’: once the futural,
revolutionary, totalizing dynamic of ‘creative destruction’ behind fascism’s
onslaught on liberal and socialist Europe is understood, and, in the case of
Nazism, on entire categories of people, it emerges as a form of modernist
politics which inspired wide-ranging plans and initiatives to create a new (but
historically rooted), ‘healthy’ and ultra-modern culture.
Third, in
their own contrasting ways, both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, the only two
fascist regimes to be established, attempted in the short time available to
them to give birth to a new culture appropriate to the (very different)
historical, national and racial revolutions on which they were embarked, a
culture which, however incoherent and experimental, can be seen as an attempt
to create their modernism. Cultural regeneration was in fascist eyes a heroic
enterprise of not just socio-political and economic, but artistic and cultural
regeneration, and was presaged by an outpouring of cultural comment, criticism,
theorizing and political intervention, often simplistically dismissed as
‘rhetoric’ and ‘bluster’. Certainly fascist cultural politics were propagandistic,
but mostly in the original sense of the term bequeathed by the Sacred
Congregation de Fide Propaganda: 29 spreading a genuine faith in imminent
national rebirth, 30 in total palingenesis (regeneration and renewal). Whatever
the differing formal characteristics of these cultural experiments to find
aesthetic forms appropriate to the fascist revolution, this utopian undertaking
can be considered modernist in its socio-political ethos, totalizing ambition,
and futural temporality.
Once this
point is grasped, it can be seen that other movements pursuing the goals of
revolutionary nationalism, and hence members of the extended fascist family,
also planned to renew national culture once they had seized state power (e.g.
the buf, the Romanian Legionaries of the Archangel Michael, Arrow Cross, the
Portuguese Blue Shirts, the Brazilian Integralist Action). It can also be
realized that even regimes which were only outwardly fascist but lacked
commitment to a radical social, anthropological and temporal revolution (so
remained ‘para-fascist’), 31 still attempted to simulate cultural renewal in
their own way, and also hosted idealists committed to a far more radical
artistic and architectural regeneration. 32 In other words, they applied a regenerative,
modernizing vision of their role as artists, architects and town-planning,
though not a fully or radically palingenetic, and hence fascist, one. Indeed,
the aesthetic results of their idealism in the built environment of the ‘era of
fascism’ (1922–1945), while rejecting the radical break with the past of
Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, or Le Corbusier, and while spurning the
cosmopolitanism of modernist rationalism, can actually be seen as styles and
forms which represented the form taken by aesthetic modernism under those
regimes, their peculiar idiom of architectural modernism. Semiotically they
signified the rejection of communism and liberalism, but still embraced the
alternative modernity of radical renewal on the basis of regenerated and purified
national community, even where it was tempered by compromise with conservatism
and a nostalgia for an idealized period of past greatness.
The
Limitations of an Aesthetic Concept of Modernism
On the first
point, there has been a gradual shift in the understanding of ‘modernism’ as a
term that should be extended to embrace not just aesthetic, but also
socio-political and ideological phenomena. Such a semantic expansion hardly
demands a great leap of the historical imagination. A profound affinity between
some of the most creative artists and prophets of modernism and the sphere of
socio-political innovation is obvious from early twentieth century history.
Under Lenin, Russian Constructivists such as Tatlin, Gabo, and Lissitsky,
considered it their mission to act as interpreters and proselytizers of the
Russian Revolution through poster art, photographs, and architecture, 33 and
left-wing social and political agendas lay at the heart of De Stijl and the
Bauhaus. Nor were the political affinities of avant-garde modernists
exclusively left-wing. Marinetti and a number of other prominent Futurists saw
Fascism as the embodiment of their vision of a new dynamic phase of
civilization based on advanced technology, 34 while numerous artists and
architects cultivating undeniably modernist aesthetics felt a deep affinity
with (generic) fascism, such as Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Adalberto Libera,
Giuseppe Terragni Gottfried Benn, Ernst Jünger, Emil Nolde, and Leni
Riefenstahl (not to mention the modernist credentials 35 and impact 36 of
Hitler’s favourite artist, Richard Wagner). The enthusiasm for a Falangist
cultural revolution in Spain of the modernist intellectual and writer Ernesto
Giménez Caballero, Salvador Dali’s support for Franco, and the adoption of Le
Corbusier’s vision of urban renewal by French fascists, 37 are no less
significant examples of the porous membranes between modernist aesthetics and
politics than Picasso and Miró’s support for anarchism 38 and socialism. 39
Just how
absurd it is to impose a strictly patrolled demarcation between modernist
aesthetics and socio-political utopianism left or right in the first part of
the twentieth century is clear when the art-historical lens is widened to take
in the visionary hopes that lay behind many avant-garde movements. Several of
their most important manifestos offered wholesale rejections of the
aestheticist ideal of art as a spiritual refuge from a decadent material world.
They show how some artists believed they were launching a spiritual revolution
(albeit conceived in strikingly different ways) that would solve the moral and
existential crisis of modernity and transform material civilization from
within. One pioneer of this revaluation of the function of art was Filippo
Marinetti. His Futurist Manifesto of 1909 sought to unleash a spring-tide of
dynamism in harmony with the technological revolution pulsing through the West
which would drown the gerontocracy of the old Italy with its sclerotic cult of
gradualism, tradition and antiquity and open the flood gates to the new:
It is from
Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary
manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish Futurism, because we want to
free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists,
tour-guides and antiquarians. For too long has Italy been a dealer in
second-hand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover
her like so many graveyards. 40
A year later
Wassily Kandinsky published his reflections Concerning the Spiritual in Art
which proclaimed that ‘anyone, who absorbs the innermost hidden treasures of
art, is an enviable partner in building the spiritual pyramid, which is meant
to reach into heaven.’ As result:
Art must be
an integral part of life. It can’t be limited to museums. Non-objective
painting has such a great force that no museum or gallery can contain it. Every
person who sees these masterpieces will be permanently affected by them. The
people who designed this Museum knew that. Kandinsky, Bauer, Hilla Rebay, and
Mr. Guggenheim to me are the symbols of creative progress. It is the artist
alone who can save our civilization from chaos, by pointing the way to the
world of tomorrow. 41
Even Dada,
often associated with nihilism and infantilism, can be seen as a movement of
collective creativity and societal renewal, intent on mobilizing at the height
of the mass slaughter, launched by those appalled by the horrors of the First
World War and the apparent suicide of the West. It called upon all those
touched by art to create a mental tabula rasa of the civilizational values that
had led European nations into the cul-de-sac of mutual destruction and create
the basis of a new start for humanity. 42 This is the spirit behind Tzara’s
exhortation in the Second Dada Manifesto of March 1918, nine months before the
end of that terrible war of apocalyptic violence:
Let each man
proclaim: there is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished. We
must sweep and clean. Affirm the cleanliness of the individual after the state
of madness, aggressive complete madness of a world abandoned to the hands of
bandits, who rend one another and destroy the centuries. Without aim or design,
without organization: indomitable madness, decomposition. Those who are strong
in words or force will survive, for they are quick in defence, the agility of
limbs and sentiments flames on their faceted flanks. 43
In a notably
more optimistic vein, now the war had finished and the Second Reich had been
abolished, Walter Gropius is no less utopian in the Manifesto of the State
Bauhaus published six months after the end of the war. Replete with a striking
cover depicting Feininger’s woodcut of a cathedral surrounded by Expressionist
beams of light, he presented the opening of a school which based architectural
training, design and practice on the values of medieval artisans as the first
stage in the creation of a new humanistic religion:
So let us
therefore create a new guild of craftsmen, free of the divisive class
pretensions that endeavoured to raise a prideful barrier between craftsmen and
artists! Let us strive for, conceive and create the new building of the future
that will unite every discipline, architecture and sculpture and painting, and
which will one day rise heavenwards from the million hands of craftsmen as a
clear symbol of a new belief to come. 44
Similarly
the ten issues of the journal The Surrealist Revolution (1924–1928) made it
abundantly clear that the Surrealists saw their movement as a catalyst to the
comprehensive transformation of the West. It is accepted within standard art
history that:
The group
aimed to revolutionize human experience, including its personal, cultural,
social, and political aspects, by freeing people from what they saw as false
rationality, and restrictive customs and structures. Breton proclaimed, the
true aim of Surrealism is ‘long live the social revolution, and it alone!’ To
achieve this goal, at various times surrealists aligned with communism and
anarchism. 45
Moreover, if
we look further into the sources of such declarations we see that their
visionary optimism was influenced by other movements in ideas not normally
associated with modernism. Futurists, Expressionists, Dadaists, Sorelians, and
radical aesthetes from Van Gogh, Rilke, Stravinsky, D’Annunzio to Virginia
Woolf, Bernard Shaw, Wyndham Lewis, and Ernst Jünger believed in the spiritual
bankruptcy or insubstantiality of the modern world in its present form.
Many such
socially minded modernists struggled to bring about a new age of heroic
vitalism based on the power of myth in a spirit informed by the influence of
Nietzsche. His promulgation in a mountain torrent of works of such idées-forces
as the liberation of the repressed Dionysian in modern human beings, Amor Fati,
the Will to Power, Creative Destruction, the Higher Self (Übermensch), and the
Eternal Return has been perceptively identified by some critics as profoundly
modernist in their own right. 46 All the most original modernists of the early
twentieth century could have taken as an epigraph to their life’s work
Zarathustra’s declaration that ‘whoever must be a creator of values in good and
evil: verily, he must first be an annihilator and shatter values.’ 47
Other
modernists also drew on sources of inspiration not normally associated with
modernism in their fulfillment of Ezra Pound’s exhortation to ‘make it new’. 48
Kandinsky was heavily influenced by Theosophy’s attempt to respiritualize a
world sinking in a morass of materialism; Gropius was inspired by utopian
socialism; the Surrealists by Freud’s attempt to free modern human beings from
a repression of the id which was a major source of civilizational malaise. By
contrast, Gaudi drew on a profound Catholicism reinterpreted through the lens
of organicist notions of creation found in late nineteenth century Lebensmystik
[life mysticism] which found a spiritual meaning in evolutionary theory. A
vitalist thinker such as Bergson and evolutionary philosopher such as Haeckel
have considerable claims to be modernist in the way they inject an existence
without a metaphysical basis with a new source of transcendence. 49
The
absurdity of not recognizing visionary social and political initiatives as
modernist on a par with artistic and architectural innovation is illustrated by
the Peckham Experiment in inter-war London. The project originated as a radical
attempt to address the pressing problems created by the poor levels of
exercise, fitness and health in working class Britain, a growing concern at a
time when there was much talk of eugenic solutions to ‘degeneracy’ on the
British left as well as the right. As a pilot, a purpose-built centre was
opened in 1935 in a deprived area of South-East London, where for one shilling
a week 950 families gained access to sports facilities, a swimming pool
(illuminated by natural light – a remarkable innovation at the time), and health
check-ups in a communal environment in stark contrast to the cramped, dark
living conditions at the time. The building was designed by Sir William Owens,
one of the few British architects at the time convinced that the engineering,
function and aesthetics of a building should exist in harmony. The result was a
major civic construction which not only reflected the influence of
international modernism, but which can be seen as an early example of
architectural determinism, the belief that new building and innovative design
techniques could enhance the effectiveness of social experiments to create a
better society. In her monograph devoted to the Peckham Experiment, Re-forming
Britain, Elizabeth Darling describes the optimistic ethos created by the
collaboration of doctors, architects, health experts and designers of sports
facilities in the project as ‘social modernism’. 50
Darling’s
book reveals how reductionist it is to see architectural modernism as an
episode in the history of aesthetics without taking into account the wave of
social and political utopianism which spread throughout Europe after the First
World War, bringing together artists, intellectuals, architects, town planners,
industrialists, municipal authorities, educators and political activists in the
determination to ‘make a new world’. 51 A testament to this utopianism, and to
the porous membranes between aesthetic, social and political innovation in this
period is the catalogue produced to accompany the exhibition Modernism
1939–1945, with the revealing subtitle Designing a New World. 52 Reading the
excellent essays in this catalogue before looking at the vast array of objects
with a social function included as examples of modernism, ranging from
sanatoria to the Volkswagen, leaves the reader under no illusion that modernism
embraces innovation far beyond the narrow spheres of aesthetics and design. The
exhibition’s curator, Christopher Wilk, himself draws attention to this fact in
his introductory essay where he stresses just how many cities generated their
own modernist experiments:
All these
sites were stages for an espousal of the new and, often an equally vociferous
rejection of history and tradition; a utopian desire to create a better world,
to reinvent the world from scratch; an almost messianic belief in the power and
potential of the machine and industrial technology. … All these principles were
frequently combined with social and political beliefs (largely left-leaning)
which held that art and design could, and should, transform society. 53
And yet even
this striking expansion of the scope of the term ‘modernism’, particularly
remarkable for the curator of an exhibition held in a museum of the decorative
arts and design, did not go far enough. Firstly, as the quotation from Wilk
itself suggests, the link of the ideologies of the Bolshevik and socialist left
with modernism was fully documented in the exhibition. Yet there was only the
most grudging and partial concession to the capacity of the nationalist and
fascist right to produce modernist artefacts and little understanding of the
possibility that the extreme right could have a radically futural dynamic
despite its mythicization of the past. In fact, David Crowley’s essay
‘Nationalist Modernisms’ betrays considerable confusion about the temporality
of fascism, giving the reader no clear indication of whether it should be seen
as backward- or forward-looking in its relationship to modernity.
Significantly, he cites conflicting sources on the topic with no attempt to
resolve the contradiction. 54 Secondly, modernism is still conceived by Wilks
in the exhibition artefacts as primarily an aesthetic category, with ancillary
phenomena in other spheres. The essays in the catalogue thus collectively fall
well short of visualizing the mythic core of modernism as a drive towards
innovation and renewal which can manifest itself in any sphere of intellectual,
artistic, social, economic, scientific, political, or cultural production, in
the extreme left, extreme right or reformist centre. Nor does it focus on the
paradox that modernism can express itself both as an agent of societal change,
but equally well without the goal of transforming the world beyond the artist’s
or intellectual’s private experiential horizon.
Modernism
as the Quest for Radical Cultural and Social Renewal
It was such
lacunae in the pronouncements on modernism of even the more enlightened
cultural commentators as late as the 2000s, combined with the persistent
reluctance in some academic quarters to recognize the futural, modernizing, and
cultural dimension of generic fascism, that prompted me to embark on the
intensive programme of research that finally led to my Modernism and Fascism.
55 The core thesis of the first half of the book is that modernism in
literature, painting, sculpture, music, architecture and design is only one
manifestation of attempts in every sphere of creativity and activism in society
to find new sources of expression, meaning, gnosis, transcendence, reality,
agency in the modern world. The mainspring of all modernism is that the nexus
of forces known as modernity is constantly undermining traditional forms of
existential security and understanding of the human place in the cosmos. Using
Peter Berger’s term ‘nomos’ for the totalizing set of normative beliefs and
practices that constitute meaningful lives in traditional societies, modernity
can be characterized as ‘nomocidal’, as eroding or destroying the ‘sacred
canopy’ that premodern religions erected over secular existence to protect it
from the infinite void. The nomocidal, desacralizing impact of modernization is
expressed in any number of different concepts, such as Barrès’ idea of
‘uprootedness’, Weber’s ‘disenchantment’, Durkheim’s ‘anomie’, Nietzsche’s
‘Death of God’, Hölderlin’s ‘Flight of the Gods’, Heidegger’s erosion of ‘being’,
Jung’s loss of ‘soul’, Sartre’s revelation of ‘the superfluity’ of each human
life, Cioran’s obsession with ‘decomposition’, Beckett’s ‘endgame’, Becker’s
‘death of meaning’, Giddens’ ‘disembedding’ of human beings from time and
space.
If this
premise about the entropy of absolute meaning under the impact of a globalizing
modernity is accepted, then modernism can be seen at work in any form of
palingenetic rebellion against the haemorrhage of transcendent significance
from the world, any attempt to infuse modern existence with more beauty,
health, communality, spirituality, transcendence, hope once it is conceived by
the artist or protagonist of change as an antidote to the ‘decadence’ of the
secularizing, atomized West which is creating a spiritual wasteland. As T.S.
Eliot reminded us, even in the most densely packed metropolis ‘The desert is
squeezed in the tube-train next to you’. 56 Modernism, then, can be
conceptualized as a rebellion against modernity, the palingenetic attempt to create
a new nomos. It is not anti-modern, but an assault on existing modernity, and
postulates a new vision of life, an alternative modernity. 57 It can take the
form of a private, highly personal, but still artistically communicable
revelation of deeper, unexplored realms of meaning and revelatory facets of
existence, with no bid to change society or ‘the world’ as such, which I term
‘epiphanic modernism’. Alternatively, it can be experienced as a mission to
transform one segment of society, a nation, or even create a whole new
civilization, an ambition typically expressed in manifestos or programmes, and
which can thus be called ‘programmatic modernism’.
The
distinction can be illustrated by the case of Van Gogh, widely considered one
of the supreme modernists in the history of painting. 58 His artistic life was
dedicated to crafting compositions in form and colour to express his intense
emotional inner life and his presentiments of a higher spiritual world, but he
had little interest in selling his canvases, let alone launching a movement of
‘Van Goghism’. Indeed, one of his letters to his brother Theo reveals he saw
his art as an act of gratitude to the earth on which he had lived. 59 His
modernism was thus thoroughly ‘epiphanic’. Yet he was fascinated by Tolstoy’s
My Religion precisely because it suggested to him the possibility of a movement
that would transform the spirituality of a world he saw plunging into chaos and
war, and thus provide a new nomos for human life:
Tolstoy
implies that whatever happens in a violent revolution, there will also be an
inner and hidden revolution in the people, out of which a new religion will be
born, or rather, something completely new which will be nameless, but which
will have the same effect of consoling, of making life possible, as the
Christian religion used to. 60
Such a
velvet revolution, had it materialized and mobilized a significant number of
Europeans to avert the horrors of the twentieth century, would have been a
spectacular example of a benign form of programmatic modernism attempting to
re-enchant, ‘renomize’ the world, to restore its sacred canopy, to make life
existentially possible once more. But the activist modernism of the sort
exemplified in Tolstoy may have more modest ambitions, focusing simply on the
reform of particular aspects psychological, physical, social or spiritual
reality as a defence against the howling ‘storm of progress’. 61 Modernism and
Fascism argues that not just the Peckham Experiment was an example of social
modernism, but also the movements inspired by the ideas of Tolstoy, Freud,
Nietzsche, Jung, and Haeckel, 62 and the popularity of Blavatsky’s theosophy,
and Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy. In this context Wassily Kandinsky was
trebly modernist: aesthetically modernist as an original abstract painter,
programmatically modernist, as a visionary who wanted to disseminate
theosophical ideas through his innovative use of colour and form, and the
composer of one of the major twentieth century manifestos promulgating the need
for the spiritual transformation of modernity through art.
Other
phenomena of the early twentieth century never generally associated with the
term modernism can now be seen as manifestations of the impulse to reverse the
slide of the Western world into the black hole of absurdity and the ‘death of
culture’:63 the Catholic revival (that helped shape Gaudi’s art), the revival
of occultism, 64 and the increasingly chauvinistic nationalism that perverted
democratic nationalism from an Enlightenment project into a pseudo-religion
glorifying war, sacrifice, and xenophobia. 65 Equally modernist was the growing
biological racism that mixed pseudo-scientific ideas of ‘purity’ of bloodlines
with imperialist and nationalist assumptions about a hierarchy of humanity to
offer a new sense of collective identity, belonging, home, and destiny to those
convinced they were members of a superior branch of homo sapiens. 66 No less
programmatically modernist was the new scientistic creeds of eugenics 67
(described by Galton as ‘the religion of the future’) and social hygiene as the
cure to degeneration both biological and spiritual. 68 All envisaged the
inauguration of a new temporality by redirecting the flux of history itself
towards a different future, the hallmark of the modernist concept of history
according to such innovative cultural historians as Reinhard Koselleck, 69
Peter Osborne, 70 and David Ohana. 71
Fascism
as a form of Political Modernism
But it was
in the sphere of revolutionary politics that the most powerful explosions of
revolutionary, palingenetic, and thus modernist energies occurred. The
twentieth century rebellions against the status quo in the name of a totally
new order were no longer directed against the tyranny of divine monarchs as in
the eighteenth century, but against modernity itself. Late nineteenth century
anarchism and early twentieth century Bolshevism both sought radical solutions
not just to capitalist exploitation and class division, but also to social and
existential alienation. Both were fuelled by the vision of a final stage of
creative, harmonious, communal living that would abolish the horrors of
‘history’. Both offered their followers a totalizing nomos, the prospect that
if they joined the struggle they would help humanity overcome the bewildering
ambivalence of modernity 72 and resolve the crisis of nihilism. Both provided
their fanatics with the powerful sense of living at the cutting edge of
history, engaged personally in a vast historical process of renewal.
But whereas
the path which would lead to the anarchist utopia remained shrouded in the
mists of utopia, Soviet Russia sought to re-engineer every aspect of Russian
life, not just culturally, politically, economically, but anthropologically, 73
at whatever human cost. It was a revolutionary bid to control the development
of society and history itself which leads Bauman to describe it as a ‘gardening
state’, 74 convinced that society had to be totally revisioned, replanned,
reshaped, replanted, with all values revalue with a Nietzschean radicalism.
This, in the case of Bolshevism, meant being prepared to throw human weeds on
bonfires for the sake of the new socialist order. Stites documents the
outpouring of aesthetic and social modernism triggered by Lenin’s seizure of
power, 75 but by realizing that Bolshevism itself was a modernist political
movement, the affinity so many artists and innovators felt with the new regime
becomes explicable. So does the fact that Nietzsche had such a profound impact
on the ethos of Stalinism. 76
At this
point in the process of radically revisioning modernism, Modris Eksteins’ Rites
of Spring has the effect of a flare exploding against a dark night sky to
illuminate enemy lines. In a book drenched with empiricism but sparkling with
fresh insights he convincingly he makes a direct link between the first
performance of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, a spectacle enacting,
through modernist music, staging, and ballet, a ritual sacrifice to awaken the
primordial forces of nature, with the orgy of fanatical blood-sacrifice to the
twin Molochs of nationalism and imperialism in the First World War, the
feverish cult of aviator heroes unleashed by the first long-distance solo
flights, and Nazism’s bloody experiment in creative destruction. The sympathetic
reader emerges from the book able perhaps for the first time to survey the
early twentieth century from high up on a new promontory, gazing down on a
historical panorama in which fascism’s modernism seems self evident, a product
of what he calls post-ww1 ‘craving for newness’ which was ‘rooted in what was
regarded by radicals as the bankruptcy of history and by moderates as at least
the derailment of history’. 77
Peter
Osborne’s Politics of Time provides a philosophical basis for the inter-war
pandemic of neophilia and palingenetic longings that permeated every sphere of
private and public life alongside feels of deep-seated ontic angst. He relates
modernism to the new experience of time that arose under the impact of
modernity and the concomitant decay of metaphysical certainties regarding a
supranatural realm of heavenly reality and a divinely ordained purpose for
human history. With the growing evanescence of suprahistorical time, history
itself became the arena for transcendence. Aesthetic and philosophical
modernism was a manifestation of a constant tension between (disenchanted)
actuality and (utopian) expectations of radical transformation, the watershed
experienced subliminally by so many between the ‘temporality of the old’ and
the possibility of a radically different and unprecedented future temporality
born of the self-reflexive temporalization of history. In this context
modernism can be conceived as ‘the affirmative cultural self-consciousness of
the temporality of the new’, 78 expressing itself not just in art, but in
philosophy and, above all, in political movements that seek to realize
alternative temporalities to resolve
the
perceived, existentially real crisis of history experienced as acute, even
unbearable anomie. Once the modern radical right is seen as attempting to
realize an alternative to liberalism, communism and conservatism it becomes
clear that the reactionary modernism of the Nazis was not, as Jeffrey Herf
erroneously assumes, a hybrid of two different temporalities (modernism +
reaction). Instead, Osborne points out, the term ‘draws attention to the
modernist temporality of reaction per se once the destruction of traditional
forms of social authority has gone beyond a certain point’. 79 The battle
between socialism and fascism is thus not between ‘revolution’ and ‘reaction’
but between ‘the revolutionary temporality intrinsic to socialist projects for
the overthrow of capitalism’; and the ‘counter-revolutionary temporality of a
variety of reactionary modernisms’, both fundamentally futural in their
orientation. 80
This line of
argument leads ineluctably to a conclusion that would have shocked several
generations of historians of fascism and historians of modern art: ‘From the
standpoint of the temporal structure of its project, fascism is a particularly
radical form of conservative revolution.’ As such it is ‘neither a relic nor an
archaism’, but a ‘form of
political
modernism.’ 81 Osborne reaches this conclusion as a philosopher of the politics
of time. It is thus significant that a convergent verdict is arrived
independently by a historian of the Third Reich, Peter Fritzsche. He expresses
succinctly the expansion of the semantic remit of the term ‘modernism’ that
follows when it is approached as a historical, and temporal rather than an
aesthetic one. Its hallmark is that ‘it breaks with the past, manufactures its
own historical traditions, and imagines alternative futures’. As a result,
‘though it has usually been conceived in literary or artistic terms’, modernism
has ‘remarkable social and political implications’. 82 Pursuing the notion that
modernism should be used to refer to radical political experiments that break
with the past, Fritzsche comes to a remarkable conclusion with regard to the
Nazis:
Again and
again, modernists staged history as a boundary situation. The most spectacular
displays of modernism are not to be found in a museum of expressionist art or a
collection of prose poetry, but in the avant-garde political collaborations
that sought to come to terms with a brand-new world regarded as unstable and
dangerous. With every step, the political adventurer as much as the modernist
poet or painter revealed ground that was tremulous, breaking apart, unclear.
Liberal certainties that proposed to reveal the coherence of the world appeared
completely inadequate. But whereas the latter made manifest the disenchantment
that had been revealed, the former proposed more fearsome designs to overcome
it. 83
My Modernism
and Fascism explores at considerable length the temporality of modernity which
breeds anomie (experienced as decadence, decline and loss of roots) and the
countervailing attempts to overcome the ‘nomic’ crisis which can all be seen as
forms of modernism. I introduce the distinction between artistic attempts to
capture the experience of modernity or postulate new visions which will reverse
its debilitating spiritual effects (epiphanic modernism) and attempts to change
the course of history itself (programmatic modernism). It then introduces the
idea of socio-political modernism and interprets the modernist forces which
gave rise to fascism and which the two fascist regimes attempted to harness in
order to produce a new culture, a new order, a new man, and a new civilization.
The two fascist regimes can then be seen as modernist states seeking
regeneration and palingenesis in every aspect of cultural, social, economic,
military, imperialist, and in the case of the Third Reich, racial policies. 84
This radical
revisioning of fascism as a futural, modernist ‘gardening state’ 85 has
particularly profound implications for how the cultural policies, and art and
architecture of both fascist regimes are approached. Instead of seeing them
through the lens offered by Walter Benjamin’s theory of ‘aestheticized
politics’, or Peter Adams’ ‘lens of Auschwitz’, they too can be seen as
modernist in ethos, even when they are not modernist in the aesthetic sense
created by the History of Art and Architecture . The curiously lifeless,
expressionless classicist nudes of Nazi ‘German art’ are obviously not formally
modernist in the way the canvases Van Gogh or Kandinsky, and the stripped
neoclassicism 86 of the Nazis’ Tempelhof airport 87 is hardly formally
innovative in the same sense as a contemporary building by the Vesnin brothers
projected for Stalin’s Russia. 88 But in both cases the art is being conceived
in a modernist spirit as embodying the construction of a new world by a new
state in which cultural production is no longer dominated by the arbitrary
forces of laissez-faire capitalism or the whims of individual ‘genius’.
In other
words, the modernist architecture that flourished under Mussolini is to be seen
not just in the projects of architects such as Giuseppe Terragni and Adalberto
Libera who were visibly inspired by international rationalism and utopian
currents of architectural experimentation, but also in the far less futuristic
civic buildings, urban schemes and exhibition spaces conceived by Giuseppe
Pagano and Marcello Piacentini which strove to find a harmonious synthesis
between the classicism of Romanità and the aesthetic and construction
techniques of international modernism which represented another variant of
Fascist modernism. It is consistent with this that Emily Braun’s groundbreaking
study of Mario Sironi reveals a gifted artist tenaciously experimenting with
total dedication to the mission to find an aesthetic that epitomized his
understanding of the Fascists’ national revolution based on a ‘rooted
modernism’, an embrace of the modern age tempered by a heightened awareness of
Italy’s Roman and neo-classical past. Again, the result was often a hybrid of
traditionalism and modernism aesthetically, but in Sironi’s understanding of
the mission of creativity under Fascism it was entirely modernist: it was
Fascist modernism, as opposed to Bolshevik modernism, or the modernism of
Western individualism. To someone familiar with the vital contributions made by
Walter Adamson on the relationship between the avant-garde culture of early
twentieth century Milan and early Fascism 89 or Mark Antliff’s ground-breaking
work on the modernism so central to both Fascism 90 and French fascists, 91
these assertions will be practically self-evident. Now that it is commonplace
to assume that fascism is defined by its palingenetic dynamic of national and
racial regeneration of international comparative fascist studies and a steady
trickle of original monographs produces irrefutable empirical evidence of
Fascism’s attempted cultural revolution, the scathing dismissal of Emilio
Gentile as a ‘culturalist’ by the self-styled expert on Fascism Richard
Bosworth 92 smack increasingly of a bygone era in fascist studies, a dead
paradigm.
In contrast
Aristotle Kallis’ The Third Rome demonstrates what can be done when rigorous
empiricism is combined with methodological and conceptual sophistication, as
well as a genuine interest in Fascism as a collective project of total cultural
renewal and not just the emanation from the fevered brain of a narcissistic
leader. It allows the past to be excavated, and not just reconstructed as a
glorified newsreel of major events collated with the shallowest understanding
of psychology, ideology, political culture, and Italy itself. The result of
Kallis’ research is a triumphal vindication of the thesis that Fascism took
very serious the mission of turning Rome into a living symbol of a new
civilization which allowed its own mythicized past to shape its creative vision
and provide the aesthetic inspiration and role model for its own totalitarian
modernism. His book depicts the intense disputes among extremely gifted
architects who welcomed the Fascist regime as one which not only took grandiose
projects of urban renewal and major civic building seriously, but offered the
prospect for architects to establish the style and ethos of the new state. Take
Giuseppe Pagano, for example, who passionately:
defended his
position as an authoritative but independent – and often unpredictable – voice
in the architectural debates of the Fascist period. He never ceased to argue in
favour of an honest, authentic modernist architecture in Italy that was at the
same time cosmopolitan, rooted in timeless design values, deeply rooted in an
ethical conception of life, fiercely anti-monumental and anti-academic, and
appreciably Italian. 93
In terms of
the present argument, this passage demonstrates that he was thus intent on
establishing his particular vision of Fascist modernism, a rooted modernism
that epitomized the Fascist bid to carry out the total renewal of Italy in the
spirit of a heroic past. The ideological, visionary seriousness of the disputes
between Fascist architects, also documented in detail by Richard Etlin in his
magisterial Modernism in Italian Architecture 1890–1940, makes nonsense of the
historical accounts of Fascism or the Duce cult as ideologically hollow
phenomena devoid of serious visionary aspirations, accounts which unfortunately
still manage to garner critical acclaim from those who prefer their history
‘lite’ and lack the historiographical curiosity and conceptual rigour to
appreciate the more demanding fruits of scholarship which combines empiricism
with historical imagination. 94
Our argument
also has profound implications for the way Fascism and Nazism should be treated
as cultural phenomena by scholars who have seemingly not progressed beyond
Bobbio’s puerile reduction of Fascist culture to ‘rhetorical extravagance,
literary bombast and hastily improvised doctrines’, or still uncritically
parrot Walter Benjamin’s specious judgments on the fate of art under fascist
dictatorship. 95 It suggests that the Fascist and Nazi states succeeded far
more than has been realized in carrying out the politicization of art with more
genuine revolutionary intent and more radical aesthetic consequences than
Bolshevism and Maoism could ever aspire to do. If anything it is Bolshevism
that ended up in practice aestheticizing the politics of repression, the
systemic exploitation of the masses, and revolutionary self-deception. The
Romanized rationalism of Fascism and the ‘Aryanized’ architecture of Nazism
were more faithful statement of Nazi biopolitics than the projects born of
constructivist, social realist theory and Stalin’s megalomania were reflections
of the State Socialist ideals under Bolshevism.
And what of
the several inter-war regimes which lacked genuine fascism’s profound
palingenetic aspirations, but which deliberately modelled the institutions,
political religions and style of their authoritarianism on Fascism or Nazism so
as to associate themselves with their youth, dynamism, modernity, and popular
consensus? The outstanding examples of these were the political experiments
carried out under Salazar, Franco, and Horthy which were neither fascist nor
traditionally conservative. Here too a paradigm shift is well underway,
especially among younger European scholars, that allows the cultural and
architectural creativity of such ‘parafascist’ regimes 96 to be seen not as the
bogus art of reactionary repression, but as serious experiments to find a
modernist style of authority and culture appropriate to the idiosyncratic blend
of traditionalism and modernization being pioneered by the regime. 97
It is
personally gratifying to have lived long enough to see theories of fascism’s
palingenetic dynamics, which only two decades ago were still widely ignored or
treated as heretical, to be assumed as self-evident. Perhaps one day fascism’s
modernism will also be taken for granted. In the meantime it is a sign of the
growing vitality and vigour of comparative right-wing studies that Franco’s
regime is increasingly recognized as driven by anti-fascist, ultra-conservative
instincts which were still futural enough to allow for genuine creative
gestures towards an alternative Spanish modernity. 98 If such a scholarly
initiative were to be duplicated in every country in Europe and Latin America
which experienced authoritarianism of the right in the period 1920–1975 it
could lead to an international palingenesis in the historical understanding of
the fascist era as one embracing a wide spectrum of fascist and other radical
right phenomena.99 Would this not be a splendid tribute to the survival of the
Enlightenment humanism which both fascism and parafascism were so determined to
destroy in their life-time?
1 William
Hillix and Luciano L’Abate, ‘The Role of Paradigms in Science and Theory
Construction,’ in Paradigms in Theory Construction, ed. Luciano Abate (New
York: Springer, 2012), 5.
2 For
information on the conference ‘Fascismo y Modernismo’ see
https://seminariofascismo.wordpress.com/2015/04/05/1296/, accessed September
14, 2016.
3 I am
thinking of such eminent forerunners of the (misleadingly termed) ‘culturalist’
approach to fascism as George Mosse, Emilio Gentile, Ze’ev Sternhell, and
Aristotle Kallis.
4 An
allusion to what is known as the ‘Dimitrov’ theory of fascism. See David
Beetham, ed., Marxists in Face of Fascism (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1983).
5 An
allusion to Ernst Nolte’s famous but utterly cryptic theory of fascism as
‘resistance to transcendence’ developed in Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism:
Action Française, Italian Fascis, National Socialism (New York: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1966).
6 A phrase
used in Roger Scruton’s extraordinarily vacuous definition of fascism in his
Dictionary of Political Thought (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1982).
7 Andrew
Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford,
ca: Stanford University Press, 1993), 17.
8 Henry
Turner, ‘Fascism and Modernization,’ in Reappraisals of Fascism, ed. Henry
Turner (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975).
9 Jeffrey
Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and
the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
10 Peter
Adam, Art of the Third Reich (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 9.
11 The
Oxford detective Inspector Morse in the episode of The Twilight of the Gods
(first broadcast by the British television itv in 1993).
12 Lynn
Nicholas, The Rape of Europa (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1994).
13 For an
example see Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ‘Rayon/Marinetti,’ in Science and Literature in
Italian Culture from Dante to Calvino, ed. Pierpaolo Antonello and Simon Gilson
(Oxford: Legenda / mhra / ehrc, 2004), 225–251.
14 Richard
Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 1890–1940 (London: mit Press, 1991).
15 F.
Caprotti, ‘Destructive Creation: Fascist Urban Planning, Architecture and New
Towns in the Pontine Marshes,’ Journal of Historical Geography 33, no. 3
(2007): 651–679.
16 Maria
Quine, Italy’s Social Revolution: Charity and Welfare from Liberalism to
Fascism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
17 Ruth
Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001).
18 Massimo
Moraglio, The Shadow of Modernity: Innovation, Technology and Propaganda in
Italian Fascist Motorways (forthcoming).
19 Fernando
Esposito, Fascism, Aviation and Mythical Modernity (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2015).
20 Pierre
Arnaud, Jim Riordan, Sport and International Politics: Impact of Fascism and
Communism on Sport (New York: Routledge, 1998).
21 Francesco
Cassata, Building a New Man: Eugenics, Racial Sciences and Genetics in
Twentieth Century Italy (Florence: ceu Press Studies in the History of
Medicine, 2010).
22 Anne
Bowler, ‘Politics as Art: Italian Futurism and Fascism,’ Theory and Society 20,
no. 6 (December 1991): 763–794.
23 Emilio
Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism
(Westport, ct: Praeger, 2003).The thesis of Fascism’s frenzied preoccupation
with modernization and renewal is extensively documented in the analysis of the
regime’s primary sources relating to the crisis of civilization and its
salvation through Mussolini’s genius in Pier Giorgio Zunino, L’Ideologia del
fascismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1985), another ignored classic.
24 Norberto
Bobbio, Profilo ideologico del Novecento, Edizione di riferimento (Garzanti,
Milano 1993), 184.
25 Anthony
Carroll, ‘Disenchantment, Rationality and the Modernity of Max Weber,’ Forum
Philosophicum 16, no. 1 (2011): 117–137.
26 Sigmund
Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer
Verlag, 1930), translated as Civilization and its Discontents (London: Hogarth
Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1930).
27 Carl G.
Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
1933).
28 Julian
Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 33.
29 Peter
Guilday, ‘The Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide (1622–1922),’ The Catholic
Historical Review 6, no. 4 (January 1921): 478–494.
30 Jakub
Drabik, ‘Spreading the Faith: The Propaganda of the buf,’ Journal of
Contemporary European Studies (forthcoming).
31 António
Costa-Pinto and Aristotle Kallis, ed., Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in
Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014).
32 On the
existence of a complex interwar New Right made up of movements and regimes all
of which sought a solution to the crisis of civilization and which are deeply
entwined with and symbiotically related to fascism, see David Roberts’
important book Fascist Interactions: Proposals for a New Approach to Fascism
and its Era, 1919–1945 (New York: Berghahn, 2016).
33 Richard
Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the
Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
34 Christine
Poggi, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Note too the brilliant essay on
futurism’s relationship to Fascism by Emilio Gentile in The Struggle for
Modernity.
35 Juliet
Koss, Modernism after Wagner (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
36 J.A.
McGregor, Myth, Music and Modernism: The Wagnerian Dimension in Virginia
Woolf’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘The Waves’ and James Joyce’s ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ (
PhD diss., Rhodes University, 2009).
37 See Mark
Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art and Culture in
France, 1909–1939 (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 2007).
38 Patricia
Dee Leighten, Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897–1914
(Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1989).
39 Paul
Mitchell, ‘Joan Miró: An artist “in the service of mankind”,’ World Socialist
Web Site, March 27, 2012, accessed September 6, 2016,
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/03/miro-m27.html.
40 ‘The
Founding Manifesto of Futurism’, Italian Futurism, accessed September 6, 2016,
http://www.italianfuturism.org/manifestos/foundingmanifesto/.
41 Wassily
Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York: Dover Publications,
1997). Available at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5321, accessed September 6,
2016.
42 P.
Prager, ‘Play and the Avant-Garde: Aren’t we all a little Dada?’ American
Journal of Play 5 (2014): 239–256.
43 Tristan
Tzara, Dada Manifesto, 23 March 1918. Available at
http://www.391.org/manifestos/1918-dada-manifesto-tristan-tzara.html#.VknYwr_oqq8,
accessed September 6, 2006. Significantly, the ‘Dada drummer’ Richard
Huelsenbeck was drawn to communism, while one of Italy’s most important
ideologues of Fascism and neo-fascism, Julius Evola, had been Italy’s leading
Dadaist painter.
44 Walter
Gropius, Bauhaus Manifesto (April 1919), available at
https://www.bauhaus100.de/en/past/works/education/manifest-und-programm-des-staatlichen-bauhauses/index.html,
accessed September 6, 2016.
45 R.C.
Matteson, ‘Surrealism,’ Matteson Art weblog, accessed September 6, 2016,
http://www.mattesonart.com/surrealism.aspx.
46 Robert
Gooding-Williams, Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism (Stanford, ca: Stanford
University Press, 2001).
47 Friedrich
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 100.
48 Ezra
Pound, Make it New (New York: Faber, 1934). The deep attraction that
Mussolini’s Fascism exerted over Pound is unintelligible outside the context of
the theory of fascism as a form of political modernism, as Charles Ferrall’s
Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001) makes only too clear. Contrast the essay by a faithful follower of
the New Consensus, Matthew Feldman, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–1945
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013).
49 Oliver
Botar and Isabel Wünsche, Biocentrism and Modernism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).
50 Elizabeth
Darling, Re-forming Britain: Narratives of Modernity before Reconstruction
(London: Routledge, 2006) .
51 Rajesh
Heynikx, Tom Avermaete, ed., Making a New World: Architecture and Communities
in Interwar Europe (Leuven: University of Leuven Press, 2012).
52 Christopher
Wilk, ed., Modernism 1914–1939: Designing a New World (London: V&A
Publications, 2006).
53 Christopher
Wilk, ‘Introduction: What was Modernism?’ in Modernism 1914–1939: Designing a
New World, ed. Christopher Wilk (London: V&A Publications, 2006), 14.
54 David
Crowley, ‘Nationalist Modernisms,’ in Modernism 1914–1939: Designing a New
World, ed. Christopher Wilk (London: V&A Publications, 2006).
55 Roger
Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and
Hitler (London: Palgrave, 2007). The title alludes to a famous book by the
English literary critic Frank Kermode, called The Sense of an Ending (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1967) that characterizes fascism as fostering an
apocalyptic sensibility without a corresponding belief in a new order or brave
new world.
56 T.S.
Eliot, Choruses from the Rock (1934).
57 A
realization central to Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities.
58 Albert
Boime, Revelations of Modernism: Responses to Cultural Crises in Fin-de-Siècle
Painting (Columbia, London: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 1–10, chapter
1, ‘Van Gogh’s Starry, Starry Night. After the Apocalypse a Heavenly Utopia.’
59 ‘The
world concerns me only in so far as I owe it certain debt and duty, so to
speak, because I have walked this earth for 30 years, and out of gratitude
would like to leave some memento in the form of drawings and paintings – not
made to please this school or that, but to express a genuine human feeling.’
Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, The Hague, c. 4–8 August 1883,
Van Gogh’s letters: unabridged and annotated, accessed September 6, 2016,
http://www.webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/12/309.htm.
60 Letter
from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, Arles, 24 September 1888, Van Gogh’s
letters: unabridged and annotated, accessed September 6, 2016,
http://www.webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/18/542.htm.
61 An
allusion to the famous image of modernity used by Walter Benjamin in his
‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, no. ix, in Illuminations (London:
Fontana, 1992).
62 Richard
Noll, The Jung Cult (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
63 Mario
Vargas Llosa, Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society
(London: Macmillan, 2015).
64 John
Bramble, Modernism and the Occult (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015).
65 Michael
Burleigh, Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the French
Revolution to the Great War (New York: Harper Collins, 2005); Michael Burleigh,
Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda
(New York: Harper Collins, 2006).
66 Léon
Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe
(London: Heinemann, 1974).
67 Francis
Galton, ‘Eugenics: its definition, scope, and aims,’ The American Journal of
Sociology 10, no. 1 (1904).
68 Marius
Turda, Modernism and Eugenics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010).
69 Reinhard
Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing
Concepts
(Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2002).
70 Peter
Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and the Avant-garde (London: Verso,
1995).
71 David
Ohana, The Futurist Syndrome (Eastborne: Sussex Academic, 2010).
72 Zygmunt
Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity, 1991).
73 Michael
Geyer, Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Beyond Totalitarianism: Nazism and Stalinism
Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
74 Tilman
Schiel, ‘Modernity, Ambivalence and the Gardening State,’ Thesis Eleven 83, no.
1 (November 2005), 78–89.
75 Stites,
Revolutionary Dreams.
76 Bernice
Rosenthal, New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalin (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002).
77 Modris
Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 257.
78 Osborne,
The Politics of Time, 142.
79 Ibid.,
164.
80 Ibid.,
163–165.
81 Ibid.,
166.
82 Peter
Fritzsche, ‘Nazi Modern,’ Modernism/modernity 3, no. 1 (1996): 12.
83 Ibid.
84 It is the
premise that fascism was driven by a palingenetic vision of national and racial
renewal that is the hallmark of the convergence of scholarly approaches to
fascism on the question of its revolutionary dynamic known by the shorthand
term ‘New Consensus’ in Fascist Studies. See Aristotle Kallis, The Fascism
Reader (London: Routledge Readers in History, 2003) and Constantin Iordachi,
Comparative Fascism Studies: New Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2009) for
critical accounts of this phrase, and Roberts, Fascist Interactions for a call
for academics to move beyond its limitations.
85 Bauman,
Modernity and Ambivalence, 15.
86 It is
finally starting to be recognized that the stripped classicism that was so
widely used in the 1930s is actually to be seen not as a rejection of aesthetic
modernism in architecture but one of its many dialects: see Brittany Bryant,
‘Reassessing Stripped Classicism within the Narrative of International
Modernism in the 1920s-1930s’ (PhD diss., Savannah College of Art and Design,
2011).
87 ‘“No” for
Tempelhof,’ Eikongraphia, June 5, 2008, accessed September 6, 2016,
http://www.eikongraphia.com/?p=2432.
88 Ivan
Leonidov, ‘Top 10 unbuilt towers: Narkomtiazhprom,’ BDonline, October 11, 2011,
accessed September 6, 2016,
http://www.bdonline.co.uk/top-10-unbuilt-towers-narkomtiazhprom-by-ivan-leonidov/5026252.article.
89 Walter
Adamson, Avant-garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism (Cambridge, ma:
Harvard University Press, 1993).
90 Matthew
Affron and Mark Antliff, ed., Fascist Visions (Princeton, nj: Princeton
University Press, 1997).
91 Antliff,
Avant-garde Fascism.
92 Richard
Bosworth The Italian Dictatorship (London: Arnold, 1998), 25. His vacuous
introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Fascism (2010), which he was prepared
to edit for Oxford University Press despite not believing in the existence of a
definable generic fascism or in any deep-seated affinity between Fascism and
Nazism, compounds his disservice to fascist studies.
93 Aristotle
Kallis, The Third Rome, 1922–1943: The Making of the Fascist Capital
(Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 70.
94 Richard
Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 1890–1940 (London: mit Press, 1991).
95 The
concept is introduced in Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction (Schocken/Random House, 1936) at the height of
Stalinism.
96 Costa-Pinto
and Kallis, Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship.
97 See, for
example, Max Guerra et al., Urbanism and Dictatorship: A European Challenge
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), and the special issue ‘Latin Architecture in the
Age of Fascism,’ Roger Griffin, ed., to be published in Fascism in 2017. For
the need to integrate fascism’s history more closely into that of the new
inter-war right more generally see Roberts, Fascist Interactions.
98 See in
particular ed. Francisco Cobo et al., Fascismo y modernismo, (Granada: Comares,
2016).
99 Such a
development in fascist studies is argued for in Roberts’ Fascist Interactions.
8
Henry
Turner, ‘Fascism and Modernization,’ in Reappraisals of Fascism, ed. Henry
Turner (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975).
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9
Jeffrey
Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and
the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
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10
Peter Adam,
Art of the Third Reich (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 9.
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12
Lynn
Nicholas, The Rape of Europa (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1994).
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15
F.
Caprotti, ‘Destructive Creation: Fascist Urban Planning, Architecture and New
Towns in the Pontine Marshes,’ Journal of Historical Geography 33, no. 3
(2007): 651–679.
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16
Maria
Quine, Italy’s Social Revolution: Charity and Welfare from Liberalism to
Fascism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
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17
Ruth
Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001).
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20
Pierre
Arnaud, Jim Riordan, Sport and International Politics: Impact of Fascism and
Communism on Sport (New York: Routledge, 1998).
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22
Anne
Bowler, ‘Politics as Art: Italian Futurism and Fascism,’ Theory and Society 20,
no. 6 (December 1991): 763–794.
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25
Anthony
Carroll, ‘Disenchantment, Rationality and the Modernity of Max Weber,’ Forum
Philosophicum 16, no. 1 (2011): 117–137.
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26
Sigmund
Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer
Verlag, 1930), translated as Civilization and its Discontents (London: Hogarth
Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1930).
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29
Peter
Guilday, ‘The Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide (1622–1922),’ The Catholic
Historical Review 6, no. 4 (January 1921): 478–494.
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33
Richard
Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the
Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
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34
Christine
Poggi, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Note too the brilliant essay on
futurism’s relationship to Fascism by Emilio Gentile in The Struggle for
Modernity.
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39
Paul
Mitchell, ‘Joan Miró: An artist “in the service of mankind”,’ World Socialist
Web Site, March 27, 2012, accessed September 6, 2016,
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/03/miro-m27.html.
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41
Wassily
Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York: Dover Publications,
1997). Available at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5321, accessed September 6,
2016.
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42
P. Prager,
‘Play and the Avant-Garde: Aren’t we all a little Dada?’ American Journal of
Play 5 (2014): 239–256.
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45
R.C.
Matteson, ‘Surrealism,’ Matteson Art weblog, accessed September 6, 2016,
http://www.mattesonart.com/surrealism.aspx.
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47
Friedrich
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 100.
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48
Ezra Pound,
Make it New (New York: Faber, 1934). The deep attraction that Mussolini’s
Fascism exerted over Pound is unintelligible outside the context of the theory
of fascism as a form of political modernism, as Charles Ferrall’s Modernist
Writing and Reactionary Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
makes only too clear. Contrast the essay by a faithful follower of the New
Consensus, Matthew Feldman, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–1945
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013).
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50
Elizabeth
Darling, Re-forming Britain: Narratives of Modernity before Reconstruction
(London: Routledge, 2006).
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52
Christopher
Wilk, ed., Modernism 1914–1939: Designing a New World (London: V&A
Publications, 2006).
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53
Christopher
Wilk, ‘Introduction: What was Modernism?’ in Modernism 1914–1939: Designing a
New World, ed. Christopher Wilk (London: V&A Publications, 2006), 14.
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54
David
Crowley, ‘Nationalist Modernisms,’ in Modernism 1914–1939: Designing a New
World, ed. Christopher Wilk (London: V&A Publications, 2006).
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55
Roger
Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and
Hitler (London: Palgrave, 2007). The title alludes to a famous book by the
English literary critic Frank Kermode, called The Sense of an Ending (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1967) that characterizes fascism as fostering an
apocalyptic sensibility without a corresponding belief in a new order or brave
new world.
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58
Albert
Boime, Revelations of Modernism: Responses to Cultural Crises in Fin-de-Siècle
Painting (Columbia, London: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 1–10, chapter
1, ‘Van Gogh’s Starry, Starry Night. After the Apocalypse a Heavenly Utopia.’
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62
Richard
Noll, The Jung Cult (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
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63
Mario
Vargas Llosa, Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society
(London: Macmillan, 2015).
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64
John
Bramble, Modernism and the Occult (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015).
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65
Michael
Burleigh, Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the French
Revolution to the Great War (New York: Harper Collins, 2005); Michael Burleigh,
Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda
(New York: Harper Collins, 2006).
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66
Léon
Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe
(London: Heinemann, 1974).
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67
Francis
Galton, ‘Eugenics: its definition, scope, and aims,’ The American Journal of
Sociology 10, no. 1 (1904).
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68
Marius
Turda, Modernism and Eugenics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010).
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70
Peter
Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and the Avant-garde (London: Verso,
1995).
Search
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Citation
71
David
Ohana, The Futurist Syndrome (Eastborne: Sussex Academic, 2010).
Search
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Citation
72
Zygmunt
Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity, 1991).
Search
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Citation
74
Tilman
Schiel, ‘Modernity, Ambivalence and the Gardening State,’ Thesis Eleven 83, no.
1 (November 2005), 78–89.
Search
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Citation
76
Bernice
Rosenthal, New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalin (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002).
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77
Modris
Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 257.
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78
Osborne,
The Politics of Time, 142.
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82
Peter
Fritzsche, ‘Nazi Modern,’ Modernism/modernity 3, no. 1 (1996): 12.
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93
Aristotle
Kallis, The Third Rome, 1922–1943: The Making of the Fascist Capital
(Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 70.
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