Modernism and Fascism Also by Roger Grifﬁ N

Modernism and Fascism Also by Roger Grifﬁ n

The Nature of Fascism (1991) Fascism (in ‘The Oxford Readers Series’, 1995) International Fascism: Theories, Causes, and the New Consensus (1998) Fascism: Critical Concepts in Political Science edited with Matthew Feldman (2004) Modernism and Fascism The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler

Roger Grifﬁ n © Roger Griffin 2007 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-1-4039-8783-9

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP.

Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St Martin’s Press LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries.

ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–8784–6 paperback ISBN 978-1-4039-8784-6 ISBN 978-0-230-59612-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230596122

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 This ain’t no time for doubting your power This ain’t no time for hiding your care You’re climbing down from an ivory tower You’ve got a stake in the world we ought to share This is the time of the worlds colliding This is the time of kingdoms falling This is the time of the worlds dividing Time to heed your call Send your love into the future Send your precious love into some distant time And ﬁ x that wounded planet with the love of your healing Send your love into the future Send your love into the distant dawn

‘Send Your Love’. Words and music by Sting © 2003 Reproduced by permission of Steerpike (Overseas) Ltd/EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London WC2H 0QY This page intentionally left blank This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother And to the future of my son This page intentionally left blank Contents

List of Illustrations xiii Acknowledgements xiv

Introduction: Aufbruch 1 New horizons 1 The quest for a bigger picture 4 Fascism as the offspring of modernism 6 Aufbruch 9

Part One The Sense of a Beginning in Modernism 1 The Paradoxes of ‘Fascist Modernism’ 15 Revolting against the modern world 15 Fascism and modernism: ‘aporia’ or paradox? 18 Strategies for resolving the aporias of fascist modernism 22 Nazism’s convoluted ‘anti-modernism’ 26 A ‘synoptic interpretation’ of fascist modernism? 32 The Babel effect in academia 34 The methodological crisis in the humanities 35 ‘Reﬂ exive humanities’ and the itinerary of this book 36 Julius Evola revisited 39

2 Two Modes of Modernism 43 Modernism’s ‘dialogic’ (dire logic?) 43 The malaise of modernity 45 Modernity as ‘decadence’ 49 An ideal type of modernism 54 Nietzsche’s modernist revolt 58 Epiphanic and programmatic modernism 61 The porous membranes of modernisms 64 Exploring the modernism of fascism 66

3 An Archaeology of Modernism 70 The rituals of modernity 70 A ‘primordialist’ theory of modernism 72 The need for a ‘sacred canopy’ 74 x Modernism and Fascism

The erosion of our ‘sheltering sky’ 76 The search for transcendence 78 The terror of Cronus 80 TMT 85 Temporalization revisited 88 The birth of aesthetic modernism 91 Three case studies in cultural modernism 92 The primordial dynamic of modernist movements 96

4 A Primordialist Deﬁ nition of Modernism 100 The myth of transition 100 The rite of passage 102 The revitalization movement 104 Programmatic modernism revisited 107 Modernity and the liminoid 109 A primordialist deﬁ nition of modernism 114 Beyond the ‘decay of values’ 117 The search for transcendence in modern art 121 A modernist evaluates modernism 126

5 Social Modernism in Peace and War 1880–1918 130 Past masters 130 Occultist social modernism 132 Modernity’s ‘cultic milieu’ 135 Rightist social modernism 137 Modernist body politics 141 Scientistic ‘narratives of change’ 146 Warning shadows 151 1914: the beginning of a beginning 153

6 The Rise of Political Modernism 1848–1945 160 Creatio ex profundis 160 Homo faber as Promethean modernist 164 Dionysian socialism 167 Marxism as modernism 172 The modernism of organic nationalism 175 Futural reaction 177 Fascism as political modernism 179 The fascist regimes as ‘gardening states’ 183 Political modernism and the Gorgon’s gaze 186 Contents xi

Part Two Fascism’s Modernist State 7 The Birth of Fascism from Modernism 191 Death in Florence 191 The modernism of the ‘pure act’ 193 The palingenetic climate of post-Risorgimento Italy 195 Italianist modernism 199 The maximalist concept of nationalist modernism 201 The search for a mazeway of one political modernist 204 The political modernism of the ﬁ rst ‘Fascists’ 206 The birth of Fascism as a revitalization movement 210 A conﬂ uence of modernisms 213 Fascism as the Rohrschach test of Italian modernism 216

8 The Fascist Regime as a Modernist State 219 Fascism’s ‘challenge to Time’ 219 Fascism’s technocratic modernism 224 The ‘voracious amoeba’ of Fascist culture 227 Cultural modernism under Fascism 233 The modernist dynamic of Fascism’s social transformation 239 The pursuit of a ‘crystalline modernity’ 242 The ‘true face’ of Fascist modernism 245 …and the ‘look’ of Nazism 249

9 Nazism as a Revitalization Movement 250 Joseph: A German destiny 250 Reconnecting forwards 255 Nazism’s alternative modernity 258 Mein Kampf as a modernist manifesto 260 Nazi modernization revisited 265 The Weimar Republic as a ‘stressed’ society 268 The sacralization of politics under Nazism 271 Hitler as a modern propheta 273 Germany’s new beginning 275

10 The Modernism of Nazi culture 279 Graduating from ﬁ n-de-siècle Vienna 279 ‘In the mind of the Führer’ 281 The modernism of Nazi art 286 Aesthetic modernism under Nazism 289 A modernist classicism 291 xii Modernism and Fascism

The modernism of Nazi music 295 Racially acceptable literature and dance 300 Through the lens of Nazism 304 The ‘destructive creation’ of Nazi modernism 306

11 The Third Reich’s Biopolitical Modernism 310 Nazi Lebensfreude 310 The ‘otherness’ of Nazi modernity 315 Converting to Hitler 319 Nazism’s marriage of technology with Being 321 The Nazi cult of technocratic modernism 324 Planning the Third Reich 327 The modernist racial state 329 The ‘ecology’ of genocide 331

12 Casting Off 336 Ending without closing 336 Maximalizing modernism 338 A footnote on postmodernity 344 Fascism: neither modern nor anti-modern 347 The modernist causality of generic fascism 349 The role of modernism in abortive fascisms 354 A modernist Iron Guard? 356 Modernist intellectuals and fascism 358 Locating fascisms in ‘something larger’ 360 The modernism of humanistic research 362

Postscript: A Different Beginning 365 The greening of Dionysus 365 A different beginning? 367

Appendix: More on Methodology 370 Notes 376 Bibliography 434 Index 461 List of Illustrations

1. Still from Leni Riefenstahl’s ﬁ lm Triumph of the Will (1935) 11 2. Dadaist painting by Julius Evola, 1920 17 3. Elevation of Giuseppe Terragni’s 1936 Casa del Fascio, Como 20 4. Vittorio Morpurgo’s building to house the Ara Pacis, Rome, 1938 21 5. Mussolini opening Morpurgo’s Ara Pacis building in 1938 21 6. Adalberto Libera’s highly modernist house built for Curzio Malaparte on Capri 23 7. Walter Gropius’ 1933 project for the Reichsbank, Berlin 29 8. Goya, ‘Saturn (Cronus) devouring one of his sons’ (c. 1815) 82 9. Paul Nash, ‘We are making a New World’ (1918) 158 10. ‘Marco Polo Tower’ designed by Vittorio Calza Bini, Naples, 1940 229 11. Mario Palanti’s 1933 entry for the Palazzo del Littorio competition 230 12. Model of another entry for the Palazzo del Littorio competition 231 13. Meeting room of Giuseppe Terragni’s 1936 Casa del Fascio, Como 236 14. Model of the projected EUR ’42 exhibition complex, showing Adalberto Libera’s arch 237 15. Artist’s impression of Libera’s completed arch for the EUR ’42 exhibition 237 16. One of Albert Speer’s ‘Cathedrals of Light’, Berlin, 1937 278 17. Painting by Ulrich Ertl, ‘Mountain of Redemption’ 290 18. Painting by Otto Meister, ‘Mount Olympus in Rain’, 1943 290 19. Maquette of ‘Monument to Work’ by Josef Thorak (unbuilt) 292 20. German forerunner of electronic computer technology, 1941 311 21. A model of the proposed headquarters of the Nazi radio broadcasting centre planned for Berlin (but never built) 315 22. Artist’s impression of a black hole 341 23. Still of actors portraying Hitler and Speer discussing the plans for Germania from the German TV docu-drama Speer und Er 353

xiii Acknowledgements

This book could not have been written without the generous period of sabbatical leave made possible by an AHRC Research Leave award for one semester combined with a Brookes Research Leave award for two. I hope the fi nal outcome goes some way towards justifying the trust placed in me by the various anonymous assessors of my grant applications. I also owe an enormous debt to several key members of the School of Arts and Humanities at Oxford Brookes University who gave me moral or practical support to progress with this project at various points in its long gestation when it was needed, and to the hundreds of its students who have taken my history courses over the years who became unwitting guinea-pigs for the interpretations and theories that culminated in this metanarrative, some of them showing the sort of spontaneous enthusiasm for my approach to history which is the life- blood of a teaching career. The process of writing the book and assembling the illustrations for it over the last 18 months has also revealed the remarkable generosity and humanity retained by some academics and para-academics despite the mounting temporal, bureaucratic, and fi nancial stress infl icted on this particular global community. So many people have played a role in the genesis or completion of this project that the list resembles the credits that roll unseen down the screen as people leave the cinema. To explain the unique contribution of each one would swell further the dimensions of a tome already full to bursting. I thus propose simply to list everyone democratically in alphabetical order of their fi rst name. They all know what they have done for me, in some cases reading a whole draft, proofreading the entire manuscript, suggesting key books of which I was oblivious, writing an inspiring article, or simply, in a timely moment, pointing me in the right direction academically or emotionally in my own wrestling match with Cronus and modernity. I hope that in their different ways those who are still with us can all fi nd something in the fi nal result that makes them pleased to be acknowledged in this understated way: Alice Demartini, Alfred Schobert, Andreas Umland, Aristotle Kallis, Cassie Watson, Claudio Fogu, Clotilde D’Amato, Cyprian Blamires, David Baker, David Luke, David Nash, David Robertson, Detlef Mühlberger, Emilio Gentile, Francesco Innamorati, George Mosse, Gillian Hooper, Gregory Maertz, Ian Kershaw, Jeffrey Schnapp, John Perkins, John Stewart, Josephine Reynolds, Library staff in the Bodleian Library (upper reserve), Karla Poewe,

xiv Acknowledgements xv

Marco Demartini, Marco Medicina, Marius Turda, Mark Antliff, Mary Chamberlain, Matthew Feldman, Michael Golston, Michael Strang, Mitch Sedgwick, Modris Eksteins, Orietta Rossini, Orietta Panicelli, Paul Hooper, Paul Jackson, Paul Weindling, Peter Fritzsche, Peter Harbour, Peter Osborne, Peter Pulzer, Quinto Demartini, Reginald Cave, Richard Evans, Rob Pope, Robert Murray, Roberto Ventrone, Robin Mowat, Roger Eatwell, Rosalba Demartini, Samuele Demartini, Siegfried Jäger, Stan Mathews, Stanley Payne, Steve King, Sue Neale, Susanne Baackmann, Susan McCrae, Tudor Georgescu, Walter Adamson, Werner Loh, Zygmunt Baumann, and last, but far from least, Mariella, without whom nothing would have been possible. This book is about the quest for transcendence under the conditions of Western modernity, and about the human need to draw from the past to give meaning to the future. If it is to be dedicated to anyone, then it is to the person from my past who did most to instil a search for ‘higher’ values and an appreciation of life’s fragile beauty, Joan Griffi n, and to the person in whom the best of what I have learnt will, I hope, live on in a different way in the future, Vincent Griffi n. On 11 December 2005 while I was writing this book his precocious grasp of the principles of academic life was illustrated by the following exchange: Vincent (aged 6, looking at the overfl owing shelves in my study) ‘Did you make all these books?’; Roger Griffi n: ‘No, I read them to write mine’; Vincent: ‘But that’s cheating, Rog.’