Italian Fascism, National Socialism, and the Lure of the Classics*

chapter 1 “Distant Models”? Italian Fascism, National Socialism, and the Lure of the Classics*

Helen Roche

It is a truth widely acknowledged that fascist movements tend to glorify the national past of the country in which they arise.1 To name two examples alone, during the interwar years, Dutch fascists recalled the triumphant exploits of their maritime empire with pride, while Austrian fascists harked back to the heroic victories of the Habsburgs against the marauding Turks.2 Yet sometimes, fascist regimes would seek to resurrect a past even more ancient, and more glorious still; a phenomenon which Ernst Nolte (who fathered the study of comparative fascism long before he fathered the Historikerstreit) ascribed to the search for “distant models”—the turn towards Greece or Rome.3 This phenomenon is particularly marked in the case of the two most powerful and most indisputably “fascist” regimes of all: Benito Mussolini’s Italy and Adolf Hitler’s Germany.4 One of this volume’s most salient aims, therefore, is to present an illuminating (if necessarily inexhaustive) survey of the whys and wherefores of this phenomenon of totalitarian Classicism, uniting contributions from scholars working in a wide variety of fields, including classics, history, philosophy, art and architecture.

* Much of the first part of this introductory chapter draws upon an essay entitled “Mussolini’s ‘Third Rome’, Hitler’s Third Reich, and the Allure of Antiquity”, prepared for a workshop on “Politicizing the Social and the Cultural in the Histories of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany”, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge (2017), in which the thesis put forward here is discussed at greater length. It is envisaged that the essay will appear in print in due course, and readers with a particular interest in the arguments adumbrated here would be best advised to consult them in this (more comprehensive and fully contextualized) form. 1 n.b. Throughout this volume, the specific movement and regime of Italian Fascism will be denoted with a capital “f”, while generic or non-Italian fascism will be denoted with a lower- case “f”. The same rule applies to the adjectives “Fascist” and “fascist” respectively. 2 Kunkeler (2017); Tálos (2013), 584. 3 Nolte (1969), 522. 4 Cf. e.g., Paxton (1998, 2004), who characterizes these as the only two fascist regimes to have endured through all “five stages of fascism”, from intellectual exploration to the achievement of power to eventual radicalization or entropy.

In previous years or decades, the “appropriations” or “abuses” of antiquity perpetrated under Fascism and National Socialism have tended to exercise a rather morbid fascination upon classicists and ancient historians,5 whilst remaining relatively overlooked by modern historians and scholars of fascism.6 This state of affairs has only recently begun to change, following the so-called “cultural turn” in the study of fascism heralded by Roger Griffin and Emilio Gentile, among others.7 Even so, there has been a tendency for scholars to focus on the more “modernist” aspects of fascist culture at the expense of taking the turn towards antiquity seriously; often, the latter may still be portrayed as mere legitimatory window-dressing.8 Arguably, when considering fascist appropriations of classical antiquity, we need to combine the best elements of both of these approaches—allowing for a sustained engagement with broader theories of fascism, whilst retaining the [ancient] historian’s detailed empirical approach and historiographical sen- sitivity.9 Such a fusion will enable us to pose important questions about the modernity—or otherwise—of fascism as a phenomenon, whilst also providing us with interpretative keyholes into which theories about fascist appropriations of the classical past may usefully be slotted. These could include Emilio Gentile’s concept of fascism as a “political religion” which “sacralizes” and “aes- theticizes” politics, or Roger Griffin’s idea of fascism as a “palingenetic” form of populist ultranationalism with a “mythic core”.10 Indeed, we might even go so

5 For a brilliant and highly convincing analysis of this phenomenon, see Fleming (2008); for an example of it in practice, see Biddiss and Wyke (1999). 6 Two classical scholars, Volker Losemann (1977), and Mariella Cagnetta (1979) provided the first, undeniably groundbreaking studies of classics and ancient history under the Nazi and Fascist regimes respectively; the first major edited volume covering both regimes, Näf (2001), which contained an extensive number of useful essays, as well as a comprehensive bibliography of relevant items published before the turn of the millennium, was also fundamentally an initiative by classical scholars. Meanwhile, many of the most seminal histories or handbooks on fascism—including Griffin (1991), Payne (1995), Laqueur (1996), Morgan (2003), Paxton (2004), and Bosworth (2009)—mention classical appropriations barely, if at all. 7 Cf. e.g., Gentile (2003); Griffin (2007). 8 Arthurs (2012), 2. Gentile (2007) provides a prominent exception to this tendency, present- ing a thorough examination of the Fascist attempt to reconstitute the present-day Italians as the “Romans of modernity”. 9 Arthurs (2012) provides a very promising example of this combined approach in practice. See also Kallis (2011, 2012, 2014a, 2014b) and Nelis (2007, 2014). 10 Gentile (1990, 1993); Griffin (1991). Griffin uses “palingenetic” in this context to mean that fascism is motivated above all by the desire for national rebirth.