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The Fascination of Fascism a Concluding Interview with Roger Griffin

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The Fascination of Fascism a Concluding Interview with Roger Griffin The Fascination of Fascism A Concluding Interview with Roger Griffin The following is an edited and revised version of a recorded interview of Roger Griffin [RG]by Matthew Feldman [MF],which took place in May 2005. The originaldis- cussion was chairedbyDr Robert Pyrah as part of the University of Oxford’s ongoing Central and South-Eastern Europe Seminar Series. As a result, this concluding text is both the most recent and most informal in this collection, and rounds out the previous essays byoffering Griffin’s synoptic reflections on his pursuit of the ‘fascist minimum’. Note the tripartite structure of the interview, focusing first on the ‘back story’ to Grif- fin’s involvement with Fascist Studies; then on his evolving approach and contribution to this interdisciplinaryfield of study;andfinally, a summary and overview of thepre- ceding chapters in this volume. These discursive and synoptic aspects are also intended to provide a more accessible ‘way in’ to the debates surrounding fascist historiography – indeed, virtually none of thepolysyllabic wordsinthis sentence are either found in the ensuing questions or in Griffin’s response to them. [MF] ***** MF: To start off on a biographical note, how didyou first get involved in Fascist Studies, at a time when it wasn’t yet a recognised academic discipline? RG: Two pivotal experiences, reinforced bypragmatic considerations, helped crystallise my abiding fascination with the nature of fascism as a multifaceted, protean political force that has had a major impact on modern history. First, in 1967, while I was an undergraduate studying French and German literature at University, I spent a day in the city of Weimar as part of a cultural tour of students from ‘the West’ to what was still the German Democratic Republic, andhence a Soviet satellite state. In the morning I saw the wooden desk – on which the world-famous German humanist and artist, Wolfgang Goethe, had written some of his greatest poetry. In the afternoon I also saw on the way to the permanent exhibition of the horrors of Buchenwald concentration camp – the site of the famous ‘Goethe Oak’, left intact as a cultural monument within the electrified fences by the camp’s SS architects. Aware of its significance to German culture, its stump had been preserved and commemorated by the SS administration after the tree itself was destroyed in an Allied air-raid in 1944. This dramatic juxtaposition of experiences seems to have triggered obsessive – though largely subliminal –thoughts about therelationshipbetween humanity and inhumanity, modern literature and modern history, ‘good’ and ‘evil’. They were embryonic questions about the nature, not just of Nazism and fascism, but of the modern age, human nature, human culture, and modernity itself, which I was only able to revisit properly more than two decades later. MF: But you mentioned two pivotal moments in the ‘pre-history’ ofyour engagement with the study of fascist ideology. RG: Indeed. The second rather weird ‘incident’ occurred in 1981, when I was half- heartedly searching for a suitable research topic for a PhD. – my first attempt to write one in my twenties, code-named ‘The Dark Realm’, having been a disaster, though 203 204 Concluding Interview the fundamental issues I engaged with then as a postgraduate in German studies were eventuallytobesubsumed within my research into modernism 40 years later. I had a curiously ‘auspicious’ encounter with a total stranger who came to sit next to me in a taverna in Genoa as I read an Englishhistorybook. He struck up a conversation and, intrigued by the fact that I was teaching in a history department in England, showed me the book he was carrying, assuring me with considerable earnestness that it contained the key to understanding the real forces determining the course of human civilisation. With a growing sense of mission, and what Hippies termed after Jung the ‘synchronicity’ of that meeting, I noted the title of the book, and tried to track it down. But the Bodleian Library in Oxford – which I fondly imagined contained all the important books in the world – had no trace of it. The book was called La rivolta contro il mondomoderno [published in English as The Revolt against theModern World ]. MF: Given the revolutionary nature and Dadaist past of the authorr, howeverr, this was not a book about a conservative revolt against themodern world, but was instead aradical call for a utopian modernity, a ‘new’ modernity, as it were. RG: Precisely. The book radically rejected linear schemes of progress or decline, instead expounding acyclic scheme that saw periods of dissolution giving way toanew phase of regeneration and health. It turned out to be the brainchild of the highly prolific Baron Julius Evola who, following in the footsteps of Oswald Spengler and ReneGu´ enon,´ in the 1930s became an autodidactic cultural prophet, theorist of occultism, and evangelist of the so-called ‘Tradition’, whose alleged existence he rightly claims is ignored by mainstream historians – though not for the reasons he maintained. Evola also came to be a visceral pro-Fascist and pro-Nazi who, after 1945, went on to become one of the most important gurus of Italian neo-fascism, providing a spurious philosophical and ‘metapolitical’ rationale for highly political bomb outrages during the years of the European far right’s ‘Strategia della Tensione’ [the ‘Strategy of Tension’ of the 1970s–early 1980s, according to which bomb out- rages would destablise society to the point of inducing the state to adopt extreme anti-communist and anti-liberal measures]. My efforts to come to grips with his alternative reading of European history would eventually become the starting point for my investigation of the recurrent motifs, structures, and fluid dynamics found in fascist ideology. It was an investigation lead- ing to what I believed was an ‘improved’ theory about an ideal type of the ‘fascist minimum’, based on its revolt against the ‘degenerate’ modern world in the name of a new, higher modernity based on the reborn nation. It also offered a clue to resolving the paradox I had encountered so graphicallyand memorably in Weimar: the readi- ness of human beings to ruthlessly ‘sacrifice’ their fellow human beings in order to purge the present phase of civilisation of its decadence so as to inaugurate a new one. MF: Surelythere were also less epiphanic and more mundane, pragmatic reasons for your involvement in Fascist Studies? Meaning thatt, in practice, how didyou start out your research on fascism? RG: At the time of my close encounter with someone who in retrospect was clearly a convinced neo-fascist and might even have been a fanatical activist – I now regret that I did not have the knowledge or Italian needed to interview him in depth about his worldview – I was teaching on a course on the debate about fascism at Oxford Polytechnic [now Oxford Brookes University]. It was run by my inspirational Head of Department, the late Robert Murray. I soon realised that, though I was ‘delivering’ this course, none of the history books on the bibliographies we were handing out to students seemed to make sense offascism either by offering a satisfactory definition Concluding Interview 205 of it, or an explanation of its genesis or its goals. There was no shortageof texts on ‘what happened’ but very littleon‘why it happened’. Certainly nothing available accounted, to my satisfaction at least, for the extreme violence, destructiveness, and systemic inhumanity of which fascism was capable, beyond making ill-conceived allusions to barbarism, reaction, nihilism, or pathology. In fact, I had yet to study key works by Stanley Payne, Ze’ev Sternhell,and Emilio Gentile, who would have put me on the right track. In the event, I undertook to resolve the issues myself within the framework of a doctorate. This eventually enabled me to write the type of book I wishhadbeen availabletome[The Nature of Fascism, Pinter: 1991] when I was designing the course and setting those questions on interwar Europe that I could not answer myself: a case of the blind leading the blind. Nonetheless, what was missing from The Nature of Fascism was a serious consider- ation of the role played by the ritual, political dimension of what I was looking at. It wasn’t enough to talk about the ideas or ideology of rebirth, and how they cast light on the trajectories of individual fascisms. I needed to look much more seriously at the praxis, at the way it was implemented,the way it was lived out and experienced. I can see now that, in this respect, it was a defective thesis. But then you only have 100 000 wordstoplay with in a PhD., and it was thethesis that basically became the book. The resulting interpretation inevitably shared many of the blind spots in understanding fascism that were so prevalent in the secondary literature of the time. And even if I had actually been aware of all the gaps in it, I probably wouldn’t have been able to write it at all, because I would have been totally paralysedbythe overwhelming sense of how inadequate everything I was writing was in order to do justice to the complexity of the topic. So I owe it to the fact that I had this ‘crush’ on the basic idea of interpreting fascism that grew out of my reading of Evola’s Revolt against theModern World that I had the one-sidedness to complete it in the first place. Nevertheless, I now recognise that it’s a defective book. A few years ago I was asked to re-edit it for students, but I have come to the conclusion that it would be a really bad idea, because I would have to annotate it so heavily to make it more complete and correct the distortions that it would no longer be The Nature of Fascism.
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