The Reclamation of Fascist Culture

Home , Decadence, Manuel Hedilla, Roger Griffin

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Review Article

Roger Griffin

Alexander De Grand, Italian Fascism: Its Origins and Development, Lincoln, NE and London, University of Nebraska Press, 3rd edn, 2000; xvi + 191 pp.; 0803266227; £9.95 Jeffrey Schnapp, A Primer of Italian Fascism, Lincoln, NE and London, University of Nebraska Press, 2000; xxi + 325 pp.; 0803292686; £16.95 G.L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Towards a General Theory of Fascism, New York, Howard Fertig, 1998; 230 pp.; 0865274320 Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000; 316 pp.; 0521480159; £40.00, US$64.95 John London (ed.), Theatre under the Nazis, Manchester, Man- chester University Press, 2000; 356 pp.; 0719059917; £17.99 Stanley G. Payne, Fascism in Spain, 1923–1977, Madison, Uni- versity of Wisconsin Press, 2000; xii + 601 pp.; 0299165647 Tom Linehan, British Fascism, 1918–1939: Parties, Ideology and Culture, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000; 306 pp.; 0719050243; £15.99

The term bonifica, used originally about ‘making good’ uninhabit- able, malaria-infested marshes, became a key metaphor under Fascism for the regeneration of Italy. It evoked the purging, re- furbishing and recycling of what was usable in Italy’s past and turning it into something new, modern, healthy. Fascist culture was once mostly treated as an oxymoronic non-subject, since genuine art and intellectual creativity were assumed to be incompatible with totalitarianism except when they were reduced to machine tools for the manufacture of consensus or travestied into media for aestheti-

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cizing the reactionary or nihilistic nature of the regime. However, in the last ten years a velvet revolution has taken place in this area of studies. Increasingly scholars are finding it common sense to approach it on the tacit or explicit recognition that Fascism was driven by the utopia of a reborn Italy conceived in terms of an anti-materialist revolt which made the sphere of ‘culture’ in its widest sense, rather than that of politics, economics or militarism, the primary focus of transformation and renewal. It is an insight bound up with a number of important secondary realizations: Fascism was by no means a ‘parenthesis’ in Italian history, but an integral part of its development into a modern nation with roots deep in the political and cultural history of the Risorgimento and the Giolittian era. Cultural policies were not essentially propagandistic in the coercive sense, but engaged the enthusiastic collaboration of a significant percentage of the intelligentsia and artistic elite in the attempt to ‘remake’ Italians. The cultural revolution they sought to bring about was not ‘anti-modern’, but part of the attempt to create an alternative modernity to rescue society from decline and decadence, an aspiration which in turn gave Fascism’s bid for the renewal of civilization a deep affinity with modernism itself. Another important corollary, though less widely grasped, is that the thrust towards national rebirth which provided the common denominator between the highly disparate cultural and political energies which converged in Fascism, is the best candi- date to date for the ‘fascist minimum’. It constitutes the structural kinship which links it to other manifestations of ‘generic fascism’, whatever the differences which separate them at the level of the specific content of surface ideologies, policies and national ‘style’. The quantum leap in the sophistication of analysis which accom- panied the growing acceptance of this paradigm has opened up ‘fascist culture’, once regarded as a boggy wasteland, to the expan- sionist drive of academia. Broad stretches of it have metamorphosed into building sites for promising academic careers in Italian studies, while elsewhere once inaccessible regions in other countries are now being energetically exploited as terrain rich in new revelations about the nature both of Fascism’s ill-starred revolution and of Western modernity itself. A sign of the times in this context is Alexander De Grand’s Italian Fascism: Its Origins and Development, which has evolved since its first edition in 1982 into the best one-volume synoptic history of the rise and fall of Fascism available to the undergraduate. Clear and concise without being simplistic, the new edition also contains an excellent annotated bibliography that will guide to the most important texts those students and teachers keen to penetrate further into 02_EHQ 31/4 articles 15/10/01 12:54 pm Page 611

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the subject. In contrast to other more recent overviews (e.g. Philip Morgan’s Italian Fascism, 1919–1945 and John Whittam’s Fascist Italy), De Grand dedicates an entire chapter to the roots of Fascism in Italy’s incomplete Risorgimento, and concludes his account with a sustained discussion of ‘The Political Culture of Fascism: Ideologies and Intellectuals’. This brings out the unresolved tensions between the various ideological currents and political traditions which Fascism harnessed in the ‘new Italy’, and gives due weight to the cultural initiatives of the regime. Yet, as De Grand himself concedes in his ‘preface to the third edition’, he remains at heart a traditional historian. It is economic and social realties that are his primary concern, which is perhaps what makes this book so accessible to undergraduates and newcomers to the complexities of the subject. Narrating lucidly what happened under Fascism is more important to him than explaining why it embarked on such a vast project of destruction and reconstruction in the first place. He points out himself that since the first edition ‘much work has been done on Fascist culture and the efforts of Mussolini’s regime to reshape Italians through the formation of civic religion, manipula- tion of symbols, mass rallies, and the intrusion of the state into the private sphere’. Yet he remains true to his conviction that ‘what Fascism did’ was always more important than what it said it wanted to do (ix). In terms of the ‘culturalist’ approach to Fascism now in the ascendancy, then, De Grand’s book is reminiscent of a moulting mammal whose new fur has not quite grown through. He accepts in the preface that (generic) ‘fascism was one of the three great approaches to the challenge of organizing the new mass society that emerged at the end of the previous century’ and that its ‘binding ideological glue’ was ‘the myth of national or racial rebirth’ (ix–x). Yet he identifies the common denominator of the many components of the Fascist ‘coalition’ as nationalism, elitism, authoritarianism and collectivism (146–7). This obscures the crucial func- tion of the myth of national rebirth, of palingenesis, in binding the various strands of Fascism together, however loosely. Similarly, his statement that the Fascist regime ‘opted for an essentially conservative solution to the complicated problem of distributing power’ (165) underestimates the revolutionary significance of the scores of initiatives undertaken by the regime for transforming the nature of Italian political culture, from Dopolavoro, local festivals, and state festivities to the demographic campaign, the state sponsorship of sport and art, and organization of the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution visited by millions. In stark contrast to Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s regime never 02_EHQ 31/4 articles 15/10/01 12:54 pm Page 612

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made a serious attempt to impose a single orthodoxy of thought or style in any area. Its Gleichschaltung consisted in the effort to present the state as the inspiration and patron of all artistic creativity and intellectual endeavour to a point where it could bathe in their reflected glory (a tactic which Marla Stone calls ‘hegemonic pluralism’). In this way the state’s official narrative of contemporary history gradu- ally became internalized to the point where the March on Rome really did mark for millions of ‘ordinary Italians’ the start of Italy’s political and cultural renaissance, at least as long as popular support for Mussolini persisted. The fact that this aspect of the regime is dealt with at the end of De Grand’s book rather than at the beginning is revealing. The cultural perspective remains an ‘add-on’ to the out- ward history of the regime rather than the key to understanding its inner dynamics. This is consistent with the way in his Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: The ‘Fascist’ Style of Rule (1995) De Grand rejects the fruitfulness of approaching the two regimes in terms of a shared fascist ideology (the search for which he describes as so much ‘wasted ink’), and opts instead to work ‘from outside in’. There is nothing transitional about Jeffrey Schnapp’s A Primer of Italian Fascism. The premise of this, the first major anthology of Fascist writings available to English readers, is that the Fascist regime can only be understood by working from ‘inside out’. Furthermore, the criterion of selection has been to reproduce texts which bring out ‘the role played by intellectuals and artists in defin- ing the nature and scope of the fascist revolution’ (xiii) — Schnapp uses lower case for Fascism throughout. The result is a fascinating selection of twenty-four excellently translated texts, each supplied with a helpful introduction. They cover such topics as the evolution of Fascist doctrine from the 1919 San Sepolcro programme to the 1943 Manifesto of Verona; various attempts by sympathetic intellectuals to define the essence of what they were convinced was the Fascist revolution; the corporate state; labour policy; Fascism’s role in the renewal of Europe (‘Universal Fascism’); racial doctrine; education; and culture. Thanks to this long-overdue volume English- speaking students working on a wide range of aspects of Fascist history can finally consult substantial samples of Fascist writing to give them direct access to the thinking behind events and policies. In particular they can discover from primary sources not only that Fascism was an ideological phenomenon, whatever some eminent historians have claimed to the contrary, but that it provoked an intense debate within the intelligentsia about the nature of Fascism’s revolution and of the institutional changes it should undertake. Far from implying the weakness of the new regime, the profusion of conflicting ideas generated a sense of dynamism, of vitalism, of 02_EHQ 31/4 articles 15/10/01 12:54 pm Page 613

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excitement, of ‘permanent revolution’ that could be presented in stark contrast to less ‘modern’ political systems. Schnapp’s anthology is not without its weaknesses. There is something rather arbitrary about the way these texts have been organized into four parts, and students in search of material for essays will soon find that the book woefully lacks a comprehensive subject index to enable them to track down particular topics. Also the anthology would have acquired even greater significance if the introduction to the volume had related the principle used to select the texts to the emergent ‘new consensus’ which identifies the definitional compo- nent of generic fascism in the attempted revolution in the nation’s political culture. In this respect A Primer of Italian Fascism is in good company. A series of fascinating contributions to the understanding of Fascist culture has appeared over the last few years, the impact of which would have been further enhanced had the authors located their topic within the cultural dynamic of generic fascism: examples are Walter Adamson’s Avant-Garde Florence, Karen Pinkus’ Bodily Regimes, Mabel Berezin’s Making the Fascist Self, Barbara Spackman’s Fascist Virilities, Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi’s Fascist Spectacle, and Günter Berghaus’ Futurism and Politics. The most recent book in this vein is Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Fascist Modernities, which breaks new ground by excavating the subterranean con- nections which formed under Mussolini between literature and cinema and the social and political life of the ‘new Italy’. In the course of this she lays bare the fact that anti-semitism was a cultural force under fascism long before its adoption as an official policy. Yet here too the analysis would have achieved even greater penetration had the author probed further into the nature of ‘modernity’ in its wider fascist context. Nowadays there is an element of tunnel vision when such wider issues are left out, or when Fascist ideology is reduced to a single dis- course, such as Sorelian syndicalism or the performative rhetoric of misogyny. Over the years a number of works have appeared which have treated Fascism cogently as a plural phenomenon deeply bound up with the European crisis of modernity as a whole. Exemplary in this respect are David Roberts’ The Syndicalist Tradition and Fascist Italy and Pier-Giorgio Zunino’s L’ideologia fascista. The outstanding scholar working in this field is Emilio Gentile, whose Le Origini dell’ideologia fascista, Il mito dello stato nuovo and Il culto del littorio (published in English as The Sacralization of the State in Fascist Italy), not to mention his important essays on Fascism’s relationship to Risorgimento nationalism and to modernity, should by now have transformed Fascist studies outside Italy but for their innate conservatism and Anglophone bias. But long before these appeared G.L. 02_EHQ 31/4 articles 15/10/01 12:54 pm Page 614

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Mosse was already investigating aesthetic and intellectual life under Fascism and Nazism on the (at the time eccentric, if not aberrant) premise that both were striving in their own ways to bring about a totalizing cultural revolution, and that it was this shared aspiration that provided the clue to identifying the elusive ‘fascist minimum’. His work on Nazi culture as the culmination of the deeply mythic and ritual forms that German nationalism adopted in the nineteenth century laid the basis for his theory of generic fascism which conceived it primarily as an attempt to use the affective power of modern iconography and ritual to transform political culture so as to create a ‘Third Way’ and a ‘New Man’. A quarter of a century on, the paradigm of fascist studies has slowly shifted, creating the optical illusion that it is Mosse who has moved from their periphery to their core, that the maverick has become a founding father. It is thus appropriate that the last volume which he produced before he died, The Fascist Revolution, is a collection of ten previously published essays, the earliest dating back to 1961, which brings out the extraordinary range, cohesion and originality of his contribution to the discipline. ‘Toward a General Theory of Fascism’ is followed by pieces on Nazism’s or Fascism’s relationship to aesthetics, racism, the French Revolution, the intelligentsia, occultism and homosexuality. It is especially Mosse’s brief introduction, written just as ‘culturalism’ and the ‘new consensus’ were beginning to transform fascist studies, that may one day assume a seminal importance in its succinct formulation of the principles to be applied in a ‘cultural interpretation of fascism’. Its cornerstone is an empathetic approach which attempts ‘to understand the movement on its own terms’ and ‘to grasp how people saw’ it, namely as one which ‘created a political environment which attempted to encompass the entire man or woman’ and ‘addressed [their] perceptions of life and their hopes for the future’. It is each movement’s ‘self-representation’ which thus provides the key to analysing the dynamics of fascism, as long as the scholars who study aspects of its ‘representation’ are concerned not with its ‘loose psychological or textual associations’, but ‘with the specific historical context in which visual self-representation takes place’ (x–xi). At this point Fascism’s integral place within European nationalism is thrown into relief, and the pervasive concern with transforming culture conceived as an indivisible ‘totality’ becomes the key to its nature as a form of politics. The problem which arises when studies of fascist culture do not observe these principles are illustrated by the collection of essays produced by Stanford Italian Review in 1990 and Journal of Con- temporary History in 1996. In both cases the whole was less than the 02_EHQ 31/4 articles 15/10/01 12:54 pm Page 615

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sum of its parts, despite the excellence of individual contributions. Fortunately there are signs that a new generation of scholars intuitively grasps the essentials of Mosse’s approach. Günter Berghaus’ editorial introduction to Fascism and Theatre (1996), for example, set out to give some coherence to a group of disparate essays on ‘the aesthetics and politics of performance’ in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain and Pétain’s France, and glittered with insights gleaned from theatrical studies and anthro- pology into the transformation in the experience of time itself which lay at the heart of the fascist revolution. Fascist Visions (1997), edited by Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff, marked an even more important break with earlier scholarship when it appeared the same year. Not only did its preface constitute a significant essay on fascist culture in its own right by refining the thesis that fascist aesthetics are shaped by the thrust towards the total rebirth of society, but its assumptions are consciously integrated into their analysis by each contributor. This gives the volume a cohesion and cumulative impact which could not be achieved by earlier undertakings, notably Richard Golsan (ed.), Fascism, Aesthetics and Culture (1992), where the attempt which the editor made in the introduction to address the need for a working definition of Fascism only muddies the waters. With Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism, Emily Braun, one of the contributors to Fascist Visions, has taken the scholarly engagement with Fascist culture to new heights and in doing so makes a major contribution both to fascist studies and to art history. She approaches her subject with a refreshing awareness of the latest developments in the search for the ‘fascist minimum’ and consciously applies a wide-angle historical lens through which to scrutinize her subject with the eye of the professional art historian. What results is an authoritative interpretation of the works of a major European painter which is simultaneously a highly readable study of the symbiotic relationship which could grow up between the fascist regime and creative individuals in their common search for a modernity of ‘activism, instinct and irrationalism’ to replace the prevailing modernity based on an Enlightenment project which had apparently run its course. As Braun points out, for many Italian artists ‘historical tradition and the avant-garde project of cultural renewal were not antithetical. To the contrary, theirs was a form of political modernism that appropriated the past to create an ideal future based on the mythic origins of the Italian people’ (88). She traces how in different phases of his life Sironi’s compositions on canvas, in stained glass, or in mosaic drew on the vitalistic dynamism of the Futurists, the brooding unease of De Chirico’s ‘metaphysical’ painting, the sobriety of Novecento, the laconic stylization of 02_EHQ 31/4 articles 15/10/01 12:54 pm Page 616

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Expressionism, and the elegant classicism of the early Renaissance. This restless eclecticism is also reflected in the variety of Sironi’s subjects. There are the ominously deserted streets of Milan which dramatically evoke the impending burst of purging violence when the Fascists acted to put an end to the general strike. There are the paint- ings of peasants as the embodiments of the rootedness and vitality needed to combat the decadence of cosmopolitan existence. There is the stained-glass window commissioned by the Ministry of Corpora- tions which deliberately evokes Christian iconography in its por- trayal of a mythologized Italy holding the Charter of Labour which would reconcile the interests of the people with those of the nation. Each of Sironi’s works displays a syncretism performed, not in the ludic, ironic spirit of post-modernism, but with an austere sense of higher morality. Far from being propaganda in the crude conventional meaning of the term, they are born of a highly creative tension not just between individualism and collectivism, between Sironi’s private cosmology and his urge to create stylistic templates for society as a whole, but also between his proclivity to melancholy and his heady enthusiasm for the new world promised by the regime. All can be seen as attempts to reattach the auratic to modern life, a form of aestheticization of politics which stemmed not from the reactionary need for travesty and disguise which Walter Benjamin attributed to all fascism as a form of politics, but from Sironi’s passionate involvement in the creation of a new future which would emerge once the state could create communal social and institutional structures with which to channel the exploding dynamism of the modern age. Without any trace of hagiography Braun reveals the creativity and artistry with which Sironi used his technical skill, imagination and deep knowledge of art history to fulfil his self-appointed mission to serve as the myth-forger and icon-maker of the regime. This was a deliberate rupture with the notion of art as a form of self-expression dedicated to the quest for a private psychological or universal human truth. The ‘self’ was now a collective one formed by the people, not in the Marxist sense of the proletariat, but of the national community which found itself historically at the point of high tension between decadence and renewal which only visionaries could fully grasp and portray, a concept of the vocation of the artist deeply indebted to European modernism. In Braun’s hands Sironi’s works become more eloquent testimonies to the Fascist dream of revolutionizing Italy’s political culture than any number of Mussolini’s speeches. In this context the most telling symbol of his own conception of his higher calling under Fascism is his painting The Architect, which harks back to early Renaissance both stylistically and thematically in 02_EHQ 31/4 articles 15/10/01 12:54 pm Page 617

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suggesting the primordial role which the artist plays in giving con- crete form and substance to the utopia of a new world. Braun’s achievement highlights the need for a major revision to take place in the way conventional historians approach the whole subject of Fascist culture and its place in the ideological dynamics of the regime. Central to this revision is a deeper grasp of the pro- found relationship which the regime’s obsessive preoccupation with the decadence and renewal of Italy gave to both modernity and modernism, as well as the elective affinity and empathy which it enabled so many artists and intellectuals to feel towards the regime in its pioneering phase. The significance of such a revision for Fascist studies in general is illustrated by the merits and shortcomings of John London’s Theatre under the Nazis. The editorial introduction is a useful essay on the place which the theatre occupied in Nazism’s cultural policies. It is followed by specialist essays on the Thing plays, historical drama, opera, Jewish theatre, the performance of foreign plays, and theatre in the occupied territories. Each is well-researched and has its own fascination. For example, Erik Levi’s chapter on Nazi opera under- scores just how misleading it is to think of Nazi censorship as the ruthless application of clearly conceived criteria about what was compatible with the Nazi Weltanschauung: here as elsewhere the Third Reich was polycentric and messy rather than ruthlessly centralized and co-ordinated. Perhaps the most striking contribution is Rebecca Rovit’s essay on the Jewish theatre of the Jüdischer Kulturbund in Berlin; this adds a valuable chapter to the history of Nazi anti-semitism. It also brings out the tenacious vitality of the cultural life of Jewish communities in Nazi Germany and just how unimaginable to them was their impending fate until the war. Overall, this book is to be welcomed for giving Anglophone students glimpses into a neglected sphere of cultural life under the Third Reich. What limits its impact is its failure to locate the six case- studies within a coherent conceptual framework concerning the nature of the Nazi revolution (G.L. Mosse is conspicuous by his absence from the footnotes and bibliography). Thus William Niven seems oblivious to the wider significance of his own evidence that the Thing plays expressed the ‘longing for transcendence, for a people’s (or peoples’) revolution and a new empire as a means of redemption’, and that their recurrent theme was a ‘transformation’ which would put an end to an age of chaos, faithlessness and decadence (82). By contrast, Stanley Payne’s Fascism in Spain, 1923–1977, though primarily a narrative history of the role played by Falangism in the Franco regime, shows how the cultural aspects of any fascism should be approached. It is the culmination and synthesis of three decades 02_EHQ 31/4 articles 15/10/01 12:54 pm Page 618

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of scholarly engagement with both the history of authoritarian Spain and the theory and history of fascism. This unique combination of expertise in one scholar has made possible a narrative history which is both highly detailed and lucidly organized thanks to the clear conceptual framework which he has applied to the conflicting political forces which clashed and fused in the Civil War. At its core lies a clear distinction, blurred by most other approaches, between the radicalism of Primo de Rivera’s original Falange, profoundly indebted to and linked with European fascism, and the neo- conservative (and hence essentially anti-Fascist) authoritarianism of Franco’s regime. At the height of the Civil War the Caudillo neutral- ized any potential threat to his authority by merging the Falange with the Comunión Tradicionalista to form the Falanga Española Tradicionalista. This was a brilliant ploy, bitterly resisted by the most idealistic, intransigent Falangists, notably Manuel Hedilla who had replaced José Antonio Primo de Rivera after his execution by the Republicans. It enabled Franco to exploit the associations of revolution, youth and charisma generated by the de Rivera movement during the war, while pursuing essentially reactionary policies aimed at restoring the authority of Spain’s traditional ruling elites, notably the Church, the landed aristocracy and big business. It is inevitable that, since el fascismo did not take power in Spain (contrary to what two generations of Spaniards were led to believe), Payne devotes little space to Fascist culture. The arts under Franco mirrored politics in lacking any of the radicalizing, palingenetic impulses found in the aesthetic policies of fascism and Nazism. It is nevertheless significant that as long as it still seemed likely that Hitler would win the war, there were attempts by unreconstructed Falangists to create a new literature, architecture and theatre imbued with the revolutionary ethos of what they saw as the new fascist era. Their mentor in this was Giménez Caballero, whose journal Arte y Estado is one of the most important sources of sophisticated aesthetics to have been produced by fascist theorists. There were also attempts to create a Falangist equivalent of the Nazi Thing spectacles. Yet such initiatives came to naught. This was not just because of the innate reactionariness and elitism of the Franco regime, which became increasingly pronounced after 1942. A no less important factor was the failure of the Falange to create a coherent secular myth which was as distinct from the values of traditional con- servatives as was Aryan racism under Nazism or Romanità under fascism. The attempt to turn Catholicism into the mobilizing myth of a movement of populist ultra-nationalism (‘the new Catholicity’) was thus doomed from the start and played into the hands of the forces of reaction. A swathe of Spanish artists and intellectuals nailed their 02_EHQ 31/4 articles 15/10/01 12:54 pm Page 619

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colours to the Falange’s mast after the Civil War broke out and continued to do so for as long as the star of European fascism appeared to be in the ascendant. It can be inferred from this that, had a genuine fascist regime been installed in Spain, it would have faced few problems recruiting an intelligentsia prepared to dedicate itself to the task of creating a new artistic and political culture. The case of Salvador Dali, an inveterate anti-Republican, even suggests that it might have hosted a strong current of modernism to combat its ‘sub- versive’ appropriation by staunch anti-Fascist modernists such as Picasso. In Britain fascism did not have to contend with revolutionizing a national identity closely interwoven with religious orthodoxy. Nor did it suffer the fate of being co-opted by ultra-conservatism. As a result its projects for cultural renewal occupy a far more important place in its policies than do those of its Spanish counterpart. This emerges clearly in Thomas Linehan’s British Fascism, 1918–1939: Parties, Ideology and Culture, which is written on the premise that ‘culture was at the centre of the fascist political project in inter-war Britain. British fascism was a cultural phenomenon as much as it was a movement for political or economic change’ (201). As a result a quarter of the book is devoted to considering the BUF’s totalizing concept of culture, its obsession with putting a stop to Britain’s decline and transcending decadence, its ambivalent attitude to tech- nology, the city and modernity, and its crusade against modernism, in which the party clearly took Nazi Germany rather than fascist Italy as its role model. Linehan displays a deep empathetic grasp of how earnestly fascists imagined themselves as engaged in a life-or- death struggle for national renewal against a background of intense ‘cultural pessimism’ about the impending fate of Western civilization, a mood captured, for example, in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come. He thus treats the claim by perhaps the BUF’s most sophisticated intellectual, Alexander Raven-Thomson, that Fascism was ‘a new and revolutionary creed of national and cultural regeneration’ (201) as a revealing expression of the BUF’s core ideology in a way practically unthinkable only a decade ago. The result is a book which deserves to have an impact far beyond the White Cliffs of Dover. Taken together these books not only demonstrate the continued vitality of fascist studies, but suggest that the contemporary preva- lence of the ‘culturalist’ approach to them should not be dismissed as a mere fad. Rather it is the sign that, after a protracted adolescence, they are finally coming of age. There is a Sufi tale of a mullah pass- ing a garden where an old man is desperately searching for something. It turns out to have been a valuable coin that he has just lost, 02_EHQ 31/4 articles 15/10/01 12:54 pm Page 620

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so the mullah helps him look for it. After a while it becomes obvious there is no coin to be found, so the mullah asks ‘Where exactly did you lose it?’ ‘Oh, I lost it inside the house’, the man replies. ‘So why are we looking for it here?’ ‘Because there is more light out here; it is dark indoors.’ Scholars have for far too long assumed that the topic of fascist culture was situated in some remote valley of despair and nihilism, or a sinister fairy-tale land of propaganda and masquerade. There are now encouraging indications that they are at least beginning to look in the right place.

Roger Griffin

is Professor of Modern History at Oxford Brookes University. As well as writing numerous articles and chapters on aspects of generic fascism, he is the author of The Nature of Fascism (Pinter 1991) and the editor of the documentary readers Fascism (Oxford Uni- versity Press 1995) and International Fascism (Arnold 1998). At present he is working on a study of the relationship between fascism, modernity and modernism.