The Fascist Revolution, by George L. Mosse

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: The Fascist Revolution, by George L. Mosse

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EIGHT: Nazi Polemical Theater: the Kampfbuhne

THE THEATER PLAYED a vital part in National Socialism; indeed, it was one of Hitler's dominant passions. No German regime in the past did more to further the theater than the Third Reich. In 1936, for example, some 331 theaters, many of them recently built or renovated, played a regular season. [1] The theater was, in fact, an integral part of Nazi ideology, serving to reinforce the political liturgy of the movement. Mass meetings and the theater were intended to supplement each other. For this reason the liturgical weihebuhne, the "Thing theater" on which the volkish ideology was acted out, assumed special significance, presenting the liturgy of the movement through cultic plays meant to create a living community of faith. The National Socialist myth was acted out in dramatic and visual form as an act of religious worship in which masses of people participated. The Thing theater has been investigated [2] and there is no need to analyze it once more. However, the Kampfbuhne (or fighting stage), the other Nazi attempt to harness the theater to their cause needs further exploration, it antedated and outlasted the Thing theater, which was created in 1933 and dissolved in 1937. [3] The Kampfbuhne began its career in 1926, well before the seizure of power, and endured as long as the Third Reich itself.

It is necessary first to describe the diverse forms of the Kampfbuhne that existed before the seizure of power. Here we shall proceed by types, as all the forms of this theater overlap chronologically. The S.A. and Hitler Youth "Spiel-Trupps" (amateur actors) appeared first; then, in 1931, the Gau theater, a mobile stage that played throughout each province, was created. The NS-Versuchsbuhne Nazi Experimental Theater) started in 1927, and in 1930 became the NS-Volksbuhne, performing on a regular basis. Once we have analyzed these various Kampfbuhnen, both amateur and professional, we can then set them into the historical background of the search for a national theater which, starting in the nineteenth century, became accelerated during the Weimar Republic. Finally, we must take a glance at the fate of the Kampfbuhne during the Third Reich.

Whatever its diverse forms, the Nazis defined a Kampfbuhne as a "Streitgesprach" -- a polemic against the enemy. It was designed partly to "indoctrinate through fun and entertainment," and partly, in the words of one S.A. leader, to encourage "fighters for the cause to emerge from the masses." [4] To be sure, the Nazi ideology was presented to the audience, but always in a crude and polemical fashion, quite different, for example, from the majestic liturgy of the Thing theater. The first "Spiel-Trupps" were attached either to the S.A. or to the Hitler Youth, and gave themselves titles like the "Storm Troops" or the "Brown Shirts." These were enthusiastic groups of amateur actors. Little record remains of their plays, and their theatrical presentations are almost impossible to reconstruct. But as far as we can tell, these fell into two parts: fun and entertainment consisting of folk songs and folk dancing; and a "fighting part," which presented "contemporary political sketches" (Politische Zeitbilder). Such, for example, was the mixture of fun and action which the "Brown Shirts" of Hesse-Nassau presented as part of the Nazi propaganda program in the city of Wetzlar in 1932. [5] Sometimes such troupes seem to have used tableaux vivantes centered upon stereotypes of bankers, trade unionists, and consumers. For the most part the troupes would march on stage in closed formation, before beginning the songs, dances, and plays.

Play troupes like the "Brown Shirts" and "Storm Troopers" were often used in election rallies, especially during mass meetings in cities. Their plays were Streitgesprache, used to bring variety to evenings of martial music and speeches. The Hitler Youth carried their plays to such election rallies in cities, and especially to the villages, where they would perform as part of a "Bunter Abend" (cabaret theater) of skits, songs, and dances.

What were such plays like? For the most part only their titles have survived, and these tend toward the banal, as in All Germans Are Brothers.  [6] I have found only one script without a title performed in Berlin by such an amateur group. Yet, for all its crudity, the play may well be typical for many others. It was performed on a bare stage in a hall belonging to the German Veterans Association (Stahlhelm). The stage represented the guard room of a local S.A. troop. As the play begins, shots are heard behind the stage and a dead S.A. man is carried into the room. Immediately afterwards a communist is dragged in as the probable murderer. But as the S.A. look through the pockets of their murdered comrade, they find a large sum of money and the address of a Jew. The Jew himself is then brought onto the stage, "whining in his jargon," and is shot by the S.A. as the man really responsible for the murder. [7] Through simple action and stereotypes the lesson is driven home that communists are the dupes of the Jews.

Such amateur players provided the inspiration for a more permanent play troupe made up of professional actors: the Gau theater. From 1931 onwards, such Gau-Buhnen presented "cultural evenings" up and down the province, which consisted of folk songs, political poetry, comic sketches, and monologues. [8] However, political plays were also performed with increasing frequency. We know more about the content of these plays than of those of the "Brown Shirts" or "Storm Troopers" because the Gau theater of Pomerania has been extensively documented for the years 1931 and 1932, though no such documentation seems to exist for other Gau theaters. For example, Walter Busch's Giftgas 500 (Poisoned Gas 500), performed during these years, was a play that maintained its popularity. Its subject is described appropriately enough by the Nazi Illustrierter Beobachter [9] as the story of a key German invention, which Jewish greed swindled from Polish heavy industry. The hierarchy of villains will remain unchanged throughout Nazi rule -- the Poles are bad but the Jews are worse. The plays performed were always highly topical. Thus the German National Party (Deutsche Nationale Volkspartei), always a rival of the Nazis, was satirized for its conceit and pretensions. In addition, plays directed against political Catholicism loomed large in a Polish border region. In one of these, a German Catholic priest hates the Nazis so much that he would rather sell good farm land to Poles than let it be farmed by a German National Socialist. [10] The director of the Pomeranian Gau theater maintained that all in all some 15,000 to 20,000 people would watch a playas it wound its way through the towns and villages. [11] Eventually, the Gau-Buhnen became a part of the "Strength through Joy" movement. [12]

The amateur play troupes and the Gau theaters traveled throughout the German provinces. But the so-called NS-Versuchsbuhne was a traditional troupe, staffed by professional actors, which performed in Berlin in theater buildings hired for the occasion. It opened on April 20, 1927, when, to celebrate Hitler's birthday, Wolf Geyser staged his drama Revolution before some 3,000 spectators. It consisted of a series of tableaux vivantes which contrasted the ideal life in the future Nazi state to that in the Weimar Republic. [13] A few months later, the Experimental Theater performed Joseph Goebbels's Der Wanderer, which was an adaptation of his novel Michael, Bin Deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblattern (Michael, The Diary of a German Fate, 1929). [14] But this so-called Experimental Theater seems to have lacked success, for no regular season was attempted for the next three years, only occasional performances.

The provinces had to step in once more, and it was their pressure which led to the establishment of another NS-Volksbuhne in Berlin in 1930. Perhaps this NS-Volksbuhne was supposed to travel throughout Germany, but that function seems to have been usurped by the Gau theater established one year later. [15] The NS-Volksbuhne was an imitation of the older, left-leaning Volksbuhne and the Christian Buhnenvolksbund. It performed regularly and its plays are easiest to reconstruct because they were reported by the party press.

The NS-Volksbuhne plays were polemical, and, whether classic or modern, were conceived as Streitgesprache in spite of their conventional staging. Schiller's Rauber was one of the first plays performed, and it was claimed that here the Rauber had finally been staged as Schiller himself desired. The character of Spiegelberg, the enemy of Karl Moor and "leader" of the band, was brought to the fore. He became the villain, transformed into a "loud-mouthed Jewish agitator" who, while himself a coward, incites others to the craven murder of Karl Moor. Schiller's play as performed by the NS-Volksbuhne was hailed by the Nazi press as the first dawn of a new area of Aryan German art. [16] By contrast, in Piscator's performance of the Rauber staged five years before the Nazis' version, Spiegelberg wore the mask of Leon Trotsky, and the murder of Moor was pictured as a noble attempt to rescue freedom from the clutches of the gang. The only other traditional plays performed in those early days of the Nazi theater were Ibsen's An Enemy of the People and Ernst von Wildenbruch's Mennoniten. The Ibsen play, first staged in 1931, was intended to demonstrate the superiority of Nordic aristocracy over majority rule, and the value of personality as opposed to public opinion. [17] The Mennoniten was directed against the Napoleonic occupation of Prussia. It dealt with German courage and French intrigue, the chastity of the German woman and the French attempt to contaminate German blood. Waldemar, the hero of the play, could be viewed as a forerunner of Albert Leo Schlageter, who had fought the good fight more recently in the Ruhr and entered the Nazi gallery of martyrs. [18]

Historical analogies were popular in the NS-Volksbuhne as they were in Nazi ideology. For example, Walter Flex's Klaus von Bismarck was part of the repertoire, a drama that attempted to show how in the Middle Ages the ancestor of the Iron Chancellor fought against the divisiveness of political parties and for the salvation of the Mark Brandenburg.  [19] The NS-Volksbuhne happily annexed such nationalist drama. If Flex's play was directed against divisiveness, others, such as G. von Noel's Wehrwolf, used the peasants of the Thirty Years' War to demonstrate that it was right and proper to defend national rights by violent means. [20] Finally the German struggle of liberation against Napoleon was an always popular theme; thus Joseph Stolzing's Friedrich Friesen invoked the wars of liberation against Napoleon. However, light entertainment was not neglected, and Ernst von Wolzogen's Ein Unbeschriebenes Blatt (A Blank Leaf), a play of "sunny laughter," was featured in the program, although with the apology that such pause in the fight rejuvenates man's energy for a renewed struggle. [21]

The party seems to have fully supported the NS-Volksbuhne. For example, when in 1930 it played Walther Ilge's Laterne, a play which castigated the French Revolution, the entire Reichstag delegation of the party was present. [22] Yet the vast majority of performances in the NS-Volksbuhne were not devoted to the historical drama or comedy but rather to contemporary plays whose message did not depend upon analogies with the past. The play written by Hitler's political mentor Dietrich Eckart, Familienvater (Father of the Family), was typical of the Volksbuhne's didactic style. Eckart's play dealt with a tyrannical and corrupt newspaper proprietor and with a cowardly Jewish journalist who does the tyrant's bidding. Between them, the tyrant and the journalist crush a young playwright (presumably the unsuccessful dramatist Eckart himself), who has dared to expose the newspaper's corruption. [23] Walter Busch's Giftgas 500, already performed by the Gau theater, was taken over by the Volksbuhne as well. The plays of a rising young playwright, Eberhard Wolfgang Moller, were especially popular, perhaps because of their more elaborate staging and the lavish use of choruses. Moller brought to the Volksbuhne plays of Germanic worship similar to those of the Thing theater for which he wrote most of his material. [24] Moller's dramas were unique among the committed Nazi playwrights during the Weimar Republic. While the plays we have mentioned had their first and often only performances on the stage of the NS-Volksbuhne, his works were frequently performed in regular municipal theaters even before the Nazi theater took them over. Thus his war drama Douaumont (the principal fortress of Verdun) was a great success at the Berlin liberal Volksbuhne before it succeeded on the Nazi stage. Moller's themes were broader than those of most other Nazi playwrights. They were a crusade against the love of money. Parliaments were manipulated as finance capitalists, representing gold, not people. Such populism appealed to the left as well as to the right, even though Moller was a committed Nazi. [25]

The Nazis liked best Moller's Rothschild Siegt bei Waterloo (Rothschild Wins the Battle of Waterloo, 1932), because unlike others this one was centered on the Jews as corrupting the world through money, a racism that became central to Moller's world view. Rothschild is depicted as the "third great power" besides England and France; indeed, he is the true victor at Waterloo. Though the banker asserts that "my money is everywhere and money is friendly, the friendliest power in the world, fat, round as a ball, and laughing," in reality, it has been earned by dishonoring the struggle against the plundering and butchering French. Rothschild is told that "The dead did not die in order that you could earn money through their sacrifice, and in such a shabby way." The moral was clear: the Rothschilds were a sinister power, "which makes cripples of humanity, men into the objects of the stock exchange, profit from life and capital from blood." [26] Finance capitalism as an all-embracing menace, whether symbolized by Rothschild or the Jews in Giftgas 500, was a staple of Nazi drama.

What then were the historical sources of the Kampfbuhne as we have sketched it? Was it an imitation of the Piscator theater, with its agitprop and polemics? The Nationalsozialistiche Monatshefte in 1931 praised the Piscator stage for having had the courage to present polemical plays. [27] The Nazis paid attention to this left-wing theater, perhaps because Piscator's radicalism appealed to their populism; his unconventional staging could be applied to the NS-Volksbuhne. However, the Piscator theater, which existed only from 1927 to 1931, was already in decline when the Nazis praised it. [28] They hardly borrowed from Piscator, in any case; certainly they did not follow the revolutionary staging or use of film, but instead placed the Nazi polemics within a conservative theatrical form. The speaking choruses are an exception here, for the Hitler Youth admitted openly to having borrowed them from the Communist Party. [29]

The genesis of the Kampfbuhne is not linked to the Piscator theater but must rather be sought in the attempt to create a national theater, and, in the Vereinsbuhne, a lay theater of trade and apprentice organizations.

The debate over the creation of a national theater had a long history. Gottfried Keller, for example, had been inspired by an outdoor performance of Wilhelm Tell during the Schiller Year of 1859 to propose the founding of a national theater, in a natural setting, which would combine choirs with folk plays. Such a theater would bring volkish mythology to life (he called his proposal the "Stone of Myth"-Am Mythenstein). [30] The conventional stage was to be abolished, and with it the distance that separates audience and actors. The audience should be drawn into a world of illusion which, through the immediacy of the drama, would become their world of reality. The Thing theater resulted from this pseudo-religious "volkische drama," and such liturgical plays were staged in open-air theaters from the beginning of the twentieth century onward.

The thrust toward the creation of a national theater also affected the traditional stage after World War I. The call went out to transform the professional stage into a national theater. Its purpose was to fight so-called degenerate forms of art, which symbolized Germany's defeat and revolution. Here then was the immediate precedent for the Nazi Kampfbuhne, both in its national purpose and in its polemical intent. Thus Richard Eisner used his older journal Das Deutsche Drama (The German Drama) after 1918 in order to advocate a national theater as opposed to the theater of the Weimar Republic. He founded an organization in 1927 and was able to sponsor some plays -- for example, one entitled Fritjof exalting Nordic man, and another, Andreas Hofer, dealing with the German war of liberation against kings, bishops, and princes. However, Schiller was Eisner's ideal, just as he was the patron saint of the NS-Volksbuhne. [31]

The Manifesto of Erich Brandenburg calling for a national theater in 1919 was more important than Eisner's efforts, even if lacking in aggressiveness. Indeed, Erich Brandenburg demonstrates how the postwar impulse for a national theater was transmitted into the Third Reich. His Manifesto called for an emphasis upon space and movement, and characterized all theater as group art. The influence of the modern dance as practiced by Rudolf Laban and Mary Wigman is of importance here; Brandenburg was captivated by "dancing choirs which make a statement," as Wigman put it. The plays performed must be dramas conceived as symbolical action, analogous to cultic rites. Brandenburg contrasted this German drama to the supposed shallowness of the French and the Italian Renaissance stage. Clearly, the Manifesto treats theater as a cultic rite that was capable of renewing the nation. The stage was to be extended into the audience in order to abolish the difference between spectator and performer, while the auditorium should be modeled after the Roman amphitheater.  [32]

The Manifesto was signed by a wide variety of intellectuals, ranging from the humanist socialist Gustav Landauer (murdered before it was printed), Thomas Mann, and Richard Dehmel to Hans Bluher of the youth movement and the future Nazi poet Will Vesper. They all joined Brandenburg's Bund fur das Neue Theater (Bund for a New Theater). The Bund soon failed, and Brandenburg then pinned his hope upon the lay plays of the youth movement. [33] Meanwhile, he had refined his Manifesto, envisioning national drama as an instrument to fight modern mechanization and materialism. The neo-romantic tone, present but subdued in the original Manifesto, took over. [34] While Brandenburg took no part in the NS-Kampfbuhne itself, as far as I can determine, he welcomed the advent of the Third Reich as the opportunity to fulfill the promise of this Manifesto and Bund. The time had come for a festive drama, one that would move "between masses and hero, Yolk and Fuhrer." [35] The Nazis, without mentioning the Manifesto, adopted Brandenburg and praised his agitation for a national stage. [36]

Brandenburg called for a national theater that would transmit its message through drama, group symbolism (such as the Kampfbuhne used frequently), and the use of movement and space. These were theatrical forms that also preoccupied the Nazi stage. But side by side with such attempts at national theater, amateur groups continued to playas a part of the youth movement. This amateur play movement was an obvious influence on groups like the "Brown Shirts" and "Storm Troopers," and it would remain highly popular throughout the Third Reich. After the First World War the amateur play was becoming increasingly nationalistic and formalized. Whereas medieval mystery plays had captivated the enthusiasm of the prewar youth movement, now Rudolf Mirbt, prominent in the amateur theater movement, recommended dramas like Hans Johst's Die Propheten (Prophets), which contrasted the Catholic to the German man, and whose hero was Martin Luther. The symbolism and the simplicity of the staging would remain. [37]

In fact, the amateur play had already been used as a weapon of political propaganda. The Free Corps Rossbach attempted to use Spielschaaren (troupes of young amateur actors) directly after the war as a way to mobilize the nation against the Poles and the Republic. Gerhard Rossbach himself saw in such troupes a secret weapon in the hands of a poor and unprotected nation, a continuation of military action by other means. [38] But the Rossbach Spielscaaren were not imitated, even by other Free Corps, and had little influence on the professional theater.

More important were those amateur play groups that performed folk plays or folk festivals in the villages or in the countryside, known as the Heimatspiele, thirty-one of which were officially recognized as worthy of support by the German government after the First World War. The vast majority of these, unlike the Oberammergau Passion Play, were not religious but either patriotic or concerned with a historical episode that had taken place in the locality. Thus, in Ahide, some two hundred amateur players reenacted the heroism and martyrdom of Andreas Hofer, the leader of the Tyrolean struggle against Italy, while other plays recreated the Hermannschlach, which the Germans won against Rome, or the saga of Wittekind. Wilhelm Tell, Goetz von Berlichingen, Andreas Hofer, and the Niebelungenlied provided the most popular themes for these Heimatspiele. [39]

Amateur plays themselves were performed through the Hitler Youth, the "Strength through Joy" movement, and the Arbeitsdienst (Compulsory Labor Service). Amateur actors engaged in simple productions, sometimes merely folk plays, at other times Kampfbuhnen.  [40] The Nazis were fearful that the amateur theater might lead to dilettantism and perhaps through the enthusiasm that it generated among the young escape their control; so amateur play educational camps (Laienspielschullager) were instituted, where lay actors could receive a minimal training for the stage. [41]

The Heimatspiele were viewed as a national theater in which the people themselves acted out their traditions and battles for survival. But side by side with the quest for a national theater, which extended from the nineteenth century into the postwar world, we must set the Vereinstheater in all its parochialism and artificiality. Eventually, the Nazis gave such plays performed by trade associations a high priority as true expressions of the Volk soul. If the quest for national theater determined the ambition and tone of the NS-Kampfbuhne, the Vereinsbuhne is directly related to its content.

The Vereinstheater was widespread and popular, [42] and we know little about it (though as the Nazis rightly claimed, every Verein had such a theater, even the Kleintierhalterverband or pet owners association, [43] but for lack of accessible records, I must confine myself to one such theater. The Association of Catholic Apprentices, founded by Adolf Kolping in 1851, loved to perform plays that were an integral part of the educational program of the "Kolping family." The apprentice was meant to become a modest and industrious craftsman, who knew how to work, to pray, and to shun easy wealth and monetary speculation. Adolf Kolping's motto was that "Religion and work are the golden soil of the Volk." [44] But there was no Protestant harshness to this morality; the Kolping family spent their evenings sharing play and song, and listening to popular lectures on history and natural science. [45]

The plays, like the short stories Adolf Kolping wrote, contained simple messages, such as "Thou shalt not steal," or lauded the triumph of love and devotion over a hard-headed businessman. The villain, the enemy of all "honest work," was the speculator, the capitalist, the Jew greedy for gold and riches. [46] There is hardly a play where the Jew does not appear as the symbol of evil. If we take as our example plays performed between 1874 and 1884, we can see a hardening of the polemic and of the racism which in notable contrast to Adolf Kolping's own stories comes to pervade such plays.

Joseph Becks was the most prolific playwright of these years; a Catholic priest, he had become the president of the St. Joseph's Guild of Kolping Apprentices in Cologne. Kolping himself in his short stories had been careful to distinguish between the evil gold-loving Jew who refuses Christian conversion and the converted Jew who became a noble figure. [47] Becks no longer makes such fine distinctions.

For example, Becks's Wurst Wieder Wurst (The Tom-Fool, 1880) shows a Jew trying to cheat a master-craftsman. But the craftsman's loyal apprentices trick the Jew instead. The Jew is not only the foil; he inevitably loses throughout these plays. Becks used traditional comedy, which featured the peasant dolt as the foil. This peasant still appears in the Kolping theater, but by and large it is the Jew who takes the peasant's place, though treated with a brutality largely absent in traditional comedy, Becks constantly stresses the Jewish stereotype, and his Jews talk "jargon" -- that mixture of Yiddish and German used in most anti-Semitic writing and found again in the Kampfbuhne as well. Such plays are crude and polemical, very much like the later performances of the "Storm Troops" or "Brown Shirts." For example, a play written by a teacher called Peter Sturn, Die Schone Nase, oder das Recht Gewinnt den Sieg (The Beautiful Nose, or Justice Triumphs, 1878) is typical. A Jew in his greed sells his nose to the highest bidder, only to finally buy it back at an exorbitant price. The content of a play entitled Hyman Levy as Soldier (1877) does not need elucidation.

These plays spread well beyond the Kolping families and even Catholic circles. After the First World War, the Buhnenvolksbund took up the heritage of this Vereinstheater: Founded in 1919 in order to counter the modern "immoral" and "atheistic" theater, it was supported by such organizations as those of Catholic apprentices (including Kolping), Catholic trade unions, and the Protestant Union of Commercial Employees (Deutsclnationaler Handlungs Gehilfen Verband). The Catholics were in the forefront attempting to influence national culture in this way. [48] The Protestants were less active in exploiting the stage for meir purposes. The Bund began with 700 individual and twenty corporate members; by 1928, it had gained 300 local affiliates and counted between 220,000 and 300,000 members. [49] This was almost exactly half the membership that had joined the rival leftist Volksbuhnenbewegung.

The plays given in the first years after its founding were anti-French, anti-socialist, and anti-Jewish. The morality presented was the same me Kolping theater had already proclaimed. Thus one hero exclaims: "Happy are those unemployed who have a wife to pray for them and keep them from falling into the hands of the Volksverhetzer [meaning the socialists]!" Philip Ausserer, a Camolic theologian and gymnasium professor in Salzburg, contributed a play, Die Wiege (The Cradle), in which a Jew deprives a peasant of his farm. Some plays glorified a pious peasantry, so always close to the heart of Catholicism. The theme of me peasant deprived of his land by the Jew was a commonplace one in all volkish literature. [51] There were other plays which showed me horror of revolution and, again through the example of a Jew, that "Hochmut kommt vor dem fall" (pride goeth before the fall). [52] Such themes are almost identical with those of the later Volksbuhne.

The physical stereotypes were present as well. Thus we learn from the Dictionary of the Theater published by the Bund for amateur players in 1925 how to make a "Jewish mask": dark skin, sharply marked facial lines, thick eyebrows, bent nose. The "usurer" is made up in similar fashion, but as these were always conceived as old men, pale skin and deep-set eyes had to be created. [53] Yet by that time such anti-Semitic plays had largely disappeared from the repertoire. At the same point, the national Bund repudiated an anti-Jewish resolution passed by its Dresden branch and refused the pressure of younger members to haul down the flag of the Weimar Republic at one of its meetings. [54] The Buhnenvolksbund had made its peace with the Republic (as had the Catholic associations that sponsored it).

The Bund declined by 1928, perhaps because of the tensions between the younger and the older generations. [55] The last years of the Weimar Republic required a greater radicalization than the Volksbuhnenbund now desired. The biblical dramas it produced and the shallow comedies (such as The Gambler of Monte Carlo) [56] could not meet this need. These were years when people flocked to see polemical plays hostile to the Republic or to plays like The Threepenny Opera where the middle classes could safely enjoy being derided and spat upon. [57] Though most people came for amusement, nevertheless this was surely one sign of the transformation of middle-class values into their own negation, something closely related to the later Nazi experience.

The building blocks of the Nazi Kampfbuhne were laid through the debate about a national theater, by the amateur play movement, the Vereinstheater; and the Volksbuhnenbund. Surely as the Kampfbuhne increasingly becomes an object of scholarly investigation, other building blocks will be discovered. The tradition of the Kampfbuhne was continued into the Third Reich mainly by the Hitler Youth, but also by the "Strength through Joy" movement and the Labor Service. Baldur von Schirach in 1936 made the renewal of the German theater a special task of the Hitler Youth. [58] Beginning the following year, theatrical congresses were held. The first, in Bochum, included not only the Kampfbuhne but also liturgical theater (in the same year in which the Thing theater itself was discontinued). Thus Eberhard Wolfgang Moller's Frankenburger Wurfelspiel (The Dice Game of Frankenburg, 1936) was performed with the participation of the Hitler Youth.

This play had been produced originally for the Thing theater, and required 1,200 participants. When it opened in 1936 as a Weihespiel (a pseudo-religious play) to accompany the Olympic Games, the Labor Service provided the choruses and the crowds. [59] The play pictured the German peasants accusing tyrants who had oppressed it throughout history in front of seven judges; the audience was drawn into the drama as the actors addressed them directly from the stage. But the NS-Volksbuhne was also represented at Bochum through Moller's Rothschild Siegt bei Waterloo, which concluded the Congress. The Hitler Youth now attempted to advance young dramatists from its own ranks, not only Eberhard Wolfgang Moller but also men like Friedrich Wilhelm Hymmen and Hans Schwitzke who wrote historical dramas very similar to those the NS-Volksbuhne had performed. [60]

But the Dramatists of the Hitler Youth (to cite the title of an official publication) also included men like Paul Alverdes, of an older generation. Alverdes, for example, brought to the drama performed by Hitler Youth the memory of his war experiences. In a play written for the Hitler Youth, Das Winterlager (The Winter Camp), he called for discipline and obedience to the leader, using as his example a dangerous adventure in which Hitler Youth are lost in a snow storm because they had broken the discipline of the group. However, Alverdes returns to his obsession at the end of the play when two war veterans draw the proper moral and refer to their experience in battle. [61] Das Winterlager was performed over the radio; indeed, the radio play provided one of the principal forums for the play groups of the Hitler Youth. But they were also sent into the countryside in order to stem the flight from the land and to help preserve peasant culture. [62] Thus the Hitler Youth took up where they had left off in their pre-1933 election propaganda. The Spielschaaren performed popular cabaret in the villages, consisting of singing, dancing, and folk plays, but Nazi polemics also remained part of their repertoire. During the Second World War they would first take a communal meal with the villagers. [63]

If little enough is known about the actual plays these Hitler Youth troupes performed, still less is known about those of the "Strength through Joy," movement, which also encouraged Spielgruppen in factories. Such factory groups were called the Vanguard (Stosstruppen) and were meant to urge their fellow workers to sing, dance, and stage plays. [64] The Labor Service in its plays does seem to have stressed what one official called the manly, heroic world view as against the attitude of a nomadic and trading people. [65] We are back to the Jewish stereotype so easily presented on the "fighting stage." Such amateur theaters seem to have been the true continuation of the Kampfbuhne. Although the professional theater did present some of the plays of the NS-Volksbuhne, I have found hardly a trace of those writers whose dramas were performed before the seizure of power and whom we have mentioned earlier.

However, it is clear that the Kampfbuhne exemplified the thrust of Nazi ideology and in its roots points to a theatrical tradition of importance. Surely neither the Vereinstheater nor the call for a national stage were without influence upon the attitudes of important sections of the population. Surely, too, the polemical theater during the Weimar Republic must be seen as a whole, in its impact upon the right as well as left, though the actual interaction between them may have been slight. We know much about the Piscator theater because it was innovative and important in putting forward a new dramatic style, while the Kampfbuhne was crude and primitive. However, the latter's enthusiastic S.A. or Hitler Youth play troupes may well have struck a spark because of their very crudeness and traditionalism. Nor was the NS-Volksbuhne without an audience, though it could never rival the famous older Volksbuhne itself.

This theater must be placed next to the Thing theater as the objectification of Nazi ideology -- an important function in a modern mass movement that relied on empathy, participation, and "enlightenment." For the Nazis themselves, the theater belonged to the most elementary expressions of life, as they put it. [66] That alone makes the Kampfbuhne worth investigating, even if it is largely devoid of literary merit.

The Nazis did innovate within the relatively new media of film and photography. Some time late in the 1920s they began to use projectors to show a rapidly changing series of photographs: "pictures without words." These contrasted, for example, slum housing to the high life of a Reichstag deputy. They were fond of projecting the so-called Jewish faces of the republican statesmen, or showing Isidor Weiss, the deputy police chief of Berlin, whom they hated, in a riding outfit. This kind of kaleidoscope seems to have been a success with audiences. The Nazis also at times used photo-montage, and did not disdain the newest avant-garde film techniques pioneered during the Weimer Republic. [67] However, such innovation was always embedded in traditionalism. The stream of history which the Nazis claimed was on their side had to be kept alive -- the past must determine the artistic and literary forms of the present. The crude and simplistic Kampfbuhne exemplified not only Nazi literature and art but also the Nazi historical consciousness.  
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Re: The Fascist Revolution, by George L. Mosse

Postby admin » Wed Mar 21, 2018 1:33 am

NINE: On Homosexuality and French Fascism

THE LITERATURE analyzing fascist attitudes towards homosexuals is growing rapidly after many years of silence. We can now, for the first time, begin to discern the difference between the Nazi and the Italian fascist persecution of homosexuals: the Nazi's tightening and applying laws against them, while in Italy homosexuality was not criminalized, but if need be, could be persecuted for disturbing the public order. However, the racial laws of 1938 made the persecution of homosexuals easier as well, as they could be accused of undermining the racial health of the Italian nation. [1] Racism provided the justification for the persecution of homosexuals under fascism, together with the attempt to maintain ideals of manliness and virility unsullied by the imputation of sexuality which was crucial for fascist self-representation.

But what about homosexual attitudes towards fascism? This question has received little notice and is indeed difficult to address, if only because anti-fascists tried to defame the Nazi leadership through the imputation of homosexuality. However, an investigation of the dialectic relationship between persecutor and persecuted is important for an understanding of the process of annihilation. Robert Lifton's Nazi Doctors (1986) can provide a model here, because of its detailed discussion of the relationship between SS doctors and prisoner-physicians at Auschwitz. While in Germany or Italy such a relationship has to be addressed through an analysis of homosexual reactions to their persecution, France under the German occupation was a special case, for, with some exceptions, the Germans themselves did not actively persecute homosexuals in occupied countries but left it to the local authorities who, as in the case of the Netherlands, obtained few convictions. [2] And in France, the Germans overruled the Vichy government when it wanted to ban one of Jean Cocteau's plays. [3] Here, in France, the attitudes of homosexuals could develop without much outside interference, free from many of the pressures of persecution which prevailed in Germany and the territories annexed outright during the war.

Homosexual attitudes towards the occupation were questioned in France after the Second World War when elsewhere the subject was passed over in silence. Anti-fascist intellectuals commented upon what they perceived as the collaboration of some conspicuous homosexuals with the occupation. We do not know the stand of the vast majority of homosexuals many of whom did serve in the resistance, while others adopted a more favorable attitude toward fascism. Here we are concerned with the collaborationists, some of whom occupied prominent or highly visible positions. Moreover, perceptions of homosexuality are sometimes different from reality, as some who through their male orientation seemed to be homosexuals may have been married, or even if single might have rejected gay sex. The very concept of homosexuality sometimes shades over into homoeroticism without observers being able to make the proper distinction.

I shall draw my example largely from the writings of Robert Brasillach, as well as from Drieu La Rochelle, who may have been a special case, though I could have added other examples from the circle of their friends. Anti-fascist polemics, as I have mentioned, often accused fascists of being closet homosexuals, citing as proof fascism's preoccupation with images of manliness. The poet Jean Queval, for example, writing immediately after the war, attacked Abel Bonnard, Jean Cocteau and Maurice Rostand, all known homosexuals and collaborators, as pederasts who attempted to draw French youth into the fascist camp, and who painted a rosy picture of French life under the occupation. "Et pourqois d'ailleurs no sera it-on pas pederaste a Paris sous I'occupation?" ("and why should one not be a pederast under the occupation?"), and he goes on to cite Jean Cocteau's aphorism, "tous est dans tous." [4]

Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Guehenno asked without any polemics why so many homosexuals supported the occupation, Sartre emphasizing the case of Drieu La Rochelle. [5] When Andre Halimi came to interview various writers and artists for his Chansons sur l'occupation (1976), he asked Jean-Louis Bory if he would care to defend homosexuals against such charges. Bory who was gay himself did not deny the premise of homosexual collaboration, but put it down to the "myth of virility" which signified power and courage. Moreover, "on retrouve par la le cote femelle qu'il peut avoir en effet chez l'homosexuel."  [6] ("Moreover, their womanish nature could have affected the homosexuals"). Fascist preoccupation with masculinity struck a deep cord not merely among so-called homosexuals but among a whole range of men. Masculinity in fascism stood for youthful energy, male camaraderie, and the aesthetics of the male body which came to symbolize true manliness.

Such masculinity held a special attraction for the young French rightists of the 1930s, intoxicated by youth, in quest of passionate engagement, and in revolt against what they considered to be a passive and degenerate society. [7] Robert Brasillach defined what he called the "douceur de vivre" as commitment, love for life, and, above all, close male friendships. "C'est l'esprit meme de l'amitie dons nous aurons volu qu'il s'elevat jusqu'a l'amitie nationale." [8] ("It is the spirit of friendship itself which we want to elevate into a national spirit of friendship"). Male friendship and male camaraderie gave body to the ideal of manliness. The Nazi Party, for example, first presented itself as such a camaraderie to its supporters. [9] But what about the sexuality inherent in such a concept of masculinity?

Drieu La Rochelle best exemplifies this problem, for in his thought, as Robert Soucy has shown, the cult of the male body and the cult of friendship were closely linked. Strength of body signified strength of mind as well, and both were made public through male friendships. "For me," Drieu wrote, "the drama of friendship between men is at the heart of politics." [10] The Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg which he attended in 1935 came to symbolize for Drieu the aesthetic of politics, and he couched his appreciation in language which was similar to Brasillach's own description of these rallies: " ... il ya une espece de volupte virile qui flotte partout et quin'est pas sexuelle mais tres envirante." [11] ("There is a virile male voluptuousness which courses everywhere and which is not sexual but uplifting").

Drieu despised homosexuals who, along with women and Jews, were the infernal triangle of decadence. [12] He was a great womanizer though he thought that true friendship with a woman was never possible. Brasillach was married and the accusation of homosexuality levelled against him at his trial for collaboration was not supported by the evidence brought forward at the time. What Sartre and the other anti-fascist intellectuals called the "pederastic attraction to fascism" was a homoerotic attraction which went much beyond that small circle of men stigmatized by Sartre, Guehenno or Jean Queval. The aesthetics of politics in fascism appealed to a large and distinguished group of European intellectuals. The idealized male body was an integral part of this aesthetic. Sculptures of nude Greek youth, for example, were thought indispensable to Nazi self-representation. The classical ideal of male beauty symbolized masculine qualities as understood by generations of young Germans, and by Brasillach's anthology of Greek poetry. Here Greece is eternally young surrounded by "perfect men." [13]

The young French Right devalued women. Brasillach's women were "etres immaterielles," [14] and even though he wrote one of the most explicit scenes of heterosexual love-making in French literature,  [15] they apparently lacked profound meaning in his private life. It seems to me that Brasillach and his equipe, who remained together from the Lycee Louis le Grand, to the Ecole Normale, to their common venture in editing the pro-fascist newspaper Je Suis Partout, were on the border between homosexuality and homoeroticism. There are hints of this in Brasillach's writings not cited at the trial, and in the polemical reply by d'Etiemble to the special issue of Le Monde at the 25th anniversary of his execution. [16] Drieu wrote that after the First World War one might have thought that he was especially interested in women; in fact, he was much more interested in men. [17] Many other examples of such attitudes towards women come to mind: thus for the writer Henri de Montherlant any woman who enters a man's life threatens to destroy it. [18]

Male camaraderie, regarded by the Nazis as the cell from which the state grew, gave political direction to the cult of masculinity. Brasillach wrote that for their adversaries Je Suis Partout was an official mouthpiece of international fascism, "mais nous savions que nous etions surtout le journal de notre ami tie et de notre amour de vie." [19] ("But we knew that it was, above all, a testimony to our friendship and to our love for life"). As far as I know, the meaning of equipe or even of friendship in French cultural history has never been investigated. However, nationalism, which furthered the Mannerbund in Germany was not so closely tied to the French equipe. While nationalism played an important role in that equipe of friends which Brasillach describes in his autobiography, Notre Avant Guerre (1941), it was not at the heart of their friendships. After all, the German tradition of the Mannerbund with its youth movements and Stefan George Circle was missing in France: all of which appealed to the male eros principally in order to regenerate the nation.

Nevertheless, the ideal of friendship in France also had an erotic component, as Arthur Mitzman has shown, analyzing the nineteenth-century fraternal utopia of the historian Jules Michelet and his friends. [20] Michelet himself wrote about male friendship as a means of progress, as the prerequisite for the love of the nation. Family, nursemaid and even the mother give way in childhood before the attachment to a male comrade, until such friendships are destroyed as man is enslaved by passion, broken by a harsh education and soured by rivalry. [21] Nevertheless, the ideal of camaraderie as an equipe of men was apparently not so fully developed in France as it was, for example, in Nazi Germany. There, these Mannerbunde encompassed not only the cult of male friendship, male eros, or a shared love for life, but above all meant the subordination of each individual to shared ideals which must be put into practice. Perhaps the French equipe implied such a self-contained world, but it seemed to lack the firm contours of the German Bunde.

However, the definition of masculinity these French fascists and young Germans brought to their ideal of camaraderie was much the same and so was the need for a leader as a role model for their group. Drieu wanted a leader, "un homme a son plein, l'homme qui donne et qui prend dans la meme ejaculation." [22] ("A real man, a man who gives and takes at the same time"). Such a leader symbolized Drieu's longing for discipline and power. Brasillach, in turn, praised leaders who were "masters of violence." [23]

This love of violence was part of the cult of virility, yet it was never supposed to be anarchic but disciplined instead. Precisely such a concept of disciplined power was symbolized by the Greek sculptures of naked youths. "The Fuherer tells me," Celine wrote, "that might makes right, and I know where I am," [24] while for Ezra Pound fascism put an end to all uncertainty. [25] Male camaraderie reflected qualities of leadership, self-control and a carefully moderated strength ready to use force if need be, all of which were thought to have been a Greek heritage.

It seems to me that one of Germany's principle attractions for such French fascists was that here they found a firm ideal of the Mannerbund. The passages from Brasillach's writings used against him at his trial, declaring his love for German soldiers with whom he wants to shake hands and whom he wants to embrace, [26] reflect not homosexuality but an idealization of such a Bund. The power of male eros, together with love of the nation, played a crucial role in defining the Mannerbund, and this was bound to prove attractive to youths for whom idealized male friendships in school and university had been at the center of their lives.

Ideals of male friendship, the aesthetics of politics, and the search for a true Mannerbund determined the attitudes of prominent homosexuals to fascism, attitudes that were not specifically homosexual but shared by many others as well. Certainly, this relationship cannot be characterized solely through the use of the term homosexual, but was informed instead by a homoeroticism which had always played a role in male friendship, camaraderie and nationalism. [27] All of these concepts need further investigation as to their role in homosexual attitudes towards fascism, including the ideal of masculinity which informed all of them. For example, was the Mannerbund, as conceived by French youth, a means to test their manliness? Such a test became an obsession to many a youth after the First World War, a time when, for example, Christopher Isherwood in England saw himself quite often confronted with the question, are you really a man?

This interpretation which makes the attraction of the ideals of manliness and camaraderie central to the attitudes of these intellectuals towards fascism seems to omit what has been represented as the true dividing line between those who were pro-fascist -- which in the French situation meant willing collaborators -- and those who joined the French resistance. Anti-Semitism was said to have determined the divide between the Left and the radical Right in France ever since the Dreyfus Affair, [28] more important than the fascist ideal of masculinity and the beauty, camaraderie and virility for which it stood. There is no doubt that in general the strength of anti-Semitism was a crucial factor in determining such political allegiance. However, this argument is irrelevant to the fact that homoerotic attraction played a key role in determining the political attitudes of a certain group of young men once they were confronted with a movement which took the masculine ideal as one of its prime symbols.

The ideals of camaraderie, friendship and of male intimacy involved can tell us something about the effectiveness of the widespread use which all of fascism made of so-called male virtues and the male image. [29] This is why within a larger framework it is important to analyze the attitudes of some homosexuals towards fascism, which were noted at the time and which transcend the specifically sexual, pointing to basic fascist ideals like the cult of masculinity and the aesthetic of politics.
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Re: The Fascist Revolution, by George L. Mosse

Postby admin » Wed Mar 21, 2018 1:33 am

TEN: Nazi Aesthetics: Beauty Without Sensuality and the Exhibition of Degenerate Art

BEAUTY WITHOUT SENSUALITY: this title refers not only to the specific relationship between National Socialism and art but also summarizes the background which led to the Exhibition of Degenerate Art in 1937 and the great success that this exhibition enjoyed at the time.

The National Socialist view of art was based upon the idealized people and sentimental landscapes which had informed nineteenth-century popular taste, and upon neo-classical themes which were Adolf Hitler's favorites. National Socialism annexed neo-romantic and neo-classical art as its own, defining it as racially pure, an art that could easily be understood and whose pictured men and women exemplified the Germanic race. This was the official art of the regime which dominated the annual German Exhibitions of Art in Munich whose paintings were often selected by Hitler himself.

There was deeper purpose to the acceptance of such art: it symbolized a certain standard of beauty which might serve to cement the unity of the nation and project a moral standard to which everyone should aspire. What was and is called respectability was supposed to inform personal and public morality which true art must support and reflect. The men and women depicted in Nazi painting and sculpture thus stood for the proper morality and sexual behavior. Beauty without sensuality was demanded of artists and sculptors -- a beauty which must reflect generally accepted moral standards which the Nazis championed as their own. For it was the strength and appeal of National Socialism that it did not invent anything new in its effort at self-representation, but simply annexed long-term traditions and popular tastes.

The Exhibition of Degenerate Art was put on in the same year as the Exhibition of German Art and featured paintings and sculpture which reflected the Nazi view of life under the Weimar Republic, as concrete evidence that the Nazis had saved German society. The Weimar Republic was viewed as an onslaught upon all the moral values people held dear: marriage, the family, chastity and a steady harmonious life. Weimar culture was "bolshevist culture," manipulated by the Jews, as the inscriptions at the exhibition and its catalogue make clear. The destruction of respectability and the destruction of society and the nation were linked.

The Exhibition of Degenerate Art must not be seen simply as Nazi propaganda for it played upon basic moral attitudes which have informed all of modern society. After all, respectability has lasted, and while the azis through the Exhibition of Degenerate Art used modern art as an example of those forces which would destroy it, even today modern art is condemned if it transgresses the normative morality in too shocking a fashion. That the Exhibition of Degenerate Art stands in a continuity, however tenuous, is demonstrated by the removal in 1989 of Robert Maplethorpe's homoerotic photographs from a Washington gallery because they were supposed to offend against decency and popular taste. Beauty with sensuality presented a danger to society because of what it symbolized, namely the revolt against respectability as a principle of unity and order: the destruction of the immutable values upon which society supposedly rested. If we are to understand the true significance of the Exhibition of Degenerate Art we must refer back to some of the relevant history in order to see how respectability coped with its enemies and what was at stake, for the exhibition itself is like the tip of an iceberg which has not yet melted.

Adolf Hitler himself pointed out at the 1934 Nuremberg party rally what art -- and morality -- were chiefly about, remarks that were reprinted in the catalogue accompanying the Exhibition of Degenerate Art: "Anyone who seeks the new for the sake of the new strays all too easily into the realm of folly." What was at issue, rather, was art as the expression of supposedly unchanging values in a society in search of such values. The modern age seemed to threaten the coherence of life itself. The accelerated pace of industrial and technological change at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries meant a certain disorientation, a "simultaneity of experience" with which people must cope. Already by mid-century we hear complaints that railroad travel had destroyed nature as the landscape performed a wild dance before the trains' windows. Just so, the invention of the telephone, the motor car or the cinema introduced a new speed of time which menaced the unhurried pace of life of an earlier age. Such concerns were reflected in the heightened quest for order against nervousness and instability.

Respectability ensured security and order, the maintenance of values, apparently taming the chaos that seemed always to threaten society. Respectability had been a political issue from the very beginning: it reflected people's lifestyle, their attitude toward all that was "different" and to themselves as well. The enemies of respectability, it was said, could not control themselves; they were creatures of instinct with their unbridled passions. Such accusations are scarcely to be found before the age of the French Revolution, but from now on they become common: whether it was Englishmen at the time of the Napoleonic Wars claiming that the French were sending dancers to England in order to undermine the islanders' morality, or whether it was First World War propaganda which sought by means of words and pictures to impute to the enemy every kind of "sexual perversion" -- it was always morality and its enemies that were involved. During the course of the nineteenth century, an increasingly clear distinction was drawn between "normal" and "abnormal" sexuality, and between "normal" behavior and what was branded as "immoral." It was above all doctors, using categories of health and sickness, who threw their weight behind society's constantly threatened moral norms, lending them legitimacy and thus defining the stereotypes of what was "abnormal."

Those whom society treated as outsiders were now furnished with all those characteristics which ran counter to the image which society had of itself. The mentally ill, Jews, homosexuals, and criminals were all said to be physically unbalanced. Nervousness was regarded as the chief enemy of bourgeois, mainstream morality with its emphasis upon steadiness and restraint -- an illness that lead from onanism to sexual excess. Nervousness was designated as a serious illness by such famous doctors as Jean-Martin Charcot in the 1880s, and, in common with the iconography of illness in general (exhaustion, contortions, and grimaces), was thought to symbolize the opposite of the normative standard of beauty. The Exhibition of Degenerate Art was built upon such views of the outsider and used modern art to construct a so-called cabinet of horrors.

The term "degeneration" summed up the fears which haunted society from the fin de siecle onwards. Degeneration was in its origins a medical term used by physicians during the second half of the nineteenth century in order to identify those who had departed from the so-called normal human type because their nerves were shattered, inherited abnormalities or the practice of moral and sexual excess. Such conditions started a process which would inevitably lead to destruction. Degenerates could be identified by their appearance: bodily deformities, red eyes, feeble and exhausted. Max Nordau in his book Degeneration (1892) did most to popularize the term as he applied it to modern literature and art. Modern artists, whether Expressionists or Impressionists, were incapable of reproducing nature because they had lost the faculty of accurate observation and instead painted distorted and irregular forms mirroring their own nervous deformities and stunted growth. Not only humans but nations as well could degenerate, a process thought to have started because of the falling birth rates in nations like France. Thus those who refused to conform to the moral dictates of society and its norms were labelled degenerate, and as they themselves were doomed to destruction they might destroy society as well.

In Hitler's view the artists in the 1937 exhibition symbolized degeneracy: "And what do they fabricate?" the exhibition catalogue quotes Hitler as asking. "misshapen cripples and cretins, women who can arouse only revulsion, [ ... ] and this as the expression of something that the present age has fashioned and which has left its mark on it." Against this background of attempts to define the boundaries of bourgeois morality, Hitler's pronouncement resurrects the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century iconography of the outsider as described by physicians like Max Nordau. Moreover, it had the identical purpose which was to advance a certain concept of beauty as a readily understood symbol of society's values.

Looked at closely, nervousness itself was a product of modernity: The home of all these outsiders was always the city, further proof of the fact that the outsider scorned the tranquility of eternal values: for him, time never stood still. One of the most despicable Nazi propagandists, Johannes von Leers, expressed it in this way, no doubt speaking for many others in doing so: the city was the refuge of immorality and crime, and it was here that the "Jewish conspiracy" tried to gain control over German hearts and minds in order to drive them insane with frenzy and lust. For all its exaggeration and racial hatred, this view was still indebted to the nineteenth-century tradition of respectability with its emphasis on controlling the passions and on the consequences of losing that control. There is a continuity here which we shall constantly encounter: The National Socialists' attitude toward sexuality and art cannot be separated from the general history of respectability.

The ideal of beauty played a dominant role as a symbol of morality extending far beyond the realm of art. Beauty helped to maintain control over the passions. Friedrich Schiller, for example, in his series of letters On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind of 1795, wrote that beauty ennobled the otherwise merely instinctive sexual act, transcending it by virtue of its eternal values. But what is "beauty"? This question penetrates to the very heart of society's morals. For beauty, in neo-romantic or neo-classical art, like the iconography of the outsider already mentioned, becomes the self-portrayal of society, the view it liked to have of itself. Morality and its symbols (of which beauty was positive and nervousness negative) were a political issue of the first order in an age when society believed itself on the very brink of chaos as a result of the new pace of change and the Great War. In this context the term "degenerate art" is merely part of a general sense of anxiety. Hitler himself boasted that with his seizure of power the "nervous nineteenth century" had finally come to an end.

Beauty without sensuality presented a special problem as far as the representation of the ideal male was concerned, for his beauty was inspired by Greek models. Thus during the late nineteenth century, but especially under the azis, he was often represented in the nude. For the Nazis such men, through their harmonious form, the play of muscles and their controlled strength, symbolized the true German upon whose commitment the Third Reich depended. The evolution of bourgeois morality went hand in hand with the rediscovery of classical sculptures. As described by J. J. Winckelmann in his History of the Art of Antiquity of 1764, male Greek statuary were paradigms of beauty for all time. Winckelmann made Greek art acceptable to the middle classes by raising the statues of naked youths to an abstract plane and turning them into a stylistic principle. Their beauty was conceived of as somehow sexless, a conviction shared by others, too, at a later date and inspired by the belief that the almost transparent whiteness of these figures raised them above the personal and sensual.

This was a male ideal of beauty: women, by contrast, were turned into passive figures such as Germania or Queen Luise, herself stylized as the "Prussian Madonna." From the moment when bourgeois morality was first established, the male and female ideals of beauty differed radically, a circumstance which largely determined the political role of women as a national symbol. The masculine was regarded as dynamic, promising to bring about a timeless order and to cure an ailing world. Thus, for example, Friedrich Theodor Fischer, the nineteenth century's foremost German writer on aesthetics, assigned to beauty and manliness the task of preventing chaos. And yet, for all the differences between male and female symbolism, they had one important point in common, in that both transcended sensuality. Nonetheless, while the male was often depicted nude, the woman, by contrast, was almost always fully clothed, at least to the extent that she functioned as a national symbol.

Male symbolism could not be stripped of all physicality. Quite the opposite. The beauty of Greek youths -- lithe and supple bodies, muscular and harmonious -- lay precisely in their nakedness. It was the physicality or corporeality of Greek sculptures that expressed strength and harmony, order and dynamism -- in other words, the ideal qualities of both burgher and nation. This ideal of beauty must once again be seen in contrast to the figure of the outsider who was weak, exhausted, unmuscular, and nervous. The youthfulness of the male stereotype symbolized the dynamic of bourgeois society and of the nation as well; outsider figures, by contrast, were generally old. Thus, for example, we do not find many young Jews on the nineteenth-century German stage: they were, almost without exception, old and lonely.

Society expressed its morality in terms of generally accepted ideals of beauty, while projecting its fears and ideas of ugliness onto Jews, homosexuals, criminals, and the mentally disturbed -- the very groups the National Socialists eventually determined to exterminate. And, once again, this was no accident, since as mentioned earlier, National Socialism claimed to have saved bourgeois morality from collapse. Or was it only Albert Speer's mother who voted for the Nazis because the youngsters marching through the streets looked so "neat?" Even before the Nazis' electoral victory in 1930 had not Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi ideologist, written in his characteristically entitled book The Swamp, "Democracy has apparently been stabilized. Yet with its pederasty, lesbianism, and procuration, it has been defeated all along the line." And yet it was precisely during the period of National Socialism that the problematical nature of "nakedness without sensuality" found its clearest expression.

The open homosexuality of Ernst Rohm, the powerful chief of the S.A. -- the storm troopers -- and other Nazi leaders, indicates the ambivalent attitude toward bourgeois respectability on the part of members of the early National Socialist movement. This is also true of Hitler, who defended Rohm against attacks by pointing out that the latter's private life was his own affair as long as he used some discretion. The 1934 murder of Rohm and other leaders of the S.A. who were known homosexuals had, in rum, little to do with their sexual inclinations. The S.A. was now threatening Hitler's own power and destroying his relations with the regular army. Be that as it may, the opportunity was seized to underline the role of the party and of the regime as the defender of respectability. Show trials were held in which Catholic priests were accused of homosexuality, and the family was given a central role to play in National Socialist propagands.

The foundations for such a development had already been laid immediately after Hitler's seizure of power on January 30, 1933. As early as February 23, all so-called pornographic literature had been banned and prostitution drastically curbed. It is no wonder that organizations such as the German Evangelical Morality League welcomed Hitler's seizure of power since it apparently brought an end to the moral chaos of the postwar period -- and this was by no means the only organization of its kind that saw the Nazis as the saviours of bourgeois morality. But the threat to respectability remained as before. The Nazi Party sought to build upon wartime experiences and first presented itself as a continuation of the male cameraderie which had existed in the trenches. Even when it broadened its base and appeal it never lost its characteristic as a Mannerbund, a cameraderie of males, a concept which, in any case, had a long tradition in Germany. Important sub-groups of the party like the S.A. or the SS were proud of being male organizations which excluded so-called unmenly men. But such conscious male bonding raised the danger of homoeroticism or even homosexuality, a possibility which frightened some of the leadership.

The driving force behind the purge of all that might pose a threat to respectability was Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS. More clearly than anyone else, he articulated the sexual policies of the Third Reich and its underlying fears. These fears went into the making of the Exhibition of Degenerate Art, which would demonstrate to anyone who could see, the consequences of the rejection of social and sexual norms. For Himmler, deviants from the sexual norm were not only outsiders, they were also racial enemies. His concern was directed in the first place at the Mannerbund -- after all, his own SS often represented itself through the image of an idealized, semi-nude male -- and if he emphasized the contrast between homosexuality and manliness, it was because of his fear that the one could easily turn into the other. Himmler's obsessional regard for respectability and his fear of all sensuality encouraged him to magnify the homoerotic or even homosexual components of the Mannerbund. At the same time he affirmed that the Third Reich was a Mannerstaat, a state based upon the comradeship of men: "For centuries, yea, millennia, the Germans have been ruled as a Mannerstaat."

But that state was now threatened with self-destruction as a result of homosexuality, as Himmler made clear in November 1937 in a speech delivered to his SS leadership in Bad Tolz. In it even prostitution -- otherwise strictly prohibited -- was suggested as a remedy. Himmler regarded homosexuality as a sickness which poisoned both body and mind, but he now went a stage further than the metaphorical language of sickness and health and drew on the imagery of "naturalness" and "unnaturalness." In the good old days of the Teutonic tribes, Himmler told his Bad Tolz audience, homosexuals were drowned in the swamps: "This was no punishment, but simply the extinction of abnormal life." Nature simply rectifies her own mistake, and Himmler laments that this kind of extinction is no longer possible today. The death of the outsider, presented here as the goal of the struggle for purity and respectability, points the way to the Holocaust.

It must be stressed that doctors such as Jean-Martin Charcot, who described Jews as subject to nervous diseases, had never for a moment thought of killing them: for Charcot, anyone who was ill could be cured. It was racism which determined Himmler's offensive against outsiders, but also the wish to protect respectability, no matter what the price.

The nakedness of the male stereotype displayed on so many Nazi buildings and monuments played a role that never lost its unsettling and latently threatening effect. In this context it is not without significance that nudism was banned immediately after the Nazis came to power. It was said to deaden women's natural shame. On much the same level is a warning, issued by the Ministry of the Interior in 1935, to the effect that nude bathing by people of the same sex could be seen as the first step toward the violation of paragraph 175, which was directed against homosexual acts.

In its attempt to strip nakedness of its sensuality, the Third Reich not only banned nudism (a ban which, given the powerful influence of the ideal stereotype, was scarcely relevant) but, more especially, drew a sharp distinction between the private and the representational. Arno Breker's nude male sculptures continued to be in official demand, and semi-nude men and women decorated public spaces. But it was an abstract, smooth, almost transparent nakedness and a frozen posture which dominated the representational sphere, a dominance achieved by recourse to Winckelmann's purified concept of beauty.

The Nazis encouraged physical training and here the problem of nudity arose once more. Hans Suren in his German Gymnastics, Physical Beauty and Training, a book which went through several editions during the Third Reich summed up the effort to strip the nude body of its sensuousness in this particular setting. He advocates nearly complete nudity in the pursuit of sport or while roaming through the countryside. But the male body had to be prepared carefully before it could be offered to public scrutiny: the skin must be hairless, smooth, and bronzed. The body had become the abstract symbol of Aryan beauty, as it was, also, in Leni Riefenstahl's film of the 1936 Olympic Games. Sensuality is transcended by being aligned with Greek forms -- figures that could be worshipped but neither desired nor loved.

And women? Goebbels insisted that girls should be strong, healthy, and good to look at, which meant that as he put it, in contrast to the male, the muscles of their arms and legs should not be visible. The importance of iconography can be judged from the extent to which the Nazis described physical detail. But how can this ideal of womankind be reconciled with the naked sportswoman, for the latter did indeed exist? The simple answer is that the female athlete's body was often approximated to that of the male. Without obvious feminine contours, it was thus, in principle, identical with that of the male youth: nakedness without sensuality. While, on the one hand, Goebbels launched his attacks on "sports girls," the League of German Girls (BDM) was liberating the mass of young girls for the first time in their history from some home and family commitments, an act of emancipation achieved through sport and country walks. The National Socialist view of women was clearly not free of contradictions, even if those contradictions existed within only a limited framework. Perhaps the reason for this is that National Socialism was based on a consciously male society that often behaved in a contradictory way toward women. Male homosexuality, for example, was strenuously persecuted, as we have seen, but the same was not true of lesbianism which was largely ignored.

In this area, too, the main concern was to separate the private from the representational. In the private sphere, women could be completely naked and sensual -- for how else can we interpret the paintings by Hitler's favorite artist, Leopold Ziegler, paintings which hung not only in the Fuhrer's private apartments but also in exhibitions of German Art? Ziegler's fleshy and full-bosomed nudes which left nothing to the imagination hung side by side with Gretchen-like figures, chaste, with blonde plaits -- the so-called typical German maiden. The representational world, by contrast, was the political world, and here the aim was to integrate the masses into the Third Reich with the aid of stereotypes that would treat the beautiful as a reflection of the eternal and immutable, revealing it as something pure and removed from all materialism and sensuality.

How deeply respectability and its concept of beauty were embedded in society can be inferred from the different ways in which the term was justified long before National Socialism. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it was religion -- and especially Protestantism -- that had taken upon itself the task of justifying respectability, whereas by the end of the century that role had been taken over by the people themselves. The stricter attitude towards sodomy, which was made a criminal offense in many countries in fin-de-siecle Europe, appealed no longer to religion but to popular sentiment. The clear and unambiguous distinction between the socially normal and the deviant, a distinction that was now medically and iconographically supported -- as well as by religion and education -- had been internalized. Goebbels knew exactly what he was doing when, in 1936, he banned art criticism on the grounds that the general public should make up its own mind -- he was risking very little. That same year the paintings on offer at the Exhibition of German Art sold better than those at almost all earlier art exhibitions.

All this is the indispensable background to the Exhibition of Degenerate Art. It was an exhibition designed to be out of the ordinary, a survey of all that was indecent and ugly and that represented an assault on bourgeois morality through the latter's concept of beauty. Works by modern artists were treated not as evidence of individual creativity but as representative of something else: they were accorded no individual value but only a symbolic status. This, of course, was a mockery of those artists who vaunted their individualism above all else, yet it was the reaction of a society which felt under constant threat, a society, moreover, bonded together by respectability with its eternal values and by the security which it radiated.

And yet foreign newspapers like the Manchester Guardian or the New York Times reported in 1937 that far more people had visited the Exhibition of Degenerate Art than the parallel exhibit devoted to German art. According to the Manchester Guardian there were five times as many visitors each day, while the New York Times reported that there had been 396,000 visitors, as against 120,000, within the space of a week. What is the explanation? Curiosity? It is a question that is difficult to answer, but it is unlikely that an interest in modern art played a part here. Moreover, the Nazis themselves encouraged people to visit the exhibition. Or had the contradiction between bourgeois respectability and the ever latent temptation to act unconventionally become acute once more, a temptation contained in the regime's anti-bourgeois rhetoric?

Notwithstanding the latent contradictions that it involved, respectability -- and all that it implied -- remained an essential part of the regime, and in the exhibition catalogue all those outsiders were blamed for the degeneration of art which had threatened society's conformist principles since the beginning of the last century. The paintings on display were the work of madmen disfigured by sexual excesses: they represented Marxist and Jewish attacks on all that was German. The text of the catalogue sums up a tradition that sought to draw an increasingly sharp distinction between respectability as something normal, and abnormality; between the healthy and the sick, and between the natural and the unnatural. Thus people could resist the chaos of the age and accept a "slice of eternity" into their lives.

What was sacrificed in the process was sensuality, passion and, to a great extent, individuality itself. The analysis of "beauty without sensuality" undertaken here can be seen as a critique of bourgeois morality with its division of labor according to sex, and as a critique, finally, of the never-ending attempt to draw a distinction between this morality, viewed as the norm, and what was seen as "abnormal." But we must never forget that for most people respectability is much more than merely a form of behavior or an ideal of beauty for their spare time; for many -- perhaps even for the vast majority -- it offers cogent proof of the cohesiveness of society, a cohesiveness necessary for all systems of government, not just for National Socialism. Hence the favorable response which the Exhibition of Degenerate Art encountered, even in places where we might not expect it. The New Statesman, for example, an English left-wing journal, wrote that the exhibition was the best thing Mr. Hitler had done so far.

The smooth running of a generally accepted morality was just as important for the cohesion of society as the oft-quoted economic and social factors, while, at the same time, it was something that people understood, something that impinged on their daily lives in a wholly concrete and comprehensive way. The ideal of beauty as exemplifying such norms was influenced not only by sentimentalism or Romanticism, it had a social function as well. The aesthetics of politics, of daily life, involved a degree of social control which it had assumed ever since bourgeois morality first came into being. The sculpture that I have mentioned, together with much of the popular literature, is filled with a passion and love that are supposedly devoid of sensuality. For example, Agnes Gunther's novel Die Heilige und ihr Narr (The Saint and Her Fool, 1913), a run-away bestseller during the Weimar Republic, was a sentimental love story in which sensuality is equated with sickness. Seen from such a standpoint, the sculpture and the popular literature that was read at this time readily fall into a tradition which the National Socialists merely took to its extreme.

And today? If my analysis is correct, I can only say that the same needs still exist; that, notwithstanding our modern tolerance toward the individual and sensuality, what seems involved here is more an extension of what is permissible than an actual breach in the principle of respectability. There may be additional proof of this in the fact that, after periods of greater sexual tolerance, the limits are always imposed once again. We are seeing this rhythm repeated once more today, in episodes like that of the Maplethorp exhibit mentioned earlier, and in the continued effort in the United States to control the erotic content of publicly funded art. Marcel Proust gave perhaps the finest expression to that reciprocal relationship between conformism and tolerance that we can see around us today: Swann, the Jewish hero of A la recherche du temps perdu, is welcomed among the aristocratic and snobbish Guermantes as an exotic plant until such time as he becomes a Dreyfusard-defending the captain against his reactionary accusers -- when they see him as a threat to their political and social position. This seems to me to symbolize the reality of a situation in which we continue to find ourselves today; bourgeois morality, once a newcomer in our midst, now appears so much a part of the way we see ourselves, so essential to our society, that we can scarcely imagine a different kind of morality. We forget that, like everything else in this world of ours, it is the result of historical evolution.
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Re: The Fascist Revolution, by George L. Mosse

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Notes

Introduction


1. See Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism 1914-1945 (Madison, Wise., 1995); Robert Eatwell, Fascism: A History (London, 1966); and R. Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London, 1991). These are the important works of synthesis to appear in the last decades.

2. i.e. Karl Dietrich Bracher, Zeitgeschichtliche Kontroversen um Faschismus, Totalitarismus, Demokratie (Munich, 1976).

3. For this context, see S. Payne, op. cit., 459-461.

4. Victor Klemperer, LTI (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1985), 118-119.

5. Manfred Hettling / Paul Nolte, "Burgerliche Feste als Symbolische Politik im 19. Jahrhundert, " in Manfred Hettling / Paul Nolte, eds., Burgerliche Feste (Gottingen, 1993), 8.

6. Anthony D. Smith, "Memory and modernity; reflections on Ernst Gellner's theory of nationalism, " Nations and Nationalism, Vol. 2, part 3 (November, 1996), 384.

7. See Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, Mass., 1996); George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (New York, 1975, 1999).

8. Michele Sarfatti, Mussolini contro gli ebrei (Turin, 1994), 47, 48.

9. i.e. George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York, 1978, 1997), Chapter 2.

10. Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis, 1996), 136.

11. George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York, 1996), Chapter 8.

1. Toward a General Theory of Fascism

1. The best recent discussion of fascism and totalitarian doctrine is Karl Dietrich Bracher, Zeitgeschichtliche Kontroversen um Faschismus, Totalitarismus, Demokratie (Munich, 1976).

2. Aryeh L. Unger, The Totalitarian Party: Party and People in Nazi Germny and Soviet Russia (Cambridge, 1974), 189, 202.

3. Piero Melograni, "The Cult of the Duce in Mussolini's Italy, " Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 77 (1976), 223-225.

4. Aryeh L. Unger, op. cit., 1, 264.

5. Cf. George L. Mosse, ed., Police Forces in History (London and Beverly Hills, 1975).

6. I am grateful to Eric Johnson for letting me see part of his soon to be published crucial new research on the Gestapo.

7. See J. L. Talmon, The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy (Boston, 1952); and the criticism in George L. Mosse, "Political Style and Political Theory, " Confronting the Nation (Hanover and London, 1993), Chapter 4.

8. Mona Ozouf, La Fete revolutionnaire 1789-1799 (Paris, 1976), 22.

9. For a more thorough discussion of the point, see George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (New York, 1975, 1999), and the unjustly forgotten Harold J. Laski, Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (New York, 1943), not for his analysis of fascism but for the weakness of parliamentary government.

10. The term "good revolution" is Karl Dietrich Bracher, op. cit., 68.

11. Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism 1914-1945, passim.

12. Renzo De Felice, Fascism (New Brunswick, N.J., 1976), 24.

13. Zeev Sternhell, La Droite revolutionnaire 1885-1914 (Paris, 1978), passim; George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution, Chapter 10.

14. i.e. Emilio Gentile, Le origini dell' ideologia Fascista (Rome/Bari, 1975), 76ff.

15. Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario (Turin, 1965), 591; Paolo Nello, L'Avanguardismo Giovannile alle origini del fascismo (Rome, 1978), 26-27.

16. George L. Mosse, Germans and Jews: The Right, the Left, and the Search for a "Third Force" in Pre-Nazi Germany (New York, 1970), Chapter 1.

17. See Chapter 6.

18. Otto-Ernst Schuddekopf, Linke Leute von Rechts (Stuttgart, 1960), 84.

19. Joseph Goebbels, Tagebucher 1945 (Hamburg, 1976), 55, 69-70.

20. Ernst Bloch, Thomas Munzer als Theologe der Revolution (Munich, 1921), 295.

21. Victor Klemperer, LTI; Notizbuch eines Philologen (Berlin, 1947), 116-118.

22. i.e. Clarke Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England (Baltimore, 1975), 8.

23. Paolo Nello, review of Daniele Marchesini, "La scuola dei gerarchi, " Storia contemporanea (September, 1977), 586.

24. Quoted in George L. Mosse, ed., Nazi Culture (New York, 1966), 116.

25. Giuseppe Bottai, Il Fascismo e l'Italia Nuova (Rome, 1923), 19.

26. Horia Sima, Destinee du Nationalisme (Paris, n.d.), 19.

27. These qualities are taken from Voor Volk en Vaderland, De Strijd der Nationaalsocialistische Bewegung 14. December 1931-Mei 1941, ed. C. Van Geelkerken (n.p., 1941), 315.

28. The remarks on the First World War are taken from George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Shaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York, 1990), Chapters 4, 5; see also his The Image of Man, Chapter 6.

29. Antoine Prost, Les Anciens Combattants et la Societe Francaise, 3 vols. (Paris, 1978).

30. See George L. Mosse, "La sinistra europea e l'esperienza della guerra, " Rivoluzione e Reazione in Europa (1917-1924), Convegno storico internazionale-Perugia, 1978 (Florence, 1978), Vol. II, 151- 167.

31. Mussolini quoted in Umberto Silva, Kunst und Ideologie des Faschismus (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1975), 108. For Hitler, see Die Fahne Hoch! (1932), 14; also George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, passim.

32. Alfred Steinitzer and Wilhelm Michel, Der Krieg in Bildern (Munich, 1922), 97; Der Weltkrieg im Bild (Berlin-Oldenburg, 1926), Preface.

33. Goebbels, op. cit., 28.

34. Teresa Maria Mazzatosta, "Educazione e scuola nella Repubblica Sociale Italiana, " Storia contemporanea (February 1978), 67.

35. Peter Hasubeck, Das Deutsche Lesebuch in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (Hanover, 1972), 77, 79.

36. Ernst Junger, ed., Das Antlitz des Weltkrieges (Berlin, 1930), Preface.

37. Oldo Marinelli, quoted in Emilio Gentile, Le Origini der Ideologia Fascista (Rome, 1974), 92.

38. Ruggero Zangrandi, Il lungo viaggio (Milan, 1948); for a discussion of this revolt of youth, see Michael Ledeen, Universal Fascism (New York, 1972), passim.

39. Drieu La Rochelle, Socialisme Fasciste (Paris, 1943), 72.

40. For Hans Naumann's speech, see Hildegard Brenner, Die Kunstpolitik des Nationalsozialismus (Hamburg, 1963), 188; Bottai, op. cit., 18 ff; and Jean Denis, Principes Rexistes (Brussels, 1936), 17.

41. Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States (Boulder, Colo., 1977), 420, 421.

42. i. e. George L. Mosse, The Image of Man, Chapter 8.

43. Charles S. Maier, "Some Recent Studies of Fascism, " Journal of Modern History (September 1976), 509; and Thomas Childers, "The Social Bases of the National Socialist Vote, " in International Fascism, ed. George L. Mosse (London, 1979), 161-189.

44. Renzo De Felice, Fascism (New Brunswick, N.J., 1976), 46.

45. Gilbert D. Allardyce, "The Political Transition of Jacques Doriot, " in International Fascism, ed. George L. Mosse, 287.

46. Henry A. Turner, Jr., "Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, " in Nazism and the Third Reich, ed. Henry A. Turner, Jr. (New York, 1972), 93.

47. i. e. George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture, Chapter 1.

48. i.e. George L. Mosse, Masses and Man (New York, 1980), Chapter 3.

49. A list of popular novels under fascism will be found in Carlo Bordoni, Cultura e propaganda nell'Italia fascista (Messina-Florence, 1974), 85, but without any analysis of their individual content. However, see Pasquale Falco, Letteratura Populare Fascista (Cosenza, 1984), which is disappointing.

50. Storia d'Italia, ed. Ruggiero Romano and Corrado Vivanti (Turin, 1973), 1526; George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses, 194.

51. Francesco Sapori, L'Arte e il Duce (Milan, 1932), 141.

52. Ibid., 123 ff.

53. Adrian Lyttleton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy 1919- 1929 (London, 1973), 389; Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, passim.

54. George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses, Chapter 7; for the liturgy of Italian fascism, see Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics, passim.

55. Anson G. Rabinbach, "The Aesthetics of Production in the Third Reich, " International Fascism, ed. George L. Mosse (London, 1979), 189-22 3.

56. Adrian Lyttleton, op. cit., 19.

57. Oral communication, Albert Speer to George L. Mosse, June, 1974.

58. Schkem Gremigni, Duce d'Italia (Milan, 1927), 116.

59. E.g., Ausstellung der Faschistischen Revolution, erste Zehnjahrfeier des Marsches auf Rom (1933). Typically enough, the official poster for the exhibition featured soldiers from the First World War.

60. Donino Roncara, Saggi sull' Educazione Fascista (Bologna, 1938), 61; George L. Mosse, The Image of Man, Chapter 8.

61. Ernst Junger, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (Berlin, 1933), 32 ff.

62. i. e. Hitler at the Reichsparteitag, 1935, Adolf Hitler an seine Jugend (Munich, 1940), n.p.

63. See George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution, Chapter 2.

64. Renzo de Felice, Fascism, 56.

65. Domino Roncara, op. cit., 55, 58.

66. Esposizione Universale di Roma, MCMXLII, XX E.F. (1942), 83, 88.

67. Giuseppe Bottia wrote that fascism was an intellectual revolution concerned with the problem of its origins-Pagine di Critica Fascista (1915-1926) (Florence, n.d.), 322.

68. Fuhrer Blatter der Hitler-Jugend(1935), 10.

69. Lehrplan fur Sechsmonatige Schullung (SS, Hauptamt IV; n.d., n.p.), 25, 79.

70. Typically enough, the newsletter of a Nazi elite school repeated this phrase in Italian, commenting that these ideals were shared by German and Italian youth-Reichsschule der NSDAP Feldafing (1940- 41), 73.

71. Ibid. (1939-40), 17.

72. i.e. Robert Brasillach, Le Marchand d'Oiseaux (Paris, 1936), passim.

73. Charles Beuchat, "Le Quartier Latin aux temps du jeune Brasillach, " Hommages a Robert Brasillach (Lausanne, 1965), 78.

74. Stanley G. Payne, "Fascism in Western Europe, " in Fascism: A Readers Guide, ed. Walter Laqueur (London, 1976), 303.

75. Sapori, op. cit., 15ff; George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution, 42-43.

76. Rex, 23 (September 1938); De Daad, 2 (September 1933).

77. Je Suis Partout, April 18, 1938.

78. Michele Sarfatti, Mussolini contro gli ebrei (Turin, 1994), especially 6 ff, 29.

79. Sebastian Haffner, Anmerkungen zu Hitler (Munich, 1978), 43.

80. George L. Mosse, Nationalization of the Masses, 12, 202.

81. Renzo de Felice, Fascism, 65.

82. Sebastian Haffner, op. cit., 154 ff.

83. See Chapter 6; also George L. Mosse, 'Toward the Final Solution, Chapters 7, 18.

84. See also Percy Ernst Schramm, Hitler als militarischer Fuhrer (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1965), passim.

85. i. e. Stuart Ewen, PR.! A Social History of Spin (New York, 1996), passim.

3. Racism and Nationalism

1. For the origins of racism, see George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York, 1978, 1997).

2. Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League 1886-1914 (Boston, 1984), passim.

3. George L. Mosse, op. cit., Chapter 2.

4. J. J. Winckelmann, Gedanken uber die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke etc. (Stuttgart, 1885), 57.

5. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, (New York, 1985, 1997), Chapter 5.

6. Camper, Dissertation Physique de M. Pierre Camper, etc., ed. Adrien Gilles Camper (Utrecht, 1791), esp. 97, 98; Robert Knox, The Races of Men (London, 1862), 404.

7. George L. Mosse, The Image of Man, Chapters 1, 2, and 3.

8. Thomas Nipperdey, "Auf der Suche nach Identitat: Romantischer Nationalismus, " Nachdenken uber die deutsche Geschichte (Munich, 1990), 140.

9. H. de Genst, Histoire de L'Education Physique, Vol. II (Brussels, 1949), 192, 294.

10. J.C.F. Guts Muths, Gymnastik fur die Jugend (Schnepfenthal, 1804, first published in 1793), 6.

11. See Chapter 2, page 49.

12. Sander Gilman, The Jew's Body (New York and London, 1991); and his Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness (Ithaca, 1985).

13. H. W Kranz, "Gemeinschaftsunfahigkeit und Ehrwurdigkeit, " Rosse, Vol. 9, Heft 2 (1942), 235.

14. Sander Gilman, The Jew's Body, 134.

15. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich, 1931), 762-763.

16. Louis Durieu, Les Juifs Algerienne (1870-1901) (Paris, 1902), 87.

4. Fascism and the French Revolution

1. Oeuvres completes de J. J. Rousseau, vol. 5 (Paris, 1907), 43.

2. Mona Ozouf, La fiee revolutionnaire 1789-1799 (Paris, 1976), 55ff; G. L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses, Chapter 4.

3. Albert Mathiez, La Theophilantropie et le Culte Decadaire (Paris, 1904), 36.

4. Michel Vovelle, Die Franzosische Revolution (Frankfurt-am- Main, 1985), 115.

5. Friedrich Heer, Der Glaube des Adolf Hitler (Munich, 1968), 56.

6. Ernst Moritz Arndt, Entwurf einer Teutschen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1814), 36.

7. Victor Klemperer, LTI (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1985), 118-19.

8. A. Aulard, Christianity and the French Revolution (New York, 1966), 106.

9. Mosse, Nationalization, 200.

10. Christoph Prignitz, Vaterlandsliebe und Freiheit (Wiesbaden, 1981), 138.

11. i.e., Hitler's Proclamation at the Nuremberg Party Day, 1934.

12. G. L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, Chapter 4.

13. Ozouf, La fete, Chapter 9.

14. Mona Ozouf, "Le Pantheon: L'Ecole des Morts, " in Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de Memoire (Paris, 1984), vol. I, La Republique, 155ff.

15. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 286; Ranier Zitelmann has given the best account of Hitler's attitude to the French Revolution, even if it seems too positive. See his Hitler: Selbstverstandnis eines Revolutionars (Hamburg, 1987), 44-49.

16. Hitler, Mein Kampf, 269.

17. Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1935), 500-501.

18. i.e., Hermann Wendel, Danton (Konigstein/Ts., 1978), 362.

19. Ibid., 344.

20.Hitler, Mein Kampf, 371.

21. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Government of Poland (Indianapolis, 1972), 11, 14.

22. Jean Starobinski, 1789: The Emblems of Reason (Charlottesville, 1982), 118.

23. Vovelle, Die Franzosische Revolution, 124.

24. See also Alfred Stein, "Adolf Hitler and Gustav le Bon, " Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht (1955), 367; Renzo de Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario (Turin, 1965), 467, n. 1.

25. Robert A. Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology (London and Beverly Hills, 1975), 73.

26. Gustav Le Bon, The Crowd (New York, 1960), 68.

27. Ibid., 118-19.

28. Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, 86, 87.

29. Piero Melograni, "The Cult of the Duce in Mussolini's Italy, Journal of Contemporary History II (October 1976), 228.

30. Ibid., 223.

31. Mosse, Nationalization, 200.

32. Emilio Gentile, Le Origini dell'Ideologia Fascista (Rome-Bari, 1975), 184.

33. G. L. Mosse, Masses and Man, 97.

34. Gentile, Le origini, 184.

35. Ozouf, La fete, 97.

36. G. L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, Chapter 3.

37. Sergio Panunzio, Italo Balbo (Milan, 1923), 36-37.

38. Hans-Peter Gorgen, Dusseldorf und der Nationalsozialismus (Dusseldorf, 1969), 98. See also Jay W Baird, To Die for Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1990).

39. Emil Ludwig and Peter O. Chotjewitz, Der Mord in Davos (Herbstein, 1986), 139.

40. Avner Ben-Amos, "Les Funerailles de Victor Hugo, " in Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de Memoire (Paris, 1984), vol. I, La Republique, 474, 487ff.

41. As, for example, in the "L'Apoteosi del Caduto" in the "Sala dedicata alle Medaglie d'Oro, " Redipuglia, ed. Ministero della Difesa, Commissariato Generale Onoranze Caduti in Guerra (Rome, 1972), 18.

42. Ozouf, "Le Pantheon, " 145ff.

43. G. L. Mosse, "National Cemeteries and National Revival: The Cult of the Fallen Soldiers in Germany, " Journal of Contemporary History 14 (January 1979), 1-20.

44. John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment (New York, 1981), 359-60.

45. Mosse, Masses and Man, Chapter 4.

46. Vovelle, Die Franzosische Revolution, 117.

47. Renzo de Felice, Intervista sul fascismo, ed. Michael A. Ledeen (Rome-Bari, 1975), 53-54.

48. Gentile, Le Origini, 328; Felice, Intervista, 53.

49. Emilio Gentile, Il Mito dello State Nuovo dall'Antigiolittismo al Fascismo (Rome-Bari, 1982). I should like to thank Professor Gentile for his valuable suggestions.

50. Alberto Maria Ghisalbert, "Giacobini, " Enciclopedia Italiana (1932), 16:934.

51. Ibid., 934.

52. Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Berkeley, 1986), 106.

53. Je Suis Partout, Numero Speciale sur la Revolution, no. 449 (30 June 1939), 1.

54. Ibid., 1.

55. Robert Brasillach, "Jacobins et Thermidoriens, " Oeuvres completes de Robert Brasillach (Paris, 1964), 12:604.

56. Roger Joseph, "Alcibiade et Socrate, " Cahiers des Amis de Robert Brasillach, no. 13 (6 February 1968), 63-64.

57. Brasillach, "Jacobins, " 605.

58. Joseph, "Alcibiade, " 64.

59. Robert Soucy, Fascist Intellectual: Drieu La Rochelle, 214.

60. Brasillach, "Jacobins, " 605.

61. Je Suis Partout, 1.

62. Philippe Burrin, La Derive Fasciste (Paris, 1986), 404.

63. Hitler, Mein Kampf, 536.

5. Fascism and the Intellectuals

1. Hayden White, "Benedetto Croce and the Renewal of Italian Culture: Croce as a Historian, " (MS read at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, December 29, 1966), 9.

2. Aldo Garosci, La Vita di Carl Roselli, Vol II (Rome, n.d.), 70.

3. Ibid., Vol. I, 143.

4. John R. Harrison, The Reactionaries (London, 1966), 127; Robert Brasillach, Leon Degrelle (Paris, 1936), 78.

5. Stanley Payne, Falange (Stanford, 1961), 49; Joris van Seeveren, La Constitution des Pays-Bas (St. Nicolas- Waes, 1938), 24.

6. Robert Brasillach, "La Poesie du national-socialisme, " Notre Combat, No. 42 (April 1943), 6-7.

7. Julie Braun-Vogelstein, was Niemals Stirbt (Stuttgart, 1966), 282. See also the accusations of Carlo Roselli against Italian socialism: Garosci, op. cit., Vol. I, 143-144.

8. Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality (New York, 1955), 288.

9. S. H. Harris, The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile (Urbana, 1966), 172-173.

10. Louis Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night (New York, 1960), 10.

11. Celine, Bagatelles pour un Massacre (Paris, 1937), 70.

12. Quoted in Harrison, op. cit., 132.

13. Celine, Bagatelles pour un Massacre, 70; Pound quoted in Harrison, op. cit., 137.

14. Celine's manifesto in Au Pillori reprinted in L'Affaire Celine (documents), Les Cahiers de la Resistance, No. 4 (n.d.), 33; his appointment by Otto Abetz, ibid., 32. For Celine's career under the occupation, see Leon Poliakov, "Le cas Louis Ferdinand Celine et le cas Xavier Vallat, " Le Monde Juif, 5 Year, No. 28 (February 1950), 5-7.

15. Andre Gide, "Les Juifs, Celine et Maritaine, " Nouvelle Revue Francaise, Vol. L (January-June 1938), 631.

16. Gottfried Benn, "Das moderne Ich, " Der neue Staat und die Intellektuellen (Stuttgart, 1933), 129-151. Hans Richter, DADA, Art and Anti-Art (New York, 1966), 112. For Benn's nihilism see Edgar Lohner, quoted in Reinhold Grimm, Strukturen (Gottingen, 1963), 309.

17. Benn, op. cit., 20, 25.

18. Quoted in Peter de Mendelssohn, Der Geist in der Despotie (Berlin, 1953), 251.

19. Benn, "Antwort an die literarischen Emigranten, " op. cit., 31.

20. Ladislao Mittner, "Die Geburt des Tyrannen aus dem Ungeist des Expressionismus, " Festschrift zum achzigsten Geburtstag von Georg Lukacs (Neuwied, 1965), 402-420.

21. Camillo Pelizzi, Una Rivoluzione Mancata (Florence, 1951?), esp. 30-35; Benn, op. cit., 25.

22. Drieu La Rochelle, Gilles (Paris, 1939), 74.

23. Walter Benjamin, "Theorien des deutschen Faschismus, " Das Argument, 6 Jahrg., Heft 3 (1964), 136.

24. La Rochelle, op. cit., 393.

25. Harrison, op. cit., 32.

26. Gottfried Benn, Kunst und Macht (Stuttgart, 1934), 106-107. Harrison, op. cit., 137.

27. La Rochelle, op. cit., p. 385.

28. Lucien Rebatet, Les Decombres (Paris, 1942), 20.

29. Harrison, op. cit., 83.

30. See George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology (New York, 1964; Reprinted 1998).

31. Alfred Baumler, "Die verwirklichte Idee, " in Leon Poliakov and Josef Wulf, Das dritte Reich und seine Denker (Berlin, 1959), 268.

32. Harris, op. cit., 172.

33. Quoted in Adrian Lyttelton, "Fascism in Italy: The Second Wave, " Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. I, No. I (1966), 77.

34. La Rochelle, op. cit., 484.

35. Harris, op. cit., 92.

36. Julien Benda, The Betrayal of the Intellectuals (New York, 1955). First published in Paris in 1928.

37. Ernst Junger, DerArbeiter (Hamburg, 1932), 66, 129.

38. Quoted in Robert Soucy, "The Nature of Fascism in France, " Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. I, No. I (1966), 52; Walter Muschag, Die Zerstorung der deutschen Literatur (Munich, n.d.), 143, 145.

39. Robert Brasillach in Je Suis Partout, Vol. XII, No. 593 (December 2, 1942), 6.

40. Quoted in Franz Schonauer, Deutsche Literatur im dritten Reich (Olten and Freiburg, 1961), 44.

41. Gastone Silvano Spinetti, Vent'anni dopo Ricominciare da Zero (Rome, 1964), 109. I owe this reference, as well as others on Italian fascism, to Michael Ledeen, Universal Fascism: The Theory and Practice of the Fascist International (New York, 1972), 39 ff.

42. Arnolt Bronnen gibt zu Protokoll (Hamburg, 1954), 302 and passim.

43. L'Universale (1931-41) and La Sapienza (1933 ff.).

44. As reported in L'Oeuvre (August 24, 1937).

45. Marc Augier, Gotter-Dammerung, Wende und Ende einer Zeit (Buenos Aires, 1950), 116.

46. H. Naumann and E. Luethgen, Kampf wider den undeutschen Geist (Bonn, 1933).

47. Cesare Rossi, Mussolini Com'era (Rome, 1947), 227.

48. Quoted in Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold (New York, 1955), 211.

49. George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture, 162.

50. Dante L. Germino, The Italian Fascist Party in Power (Minneapolis, 1959), passim.

51. La Rochelle, op. cit., 419.

6. The Occult Origins of National Socialism

1. See also Ellie Howe, Urania's Children: The Strange World of the Astrologers (London, 1967); Dusty Sklar, Gods and Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult (New York, 1977); Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of National Socialism (Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, 1985). This book contains an extensive bibliography of some of the men discussed in this chapter.

2. It is significant that one common tie among all those men was their frustration in being denied academic recognition. Schuler and List were kept at arm's length by the academic world whose company they sought, while Paul de Lagarde had to teach in a Gymnasium for twelve years before he finally obtained a chair at the University of Gottingen. Julius Langbehn failed to obtain an academic post despite repeated efforts. These experiences undoubtedly deepened their aversion to intellectualism and to what they called academic pedantry. Langbehn's Rembrandt as Educator is full of diatribes against the professors whose world outlook he opposed. Such men were part of what has been called the "academic proletariat." Langbehn eventually converted to Catholicism (1900). This is not mentioned in C. T Carr, "Julius Langbehn-A Forerunner of National Socialism, " German Life and Letters, III (1938-39), 45-54. For Paul de Lagarde, see Robert W Lougee, Paul de Lagarde (Cambridge, 1962).

3. Julius Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher (Leipzig, 1900), 8.

4. Ibid., 82.

5. Eugen Diederichs Leben und Werke, ed. Lulu von Strauss and Torney-Diederichs (Jena, 1936), 180.

6. Ibid., 82.

7. Freideutsche Jugend: Zur Jahrhundertfeier auf dem Hohen Meissner (Jena, 1913), 98 ff.

8. Langbehn, Rembrandt, 131.

9. The Life and Letters of Jacob Burckhardt, trans. Alexander Dru (London, 1955), 225.

10. Langbehn, Rembrandt, 65.

11. R. Burger-Villingen, Geheimnis der Menschenform (Leipzig, 1912), 23, 27.

12. Langbehn, Rembrandt, 315.

13. Eugen Diederichs, 74, 452.

14. Quoted in the National Socialist article, Karl Friedrich Weiss, "Individualismus und Sozialismus, " I, Der Weltkampf, IV (1927), 66-70.

15. Paul de Lagarde, Lebensbild und Auswahl, ed. K. Boesch (Augsburg, 1924), 52.

16. Johannes Baltzli, Guido von List (Vienna, 1917), 18, 23.

17. Ibid., 26, 27.

18. Alfred Schuler, Fragmente und Vortrage aus dem Nachlass, ed. Ludwig Klages (Leipzig, 1940), 33, 159.

19. Ibid., 51.

20. Claude David, Stefan George (Paris, 1952), 200.

21. Baltzli, Guido von List, 45; Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Theosophy (New York, 1930), 116-117.

22. Baltzli, Guido von List, 55n.; Kuhn, Theosophy, 144.

23. Ibid., 135, 133.

24. Besser, "Die Vorgeschichte ... , " 773.

25. Franz Hartmann, The Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme (Boston, 1891), 166 n. 1.

26. Erste Gesamtausstellung der Werke von Fidus zu seinem 60. Geburtstage(Woltersdorf bei Erkner, 1928), 9, 11.

27. Eugen Diederichs, 171, 207, 220.

28. Ibid., 267.

29. Langbehn, Rembrandt, 93. "With a dose of mysticism one can gild the life of a nation" (203).

30. Prana, Organ fur angewandte Geisteswissenschaften, VI, 1-2 (1915), 4.

31. Ibid., 348-349. Nourishment and the development of the soul go hand in hand. Anti-alcoholism plays an important role here as well. At the Hohen Meissner gathering, the Temperance League said that it too wanted to serve the race-Freideutsche Jugend, 16; see also Langbehn, Rembrandt, 296-297.

32. Kuhn, Theosophy, 297; Prana, 46-47.

33. Arthur Dinter, Die Sunde wider den Geist (Leipzig, 1921), 236.

34. Besser, "Die Vorgeschichte ... , " 773.

35. Baltzli, Guido von List, 185. His name was Friedrich Wannieck, and he contributed more to the List Society than all other members put together (79). Wannieck and Franz Hartmann had at least one seance together (185).

36. Langbehn, Rembrandt, 94-95. Blavatsky and G. R. S. Meade believed that "of all mystics, Swedenborg has certainly influenced Theosophy most ... , " though his powers did not go beyond the plane of matter. H. P. Blavatski, The Theosophical Glossary (Hollywood, 1918), 293.

37. Eugen Diederichs, 15.

38. Baltzli, Guido von List, 155, 199.

39. Langbehn, Rembrandt, 130-131.

40. Ibid., 158, 159.

41. H. F. K. Gunther, Ritter, Tod und Teufel (1920). Quoted in R. Walther Darre, Das Bauernthum als Lebensquell der Nordischen Rasse (Munich, 1937), 97. Darre was the National Socialist Minister of Agriculture.

42. Langbehn, Rembrandt, 5.

43. Paul de Lagarde, 96; Reichsschule der NSDAP Feldafing (1939- 40), 17.

44. Eugen Diederichs, 351-352.

45. Langbehn, Rembrandt, 158, 160.

46. Eugen Diederichs, 72. On Die Tat, see Klemens von Klemperer, Germany's New Conservatism (Princeton, 1957), 97-100.

47. Paul de Lagarde, 64.

48. Langbehn, Rembrandt, 218-219.

49. Gerhard Heine, Ferdinand Avenarius als Dichter (Leipzig, 1904), 45.

50. Langbehn, Rembrandt, 113. Tudel Weller, Rabauken! Peter Moenkemann haut sich durch (Munich, 1938), 114; d. George L. Mosse, Germans and Jews, Chapter 2.

51. Weltkampf, IV (1927), 189.

52. Baltzli, Guido von List, 29; Klages in Schuler, Fragmente, 43.

53. Paul de Lagarde, 104.

54. Schuler, Fragmente, 163 ff.; Review of Guido von List, Die Ursprache der Ario-Germanen und ihre Mysterien-Sprache in Prana, VI, 11-12 (February-March 1916), 560.

55. Langbehn, Rembrandt, 353, Eugen Diederichs, 84-85.

56. Melanie Lehmann, Verleger J. F Lehmann: Ein Leben im Kampf fur Deutschland (Munich, 1935), 23 ff. Lehmann was intimately involved with the growth of the National Socialist Party in Munich.

57. Langbehn, Rembrandt, 326-327.

58. Eugen Diederichs, 73.

59. Langbehn, Rembrandt, 95.

60. Guido von List, Die Namen der Volkerstaemme Germaniens und deren Deutung (Leipzig, 1909), 4.

61. Weltkampf, IV (1927), 92.

62. Alfred Rosenberg, "Rebellion der Jungend, " Nationalsozialistiche Monatshefte, Heft 2 (May 1930), 50 ff.

63. Hans Bluher, Wandervogel, Geschichte einer Jugendbewegung (Berlin, 1916), II, 83 ff. Bluher blamed Christianity for the degeneration of the romanticism of the Wandervogel (172).

64. Alfred Andreesen, Hermann Lietz (Munich, 1934), 101.

65. Hermann Lietz, Deutsche Nationalerziehung (Weimar, 1938), 123-124.

66. Ibid., 114, 120; H. Lietz, Lebenserinnerungen (Weimar, 1935), 41, 47. Christ symbolized struggle (189).

67. For his developing attitude toward Jews, see Lietz, Lebenserinnerungen, 115. From 1909 on, only students of Aryan descent were admitted (161). On the Jewish spirit, see Lietz, Deutsche Nationale-rziehung, 14.

68. Lebenserinnerungen, 194; Andreesen, Hermann Lietz, iii; for Lietz's own hymn on patriarchal society, see Lebenserinnerungen, 194.

69. Hermann Lietz, Des Vaterlandes Not und Hoffnung (Haubinda, 1934), 86.

70. Ibid., 76. Eugen Diederichs, 64; Lehmann, Verleger, 38, 277. The close collaborator was Alfred Andreesen, from 1909 his deputy director at Bieberstein. Lietz, in his social-political confession of faith during the war, tells of his allegiance to the world view of German idealism-Lebenserinnerungen, 196, The schools were also represented on the Hohen Meissner in 1913 (Freideutsche Jugend, 18).

71. David, Stefan George, 208.

72. For the relationship of Strindberg and Lanz von Liebenfels, see Wilfried Daim, Der Mann der Hitler Die Ideen Gab (Munich, 1958), 92-99.

7. Fascism and the Avant Garde

1. Robert O. Paxton, La France de Vichy (Paris, 1973), 251.

2. Henry de Montherlant, Le Songe (Paris, 1922), 374.

3. Antoine de Saint-Exupery, "Terre des Hommes, " Oeuvres (Paris, 1959), 169-170.

4. Quoted in Rolf Italiander, Italo Balbo (Munich, 1942), 137. H. G. Wells saw the "Coming of Bleriot" (1909) as the end of natural democracy-The Works of H. G. Wells, XX (New York, 1926), 422; Guido Mattioli, Mussolini Aviatore (Rome, 1936?), 3.

5. Mattioli, op. cit., 3.

6. Bertold Brecht, "Der Ozeanflug, " Brecht, Versuche 1-12 (Berlin, 1959), 14. I owe this reference to Reinhold Grimm.

7. Ibid., 24.

8. Rolf Italiander, Marschall Balbo, 11.

9. Giuseppe Fanciulli, Marschall Balbo (Essen, 1942), 116.

10. Anson Rabinbach, "The Aesthetics of Production in the Third Reich, " International Fascism, ed. George L. Mosse (London, 1979), 189-223.

11. Hans Poelzig, quoted in Anna Teut, Architektur im Dritten Reich (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1967), 32.

12. See, for example, Jost Hermand and Frank Trommler, Die Kultur der Weimarer Republik (Munich, 1978), 382 ff. "Omagio a Terrgani, " L'Architettura: Chronache e Storia, XIV; No. 3 (July 1968).

13. Hildegard Brenner, Die Kunstpolitik des Nationalsozialismus (Hamburg, 1963), 64 ff.

14. Ibid., 73; Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918-1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), 152, 172 ff. Mies van der Rohe was a member of the Reichskammer fur Bildende Kunste, 264, n. 73. He designed an exhibit for the exhibition "German People, German Work" in 1934 -- Philip C. Johnson, Mies van der Rohe (New York, 1947), 53. Mies, so one book claims, did not leave Germany until 1937, while Barbara Miller Lane gives the impression that he left shortly after 1933. Cf. Arthur Drexler, Mies van der Rohe (New York, 1960).

15. Albert Speer, Erinnerungen (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1969), 94.

16. George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses, 186. For the relationship of Neo Klassizismus and Neue Sachlichkeit, see Georg Friedrich Koch, "Speer, Schinkel und der Preussische Stil, " in Albert Speer; Architektur (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1967), 136 ff.

17. E. Crispolti, B. Hinz, and Z. Birolli, Arte e Fascismo in Italia e in Germania (Milan, 1974), 129.

18. "Omaggio a Terragni, " 180.

19. Ute Diehl, "Der lange Weg in die Abstraktion. Die italienische Kunst und der Faschismus, " Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 89 (May 2, 1978).

20. Emilio Gentile, Le Origini dell' Ideologica Fascista (Rome, 1975), 6.

21. Alexander J. de Grand, Bottai e la Cultura Fascista (Rome, 1978), 251.

22. CaIro Bordoni, Cultura e propaganda nell'Italia fascista (Messina- Florence, 1974), 167.

23. Cited in ibid., 44, 46.

24. Emilio Gentile, "Bottai e il fascismo. Osservatione per una biografia, " Storia Contemporanea, X, No. 3 (June 1979), 559.

25. "Novocento, " Enciclopedia Italiana (1934), XXIV; 995.

26. Mosse, op. cit., 224

27. "Novocento, " Enciclopedia Italiana, 994.

28. Adrian Lyttleton, The Seizure of Power, 391-393.

29. Francesco Sapori, L'Alle e it Duce (Milan, 1932), 37, 49, 66.

30. Ibid., 124, 125, 129; Bordoni, op. cit., 71.

31. Marcello Piacentini, Architettura d'Oggi (Rome, 1930), 56-57.

32. i.e. George L. Mosse, Die Volkische Revolution (Frankfurt-am- Main, 1991).

33. "Omaggio a Terragni, " 161.

34. Cited in Nicolas Slonimsky, Music Since 1900 (New York, 1946), 355.

35. Mussolini ignored Pound, who bombarded him not with poetry but with bizarre political and economic tracts-Niccolo Zapponi, "Ezra Pound e il fascismo, " Storia Contemporanea, IV, No.3 (September, 1973), 423-474.

36. See Chapter 5.

37. Gottfried Benn, "Rede auf Stefan George" (1934), Essays, Reden. Vortrage (Wiesbaden, 1959), 473.

38. Ibid., 627.

39. Crispolti, et al., op. cit., 59.

40. Renzo De Felice, Fascism, 56.

41. "Fascismo, " Enciclopedia Italiana, XIV (1932), 847.

42. See Robert Soucy, Fascist Intellectual: Drieu La Rochelle (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979).

43. Drieu La Rochelle, Gilles (Paris, 1939), 405-406.

44. i.e. George L. Mosse, "The Poet and the Exercise of Political Power: Gabriele D'Annunzio, " Masses and Man, Chapter 5.

45. Quoted in Soucy, op. cit., 2.

46. David L. Shalk, The Spectrum of Political Engagement (Princeton, 1979), 99.

47. J.-L. Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes des annees 30 (Paris, 1969), 101.

48. Walter Laqueur, Young Germany (London, 1962), 102.

49. i.e. Ulrich Linse, Anarchistische Jugendbewegung 1918-1933 (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1976).

50. Giovanni Sabbatucci, I Combattenti nel Primo Dopoguerra (Rome, 1974), 358.

51. Ferdinando Cordova, Arditi e Legionari Dannunziani (Padua, 1969), 22.

52. Donino Roncara, Saggi sull'Educazione Fascista (Bologna, 1938), 65.

8. Nazi Polemical Theater: The Kampfbune

1. Gunther Ruhle, Zeit und Theater; III, Diktatur und Exil (Berlin, n.d.), 27, 28.

2. i.e. Klau Vondung, Magie und Manipulation (Gottingen, 1971).

3. George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses, 192.

4. Johann von Leers, quoted in Eugen Hadamovskry, Propaganda and National Power (New York, 1972), 175, 176; see also "Politisches Streitgesprach ist der Ausdruck Unseres Theaters, " Der Aufmarsch (Marz, 1931), 8.

5. Ulrich Mayer, Das Eindringen des Nationalsozialismus in die Stadt Wetzlar (Wetzlar, 1970), 46.

6. See, e.g., Der Junge Nationalsozialist (September 1932), 12, 13; Der Junge Sturmtrupp (Marz, 1932), n.p.

7. This play is included in the Eine Materialsammlung Vorgelegt vom Centralverein Deutscher Staatsburger Judischen Glaubens (Berlin, 1932). This collection of documents was to be submitted to President von Hindenburg.

8. Adolf Gentsch, Die Politische Structur der Theaterfuhringg (Dresden, 1942), 303.

9. Ibid., 307; Illustrierter Beobachter (1931), 21.

10. Gentsch, op. cit., 305.

11. Ibid., 308.

12. A. E. Frauenfeld, Der Weg Zur Buhne (Berlin, 1940), 33.

13. Illustrierter Beobachter (1927), 132.

14. Ibid., 312.

15. Ibid., (1930), 14.

16. Ibid., 773.

17. Ibid., 72.

18. Ibid., 14.

19. Ibid., (1931), 119.

20. Ibid., (1930), 13, 14.

21. Ibid., (1931), 321.

22. Ibid., (1930), 211.

23. Volkischer Beobachter, 2 Beilage (October 6, 1932), n.p.

24. Richard Biedrzynski, Schauspieler, Regisseure, Intendanten (Heidelberg, 1944), 53.

25. Ruhle, op. cit., 778.

26. Eberhard Wolfgang Moller, Rothschild siegt bei Waterloo (Berlin, 1944), preface to the 4th edn., 11, 41, 124.

27. Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte (Marz, 1934), 109.

28. Erwin Piscator, Das Proletarische Theater (Berlin, 1929), 41, 243.

29. Gott, Freiheit, Vaterland, Sprech-Chire der Hitler-Jugend (Stuttgart, n.d.), 7.

30. Mosse, op. cit., 110.

31. Ernst Lenke, "Richard Elsner zu seinem 50. Geburtstage am 10, Juni, 1933, " Das Deutsche Drama (1933), 9, 13.

32. Hans Brandenburg, Das Theater und das Neue Deutschland; Ein Aufruf (Jena, 1919), 36, 20, 11, 33; Mary Wigman, Die Sprache des Tanzes (Stuttgart, 1964), 17.

33. Ernst Brandenburg, Das Neue Theater (Leipzig, 1926), 490.

34. Ibid., 449.

35. Hans Brandenburg, "Der Weg zum Nationaltheater. Ein Zweigesprach, " Die Neue Literatur (July 1936), 402.

36. Christian Jensen, "Hans Brandenburg, Volkhafter Deutscher Dichter, " Die Neue Literatur (January 1936), 10-15.

37. Rudolf Mirbt, Laienspiel und Laientheater (Cassel, 1960), 15, 16.

38. Gerhard Rossbach, Mein Weg Durch Die Zeit (Weilburg-Lahn, 1950), 90-93.

39. These are listed and described in Wille und Werk; Buhnenvolksbund Handbuch (Berlin, 1928), 96-99.

40. There is unfortunately no investigation so far as I know of the similarity and differences between plays staged by such organizations.

41. Das Laienspiel, Erfahrungen, Grundsatze, Aufgaben (Berlin, Arbeitsfront publication, n.d.), 11.

42. See Eugen Kurt Fischer, Die Neue Vereinsbuhne (Munich, 1926?), 208.

43. Das Volksspiel im NS Gemeinsehaftsleben (Munich, 1938), 19.

44. Christian Hermann Vosen, Kolpings Gesellenverein in Seiner Sozialen Bedeutung (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1866), 12.

45. Ibid., 17, 18.

46. These and the following plays will be found bound together in the British Museum, London, catalogue number 11747 d. 5. (Familein und Vereinstheater in Paderborn). They were published as Kleines Theater: I owe this reference to Sister Dr. Charlotte Klein.

47. See Adolf Kolping, "Gebet, und es wird euch gegeben, " Ausgewahlte Volkserzahlungen von Adolf Kolping (Regensburg, 1932), VI, 33-85.

48. Gentsch, op. cit., 53, 203; Die Volksbuhne (July 1930), 119.

49. Gentsch, op. cit., 206.

50. Die Volkstumliche Buhne (1918), 191; ibid., 2 ff, 51.

51. George L. Mosse, Germans and Jews, 50 ff.

52. Die Volktumliche Buhne (1918-19), 97 ff.

53. Demetrius Schrutz, Handlexieon des Theaterspiels (Munich, 1925), 40.

54. Gentsch, op. cit., 204.

55. Die Volksbuhne (February 1931), 482.

56. Gentsch, op. cit., 55.

57. Gerschom Scholem, Walter Benjamin-die Geschichte einer Freundschaft (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1975), 220.

58. Dramatiker der HJ, Sonderheft Zur Theaterwoche der Hitler- Jugend verbunden mit einer Reichstheateragung der Hitler-Jugend, Vol. II, April 18, 1937 (Bochum, n.d.), 26.

59. Ruhle, op. cit., 787.

60. Wille und Macht (1937), V, 21.

61. Paul Alverdes, Das Winterlager (Munich, 1935), passim; Herbert Georg Gopfert, "Paul Alverdes, " Die Neue Literatur (September 1936), 503-509.

62. Speech by Baldur von Schirach at the Weimarer Tagung of the Hitler Youth, in 1937, Die Neue Literatur (May 1938), 223, 224.

63. Die Spielschaar (January 1943), 12.

64. Volktums Arbeit im Betrieb (Berlin, Kraft Durch Freude publication, 1938?), 23.

65. Hermann Kretzschmann, Unterricht und Erziehung im Deutschen Arbeitsdienst (Leipzig, 1933), 8.

66. Die Neue Literatur (June 1936), 328. The typical phrase stems from Martin Luserke.

67. Hans Hinkel, Einer unter Hunderttausend (Munich, 1937), 261. I am indebted to Barry Fulkes, who supplied the knowledge about Nazi films.

9. On Homosexuality and French Fascism

1. Giovanni Dall'Orto, "Omosessuale e stato, " Quaderni di Critica Omossuale, supplemento no. 11 (Rome, 1977), 44, 46, 47.

2. Pieter Koenders, Homosexualiteit inBezet Nederland (S-Gravenhage, 1983), 95ff, 109.

3. Lucien Steinberg, Les Autorites Allemandes en France Occupee (Paris, 1966), 280.

4. Jean Queval, Premiere Page, Cinquieme Colonne (Paris, 1945), 280, 281.

5. Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations, III (1949), 58; Jean Guehenno, Journal des Annees Noires (Paris, 1947), 123, 118.

6. Andre Halimi, Chantons sous L'Occupation (Paris, 1976), 225.

7. J. L. Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes des annees 30 (Paris, 1969), passim.

8. Robert Brasillach, Notre Avant Guerre (Paris, 1941), 283.

9. George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, 217.

10. Robert Soucy, Fascist Intellectual: Drieu La Rochelle, 203, 326.

11. quoted in Dominique Desanti, Drieu La Rochelle (Paris, 1975), 315.

12. Drieu La Rochelle, Gilles (Paris, 1939), 455; Solange Leibovici, Le sang et l'encre: Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. Une psychobiographie (Amsterdam, 1994), 289.

13. Robert Brasillach, Anthologie de la poesie grecque (Paris, 1950, written 1943/44), 10.

14. Ginette Guitard-Auviste, "Le Precaire bonheur de vivre, " Supplement, Le Monde (7. Fevrier, 1970), 4.

15. Robert Brasillach, Comme le temps passe (Paris, 1937 and 1938), 74ff.

16. d'Etiemble, "A propos de Brasillach, " Le Monde (February 14, 1970), 11.

17. Robert Soucy, op. cit., 326; see also Robert Brasillach, Comme le temps passe, 72, for men preferring the company of men to that of women.

18. i.e. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 175.

19. Robert Brasillach, Notre Avant Guerre, 214.

20. Arthur Mitzman, Michelet, Historian (New Haven, 1990), 71, 107.

21. Jules Michelet, The People (Urbana, 1973), 158, 159-160.

22. quoted in Maud de Belleroche, Le ballet des crabes (Paris, 1975), 12.

23. i.e. Drieu La Rochelle, Gilles, 406; Robert Brasillach in Je Suis Partout (December 11, 1942), 6.
24. Louis Ferdinand Celine, Bagatelles pour un Massacre (Paris, 1937), 70.

25. See Chapter 5.

26. Jacques Isorny, Le Proces de Robert Brasillach (Paris, 1946), 138-140.

27. i.e. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, passim.

28. Christian Bourqueret, "Die Invertierten van Paris," 100 Jahre Schwulenbewegung, Eine Ausstellung des Schwulen Museums and der Akademie der Kunste (Berlin, 1997), 151.

29. George L. Mosse, The Image of Man, Chapter 8.
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Re: The Fascist Revolution, by George L. Mosse

Postby admin » Thu Mar 22, 2018 2:07 am

Index

aesthetics, x-xi, 45-53, 141-42
National Socialist, 183-97. See also
beauty
agriculture, 132-33
anti-Semitism, xiv, 35-37, 181
apocalypticism, xv, 9, 11, 12, 86. See also
utopian ism
architecture, 141-42, 146-47, 149
"Ariosophy, " 125
Arnold, Thomas, 113-14
art, National Socialist view of, 183
"asocials, " 43
authority, longing for. See also
leadership
avant garde, 137-55
incompatibility with political mass
movements, 151
aviation, 139-40

Baiocchi, Adolfo, 14
Baroque, the, 32, 53, 73, 82, 85
Bauhaus, 141-43
beauty, x, 46-48, 50-52, 188
ideals of, 13-14, 187-88, 196
male vs. female, 188-89. See also male
beauty
projection of ugliness and, 189
racism and, 58
without sensuality, 183, 184, 188,
190, 192, 195
"Beauty of Work" program, 140
Becks, joseph, 168
Belgium, Rexist movement in, xiii-xiv,
20, 36
Benn, Gottfried, 103-7, 110, 148
Bergson, Henri, 119
Binding, Rudolf, 14
Blavatsky, Madame, 118, 123, 126
Bloch, Ernst, 10
bolshevism, 184
differences from fascism, 2-3, 6
similarities to fascism, 2, 4, 5
Bory, Jean-Louis, 177
bourgeoisie, 13, 21, 149, 153, 154, 196
and morality, 189, 190, 195, 197
opposition to, 26-27, 101, 118, 137,
195
support for fascism, 20
unified by fascism, 20
Brandenburg, Erich, 165-66
Brasillach, Robert, 90, 98, 176-78,
180
Brecht, Bertold, 139
Bronnen, Amolt, 111-12

camaraderie, 18, 177. See also male
friendship and camaraderie
wartime, xvi, 18, 30
capitalism, 102, 105
hatred of, 26
perceived as product of Jews, 102
Catholicism, 130, 169, 190
Celine, Louis-Ferdinand, 101-3,
152-53, 180
Christianity, xii, 10, 74, 84, 133
ambivalence toward, 130
death and, 85-86
Cocteau, Jean, 176, 177
communism, 102. See also bolshevism
community, 33-34
counter-types, 49, 64-66
Jews as, 49, 64-65
Croce, Benedetto, 95, 96
cult of the dead. See under death

D'Annunzio, Gabriele, 82, 151
Darwinism, 132
death. See also war experience,
deification of fallen soldiers
Christianity and, 85-86
cult of, 83-87
Germany and Italy's, 8-1-86
desensitization to, 16-18
preoccupation with, 83-87
symbolism, 83
transcendence of, 85
decadence, 101, 102, 104
degeneration, 105, 109, 114, 138.
See also Exhibition of Degenerate
Art
fear of, 26, 43, 77, 184-87
Degrelle, Leon, 36
democratic leadership, 80-81
democratic nationalism, 72-73
Diederichs, Eugen, 119-21, 124, 128,
130, 131, 134
Doriot, Jacques, 21
Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre, 106, 109,
116, 151, 152, 176-78
Duce. See Mussolini

Eckart, Dietrich, 162
Eckhardt, Meister, 119, 126
Eisner, Richard, 164, 165
elitism, 107, 113, 138-40, 142
enemies, 78
need for, 37, 43, 63, 65. See also
counter-types
English national character, 62-63
Exhibition of Degenerate Art, 184, 185,
191, 194-96
Expressionism, 105, 138, 141, 154

Falange, Spanish, xiv
fascism, 2, 32. See also specific topics
foundations, 1-2, 18, 27, 42. See also
nationalism
in aftermath of First World War,
xv-xvi
heterogeneity of followers, 21-23
inside view of. See fascist self-representation
lack of original ideas in, xvii
reasons for popularity of, x
fascist movements. See also specific
movements and leaders
integration of masses into, 81
nonracist, xiii-xiv, 36, 67. See also
Italian fascism
second generation of, 19
fascist self-representation, x-xi, xvii,
178
as avant garde, 137-55
as cultural movement, 12, 37
democracy in, xvi-xvii, 7-1-75, 83
freedom in, 26
individualism, xvii, 33-34
"open-endedness" in, 19
and religion, xvi, 10, 18, 27, 81-
82
tolerance in, 24, 26
Felice, Renzo De, 41
festivals, 28, 79
Fidus, 123-24
Franco, Francisco, 35
French fascism, homosexuality and,
175-81
French fascists, 34, 69, 89
French Revolution, 90-92
collective leadership during, 79-80
conformity and, 71
democracy and, 83, 87
fascism and, 69-92
fascists' rejection of, 92
German nationalism and, 75-76
influence on Hitler and Mussolini,
81, 87
Mussolini's criticism of, 90
National Socialists' attitude toward,
75
nationalism and, 69-76
Nazi condemnation of, 89
preoccupation with death and youth,
83, 86, 87
self-representation, 76, 83, 87
friendship. See male friendship and
camaraderie
funerals, 83-85
futurism, 9, 33, 93, 99, 112, 138, 144,
147-50, 153, 154. See also
apocalypticism; utopianism

Gall, Francis, 120
gender roles, xvi, 78
division of functions between sexes,
77
division of labor, xvi, 50-51
Gentile, Giovanni, 101, 109
George, Stefan, 122
German nationalism, 75-76
use of Christian terminology, 11,
74
German Youth Movement, 13-14, 83,
87, 153, 159, 170-72
Gide, Andre, 103
Goebbels, Joseph, 17, 114, 193, 194
Guido von List, 124--26, 131
Gunther, H. F. K., 127

Haffner, Sebastian, 38, 40-41
handicapped. See "asocials"
Hegel, Georg WE, 108
Hegelianism, 19, 108, 111
hereditary monarchy, 127
Himmler, Heinrich, 191, 192
Hitler, Adolf, xii, 10, 11, 14, 16, 19,
22-24, 27, 29, 31, 114, 154
biographies of, 41
final days of, 40--41
Mussolini contrasted witl1, 37, 39--41,
80-81, 87, 143
mysticism of, 125
position toward French Revolution,
77
successes of, 37-38
Hitler Youth, 170-72
homosexuals, 43
attitude toward fascism, 181, 182
collaboration, 176, 177
fear of, 191
French fascism and, 175-81
and Jews, 64
masculine ideal and, 175, 177
Nazi, 190

idealism of deeds, 111, 122, 128-29,
134, 135
impotence, feeling of, 105
individualism, xvii, 33-34, 111, 144
redefinition of, 34, 127-28
industrialists, attitude toward fascism,
22
industrialization, 138, 140
intellectuals, 95-116
fascism's repudiation of, 115
fascist, 96
attraction to fascism, 104
hatred of society and institutions,
106
ideological commitments, 115-16
rejection of, 100
Socialist hostility toward, 100
invulnerable masculinity, 30
irrationality, 97-98, 100
Italian fascism, x, xiii, 32, 33, 35, 39-42,
141-43
cult of death and, 84-86
persecution of homosexuals in, 175

Jacobin dictatorship, 70-72, 79
Jacobin politics, 72
Jacobins, 5, 7, 70, 72, 78, 79, 88, 90, 91
Jews, 36, 63-64, 159, 160. See a/so anti-
Semitism
Hitler's perceptions of, 65, 77
homosexuals compared with, 64
in Italian fascist party, xiii
"Jewish conspiracy, " 187
qualities symbolized by, 102, 129
viewed as feminine, 64
Johst, Hans, 12
Junger, Ernst, 110

Kabalah, 123
Kampfbune (Nazi theater), 157-73
Catholics portrayed in, 160
indoctrination through, 158-72
Jews portrayed in, 159, 160
moral messages in plays, 168
Klages, Ludwig, 130
Kolping, Adolf, 167-69

Lagarde, Paul de, 128, 130, 13 3
Langbehn, Julius, 118-20, 124, 126,
127, 129, 213
Le Bon, Gustav, 39, 80
leadership, 79-81, 107
cult, 3
fascist, xvi, 48, 52, 70, 79-81, 107,
117, 132, 151
democratic leadership, 80-81
from the Left, 2 I
need for supreme, xvi-xvii
yearning for, 109
liberalism, 25
Lietz, Hermann, 132-33
Lifton, Robert, 175-76
liturgy, xii, 28, 47, 51, 72-75, 80-83,
98, 151

"magic realism" 24
male beauty, ideal of, 20, 48, 50, 177,
180, 188, 193. See also masculinity
and female beauty, 188-89
male body, as aesthetic ideal, 48, 50, 61,
177, 178, 188, 192-93
male friendship and camaraderie,
177-81, 190, 191
man, new ideal fascist, xvi, 30-33, 48,
87-88, 111, 149
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 148
martyrs, 76, 84, 86
masculine symbolism, 59
masculinity, xvi. See also male beauty
ideal of, xvi, 26, 30-31, 50, 177, 181
homosexuality and, 175, 177
masses, mobilization of, 5, 6, 71, 75-76,
79, 80, 92-93
May, Karl, 23-24
medical science, 125
"Hein Kampf 65, 77
Michelet, Jules, 179
millenarianism, 11. See also
apocalypticism
Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur, 9
Moller, Eberhard Wolfgang, 162-63
morality
bourgeois, 189, 195, 197
in Nazi aesthetics, 184-89, 195-97
racial symbols and stereotypes and,
62
traditional, 19-20. See also puritanism
Mussolini, Benito, 7-9, 14, 16, 25, 27,
30, 36, 38, 40, 113, 139, 144, 149,
150, 153-54. See also Hitler, and
Mussolini; Italian fascism
aesthetic preferences, I43, 144
successes of, 38
mysteries, 126
mysticism, 119, 120, 126, 131. Sa also
apocalypticism
myth, 35, 76, 79. See also national
symbols and myths
influence of, 39

nakedness. See nudity
national character, 60
English, 62-63
National Socialism, xii, xiii, xv, xvi, 7,
66
occult origins, 117, 120-35
National Socialist myth, 157
national stereotype, 60-61, 63
based on male body, 61
national symbols and myths, 35, 42-44,
60, 76, 188-89
nationalism, xi-xiii, 7, 10, 21, 35, 60,
150, 151
democratic, 72-73
French Revolution and, 69-76
German, 74-76
modern right-wing, 67
as patriotism, 62, 68
racism and, xiv-A-vi, 55-57, 60-68
difference between, 61-62
revolutionary, 73
Naumann, Hans, 113
Nazi aesthetics, 183-97
Nazi art, 145, 183-84
Nazi symbols, 20, 4243
Nazi theater. See Kampfbune
Nietzscheanism, 110, 112
nudity
banning of, 192
male, 188-89, 192. See fllso male
body

obedience, 110
occult origins of National Socialism,
117, 120-35. See also mysticism
occult symbolism, 123-25
"organic state, " 133

parliamentary government, 5
patriotism, 62, 68
poetry, 97-99
police, secret, 4
populism, 28-29, 48, 137, 163
positivism, 118, 122, 135
Pound, Ezra, 102, 148, 180
Prana, 135, 136
precedent, xvii, 9
propaganda, 3
puritanism, 21

race, superior, 59-60
"race mysticism, " 131
race war, xv-xvi
racial purity, 77
racial revolution, 66-67
racial stereotype, 62, 63, 67
racial utopia, 66-67
racism, xiii-xvi, 31, 35-36, 56-58, 67.
See also fascist movements, non racist
aesthetic adopted by, 58
as aggressively masculine, 59
depends upon having enemies, 63
foundations, 57
functions, 36
gender division, 59
substitute for religion, 20
transcendent beauty and, 58
racist symbol(s), 57, 59, 62
human body as, 58
Rassemblement National Populaire
(RNP), 91
religious overtones in fascism, xvi, 10,
18, 27, 81-82
Republic of Virtue, 89
respectability, 185, 190, 191-92,
194--95
revolution, xi-xii, 6, 7, 42, 77. See also
French Revolution
based on the already familiar, xvii
from the Right, 67
revolutionaries, social, 17, 21
fascist leaders' attitudes toward, 8
revolutionary nationalism, 73
Rexist movement in Belgium, xiii-xiv,
20, 36
Robespierre, Maximilien, 76, 78, 79,
90
Rohm, Ernst, 190
romanticism, 23-25, 108, 114, 119,
120, 134-35, 145, 148
Roselli, Carlo, 96-97
Rosenberg, Alfred, 77-78, 132, 189

Saint-Exupery, Antoine de, 139
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 177, 178
Schiller, Friedrich, 161, 165, 187-
88
Schuler, Alfred, 121, 122
science, attitudes toward, 28, 125. See
also technology
socialist and Bolshevik revolutions,
fascists' view of, 77
socialist rhetoric, borrowed by fascism,
27
Soviet Union, 2-3
Spain. See Franco
Spanish Falange, xiv
stereotypes, 48, 49, 62, 63, 67
as symbols, 67
symbolism, 49, 59, 83
occult, 123-25
in speeches, 48
symbol(s), 46, 49. See also national
symbols and myths
Nazi, 20, 4243
racial, 57, 59, 62, 67, 123-24
sun as symbol, 123-24

Talmon, Jacob, 4. See also Jacobins
technology, 137-39
attitudes toward, 28
theosophy, 123-25, 128
Thing theater, 157
"Third Force, " 7-9, 11, 18, 116
"Third Way, " 9, 40, 42
"totalitarian democracy, " 4-5
totalitarianism, 4-6
traditionalism, xvii, 10, 19-20, 114, 143

urbanism, 122, 129
utopianism, xv, 10, 30, 66-67, 72, 88.
See also apocalypticism

Valois, George, 89

war, acceptance of, 16
war experience, 15-17
deification of fallen soldiers, 16, 84
wartime camaraderie, xvi, 18, 30
Weimar Republic, 184
will of the people, general, 70-72,
74-75, 78, 79, 83, 148
Winckelmann, J.J., 188
women, 50-51
aesthetics of, 51
artistic portrayals of, 188-89
contradictory attitudes toward, 193
devaluation of, 178-79
ideal of beauty in, 188-89, 193
stereotyped passive role of, xvi,
188
world view, importance of, 22

youth, fascism as movement of, 13-14,
83, 87, 150, 153, 170-72. See also
Hitler Youth

Ziegler, Leopold, 193
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