modernism revisited five fascist modernism
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MODERNISM AND FASCISM
MODERNISM REVISITED
Roger Griffin
Lecture Four
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Fascism as reactionary
The left-wing reluctance to acknowledge agenuinely modernist radical right inaesthetics is corroborated by axiomaticassumptions of fascisms (for Marxists)anti-revolutionary, backward-looking
relationship to History and hostility togenuine culture (a hostility epitomizedin Nazi book-burning and pogromsagainst modernist art).
Ernst Bloch, himself a modernist writer,sums up this approach in his essay
Inventory of a Revolutionary Faade of1933 (in The Heritage of our Time, 1991)which maintains that the enemy [theNazi] is not content with torturing andkilling workers. He not only wants tosmash the red front but also strips the
jewellery off the supposed corpse. Forexample the burning of the Reichstag
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Nazism for Bloch has created a revolutionary faade with
trappings of the Paris Commune. It is a false siren
song, an illusion, a deception, a Little Red Riding
Hood who has stolen from the Communists only theemblems of revolution: the colour red, the
procession, and the dangerous songs, the forest of
flags.
This assumption is also crystallized in what has become acanonical text for left-wing aesthetic theorists: the
cryptic assertion at the end of Walter Benjamins 1936
essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction that [Mankinds] self-alienation has
reached such a degree that it can experience its own
destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.
This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering
aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.
Under Fascism art is thus essentially a mystification of self-
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The Aestheticization of(reactionary) Politics?
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More reactionarymodernism?
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The official liberal view offascist modernism
Dan Cruickshank must have confirmed thepreconceptions of most educated viewersin his widely seen TV series Marvels of theModern Age when (having dedicated awhole programme to the wonders ofBolshevik modernism) he asserted in hiscommentary on the Casa Malaparte thatthis eccentric but brilliant statement,
both personal and social, defied thetimes since it embodied modernism atits wildest and most solitary. After all, hewent on, Mussolini, like Hitler had
suppressed modernism, yet
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Fascism as PoliticalModernism
According to the approach expoundedin Modernism and Fascism, radicalfascism in its many forms was a
palingenetic response to thebreakdown of the West and itsnomicidal postwar environment, andhence a form of programmatic
modernism This explains the elective affinity that
existed with a) modern technology; b)aesthetic modernism in Italy; c) some
modern artists (futurists, Ezra Pound,
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Elevation of Giuseppe Terragnis 1936 Casa del Fascio, Como
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Dadaist painting by Julius Evola, 1920
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Example of Futurist
aeropittura
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Aeropittura
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Schemes for sacred spaceunder Fascism: Palazzo del
Littorio Project
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University la SapienziaRome
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OUT OF COPYRIGHT
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A Fascist modernist arch
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St Louis Gateway Arch
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Nazi Modernism
Nazism officially hostile to aestheticmodernism because of its identification withdecadence
A number of aesthetic modernists weredrawn to Nazism because of its futuraldynamic and promise of an anthropologicalrevolution:
Johst, Benn, Orff, Nolde, Barlach van der Rohe, Gropius stayed on in Nazi
Germany Goebbels drawn to Van Gogh and Edvard
Munch Some Nazis saw expressionism as Aryan modernist design continued after 1933
the modernism of Nazi neoclassicism the modernism of the Nazi cult of Wagner and
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One of Albert Speers Cathedrals of Light, Berlin,1937
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Maquette of Monument to Work byJosef Thorak (unbuilt)
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The location envisaged for Thoraks sculpture
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The House of German Art
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National War Monument
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Market Building Franfurt
b ildi l ith fi fl th t t d
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building complex with five floors that was createdby the Nazi's as holiday resort for its Nazi wing Kraftdurch Freude KdF "Strength through joy". 10000 2
bed rooms with sea view supposed to have brought
holiday makers during the 3rd Reich time "joy".2000 employees were planned to be the host of this
massive Nazi monster.
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Conclusions
This series of talks has argued that: The relationship between aesthetic
experimentation/innovation andutopianism/innovation in society and
politics is to be rethought It is heuristically useful to extend the
category of modernism to embrace non-aesthetic phenomena
The human sciences should be de-ghettoized and taught in atransdisciplinary framework in which art,society and politics as are treated as aintimately connected in the modern age
as expressions of the liminoid state of
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