67 Nazi propagandists “aestheticized politics”: For Benjamin, the only way to counter fascism’s aestheticized politics was to “politicize aesthetics.” He wrote of this phenomenon in the landmark essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 1935. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s discussion of Benjamin in Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner (1990; repr., Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).
Zeev Sternhell writes, “[The fascists] turned their movement into both an ‘ethic and a system of aesthetics.’ ” Sternhell, 249. Virginia Woolf famously made the connection between advertising and fascism in Three Guineas: “With the example then that [Fascists] give us of the power of medals, symbols, orders, and even, it would seem, of decorated ink-pots to hypnotize the human mind it must be our aim not to submit ourselves to such hypnotism. We must extinguish the coarse glare of advertisement and publicity.” Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938; repr., San Diego: Harvest-Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966), 114. I thank Susan Gubar for drawing this remark to my attention.
68 nothing could compete with fascism: Historian Fred Inglis, who writes of fascism’s relationship to celebrity, remarks: “These spectacles and performances … were not the adjuncts and externalities of power, they were as much Fascism in action as beating Jews in the street and fixing louvers to the tail-fins of Stuka fighter-bombers so that they howled when diving.” Fred Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 169.
69 “The masses are made to take”: Sontag, 97.
70 Riefenstahl’s films of the crowds: Robert Brasillach wrote eloquently of these crowds, “where the rhythmic movements of armies and throngs seemed like a single heartbeat.” Brasillach, Notre Avant-Guerre (1941), 282, quoted in Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left, 236. Lacoue-Labarthe explains, “The political model of National Socialism is the Gesamtkunstwerk because, as Dr. Goebbels very well knew, the Gesamt kunstwerk is a political project, since it was the intention of the Festspiel of Bayreuth to be for Germany what the Greater Dionysia was for Athens and for Greece as a whole.… The political itself is instituted and constituted (and regularly regrounds itself) in and as a work of art.” Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics, 61. Mussolini spoke openly about imagining his power to “sculpt” the crowd as an artist would. See Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 21, originally published in Emil Ludvig, Colloqui con Mussolini (Milan: Mondadori, 1932), 125.
71 “the understanding of life”: Lacoue-Labarthe, Le Mythe nazi, 64–65.
72 grand and racially pristine: Theorist of fascism Alfred Rosenberg wrote, in The Myth of the Twentieth Century, “The great Aryans of Antiquity are the Greeks, that is, they are the people that produced myth as art.” Quoted in Lacoue-Labarthe, Le Mythe nazi, 62.
73 “utopia of blood and soil”: Gobineau was the author of the 1855 racist tract “An Essay on the Inequality of the Races.” Sorel was famous for his 1908 anti-parliamentarian Reflections on Violence. The phrase “Utopia of blood and soil” belongs to George Mosse. See Mosse, The Image of Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 167.
Umberto Eco refers to fascism’s use of this myth as a “cult of tradition,” which was misremembered by means of a reinvented or “modernized” past. Eco, 78. Brasillach retained an impression of Hitler’s Germany as “the surprising mythology of a new religion.” Brasillach, Notre Avant-Guerre, 277–78, quoted in Sternhell, 250.
74 emulate the story’s heroic figures: Lacoue-Labarthe, explaining the dangerous power of the Nazi myth, recalls that Plato famously banned the narration of most myths (those he deemed unsuitable, including much of Homer) from his Republic—precisely because of the risks of enticing spectators to imitate the corrupt behavior recounted:
[Plato’s] condemnation of the role of myths presumes that we see in them in fact a specific function of exemplarity. Myth is fiction in the strongest sense, in the sense of active fashioning, or as Plato says, in the sense of “plasticity”: it is therefore a fashioning whose role is to propose, if not to impose, models or types … which an individual, a city, or an entire people might seize upon and with which they might then identify themselves.… Mythic power is … that of the projection of an image with which one can identify.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Le Mythe nazi, 32, 35, and 54.
75 the Greek-Aryan superman: In his 1930 Myth of the Twentieth Century, Alfred Rosenberg explained how the myth justified the Nazi project of racial “cleansing”:
This is the task of our century: to create a new human type from a new life-Mythus. Today an epoch begins in which world this story must be rewritten.… A life-feeling, both young and yet known in ancient times … a Weltanschauung is being born.… The dream of Nordic humanity in Hellas was the most beautiful of all.… Today a new belief is arising: the Mythus of the blood; the belief that the godly essence of man itself is to be defended through the blood; that belief which embodies the clearest knowledge that the Nordic race represents that which has overthrown and replaced the old sacraments.
Alfred Rosenberg, Selected Writings, ed. Robert Pois (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 34, 45, 47, 82. Originally published in 1938 as Der Mythus des 20 Jahrhunderts.
76 apparent cultural gravitas: Fascism, writes Robert Paxton, “is NOT a real ‘ism’, no doctrine, no manifesto, no founding thinker.… Their only moral yardstick is the prowess of the race, of the nation, of the community.” Paxton, “The Five Stages of Fascism,” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 1 (March 1998): 1–23.
77 physical, visceral manipulations famously used: On fascism’s borrowings of commodity culture and its pleasures, Lutz Koepnick writes, “The Third Reich not only promised new career opportunities but also new tactics of diversion and commodity consumption. Apart from short periods of political euphoria, the allure of racing cars, radios, Coca-Cola … and Hollywood-style comedies—rather than the choreography of Riefenstahl spectacles—provided the stuff dreams were made of.” Koepnick, 52.
78 as Susan Sontag famously pointed out: The sexuality was not openly acknowledged. All the nude male imagery was required to have a veneer of superhuman perfection intended to defuse the inherent sexual charge. Sontag was among the first to observe the sexual nature of fascist aesthetics, which she describes as “petrified eroticism” and “prurient.” She points particularly to the homoerotic nature of fascism, with its muscular men and tight leather uniforms. To support her point she quotes a passage from Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1949 novel, Mort dans l’âme, when the French protagonist, Daniel, watches with erotic delectation as the Germans march into Paris. Irène Némirovsky’s novel Suite Française gives equal time to the erotic appeal of the German soldiers to French women. See Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française, trans. Sandra Smith (New York: Vintage, 2007).
79 develop their cult followings: German film director Hans-Jürgen Syberberg called Hitler “the greatest filmmaker of all time.” Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, “Hitler”: A Film from Germany, trans. J. Neugroschel (London: Littlehampton, 1982), 109.
80 skiing the Alps bare chested: “Mussolini became the living expression of the nation. Mussolini’s body, thus his virility, endlessly paraded in photographs, posters, newsreels, the press and advertising, as well as in public rallies, came to represent the social body as a whole.” Saunders, 236. For an excellent study of Mussolini and the Italian fascists’ use of media and the cult of personality, see also Falasca-Zamponi’s Fascist Spectacle and Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising Under Fascism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
81 as unrelentingly as Mussolini’s: In fact, Hitler had studied Mussolini’s rise to power and took him as his model. Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw writes, “Mussolini’s triumph made a ‘deep impression on’ Hitler. Gave him a role model. Referring to Mussolini, less than a month after the March on Rome, Hitler reportedly stated:
‘so will it be with us.’ ” Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936: Hubris (New York: Norton, 1998), 729, citing Hitler: Samtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905–1924, ed. Eberhard Jäckel and Axel Kuhn (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980). In her 1936 multipart profile of Hitler for The New Yorker, Janet Flanner captured this canny use of media:
“Though Hitler takes the worst photographs in the world, there are 70,000 of them, all different poses, in the Berlin files of Reichsbildberichterstatter Heinrich Hoffmann, who is the official Nazi photographer.… Nazi Germany uses the camera lens more concentratedly and professionally than any other region on earth except Hollywood.” Janet Flanner, “Führer III,” The New Yorker, March 14, 1936, 23–26.
82 personally signed each man’s sleeve: Flanner, 24.
83 a paragon of masculine virtues: Historian of fascism George Mosse writes, “Every man must aspire to a classical standard of beauty, and as he built and sculptured his body (and we must remember the part played by physical exercise in the aesthetics of fascism), his mind would come to encompass all the manly virtues which the fascists prized so highly.” George Mosse, “Fascist Aesthetics and Society: Some Considerations,” Journal of Contemporary History 31, no. 2 (April 1996): 245–52.
On the insistence of youth in fascist ideology, see also Walter Laqueur, Fascism: Past, Present, Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996): “Physical exercise played a crucial part in forming the fascist man; fascism accepted the by then traditional notion that a fit body was the sign of a manly spirit. The insistence on youth was at least as emphatic. Nazism, like Italian Fascism, appeared as a movement of youth; to wit, the Italian anthem was ‘Giovinezza.’ Most Nazi leaders were in their late twenties and thirties. Goebbels was made head of the Nazi organization in Berlin at age 28 and became minister of propaganda at 36. Himmler became head of the SS at 29.” Laqueur, 29.
“The liberty of the soul,” wrote Alfred Rosenberg, “is Gestalt [form or figure]. Gestalt is always [delimited by form]. This limitation is determined by race. But race is the externalization of a particular soul.” Rosenberg, 529. Rosenberg’s emphatic use of “Gestalt” here—meaning plastic form—draws a pointed contrast with the opposite concept it tacitly conjures: the deformity of the Jews, who were believed to be so hyper-intellectualized that they devolved into useless, distasteful abstraction.
84 “(female) interior”: Klaus Thevelveit, Male Fantasies, vol. 1, Women, Floods, Bodies, History, trans. Stephen Conway (1977; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 434.
85 urgings about exercise and fitness: Embracing the notion that national decay could be fought with a fit citizenry, Vichy in particular promoted renewed attention to sports. See Francine Muel-Dreyfus, Vichy and the Eternal Feminine, trans. Kathleen Johnson (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001). See also Dominique Veillon, La Mode sous l’Occupation (Paris: Editions Payot, 2001): “Vichy, obsessed by the idea of physical decadence in French society, tries to develop a true politics of sports. Most women’s magazines agree on one point. That one of the causes of France’s degeneration is the forgetting or neglecting of the body. The national ‘revolution’ must be accomplished through a ‘renaissance of the French body.’ ” Veillon, 229.
86 Breker frequently dined: Breker’s solo exhibition at the Orangerie, which opened in Paris in May 1942, attracted more than eight thousand French visitors. George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 174. In a review of the exhibition, Abel Bonnard, Vichy’s minister for education, gushed, “Monsieur Arno Breker, you are the sculptor of heroes.… The hero is Man revealed not only in his superiority, but in his plenitude. You reveal the effort of those who work and of those who struggle.… These grand statues stand like watchmen at the mast, contemplating the horizon of the centuries, while men exist merely within the horizon of days.” Abel Bonnard review of Breker, reprinted in La France Allemande: Paroles du collaborationisme français, 1933–1945, ed. Pascal Ory (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 226, originally published in Nouvelles continentales, May 1942.
87 acclaim beyond Italy and Germany: Artist and reserve SS officer Karl Diebitsch, along with graphic designer Walter Heck, created many aspects of the fascist regalia, including the all-black uniform. Umberto Eco puts fascist fashion in the grandest possible company: “Italian Fascism was the first to create a … style of dress—which enjoyed greater success abroad than Armani, Benetton, or Versace today.” Eco, 72.
88 any potentially emasculating effect: As Fred Inglis notes, “The accouterments of fascism as designed in Italy and Germany were characterized by terrific style. This expressed itself, on the one hand, by such flashy details as the big, contrastively coloured lapels of senior officers’ greatcoats, their polished riding boots, and their bowed riding breeches; on the other hand, this dandyism was placed beyond criticism by the brute power and mass of metal and thunderous noise commanded by the troops of tanks which were overture to the appearance onstage of a single, solitary, and heroic leader.” Inglis, 166.
89 “the legitimate exercise of violence”: Sontag, 97.
90 “All young men who joined”: Walter Schellenberg, The Labyrinth: Memoirs of Walter Schellenberg: Hitler’s Chief of Counterintelligence, trans. Louis Hagen (New York: HarperCollins, 1984), 3–4. Originally published in German in 1956 by Harper and Brothers.
91 early induction into the SS: Reinhard Spitzy, So haben wir das Reich verspielt (Munich: L. Muller, 1987). Published in English as Spitzy, How We Squandered the Reich, trans. G. T. Waddington (Norfolk, UK: Michael Russell, 1997).
92 “[I]n the SS”: Reinhard Spitzy, “The Master Race: Nazism Takes Over German South,” Master Race, PBS television series, first aired June 15, 1998, produced and directed by Jonathan Lewis.
93 even to civilian audiences: The particular color of the Nazi uniform acquired symbolic, transmissible power, too. “Brown” and “Nazi” became interchangeable terms. Crowds attending a Hitler rally were described in the press as a “brown mass,” and Hitler himself spoke of his “brown SA men,” his “brown army,” or “brown wall.”
“A female Nazi proudly defined herself as one of Hitler’s ‘little brown mice.’ By the summer of 1933 opponents spoke of the brown steamroller that had flattened public life.” Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 69.
94 all emblazoned with the swastika: See Koonz, 69. See also Irene Guenther, Nazi Chic: Fashioning Women in the Third Reich (London: Berg, 2004), 136.
95 under a single graphic symbol: See Flanner, “Führer III,” 26.
96 “a civic religion”: The term belongs to George Mosse.
97 displaying Hitler’s photograph: George Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars Through the Third Reich (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975), 206.
98 heart of the totalitarian project: Jacques Delarue translates the term as “uniformization,” and writes, “Gleichschaltung … in other words the total Nazification of Germany [consisted of] the submission of the people, and the subordination of the State to the all-powerful Party.” Delarue, The Gestapo: A History of Horror, trans. Mervyn Savill (New York: William Morrow, 1964), 10. Originally published as Histoire de la Gestapo (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1962). See also Guenther, Nazi Chic.
99 suppression of trade unions: Thomas Saunders defines Gleichschaltung as “a vision of citizens and the economy harnessed in perfectly coordinated fashion to a national purpose.” Saunders, 237. Claudia Koonz writes, “The word adapted by the Nazis to describe this unique process, Gleichschaltung, has no equivalent in other languages. ‘Nazification’ ‘coordination’ ‘integration’ and ‘bringing into line’… The removal of anyone who ‘stained’ or ‘soiled’ the nation was ‘switching them off.’… A German citizen, reporting anonymously for a London paper, captured both the mechanical and biological overtones of Gleichschaltung, when he explained, ‘It means that th
e same stream will blow through the ethnic body politic.’ ” Koonz, 70, citing “Die Erneuerung der Universität,” Spectator, June 9, 1933, 831–32.
100 mechanisms that propelled fascism: Mario Lupano and Alessandra Vaccari explore the deep connections between fashion and fascism in their beautifully illustrated and provocative study, Fashion at the Time of Fascism: Italian Modernist Lifestyle 1922–1943 (Bologna: Damiani, 2009). They write of the “grounds for a comparison between fashion and fascism [and] their mutual interests … [which] include totalitarian ambition, the sense of beginning, the epoch-making factor and an emphasis placed on creation.” Lupano and Vaccari, 8.
101 Both play upon the struggle: Georg Simmel, founding father of fashion theory, was the first to articulate this dual purpose: ‘ “Fashion is the imitation of an example.… At the same time it satisfies in no less degree the need for differentiation.” Georg Simmel, “Fashion,” International Quarterly 10 (New York, 1904): 130–55, 296.
102 imitate a given behavior: Fashion theorist René König makes the connection quite plain when he describes fashion as “a special form of regulated behavior … [in which] imitation, starting from an initial triggering action, creates mighty currents which cause uniform action among the masses.” René König, A La Mode: On the Social Psychology of Fashion, trans. F. Bradley (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 128. He might as well as have been recounting a Nazi rally.
103 Hitler insisted they be redesigned: Guenther, 120.
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