The most interesting aspects of the story lie between the two extremes of coercion and popularity. It might be instructive to consider fascist regimes’ management of workers, who were surely the most recalcitrant part of the population. It is clear that both Fascism and Nazism enjoyed some success in this domain. According to Tim Mason, the ultimate authority on German workers under Nazism, the Third Reich “contained" German workers by four means: terror, division, some concessions, and integration devices such as the famous Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude) leisure-time organization.84
Let there be no doubt that terror awaited workers who resisted directly. It was the cadres of the German Socialist and Communist parties who filled the first concentration camps in 1933, before the Jews. Since socialists and communists were already divided, it was not hard for the Nazis to create another division between those workers who continued to resist and those who decided to try to live normal lives. The suppression of autonomous worker organizations allowed fascist regimes to address workers individually rather than collectively.85 Soon, demoralized by the defeat of their unions and parties, workers were atomized, deprived of their usual places of sociability, and afraid to confide in anyone.
Both regimes made some concessions to workers—Mason’s third device for worker “containment." They did not simply silence them, as in traditional dictatorships. After power, official unions enjoyed a monopoly of labor representation. The Nazi Labor Front had to preserve its credibility by actually paying some attention to working conditions. Mindful of the 1918 revolution, the Third Reich was willing to do absolutely anything to avoid unemployment or food shortages. As the German economy heated up in rearmament, there was even some wage creep. Later in the war, the arrival of slave labor, which promoted many German workers to the status of masters, provided additional satisfactions.
Mussolini was particularly proud of how workers would fare under his corporatist constitution. The Labor Charter (1927) promised that workers and employers would sit down together in a “corporation" for each branch of the economy, and submerge class struggle in the discovery of their common interests. It looked very imposing by 1939 when a Chamber of Corporations replaced parliament. In practice, however, the corporative bodies were run by businessmen, while the workers’ sections were set apart and excluded from the factory floor.86
Mason’s fourth form of “containment"—integrative devices—was a specialty of fascist regimes. Fascists were past masters at manipulating group dynamics: the youth group, the leisure-time association, party rallies. Peer pressure was particularly powerful in small groups. There the patriotic majority shamed or intimidated nonconformists into at least keeping their mouths shut. Sebastian Haffner recalled how his group of apprentice magistrates was sent in summer 1933 on a retreat, where these highly educated young men, mostly non-Nazis, were bonded into a group by marching, singing, uniforms, and drill. To resist seemed pointless, certain to lead nowhere but to prison and an end to the dreamed-of career. Finally, with astonishment, he observed himself raising his arm, fitted with a swastika armband, in the Nazi salute. 87
These various techniques of social control were successful. Mussolini was broadly supported from 1929 at least up through his victory in Ethiopia in 1936.88 Accommodation with the Catholic Church was central to this support. The Lateran Treaties concluded by Mussolini and Pope Pius XI in February 1929 ended nearly sixty years of conflict between the Italian state and the Vatican with mutual recognition and the payment by Italy of a substantial indemnity for its seizure of papal lands in 1870. Italy recognized Roman Catholicism as “the religion of most Italians." The once anticlerical Mussolini, who had written a youthful novel called The Cardinal’s Mistress and, at twenty-one, in a debate with a Swiss pastor, had given God—if He existed—five minutes to strike him dead,89 had submitted in 1925 to a belated church marriage to his longtime common-law companion Rachele Guidi and to the baptism of their children. In elections on March 24, 1929, the Church’s explicit support helped produce a vote of 98 percent in favor of the Fascist list of candidates (there were no others) for parliament.90 Fascism paid a high price in the long term for the Church’s aid to consensus: as the hare of Fascist dynamism wore itself out, the tortoise of Catholic parish life and culture plodded along to become the basis of Christian democratic rule in Italy after 1945.
The other ingredient of Mussolini’s popularity in the middle years was his victory over Ethiopia in summer 1936, the last—it turned out—of his military successes. Popular approval of the Italian Fascist regime declined only when Mussolini’s expansionist foreign policy began to produce defeats. The Duce’s need to demonstrate a “special relation with history" required him to mount a dynamic foreign policy. Beginning with the defeat of his “volunteer" armored force by Spanish Republicans and international volunteers at Guadalajara, in the hills northeast of Madrid, in March 1937, however, foreign policy provided more humiliation than reinforcement for Mussolini’s regime.91
The Nazi regime, too, aroused considerable popular enthusiasm within Germany by the mid-1930s. Full employment plus a long string of bloodless foreign policy victories raised approval far above the Nazis’ initial 44 percent in the March 1933 elections. Although Germans grumbled a lot about restrictions and shortages, and although the outbreak of war in September 1939 was received glumly,92 the Hitler cult was exempt from the criticism reserved for party officials and bureaucrats.
Fascist regimes were particularly successful with young people. Fascist arrival in power sent a shock wave down through society to each neighborhood and village. Young Italians and Germans had to face the destruction of their social organizations (if they came from socialist or communist families) as well as the attraction of new forms of sociability. The temptation to conform, to belong, and to achieve rank in the new fascist youth and leisure organizations (which I will discuss more fully below) was very powerful. 93 Especially when fascism was still new, joining in its marching and uniformed squads was a way to declare one’s independence from smothering bourgeois homes and boring parents.94 Some young Germans and Italians of otherwise modest attainments found satisfaction in pushing other people around. 95 Fascism was more fully than any other political movement a declaration of youthful rebellion, though it was far more than that.
Women and men could hardly be expected to react in the same way to regimes that put a high priority on restoring women to the traditional spheres of homemaking and motherhood. Some conservative women approved. The female vote for Hitler was substantial (though impossible to measure precisely), and scholars have argued sharply about whether women should be considered accomplices or victims of his regime.96 In the end, women escaped from the roles Fascism and Nazism projected for them, less by direct resistance than simply by being themselves, aided by modern consumer society. Jazz Age lifestyles proved more powerful than party propaganda. In Fascist Italy, Edda Mussolini and other modern young women smoked and asserted an independent lifestyle like young women everywhere after World War I, while also participating in the regime’s institutions.97 The Italian birth rate did not rise on the Duce’s command. Hitler could not keep his promise to remove women from the workforce when the time came to mobilize fully for war.
Intellectuals found their relationship with fascist regimes more strained than with early fascist movements. They had good reason to feel uncomfortable under the rule of former street fighters contemptuous of “professors examining things behind their glasses, idiots who raise unrealistic objections to every affirmation of doctrine."98 All the more so since these regimes regarded the arts and sciences not as a domain of free creativity but as a national resource subject to tight state control. Since leaders supposedly had superhuman mental powers, fascist militants preferred to settle intellectual matters by a reductio ad ducem.99
Fascist regimes also had the power to reward tractable and celebrated intellectuals with positions and honors. Where the regime was ready to leave a fair amount of leeway to intellectuals, as
in Fascist Italy, a wide range of responses was possible. Some liberal and socialist critics rejected the regime totally, in the face of arrest100 or even death,101 joined soon by the untouchable liberal eminence Benedetto Croce; at the other extreme, a few authentically distinguished intellectuals like the philosopher Giovanni Gentile,102 the historian Gioacchino Volpe, and the statistician/ demographer Corrado Gini103 offered enthusiastic support.
Mussolini never needed to crack down severely on cultural life because most intellectuals accepted some degree of accommodation with his regime, if only partially and occasionally. Of the signers of Croce’s Manifesto of the Intellectuals of 1925, ninety could be found in 1931 writing for the very official Enciclopedia italiana.104 When university professors were required to take an oath to the regime during the academic year 1931–32, only 11 out of 1,200 refused.105 Only after the racial legislation of 1938, about which I talk more in the next chapter, did a significant number of Italian intellectuals emigrate.
Intellectuals faced more intense pressure in Nazi Germany. Nazi ideologues attempted to transform thought, as in the German physics that was supposed to supplant the “Jewish physics" of Einstein106 and the “German Christianity" that was supposed to purge Christian doctrine of its Jewish influences. Substantial numbers of intellectual emigrants included some non-Jews (Thomas Mann was only the most celebrated). The physicist Max Planck managed to remain active in Germany, defend some measure of independence and that of some of his colleagues, and retain the respect of the international scientific community.107 Still other prominent intellectuals—among them the philosopher Martin Heidegger, the sociologist Hans Freyer, 108 and the legal scholar Carl Schmitt109—found sufficient common ground with Nazism to accept official assignments. Within the range of compromise, accommodation, and quiet reticence adopted by most intellectuals, some positions remain obscure even today: Did the Nobel Prize physicist Werner Heisenberg weaken the German atomic energy program from within, as he claimed, or did it fail because of inadequate funding, changed priorities, the departure of important Jewish colleagues like Lise Meitner, and Heisenberg’s own erroneous overestimate of the amount of plutonium required to operate an atomic pile? 110
Even if public enthusiasm was never as total as fascists promised their conservative allies, most citizens of fascist regimes accepted things as they were. The most interesting cases are people who never joined the party, and who even objected to certain aspects of the regime, but who accommodated because its accomplishments overlapped with some of the things they wanted, while the alternatives all seemed worse. The eminent German orchestral conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler was penalized after the war for having been photographed with a beaming Hitler, but in fact his relations with the Nazi regime were complicated. Furtwängler never joined the party. He tried in two tense face-to-face meetings to persuade the Führer to relax his ban on Jewish music and musicians. He was removed from some of his conducting posts for persisting in playing the atonal music of Hindemith. But he shared the Nazis’ assumptions that “music arises from deep and secret forces which are rooted in the people of the nation"111—especially the German nation. It was unthinkable for him to leave Germany or cease his musical activity. He was indeed a privileged person under Nazism, for even though Hitler knew of Furtwängler’s reservations, he also understood enough about music to realize that Furtwängler was the best conductor in Germany.112
By accepting accommodations of this sort, fascist regimes were able to retain the loyalty of nationalists and conservatives who did not agree with everything the party was doing.
The Fascist “Revolution”
The radical rhetoric of the early fascist movements led many observers, then and since, to suppose that once in power the fascist regimes would make sweeping and fundamental changes in the very bases of national life. In practice, although fascist regimes did indeed make some breathtaking changes, they left the distribution of property and the economic and social hierarchy largely intact (differing fundamentally from what the word revolution had usually meant since 1789).
The reach of the fascist “revolution" was restricted by two factors. For one thing, even at their most radical, early fascist programs and rhetoric had never attacked wealth and capitalism as directly as a hasty reading might suggest.113 As for social hierarchy, fascism’s leadership principle effectively reinforced it, though fascists posed some threat to inherited position by advocating the replacement of the tired bourgeois elite by fascist “new men." The handful of real fascist outsiders, however, went mostly into the parallel organizations.
The scope of fascist change was further limited by the disappearance of many radicals during the period of taking root and coming to power. As fascist movements passed from protest and the harnessing of disparate resentments to the conquest of power, with its attendant alliances and compromises, their priorities changed, along with their functions. They became far less interested in assembling the discontented than in mobilizing and unifying national energies for national revival and aggrandizement. This obliged them to break many promises made to the socially and economically discontented during the first years of fascist recruitment. The Nazis in particular broke promises to the small peasants and artisans who had been the mainstay of their electoral following, and to favor urbanization and industrial production. 114
Despite their frequent talk about “revolution," fascists did not want a socioeconomic revolution. They wanted a “revolution of the soul," and a revolution in the world power position of their people. They meant to unify and invigorate and empower their decadent nation—to reassert the prestige of Romanità or the German Volk or Hungarism or other group destiny. For that purpose they believed they needed armies, productive capacity, order, and property. Force their country’s traditional productive elements into subjection, perhaps; transform them, no doubt; but not abolish them. The fascists needed the muscle of these bastions of established power to express their people’s renewed unity and vitality at home and on the world stage. Fascists wanted to revolutionize their national institutions in the sense that they wanted to pervade them with energy, unity, and willpower, but they never dreamed of abolishing property or social hierarchy.
The fascist mission of national aggrandizement and purification required the most fundamental changes in the nature of citizenship and in the relation of citizens to the state since the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first giant step was to subordinate the individual to the community. Whereas the liberal state rested on a compact among its citizens to protect individual rights and freedoms, the fascist state embodied the national destiny, in service to which all the members of the national group found their highest fulfillment. We have seen that both regimes found some distinguished nonfascist intellectuals ready to support this position.
In fascist states, individual rights had no autonomous existence. The State of Law—the Rechtsstaat, the état de droit —vanished, along with the principles of due process by which citizens were guaranteed equitable treatment by courts and state agencies. A suspect acquitted in a German court of law could be rearrested by agents of the regime at the courthouse door and put in a concentration camp without any further legal procedure.115 A fascist regime could imprison, despoil, and even kill its inhabitants at will and without limitation. All else pales before that radical transformation in the relation of citizens to public power.
It follows almost as an anticlimax that fascist regimes contained no mechanisms by which citizens could choose representatives or otherwise influence policy. Parliaments lost power, elections were replaced by yes-no plebiscites and ceremonies of affirmation, and leaders were given almost unlimited dictatorial powers.
Fascists claimed that the division and decline of their communities had been caused by electoral politics and especially by the Left’s preparations for class warfare and proletarian dictatorship. Communities so afflicted, the fascists taught, could not be unified by the play of naturally harmonious huma
n interests, as the liberals had believed. They had to be unified by state action, using persuasion and organization if possible, using force if necessary. The job required what the French sociologist Émile Durkheim called “mechanical solidarity" rather than “organic solidarity." Fascist regimes thus contained multiple agencies for shaping and molding the citizenry into an integrated community of disciplined, hardened fighters. The fascist state was particularly attentive to the formation of youth, jealously attempting to retain a monopoly of this function (a matter that brought fascist regimes and the Catholic Church into frequent conflict).
Fascist regimes set out to make the new man and the new woman (each in his or her proper sphere). It was the challenging task of fascist educational systems to manufacture “new" men and women who were simultaneously fighters and obedient subjects. Educational systems in liberal states, alongside their mission to help individuals realize their intellectual potential, were already committed to shaping citizens. Fascist states were able to use existing educational personnel and structures with only a shift of emphasis toward sports and physical and military training. Some of the schools’ traditional functions were absorbed, to be sure, by party parallel organizations like the obligatory youth movements. All children in fascist states were supposed to be enrolled automatically in party organizations that structured their lives from childhood through university. Close to 70 percent of Italians aged six to twenty-one in the northern cities of Turin, Genoa, and Milan belonged to Fascist youth organizations, though the proportion was much lower in the undeveloped south.116 Hitler was even more determined to take young Germans away from their traditional socializers—parents, schoolteachers, churches—and their traditional spontaneous amusements. “These boys," he told the Reichstag on December 4, 1938, “join our organization at the age of ten and get a breath of fresh air for the first time; then, four years later, they move from the Jungvolk to the Hitler Youth and there we keep them for another four years. And then we are even less prepared to give them back into the hands of those who create our class and status barriers, rather we take them immediately into the Party, into the Labor Front, into the SA or the SS . . . and so on."117 Between the end of 1932 and the beginning of 1939, the Hitlerjugend expanded its share of the ten-to-eighteen age group from 1 percent to 87 percent. 118 Once out in the world, the citizens of a fascist state found the regime watching over their leisure-time activities as well: the Dopolavoro in Italy and the Kraft durch Freude in Germany.
The Anatomy of Fascism Page 19