Modernism Revisited Five Fascist Modernism

8/3/2019 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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Modernism Revisited Five Fascist Modernism

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