Fascism and the masses: the revolt against the last human, 1848-1945 [First published] 9780815385851, 9781351179997, 0815385854, 1351179993

Table of contents :
Introduction: The Masses and the Fascist Political Unconscious 1. The Rise of the Last Human I: The Formation of Mass Society 2. The Rise of the Last Human II: The Opposition to Mass Society 3. Fascism and Mass Politics 4. Fascism and Mass Society I: Cultural Questions 5. Fascism and Mass Society II: Consumption, Leisure, Americanism 6. The Wandering Womb: Fascism and Gender 7. The Wandering Jew: National Socialism and AntisemitismEpilogue: Nietzsche, the Left, and the Last Humans

Citation preview

Fascism and the Masses

Highlighting the “mass” nature of interwar European fascism has long become commonplace. Throughout the years, numerous critics have construed fascism as a phenomenon of mass society, perhaps the ultimate expression of mass politics. This study deconstructs this long-standing perception. It argues that the entwining of fascism with the masses is a remarkable transubstantiation of a movement which understood and presented itself as a militant rejection of the ideal of mass politics, and indeed of mass society and mass culture more broadly conceived. Thus, rather than “massifying” society, fascism was the culmination of a long effort on the part of the élites and the middle classes to de-massify it. The perennially menacing mass—seen as plebeian and insubordinate— was to be drilled into submission, replaced by supposedly superior collective entities, such as the nation, the race, or the people. Focusing on Italian fascism and German National Socialism, but consulting fascist movements and individuals elsewhere in interwar Europe, the book incisively shows how fascism is best understood as ferociously resisting what Elias referred to as “the civilizing process” and what Marx termed “the social individual.” Fascism, notably, was a revolt against what Nietzsche described as the peaceful, middling and egalitarian “Last Humans.” Ishay Landa is Senior Lecturer of History at the Israeli Open University.

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Fascism and the Masses The Revolt Against the Last Humans, 1848–1945 Ishay Landa

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Ishay Landa to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-8153-8585-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-17999-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To Maria, Judith and Nomi

Contents

List of Figuresviii List of Tablesix Acknowledgmentsx

Introduction: The Masses and the Fascist Political Unconscious

1

1 The Rise of the Last Human I: The Formation of Mass Society

29

2 The Rise of the Last Human II: The Opposition to Mass Society

63

3 Fascism and Mass Politics

139

4 Fascism and Mass Society I: Cultural Questions

218

5 Fascism and Mass Society II: Consumption, Leisure, Americanism

278

6 The Wandering Womb: Fascism and Gender

320

7 The Wandering Jew: National Socialism and Antisemitism

354

8 Epilogue: Nietzsche, the Left and the Last Humans

400

Index421

Figures

1.1 The growth in Europe’s population (not including Russia), in town and country (1770–1980) 2.1 Liberty Leading the People. Eugène Delacroix [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons 3.1 “Compulsory Spontaneous Demonstration” 3.2 Population deterioration due to insufficient propagation of the valuable families 3.3 Left illustration (Helmut 1939: 29): “The menace of the under-man.” 3.4 Right Illustration (Helmut 1939: 25): “Number of children according to profession.” 4.1 Katia Mann’s childhood home, Pringsheim Palace in Munich 4.2 Gino Boccasile, propaganda poster 6.1 “Decline in matrimonial fertility” 6.2 The Jazz Singer (1) 6.3 The Jazz Singer (2) 7.1 “I’ve settled the fate of Jews—And of Germans” 7.2 “Entartete Musik”

45 80 184 203 204 205 221 240 336 346 347 375 391

Tables

1.1 Voting percentage for the German Social-Democratic Party (SDAP) between 1871–1912, in elections to the Reichstag 2.1 The political-demographic vicious cycle 3.1 New graduates in technical professions 3.2 National parliamentary elections, 1919–33

38 89 162 165

Acknowledgments

In the long process of writing this book, numerous people were greatly helpful to me. For their various incisive suggestions, kind encouragements and useful critiques, I wish to express deep gratitude to my esteemed colleagues, Michal Aharony, Stuart Cohen, Guy Elgat, Yuval Eylon, Donny Gluckstein, Nicolás González Varela, Daniel Gutwein, Zohar Kohavi, Guy Miron, Inbal Ofer, Iris Shagrir, Alberto Spektorowski, Bernhard H. F. Taureck and Shulamit Volkov. I thank Harrison Fluss, who read the entire manuscript and made many helpful suggestions. I am very grateful to Max Novick of Routledge for his interest in this project and support in having it published. I am especially obliged to Bat-Zion Eraqi Klorman, whose generous, wise and abiding assistance and encouragement were invaluable. Very special thanks to Luis, my Argentinean Yiddishe tate, for help beyond measure. As I was writing this book, I often felt that whatever value this study may hope to possess for understanding the horror of fascism, derives from the lessons he has given me all these years, in his infinitely kind and humane way. Ishay Landa Summer 2017

Introduction The Masses and the Fascist Political Unconscious

So I shall speak to them of the most contemptible human: and that is The Last Human. [. . .] Nobody grows rich or poor anymore: both are too much of a burden. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both are too much of a burden. No herdsman and one herd. Friedrich Nietzsche 1883 (1969: 45–46)1 The overman [. . .] will have to do battle with two enemies: the mass and God. The fight against the latter will not be dangerous. God is dead, isn’t it so?[. . . .] The mass [la Plebe] will pose greater obstacles to the development of the overman. The mass is too Christian and too egalitarian, and it will never comprehend that in order for the overman to ascend, a higher level of cruelty is required. [. . .] Nevertheless, the overman will overcome both the mass and God. He will impose on all his “leonine will.” Benito Mussolini 1908 (1958, vol. 1: 183) [Nietzsche’s] prophecy of the Last Human has found rapid fulfillment. It is accurate—except for the assertion that the Last Human lives longest. His age already lies behind us. Ernst Jünger 1934 (2008: 13)

In the historiography of fascism and in the way this political movement is understood across academic disciplines, and indeed “remembered” by the general public, few convictions have struck deeper roots, proving more persistent and influential, than the one affiliating fascism with “the masses.” As conservative and liberal critics—but also many radical ones—traditionally aver ever since the 1930s, interwar European fascism was essentially a case of “mass hysteria,” an over-boiling of the pernicious populist tendencies inherent in mass democracy. This book will revisit the long-standing notion that fascism was mass politics at its purest, least inhibited and most vehement form. Scrutinizing such a common argument, the aim will be to show, not only that it is in some respects

2  Introduction inadequate, as other historians have done before (see Hagtvet’s (1985) classical critique of mass society theories of fascism); going beyond specific reservations, it will be claimed that it is in fact useful to reverse the argument altogether and see fascism as the culmination of an effort on the part of the upper-class élites and their middle-class allies, especially since the 1848 revolutions, to subdue mass politics and its broader social, cultural and economic implications, to cut short the advances of the working class and the lower orders more generally. The notion of the masses, newly approached, can offer vital insight into the nature of one of the most fateful political and social phenomena of modern times. For that to happen, a critical confrontation will be necessary with the deeplyingrained association of fascism with the masses.

Fascism as a “Mass Beast”: An Abiding Trope Highlighting the “mass” nature of fascism has long become a commonplace, a mere statement of fact, as it were. Expounding on an alleged linkage between fascism and the French Revolution, the celebrated cultural historian George Mosse (1989: 7) could thus affirm, in one of his later essays: “The age of mass politics had begun. Stressing this aspect of the French revolution should clarify its importance to fascism.” It is as if the connection between mass politics and fascism were self-evident, a long-established historical fact, rather than a product of an interpretation, a story about fascism. Mosse’s formulations of the connection between mass democracy and fascism were quite bold. “The French Revolution,” he maintained, “stood at the beginning of a democratization of politics which climaxed in twentieth-century fascism” (Mosse 1989: 20). He spoke (14) of the “theory of democratic leadership adopted by Hitler and Mussolini” and asserted (16) that “Fascism and the French Revolution, each in its own way, saw itself as a democratic movement directed against the establishment.” On a similar vein, in his long essay published in 2000, the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk defined modernity as a continuing process whereby the masses learn to see themselves as the subject of history and strive to drag all of society down to their level, banishing any attempt at a higher and more individualistic culture. For Sloterdijk, the historical phenomenon of German fascism represents one of the most notable examples of such egalitarian uprisings. Nazism is described as “quasisocialism from the Right” embodying a fiercely anti-elitist egalitarianism. Hence the description of Hitler as “a container of mass-frustrations,” and the talk about “brother Hitler, extending his hand to all” (Sloterdijk 2000: 9–12). It was contended (26–27) that “the masses and the susceptible elements of the élites” took to him “since it was not necessary to look up to him [. . .]; since it was enough to direct one’s own

Introduction 3 resentful vulgarity and life-ineptitude to his own eye-level.” To make no mistake possible, within little more than three pages (25–28) the author associated Hitler no less than 15 times with adjectives implying his mass nature: with “lack of exceptionality,” “commonness” (three times), “crudity,” “triviality,” “vulgarity” (four times) “lack of achievement,” “plebeianism,” “life-incompetence,” “ignobility,” “lack of talent.” Yirmiyahu Yovel, also a philosopher, argued that Nietzsche’s historical misfortune was the mass usurpation of his ideas, which took place during the fascist era: Inevitably, modern politics is mass politics. [. . . .] Nietzsche’s Übermensch cannot be universalized—that is, vulgarized [. . . . Fascism, though abhorrent to Nietzsche, is one of the tragic caricatures of such an impossible combination of the aristocratic and the vulgar. As the shopkeeper, the bus driver, and the petty intellectual worker are endowed with “Dionysian” qualities and placed beyond good and evil, the result must assume onerous dimensions. (Yovel 1992: 132) Such exegesis of fascism is well embedded in a long and venerated tradition of critical thinking. A fractional list would include such notables as Wilhelm Reich, Emil Lederer, many members of the so-called Frankfurt School, William Kornhauser, Fritz Stern. Whatever differentiates these approaches in terms of political leanings—which can be conservative, liberal or radical—or disciplinary vantage-points—history, literature, sociology, psychoanalysis, philosophy and more—they are all united in the common perception of fascism, particularly Nazism, as a rising tide of vulgarity, gullibility and resentment, whereby the masses disastrously assume control of politics via their dictatorial proxies or, in the more leftist variations emphasizing “mass deception,” duped and manipulated into perpetrating terrifying acts of barbarism. The abiding fascination and influence of the theory is indebted in part to the fact that it was never simply a matter of dry scholarly representation, receiving throughout the decades vast representation in works of art, both literary and cinematic. These have contributed to imprint the image of fascism as a mass orgy on our collective retina. A classic example is the work of the great Austrian novelist, Hermann Broch, grappling with the phenomenon of Nazism in terms of “mass madness.”2 In Broch’s acclaimed modernist masterpiece, The Death of Virgil, the Roman poet Virgil provides the author a means of conveying his own condition as a pariah artist under Nazi rule, while the Emperor Augustus represents something of an ancient Führer, inasmuch as he stands for the prototypical mass leader. In one of the opening scenes, Virgil—old, sick, estranged and helpless—is carried upon a canopy onto the shore

4  Introduction of Brundisium where he is surrounded by the roaring “mass-beast” that celebrates Augustus’ birthday: [T]he moment had arrived which the brooding mass-beast had awaited to release its howl of joy, and now it broke loose, without pause, without end, victorious, violent, unbridled, fear-inspiring, magnificent, fawning, the mass worshipping itself in the person of the One. These were the masses for whom Caesar had lived, for whom the empire had been established, for whom Gaul was conquered [. . .] And these were the masses without whom no policy could be carried out and on whose support Augustus must rely if he wished to maintain himself, and naturally Augustus had no other wish. (Broch 2000: 22) The picture of ancient Rome is an easily decodable description of the Third Reich. And it is Augustus who is seen as governed, indeed victimized, by the masses. The mass is the genuine subject of the empire, “victorious, violent, unbridled,” ruling supreme by proxy of an emperor who is essentially a marionette, a projection of the mass. Behind the Nazi crowds, Broch continues to see the independent-minded masses forcefully carrying forward their project. The masses are not victims, nor even hoodwinked fools, but the hysteric perpetrators. In this reading of history, preceding the outbreak of the war (the novel, though published in 1945, was written mainly before the war, its fourth version completed in 1940), the leader is a faithful, indeed submissive, representative of the masses. Broch/Virgil senses palpably enough the evil of the empire/Reich, which is the immanent evil of the masses, terribly erupting from below, overwhelming the anxious individual: Evil, a tide of evil, an immense wave of unspeakable, inexpressible, incomprehensible evil seethed in the reservoir of the plaza; fifty thousand, a hundred thousand mouths yelled the evil out of themselves, yelled it to one another without hearing it, without knowing it was evil [. . .]. What a birthday greeting! Was he the only one to realize it? (Broch 2000: 22) The contrast between the sensitive, intimidated, bourgeois “individual-animal” and the amorphous, evil, “crowded, snorting herd-mass” is complete (48). Time and again, the masses—namely the people Virgil’s canopy is carried over—are portrayed as dehumanized lava of filth, hatred and vindictiveness, “a single conglomerate flood of creaturekind, a massed, formed, forming, boiling human-humus” (48). Instructively, although the masses in Broch’s vague definition are supposed to mean

Introduction 5 some cross-section of the populace at large, the greatest threat to Virgil is sensed when passing through a typical working-class slum. Painfully advancing through a “frenetic street of evil that would not end” (in thinly veiled Vienna going under the name of Brundisium), Virgil is abused by the poor residents of “Misery Street.” Not even the children emerge as truly human but are animalized, made interchangeable with the beasts (41): “This began gnome-fashion, that is to say with the children, yes with the goats too, neither stepping aside and so becoming entangled between the legs of the porters, the quadrupeds bleating, the little bipeds screaming.” The mass hysteria of fascism thus infects the children as well, even the animals. In Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951, one of the most influential treatises in the aftermath of the war, the view of fascism as mass driven was taken out of the realm of art and philosophy and transferred onto that of political thought (Arendt, it should be noted, got to know Broch in the United States in the 1940s and became well acquainted with his work). For Arendt, totalitarianism was predicated on the modern phenomenon of mass society. Very early on in her discussion, she fully subscribed to the European body of anti-mass literature. She wrote: Eminent European scholars and statesmen had predicted, from the early nineteenth century onward, the rise of the mass man and the coming of a mass age. A whole literature on mass behavior and mass psychology had demonstrated and popularized the wisdom, so familiar to the ancients, of the affinity between democracy and dictatorship, between mob rule and tyranny. They had prepared certain politically conscious and overconscious sections of the Western educated world for the emergence of demagogues, for gullibility, superstition, and brutality. (Arendt 1960: 316) For Arendt, as for Broch, the masses were not so much duped victims as the active agent behind totalitarianism, its genuine animating force. Arendt maintained that, although the bourgeoisie had initially supported the Nazi leaders, they failed to realize that such dictators are ultimately answerable to the masses, and the masses alone. The bourgeoisie, she asserted (318–319), overlooked the independent, spontaneous support given the new mob leaders by masses as well as the mob leaders’ genuine talents for creating new forms of organization. The mob as leader of these masses was no longer the agent of the bourgeoisie or of anyone else except the masses.

6  Introduction Quite recently, Zeev Sternhell, the well-known historian of fascism, underlined the way the masses eternally form the epicenter of fanatical fascist nationalism: From every corner of Europe the same call was heard: the common people, the peasant opening a furrow in his forefathers’ land, the artisan and his apprentices in the suburb, the non-Marxist worker, people not addicted to foreign cultures, uninterested in Kant and Rousseau, are the bearers of the national truth. By contrast, [. . .] the freedom to criticize and to express views that the majority refutes undermines the nation’s foundation. The conclusion is evident: in order to save the nation a cultural revolution is necessary, which will turn the common people into a solid wall, resisting the tides of decomposition. This was the first great invention of those times: the mass will always be the majority, and therefore universal suffrage could be employed against the values of liberal democracy and of human rights. This, too, is well understood in Israel, since this is the meaning of the Cultural Revolution which we are going through. [. . .] Let us make no mistake: fascism is first and foremost a radical nationalism, [. . .] in the name of the mass that possesses “healthy” instincts, still uncontaminated by the French Revolution’s virus of the Enlightenment and human rights. (Sternhell 2016) The successful popularization of such a conviction, the way it has been converted into an axiom, can be exemplified by way of a children’s book on the history of Vienna. The chapter dealing with National Socialism is revealingly titled: “The power of the masses, 1930 to 1945” (Hewson 2006: 105).

Taming the Mass Beast—How Fascists Saw Things In historiographic terms, this entwining of fascism with the masses emerges as a remarkable transubstantiation of a movement which, across Europe, understood and presented itself as a militant rejection of the ideal of mass politics (and indeed of mass society, mass culture, and so on and so forth). The fascists were strongly opposed to the masses and, with remarkably few exceptions, saw their task as one of eliminating mass power and transforming the threatening masses into other, presumably superior and benign, collective forms, notable among them “the people,” “the nation” or “the race.” Fascism framed its mission very much in terms of delivering the nation from mass politics, rescuing the state from the grip of democratic and socialist demagogues, and placing it in the hands of responsible leaders, who will no longer be at the beck and call of a foolhardy and unruly populace. Only by reinstating social hierarchy,

Introduction 7 re-subordinating the masses and quelling their revolt, can the urgent task of national regeneration resume its course. If the masses are indeed a beast, it was one that the fascists came to tame. In fact, if we may agree with Sloterdijk’s broad definition of modernity as the steadfast process whereby the masses attempt to take the helm of politics and culture, then we must insist that this was a project which the fascists came on the scene not to carry through but to sabotage and overturn. Consider the following lament over the demagoguery inherent in democracy, which allows malicious rabble-rousers to mobilize the mass beast and take control over the political arena: The majority. . . . What force can a majority have? Brute force; it can deal you a blow; but the avalanche, when it reaches the ground, crumbles into fragments at the same time. Oh, how sickening they are, how sickening! Take them singly, they are afraid, you understand; and so they gather a thousand strong to take a step which they could not take each by himself; take them singly, they have not a thought among them; and a thousand empty heads, crowded together, imagine that they have, and fail to observe that it is the thought of the madman or mischief-maker who is leading them. This is, unmistakably, a classic liberal-conservative admonition against the perils of mass democracy and the way it leads up to what Alexis de Tocqueville classically called “the tyranny of the majority.” It is interchangeable with the views of the likes of Broch, Arendt, Mosse or Sloterdijk. Strikingly, however, this was not a critique of fascism, representing, rather, the contrary. For these are the words of a character in an Italian novel written between 1909 and 1913, recounting the events of the peasant and worker militancy which shook up Sicily in the last decade of the 19th century. Denounced, from an anxious upper-class perspective, is not fascist but socialist and democratic demagoguery. Furthermore, this was written by an author, Luigi Pirandello (1928), who some ten years later would warmly welcome fascism, like so many of his class counterparts, seeing in it the only way of knocking some sense into the “thousand empty heads” of the Italian masses, who have grown intolerably restless. In fascism, Pirandello perceived not demagoguery but its termination, not mass tyranny but the subordination of the masses. In 1924 he declared himself in the Giornale d’Italia an “anti-democrat par excellence,” because he was convinced that “the mass itself needs those who would form it, it has material necessities, aspirations that do not go beyond practical need” (In De Grazia and Luzzatto 2005, vol. 2: 382). Fascism, if anything, banishes the chimera with which the socialist madman deluded the masses and fills their hollow minds with lofty content, supplying them with the proper ideal to guide them beyond crass materialism.

8  Introduction In an important article published some eight months before the March on Rome in the fascist organ tellingly titled Gerarchia—hierarchy— Benito Mussolini tolled the death knell of the democratic age of mass predominance: The century of anti-democracy commences. “Everyone” is the main term of democracy, the word which has overflowed the 19th century. It is time to say: the few and the elect. [. . .] Capitalism may have needed democracy in the 19th century: today, it can do without it. [. . .] The orgy of indiscipline is at an end, the enthusiasm over the social and democratic myths is finished. Life turns to the individual. [. . .] Gray and anonymous democratic egalitarianism, which had banished all color and leveled down all personality, is about to pass away. New aristocracies come forward, now that it has been demonstrated that the masses cannot be the protagonists of history, only its instruments. (Mussolini 1958, vol. 18: 71) Fascism, according to Mussolini, was not the rule of the majority but the majority very much ruled. The open embrace of capitalism may have been new, yet the contempt for the masses underlay Mussolini’s worldview even when he was a militant socialist. As early as 1904, he rejected what he termed a false, “Christian” conception of socialism, in favor of a “new conception of socialism, a profoundly ‘aristocratic’ one” (Mussolini 1958, vol. 1: 70). And in 1909 he stressed the fact that “my temperament and my convictions lead me to prefer the small, resolute and audacious nucleus over the mass, which is numerous, but chaotic, amorphous, cowardly” (Mussolini 1958, vol. 2: 75). Things were no different with Hitler. The following words from Mein Kampf reflect the National Socialist commitment to a cultural, social and economic anti-mass project: Marxism presents itself as the perfection of the Jew’s attempt to exclude the pre-eminence of personality in all fields of human life and replace it by the numbers of the mass. To this, in the political sphere, corresponds the parliamentary form of government [. . .] and in the economic sphere, the system of a trade-union movement. (Hitler 1999: 447) Hitler, to be sure, always underlined his ability to persuade the masses, and analyzed the impact of different methods of suggestion, such as the spoken word, liturgies and ceremonies, symbols, and so on and so forth. But the goal was to defuse mass power. Here it should be emphasized that concepts like “the nation,” “the race” “the people” or “the people’s community” that were so central to the fascist vocabulary, are not to be confused with the masses, since they were in fact opposites. These entities

Introduction 9 represented everything that the masses should become. The mass was perceived as independent, lazy, peace-loving, egalitarian, fickle, rebellious, feminine, spoiled, disrespectful, squeamish, sentimental, urban. The people, by contrast, was disciplined, respectful of authority, laborious, humble, decent, virile, ready to make sacrifices, of a peasant mindset and attached to the land. The mass was also crucially and inextricably attached to democracy, which was its source of power, whereas the people remain fastened to an authoritarian system of ruling. Thomas Mann (2002: 263) packed this into a formula, in 1918, when his views were still conservative: “The individualistic mass is democratic, the Volk is aristocratic. The former is international, while the latter is a mythical personality of the most distinctive characteristics.” Antoine Rédier, leader of the Légion—the first fascist movement in France (founded in 1924)—similarly inveighed against the democratic domination of numbers. “The people,” he insisted, “are not the multitude” (In Soucy 1986: 28). To be sure, Rédier found cause to disagree with Tocqueville’s theories of mass democracy. Yet the fundamental reasons for his disagreement with the seminal liberal critic of majority rule are quite revealing: he fully subscribed to Tocqueville’s aristocratic disdain for the masses, as expressed in the following passage, which he approvingly quoted: By reason, I approve of democratic institutions, but I am aristocratic by instinct, that is to say, I despise and fear the crowd. I passionately love liberty, legality, the respect for the rights, but not democracy. [. . .] I hate demagoguery, the disordered activity of the masses, their violent and ill-advised intervention in the affairs, the envious passions of the lower classes, the irreligious tendencies. (In Rédier 1925: 48) Yet Rédier chastised Tocqueville for being an inconsistent opponent of the mass, for faintheartedly accepting democracy rather than drawing the necessary, elitist conclusions from his own analysis of its insurmountable failings. Sadly acquiescing with democracy, Tocqueville had proven himself “unfaithful to liberty,” had “betrayed” it. “He puts us,” Rédier argued (104–105), before the alternative of being governed either by a single despot or by the mass [la foule], and it is the mass, which he is obliged to choose. He jettisons the liberating solution, condemning with a single stroke of the pen all the reasonable institutions which were overwhelmed by the revolutionary storm. He pays them, as he goes along, an admirable homage but he then makes an about-turn and circumvents them: and thus, in the name of liberty, sacred democracy rules the world.

10  Introduction While liberal literature perennially draws inspiration from Tocqueville to expose the fascist embrace of the masses, we have here an instructive case of a fascist denouncing liberalism for its enthrallment to majorities. As much as the fascist worldview was eclectic and contradictory in other respects, it was of virtually one mind on this question. The judgment on the masses remains almost invariably the same, no matter if one turns to fascist politicians, intellectuals or soldiers. For Oswald Spengler (1999: 1004) the concept of the Volk “is eliminated [. . .] through the concept of the fourth estate, the mass, which principally rejects culture with its attendant forms. [. . .] The mass is the end, the radical nothing.” And if we turn to the Freikorps’ literature, we find many passages such as this, where a Freikorps soldier proclaimed: “Parties are a mass. Freikorps are a team!” (F. W. Heinz, in Theweleit 1978: 94). The notable anti-Bolshevik activist and subsequently Nazi politician, Eduard Stadtler (1937: 13), who boasted of having instigated the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, saw Marxist ideology as symbiotic with mass hedonism: “The materialist collective ‘mass-man’ elevates itself into a self-sufficient ‘ideal,’ as it totters along in a this-worldly rapture of mass experiences.” The virulent French fascist and anti-Semite, Lucien Rebatet (1942: 401), placed all his hopes for his country on the intervention of a determined minority, the foil of the base masses: Dismaying as [the French people] are, I know that there yet remains, dispersed among this puerile and ignobly dull mass, the élite that suffices for a fascist revolution. Are there three hundred thousand, five hundred thousand of them, those unknown people whom I evoke with all the force of affection I am capable of? I do not know, but they exist, numerous enough to fulfill what true leaders could expect from them. And Colonel François de La Rocque, leader of far-right league Croix-deFeu and, after the latter’s dissolution by the government, head of the highly successful Parti Social Français, considered by some historians a fascist party, affirmed the following: “I hear talk here of the mass. Members of the Croix-de-Feu are an élite” (De La Rocque 1934: 53). Somewhat more optimistic than Rebatet, he clang to the reassuring belief that “French temperament is the temperament of cadres and not of masses.” With the latter, he associated his political arch-enemies: “Revolutionary socialism appeals to violence, to the law of the mass and of number, and so to injustice.”3 In Spain, equally, fascism was predicated on a resolute rejection of mass society which, as José Antonio Primo de Rivera warned in 1935, was perceived as the common thread leading from capitalism to communism: Quickly or slowly, but implacably, Marx’s forecasts become a reality. We are heading to the concentration of capital, to the proletarianization of the masses, and, finally, to social revolution, which will bring

Introduction 11 a terrible period of communist dictatorship. And this communist dictatorship has to terrify us, Europeans, Westerners, Christians, since it will signify the terrible negation of man; the absorption of man in an immense, amorphous mass, where individuality is lost [. . .]. Notice well that this is why we are anti-Marxists; that we are anti-Marxists because we are terrified [. . .] of being an inferior animal in an antnest. And we are terrified by it because capitalism gives us a hint of such a condition; capitalism, too, is internationalist and materialist. That is why we want neither the one nor the other; that is why we wish to avert—since we believe in their accuracy—the realization of Marx’s prophecies. (Primo de Rivera 1976: 484–485) Ernesto Giménez Caballero (2005: 189), one of the central intellectual figures of Falangism, avowed that “we cannot tolerate the tyranny of an art of absolute masses that Russian communism, the Orient, wishes to impose on us.” A fervent Nietzschean, he credited the German philosopher with nothing less than a “resurrection” of the Spanish national spirit, rising like a magnificent dawn after the dark night of the national humiliation in the Spanish-American war of 1898. “Zarathustra did his magic,” he recalled (51), and “from these moments a germ of a complex rebirth was fertilized in Spanish life, to the warmth of the Nietzscheans.” In agreement with the spirit of this rebirth, he often denounced the massification of modern Spain, and of Europe more broadly, in profoundly elitist observations such as the following one, where the fate of erstwhile aristocratic sports is described, once they are appropriated by “the riffraff”: “The destiny of many of the games which become popular is just like that of the gentleman’s suits: they are handed down from hand to hand until they reach the man of the street, already dirty, patched, ignoble” (14). It is highly significant that unlike other major keywords or concepts favored by the left, “the masses” was not a concept which the fascists strove to appropriate and transubstantiate. The term “socialism” itself was adopted by some fascists, and was of course incorporated into the very name of the Nazi movement; “the worker” was occasionally viewed positively, although not quite as much as the peasant or craftsman: the worker could and had to be saved, cured of his Marxist madness; the concept of “revolution,” too, was newly interpreted by the fascists and enthusiastically embraced in the form of “national” or “conservative” revolution. Nothing comparable occurred with the notion of the masses. The masses were seen by fascists almost uniformly as something negative, obscene, threatening and contemptuous. The masses could not hope to be semantically reborn in some purified form. The destiny of the masses was to be eliminated, at least as an independent social phenomenon, and to be subjected to, replaced by or absorbed into something else, and better: “Volk,” “nation,” “race,” “army” and so on and so forth.

12  Introduction The best that the mass could hope for on fascist terms was to remain strictly subordinated to the élite, forfeiting any aspiration to shape society’s values, let alone be its governor. Only this was a concept of the mass which fascists could stomach. A good example is provided by the Spanish Nietzschean José Ortega y Gasset, who was revered by the leading Falangists, José Antonio, Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, and Giménez Caballero, among others. (See Gracia 2005: 120.) In a 1977 interview Giménez Caballero affirmed that the “roots of fascism are Nietzschean, pagan, of ‘overmen.’ Our Generation of ’98 was Nietzschean, and Ortega [sic], and I proceed from them. Nietzsche was the spiritual father of Mussolini, of Hitler . . . and of [Pío] Baroja, and of Ortega. Our masters” (Giménez Caballero 1979: 318). When push came to shove in the 1930s, Ortega himself refused to draw dictatorial conclusions from his trenchant elitism, opting for a paternalistic defense of the Republic, which has earned him the rebuke of a dismayed José Antonio (1976: 577–579). Yet Ortega’s denunciations of the rise of mass power in modern society, particularly in his two most important political works, Invertebrate Spain (1921) and The Revolt of The Masses (1930), were hugely influential in ideologically underpinning Spanish fascism and furnishing it with sense of social mission. (See Saz Campos 2003: 98–99.) That mission, for Ortega, seems at first glance to be far removed from enmity to the masses as a social factor; on the contrary, he wished for the mass to remain, at all costs, precisely that—a mass. “A nation,” Ortega stated, “is an organized human mass, structured by a minority of select individuals.” A sickness fatally affects the social body only when “the mass rejects being a mass—that is, refuses to follow the directing minority.” When this “anomaly” happens, “the nation disintegrates, society is dismembered and the result is social chaos, the historical loss of structure [invertebración]” (Ortega y Gasset 2015: 96–97). While the mass, here, is deceptively defined as a positive entity, this is so only inasmuch as it accepts its prescribed role as passive matter in the hands of the rulers. The unruly mass, the mass striving to preside over society, is the worst social and political disease—and Ortega, like many of his contemporaries, was fond of employing pseudo-biological language in diagnosing the political situation, talking of “healthy” versus “sick” social bodies and classifying peoples and “races” as distinct “zoological and biological” species. Significantly, he identified the characteristic attribute of the “superior” races in their ability to engender a relatively high number of “eminent individuals” (Ortega y Gasset 2015: 113), whereas in the inferior or “degenerate” races such individuals are rarer than normal and it is the mass that dominates. Thus, while Ortega defends the mass as mass he nonetheless attacks mass society as one where the mass rebels and becomes the ruler. One might imagine that, to introduce his discussion of the modern ailment, he will choose some such title as “the disappearance of the mass”: the modern mass, after all, is said to have “rejected being a mass.” The actual subtitle is very different, and very revealing:

Introduction 13 “The empire of the masses” (Ortega y Gasset 2015: 96). This conveys Ortega’s true problem and, by extension that of his Falangist pupils: the masses have become insufferably strong and independent. Anticipating fascism, Ortega recommends at the very conclusion of the book the stringent application of “selection” as the only corrective to Spain’s fatal “lack of eminent minorities and the unperturbed empire of the masses.” “The imperative of selection” will be the precondition for any putative national “resurrection,” setting itself the task of “forging a new type of Spanish man and [producing] the refinement of the race” (Ortega y Gasset 2015: 140). Ortega’s choice was ultimately not fascist, yet this does not diminish the compatibility of many of his ideas with fascism. Apart from the aspects already discussed, there are noticeable parallels, for instance, between the way he diagnoses modern society as fallen and degenerate and the views of the irascible Italian extremist Julius Evola. Both thinkers denounce modernity as an extreme manifestation of popular sovereignty—which Evola (1995: 24) associated “with the triumph of the collectivistic world of the masses and with the advent of radical democracy” and Ortega (2006: 86) termed “hyper-democracy”; both draw on the ancient Hindu religious texts, the Puranas, and see in modernity the realization of the prophecy of the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, when the time-honored caste order falls apart (Ortega 2015: 101; Evola 1995: 177); and both identify “massman” at the center of these developments.4 And like Pirandello, who as we saw reduced democracy to the chimeras produced in the masses’ “empty heads,” Ortega (2015: 99) sneered at the way the subjects attempt to impose “on their leader the international politics which has nested in their light and impetuous heads, their ‘mass’ heads.” Another interesting case displaying some terminological ambiguity visà-vis the masses, is the thought of the court philosopher of Italian fascism, Giovanni Gentile. On the one hand, Gentile resorts to a strategy sometimes employed by fascists to present their movements as democratic ones, embodying the will of the people, and, in this instance, explicitly of the masses: The nationalist state was aristocratic state, that constructed itself out of the force it inherited from its origin, that made it valued by the masses. The Fascist State, on the other hand, is a popular state, and, in that sense, a democratic State par excellence. Every citizen shares a relationship with the State that is so intimate that the State exists only in so far as it is made to exist by the citizen. Thus, its formation is a product of the consciousness of each individual, and thus of the masses, in which the power of the State consists. (Gentile 2007: 28) Almost instantaneously, however, Gentile refutes this very claim and concedes that the allegedly “intimate” state-masses relationship is in fact

14  Introduction extremely tense and arduous, necessitating control, subjugation and indoctrination. And thus, in direct continuation (28–29), he convolutedly asserts the following: That explains the necessity of the Fascist Party and of all the institutions of propaganda and education that foster the political and moral ideals of Fascism, so that the thought and the will of the solitary person, the Duce, becomes the thought and the will of the masses. Out of that arises the enormous difficulty in which it is involved, to bring into the Party, and into the institutions created by the Party, all the people, commencing from their most tender years. It is a formidable problem, the solution of which creates infinite difficulty, because it is almost impossible to conform the masses to the demands of an élite Party of vanguard morality. Such a conformity could only happen slowly, through education and reform. Strangely enough, it turns out that making the masses conform to their own consciousness is an “almost impossible” task. But of course this cannot but be so, since the “democratic state par excellence” must at all time conform to the will of the Duce and his élite Party. The leaders will represent the masses, certainly, but only if, and after, the masses will come to embody the leaders’ thought and will. In order to represent you, in other words, I first have to brainwash and to subordinate you. This incongruity, trying to graft popular commitment onto a stringent elitism, runs through Gentile’s doctrines. Still, no matter how patently weak, the very pretense to embody mass will is rather exceptional since for the most part fascists dismissed the masses, taking a line more in agreement with Nietzsche: The masses seem to me to deserve notice in three aspects only: first as faded copies of great men produced on poor paper with worn-out plates, then as a force of resistance to great men, finally as instruments in the hands of great men; for the rest, let the Devil and statistics take them! (Nietzsche 1997: 113) Why, it might be asked, should Gentile be different? Not, certainly, in the substance of his political position; shorn of his papier-mâché populism Gentile, like all fascists, sees in the masses only a force of resistance to great men or their instrument. The answer may lie in Gentile’s roots in right-wing Hegelianism. For Hegel, unlike Nietzsche, the great men of history were indeed, whether they realized it or not, envoys of the masses. Their very greatness depended on the extent to which they were seen to embody and facilitate historical tendencies and necessities far exceeding their own conscious and often petty, motivations. (See,

Introduction 15 for example, Hegel 1984: 52, 63, 76.) So Gentile’s contradictory stance may be traced back to his tortuous effort to absorb a Hegelian concept within a framework which is in its essence Nietzschean. It should be noted that Nietzsche’s concept of the masses which we have quoted, from On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, was part of a fierce polemic against the Hegelian view of history. And given that, in general, Nietzsche’s impact on fascism was enormous (as will be observed on many occasions throughout the book) while Hegel remained peripheral—in truth, the German dialectician was in many cases ardently opposed by fascists—it is understandable why such positions as Gentile’s remained atypical within the fascist discourse. Another figure displaying a somewhat similar predicament of trying to subsume Hegelianism under Nietzscheanism was Alfredo Oriani, the Italian thinker who died before the First World War, who was hugely admired by the fascists, especially by Mussolini, who even edited his collected works. In Oriani, too, extravagant aristocratism and vitalism in the spirit of Nietzsche—whom he valued as “possibly the greatest poet of philosophy” (Oriani 1924: 284)—are punctured by conflicting moments of more popular sentiment, owing to his profound admiration for Hegel, whom he referred to as “the greatest philosopher in history” (250). And thus we can find in his work typically proto-fascist protestations against “the ascent and tyranny of the plebs” and of the masses (331), alongside an endorsement, infinitely less typical of the fascist worldview, of the plebs, even to the point of denying the right of putative “overmen” to “believe themselves distinct from the mass” (284).

From the Mass to X The fact should be emphasized that fending off mass society was for the fascists by no means a simple restoration of the status quo ante. They were aware of the fact that merely traditionalist or conservative remedies in general no longer apply to modern conditions, and adopted radical and militant positions far exceeding conservative politics. In a momentous departure from 19th-century conservatism, the fascists embraced rather than curbed nationalism, indeed they drove nationalism to its limits. This led many commentators to perceive fascism as keenly practicing “mass politics.” Historians correctly identified the effort to “nationalize the masses” at the very core of fascism (for example, Mosse 1991; Gentile 2002: 161–164). There can be no doubt that the stubborn reluctance of the masses to be incorporated into the bourgeois nation and their frequent adherence to autonomous and sometimes antagonistic projects of class politics and international solidarity, gave fascism one of its strongest rationales for taking over the state and displacing the old, and presumably ineffectual, political elite. This was most obvious in the latecomer nations Italy and Germany, whose elites and middle classes

16  Introduction were exasperated by the popular lack of enthusiasm for the projects of national renewal. As the prominent Italian fascist Dino Grandi (1985: 26) speculated, had Italian socialists in 1914 agreed to take part in the First World War, thereby definitively inserting themselves in the history of our risorgimento and automatically resolving the dramatic problem of the insertion of the popular masses into the unified state, which was formed without the peasant and the Catholic masses, [. . .] fascism would not have emerged as a rebellion of the youth that had fought the war and that could not accept that it should be blasphemed by Italian Marxism. Yet the whole point of “nationalizing the masses” was that they shall cease to be masses and become, at long last, a nation. “Totalitarian fascism,” writes historian Emilio Gentile, approximating the heart of the matter, “maintained that the organization and the control of the masses were the conditions for transforming their character, their mentality, their behavior, thereby producing the active adherence to fascism” (Gentile 2002: 162; emphasis added). In other words, the masses as they actually were before such grand transformation, enormous pedagogic act, were of no use at all to the fascists; they had to be totally re-educated to become something other than they had hitherto been, redirected onto wholly new tracks. The “integral and totalitarian” education of the masses, affirmed the Popolo d’Italia on December 15, 1929, constitutes “the central problem, is one and the same with the political problem of fascism” (In Gentile 2002: 161). That is why fascists regularly promoted other collective entities against the masses, variously substituting a given X—perceived as legitimate and positive—for the anathematized “mass.” In 1933, criticizing 19th-century Bonapartism, the Nazi author Franz Kemper (1933: 13) thus defined the purpose of modern politics: “Bonapartism failed because it lacked a true élite principle. The revolting masses were not structured into a people. The great and only political task since the dissolution of the unity of the medieval world has remained unaccomplished.” As editor, he revealingly chose to add the words Mass or People to the original title of a book written in 1852, thereby packing into a formula the National Socialist political imperative. Another Nazi politician, Count Ernst Reventlow, concluded his 1930 treatise, German Socialism, with the following sentences: The Germans, who have been degraded by Marxism into a “mass,” German socialism must not, nor does it want to, lead by way of panem et circenses, appealing to the lower drives. Germans want to obey freely, out of a conviction independently arrived at. They want even more, and they are entitled to more, their longing and their abilities go farther still, much farther. And thus will the

Introduction 17 Germans, internally disunited, confused and alienated, find their way to a people. (Reventlow 1933: 312) In 1925, the German nationalist Max Delmar likewise contrasted the values of “the mass” with those of a superior collective entity, in this case “the race”:

Decalogue of the Mass   1. Mass is a dispirited dying of landscape, blood, and form.   2. Mass is the decline of what was once real.   3. Mass is the destiny of all the worst.   4. Mass is equality and its terror.   5. Mass is suffering and death.   6. Mass is weakness, ugliness and fear.   7. Mass is perpetual peace, infatuation, and law-making.   8. Mass is the feminizing of the will in man.   9. Mass is prostitution in woman. 10. Mass is now the hallmark of the French nation.

Decalogue of the Race   1. Race is spirited grace, arising out of landscape, blood, and form.   2. Race is the perfection of what is possible.   3. Race is the destiny of the few who are the best.   4. Race is exception and its prerogative.   5. Race is happiness and life.   6. Race is power, beauty and passion.   7. Race is battle, wisdom and play.   8. Race is in man the passion of will.   9. Race is in woman the passion of devotion. 10. Race was once the hallmark of the French nation. (Delmar 1925: 143, 78)5 José Antonio, similarly, was guided by the assumption that the mass is inferior to the people. He inveighed (1976: 538; emphasis added) against those revolutionary leaders who “believe in the innate capacity of the people—considered inorganically as a mass—to find its own way.” Genuine leaders, he was convinced, are only those who are able to “resist and discipline” the mass (539). “The masses,” he similarly complained (545), “always consider what their chiefs do to be inadequate: they always consider themselves betrayed. [. . .] Paradoxically, those traitors to the masses are the only loyal and effective servants of the people’s destiny.” And the Spanish fascist sympathizer, the author Francisco Camba,

18  Introduction clearly differentiated between “the people” (pueblo) and “the rabble” (chusma): “Is the people, perchance, the rabble?” he asked, and provided the answer: “This is not the people. The people are the professional man, the decent worker, the decent woman” (In Puértolas 2008: 512). As indicated by these examples, the likes of which could be multiplied many times over, the masses qua masses were not something about which the fascists found anything positive. Taking a people, a race, or a nation, and re-educating them to become a mass, was for the fascists a scandalous prospect, a political suicide. It was the very reverse of genuine and valuable politics; this was precisely what the nemeses of fascism, Marxism and liberalism, had been doing all along, Marxism forcefully, consciously and deliberately,6 liberalism weakly, reluctantly and faintheartedly. That is why seeing mass society as the goal of fascist politics is a complete misconstruction; mass society represented everything that fascism aimed to move away from, to transform and overcome. “Socialism,” “revolution” and “the worker” were terms which had direct political implications. It was important for the fascists to appropriate these concepts in order to deliver a direct blow to their enemy, and in order to repel the charges that they were, in truth, a bourgeois, procapitalist force. To admit, for example, enmity for the workers would have been as good as admitting, to oneself as well, the class character of the movement, to say nothing of the fact that without workers no nation can hope to “reawaken” or to speed up its rearmament plans. But “the masses,” not being a directly political concept, provided a semantic field relatively free from political obligations, where the fascists could uninhibitedly express their real contempt and loathing at those same “workers” they otherwise pretended to respect or admire. Here their elemental elitism could freely vent itself, and they could bemoan “mediocrity,” the “power of numbers” or the loss of the individual’s value. In that respect, the concept of “the masses” gains a special importance from a historical point of view in providing access to the fascist political unconscious, as it were, exposing the real social character of the movement.

Taking Fascists at Their Word This paradoxical situation, whereby fascism is linked to the masses, is all the more glaring in view of the fact that in the last three decades or so historians have increasingly agreed on the need to take fascist ideology seriously and analyze it at face value in order to gain a clearer understating of what this political phenomenon was all about. This approach was prescribed as an antidote to the traditional left-wing perspectives, especially Marxist leaning, that have supposedly imposed a narrow, class-oriented way of looking at fascism. Thus, in 1996, George Mosse observed with gratification that the study of fascism is slowly emerging from the period when this movement was almost solely discussed from the point of view of socialist

Introduction 19 theory, anti-fascism, or parliamentary government—measured by the standard of other ideologies—to a time when we can take the measure of fascism on its own terms, investigating its self-representation, and attempt to grasp it from the inside out. (Mosse 1996: 245) Even more explicit in his polemic against Marxist historiography was the sociologist Michael Mann (2004: 21), who argued that “by centering on ‘social base’ and ‘objective functions,’ most class theorists obviously ignore fascists’ own beliefs. They view fascism ‘from outside,’ from a perspective that made little sense to fascists, who rebutted class theories as they did all ‘materialism.’ ”7 In practice, this has meant that fascist avowals of being a force above class interest, fostering national reconciliation independently of both the capitalists and the working class, and even breaking down old social barriers and performing a true social revolution, have all been upgraded: no longer dismissed as so much rhetorical humbug, as was the habit of “class theorists,” they are now widely accepted as bona fide declarations. The upshot of this theoretical reorientation is that fascism has been rewritten as a force significantly informed by egalitarianism and populism, if not outright socialism of a national, non-Marxist variant. The former view of fascism as a dictatorship against the majority of the people has become something of a minority position.8 This methodological tenet, however, has so far remained largely inoperative when it comes to addressing the relationship of fascism to the masses. Blatantly disregarding the fascists’ own avowals and “self-representation,” this relationship is still widely seen as one of harmony, even symbiosis. When fascists claim that they endorse the people, this is taken literally; when they scream to high heaven that they abhor the masses, they are mostly ignored. This inconsistent reading of fascist ideology is difficult to justify. In fact, while there are all-too-obvious reasons to be wary of fascist affirmations to being “revolutionary” or “socialist,” there emerges no clear vested interest that might lead us to question the sincerity of the fascists when disparaging the masses. Suppose, just for the sake of discussion, that the fascist is in fact committed to the protection of the socioeconomic élites and to disempowering the workers; at the same time, he is working within a parliamentary framework and striving to gain as many votes as possible among the lower orders, who after all form the bulk of the population. He would then have a very good reason to camouflage this design and vouch instead for his social impartiality, indeed present himself as the champion of “the people.” Yet what good can come of feigning contempt for the masses? Surely, the political advantages, electoral or otherwise, which one might therewith accrue, are negligent. Then again, as already observed, there is also relatively little to lose by speaking one’s mind in that regard. One is not directly offending any single constituency, since few people think of themselves as part of “the mass,” and are therefore

20  Introduction not very likely to take offence when it is disparaged. One can thus speak and write more or less candidly. In short, while there is excellent reason to fake populism, there is no good reason to fake elitism. So here, precisely, we have an opportunity to “take fascists at their word” with little qualms.9 Yet curiously, this has seldom been the case. This study will aim to redress this interpretative imbalance by giving due credit to the fascist enmity to the masses, and will even construe it as a unifying theme, underlying interwar fascism in its different manifestations: social, political, economic and cultural. The emphasis will be on the all-embracing nature of the fascist assault on mass society: while the struggle against working-class organizations, as Marxist historians have rightly emphasized ever since the 1920s, was pivotal in these efforts, fascism cannot be reduced to this single aspect, however vital. Rather, the anti-mass thrust of fascist movements needs to be analyzed also with regards to the sphere of culture and the general ethos of mass society. Hence the importance of interpreting fascism as an effort to unseat what Nietzsche has scornfully termed “The Last Humans” from their allegedly underserved and unnatural position of social supremacy. In an important way, fascism can be seen as a counter-hegemonic movement, in the sense that its ideologists and militants regarded the masses as the hegemon in modern society and culture. If the fundamental feature of the modern age was “the revolt of the masses,” as Ortega famously argued, then fascism was a counter-revolt meant to force the masses to resume their subordinate position. The following words, used in 1931 by Ortega’s disciple, José Antonio, to pay homage to his recently deceased father, the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, attest to this insurgence against the masses: He did not flatter the lobbies in Palace, where he was defeated by the courtiers, nor, which is even more valuable, did he flatter the masses in revolt, who are today stronger than kings and therefore more demanding of praise. (Primo de Rivera 1976: 94) The comprehensive nature of the fascist opposition to the mass explains why fascism rejected mass power not only qua violent and insurrectionary, but also in its more peaceful and democratic manifestations. The aim was therefore both to impede social revolution, as defined by Marx, and to undermine what Norbert Elias referred to as “the civilizing process”: indeed, it is useful to de-dichotomize these notions and see them not as distinct options but as moments of a single process: evolution can be quite revolutionary and socially destabilizing in its effects, while Marx’s revolution can be conceived as a dramatic intervention meant less to create a new society ex nihilo as much as to activate processes and actualize potentialities that are very much present, no matter how dormant and hampered, in society as it already is. The fascist bid to reverse the

Introduction 21 civilizing process will be elucidated via an analysis of the fascist opposition to, and domestication of, mass culture and mass consumerism, to the perceived “effeminacy” perverting Western patriarchy—the association of the masses with femininity is of central importance here—and to “Americanism.” Indeed, even our understanding of one of the most insidious and inscrutable aspects of fascism, National Socialist antisemitism, can profit from an exploration of the ways “the Jew” was cast, in the Nazi imaginary, in the role of the agent par excellence of mass empowerment, both as a leader of revolutionary movements and as a promoter of social and cultural egalitarianism.

The Last Humans and the Promise of the Omniplace The renewed attention to the concept of the masses will in that way, it is hoped, contribute to a broad and integrative understanding of the nature of European fascism. It will shed light on many issues which have divided historians and political scientists so far, for example the question of whether fascism was “left or right,”10 how to explain the specific form of extreme nationalism characterizing fascism,11 or the debate between the historians focusing on fascist practice and those seeing fascism above all in ideological terms.12 It will also bear on an issue which has often accompanied the research of fascism: the imperative, whether implied or explicitly stated, of “never again,” involving the best way to impede the reoccurrence of fascism. Liberal strategy regularly revolves precisely around the conviction that anti-fascism must entail curbing and diluting as much as possible the political influence of the mass, seen as an irascible force, threatening to undermine liberal democracy, either acting on its own impulses or being goaded by reckless demagogues into a frenzy of destruction. Given the presumed “affinity between democracy and dictatorship,” the best recipe is to ensure that liberal democracy stays just that, liberal, keeping the mass beast contented, perhaps, but never allowing it to roam free around the social arena. Much of left-wing theory echoes these concerns in its critique of the culture industry and of mass consumerism, understood as forms of political indoctrination, mind-numbing, and pacification. Mass society is seen as the hotbed of fascism, promoting its growth in ways which are both passive and aggressive. Here, too, therefore, although from a somewhat different vantage point, the challenge is seen as one of overcoming massification. Since Nietzsche’s ideas have strongly influenced the left, as well, The Last Humans are de facto resisted by a common front of “radicals” and “reactionaries,” although each group has a very different goal in mind: the former would like to combat fascism, the latter to promote it. If, however, the hypothesis of this book is correct, and fascism is better conceived as an anti-mass movement, the standard political diagnosis must also be reversed. The best way to preempt fascism, seen thus, is

22  Introduction not to restrain massification but to unleash it, to create a society which is truly, and for the first time, governed by the masses. Whereas liberals, and in truth many radicals, too, embrace paternalism as their remedy, the alternative is seeing the masses as a solution, not a menace. Looking at interwar fascism tells us, as few would doubt, something important about modern society and history. Yet fascism was, and remains, not simply an indication of the failures of that society and the dangers inherent in it—although it is clearly also that. It equally attests, in spite of itself, to the strengths and to the values of mass society. If indeed the final nemesis of fascism was “mass-man,” then it is a good idea to comprehend this human specimen more precisely and see it under a new light. And, perhaps, a new understanding of The Last Humans will drive home the need to offer them succor in their struggles to come into their own and complete their evolutionary-revolutionary project. To many readers this might seem like a strange proposition, at a time when left-wing discourse is dominated by critiques of consumerism, disdainful scrutinies of the brutalities and inanities of mass culture, and anxieties concerning the recrudescence of right-wing populisms across the Western world. Why, it may be objected, should we endorse the mass, rather than realize that the goal is precisely to (re-)transform the masses into a class? Was not this unaccomplished task at the very heart of 19thand 20th-century radicalism? Against this study’s argument, a countercase could be made that if the goal of the right was to transform the mass into a nation, people or ethnic group, the left wanted to displace it in favor of a superior X of its own: i.e. “class.” Hence the mass cannot provide a particularly stable anchor for emancipatory politics. Yet such an argument would overlook the crucial differences between the way the radical left has approached the masses and that of the right. To begin with, the concept of the masses was never anathematized by the left to the same extent and degree as happened on the right. Far from being seen as the very enemy which needs to be taken down, it was often regarded favorably, as an ally of egalitarian politics, indeed as its subject. For illustration sake, the fact could be mentioned that in Italy at the start of the 20th-century the progressive writer Paolo Valera founded a journal called La Folla [The Crowd], where radical socialist positions were voiced, attacking chauvinism, monarchism and imperialism and defending the class struggle. At roughly the same time radical American socialists published a journal called The Masses (1911–17) subsequently called The New Masses (1926–48). (See Fishbein 1982; O’Neill 1966.) It is true that for other socialists the masses was a more ambiguous concept, and that many insisted, as they continue to do, on the need to move from mass to class. Yet while this claim formally resembles the desire on the right to supplant the mass with something better, there were substantial differences between the two positions. On the left, class was mostly conceived not as the antithesis of mass, let alone the latter’s dispossession or

Introduction 23 destruction; on the very contrary, the class was regarded as an upgraded mass, a mass not disarmed but precisely armed, politically, ideologically, culturally, in some cases even armed in a literal sense. The class was the mass fulfilling its inherent potential, maturing, empowering itself. And the emphasis indeed was on self-empowerment. As Marx famously put it, a class was a mass for itself: Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The domination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have pointed out only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. (Marx 2010: 159–160) The class is thus an organized, a potentiated mass. And in stark contrast to fascism it was seen as its own liberator, acting on its own initiative. To the strictly limited extent that the fascists could see any redeeming quality about the masses, it was in their ability to serve as instruments in the hands of great men. The masses thus represented in the very best of cases a passive raw material, “mass” in the sense of pliant matter, to be shaped at will by politician-artists: this ambition of fascist leaders to defend great art, indeed to be artists—a recurrent claim that will be discussed in Chapter 4—derived principally from their view of the masses as passive. Nothing similar can be found on the left. Even the concept of the avant-garde, important in certain forms of radical left-wing politics, was conceived in terms of fulfilling a necessary function, of showing the masses the way and pushing them in what was regarded the right direction rather than shaping them against their will, let alone against their interests. But there might be another, and even more important difference, between the left and the right in their respective approaches to “the masses.” Surely, the fact that the left could use terms such as la folla positively, cannot be explained solely on account of the potential attributed to the masses to become something else; one does not treat a precondition as admiringly as that, one does not celebrate it. Rather, something valuable was identified about the masses themselves. In the fascist variant, the people, the race, the nation and so on, were not just desired stations, but represented the final destiny, the last horizon, beyond which there was nothing. For socialists by comparison, the class was emphatically not such an end. Their dream was in fact that of moving onto the classless society. And that implies a return, albeit by way of a Hegelian circle of sublation, to the masses. “Progress,” as Hegel (1984: 149) argued, “is not an indeterminate advance ad infinitum, for it has a definite aim—namely that of returning upon itself.” And this was the reason that the putative

24  Introduction realm of The Last Humans, of a mass society for itself, gave cause to such profound anxieties on the fascist camp, on account of its promise to transcend classes. “Nobody grows rich or poor anymore: both are too much of a burden,” shuddered Zarathustra, giving voice to widespread upper-class’ fears. “Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both are too much of a burden.” The fascists, in truth, were the ones adhering to class as a rigid, insurmountable historical reality, and dreading its abolition. They wanted class to stay, and the mass to remain at bay. And precisely on that account the mass was seized upon by radicals, as programmatically stated by Paolo Valera in the first issue of La folla: The title is our enterprise. Everybody understands that we are of the CROWD, for the crowd, with the crowd [. . .]. With the human sense that is in us and with the theories that emanate out of life, we enter the stockade of the CLASS STRUGGLE to occupy our place as combatants and to affirm the physical and intellectual superiority of the crowd that yearns for the abolition of rich and poor. (In Rainero 1983: 59) Here we see how the celebration of the condition of being masses, is at one and the same time an enterprise, a striving towards a new condition, towards becoming a mass. And inasmuch as fascism was a refutation of that utopia, it unwittingly underscores it. Rather than simply a dispiriting tale of human wickedness and the vacuity of progress and of civilization, there is folded in fascism a surprisingly encouraging lesson, obscured by the liberal-radical tale of mass hysteria. And because it diagnosed The Last Humans as the most normal and familiar human beings, fascism indicates that utopia might in fact be much more realizable, at any rate much closer at hand, than the tales of apocalypse and modern hopelessness suggest. From time immemorial people have dreamt of an earthly paradise where freedom, equality, joy and abundance will be found. But it was little more than a dream of an unreachable place, somewhere over the rainbow. And while the upper-classes, from a position of privilege and plenty, were traditionally mindful to scoff at this dream,13 there was never in history, until the 20th-century, a full-blown rebellion against such a vision, a war to forestall Cockaigne or Schlaraffenland. And if that is what fascism signified in its effort to subdue mass society, then the latter emerges as harboring a utopia which is no longer a no-place but an omniplace. * * *

Overview of the Book’s Chapters The first two chapters will deal mainly with the 19th century, exploring mass society as a comprehensive West European phenomenon, integrating closely linked political, social, demographic, economic and cultural

Introduction 25 dimensions. Subsequently, the response to these developments on the part of the elites and some of their leading spokespeople, especially Friedrich Nietzsche given his later resonance throughout the Western world, will be discussed. The remaining chapters will turn to the 20th-century and focus on fascism, especially in its birthplace, Italy, and in Germany. It will be shown how fascism continued and exacerbated the concerns of the previous century, and signified an effort to forcefully repel the perceived encroachment of the masses on all fronts: political and economic (as will be discussed in Chapter 3), as well as social and cultural (Chapter 4, dealing with fascism and mass culture and Chapter 5, whose focus is on the fascist approach to mass consumption). The concluding chapters will examine two faces of fascism which at first blush do not closely correlate with its social position, yet in truth also form central pieces of the antimass puzzle: the fascist attitude to gender issues, and the fascist—particularly National Socialist—hatred of Jews. In the Epilogue, the historical problem of left-wing Nietzscheanism—a problem both in that it seems to fly in the face of this study’s main contention, and on account of its abiding political import—will be revisited.

Notes 1 Here, and throughout the book, I use the term “Last Human,” consulting the original German, for two main reasons: The Last Humans are usually rendered “the Last Men” in English, yet this is problematic, since, first, the German term is the gender-neutral Mensch, encompassing both men and women. Second, and more importantly, in view of their alleged deterioration and loss of vigor, the Last Humans—as Nietzsche saw them—are more womanly and effeminate than virile, making the term “men” doubly misleading. 2 As reflected in the title of Broch’s uncompleted theoretical work: Massenwahntheorie—theory of mass madness. See Aschheim (1996: 181). 3 Both quotes are from the following webpage: http://lesmaterialistes.com/croixfeu-psf 4 The “hombre-masa” is a key concept in Ortega’s The Revolt of the Masses; for Evola’s use of the concept, see Evola (1995: 350). 5 See also the discussion in Theweleit (1978: 89–93). This classic study is in general extremely informative and insightful with regards to the enmity of the German far-right in the interwar period to the masses. 6 Consider, among numerous comparable cases, the way the French fascist Georges Valois identified communism with the masses: “To Valois’ mind the communists’ attack on private property was evidence of their nomadic impulse, instinctive to Asian cultures. Thus in fascist imagery the communists are presented as “la horde,” the nomadic restless masses who attack the propertied ‘combatant,’ the farmer rooted in the soil of France” (In Antliff 1997: 158). 7 For a fuller critique of the contradictory and inconsistent nature of the methodology that will have us “take fascism seriously,” see Landa (2010: 1–20). 8 For a useful critique of this emerging consensus, from a vantage point that refuses to relinquish the older notion that fascism—in this case National Socialism—was a regime based primarily on oppression rather than on consent and fraternity, see Chapters 7 and 8 in Evans (2016).

26  Introduction 9 “My objectivity,” argued Eugen Weber early on, showing the way to future historians, “consists of taking Fascists and National Socialists at their word, whenever possible” (Weber 1964: 3). 10 An issue seminally raised in Sternhell (1996). 11 A question associated mainly with Roger Griffin and his many publications, for example, Griffin (1993). 12 The latter position represented, for instance, by Mann (2004). 13 Consider Hans Sachs’ poem Das Schlaraffenland or Pieter Bruegel’s famous painting of the same title (1567), both of which satirize the popular dream as a paradise of fools, idlers and debauchees.

References Antliff, Mark (1997) “La Cité française: Georges Valois, Le Corbusier, and Fascist Theories of Urbanism,” in Fascist Visions. Art and Ideology in France and Italy, Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff, eds., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 134–170. Arendt, Hannah (1960) The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Meridian. Aschheim, Steven E. (1996) Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations With National Socialism and Other Crises, New York: New York University Press. Broch, Hermann (2000) The Death of Virgil, Harmondsworth: Penguin. De La Rocque, François (1934) Service Public, Paris: Bernard Grasset. De Grazia, Victoria, and Sergio Luzzatto, eds. (2005) Dizionario del fascismo, Turin: Einaudi. Delmar, Maximilian (1925) Französische Frauen, Freiburg: Ernst Guenther Verlag. Evans, Richard J. (2016) The Third Reich in History and Memory, London: Abacus. Evola, Julius (1995) Revolt Against the Modern World, Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions International. Fishbein, Leslie (1982) Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of The Masses, 1911– 1917, Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Gentile, Emilio (2002) Fascismo: Storia e interpretazione, Bari: Laterza. Gentile, Giovanni (2007) Origins and Doctrine of Fascism: With Selections From Other Works, A. James Gregor, ed., New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Giménez Caballero, Ernesto (1979) Memorias de un dictador, Barcelona: Planeta. Giménez Caballero, Ernesto (2005) Casticismo, Nacionalismo Y Vanguardia: Antología, 1927–1935, José-Carlos Mainer, ed., Madrid: Fundación Santander Central Hispano. Gracia, Jordi (2005) “Fascismo y literatura o el esquema de una inmadurez,” in Fascismo en España, Ferran Gallego and Francisco Morente, eds., Madrid: El Viejo Topo. Grandi, Dino (1985) Il mio paese: Ricordi autobiografici, Bologna: Il Mulino. Griffin, Roger (1993) The Nature of Fascism, London and New York: Routledge. Hagtvet, Bernt (1985) Who Were the Fascists? Social Roots of European Fascism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. (1984) Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hewson, Elisabeth) 2006) Wien, deine Geschichte, Vienna: öbv & hpt. Hitler, Adolf (1999) Mein Kampf, Boston and New York: Mariner Books.

Introduction 27 Jünger, Ernst (2008) On Pain, New York: Telos. Kemper, Franz (1933) “Einleitung,” in Konstantin Frantz, Masse oder Volk: Louis Napoleon, Potsdam: Alfred Protte Verlag: 9–14. Landa, Ishay (2010) The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism, Boston and Leiden: Brill. Mann, Michael (2004) Fascists, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mann, Thomas (2002) Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Marx, Karl (2010) The Poverty of Philosophy, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House. Mosse, George L. (1989) “Fascism and the French Revolution,” Journal of Contemporary History, 24: 5–26. Mosse, George L. (1991) The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany From the Napoleonic Wars Through the Third Reich, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Mosse, George L. (1996) “Fascist Aesthetics and Society: Some Considerations,” Journal of Contemporary History, 31: 245–252. Mussolini, Benito (1958) Opera Omnia, Florence: La Fenice. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1969) Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1997) Untimely Meditations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Neill, William L., ed. (1966) Echoes of Revolt: The Masses 1911–1917, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. Oriani, Alfredo (1924) La rivolta ideale, Bologna: Licinio Cappelli. Ortega y Gasset, José (2006) La rebelión de las masas, Madrid: Austral. Ortega y Gasset, José (2015) España invertebrada, Barcelona: Austral. Pirandello, Luigi (1928) The Old and the Young, C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, trans., Kindle edition. Primo de Rivera, José Antonio (1976) Escritos y Discursos: Obras Completas (1922–1936), Agustín del Río Cisneros, ed., Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Políticos [digitalized PDF file, 2004]. Puértolas, Julio Rodríguez (2008) Historia de la Literatura Fascista Española, Madrid: Akal. Rainero, Roman (1983) Paolo Valera e l’opposizione democratica all’impresa di Tripoli, Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider. Rebatet, Lucien (1942) Les Décombres, Paris: Denoël [digitalized PDF file, 2004]. Rédier, Antoine (1925) Comme disait Monsieur de Tocqueville . . ., Paris: Perrin. Reventlow, Graf Ernst (1933 (Deutscher Sozialismus: Civitas Dei Germanica, Weimar: Alexander Duncker Verlag. Saz Campos, Ismael (2003) España contra España: Los nacionalismos franquistas, Madrid: Marcial Pons. Sloterdijk, Peter (2000) Die Verachtung der Massen—Versuch über Kulturkämpfe in der modernen Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Soucy, Robert (1986) French Fascism: The First Wave, 1924–1933, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Spengler, Oswald (1999) Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte, München: DTV. Stadtler, Eduard (1937) Weltrevolutions-Krieg, Düsseldorf: Neuer Zeitverlag.

28  Introduction Sternhell, Zeev (1996) Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sternhell, Zeev (2016) “The Birth of Fascism,” Haaretz, July 7, 2016. [In Hebrew]. www.haaretz.co.il/opinions/1.3000104 Last accessed March 2017. Theweleit, Klaus (1978) Männerphantasien: 2 Band, Frankfurt am Main: Roter Stern. Weber, Eugen (1964) Varieties of Fascism, Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand. Yovel, Yirmiyahu (1992) Spinoza and Other Heretics. Volume 2: The Adventures of Immanence, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

1 The Rise of the Last Human I The Formation of Mass Society

There is one fact which, whether for good or ill, is of utmost importance in the public life of Europe at the present moment. This fact is the accession of the masses to complete social power. As the masses, by definition, neither should nor can direct their own personal existence, and still less rule society in general, this fact means that actually Europe is suffering from the greatest crisis that can afflict peoples, nations, and civilisation. [. . .] It is called the rebellion of the masses. In order to understand this formidable fact, it is important from the start to avoid giving to the words “rebellion,” “masses,” and “social power” a meaning exclusively or primarily political. Public life is not solely political, but equally, and even primarily, intellectual, moral, economic, religious; it comprises all our collective habits, including our own fashions both of dress and of amusement. José Ortega y Gasset 1929 (1957: 11)

This chapter will chart the contours of what is often referred to as “mass society,” as it took shape in the second half of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century. There is a wide—and rare—agreement among scholars that fascism was a quintessential product of mass society, mass politics, mass culture and so on and so forth. The debate is mainly on how to interpret this link: as was described in the introduction, the assumption is usually that fascism signifies a continuation, even culmination, of mass society. “Mass society” is a general title comprising a broad spectrum of significant modern innovations and developments affecting nearly all spheres of life in Western societies. Rather than taking these changes for granted, or over-generalizing about their nature, it is useful to divide them into central departments or areas, for example changes that were mainly political, others that were mostly demographic, cultural, economic, etc. Such division will be useful in concretizing and ordering the society we aim to describe, although it must be kept in mind that these developments were in fact not isolated and autonomous but rather intimately and variously interconnected.

30  The Rise of the Last Human I Nietzsche’s notion of “The Last Human,” which was integral to his critique of what he referred to as “passive nihilism,” will represent the most uncompromising, wide-ranging, incisive and influential form taken by the opposition to the masses. For Nietzsche, the triumph of the masses was inevitable (or at least so he claimed in his moments of despondency) and will signify the end of Western civilization, to be followed by an era of mediocrity, stasis and moral, economic and cultural dissolution. The mass project is politically democratic and economically and culturally egalitarian. As against this fateful devolution Nietzsche proposed, in his more buoyant moments, an ambitious project of renewal which he termed “a re-evaluation of all values” (Umwertung aller Werte). The significance of the Nietzschean project is not simply that it prefigures fascism in many ways—albeit not fully and not without contradictions; beyond his enormous influence, Nietzsche is a representative figure, whose thought provides a vital insight into the European Zeitgeist. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Thomas Mann, who was himself deeply influenced by Nietzsche, described his philosophy as a seismograph whose needle registers the feverish movements of the European spirit, during “the fascist era of the West” (Mann 1974: 702). Mann attempted to somewhat blunt the edge of the criticisms leveled at Nietzsche, by arguing that he was less an active agent than a perceptive observer. This is not entirely convincing for, Marx aside, what modern thinker if not Nietzsche could claim a real impact on the course of historical developments? Nietzsche, at any rate, liked to think of himself not as a needle but as “a dynamite,” a fateful force shaping the destinies of the world. “I have,” he once wrote to his sister, “quite literally speaking, the future of mankind in the palm of my hand” (Nietzsche 1986, vol. 8: 473). Yet for our purposes deciding the matter is not very important, since the comparison of Nietzsche to a seismograph needle is itself highly useful. In Chapters 1 and 2 it will be shown how, during the 19th century and the early 20th century, the issues dealt with by Nietzsche were at the heart of the political and cultural discourse in Europe. In the remaining chapters we will examine how, and to what extent, these themes have been taken up, further elaborated and politically materialized under fascism.

What is “Mass Society?” Common Perceptions The term “mass society,” often accompanied by negative overtones, indicates a new kind of human society emerging in the Western, industrial world, in the course of the 19th-century (or the so-called “long 19th century,” which according to Eric Hobsbawm started with the French Revolution), and since then becoming the dominant model in many countries. The emphasis on the “mass” nature of that society points, in different and sometimes contradictory ways, to the important role played within its framework by the common mass of the people. It is usually

The Rise of the Last Human I 31 argued that the main historical novelty of mass society consists not in creating the mass as such, for it is assumed that the common people, sometimes called the populace, the mob, the plebs, the crowd, et cetera, existed throughout history, but in the fact that for the first time the mass becomes the center of society, its most significant group.1 According to some views, however, the modern era created the mass as such, or at least a unique and unprecedented sort of mass. This approach takes it to be that in the past the commoners were not masses in the modern sense but a different, and usually better, social entity.2 Another moot point concerns the role of the modern mass. Here, two main approaches can be distinguished, the active mass, on the one hand, and the passive mass, on the other hand. The first sees the mass as the leading social force. While in the past different élite groups—nobility, clergy, bourgeoisie, educated or cultivated groups—presided over society, ruled and guided the masses, modern society is historically the first in which the masses enjoy primacy and the other social groups are relegated to a secondary plane and are forced to take the masses into consideration, compromise with their taste, serve them and satisfy their needs. Hence the story of the rise of the masses is conventionally also that of the descent of the traditional élites and ruling groups, which have gradually lost their sway. On many versions it is also a tragic story, recounting the way in which presumably low and inferior social groups have displaced their betters. In “the most famous book in the Spanish language of the 20th century,” (Marías 2006: 9) Ortega lamented (1957: 13) the fact that Now, suddenly, [. . .] looking in any direction our eyes meet with the multitudes. Not only in any direction, but precisely in the best places, the relatively refined creation of human culture, previously reserved to lesser groups, in a word, to minorities. The multitude has suddenly become visible, installing itself in the preferential positions in society. The active-crowd view is fundamentally conservative and right-wing, combining elitism—an identification with ruling “minorities” such as the ones that we have mentioned; nostalgia—the belief that past times were better since minorities still predominated; and, usually, also pessimism: the assumption that once the dam has broken, which happened sometime at the beginning of the new age,3 it is exceedingly difficult if not outright impossible to reverse the process. All that can be done, and even that tentatively, is to somewhat moderate the rule of the masses and contain it within tolerable limits. This, as we shall see later on in this chapter, was the position of the most influential “crowd theorist” of them all, Gustave Le Bon. The second approach, that which ascribes the mass a fundamentally passive role, insists that while the modern mass is indeed important it is not actually in control of society. Different élites continue to be in charge

32  The Rise of the Last Human I and to direct or manipulate the masses as they have done throughout history. This is the claim of the classical élite theories put forth by sociologists and political thinkers such as Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, Robert Michels, Walter Bagehot and others, who argued that the division between a governing élite and a governed mass is a timeless and unalterable social fact, which can be given different forms but never cancelled. The mass by its very nature cannot rule but can be under the illusion that it does. Ortega occupies here something of a middle position, in that he, on the one hand, emphatically credits the modern masses with seizing the levers of power, yet on the other hand he shares the élite theorists’ conviction that this elimination of the rule by minorities is unnatural, an anomaly, a fever which is bound to run its course and end up by reinstating elitism. Mass rule, one might therefore say, is an impossibility that happens. Technically, Ortega, the arch-denouncer of “hyper-democracy,” seems to be far removed from Pareto, who repeatedly reassures his readers that democracy can never be more than a façade, covering up the activity of minorities. Yet in truth their positions are fairly close, since Pareto, too, for all his professed conviction that elitism is a law of nature, was exasperated by the democratic rise of the masses and the descent of the élite. “Slowly but surely,” he observed, “the use of force passes from the upper to the lower classes” (Pareto 1966: 315). Or: Since the force of the masses is now the stronger of the two forces in conflict in our society, the bourgeois state is lurching on its foundations and its power is disintegrating. [. . .] [P]lutocracy is weakening and democracy growing ever stronger (323) Contradictions apart, this state of things—whereby the masses are said to be still under control—is then seen in either positive or negative light, depending on one’s political vantage point. Conservatives like Pareto drew a modicum of confidence from such an analysis, struggling to reassure themselves, their supporters and their opponents that the radical dream of mass democracy is just a utopia. For radicals agreeing with their diagnosis, it was a source of lament and dismay. On the left, the masses were seen as the victims of political and economic élites deceiving them for their own purposes. Thus, most members of the Frankfurt School stressed the fact that mass society was not controlled by the mass. On the contrary, in modern society the masses are pliant raw material in the hands of politicians, industrialists, public relations experts and advertisers, who through “the culture industry” and mass consumerism systematically instill the masses with a vacuous and distorted worldview, draining them of all autonomy of thought and action, and reconciling them to a repressive and inhuman system. The needs catered to by modern industry are “false” and “imaginary” ones, created by capitalism

The Rise of the Last Human I 33 itself to further subjugate the masses. The most succinct and seminal expression of these views is probably the chapter on “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, where mass society and culture were seen as integral to the political and human calamity that is modernity, up to and including its most horrid expression: fascism. Mass society is thus the object of profound criticisms and anxieties on both the right and the left. The former attacks mass society on account of the active role of the masses, the latter on account of their passive role. Moreover, the boundary between their respective critiques is in fact not always clear. Consider the following critique of mass consumerism under capitalism, denouncing false needs and subconscious manipulation: After [. . .] the frantic circulation of capital [. . .] was set in motion, mankind has finally arrived at a point where the relationship between need and machine (or work) have been totally reversed; it is no longer need that requires mechanical work, but mechanical work [. . .] that generates new needs. In a regime of superproduction, in order for all the products to be sold it is necessary that the needs of single individuals [. . .] be maintained and even multiplied so that consumption may increase [. . .]. Modern civilization has pushed man onward; it has generated in him the need for an increasingly greater number of things; it has made him more and more insufficient to himself and powerless. Thus, every new invention and technological discovery, rather than a conquest, really represents a defeat and a new whiplash in an ever faster race blindly taking place within a system of conditionings that are increasingly serious and irreversible and that for the most part go unnoticed. This is very much in the spirit of the Frankfurt School and might have been written by a Horkheimer or a Marcuse. Yet the author is Julius Evola—the fascist Italian thinker, who also supported German National Socialism (Evola 1995: 335–336). Evola, however, diagnoses the ailment as part of the modern “regression of the castes” (327), whereas the Frankfurt School paradigm presumes to be all in favor of egalitarianism. Common to both approaches is a negative assessment of the masses’ role. In the first, conservative account, they are the perpetrators, found guilty of destabilizing society; in the second, radical account, they are accomplices, guilty of failing to destabilize society, of allowing themselves to be manipulated. And on both accounts mass society is a dead end: for conservatives it signifies the degeneration of the people, the race or the castes; for radicals, it is the degeneration of class, of the proletariat failing to revolutionize society. The mass, as discussed in the Introduction, is an aborted class, one that has failed to mature, remaining forever an underage. The frequent accusation against consumers as puerile reflects

34  The Rise of the Last Human I this rejection of mass society: “Consumed,” states the title of a recent critique of consumerism, and elaborates: “How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole” (Barber 2007). Both these approaches are heavily laden with ideological content, and so are those rarer positions, almost always of left-wing provenance, that have celebrated the masses as representing a vibrant force for social change and human emancipation. In order to better understand “mass society” it will be useful to trace, with a broad brush, the key processes to which this concept takes reference. What exactly happened in the new era on the social, economic, political and cultural spheres, which gave cause to historians, sociologists and psychologists to employ the concept of “the masses” in the first place and then to refer back to it as often as they did? In the next section the main features of this society will be briefly presented and analyzed. Once this is done, it will be possible, in the following chapter, to proceed and on this basis discuss the responses, especially hostile ones, to mass society.

Mass Society Outlined As rightly claimed by Ortega, in the sentences cited at the beginning of this chapter, the rebellion of the masses needs to be understood as a comprehensive and multi-faceted phenomenon. “Mass society” is an umbrella term covering a whole range of important developments, affecting nearly all spheres of life. In order to obtain an overview of these changes, they will be divided into central “departments,” such as the political, the social or the cultural. This will be convenient as a heuristic method, but should not obscure the fact that in historical reality these spheres were not clearly separated. On the contrary, developments in one sphere—say, the political—profoundly affected other domains, say the social. Nor will the spheres be ordered hierarchically, ascribing a priority to any one of them. In that respect the order of the presentation is largely arbitrary: the discussion will commence with the political domain, but might have started with the social or the economic ones. The subsections should be regarded as pieces of a puzzle: each separate piece is vital, yet of ultimate importance is the overall picture. Politics In the political field, the role of commoners grows increasingly, at least in a formal sense, first that of the middle classes and then, slowly but surely, that of the workers. The origins of the process are in the shift, brought about by the French Revolution of 1789, from the sovereignty of the monarch to that of people. This is, indeed, a revolutionary change, calling forth the strongest of resistances on the part of the forces opposed to the revolution. One might think that the revolution was soundly defeated

The Rise of the Last Human I 35 and evacuated the historical scene in tandem with Napoleon Bonaparte and the onset of the Restoration. Yet in reality the innovative ideals of the revolution continued to strike root and spread throughout Europe even after the defeat of revolutionary France, indeed even in those countries in which conservative forces appeared to have scored a decisive victory. “The third estate,” which the bourgeois revolutionary Abbé Sieyès wished to install as the new hegemon gained in strength ubiquitously, even where republics did not substitute monarchies. The years following 1815 are not a period of social peace and political stagnation. Far from it, rising political discontent brought about a series of reforms gradually increasing the suffrage to formerly disenfranchised groups of the population. The changes, to be sure, were very slow and in part minute—in England “the Great Reform Act” of 1832 granted only one in seven men the vote—yet by the end of the process, about a century later, in 1928, a universal suffrage was granted to men and women without property qualifications. (See Whitfield 2001: 270.) A similar process took place in most other West European countries: in France universal suffrage, for men only, was granted in 1871, after the collapse of the Empire and the establishment of the Second Republic: French women had to wait much longer, until after the Second World War, before obtaining that right. Germany granted universal suffrage to men as early as its unification. In many countries—Austria, Hungary and others—universal suffrage was instituted only after the First World War, yet they too experienced in the course of the 19th century significant extension of the franchise. Thus, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a series of reforms drew more and more citizens into the circle of voters, as happened in 1882, 1896 and 1907. The assumption, that is, that the government needed to represent “the people,” court its approval and win its consent, an assumption first advocated in the American and French revolutions, became increasingly— whether by the smallest of steps or by leaps and bounds—predominant, marginalizing positions that refuted democracy tout court. The extension of the franchise certainly did not signify a universal and unconditional acceptance of the democratic system of ruling. Far from it, one can interpret it as a paradoxical attempt to refrain from moving into full-blown democracy and to cement, under new circumstances, the rule of the élites. The historian Eric Evans explains this well with regards to developments in Britain: It is important to remember that what was essentially a reformist creed remained undemocratic. Democracy, as one Whig supporter said, is “fatal to the purposes to which government exists.” Throughout the nineteenth century, therefore, the key reform question was: “Whom is it safe to enfranchise?” It was the definition of “safe” that changed rather than the ultimate objective. The enfranchisement

36  The Rise of the Last Human I clauses of the so-called Great Reform Act were carefully designed to include the fearfully conservative lower-middle classes and to exclude working people, many of whose leaders called stridently for democracy. (Evans 2000: 93) Thus, for reformers, the extension of the franchise was often a mechanism for containing social change, used as a safety valve to release some steam and prevent social frustrations from over boiling. Yet the wide percolation of the principle of popular sovereignty, no matter how diluted, and the extension of the franchise to ever growing circles of voters were two processes that clearly reflected the rise in the political status of commoners. Beyond the technical and numerical aspect of the extending franchise, a profound qualitative change affected politics: alongside the old political forces, the traditional parties and lobbies representing the nobility and the upper-middle classes, parties were founded that courted the votes of the new constituencies, the lower-middle classes and eventually the workers. Throughout Western Europe socialist parties of one hue or another, reformist or revolutionary, were clamoring for redistribution of wealth, progressive taxation, legislation protecting and benefiting workers, education for their children and so on and so forth. While these parties initially faced great difficulties, their visibility as representatives of the masses was steadily growing. For example, the British Labour Party was founded in the 1900 and claimed to stand for the urban proletariat. In the first decades of its activity it was a secondary factor compared to the two traditional forces of British politics, the Tory Conservatives, representing the nobility and the landowners, and the Whig Liberals, representing industry and the high bourgeoisie. Labour often joined the Liberals as junior partners in so-called Lib-Lab blocks. Yet gradually it grew at the expense of the Liberals until becoming, in the aftermath of the First World War, the most important political party alongside the Conservatives.4 The formation of parties with broad popular base compelled a reorientation on the part of the traditional parties. Given the numerical advantage of those with low income as compared to the well off, the old politics, conducted above the masses’ heads, lost its efficacy. They had to come to terms with the imperative to placate—rhetorically, but practically as well—the new voters and prevent them from throwing their full electoral weight behind radical movements. Even those who rejected the notion of mass influence were forced to cater to the masses, compromise and make concessions to them in order not to lose their political footing. This led to a situation, recurring in many countries, in which social reforms, in some cases of path-breaking significance, were implemented by conservative political forces. In face of vociferous opposition coming from the right-wing flank of his own, Conservative Party, the charismatic

The Rise of the Last Human I 37 Tory leader Benjamin Disraeli initiated the Reform Act of 1867, adding close to million voters to the franchise and nearly doubling the number of voters. This step was the outcome of several motives, among them the wish to enjoy the support of artisans and small businessmen who, as it was correctly assumed, will tend to back up the Conservatives against the workers who pushed for more substantial political reform. (See, for instance, Morton 1948: 357–358.) Disraeli’s second term as Prime Minister, from 1874 to 1880, was characterized by further social reforms such as legislation regulating artisans’ lodgings, public healthcare, education, trade unions and restrictions on the pollution of rivers. In retrospect, most of these measures were modest and remained only partially implemented, yet they reflected for all that the revamping of the once stringently exclusive Conservative Party and its efforts to come nearer to the general public. These policies generated the term “Tory democracy,” designating some blend of the hierarchical old and the egalitarian new. Noticeably, the fact that some conservatives made their own the term “democracy,” not long ago in exclusive radical use, is an important innovation and the sign that élite circles had to take in, one way or another, the realities of a mass society in formation. (On Disraeli’s historical legacy, see Adelman 1997.) In Germany, the architect of the unified state Otto von Bismarck embodies a similar contradiction in his approach to mass society. On the one hand, Bismarck adopted a repressive policy toward the Socialist Party, whose activities he sought to curtail with a series of anti-Socialist laws (1878–88), outlawing trade unions and gatherings meant to diffuse social-democratic propaganda, closing down tens of radical newspapers, and so on and so forth. On the other hand, however, since the Socialists enjoyed ever expanding popular support, Bismarck had to carry forth pioneering social reforms, exceeding those of Disraeli, which are sometimes seen as the first indications of the modern Welfare State. Among these can be mentioned workers’ health insurance (1883), jointly funded by the government and the employers, guaranteeing the employee free medical care and financial support for a period ranging from 3 days to 13 weeks. In 1884 an accident insurance was established, fully paid for by the employers, which included the transference of monies to the family in case of fatal injury. And in 1899, already after Bismarck, these were boosted by pension and by insurance for invalids, jointly financed by employer and employee (Müller 2002: 193–194; Wehler 1995: 907–915). Ironically, the very desire to sink the socialist vessel turned Bismarck into a figure that de facto executed parts of the socialist agenda, albeit, needless to say, in a reformist rather than revolutionary way. Bismarck’s liberal opponents on the right even accused him of instituting state socialism (Williamson 1998: 64–65). In any event, the effort to foil the advance of socialism fell flat and the Social Democratic Party progressively grew, continuing to expand its basis of support, as illustrated by Table 1.1:

38  The Rise of the Last Human I Table 1.1 Voting percentage for the German Social-Democratic Party (SDAP) between 1871–1912, in elections to the Reichstag

The period this chart covers is the so-called Kaiserreich, spanning from the unification of Germany in 1871 to the threshold of the First World War. It can be seen that apart from a short-term decline in the voting percentage for the SDAP in the first two elections taking place after the beginning of the anti-socialist legislation, in 1878 and 1881, the party was steadily growing throughout the entire period (the minor exception was 1907). To this should be added the fact that, starting with the 1890 elections—the first ones after the suspension of the Sozialistengesetz—the party was the biggest in the Reichstag, and its power was by no means just electoral: it deeply engaged the German workers, boasting of a larger membership than that of any other party. It was the flagship of world socialism, in the country with the highest industrialization rate in Europe. Ideologically, under the charismatic leadership of August Bebel, the party was committed to social revolution and the replacement of capitalism with socialism. Yet it operated legally, and included a strong reformist sector advocating the gradual move to socialism through legal achievements and the democratic conquest of political power. The mass politics of the German socialists (mass both in terms of the number of supporters and in reference to their social origins), seemed like such a successful model that it aroused enormous hopes and the belief that momentous social and economic improvements, and even a move to a radically different social order, were within reach. An interesting expression of these expectations can be found in the following sentences written by Friedrich Engels in the year he died, 1895: The irony of world history turns everything upside down. We, the “revolutionaries,” the “overthrowers”—we are thriving far better on legal methods than on illegal methods and overthrow. The parties of order, as they call themselves, are perishing under the legal conditions created by themselves. They cry despairingly with Odilon Barrot: la légalité nous tue, legality is the death of us; whereas we, under this legality, get firm muscles and rosy cheeks and look like life

The Rise of the Last Human I 39 eternal. And if we are not so crazy as to let ourselves be driven to street fighting in order to please them, then in the end there is nothing left for them to do but themselves break through this dire legality. [. . .] They can cope with the Social-Democratic overthrow, which just now is doing so well by keeping the law, only by an overthrow on the part of the parties of Order, an overthrow which cannot live without breaking the law. Mr. Roessler, the Prussian bureaucrat, and Mr. von Boguslawski, the Prussian general, have shown them the only way perhaps still possible of getting at the workers, who simply refuse to let themselves be lured into street fighting. Breach of the constitution, dictatorship, return to absolutism, regis voluntas suprema lex! [The King’s will is the supreme law!]. (Engels 1895; several emphases were added) Mass politics thus challenged the old ways of the world. The way in which Engels, the communist, exulted over the peaceful achievements of socialism and warned the workers not to take to arms, points to one of the salient characteristics of mass politics, and of mass society more generally, namely to the way in which initially radical ideas spread and gain more and more supporters until they become well-nigh a matter of course. This is a slow, at times almost imperceptible process, whereby radicalism undergoes was might be termed centralization: ideas emanating from the political fringes embed themselves within the consensus, and political demands which sound at first extreme and even fantastic are with time put into practice, occasionally even by conservative agents. This process is interspersed with violent struggles and revolutionary eruptions—famous over-boiling points were the revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871, and the routine itself is in fact accompanied by demonstrations, riots, collisions with military and police forces—yet it seems that its greatest triumphs are obtained long after the fire and smoke subside. Let us mention two examples for historical struggles that may be seen as such “successful failures,” struggles that fall through on the short term but yield their fruits later on. The first is Chartism, the British workers’ movement that conducted a bitter campaign in demand of political reform and universal suffrage from 1838 to 1848. In spite of the huge enthusiasm infusing their activities and the mobilization of masses of activists and demonstrators, Chartism, considered as a kind of a grand rehearsal for a more mature socialism, failed to obtain its goals and dissolved. And yet, looking backwards to the founding document of the movement, the People’s Charter of 1838, it is striking how nearly all its demands were accepted in time and became the bread and butter of modern politics in Britain and in many other countries: 1. Voting right for all men over 21. 2. Vote by secret ballot.

40  The Rise of the Last Human I 3. 4. 5. 6.

Abolition of property qualifications for members of parliament. Payment for members of parliament. Creation of equal-size electoral districts. Annual parliamentary elections.

Most of these demands were obtained with time, and were even exceeded: universal suffrage eventually included women and the voting age limit went below 21. With a considerably more radical treatise, The Communist Manifesto of 1848, things turned out not altogether differently. Many of the concrete measures proclaimed necessary near the end of this seminal text (Marx and Engels 1985: 104–105) were realized in Western welfare states, such as “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax” (paragraph 2), “Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State,” (6) or “Free education for all children in public schools” (10). It is easy in retrospect to belittle these achievements and be disenchanted by them, even to the point of forgetting that they ever contained liberating potential to begin with and imagining that they were never more than tepid reformist initiatives, if not conservative subterfuges altogether. Yet the fact that such demands have been assimilated into the political common sense, and are then taken for granted by nearly everyone, may be the surest measure of their success. The thankless fate of reforms of this kind, the way extravagant utopias, once realized, become too small to see, was nicely summarized by Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward 2000–1887: The readiness with which men accustom themselves, as matters of course, to improvements in their condition, which, when anticipated, seemed to leave nothing more to be desired, could not be more strikingly illustrated. What reflection could be better calculated to moderate the enthusiasm of reformers who count for their reward on the lively gratitude of future ages! (Bellamy 1986: 35) The entry of the masses to the political arena, however, did not signify a net and exclusive gain for forces on the left. All parties, new and old, competed over the new votes, and many of them claimed to represent those newly enfranchised. An important phenomenon, particularly in Germany and Austria, was the success of “populist” parties, whose basis of support was provided less by the socialist workers and more by artisans, shopkeepers, clerks, white-collar employees (as well as the peasantry, with its distinct interests and worldview), that is, voters from the middle- and lower-middle classes. In the Marxist lingo these were referred to with more than a hint of scorn as the “petty bourgeoisie” or the “rags proletariat” and were often seen as unreliable constituencies, unlikely

The Rise of the Last Human I 41 to support the working-class struggle and even as potential recruits for reactionary counter-strikes. Marx’s observations on the Lumpenproletariat drafted into the Bonapartist counter-revolutionary militias, from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, are worth recalling here, for they provide a glimpse into the significant differences between factions of what is collectively referred to as “the masses”: Alongside decayed roués of doubtful origin and uncertain means of subsistence, alongside ruined and adventurous scions of the bourgeoisie, there were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged criminals, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, confidence tricksters, lazzaroni, pickpockets, sleight-of-hand experts, gamblers, maquereaux, brothel-keepers, porters, pen-pushers, organ-grinders, rag-and-bone merchants, knife-grinders, tinkers and beggars: in short, the whole indeterminate, fragmented mass, tossed backwards and forwards, which the French call la bohème. (Marx 2010: 197) Historians differ on how to characterize the goals of these voters and of the parties soaking up their votes. Some of their demands worked to deepen the democratic process yet these voters were simultaneously interested in bolstering their position vis-à-vis the workers. In the middle layers the ambition was frequently to align with the bourgeoisie and to turn the cold shoulder to “the rabble” below. These parties, it is usually assumed, dished up versions of populist socialism that, more than taking on the capitalists and threatening the élites, feared the rise of the organized workers. To the extent that capitalism was attacked, the hostility was mostly directed against the allegedly destructive financial sector, as opposed to the positively viewed industrial sector. Here prevailed the distinction, later embraced by the Nazi ideologue Gottfried Feder, between raffendes and schaffendes Kapital, the former insidious and parasitic, lacking any national commitment and feeding off the activity of industry on which it merely speculates; the latter productive and work providing, promoting national prosperity. It was convenient to identify the allegedly parasitic finance capital with the Jews, exploiting the age-old image of the Jew as a ruthless usurer preying on the people, and to compound this with the myth of the Jewish international conspiracy, manipulating the nations for its purposes.5 Parties with such an outlook, usually antisemitic, were founded in Europe toward the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th century, and were sometimes quite successful. Two notable cases were the Austrian Christlichsozial Party, headed by Karl Lueger and the panGerman Party of his compatriot Georg Ritter von Schönerer, two politicians who are remembered today mainly as inspirations for the young Hitler during his days as a penurious artist in Vienna. (On their impact, see Hamann 1999.)

42  The Rise of the Last Human I Lueger’s Christian Socialism, was characterized by the already familiar combination of strict anti-Marxism and progressive social policy. The transformation of Vienna into a modern urban center is regarded as one his great achievements. One of the secrets of his success was the blatant use of antisemitism to win the favor of the middle classes, whose members were engaged in hard economic competition with their Jewish counterparts in the fields of jurisprudence, commerce, medicine and journalism, a factor which accounts for his later reputation as a forerunner of Nazism. Yet his antisemitism, as is agreed today, was essentially rhetorical, was not accompanied by physical violence or anti-Jewish legislation, and was cynical and opportunistic rather than motivated by sincere and consistent animosity. When attacked from the right on account of frequently hosting Jews in his home, Lueger famously answered: “Wer ein Jud’ ist, bestimme ich!”—“I decide who’s a Jew.” Toward the end of his days, in 1908, he acknowledged the way he had exploited antisemitism for political reasons: “Yes, you know, antisemitism is a very useful propaganda means to climb up politically. But when you’re already up there you can no longer use it, since it is a rabble’s sport!” (In Ehrlich 2010: 100). Schönerer, in that respect, provides a much clearer antecedent of National Socialism: a rabid antisemite, he adhered to a racist definition of Jews, expressed in his famous saying, meant to dismiss the idea that a converted Jew can be regarded as a legitimate German: “Die Religion ist einerlei—im Blute liegt die Schweinerei”—“Religion changes not a trace: in the blood lies the disgrace” (In Opitz 1996: 33). In social terms, Lueger’s party was backed by the lower-middle class, “the petty bourgeoisie.” Schönerer, by comparison, was endorsed by the upper-bourgeoisie and the non-Jewish intelligentsia. Viewed thus, an identification of his political movement with “massification” would be questionable. As the Austrian historian Helmut Rumpler noted: Schönerer’s ideological stance was on demand particularly on the part of the leading bourgeois layers and the elevated middle-class [gehobenen Mittelstand]. The crowd of the German students [. . .] and the bulk of the German professors [. . .] completely identified with Schönerer’s platform. Enjoying the spread of social Darwinist race ideology, [. . .] Schönerer, the beer-table politician, became the prophet of the German national revolution. (Rumpler 2005: 502–503)6 Another example for a mass movement sometimes mentioned as anticipating fascism is French Boulangism coalescing in the 1890s around the rebellious colonel and Minister of War, Georges Boulanger. The express goal of the movement was to avenge the defeat to Germany and redeem France’s national honor. But besides, and possibly beyond this goal, were

The Rise of the Last Human I 43 two additional aims, directed at internal, rather than external, enemies: first, Boulanger became the hero of many right-wing enemies of the Third Republic, nationalistic and monarchist circles wishing to destroy the republic. Second, Boulanger managed to attract the support of many among the common people who were disgusted with the venality of the republic and construed the general as a figure who could vindicate the perspective of the common man as against the establishment. This twofold revanchism that was both conservative and popular appeared in retrospect as a foretaste of the new, nationalistic-populist synthesis that fascism would come to embody. Zeev Sternhell (1997: 59–98) regarded Boulangism as one of the clear cases of a “revolutionary right” coming close to fascism, as distinct from the traditional, merely conservative right. This relatively short episode, which came to a definitive close after Boulanger collapsed under the expectations and committed suicide in 1891, appealed to many on the right since it opened up the surprising prospect of mobilizing the common people for an anti-revolutionary cause. As observed by Robert Soucy (1972: 13) apropos one of the towering figures in the radical nationalist camp, the writer and ideologue Maurice Barrès, a major problem faced by the right was the fact that they found themselves relatively isolated amidst the French people: At a time in French history when the majority of Frenchmen were finding the Third Republic and its ideals increasingly acceptable, the majority of France’s literati were finding them increasingly unacceptable. Disgusted with parliamentary corruption, ‘decadence,’ and mediocrity, they turned a sympathetic ear to the siren call of authoritarian nationalism. For a fleeting moment, therefore, Boulangism seemed to offer the tantalizing prospect of nationalizing the masses: emerging from this seclusion and turning the multitudes against the republic. Many in the Boulangist camp continued to promote their nationalist-conservative agenda in the course of the Dreyfus affair (1894–1906), among them Barrès who began as a champion of the solitary individual’s revolt against the claims of the “barbaric” mass in the Le Culte du moi trilogy (1888–91), where the solipsistic integrity of the individual was rigidly upheld, yet in continuation, indeed toward the end of the trilogy itself, tried to bridge up the supposed gulf between the self and the French nation, claiming that the “private I” must be subordinated to the “national I” (Bosc 2007: 221– 223). Barrès strove to distill a pure French nationality, bringing together “nationalism, protectionism and socialism” on the basis of organicism and racism. In 1898 he referred to his political worldview as “national socialism” (In Soucy 1972: 13). Rejecting the French Revolution’s notion of nationality, which was civil and legal, Barrès and fellow right-wing nationalists insisted that the principal component of nationality is not a

44  The Rise of the Last Human I meaningless and contingent citizenship, that could be arbitrarily obtained or relinquished, but the ties of blood between the nation’s members, their common ethnic roots. For that reason, Barrès’s distillation of the French essence necessitated the ostracism of the purportedly non-French, the foreigner, who cannot view the world from an authentically French perspective: the Jew. [Dreyfus is] the deracinated individual who feels ill at ease in one of the plots of the old French garden [. . .] because he had no roots [. . .] that associated him strongly enough with the soil and the conscience of France to keep him from looking for his happiness, his peace, his life, in foreign lands. I don’t need to be told why Dreyfus betrayed. Psychologically speaking, it is enough for me to know that he is capable of betrayal to know that he betrayed. The gap is filled in. That Dreyfus is capable of betrayal, I conclude from his race. (In Carroll 1995: 28) Demographics This is the way Ortega begins his attempt to account for the revolt of the masses: Perhaps the best line of approach to this historical phenomenon may be found by turning our attention to a visual experience, stressing one aspect of our epoch which is plain to our very eyes. This fact is quite simple to enunciate, though not so to analyse. I shall call it the fact of agglomeration, of “fullness.” Towns are full of people, houses full of tenants, hotels full of guests, trains full of travelers, cafés full of customers, parks full of promenaders, consulting-rooms of famous doctors full of patients, theaters full of spectators, and beaches full of bathers. What previously was, in general, no problem, now begins to be an everyday one, namely, to find room. (Ortega 1957: 11–12)7 Ortega refers to the phenomenon of agglomeration as “visual,” yet it is clearly experienced also, and perhaps primarily, in a more directly physical way. Space narrows, less of it is available, and it becomes increasingly difficult to find room, to make way. This is an irritating sensation, not just for the eyes but for the body more generally, that is forced to plow through the crowds whenever it goes. And the organ of the body chiefly affected, it would seem, are actually the lungs: they struggle for air, for the few short sentences of the passage are difficult to read through, inducing a claustrophobic, asphyxiating effect. There are great many people around, perhaps too many. For Ortega, the first fact noted about mass society is the demographic one of population growth.

The Rise of the Last Human I 45 This fact, however, is not uniform, and concerns the city first and foremost: “Towns are full of people,” he claims, and goes on to describe the congestion in a number of activity and recreation loci typical of urban space: hotels, cafés and so on and so forth. And indeed these two processes, population growth and urbanization, are objective measures of massification, of conglomeration. The following historical chart (Figure 1.1) provides a perspective on both of them: country populaon

13 89

town populaon

186 272 301 108 127 160 38 71 15 19 175 185 173 181 155 152 105 135 165 172

1700 1750 1800 1850 1880 1900 1910 1930 1950 1970 1980

Figure 1.1 The growth in Europe’s population (not including Russia), in town and country (1770–1980)

It can be seen, first, how Europe’s population grew enormously between the early 18th century and the late 20th century, from 102 million people in 1770 to 453 million in 1980. Second, the change took place above all in the cities: while country people increased very significantly between 1700 and 1980—from 89 to 152 million—this remains less than a 100 percent increase. By comparison, town population went up from 13 million in 1700 to 301 million in 1980: that is, multiplied by 23! Furthermore, since the mid 19th century the number of country habitants remained fairly stable; in fact, in 1980 Europe there were less country folk than in 1850. The number of town dwellers, by comparison, rose both steeply and consistently.8 This data is even more striking when it is taken into consideration that during the 20th century Europe was the epicenter of two wars of unprecedented scale collecting a gigantic toll in human life. There were many reasons for the drastic demographic changes in Modern Europe, but two of them were central: the combined impact of a couple of vast economic transformation whose center was in Britain, and that are commonly referred to as “the agricultural revolution” and “the industrial revolution.” For our purposes, the briefest of overviews of these revolutions, whose roots are in the early modern period, that is, the 15th and 16th centuries, will suffice. The agricultural revolution was a slow but steady process of improvement in the efficiency of crops growing, due to technological and scientific innovations, as well as changes in the economic and political model. The first kind of change affected sowing and harvesting, brought about the improvement of the

46  The Rise of the Last Human I land’s productivity through new fertilizers, mechanization and new crops imported from “the new world,” such as potatoes and maize, providing cheap food sources for both humans and livestock. The second kind of innovation involved changes in the ownership of land and the move to a competitive market economy that increased the motivation and imposed the compulsion to enhance production in order to extract profit. (See Meiksins Wood 2002; Allen 2009: 57–59.) The steep rise in agricultural productivity made many peasants economically superfluous and unemployed. With the first stirrings of industrialization, demand for work increased in the urban centers. This resulted in a steady stream of immigration from the countryside to the towns, which grew correspondingly. Now it was possible to feed the ever growing number of town dwellers since the age-old obstacle of food production was no longer unsurpassable. In tandem with the institutional and technological changes which permitted the increases in food production, a number of path-breaking innovations caused a leap in industrial production, at first mainly in Britain but subsequently also in other West European countries. Among the numerous improvements can be mentioned the enhancement of cotton spinning brought about by the inventions of engineers such as James Hargreaves, with his “spinning Jenny” (1764) that tripled the output of cotton spinning (Allen 2009: 215) or Richard Arkwright who in 1769 patented a spinning frame powered by water; James Watt’s improved steam motor; George Stephenson’s 1814 steam motor that inaugurated the locomotive era; and the use of coke energy for the cheap production of steel in the course of the 18th century. The rapid urbanization process of the industrial revolution created severe social problems. Alongside the riches amassed by industrialists and bankers many suffered acute deprivation. The systems of services and infrastructure could scarcely cope with the pollution caused by the massive use of coal, drainage systems were primitive and insufficient (until late in the 19th century, London’s sewage, for example, was drained directly into the Thames, resulting in stench and disease), and in workers’ slums gathering around the industrial centers living conditions were appalling, poverty was often dire and criminality rates were high. The plight of the workers and the poor in the industrial cities of England, the proud “workshop of the world,” was documented by sympathetic and anxious contemporaries, some from a radical perspective such as Friedrich Engels (The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1844), Charles Dickens (Hard Times, 1854), or Elizabeth Gaskell (North and South, 1854); others from a conservative viewpoint such as Disraeli (Sybil, or The Two Nations, 1845) or Thomas Carlyle (Past and Present, 1843). Yet gradually, under the joint effect of new political factors and of expanding material and technological means, living and working conditions for most people in West Europe began to improve.

The Rise of the Last Human I 47 Some of the changes, as already discussed, had a political and reformist character (such as the shortening of the working day, legislation limiting child labor, health insurance and pension system), others were technical and administrative (such as improved lighting, use of sewage pipes, opening up of parks in the cities, urban planning broadening streets and avenues in ways which made them more pleasant and were also designed to impede street fighting and barricading of the kind characterizing popular uprisings) and still others were economic (rise in workers’ pay and a cheapening of prices of mass-produced goods). All these caused a marked improvement in the average standard of living and a rise, albeit slow one, in the consumption levels of employees and workers. One of the most decisive changes, if not the most significant of them all, was the increase in average life expectancy and the decrease in infants’ mortality, registered throughout the 19th century. These were the results of superior and more consistent diet as compared with the past, improved sanitation, and particularly of the discoveries of Louis Pasteur in the sphere of bacteriology. The fathoming of the connection between bacteria and disease achieved by Pasteur and his followers was the basis for a true revolution in medicine, allowing a series of practical measures of enormous importance for the ability to identify diseases, cure and even prevent them, such as the pasteurization of milk, purification of drinking water, disinfection of wounds and medical instruments. Sometimes referred to as the Bacterial revolution, this was surely the most momentous accomplishment in the history of medicine.9 It had a strong impact on population increase, while the average number of children per family simultaneously lowered. It should be noted, however, that while this trend was typical for the Western centers of industry, a reversed trend characterized many of the world’s areas that were under the control of Western imperialist powers, especially England, in what was later called “the third world.” In 19th-century India and China, which were under direct or indirect British control, the standard of living actually deteriorated, and mass starvation became frequent, in a way which was unprecedented before the modern age. Thus, population growth in those countries, rather than registering a leap as was the case in Europe, actually slowed down. And while this trend is usually attributed to natural calamities such as droughts, some argue that it was at least as much the outcome of political and economic policies imposed by imperialism. The American historian Mike Davis, for instance, argues that imperialism dismantled the sophisticated welfare systems which existed in China, mainly, but in India too, between the 16th and the 18th centuries. These systems strictly supervised the prices of grain and generously provided food from government storages during arid years. Their replacement with mechanisms that were geared toward turning profit, as well as the general indifference of the foreign administrators to the sufferings of the

48  The Rise of the Last Human I “natives,” brought about a decrease in the standard of living in vast areas of the world, in which starvation and plagues collected staggering numbers of victims (Davis 2002). This should not lead to the impression that, in the industrial world, living and working conditions for the residents of poor neighborhoods were becoming cozy and pleasant toward the end of the 19th century. Far from it, most people still lived in dire conditions, on or below the threshold of poverty. In Britain, one of the richest and most highly developed countries in the world, nearly 30 percent of the population was living in what was defined by the sociological researcher Seebohm Rowntree as “primary or secondary poverty” and the economic disparity between the classes was shocking, giving cause to widespread indignation. And yet, as noted by historian H.C.G. Matthew (2009: 516–517), this “also meant that 70 per cent were living in relative affluence, a proposition inconceivable in the days of the ‘iron law of wages’ of the mid-century.” Rapid urbanization, population growth, and a—relative—rise in the standard of living: this is the demographic background of “mass society” to which critics such as Ortega were referring. Society and Culture The political and demographic changes were accompanied by a profound and multifaceted social and cultural transformation. Trade Unions The workers’ newly found political leverage was backed up by a new social and economic source of leverage, the trade unions formed in the course of the 19th century, which constituted the beating heart of working-class organization. While these carried on in some ways the guilds and artisan associations of the Middle Ages, they were primarily a modern phenomenon, whereby the workers in the different branches of industry organized to collectively confront their employers. The unions allowed the workers, which in the past were devoid of any organizational framework and had to deal individually with the bosses, to represent their interests and struggle en masse to improve their working conditions, their employment terms and their wages. This organization, which narrowed their autonomy and obliged them to consider the demands from below, was in the nature of things zealously resisted by the factory owners. Until the middle of the century unionizing and collective bargaining on the part of the workers was strictly forbidden, also on the pretext that this cancelled the economic liberty of each worker to negotiate work terms at his discretion and work when the opportunity presented itself. Unions, it was claimed, violated economic liberty and free competition. In Britain, for example, in 1799 the Combination Act was passed prohibiting “Unlawful Combinations of

The Rise of the Last Human I 49 Workmen.” This was repealed in 1824 but a wave of strikes set off new regulations in the following year that again suppressed the right to strike and penalized attempts to persuade workers to refrain from work. Only in the Trade Union Act of 1871 did trade unions receive a legal legitimacy, although the rules continued to be phrased vaguely enough to allow the employers to legally pursue strikers.10 From the start certain vagueness, or double purpose, characterized the trade unions and their activity: on the one hand, they were a tool for economic bargaining, used to obtain a fairer distribution of the cake, in the form of various employment benefits and material well-being, yet without aspiring to change the very nature of work relations or of property ownership. Yet on the other hand, also on account of the political persecutions, the limitations and the prohibitions they endured, unions were the loci of political ambitions, striving for far-reaching social and economic changes. Often, though not always, the unions were the extensions, within the factory or workplace, of political parties with a socialist and revolutionary platform. Correspondingly, there were big differences between the forms of struggle used by different sorts of unions. In Germany, for instance, there was a major gap between white-collar unions, referred to as “yellow” ones, which sought to represent their members via amicable negotiations with the employers and recoiling from full-blown confrontations, and their counterparts set up by blue-collar workers that regarded strikes and direct action vis-à-vis the state the main form of struggle. Another important development taking place toward the end of the 19th century was the rise of syndicalism: a form of workers’ organization that stressed the independence of the workers’ own associations from the political parties, notably socialist ones, which claimed to stand up for them. They believed that only the syndicates radically and autonomously represent the workers, preserving the original revolutionary spirit of radical social change rather than hoping for insulting, puny material concessions. The workers’ parties were faulted with forsaking revolution, de facto if not de jure, advocating piecemeal reforms and letting themselves be swallowed up by the political-parliamentarian order. A tension revealed itself between the syndicalist, revolutionary and anarchist side, refusing not only the way capitalist profits were being distributed but the capitalist system itself, and the political side, that wished to empower workers within the prevailing framework. Syndicalists often emphasized the literal meaning of class struggle, involving confrontation rather than negotiation, up to and including violent clash. In the research of fascism, there are those who see in anarcho-syndicalism, particularly as it was understood by uncompromising intellectuals such as Georges Sorel, one of the key factors in the early formation of fascist thought.11 Paralleling the trajectory of workers’ parties in the decades leading up to fascism, European trade unions too were gaining momentum. Information from chosen European countries, among them three in which

50  The Rise of the Last Human I fascism of one sort or another eventually took over, will serve to illustrate this empowerment. In Britain in 1892 unions counted 1.576.000 members; in 1932 the number reached 4.441.000. In Germany in 1891 there were 278.000 members in unions; in 1931 there were 4.412.00 of them. In Austria in 1919 295.000 workers were unionized; in 1930 their number rose to 655.000. In Italy in 1907 the biggest union, the Confederazione Generale del Lavoro, had 190.000 members; in 1914, when the First World War erupted, the number was 321.000, and in 1919, after the war, it rose to 1.159.000 (all data from Neumann 1936: 17–36). In 1917 the US paper Solidarity, published by the Industrial Workers of the World, featured an illustration of a mass of workers, holding their hands up to form, in fusion, a gigantic fist. “The Hand that Will Rule the World,” went the subtitle, “—One Big Union.”12 “In Nothing Alike”? Changes in the Status of Women Another pillar of mass society was the gradual transformation affecting women. Until the late modern period, European women were almost completely excluded from all spheres of public life and lived in political and economic subjection to men. They were not allowed to vote, academic institutions did not admit them and their legal and economic rights were very limited. In the relatively advanced England, for instance, only in 1883 the decree was cancelled that denied women the right to own property once they married, and their participation in the world of labor was also restricted. Women of the lower classes provided cheap labor in industry or earned a living as servants or nannies at upper-class homes, while middle-class women focused, whether they were satisfied with that or not, with raising children and managing the affairs of the house. This state of things was ideologically justified by a combined appeal to two claims: the alleged natural inferiority of women, and the principle of the “separate spheres,” according to which there are innate and natural differences between the sexes to which corresponded separate spheres of action. Culturally, there prevailed a mishmash of misogynic and disparaging positions, on the one hand, feeding on the stereotypes of women as weak, superficial, sentimental, hysteric, prattling and so on and so forth, with romanticization of woman, on the other hand, portraying her as a pure, chaste and almost saintly creature, requiring the protection and admiration of men. Yet despite the differences between the two sets of images, they lead to similar conclusions: woman’s place was in the domestic, familial and shielded space, and not in the public, economic or political one. A classic formulation of the separate spheres tenet was provided in 1865 by the important English cultural critic John Ruskin: We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking of the “superiority” of one sex to the other, as if they could be compared in

The Rise of the Last Human I 51 similar things. Each has what the other has not: each completes the other, and is completed by the other: they are in nothing alike, and the happiness and perfection of both depends on each asking and receiving from the other what the other only can give. Now their separate characters are briefly these. The man’s power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest, wherever war is just, wherever conquest necessary. But the woman’s power is for rule, not for battle,—and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision. [. . .] Her great function is Praise; she enters into no contest, but infallibly adjudges the crown of contest. By her office, and place, she is protected from all danger and temptation. The man, in his rough work in open world, must encounter all peril and trial; [. . .] often he must be wounded, or subdued [. . .]. But he guards the woman from all this; within his house, as ruled by her, unless she herself has sought it, need enter no danger, no temptation, no cause of error or offence. This is the true nature of home—it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division. (Ruskin 2002: 77) The European bourgeoisie, that has assumed social leadership in most countries, nurtured a Victorian feminine ideal of the woman as chaste, motherly, dedicating herself to the family and well-nigh bereft of selfhood.13 This was reflected, among other things, in the taboo placed on female sexuality. The ideal middle-class woman was conceived as fundamentally a-sexual, or at least one that managed to completely domesticate her drives, and channel them perfectly to child bearing. Female lust was regarded as unnatural, typical of women with sinful proclivities, whose final manifestation was prostitution: “It was not the men who frequented prostitutes who stood condemned by society; rather, by a widely accepted double standard, it was the prostitute herself who was held responsible” (Barringer 2012: 106). Prostitution, endemic in Victorian society, and forming a kind of dark and repressed shadow cast by the so often eulogized familial nest, was not understood as a phenomenon grounded in social and economic conditions, and rooted in the paucity of economic options available to women, but as a moral issue, a question of a depraved decision on the part of the woman herself. Comparing two Pre-Raphaelite paintings, the art critic Tim Barringer (2012: 108) nicely captures the contradiction inherent in Victorian sexual mores: “[W]ife and whore; madonna and magdalene. The image of the kept woman, clad in loose undergarment, concentrates on sexuality without reproduction; [the wife], her body encased in steely satin, seems to indicate the Victorian ideal of fecundity without sexuality.”

52  The Rise of the Last Human I The women’s movement grew out of an organized struggle whose goal was to improve the legal, political and economic standing of women. In that respect, too, the first steps were taken during the French Revolution of 1789 when for the first time, albeit at the margins of the debates that contemporaries regarded as fundamental, voices were heard questioning the inferior position of women and asking that the new human and civil rights be applied to women as well. This was the demand made in an important proto-feminist text, Olympe de Gouges’s Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (1791). A similar role, in the British context, was played by Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). These and additional demands matured and sharpened in the course of the 19th century, in radical, revolutionary circles,14 as well as liberal ones.15 Women’s organizations gradually became an important factor in many West European countries. In Germany, for instance, the women’s movement of the Social Democratic Party became the largest in Europe with some 175.000 members in 1914. In England the struggle of the Suffragettes to obtain the vote became iconic. Alongside political rights, the central demands concerned women’s employment—equality of opportunity, equal pay for equal work, protection of the female worker during pregnancy and after giving birth—struggles to obtain and secure women’s education and property, and a series of further demands that were heard towards the First World War and in its aftermath: the right of abortion, of using contraceptives, of sexual freedom, in some cases challenging the very structure of the nuclear family that was regarded as oppressive. On many of these fronts the struggle was crowned with notable, if not complete, success: the vote was granted in one country after another (Denmark in 1915, Germany in 1918, the United States in 1920, Britain in 1928, France in 1944, etc.); the First World War, sending millions of men to the front, meant the mass entry of women to the workforce; and on the cultural domain and in daily social interchanges the Victorian mores and their double standards somewhat gave way, and the sharp differences in behavior and appearance between men and women became less so. In the aftermath of the War, talk began about the model of “the new woman”: more independent, confident of herself and her abilities, disposing of grater scope of expression and enjoyment, also in the romantic and erotic senses, able to fulfill her aspirations outside of the domestic arena, less supervised by men and also less obliged to dress “as a woman”: many women shortened their hair so that it looked more “manly” or “boyish”— the Bubikopf haircut of the American actress Louise Brooks as paradigmatic case in point—the dresses got shorter, and for the first time women started to wear trousers. Seen globally, these improvements were slow and partial. Women’s pay remained significantly below that of men; abortions remained illegal and were severely punished,16 and women’s labor was frequently used as a scapegoat to explain high unemployment rates in times of economic

The Rise of the Last Human I 53 downturn. Women, moreover, were still almost solely responsible for performing house chores and raising children, and life for most workingclass women remained gray and arduous (Kaes and Jay 1995: 208–210). The emancipatory significance of revealing dress and new fashions could also be questioned, asking to what extent it reflected the liberation of woman rather than conformed to the wishes of men, and functioned to further objectify women. Yet to many contemporaries these changes more than sufficed to create the impression of an epochal transformation, taking place under their very eyes, in the role of women and in the social power relations between the sexes. Whether positively or negatively esteemed, approached with hope or with concern, many believed that “the separate spheres” matrix was dissolving, and was perhaps already a thing of the past. The differences between the sexes, not long ago taken for granted, were increasingly seen as artificial rather than biological, restrictions evolving throughout history and imposed by the hegemonic, patriarchal codes and norms. In retrospect, these decades were the beginnings of a feminist discourse of gender, refusing the biological conditioning of social differences, and emphasizing the role of society in producing both female and male behavior. Why, it could be asked, should these changes in the status and role of woman be seen as part of mass society, precisely? Were women a section of the mass? In the next chapter, and later on in the book (Chapter 6, especially) it will be seen how the women’s movement was indeed regarded by many contemporaries as a central flank of the general empowerment of social forces that were until then weak and subjected. Furthermore, a common trope expressly linked femininity and massification. Alongside the changes in the status and sexual image of women, important struggles were also waged surrounding the status of homosexuals and lesbians, who also strove to gain acknowledgment of their rights and for the removal of the social and legal taboo placed on their sexual preferences and their realization. In that regard, too, the watershed was the French Revolution, since revolutionary France was the first country to do away with the punishment of homosexual intercourse, in 1791. But in other European countries some 150 years were necessary until a similar progress was achieved. In England, Germany and elsewhere, the first third of the 20th century was characterized by vigorous efforts to legitimize sexuality between members of the same gender and to dispel the prejudices against it.17 As shall be seen below, this struggle, too, was a manifestation of mass society that was seen by its critics as menacing and elicited a sharp response on their part.18 Mass Culture An important aspect of mass society was the expansion of a commercial, widely accessible culture, variously referred to as mass culture, popular culture or the culture industry. Before the modern age and the industrial

54  The Rise of the Last Human I revolution, the consumption of culture was restricted to fairly limited layers of the population, the upper and middle classes, that disposed of the required leisure, wherewithal and education—the latter meaning, as a vital precondition, literacy. Lacking these resources meant that most people were barred from producing or consuming culture, or, alternatively, that they created a separate and highly delimited culture based on the oral transmission of tales, songs, etc. This kind of cultural activity is referred to as folklore, or as presumably genuine popular culture, to set it apart from its modern, massified counterpart. The former is often cast as superior and as nobler than the latter, since it is perceived as reflecting the spontaneous mindset and yearnings of the common folk, and even embodying “the people’s spirit,” while the latter is conversely chastised for its crass commercialism and its efforts to spread among the lower orders substandard, superficial and manipulative culture. Scholars have frequently approached folklore or Volkskultur—as they sometimes continue to do—with a nearly religious awe, collecting and preserving oral traditions, while contemporary mass culture—best sellers, popular music and subsequently the products of cinema and television—were long regarded as the production of cultural trash unworthy of serious consideration, let alone scholarly attention, unless the purposes of the research were to document and analyze the negative political, social or moral impact of this “culture,” or to approach it as a symptom that might help to diagnose deep-lying social disorders, such as materialism, irrationality, aggression, hedonism, authoritarianism, loss of individual autonomy and so on and so forth. In the last decades, particularly since the 1970s, attitudes have greatly changed and many scholars have drawn attention to the complexity of the products of mass culture, and their social and artistic merit, as well as to take issue with the former scholarly position for its perceived arrogance and elitism. In explicit opposition to the traditional reluctance to grant modern production the elevated title of “culture,” and preserve it to the work of great artists, the discipline known as “culture studies” has expanded the use of the term so as to include not just classic and “high” art, but also contemporary culture addressing the wider public and even everyday trends and practices.19 The debate between those the Italian writer and critic Umberto Eco (1964) has called “populists,” who embrace mass culture, and the “elitists” who treat it with suspicion and contempt, continues in our days and no consensus has been reached with regards to the quality and significance of mass culture. But it is agreed that the conditions for the spread of this culture were the of introduction of compulsory, universal education, in the second half of the 19th century, a steady rise in literacy, an improvement in the ability to produce and distribute papers and books in a way that made them cheaper and available to ever growing publics (such as the “penny magazines”—named after the original English

The Rise of the Last Human I 55 magazine bearing this title that was published between 1832–45—illustrated magazines that usually catered to the lower-middle class and the working class), and subsequently the introduction of new technologies—photography, recording, filming and so on and so forth—which turned cinema (from 1895 onwards), the gramophone (1877) and the radio (1895) into means of mass communication and entertainment that became integral to the lives of millions of readers, listeners and viewers.20 In its broadest application, modern mass culture also encompasses the significant expansion of middle- and working-class consumption in the countries of the industrial world. This trend began in earnest in the last third of the 19th century and gained further momentum after the First World War, in spite of the great economic hardship of the 1920s (it historically peaked after the Second World War, a period that is not included in the present discussion). As noted by historian Martin Pugh (2008: viii) apropos interwar Britain, in spite of the world economic crisis, there were growth phases in 1919–20, 1922–28 and 1934–37. [. . .] [W]e now recognize that in Britain, as all over the world, this was a bad time for producers in industry and agriculture but a good one for consumers because of the steady fall in prices. As most people managed to retain their employment, the rising real value of their wages made possible the boom in housing, consumption of minor luxuries, motoring, holidays and leisure activities that became characteristic of the era. Indeed, the society of obsessive consumers and shoppers that the British have now become owes its origins to the interwar period. Central to modern capitalism is the mass production of goods, whose price tends to fall on account of serial manufacture on assembly lines, competition and technological innovation. This system is identified with Henry Ford, the first who was able to considerably lower the price of the car, turning it into a mass product. The expansion of mass consumption was limited by sharp disparities in the buying power of different classes, as well as geographic disparities. In interwar England, for example, a gulf separated London and the prosperous south, experiencing a marked improvement of the standard of living, from the central and northern parts of the country, suffering mass unemployment and deprivation. And yet, the rise of consumption made several technological innovations and appliances widely available. Alongside Ford’s model-T, selling more than 15 million cars, the following appliances could be mentioned, along with the date, indicating the beginning of production for mass use rather than the time of invention: can opener (mid 19th century); gramophone (1887); telephone (1890); electric kettle (1893); electric stove (1910); refrigerator (1913); electric hair dryer (1915); electric pop-up toaster (1919); the beginning of radio transmissions (1920); washing machine (circa 1925). This process was accompanied with massive use of advertising, designed

56  The Rise of the Last Human I to expose the consumers to new products and pave the way to their wallets amidst fierce competition between producers. Another by-product of nascent consumerism, becoming a symbol of urban modernity, a simultaneous source of enthusiasm and dismay, was the opening of huge department stores, where a wide variety of goods could be purchased at cheaper prices than could be offered by the smaller shops, which often went bankrupt. One of the first and most famous of such stores was the Parisian Le Bon Marché, opened in 1869, providing the subject matter for Émile Zola’s 1883 novel, Au Bonheur des Dames: one of the first works of literature to grapple with the significance of consumerism, and a book that was itself, in a way, a product of mass culture, serially published in the popular periodical Gil Blas.21 In Germany, the chain of stores Kaufhaus Schocken became famous, owned by Salman Schocken, a Polish-born Jew, who later would become owner of the Israeli journal, Haaretz. His stores, which consciously catered to the masses, were a representative product of the Republic of Weimar, and were known also for their often striking and innovative, Bauhaus designs.22 The urbanization processes here described, the “conglomeration” of millions in urban centers as well as the rise of mass communication— newspapers first, and then radio and cinema—formed the basis of modern entertainment, involving the masses. Thus, the 19th century saw the first examples of modern, mass spectator sport. In Britain bare-knuckle boxing contests were hugely popular, and the best fighters attained the status of folk heroes. Such were the champions William Abednego Thompson and particularly Tom Sayers, who was crowned a national hero. His funeral march drew some hundred thousand working-class admirers to Highgate Cemetery in North London, provoking anxious responses on the part of middle-class observers (Brooks 1989: 5). Yet the real triumph of mass sports came only toward the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century. In 1896 the first summer Olympics was held in Athens, and the football world cup was hosted by Uruguay in 1930, the final match attended by a 100.000 spectators. Football, whose base of support was in the working class, became the most important professional sport in the world, in advance of other popular sports such as rugby, tennis or cricket, which drew mainly middle- and upper-class interest. The early history of modern football witnessed a hard struggle revolving around the question of whether the sport should turn professional or not: the middle classes wished to preserve its amateur and elitist character, while working-class representatives asked that it be turned into a profession in order for commoners, who could not afford to play in their leisure time, to play the game as well. (For a detailed account, see Sanders 2010.) This drama, in which the supporters of professionalization finally prevailed, reflected the debate that took place a few decades earlier, on the question of payment to public representatives; here, too, supporters of democracy

The Rise of the Last Human I 57 favored turning politics into a paid profession, providing an example of the way in which the different spheres of mass society were in fact interlinked. The turn of the century was the time in which today’s most successful football clubs were established in Europe and South America, such as Manchester United (1878), Arsenal (1886), Barcelona (1899), Real Madrid (1902), Juventus (1897), Racing Club de Avellaneda (1903), Boca Juniors (1905), Santos (1912) or Bayern Munich (1900). Football stars became cultural icons, for instance Everton’s striker “Dixie” Dean, who played in the years 1925–37. Their salaries however were negligible as compared with that of today’s stars, and during the first half of the 20th century they earned no more than a skilled industry worker.23 A great significance within mass culture was gained by a new medium of art and communication: cinema. The popularity of films—silent ones at first and then “talkies”—was gigantic, providing cheap and accessible entertainment in nearly every city. Cinema afforded opportunities for escape from harsh realities, an avenue of laughter, excitement and dream, as well as a mirror where contemporaries could contemplate their own image. The illusion of realism of the moving images caused many—and continues to, long after the original thrill of watching movement upon a screen has faded—to embrace role models from the movies, adopt their behavior, talk and appearance so as to resemble the cinematic heroes and heroines. Cinema was attacked from the very beginning as an industry of rosy dreams and dubious morality. “Every visit to the cinema,” wrote Theodor Adorno (2002: 25), “leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse.” Yet it is clear in retrospect that many movies, including some of the most commercially successful ones, were great works of art and certainly did not brutalize their viewers or turned them more complacent. Suffice to mention one cinematic creator, an Anglo-American appreciated even by Adorno, whose pioneering films were an astonishing combination of humor, acrobatics, charm, and humane and critical content: Charlie Chaplin was a genuine cultural hero, revered by the public and an icon of mass culture, producing brilliantly conceived and amazingly executed satires on the conditions prevailing in modern times, the exploitation, poverty, disparity between rich and poor, the elusiveness of the dream of consumption and well-being, and doing all this in a way that radiated with compassion for the plight of the common man. Besides sports and the cinema, mass entertainment encompassed a rich scene of clubs and nightlife, entertainment shows of various kinds, halls in which people danced to the latest hits and musical fashions. At the start of the 20th century Europeans danced, for instance, to the rhythms of jazz and tango—musical genres that came from the new continent, North and South America. Their success was so great that in France, for instance, both of these styles were adopted as one’s own, assimilated into the national culture to the point that they are now largely identified with French culture.

58  The Rise of the Last Human I The last comment provides an opportunity to emphasize a central characteristic of mass culture in its entirety, that is, its common identification with “America,” particularly the United States. The commercial culture produced for the masses (aiming at “the lowest common denominator” as critics sneered); the disregard for traditional class barriers and the aspiration to create a culture that would reach the broadest possible audience; the new methods of production, especially the assembly line; the aggressive advertising methods; the competitive sports; the cult of hits, bestsellers and blockbusters; the stress on hedonism and material pleasures; down to the literally spreading popularity of the chewing gum: they were all understood in Europe as linked to the American “way of life,” even as emanating from it. A lot was written in newspapers and in books on “Americanism,” mostly reflecting disdain towards the ills of the modern world and nostalgia for old, and endangered, ways of life. This criticism will be explored below, both in the next chapter and in Chapters 4 and 5. Here we shall only note that America also found many admirers and defenders, and this for many reasons, not least among them precisely its defiance of the rigid European social hierarchy and the association of the American dream—or chimera, as some would retort—with a more open and egalitarian social space.24 These real or imagined American qualities were particularly attractive to working-class youth, of whom the social historian Jerry White has written the following, apropos Britain: American films offered heroes and heroines who were less hidebound by class than their technically inferior British counterparts. The glamourised male (especially young male) violence of films like Little Caesar (with Edward G. Robinson, 1930), Public Enemy (with James Cagney, 1931), Scarface (with George Raft, 1932), helped workingclass youngsters see themselves as heroes rather than bystanders, the subject of life rather than its object. The adopted American accents, dress-styles and mannerisms, which many observers bemoaned as slavish emulation of a new trash culture, can be interpreted quite differently. This borrowed “style” was a self-conscious identification with a more democratic discourse than anything British society (including its labour movement) had to offer them. (In Strinati 1995: 33)

Notes 1 It is customary to assume that this process, seeing the masses rise to preeminence, began with the French Revolution and deepened during the 19th-century, particularly during the 1848 revolutions. See McClelland (2011: 3–5). 2 On the way in which the terms “mass” and “masses” came to replace, in 19th-century Britain, former negative concepts for the commoners such as rabble or multitude, see Williams (1983: 192–197).

The Rise of the Last Human I 59 3 The French Revolution, unsurprisingly, is perennially seen as the watershed moment. Thus, in 1807, the conservative English poet Robert Southey argued that “the levy in mass, the telegraph and the income-tax are all from France” (In Williams 1983: 193). 4 For a clear and detailed account of this twofold process of Labour ascent and Liberal descent, see Adelman (1995, 1996). 5 On this distinction between good and bad capital, see the following classic study, which provides a detailed portrait of the many variants of antisemitism in 19th-century Austria and Germany: Pulzer (1964: 236). 6 Karl Vocleka likewise distinguishes between Lueger’s party, relying on new voters from the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry, and Schönerer’s party, founded on elitist concepts and praising property and education. See Vocleka (2002: 244–245). 7 The translation of the Spanish word “lleno” was here changed from “plenitude,” which has mostly positive connotations, to the more neutral “fullness.” 8 This chart is based on data provided by the economic historian Bairoch (1988: 216). 9 There is a scholarly debate on how to rank the factors that have impinged on the decrease in the rate of mortality. Some three decades ago, in a research of great repercussion, Thomas McKeown (1980) disputed the assumption that advances in medicine were the key factor, ascribing decisive importance rather to the rise in the standard of living and to improved diet. In response, other scholars emphasized the role of an improved healthcare system sustained by governmental funding (see, for instance, Szreter 2002: 722–725). For our purposes, the disputes between the different approaches are less important than the basic fact they variously seek to explain. 10 As observed by Franz Neumann (1936: 16), the 1871 regulations affirmed that “Although the strike in itself would be lawful, the threat of strike was not.” And for many years later the vagueness of the legal formulations encumbered the unions’ activities. For a detailed account of the bitter struggle conducted by English workers to unionize in the face of opposition by employers and government, see Thompson (1991). 11 Most notable among these scholars is Zeev Sternhell who stressed Sorel’s indispensable role in forming “the fascist synthesis” in various works, among them: Sternhell et al. (1994). 12 Industrial Workers of the World journal, Solidarity, June 30, 1917. 13 For a survey of Victorian culture in broad European context, see Gay (2002). 14 Path-breaking ideas about the equality of women, at least in the context of their time, were espoused in the socialist and later Marxist camp, by such thinkers and activists as Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, Flora Tristan, Friedrich Engels and August Bebel. 15 John Stuart Mill was a pioneer in this camp, but liberal voices in favor of the civil equality for women were heard already in the late 18th century, for example in Nicolas de Condorcet’s 1790 treatise, De l’admission des femmes au droit de cite. For an excellent overview of the most significant proto-feminist literature and its different strands, see Delap (2011). 16 An interesting data from interwar Germany: under legal paragraph 218, introduced in 1871, a maximum penalty of 5 years in prison was determined for abortion. In 1920 2.450 women were prosecuted. In 1933 the number of these women, of mostly working-class background, rose to 60.000. See Kaes and Jay (1995: 202). 17 For a number of relevant sources on debates surrounding sexuality in the Weimar Republic, see Kaes and Jay (1995: 693–718).

60  The Rise of the Last Human I 18 Scholarly literature on this topic is extensive. For a few classical examples, see Gay (2001); Mosse (1985, 1996) ; and Gilman (1985). 19 For a useful discussion of this shift, see Storey (2003). 20 And still later, of course, of television, the internet and other media, which lie outside the period examined in this study. 21 The following study centers on this store and employs it as a case study for analyzing French society in these years: Miller (1981). 22 On Schocken’s self-understanding as a champion of the German masses and a fighter against the élites, see Anthony David’s intriguing biography (2003). 23 For a survey of the roots of modern football and its spread across the globe, see Goldblatt (2007). 24 On the various and sometimes contradictory ways in which Americanism was perceived in the Republic of Weimar, see Peukert (1993: 178–190).

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The Rise of the Last Human I 61 Ehrlich, Anna (2010) Karl Lueger: die zwei Gesichter der Macht, Vienna: Amalthea. Engels, Friedrich (1895) “Introduction to Karl Marx’s the Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850,” http://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/marx/works/1895/03/06. htm Last accessed May 2017. Evans, Eric (2000) Parliamentary Reform, c. 1770–1918, Harlow: Longman. Evola, Julius (1995) Revolt Against the Modern World, Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions International. Gay, Peter (2001) Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, orig. 1968, New York: Norton. Gay, Peter (2002) Schnitzler’s Century: The Making of Middle Class Culture, 1815–1914, New York and London: Norton. Gilman, Sander (1985) Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness, New York: Cornell. Goldblatt, David (2007) The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football, London: Penguin. Hamann, Brigitte (1999) Hitler’s Vienna: A Portrait of the Tyrant as a Young Man, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kaes, Anton and Martin Jay, eds. (1995) The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Mann, Thomas (1974) “Nietzsches Philosophie im Lichte Unserer Erfahrung,” in Gesammelte Werke in Dreizehn Bänden, vol. IX, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Marías, Julián (2006) “Introducción,” to José Ortega y Gasset, in La Rebelión de las Masas, Peter De Mendelssohn, ed., Madrid: Austral. Marx, Karl (2010) Surveys From Exile: Political Writings Volume 2, David Fernbach, ed., London and New York: Verso. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels (1985) The Communist Manifesto, London and New York: Penguin. Matthew, Henry Collin Gray (2009) “The Liberal Age,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, Kenneth O. Morgan, ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press: 463–522. McClelland, J.S. (2011) The Crowd and the Mob: From Plato to Canetti, Oxford and New York: Routledge. McKeown, Thomas (1980) The Role of Medicine: Dream, Mirage, or Nemesis? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Meiksins Wood, Ellen (2002) The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, New York and London: Verso. Miller, Michael B. (1981) The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Morton, Arthur Leslie (1948) A People’s History of England, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Mosse, George (1985) Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe, New York: Howard Fertig. Mosse, George (1996) The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Müller, Helmut M., ed. (2002) Deutsche Geschichte in Schlaglichtern, Leipzig: Brockhaus. Neumann, Franz (1936) European Trade Unionism and Politics, New York: League for Industrial Democracy.

62  The Rise of the Last Human I Nietzsche, Friedrich (1986) Sämtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe in 8 Bänden, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, eds., Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Opitz, Reinhard (1996) Faschismus und Neofaschismus, Bonn: Pahl-Rugenstein. Ortega y Gasset, José (1957) The Revolt of the Masses, New York: Norton. Pareto, Vilfredo (1966) Sociological Writings, New York: Frederick A. Praeger. Peukert, Detlev J.K. (1993) The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, New York: Hill and Wang. Pugh, Martin (2008) We Danced All Night. A Social History of Britain Between the Wars, London: Vintage. Pulzer, Peter G. J. (1964) The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria, New York and London: John Wiley. Rumpler, Helmut (2005) Eine Chance für Mitteleuropa: Bürgerliche Emanzipation und Staatsverfall in der Habsburgermonarchie, Vienna: Ueberreuter. Ruskin, John (2002) Sesame and Lilies, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Sanders, Richard (2010) Beastly Fury: The Strange Birth of British Football, London: Bantam. Soucy, Robert (1972) Fascism in France: The Case of Maurice Barrès, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Sternhell, Zeev (1997) La Droite Révolutionnaire, 1885–1914: Les Origines Françaises du Fascisme, Paris: Gallimard. Sternhell, Zeev, Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri (1994) The Birth of Fascist Ideology, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Storey, John (2003) Inventing Popular Culture—From Folklore to Globalization, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Strinati, Dominic (1995) An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture, London: Routledge. Szreter, Simon (2002) “Rethinking McKeown: The Relationship Between Public Health and Social Change,” American Journal of Public Health, May, 92: 5. Thompson, EdwardPalmer (1991) The Making of the English Working Class, (orig. 1963), London: Penguin. Vocleka, Karl (2002) Geschichte Österreichs: Kultur-Gesellschaft-Politik, Munich: Heyne. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich (1995) Deutsche Gesellschaftgeschichte, 1849–1914, Munich: C.H. Beck. Whitfield, Bob (2001) The Extension of the Franchise, 1832–1931, London: Heinemann. Williams, Raymond (1983) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williamson, David G. (1998) Bismarck and Germany, 1862–1890, London: Longman.

2 The Rise of the Last Human II The Opposition to Mass Society

We now have a broad picture of the historical phenomenon known as “mass society” in its different manifestations: political, demographic, social and cultural. In this chapter the goal will be to describe the resistance to massification, surveying the criticisms and anxieties to which it gave rise. Here, too, the criticisms will be divided into subsections: politics, demographics, society and culture. The theme that will take center stage in the next chapters, the fascist response to the mass, will not be dealt with here. The period covered will be, roughly, from the mid 19th century to the verge of the First World War. On a few occasions, when this will be necessary, events will be discussed from outside this timeframe. Geographically, we remain in Europe, with occasional visits to the United States, the most important overseas Western country. Since mass society is a pan-European phenomenon, no distinction will be drawn at this stage between countries that will subsequently turn fascist (Italy, Germany) and countries that will maintain their parliamentary democracy (England, France—the latter succumbing to an authoritarian regime only with military defeat and occupation). This does not mean that this important difference has been forgotten, yet for the time being the focus will be on processes jointly experienced by Western European countries, under the assumption that fascism is a political and ideological plant that grows on European soil everywhere, even if it bears fruit only in certain countries, offering a particularly favorable climate.

Politics Democracy The gradual extension of the franchise and the demand of the masses to participate in political life triggered deep fears among the élites and the middle classes. The result was the blossoming of a fierce anti-democratic polemic, admonishing against the insidious implications of mass rule. Already in the 19th century, and as limited as the political enfranchisement of the masses was, critics of democracy glimpsed in it a fundamental

64  The Rise of the Last Human II threat to all the goods of civilization: social order, the rule of law, hierarchy, private property, culture and so on and so forth. The masses were seen as a force subverting all that, leaving anarchy, disobedience, and cultural decline in their trail. At the root of the fear was the acknowledgment that, for all their cultural, spiritual and intellectual inferiority, there was one advantage enjoyed by the masses, which democracy converted into a lethal weapon: their quantitative superiority. This led to one of the most common tropes of the opposition to mass politics, i.e., the claim that democracy displaces “quality” and brings “quantity” to the fore, relying on the arbitrary advantage of “numbers,” whereas worthy rule reflects qualitative stature. Such reproaches were by no means the exclusive fare of die-hard conservatives rebuffing all reform. Many liberals regarded the triumph of the masses as the triumph of quantity—the very term “mass” in many different European languages of course designates a clear quantitative criterion. And so, the English liberal Robert Lowe, who held several important offices under W. E. Gladstone in various governments (Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary), strictly opposed the extension of the franchise demanded by the Conservative Disraeli, and during the campaign surrounding the proposed reform of 1867 gave several passionate speeches warning against democracy. In one of them he defined this political system as “a right existing in the individual as opposed to general expediency . . . numbers as against wealth and intellect” (Hansard July 15, 1867: 1540). He further admonished against the democratic empowering of the trade unions: It was only necessary that you should give them the franchise, to make those trades unions the most dangerous political agencies that could be conceived; because they were in the hands, not of individual members, but of designing men, able to launch them in solid mass against the institutions of the country. (1546) Lowe concluded his speech (1549–50) with an apocalyptic vision according to which the extension of the franchise signifies nothing less than the terminal decline of English civilization: Sir, I was looking to-day at the head of the lion which was sculptured in Greece during her last agony after the battle of Chaeronea [a 338 BC battle in which the Greek were defeated by the Macedonians], to commemorate that event, and I admired the power and the spirit which portrayed in the face of that noble beast the rage, the disappointment, and the scorn of a perishing nation and of a downtrodden civilization, and I said to myself, “O for an orator, O for an

The Rise of the Last Human II 65 historian, O for a poet, who would do the same thing for us!” We also have had our battle of Chaeronea; we too have had our dishonest victory. That England, that was wont to conquer other nations, has now gained a shameful victory over herself; and oh! that a man would rise in order that he might set forth in words that could not die, the shame, the rage, the scorn, the indignation, and the despair with which this measure is viewed by every cultivated Englishman who is not a slave to the trammels of party, or who is not dazzled by the glare of a temporary and ignoble success! In their clamor to contain the political rise of the mass, critics of democracy often embraced positions that anticipate, in part, the fascist vision. This was the case of the Scottish social critic Thomas Carlyle, one of the most influential writers of the Victorian period. Carlyle illustrates the fact that the difficulty in coming to terms with mass society yielded authoritarian conclusions not only in countries with relatively young and unstable liberal and parliamentary traditions, such as Italy and Germany, but in Britain, the liberal political milieu par excellence. This, in turn, underscores the need to understand fascism in a wide European context. In the first decades of his intellectual career Carlyle gained a reputation as an acerbic critic of modern Britain, which he portrayed as narrow-minded, materialistic and greedy. He lashed out against what he termed mammonism and the laissez-faire that subordinated all social procedures to the whims of the market, draining modern life of its moral and spiritual content, abusing the poor and instilling them with social resentment, driving a wedge between them and the upper classes and thus sowing the seeds of revolt. These attacks on capitalism and its underlying economic doctrine, that he called “the dismal science,” might create the impression that the Sage of Chelsea was a man of the left. Yet what truly concerned him in reality was not the suffering of the vulnerable members of society as much as the pit that unrestrained capitalism was unwittingly digging for itself, its short-term quest for profit at all costs endangering the long-term stability of the class system. Exploitation he deemed natural and inevitable in any healthy society, yet too much of it, or an exploitation that was too naked and unembarrassed, will endanger capitalism. At the same time, Carlyle faulted laissez-faire less for its ruthlessness and more for the leniency he attributed to it. Politically, capitalism emancipates the worker, basing his labor on a strictly voluntary and contractual agreement. Unlike past epochs, the worker is under no extra-economic obligation to his employer, and both seek each other out of sheer self interest. Yet this was too flimsy a basis on which to found an enduring society. Class inequality cannot remain economic only but must be anchored legally, politically and ethically; hence his support for the “permanent contract” of slavery over the “nomadic contract” of liberal modernity. This explains Carlyle’s ultraist rejection of mass politics, of

66  The Rise of the Last Human II political liberalism, democracy and socialism. He saw them as myopic and sentimental, rushing headlong to free the slaves without recognizing the acute dangers this entailed for the entire social order. Already in 1849, during a public campaign to improve the living and working conditions of the black plantation workers in the West Indies, then partly under British control, he defended slavery as a natural system, well suited to extract from the worker the labor he owed to society: [W]ith regard to the West Indies, it may be laid down as a principle, which no eloquence in Exeter Hall, or Westminster Hall, or elsewhere, can invalidate or hide, [t]hat no Black man who will not work according to what ability the gods have given him for working, has the smallest right to eat pumpkin, or to any fraction of land that will grow pumpkin, however plentiful such land may be; but has an indisputable and perpetual right to be compelled, by the real proprietors of said land, to do competent work for his living. This is the everlasting duty of all men, black or white, who are born into this world. (Carlyle 1869a: 299) Some 20 years later, Carlyle naturally became one of the most stringent critics of the 1867 reform, who many regarded as the triumph of democracy in Britain. He fully shared Robert Lowe’s bleak view of democracy as the twilight of civilization, and held that the only way to prevent this outcome is to enact a counter move that will restitute proper order. In a famous polemic treatise against the reform, he repeated the assertion that the abolition of slavery, that is of the political subordination of the workers, necessarily ushers in socialism or revolution: One always rather likes the Nigger [. . .]. The Almighty Maker has appointed him to be a Servant. [. . .] The whole world rises in shrieks against you, on hearing of such a thing:—yet the whole world [. . .] listens, year after year, for above a generation back, to “disastrous strikes,” “merciless lockouts” and other details of the nomadic scheme of servitude; nay is becoming thoroughly disquieted about its own too lofty-minded flunkeys, mutinous maid-servants [. . .] and the kindred phenomena on every hand: but it will be long before the fool of a world open its eyes to the taproot of all that, to the fond notion, in short, That servantship and mastership, on the nomadic principle, was ever, or will ever be, except for brief periods, possible among human creatures. (Carlyle 1867: 5–6) While capitalism, for its own good, needs to somewhat moderate its exploitative ways, the political solution to the democratic slide is the reinstatement of a neo-aristocratic rule where the many are governed

The Rise of the Last Human II 67 by the few. “Democracy,” he claimed (1869b: 74) “may be natural for our Europe at present; but cannot be the ultimatum of it. Not towards the impossibility, ‘self-government’ of a multitude by a multitude; but towards some possibility, government by the wisest, does bewildered Europe struggle.” Carlyle’s diagnosis of the modern political conundrum led him to advocate stances that many have retroactively regarded as proto-fascist. “Carlyle,” wrote one scholar, “appears to be a violent conservative, or, as some have argued, virtually a fascist. That some aspects of his political position are similar to fascism is beyond dispute” (Abrams 1986: 943). Carlyle goaded the chosen few, the champions of order, and summoned their courage before the decisive clash against the masses, the carriers of anarchy. He was confident that in spite of their numerical disadvantage, the élite will prevail: For everywhere in this Universe,[. . . .] Anti-Anarchy is silently on the increase, at all moments: Anarchy not, but contrariwise; having the whole Universe forever set against it; pushing it slowly, at all moments, towards suicide and annihilation. To Anarchy, however million-headed, there is no victory possible. Patience, silence, diligence, ye chosen of the world! (Carlyle 1867: 50) The invoked “chosen of the world” would come, Carlyle hoped, out of a union between the traditional nobility and the middle-class, the industrial heroes of the present. They will close their ranks and defeat the millions of the rabble. He envisaged a militarization of social life, wanting to mold society and economy after a military fashion, as attested to by his expression “the captains of industry.”1 Carlyle, it is interesting to note, was an admirer of German culture and tradition, which he saw as a wholesome alternative to the crass materialism infecting England. He popularized in Britain the tenets of German idealism—heavily filtered through his own cult of heroes—as expressed in the works of J. G. Fichte, Schiller and Goethe, and equally praised the German, particularly Prussian, political tradition, where he identified the military and heroic nobility so dear to his heart: in 1858 he published the biography of Friedrich “the Great.” His writings, in turn, were highly appreciated in Germany and influenced intellectual developments there during the second half of the 19th century. And while Nietzsche liked to ridicule the Scottish writer’s style and ideas, a close reading of his own texts reveals unmistakable Carlylean traces, especially in what concerns the social and political dimension of his thought.2 One might argue that Carlyle’s extreme critique of democracy is unrepresentative of the age’s Zeitgeist, at least within the moderate British context. This is true to an extent, but Carlyle’s exceptionality should not be overstated. Few in Britain went as far as he did, for instance on the issue

68  The Rise of the Last Human II of reverting to feudal labor relations, but many shared his basic fear that mass democracy poses a serious social threat, unless a way is found to significantly constrain and dilute it. The position of the liberal Lowe was already mentioned. And there are many other cases. One of them is Matthew Arnold, who like Carlyle was an eminent Victorian social critic, with a long-term impact on 20th-century conservatives and mass critics such as Ortega y Gasset and T. S. Eliot. (See Femia 2001: 136.) Arnold, formerly engaged in literary writing, began in the early 1860s to publish a series of essays reflecting on the significance of the move to a more democratic regime. His most famous and important book, Culture and Anarchy, was written in 1867–69, accompanying the reform of the franchise. These writings express the conviction, close to Carlyle’s view, that culture is presently retreating before anarchy, and that the former must be protected from the latter. Democracy was typically seen as the victory of quantity over quality, of the indistinct collective over the talented individual. The English, he claimed in an 1861 essay titled “Democracy,” are historically an aristocratic and competitive nation, relying for their advance on the triumph of the best competitors. All this is jeopardized by the democratic, mediocre ideal, which strives toward joint action and the narrowing of gaps at the expense of national greatness: Democracy is a force in which the concert of a great number of men makes up for the weakness of each man taken by himself; democracy accepts a certain relative rise in their condition, obtainable by this concert for a great number, as something desirable in itself, because though this is undoubtedly far below grandeur, it is yet a good deal above insignificance. A very strong, self-reliant people, neither easily learns to act in concert, nor easily brings itself to regard any middling good, any good short of the best, as an object ardently to be coveted and striven for. It keeps its eyes on the grand prizes, and these are to be won only by distancing competitors, by getting before one’s comrades, by succeeding all by one’s self; and so long as a people works thus individually, it does not work democratically. The English people has all the qualities which dispose a people to work individually; may it never lose them! [. . . .] But the English people is no longer so entirely ruled by them as not to show visible beginnings of democratic action; it becomes more and more sensible to the irresistible seduction of democratic ideas, promising to each individual of the multitude increased self-respect and expansion with the increased importance and authority of the multitude to which he belongs, with the diminished preponderance of the aristocratic class above him. (Arnold 1993: 10) Arnold was no sworn elitist. He took to task all classes in England of his day and affixed them with unflattering epithets. The nobility he called “barbarians,” members of the middle class he referred to as “philistines,”

The Rise of the Last Human II 69 a term he made popular in the English language, and the working class he disparaged as “populace.” This creates the impression, which Arnold certainly wanted to nurture, that he was an impartial observer standing beside the classes, committed to none of the great social camps. Central to his teaching was the stress on the need to overcome social divisions and form policies serving the nation as a whole. Yet this objectivity claim does not withstand a closer scrutiny of his works, which reveals that of the three great social classes he mostly feared the last one, the populace, chastising the other two fundamentally for failing to contain the mass and integrate it in the nation, as a result of both their weakness and their corruption. That working-class empowerment was the development truly disquieting him, emerges clearly from the following sentences: This is the old story of our system of checks and every Englishman doing as he likes, which we have already seen to have been convenient enough so long as there were only the Barbarians and the Philistines to do what they liked, but to be getting inconvenient, and productive of anarchy, now that the Populace wants to do what it likes too. (Arnold 1993: 120) Arnold’s descriptions of the working class are suffused with fears of their new and bold political demands, and recoil from their crude and aggressive demeanor. Compared to Carlyle’s prophetic tone, and his quasi biblical, fiery language, Arnold cuts a relatively moderate figure, much closer to the political center. Next to the Scot, his style is dry and cautious, he often takes care to qualify his assertions and in general appeals more to his readers’ logic than to their emotions. Arnold’s name is therefore not mentioned in any genealogy of proto-fascism, and rightly so. It is therefore interesting to observe how even he, confronted with mass society, looks to authoritarian solutions. Central to his political doctrine is the recurring insistence that the time has come to moderate the moderation characteristic of English political culture and to embrace, however selectively, less permissive models of government, used by other countries. Passing through his political writings like a crimson thread is the call for the English to conquer their instinctive aversion to the state and realize that without a strong state, capable of assuming the tasks of social containment and molding, impending anarchy will not be halted. Arnold believed that the English middle class must educate the populace, shape and direct it, yet without state action it will find it difficult to do so, narrow-minded as it is (Arnold 1993: 22). Instructively, in presenting the state as a supra-class body that can conciliate the classes and bind them into a harmonious nation, Arnold (88) employs a term that will become pivotal in the fascist discourse, namely the corporate state: [The workman] is just asserting his personal liberty a little, going where he likes, bawling as he likes, hustling as he likes. Just as the

70  The Rise of the Last Human II rest of us,—as the country squires in the aristocratic class, as the political dissenters in the middle class,—he has no idea of a State, of the nation in its collective and corporate character controlling, as government, the free swing of this or that one of its members in the name of the higher reason of all of them, his own as well as that of others. Was Arnold willing to contemplate the use of force and coercion for attaining the so desired social peace? In principle, he makes clear that coercion is not legitimate and recommends in its stead the unifying force of a common culture, spiritual and above interests, a “harmony of ideas,” as the glue that will connect all social “organs.” Yet a more belligerent stance occasionally comes forward, since culture and ideas may not always suffice. He thus points to the supposed passivity of the forces of order facing demonstrators and rioters—the immediate background for this was the rioting of protesters in Hyde Park in 1867, clamoring for an extension of the franchise. He decries the way the working class, “our playful giant,” the representative bar none of modern anarchy, takes full advantage of the leniency of the liberal system, screams, riots, breaks and devastates as he wills, while the forces of order remain complacent. The “outbreaks of rowdyism tend to become less and less of trifles,” he observes (85), while “our educated and intelligent classes remain in their majestic repose, and somehow or other, whatever happens, their overwhelming strength, like our military force in riots, never does act.” It is thus not completely surprising that Arnold exhibits a marked admiration for countries on the continent whose government is central and authoritarian, such as Prussia (117–18), or France under Napoleon III and advises liberal England to take a leaf out of their book. “The growing power in Europe is democracy,” he writes in 1861, “and France has organized democracy with a certain indisputable grandeur and success.” “Being an Englishman,” he adds a little later (13), “I see nothing but good in freely recognizing the coherence, rationality, and efficaciousness which characterize the strong State-action of France.” Carlyle seems not so far removed, after all; in stopping the playful but anarchic giant, harmonic national ideas are indispensable, but so is military force. The profound fear caused by mass democracy is the ground on which flourishes the different theories of the élite, which will eventually be enshrined at the heart of fascist ideology, in Italy, Germany and elsewhere.3 The three main proponents of this theory, regularly mentioned in the scholarly literature, are two Italians, Vilfredo Pareto—who introduced the term “élite” into the sociological discourse—and Gaetano Mosca, and one German, who lived mostly in Italy and Switzerland, Robert Michels. Minor differences between their theories notwithstanding, all three regarded democracy as impossible since the people or the mass cannot rule but always only small minorities, élites. Mosca and Pareto

The Rise of the Last Human II 71 saw this positively, since for them mass rule was not only impossible but undesirable. They sharply attacked the mass for its purported irrationality and recklessness, while Michels regretted this insight: at least to begin with he saw in democracy an ideal worth striving for, yet with time he reached the pessimistic conclusion that genuine democracy can never be established since every organization, no matter how democratic it might be in its intentions and ideology, is bound sooner or later to develop an authoritarian structure where an élite takes command, whether this happens for all to see or behind the scenes. This was conceived by Michels as a true sociological inevitability, which he termed “the iron law of oligarchy.” As observed in Chapter 1, the theories of Pareto and Mosca exhibit a peculiar paradox: they sharply attack the rule of the masses at the same time that they claim that it is impossible. The danger of the masses is in its irrational onslaught on the laws of the capitalist economy, which for both sociologists are the laws of nature itself. As proclaimed by Pareto (1966: 122), “Above, far above, the prejudices and passions of men soar the laws of nature. Eternal and immutable they are the expression of the creative power; they represent what is, what must be, what otherwise could not be.” If, however, democracy is ruled out by nature itself, why write entire books to dismiss it? If the monster is just a bogeyman, why guard against it? And if the rule of the élites is indeed a sociological given, why invest so much energy in recommending it? Certainly, both writers see a great difference between different variants of élites. Élites they may all be, but some among them are painfully susceptible to democratic pressures. As a consternated Mosca (1939: 478–481) observed: The ruling classes in a number of European countries were stupid enough and cowardly enough to accept the eight-hour day after the World War, when the nations had been terribly impoverished and it was urgent to intensify labor and production. [. . .] Slave to its own preconceptions, therefore, the European bourgeoisie has fought socialism all along with its right hand tied and its left hand far from free. [. . .] A powerful labor union or, a fortiori, a league of labor unions can impose its will upon the state. One of Pareto’s central and most famous ideas concerned the circulation of élites, the thesis that history follows a circular pattern in which one ruling minority displaces another, and is displaced by a new ruling group in its turn. Among these élites he distinguished two main types, a lion-like, aristocratic élite, ruling via men and classes that are majestic, strong, determined and inflexible; and élites that resemble foxes, and rule with cunning, sophistication, smooth-talk and adaptability. Historically, the latter kind characterizes the period of bourgeois, liberal rule, which governs by coalitions and alliances, accommodates the popular classes and tries to cajole the masses. What is mistakenly called “democracy” is

72  The Rise of the Last Human II therefore not the rule of the people, but that of an élite of foxes flattering the masses that as a result become ever more impudent in their demands and infringe with impunity the law of the liberal economy, defying their employers and the—spineless—rulers. Once the situation becomes intolerable, the lions make a comeback, brushing aside the foxes and re-yoking the familiar, over-playful giant. In the context in which Pareto was writing, the reign of foxes is a clear allusion to the government of the liberal Giovanni Giolitti, who ruled Italy almost uninterruptedly in the years 1901–14, mediating between the industrialists and the socialists, interfering in the economy on behalf of the workers, and thus further abetting mass impertinence. Pareto predicted that the lions will sooner or later have to rescue Italy from the engorged mass trolls fed by the liberal élite, and when Mussolini’s troops marched on Rome in October 1922 the old Pareto, according to one account, rose from his sickbed and declared: “I told you so!” (In Livingston 1935: xvii). With Mosca and Pareto we are already on the threshold of fascism, and they are commonly regarded as key figures in the evolution of the fascist worldview. Yet the conclusion should be avoided that their élite theories, alongside that of Michels, reflect the backward or otherwise unique attributes of Italy and Germany, as compared with the classical liberal countries. Pareto’s political and economic role model was always the liberal English one, and he highly esteemed the Swiss one as well. If he saw political liberalism as betraying economic liberalism, and hence yearned for the coming of the rescuing lion, this was not fundamentally so unlike Carlyle or Arnold wishing for England to move in an authoritarian direction in order to put a stop to mass unruliness. Or consider the following polemic against mass democracy by the English liberal Henry Maine, which might have been copied down from Pareto’s doctrines were it not for the fact that it preceded them. This is from 1885: History is a sound aristocrat. [. . .] [T]he progress of mankind has hitherto been effected by the rise and fall of aristocracies, by the formation of one aristocracy within another, or by the succession of one aristocracy to another. There have been so-called democracies, which have rendered services beyond price to civilisation, but they were only peculiar forms of aristocracy. (Maine 1909: 42) Maine also partakes of the ambiguity of his Italian counterparts with regards to whether democracy is real or nominal. Like them, he reassures his readers (29–30) who identify with the élite—and discourages those who do not—that democracy can never mean more than the façade of popular rule, since behind the scenes the professional “wire-puller” always prevails, moving the masses like marionettes. Yet this confidence

The Rise of the Last Human II 73 is shallow, and just a few pages later (38; emphases added) Maine concedes the real political power of the mass: The relation of political leaders to political followers seems to me to be undergoing a twofold change. The leaders may be as able and eloquent as ever, [. . .] but they are manifestly listening nervously at one end of a speaking-tube which receives at its other end the suggestions of a lower intelligence. On the other hand, the followers, who are really the rulers, are manifestly becoming impatient of the hesitations of their nominal chiefs, and the wrangling of their representatives.4 Fascio Against Fascio: Imperfect Nationalization— the Case of Italy One of the critical quandaries the élites were facing in an age of unfolding mass democracy was the frequent reluctance on the part of the masses to be absorbed into “the nation,” conceived of as a hierarchic working and fighting unit under the leadership of the bourgeoisie. If this was a thorn in the flesh of British nationalists such as Arnold or Carlyle, who were exasperated by the ever growing assertiveness of the populace, the problem was all the more vexing in newly established countries such as Italy, where national traditions and a collective sense of identity were far less developed than in England or France. The euphoria of the eventual political triumph of the Risorgimento, led by the middle classes in the face of frequent aristocratic hostility and widespread popular indifference, soon gave way to dismay at the masses’ perceived lack of gratitude for the heroic efforts of the bourgeoisie on their behalf, and lack of comprehension for the national mission, which was to cement and aggrandize Italy’s standing and reputation among the nations. The new ruling élite of post-unification Italy, composed predominantly of Piedmontese liberals, counted on the masses of the peasantry as foot-soldiers in the cause of the national revolution but was by no means eager to see them as equal political partners. As observed by Jonathan Dunnage (2002: 4–5): Because of their frequent mobilization in the cause of counter-revolution, the fathers of the Risorgimento mistrusted the masses to the extent that [. . .] they were reluctant to concede power to them. Even figures like Giuseppe Mazzini [. . .] belonged to an enlightened middle class and aristocratic élite that was not prepared to overturn economic injustice or consider redistribution of land. This situation meant that many liberals who had begun as radicals and revolutionaries, when it was a matter of terminating foreign rule in Italy,

74  The Rise of the Last Human II eventually transmogrified into conservatives and even outright reactionaries, when it was a matter of stemming internal opposition to their own rule in the post-unification era. A notable example of this trend was the right-wing hardliner Francesco Crispi, prime minister during the late 1880s and then throughout most of the 1890s, a strongman whose policies of internal repression and external adventurism earned him a reputation as a precursor of Mussolini, but who actually started as a fervent democratic patriot alongside Giuseppe Garibaldi. “During the 1860s,” writes Dunnage (2002: 5), “the rule of the Liberal Right (Destra Storica) often appeared to take on the characteristics of a dictatorship rather than a politically enlightened power.” This rule derived its popular mandate from an electorate that in 1870 was restricted to just 2 percent of the population, and relied on police and criminal codes largely adopted from the times of the ancien régime and the Napoleonic occupation. Liberal rule in Italy generally catered to the interests of the industrial north of the country, advancing policies which, either by design or miscomprehension of the realities of the Mezzogiorno—the southern parts of the country—could not resolve the socioeconomic disparities geographically dividing the peninsula. This meant that popular alienation in the South towards the national project could never be truly surmounted. During the 1860s, especially, a traumatic gap opened up between the liberal élite and the Southern peasant masses, a wound that subsequently proved nearly impossible to heal. The liberals meted out severe punishment to Southern “brigands,” who were often discontented peasants who could not see how Italy’s rulers better served their interests than former local élites with whom they had developed complex interdependencies for decades, at least. In suppressing social disorder in the South, observes Giuseppe Finaldi (2012: 53), “far more ‘Italians’ were killed than all the heroic dead who had lain down their life for the ideals of the Risorgimento,” the number of the dead estimated at “several tens of thousands.” But “the social question” was not merely a Southern one; the Italian masses in general responded lukewarmly to a country that would have them serve it, as workers, soldiers and tax-payers, but largely deprive them of political rights. While the Liberal left—Sinistra storica—has proven more attentive to popular grievances and sought to nationally incorporate the masses via piecemeal reforms and gradual extension of the franchise, its Trasformismo policies, too, were less than wholly successful. The Italian masses had, and were in the process of developing, strong allegiances to alternative, non-national identification loci, notably Catholicism and its political ramifications and then, slowly but surely, also socialism and other variants of radical politics.5 The Liberal order could never emerge as a truly legitimate representative of the people, either being too repressive, in its right-wing variant, or too corrupt, in its left-wing incarnation, that seemed to be offering a tepid, second best alternative, to the genuinely autonomous popular parties.

The Rise of the Last Human II 75 The state hoped to nationalize the masses by massive spread of patriotic propaganda, whose goal was to produce hard-working, hard-fighting and self-sacrificing Italians. The type of ethos propagated by the liberal élite could be exemplified by a passage from Edmondo De Amicis’s 1886 best-selling pedagogic book, Cuore, where a father explains to his son his love for Italy (De Amicis 1915: 100–101): Why do I love Italy? Do not a hundred answers present themselves to you on the instant? I love Italy because my mother is an Italian; because the blood that flows in my veins is Italian; because [. . .] all that I see, that I love, that I study, that I admire, is Italian. Oh, you cannot feel that affection in its entirety! You will feel it when you become a man [. . .]. You will feel it in more proud and vigorous measure on the day when the menace of a hostile race shall call forth a tempest of fire upon your country, and when you shall behold arms raging on every side, youths thronging in legions, fathers kissing their children and saying, “Courage!” mothers bidding adieu to their young sons and crying, “Conquer!” You will feel it like a joy divine if you have the good fortune to behold the re-entrance to your town of the regiments, weary, ragged, with thinned ranks, yet terrible, with the splendor of victory in their eyes, and their banners torn by bullets, followed by a vast convoy of brave fellows, bearing their bandaged heads and their stumps of arms loftily, amid a wild throng, which covers them with flowers, with blessings, and with kisses. Then you will comprehend the love of country; then you will feel your country, Enrico. It is a grand and sacred thing. May I one day see you return in safety from a battle fought for her, safe,—you who are my flesh and soul; but if I should learn that you have preserved your life because you were concealed from death, your father, who welcomes you with a cry of joy when you return from school, will receive you with a sob of anguish, and I shall never be able to love you again, and I shall die with that dagger in my heart. Thy Father. This mass education in fighting and, if need be, dying for the patria was not merely intended to steel the people for the eventuality—rather unlikely at the time of writing—of a foreign invasion by “a hostile race.” As the ominous cry of “conquer!” indicates, it looked forward, if anything, to an Italian invasion of the lands of foreign races. For these were precisely the years when Italy was starting to enter the fray of colonialist enterprise, in a way which was itself largely meant to provide a solution for domestic unrest, both by providing a proper national destination for the millions of Italian migrants who could not find employment on the peninsula, and by finally uniting Italians in a glorious, shared venture. But this liberal-imperialist hope again proved elusive, and the

76  The Rise of the Last Human II “wild throng” greeting the victorious troops remained largely a fantasy. In March 1896 the fantasy even became a nightmare when Italy was humiliatingly defeated by Ethiopian forces in the Battle of Adowa, resulting in demonstrations and riots in many Italian cities, forcing Crispi’s resignation. Colonialism failed to provide the glue that will bind the masses to the state since, as Finaldi (2017: 3) explains in a fine study of 19thcentury Italian colonialism, the reality of migration to the Americas kept the gaze of many among Italy’s poor away from colonial daydreams. Other places could be metaphorically migrated to as well: socialism promised a world that contradicted the self-sacrificing patriotism and obedience expected by the liberal order. Thus, by the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century the sense of middle-class elation brought about by the successful culmination of the Risorgimento some four decades earlier, gave way to profound disillusion with a reality of a divided nation, whose masses have not only failed to live up to the bourgeoisie’s expectations, but were busily undermining the national edifice by way of their independent class politics. In many bourgeois politicians and intellectuals this produced profound resentment of the masses that seemed intractable to both Giolitti’s conciliatory carrot and Crispi’s authoritarian stick. Other, even more drastic means for nationalizing the masses began to be contemplated in nationalist bourgeois circles. An excellent glimpse into this mindset is afforded by one of the great historical novels of the era, Luigi Pirandello’s pre-war I vecchi e i giovani of 1913 [The Old and the Young], which unfolded a vast panorama of Sicilian society and politics in the turbulent 1890s. At the story’s center was the uprising and eventual brutal suppression of the Fasci Siciliani dei Lavoratori during the early 1890s. The Fasci Siciliani was a democratic and socialist federation of peasant and workers leagues that took inspiration from earlier workers’ Fasci formed in the North of Italy in the 1870s. While led by urbane socialist intellectuals, it was infused with a millenarian outlook that foresaw the imminent coming of an egalitarian order, abolishing all injustice and poverty (Hobsbawm 1959: 93–107). Amidst profound economic crisis, the Fasci gathered behind it the island’s poor and confronted Sicily’s landowners and industrialists with a series of radical demands for land redistribution, raising the minimum age for work at the sulfur mines to 14 years of age, reducing working hours, etc. When most of these demands were rejected, the social conflict intensified and eventually reached the proportions of a popular uprising, with the élites asking for the government to send in armed forces to restore order. While prime minister Giolitti complied with this demand, his measures were still relatively mild, and it was only after his resignation in 1893 in association with a banking scandal and the much harder line imposed by

The Rise of the Last Human II 77 his successor Crispi in 1894, including declaring a state of siege throughout the island and sending in some 40.000 troops, that the movement was finally quashed. The Fasci’s “leaders were arrested and sentenced to long terms in prison; the Socialist Party was suppressed; and the electoral registers were ‘revised,’ and more than a quarter of all Italian voters (most of them poor) were disenfranchised” (Duggan 1994: 167–168). Pirandello’s novel, that heavily draws upon autobiographic materials and displays a broad first-hand knowledge of Sicily’s political and economic conditions—Pirandello came from a wealthy family involved in the sulfur industry—is to a certain extent polyphonic, in that the viewpoints of various classes (especially the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, but also the working class and the peasantry) and of different political factions (die-hard adherents of the deposed House of Bourbon, right-wing liberals, left-wing liberals, conservatives, and radical socialists) is represented. But the predominant perspective is by far the allegedly impartial, merely patriotic one, of the veteran heroes of the Risorgimento, now being besieged on all sides by vilifying forces, their historic and self-sacrificing work dragged in the mud, on account of their own failings, but mostly since it is ill-understood by the ingrate, cynical and self-seeking nation. Pirandello himself embodies the aforementioned transmogrification of liberalism, shifting from a progressive to a reactionary position: coming from a family of zealous patriots that participated in the struggles of the Risorgimento, as a young man he was radical in outlook, and supported the Fasci’s bid for social justice; by the time the novel was written, however, he had long left behind him such radicalism, and was an embittered national conservative (for a detailed account of the author’s political trajectory, see Providenti 2000), espousing a pessimistic life philosophy stressing the absurdity of existence, which he derived to a significant extent from the German idealism he admired (on Pirandello’s profound affinities with Nietzsche, see Romano 2008). Later on, Pirandello would become a supporter of fascism and in 1935 he will gladly donate the literature Nobel Prize medal he won a year earlier as part of the “Gold for the Fatherland” campaign, launched by the regime to finance the war with Ethiopia in defiance of the international economic sanctions imposed on Italy (on the general compatibility between Pirandello’s worldview and fascist politics, see Venè 1971). Élite anxieties vis-à-vis the unruliness of the poor find expression throughout the novel but are most systematically articulated during a private meeting of several old heroes of the Risorgimento, who have come to support the candidacy of an old liberal friend who has returned to Sicily from Rome, amid rumors that the Fasci’s socialist candidate, a certain Zappala, is quickly gaining ground among the discontented. “One Zappala only?” fumes one of the old liberals, and continues sardonically: “No! Five hundred and eight Zappalas, one for every constituency in the Peninsula! [. . . .] The first thing would be to abolish all the

78  The Rise of the Last Human II schools! Abolish all taxation! Abolish the army and the police! Law and order, soap and water! The frontiers levelled, and universal brotherhood!” (Pirandello 1928) He then recites a lampoon on humanism by the poet Giuseppe Giusti, bemoaning the way the masses reject Italy in favor of vacuous internationalism: Differences of custom and clime are fancies of the past; we have changed the tune. Deserts, mountains, seas, are frontiers only in the almanacs, dreams of geographers. . . . And do you keep silence now, O Muse, who weary me with the plea of love of country. I am a child of the universe, and it seems to me a waste of time to write for Italy. When he finishes, the patriots rise up and enthusiastically applaud. Another speaker then laments the rise of “the Fourth Estate,” whose preposterous “drunkard’s nightmare” of a welfare state benefitting all at the expense of the well-off, pampering the ever more ambitious proletariat, is abetted by the feeble resistance of a confused and sentimental ruling classes. While this picture of élite meekness seems questionable as a description of the actual bourgeoisie of the 1890s, it was certainly inadequate at the time the novel was written, for this was a period marked by what historian Alexander De Grand (1982: 13) called “new bourgeois militancy,” in which leading young critics of the Giolittian establishment, such as Enrico Corradini, Alfredo Rocco or Luigi Fedrezoni, brandished an “antidemocratic, elitist, imperialist ideology of extreme bourgeois politics.” The novel’s tragic hero—perhaps the only figure who emerges as unambiguously worthy of admiration—is Mauro Mortara, a selfless, rugged, and aging Risorgimento foot-soldier of humble origins, who has dedicated his entire life to the cause of Italian renaissance without expecting any reward. A firm believer in the glory of the nation and its right to imperial expansion, which he eagerly anticipates, he lives isolated from the world, working as a housekeeper in the decaying estate of a dreamy, life-weary, petty-aristocrat. Mortara’s old age is sweetened by the blissful illusion of the nation’s grandeur, but he is gradually exposed to the sordid reality of contemporary Italy and the way the heroes of the past are everywhere on the defensive. And while he is furious with all social and political intrigues, undercutting the sacred cause of the patria, the worst renegades are by far the ignominious socialist Fasci, wreaking havoc in his beloved Sicily. Upon hearing of the clashes between the army and the rioters, Mortara, now over 80 years old, takes to arms to render Italy a final service by ridding her of the anti-patriotic brigands and traitors. He rushes to the aid of Crispi’s troops, which, mistaking him for a member of the mob, shoot him down, symbolizing the travesty which is modern Italy.

The Rise of the Last Human II 79 The novel ends on an ominous note, one of its last passages containing heavy hints of Italy’s near future and the rise of a new movement, an anti-fascist fascism, whose goal will be to subdue the revolting masses and salvage the Risorgimento. The following is written, remember, in 1913, when a certain Benito Mussolini is still an ultraist socialist leader: Mauro [. . .] begun to make preparations for departure. At his age? Sangue della Madonna, what had age to do with it? Who dare speak of age, to him! [. . .] Armed to the teeth, ready for any provocation, he would go up to Girgenti, to discuss and arrange some plan of campaign with the other veterans, Marco Sala, Celauro, Trigona, Mattia Gangi, who surely, if the blood still flowed in their veins, must feel, as he did, the need to arm themselves and rally in defense of their common handiwork. If their enemies were united, banded in Fasci, why could not they unite, band themselves in a Fascio of their own, of the Old Guard? The troops were not sufficient; civilians must give them solid support, forcibly disband these Fasci, scatter all these dogs with powder and shot, if need be. (Pirandello 1928)

Demographics Of all the experiences which made his life what it was, Baudelaire singled out being jostled by the crowd as the decisive, unmistakable experience. [. . .] To heighten the impression of the crowd’s baseness, he envisioned the day on which even the fallen women, the outcast, would readily espouse a well-ordered life, condemn libertinism, and reject everything except money. Betrayed by these last allies of his, Baudelaire battled the crowd—with the impotent rage of someone fighting the rain or the wind. Walter Benjamin (2003: 343)

Let us now turn to the response to the demographics of mass society, which as observed encompassed above all population growth and urbanization. To many members of the upper classes, the nobility and the bourgeoisie, these developments gave cause to a feeling of suffocation, spiritual no less than physical, intolerable congestion, dirt, pollution, moral and physical decline (or “degeneration” as it was widely referred to), loss of intimacy and of personal security, and even a threat to one’s sense of selfhood, as the individual felt that he or she were about to be swallowed up by the crowd. Mass Against Mass: Delacroix vs. Poe Ortega’s description has numerous antecedents going many decades back. But it should be kept in mind that this fear and loathing were the result

80  The Rise of the Last Human II of a certain social sensibility, expressing the subjective viewpoint of the writers, who nearly always came from the ranks of the “better” classes. It was a product of an interpretation of modern society, reflected, one might say, through a distorting mirror, to use the apt formulation proposed by Susanna Barrows (1981) in her excellent study of upper-class’ responses to the masses in late 19th-century France. The same phenomena could be construed—as indeed they sometimes were—in a positive way, not with fear but with hope. To illustrate this fact, let us examine a text, in this case a visual one, Eugène Delacroix’s celebrated La Liberté guidant le people (Figure 2.1), one of the iconic paintings of the 19th century, drawn in 1830 as an homage to the popular uprising of the same year in which commoners— workers as well as members of the middle class—rose up against King Charles X and deposed him, thus terminating the Bourbon Restoration in France. This visual hymn to the popular revolt, has two main protagonists: “liberty,” represented by the female flag carrier holding a gun, and “the people,” that is present as the sum total of the participants. Among them, to the left of liberty, is a gentleman wearing a cylinder hat and a black jacket and holding a musket gun. Although this cannot be known without additional information, this is a self-portrait of the painter, Delacroix (Néret 2000: 25). He joins the street fighters (at least vicariously:

Figure 2.1 Liberty Leading the People. Eugène Delacroix [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The Rise of the Last Human II 81 Delacroix did not actually take part in the fighting), and in spite of his somewhat more elevated social status, indicated by his attire, sees himself as one of the crowd. A common third estate front of workers and middleclass individuals closes ranks in defiance of the enemies of the people, the nobility and the monarchy. The vision reflected in the painting is boldly popular, democratic and plebeian. Liberty herself is one of the populace; the people are “guided” by one their own, not by any élite, whose corrupt members they in fact seek to depose. The mass is positively depicted, indeed celebrated. The identity of the participants is not lost once they join the crowd, as a later trope would have it, but is enhanced. They gain individual expression precisely because they have joined a group that fights for its rights. One could assume, for example, that the urchin depicted to the right of liberty, waving two revolvers, would not have been represented in another painting, and certainly not as a distinct protagonist of the events. In fact, he got to express his individuality further in the field of literature, since Gavroche of Les Misérables was reputedly inspired by his figure. At this, relatively early historical phase, the people has not yet been transformed into a rabble. The definitive rift between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat has not yet opened: this will happen only during the next revolutionary wave, the 1848 revolutions, when for the first time full-scale fighting between the middle class and the working class shook Paris. Ten years later, in 1840, Edgar Allan Poe wrote his short story The Man of the Crowd, which also centers on the adventures of a bourgeois among the common people in the big metropolis, in this case London. Like the character of Delacroix in Liberty, this story’s narrator and protagonist is not a member of the lower orders. Very little information concerning him is provided, yet he is sufficiently well-off to spend the day in a coffee house—“with a cigar in my mouth and a newspaper in my lap” (Poe 1982: 475)—and the night chasing figures stirring his curiosity. While a story’s narrator, of course, is not automatically or seamlessly the mouthpiece of the author, in this instance everything indicates a basic resemblance and affinity between them, in terms of social origins, sensibility and worldview, so that, like the painter’s delegate in Liberty, we have here the writer’s representative on the scene of action. This supposition is also supported by further information, not included in the story itself, to which we shall return. Yet here the resemblance between the two figures—“Delacroix” in Liberty and the narrator of The Man of the Crowd—exhausts itself. In the former case, the artist is an integral and empathetic participant in the revolutionary collective storming Paris; in the latter, the narrator is a detached observer of the crowd, removed, reserved and even, as becomes increasingly clear as the story unfolds, hostile. As in the usual detective story, a genre pioneered by Poe, here too a mystery needs to be solved and a crime explained: the narrator, it turns out, seeks to fathom the

82  The Rise of the Last Human II riddle of the crowd, which is generally associated with criminality. While no concrete crime is committed, The Man of the Crowd can be read as the ultimate crime mystery, since the crowd is construed as the criminal par excellence. Already at the beginning it is stated that “the essence of all crime is undivulged,” (Poe 1982: 475) and the offender’s identity is revealed a few lines before the end (481): the man of the crowd is “the type and the genius of deep crime.” The mass is defined as “the worst heart of the world.” While in Delacroix “the people” is a noble and admirable entity, the man of the crowd is demonic. In terms of his social origins, while it appears initially to be unclear—the masses observed are said to display “innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance” (476)—it becomes evident that the core of the mass, its innermost essence, are the lower and poorer social orders: we approximate the wicked and evil inside of the mass the more the day fades and the night deepens. The mystery increases the more the upper classes evacuate the scene and it is filled with the commoners. Thus, in describing the respectable passers-by, the lack of mystery is underlined (476): There was nothing very distinctive about these two large classes beyond what I have noted. Their habiliments belonged to that order which is pointedly termed the decent. They were undoubtedly noblemen, merchants, attorneys, tradesmen, stock-jobbers [. . .] men of leisure and men actively engaged in affairs of their own—conducting business upon their own responsibility. They did not greatly excite my attention. Crime, clearly, need not be sought after in the “decent” classes. The bourgeois, moreover, exhibit passivity, embarrassment and impotence when dealing with the proper crowd, with whose aggression and pushiness they do not know how to cope (476): By far the greater number of those who went by had a satisfied business-like demeanor, and seemed to be thinking only of making their way through the press. [W]hen pushed against by fellow-wayfarers they evinced no symptom of impatience, but adjusted their clothes and hurried on. Others, still a numerous class, were restless in their movements, had flushed faces, and talked and gesticulated to themselves, as if feeling in solitude on account of the very denseness of the company around. When impeded in their progress, these people suddenly ceased muttering, but re-doubled their gesticulations, and awaited, with an absent and overdone smile upon the lips, the course of the persons impeding them. If jostled, they bowed profusely to the jostlers, and appeared overwhelmed with confusion.

3 The Rise of the Last Human II 83 When the narrator finally detects genuine crooks, he explains that these pickpockets merely try, in vain, to look respectable: “I watched these gentry with much inquisitiveness, and found it difficult to imagine how they should ever be mistaken for gentlemen by gentlemen themselves” (476–477). Real horror and mystery begin only when one climbs down the social ladder: “Descending in the scale of what is termed gentility, I found darker and deeper themes for speculation” (477). The hierarchy of crime runs inversely to the hierarchy of class: “As the night deepened, so deepened to me the interest of the scene,” states the narrator, and further elaborates: the general character of the crowd materially alter (its gentler features retiring in the gradual withdrawal of the more orderly portion of the people, and its harsher ones coming out into bolder relief, as the late hour brought forth every species of infamy from its den). (478) This is the context in which there suddenly leaps forward the monstrous criminal after whom the story is titled, the devilish “man of the crowd”: I was thus occupied in scrutinizing the mob, when suddenly there came into view a countenance (that of a decrepid old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age)—a countenance which at once arrested and absorbed my whole attention, on account of the absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression. Any thing even remotely resembling that expression I had never seen before. I well remember that my first thought, upon beholding it, was that Retzch, had he viewed it, would have greatly preferred it to his own pictural incarnations of the fiend. (478) This demonic quality is a class token of the cockney, re-emerging in its fullest horror towards the end of the story as the man of the crowd reaches a den of gin, that typical working-class drink, signifying that we have landed at the very opposite side of the spectrum from which we have started: the respectable coffee-house in which the narrator was sitting as the story began: finally large bands of the most abandoned of a London populace were seen reeling to and fro. The spirits of the old man again flickered up [. . .]. Once more he strode onward with elastic tread. Suddenly a corner was turned, a blaze of light burst upon our sight, and we stood before one of the huge suburban temples of Intemperance—one of the palaces of the fiend, Gin. (481)

84  The Rise of the Last Human II Demographically, the story takes place in the urban congested center par excellence, London, which as the American reader is instructed, is characterized by inconceivable population density (479): It was now fully night-fall [. . .]. [T]he press was still so thick that, at every such movement, I was obliged to follow him closely. The street was a narrow and long one, and his course lay within it for nearly an hour, during which the passengers had gradually diminished to about that number which is ordinarily seen at noon in Broadway near the Park—so vast a difference is there between a London populace and that of the most frequented American city. The liberty hailed by Delacroix is for Poe mere anarchy, a helter-skelter of senseless pleasures, sin and crime. The modern metropolis is for the French artist a site of social struggle, embodying not just poverty and crime but also hope for a better world. Poe’s London, by contrast, is just a huge den of corruption. There is no politics in The Man of the Crowd. It is not known whether the narrator supports the extension of the franchise or not, endorses or opposes the right of workers to unionize, and so on and so forth. Yet given the disparagement of the commoners permeating the story, it would be surprising if one discovered that Poe was a zealous democrat. And indeed, he was democracy’s staunch opponent, refusing all social forms in which the people are sovereign. This stance emerges in the following story (Mellonta Tauta) where a future state of things is imagined—the date is 2048—in which democracy and republicanism are a thing of the past, leaving behind them just a memory, and a bad one at that: A little reflection upon this discovery sufficed to render evident [. . .] that a republican government could never be any thing but a rascally one. While the philosophers, however, were busied in blushing at their stupidity in not having foreseen these inevitable evils, [. . .] the matter was put to an abrupt issue by a fellow of the name of Mob, who took every thing into his own hands and set up a despotism, in comparison with which those of the fabulous Zeros and Hellofagabaluses were respectable and delectable. This Mob (a foreigner, by-the-by), is said to have been the most odious of all men that ever encumbered the earth. He was a giant in stature—insolent, rapacious, filthy, had the gall of a bullock with the heart of a hyena and the brains of a peacock. He died, at length, by dint of his own energies, which exhausted him. Nevertheless, he had his uses, as every thing has, however vile, and taught mankind a lesson which to this day it is in no danger of forgetting—never to run directly contrary to the natural analogies. As for Republicanism, no analogy could be found for it upon the face of the earth—unless we except the case of the “prairie dogs,” an

The Rise of the Last Human II 85 exception which seems to demonstrate, if anything, that democracy is a very admirable form of government—for dogs. (Poe 1982: 390–391) In Poe, as can be seen, criticism of the demographics of mass society went hand in glove with a refutation of its politics. It should be noted that while the man of the crowd is described as “the type and the genius of deep crime,” the narrator, although pursuing him for a whole day and night and scrutinizing his every move, does not actually catch him red-handed committing any illegal act. His criminality is merely assumed, and the narrator fancies he has detected some incriminating signs, although he admits that they were quite intangible: I had now a good opportunity of examining his person [. . .] and my vision deceived me, or, through a rent in a closely-buttoned and evidently second-handed roquelaire which enveloped him, I caught a glimpse both of a diamond and of a dagger. (479) His “crime,” it would seem, is actually a very paltry one: that of sociability itself. “He refuses to be alone,” states the narrator in the concluding lines, as if this provided cause for legal action. Yet for Poe, the seclusion of the individual within himself and the distancing from the others, especially when they come from the lower classes, was considered of great merit, as testified by the story’s motto, taken from La Bruyère: “Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul” [This great unhappiness, of not being able to be alone]. This conviction also found expression in one of Poe’s early poems Alone, written when he was 20 years old. Alone From childhood’s hour I have not been As others were—I have not seen As others saw—I could not bring My passions from a common spring. From the same source I have not taken My sorrow; I could not awaken My heart to joy at the same tone; And all I lov’d, I lov’d alone. Then—in my childhood—in the dawn Of a most stormy life—was drawn From ev’ry depth of good and ill The mystery which binds me still: From the torrent, or the fountain, From the red cliff of the mountain

86  The Rise of the Last Human II From the sun that ’round me roll’d In its autumn tint of gold— From the lightning in the sky As it pass’d me flying by— From the thunder and the storm, And the cloud that took the form (When the rest of heaven was blue) Of a demon in my view. (Poe 1982: 1026) Already here the tendency is evident to take distance from the common—in the sense of something “general” and possibly also in the social sense of that which is “low” and “simple.” In a romantic and expressionistic vein, Poe’s writing gives precedence to his inner feelings and subjective impressions over external, objective reality. The poet projects onto the nature surrounding him—the cloud, the sky and so on and so forth—his internal sensations and bestows upon it a sense of “mystery,” a “demonic” aspect, in the same way that he would later invest a man in the crowd with fiendishness. This reflects a distancing from realism, the literary genre that was dominant in the first half of the 19th century, and which strove to reflect objective reality as closely as possible, registering, in particular, social and historical processes. The great realistic novels of the age, by writers such as Walter Scott, Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, or Charles Dickens, attempted to unfold the vastest possible panorama of society and of the relationship between its various groups and classes (as discussed by Frye 1990; Lukács 1964; Jameson 1981). In realistic literature a great number of characters, representing all walks of society, were given the possibility to speak, hence the characterization of the novel as a “dialogic” genre. In addition to this polyphonic nature, many of these novels were characterized by a sympathetic point of view of the commoners, members of the third estate, and their heroes and anti-heroes were often plebs. Poetry, by comparison, is mostly a form of personal expression, giving voice to the poet’s thoughts, moods and mindset, in a way that is less concerned with reflecting the views of those around him or deciphering the relationships between them. In the move from realism to romanticism, from objectivity to subjectivity, and from dialogue to monologue, it is possible to discern, however indirectly, the historical process whereby the middle-classes—from whose ranks came most artists and writers—and the working classes drifted apart. Delacroix, although he is considered a quintessential painter of the romanticist movement, which was certainly not of one cloth, was content to portray figures of the common people, among whom he counted himself. In Poe’s story, by comparison, the narrator is hermetically shielded from society: in the course of the story he exchanges not a word with the countless people he intermingles with.

The Rise of the Last Human II 87 Following the man of the crowd and totally intrigued by him, the possibility does not occur to him to try to engage him in conversation, ask him who he is and what is the purpose of his roaming through the streets of London. His far-reaching conclusion regarding the nature of this figure is totally one-sided and subjective: he decides that this is the fiendish “man of the crowd” and weaves an entire theory about him, without ever asking his opinion or trying to make contact with him. In that respect, Poe anticipates one of the salient features of the vast literature on the masses, which, whether scholarly or literary, is written almost universally from external and condescending perspective: no matter whether we are dealing with Hippolyte Taine, Nietzsche, Gabriel Tarde, Scipio Sighele, Le Bon, Ortega, or any other would-be mass expert, the preconceptions of the writer, mostly negative and judgmental, are projected onto the crowd, without in any way engaging it or any of its perceived members. “The idea of empirical investigation”—writes Susanna Barrows (1981: 87) apropos Taine, the pioneer of mass psychology in France—“was wholly alien to Taine; when conversing with Gabriel Monod about his impending research trip to Italy, Taine asked, ‘And what theory are you going to verify there?’ ” When Quantity Threatens Quality The rise in average life expectancy, the decrease in the rate of mortality and the growth of population are presumably salutary developments. One would have expected that contemporaries would enthusiastically welcome the possibility to live a healthier and longer life. Yet at least as far as mass critics were concerned, these demographic trends were construed as fundamentally negative, both quantitatively and qualitatively. With regards to quantity, a common complaint alleged that there were now too many people. And as far as quality is concerned, it was presumed that population growth is no neutral process, benefiting all in equal measure, but one that decisively favors the masses, the lower orders, the supposedly inferior segments of the population at the expense of the upper and middle classes. The assumption underlying such complaints was that birth rate was highest among the poor, while the number of middle-class’ births remained, at most, stable, which meant that their proportion in society diminished from generation to generation. Several key processes were perceived as contributing to this social deterioration in which the “better” classes were dwindling while the lower classes were multiplying, primary among them the slowing down or outright cessation of the process of natural selection. According to the theories of social Darwinism, fashionable and prestigious in equal measures, under “normal” conditions the surplus population naturally thins out since it comprises those who are physically weak, too poor to provide for themselves, too lazy, reckless

88  The Rise of the Last Human II or stupid to succeed, for which they frequently pay with their lives, or at least cannot be expected to live very long. Thus, the balance is kept between the better and lesser members of society. Yet modern developments, and here demographics and politics seemed to be feeding off each other, were undercutting this process: the medical improvements that have been described—medicines, vaccinations, hygiene and improved diet—presently permitted to artificially extend even the lives of those who should duly and naturally have passed away. Under natural circumstances, i.e., pre-modern ones, members of the nobility and the bourgeoisie, whose livelihood was guaranteed, who enjoyed good diet and led a healthy way of life, tended in any case to live long. But now, it was argued, the lives of the poor were extended, those who in the past could scarcely survive to old age. Now they receive vaccines that turn them less vulnerable to natural culling. Worse still, modern, mass politics boosted further the effects of demographics and medicine: due to the extension of the franchise the poor can now extend the range of medical services provided by the state, and therefore lengthen their life expectancy even more. This they do fundamentally by progressive taxation that comes at the cost of the affluent taxpayer from the middle and upper classes. As a result, these classes, thrifty, industrious and productive, grind under the “tax burden” and are compelled to finance the services enjoyed by the undeserving. If all this is not bad enough, argued the critics of the mass, the problem gets even worse once the long-term impact of the demographic changes on the political power relations is considered: the population growth of the lower orders becomes a superb political tool, allowing them to accumulate ever more power vis-à-vis the élites. Democracy was seen as the displacement of quality by quantity, the triumph of “the great number.” Consequentially, the greater the number of the masses the more they can cash in on politically, empowering themselves from one election to the next, while the parties of the bourgeoisie, whose number of voters stagnates, progressively lose ground. As we saw, the advances of the workers’ parties seemed to confirm this scenario: in Germany, as will be recalled, the socialists were growing apace up to the First World War. And the more political power they enjoy, the more they can, in principle, tax the bourgeoisie, extort more and more services from the state, and thus live longer, procreate more and increase their number and then further expand politically. Seen from the vantage point of the upper and middle classes, this process looked like a dismal vicious cycle allowing no escape (Table 2.1), at least as long as democracy continues to exist. Confronted by this abysmal cul-de-sac, at least as perceived by many among the élites, the complaint against “parasitism” became a recurrent trope in the political discourse, and would later feature prominently in fascist—especially Nazi—ideology. The mass was blamed for living

The Rise of the Last Human II 89 Table 2.1 The political-demographic vicious cycle The masses enjoying great numbers

The polical power of the masses increases

Democracy

The masses connue to grow in number as compared to the elites

The masses obtaining polical power

The protecve state expands

parasitically, feeding off the strong and extorting from their talent and hard labor undue advantages. This condition was perceived as morally distorted—the weak, being the majority, exploit their numbers to prey on the strong, who are fewer and thus cannot defend themselves—and economically detrimental: the more the masses would burden the economic engine (i.e., the industrious bourgeoisie, pulling the rest of the train’s cars along) the more the economy will lose momentum or stop altogether. For Pareto (1966: 139), the liberal critic of mass democracy, it was a system that delivered the helpless economy into the hands of the unfit: “Tilling a field to produce corn is an arduous labor,” he wrote. On the other hand, going along to the polling station to vote is a very easy business, and if by so doing one can procure food and shelter, then everybody—especially the unfit, the incompetent and the idle— will rush to do it. This condition, he asserted (302–303), is unsustainable and sooner or later the economy will collapse under the weight of the bloated mass parasites: [T]he workers prefer the tangible benefits of higher wages, progressive taxation and greater leisure [. . .]. It may be “just, laudable, desirable, morally necessary” that the workers should labor only a

90  The Rise of the Last Human II few hours each day and receive enormous salaries; but [. . .] is this in reality possible, that is, in terms of real, not merely nominal, wages? And what will be the consequence of this state of affairs? Nietzsche’s Double Standard with Regards to Parasites A highly interesting example of the complaint against mass parasitism is provided by Nietzsche. His use of this trope is intriguing both on account of its habitual flagrancy, which helps clarify the issues at stake, and because it exposes the contradictions and inner tensions characterizing the discourse on the parasitism. The notion of parasitism was of some importance in Nietzsche’s social thought. Like many middle-class individuals of his time he was greatly distressed by the demographic imbalance, perceivably favoring the masses at the expanse of the élites. He gave a lot of thought to the matter, and advocated a variety of ways of coping with this problem. First, he wanted to affect the consciousness of the weak, those who he felt did not deserve to go on living, and to encourage them to forsake their lives of their own accord with a view to the greater social good. In Twilight of the Idols (1888–89), Nietzsche demanded that invalids be given clear indications by their doctors that their presence among the living is no longer appreciated. This is the proposition of the passage whose title is “A moral code for physicians”: The invalid is a parasite on society. In a certain state it is indecent to go on living. To vegetate on in cowardly dependence on physicians and medicaments after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost ought to entail the profound contempt of society. Physicians, in their turn, ought to be the communicators of this contempt—not prescriptions, but every day a fresh dose of disgust with their patients. [. . .] To create a new responsibility, that of the physician, in all cases in which the highest interest of life, of ascending life, demands the most ruthless suppression and sequestration of degenerating life—for example in determining the right to reproduce, the right to be born, the right to live. (Nietzsche 1990: 99) It needs to be borne in mind that this was asserted at a time that the German state was exasperatingly moving in the opposite direction: rather than pushing the invalids to suicide, it introduced legal and material measures that encouraged them to go on living, such as health insurance (1883), accident insurance (1884) and the Invalidenversicherung (1889). Going on, Nietzsche turned from the parasite’s physician, to the parasite himself; here, his strategy was not to threaten but to convince the parasites to do the right thing, i.e., put an end to their unworthy life:

The Rise of the Last Human II 91 To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one’s own free choice, death at the proper time [. . .]. We have no power to prevent ourselves being born: but we can rectify this error— for it is sometimes an error. When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live. . . . Society—what am I saying! life itself derives more advantage from that than from any sort of “life” spent in renunciation, green-sickness and other virtues—one has freed others from having to endure one’s sight, one has removed an objection from life. (Nietzsche 1990: 99–100) Nietzsche’s notion of what it means to be sick or invalid, moreover, was very broad and inclusive. It encompassed not only those deemed physically unfit, but the mentally ill as well, those suffering from a spiritual defect and even those who were simply considered mediocre, without any special abilities, and hence categorized as failures. As Zarathustra proclaimed: “The earth is full of the superfluous, life has been corrupted by the many-too-many. Let them be lured by ‘eternal life’ out of this life!” (Nietzsche 1969: 72). Or in the passage entitled Of Voluntary Death: For many a man, life is a failure: a poison-worm eats at his heart. So let him see to it that his death is all the more a success. Many a man never becomes sweet, he rots even in the summer. It is cowardice that keeps him fastened to his branch. Many too many live and they hang on their branches too long. I wish a storm would come and shake all this rottenness and wormeatenness from the tree! I wish preachers of speedy death would come! They would be the fitting storm and shakers of the trees of life! (Nietzsche 1969: 98) Elsewhere (224), Zarathustra recommends a shock-therapy that will sift those who fake sickness from those who are genuinely incurable. The former should be forced to abandon their parasitic shirking of competition; the latter should be extinguished: But you world-weary people! You should be given a stroke of the cane! Your legs should be made sprightly again with cane-strokes! For: if you are not invalids and worn-out wretches of whom the earth is weary, you are sly sluggards or dainty, sneaking lust-cats. And if you will not again run about merrily, you shall—pass away! One should not want to be physician to the incurable: thus Zarathustra teaches: so you shall pass away! “The weak and ill-constituted,” Nietzsche (1990: 128) defiantly declares in The Anti-Christ, “shall perish: first principle of our philanthropy. And

92  The Rise of the Last Human II one shall help them to do so.” And in his last book, Ecce Homo, one finds the following prediction: Let us look a century ahead, let us suppose that my attentat on two millennia of anti-nature and the violation of man succeeds. That party of life which takes in hand the greatest of all tasks, the higher breeding of humanity, together with the remorseless extermination of all degenerate and parasitic elements, will again make possible on earth that superfluity of life out of which the dionysian condition must again proceed. (Nietzsche 1992: 51–52)6 Social parasitism was therefore fiercely combated by Nietzsche who saw it as a paramount threat to life; or maybe not quite so fiercely? A class theorist, representing the views and defending the interests of the élites, Nietzsche in truth rebuked the ruling classes of his time precisely for slackening the parasitic hold on society that no aristocracy worthy of the name must ever relinquish. For Nietzsche, the main political defect of the modern élites of the post French-Revolution era was their inability to function as proper élites vis-à-vis the masses. The bourgeois ethos, he argued, was hampering the élites with an excessive weight of democratic commitment and the reminiscences of the revolutionary past. The traces of this egalitarian ethos made it difficult for the bourgeoisie to stand firm before the spread of mass society and its escalating demands. The bourgeois élite conceives of its task too much in terms of rendering service to a reputedly higher goal such as “the general good” or “the progress of humanity.” A genuine élite, by contrast, shuns any notion of rendering service, and instead unabashedly takes pride in its parasitic existence: The crucial thing about a good and healthy aristocracy, however, is that it does not feel that it is a function (whether of monarchy or community) but rather its essence and highest justification—and that therefore it has no misgivings in condoning the sacrifice of a vast number of people who must for its sake be oppressed and diminished into incomplete people, slaves, tools. Its fundamental belief must simply be that society can not exist for its own sake, but rather only as a foundation and scaffolding to enable a select kind of creature to ascend to its higher task [. . .] much like those sun-loving climbing plants on Java (called sipo matador) whose tendrils encircle an oak tree so long and so repeatedly that finally, high above it but still supported by it, they are able to unfold their coronas in the free air and make a show of their happiness. (Nietzsche 1998: 152)

The Rise of the Last Human II 93 This was written in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) in direct response to the mass politics of statesmen such as Bismarck, who sought to contain socialism by using social legislation. While Nietzsche realized that the purpose of such goal was conservative, he regarded it as counter-productive: instead of quashing socialism, the state provides the masses quasisocialism, and therefore gets bogged down still deeper in the quicksand of mass society. Mass politics and mass society were for Nietzsche an inversion of the natural order of things. Instead of the masses serving the élites, the élites busily serve the masses. As he wrote early on, in 1874: [T]he kind of history at present universally prized is precisely the kind that takes the great mass-drives for the chief and weighty facts of history and regards great men as being no more than their clearest expression, as it were bubbles visible on the surface of the flood. Greatness is, under this supposition, the product of the masses, which is to say order is the product of chaos [. . .]. But is that not a quite deliberate confusion of quantity with quality? (Nietzsche 1997: 113) Dehumanizing Atheism and the Religion of Nature One of the most fateful ideological struggles waged in the 19th-century concerned the appropriation and social application of Darwinism. The outcome, as is clear retroactively, was a triumph for the camp of “social Darwinism”: a justification of capitalism as a system of ruthless competition, selection and ultimately annihilation, and a concomitant denunciation of state intervention in the economy as perverting the laws of nature. Yet there was a moment when such an interpretation was not yet hegemonic, and in which social Darwinism might have been invested with a radically different significance. The immediate impact of Darwin’s theory of evolution was simply to remove divine intervention and supervision from human affairs; in Nietzsche’s unsurpassable formulation, it killed God. It gave atheism its strongest ever impetus, but beyond that it did not contain an intrinsic lesson on what a society without god should look like. The social implications of Darwinism were therefore up for grabs. While there were of course many ideas on how to fill the vacuum left by god and by religion, it is helpful to distinguish between two main options: the humanist and egalitarian proposition, and the anti-humanist and anti-egalitarian one. As I have argued in some detail elsewhere, the former is best identified with the thought of Karl Marx, while the latter’s most important representative was Nietzsche (see Landa 2006). To many, it seemed that a society without god would be free of oppressive religion, which for centuries had provided the social hierarchy with one of its most effective props. “Social Darwinism,” if they had defined it, would have signified a society in which humans come into their own,

94  The Rise of the Last Human II bring to an end all relations of exploitation that were sanctified in the name of god, and create a fraternal and egalitarian order. For them, one might say, only the death of god facilitated the arrival of the social messiah. For Marx, the notion of evolution seemed to chime in with the theories of social progress, the advance from simpler forms to more complex ones, culminating with communism, and the vindication of materialism and the free and creative play of atoms, to which Marx adhered already as young scholar, writing his doctoral dissertation on Epicurus (for a useful survey of Marx’s materialism, see Bellamy Foster 2000). This goes a long way toward explaining the enthusiasm with which Marx and Engels greeted the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. Such a sanguine reception of Darwinism was shared by others, who did not believe in the socialist revolution, but hoped to witness the emergence of a freer and more humane world. As the French critic Jacques Novicow wrote before the First World War: The triumph of Darwinism marks the release of the human mind from the bonds of theology. [. . .] Immutable order in the universe replaced an arbitrary divinity. Man could raise his head, and feel himself the master of the world. He saw unbounded horizons open before his eyes, with no authority now able to stop him in his conquests. (In Pichot 2009: 37) Yet by the time Novicow was writing these lines, as he was all too painfully aware, another reading altogether had cornered the market of Darwinism, one based not on enlightenment, progress and fraternity but on pitiless competition and irrationality. For fairly soon after Darwin’s first publications, another interpretation of his theories established itself alongside the humanist one, ultimately displacing it. The weakening of religion, it was argued, need not entail the weakening of social hexarchy, as progressives had hoped. On the contrary, the death of god may finally rebound in favor of an even stricter social hierarchy, for it will allow the rulers, the powerful and the affluent, to shake off the antiquated social inhibitions imposed on them by Judaeo-Christian egalitarianism and other, outmoded and non-scientific concepts, seeking to succor the weak. Nature could perform god’s former social duties in supervising and chastising the lower orders, indeed might do so even more thoroughly and ruthlessly. Nietzsche’s doctrines were amongst the sharpest formulations of the new concept and played a vital role in disseminating it among the European educated classes. In the demise of religion Nietzsche identified a great opportunity to discard its egalitarian and humanist legacy, especially as embodied in what he decreed were its modern, secular offshoots: democracy and socialism. It was vital to ensure that with god, not the ethics of Rangordnung shall evacuate the scene, but rather those

The Rise of the Last Human II 95 of egalitarianism. As Zarathustra preached, not the rabble, but the Übermensch must inherit the god-less earth: “You higher men”—thus the mob blink—“there are no higher men, we are all equal, man is but man; before God—we are all equal!” Before God! But now this god has died. And let us not be equal before the mob. You Higher Men, depart from the market-place! Before God! [. . .] You Higher Men, this god was your greatest danger. Only since he has lain in his grave have you again been resurrected. Only now does the great noontide come, only now does the Higher Man become—lord and master! [. . .] God has died: now we desire—that the Superman shall live. (Nietzsche 1969: 297) In order to resist the rise the humanist atheism envisioned by the progressive camp, whose premises were the dignity and sovereignty of humanity, Nietzsche developed an alternative brand of atheism, prioritizing nature rather than humanity, which explicitly discarded such “illusions.” This is the gist of the following passage in which Nietzsche numbers several typically human errors that should be avoided. One of these misconceptions was the assumption that humanity occupies a privileged place in the natural order or possesses a special value within it. Against this, Nietzsche underscores humanity’s negligible position in nature, and proceeds on this basis to dismiss the belief in the social and political rights of man: “Third, [man] placed himself in a false order of rank in relation to animals and nature. [. . .] If we removed the effects of these four errors, we should also remove humanity, humanness and ‘human dignity’ ” (Nietzsche 1974: 174). It is as if Nietzsche’s theory was written in specific rebuttal of Marx’s contention that “the criticism of religion ends with the teaching that for man the supreme being is man” (Marx 1992: 251). For Nietzsche (1968: 398–399), the criticism of religion rather ends by the realization, that “One has no right to existence or to work, to say nothing of a right to ‘happiness’: the individual human being is in precisely the same case as the lowest worm.” While Marx (1992: 251) animated his readers “to overthrow all conditions in which man is a debased, enslaved, neglected and contemptible being,” Nietzsche strove to create precisely such a new condition, for which the cosmic insignificance of humanity will serve as a presupposition. Nietzsche’s solution to the political problem of humanizing atheism was thus to attempt and develop a dehumanizing atheism. By introducing a form of atheism-cum-pantheism that places nature above humanity, one can deny the political demands of humanistic socialism. François Bédarida, in an informative essay, has characterized National Socialism

96  The Rise of the Last Human II as an Ersatzreligion that was meant to take the place of Christianity. It was, moreover, a “naturalistic religion,” substituting immanency and this-worldliness for transcendentalism and the afterlife. At the heart of this “secular religion” lay a project—we may add, a Nietzschean project, compatible at least in that respect with Nietzsche’s teaching—of a “naturalized humanity”: Such a world stands completely under the sign of naturalism. Man is only a part of nature. “The earth will continue to spin,” claims Hitler, “whether man kills the tiger or the other way around; the world does not change. Its laws are eternal.” The only thing that counts is to adapt to these laws. (Bédarida 1997: 161) Philippe Burrin (1997: 181–182) likewise stresses the naturalistic character of Nazi ideology as a means of “re-enchanting” a world that has dangerously gone secular, combined with an effort to dehumanize the world: The human species is a part of nature and subject to its “eternal laws.” The important thing is the struggle for survival and the selection of the strongest. The role of this desacralized and nature-fixated mode of thought cannot be overestimated when considering the crimes of the regime. [. . .] Auschwitz is the culminating point of a specific anti-humanistic reenchantment attempt, as the mythicalsymbolic inspiration of Nazism clearly shows. And Mark Neocleous (1997: 76) writes: For the Nazis especially, the concept of “humanity” is biological nonsense, for man, “species-man,” is part of nature. [. . .] [I]n place of God and any idea of divine humanity, Nazism puts life itself. This in effect downgrades man: “Man is nothing special, nothing more than a piece of earth,” Himmler tells us. Elsewhere in this excellent introduction to fascist ideology, the author briefly refers to Nietzsche’s important contribution to the formation of the fascist worldview. (See Neocleous 1997: 3–13.) National Socialism as Ersatzreligion was but one historical instance of this naturalistic fetishism, though surely the most far-reaching and extravagant one. But the general principle of applying the reputed inhumanity of nature to legitimize the inhumanity of society was an ideological stratagem ubiquitous throughout the West in the form of social Darwinism and its diverse sociological, anthropological and cultural manifestations. The “divine scheme” of the past was everywhere replaced, or at any rate complemented, by the “natural plan,” according to which the

The Rise of the Last Human II 97 strong “naturally” survive and the weak “naturally” perish (or exterminated: Nietzsche, for one, wrote: “To gain that tremendous energy of greatness in order to shape the man of the future through breeding and, on the other hand, the annihilation of millions of failures, and not to perish of the suffering one creates, though nothing like it has ever existed!”) and any intervention in that process amounts to heresy against the pagan yet monotheistic deity of Nature. Nietzsche’s philosophy was thus instrumental in the creation of a new, pantheistic quasi-religion. In this context as well it is useful to juxtapose this doctrine with Marx and Engels’s position, as it was expressed in their early writings. Even before the rise of Darwinism, they were pointing to the obstacle placed by the cult of the nature in the path of humanism. Thus, in 1844, Engels (1988: 500) criticized traditional materialism for rising against Christianity yet falling short of emancipating humanity: “The fundamental assumptions remained everywhere the same. Materialism did not attack the Christian debasement and contempt for the human being, and merely replaced the Christian God with nature, as the Absolute facing humanity.” Nietzsche exemplifies the way the cult of nature established itself ideologically as a powerful means of combating the mass ideologies threatening to transform the social order after the weakening of traditional religion. If, at the start of the 19th century the priest is still the one standing above humanity, in the course of the 19th century and at the start of the 20th century this place is increasingly occupied by nature, and by the overman (revealing himself as the priest’s surprising, secular successor). In fact, substituting nature for God meant that the struggle against the masses could assume considerably more aggressive forms. The emphasis on remorseless competition and the repression-cum-elimination of the unfit signified a marked upping of the ante, a strikingly offensive move, as compared with the more defensive nature of conventional religious conservatism. An express call for the extermination of millions could hardly have been possible in the framework of the old conceptions. Yet now dehumanizing atheism provided more than a stronghold that could repel the advances of social revolution: it formed a basis from which attacks could be launched against the state promising social rights. This was the meaning of the social Darwinist call for selection, which Nietzsche echoed: Through Christianity, the individual was made so important, so absolute, that he could no longer be sacrificed: but the species endure only through human sacrifice—All “souls” became equal before God: but this is precisely the most dangerous of all possible evaluations! If one regards individuals as equals one calls the species into question, one encourages a way of life that leads to the ruin of the species: Christianity is the counterprinciple to the principle of selection. [. . .] The species requires that the ill-constituted, weak, degenerate, perish:

98  The Rise of the Last Human II but it was precisely to them that Christianity turned as a conserving force [. . .]. What is “virtue” and “charity” in Christianity if not just this mutual preservation, this solidarity of the weak, this hampering of selection? (Nietzsche 1968: 142) This line of thought had many adherents, who keenly embraced the possibility to replace Christianity with an even more hierarchical cult of nature.7 Notable among them was Ernst Haeckel, the foremost German Darwinist, who some see as an important precursor of fascism and Nazism (notably Gasman 1998). Haeckel was a scientist of world renown and a propagandist for the political and social agenda that he believed was implied in Darwin’s teaching. He did possibly more than anyone else to redirect atheism into pantheistic channels, by founding a quasi-religion which he called “monism” (not to be confused with Spinoza’s radically different understanding of both monism and pantheism). This attempt is reflected in the title of his 1892 book, Monism as Connecting Religion and Science, where one finds a scientific corroboration of Nietzsche’s more impressionistic assumption that an estranged nature takes the place of a compassionate God: We now know that the whole of organic nature on our planet exists only by a relentless war of all against all. Thousands of animals and plants must daily perish in every part of the earth, in order that a few chosen individuals may continue to subsist and to enjoy life. [. . .] The raging war of interests in human society is only a feeble picture of the unceasing and terrible war of existence which reigns throughout the whole of the living world. The beautiful dream of God’s goodness and wisdom in nature, to which as children we listened so devoutly fifty years ago, no longer finds credit now—at least among educated people who think. (Haeckel 1895: 73–74) A few pages earlier (68), Haeckel reassured his readers that the monistic ethics he advocates is not revolutionary but conservative: Against this monistic ethic [. . .] it has been objected that it is fitted to undermine existing civilization, and especially that it encourages the subversive aims of social democracy. This reproach is wholly unjustified. [. . .] Political ‘free-thinking,’ so-called, has nothing whatever to do with the ‘freedom of thought’ of our monistic natural religion. The French Leon Dumont, in a 1876 book, promoted Haeckel’s ideas amongst his country’s conservatives and explained to them that there is no reason to fear Darwinism, the only theory, in fact, which can scientifically confirm their political values of competition, economic disparities

The Rise of the Last Human II 99 and human inequality (see Pichot 2009: 7–8). Dumont, it is interesting to note, influenced Nietzsche’s ideas (see Small 2001: 167). In 1891 another influential Darwinist, Otto Ammon, who espoused the notion of German racial superiority, published a book explaining how Darwinism batters socialism (Ammon, 1891). Nearing the end of the 19th century, the German Alexander Tille, who was close to Haeckel, recounted the rise of social Darwinism and the crystallization of its messages as a story that begins with Darwin and Alfred Wallace and reaches its ideological culmination in Nietzsche. He considered the first Darwinists too timid, hesitating to draw from the radical evolutionist theory they embraced the inevitable ethical and social conclusions, namely ultraist aristocratic ones, implacably opposed to the Christian-humane-democratic-socialist morality that they proved to be devoid of any scientific value. Contemptible Christianity is different from Darwinism as “peace is different from war, the slave from the free citizen, the sick from the healthy, the weak from the strong” (Tille 1895: 6). Darwin’s generation was too emotionally embroiled in the old morality, which it never managed to completely shake off. Only gradually did social Darwinist ethic evolve, until reaching its sharpest form in Nietzsche’s writings, in which the uninhibited morality of the masters was promoted and the slave morality of Christianity, democracy and socialism demolished. At the beginning it could not be established whether or not the modern, Christianhumanist-democratic ethic could be squared with the account of the world emerging out of the research of nature. [. . .] Darwin said yes, Nietzsche [who was still alive when this was written. I.L.] says no. (Tille 1895: 10) As can be seen, Tille fully subscribed to Nietzsche’s view that the egalitarian politics of the modern era is a direct consequence of Christianity, an argument which was repeated over and over in his book. Yet he also clarified, and this too in agreement with Nietzsche, that the truly serious conflict is not with Christianity proper but with its perceived political ramifications. “The theory of evolution,” he argued (20), “squared better with the realm of divine grace than with universal franchise, with the cult of heroes than with the cult of the masses, and with individualism more than with social democracy.” Tille also well internalized the necessity of uprooting humanism—since it is the source of the dream of equality, peace and international fraternity—and replacing it with a worldview founded on humanity’s marginal place in nature. He hopefully looked forward to the new century in which the man would be found capable of instilling humanity with the new gospel: From the doctrine that all humans are God’s children and equal before him, the ideal finally grew of humaneness and socialism, according to which all humans have an equal right to exist and an equal value. This

100  The Rise of the Last Human II had affected very significantly the policies of the previous century and of the present one. This ideal is incompatible with the theory of evolution. [. . .] It recognizes only the fit and the unfit, the healthy and the sick, geniuses and atavists. In place of the welfare of all human beings presently living on the earth, a bright future must come for the most developed races. And just as humanism and socialism tried to derive from human equality norms for human behavior, so will the evolutionist ethic do, out of its ideal of the future of the race. [. . .] The man who will be able to concretize these norms and pack them into a formula that will gain the masses’ enthusiasm for the new ideal, [. . .] will take his place in the history of the life of the spirit, the history of morality, alongside Moses, Buddha, and Jesus. (Tille 1895: 22) Evolution, as can be appreciated, was regarded by many of its advocates as a new, or a surrogate religion, one that already exists in embryo yet awaits its founder, or at least its propagandist, to become an active force in the world. The reference to the masses is highly significant, too, since it indicates the clear social and political role of the new religion, as well as the fundamental contradiction at its ideological base, a contradiction that will come to characterize fascism as well. For Tille—like Haeckel, Nietzsche and most of their colleagues—is a member of the educated middle class, sharing its deep elitist commitment. We have seen how Haeckel writes about “educated people who think.” Tille, similarly, identifies with individualistic heroes, not with the masses, and writes about “the great fortune of cultivated humanity” that the theory of evolution arrived in time to defeat the threatening ideas of equality (Tille 1895: 19). Nietzsche’s acute elitism need not be reemphasized. Yet for all their disdain of the masses, in fact precisely because of such disdain, these elitists cannot stay aloof from mass society and politics, in an age when both have become lamentable realities. Thus, as many fascists will later do, Tille yearns for the charismatic leader who might rally the masses behind an anti-mass ideal. This echoes the way that Zarathustra, disgusted as he is by the rabble, had to try and spread his aristocratic message in the marketplace to begin with, rubbing shoulders with vulgar entertainers. Zarathustra found in that very place many people assembled in the marketsquare: for it had been announced that a tight-rope walker would be appearing. And Zarathustra spoke thus to the people: I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? (Nietzsche 1969: 41) The subtitle of Thus Spoke Zarathustra contains the paradox of elitism in a mass age: “A book for everyone and no one.” And while Zarathustra

The Rise of the Last Human II 101 advises the higher-men to stay aloof of the marketplace, he himself might be the best candidate for the role of the new religion’s prophet, so eagerly awaited by Tille, to spread the word among the masses. Tille is aware of the fact that Nietzsche often criticized Darwin and Darwinism. He correctly point out that this criticism primarily addressed the defensive character of Darwinism, identifying survival as the goal of the natural struggle. Nietzsche, by contrast, strove to develop an offensive doctrine, in which struggle is not simply a means to survival but to empowerment, growth, dominion: “Not a defensive but an offensive battle, which takes on a defensive form only under certain conditions” (Tille 1895: 222). Only on one point does Tille (241) find cause for serious disagreement with Nietzsche, and this is the question of nationalism. For all his accomplishments in extracting the anti-humanist meaning of Darwinism, in this sense [Nietzsche] did not overcome humanism. He still believed that one can directly serve humanity. He did not yet think that each person belongs firstly to a certain people, and that no one could better serve humanity than by serving his people. In retrospect, Tille represents a more “advanced” proto-fascist position than the one offered by Nietzsche. Fascism, as we shall see further in the next chapters, inherits from social Darwinism and from the romantic cult of a nature, a mystic glorifying of nature and its supposed laws. This tendency should not be seen as exclusively characteristic of Germans such as Haeckel, as implied by the historian Daniel Gasman, who emphasizes the anti-Western facet of this Darwinism. The quasi-religious potential of the new doctrine was also noted outside Germany. One of those who explicitly acknowledged this potential was Francis Galton, the originator of eugenics, and Darwin’s half-cousin. This doctrine was one of the most important practical implications of social Darwinism. It assumed that once the laws of natural selection were understood it was imperative to practically apply them to human affairs in order to guarantee the improvement of “the stock,” mainly by encouraging greater birth rates among the fit and intelligent (coming, it was argued, from the well-off upper classes) and restricting births among the unfit (stemming mostly from the lower classes). This intervention was seen as a counter-measure to the prevailing demographic trend, which we have described as the political-demographic vicious cycle. Eugenics took two main forms, according to the recommended course of action, “positive,” and “negative.” The former wished to encourage births among the fit, for example by using financial incentives; the latter to decrease propagation, by a number of ways, ranging from economic sanctions, through voluntary or forced sterilization and up to euthanasia. Among “educated people who think” the movement gained

102  The Rise of the Last Human II widespread support, especially in England and the United States, yet its scope of action remained seriously restricted by the democratic order. In Britain, for example, a proposed Sterilization Bill was rejected in parliament, on account of a strong resistance put up by the labor movement (Child 2001: 6). In Nazi Germany, by contrast, where such restrictions have been eliminated, eugenics experienced its finest hour, and humanity one of its darkest. Between 1934 and 1939 some 380.000 people were sterilized in Germany; with the outbreak of the Second World War the sterilization officially stopped, not on account of any change in policy, but simply because under the cover of war quasi-legal authorizations were no longer required and it was possible to battle “the unfit” and even exterminate them much more straightforwardly. It is thus interesting to observe how Galton was well aware of the religious potential of his doctrine: [Eugenics] must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion. It has, indeed, strong claims to become an orthodox religious tenet of the future, for Eugenics co-operate with the works of Nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races. What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly. (In Childs 2001: 3) This expectation was wholly shared by the salient English biologist Julian Huxley, who wrote: “Once the full implications of evolutionary biology are grasped, eugenics will inevitably become part of the religion of the future, or of whatever complex of sentiments may in the future take the place of organized religion” (In Childs 2001: 4). In his fascinating book on the presence of eugenic thought in the ranks of the British and American intelligentsia from the 1880s to the 1930s, the historian Donald J. Childs provides two lists, the first with names of famous Anglo-American supporters of eugenics, the second with some its preeminent critics. Tellingly, the first reads like a Who’s Who list of the great Nietzsche fans of the period, including such names as W. B. Yeats, G. B. Shaw, H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, H. L. Mencken and Jack London. In the second list—a much shorter one—no such famous Nietzscheans are to be counted, but at least one staunch opponent of Nietzsche, the writer G. K. Chesterton, who in 1922 wrote a magisterial polemic against eugenics, Eugenics and other Evils, described by Angelique Richardson as “both prescient and profound” (Richardson 2003: unnumbered page). And while Nietzsche himself is mentioned only once in the book, at least one indirect reference suggests the pertinence of his thought for the eugenic milieu: “Thus eugenics was positioned [. . .] to assume responsibility for a creation recently orphaned by the death of God” (Childs 2001: 4; on Nietzsche’s great significance for the British eugenic movement, see Stone 2002).

The Rise of the Last Human II 103 Another aspect of mass modernity strongly resisted by Nietzsche was the way modern medicine has managed to reduce sickness and, by way of painkillers and anesthesia also to alleviate the suffering of patients. Nietzsche, however, turned even this against modernity, citing it as a proof that the era was sanitized and sedated. Mass modernity was linked with a nearly universal condition of mild satisfaction. Yet, as the counterargument went, such contentment comes at great cost: to Nietzsche and other critics, “the civilizing process” described by Norbert Elias, far from representing an undiluted boon, signified the dwarfing of humanity, a social and economic leveling down. Political and social institutions, such as democracy and the welfare state may have made life safer and more comfortable for average people, but they have simultaneously drained life of the elements that make it truly worthwhile: risk, adventure, battle and last but not least, pain. One of the most characteristic features of the Last Humans despised by Nietzsche is their squeamishness and aversion to pain. As stated in The Gay Science, The general lack of experience of pain [has] an important consequence: pain is now hated much more than was the case formerly [. . .]. [T]he refinement and alleviation of existence make even the inevitable mosquito bites of the soul and the body seem much too bloody and malignant. (Nietzsche 1974: 113) And in that context pain assumed an unexpected redeeming role, as an enlivening spur amidst a deadened monotony. Past ages were evoked as healthier times when pain was not only accepted as integral to life, but appreciated as one of life’s attractions: Now, when suffering is always the first of the arguments marshaled against life, as its most questionable feature, it is salutary to remember the times when people made the opposite assessment, because they could not do without making people suffer and saw first-rate magic in it, a veritable seductive lure to life. Perhaps pain—I say this to comfort the squeamish—did not hurt as much then as it does now; at least, a doctor would be justified in assuming this, if he had treated a Negro (taken as a representative for primeval man) for serious internal inflammations which would drive the European with the stoutest constitution to distraction;—they do not do that to Negroes. (human capacity to pain does seem to sink dramatically and almost precipitously beyond the first ten thousand or ten million of the cultural élite; and for myself, I do not doubt that in comparison with one night of pain endured by a single, hysterical blue stocking, the total suffering of all the animals who have been interrogated by the knife in scientific research is as nothing). (Nietzsche 1994: 47)

104  The Rise of the Last Human II From its earliest expressions this nostalgia for pain was closely associated with a critique of the perceived social and political leveling down of modernity. Joseph Conrad, for instance, was deeply nostalgic about the docile and manageable working classes of the past, and conscious of the fall signified by modernity, following what he called “the rush of social-democratic ideas” (In Baines 1967: 80–81). In his 1897 novel, The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” Conrad glorified the pious seamen of the past, untouched by radicalism, while sternly portraying their deplorable modern successors. What makes the present so different from the past is a new hyper-sensitivity to pain and suffering. The crew aboard the Narcissus becomes obsessively concerned with the life of one its members, a sickly black person, James Wait. One sailor, who is particularly thorough in tending to the patient, becomes “as gentle as a woman, [. . .] as sentimentally careful of his nigger as a model slave-owner” (Conrad 1997: 104). The fact that the crew goes out of its way to care for its “nigger” is an unmistakable sign of the times. “He was demoralising. Through him we were becoming highly humanised, [. . .] as though we had been over-civilized, and rotten, and without any notion of the meaning of life” (102–103; all emphases added). The modern sense of compassion, for Conrad as well as Nietzsche, is not a beneficial improvement of the human character, but a symptom of enervation. As Nietzsche (1968: 34) once avowed: “precisely pity I recognized as more dangerous than any vice. [. . .] One has to respect fatality—that fatality that says to the weak: perish!” The effeminate crew of the Narcissus, however, rejects precisely such fatality. A veteran seaman who is the voice of a bygone era, the solitary Singleton, reproaches the rebellious, younger sailors, recalling the times when pain was acknowledged as an irredeemable aspect of existence: “And a black fellow, too,” went on the old seaman, “I have seen them die like flies.” He stopped, thoughtful, as if trying to recollect gruesome things, details of horrors, hecatombs of niggers; and they looked at him absorbed. [. . .] What would he say? He said:—“you can’t help him; die he must.” (Conrad 1997: 95) Biologizing Crime and Social Revolt In the last third of the 19th century and the start of the 20th century, the elitist discourse on demographics became increasingly biologist and racist. The opposition to the masses interlocked with social Darwinism and eugenics. The struggle of the nobility and the bourgeoisie (that now close ranks and put past feuds behind them) and the masses was presented as a conflict between two human species, whose differences are natural and inborn rather than results of education or environment. Élite and mass

The Rise of the Last Human II 105 were often perceived as different races, in a way that does not lend itself to social alteration. Attempts on the part of the state to narrow socioeconomic gaps are worse than useless, since not only will they fail to eliminate poverty and social backwardness, both being natural products, but they will also drag down the whole of society by increasing the ranks of the inferior and decimating the élite. The ways to interrupt the vicious demographic cycle were to reverse democratization and embrace authoritarian rule or at least to maintain a diluted democracy, where property qualifications are reinstated, and/or introduce wide scale eugenic measures to arrest “degeneration.” The alleged parasitism of the mass was lamented as undermining society’s ability to switch economic activity into the highest gear. The criterion of productivity was ever more important in a capitalist society, where profit making through industriousness became one of the most central considerations, if not the most central one, by which to measure the individual’s merit and social contribution. The productivist ethos was used not only to evaluate an individual’s performance but also the health and vigor of the entire nation, as international competition between the industrial powers was intensifying. Encouraging births among the productive segments of society and suppressing it among the non-productive appeared to many as a useful way to advance the nation’s position. (For a discussion of productivist ideology, see Spektorowski and Ireni-Saban 2010.) These concepts took hold across the Western world. There developed a kind of international racist colloquium, to which scholars, intellectuals and propagandists of different countries contributed. Ideas circulated between the countries and enriched—if that is the right term in this context—racist thinking. Already in its early phases racism was a way of classifying not only different ethnic groups but also social classes. This class function of racism manifested itself even before the French Revolution, for instance in the writings of the French count Henry de Boulainvilliers who argued in the 17th and early 18th century that French nobility descended from the ruling classes, the Francs, whereas the common people were of inferior, Gallic stock (Lukács 1962: 578; Mosse 1978). In the mid 19th century these ideas were refurbished by another French count, Arthur de Gobineau, to meet the new circumstances of mass society. Gobineau “was a firm believer that an aristocratic elite had always ruled the masses [. . .]. In the modern age, the masses had risen and destroyed the natural order” (Jackson and Weidman 2005: 107). In his highly influential Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (four volumes, 1853–1855) he gave a constitutive expression to the ideas of Nordic superiority: He affirmed the widely accepted division of the races into white, black, and yellow, and introduced the idea that civilization itself was

106  The Rise of the Last Human II based on race. The white race, which Gobineau called the “Aryan” race, was the only one capable of creative thinking and civilization building. The downfall of such great civilizations as Egypt and Greece owed to the commingling of Aryan blood with that of the lesser races. (Jackson and Weidman 2005: 107) In Western Europe the bourgeoisie increasingly referred to the masses under the codename “the dangerous classes,” the social source of crime and political revolt, which were construed as biologically rooted phenomena: these classes were attributed low intellect, bestial violence, wanton sexuality and so on and so forth (Chevalier 1973). A key figure in the attempt to anchor crime and social unrest in defective genes was the Italian anthropologist and criminologist Cesare Lombroso. Coming from a wealthy Veronese merchant family, Lombroso developed and expanded the old method of phrenology, the measuring of skulls, in order to diagnose inborn anti-social tendencies, which he supported by numerous photographs supposedly displaying the defects of the criminal “type,” whose transgressions are inborn and transmitted from one generation to the next. (See MacMaster 2001: 36.) Lombroso’s theories of crime, it should be noted, were meant to explain not the problems of the modern world as such, but the backwardness of Italy in the post-unification years. He saw crime as rooted in the country’s past and concentrated in its non-developed, especially southern parts, insufficiently affected by modern industry. His strong emphasis on “atavism,” the pathological retreat to or resurgence of the primitive past, reflected an approach that still favored progress. Later theorists transferred Lombroso’s critique from the past to the present, to the paradigmatically modern metropolis and the masses crowding its slums.8 During these years and decades the social explanation of crime went on the defensive, increasingly marginalized by what criminologists refer to as the “positivist approach to crime,” namely a theory which conceives of crime as separate from politics and society, rooted in some purely individual attribute, whether genetic or psychological. (See Maguire 2002: 12, 155.) Precisely this shift from the social to the biological was satirized by Dickens (1996: 346), who had Magwitch, one of the protagonists of Great Expectations, exclaim: “they measured my head, some on ’em—they had better a measured my stomach.” It was common to view the poor as a different race altogether. In a social research of the 1850s Henry Mayhew wrote, apropos London: The transition from the artisan to the labourer is curious in many respects. In passing from the skilled operative of the West-End to the unskilled workman of the Eastern quarter of London, the moral and

The Rise of the Last Human II 107 intellectual change is so great, that it seems as if we were in a new land, and among another race. (In Richardson 2003: 22) Or consider the way in which the 19th-century German national-liberal Heinrich von Treitschke (1916: 226–227) conveniently conflated class with race: Still more significant is the growth of the population when two different races meet on the same soil. In Austria, for instance, the Slovaks and Vlaks breed like rabbits, and the superior German and Magyar stocks are in danger of being swamped by the rising flood of the proletariat. We see with astonishment that it is precisely to the lowest races that the word “proletariat” can be applied in its literal meaning. [. . .] Our Saxon country folk in Siebenbürgen, who are themselves all of the upper class, have a general term for their servants, derived from the word which means “menial,” which they use freely in speech, without the least intention of giving offence. This is because all their domestics are Vlaks, or gipsies, and utterly inferior to themselves. An important center of racist and eugenic thought was the United States, producing prolific propagandists of white supremacy wedded to acute elitism such as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. In the latter’s The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man (1922), poverty, criminality, mental and physical illness, as well as success, are directly related to an individual’s biological starting point. Like Treitschke in the passage just cited, his doctrine combined both horizontal and transversal racializations, to employ the categories suggested by Domenico Losurdo (2004: 823–826), to distinguish between the racist taxonomy which is directed primarily against other races and nations (razzizzazione orizzontale) and that which targets the masses within one’s own country (razzizzazione transversale). Stoddard thus endorsed a strict hierarchy of races, with the Anglo-Saxons at the top, who are naturally superior intellectually and ethically, being industrious, decent, virtuous, etc., etc., the physically strong but intellectually feeble Negroes at the bottom, and other ethnic groups occupying the middle echelons: Poles, Jews, southern Italians, and so on and so forth. Yet he also insisted on the stark differences of quality between the classes of the same race, a true genetic wall separating the well-off and successful middle classes from the mass of the poor, beggars and vagabonds. Since social differences derived from genetic ones, the conclusion was that the social groups must be kept strictly apart and that miscegenation must be prevented at all costs, whether involving races or classes. To illustrate its dangers he used an example favored in eugenic literature, the case of the Juke family, whose forefather was said to be

108  The Rise of the Last Human II “one lazy vagabond nicknamed ‘Juke,’ born in rural New York in 1720.” His “two sons married five degenerate sisters, six generations numbering about 1.200 persons of every grade of idleness, viciousness, lewdness, pauperism, disease, idiocy, insanity, and criminality were traced,” finally costing the state some $2.500.000. Similarly corroborating the way that “superiority and degeneracy are alike rigidly determined by heredity” was the illicit affair of one “young soldier of good stock [. . .] with a feeble minded servant-girl.” From his marriage to a “woman of good stock” stemmed an eminent family, whose descendants “are doctors, lawyers, judges, educators, traders, landholders, in short, respectable citizens, men and women prominent in every phase of social life.” In sad contrast, the line began by the one feebleminded girl produced some 480 wretched and costly failures: “Their record is: 143 clearly feebleminded, 36 illegitimate, 33 grossly immoral (mostly prostitutes), 24 confirmed alcoholics, 3 epileptics, 82 died in infancy, 3 criminals, 8 kept houses of ill fame” (Stoddard 1924: 95–97). Stoddard’s book was quickly translated into other languages, and appeared in German as early as 1925. Its notion of the “Under Man” would achieve notoriety once Germanized as the Untermensch, excoriated by the Nazis. (See Losurdo 2004: 886–887.) The biologization of crime also offered “an explanation” for another development that elitists found exasperating, namely the spread of socialism and anarchism. Just as the positivist approach denied the possibility that crime many be a response to social conditions such as scarcity, neglect, want and hunger, so did it dismiss the idea that socialism and other radical movements were inevitable responses to genuine social problems. Instead, it was easier to ascribe radicalism to the personal pathologies of mentally sick and distorted individuals. This tenet, too, came to impinge on fascism, which identified the roots of social discontent in a revolutionary virus whose carriers were first and foremost the Jews. Stoddard emphatically subscribed to the theory that the revolutionary was a pathological individual, thereby joining a long tradition, including such notables as Joseph de Maistre, Edmund Burke, Taine and Lombroso, for whom the revolutionary was a born criminal. * * * From the sum total of complaints raised by opponents of the masses in the demographic context, a basic paradox emerges: the more the general standard of living improves, the more life expectancy rises, and the more medicine develops, the more the representatives of the élites speak of “degeneration,” focus on poverty, denounce corruption and so on and so forth. The congestion and narrowing of space they repeatedly lament were not, it is important to realize, objective facts. They were to a large extent reflections of reality though a class prism. When Ortega, for instance, compared the present condition—that is, the one he encounters in the 1920s—with the past and sees deterioration, he forgets, or rather

The Rise of the Last Human II 109 neglects the fact, that this was not true in an absolute sense: for most people, the early 20th century is a less crowded and more spacious time than past epochs. During the mid 19th century, in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, living conditions for most people in the urban centers were appalling and congestion nearly unimaginable in working-class dwellings, as classically described by Engels apropos 1845 Manchester. The first decades of the 20th century, by comparison, are a time of general, albeit relative and restricted, improvement in living conditions, in the state of hygiene, etc. Mass politics, together with economic and technological processes introduce electricity and running water into many working-class homes, and some nuclear families of the lower classes now have a private apartment, no matter how small. Yet all this, far from encouraging observers such as Ortega and his class members, is a source of concern: they assume that what the masses gain is taken from their “betters,” comes at the expense of the traditional élites. When Ortega describes the revolt of the masses, he points to the way it gains a foothold in areas that were formerly closed to it, places providing services and entertainment that not long ago were exclusive to the upper and middle classes: “consulting-rooms of famous doctors full of patients, theaters full of spectators, and beaches full of bathers. What previously was, in general, no problem, now begins to be an everyday one, namely, to find room.” Yet the “problem” is only such from an elitist point of view; seen by the mass, it is a source of hope and expectation. Demographically, the feeling of suffocation and congestion felt by the élite is one of freer breathing, of opening spaces and expanding possibilities for many among the lower classes. Thus, for all the insistence of mass critics on the scientific underpinning of their grievances, their basis in objective fact, what is striking about them is rather their arbitrariness, the wild nature of racist affirmations, the capricious employment of statistics, the apodictic rather than genuinely analytical character of eugenic theories, as well as the fantastic methodologies they espouse, skull measuring being only the most extravagant example. All this reveals what may be described as the auto-referential structure of élite positions: they claim to diagnose defects in reality, but in doing so mostly expose their own. This auto-referential structure, eugenic abuse returning boomerang-like to its hurlers, was repeatedly played upon by Chesterton in his brilliant assault on eugenics. “I need not pause to explain,” he wrote, “that crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease” (Chesterton 1922: 167). Trying to characterize the typical supporter of eugenics, Chesterton argued that he had started as a liberal or a radical, but has changed his political affiliation and become a Tory, or a wrong kind of socialist. “It is a sad history,” he continued (116), “for he is certainly a less good man than he was when he started. That is why he is the man who is really behind Eugenics. It is because he has degenerated that he has come to talking of Degeneration.” And of the Mental Deficiency Bill, he wrote (19–20): “I will call

110  The Rise of the Last Human II it the Feeble-Minded Bill, both for brevity and because the description is strictly accurate.”

Society and Culture Trade Unions The power of unionized workers was a source of dismay for critics of mass society, whose premise was that the extraction of hard and tedious labor from the masses was the sine qua non of society and culture. As Treitschke put it (1916: 42), mankind is by nature so frail and needy that the immense majority of men, [. . .] must always and everywhere devote themselves to breadwinning and the material cares of life. To put it simply: the masses must for ever remain the masses. There would be no culture without kitchen-maids. In modern times, however, to say it with Ortega, the masses increasingly refused to be masses. This created a major problem from the point of view of the representatives of “culture,” as an exasperated Nietzsche observed in 1888: The labour question.—The stupidity, fundamentally the instinct degeneration which is the cause of every stupidity today, lies in the existence of a labour question at all. About certain things one does not ask questions: first imperative of instinct.—I simply cannot see what one wishes to do with the European worker now one has made a question of him. He finds himself far too well placed not to go on asking for more, or to ask more and more impudently. After all, he has the great majority on his side. [. . .] The worker has been made liable for military service, he has been allowed to form unions and to vote [. . .]. But what does one want?—to ask it again. If one wills an end, one must also will the means to it: if one wants slaves, one is a fool if one educates them to be masters. (Nietzsche 1990: 106) Less than ten years later, in 1895, the French sociologist Gustave Le Bon published his hugely influential, Psychologie des Foules, a book that was issued in tens of editions and attracted numerous avid readers, as different from each other as Sigmund Freud, the originator of psychoanalysis, and Benito Mussolini, the originator of fascism. At least until the mid 20th century this was the basic textbook consulted by all who wished, for either scholarly or political purposes, to fathom “mass psyche.” In the introduction it was written:

The Rise of the Last Human II 111 The entry of the popular classes into political life—that is to say, in reality, their progressive transformation into governing classes—is one of the most striking characteristics of our epoch of transition. It is by association that crowds have come to procure ideas with respect to their interests which are very clearly defined if not particularly just, and have arrived at a consciousness of their strength. [. . .] The masses are founding syndicates before which the authorities capitulate one after the other; they are also founding labour unions, which in spite of all economic laws tend to regulate the conditions of labour and wages. [. . .] To-day the claims of the masses are becoming more and more sharply defined, and amount to nothing less than a determination to destroy utterly society as it now exists, with a view to making it hark back to that primitive communism which was the normal condition of all human groups before the dawn of civilization. Limitations of the hours of labour, the nationalization of mines, railways, factories, and the soil, the equal distribution of all products, the elimination of the upper classes for the benefit of the popular classes, etc., such are these claims. (Le Bon 1960: 15–16) The threat of the masses according to Le Bon is not restricted to the existence of democracy, but stems from the way democracy interconnects with, and draws nourishment from, deeper social and ideological processes: “communistic” workers’ unions determined to press society into a radically egalitarian mold. Despite the claim that the masses wish “to destroy utterly society as it now exists,” their menace is not represented in terms of armed insurrection. Their power is in their numbers—being the popular classes they enjoy a clear quantitative advantage; in their determination—they are conscious of their collective will; and finally in their organization—their ability to concretize their numerical edge and form pressure groups, unions and committees, which compel the rulers to do their bidding. The mass gradually takes over the political system from within, without having to resort to violence. The mass, for Le Bon, is active and militant. It is, essentially, another term for the organized working class. Its new-found autonomy is precisely the reason that it is dangerous. Like many other critics, he clarifies that for as long as democracy was under the control and guidance of the élites, and the masses’ role remained only peripheral, the danger to the socioeconomic order was trivial. But once it liberated itself from such tutelage, it became a serious and powerful factor: But may this result be prevented? [. . .] Civilizations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. Crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase. [. . .] When the structure

112  The Rise of the Last Human II of a civilization is rotten, it is always the masses that bring about its downfall. [. . .] Is the same fate in store for our civilization? (Le Bon 1960: 17–18) One of Le Bon’s innovations, and a major reason for his rather surprising success in spite of the almost complete lack of originality of his theories, is that he was not content with merely describing the problem of mass empowerment—this was done before him9—but dedicated a significant part of the discussion to suggesting a possible antidote, a way of minimizing the damage caused by the masses and drawing them back to their previous, passive role. For that purpose, charismatic leaders were called for who might, by mastering mass psychology and speaking the right language, put themselves in charge if the mass: [A]ll the world’s masters, all the founders of religions or empires, the apostles of all beliefs, eminent statesmen, [. . .] have all been unconscious psychologists, possessed of an instinctive and often very sure knowledge of the character of crowds, [which] enabled them so easily to establish their mastery [. . .] A knowledge of the psychology of crowds is to-day the last resource of the statesman who wishes not to govern them—that is becoming a very difficult matter—but at any rate not to be too much governed by them. (Le Bon 1960: 19) The challenge of modern politics was thus to contain as much as possible the rising masses, and convert them from the anarchic, barbaric and destructive force that they presently are, to “virtuous and heroic crowds” (19). The latter, by definition, would be passive crowds, since as Le Bon made quite clear, only minorities could rule civilizations, while crowds, unless strictly governed, can only destroy them. Le Bon’s thus writes a leader’s guidebook, explaining how to sway the mass, mainly by use of suggestion and rhetorical manipulation. The modern leader will be above all a virtuoso of language, able to sell to the masses policies that, if called by their proper names, they would have loathingly rejected: One of the most essential functions of statesmen consists, then, in baptizing with popular or, at any rate, indifferent words things the crowd cannot endure under their old names. The power of words is so great that it suffices to designate in well-chosen terms the most odious things to make them acceptable to crowds. [. . .] The art of those who govern, as is the case with the art of advocates, consists above all in the science of employing words. (Le Bon 1960: 106–107)

The Rise of the Last Human II 113 Responses to the Changes in the Role of Women The changes in the role of women, however slow and partial, were strongly protested by critics of mass society. They were taken to indicate a general social emasculation, whereby society gradually loses its supposedly masculine traits, such as vigor, initiative, competitiveness, assertiveness, etc., and takes on stereotypically feminine attributes: sentimentalism, squeamishness, hedonism or hysteria, to name some of the most notable clichés. The liberation of women was understood as a clear symptom of the general reversal of the natural order. It became for many the unsurpassable example of the modern tendency to flatten hierarchy and cancel gaps and differences created by nature and sanctified by tradition. In that regard as well, Nietzsche’s writings can be used to exemplify the sort of anti-feminist arguments that were common: To address the fundamental problem of “man and woman” in the wrong way, either by denying a most profound antagonism and the need for an eternal-hostile alertness, or by dreaming perhaps of equal rights, equal education, equal ambitions and obligations: that is a typical sign of shallowness, and any thinker who has demonstrated that he is shallow (shallow in his instinct!) in this dangerous area may generally be considered not only suspicious, but also revealed, exposed: he will probably be too “short” for all the fundamental questions of life or of the life to come and be unable to reach down to any depth. A deep man, on the other hand, deep both in spirit and in desire [. . .], can think about women only like an Oriental: he has to conceive of woman as a possession, as securable property, as something predetermined for service and completed in it. He has to rely on the tremendous reason of Asia. (Nietzsche 1998: 127) Women’s social struggle Nietzsche sees as the product of a wrong idea on the part of men. He stresses the way woman is understood by man: “A deep man, on the other hand,” etc. Men are those who have disseminated the notion of equality between the sexes, in a way which is fundamentally alien to women’s nature, for they do not truly strive for a presence in masculine domains—politics, science, economic activity. Regrettably, the modern ideas of equality adhered to by men, at least the shallow among them, have now infected women. The outcome of the liberation of women is an inappropriate change in both sexes: their approximation means a loss of virility on the man’s part and of femininity on the woman’s. Countering nature, modernity is a depressing display of feminine men and masculine women: contemporaries often talked about weak, castrated men, unable to provoke women’s fear and respect,

114  The Rise of the Last Human II and about strong, enervated women, unable to attract men. Both sides are involved in a game with no winners, as Nietzsche argues: [Women] are forgetting how to fear men—but a woman who “forgets how to fear” is abandoning her most womanly instincts. It is fair enough, even understandable enough if women dare to assert themselves when the fear-inducing element in men (let’s put it more definitively: when the man in men) is no longer desired or cultivated; what is harder to understand is that this is enough to result in—the degeneration of women. This is happening today; let’s make no mistake about it! Wherever the industrial spirit has triumphed over the military or aristocratic spirit, women are striving for the economic or legal independence of office clerks: “Women as clerks” is written over the entrance-way to our developing modern society. While they are gaining these new rights, aiming to become “master,” and writing about women’s “progress” on their flags and banners, it is terribly clear that the opposite is happening: women are regressing. Ever since the French Revolution, women’s influence in Europe has decreased to the same extent that their rights and ambitions have increased. (Nietzsche 1998: 128) Nietzsche’s (1969: 93) allegedly misogynic advice has become notorious: “Are you visiting women? Do not forget your whip!” What is usually forgotten is that this advice was not given to the reader by Nietzsche’s direct mouthpiece, Zarathustra, but to Zarathustra himself, and by a woman— “a little old woman” he has encountered in his wanderings, and with whom he converses on the nature of the relations between the sexes. This is an important point, since it shows how Nietzsche was keen to present his position not as misogynic but as women-friendly. Elsewhere (1998: 125) he portrays himself as “a real friend of women.” Nietzsche’s argument, largely typical of the paternalistic discourse of his times, is that the subjugation of woman by man is not some wrong that she has endured but the fulfillment of her own deepest longings. It is the woman who desires the whip, as well as the cane, as an aphorism from Beyond Good and Evil explains: “From old Florentine tales, and in addition—from life: buona femmina e mala femmina voul bastone [Good women and bad women both need the stick]” (Nietzsche 1998: 68). Nietzsche’s defenders, and they are legion, tried to qualify the reproach that his writings are misogynic. For instance, referring to the saying mentioning the whip, Richard Elliott Friedman (1995) argued that it is by no means clear who is supposed to wield it: will the man necessarily apply it to the woman? Or will it be a reverse procedure? In justifying this claim he refers to a famous photograph, taken about a year before the writing of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where Nietzsche is seen together with his friend Paul Rée

The Rise of the Last Human II 115 and his unreciprocated love interest, Lou Salomé. Nietzsche and Rée are standing before a cart, like two horses, while in the cart itself sits Salomé, looking straight at the camera with a hint of mischief in her gaze, while holding a whip! This interpretation has a lot to recommend it, as far as it goes. Nietzsche certainly stressed that the “eternal-hostile alertness” between the sexes is irreducibly reciprocal: not only the woman, in his view, wishes to be afraid of man, but he too longs to fear woman. And here it is Zarathustra himself who is talking: The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything. [. . .] Let man fear woman when she loves. [. . .] Let man fear woman when she hates. (Nietzsche 1969: 91–92) It is thus by no means impossible within Nietzsche’s framework, that in certain circumstances the woman will be the one carrying the whip. And yet, the protective argument according to which Nietzsche does not take a clear stand on the question of the hierarchy between the sexes is flimsy. Socially and politically his denial of all the claims and attainments of the women’s movement is unmistakable. Against it, Nietzsche’s writings re-raise the Victorian idea of “the separate spheres,” the absolute biological and spiritual differences between the sexes, from which a totally different social role follows. But this insistence is made no longer from a position of superiority and security but with deep pessimism. Nietzsche and his conservative contemporaries are well aware of the fact that the clear-cut separation line is no longer such, that the boundaries have been crossed, that the modern ideas of the French Revolution have significantly advanced on this terrain, too. It is probably against this background that the extremism and defiance in Nietzsche’s (1969: 91) emphasis on sexual dichotomies can best be understood: “Everything about woman is a riddle,” avows Zarathustra, “and everything about woman has one solution: it is called pregnancy. [. . .] Man should be trained for war and woman for the re-creation of the warrior: all else is folly.” Like the positivist criminologists, Nietzsche is here biologizing the sexes, anchoring their essence in a presumed physical, inborn attribute. Woman is biologically programmed to give birth rather than for intellectual or political activity, and hence her riddle is solved with pregnancy. The aim of this argument is to dismiss the social and cultural plane, where more and more women demonstrate their desires to be more than mothers and wives, or not to be such at all, and were fighting for their right to be so. As against this development, Nietzsche wants to reduce women again to their biological basis. He wants in fact to sexualize them, so that they shall (continue to) find their ultimate self-realization only as objects

116  The Rise of the Last Human II of re-creation for the warrior man. He also ties men to their supposed biological essence, casting them as warriors, and implying that men who reject that role, who have no desire to fight and arouse fear, are not “true men,” are defective in their masculinity, degenerate, effeminate. While Nietzsche avows that man is interested in fearing woman, this is a very specific, and delimited, kind of fear: that of losing her love, ceasing to be the object of her admiration, etc. Real men, according to Nietzsche, have no interest whatsoever in fearing women as their intellectual equals, and they are terrified of having to confront them as economically and politically independent. Woman should by all means be dangerous, yet only in so far as she remains the man’s plaything. In this Nietzsche lends voice to widespread contemporary anxieties. A common trope recurring in the art and polemics of these decades is that of the frightening, dominant, castrating woman, the femme fatale. This was a central phobia of men of the period, fearing that women will rob them of their employment, undermine their position of primacy within the family, and in general put their masculine identity in doubt, an identity that relies on the very existence of the conventional division of roles and of the separate spheres. Hence the complaint against women who turn masculine and men who become effeminate, weak, vulnerable and dependent. This fear also stemmed from the modern woman’s sexual assertiveness. In that respect, Nietzsche’s position seems less typical: his discussion implies productive erotic tension between the sexes, which he sought to preserve and maybe intensify. In this lies part of his attraction, a generation later, for Freud, and his influence over the latter’s path-breaking theories of sexuality. Yet for many conservatives this unleashed erotic energy on the part of women was perceived as a threat. They missed the Victorian past when, at least as far as the hegemonic ethos was concerned, feminine sexuality was modest, functional and often downright suppressed. Now, according to a common lament, too many women disown the inhibitions of the past and begin to flaunt their sexuality in a blunt and defiant way. Moreover, this aggressive permissiveness of women was identified with the rise of weak groups in general. Women’s liberation was diagnosed as an extreme case of mass empowerment: just as workers and commoners defy the rule of the upper-classes so do women, immemorially the “weak,” flout men. The clear hierarchy starts to wobble, just as the distinction between “high” and “low” in all spheres, including that of cultural production and consumption, can no longer be taken for granted. Here, the question of woman’s new role can be connected with the issue of mass culture, which will be the topic of the next section: in contemporary discourse mass culture was frequently seen as somehow interchangeable with the new, defiant woman. Woman and mass were seen as two sides of the same coin. As the historian Andreas Huyssen (1986: 52–53) wrote in a chapter titled “Mass Culture as Woman”:

The Rise of the Last Human II 117 In Le Bon’s study the male fear of woman and the bourgeois fear of the masses become indistinguishable: “Crowds are everywhere distinguished by feminine characteristics. [. . .] Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: it is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problem offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them.” Male fears of an engulfing femininity are here projected onto the metropolitan masses, who did indeed represent a threat to the rational bourgeois order. The haunting specter of a loss of power combines with fear of losing one’s fortified and stable ego boundaries, which represent the sine qua non of male psychology in that bourgeois order. This combined threat posed by the woman-mass to the male-élite had countless expressions in the culture of the period—in philosophy, literature, theater, visual art, research and journalism.10 Interestingly, it was abundantly present in mass culture itself, in popular literature and highly successful commercial films. Two examples taken from Weimar Republic cinema, a few years before the Nazi takeover, would here have to suffice. The first film is G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929), based on a play with the same title by Frank Wedekind (1904). Its bourgeois and comfortably off male protagonist is madly in love with Lulu, a frivolous courtesan played by the aforementioned Louise Brooks, the actress who perhaps more than any other embodied for contemporary viewers, for good or ill, the figure of “the new woman.” Sensual and careless, Lulu freely interacts with the masses, represented by Schigolch, an aged and wanton circus artist. Step by step Lulu leads her respectable bourgeois lover, unable of mastering his drives, to the abyss of self-destruction and debasement. At the end of the film the viewers experience a catharsis of sorts when reckless Lulu meets her due punishment as she falls victim to Jack the Ripper, in the heart of the depraved East End. In this terrible way a certain poetic justice is meted out, and the good bourgeois order is, to some extent, restored. A year later, a very similar motif was at the heart of an even more successful film: Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930), freely adapted from Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Unrat (1905). The film launched the legendary international career of Marlene Dietrich. Here, too, a miserable love affair is recounted between a bourgeois man and a mass woman, yet the mismatch between them is even more grotesque. The man, the film’s tragic hero, is the elderly gymnasium teacher, the conservative and fastidious Immanuel Rath, an unmistakable representative of the old bourgeois order, who falls in the net of seduction spread by a quintessential femme fatale, the cabaret performer Lola Lola. In an early scene, a minimally clad Dietrich sings what will become one of the most famous songs in the history of cinema, “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt,” whose lyrics fully convey the fatal erotic attraction of her figure.

118  The Rise of the Last Human II The mass woman drives the hapless Professor to his ruin, as he marries her, leaves his respectable occupation and joins The Blue Angel wandering cabaret as a regular clown, touring Germany. He goes bankrupt and must witness his wife flirting with other entertainers. In one of the film’s last scenes the cabaret returns to the city in which the Professor used to teach, and he goes on the stage as a pathetic and humiliated buffoon, to the ecstatic jeers of his former city folk, celebrating his downfall. The revenge of the feminine crowd is complete, and the élite is resoundingly defeated, but this time no catharsis is provided and Lola Lola remains unpunished. Mass Culture Mass culture in its different facets—mass production and the rise of consumption, commercial culture engaging wide publics, the proliferation of entertainment outlets, cinema, sports and “Americanization”—was a major source of concern for the upper and middle classes. There was hardly a social critique coming from the right or center that did not point out these phenomena in recoil, annoyance and alarm, and responding either with passive melancholia and nostalgia for the past or with a call to arms, demanding cultural action, and political steps, to stop the rot. Mass culture was seen as variously problematic. Aesthetically, it was denounced as a vulgarizing of taste, a leveling down of culture. Ethically, it was identified as the root of modern humanity’s materialism and selfcentered hedonism, the abandonment of higher values involving care for the collective and self-sacrifice. Socially and politically, mass culture was described as naturally leading to a society that is inclusive and tolerant, sanctifying the shallow, easy and low, and marginalizing what is profound, exceptional and difficult. Here, too, as happened in the political domain proper, quantity was seen as outweighing quality and excellence losing ground to mediocrity. Consumption The rise in the consumption levels of the masses and the cheapening of products by the use of assembly-line production, from collection cards and tinned food to the relatively affordable private car, were attacked by many as indications of a contemptible, spoiled, hedonistic, self-satisfied, philistine and peaceful way of life, which has gradually come to replace the noble one, founded on heroism, sacrifice and struggle in all its manifestations including the most drastic one: war. This way of life was routinely denigrated under the general term “materialism,” while its alternative was understood as more spiritual. The supposed contrast between matter and spirit was much talked about: in Germany, for instance, the term Geist became a banner waved by the educated middle classes, used both as a mark of distinction from the vulgus and in order to underscore a

The Rise of the Last Human II 119 general national difference between the spirituality, frugality and depth of the German people, and the materialism and pleasure-seeking of other nations, mainly the French and the English. This polemic intensified in the run-up to the First World War, and during the conflict itself, when it was condensed into patriotic formulas such as Werner Sombart’s famous Händler und Helden contrast, merchants and heroes, representing the military clash as a decisive confrontation between the heroic German “culture” and the commercial “civilization” of the English. Nietzsche baptized modern humans, the products of mass culture, as the Last Humans, deriding the results of progress and of Enlightenment, so eagerly anticipated in the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century. Nietzsche did not dispute the prognosis of progress as much as he inverted its value judgment. He agreed with Hegel and other believers in the triumph of reason and freedom, that rational modernity looks set to gain a decisive victory, yet of a classically Pyrrhic nature. Instead of leading humanity to new cultural summits, modernity signifies a social and economic leveling down, the formation of a mass society at the heart of which stands the most contemptible human: and that is the Last Human. [. . .] The earth has become small, and upon it hops the Last Human, who makes everything small. His race is as inexterminable as the flea; the Last Human lives longest. [. . .] Nobody grows rich or poor anymore: both are too much of a burden. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both are too much of a burden. No herdsman and one herd. (Nietzsche 1969: 45–46) The Last Human is mass society incarnate. He or she epitomizes the nightmare of social subversion, an egalitarian dystopia, consisting of increased consumption and mass happiness—Zarathustra says (46–47) that the Last Humans “still work, for work is entertainment. [. . .] They have their little pleasure for the day and their little pleasure for the night: but they respect health. ‘We have discovered happiness,’ say the Last Humans and blink.” The Last Humans, as is clear from Zarathustra’s rebukes, may be contemptible but they are satisfied and their spirits are high. They laugh at the beginning of the sermon—“There they stand [. . .], there they laugh: they do not understand me, I am not the mouth for these ears”—and continue to laugh when it concludes: “And now they look at me and laugh: and laughing, they still hate me.” Zarathustra knows that he is dealing with a contented human being, and it is not difficult to see why: his needs are satisfied, his days and nights are spiced up with pleasures, puny as the aspiring prophet may deem them to be, he lives long and his work is easy. The Last Human lives, moreover, in a society with insignificant socioeconomic gaps and where human relations are conducted on an egalitarian

120  The Rise of the Last Human II and cordial basis. It is not the mass that comes to listen to Zarathustra, but the latter who seeks to influence the mass. And at least for the time being, unsuccessfully: the crowd in the marketplace asks Zarathustra to fulfill the Last Human’s vision and dismisses his noble alternative: the overman. One of the things that stand out is Nietzsche’s readiness to employ any means, no matter how drastic, to prevent the rise of the Last Humans. To be sure, at the end of the passage he complains, being a highly sensitive soul, about the alleged cruelty of the masses, and believes that “there is ice in their laughter.” But in reality the mass is only amused by the self-appointed pedagogue, and there is no suggestion of violence on its part, not even a verbal one. It is Zarathustra who from the very beginning contemplates severe violence towards the crowd: “Must one,” he asks, “first shatter their ears to teach them to hear with their eyes?” Later on he seems to lament the fact that one cannot actually exterminate the Last Humans outright, and compares them to resilient fleas. Is this just a joke or a rhetorical hyperbole? It is hard to tell, but it should be remembered that Nietzsche elsewhere recommended “the annihilation of millions of failures.” This burning hostility and unleashed fury against the masses is also reflected in many other places, for example in a passage in which Zarathustra attacks “the rabble:” Life is a fountain of delight; but where the rabble also drinks all wells are poisoned. [. . .] And many a one who came along like an annihilator [. . .] wanted merely to put his foot into the jaws of the rabble and stop its throat. [. . .] And like a wind I will one day blow among them and with my spirit take away the breath from their spirit: thus my future will have it. (Nietzsche 1969: 120–122) Here, too, a sharp asymmetry reveals itself between Zarathustra and the mass: the latter is not violent, and gains its advantages through a gently unfolding social revolution. When Zarathustra looks in the well, now expropriated by the mass, he sees neither a knife, nor a gun nor a bomb, but, once again, merely a “repulsive smile.” The limitless aggression is strictly onedirectional, coming from Zarathustra’s side. The rabble may at most “spew and spit” but Nietzsche’s prophet talks of “annihilation,” and fantasizes about putting his foot into the jaws of the rabble and stopping its throat. The criticism of mass consumption as a symptom of social and cultural decay was deeply installed in the dominant discourse. In his seminal book on the protestant ethic, Max Weber (2002: 112) took his cue from Nietzsche and viewed the pleasure-seeking, soulless capitalism of modernity as a daunting fall from the early “heroic age of capitalism,” characterized by lofty moral values and an “asceticism” which “turns all its force [. . .] against one thing in particular: the uninhibited enjoyment of life.” The early, admirable capitalist specimen “had no wish to consume but only to make profits” (22). Dutifully accompanying this

The Rise of the Last Human II 121 heroic capitalist was an exemplary early worker, “kept in poverty” and hence highly productive. The incipient capitalist ethos, Weber emphasized (119), glorifies the faithful worker who does not look for profit [. . .]. Indeed, the entire ascetic literature of all denominations is imbued with the attitude that faithful work, even for low wages, by those to whom life has dealt no other opportunities, is highly pleasing to God. In the famous, elegiac passages concluding his book, Weber (121) lamented what he called a “monstrous development,” which has led to the demise of the admirable ascetic spirit and facilitated the rise of a crass materialistic civilization. Such anti-climactic civilization appears destined, unless a cultural revolution takes place, to be presided over by “the last men.” Werner Sombart, too, lamented a few years later the historical transition from early capitalist production of luxury goods for the consumption of a small élite, deliberately keeping the masses at arm’s length, and with considerable margin of profit, to the frenzied activity of modern capitalism, catering to the masses, where prices are low and so is profit: Little volume, big profit: that was the business principle of the entrepreneur, back in those days. [. . .] That, for example, was the principle of the Dutch East India Company: to conduct “Small business with great profit.” Hence their policies: to eradicate the leguminous trees, to burn up plentiful harvests, etc. This was done also in order to prevent the poor from partaking in the harmful consumption [Genuss] of the colonial products. It was basically selling to the rich, which is always more comfortable than selling to the great mass. (Sombart 2003: 201–202; some emphases added) Regretfully, all this changes in the course of the 19th century, giving way to the new, debased, properly modern form of production and consumption, whose common denominator is massification. Now all that counts is “the supply of ever greater masses of products at the lowest prices” (221). The venerated old principle of great profit at small investment is totally reversed: “Today the aim is to earn a little out of many business transactions.” This unwholesome shift comes complete with a sweeping moral erosion: “Obligations of any sort, scruples of any sort, whether concerning ethics, aesthetics, or comfort, are no more” (233). These positions were by no means exclusive to Germany but were rife across Europe. For example, in 1927 the French conservative René Guénon (2001: 93–94) admonished against the destruction unleashed by consumerism: [M]odern civilization aims at creating more and more artificial needs. [. . .] If modern civilization should some day be destroyed

122  The Rise of the Last Human II by the disordered appetites that it has awakened in the masses, one would have to be very blind not to see in this the just punishment of its basic vice [. . .]. [T]hose who unchain the brute forces of matter will perish, crushed by these same forces, of which they will no longer be masters; having once imprudently set them in motion, they cannot hope to hold back indefinitely their fatal course. It is of little consequence whether it be the forces of nature or the forces of the human mob, or both together; in any case it is the laws of matter that are called into play, and that will inexorably destroy him who has aspired to dominate them without raising himself above matter. British culture was similarly awash with hostility to mass consumption. As John Carey (1992: 21–22) argued in an illuminating study, cans of tinned food—seen as a particularly repulsive token of the crass modern age—provided a favorite target for the derision of English writers. In this context, too, the various manifestations of mass society were seen as interlinked and were consequently attacked conjointly. Mass consumption was thus seen as primarily feminine, and women were chastised as compulsive spenders. One example out of a virtually endless supply of this trope is provided by the essayistic work of Wyndham Lewis, the brilliant and radical intellectual who supported both Mussolini and Hitler. In 1927 he wrote about the blind “will” that “causes, daily, millions of women to drift in front of, and swarm inside, gigantic clothes-shop in every great capital, buying silk underclothing, cloche-hats, perfumes, vanishing cream, vanity-bags and furs” (Lewis 1957: 321). Sport Mass sport was equally the butt of strong invectives on the part of elitists, dismayed at the admiration awarded to “mere” athletes and resentful of the fact that the attention they drew often overshadowed that of intellectuals and artists. In the same place where he commented on women’s obsessive consumerism, Lewis (1957: 321) mentioned another effect of the blind will that “enables Dempsey to hit Firpo on the nose, or Gene Tunney to strike Dempsey in the eye.” Guénon (2001: 93), for his part, decried in apocalyptic terms the fact that the Anglo-Saxon mania for sport gains ground day by day: the ideal of the modern world is the ‘human animal’ which has developed his muscular strength to the highest pitch; its heroes are athletes, even though they be mere brutes; it is they who awaken popular enthusiasm, and it is their exploits that command the passionate interests of the crowd. A world in which such things are seen has indeed sunk low and seems near its end.

The Rise of the Last Human II 123 Ortega (1957: 12), too, insisted on the insuperable spiritual barrier that separates the intellectual from the mass sports enthusiast: “This faculty of wonder is the delight refused to your football ‘fan,’ and, on the other hand, is the one which leads the intellectual man through life in the perpetual ecstasy of the visionary.” Albert Camus, who in youth was a passionate football goalkeeper, would probably have disagreed with this view. “All that I know most surely about morality and obligations,” he once said, “I owe to football.”11 In Robert Musil’s great modernist novel The Man without Qualities, one finds the following protest against the way in which sporting triumph, massified and bestial in equal measures, increasingly overshadows artistic and scientific prowess in the fallen modern world, and therefore produces resignation and apathy in the novel’s hero, Ulrich, who once had dreamt of becoming a great scientist: And one day Ulrich stopped wanting to be promising. The time had come when people were starting to speak of genius on the soccer field or in the boxing ring, although there would still be at most only one genius of a halfback or great tennis-court tactician for every ten or so explorers, tenors, or writers of genius who cropped up in the papers. The new spirit was not yet quite sure of itself. But just then Ulrich suddenly read somewhere, like a premonitory breath of ripening summer, the expression “the racehorse of genius.” [. . .] Ulrich instantly grasped the fateful connection between his entire career and this genius among racehorses. For the horse has, of course, always been sacred to the cavalry, and as a youth Ulrich had hardly heard talk in barracks of anything but horses and women. He had fled from this to become a great man, only to find that when as the result of his varied exertions he perhaps could have felt within reach of his goal, the horse had beaten him to it. [. . .] [A] horse and a boxer have an advantage over a great mind in that their performance and rank can be objectively measured, so that the best of them is really acknowledged as the best. This is why sports and strictly objective criteria have deservedly come to the forefront, displacing such obsolete concepts as genius and human greatness. (Musil 1995: 41–42) Like so many European writers of his generation Musil was profoundly inspired by Nietzsche, whom he quotes shortly thereafter. Nietzsche, it should be pointed out, regarded sport positively, yet not, needless to say, on account of its popular appeal, but since he saw it as a means of renewing the spirit of struggle and competitiveness against affable modern egalitarianism, of reinstating the much admired “agonistic” spirit of the ancients. (On Nietzsche’s approach to sport, see the following essays: Crowell 1998; Hatab 1998; Schacht 1998.)

124  The Rise of the Last Human II That was the pervasive, bleak approach of mass critics to sport. Yet it was not shared by all intellectuals: on the left, among people whose general attitude to mass society was less condemning, there were many sport aficionados or those who believed it should be defended. As notable examples one might mention Bertolt Brecht, a passionate fan of boxing, who said that “one must go to the theater as one goes to a sport feast” and who learned from the audience of boxing contests, as one scholar put it, “to what wisdom, passion and enthusiasm, identification and empathy, judgment and justice the crowd is capable of” (Kleinschmidt and Hörnigk, 2006: 7); the great Austro-Hungarian author Ödön von Horváth, who frequently wrote on positive and humane characters out of the world of sport (for example Horváth 1988); and Thomas Mann, who started as a conservative but developed more and more in a leftwing direction until finally becoming one of the most outspoken critics of National Socialism. In 1932, in a lecture he gave to Viennese workers, he defended sport as follows: As things presently stand, the big city, with the new sensitivity that characterizes it to hygiene and to sport, and with the new forms of life that take place in the open air, can contribute to a vital renewal no less than the way of life of the country. (Mann 1981: 363) “When These People are Our Masters”: Artistic Elitism Versus Democracy Mass culture was criticized both for its presumed aesthetic defects and for the egalitarian social implications ascribed to it. Against the spread of literacy, the possibility of many to read newspapers, visit museums, watch shows and later on movies, mass critics began to emphasize the idea that the beautiful by its very nature resists being generalized, and that only a select minority of connoisseurs and truly gifted spirits could genuinely appreciate art.12 Nietzsche used to repeat a favorite Latin motto: “Pulchrum est paucorum hominum”: beauty belongs to the few (Nietzsche 1967: 167). This was said by Nietzsche in 1888 as part of a heated polemic against the initiative of his former friend and tutor, Richard Wagner, to create operas for the widest possible public, which he performed in a specially designed theater in Bayreuth, where all differences of seats and stands were abolished in order to create a formal equality between all visitors. In that, Wagner anticipated modern mass culture, especially cinema, earning him the rebukes of Theodor Adorno (2009), a bitter enemy of cinema. Wagner, who began as a revolutionary and went to exile in France following his participation in the aborted 1848 revolution, later on carved himself a comfortable niche in post-unification Germany, and both in his political writings and artistic works embraced

The Rise of the Last Human II 125 a nationalistic and conservative line. This, as well as his virulent antisemitism, allowed numerous critics to routinely use him as a dark foil against which to foreground Nietzsche’s supposed enlightenment and moderation. This complex debate will be revisited in Chapter 7; here it should be noted that alongside this or that criticism of Wagner’s nationalism, Nietzsche was profoundly hostile to what he saw, justly or not, as the democratic and egalitarian residue underlying the composer’s artistic and social concept. This stood in stark contrast to the pronounced elitism of Nietzsche, who already in his early writings understood culture as the exclusive asset of the few, a domain forever closed to the wider public, and justifying, moreover, the subjugation of the majority.13 As he explained in no second terms in his 1872 essay, The Greek State: In order for there to be a broad, deep, fertile soil for the development of art, the overwhelming majority has to be slavishly subjected to life’s necessity in the service of the minority [. . .]. Accordingly, we must learn to identify as a cruel-sounding truth the fact that slavery belongs to the essence of culture [. . .]. The misery of men living a life of toil has to be increased to make the production of the world of art possible for a small number of Olympian men. Here we find the source of that hatred which has been nourished by the Communists and Socialists as well as their paler descendants, the white race of “Liberals” of every age against the arts. (Nietzsche 1994: 178–179) For Treitschke (1916: 42), similarly, “education could never thrive if there was nobody to do the rough work. Millions must plough and forge and dig in order that a few thousands may write and paint and study.” These typical observations plainly reflect the fact that the struggle against mass culture was never simply, or in the first instance, about resistance to commercialism, to bad taste, and to the political pacifying of the masses. “Radical” cultural critics who reduce the issue to these concerns obscure the crucial fact that the original sin of mass culture, as far as the élites were concerned, was no more and no less than the fact that it was, precisely, mass culture. This very oxymoron constituted the elemental scandal in their eyes. For according to their conception, once culture becomes a mass asset, once it escapes “the thousands” and is appropriated by “the millions,” it annihilates itself eo ipso. Culture is by its very definition the prerogative of the few. Hence, far from lamenting the political pacification of the populace, the struggle against mass culture was integral to the campaign to contain democracy, to put a stop to the political and social ascendancy of the masses. A further insight into the widespread feeling that the cultural advance of the masses threatens the social hierarchy is provided by the following passage from Thomas Hardy’s diary, in which he describes his sentiments

126  The Rise of the Last Human II upon encountering masses of visitors assaulting the British Museum, the citadel of culture laid open to democratic invaders, in 1891: Crowds parading and gaily traipsing round the mummies, thinking to-day is for ever, and the girls casting sly glances at young men across the swathed dust of Mycerinus [?]. They pass with flippant comments the illuminated MSS.—the labours of years—and stand under Rameses the Great, joking. Democratic government may be justice to man, but it will probably merge in proletarian, and when these people are our masters, it will lead to more of this contempt, and possibly be the utter ruin of art and literature! [. . .] Looking, when I came out, at the Oxford Music Hall, an hour before the time of opening, there was already a queue. (Hardy 1985: 247) Hardy’s deep fear of the mass also found expression when he described how he felt when lying awake in bed in his London apartment, one night in 1880, unable to fall asleep on account of the horror of lying so close to “a monster whose body had four million heads and eight million eyes” (141). While the roots of such conceptions and anxieties are in the 19th century, they bear important cultural consequences mainly in the 20th century. Among them was the demand to develop an alternative to mass culture designed especially for connoisseurs, keeping the masses purposely at arm’s length. In order to insulate themselves and their audiences from the masses, many artists chose to write, draw or compose in such a way that the person of average education, now universally available, would not be able to comprehend the work’s messages, would not be thrilled by such art and would not, therefore, wish to take part in it. Many advocates of “high culture” started to espouse works of art that are difficult, complex, abstract, combining elements of special or antiquated education, such as phrases in Latin and ancient Greek in order to exclude the mass. This does not imply that the attempt to innovate in artistic form or subject matter was necessarily elitist: experimentation, personal expression, crossing of boundaries and violation of consecrated codes and norms, are integral to artistic creativity in all fields, and often involves social and political defiance. Yet it is possible that never before the 20th century did the bid to remain incomprehensible form such an integral part of art. In the first part of the 19th century, when the bourgeoisie was still a class with revolutionary pretentions and claims to represent the whole of society, appreciated artists and writers were often also popular ones, whose works held an appeal to wide audiences. This was the case with authors such as Scott, Gogol, Balzac, Stendhal, Dickens, or Tolstoy, to name but a few such greatly acclaimed authors, whose work was sometimes serially published in widely distributed magazines; this was also the case with distinguished composers such as Mozart, Verdi, Rossini, Bizet or

The Rise of the Last Human II 127 Wagner, whose themes were hummed by the man in the street somewhat like the radio hits of later times. Thematically, as well, no barrier existed as yet between the subject matters of these works and the masses: Mozart composed light-hearted operas revolving around romantic themes and colorful and sensual protagonists, and distinguished authors often wrote crime mysteries and adventure tales, such as Ivanhoe, Oliver Twist, or La Rabouilleuse. Even sworn elitists, such as Poe, did not yet write for the élite alone. Yet in the course of the 19th century and increasingly during the 20th century, a marked difference began to be noticed between two forms of art, “low” and “high.” In literature there were ever more difficult novels, whose plots were sparse, descriptions were many and sentences very long and sometimes replete with classical references, as in the works of Joyce, Proust, or Musil. These were strikingly original writers, whose works are considered masterpieces of modern prose, and yet their readership has remained relatively limited when compared with that of the masters of past ages. Modern visual art, too, has largely abandoned realism and romanticism, that were fairly accessible, and offered easily identifiable characters, landscapes and scenes—contemporary, historic, biblical, etc.—and moved on to ever more abstract art, whose link with reality became weak or at least very hard to decipher. And in music, partly in protest against the success of popular music and genres such as jazz or tango, and in refusal to partake in what was seen as a pernicious commercialization of art, composers began to compose mainly for their colleagues, music that was unapproachable and unattractive but to a limited circle of experts: the classic example is the music sometimes referred to as “atonal,” unsurprisingly admired by Adorno, of such composers as Arnold Schönberg or Alban Berg. Here, too, the artistic accomplishments of these composers are undisputed, but so is the fact they have remained, and intentionally so, un-popular. Artists and critics were not always fully conscious of these trends and of their social significance. But occasionally the need to draw a fence around high art—which was alone considered proper art, “artistic art,” as opposed to the commercial “trash” produced below—and debar the masses from its domain was expressly and programmatically stated. The clearest spokesperson of such an agenda was probably Ortega, whose following words, written in 1925, amount to a manifesto for art against the masses: Romanticism was the popular style par excellence. Democracy’s first born son, it was treated most affectionately by the mass. The new art, by contrast, finds the mass, and will always find it, opposed to it. [. . .] In my judgment, what characterizes the new art, “from the sociological point of view,” is that it divides the public into two classes of men: those who understand it and those who do not. And this implies that the former are in possession of a capacity of

128  The Rise of the Last Human II comprehension denied to the latter; that they are two distinct varieties of the human species. The new art, therefore, is not for everyone, as was romantic art, but directs itself to a specially gifted minority. Hence the irritation it provokes in the mass. [. . .] Used to predominate in all things, the mass feels offended by the new art in its “human rights,” for this is an art of privilege, nobility, and instinct— of an instinctive aristocracy. [. . .] For a century and a half [that is, at the time of writing, almost exactly the time that has passed since the start of the French Revolution. I.L.] “the people,” the mass, has pretended to be the whole of society. The music of Stravinsky or the drama of Pirandello has the sociological merit of forcing it to recognize itself for what it is, namely as “mere people,” one ingredient among others of the social structure, inert matter of the historical process, a secondary factor of the spiritual cosmos. Moreover, the new art also contributes so that the “best” know and acknowledge each other amidst the grey multitude and learn their mission, which consists in being few and in fighting the many. (Ortega 2007: 46–48) For that reason Ortega asked to bring into completion the process of “de-humanization of art,” in which art detaches itself from the affairs of common people, the loves, hates, sufferings, hopes, excitements and so on and so forth which attract the masses, and deals with abstract art, art for art’s sake, “an artistic art,” that disowns humanity and soars high above it, thereby separating the wheat of élite, special people, from the human, all-too-human chaff of the mass. Ortega’s theory of art again displays the same tendency to biologize social differences that we have noted in several other contexts. It is crucial for him to identify an inborn, natural difference between two kinds of audiences, those susceptible to art and those who are not, in a way that generates a nearly racist division between “distinct varieties of the human species.” Strictly obliterated in this account are, first, the historical dimension in the evolution of art: if indeed real art deals not with human questions but with pure aesthetics, why does that become so only at the time in which Ortega is living, and not before it, at the times of Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, or Cervantes, who have all dealt with quintessentially human dramas and have gained numerous admirers, as opposed to a coterie of fans? Second, it is vital for him to banish the role played by social and class position, with its attendant education, when decreeing that the comprehension of art, or lack thereof, is innate in different sorts of people. These are the reasons that have lead Pierre Bourdieu (1979) to critically engage with Ortega’s writings, and use them as a starting point from which to unfold a sociological theory about the role of education and of art in reflecting, indeed in creating and sustaining, social distinctions. Artistic taste, argued Bourdieu, is neither natural nor innate: it is

The Rise of the Last Human II 129 learned and acquired through a complicated social process, in which the masses are excluded even in the modern, and allegedly equal, system of education, and the members of the élite make their own the “proper” taste, the “cultural capital” which will sustain their elevated status. Like Ortega, many other contemporaries took notice of the new phenomenon in which the masses are alienated from art. One of them was the writer Romain Rolland, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1915. Yet unlike Ortega, for Rolland this development was to be regretted rather than celebrated and further nurtured. This emerges from things he wrote on the 18th-century composer George F. Handel, whose work, addressing the wide public, he contrasted with contemporary, aloof, art: [W]hat I wish to notice chiefly in the popular character of Handel’s music is that it is always truly conceived for the people, and not for an élite dilettanti [. . .]. Without ever departing from his sovereign ideas of beautiful form, in which he gave no concession to the crowd, he reproduced in a language immediately “understanded of the people” those feelings in which all could share. Our epoch has lost the feeling of this type of art and men: pure artists who speak to the people and for the people, not for themselves or for their confrères. To-day the pure artists lock themselves within themselves, and those who speak to the people are most often mountebanks. (Rolland 1920: 191–192) Americanization Not all participants in “high art,” of course, were complicit with Ortega’s anti-democratic political goals. Some were of the political left and saw themselves as part of an avant-garde whose role was to boldly lead the masses onto new victories. The debate between “high” and “low” culture, however, had a clearly defined geographical demarcation line. Élite culture was associated with Europe, “the old continent,” the bastion of venerated tradition, whereas mass culture, democratic and commercial, was affiliated with “the new continent,” America, or more precisely, the United States. This division was common already in the 19th century, as evidenced in the words of Heinrich Heine, written in 1840: Or shall I travel to America, that huge prison of liberty, where the invisible chains will press me even more painfully than the visible ones at home, and where the most repulsive of all tyrants, the rabble, exercises his rude domain! (Heine 1997, vol. 4: 38)14 The United States, for its part, had embraced its image as the motherland of the masses rejected by Europe, as most famously conveyed by the lines

130  The Rise of the Last Human II of The New Colossus, written by the Jewish, pro-socialist poet, Emma Lazarus (2002: 23) in 1883: Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, these words indeed welcomed, in the next decades, millions of Old continent immigrants, mostly penniless, representing the hope signified by America to “the common man.” They also poignantly express the American mass defiance of European elitist pomp, and equally befitting, of course, is the bond between the woman and the mass, whom it greets. Matthew Arnold, who as remembered was impressed by the strongstate model of France under Napoleon III, warned the English against replacing their aristocracy with the massified and anarchic rule he associated with the United States: “what influence may help us to prevent the English people from becoming, with the growth of democracy, Americanised? I confess I am disposed to answer: On the action of the State” (Arnold 1993: 12–13). If the English will refuse to acquiesce with a stronger rule capable of uniting the nation, he admonished (15), “then the dangers of America will really be ours; the dangers which come from the multitude being in power, with no adequate ideal to elevate and guide the multitude.” Given this association of America with the masses and the challenge it was seen to pose to the bourgeois and aristocratic order, a more favorable image of America was formed precisely on the European left, among socialists and communists, in a way which may look surprising today, long after “America” has become widely identified with neo-imperialism, becoming the bane of radicals worldwide. Yet even on the left attitudes were often ambivalent, since America was also the capitalist country par excellence. It was similarly unclear how to interpret the masses’ attraction to the American way of life: was it politically radical? Was it compatible with socialism? Or was it rather seen by workers as an alternative to socialism? These uncertainties are reflected, for instance, in a 1929

The Rise of the Last Human II 131 book documenting the life of proletarian youth in Berlin, written by the protestant and socialist cleric, Günther Dehn, who would in a few years become a target of Nazi persecution. Dehn wrote with empathy on the life of workers in the German capital’s poverty districts, describing their difficulties, struggles and ambitions. Yet he saw a tension between socialism, as he understood it, an ethical and spiritual approach, and the materialistic mindset of the working-class youth, sanctifying the here and now: The proletarian youth [unlike its bourgeois counterpart] does not write poetry. At most, when it has the opportunity, it writes poems of class struggle. It has no time for aesthetic, egocentric pursuits. It must work and earn a living. [. . .] If you were to ask them about the meaning of life, they will only tell you: “What it actually means, we don’t know, nor are we interested in finding out. But since we are alive, we want to get all we possibly can out of life.” To earn money and to enjoy, these are the two cornerstones of existence, whereby under “enjoyment” one must understand both the noble and the ignoble, from primitive sexuality and jazz music, to new proletarian living culture and a rationally kept bodily hygiene. [. . .] From this world, and from this world alone, they try to extract for themselves as much as can possibly be extracted. This is a truly Americanized people, rationalistic to the core, consciously and as a matter of course superficial [oberflächenhaft]. Coming into contact with them, one cannot but think time and again: not socialism, but Americanism will be the end of all things. (Dehn 1929: 38–39) For all the vast differences between their political and social vantagepoints, Dehn too, like Nietzsche, cannot contain a certain frustration at the sight of young workers, whose approach to enjoyment, labor and life in general is not so unlike that imputed by the German philosopher to the Last Humans.

Conclusion Chapters 1 and 2 have surveyed mass society, as it is agreed upon by nearly all scholars that this society provided the basis upon which fascism grew. The survey was thematic, dividing mass society into its various components, but it was seen that they were strongly interrelated: mass politics rested on social and demographic developments, which in turn drew upon and reflected cultural changes. The perspective taken was European, even Western, under the assumption that the roots of fascism were not in the ground of one or another single country. Chronologically, we have come quite close to the fascist era but have mostly deliberately refrained from crossing this time-line: the relationship

132  The Rise of the Last Human II between mass society and fascism—the question of whether it is one of continuity, disruption or synthesis—will be the center of the discussion in the remaining chapters. In Chapter 2 the opposition to mass society was discussed, again divided to different sections for the sake of clarification. A strong mismatch revealed itself between the developments themselves and the responses, which often bordered on hysteria. In many cases, where objective improvements affected the lives of most people, the critics of mass society perceived deterioration and pointed to great dangers lying ahead, including the final breakdown of civilization. Yet this incongruity is not, of course, coincidental. It reflected a class bias, the consternation aroused by the élites in the face of the ascent of the masses. This meant that even phenomena that were eminently positive and whose political implications seem minor, such as advances in medicine or the rise in average life expectancy, were perceived as problematic and threatening. The extremism, fanaticism and pessimism we have so frequently encountered might be interpreted as reactions to a fundamental defeat: racism was exacerbated at a time when masses and cultures migrated and interpenetrated; the “natural” differences between the genders were emphasized precisely when it became increasingly evident that they were essentially social and historical products, when it was seen that women could with great success earn their living, undertake “masculine” jobs, write and create; the stress on crime as genetic and biological and the effort to detect a clear-cut, innate difference between the élite and the mass ought to be understood precisely in the context of greater social mobility and the entry of the masses into domains of activity, of material and cultural consumption, from which they were until recently excluded. This was a response, in other words, that combined desperation, denial and aggression: the Last Human was seen as a scandal, as something unnatural, almost unthinkable, and yet he was already roaming the streets, a living reality or one that seemed imminently to become such. This dissonance bred impotence, which in turn bred the willingness to employ violence. Let us, in conclusion, recall Zarathustra’s words, which speak of the past at the same time that they envision the future: And many a one who came along like an annihilator [. . .] wanted merely to put his foot into the jaws of the rabble and stop its throat. [. . .] And like a wind I will one day blow among them and with my spirit take away the breath from their spirit: thus my future will have it.

Notes 1 For a more extended discussion of Carlyle’s position and its affinities with fascism, see Landa (2010: 153–164).

The Rise of the Last Human II 133 2 See, for more details, Landa (2010: 157). 3 On political elitism in the Italian context, see, for instance, Paxton (2004: 34–37). For a comprehensive account of elitism in Germany, see Struve (1973). 4 Other English liberals also anticipated the elitism of Pareto and Co., for example Walter Bagehot, who advised the élites to appeal to the emotions of the masses in order to control them. See Mandler (2006: 79). On the continuity between the classical liberal critique of democracy on the part of J. S. Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, and that of Pareto and Mosca, see Joll (1973: 128). 5 For useful overviews of the rise of Italian socialism during the Giolittian era, see Dunnage (2002: 22–29); and Di Scala (2009: 163–181). 6 The translation of Vernichtung was changed from “destruction,” to “extermination.” 7 On Nietzsche as one of many “scientifically illiterate pundits” promoting eugenics during the late 19th century, see Burleigh and Wippermann (1996: 34–36). 8 For a discussion of Lombroso, the context in which he wrote and his influence, see the following two books: Bosc (2007); Pick (1989: 109–154). 9 Mainly by the Italian sociologist Scipio Sighele who a few years before Le Bon published, to some resonance, a study of The Criminal Crowd (La folla delinquente, 1891). Sighele was influenced by his countryman, Lombroso, whose model of criminality he transferred from the individual to the mass. The book was translated into several languages, among them French, and influenced Le Bon, who was a notorious plagiarist. Unlike Le Bon, Sighele’s approach to the masses was less conservative and more popular and democratic. This made him write another book in which he pointed, rather, to the crowd’s supposed moral and political advantages, called The Crowd’s Wisdom (L’intelligenza della folla, 1903). The most comprehensive discussion of Sighele and his wide and ramified impact is probably in Bosc (2007). Also very useful is Barrows (1981) which discusses at some length Le Bon’s heavy borrowing from the likes of Sighele and Gabriel Tarde. 10 On the reversal of gender roles and its accompanying anxieties as expressed in interwar French culture, and also after the Second World War, see Drury (1994). For an example of the debate surrounding the topic in the Weimar Republic, see “Enough is Enough! Against the Masculinization of Women,” in Kaes and Jay (1995: 659). For an overview of the changes in the role of women in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, and the responses to it, see Peukert (1993: 86–106). 11 As quoted in Russell Trott, Marrying Football and Philosophy, http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7604620.stm. 12 On the great anxieties provoked among 19th-century British élites by the spread of mass literacy and the expansion of the “bad” habit of reading novels, see Brantlinger (1998). 13 For a good discussion of the Nietzsche-Wagner ideological contrast, refreshing in its departure from the standard tendency to simplistically pit the good philosopher against the bad musician, see Geuss (1999). Also recommended is the following volume of essays: Wildermuth (2008). 14 These, and other aristocratic sounding verdicts may help to explain the great admiration expressed by Nietzsche for Heine, several decades later. It should be noted, however, that in continuation Heine rebukes America not on account of its egalitarianism but for its abhorrent treatment of blacks and mulattoes, which did not elicit Nietzsche’s protestations. On the contrary, during the American Civil War he sided rather with the slave-owning Confederacy. See Losurdo (2004: 1030–1031).

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136  The Rise of the Last Human II Jameson, Fredric (1981) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press. Joll, James (1973) Europe Since 1870—An International History, London: Penguin. Kaes, Anton and Martin Jay, eds. (1995) The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Kleinschmidt, Sebastian and Therese Hörnigk, eds. (2006) Brecht und er der Sport, Berlin: Theater der Zeit. Landa, Ishay (2006) “Aroma and Shadow: Marx vs. Nietzsche on Religion,” Nature, Society, and Thought, 18, 4: 461–499. Landa, Ishay (2010) The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism, Boston and Leiden: Brill. Lazarus, Emma (2002) Selected Poems and Other Writings, Gregory Eiselein, ed., Toronto: Broadview. Le Bon, Gustave (1960) The Crowd. A Study of the Popular Mind, New York: Viking Press. Lewis, Wyndham (1957) Time and Western Man, Boston: Beacon Press. Livingston, Arthur (1935) “Biographical Note,” in The Mind and Society: A Treatise on General Sociology, Vol. 1, Vilfredo Pareto, ed., New York: Harcourt, Brace. Losurdo, Domenico (2004) Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratic: Biografia intellettuale e bilancio critico, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Lukács, Georg (1962) Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, Berlin: Luchterhand. Lukács, Georg (1964) Studies in European Realism, New York: Grosset & Dunlap. MacMaster, Neil (2001) Racism in Europe: 1870–2000, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Maguire, Mike, ed. (2002) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maine, Henry S. (1909) Popular Government, London: John Murray. Mandler, Peter (2006) The English National Character: The History of an Idea From Edmund Burke to Tony Blair, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Mann, Thomas (1981) Von Deutscher Republik, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer. Marx, Karl (1992) Early Writings, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mosca, Gaetano (1939) The Ruling Class, New York: McGraw-Hill. Mosse, George L. (1978) Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism, New York: Howard Fertig. Musil, Robert (1995) The Man Without Qualities, Sophie Wilkins, Burton Pike and London: Picador. Neocleous, Mark (1997) Fascism, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press. Néret, Gilles (2000) Eugène Delacroix 1798–1863: The Prince of Romanticism, Cologne: Taschen. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1967) The Birth of Tragedy/The Case of Wagner, Walter Kaufmann, trans., New York: Vintage. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1968) The Will to Power, Walter Kaufmann, trans., New York: Vintage. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1969) Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Reginald John Hollingdale trans., Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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3 Fascism and Mass Politics

At this stage, it is possible to proceed and ask: with relation to the developments described so far, what did interwar European fascism continue, exacerbate, change, disrupt? It was seen how the multifaceted formation and advances of mass society in the course of the 19th century provoked a sharp reaction on the part of its critics and an attempt to comprehensively displace democracy, socialism and mass culture. Did fascism inherit this reaction? Or was it, as is often argued, rather the product of the dangerous patterns of behavior and irrational cravings of the masses themselves, a quintessential eruption of mass hysteria? Or, as argued for example by Hannah Arendt, did fascism arise out of mass apathy, retreat from civil society, and the fizzling out of collective politics? We will begin by examining the role played by the First World War in preparing the ground for fascist politics. If many of the social dilemmas that produced fascism and a considerable part of its ideological baggage can be identified already in the 19th century, a profound crisis of European civilization was required to bring this potential to fruition. Only once large sections of the public lost faith in the old and tested ways and began to seek radical alternatives, did fascism become a real possibility. Such a crisis traumatically erupted in mid 1914, irretrievably changing the political and social landscape.

A Failed Redemption: The First World War as a Precondition for Fascism The First World War (July 28, 1914–November 11, 1918), was the most comprehensive and destructive military conflict in human history. It is considered the first “total war,” in the sense that it engulfed entire societies and that the warring sides shrank from almost no measures of attaining victory, from the use of new and atrocious weaponry to the spreading of wild propaganda. Few red lines remained uncrossed in the fighting, which caused indescribable suffering and exacted an enormous toll in human life. Around 65 million combatants took part in the war, of whom some 8.5 million died on the battlefield (Russia and Germany each had almost 2 million casualties; France one and a half million;

140  Fascism and Mass Politics Austro-Hungary over a million; Britain a little less than one million; Italy more than half a million), and 21 million were badly injured. Civilian casualties were also huge and are estimated at some 6.5 million. In the battle of the Somme (July-November 1916) 420.000 British soldiers were killed (19.240 on the first day of fighting alone), some 500.000 Germans and 204.000 Frenchmen, and this in order to gain a territorial advance of some 10 kilometers. The scale of the fighting was such that for two decades it was referred to simply as “the Great War,” until another, and even more deadly military conflict broke out that cancelled the unique meaning of that title. Fascism could hardly have existed in the absence of this unprecedented bloodbath and its attendant dehumanization. As historian Alan Kramer (2010: 50) put it, The First World War made the unthinkable thinkable. The mass death of thousands in a day, industrial killing, poison gas, and genocide: these potentials had been shown in 1914–18. The era of the First World War witnessed a decisive step towards total war. Another historian, Richard Bessel (2010: 53), conceived the link between the war and fascism as follows: The idea of the First World War as totality thus is not only about the extent of fighting and of the social and economic mobilization which it required; it also is about a total conflict, beyond reason and without end. This combination—struggle beyond reason and war without end—became the agenda of fascism. The war was the end result of various processes and factors—an international struggle over the control of territories, markets and raw materials; an escalating armament race; an intricate web of allegiances that permitted a relatively minor local altercation to catch fire globally and so on and so forth. These issues were widely debated in research and cannot be closely examined here. (See, for good starting points, Neiberg 2007; Stone 2009) One curious phenomenon, however, commented on by many astonished observers, deserves special attention in the present context: the overwhelming public enthusiasm with which the declaration of war was greeted, or so at least it is commonly assumed, in different countries. Many saw the war as an event containing great hope and opening up exciting new possibilities, rather than as a potentially catastrophic conflagration. In the testimonies of those contemporaries who welcomed the war, what is perhaps especially striking is the way it was conceived as a thrilling, joyful and lively event, bringing to an end the tedious routine of an intolerably protracted peace. So, for instance, wrote the young English poet Rupert Brooke in his poem “1914”:

Fascism and Mass Politics 141 I. Peace Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour, And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping, With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary, Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move, And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary, And all the little emptiness of love! (Brooke 2010: 135) Brooke’s war poems are permeated with a devout and mystic patriotism, which embraces the prospect of dying for one’s country. “If I should die,” he famously wrote, “think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England” (139). Like many of his generation and class (upper-middle class) in England, Brooke was influenced by Nietzsche’s eulogies of a life of heroism and danger and his criticism of mass society. “Nietzsche is our Bible,” he wrote in 1910 (Strachan 2001: 137; for a fascinating interpretation of the First World War as a fundamentally Nietzschean enterprise to create a New Man, and an overman, and victoriously resurge from a perceived European decadence, see Gentile 2008, esp. Chapter 6). Brooke, it might be added, indeed died in the first stages of the war and is buried in a foreign field, in Greece. Somewhat less heroically, however, he did not die in combat but, in an irony that mirrors the general anti-climactic trajectory of the war, as the result of an infected mosquito bite that caused a severe blood poisoning. Brooke’s attitude was not exceptional. It reflected a widespread desire among his generation to escape the “unconscious boredom of peace” (Tuchman 1994: 311). According to Joachim C. Fest (2002: 64), “the whole European world, including Germany, was suffering from profound ennui. The war seemed an opportunity to escape from the miseries of normality.” Another historian, Albert S. Lindemann (1997: 392), contended that “For many Germans the war seemed to offer an uncanny sense of release, of an escape from the ordinary, from the much lamented sense of sterility and Verdrossenheit (peevishness) of the immediate prewar years.” While Strachan (2001: 137) summarizes in the following way the general European climate that made many greet the war: The notion that modern society was too safe, that boredom and enervation were the consequences, was propagated by popular British writers like John Buchan and H. Rider Haggard. In France Charles Péguy and Ernest Psichari, both killed in the opening weeks of the war, had written successful books venerating the glory of war and the asceticism of military service. In Germany A. W. Heymel penned

142  Fascism and Mass Politics a poem in 1911 that longed for war as an end to the “opulence of peace,” and in the winter of 1912–13 Johannes R. Becker portrayed his generation as rotting, seated at their desks, as they waited for the trumpet call to a “great world war.” Most famous among those war enthusiasts were two who are particularly relevant in the present discussion: Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. The war was a precondition of fascism in the first instance simply because it created the breach between the interventionist Italian leader and his Socialist party that, alone among its West European counterparts, opposed the war, a breach that culminated with Mussolini’s expulsion. Once that happened, Mussolini had to seek a new political base, a situation that culminated in the postwar foundation of the fascist party. For Mussolini, who already at that early phase espoused a worldview anchored in what may be described as Nietzschean social Darwinism, the war was a great evolutionist campaign to decide which societies will flourish and which will lag behind in the struggle for primacy. He was aware of the heavy cost in life that the war will exact, but saw it as well worth paying since it will facilitate the process of selection and the emergence of a new and bold political élite what will lead Italy to greatness. Thus, shortly after his expulsion from the Socialist Party, on December 13, 1914, Mussolini gave a speech in Parma where he proclaimed that “the universal phenomenon of war” should not be explained “by attributing it to the caprices of monarchs, race-hatred or economic rivalry.” It was, rather, due to “other feelings which each of us carries in his heart, and which made Proudhon exclaim, [. . .] that war was of ‘divine origin.’ ” Mussolini insisted that “Internationalism is ended,” and that, while “War and Socialism are incompatible, [. . .] every epoch and every people has had its wars.” “We want the War!” he demanded, “and we want it at once!” The speech was concluded with an ardent call: “It is necessary to act, to move, to fight and, if necessary, to die. Neutrals have never dominated events. They have always gone under. It is blood which moves the wheels of history!” (Mussolini 1923: 9–17). While during the war still occasionally paying lip service to socialism, his views expressly discarded democracy and embraced aristocratism, rehearsing the antidemocratic tropes with which we have become familiar in the last chapter, as can be observed in the following, 1918 speech: Quality versus Quantity. This war has so far been one of quantity. Now, it is realised that the masses do not beat the masses, an army does not vanquish an army, quantity does not overcome quantity. The problem must be faced from another point of view—that of quality. This war, which began by being tremendously democratic, is now tending to become aristocratic. Soldiers are becoming warriors. A selection is being made from the armed mass. (Mussolini 1923: 40)

Fascism and Mass Politics 143 Directly continuing (41), he saw fit to stress the qualitative superiority of the Latin over the German, precisely since the former was individualistic whereas the latter—massified: Read [H. G. Wells’s] book The War on Three Fronts. It is in this book that he advised the exploitation of the “quality” of the Latin and Anglo-Saxon races. Because, whereas the Germans only work in close formation, only give good results through the automatism of the masses, the Latin feels the joy of personal audacity, the fascination of risk, and has the taste for adventure. Later on, this belligerence became integral to official fascist ideology. In the course of the next decades the affirmation of war was a tenet underlined by the Duce time and again. For example, in a discourse he delivered in the Italian parliament in 1934, where he defined himself as “a disciple of Friedrich Nietzsche,” (Mussolini 1958 vol. 26: 235) he proclaimed (259): Will there be peace or will there be war? History shows that war is a phenomenon accompanying human development. It may be the tragic destiny weighing upon man. [. . .] Bleak Heraclitus of Ephesus found that war was the origins of all things. [. . .] In the Encyclopedia [the Italian encyclopedia, to which in 1932 Mussolini, together with Giovanni Gentile, contributed the entry on fascism], I have expressed in the clearest of fashions my philosophical and doctrinal position: not only do I not believe in perpetual peace, but I find it depressing, and opposed to all of man’s virtues, which come into light only during bloody conflict. [sforzo cruento] Hitler, of course, welcomed the war no less eagerly. He took part in the patriotic gathering in Munich, August 2, 1914—a day after Germany declared war on Russia—and was captured in a famous photo, a jubilant face in the crowd. Some ten years later he described in Mein Kampf his excitement at Germany’s entry to the war, emphasizing that his personal thrill was shared by the German masses: The struggle of the year 1914 was not forced on the masses—no, by the living God—it was desired by the whole people. [. . .] Only thus can it be understood that more than two million German men and boys thronged to the colors for this hardest of all struggles, prepared to defend the flag with the last drop of their blood. To me those hours seemed like a release from the painful feeling of my youth. Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune

144  Fascism and Mass Politics of being permitted to live at this time. [. . .] A single worry tormented me at that time, me, as so many others: would we not reach the front too late? (Hitler 1999: 161–164) How could this enthusiasm be accounted for? The emphasis is usually put on a general eagerness for war, crossing boundaries of social class or party affiliation: in other words, mass enthusiasm. This, for Hitler, was a fact that it was vital to place above any doubt. And many historians give credence to such a claim. Albert S. Lindemann (1997: 392), for instance, wrote about a belligerent zeal encompassing “Germany and France, Great Britain and Russia, right and left, rich and poor, and Jews as well as non-Jews.” We have already cited Fest’s claim that “the whole European world” welcomed the opportunity to escape the tediousness of peace. Relying on the notion of a general bellicose craving on the eve of the war, the cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek (1992: 166), in one of his earlier books, grounded the outbreak of the war in “the real of enjoyment,” a private kernel which resists being universalized, and facilitates nationalism. Francis Fukuyama (2006: 331–332), similarly, construed the war enthusiasm as a rebellion against middle-class boredom. In recent years, however, historians have begun forcefully to dismantle the long-standing myth that all Europeans had longed for the war and rapturously welcomed its outbreak. Analyzing the national mood in various countries in the build-up to the war, especially in Germany, France and Britain, those historians compellingly argued that the notion of mass enthusiasm is a distorted and exaggerated reflection of historical realities. This does not mean that enthusiasm did not exist at all; as we have seen, it had very concrete manifestations, and we have sampled only a few cases. Yet the renewed examination of the sources reveals that it were mainly the middle and upper classes that were infected with the joy of war, whereas the other classes, the workers, the peasants as well as the petty bourgeoisie, exhibited mostly doubts, fears and outright reservations about the war.1 What, in turn, might explain these disparities between the ways different social groups approached the war, and why did class affiliation play such an important role? The developments described in the last two chapters contain an important part of the answer, namely the deep anxieties provoked among the élites and the middle classes by the rise of mass society. Newly examined, it turns out that more than mass enthusiasm, the belligerent mood among those specific groups reflected an anti-mass enthusiasm. The war, for all its horror and devastation—to a certain extent precisely on their account—was understood by many as a means, perhaps the last one available, of putting a stop to the worrying processes of mass society. Primary among them was the social, political and cultural polarization felt in most European countries. The rise of workers’

Fascism and Mass Politics 145 parties and the strength of the unions suggested to many that society itself was threatened by disintegration, and that the masses were on the verge of taking over the levers of social and political power. This scenario appeared particularly likely in Germany where, as we saw, the Socialists were going from strength to strength ever since the country’s unification and, from a party winning 3 percent of the vote in 1871, it grew almost uninterruptedly to become the nation’s biggest party, winning, in the last elections before the war, more than a third of the vote. Mass culture and the increase in mass consumption were also seen as threatening the old hierarchy. In this sense it is possible to understand why the war presented itself as a golden opportunity to unify the nation, bridge over the gaps, prevent the triumph of the unionized masses and stem the flow of materialistic mass culture with the aid of a “superior” and “spiritual” national ideal. Wars had throughout history served to reunite discordant nations and draw them together in the face of a foreign enemy, a real or imagined one. This is a motif recurrent in Shakespeare’s historical dramas, as the following passage from the Second Part of Henry VI illustrates. Clifford, the nobleman, faces a rebellious crowd that is on the verge of toppling down the English monarchy, and reminds them that they must forsake the uprising in order to defeat the common enemy of both the aristocracy and the plebs—the French: Were’t not a shame that, whilst you live at jar, The fearful French, whom you late vanquishèd, Should make a start o’er-seas and vanquish you? Methinks already in this civil broil, I see them lording it in London streets [. . .]. To France, to France, and get what you have lost! Spare England for it is your native coast. (Shakespeare 1991: 192) This call is heeded, as expected, the rebels abandon their leader, Jack Cade, and rejoin Clifford and the King, to save England. And war as an instant cure to social unrest was similarly used, some 300 years later, by Europe’s élites and middle classes in 1914. This unifying function was so prominent that from many sources one gets the impression that overcoming internal tension was a vital consideration in the entry to war, almost as important as the external threat. As clearly emerges from an article published at the start of the fighting in one of Germany’s leading journals: What we are now, with deepest emotion, experiencing, is a resurrection, a rebirth of the nation. Suddenly shocked out of the troubles and pleasures of everyday life, Germany stands united in the strength of moral duty, ready for the highest sacrifice. The Kaiser,

146  Fascism and Mass Politics today truly a People’s Kaiser, proclaimed: “I know no parties any longer, I know only Germans” [. . .]. These first days of August are undying, incomparable days of glory. Whatever had arisen over four decades of peace by way of strife and discord of parties, confessions, classes, and races has been totally consumed by the breath of flame of national fervor. (In Kershaw 1999: 88–89) Against the background of this perceived mass threat it is possible to understand the overwhelming endorsement of the war on the part of the intellectual and spiritual representatives of the bourgeoisie in different European countries. In Germany, where this tendency was perhaps especially clear, a great majority of the professors signed, on October 16, 1914, a statement of identification with the army and support for the military invasion of Belgium and France. The war was construed, moreover, as a defense of German Kultur and an expansion of its reach (Kramer 2010: 35). From this peculiar standpoint, peace was interpreted as a deadly threat, while war alone—“truly great and wonderful beyond all expectations,” as Max Weber put it (in Losurdo 2001: 12)2—was anticipated to re-weld the Gemeinschaft for a glorious, long-hoped-for insurrection against the herd-like, protracted reign of the of masses, with its materialism, hedonism, consumerism, lack of authenticity and social strife. The longing for a redemptive war, it is important to bear in mind, was by no means a German idiosyncrasy. It was shared by many across Europe. The fear that peace might spoil the party was captured perhaps best of all by Winston Churchill, who at the start of the First World War was First Lord of the Admiralty. According to the then Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, Churchill was exhilarated by the prospect of war, and when, on July 1914, it fleetingly seemed as if it might be averted, “he exclaimed moodily that it looked after all as if we were in for a ‘bloody peace’!” (In Ponting 1995: 141). David Lloyd George, for his part, condemned the pre-war days on account of the “great flood of luxury and sloth,” and claimed the war had helped the nation to see “the fundamental things that matter in life, that have been obscured from our vision by the tropical growth of prosperity” (In Pugh 2006: 25; Lloyd George’s words are from a September 1914 speech). Hitler, for his part, regarded peace as an inferior way of life when compared to the elation and heroism of war: As a young scamp in my wild years, nothing had so grieved me as having been born at a time which obviously erected its Halls of Fame only to shopkeepers and government officials. The waves of historic events seemed to have grown so smooth that the future really seemed

Fascism and Mass Politics 147 to belong only to the “peaceful contest of the nations” [. . .]. This development seemed not only to endure but was expected in time (as universally recommended) to remodel the whole world into one big department store [. . .]. Why couldn’t I have been born a hundred years earlier? [. . .] Even as a boy I was no “pacifist,” and all attempts to educate me in this direction came to nothing. The Boer War was like summer lightning to me. Every day I waited impatiently for the newspapers and devoured dispatches and news reports, happy at the privilege of witnessing this heroic struggle even at a distance. (Hitler 1999: 157–158) The way that the war was greeted as a formidable axe-blow to the trunk of consumer society, was captured by Ernst Jünger in 1922, recalling an episode which has taken place in a Brussels street in 1917. Jünger was standing in front of an illuminated shop window, displaying wonderful decorative objects, “mountains of porcelain [. . .], delicate little things from Meissen, Limoges, and Copenhagen, colored Venetian goblets, big bowls of water-clear, polished glass.” His contemplation of such delicacies is interrupted by the conversation of two soldiers, rugged and manly front types, standing next to him. Their cynical, and yet robust and admirable attitude awakens Jünger to the superiority of war and its attendant emotions, over the indulgent luxuries of peace: “See, here you notice nothing from the war. Everything’s there!” “Mate, a 38 [missile] should hit this place bull’s-eye, from high above.” “That would make the whole junk splatter in the air!” The lust which this thought filled them with, was written all over their faces. (Jünger 2002: 42–43) Historians trying to conceptualize the crucial role played by the First World War in the rise of fascism, often pointed to experience of trench warfare with its unimaginable difficulties, but also the camaraderie it fostered between brothers in arms, as factors that impinged on the fascist worldview and mentality, which sanctifies struggle and the military way of life and spurns civilian life, as comfortable and meaningless, bereft of risk or heroism. (See Omer Bartov’s insightful essay, 2003.) It can hardly be doubted that the atrocious warfare indeed deepened the ideological dehumanization of many combatants, entrenched the conviction that human life was a trifle and the feeling that peace was fragile and temporary, while war contained a fundamental existential truth, tragic and horrendous as it may be. It helped cement the myth of the soldier’s

148  Fascism and Mass Politics superiority over the civilian, and the assumption that the former and not the latter must lead society and dictate its values (as incisively analyzed by Mosse 1994). Such beliefs and sentiments were rife among the combatants and officers, many of whom would later find their place in the ranks of the right-wing paramilitary groups that have contributed so greatly to the formation of fascism. (See Gerwarth and Horne 2012.) “Most men who served in the First World War,” wrote Eric Hobsbawm (1997: 26), came out of it as convinced haters of war. However, those ex-soldiers who had passed through this kind of war without being turned against it sometimes drew from the shared experience of living with death and courage a sense of incommunicable and savage superiority, not least to women and those who had not fought, which was to fill the early ranks of the post-war ultra-right. Yet the hostility to civilian life, to peace, was not simply a product of the dehumanizing effects of trench warfare: while certainly exacerbated by the experience of the trenches, this bellicose mood predated the war, forming, in reality, one of its indispensable preconditions. (For a useful survey of 19th-century cultural attitudes to warfare, see Pick 1993.) One of the main purposes of the war was thus to forge internal unity within the different nations, heal the rifts and wounds paradoxically created by the long peace. Yet the very opposite happened: instead of resolving their distress, European élites went from bad to worse, at least in certain countries. In that sense the First World War can be seen as a redemption that failed. It came to create unity but deepened discord; its goal was to stop the further expansion of mass society yet it continued, and even gained momentum. This generalization is confirmed on several levels: politically, the war was meant to check the rise of socialism; and the beginning was indeed encouraging, for those entertaining such hope: the Socialist parties in all Western European countries, with the exception of Italy, abandoned their commitment to international fraternity and joined the “war effort,” albeit following internal debates that were often very intense. This accounts for the initially soothing sensation among nationalist circles that the ranks have been finally closed and chronic party and class strife has been surmounted. Yet the internal truce proved short lived and when the smoke of battle between the nations dispersed it turned out that the result was to a large extent the very opposite of what was hoped for: workers’ parties resumed from where they were interrupted and continued to gain strength and many countries, among them those that will soon experience the move to fascism, were swept by waves of unrest and radicalism, whether in the form of strikes (the biennio rosso in Italy, 1919–20), or in the form of an outright revolution, such as the one occurring in Germany. If these developments were not anti-climactic enough, world socialism received a massive boost with

Fascism and Mass Politics 149 the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917, resulting with the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922, a country that presented itself and was perceived by both friend and foe as the representative of the international proletariat, determined to bring revolution to all corners of the industrial world, and driving anti-socialist fears to a whole new level. The “Third International” of the world communist parties, as observed by Stanley Payne (1995: 78), “created a persistent challenge and menace from the extreme revolutionary left that had never existed before, adding a new polarization and tension to political life in many European countries.” Far from driving a final nail in the internationalist coffin, the war unwittingly fostered the principle of internationalism, equipping it with a new, proud flagship. A similar state of things prevailed demographically. We have seen in previous chapters that, from the late 19th century onward, complaints multiplied about what was understood as a deterioration of the quality of the population, and the way supposedly inferior classes proliferate at the expense of the high-quality middle and upper classes, whose families have fewer children. This trend was regarded as artificially countering the natural evolutionary process, where the strong and the fit multiply, not the weak and incompetent. Many thus presumed that the modern era is under the sign of devolution, the triumph of the unfit, enjoying improved medicine, hygiene and state protection. The war, in that sense, clearly exacerbated this process: on the one hand, the standard of living of the workers, including that of the poorest social layers, relatively improved, since the demand for labour increased, and in Britain, for example, the number of strikes steeply climbed throughout the war. One of the classic measures of the standard of living therefore indicated considerable improvement during the war: there was a decline in the rate of child mortality among the working class. (See Gregory 2008: 285–287.) This tilting of the balance of forces in favor of the workers found expression, in a way which was perhaps symbolic, even in London’s East End, long identified by the bourgeoisie as the hub of the demographic menace. As noted by historian Adrian Gregory (2008: 289), during the war, in “the East End of London, the classic and definitive epicenter of pre-war poverty, almost every conceivable variety of worker fought for and won pay rises.” On the other end of the social divide, the result was practically the reverse. Mortality rate among the middle and upper classes went up higher than that of the workers, and this for several reasons: first, the workers were required for armament production and were therefore sent less frequently to the front (not in absolute numbers, of course, but in proportion to their percentage in the population). Moreover, given their bad physical state many of them did not qualify as combatants. Members of the élite, by comparison, suffered losses at a higher rate. This may sound unlikely today, when many armies are undergoing, or have completed, a process of professionalization, and the ranks of combatants are filled by sons of the lower classes and of ethnic groups where poverty is high—the

150  Fascism and Mass Politics US modern army as perhaps the prime example. Yet the situation during the First World War was fundamentally different. As Gregory (2008: 289) points out, in “broad terms, the greater the wealth and status of an adult male in 1914, the greater his chance of dying in the war.” Casualties were very high among officers, who were mostly of “good” families.3 Mortality rate among majors of élite universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge, was staggering, 29 and 26 percent, respectively. An eloquent testimony is provided by middle-class author and Oxford scholar J.R.R. Tolkien, whose traumatic experience as an officer fighting on the Somme found expression in his fantasy tales. In a Foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings he wrote: One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead. (Tolkien 1994: xxiv) The war, which was meant to breathe new life into old values and repel the tides of mass culture, further eroded the masses’ confidence in the élites and their leadership competence. Mass consumption only grew in the aftermath of the war given the—relative—rise in workers’ buying power, and nor, on the gender front, was the expansion in the roles and rights of women brought to a halt. On the contrary: it only escalated the entry of women into the “male” labour market due to the desperate need for working hands following the massive mobilization of men to the front. Revealing itself as a nightmare, the war delivered a further blow to the paternalistic worldview by casting a shadow on the aura usually accompanying that exclusive male occupation: fighting. (Many studies deal with the damage inflicted by the war on the warrior ethos and traditional stereotypes of masculinity, for example, Bourke 1999; Reid 2011.) It thus seemed that the process of effeminacy, much lamented by 19th century conservatives, only quickened as a result of the war. These processes were of a general European nature. In England and France, however, the crisis was mainly ethical, cultural and social, and only secondarily political.4 In Italy and Germany, by comparison, these sensations were compounded by one of deep national humiliation: Italy was officially among the victorious nations, yet its aspirations for territorial expansion and for a firmer international standing were bitterly disappointed. The performance of the Italian army was underwhelming, including some resonating defeats, most notably in the battle of Caporetto (October-November 1917), where Italian forces were thrashed by the Austrian and German ones. Beyond the numerous casualties, some 300.000 Italians were taken prisoners and the number of deserters was

Fascism and Mass Politics 151 even greater. The army’s weakness was construed by the old and new right, including the fascists, not as evidence of the limits of militarism per se, but as proof of liberal weakness and its failure to create a powerful and assertive nation. The fascists promised to erase the blot of Caporetto and nurture a military spirit in the Italian nation. Italian nationalists were seized by violent indignation once the terms agreed in the Paris peace conference (1919–20) made clear that Italy will not receive all the territories it was promised in the London pact of 1915, for instance Dalmatia, nor will she get colonies in Africa. The outcome was the myth of la vittoria mutilata originated by D’Annunzio on October 24, 1918, fueling postwar irredentist nationalism. Germany was even more sturdily shaken, following the fall of the Prussian monarchy and the transition to a republican regime strongly resented by the right (with an attempted Soviet revolution in between these two events). The conditions dictated by the Treaty of Versailles were perceived, and not only in Germany, as unjust and vindictive, even though this is by no means so unambiguous in historical perspective: some historians point out that that the territories that Germany was forced to relinquish were not ethnically German, and that the demands for reparations were logical, in view of the fact that the war caused enormous damage in France and other countries on the continent but left Germany itself relatively unharmed. In support of their claims, these historians also use as evidence the quick economic recovery of Germany in spite of the allegedly draconic peace conditions, and the fact the country reestablished itself within a few years as a leading European power. (See Gregory 2008: 295.) Be that as it may, right-wing German circles acted out of deep conviction of a crying injustice caused to their fatherland with the support of internal forces: weak circles in the army and, especially, the socialist renegades from within. As in Italy, here too resentful national myths were greatly influential, above all the Dolchstoßlegende, according to which Germany never really lost the war, succumbing only to internal subversion, stabbed in the back by Bolsheviks and Jews. In both countries the original war elation among right-wing circles gave way, obviously not to regret, but to a profound sense of betrayal, breeding an ardent revanchist commitment. The military outcome was rejected and the ambition was to overturn it and vindicate the war effort. This explains the significance of ex-combatants as providing a crucial base for fascism, the Arditi in Italy, the Freikorps in Germany. Both refused to accept the verdict of the despicable peace and demanded a military re-match that will redeem the nation. Hitler’s testimony, recounting his sensations upon hearing of Germany’s acceptance of the peace conditions, is again representative: [E]verything went black before my eyes; I tottered and groped my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my bunk, and dug my burning head into my blanket and pillow.

152  Fascism and Mass Politics Since the day when I had stood at my mother’s grave, I had not wept. [. . .] But now I could not help it. Only now did I see how all personal suffering vanishes in comparison with the misfortune of the fatherland. And so it had all been in vain. In vain all the sacrifices and privations; in vain the hunger and thirst of months which were often endless; [. . .] and in vain the death of two millions who died. [. . .] Did all this happen only so that a gang of wretched criminals could lay hands on the fatherland? [. . .] There followed terrible days and even worse nights.—I knew that all was lost. [. . .] in these nights hatred grew in me, hatred for those responsible for this deed. In the days that followed, my own fate became known to me. [. . .] Kaiser William II was the first German Emperor to hold out a conciliatory hand to the leaders of Marxism, without suspecting that scoundrels have no honor. While they still held the imperial hand in theirs, their other hand was reaching for the dagger. There is no making pacts with Jews; there can only be a hard: either—or. I, for my part, decided to go into politics. (Hitler 1999: 204–206) Meant to provide a solution to the afflictions of mass society, the war only deepened them, placing the élites and those throwing their lots with them in front of a broken water trough. Instead of the national reconciliation between bourgeois and workers, their antagonism was sharpened, reaching, and crossing, the threshold of civil war. As against this dead end, fascism emerged as a new political form, whose task was to finally resolve the national crisis.

Fascism and Mass Politics What, then, was the fascist stance vis-à-vis the masses? As we saw, mass society was a complex quilt of different phenomena. Fascism, too, was a self-described “totalitarianism,” a comprehensive movement aspiring to affect all spheres of life, rather than a mere political form. It therefore had social, cultural and ideological implications. Thus, in order to approximate an answer on the issue of fascism’s relation to mass society it is useful to separately discuss the different sides of the question. We shall begin this task in this chapter by looking at political matters and demographic issues; in the next chapters, the focus will be on more properly social and cultural aspects. Politically examined, the anti-mass nature of fascism seems, at least on first sight, rather straightforward. Mass politics, as we have defined it, is based first and foremost on workers’ parties whose power increasingly increments. “[A]ll crowd theorists up to and including Le Bon,” wrote

Fascism and Mass Politics 153 J. S. McClelland (2011: 289), “expected crowd politics to be socialist.” Fascism put an end to that process. Whenever fascist or semi-fascist movements attained power—Italy, Austria, Germany, Spain, and so on and so forth—a process began in which eventually all parties except the fascist one were outlawed. The pace of the shift from a parliamentary regime to a single-party one was different from case to case: in Italy it took more than two years for the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) to displace all other political forces, from the end of October 1922, when Vittorio Emanuele III appointed Mussolini Prime Minster, to 1925–26. In Nazi Germany, by comparison, the process was much quicker, and only a few months were needed for the NSDAP to complete the Gleichschaltung and take control of German politics and society. It could be asked, whether every modern dictatorial or a single-party regime is eo ipso anti-mass, as well. The answer requires a case-by-case examination of the historical context in which the regime operates. Did it come along to truncate the political ascent of the mass? What was its social base of support? For example, in the Bolshevik regime established by Lenin after the First World War and taken to further extremes under Stalin, the degree of “totalitarianism” in the control and penetration of the individual citizen’s life, in the suppression and punishment of dissenters, was doubtlessly quite high. Yet this was a regime that saw itself as the spearhead of the masses against the élites, and it enjoyed, certainly to begin with, a wide support amongst the country’s poorest, especially workers but also peasants. Its first opponents were from the élites, both the Czarist and the bourgeois ones. This was not a regime that came to terminate a long historical process in which the political rights of Russia’s masses had been expanding. The Soviet regime was fundamentally an alternative, popular dictatorship, to that of the Czars.5 It would therefore not be very instructive to classify such a regime, or other communist ones such as that of Mao Zedong, under the rubric of “anti-mass” regimes. The main fascist regimes, by comparison, put a stop to successive and significant empowerment of workers’ parties and unions. In Italy, Germany, Austria and Spain, they overthrew democratic republics and not authoritarian regimes. Let us examine this in the light of the two major case studies, Italy and Germany. Italy Political and social historians of Italian fascism have long emphasized the way in which Mussolini’s new movement came to the succor of the traditional power holders in Italian society of the post-unification era—the king, the Vatican, the industrialists, the landowners and the bourgeoisie. In these historians’ assessment, fascism was first and foremost a reaction to the erosion in the status of these groups vis-à-vis the empowerment of the working class. The main dread of the élites and the middle classes did not concern the possibility of Bolshevik style

154  Fascism and Mass Politics resolution; although this fearful prospect played its part, their power was much more concretely hampered by the democratic empowerment of the popular classes. Profiting from the extension of the franchise, the Socialist Party (PSI), outlawed from 1893 to 1899, became the biggest party in postwar parliaments. As observed by Alexander De Grand (1982: 23–24), it emerged as the big winner from the elections of 1919: Large segments of Italian society no longer responded to traditional means of political control. The full impact of universal suffrage was now felt [. . .]. The quantum leap forward made by the Socialist party was probably the most impressive political change to result from the war. Membership in the General Confederation of Labor rose from 250.000 in 1918 to 2 million in 1920. In the elections of November 1919, the Socialist party gained almost 2 million votes and 156 seats to become the largest single political force in Italy. Another rising force was the new Catholic party, the Partito Popolare Italiano (PPI), under the leadership of the charismatic priest Don Luigi Sturzo. The PPI acted in certain independence from the Pope and its politics were left-leaning and social, often referred to as “clerical socialism.” Don Sturzo was among the few non-socialist political figures who would rebuff any fascist advance and, forced into exile in 1924, would become a prolific critic of the new regime. In the elections of 1919—the first in which the Popolare ever participated, having been founded that very year—they won 1.167.000 votes (Salvemini 1973: 232). Taken together, the two big mass parties had more than 50 percent of the general vote: the PSI winning 32.3 percent and the PPI 20.5. Next to this meteoric rise of the major mass parties, and no less significantly, 1919 represented a resounding defeat for the traditional power centers. This was reflected in the steep decline in the popularity of the broad coalition led by the veteran Liberal Giovanni Giolitti, which included, beside the Liberals, nationalists, democrats and radicals of different sorts. In 1913 this coalition won 3.392.000 votes; in 1919, only 1.779.000 votes (Salvemini 1973: 232). In order to explain the social and political crisis, De Grand divided postwar Italian society into 4 categories: 1. The Italian political class—the forces managing the affairs of Italian politics at the highest level. 2. Dominant interest groups—lobbies of industrialists, landowners, the military and the Catholic Church. 3. Intermediate élites—referred to by Antonio Gramsci as “organic intellectuals,” these were the groups that mediated between the

Fascism and Mass Politics 155 Italian political class and the dominant interest groups, on the one hand, and the rest of Italian society, on the other hand. Members of this category included labor managers, teachers, public servants, union leaders, journalists and others, who in terms of their socioeconomic status belonged to the middle and lower bourgeoisie. 4. The mass base—in the cities this included white- and blue-collar workers, small businessmen, unskilled workers, small artisans and the unemployed, and in the country the small farmers, sharecroppers, landless peasants, as well as migrant workers. A “crisis in the relationship between and within each of these levels of Italian society,” argued De Grand (1982: 4), “led to the Fascist regime.” The gist of the crisis lay in the fact that the dominant interest groups (2) and the intermediate élites (4) found themselves at a disadvantage because of the failure of the political class (1) to continue and defend their interests, in the face of growing unrest among the mass base (4). As stated, the general elections of 1919—as well as the municipal ones of 1920—weakened the liberal and conservative parties and benefited the left-wing parties. Yet the former still held on to political power given the fact that the Socialist party was divided between moderate and radical forces, “Reformists” and “Maximalists,” respectively, who held each other in mutual suspicion and hostility, while a similar mutual antagonism kept the PSI and the PPI apart. Yet the Liberal party, under Giolitti who returned to office in July 1920, could not ignore the clamor of the mass base and undertook reforms that only increased the frustration of the bourgeoisie and the upper classes, such as “proposing progressive taxation, an inquiry into excess war profits, publication of stock ownership, and the nationalization of the telephone industry” (De Grand 1982: 27). Industrialists were politically weakened by the considerable advances of the trade unions, while peasants unions were similarly threatening from the point of view of the landowners. “Proletarian militancy and expectations,” wrote De Grand (24), were never higher. In 1919 there were 1.633 industrial strikes involving over a million workers; 208 agricultural strikes brought out another half million. [. . .] [P]easants in central and southern Italy spontaneously began to seize poorly cultivated and uncultivated land. Throughout the country the violent class warfare [. . .] exploded into what seemed like civil war. As if that were not a sufficient strain on the upper and middle classes, the Italian market was flooded by many thousands of new professionals seeking occupation while the options of employment remained relatively limited. One of the instructive data provided by De Grand tells of a rise of 256 percent in the number of graduates of technical schools in the

156  Fascism and Mass Politics years 1918–19 as compared with the pre-war period. This gives a strong indication of the aspirations of the lower middle classes and the workers to improve their position. Needless to say, such levels of social mobility were a source of preoccupation and embitterment among those situated higher up the social ladder. Here transpired the social role of fascism as a movement that offered to the dominant interest groups and the intermediate élites an attractive escape route from the liberal quagmire. The fascist troops were an unofficial army that in the years 1920–22 quelled, with a wave of organized violence, the “pest” of the strikes and severely weakened the power of the trade unions and peasant leagues. One data suffices to summarize the transformation, blessing the élites like manna from heaven: in 1920 the agricultural sector in Italy experienced 1 million strikes; the following tear, only 80.000. “Directly financed and equipped by local farmers’ and business associations,” (Morgan 2004: 52) and benefiting from the military expertise gained in the war—in that respect, the war experience did prove conducive to social cohesion and unity, although not quite in the form of the spontaneous and harmonious social embrace originally fantasized about by the nationalists—the fascist troops, many of whom were exsoldiers and commanded by ex-officers, “leapfrogged from commune to commune, simultaneously attacking socialist organizations and founding rural fasci” (Morgan 2004: 52); they encircled cities, put fire to socialist headquarters, imprisoned the leaders and forced castor oil down the throats of dissidents. In the course of “the first six months of 1921, 119 labor chambers, 107 cooperatives, and 836 peasant league offices were attacked and destroyed, the loss of a generation of struggle for a better life” (De Grand 1982: 31). Once installed in power, fascism continued the same line, cooperating with the bourgeoisie and the dominant interest groups while restraining the mass base of society. Its policies were, at least to begin with, fundamentally conservative and were not totalitarian, if that means complete control of the economy or the cancellation of independent institutions. There was a great disparity between the ruthless way in which politically active workers and peasants were suppressed, along with those members of the élites who supported the popular and democratic camp, and the considerable scope of action allowed by fascism to conservative circles, such as the Church, the army, industry and even academic institutions, which maintained their autonomy to a significant extent. The first years of the regime (1922–25) were in fact characterized by free-market policies, under the guidance of the economically liberal finance minister Alberto De Stefani, who “reduced controls over industry and cut expenditures and taxes. [. . .] [T]elephone companies were restored to private control; the concessions given to electrical companies were renewed; the state monopoly over life insurance companies was ended” (De Grand 1982: 47). The shift from Giolitti, the fox, to Mussolini, the lion, corresponded

Fascism and Mass Politics 157 to Vilfredo Pareto’s prescriptions: political liberalism was eliminated, in order to unleash economic liberalism. This was a period described by Franklin Hugh Adler (2005: 425) as “liberal fascism,”6 when freemarket principles were introduced into the PNF’s official program, in August 1922. The period of laissez-faire, it is true, did not last and state intervention in the economy increased under the new finance director Alberto Beneduce. This, however, should not be taken as an indication of a move to collectivism, to say nothing of socialism. Those who clamored for a more active and supportive state were to a large extent the industrialists themselves. As economic historian Marcello De Cecco (2002: 74) argues, the transition from De Stefani to Beneduce favored the interests of large-scale industry over that of the small producers, and was thus, in a sense, more, rather than less, properly capitalist: In order to rise to power, [Mussolini] did not hesitate to play the role of the apostle of free enterprise, advocating the immediate dismantling of all forms of wartime planning of economic activities. He thus touched the heart of the small-scale entrepreneurs who produced traditional labor-intensive industrial goods; but he would soon afterwards abandon them in favor of the large-scale industrial entrepreneurs who produced capital-intensive products and the great public managers. During the first years of fascism its founder and leader was well aware of the minority nature of his movement, rowing against the current and combating the masses, while those for their part either reject or ignore it. It should be born in mind that the first fascist list standing for election garnered measly results, while the Socialists and the Catholics attracted millions. The first fascist program was flagrantly radical—probably against Mussolini’s opinion and on account of the dominance of radical members who would mostly leave the movement later on—and included, among other demands, support for universal suffrage, including female one, a founding of a democracy that will be inspired by the ideas of none other than the German communist Kurt Eisner, and strongly progressive taxation of capital. Yet in spite of this platform the fascists failed miserably, both on account of the fact that the immeasurably stronger Socialists had already monopolized political radicalism and because of the personal dislike among the workers toward Mussolini who was regarded as a vain, untrustworthy intriguer (Tasca 2000: 41–47). In stark contrast to the workers’ attitudes, Mussolini enjoyed wide popularity among ex-soldiers, the Arditi. “Against the vast masses,” wrote Angelo Tasca (2000: 49), “against those flocking to Socialist gatherings and voting ‘red,’ Mussolini had at his disposal armed groups, firebrands ready for everything and deterred by nothing.” This only enhanced Mussolini’s inherent elitist tendencies, contemptuous of the masses and eulogizing the creative, uniquely talented individual. Disappointed by the results of the election,

158  Fascism and Mass Politics Mussolini would in the course of the next months pen articles, such as the following one from December 1919, where he tried to bestow an aura of glamour and prestige, in the spirit of Nietzsche and Stirner, on his political isolation and defied both the “red” mass of PSI voters and the “black” mass of PPI supporters, two publics who had slighted his own movement: We profoundly detest all forms of Christianity, that of Jesus as that of Marx, and passionately support the rise, taking form in the modern world, of the pagan cult of power and audacity. [. . .] Cease already, red and black theologians of all churches, to spread sophisticated and false promises of a paradise that will never come! [. . .] Make way for the fundamental forces of the individual, since no human reality exists apart from that of the individual. Why should Stirner not recover his actuality? (Mussolini 1958, vol. 14: 193–194) And in another article (January 1920) he stressed that Above all we do not believe in happiness, in redemption, in the promised land. [. . .] Let’s return to the individual. We support everything that glorifies and amplifies the individual. [. . .] There are today two religions which fight between them to obtain control over the individual and the world: the black and the red; [. . .] that of Rome, and that of Moscow. We are the heretics of these two religions. We, alone, are immune to the contagion. [. . .] It is necessary to sail.7 Even against the current; even against the mass [il gregge]; even if our ship, carrying the solitary and proud apostles of our new heresy, may go under. (Mussolini 1958, vol. 14: 231–232) And later, after his armed squads had already defeated the socialists, Mussolini kept boasting of the way the fascist David, the small vanguard army, had defeated the red Goliath, with its mass of supporters, as in this 1921 speech: 1.850.000 voters dropped in the ballot box the paper with the hammer and the sickle: 156 delegates were sent to the House of Representatives. Catastrophe seemed imminent [. . .]. But one thing was forgotten: forgotten was my most tenacious spirit and my will that was sometimes indomitable. I, full of pride in my 4.000 voters, said: [. . .] the battle continues! (Mussolini 1958, vol. 16: 241) By destroying democracy and breaking the workers’ unions, fascism removed a thorn from the flesh of the élites and the middle classes, bringing to a decisive resolution one of the most urgent tasks on the agenda of

Fascism and Mass Politics 159 mass critics from Nietzsche to Le Bon. “The worker,” Nietzsche bemoaned (1990: 106), “has been made liable for military service, he has been allowed to form unions and to vote.” But what was “stupidly” allowed to the worker could be disallowed; under fascism, only military service remained open to him. “The labour question” was emphatically answered. In The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig recalled the way he was first acquainted with the fateful phenomenon of fascism—the writing of the book started in 1934, and continued over the next years, and the author did not doubt the continuities between Italian fascism and German Nazism—during a 1921 visit to Italy. Even colored by his utter abhorrence of Nazism, his story is an ambivalent one. Arriving in his beloved Venice, encumbered by two heavy suitcases, he finds no one who is willing to assist him to his hotel, as striking “Workmen and railwaymen stood around idle with their hands ostentatiously in their pockets.” A strike-breaking gondolier comes to his rescue, and once safely in the hotel he immediately goes to Piazza San Marco, as was his habit. But the plaza, too, “looked remarkably deserted. The shutters were down over most of the shop-fronts, there was no one sitting in the cafés, only a large crowd of workers standing under the arcades in isolated groups, as if waiting for something out of the ordinary.” It comes in the form of a fascist squad running through the crowd in provocation to the chant of the Giovinezza. Humanist and pacifist though he is, the writer cannot suppress a sense of admiration for the small group’s daring and perfectly executed maneuver, in defiance of an enemy superior in number: And soon they had passed at their swift pace, swinging batons, before the hundreds of men waiting for them in far superior numbers had time to make a move against their enemy. The audacious and genuinely brave march staged by this small, organised group was all over so quickly that the waiting crowd were aware of the provocation only when there was no chance for them to get to grips with their adversaries. Angrily, they crowded together, clenching their fists, but it was too late. (Zweig 1964) Looking at things from the point of view of the well-off middle-class individual, pestered by strikes and working-class’ effrontery, there is no hint of condemnation in this account. The tone completely changes later on in the narrative when Zweig recalled the similar modus operandi of the German fascists, disrupting a Socialist meeting. “I had seen just the same thing in the Piazza San Marco in Venice,” the author states, but now he is clearly on the vulnerable side, a fact that seems to strongly reduce his inclination to admire the deftness of the paramilitary maneuver. Instead of “determined, bold young men,” as he defined the Italian fascists, the SA are perceived as a military machine shorn of individualism. “It was not a matter of personal skills,” he insists, for each “of those movements had had to be practised in advance, dozens or even hundreds of times, in

160  Fascism and Mass Politics barracks and on parade grounds. From the first, as anyone could see at a glance, this gang had been trained in methods of attack, violence and terrorism.” (Zweig 1964) Now being threatened by this paramilitary violence, rather than benefitting from its activities, Zweig is also much more disposed to look at the bigger picture and identify the way Nazi violence serves the interests of the ruling élites: “The authorities paid little attention to these strange nocturnal manoeuvres. Were they really asleep or turning a blind eye? Were they indifferent to the movement, or actually encouraging it in secret?” (Zweig 1964). It should be noted that Italian fascism did not eliminate workers’ unions altogether, nor did it simply refute the principle of workers’ rights. Its goal was rather to detach the syndicates from left-wing parties. Once politically purified, the syndicate could even function as a cell of national renewal, provide a nucleus for a new aristocracy. The fascist innovation consisted mainly in transforming the syndicate from an organization defending the worker’s interest to a basis of national productivity. This, as well, attests to the role of fascism as a tamer of the masses, even as it selectively appropriates and re-signifies parts of their legacy. Fascist movements courted the workers and presented themselves as independent, anti-establishment and even revolutionary forces. Fascist rhetoric therefore reveals many avowals of commitment to workers’ rights and even to their expansion. “The vessel of fascism,” announced Mussolini in April, 1921, should not be used to smuggle in a foolish, reactionary or conservative politics. One should not think that one could deny the workers the achievements they have gained through sacrifice. We are the first to acknowledge that the eight hour work day should be legally recognized, and that social legislation must be passed in accordance with the demands of the new times. (Mussolini 1958, vol. 16: 242–243) The threat of violence, however, seldom lags far behind. If need be, the love of Italy should be literally hammered into the workers (248): We fascists claim that beyond the competition and the disagreements there is a single reality [. . .] and that is the reality of the nation, the patria, to which we are all bound like the tree is bound by its roots to the earth on which it grew. Thus, like it or not, the patria is an indestructible, eternal, immortal unity [. . .]. And thus, with our furious hammer blows, we have shuttered the shameful crust that has covered the soul of the proletariat. The proletarians were those who were ashamed of being Italian. There were among them those who, bestialized by a deplorable propaganda, shouted “Let the Germans come!” or “Long live Austria!”

Fascism and Mass Politics 161 As a middle way between capitalism and socialism, fascism took pride in corporatism, a system for managing production based on the corporations, bodies that include representative of both the workers and the employers, and that facilitate, so it was claimed, direct and balanced negotiations between them for the good of the entire nation, eliminating, on the one hand, class struggle and strikes, and, on the other hand, arbitrary and exploitative policies on the part of the bosses. In case no such agreement could be reached, the fascist state reserved the right of final ruling. In reality, however, corporatism functioned as a means for controlling and supervising the workers, who were deprived of real bargaining power. The employers, by contrast, enjoyed considerable room for maneuver. Propaganda value aside, this method permitted Mussolini to obtain two objectives: first, the state could direct economic affairs to a certain extent, together with the employers, during the 1930s economic depression; second, since the main positions in the corporations were occupied by Party members, a web of political and economic supervision was efficiently spread. As recently observed by Matteo Pasetti (2017a: 72) “the Fascist regime had user (sic) repressive policies to prohibit labour conflicts and had abolished social pluralism through the compulsory representation of organized interests.” The purpose of the corporatist regime, the same author elsewhere indicates (Pasetti 2017b: 69), was to effectively put an end to workers’ autonomy: “the unions had to be included in a corporatist system for the purpose of integrating the nation’s labor force, suppressing the class struggle, and nationalizing the workers.” The gaps between fascist rhetoric and practice did not, for the most part, confuse the left, yet it did produce certain misunderstandings within the fascist camp itself, where many supporters and activists took the Duce’s proclamations about integrating the workers in the nation and securing social justice at face value, and believed that corporatism is indeed capable of giving the workers’ an independent voice in defense of their interests. For a while, this created internal tensions between different factions, the workers being represented by the leader of the fascist unions and former revolutionary syndicalist Edmondo Rossoni. At the head of a union counting some 2.4 million workers in 1927, Rossoni wished to translate these numbers into actual political power and ensure that the syndicate will be an independent agent vis-à-vis the state. He construed fascist corporatism as a system allowing the fascist unions freedom of action, and claimed in May 1928: The corporation has now become an organ of the state. This does not imply that the syndicates’ liberty of action must be curtailed. For just as the law leaves the development of the individual personality untouched, so also it can allow the personality of the syndicate to develop. (In Neumann 1936: 40)

162  Fascism and Mass Politics But the regime soon made Rossoni realize his mistake, relieving him of his duties at the end of the same year. (For a book-length discussion of Rossoni’s trajectory, see Tinghino 1991.) In place of his ideas, the conservative line of such fascists as Giuseppe Bottai and Alfredo Rocco was officially endorsed, finding expression if the 1927 Carta del Lavoro. This important document “reaffirmed the primacy of private initiative and allowed state intervention only where the private sector was inadequate” (De Grand 1982: 70). A series of legal and practical measures undertaken in the course of 1928 finally dissolved Rossoni’s impressive syndicate until it was “reduced to an impotent series of small federations” (71). In reality, far from attesting to any lingering degree of working-class autonomy, Fascist trade unions were ingeniously and very effectively turned against the workers, becoming a very powerful tool of regimenting workers and pressurizing them into political conformity. This was achieved through various ways, notable among them the granting of the fascist union card without which it was very difficult to find employment. This was done on a case by case basis, giving “the fascists enormous possibilities of leverage and control in relation to the working class” (Corner 2002: 338). For instance, unruly workers could be punished and workers could in general be forced into submission or variously blackmailed, for instance into giving information on fellow workers or neighbors. While neutralizing the trade unions, indeed turning them to the regime’s benefit, was the jewel in the crown of the fascist social disempowerment of the masses, it had many other expressions. A notable example of the way the regime acted to assuage the middle classes was the policy of closing down technical schools, therewith greatly narrowing the possibilities for upward social mobility. The Italian middle classes, as will be recalled, strained under the massive influx of new professionals into the market in the immediate postwar years. Table 3.1, indicating the number of new graduates in technical professions on four key dates—before the war, in the year of Mussolini’s accession to power and in the first three years of his regime—instructively reflects the changed trends:8

Table 3.1 New graduates in technical professions Years

Number of graduates

1900–1901 1920–1921 1922–1923 1923–1924

38.324 133.442 112.981 65.123

Fascism and Mass Politics 163 According to historian Vera Zamagni (1993: 303), Giovanni Gentile’s reform, which was passed during the summer of 1923, not only reinforced the authoritarian and hierarchical nature of the school system, but also led to higher levels of selection through the introduction of school admission exams, various diplomas and certificates, and above all, through stopping students from technical (renamed subsidiary) schools going to university. This reform was strongly resented not only by opponents of fascism but even by some of its middle-class supporters, who justly felt that it curtailed opportunities for social mobility for their children; it was therefore gradually rescinded, but not before seriously slowing down the development of Italian higher education for a decade or so (Zamagni 1993: 303–304. See also Dunnage 2002: 82–83). Germany Germany, already in the late 19th century, was the country in which the flagship of European socialism operated, the Socialist party, which Bismarck’s stick-and-carrot strategy could not abidingly restrain. As we saw, nor could the First World War provide the hoped for resolution of social conflict, culminating instead in the Dolchstoßlegende. The widespread conviction in right-wing circles that rejected the new republic was that the forces of “Marxism,” socialist as well as communist, form an inner enemy whose subversive activities have caused the nation’s downfall to begin with and then prevented its recovery. Eliminating that enemy was thus one of the primary goals of the National Socialist movement, as Hitler never tired of repeating. Of all interwar fascist movements, Nazism can surely make the strongest historical claim for having won a broad “mass” support by participating in democratic elections, as compared to other fascist movements of lesser popular purchase, in Italy, Austria, France, Britain, etc. If there is an historical case approximating the classic stereotypical model of fascism as mass politics, “a wave” (Strasser 1981) produced by a charismatic leader who masters collective psychology and manages, by isolating scapegoats, to instill the people with a sense of pride and purpose, it is Nazism. Hitler led a movement that garnered impressive electoral results, at least in the second, legalist phase of its activity, after abandoning its earliest putschism. As emphasized by many historians, Hitler promised to nationalize the red masses, extricate the wayward workers from the influence of radical Marxist and Jewish agitation and bring them back into the bosom of the nation. In his 1923 trial, following his involvement

164  Fascism and Mass Politics in the Beer-Hall putsch, Hitler addressed the jurors and expounded on the goals of his movement: The National Socialist movement [. . .] adopted as its first principle the realisation that the Marxist movement was to be fought to the end; second the realization that the revolution [of 1918], as the consequence of Marxism and of an unprecedented criminal act was not a matter of the German bourgeoisie becoming national once more: the problem is that the German working people, the broad masses, must be made national again. That means [. . .] an active fight against those who have ruined [German nationalism] until now. Besides, it is ridiculous to want to nationalise a people at a time when hundreds of thousands are working on all sides to de-nationalise the people, and these hundreds of thousands, who also brought about the revolution, do not even belong to the race. Thus the Marxist problem has become a racial problem, the most serious and deepest problem of the day. (In Passmore 2002: 140–141) What those historians often forget to add is that, at least as long as parliamentary democracy was allowed to persist, “the drummer” clearly failed to deliver the goods. His electoral triumphs, impressive though they certainly were in other respects, only marginally affected the “red” parties. In confirmation of this, Table 3.2 is very useful, summarizing the results of all the national elections during the Republic of Weimar, from 1919 to late 1932. Provided by historian Donny Gluckstein (1999: 79) as part of an excellent work on National Socialism, which is regretfully consulted less frequently than it deserves, this table is doubly helpful because it not only provides a comprehensive picture of Weimar elections, but also groups the different parties into the most important social and political categories—the left parties, the Catholics, the middle-class parties and the National Socialists. In this way, it provides concrete insights into the Nazi impact on the major social groups, as well as answers to the critical questions: which groups weakened as a result of the Nazi rise? Which maintained their power? As can be seen in Table 3.2, the NSDAP begins its meteoric rise in the 1930 elections, with 18.3 percent, reaches its apex in the following elections (37.4) and then suffers a certain setback in the last elections of the Republic of Weimar in November (33.1). Yet this success had an only marginally negative effect on the left, whose voters, after all, Hitler promised to “nationalize,” cure of their subversive folly. The combined electoral share of the left-wing parties, communists and socialists, suffered only minor losses: from 40.4 percent in 1928 to 36.1 in July 1932 and 37.3 in November. The maximal decline in left-wing vote that might be attributed to the Nazis is thus one of 4.3 percent. Not only is this a relatively marginal decline (cf. Mason 1997: 69), but it is one that needs to

Fascism and Mass Politics 165 Table 3.2 National parliamentary elections, 1919–33 National parliamentary elections, 1919–33 (in percentages) 1919 1920 1924 1924 1928 1932 July November 1932 1932 Left KPD USPD SPD Total Catholic Center BVP Total Middle class DDP DVP DNVP other Total without the Nazis NSDAP Total with the Nazis

–

2.1 12.6 9.0 7.6 17.9 0.8 0.1 37.9 21.7 20.5 26.0 45.5 41.7 33.9 35.1

10.6 – 29.8 40.4

13.1 – 24.5 37.6

14.5 – 21.6 36.1

16.9 – 20.4 37.3

15.9 13.6 13.4 13.6 12.1 11.8 12.5 11.9 3.8 4.2 3.2 3.8 3.1 3.0 3.7 3.4 19.7 17.8 16.6 17.4 15.2 14.8 16.2 15.3 18.6 4.4 10.3 1.6 34.9 – –

8.3 5.7 6.3 4.9 19.9 9.2 10.1 8.7 15.1 19.5 20.5 14.2 3.3 8.6 7.5 13.9 40.6 43.0 44.4 41.7 – 6.5 3.0 2.6 – 49.5 47.4 44.3

3.8 1.0 1.0 4.7 1.2 1.9 7.0 6.2 8.9 13.8 2.0 2.6 29.3 10.4 14.4 18.3 37.4 33.1 47.6 47.7 47.5

Source: Donny Gluckstein, The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class, 1999. Bookmarks Publications. Reader: The left: * KPD: The Communist Party. * USPD: Independent Social Democrats—left-liberal orientation. * SPD: The Socialist Party. Catholics: * Center [Zentrum]: The major Catholic party, with cross-class support. * BVP: A Bavarian Catholic party. Middle class: * DDP: German Democratic Party—a centrist, progressive party. * DVP: German People’s Party—the major national-liberal party. DNVP: German National People’s Party—rightwing liberals, nationalistic and anti-Semitic. * Others: small parties of mostly petty-bourgeois character, such as “the Real Estate and Homeowners Party” or “The Reich Party of the Middle Class.” * NSDAP: The National Socialist Party.

be further qualified in two senses: first, taking a global look at the Republic’s political map, it is difficult to argue that the Nazis brought about a significant reduction in the power of the combined left-wing forces. In fact, in the last year of the Republic, the total left-wing share of the votes, 37.3, was higher than it had been in the two elections of 1924, well before the Nazi take-off: 33.9 and 35.1, respectively.9 Furthermore, considering the significant internal shift from socialism to communism which characterized those years, one may say, if anything, that the recalcitrant

166  Fascism and Mass Politics masses became more rather than less “red,” drifting further away from the national mainstream. What the NSDAP did manage to do, and this staggeringly well, was to homogenize the non-left forces, very quickly establishing a near monopoly over the center and the right alike. Nazism, in other words, hyper-nationalized forces whose national adherence—understood in middle-class terms—was never in any doubt, and which could hardly be seen as part of the “mass,” either in terms of their social and class origins—although we shall shortly qualify this statement—or in terms of their ideological outlook. The Nazi electoral leap forward went hand in hand with a dramatic fall in the power of center and right-wing parties, most of whose voters, although not all of them of course, came from the middle class. Middle-class parties of different hues, whose combined share of the national vote was 41.7 percent in 1928, just before the Nazi surge, lost no less than 27.3 percent of the vote, shrinking to just 14.4 percent in November 1932 (the notable exception to this rule was the Catholic Zentrum which basically retained its voters). Their nadir was June 1932, where they could only win 10.4 percent of the vote, and fell from 11.9 million voters to 3.5 million. Rather than appealing to the masses, the Volksgemeinschaft proved an attractive prospect to their sworn enemies: in 1928, the moderate liberal DVP obtained 8.7 percent of the votes; in November 1932, the last free elections in Weimar, they dwindled to a measly 1.9 percent, which actually signified an improvement on their performance from July the same year, when they got only 1.2 percent. The other major liberal party, the far-right DNVP, whose leader Alfred Hugenberg greatly admired the Nazis, fared comparatively better, but only slightly: from 14.2 percent in 1928 it was reduced to 8.9 percent in November 1932 (reaching a low of just 6.2 percent in July). This demonstrates that the “socialism” of the Nazis, whatever we wish to make of it in ideological terms, was generally shunned by the socialists, and widely embraced, rather, by anti-socialists, by liberals, conservatives and nationalists.10 As can be supposed, not all voters for “middle-class” parties were indeed from the middle classes: many workers voted in the past for conservative parties and in 1930 transferred their support to the Nazis (while, conversely, left-wing parties did not rely exclusively on workingclass votes, gaining some support among the middle classes, especially white-collar employees). This fact led some historians to conclude that support for Nazism lacked a clear class pattern and that working-class vote was crucial for its success (for instance, Falter 1991; Fischer 1996). Yet an examination of the social position of those workers tending to vote for the Nazis generally confirms rather than disproves the anti-mass nature of the movement: these workers were less organized, came from service and agricultural sectors (rather than industry), and mainly from small towns and the country, and not from big metropolises such as

Fascism and Mass Politics 167 Berlin or Hamburg. Trying to characterize the pro-Nazi worker, Richard J. Evans (2003: 263) wrote of many Catholic workers, workers in small, often paternalistically managed firms, manual laborers in the state sector (the railways, the postal service and so on) and employees who were not unionized (including especially female manual workers). Rural laborers in Protestant areas with a relatively small proportion of manual laborers proved particularly susceptible to the Nazi appeal. It is furthermore clear that when Hitler promised to nationalize the workers he did not mean those who had voted for “nationalist” parties in any case but specifically the ones supporting the left-wing parties and here, as already emphasized, his success was quite modest (Evans 2003: 263). The electoral achievements of the Nazis between 1930 and 1932 were thus primarily the result of a migration of votes taking place within the middle-class, liberal and conservative camp. As noted by Thomas Childers (1983: 127), an important scholar of Weimar-Republic voting patterns, “without the destabilization of traditional voting allegiances within the middle-class electorate, the spectacular rise of National Socialist fortunes after 1928 is hardly conceivable.” What is more, zooming in on middle-class Nazi voters reveals even more sharply the movement’s non- and anti-mass character: in the past, historians were prone to attribute the rise of Nazism to the lower middle-class, the “petty bourgeoisie,” or to the new middle class, white-collar folk, employed in relatively lowstatus jobs—such as junior clerks, secretaries or salespeople, whose professional situation was unstable and many of whom were unemployed, and this in contrast to the old middle class, employed in the public service, and enjoying a much more stable position. Later research, however, empirically deflated such ideas. In fact, it pointed in the opposite direction: precisely the more established and elitist middle classes tended to vote for the Nazis in higher percentages, whereas the lower-middle classes distributed their votes among the different parties—including those of the left, especially the SPD—in a less clear way: There is little convincing empirical evidence to support the traditional view that white-collar employees flocked to the NSDAP in 1931–32. The Nazi/white-collar coefficients do rise in the elections of 1932 [. . .], but that rise is surprisingly modest. In both elections of 1932 the National-Socialist new middle-class coefficients remain substantially lower than the figures for either the old middle class or the Rentnermittelstand. Moreover, the civil service, as in 1930, continues to be more strongly related to the Nazi vote than is whitecollar labor.

168  Fascism and Mass Politics Given the traditional emphasis on the lower-middle-class locus of the Nazi constituency, the surprisingly strong civil-service coefficients and the equally surprising weakness of the white-collar figures are particularly significant. (Childers 1983: 240) A little later (243) Childers observes that equally significant is “that support appears to have been far more concentrated in the traditionally elitist civil service than in the socially heterogeneous but largely lower-middleclass Angestelltenschaft.” No less instructive data against the notion of a mass, “petty-bourgeois” support for the Nazis was provided by Richard Hamilton in his cogent study of the Nazi constituency. According to Hamilton’s findings, the Nazi urban constituency resembled a reversed pyramid: support was disproportionally high among the upper classes, and subsequently and consistently diminished the “lower” one descended down the social ladder, from the intermediate levels of consent of the lower-middle classes, right down to the lowest harvests (not in absolute but in proportional terms) among the working class. “Support for the National Socialists,” Hamilton (1982: 421) argued, “in most towns varied directly with the class level of the district. The ‘best districts’ gave Hitler and his party the strongest support.” Even Jürgen Falter, prominent among those historians seeking to challenge the notion that the working class electorally resisted Nazism, acknowledged the fact that support for the Nazis among the unemployed, most of whom had been former workers, was astonishingly low, and that they typically rallied behind the communists: “In all Reichstag elections after 1930 the NSDAP fared, on average, significantly better where unemployment was low and vice versa. The contrary is true for the Communists” (Falter 1986: 189).11 In its attempts to draw workers from the left to the right, the Nazi party created its own workers’ union, the NSBO, designed to be an alternative to the socialist unions. This organization was very active during the last years of the Republic, including participation in a fair number of strikes, yet its real goal, as far as the Nazi leadership was concerned, was to weaken the left and prove to the élite that Nazism was a social force to be taken seriously. (See Gluckstein 1999: 72–73.) As happened in Italy, the leaders of the union did not always correctly interpret their part in the play and believed that their position will be upgraded once the party was installed in power. Filled with confidence and ambition, they even threatened industrialists that they will land in concentration camps unless they will raise their workers’ pay. And here, too, it was necessary to make them see their error. “Already in 1933,” writes Kevin Passmore (2002: 143), “the NSBO had been incorporated within the corporatist German Labour Front (DAF). In practice the destruction of left-wing unions and the banning of strikes, together with endorsement of management’s right to manage, ensured that German workers lacked collective representation.” In a way that was typical of German fascism, which always took the methods learned from

Fascism and Mass Politics 169 the Italian master to the next level, this lesson about the real goals of the regime was only the first that was given: the decisive blow to the more radical section of the party was landed in 1934, when it was physically purged during the Night of the Long Knives. As Tim Mason argued (1997: 93), in discussing Nazi corporatism, even the last remnants of mass defiance embodied in Ernst Röhm and “the populist element in National Socialism” had to be extinguished, since “the enemy was the politically active people who refused to accept the role of the managed and the ruled.” German corporatism under the leadership of Robert Ley, head of the DAF, dictated very harsh terms to the workers: [The DAF] had complete control over wages and income tax deductions: pay was frozen, and then reduced. The right to strike was taken away. It issued work-books that acted as a kind of employment “passport”—they recorded the employment record of the individual worker, and no one could gain employment without such a book. It ordered that a worker could not leave his job without the government’s consent. The number of hours worked by an average worker rose from sixty to seventy-two per week (including overtime) by 1939. (Davies 2006: 673) Also in resemblance to its counterpart in Italy, Nazi repression was socially selective: Supervision and persecution were directed first and foremost at the workers and the lower social orders. A big part of the workers felt unsatisfied by the situation. They were less susceptible to Nazi propaganda, and their basic position and way of thinking were to a large extent foreign to National Socialism. (Benz 2001: 294) German fascism, therefore, in spite of the propagandistic efforts to present itself as revolutionary and its vigorous courting of the workers, set out to crush the parties of the left, to destroy “Marxism.” It is therefore unsurprising that the movement appealed to wide sections of the élites and the middle classes but gained only limited traction among the lower orders, its influence typically restricted to the less politically conscious and organized laborers. The ruthless class war raging just beneath the surface of the conciliatory Volksgemeinschaft is evident even when Hitler does his utmost to present himself as a magnanimous unifier and pacifier of the nation, as he did on a particularly festive occasion, a speech delivered before ecstatic supporters in the Berlin sport palace on February 10, 1933, some ten days after he was appointed Chancellor (on the 30th of January).12 Hitler, in a way typical of fascist rhetoric, presents himself as the defender of the entire German people, whose goal is strictly national and has nothing to

170  Fascism and Mass Politics do with class strife. He turns to all parts of the people—the peasants, the middle classes, the workers, the intellectuals—and promises them a full integration into the finally emerging community of the people. His vision is thus, superficially at least, one of social conciliation: It is necessary to cross the boundaries between classes and estates, professions and parties, in order to again create from them a united German people. [. . .] Certainly: rich and poor, town and country, educated and ignorant, they are all there. But the goal of politics cannot be to therefore organize them in separation of each other, [but to] overcome these natural differences with a great ideal, a great realization. I therefore decided, being then an anonymous, unknown soldier, to found a movement that will reunite on a new basis the estates, professions, parties and classes. Yet it is simultaneously obvious that the realization of this vision rests on the unflinching suppression of those forces standing in its way, the forces of “Marxism.” Here transpires Hitler’s clear social affiliation and the class goal of his movement: And as I then set up for myself this positive goal, it was clear to me that it would be necessary to tie this up with a war and a battle against these phenomena of our political life, which are not only uninterested in achieving the goal, but on the contrary hate it outright, for it is on fragmentation alone that their existence is founded. And it was therefore first and foremost necessary to fight against the concepts of class, against the idea of class war and class struggle, the rule of classes, no matter where these concepts come from. The fight against Marxism was then, for the first time, elevated to the level of a battle’s goal. I then, as an unknown individual, reached the decision to start this war and not to rest until, finally, this phenomenon is eliminated from German life. Hitler’s vision of reconciliation is thus at one and the same time a vision of social war to the end: Of this you can be certain: [. . .] as long as the Almighty gives me life, my resolution and my will to exterminate them will be limitless! I will never stray from my mission to extirpate Marxism and its byproducts from Germany. And here I will never contemplate a compromise. One or the other must win: Marxism or the German people. And Germany will win! Hitler’s love for the German people is thus also a burning hatred for the same people. For “Marxism”—by which he means the parties of the left—is supported, even as Hitler is speaking, by many millions of

Fascism and Mass Politics 171 Germans. He is aware of the fact that the masses have not been nationalized; at the speech’s finale, he asserts that “I cling as to a solid rock to the conviction that the hour will come when millions, who today still curse us, will rally behind us and welcome the new German Reich.” Hitler’s victory speech thus reflects the fact that he was unable, using democratic means, to unite German society. Hence the pledge to break with all forms of a rotten democracy and to replace it with the realization that everything that is great can only come out of the power of the individual personality. [. . .] Down with the phenomena of our parliamentary democratic system! Nazism thus represented the defeat of mass politics as above defined: a process whereby the workers increasingly accumulate power and independence vis-à-vis the élites in the form of parties and unions. This defeat well accorded with the hopes and expectations of those Germans among the élites and the middle classes who were interested in seeing the challenge from below mastered, and consequently transferred their votes en masse, and yet against the mass, to the NSDAP. This does not mean that the élites embraced Hitler and his movement uniformly and unreservedly: he was not, after all, one of them in terms of his social origins, nor was he even a German native; they were also deterred by parts of Nazi rhetoric that included a promise, however patently hollow, to establish a form of “socialism,” even though this flirting with the term socialism and its transubstantiation into something a respectable, well-off German might find quite appetizing, was by then a very common move on the right. Yet such reservations notwithstanding, the compatibility between Hitler’s program and the worldview and ambitions of vast sections of the upper and middle classes was considerable. Hitler promised to reunite Germany (namely, tame the laboring masses and re-establish the old chain of command), to rally the nation again behind the army (“the embodiment of our people’s greatest historical achievement”), to return to the roots of classical German culture, as opposed to both mass culture and experimental modernism, to liberate the economy from political intervention by the masses13 and to organize German society and politics hierarchically, under the conviction that the people, for all its good qualities (it is not, after all, the mass), cannot wield power but only an outstanding “individual personality.” These goals and visions were shared by many in the German establishment following the defeat in the war, the same establishment that compromised with the democratic Republic, to the extent that it ever did, only under extreme duress. In the eyes of many, Hitler and his cronies may not have seemed necessarily like the best conceivable executors of these policies, being rather rowdy, flamboyant and unreliable, but they were finally the ones who had the best chance of implementing them. One indication of the significant level of overlap between widespread views on the bourgeois-national camp and Nazism, even in its brazenly

172  Fascism and Mass Politics putschist variant, are provided by things said about Hitler by the Bavarian jurist Ludwig Stenglein, who acted as the State’s prosecutor in Hitler’s trial of 1924. They express a highly positive evaluation of the man he is trying to convict and who is accused of no lesser crime than high treason. In historian Karl Dietrich Bracher’s view (2004: 174), these words amounted to “a hymn of praise to Hitler’s noble goals.” Hitler came from a humble background: during the Great War he proved, being a brave soldier, his German consciousness, and he thereafter constructed out of nothing and with great effort a big party, “The National Socialist German Workers’ Party,” whose programme’s main clauses were the fight against international Marxism and Jewry, setting scores with the November criminals, and spreading the national idea among all circles of the people, particularly the workers. I do not come to pronounce judgment on his party politics, but his sincere desire to restore an oppressed and weaponless people’s belief in the German cause, should be noted in his favor. In this area he did much, aided by his tremendous oration talent. Even if the spirit of the struggle among his supporters led him to espouse one-sided views, it would be unjust to describe him as a demagogue. From such a reproof, the sincerity of his views and his selfless dedication to his chosen life task, will defend him. His private life was always above any blemish, and this deserves a special appreciation, in view of the temptations to which, as an eminent party leader, he was naturally exposed. (In Bracher 2004: 174–175) Stenglein describes Hitler by using the defendant’s own terminology, as if it provided a merely factual description of his deeds, talks of “the November criminals,” etc.; he ascribes him the founding of a new party, even though this is incorrect, since Hitler in fact joined an existing party (and was asked to do so by his army officer—a fact to which Stenglein may have been oblivious); and it is clear that the prosecutor feels a profound empathy and understanding for many of Hitler’s goals, especially that of nationalizing the workers, even as he deems his methods inappropriate. Stenglein’s words reflect views that were widespread in the German establishment and the fact that Hitler, even after the events of 1923, was considered not a traitor but a patriot, if a slightly overzealous one. The trial’s verdict and further developments also indicate the degree to which the German élites have shielded Hitler: he got the minimal sentence determined by the law, five years in prison, and was expressly promised that he may look to an early release, a promise that was naturally kept: he left prison after only 264 days. We may add, in conclusion, that Stenglein himself joined the NSDAP in 1933 and that German judges proved in general among the most reliable and thorough collaborators with the Nazi regime. Scholars specializing in the relationship of the justice system to

Fascism and Mass Politics 173 Nazism, reached the conclusion that “hardly a single judge emerges with credit from the Third Reich” (as summarized by Stephenson 1995: 227).

Two Alternative Interpretations: Fascism as “Democratic Authoritarianism” and the Majoritarian Hypothesis It is important, however, to bear in mind that the view of fascism as fiercely anti-democratic is by no means universally accepted. There are historians and political scientists who, while agreeing that fascism was against the parliamentary model of democracy, and hence that it was emphatically anti-liberal, nevertheless maintain that it represented a different, perhaps even deeper variant of democratic politics. In the spirit of Jacob Talmon, they see in fascism a democratic–totalitarian realization of Rousseau’s “general will,” one that rejects parties and interest groups and unites the entire nation. George Mosse, perhaps Talmon’s most important follower in that respect, argued that fascism, far from discarding popular sovereignty, was in fact predicated on this all important legacy of the French Revolution, embodying a new, mass politics. For Mosse, writing in 1975, key to deciphering fascism was its mass-democratic dimension. Already in the Acknowledgments section he wrote: [T]he nineteenth century with the developments of mass movements and mass politics seemed to transform the political process itself into a drama which further diminished the individual [. . .]. It seems to me, at least, that the creation of “mass man” was a necessary consequence of the industrialization of Europe, and the world of myth and symbol within which such mass politics moved provided a most effective instrument of dehumanization. (Mosse 1991: vii) And he went (1–2) on to directly link popular sovereignty with fascism: For what we call the fascist style was in reality the climax of a “new politics” based upon the emerging eighteenth-century idea of popular sovereignty. [. . .] This concept of popular sovereignty was given precision by the “general will,” as Rousseau had expressed it [. . .]. The new politics attempted to draw the people into active participation in the national mystique through rites and festivals, myths and symbols which gave a concrete expression of the general will. Much more recently, Dylan Riley took issue with the perception of fascist regimes as anti-democratic dictatorships. He stressed the difference between liberal parliamentary rule, which the fascists stringently opposed, and democracy, which the fascists embraced. This they did, so the argument goes, precisely because liberalism was regarded by the fascists as antagonistic to genuine popular rule, which only an authoritarian

174  Fascism and Mass Politics system was said to truly guarantee. Riley (2010: 4) therefore proposed to re-define fascism as a form of “authoritarian democracy:” Fascists tended to reject liberalism but to embrace democracy as a political formula. They argued that membership in regime-sanctioned parties and corporate groups were a more adequate method of establishing popular rule than the “outdated” technologies of parliament and elections. [. . .] The fundamental problem with liberalism, from the fascist perspective, was not that it was democratic, but precisely the opposite. [. . .] The rule of the people, from the fascist perspective, had become, at least in modern conditions, incompatible with parliamentary government. It is in this sense that one might say that fascists were authoritarian democrats and that fascist regimes were authoritarian democracies. Leaving aside the hollow, quasi oxymoronic nature of the very term “authoritarian democracy”—which sounds hardly more congruent than other possible combinations such as “aristocratic egalitarianism,” “republican monarchism” or “pacifist militarism”—there are, in my view, two deeper problems with this “political formula.” To begin with, it misrepresents “the fascist perspective”: in general, fascists cannot be said to have espoused democracy; quite the opposite is true. Second, it misconstrues the relationship of fascism to democracy and liberalism, to the point of outright inversion: the fundamental problem fascists had with liberalism, as I have argued in a previous book, was that it was much too democratic for their liking, and that they therefore created a political order bereft of democracy but continuing liberalism in some key ways (Landa 2010). If political formulas are what we are after, then that political order can be defined, if anything, as “authoritarian liberalism.” Let us shortly elaborate on these two points of critique. To begin with, the notion that fascism, in its self-understanding, was democratic and that it was construed as anti-democratic only by its enemies or by misguided scholars is problematic. “To what extent,” asks Riley (2010: ix), “were fascist movements ‘antidemocratic,’ as they are widely presented in both historical and sociological accounts?” Later on (4) he claims that “fascist regimes are generally understood as antidemocratic dictatorships. Indeed, much of the literature on fascism concentrates on the ‘breakdown of democracy.’ ” He takes issue with such views, since they rely “either explicitly or implicitly on a very specific definition of democracy,” which ties it up with elections and universal suffrage. By defining fascists as anti-democrats we are thus found guilty of a sin that is considered by much of recent literature as a very grave one indeed: measuring the fascists with recourse to some external yardstick, which was irrelevant for them, looking at them from the outside, and ignoring their own “perspective.” And Riley is not alone in stressing

Fascism and Mass Politics 175 the democratic self-perception of fascism. Mosse wrote of the “theory of democratic leadership adopted by Hitler and Mussolini” (1989: 14) and asserted (16) that “Fascism [. . .] saw itself as a democratic movement directed against the establishment.” Fascists, however, widely presented themselves as anti-democratic. Let us recall the words of Mussolini (1958 vol. 18: 71): The century of anti-democracy commences. “Everyone” is the main term of democracy, the word which has overflowed the 19th century. It is time to say: the few and the elect. [. . .] Capitalism may have needed democracy in the 19th century: today, it can do without it. [. . .] The orgy of indiscipline is at an end, the enthusiasm over the social and democratic myths is finished. Life turns to the individual. [. . .] Gray and anonymous democratic egalitarianism, which had banished all color and leveled down all personality, is about to pass away. New aristocracies come forward, now that it has been demonstrated that the masses cannot be the protagonists of history, only its instruments. So claiming that Mussolini was a leader of a democratic movement flies in the face of what he himself believed he was doing. And such visceral refutations of democracy on the part of countless fascists could be multiplied many times over. In fact, opposition to democracy was a key and explicit fascist tenet which, nine times out of ten, fascists would proudly brandish. “You have great contempt for democracy?” was a question put by the British interrogator to Diana Mosley, nee Mitford, following her 1940 arrest. The passionate pro-Nazi, who had the beloved Führer as a guest at her wedding, answered simply: “Yes” (In Pugh 2006: unnumbered page). Certainly, there were also occasions, albeit rarer by comparison, when fascists did claim to be in favor of democracy and they certainly, for the most part, presented themselves as anti-liberal, although there are many exceptions to this rule. (For more details on fascist pro-liberalism and many relevant examples, see Landa 2010.) So it is possible by zooming in on such instances, and by ignoring the abundant evidence to the contrary, to construe fascists as “democratic” and quote them to that effect. But is it also advisable? How much weight, in other words, should we place on these scattered pro-democratic avowals? When one of the most notable fascist thinkers, Carl Schmitt, claims that the move from liberalism to fascism will deepen a country’s democratic character since liberalism caters to the rich and the strong at the expense of the poor and socially vulnerable, does he really mean it, and was this the true motive behind his support for fascism? Riley argues that we should believe him. He cites Schmitt as providing the clearest formulation in the interwar period of the “notion that liberal institutions were incompatible with democracy,” (Riley 2010: 214) and he takes the fascist pretense of

176  Fascism and Mass Politics democratically outflanking liberalism with no grain of salt whatsoever. “Fascist movements were generally democratic movements,” he claims, “and their attacks on liberalism derives from their democratic character. Fascism promised not less responsive, less representative political organizations but more responsive, more representative organizations than had existed in the preceding liberal period” (207; emphasis in the original). This credulity, I argue, is misplaced. When fascists claim that they are democratic, it is not difficult to show that they are disingenuous and have an obvious axe to grind. Cynicism on the part of the historian is here very much in order. But, as a critical reader of this study might at this point object, this “cynical” posture, which mistrusts fascist avowals, is a classic case of moving the goalposts to suit one’s purpose. For how can one take fascist avowals to mass enmity and anti-democracy as is, but then gleefully deconstruct fascist populism and pro-democracy? Does not such a procedure suffer from a serious methodological flaw? Why should we trust Mussolini when he speaks on behalf of aristocracy, and distrust Schmitt when he waves the banner of the weak? The answer to such an objection is that a double methodological standard is indeed, in this case, not only permissible, but even obligatory. Cautious scholars should approach fascist democratic avowals with great vigilance, which they are entitled to dispense with when fascist aristocratism is concerned. And this for the simple reason that the former avowals, genuine or fake, are politically useful to those who utter them, while the second avowals are not. Presenting oneself as a democrat one stands to gain, whereas faking elitism is not politically profitable. As can be generally agreed, it is a foolish person who rejoices when a politician of whatever sort promises bread and roses before an election; but if he or she promises blood, sweat and tears, they probably mean it. That professions of belief in democracy may be less than totally sincere whereas comparable avowals of aristocratism may be safely trusted, was a truth shrewdly acknowledged by no other than Vilfredo Pareto (1966: 319): [T]he fact that a religion has hypocritical supporters is an indication of the faith’s power, since men feign belief in something only if it is widely accepted by large numbers of their fellow men. [. . .] It is today a sure index of the power of the belief in democracy to see so many people pretending to share the belief, while it is a certain sign of the decline of the belief in aristocracy that among this belief’s supporters there remains not one hypocrite. Nor was it beneath Pareto himself, as I have argued elsewhere, to recommend using apparently democratic methods in order, in fact, to lead gullible “King Demos” by the nose (Landa 2010: 288–289). He saw this as a useful way of ensuring that beneath the democratic façade, the benign rule of the élites shall proceed as before. To the limited extent that the

Fascism and Mass Politics 177 fascists paid lip service to democracy, it was precisely such an apparent democracy that they had in mind. A valuable indication of that was provided by Gaetano Mosca, whose view of things is doubly important in the present context because he is one of the major proto-fascist authors, along with Schmitt, who are invoked by Riley to substantiate the claim that fascism embraced democracy as “a political formula.” If this is so, what does it actually mean? Did Mosca accuse liberalism because it was not democratic and responsive enough? On the very contrary, writing in the 1890s, he admonished liberalism never to allow democracy to switch from the realm of make believe to that of reality: Democratic institutions may be able to endure for some time yet if, in virtue of them, a certain equilibrium between the various elements in the ruling class can be maintained, if our apparent democracy is not fatally carried away by logic, its worst enemy, and by the appetites of the lower classes and their leaders, and if it does not attempt to become real democracy by combining political equality with economic and cultural equality. (Mosca 1939: 335; emphases in the original) Fascism became a historical necessity precisely because the liberal institutions, as we have seen, could not contain mass democracy. Hence, as Mosca diagnosed, they have proven themselves in a relatively short time unendurable. Pace Riley and Mosse, fascism did not come to offer a more responsive and representative system “than had existed in the preceding liberal period” but precisely to take over once liberalism proved unable to rein in “real democracy.” The occasional ambivalence in fascist ideology vis-à-vis democracy, which interpreters seeing fascism as democratic make so much of, reflected precisely this oscillation: on the one hand, fascism boldly brushed democracy aside and proclaimed it over and done with it; on the other hand, it prolonged, however peripherally, the old liberal scheme of apparent democracy, which it trumpeted to the people as real one, indeed so much more genuine than the one they formerly had, in the times when parties, independent unions and voting still existed. It should be noted that Riley, for one, does not, in the end, dispute this fact as much as he refuses, for whatever reason, to call it by its real name. He virtually admits that fascism emerged precisely where apparent democracy was threatening to burst the liberal shell and become a real one: The problem [in pre-fascist Italy, Spain and Romania] was the strength of this democratizing thrust—for popular forces took democracy so seriously that they threatened the pillars of élite domination. The élite’s inability to blunt the democratic thrust, within a liberal framework, was the underlying cause of fascism in many cases. (Riley 2010: 21–22)

178  Fascism and Mass Politics This is very well said indeed; but what follows from it is that fascism was an anti- and at most pseudo-democratic movement, coming to the rescue of the threatened élites, rather than an “authoritarian democracy.” Things are no different with regards to Carl Schmitt, this great exponent of a putative fascist democracy, on whom several scholars rely seeking to give credence to the thesis of a populist, democratic fascism, hostile primarily to liberalism. (For two examples, see Bielefeldt 1998: 23; and Mann 2004: 75–77.) It is admittedly easy to glean from Schmitt’s writings of the 1920s and 30s many instances in which he attacks liberalism on the grounds that it is not truly democratic and contends that the move to fascism will therefore facilitate a real democracy. Yet what is thereby overlooked is that Schmitt was anything except a writer wearing his heart on his sleeve; he is a prime example of a shrewd and sophisticated rhetorician who was no less aware than Pareto and Mosca of the inherent duplicities of political language and the way that any regime, if it is any good, must deceive its subjects and broadcast them reassuring falsehoods, while esoterically keeping the cards close to the chest. As he described unsentimentally in his book The Dictatorship, such esotericism, for those who wished to run a state, is an objective, timeless necessity: For the state certain measures are always necessary, in order to create an appearance of freedom, if only to calm the people, simulacra, decorative constitutions [Einrichtungen]. In contrast to such external, ostensible motives, the Arcana Reipublicae are the internal driving forces of the state. (Schmitt 2006: 14) The question was thus simply how best to manipulate the people, and for Schmitt clothing fascist dictatorship in a democratic garb was a very useful “ostensible motive” indeed.14 Such a cynical and opportunistic employment of concepts and theses is of course typical of political discourse generally, and fascists, far from being the exception to that rule, were in general only more straightforward about their mendacity, elevating manipulation and deception into a political principle. As a final example one can mention Hitler, who like Schmitt regarded deception as indispensable in the politician’s toolkit, and explicitly advocated the art of the political lie, the ability to oppress while talking of freedom. One illustration of this is the way in which, in private conversation, Hitler explained to his listeners the need to adopt the propagandistic methods of the English, whom he held in great esteem. “But how could the English,” he stated, with 50 million people, possibly rule over their world empire, without being masters in lying. If they truly wanted, as they always claim, to bring the Indians freedom and Indian culture, they would have

Fascism and Mass Politics 179 had to get out of India. Like Goethe’s ‘Reinhard the fox,’ they were pretending up until the last minute. (In Picker 2003: 317) Taking fascists at their word, especially when that word is “democracy” (or, for that matter, “socialism”), thus overlooks the element of duplicity and manipulation that was hardwired into fascist politics, and ends up transforming Reinhard the fox into a perfectly candid animal, whose every utterance can be trusted. Yet what about the claim that fascism inherited from the French Revolution the belief in popular sovereignty and hence that it was somehow democratic? Interestingly, this supposed link is established particularly with regards to the Jacobin phase of the revolution, the popular regime of 1793, as distinguished from the more properly bourgeois and liberal, Girondin phase of 1789. Fascism could positively relate, it is suggested, to the violent and terroristic Jacobins, with the concomitant rule of the sans-culotte mob. Some such theory can be found in the writings of the Social Democrat author Peter Beilharz (2009: 122), who claimed that it might “be possible to construct a socialist argument that connects Jacobinism in the manner of Bolshevism with something like fascism.” Yet the sharpest and most explicit articulation of the affinity between Jacobinism and fascism is probably Mosse. In his attempts to identify fascist roots in the soil of the French Revolution Mosse was adamant that these had nothing whatever to do with the revolution’s liberal phase, but only its Jacobin escalation. His argument is highly important and we shall quote it at some length, but divide it in two, in order to facilitate a discussion: Fascism saw the French Revolution as a whole through the eyes of the Jacobin dictatorship, and it was this aspect of the Revolution which exercised its influence upon it. The parliamentary phase of the French Revolution was non-existent as far as the fascists were concerned, and it is of interest in any comparison between the two movements only for contrast, as providing the opposite pole of the political spectrum. But one would learn little from this comparison about either fascism or the French Revolution. When the general term French Revolution is used in our context, it must be restricted to the Jacobin phase of the Revolution. (Mosse 1989: 6; emphasis added) Mosse here weaves a quintessential liberal narrative, on which “blame” is put on the radical 1793 revolution and on it alone. It is difficult to imagine a clearer example of the habitual distinction between the beautiful and “parliamentary” 1789 revolution and the ugly and “dictatorial” one of 1793. (For a critique of this distinction, see Žižek 2007: vii.) Let us read further, to see the way in which Mosse tries to ground his claim

180  Fascism and Mass Politics that through Jacobinism, and it alone, passes the thread that connects the revolution with fascism: [In the Jacobin phase of the Revolution] the worship of the people thus became the worship of the nation [. . .]. This new politics attempted to draw the people into active participation in the new order and to discipline them at the same time through rites and festivals, myths and symbols, which gave concrete expression to the general will. [. . .] The general will became a new religion expressed through an aesthetic of politics. Though revolutionary festivals took a variety of forms, they pointed to the new age of mass politics. The chaotic crowd of the “people” became a disciplined mass movement during the Revolution, participating in the orchestrated drama of politics. [. . .] The new politics attempted the politicization of the masses: for the first time in modern history they functioned as a pressure group and not just through episodic uprisings or shortlived riots. The age of modern mass politics had begun. Stressing this aspect of the French Revolution should clarify its importance for fascism, especially as nationalism took up this new politics with its carefully organized festivals, rites, myths and symbols. (Mosse 1989: 6–7; emphases added) This was written on the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, in 1989, revealing Mosse’s subscription to a long tradition interpreting fascism as a movement driven by the masses, propelling them into political action and fulfilling, at least in part, their desires. In discussing Mosse’s claims it is important to clarify that he does not speak of an identity between Jacobinism, on the one hand, and fascism/ National Socialism, on the other. On the contrary, he underlines the fact that, on the immediate and overt level, fascists were usually decided opponents of the Revolution, and on a number of occasions throughout his essay he stresses that the resemblance between the two movements is formal and methodical, while their political content is very different. He points out, for instance, that many fascists hated the Revolution, and saw the rites and ceremonies of the Jacobins only as a part of the Terror. This makes tracing any continuity difficult indeed, and yet as a matter of fact, Jacobin politics were adapted to quite different ends. (8; emphasis added) Or, (11): The content of most nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalism was different from that of the French Revolution, but its method of

Fascism and Mass Politics 181 politics and self-representation was similar. For example, Robespierre might have felt at home in nazi mass meetings [. . .]. He would have recognized the rhythms of such meetings, their songs and speaking choruses, and their play upon light and shadow would not have been strange, for the Revolution was fond of annexing to its own festival, sunrises, sunsets and dawns. Such qualifications notwithstanding, Mosse’s argument reveals problems that are readily identifiable even at this early stage in the analysis. One can take Mosse to issue in three main senses: 1. It is unclear if Mosse’s qualification of the argument does not in fact deflate it and render it meaningless. If the parallels between fascism and Jacobinism are merely formal, leaving substance alone, why do they matter? Hitler and Charlie Chaplin may look somewhat alike, but what of it? In establishing political links between different movements, pointing to formal resemblances is insufficient. One must rather identify some common goals and “ends.” 2. Even agreeing with Mosse that the French Revolution contributed to a political ceremonial and formal innovation, does this shed any special light on fascism? Modern politics in general, at least in countries embracing some form of democracy, exists in a dialogue with the masses. Ceremonies attempting to create the widest possible enthusiasm and emotional identification for a political movement thus form part of the mass politics in any given country, and one is hard put to see why fascism, of all movements, continues the revolutionary tradition. Would Robespierre have felt ill at ease, in formal terms at least, in ceremonies taking place, for instance, as part of an American, Australian or Brazilian election campaigns? Connecting him specifically with Nazism thus seems strained. In point of fact, enthusiastic mass participation in painstakingly orchestrated ceremonies and jubilees of various sorts is by no means either a strictly modern or a democratic innovation. It was used from times immemorial by European monarchies, for example, to arouse and/or deepen the subjects’ identification with their rule, and is still used in that way today. Can we detect here, too, the legacy of the Jacobins and the metamorphosis of the idea of popular sovereignty? 3. Most important, however, is a final point of criticism: for all his protestations to the contrary, Mosse did not in truth restrict his analogy between Jacobinism and fascism to mere issues of form but included ones of substance and goals. Consider the following claims, made later on in the essay (16): We have found links and differences between the French and the fascist revolutions [. . .]. Basic to all of these links was the

182  Fascism and Mass Politics democratization of politics, the rule of the general will, which informed the nationalism upon which fascism was built. Fascism and the French Revolution, each in its own way, saw itself as a democratic movement directed against the establishment. Fascism as a movement had a revolutionary thrust, and even in power— now itself the establishment—made full use of an anti-establishment rhetoric directed against the bourgeoisie. And a little later (20) he maintains that “the French Revolution stood at the beginning of a democratization of politics which climaxed in twentieth-century fascism.” Introducing the masses into politics, turning them into “pressure groups,” driving them into action, etc.: all these are not, surely, superficial and formal aspects but very substantial ones indeed. And “democratization” is the political question of substance bar none, concerning the extent to which the people can impact political developments, the degree in which these mirror the popular will and goals. These are hardly matters of form and ceremony. Mosse seemed eager to condemn mass democracy and recommend liberal elitism. Notice the way in which he did not find it sufficient to argue that fascism was one expression of democracy, but its very climax. After fascism, by implication, politics has become less rather than more democratic. And we are invited, between the lines, to appreciate that fact and, perhaps, commit ourselves to making sure that it stays a reality, that democracy is further curtailed. But such an argument against democracy fails to convince. Let us recall the following claim: “The new politics attempted the politicization of the masses: for the first time in modern history they functioned as a pressure group and nut just through episodic uprisings or short-lived riots. The age of modern mass politics had begun.” Here Mosse identified the common ground between Jacobinism and fascism, but ought to have identified precisely that which stands firmly between the two historical phenomena, the critical difference between them. Is there really any room for analogy? Preceding the French Revolution, the masses were indeed deprived of any political representation worth speaking of. It is only with the Revolution, and particularly during its Jacobin phase, that the commoners become a pressure group and that mass, democratic politics commences. But is this true of fascism, too (and here, of course, lies the novelty of Mosse’s thesis)? Paradoxically, the very innovation ascribed by Mosse, and rightly so, to the Jacobins, should have prevented him from attributing the same to the fascists. For in the nature of things, if the masses entered politics in 1789, and still more thoroughly in 1793, it follows that they were not ushered into politics by Italian fascism in 1921 or in 1933 Germany. By that historical stage they were exercising a very real pressure on the holders of power, were already very much part of the

Fascism and Mass Politics 183 game, indeed, according to many contemporary complaints, including fascist ones, they were arbitrating it altogether. One might have pointed to a certain analogy, had the masses in those countries in which fascists assumed power been formerly neutralized or depoliticized. Yet they were in truth highly active, enjoying various democratic rights which they have long and arduously fought for, and they were investing this power, to considerable effect, in strong mass parties and unions. How, then, can it be claimed that democratization climaxed in fascism? On what grounds can it be alleged that Nazism represented an empowerment of the masses as compared with the Republic of Weimar? Wherever it came to rule—in Italy, Germany, Austria, Spain and so on and so forth—fascism truncated democratic politics, prohibited independent unions, outlawed strikes and draconically persecuted labour leaders. Thus, whatever its liturgy, in substantial terms fascism represented a maximal neutralization of mass politics, the negation of the masses’ power and the confiscation of their organizational weapons. This signifies a clear disruption of the process that begun in the French Revolution rather than its prolongation, let alone “climax.” The improbability in seeing fascism as somehow “Jacobin” stands out, among other things, when the Jacobins’ relationship with the nobility, a harsh and hostile one, is compared with that between fascism and the aristocracy, which was characterized by a significant measure of harmony and mutual good will.15 The abortive nature of the attempt to blur the differences between the formal and the substantial aspects of politics is revealed in the very claim that “the new politics attempted to draw the people into active participation in the national mystique through rites and festivals, myths and symbols which gave a concrete expression of the general will.” In what sense can participation in carefully orchestrated ceremonies, in which every detail is painstakingly planned in advance by the regime, be said to be “active”? And does not such a choice of words conceal from our view the fact that attending such ceremonies was, at most, a substitute for the active participation of the masses—through voting, demonstrating, striking, etc.—in the democratic politics eliminated by fascism? Emilio Gentile (2002: 163) was therefore justified in stressing the radical incompatibility between fascism and democracy. As a corrective to Mosse’s perspective one might consult the great British caricaturist, born in New Zealand, David Low. One of the outstanding political commentators of his generation, in a 1934 drawing (Figure 3.1) he has shown himself more skeptical about mass’ participation in fascist ceremonies (Low 1949: 16): This caricature, as any caricature, simplifies things. It is clear that not all the enthusiasm expressed in fascist ceremonies was feigned, an artificial product of threats and penalties. There is no doubt that many felt a genuine identification with fascist regimes, adored the leaders and “burst

Figure 3.1 “Compulsory Spontaneous Demonstration” David Low/Solo Syndication

Fascism and Mass Politics 185 with joy” in gatherings and parades. And yet many others were compelled to participate, facing social pressure if nothing else, and, no less importantly, those who did not wish to participate could not express their dissent by, say, jeering and booing, not to mention organizing a counter-demonstration. I therefore propose the following revision of Mosse’s definition of the fascist political innovation: The new politics attempted to draw the people out of active participation in politics, and into passive participation in the national mystique through rites and festivals, myths and symbols which presented the will of the rulers as the general will. In the mid 1970s Mosse (1991: 3) advanced his interpretation of massified fascism in conscious opposition to traditional views, of liberals and left-wing observers, who saw in fascism an anti-popular dictatorship: Theories about fascism itself have tended to ignore the importance of those myths and cults which eventually provided the essence of fascist politics. For those who thought of themselves as liberals or as belonging to the left, fascism often presented an aberration of history, an “occupation” of the country by a barbaric minority. The people were held captive and when left to determine their own destiny would return either to a renewed liberalism or to Socialist ideals. Mosse obviously believed that such assumptions were hopelessly naïve. Yet so far at least, more than 70 years after the Second World War, the course of historical events seems rather to have given them credence: once fascist dictatorships have been toppled and the people resumed their participation in politics, a return to a non-fascist politics has taken place, one that may in fact be defined as a renewed liberalism or social democracy. In no formerly fascist country did fascism return to power, and even such movements that continue the fascist legacy in certain respects and that did manage to be electorally successful to some degree—for example in Italy, Austria or France—no longer declare their intent to do away with the parliamentary system. One may agree with Mosse, to be sure, on one thing: fascism did not represent a tiny minority. As we saw, it managed, under democratic conditions, to sway a significant portion, for instance, of the German public, albeit still a minority (its peak result in free elections being 37.4 percent). Yet an examination of its social base of support does not confirm the thesis of massification, pointing rather to a broadly based elitism: its appeal resonated, especially, from the middle classes upwards.16 How representative are the views of Mosse and Riley? While interpretations seeing fascism as outright “democratic” are exceptional, not so are what I propose to term “majoritarian interpretations” of fascism.

186  Fascism and Mass Politics While more sophisticated than earlier forms of mass theory, a significant part of the historiography of the last three decades or so has continued some of the latter’s main emphases in somewhat different form: National Socialism is now recurrently presented as a fundamentally majoritarian oppression of minorities—Jews, a-socials, homosexuals, gypsies, political dissidents and so on—with the consent of the majority and, indeed, to its benefit. While the works of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (1996) and Götz Aly (2006), emphasizing the collective guilt and complicity of common Germans with the crimes of the Nazi regime, have remained extreme exemplars of this trend, and were rejected by many, in attenuated form their claims are in fact not so far from what is now the hegemonic perspective. The majoritarian historians, if so they may be called, have now become a majority while the “minoritarians,” it would seem, have dwindled into a minority. This is especially clear with regards to the debate on the significance of the Volksgemeinschaft: once widely rejected as a fundamentally propagandistic trope, at present more and more historians seem to be taking it at face value, and giving large credit to the Nazi claim to have successfully united German society around an egalitarian ethos, excluding from this harmony only the persecuted minorities. (For a recent collection of essays that mostly advance such claims, see Steber and Gotto 2014.) Directly or indirectly, this interpretation reinforces the old liberal matrix, according to which fascism was “the tyranny of the majority”; it is sometimes linked with a critical view of the post-Second World War welfare state as somehow perpetuating the Nazi legacy (examples of overt anti-welfarism would be Aly and Robert Gellately 2002).17 A remarkably similar historiographical trend was set even earlier with regards to fascist Italy, with the initially revisionist contentions of Renzo De Felice, which have by now been largely assimilated into the mainstream. In the fourth volume of Mussolini’s massive biography, Gli anni del consenso [The years of consensus] published in 1974, De Felice—himself indebted to Talmon and Mosse’s views of fascism as an offshoot of the French Revolution—claimed that from 1929 to 1934 the fascist regime was enjoying its period of greatest stability with a population largely aligned behind it. This originally tentative and qualified assessment was later taken further by the author, and especially by his many followers (De Felice died in 1996), to imply something of a general consensus enjoyed by Italian fascism during most of its career. This wide support came to an end only with the major blunder committed by Mussolini of joining Hitler and entering the Second World War on the side of the eventual losers. The worst features of Italian fascism—such as the introduction of racial laws and irresponsible militarism—were something of byproducts of that illadvised alliance rather than inherent to fascism as such. In a way that would have been unthinkable some decades ago, majoritarian interpreters in both cases—the German and the Italian—paint a

Fascism and Mass Politics 187 rather rosy picture of the regimes they address, with regards, that is, to the majority of Italians and Germans. Supposedly low levels of dissent and of repression under both Mussolini and Hitler indicate to these scholars that life under these dictators, unless one happened to belong to fairly limited circles of victims, was not that bad at all, until the latter phases of the war. Hence the term “the indulging dictatorship” (Gefälligkeitsdiktatur) used by Aly to refer to the Nazi system,18 recalling earlier flattering epithets attached to Italian fascism. “Without too much effort,” wrote Paul Corner (2002: 325) of Italian historiography, “we are back to the well-worn clichés of il fascismo bonario (kind-hearted fascism) and la dittatura all’acqua di rosa (rosewater dictatorship), and collective guilt (if it was ever felt) turns into collective absolution.” The last words aptly convey an important distinction between the effect majoritarianism has in both cases: in Germany it has functioned mainly to inculpate the majority—presented as apathetic, selfish, indulgent and often outright belligerent—in the undeniable atrocities of the regime, while in Italy the same logic served an apologetic and exonerating function: if a majority of Italians found Mussolini’s dictatorship not only bearable but in many ways attractive, it cannot have been quite as bad as it was made out to be for several decades by postwar moralistic and preachy anti-fascists. So while in Germany majoritarianism censures the people, in Italy it generally rebounds in favor of the regime. A critique of the majoritarian view can draw on the incisive responses of those historians who have insisted that fascism in both countries was based, in fact, on the oppression of the majority of the subjects, that its rule, while doubtlessly popular in certain circles, relied on a vast apparatus of terror, and that it harmed, rather than furthered, the vital interests of most subjects. The very notion of popular consent, to begin with, is dubious in the context of a dictatorial regime blocking all avenues of free expression, organization and dissent. As asked by Ian Kershaw (2014: 36), “how do we ascertain consensus in a terroristic dictatorship?” Where expressions of enthusiasm are encouraged and manifestations of discontent are disallowed by a single-party regime in complete control of all mechanisms of punishment and reward alike, there is something deeply disingenuous about accepting enthusiasm as necessarily genuine and construing silence by default as approval. As Richard J. Evans (2016: 115) poignantly observed apropos such notions, “to talk of ‘consent’ is meaningless unless it is freely given.” Which justified his further claim: “Categories such as ‘tacit consent’ or ‘passive consent’ are in this context little more than vehicles of negative moral judgment.” A comparable critique of the use of the terms “consent” and “consensus” in description of Italians’ attitudes to fascism was advanced by Paul Corner in a concise, tour-de-force deconstruction of the new paradigms in Italian historiography. Drawing attention to the a priori limits of the notions of consensus where it is enforced upon the citizens, Corner has none other than

188  Fascism and Mass Politics Mussolini himself spell out the dependence of any possible consensus he may achieve on the use of force, a dependence that so many historians now gratuitously choose to miss. “I am taking to myself,” declared Mussolini in 1923, “the maximum of available force. Because it may turn out that, by chance, force will create consensus—and in any case, should consensus be lacking, there is always force” (In Corner 2002: 329). Beyond the methodological flaws that perforce vitiate any arguments about consent under dictatorships, historians such as Corner, Evans, Kershaw and many others have amassed a wealth of concrete evidence showing that it is not only logically dubious to speak of a consensus for the fascist regimes in Italy and Germany, it is also factually and demonstrably problematic, to put it mildly. Here the evidence concerns, first, direct state violence against large sections of the Italian and German peoples, the widespread use of terror as an instrument of both repression and deterrence; second, even when actual or potential violence was not involved, fascist regimes so completely monopolized the public sphere and the domain of work, that the vast majority of the subjects simply had no real alternatives other than submitting. With regards to the first aspect—direct or implied application of force—it may defy belief but much of the effort by historians trying to stem the majoritarian flood went simply into showing that Mussolini’s and Hitler’s regimes were brutal police states showing little scruples in the repression and surveillance of their populaces. What in the past would have been almost too obvious to mention, has now become a case that needs to be made. The Nazi state’s general reputation is still vicious enough, perhaps, for us not to dwell on this aspect too much. But it is worth mentioning, against the notion gaining in currency that Nazi violence targeted almost exclusively select minorities and left the majority relatively unscathed, that the regime’s very existence depended on the suppression of workingclass organizations, both communist and social democratic, that were representative of many millions of Germans and that this was effected with ruthless brutality. Evans here very effectively dismantles the majoritarian premises, targeting especially Gellately’s as well as Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s work. Against the claim that Nazi violence was “visited upon small minorities,” Evans (2016: 92) stresses the fact that “in 1933 the Communists were by some distance the largest category of people imprisoned in the [concentration] camps” and that they “were only social outsiders from the perspective of the middle classes, a perspective which Gellately too often unconsciously adopts.” He goes on to describe the thorough suppression of the forces of “Marxism,” which in the Nazi jargon meant the Social Democrats, as distinguished from the Communists who were referred to as Bolsheviks. And he is obliged to point out what should have been obvious but is regrettably obscured in many accounts, namely that in the last Weimar Republic Reichstag elections, both parties

Fascism and Mass Politics 189 had 13.1 million voters between them, outstripping the Nazis who won 11.7 million votes. This leads Evans (95) to protest against the way majoritarian historians are happy to differentiate “simply between ‘social outcasts’ and the rest, describing the latter as a more or less uniform majority of ‘the people,’ ‘the masses,’ or ‘the Germans,’ ” and to remind them that the main obstacle to the Nazis consolidation in power “was posed by the mass allegiance of millions of workers to the ideals and principles of Social Democracy and Communism, an allegiance whose formal expression could only be broken by terror.” (On continual suppression of Communist resistance fighters during the Third Reich, see Mason 1997: 178.) And while Evans is aware of the fact that the middle classes and the peasantry were incomparably less threatening from the regime’s point of view, he feels obliged to mention that they too were in many cases harshly disciplined, as Nazi threats and violence directed against Catholics, liberals and even nationalists demonstrates. In another important contribution in the same book, Evans (2016: 125) scrutinizes the assumptions underlying what has been called “the voluntarist turn” in the historiography of Nazism, namely the move from the view that the Nazi state forced itself on the ordinary German, to one that sees him or her as freely acquiescing with the regime. (Evans’s main adversary here is the American historian Peter Fritsche 2009.) Authors of this new line emphasize the nearly universal support allegedly given to the Nazi war, and substantiate this, for example, by invoking the way the troops kept on fighting even when the prospect of winning all but vanished. A single data provided by Evans (2016: 127) will suffice to put in doubt the depth of such ostensible voluntarism: in the course of the Second World War some 30.000 German troops were put before firing squads, “compared to a mere eighteen— eighteen!—during the First World War.” Documenting state brutality is probably more pertinent, however, with regards to Mussolini’s rule, that was always surrounded by a somewhat innocuous aura, represented as an almost benign dictatorship a la Italiana, a notion often buttressed by clichés about the easygoing, lighthearted and gentle Italian character and with the iconic view of Il Duce as a buffoonish tyrant, tilting more to the grotesque than to the properly terrifying side. It is here that the importance of a number of recent studies emerges in which this stereotypical concept is dismantled and Italian fascism is shown to have been a repressive system in many ways akin to the Nazi and the Stalinist regimes, to which it so often flatteringly compared. As Michael R. Ebner argues in a very useful book-length exploration of the pervasive, “ordinary violence” meted out by Italian fascism, Mussolini’s was a classic police state: The case files of Fascism’s political detainees reveal patterns of physical attacks, threats, intimidation, and discrimination that were so

190  Fascism and Mass Politics mundane, banal, and similar, that they can only have occurred repeatedly literally ad infinitum, hundreds of thousands, even millions, of times over the course of two decades. Consequently, public and private spaces—particularly the iconic spaces of public life (e.g., the bar or the piazza)—were transformed into sites of fear and intimidation. (Ebner 2011: 5) Such a conclusion is reinforced by information provided by Paul Corner, pointing out that in the late 1930s, on a weekly average, “some 20.000 police operations against opponents of the regime” were conducted, “resulting in arrests, the seizure of arms and opposition pamphlets, and the closure of meeting places.” Mounting up to over a million yearly police operations, this suggests, as the author sardonically comments, “a consensus for fascism that was at best somewhat strained” (Corner 2002: 333). Corner likewise underscores (334) the enormous significance of the fascist secret police, the OVRA, in spreading a general atmosphere of terror that served to suppress actual dissenters and deter potential ones: The OVRA—whose director, along with the chief of police, reported every morning personally to Mussolini—demonstrated a typically totalitarian obsession with detail in its investigations and built up over the years a huge data bank of files on political suspects in Italy and abroad.19 Complementing this vast repressive apparatus, which was fascism’s first line of attack, was the monopolization of civil society in such a way that effectively made it extremely difficult for Italians and Germans to step out of line. Majoritarians typically emphasize the cajoling nature of these regimes—the perks offered to party members, the benefits of after work activities, etc. What they neglect by comparison is the extremely negative consequences these same measures implied for those who refused to go along. For many Italian workers, for example, declining the fascist union card meant that obtaining livelihood became very unlikely. So the carrot was at one and the same time a stick. Normal life under fascism was permitted only to those who would accept the regime and relinquish all open opposition to it, so that, contra majoritarianism, the huge majority of people simply had no real alternative but to behave themselves. Nor should one infer from this that, if one just embraced the fascist state, the state in turn would reciprocate in kind by opening up a realm of egalitarianism and possibilities for advancement to the very humble. The class logic of fascism, as we have analyzed, meant that fascist welfare benefits, such as they were, overwhelmingly favored the middle classes over the workers. Corner is again very useful, stressing the systematic preferential treatment accorded by Italian fascism to the impiegati, white-collar employees in both the state and the private sector, as compared to blue-collar

Fascism and Mass Politics 191 workers. One data will have to suffice: “the more you earned the less you paid proportionately; the contributions were in every sense regressive. Yet pensions for impiegati were 114 percent higher than those paid to workers” (Corner 2002: 347). To conclude, relative paucity of open dissent in both countries granted, it is simply beside the point: there was so little to gain by defying Mussolini and Hitler and so much to lose, for open dissent to provide a valuable indication of people’s levels of actual satisfaction from their lives under the reputedly indulging dictatorships. In reality, there are strong indications that many people were highly dissatisfied with their lives, at least for long periods of fascist rule. In a recent, book-length study dedicated to the way ordinary Italians experienced the fascist ventennio, the 20 years of fascist rule, Corner subjected to sustained critique the prevalent notions of a popular consensus backing the regime and the idea of “a political religion,” which, according to Emilio Gentile and others, successfully captured the subjects’ imaginations and gave their lives new and satisfying content.20 The author’s conclusions point rather to a widespread frustration with a political experiment that many Italians resentfully perceived as corrupt, unjust and not even efficient (Corner 2012). With regards to Nazi Germany, similar conclusions can be drawn from sources that are above suspicion of entertaining an oppositional bias. Ian Kershaw (2014: 37) provides illuminating commentary: When the Berlin Gestapo conducted its own soundings into the mood of the people in all parts of the city in January 1936, it spoke of a “directly negative attitude towards State and Movement,” prevalent among a “shockingly high percentage of the population.” [. . .] The report interpreted the discontent as a symptom of a deep-seated lack of confidence in the state leadership, not stopping at Hitler, and huge anger at the disparity between the poverty of the masses and the ostentatious wealth and blatant corruption of the Party bosses. This does not sound much like a united Volksgemeinschaft and a “consensual dictatorship.” It is important, moreover, to approach the notion of the Volksgemeinschaft historically, and locate its roots in elitist and hierarchic discourses rather than in the putative egalitarianism that the very word combination “people’s community” seems to evoke. Neither “Volk” nor “Gemeinschaft” should be understood as reflecting simply popular and egalitarian sensibilities. As far as “the people” are concerned it is useful to recall Thomas Mann’s assertion (2002: 263) that “The individualistic mass is democratic, the Volk is aristocratic.” Talk of the “community,” similarly, was common among German conservatives as well as industrial magnates. As will be discussed in Chapter 5, whose focus is on consumption under fascist regimes, Nazi social policies were largely compatible with

192  Fascism and Mass Politics industrial measures and often took over from where capitalist initiatives left off. It is therefore necessary to qualify the populist break too hastily ascribed to the Nazis, as a line from a novel by Hans Fallada (2009: 93) can serve to remind us: The few civilians present were lost in this swarm. They were insignificant and boring among so many uniforms, just as the civilian population out in the streets and factories never amounted to anything compared to the Party. The Party was everything, and the people nothing. This is not to deny that Nazism enjoyed wide support among the population, let alone to claim that every section, social or religious, of the German people was oppressed in quite the same way and to the same degree. The aim is rather to resist the tendency to overstate “consent” and downplay state terror, coercion and the systematic elimination of any genuine alternatives. Finally, it is important to say something about the ideological context in which these scholarly debates unfold since, as is usually the case, especially where issues of such obvious sociopolitical ramifications as the nature of fascism are concerned, science and society are not separate spheres but ones closely interlinked. And so they must finally be considered in conjunction. After cogently making the case that Nazism was an oppressive regime and that its violence quite centrally targeted common Germans, not just outsiders, Evans (2016: 99) is compelled to raise a highly pertinent question: “How, then have some historians failed to recognize this fact and claimed instead that Nazi violence was directed only against small and socially marginal minorities?” It seems to me, however, that the question will be more productive if the initial “how” will be replaced by a “why,” because the majoritarian theories cannot be adequately understood unless their social vantage point is taken into consideration. It is necessary to take cognizance of the way that the notion of collective guilt can indirectly lead to an exoneration of those individuals and groups who in truth were chiefly responsible for Nazism. One of the explicit reasons many supporters of fascism gave to first encourage and then justify the transition from democracy to authoritarianism, was that the former system dissolves political responsibility among the mass, bogs decision making in a morass of anonymous voters and committees, whereas the latter firmly deposits responsibility in the hands of a capable leadership, and ultimately in one, supreme leader. As Luigi Pirandello (1993: 146) put it, through one of his characters: But do you know what is the real cause of our ills, of this our affliction? Democracy, my dear, democracy, that is the rule of the majority. Since when power is in the hands of one alone, this one knows that

Fascism and Mass Politics 193 he is one and that he must satisfy many; but when the many govern, and think only of satisfying themselves, then we have the most stupid and hideous tyranny of all: tyranny masquerading as liberty. Pirandello’s characters, it turns out, were not only searching for an author, as the title of his famous 1921 play has it, but also for a dictator. And this, by extension, can be said of many middle-class Italians and Germans. Fascist dictators thus duly stepped in to execute what wide sections of their elitist countrymen and women felt was necessary, as Hitler made clear in Mein Kampf, regurgitating what were by that time established anti-democratic clichés. “The parliament,” he complained (1999: 79), arrives at some decision whose consequences may be ever so ruinous—nobody bears any responsibility for this, no one can be taken to account. [. . .] Can a fluctuating majority of people ever be made responsible in any case? Isn’t the very idea of responsibility bound up with the individual? We need to critically confront not only the classical theory of mass society expounded by the likes of Arendt, but also its fashionable reformulation which grants the fascists their claims of having founded genuine “people’s parties,” drawing their support from all social classes, representing, basically, everyone. In this historical account, accountability takes the form of some collective guilt, affecting the entirety of the German or Italian peoples. But the blame is so generously and indiscriminately placed as to become irrelevant. Guilt ascribed in such manner loses all political and historical sense, failing to distinguish between those who longed for the leader and those who merely succumbed; those who actively sought to dispose of mass democracy, and those who passively suffered the results; those who undermined all efforts to create an egalitarian community and preached the alternative of the Volksgemeinschaft, and those who were the victims of this so-called community; those who called for the great individual to step forward and take “responsibility” and those who preferred to have it democratically shared. Ironically, those who clamored for the masses to give way and the individual to finally bear responsibility, then disappeared into the same masses they formerly despised. Uncannily, if conveniently, the responsible ones shed their concrete, individual identity, and melt into a faceless, amorphous, gray multitude, quite reminiscent of Martin Heidegger’s das Man. But, when it comes to “the they,” it is perhaps Heidegger (1967: 127) who should be given the last word: The “they” is everywhere present, but in such a way, that it always sneaks away whenever Dasein presses for a decision. Yet because the “they” pretends to judge and to decide everything, it takes the

194  Fascism and Mass Politics responsibility away from the particular Dasein. The “they” manages, as it were, to have “them” always invoking it. It can account for everything most easily, since it is nobody who needs to answer for anything. It was always the “they” and yet it can be said that it was “nobody.” Paradoxically, by underscoring collective guilt, such interpretations end up distracting attention from those mainly responsible and rolling it back to the doorstep of das Man. Bourgeoisie and masses, perpetrators and victims, are conveniently rolled into one. Thus George Mosse, son of one of Germany’s richest families, was born and raised in a fancy Berlin quarter, precisely one of the city’s parts where the NSDAP garnered its best results in free elections, as contrasted with working-class quarters where their results were significantly less impressive (as argued in Hamilton 1982). And while initially Mosse wrote from a left-wing perspective and was harshly critical of the country’s upper and middle classes, as time went by he seemed increasingly more content with emphasizing the role of “the masses” in sustaining fascism, until finally proclaiming it the pinnacle of democracy.21 Other histories go a step farther, and have perpetrators and victims swap places altogether. In Götz Aly’s account, if anyone in Germany needs feel aggrieved by the Nazis (small minorities apart), it is the country’s bourgeoisie, at whose expense was erected the “indulging dictatorship,” pampering the masses. As reflected by two subsections of his discussion of Nazi economics, titled “taxation mildness for the masses” and “taxation severity against the bourgeoisie” (these claims will be revisited, in a slightly different context, in Chapter 5). Here, das Man not only provide a convenient hiding place for the guilty individual; they become the story’s very villain.

The Religion of Nature and Eugenics An important facet of the new, surrogate religion of nature that was developed as part of the attempt to dehumanize atheism (as discussed in the previous chapter), and which was embraced and further processed by fascism, was the mystical approach to nature, to plants and to wildlife. These attitudes also reflected a neo-romantic sensitivity and an aversion to the modern, massified, metropolis. A characteristic manifestation of this mystique was the National-Socialist cult of the forest, that facilitated an evocation of glorious episodes in the German past such as the victory of the legendary military leader Arminius (Hermann in modern German) over the Romans in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (Varusschlacht), which took place in 9 CE, in the northwestern part of modern Germany. This battle became a symbol of German nationalism especially during the romantic period, as stylized by writers such as Heinrich von Kleist. (On

Fascism and Mass Politics 195 the forest as a symbol of German nationalism from the early 19th century to the end of the Second World War, see Zechner 2011.) The forest represented the vigorous and primeval ethos with which Nazism sought to replace the meek Christianity imposed on the German tribes, as well as a mysterious image of an organic, cohesive and combative collective, which is well rooted in the soil but manages nevertheless to expand and annex further territories: the image’s role was emotional, not logical. As in the forest, what seemed to count was not the individual warrior, the lonely tree, but the survival of the entire forest. The Nazis pseudo-historically bestowed on the Germans the title of “forest people,” a people striking deep cultural roots into the forest soil from which it allegedly sprang forth. This mythical self-representation was grafted onto the regime’s racist ideology. The ability to care for the forest was perceived as a unique attribute of the Aryans, while Jews and Slavs were represented as desert and steppe peoples, respectively, hostile to the forest. So argued Hermann Göring, the prominent figure in the Nazi movement for the preservation of nature: “When we walk around in the forest, we see God’s magnificent creation [. . .]. That distinguishes us from yonder people which deems itself chosen, yet will only calculate the market prize for a cubic meter of timber” (In Zechner 2011: 25). These motifs were propagandistically employed in a full feature motion picture, Eternal Forest (1936), produced at the behest of Alfred Rosenberg (directed by Hanns Springer and Rolf von Sonjevski-Jamrowski). Its dramatic opening sentence already contains the racist, imperialist, social Darwinist and mystical messages of the movie: “Eternal forest—eternal people. The tree, it lives like you and me, it strives for space like you and me. [. . .] People and forest persist for eternity.” And one of its final sentences focuses on the message of a national regeneration, to be achieved by eliminating the sick and the foreign: “Let’s weed out the racially alien and the sick. [. . .] Join in to sing the new song of the time: ‘People and forest persist for eternity’ ” (In Zechner 2011: 23). The movie is also a prime example of the Nazi attempt to displace the humanistic legacy of Judaeo-Christianity in favor of a pantheism imbibed by the spirit of Nietzsche and Haeckel. As stated by Lee and Wilke (2005: 42) in their analysis of the film and its ideological context: To a certain extent, National Socialist ideology stemmed from the pantheistic rationalism of Ernst Haeckel, zoologist, father of ecology, and founder of the Monist League. Haeckel’s monism, for Darré and other Nazis, provided an influential “over-arching belief system” because it legitimated the rejection of Christianity in favor of a monistic religion in which the nation was seen as the ultimate whole, worthy of worship and obligation.

196  Fascism and Mass Politics This worship of nature can help to explain an aspect of National Socialism that may seem somewhat surprising in retrospect, and this is the way the Nazi regime was in many senses a “green” one, exhibiting special sensitivity to issues of protection and preservation of nature, restriction of animal suffering, an emphasis on natural and organic nutrition and so on and so forth. Under Nazism several pioneering laws were passed for the preservation of nature and preventing experimentation with animals, and the regime actively encouraged consumption of organic food, notably the promotion of whole wheat bread. In order to have bakeries produce especially such bread, the “Reich’s committee for whole wheat bread” (Reichsvollkornbrotausschuss) was established in 1939, and Dr. Leonhard Conti, head of the physicians’ union, declared: “The fight over whole wheat bread is the fight for the people’s health” (In Melzer 2003: 189). In January 1940, it is interesting to note, the same Conti, according to various testimonies, was involved in the euthanasia killings, through the use of lethal injections and gas chambers, undertaken in a “medical center” in Brandenburg, where their respective effects were compared. He himself, apparently, administered lethal injections to invalids. This experiment was of great importance for the continuation of the Nazi euthanasia project.22 Nazism also conducted a successful national campaign against smoking and encouraged researches that established for the first time the connection between smoking and lung cancer (Proctor 2000). Pioneering legislation protected the environment and was praised by activists for the preservation of nature, such as the June 1935 Reichsnaturschutzgesetz (Uekoetter 2006: 61).23 In August 1933, Nazi Germany also had the honor of passing the first law against vivisection, under Göring’s initiative. In a radio broadcast he explained the motives behind the law: An absolute and permanent ban on vivisection is not only a necessary law to protect animals and show sympathy with their pain, but it is also a law for humanity itself. [. . .] I have therefore announced the immediate prohibition of vivisection and made the practice a punishable offence in Prussia. Until such time as punishment is pronounced the culprit shall be lodged in a concentration camp. (In Marquardt 1993: 124)24 Göring forbade the setting of traps for commercial purposes, limited hunting and set up regulations for horse shoeing and the boiling of lobsters. A fisherman cutting up a frog for use as bait was sent to a concentration camp (Marquardt 1993: 124–125). Göring’s anti-vivisection law survived in its original form for only three weeks, since it collided with the requirements of scientific and technological development that was vital, among other things, for speeding up rearmament (Uekoetter 2006: 55–56). Yet this law, alongside other “green” facets of the regime, still

Fascism and Mass Politics 197 cannot but astonish. How could a movement that held human beings in contempt, respectfully and mercifully handle animals or trees, at least in certain cases? Why did the Nazis, under whose rule spine-chilling experiments were conducted in humans, take a stand against animal vivisection? How could a movement that sent millions to their deaths, be so interested in healthy food, in the damages of smoking and in the battle against cancer? The foregoing discussion of the fascist cult of nature and its ideological roots (Chapter 2) suggests that, far from presenting a contradiction, this side of Nazism displays an ideological and emotional consistency. The Nazis’ contempt for humans did not fly in the face of their sensitivity to nature, but complemented it, forming the other side of the coin. Nazism did not adore nature in spite of its disdain for humans but because of it. It relied upon the dehumanizing tradition whose purpose was to belittle humanity as compared to nature and to deprive it of its position of primacy, which both science and Lebensphilosophie demonstrated to be underserved. As Nietzsche advised, fascism redressed the “error” that privileged humanity, placing it “in a false order of rank in relation to animals and nature,” and, doing that, it managed to simultaneously “remove humanity, humanness and ‘human dignity.’ ” From Darwinism as a theory seeking to trace and explain the development of different organisms, contempt for humanity by no means necessarily follows. As rightly observed by Daniel Gasman, from the scientific recognition that the human being is a natural creature rather than having a divine origin, it is indeed possible to draw the conclusion that it is a creature of inferior value—a “monkey” of sorts, and monkeys are usually not highly evaluated. Yet the opposite conclusion can also be drawn: humanity’s “humble” beginnings can serve as evidence of the remarkable progress it has made, and hence vouch for its value and achievement. But this was not the line of thought taken by social Darwinists such as Haeckel: For Haeckel knowledge of the animal origin of man did not deepen one’s knowledge of man qua man, as much as it showed how man was rooted in nature and how meager his distinctive human characteristics were. He emphasized not how far man has travelled from his animal past, but how close he really was to his animal forbears. (Gasman 2007: 11) Herein the reduction in the value of humans brought about by the social Darwinist school, a reduction that was of course not coincidental, or the product of a merely theoretical discussion, but the result of social and class struggle and the desire to destroy the basis sustaining social and political demands. The worker as a human being, has rights; the worker as a worm—does not. Thus, the scientific realization of humanity’s

198  Fascism and Mass Politics natural origins went in two directions: on the one hand, it triggered a positive evaluation of nature, of plants and animals, upon which were bestowed greatness and value formerly exclusive to humanity. On the other hand, humanity was demoted on account of its naturalization. This line of thought anathematized the humanistic tradition. For example, the supporters of animal protection in Nazi Germany explicitly denied that their position had anything to do with anthropocentrism: “We no longer punish animal torture because it hurts human feelings due to man’s compassion for the creation but because the animal as such needs protection against abusive behavior” (In Uekoetter 2006: 55). The author of the book in which this sentence is quoted gives these activists credit, since he identifies the presumably progressive nature of this recognition of the immanent value of animals. But he overlooks the other side of the coin, in which a higher value placed on animals went hand in hand with a reduction in the value of human beings. This internal logic of the Nazi cult of nature, distorted as it was, is reflected in one of the infamous speeches given by Heinrich Himmler before SS leaders on October 4, 1943, in occupied Poland. It includes well-known praise for the heroic way in which those he commanded managed to stay decent (anständig) people even while “exterminating the Jews.” But it also contains an argument which instructively places the Nazi treatment of occupied peoples in the framework of their attitudes to animals: Whether other peoples live well or starve to death interests me only insofar as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise it doesn’t interest me. Whether during the construction of an anti-tank trench 10.000 Russian wenches collapse of exhaustion or not, interests me only insofar as the trench needs to be completed for Germany. We will never be rough and heartless where this is unneeded, this is clear. We Germans, who alone in the world have a decent approach to animals, will also decently treat these human animals [Menschentieren] but it is a crime against our own blood to be concerned about them and bring them ideals, that will make it even more difficult for our sons and grandsons to deal with them. If someone comes to me and says: “I can’t build the tank trench with children or with the women, this is inhuman for they will die of it,” then I have to say: “You are a murderer of your own blood since, if this tank trench will not be built, German soldiers will die, and these are the sons of German mothers. That is our blood.”25 In the emphasized sentence, the paradoxical, twofold character of the Nazi cult of nature is encapsulated. Animals get to be treated decently since they are close to humans; but humans, especially those regarded as inferior, the Slavs, merit contempt on account of their proximity to animals: “Human animals.” Himmler’s social Darwinism, needless to

Fascism and Mass Politics 199 say, is nationalist and racist. The battle for survival is not waged merely between individuals or classes, but between nations of different “blood.” And German blood is infinitely more precious than Slav, let alone Jewish one. But it is important to remember that with all the importance of this aspect, the Nazis by no means sanctified German blood as such, and did not shy away from euthanasia and sterilization of those who carried it in their veins but were considered of “lesser value” for being sick, invalids, alcoholic and so on and so forth. In summary, the fascists and particularly the Nazis—who were very close to the West scientifically and keenly embraced Darwinism—brought the religion of nature as far as it can go. Under their hands, this cult yielded the most horrendous crimes in history. Yet they did not invent ex nihilo; they fed off existing ideologies. The contempt for humans—especially of the lower, “primitive” sort—and the appreciation of animals were a common motif in contemporary Western culture. As evidence it is possible to quote from a story that was first published in 1912 and became immensely popular throughout the Western world, recounting the wondrous exploits of an English aristocrat who finds himself alone in the African jungle as a baby, is adopted by a motherly ape, and grows up to be lord of the entire jungle. This son of lords is world known by the name he was given by the apes of the tribe in which he grew, Tarzan, which means “white skin” in the apes’ language. And in the book opening the series one can read the following passage, in which Tarzan deepens his knowledge of other humans living in the jungle, whose skins are black: Tarzan had learned from his books but scattered fragments of the ways of human beings. When he had followed Kulonga through the forest he had expected to come to a city of strange houses on wheels, puffing clouds of black smoke from a huge tree stuck in the roof of one of them—or to a sea covered with mighty flowing buildings which he had learned were called, variously, ships and boats and steamers and craft. He had been sorely disappointed with the little village of the blacks, hidden away in his own jungle, and with not a single house as large as his own cabin upon the distant beach. He saw that these people were more wicked than his own apes, and as savage and cruel as Sabor [the lioness], herself. Tarzan began to hold his own kind in but low esteem. Now they had tied their poor victim to a great post near the center of the village [. . .]. [Tarzan] wondered if they would spring upon their meat while it was still alive. The Apes did not do such things as that. The circle of warriors about the cringing captive drew closer and closer to their prey. [. . .] Eyes, ears, arms and legs were pierced;

200  Fascism and Mass Politics every inch of the poor writhing body that did not cover a vital organ became the target of the cruel lancers. The women and children shrieked their delight. The warriors licked their hideous lips in anticipation of the feast to come. (Burroughs 1990: 103–104) The higher-race Tarzan, who lives in an “eternal forest” of his own and sees the blacks as lower than the animals whom he highly values, is a good example of the enormous impact of social Darwinism and the cult of nature over contemporary imagination, very far from Germany: the author, E. R. Burroughs, was an American. Is this a “vulgarization”? An inevitable distortion of scientific ideas once they become reflected in the mirror of popular culture? This conclusion would be unjust. For one thing, the Tarzan tales are more complex than this passage would lead one to suppose, and they include humane and tolerant inclinations, which were magnified in the cinematic version of the stories in the 1930s and 40s.26 But beyond that, very similar messages, preferring animals over humans of “inferior” races, can be found in many texts where no adventures and heroic acts are told, written in scholarly style, and whose place is not on the teenager’s shelf but in the library of the sophisticated and well-educated person of the age. The following is an example: But there can hardly be any doubt that we are descended from barbarians. The astonishment which I felt on first seeing a party of Feugians on a wild and broken shore will never be forgotten by me, for the reflection at once rushed to my mind—such were our ancestors. These men were absolutely naked and bedaubed with paint, their long hair was tangled, their mouths frothed with excitement, and their expression was wild, startled, and distrustful. They possessed hardly any arts, and like wild animals lived on what they could catch; they had no government, and were merciless to every one not of their own small tribe. He who has seen a savage in his native land will not feel much shame, if forced to acknowledge that the blood of some more humble creature flows in his veins. For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon, who descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs—as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions. The author in this case is very far removed from sensationalism and cannot be charged with any extremism. It is Charles Darwin himself (2004: 689).

Fascism and Mass Politics 201 Considered demographically, fascism—especially in its German variant —inherited the late 19th-century and early 20th-century legacy of preoccupation about the rise of the masses and the perceived secular process through which quantity trumped quality. These issues, and the readiness to deal with them eugenically, were an important part of the National Socialist concept of race. Some scholars draw a distinction between Western eugenics—British, North American, French and so on and so forth—and the Nazi one, on the grounds that the former focused on internal social improvement, and hence worked primarily with a criterion of class, whereas the latter was obsessed with the struggle of the entire race, embracing all Aryans regardless of class, against other races. (See, for a useful overview of the debate, Stone 2002.) This distinction may contain a measure of truth with regards to the main emphases, but it is too sweeping, in both directions: for in truth Western eugenics—of which it would be capricious to exclude Germany in any case—by no means shunned issues of race and imperialism, while Nazi eugenics, for its part, had a crucial class dimension. The theories of Hans F. K. Günther, known also as the Race Pope (Rassenpapst), one of the most influential authors on issues of racial hygiene in the Republic of Weimar and the Third Reich, exhibit an unmistakably bourgeois vantage point. In his often best-selling pedagogic books, laden with tables and illustrations, Günther, “the major scientific ideologue of Nazi racial theory,” (Tucker 1994: 131) lamented the high procreation rate among the lower orders—blue-collar workers, the unemployed, criminals—at the expense of the “Nordic man” who is expressly identified with the educated, competitive and productive middle class, whose members include academics, teachers, educated merchants and so on and so forth. The latter, far from being able to keep up demographically, collapses under the tax burden levied by the welfare state in its zeal to sustain the backward masses (Günther 1929: 73, 305). Invoking Goethe and Nietzsche, Günther summons up his readers’ courage to overcome the feminine and humanitarian sense of compassion that has crippled the Western nations, and supplant it with the manly, sober and responsible recognition that only the weeding out of the weak, the invalid and the subnormal could strengthen the race. “Nietzsche’s sentence, ‘That which is falling, deserves to be pushed,’ if it will inspire new legislation will, in spite of its apparent harshness, bring about the toughening of the peoples” (Günther 1929: 306). Knowing very well that most supporters of Nordic, eugenic thought come from the middle classes, (326) he concludes his book (334) with a clear elitist message: The doctrine of race and the research of heredity call for action and endorse a new aristocracy. [. . .] Given that in such a movement one does not expect profit and gain, it will always remain a minority movement. But the spirit of every age was always determined by

202  Fascism and Mass Politics minorities, even our mass age, and the Nordic movement aspires to determine the spirit of the present age, and even beyond it. Unless it had that kind of confidence, its attempt to continue Gobineau’s thought would have been a mere idle game. An examination of placards and illustrations distributed under National Socialism with the goals of creating awareness to the problem of racial degeneration and justifying eugenic measures reveals the class logic behind Nazi racial hygiene (Rassenhygiene). Messages were not always unmistakably class oriented, and at times seemed to be directed not against a specific social group as against a genetically defective minority jeopardizing the health of the people’s community. One such placard showed a black-haired “hereditary defective” person (Erbkrank) standing alone to the left of the image, faced by a “healthy” family of robust and exclusively blond people, a father, mother and their four kids, to the right. The main title proclaimed: “The hereditary sick endanger the people’s health: they burden the state and the tax payer.” The social division is unclear, and the father’s apron and rolled up sleeves suggest that he is an artisan or a manual laborer. Yet other illustrations exposed the class rationale behind racial hygiene, the way it sought, on behalf of the middle classes, to put an end to the ascendancy of the masses. Let us look at three such cases (Figure 3.2): Here, the empowerment of the mass—as perceived by the middleclasses—finds striking expression. The lower, black frames, are populated by figures described as “less valuable” [Minderwertigen], coming from the lower orders, wearing working-class berets, etc.; their spaces increasingly shoot up, at the expense of the social élite, middle-class families of “full value,” whose white space continually shrinks as the years go by. At the process end, the high-quality classes can no longer even afford to stand in the diminished room they are left with, and must lie on the ground. The next two illustrations (Figures 3.3 and 3.4) convey the threat posed by lower-class procreation to the social élites and middle classes, 3.3 by stressing the high birth rate among criminals, 3.4 by offering a class classification. It should be noted how, on Figure 3.3, the middle-class family is described simply as “the German family,” as if the other ones were of a different people. It suggests that an authentic German family head necessarily wears a tie. This contains a heavy clue on the way many Nazis conceived of the nation, disclosing the real sentiments behind the inclusive rhetoric of the Volksgemeinschaft. An additional explanation praises “the Third Reich,” among other things, for the “legal regularization of castration” (Helmut 1939: 28). We have seen in the previous chapter, how the threatening demographic trend caused elitist ideologues, notably Nietzsche, to resist even the seemingly most salutary and unproblematic developments of the modern age,

Fascism and Mass Politics 203

Figure 3.2 Population deterioration due to insufficient propagation of the valuable families (Helmut 1939: 31) “At the beginning/after 30 years/after 60 years/after 90 years/after 120 years.”

such as the improvements of medicine and the attenuation of pain and suffering attendant on them, as well on social developments such as health and accident insurances. Many of Nietzsche’s 20th-century disciples carried on their master’s work, and continued the campaign against working-class insurance and for pain and suffering, elevating the latter

204  Fascism and Mass Politics

Figure 3.3 (Helmut 1939: 29): “The menace of the under-man.” And the captions, top to bottom and left to right: “Men criminals: 4.9 children/ marriage between criminals: 4.4 children/parents of children requiring a special education: 3.5 children/the German family: 2.2 children/ Marriage between academics: 1.9 children.

to wholesome, if tragic, components of life. Oswald Spengler, one of the most influential thinkers of the European conservative intelligentsia, who admired Mussolini but disliked Hitler, rejected wholesale the hard-won benefits of the German workers, obtained since the time of Bismarck.27 “Every human being,” he wrote in 1934, “like every animal, must protect

Fascism and Mass Politics 205

Figure 3.4 (Helmut 1939: 25): “Number of children according to profession.” And the captions, top to bottom and left to right: “High officials, free professions: 2 children/white-collar workers: 2.5 children/educated workers: 2.9 children/uneducated workers: 401 children/agricultural workers: 5.2 children.

himself against the unpredictable shifts of destiny, or succumb to them. Everyone must carry a full personal responsibility for himself.” He who cannot for whatever reason withstand the trials of existence must therefore, in his opinion, “face the consequences and beg for his life or die, in the way he sees fit. Such is life.” For that reason, he deemed “the wish to

206  Fascism and Mass Politics insure oneself, against old age, accident, sickness or unemployment” one of the age’s tokens of enervation (Spengler 1980: 151). Another highly significant Nietzschean, Ernst Jünger, published in the same year a widely read essay titled “On Pain,” where he censured the modern, bourgeoismassified evasion of the pain and suffering bound up with existence. He lamented the demographic trends that have made the life of the Last Humans less painful, chastising their determination to live with a maximum of safety and comfort. Reassured, however, he proclaimed that the “the Last Man [. . .] is already history”: In this situation, the biased belief that reason can conquer pain loses its allure. This belief is not only a characteristic feature of forces allied with the Enlightenment, but it has also produced a series of practical measures typical for the human spirit of the last century, such as—to name but a few—the abolition of torture and the slave trade, the discovery of electricity, vaccination against measles, narcosis, the system of insurance, and a whole world of technical and political conveniences. (Jünger 2008: 9–10) The fact that a eugenic commitment to dispatch the weak, degenerated and inferior stood at the heart of Hitler’s worldview is perhaps too well known to require illustration; in view, however, of the current emphasis put by many scholars on the supposedly warm and inclusive nature of the Volksgemeinschaft generally and sometimes of Hitler’s personally—Peter Sloterdijk’s (2000: 26) talk of “brother Hitler, extending his hand to all” here springs to mind—a reminder of Hitler’s unabashed elitism and the prerogative of the select few may not be totally superfluous: If man wanted to reduce his numbers without the dire consequences resulting from a reduced birth rate, he would then have to place no controls on the number of births but limit the number allowed to live. The Spartans were once capable of such a wise measure, but not our current dishonest, sentimental, bourgeois-patriotic crowd. The subjugation of 350.000 Helots by 6.000 Spartans was only possible because of the racial superiority of the Spartans. This, however, was the result of systematic racial preservation, so we see in the Spartan state the first racialist state. The abandonment of sick, frail, deformed children—in other words, their destruction—demonstrated greater human dignity and was in reality a thousand times more humane than the pathetic insanity of our time. (Hitler 2006: 19–20) Hitler drew from eugenic thought many motifs that became central to his social Darwinism, such as sterilization of the “unfit” or prohibition

Fascism and Mass Politics 207 of marriage with the hereditary sick. Eugenic ideas were rife among the professional middle classes in Germany, doctors, engineers, academics and so on and so forth, and became an important feature of Nazi propaganda toward the end of the 1920s, when the effort to appeal to this constituency became central.28 National Socialist Germany became the eugenic country par excellence, where the total elimination of political opposition allowed its advocates not only to write, plan and recommend drastic measures of racial hygiene, as happened in many other countries before, but to carry them out on an unprecedented scale. Hitler’s Germany thus became the bellwether of world eugenics, drawing admiration from adherents of the creed, enthusiastic about the way their vision was finally becoming reality (Kühl 1994). This framework made possible the realization of atrocious projects such as the sterilization of some 450.000 people, the killing the 250.000 gypsies, the euthanasia of 120.000 human beings, including many children, whose lives were arbitrarily defined as worthless, and the sadistic experiments carried out by “doctors” in the concentration camps. (The data is from Blamires 2006: 205 and Benz 2001: 245–249.) In this way, the vision of eugenicists such as Günther was fulfilled, and their “new aristocracy” indeed managed to define the age’s spirit. It should be noted, however, that much of this was done behind the public’s back. The meticulously planned euthanasia program, Aktion T4—which largely prefigured the extermination of the Jews in its means and methods (such as use of gas chambers), as well as the training of the personnel—remained secret at Hitler’s behest, under the pretext that “the German people was not yet ripe for it” (Benz 2001: 246. For comprehensive coverage of these topics, see Burleigh and Wippermann 1996; Proctor 1988.) In Italy, the birthplace of fascism, the ambitions of the eugenic movement remained more modest. Measures undertaken consisted of “positive” eugenics—mainly rewarding procreation—whereas “negative” eugenics, such as sterilization and euthanasia, was negligible. This does not mean that Italian eugenicists opposed such measures as a matter of principle; on the contrary, they approved of them. Yet the strict opposition of the Catholic Church to any such experimentation, opposing contraception to say nothing of sterilization, proved an insurmountable obstacle (Gillette 2002: 8). Most Italian eugenicists supported fascism which in turn rewarded them with jobs (Blamires 2006: 206). Mussolini himself put a strong emphasis on high national fertility and conducted a campaign to encourage births, known as the “Battle for Births.” (See, for an extensive discussion, Ipsen 1996: 145–183.) In that regard, he espoused a quantitative criterion that saw a large number of Italians as hugely important. “Number is strength,” was the title of one his articles (Mussolini 1958, vol. 26: 52). Wishing to increase the population, he here saw the mass as a positive factor, yet not in a political or sociological sense, but, on the contrary, as a passive cannon fodder of soldiers and

208  Fascism and Mass Politics combatants, that could be thrown into the fray for the greater national glory: Italy is from that [demographic] perspective, a second-rate nation. Its 42 million inhabitants are a modest mass as against 200 million Slavs, [. . .] multiplying at an impressive rate of 8 or 10 million a year; 70 or 80 million Germans [. . .]; and as compared with the Japanese—whose birth rate is truly prodigious—who have soldiers and workers enough for three continents. [. . .] These figures give cause for reflection and concern. (Mussolini 1958, vol. 26: 65) Yet alongside the quantitative criterion Mussolini also exhibited the typical eugenic reasoning, which ranked people according to their class. He lamented, for example, the fact that intellectuals do not multiply fast enough to raise the level of the nation (Mussolini 1958, vol. 26: 315). He also justified (327–328) German racial hygiene, including its measures of negative eugenics, since the German race is degenerate and held back by “the mentally ill, the retarded, the epileptics.” And he in general subscribed to the thought of racial hierarchy and inter-racial struggle, for instance in an article titled, “Is the white race going under?” where the question was raised: “It is necessary to know, facing the numerical rise and the spreading of the yellow and black races, whether the civilization of the white man is not doomed to extinction” (Mussolini 1958, vol. 26: 315). The imperial aspirations of fascism, it can be added, should also be located in the framework of the effort to solve the demographic problems ascribed to the age of the masses. The fascist obsession with “living space” ought to be juxtaposed with the feeling, well expressed by mass critics such as Edgar Allan Poe or José Ortega y Gasset, that mass society is overcrowded and asphyxiating, one in which it is increasingly difficult, as Ortega put it, “to find room.”29 The imperative need to conquer space—the well-known German stress on Lebensraum, but equally so the less familiar Italian variant, the spazio vitale—was central to the fascist agenda. As exemplified by Hitler, space, and the struggle for its acquisition, formed the basis of fascist politics: The types of creatures on the earth are countless, and on an individual level their self-preservation instinct as well as the longing for procreation is always unlimited; however, the space in which this entire life process plays itself out is limited. It is the surface area of a precisely measured sphere on which billions and billions of individual beings struggle for life and succession. In the limitation of this living space lies the compulsion for the struggle for survival, and the struggle for survival, in turn, contains the precondition for evolution. (Hitler 2006: 8)

Fascism and Mass Politics 209 According to historian Davide Rodogno (2003: 69), this “distinctly fascist” tenet was shared by both the Italian and the German fascist regimes, forming, in fact, “the highest point of the fascist myth.” It was interlinked with other aspects of the fascist worldview, the social Darwinist and racist ones, given that the spaces to which the fascists turned their gaze were inhabited by peoples and races considered inferior, the East-European Slavs, in the case of Nazism, the African and Mediterranean peoples, in the case of Italian fascism. In opposition, that is, to the massified space of the egalitarian Last Humans, sharing goods and services horizontally and amiably, the new space that the fascists were determined to absorb for their empires was to be structured along strictly hierarchical lines of both class and race: within the imperial nation, as clarified for instance by Giuseppe Bottai, one of the notable ideologues of the imperial “new order” of Italian fascism, high production would be guaranteed by “the acknowledgement of private initiative” and “collaboration between the classes” (Rodogno 2003: 74–75); in the conquered imperial space, relations would be structured in agreement with a firm racial hierarchy. That this was so in the Nazi empire requires no elaboration. But it is worth emphasizing that the Italian empire, an uncompleted project that it remained, was equally based on a racial pecking order: the lowest echelons were to be occupied by the black Ethiopians; a notch above them were North-African Libyans; then came Semites, Hamites and Turks; in the next level were situated the Latins, Slavs and Hellens, with the master slot being occupied, obviously, by the race of the Italians (Rodogno 2003: 80).30 In the projected nuovo ordine, the creeping modern egalitarianism lamented by Zarathustra—“Who still wants to rule? Who obey? [. . .] No herdsman and one herd”—stood to be permanently redressed.

Notes 1 On the reserved mood among workers and peasants from a general European perspective, see Bessel (2010: 54). On the recent deconstruction of the notion of popular enthusiasm that “was once an axiom,” see Ferguson (2000: 174–175). With regards to Germany, the renowned German social historian, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, can be cited, inveighing against the “propaganda cliché of the ‘passion of the masses,’ their ‘enthusiastic readiness to sacrifice,’ their liberating national intoxication in August 1914 [. . .], a cliché that persisted, with astonishing endurance, for over 80 years” (Wehler 2003: 16). Probably the most systematic deconstruction of this myth in the German context was undertaken by Verhey (2006). For a lucid critique of Fest’s position, see Kühnl (1990: 53–56). The following books provide an analysis of the British case leading to comparable conclusions, stressing the differences between classes in the attitudes to the war, as well as other relevant differences, such as regional ones: Gregory (2008: esp. 9–25); Pennell (2012). Similar conclusions concerning the attitudes of the French were reached even earlier by Becker (1977). 2 This book contains a fascinating discussion of the way the German intelligentsia almost universally saw the war as an avenue to national redemption.

210  Fascism and Mass Politics 3 On the belligerent fit seizing the British nobility at the start of the war, and the social damage it then endured, see Chapter 17, “ ‘Brideshead Revisited’ The Decline of the Aristocracy,” in Pugh (2006). 4 On the comprehensive crisis in interwar Britain, see the aptly titled book by Richard Overy (2010): The Morbid Age. 5 For two books comparing different varieties of dictatorship, see Lee (2008); Overy (2006). 6 For the same author’s detailed account of the approach of industrialists to fascism, see Adler (1995). 7 Originally in Latin, navigare necesse, which is a citation from Ancient Roman literature: navigare necesse est, vivere non est necesse: it is necessary to sail, to live is not necessary. 8 Source, De Grand (1982: 50). Under Nazism, too, similar measures to reduce pressure from below on strained professional groups were undertaken, through the requirement of academic titles for obtaining work in different professions, such as jurisprudence, pharmacy or dentistry, thus reducing competition in them. See Stephenson (1995: 226–227). 9 In Italy, as well, in May 1921, amid the violence of the squadristi, “the combined Socialist and Communist vote [. . .] dropped only slightly from the high point of 1919,” at the time that the fascist party outvoted Giolitti’s Liberals, their allies of the national bloc (De Grand 1982: 34). 10 Gluckstein did a thorough job with regards to the Nazi rank and file, the party members, militants and the street combatants in showing that any attempt to paint these militants in red, or associate them with the working class, is empirically unacceptable (see Gluckstein 1999: 87–96). The explicit anti-mass convictions, indeed obsessions, of the typical Freikorps soldier and Nazi sympathizer are amply documented in Klaus Theweleit’s classic (1978). 11 For an incisive critique of Falter’s thesis of weak working-class resistance to Nazism, pointing to its conceptual, rather than empirical problems, see Gluckstein (1999: 81–82). 12 Adolf Hitler, Rede vom 10. Februar 1933, http://de.metapedia.org/wiki/ Quelle/Rede_vom_10._Februar_1933_%28Adolf_Hitler%29 Last accessed, May 2017. 13 On this important plank of Hitler’s ideology, see Landa (2010: 59–97). 14 As I have tried to show elsewhere, in a scrutiny of Schmitt’s early political texts. See Landa (2010: 165–187). 15 The mutual respect between the nobility and fascism is the subject of many studies, some of them general, others dealing with specific case studies. For a general perspective, see Urbach (2007). On the German aristocracy, see Malinowski (2004); Petropoulos (2008). On the widespread sympathy for fascism and Nazism in the circles of the British nobility, see Kershaw (2005); Guinness (1984). Information on Hitler’s admiration for the way of life of the British aristocracy and on his efforts to imitate it can be found in the following study: Milton (2007). 16 Another effort to construe Nazism as the triumph of the masses was made by J. S. McClelland, who characterized Hitler as the “perfect crowd-man” (McClelland 2011: 273). Yet this argument, too, runs into difficulties and internal contradictions, reflected, for instance, in the acknowledgment that the fascist political model was in truth a reaction against mass society. He writes, somewhat torturously: “crowd and crowd society become antitheses; crowd politics is not the symptom of crowd society, the crowd disease in its galloping form, acute not chronic; rather the crowd is the solution to the enervation of crowd society.” (277; emphases in the original)

Fascism and Mass Politics 211 17 While critique of the welfare state features importantly in these authors’ scholarship, it is even more explicit in some of their media appearances and commentaries on current affairs. 18 The title of one of the chapters in Aly (2006: 326). 19 For a detailed account of OVRA’s activities, see Ebner (2011). 20 For this influential argument, very useful as an ideological analysis of the fascist worldview, see Emilio Gentile (1996). 21 To be sure, the emphasis on mass culpability featured already in his earlier works, existing in unresolved tension with his criticisms of the bourgeoisie. See, for example, Mosse (1966a). And in the same year he already wrote of “the Fascist version of democracy” (Mosse 1966b: 623). 22 See, for further information on this center, also mentioning Conti: Last accessed, May 2017. 23 The book generally evaluates the conservation of nature under Nazism and explores both parallels and differences between the Nazi and the environmentalist agendas. Two additional interesting books, out of a growing body of literature on this topic: Brüggemeier et al (2005); Biehl and Staudenmaier (2011). 24 The book contains interesting information, although it is written in a polemical tone and from a conservative perspective. 25 Heinrich Himmler, Rede des Reichsführers SS bei der SS-Gruppenführertagung in Posen am 4. Oktober 1943. Last accessed, May 2017. Emphasis added. 26 For my reading of the stories as exhibiting a tension between Nietzschean ideas of “the blond beast” and Rousseau’s notion of “the noble savage,” see Landa (2007: 159–173). 27 On Spengler’s contradictory criticism of Hitler, see Landa (2010: 98–108). 28 The bourgeois, class background of the eugenic agenda is well depicted in the following study: Weindling (1993). 29 For an interesting argument connecting Ortega’s notion of the revolt of the masses to an underlying bid for colonial expansion, see Cataldo (2015). 30 For a comprehensive discussion of the various competing theories of race entertained by Italian fascists, see Gillette (2002).

References Adler, Franklin Hugh (1995) Italian Industrialists From Liberalism to Fascism: The Political Development of the Industrial Bourgeoisie, 1906–1934, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Adler, Franklin Hugh (2005) “De Stefani,” in Dizionario del fascismo,Victoria De Grazzia and Sergio Luzzatto, eds., Vol.1, Turin: Einaudi. Aly, Götz (2006) Hitlers Volksstaat. Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus, (orig. 2005), Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer. Bartov, Omer (2003) “ ‘Fields of Glory’: War, Genocide, and the Glorification of Violence,” in Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, Moishe Postone and Eric Santner, eds., Chicago: The University of Chicago Press: 117–135. Becker, Jean-Jacques (1977) 1914, comment les Français sont entrés dans la guerre, Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques.

212  Fascism and Mass Politics Beilharz, Peter (2009) Socialism and Modernity, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Benz, Wolfgang, Hermann Graml, Herman Weiß, eds. (2001) Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus, Munich: DTV. Bessel, Richard (2010) “The First World War as Totality,” in The Oxford Handbook of Fascism, Richard James Boon Bosworth, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Biehl, Janet and Peter Staudenmaier (2011) Ecofascism Revisited: Lessons From the German Experience, (1st edition, 1995) Porsgrunn: New Compass. Bielefeldt, Heiner (1998) “Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism. Systematic Reconstruction and Countercriticism,” in Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, David Dyzenhaus, ed., Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Blamires, Cyprian P., ed. (2006) World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia— 2 Volume Set, Santa Barbara, CA: Abc-Clio. Bourke, Joanna (1999) Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War, London: Reaktion Books. Bracher, Karl Dietrich (2004) The German Dictatorship, Arnon Magen, trans., Tel Aviv: Am Oved [Hebrew translation]. Brooke, Rupert (2010) Collected Poems, Cambridge: Oleander Press. Brüggemeier, Franz-Josef Mark Cioc, and Thomas Zeller, eds. (2005) How Green Were the Nazis? Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich, Athens: Ohio University Press. Burleigh, Michael and Wolfgang Wippermann (1996) The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burroughs, Edgar Rice (1990) Tarzan of the Apes, Toronto: Signet. Cataldo, Carlos Petilo (2015) La rebelión de las masas o el discreto encanto del colonialismo. Kindle edition. Childers, Thomas (1983) The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919–1933, Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press. Corner, Paul (2002) “Italian Fascism: Whatever Happened to Dictatorship?” The Journal of Modern History, 74, 2: 325–351. Corner, Paul (2012) The Fascist Party and Popular Opinion in Mussolini’s Italy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Darwin, Charles (2004) The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Davies, Peter J. (2006) “Trade Unions,” in World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia—2 Volume set, Cyprian P. Blamires, ed., Santa Barbara, CA: Abc-Clio. De Cecco, Marcello (2002) “The Economy From Liberalism to Fascism,” in Liberal and Fascist Italy, Adrian Lyttelton, ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Grand, Alexander (1982) Italian Fascism: Its Origins and Development, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Dunnage, Jonathan (2002) Twentieth Century Italy: A Social History, London: Pearson. Ebner, Michael R. (2011) Ordinary Violence in Mussolini’s Italy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Evans, Richard J. (2003) The Coming of the Third Reich, London: Penguin. Evans, Richard J. (2016) The Third Reich in History and Memory, London: Abacus.

Fascism and Mass Politics 213 Fallada, Hans (2009) Every Man Dies Alone, Michael Hofmann, trans., New York: Melville House. Falter, Jürgen W. (1986) “Unemployment and the Radicalization of the German Electorate, 1928–1933,” in Unemployment and the Great Depression in Weimar Germany, Peter D. Stachura, ed., London: Palgrave Macmillan. Falter, Jürgen W. (1991) Hitlers Wähler, Munich: C. H. Beck. Ferguson, Niall (2000) The Pity of War: Explaining World War I, New York: Basic Books. Fest, Joachim (2002) Hitler, New York: Mariner Books. Fischer, Conan ed. (1996) The Rise of National Socialism and the Working Classes in Weimar Germany, Oxford and New York: Berghahn. Fritsche, Peter (2009) Life and Death in the Third Reich, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fukuyama, Francis (2006) The End of History and the Last Man, New York and London: The Free Press. Gasman, Daniel (2007) The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, New Brunswick and London: Transaction. Gellately, Robert (2002) Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gentile, Emilio (1996) The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gentile, Emilio (2002) Fascismo: Storia e interpretazione, Bari: Laterza. Gentile, Emilio (2008) L’apocalisse della modernità: La Grande Guerra per l’uomo nuovo, Milan: Mondadori. Gerwarth, Robert and John Horne, eds. (2012) War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe After the Great War, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gillette, Aaron (2002) Racial Theories in Fascist Italy, London and New York: Routledge. Gluckstein, Donny (1999) The Nazis, Capitalism and the Working Class, London: Bookmarks. Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah (1996) Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and The Holocaust, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Gregory, Adrian (2008) The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guinness, Jonathan and Catherine Guinness (1984) The House of Mitford, London: Orion. Günther, Hans F. K. (1929) Rassenkunde Europas: Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Rassengeschichte der Hauptvölker indogermanischer Sprache, Munich: J. F. Lehmanns Verlag. Hamilton, Richard (1982) Who Voted for Hitler? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Heidegger, Martin (1967) Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Helmut, Otto (1939) Volk in Gefahr: der Geburtenrückgang und seine Folgen für Deutschlands Zukunft, 10th edition, Munich: Lehmans. Hitler, Adolf (1999) Mein Kampf, Ralph Mannheim, trans., Boston and New York: Mariner Books. Hitler, Adolf (2006) Hitler’s Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf, Gerhard Weinberg, ed., New York: Enigma.

214  Fascism and Mass Politics Hobsbawm, Eric (1997) Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914– 1991, London: Abacus. Ipsen, Carl (1996) Dictating Demography: The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jünger, Ernst (2002) Essays I, Betrachtungen zur Zeit, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Jünger, Ernst (2008) On Pain, David C. Durst, trans., New York: Telos. Kershaw, Ian (1999) Hitler: 1889–1936. Hubris, New York: W. W. Norton. Kershaw, Ian (2005) Making Friends With Hitler: Lord Londonderry, the Nazis, and the Road to War, London: Penguin. Kershaw, Ian (2014) “Volksgemeinschaft: Potential and Limitations of the Concept,” in Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering & Private Lives, Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto, eds., Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kramer, Alan (2010) “The First World War as Cultural Trauma,” in The Oxford Handbook of Fascism, Richard James Boon Bosworth, ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kühl, Stefan (1994) The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism, New York and London: Oxford University Press. Kühnl, Reinhard (1990) Faschismustheorien: Ein Leitfaden, Heilbronn: Distel Verlag. Landa, Ishay (2007) The Overman in the Marketplace: Nietzschean Heroism in Popular Culture, Lanham, MD: Lexington. Landa, Ishay (2010) The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism, Leiden and Boston: Brill. Lee, Robert G. and Sabine Wilke (2005) “Forest as Volk: Ewiger Wald and the Religion of Nature in the Third Reich,” Journal of Social and Ecological Boundaries, 1, 1: 21–46. Lee, Stephen J. (2008) European Dictatorships 1918–1945, 3rd edition, New York: Routledge. Lindemann, Albert S. (1997) Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Losurdo, Domenico (2001) Heidegger and the Ideology of War: Community, Death, and the West, New York: Humanity Books. Low, David (1949) Years of Wrath: A Cartoon History, London: Victor Gollancz. Malinowski, Stephan (2004) Vom König zum Führer: Deutscher Adel und Nationalsozialismus, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Mann, Michael (2004) Fascists, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mann, Thomas (2002) Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Marquardt, Kathleen (1993) Animalscam: The Beastly Abuse of Human Rights, Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing. Mason, Tim (1997) Social Policy in the Third Reich: The Working Class and the “National Community”, Oxford and New York: Berg. McClelland, John S. (2011) The Crowd and the Mob: From Plato to Canetti, Oxon and New York: Routledge. Melzer, Jörg M. (2003) Vollwerternährung—Diätetik, Naturheilkunde, Nationalsozialismus, Sozialer Anspruch, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner. Milton, Richard (2007) Best of Enemies: Britain and Germany: 100 Years of Truth and Lies, Cambridge: Icon.

Fascism and Mass Politics 215 Morgan, Philip (2004) Italian Fascism, 1915–1945, 2nd edition, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mosca, Gaetano (1939) The Ruling Class, New York: McGraw-Hill. Mosse, George L. (1966a) “Introduction: The Genesis of Fascism,” Journal of Contemporary History, 1, 1: 14–26. Mosse, George L. (1966b) “E. Nolte of Three Faces of Fascism,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 27: 4. Mosse, George L. (1989) “Fascism and the French Revolution,” Journal of Contemporary History, 24: 5–26. Mosse, George L. (1991) The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany From the Napoleonic Wars Through the Third Reich, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Mosse, George L. (1994) Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mussolini, Benito (1923) Mussolini as Revealed in His Political Speeches: November 1914-August 1923, London and New York: J. M. Dent & Sons. Mussolini, Benito (1958) Opera Omnia, Florence: La Fenice. Neiberg, Michael S., ed. (2007) The World War I Reader, New York: New York University Press. Neumann, Franz (1936) European Trade Unionism and Politics, New York: League for Industrial Democracy. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1990) Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, Reginald John Hollingdale trans., Harmondsworth: Penguin. Overy, Richard (2006) The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, New York: W. W. Norton. Overy, Richard (2010) The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilization, 1919–1939, London: Penguin. Pareto, Vilfredo (1966) Sociological Writings, New York: Frederick A. Praeger. Pasetti, Matteo (2017a) “The Fascist Labour Charter and Its Transnational Spread,” in Corporatism and Fascism: The Corporatist Wave in Europe, Antonio Costa Pinto, ed., London and New York: Routledge: 60–77. Pasetti, Matteo (2017b) “Corporatist Connections: The Transnational Rise of the Fascist Model in Interwar Europe,” in Fascism Without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation Between Movements and Regimes in Europe From 1918 to 1945, Arnd Bauerkämper and Grzegorz RossolińskiLiebe, eds., New York and Oxford: Berghahn: 65–93. Passmore, Kevin (2002) Fascism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Payne, Stanley (1995) A History of Fascism, 1914–1945, Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Pennell, Catriona (2012) A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Petropoulos, Jonathan (2008) Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pick, Daniel (1993) War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age, New Haven: Yale University Press. Picker, Henry (2003) Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führehauptquartier, Munich: Propyläen. Pirandello, Luigi (1993) Il fu Mattia Pascal, Turin: Einaudi.

216  Fascism and Mass Politics Ponting, Clive (1995) Churchill, London: Sinclair-Stevenson. Proctor, Robert (1988) Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Proctor, Robert N. (2000) The Nazi War on Cancer, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pugh, Martin (2006) “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ ” Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars, London: Pimlico. Reid, Fiona (2011) Broken Men: Shell Shock, Treatment and Recovery in Britain 1914–30, London and New York: Continuum. Riley, Dylan (2010) The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain and Romania, 1870–1945, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Rodogno, Davide (2003) Il nuovo ordine mediterraneo: Le politiche di occupazione dell’Italia fascista in Europa (1940–1943), Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Salvemini, Gaetano (1973) The Origins of Fascism in Italy, New York and London: Harper. Schmitt, Carl (2006) Die Diktatur: Von den Anfängen des modernen Souveränitätsgedankens bis zum proletarischen Klassenkampf, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Shakespeare, William (1991) The Second Part of King Henry VI, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sloterdijk, Peter (2000) Die Verachtung der Massen—Versuch über Kulturkämpfe in der modernen Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Spengler, Oswald (1980) Jahre der Entscheidung, Munich: C. H. Beck. Steber, Martina and Bernhard Gotto, eds. (2014) Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering & Private Lives, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stephenson, Jill (1995) “Nazis, Class and Justice,” The Historical Journal, 38, 1: 221–229. Stone, Dan (2002) Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Stone, Norman (2009) World War One: A Short History, London: Penguin. Strachan, Hew (2001) The First World War: Volume I: To Arms, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strasser, Todd (1981) The Wave, New York: Dell. Tasca, Angelo (2000) El nacimiento del fascismo, (orig. 1938) Barcelona: Critica. Theweleit, Klaus (1978) Männerphantasien, Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Roter Stern. Tinghino, John J. (1991) Edmondo Rossoni: From Revolutionary Syndicalism to Fascism, New York: Peter Lang. Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel (1994) The Lord of the Rings: 50th Anniversary Edition, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin. Tuchman, Barbara W. (1994) The Guns of August, New York: Random House. Tucker, William H. (1994) The Science and Politics of Racial Research, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Uekoetter, Frank (2006) The Green and the Brown: A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Urbach, Karina ed. (2007) European Aristocracies and the Radical Right, 1918– 1939, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fascism and Mass Politics 217 Verhey, Jeffrey (2006) The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth, and Mobilization in Germany, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich (2003) Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 1914–1949, Munich: C. H. Beck. Weindling, Paul (1993) Health, Race and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zamagni, Vera (1993) The Economic History of Italy 1860–1990: Recovery After Decline, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Zechner, Johannes (2011) “Politicized Timber: The German Forest and the Nature of the Nation 1800–1945,” The Brock Review, 11, 2: 19–32. Žižek, Slavoj (1992) Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Žižek, Slavoj (2007) “Introduction: Robespierre, or, the ‘Divine Violence’ of Terror,” in Virtue and Terror, Maximilien Robespierre, ed., London and New York: Verso. Zweig, Stefan (1964) The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European, Anthea Bell, trans., London: Pushkin Press. Kindle edition.

4 Fascism and Mass Society I Cultural Questions

In the previous chapter, it was described how the fascists aimed to block as far as possible the continued advance of the masses along the political track. Yet does not this argument run into difficulties when we move on from a discussion of political measures, to address the way fascism related to mass culture? If fascism negated the principle of mass political rule, is it not possible that the terrain of mass culture, being less about tangible power and more about symbolic recompense, permitted the fascists to accommodate themselves to the masses? That what was taken from the masses politically was given back to them, with compound interest, symbolically and culturally? “It was only in cultural matters,” argued a judicious observer such as Robert Soucy (1995: 25), “in their pandering to some of the most parochial, authoritarian, and vicious aspects of popular culture, that fascists were, in a sense, democratic.” And a comparable claim was contained in George Mosse’s affirmation that fascism screwed to its highest pitch the ritualistic dimension of mass politics. Such a notion, indeed, is very common. Many have regarded fascism and continue to regard it as a typical manifestation of mass culture, a brutal uprising against Western civilization and the heritage of high culture. Nazism, in particular, it is often claimed, represented an attack on culture on the part of the uneducated or half-educated (see the frequent complaint, in the German context, against Halbbildung). From such vantage point, fascism ought to be seen as integral to the revolt against the élite theorized by José Ortega y Gasset. This interpretive line has produced innumerable examples, which can be gleaned not only from texts written by historians, but also from cultural and philosophical theories, as well as works of art and literature attempting to reflect fascism. Let us sample just a few of these cases.

Fascism as a Product of Mass Culture? In her influential works published after the Second World War, Hannah Arendt unfolded a theory according to which Nazism1 was a product of mass society and culture. Grafting together political science and

Fascism and Mass Society I 219 philosophy, she contended that modern “mass society”—the upshot of such developments as the dissolution of social networks, the atomization of human beings and the weakening of traditional political a­ ffiliations— permitted demagogues such as Hitler to rally behind them so considerable parts of the public. She acknowledged the incontrovertible fact that many members of the élites and the educated classes supported Nazism, but not their class-rooted motivation for doing so. On the contrary, Arendt argued that what drove them to endorse such a mass movement as Nazism was not their elitism but rather the opposite tendency to identify themselves with the masses and the psychological wish to be integrated into their culture. In her classical The Origins of Totalitarianism, originally published in 1951, Arendt (1960: 332) emphasized the élite’s contempt for the genius and its yearning for anonymity [. . .]. [A]ll the art theories of the twenties tried desperately to prove that the excellent is the product of skill, craftsmanship, logic, and the realizations of the material. In order, however, to substantiate this surprising insistence on the prevalence of an egalitarian mood among the élite, Arendt referred her reader to the “art theories of the Bauhaus” as well as to “Bertolt Brecht’s remarks on the theater.” These were the exclusive references made, ignoring the fact that neither the communist and militant anti-Nazi dramaturge nor the overwhelmingly left-wing Bauhaus school could be taken as representatives of the views predominant among élite circles, let alone explain Nazism’s root in mass culture. Yet this was only one part of her argument. Complementing such pressing together of Nazism and the masses, Arendt was equally adamant that there existed a hermetic separation between high culture and Nazism. This intent to shield classical culture was expressly stated in Arendt’s correspondence with her former teacher and life-long friend, Karl Jaspers: “[o]ne compelling reason why I took such trouble to isolate the elements of totalitarian governments was to show that the Western tradition from Plato up to and including Nietzsche is above any such suspicion [of proto-Nazism]” (In Aschheim 1996: 111). In the immediate aftermath of the war, one may point out, Nietzsche’s reputation was in far greater need of rehabilitation than Plato’s; and with Nietzsche, the thinker who had advocated “the annihilation of millions of failures,” (Nietzsche 1968: 506) élite heritage in its entirety was to be placed beyond suspicion: Nazism [. . .] owes nothing to any part of the Western tradition, be it German or not, Catholic or Protestant, Christian, Greek, or Roman. Whether we like Thomas Aquinas or Machiavelli or Luther or Kant or Hegel or Nietzsche [. . .] they have not the least responsibility for what is happening in the extermination camps. Ideologically

220  Fascism and Mass Society I speaking, Nazism begins with no traditional basis at all, and it would be better to realize the danger of this radical negation of any tradition, which was the main feature of Nazism from the beginning. (Arendt 1945: 95) Similarly, in a 1969 review article, George Mosse recommended that we shift our gaze from texts of high culture to focus on popular culture, for the latter contains a key to understanding modern mass movements such as fascism: the time has come to go beyond the study of such elitist groups to a more thorough investigation of popular practices and sentiments. In an age of mass politics and mass culture, the intellectual historian needs new approaches that take into account those popular notions that have played such a cardinal role in the evolution of men and society. (Mosse 1969: 447) Instructively, Mosse clarified that in the shift from the high to the popular what changes is not just the subject of study, but also the methodology that the scholar must apply. This is perforce the case because unlike élite culture, where rationality holds sway, mass culture is mostly irrational: “In the analysis of popular culture or mass politics, the irrational seems to predominate, and the historian needs different tools to capture the structure of the popular mind” (448). Stefan Zweig (1964: 424), too, regarded Nazism as the collapse of the world of culture, overridden by primeval impulses, as Freud had predicted: In those hours I frequently spoke with Freud about the horror of Hitler’s world and the war. The outburst of bestiality deeply shocked him as a humanitarian, but as a thinker he was in no way astonished. He had always been scolded as a pessimist, he said, because he had denied the supremacy of culture over the instincts; but his opinion that the barbaric, the elemental destructive instinct in the human soul was ineradicable, has become confirmed most terribly. This effort to draw Nazism away from the “high,” the elitist and the cultivated, and affiliate it to the “low,” the popular and the vulgar—in this context it is useful to recall that Freud identified the id with the mass, and the super-ego with the élite whose role is to tame it2—stands out particularly with regards to Adolf Hitler’s character, commonly conceived as the personification of the mass revolt. Walter Mehring (1991: 188), a German-Jewish author escaping the Nazis, expressed the sentiment of many left-wing intellectuals when writing on the coming to power of a mangy cur, abused and disregarded until it went mad—a street mongrel raised on the garbage of jingoism

Fascism and Mass Society I 221 and trained by universal education until it became rabid whenever it came across anything that smelled of intelligence. On a similar vein, the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk (2000: 26) described Hitler as “a container of mass-frustrations,” and talked about “brother Hitler, extending his hand to all.” An especially edifying case of the interpretation of Nazism as a mass assault on culture and of Hitler as a vulgar outsider placing himself at the vanguard of the cast-off and resentful plebs is provided by Klaus Mann. One of the outstanding German writers of his generation, Mann long grappled with the bewildering emergence, seemingly ex nihilo, of the crude Nazi movement and the way it had managed to take hold of Germany, the supreme citadel of high culture. Mann himself was an unmistakable representative of the upper classes, in possession of capital, both financial and cultural. His father was Thomas Mann, widely regarded as Germany’s foremost literary figure, and his mother was Katia Mann, of the German-Jewish Pringsheim family, one of the wealthiest in Germany (Figure 4.1). The relative of other notable cultural figures, such as uncle Heinrich Mann and siblings Erika and Golo, Klaus was thus scion to a very refined and patrician family, if not by title than in any other respect. His writing career began precociously and by the time National Socialism was installed in power, when he was just 27 years old, he had already published five novels. In Mann’s writings one can find, indeed in accentuated form, all the motifs listed above. First, he saw Nazism as an assault

Figure 4.1 Katia Mann’s childhood home, Pringsheim Palace in Munich Source: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

222  Fascism and Mass Society I on culture, an assault stemming, moreover, from external circles, having no part whatsoever in its heritage and achievements. “Our world was under threat,” he wrote in his 1942 autobiographical novel, The Turning Point. “By whom? What was the name of this danger? We refused to admit that a political party, a gang of adventurers and fanatics [. . .] could challenge all the traditions and values of the West” (Mann 2005: 343). To underscore the conviction that the Nazi enemies emerged from outside the Western order, they were likened to foreign invaders. Mann referred to them (344) as “Persians,” alluding to the armies invading Greece in the fifth century B.C., threatening to obliterate its glorious civilization. The struggle was thus represented as one taking place between cultured people, on the one side, and “barbarians,” on the other. In social terms, the barbarians corresponded to the modern masses, members of the lower orders, albeit “petty bourgeois” more than proletarians. These people lived unenlightened by the Western cultural heritage, feeding themselves instead upon the inferior, rude and instinctual mass culture. They were described as lacking knowledge of foreign languages, such as French (Mann was well aware of the fact that many who belonged to the higher orders, including artists and cultivated people, collaborated with the Nazis. Yet in their case this support was interpreted, in certain affinity with Arendt’s later line, not as an expression of culture but as betrayal of it and defection to the ranks of the barbarians. We shall return to this point shortly). This is the way Mann described a friend of his who was to become a Nazi supporter and join in the murder of culture: A fellow like Hans P. was without question a potential “Persian,” in spite of his pleasant ways [. . .]. He was no fool, this Hans P, [. . .] yet his ignorance was staggering. I sometimes amused myself by putting complicated questions to him, such as “you know, don’t you, that Johann Wolfgang Goethe was the valiant general who led us in 1870 to victory over the Chinese?” Hans would then smile: “Obviously, man!” He knew nothing, besides the weight of an international boxer, and the jokes of movie stars. He came from the German petty-bourgeois layer that descended into the proletariat because of the inflation. [. . .] He was a nihilist who rejected, without being familiar with them, all philosophical systems and all principles. Concepts such as “culture,” “peace,” “liberty,” “the dignity of man” were totally meaningless to him, bereft of all content. [. . .] Why haven’t I made the effort to bring this brother, who was in danger but still not irredeemably lost, onto the right track? [. . .] Since this youngster received no true leadership, he was caught in the trail of the great swindler. (Mann 2005: 358–359) Mann had the opportunity to observe the great swindler from close range in 1932, shortly before he became the all-powerful dictator, when both

Fascism and Mass Society I 223 were sitting at a café. And here, too, Mann (353–355) reflected on Hitler with elitism difficult to surpass: The ugliness I now found in front of me exceeded all my expectations. The vulgarity of his face relaxed me, soothed me. I saw him and thought: you won’t win, Schicklgruber, even if you scream the soul out of your body. You want to rule Germany? You want to be a dictator—with that nose? Don’t make me laugh! [. . .] By all means, order yourself another strawberry cake, Schicklgruber; is it the fifth already? In a few years you won’t be able to afford such an expense. A beggar you will be, a forgotten man, in a few short years. Mann construed Nazism as a social collision between the élites, of whom he was an intimate member, and the lower orders, eager to avenge themselves for their suffered wrongs and humiliations. He could not at first fathom how he and his family, so integral to Germany’s culture, could be banned and persecuted, while the Germans were being seduced by “a house bug.” How could such a thing take place? These Germans, I couldn’t understand them. But was I not myself a German? Of course I was. And not only on account of the language. German culture shaped my picture of the world, my spiritual essence, or at least crucially impinged on them. A house like my parents’ one, and what came of it, did it knew nothing of Germanness? My childhood went by accompanied by German songs and tales, my youth with Novalis, Nietzsche, Hölderlin, George—could I be foreign to the German spirit? (Mann 2005: 356) The mystery was solved, at least for Mann, once he realized that Nazism is not a product of the same culture, but in fact a mutiny against it on the part of the masses gripped by an inferiority complex, determined to depose Mann and the élite. This aim is defiantly stated by Hans P., the former friend, who decides to join the National Socialist party: Instead of an answer he just kept repeating his words, evading and threatening all at the same time: “We shall be the masters, you will see!” [This is said in colloquial German. I.L.] Yes, now I saw it: he gave up on me, me and my world. He hated it, the world of morality and the dignity of man, the world of “democracy” [. . .]. To be a master, where he was so long neglected and ignored! And as a “master” to have permission to destroy what must have appeared alien and hostile to him—civilization! (359–360)

224  Fascism and Mass Society I

Karl May—A Spiritual Forefather of National Socialism? Mann, as can be seen, assumed an identity between the world of high culture and such political and moral values as “peace,” “liberty” or “human dignity.” The challenge to these values he saw as emanating from outside the boundaries of culture, from “the Persians.” The flaw with such an assumption, as was discussed in Chapter 2, was that major currents of high culture, far from embracing said ideals, in fact vehemently berated them. Paradoxically, Mann transformed democracy, for example, from a political weapon fought over by the masses and wielded by them to defend their rights and extend them, into an elitist tenet sheltered by culture. Yet many representatives of culture abhorred democracy, and considered it a threat, often the threat par excellence, to civilization, culture and art. It is telling that among the four cultural icons mentioned by Mann as forming his spiritual identity—Hölderlin, Novalis, Nietzsche and George—not a single unmistakable friend of democracy can be found, and two of them, Nietzsche and George, were its sworn enemies. Mann pushed such difficulty aside, and joined those who defend Nietzsche by claiming that his avowals should not be taken literally. Instead he argued, as Mosse will do, that the roots of fascism are to be sought primarily in popular culture. In the ideological family tree he charts, the literary figure that emerges as Hitler’s spiritual ancestor is thus Karl May, the author of immensely popular adventure stories, copiously catering to the escapist dreams of generations of German adolescents. One of May’s voracious readers, maintaining a life-long loyalty to him, was indeed Adolf Hitler. May’s influence on Hitler was apparently strongest with regards to battle strategy. During the Second World War, for example, Hitler claimed that it was not obligatory to have first-hand knowledge of the deserts in order to successfully conduct the African campaign, echoing the way that May only very late in life actually visited the foreign lands he described in his tales in such great, and affectedly realistic, detail (Klee 2007: 399). Such admiration allowed Mann (1940) to argue that the Führer’s politics—adventurous, jingoistic, aggressive and reckless—was at bottom a transliteration of May’s fictions into real-life. Similar claims were made by others, both before and after Mann, among them Karl Kraus (1989: 55) and George Mosse (1987: 43). Literary critics in general were never appreciative of May’s output, habitually chastised for its repetitive storylines, skin-deep characterization and poor language, all used to remorselessly drive home the problematic or outright dangerous didactic messages. To be sure, May also had prominent defenders, who have found both literary and ethical merits in his work, among them philosopher Ernst Bloch, writer Hermann Hesse and peace activist Bertha von Suttner. Upon examination, May’s stories do not dismiss out of hand the charge that they exhibit some affinity with National Socialism. They are

Fascism and Mass Society I 225 suffused, for instance, in German patriotism to the point that, with the exception of the native Indians, nearly all heroes are Germans, notably the invincible Old Shatterhand, a traveler from Germany who usually recounts his exploits in first-person narrative, giving the impression that May is simply committing to paper his own experiences. Typically, even those characters that appear at first to be common Americans sooner or later reveal themselves, if they are properly heroic and morally unassailable, as descended from Germany. Even more to the point, the stories are not without instances of hostility to Jews, albeit one that pales when compared with the Nazi obsessions.3 Yet the differences between May’s worldview and Nazism are no less striking and cardinal. Many facets about May’s ideology are not only different but fundamentally opposed to the National Socialist Weltanschauung. May, for example, was ingrained with a Christian and humanist belief that motivated him, especially in his last years, to write and lecture in favor of world peace and international fraternity. His heroes regularly take protection of the weak and vulnerable, in the same vein of primordial Judaeo-Christian compassion and concern for the underprivileged, which the Nazis were bent on uprooting. And while May’s heroes take pride in being German, they define Germanness in a way which is overtly anti-racist. They fight the Ku Klux Klan, for instance, and it is precisely from an avowed German perspective that Old Shatterhand takes a stance against slavery: “As a German, who cannot agree with the rebellious South on the question of slavery, I was considered suspicious as a matter of course” (May 2001: 8). The gulf between May and Nazism is thrown perhaps into the strongest relief when the following dialogue is cited, between Old Shatterhand, determined to free a black person from captivity, and a bigoted American cowboy, who is convinced that a “colored person is never a real man, or else God wouldn’t have colored him!” To which Old Shatterhand responds: With the same justice a black man can argue, that a white is not a real man, otherwise God wouldn’t have made him colorless. I’ve been about in the world a little more than you, and amongst black, brown, red and yellow peoples I’ve encountered good people at least as often as I have amongst the whites. At least, I say, at least! You understand me, Mr. Cutter? [. . .] I’m not polite to people who despise other people. [. . .] All men are God’s creatures and his children, and if you imagine that he made you out of particularly fine stuff and that you hold special favor in his eyes, that is a mistake I can’t even grasp. (May 1949: 191–192) The attempt to unearth some sort of pre-Hitlerism in Karl May’s stories is constrained, and is explicable as part of the effort to divert attention away from the flaws of German canonic culture, and onto the terrain of

226  Fascism and Mass Society I the supposedly irascible masses and their pulp fiction.4 Mosse, like Mann, runs into contradictions when trying to point out a strong link between May and Hitler, while being in fact conscious of the scant resemblance between them. This paradox is well reflected in the following argument: Although Adolf Hitler once remarked that Karl May had opened his eyes to the world, these popular novels were not the direct forerunners of National Socialism. [. . .] For Hitler’s manichean universe was fundamentally opposed to virtue as these novels defined it. (Mosse 1987: 65) Yet just three sentences further on, he insists that “May’s virtues were precisely those which Hitler wanted to defend against all enemies” (Mosse 1987: 65). The attempt to square the circle is obvious.

Mephisto Against Faustus It is interesting to juxtapose Klaus Mann’s stance on the relationship between culture and Nazism, as found in his most famous novel, Mephisto (1936), with that of his father, Thomas Mann, especially in his novel Doctor Faustus, which he began writing in 1943, and published in 1947. At first glance, father and son appear to hold similar views. Both novels are dedicated to probing the Nazi appeal for intellectuals and artists, and both associate such appeal with the attraction of the demonic: Mephistopheles is of course a devil’s moniker, especially common in the German literary tradition, while Doctor Faustus alludes to the pact with the devil recounted in Goethe’s Faust, the keystone of modern German literature. Moreover, both Mephisto and Doctor Faustus are intensely critical of people of culture. Yet there are significant differences between their critiques: for Klaus Mann, as already mentioned, the artists toeing the line with Nazism are charged with betraying culture. Mephisto draws a thinly-disguised portrait of Mann’s erstwhile brother-in-law, actor Gustaf Gründgens, represented by the main protagonist, Hendrik Höfgen. Gründgens is described as someone who had opportunistically cast off his liberal principles and compromised with the Nazi regime out of sheer careerism and personal ambition. He thereby, according to Mann, enacted in actual life the story of the artist selling his soul to the devil in exchange for power and glory. Höfgen-Gründgens thus illustrates the way certain educated people have deserted culture to join the ranks of the barbaric, “Persian” masses. Yet in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus the problem has deeper roots: the novel’s hero, the brilliant composer Adrian Leverkühn, also exchanges his soul in return for a period of astounding artistic productivity. Yet in his case this does not represent a distortion of culture or its abandonment as much as an act intimately deriving from high culture itself, at least in its German inflection. The interpretation of Nazism advanced

Fascism and Mass Society I 227 in Doctor Faustus is correspondingly different from that of Mephisto. For Thomas Mann the intellectual élites are not to be seen as affixing themselves belatedly to Nazism, motivated by short-term considerations of profit and career-making; rather, they were at the center of things from the very beginning. Not simply a product of a crude Volkish ideology, deifying the people, Nazism is in fact shot through with unmistakable elitism. The sin of German culture is that it had cast off the normal and “banal” values guiding common humanity, such as love, mutual accountability, modesty and consideration for others, and had sanctified pure art, placed it beyond good and evil and turned unbridled ecstasy into its ideal. For Klaus Mann some intellectuals may be guilty, yet of a second degree: they do not trigger and initiate developments as much as they prove spineless enough to be overwhelmed by them. Thomas Mann, by contrast, incriminates German culture generally and deems it, moreover, guilty in the first degree, for having cleared the path for German fascism by creating a twisted and alienated cultural and spiritual climate. Nazi inhumanity could thus draw upon tendencies which form the very core of modern German culture. “For was this government,” asks the narrator, Leverkühn’s level-headed and temperate friend, Serenus Zeitblom, in word and deed, anything but the distorted, vulgarized, besmirched symbol of a state of mind, a notion of world affairs which we must recognize as both genuine and characteristic? Indeed, must not the Christian and humane man shrink as he sees it stamped upon the features of our greatest, the mightiest embodiments of our essential Germanness? (Mann 1970: 482) This difference stands out with particular clarity when the two Mann’s attitude to Nietzsche is compared: Klaus, on the one hand, defends him and dismisses the Nazi thinkers who invoke the philosopher’s authority, as well as the critics who point to his share in the responsibility. Thomas, for his part, is far more critical. Leverkühn’s story was conceived to a significant extent as a literary reflection of Nietzsche’s trajectory.5 Similarly, for Thomas, unlike Klaus, the commoners do not constitute a major target of criticism. On the contrary, Nazism is primarily a translation— however clumsy and abridged—of the values of high culture into political language and action. It comprises a “deliberate rebarbarization,” a quasiNietzschean, neo-pagan assault on pity and the concern for the weak: For in a matter of hygiene it was quite in place to suspect an ideological basis. There was no doubt that in the future, after we had begun to practice a large-scale elimination of the unfit, the diseased and weak-minded, we would justify the policy by similar hygienic arguments for the purification of society and the race. Whereas in reality

228  Fascism and Mass Society I [. . .] the real reason lay far deeper down, in the renunciation of all the humane softness of the bourgeois epoch; in an instinctive selfpreparation of humanity for harsh and sinister times which mocked our humane ideals; for an age of over-all wars and revolutions which would probably take us back far behind the Christian civilization of the Middle Ages; in a return to the dark era before it arose after the collapse of the classic culture. (Mann 1970: 370) A little earlier (369), Mann refers to a passage from Gulliver’s Travels to drive home the way the deliberate rebarbarization is advocated by the upper layers, by the highly educated, whereas its opponents are mainly the commoners: I recalled a satire of Swift’s in which some learned scholars with reform gone to their heads decided, in order to save their lungs and avoid empty phrases, to do away altogether with words and speech and to converse by pointing to the things themselves, which in the interest of understanding were to be carried about on the back in as large numbers as possible. It is a very witty piece of writing: for the women, the masses, and the analphabetic, they it is who rebel against the innovation and insist on talking in words. We may add Swift’s (2008: 173) own ironic comment: “Such constant irreconcilable Enemies to Science are the common People.” Just as there are major differences in the way Klaus and Thomas Mann view Nazism in general, so too they differ in their specific assessment of Hitler. Klaus, as we have seen, regards him a grotesque figure, a destructive outsider brusquely barging into the salons of culture. Thomas, by comparison, in a fascinating essay published in 1939, offers a more complex account, informed by a heavy measure of self-critique. The essay was entitled Brother Hitler, which may seem to tally with Sloterdijk’s notion of “brother Hitler,” as the amiable man of the people reaching his hand to the masses. Yet Mann by no means saw an exclusive family resemblance between the Führer’s and the common people. He acknowledged his own kinship, as a representative of Germany’s artistic élite, with Hitler. The piece does not lack, to be sure, descriptions of Hitler as an utter failure, recalling Klaus Mann’s and Sloterdijk’s contempt. Yet for all that Hitler is regarded as a reflection—no matter how twisted or exacerbated—of deep currents in German culture, vitiated by a worship of pure art, unbridled emotion, unfettered instinct, the cult of genius and a revolt against reason and morality, the seductions of which he himself had felt only too keenly. He writes: Nonetheless, I feel that my best hours are not those in which I hate this miserable, but fateful creature. [. . .] A brother . . . A somewhat

Fascism and Mass Society I 229 unpleasant and shameful brother. He gets on your nerves, and it is a very embarrassing kinship. But I do not want to close my eyes to it: better, more honest, merrier and more productive than hate, is to recognize yourself, be ready to unite yourself, with what is worthy of hatred. (Mann 1986: 254–257) This family relationship has nothing to do, of course, with a common political denominator—Mann was a firm and eloquent opponent of National Socialism—but with the realization that Hitler is a product of German culture. He is not a strange and foreign implant, not even a stepchild or a bastard, but a legitimate offspring of a culture and a society that have embraced destructive moral and aesthetic norms. Overcoming Hitler therefore does not entail repelling an invader as much as purging and reconstructing the fortress itself, the fundamental reformation of German culture. The piece concludes (260) with a call to disengage from the heritage of élite culture, at least from its mystical and fateful elements, in order to usher in the culture of the future which will be open and humane: I want to believe, indeed I am convinced that the future is already coming, in which art will be despised which is not under spiritual control, art as black magic, a reckless and mindless cult of the instinct. It will be despised to the same degree that in weak human times, such as ours, it is idolized. [. . .] In a clearer and more successful form than hitherto art in the future will be a magic filled with light; it will be a conciliation [Mittlertum] between spirit and life. But conciliation itself is spirit. Thomas Mann, we might add, takes issue not only with Klaus, his son, and with Sloterdijk: he also disagrees with Arendt’s notion that the cult of genius played no role in the rise of Nazism.6 How can such differences between the views of Thomas Mann and his son be accounted for?7 The answer may have something to do with the biographic differences between the two of them. Thomas carried in his personal file, as it were, a burden of guilt; for he was not always a progressive thinker. The early years of his artistic and public activity were marked by a conservative affiliation, a profound identification with the predominant values of German culture, a boundless admiration of Nietzsche and a passionate support for the German military effort in the First World War.8 Only gradually did he take distance from these positions, began to question their premises and adopt an alternative social, political and cultural theory, affirming democracy and even a mild form of socialism. Klaus, by comparison, had no such checkered ideological record with which to deal. He was from the start a moderate liberal, who did not know the temptations of belligerent nationalism,

230  Fascism and Mass Society I let alone succumb to them. The culture informing his worldview had already underwent mediation, critique and refinement—notice the way he associated the iconic figures of German culture with democracy. Paradoxically, precisely the fact that Thomas had to grapple with emotions of remorse and complicity, totally unknown to his son Klaus, seems to have sharpened his awareness of the culpability of German culture and the crucial contribution of the élites to the ascent of Nazism. “The German ­intellectuals,” he wrote in a 1934 letter, “will in fact be the very last to begin to see, for they have too deeply, too shamefully collaborated and exposed themselves” (Mann 1975: 191). He knew all too well from personal experience that “culture” was not simply an innocent lamb sacrificed on the altar of some foreign, barbaric cult, emerging out of the blue, but that it had taken part in the anti-humanistic and militaristic frenzy, in the worship of the nation and the dismissal of democracy and humanism. He could therefore not posit it simplistically as the wholesome antithesis of Nazism, and construe the latter reassuringly as the rotten fruit of mass culture. His personal experience, richer and more painful than that of his son, allowed him to identify not only the monster in Hitler, his pathetic and contemptible side, but also the “brother,” the embarrassing family relative. Thomas Mann’s Hitler is thus a more complex figure than Klaus’s: he is not simply the slaughterer of culture, but also its victim.9

Fascism as the Dictatorship of the Educated Classes? Thomas Mann was not the only contemporary observer who regarded fascism as the executor of ideas and attitudes nurtured by élite circles. In truth, such a view seemed to have been that of a majority, if not among critics of fascism than at least among the fascists themselves and their sympathizers. Fascism in general claimed to shield the values and assets of classical high culture and stand as a solid rock between them and the corroding tides of modern mass society. “Vile, wretched and tasteless mass [plebe] of Madrid!” fumed the falangist Antonio de Obregón in 1938, “You—rabble, the worst and most irritating of rabbles.” He explained why he and his fellow fascists were hated by the mob of the Spanish capital: They declared a mortal war upon us, because our homes were gay and welcoming, because we had books and drank tea, [. . .] because we wore good ties and were born in comfortable homes, because we travelled, because we were of the universities. [. . .] Class struggle. Barbarism against cultivated minds [. . .], dirtiness against cleanliness, he who shaves on Saturday against he who shaved daily; the stupid and idiotic brain, filled with socialistic hogwash [. . .], against the noble talent of the scholar and the reader. (In Puértolas 2008: 395)

Fascism and Mass Society I 231 Consider, likewise, the case of one of the most talented among those who have viewed fascism in a generally positive light, the great Irish poet, W. B. Yeats. Yeats was a staunch opponent of democracy and in his writings and correspondence, expressed a eugenic fear with regards to the alleged deterioration in the quality of the people: “Since about 1900 the better stocks have not been replacing their numbers, while the stupider and less healthy have been more than replacing theirs.” Unless eugenic measures are undertaken, he warned, “every rank above the lowest must degenerate, and, as inferior men push up into its gaps, degenerate more and more quickly. The results are already visible in the degeneration of literature, newspapers, amusements” (Yeats 1994: 229). Such views prompted Yeats to endorse General Eoin O’Duffy’s fascist “Blueshirts” as an aristocratic alternative to the democratic nationalism of Éamon de Valera: Politics are growing heroic. De Valera has forced political thought to face the most fundamental issues. A fascist opposition is forming behind the scenes to be ready should some tragic situation develop. I find myself constantly urging the despotic rule of the educated classes as the only end to our troubles. [. . .] Our chosen colour is blue, & blue shirts are marching about all over the country, and their organizer tells me that it was my suggestion—a suggestion I have entirely forgotten—that made them select for their flag a red St Patrick’s cross on a blue ground—all I can remember is that I have always denounced green & commended blue (the colour of my early book covers). [. . .] History is very simple—the rule of the many, then the rule of the few, day & night, night & day for ever, while in small disturbed nations day & night race. (In Foster 2005: 473–474) Yeats believed that “every government is a tyranny but by the government of the educated classes & that the state must be hierarchical throughout.” As against De Valera’s reputed claim to be an “autocrat expressing the feeling of the masses,” he posited an autocrat that would “express what Swift called ‘the bent & current of a people,’ not a momentary majority” (In Foster 2005: 473–474). He was alarmed by the prospect that economic prosperity and technological improvements in agriculture and industry would permit the unchecked “multiplication of the uneducatable masses,” and therefore predicted that “it will become the duty of the educated classes” to fight and subjugate them: The drilled and docile masses may submit, but a prolonged civil war seems more likely, with the victory of the skillful, riding their machines as did the feudal knights their armoured horses. During the Great war Germany had four hundred submarine commanders,

232  Fascism and Mass Society I and sixty percent of the damage done was the work of twenty-four men. The danger is that there will be no war, that the skilled will attempt nothing, that the European civilization, like those older civilizations that saw the triumph of their gangrel stocks, will accept decay. (Yeats 1994: 231)10 Mussolini, on whom Yeats had pinned great hopes (Hitler he was not enthusiastic about), likewise saw his movement as embedded in the glorious tradition of canonic Italian culture and defined the fascist task as hammering such national and cultural pride into the reluctant masses. “There were proletarians who were ashamed of being Italian,” he declared in a 1921 speech. As against such unpatriotic disposition, the fascists want to spread everywhere the pride of belonging to such a noble race as the Italian; and if the commoners do not yet know this pride, we fascists will act in such a way that [. . .] all Italians will feel proud of belonging to a race which has produced Dante Alighieri, Galileo, the consummate artists of all the masterworks, Verdi, Mazzini, Garibaldi, D’Annunzio and the people of Vittorio Veneto. (Mussolini 1958, vol. 16: 248) In a 1933 book review he summarized the main ideas of Oswald Spengler’s book, The Years of Decision, which was highly appreciative of the Duce’s enterprise. Mussolini (1958, vol. 26: 123) sums up, without any objection, the book’s thesis: The world is menaced by two revolutions, a white one and a colored one. The white one is the “social” revolution, the catastrophic outcome of the collapse of the civilization of the 18th century and the arrival of the rule of the mass, especially the one that crowds, soulless and faceless, in the big cities, a process which takes place during the 19th century under the rule of liberalism, democracy, universal suffrage and, to put it generally, demagoguery. The other revolution is that of the colored peoples, who, because they are more prolific than the peoples of the white race, will end up submerging them. And the question we, Europeans of the 20th century, therefore face, is: what to do? Let it be duly noted that Mussolini considers himself an anti-demagogue. His mission as he understands it is to redeem the civilization preceding the French Revolution and the rise of the masses, not by returning to the past—which would be impossible in any case—but through the necessary adaptations to modern conditions. And this vital function of fascism as a

Fascism and Mass Society I 233 protector and renovator of classical culture was often stressed by Hitler as well, as in the following instance: During a visit to Rome or Florence, who cannot be depressed by thinking about what would have been the fate of these unique monuments of art and human culture, had not Mussolini and his fascism managed to save Italy from Bolshevism. Germany faced the same danger. Here National Socialism managed to perform the miracle of rescue. To these two countries is now attached, in the spiritual conception of countless people of all races, the belief in a new renaissance of our times. (In Domarus 1973, vol. 2: 1062)11 In truth, not only did fascism raise the banner of art and culture, it went a step further and claimed to be a form of artistic activity. This fusion of the artistic and the political deeds is one of the salient features of the fascist worldview. This, too, was prefigured by Nietzsche who envisioned the emergence of “international dynasties” setting themselves “the task of rearing a master race, [. . .] a new, tremendous aristocracy [. . .] in which the will of philosophical men of violence and artist tyrants is made to last for thousands of years.” These artist tyrants will form a higher species of men who, thanks to the superiority of their willing, knowing, wealth and influence, would make use of democratic Europe as their most tractable and flexible tool to take the destinies of the earth in hand, to sculpt ‘man’ himself as artists. (Nietzsche 2003: 71) Mussolini rehearsed this motif obsessively, presenting himself as an artist creating masterpieces out of passive matter—the people.12 While Joseph Goebbels (1942: 21) proclaimed in Michael, his semi-autobiographic novel: The statesman is an artist too. The people, to him, is what the rock is to the sculptor. In the relationship between the leader and the mass, there is as little problem as in the relationship between the painter and his colors. [. . .] From the mass to make a people, and from the people to make a state: that has ever been the deepest meaning of politics. Ernesto Giménez Caballero (2005: 240), the ultraist Spanish fascist, averred that [e]very great head of state is such, because he is an artist. Inspiration and not science is the fountain of his political oeuvre. He manages masses, numbers, hearts, destinies as the organist controls the keys

234  Fascism and Mass Society I and registers of his pipe organ, and the painter masters colors and lines, and the architect oversees calculations, plans, perspectives. And Robert Brasillach (1992: 314) recollected his impressions of a joint car travel with the founder of Rexism, Léon Degrelle: There is no leader, I am certain, who lacks profound poetry. While he is speaking to Italians of the home country and to those on the other side of the sea, Mussolini is a great poet, of the same lineage as those others of his race, evoking immortal Rome, the galleys on the Mare nostrum, and a poet too, a German poet, is this Hitler who invents Walpurgis nights and May celebrations, who combines in his poems the romanticism of Cyclope with that of Myosotis, the forest, Venusberg, the young girls adorned with blueberries engaged to a lieutenant of the Sturmabteilung, the comrades who fell at Munich in front of the Feldherrnhalle; and a poet is also Codreanu of the Rumanians with his Legion of the Archangel Michael. There is no politics which does not contain its share of images, there is no politics which is not visible.

Futurism and the Disdain for Common Humanity To be sure, not all cultural currents flowing into fascism defended classical art forms and turned to time-honored tradition for their inspiration. The precise opposite tendency characterized one of the most significant artistic movements impinging on Italian fascism, especially in its early phases, namely Futurism. The avant-garde movement founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909 and quickly finding realizations in such different fields as literature, painting, music, choreography, architecture and design, demanded to embrace the future wholeheartedly, while heaping contempt on the past and its stale conventions, both aesthetic and moral ones. In a strong departure from classicism and its harking back to the peaks of ancient culture, to Greece and Rome but also the Renaissance, Futurism enthusiastically upheld the modern age and demanded new aesthetic forms that will celebrate its achievements and accentuate its innovations, in particular the industrial, the technological and the military. In the famous founding document of the movement, The Futurist Manifesto, Marinetti (1960: 181–183) gave full vent to such praise of the future and scorn for the past: We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath [. . .]. We want to glorify war—the only cure for the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful

Fascism and Mass Society I 235 ideas which kill, and contempt for woman. [. . .] We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt [. . .]. Museums, cemeteries! [. . .] Do you want to waste the best part of your strength in a useless admiration of the past, from which you will emerge exhausted, diminished, trampled on? While Futurism never became the ideological pillar of fascism in Italy, and in Germany its direct influence was negligible, both Italian and German fascism evinced many parallels with the Futuristic spirit, in the affirmation of violence, aggression and war, and in the dismissal of traditional morality. Yet Futurism, in spite of its abandonment of the old civilization, was an attack on mass civilization, just like the conservative nostalgia characterizing the position of Yeats and many others. Both approaches, the classicist and the Futurist, were united precisely by their elitism. Both were ways of repelling the option of mass society, the first by relying on the past, before the rise of the masses, the second by wagering on a giant leap beyond mass society, into a heroic future in which pride of place will be reserved to the select few. It is instructive to see how Yeats, while drawing upon old Irish myths and decrying the decay of ancient civilization, employs against the masses violent methods which can be seen rather as futuristic and modern: suffice to recall the way he envisaged the triumphant élite of the future, soundly thrashing the masses while riding its machines, not as a contrast to the past, but as a replication of the deeds of feudal knights. After all, Yeats, the traditionalist, and Marinetti, the Futurist, are both admirers of Nietzsche.13 And it is the Nietzscheanism at the basis of their worldview which allows them great tactical flexibility in the choice of weapons as long as the strategic goal—the defeat of the masses—is obtained. If such victory had relied on horses in the past, there is no reason that it should not, in the modern age, avail itself of, say, submarines.14 Futurism, it is true, especially before the First World War, sometimes approached the masses in what appears to be empathetic fashion. In the manifest itself, as we have seen, Marinetti declared his intent to “sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt.” The versatile experimenter, Luigi Russolo, for instance, portrayed with perceptible admiration a demonstrating crowd, in his 1911 The Revolt, while another artist, the painter Umberto Boccioni produced works impressionistically reflecting scenes of everyday urban life, for example in his 1911 trilogy of paintings titled “States of Mind,” which described the emotions experienced by people as they arrive and depart at a railroad station. Futurism was certainly not a monolithic movement, advancing a single message, but rather a complex combination of ideas and individuals; nor, of course, should an identity be assumed between Futurism and fascism or a seamless transition from the former to the latter. There

236  Fascism and Mass Society I were irrefutably radical stirrings in Futurism, and its irreverence lent itself to non-fascist and non-elitist political appropriations, as happened in Russian Futurism and in the works of its most famous representative, Vladimir Mayakovsky.15 Yet for all that, the link between Futurism and fascism, particularly via Marinetti, the movement’s epicenter, was neither accidental nor ephemeral. Even the more affirmative, pre-War gestures to the masses, were mostly impressionistic and aesthetic, rather than the result of genuine identification with the way commoners lived, with their political goals and their aspirations for a better life. Futurism was attracted to an ideal of the crowd mainly qua immanently destructive, dynamic and restless. It was admired in much the same way that a military plane could be admired, or a tiger preparing to launch itself on its prey. The world of labor and industry was celebrated, similarly, on account of its vigor and productive prowess, rather than as a means to human enrichment. The ideal pursued by Futurism was for the most part resolutely anti-eudemonistic, celebrating hardness, struggle and pain, rather than well-being and self-fulfilling activity. In general, it was not sufficient for the fascists to sabotage mass society in simply political terms; rather, they had to overturn what Norbert Elias seminally referred to as “the civilizing process:” a very long evolution in Western Europe which replaced the militaristic ethos of the nobility with the more peaceful habitus of the bourgeoisie. The civilizing process centrally consisted of blurring of formerly rigid hierarchies and social distinctions, as well as the spread of a general aversion to violence increasingly internalized by the common man and woman. This was a development which stood in the way of the fascist project of military expansion, and which they needed to reverse culturally and ethically. In that respect, too, it is useful to recall the way Nietzsche attacked the peacefulness of the Last Humans, their reluctance to obey orders and march into war. Hence, with Elias, it is important to foreground the consciously “decivilizing spurt” of fascism, and its effort to remilitarize culture and drill the Last Humans into order and discipline (Elias 1996: 1; italics added). Such spurt, while vocally “anti-bourgeois” in terms of its ethos and rhetoric was at the same time profoundly bourgeois as far as its social basis and its goals are concerned. The bourgeoisie itself turned to embrace the values of the former antagonist, the aristocracy—values such as fixation on blood distinctions, on military valor and on human inequality—and mobilize them against the one-time allies, the popular classes, the “petty bourgeoisie” and the workers.16 The aristocratic ethos, which appeared at one point wholly antiquated, thus received a new lease of life, albeit in updated ways and indeed radicalized and exacerbated by the impetus of new ideological and cultural elements such as social Darwinism, modern nihilism and the overcoming of traditional moral inhibitions and commitments. As Elias argued (15), once adopted by middle-class groups who “came to support the boundless use of power and violence” the

Fascism and Mass Society I 237 militarist ethos was liberated from certain aristocratic inhibitions and attained its most naked expression. Many of these elements were illustrated by the Futurists in a nearly textbook clarity. Although mostly middle class in origins, they flirted with ways of resuscitating a neo-aristocracy, composed of would-be overmen—and occasionally over-women, too—geniuses, artists and heroes. One Futurist organ during the 1930s was called Artecrazia, reflecting Marinetti’s ideal of the rule of artists. Those crucial aspects of mass society and culture of which “the civilizing process” are composed, namely a way of life grown less violent and belligerent, of people becoming more appreciative of comfort and material pleasures, more civil and courteous, more egalitarian in social and gender terms, were shunned with disgust by most Futurists, and the more so, it would appear, the more they were prone to welcome fascism. Its nod to the crowd notwithstanding, Marinetti’s manifest is vehemently opposed to the Last Humans. If he champions modernity, it is decidedly not on account of accepting the present, which he abhors, but only in the hope of future, heroic transcendence. The text begins with a statement of this minority position, isolated from its environment, even as it aspires to future leadership. “We have been up all night, my friends and I,” Marinetti declares (1960: 179), and he goes on: “Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost, facing the army of enemy stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs.”17 Marinetti (1960: 184) clearly advocates a decivilizing spurt on the part of renewed culture when he states that “art can only be violence, cruelty and injustice.” In a no less patent protest against the Last Humans, who seek to live a long life by minimizing risks, especially mortal ones, Marinetti (180) ostentatiously courts danger and death: “And we hunted, like young lions, death with its black fur dappled with pale crosses, who ran before us in the vast violet sky, palpable and living.” As historian Emilio Gentile observes (2014: 172), the future fascist writer Giovanni Papini, “had contempt not only for the dead but also for the living masses of ordinary men. He declared that life was not sacred” and approved of any means to decimate the superfluous many. “It is good,” Papini declared, at a time when he was closely associated with Futurism, “to have general and collective assassination” (In Gentile 2014: 172). In 1912, the French futurist Valentine de Saint-Point took issue with Marinetti’s hostility to women, penning her own Manifesto of Futurist Woman. His low regard for the masses, however, she shared unconditionally and indeed spelled out even more explicitly. “Humanity is mediocre,” she observed in the opening sentence, and further specified: “The majority of women are neither superior nor inferior to the majority of men. They are both equal. They both deserve the same disdain” (SaintPoint 1914: 69). Humanity she considered only “the breeding ground” from which “burst forth the geniuses and the heroes of both sexes.” But

238  Fascism and Mass Society I for such rare sprouts to grow, a cultural rejuvenation is needed, a propitious, sunny climate: “We are the beginning of springtime; what is still missing is a profusion of sunshine, that is to say a lot of spilled blood.” Saint-Point was adamant that women should play a vital part in such cultural renaissance, but she urged them to shake off their pacifism and meekness and adopt virile virtues, indeed sheer brutality to reawaken the sedated age. But we have to impose on everyone, men and women who are equally weak, a new dogma of energy in order to arrive at an era of superior humanity. [. . .] Women are Furies, Amazons, Semiramis, Joans of Arc, Jeanne Hachettes, Judiths and Charlotte Cordays, Cleopatras, and Messalinas: combative women who fight more ferociously than men, lovers who arouse, destroyers who break down the weakest and contribute to selection. [. . .] Let woman reacquire her cruelty and her violence that make her attack the vanquished because they are vanquished, to the point of mutilating them. [. . .] Women, become again sublimely unjust, like all the forces of nature! (Saint-Point 1914: 70–73)18 Italian Futurists were of course almost invariably ardent nationalists and irredentists, committed to restore the greatness of Italy among the nations, and to the building of an empire. Yet this too cannot be properly understood unless the opposition to mass society and its fundamental internationalist and peaceful tendencies are taken into account. The Futurists welcomed the outbreak of the First World War euphorically and agitated relentlessly to drive Italy into the fray, in the face of a largely reluctant population. Their goal is indeed usefully defined as an attempt to “nationalize the masses,” as long as it is realized that such move entailed, precisely, turning the masses into something else, and non-mass—the nation. Marinetti orchestrated theatrical street events in 1915 to “instill a warlike spirit in Italians,” precisely because, in his view, they generally lacked such spirit (In Adamson 2014: 175). The Futurists intervened in mass culture to rally it in under the Tricolore flag and promote the cause of war, sometimes in a literal sense, as when Marinetti and Giacomo Balla came out with a concept for an “antineutral suit”: a man’s suit that, instead of the conventionally subdued colors, will be gaily colored red, green and white (Adamson 2014: 176). Throughout their turbulent career, the irony seemed to escape Marinetti and his circle that, for all their avowed opposition to the past and comprehensive effort to irreverently break into the future, they never questioned the most important legacy of the past which remained the sine qua non of their entire enterprise: the ideal of the nation itself. Elitists and conservatives at heart—or reactionary modernists, to put in Jeffrey

Fascism and Mass Society I 239 Herf’s well-known terms (see Herf 1984, a book which includes several references to Marinetti)—it never occurred to them that the nation, too, might be considered an antiquated value, worthy of the dustbin of history, nor even the more modest idea that one might entertain a notion of nationalism that was not centered around war and conquest. The Nietzschean elitism underpinning Italian Futurism was described by Mosse (1990: 256), with whose apt characterization we find no reason to disagree: This new man of Futurism, then, was [. . .] part of an élite of “supermen” voluntarily sharing an identical attitude towards life, discipline and claims to national leadership. Individualism meant possessing the strength of will to rise above the mass of men in order to accept Futurism and its consequences.19

The Significance of Museums and Original Artworks Such artistic currents, however, that aimed to pour fascist elitism into innovative and modernist artistic vessels remained in the final account marginal within fascist aesthetics. The nostalgic-conservative approach was far more pervasive. Marinetti’s attacks on museums notwithstanding, fascists frequented them and cultivated a sense of awe towards the achievements of the past. They regarded such relics not as cemeteries or as signs of impotence and exhaustion, but as monuments that can be harnessed in the struggle against the modern, massified spirit. Consider the following poster (Figure 4.2) by Gino Boccasile, one of the major propagandists of Italian fascism, produced around 1942.20 The image warns against the consequences which are sure to befall Europe under US occupation, in a way which condenses and unifies to great effect many motifs and phobias of the fascist worldview. It describes a black sergeant of the US army, leering obscenely as he embraces the statue of Venus de Milo, an icon of classical Greek culture and by extension of Western civilization, on which he has scribbled a two-dollar mark. The poster is meant to evoke primal anxieties about the imminent future in case fascism is defeated, anxieties which engage the simultaneous threats of class usurpation, racial miscegenation, cultural decay, crass commercialization and sexual depravity. Fascism, by implication, is the last bulwark of classical tradition against the untrammeled advances of mass culture from across the Atlantic. And fascism was indeed very far from acting on Marinetti’s demand to “demolish museums,” those depressing cemeteries. One might perhaps say, with a measure of interpretive freedom, that the fascists did exactly the opposite: they breathed new life into museums, used them

240  Fascism and Mass Society I

Figure 4.2 Gino Boccasile, propaganda poster

monumentally as if they were temples, while scattering mass cemeteries around the museums. Classical culture was used by the fascists not simply to venerate the past, but to celebrate the future which will be no less glorious, in a way which combined backward- and forward-looking approaches, conservatism and futurism. What got demolished was rather the present, perceived as irredeemably degenerate, at least as long as it remains under the sway of the masses. The museal dimension of fascism, if such an adjective can be used, found its ultimate expression in the Nazi craze for art collection-cum-plundering. Hitler, a would-be artist himself of course, treated paintings with quasi-religious awe. Reportedly, when

Fascism and Mass Society I 241 critical decisions had to be taken he was in the habit of staring for hours at a given picture, as if expecting illumination. Hitler, writes Fabrice d’Almeida (2008: 129), lived in a virtual museum, whether he was in Berlin or the Obersalzberg. He owned Cranachs, Dürers, and Holbeins. His ambition was to collect around 6.755 paintings, including 5.350 old masters, for the great art museum he intended to establish in Linz, where he had gone to school.21 Following Hitler’s example were most leaders of the NSDAP, among them Göring, Ribbentrop, Goebbels and Himmler. They collected artworks on an immense scale, and used them to beautify their residences, to underline their personal rank in the political pecking order and, not least, to pad their pockets: original works of art were a tangible asset of great value. At the war’s end, Göring’s collection, for example, included 1.375 paintings, 250 statues and 168 tapestries (d’Almeida 2008: 121).22 “The Nazi leaders,” points out John Petropoulos (2000: 5), “devoted an inordinate amount of time to cultural matters.” And he adds: Never before, with the possible exception of Napoleon and his cohorts, had an entire leadership corps been responsible for the acquisition of so much art. Through purchase and plunder [. . .] their harvest amounted to hundreds of thousands of pieces. In the Nazi leaders’ infatuation with original artworks and their obsessive hoarding—the Nazis confiscated during the 1930s pieces and collections belonging to Jews and during the Second World War systematically looted the treasures in the occupied countries (Nicholas 1994)—one can also discern a mode of contesting mass culture, albeit indirectly. It is instructive to examine the Nazi attitude to artworks under the light of one of the most important art theories of the 20th century, put forth by Walter Benjamin. This theory was written, perhaps not coincidentally, during the Nazi reign, between 1936 and 1938, when the author was in exile. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin argued that the status of art has fundamentally changed the moment it became possible, with the aid of modern technical means of photographing, printing and so on, to distribute reproductions of artworks among the masses. For the first time in history these works became accessible and cheap, in a way which dispersed the individual “aura,” in which they were enshrouded as long as they were unique, individual works, which could be encountered only in the specific place in which they were exhibited (a given museum, a church, etc.). According to Benjamin and his followers, such as the art critic John Berger, this development had important social and cultural consequences, both positive and negative,

242  Fascism and Mass Society I yet for our purpose what is important is the fact that, to the disappearance of the reproduced work’s aura, was coupled a dramatic augmentation in the value—monetary as well as spiritual—ascribed to the original works. On this dialectical development, Berger has written the following sentences, which are worth quoting at some length, for although they do not address fascism or other political movements, they nevertheless illuminate the otherwise enigmatic character of the Nazi art mystique: But it is at this point that a process of mystification again enters. The meaning of the original work no longer lies in what it uniquely says but in what it uniquely is. How is its unique existence evaluated and defined in our present culture? It is defined as an object whose value depends upon its rarity. This value is affirmed and gauged by the price it fetches on the market. But because it is nevertheless a “work of art”—and art is thought to be greater than commerce—its market price is said to be a reflection of its spiritual value. Yet the spiritual value of an object, as distinct from a message or an example, can only be explained in terms of magic or religion. And since in modern societies neither of these is a living force, the art object, the “work of art,” is enveloped in an atmosphere of entirely bogus religiosity. [. . .] The bogus religiosity [. . .] is the final empty claim for the continuing values of an oligarchic, undemocratic culture. [. . .] [T]he majority of the population do not visit art museums. [. . .] [T]he majority take it as an axiomatic that the museums are full of holy relics which refer to a mystery which excludes them: the mystery of unaccountable wealth. (Berger 1972: 20–24) One profits from reading Berger’s diagnosis while picturing Hitler as he ponders a painting in search of the divine inspiration which will assist him in running a military campaign. The cult of the original work of art reveals itself as integral to the extreme anti-democratic nature of fascism. Worshipping such works allowed the owner of the original to conduct a personal, quasi-religious dialogue with it, and accentuate his own superiority vis-à-vis the symbolically debarred masses—who can, at most, look at its reproductions. The Nazi élite person towers above the masses in the same way that the original work towers above its mass of reproductions. In Berger’s example, those members of the public interested in it, at least had the possibility of visiting the museum and conducting the one-toone dialogue themselves, even if only a fraction of the population would choose to act upon it. By contrast, a great part of the Nazi art collections were private ones, closed to the public, a fact which must have boosted even more their owners’ sense of individuality and self-esteem. If one of the main challenges faced by élites in the age of the masses was to hold on to their cultural capital amidst the relative democratization of culture,

Fascism and Mass Society I 243 the cult of original artworks provides an example of how fascism sought to bypass this obstacle. That such capital was not only cultural, but a perfectly material one, too, could not be emphasized enough. The persistent fascist preoccupation with art and culture reinforces the conclusion that they were insiders to Western culture, rather than invading “Persians.” This is not, of course, the same as saying that their interpretations of the Western cultural tradition were authoritative and reliable. Far from it, as numerous authors have protested through the years, in order to symbolically take possession of the world of art, literature and philosophy, the fascists were obliged to regularly distort the messages and ideas contained in that tradition, a habit particularly uninhibited in the case of Nazi Germany and its effort to retroactively turn all major German and “Nordic” thinkers and artists—Jewish ones excepted—into precursors of National Socialism and examples of the genius of the Aryan race. This practice reached its grotesque pinnacle, perhaps, in those Nazis insisting that Jesus Christ himself was not a Jew but an Aryan (as comprehensively discussed in Heschel 2010). In that context of the reckless plundering of the past, Walter Benjamin’s famous lines from 1940 need to be situated (2006: 391): “The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.” But there is a danger here. One-sidedly emphasized, the fact of distortion and appropriation, significant as it certainly is, can easily turn into a wholesale exoneration of the Western tradition, an attempt to severe all links between fascism and the past, and represent it reassuringly as a phenomenon emerging ex nihilo. This ignores the fact that, while Western culture indeed offers numerous possibilities to resist fascist ideas, it also, particularly during the decivilizing period which began in the 19th century, variously prepared the ground for fascism. Therefore, if Nazism, as a recent historian claims (Dennis 2012), had indeed forced Western culture into its “inhuman” mold, this should not conceal the many inhumanities integral to that culture, actively fostered by numerous writers, artists and thinkers. More useful than a monolithic exegesis of Western culture is to insist on its irreducible plurality, the different and sometimes totally antagonistic currents and traditions it encompasses. The considerable complicity of the world of culture and art with fascism at the crucial juncture of the 1920s and 1930s is further evidenced by the circumstance that “those in the learned professions were often among the first to be co-opted, not to mention frequently supportive of the Nazi regime right until the end” (Petropoulos 2000: 3). Just as Nazism was not an outsider to the world of art, so did the world of art—represented by museum directors, art traders, art journalists, historians and artists—widely and profoundly cooperate with the Nazi cultural policies, including offering aid and counseling to the Nazi raid of artworks across Europe (the exception to this rule, as in all other domains, were Jewish

244  Fascism and Mass Society I artists and intellectuals, and those associated with the left, together not a small public by any means). And similar co-optation to Nazism was notable in other sections of the educated public, such as doctors (Lifton 1986), jurists (Müller 1991), academics (Weinreich 1946; Gallin 1986; Friedländer 1998: 59), musicians (Kater 1997; Potter 1998), teachers (Jarausch 1990), engineers (Jarausch 1990), philosophers (Korotin 1998) and indeed the Bildungsbürgertum in general (Bollenbeck 2000) and the German elites broadly seen (Gnau 2007). Italian fascism was much more open than its German counterpart to formal artistic innovation and experimenting, reflecting the distant anarchistic backgrounds of several leading fascists. As we have seen, artistic modernism was by no means inherently opposed to fascism and to authoritarian rule more generally, and in many guises lent itself to a glorification of the perceived renewed vigor of the nation. Similar openness to modernism can be found in other fascist or quasi-fascist currents, for example British Vorticism, which ran parallel to Italian Futurism. Such was the case of the writer, thinker and artist Wyndham Lewis, a sympathizer of both Mussolini and Hitler, whose early painting The Crowd (1915) reflects his abiding disdain and aloofness vis-à-vis the revolutionary masses, portrayed as an agglomerate of anonymous, tiny, almost insect-like figures, scurrying along the streets of the modern metropolis carrying red banners.23 Nazism, however, rejected modernist avantgardism and saw in it no potential for national aggrandizement. Here, Hitler played a decisive role in dictating the rigidly conservative aesthetic line of the regime, whereas other Nazi leaders, such as Goebbels, would probably have adopted a less intransigent line. (See Lyttelton 2014: 73.) Nazism lumped together abstract art, experimentalism and critical realism, which were branded already during the Weimar Republic as Kulturbolschewismus, promoting social and moral decline, elevation of the diseased, the weak and the ugly, in the service of the corrosive forces of the left. Correspondingly, the ideal visual art under Nazism reflected the glorification of the past and its classical values, filtered of course through the Nazi prism, before the modern degeneration of art— entartete Kunst—had set in. Accompanying such neo-classicism was the fascist attempt to intervene in mass culture so as to weaken the massified element and enhance the national one. In music, the mass genre of the era par excellence, jazz, was condemned by the Nazis, who conducted several campaigns to restrict its consumption, although it was never comprehensively and officially outlawed. In 1933, for instance, a decree was issued forbidding the radio from broadcasting “Negro jazz.” Jazz was perceived as an instinctual challenge—identified with lower classes and races, particularly with Negroes and Jews—to refined and properly national culture, even if there were attempts to appropriate it and produce legitimate, “German” jazz.24 Similarly, although different thinkers (Broch 2003; Friedländer 1984)

Fascism and Mass Society I 245 have attempted to link Nazism to a collective cultural descent into the substandard aesthetical regions of kitsch—sentimental, flashy items with meager spiritual value and a purely decorative function, as well as a sugary and melodramatic concept of the world—an actual examination of Nazi policies reveal that they opposed kitsch and even tried to systematically curtail its distribution (Skradol 2011).

Fascism and the Culture Industry: Taking the Mass Out of Mass Culture But does not such a reading of fascist cultural attitudes as elitist fly in the face of the overt populist commitment so often avowed by fascist artists, critics and politicians? Did not fascists frequently and unmistakably articulate their cultural politics in terms of the promotion of popular and accessible tastes and in frontal opposition to sheer aestheticism and snobbery? As Hitler programmatically stated in July 1937: An art which cannot count on the most joyous and heartfelt approval of the broad mass of the people, and instead bases itself on a small, half-interested half-blasé clique, is insufferable [. . .]. The artist creates not for artists but for the people! And we will see to it that from now on precisely the people will again be called upon to serve as judge over his art. (In Ellrich 2008: 9) And a similar endorsement of popular art was expressed by Italian fascists, notably the important figure of Luigi Freddi, who served as head of the General Directorate of Cinematography and director of the Cinecittà studios—the Italian response to Hollywood—and critics such as Eugenio F. Palmieri, who hailed Alessandro Blasetti’s 1929 silent film Sole, despite its scant success at the box office, as “a film of the multitude—born of the people and for the people” (In Hay 1987: 265; translated from the Italian).25 To this ideological populism should be added the facts that under fascism cultural industries continued their commercial operations in a seemingly unhampered way. Not only did commercial “mass culture” expand massively in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany—in terms of cinema attendance, introduction of the wireless to millions of new homes, proliferation of popular music, commercial literature, comics and so on and so forth—but such operations were for the most part non-propagandistic in an overt sense. For example, only a very small minority of the films produced in Italy and Germany directly engaged contemporary political themes or celebrated the achievements of the regimes. Many films could be classified as entertainment: light comedies, adventure films, musicals and other forms of non-political “escapism.” Other films may have been

246  Fascism and Mass Society I ideologically instrumental but in a more subtle, roundabout way, such as the many historical movies dealing with heroic periods and figures of national history. For many scholars, these accumulated facts seem to indicate a significant continuity between pre-fascist and fascist times or even an actual empowerment and expansion of mass culture, whether actively willed by the regimes or reluctantly conceded by them. The social historian Michael Schneider (1999: 656), for instance, described the abundance of non-political, entertainment films under Nazism as “the way to mass culture.” Adopting a similar perspective, the historian of culture Georg Bollenbeck reached the conclusion that, once in power, Nazism had largely disappointed those traditionalists and Bildungsbürger who had hoped that it would rein in the massification of culture. Far from doing that, the Nazis in fact drove an additional nail in the coffin of traditional, high culture by further “promoting” and “legitimating” the “mass arts, especially the two preferred media of radio and film” (Bollenbeck 1999: 309, 332). In addressing this complex issue, it is important to realize from the start the limitations of formalistic and quantitative criteria, and acknowledge the need for a theoretical understanding of mass culture. In other words, it is not sufficient to know how many people went to the cinemas or listened to radio broadcasts under Mussolini and Hitler; what is really necessary is to know whether or not what these audiences viewed, listened to or read was indeed mass culture. And for that purpose, a theoretical rather than an empirical approach is called for. Here, three main interpretations of “culture industries” might be broadly distinguished, each carrying radically different implications for deciphering fascist culture. The first and perhaps still most prevalent approach is the famous critique of the culture industry as formulated by many members of the Frankfurt School, notably Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer but also Herbert Marcuse and, somewhat more ambiguously, by Adorno’s mentor, Siegfried Kracauer. For these critics, apart from its irremediable aesthetic deficiencies, the culture industry was intrinsically serviceable to repressive politics, capitalist in “normal” times and then, by mere escalation, fascistic. Its contents were almost invariably apologetic of the inhumanities of capitalism, either by simply entertaining (“To be entertained,” stated Adorno and Horkheimer (2007: 115), “is to be in agreement”); or by endorsing sadism at the expense of the hapless victims of the system (“the laughter of the cinema audience,” Adorno wrote to Walter Benjamin, typically allowing for no distinctions between different kinds of laughter, movies or audiences, “is full of the worst bourgeois sadism.” In Müller-Doohm 2005: 218); or, finally, by defusing social tensions and de-politicizing the audiences, for example via spurious reconciliations of class conflict, as in the formulaic romance between rich and poor: “The American is really a good person who deserves his millions,” Kracauer wryly commented (1995: 304), “Love is stronger than money

Fascism and Mass Society I 247 when money is supposed to win sympathy. The little shopgirls were worried; now they can breathe easy again.” From such a vantage point, which reduces mass culture to a pure instrument of the dominating classes, fascism cannot but emerge as a faultless continuation of the same tendencies, at most as their exacerbation, disclosing their repressive and inhuman nature and dispelling even their faintest pretenses of countering the hegemonic structures. Fascism merely transforms potentiality into concrete reality. “The citizens whose lives are split between business and private life,” according to Adorno and Horkheimer (2007: 125), “are virtually already Nazis.” The culture industry was seen not merely as compliant with “the spirit of Fascism” but amongst its “deep-lying” causes. This happened since art had been persistently drained of its higher purpose and degraded into a consumerist good, “measured only according to what people can ‘get out of it,’ the amount of gratification or pleasure it provides them with or, to a certain extent, its historical or educational value” (Adorno 2002a: 377). Eager to weld mass culture to fascism, Adorno insisted, undaunted by abundant evidence to the contrary, on a supposed affinity between jazz, of all musical styles, and fascism: In Italy it is especially well liked [. . .]. The ban against it in Germany has to do with the surface tendency to reach back to pre-capitalist, feudal forms of immediacy and to call these socialism. But, typically, this ban is a powerless one. (In Müller-Doohm 2005: 200) The transition from jazz to militarism was, in his eyes, the most natural in the world: “The military march has long been lying in wait underneath the colorful arabesques of jazz” (Adorno 2002a: 499). A second approach to the relationship between fascism and the culture industry starts from very different premises but reaches a surprisingly similar conclusion. I have in mind a current of a much more recent scholarship which draws on the works of authors such as Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, Michel de Certeau or Stuart Hall who have influenced the field of “cultural studies.” These and other theorists were far less condemning of the culture commercially produced under capitalism, either because they believed that such culture itself was forced, if only in order to sell its products, to take into consideration the desires, aspirations and grievances of the masses, hence producing a culture which was not simply instrumental; or because they assumed that, whatever the intentions of the producers and the limitations of their cultural goods, the possibility could never be entirely denied for audiences to make use of these products in autonomous ways, “read” them against the grain, thus empowering themselves. Applying this theoretical perspective to fascism, several scholars have subsequently argued that, particularly in its

248  Fascism and Mass Society I Italian, less forbidding variant, the fascist state never entirely controlled the private production of culture or subordinated it to its ideological imperatives. This meant that both artists and audiences could continue, in however subtle ways, to practice what Michel de Certeau has called “micro-resistance” to the regime. While this interpretation is radically different from the one put forth by the Frankfurt School, it strangely leads to a comparable conclusion that fascism was not that much of a caesura in Italian cultural history, that many supposed innovations of the postwar era, notably neorealist cinema and its great masterpieces were elaborations on themes, styles and ideas which were already evident in the films produced under Mussolini. These scholars challenge the claims that fascism was able entirely to harness the population to its cause, that it stifled all popular initiative or that its claim to produce culture which was a genuine reflection of popular sentiment was simply an ideological imposture. Thus, for example, two scholars of Italian mass culture, David Forgacs and Stephen Gundle, while not overlooking the “decisive cultural changes” which occurred in the transition from fascism to the post-fascist era, nevertheless “argue that, on balance, the continuities were more significant than the changes” (Forgacs and Gundle 2007: 4). While James Hay, another historian of Italian cinema, has repeatedly underscored the successful creation of popular culture under fascism, and even went on to suggest that the “contemporary films which examine the psychological undercurrents that may have sustained Fascism also lend support to the notion that it was not a historically specific phenomenon” (Hay 1987: xvi).26 A third approach, which is the one defended here, regards the commercial culture produced under capitalism as an arena in which, under “normal” times when no special political force is applied to administer its procedures, a fierce contention takes place between different ideologies and class-based perspectives. While this struggle is by no means free of constraints, pressures and outright censorship, both imposed from above and self-exercised by the artists, it can find significant scope to unfold itself.27 The fact that a cultural text is produced with a view to commercial success does not in and of itself tells us anything decisive about its ideological or political content and, as Terry Lovell (1980: 61) pointed out, there is nothing in Marx’s own theory that would suggest otherwise: Any marxist theory of consumption would have as its central category “use-value” and would focus on “the pleasure of the text.” [. . .] The pleasure of the text stems at least in part from collective utopias, social wish fulfillment and social aspirations [. . .]. Whatever the locus and nature of use-values of cultural products it remains certain that capitalist producers of those products must make and sell commodities which embody those use-values if they are to succeed in meeting the wants which they satisfy, and through doing so,

Fascism and Mass Society I 249 generating surplus value. The producer must “give the public what it wants” and what it wants does not necessarily sit square upon bourgeois ideology. Concurring with that, I would go further and argue that, although producers and managers of big entertainment conglomerates might be interested chiefly in money making, the people who actually produce the goods that deliver the profits—directors, screenwriters, musicians, song writers, etc.—are in many cases genuine artists and/or conscientious citizens for whom the aesthetic, social and moral import of the work they produce is quite important. And of these, not a few are highly critical of capitalist society and its iniquities and have sincere empathy with those suffering from them. Many of those employed by the culture industry doubtlessly care very little about anything which exceeds the financial aspect of their work, and still others are committed defenders of the existing social order and if they occasionally criticize it, it is on account of what they perceive as its excessive democracy and serviceability to the masses. It is this heterogeneity which makes “mass culture,” seen simply as the entirety of works produced by the culture industries, such a contradictory whole, made of conflicting vantage-points, conservative, utopian, liberal, radical, reactionary or simply trite and insipid. To generalize, therefore, about the “reactionary” nature of mass culture is just as little justified as to speak of the “reactionary” character of high art, without taking the trouble to dwell on actual, individual texts and try to understand how their authors conceived them and what the audience makes of them. It is highly symptomatic of their methodology that most writers of the Frankfurt School dispensed with paying much attention to individual texts, focusing instead on broad categories such as “entertainment,” “jazz” or “cinema” or writing about genres and formulas. “Every visit to the cinema,” wrote Adorno (2002b: 25), “leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse.” No mention was given of a specific film which had this lamentable effect, for it is precisely all films which have them. Indeed, to analyze a text of the culture industry individually would be for Adorno a contradiction in terms, since individuality is precisely of what such works are supposed to be structurally devoid. As I have tried to show elsewhere (Landa 2007), in a discussion of the Nietzschean influences and affinities in 20th-century popular culture, popular texts can give expression to acutely elitist messages, while others may espouse a plebeian and egalitarian ethos. Popular, commercial art may be allied with and useful to radical and irreverent politics, as was recently argued by Owen Hatherley (2016) in a book documenting the tremendous attraction of communist intellectuals, artists and politicians, such as Mayakovsky and Lenin, to American slapstick comedians, not only Charlie Chaplin, whose political commitments are well known, but also sheer entertainers such as Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. If this

250  Fascism and Mass Society I radical edge and defiance of the bourgeois order is, as I would argue, an irreducible feature of mass culture, it was all the more vital and difficult to contain during the period we are analyzing. As discussed in Chapter 2, the rise of mass culture in the latter stages of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century appeared to many conservatives to represent a serious threat to established society, undercutting class and gender hierarchy, bourgeois mores and canonic culture and amounting to no less than a terrifying “revolt of the masses.” Most people in bourgeois circles in Italy and Germany during the 1920s and 1930s would have found preposterous the proposition that mass culture is an ideological apparatus wielded by the state and by industrial leaders to pacify and disarm the plebs. They were convinced, on the contrary, that it was the spearhead of social subversion. And they were therefore eager to introduce political measures to tame mass culture and deprive it of the power to destabilize society. In Germany during the 1920s all bourgeois forces, from the liberals to the nationalists on the far right, were thus united in a campaign to impose state limits on the proliferation of what was referred to as cultural “Schmutz und Schund”— smut and trash. They called for rigorous state intervention to curtail the pernicious aspects of mass culture: internationalism, lack of patriotism, pacifism, profanity, as well as more radical social and political critique (although this latter aspect was conveniently understated). On December 1926 this campaign bore fruit, as the Reichstag approved of “the law to protect the youth from trashy and smutty literature.” The only parties opposing this law were the socialists and the communists, realizing that it was devised not least to curtail their own cultural activities. This bourgeois front, of which the Nazis were a part, thus never believed in the benign neutrality, let alone conservative nature of mass culture. As an incensed critic, one Adolf Hitler, observed (1999: 33): Day by day, in the theater and in the movies, in backstairs literature and the yellow press [the bourgeois] see the poison poured into the people by bucketfuls, and then they are amazed at the low ‘moral content,’ the ‘national indifference,’ of the masses of the people. This coalition of center-right forces never intended to allow “the broad mass of the people” to sit in judgment of culture before it could be firmly dictated to the masses what that judgment should be; before, that is, the masses could be turned, whether they liked it or not, into “a people.” Here the Nazis merely expressed, in a typically aggravated and ruthless form, the convictions of the right-wing camp in its entirety, pursuing to its utmost conclusions this project of enforced nationalization and demassification (cf. Maiwald 1983: 26, 94). “This cleansing of our culture,” Hitler insisted (1999: 255), “must be extended to nearly all fields. Theater, art, literature, cinema, press, posters, and window displays must

Fascism and Mass Society I 251 be cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world and placed in the service of a moral, political, and cultural idea.” The “reawakening of a nation’s dormant spirits of life” demands the total purification and mobilization of culture: from the child’s primer down to the last newspaper, every theater and every movie house, every advertising pillar and every billboard, must be pressed into the service of this one great mission. [. . .] All this was neglected and nothing was done. (632–633) That such a transformative mission could not be entrusted to the culture industry and its sinister—and supposedly mostly Jewish—controllers goes without saying. It was precisely they, according to the Nazi dogma, who had a vested interest, commercial as it was political, in seeing the German nation further dissolve into the mass. In a highly useful survey of cultural attitudes during the Weimar Republic years, the social historian Adelhied von Saldern recounts an illuminating, and rather amusing exchange, which had taken place during a Reichstag debate in 1927. Helene Weber, a representative of the Catholic Center Party, inveighed against the culture industry’s insidiousness in terms which are not so dissimilar from those of the Frankfurt School: That greed for profit which speculates on the lowest instincts and drives is not art, it is only greed and business ([calls of] very true! from the center and right). That is only capitalism under the cloak of art, both in the youth literature and in the amusements and expositions. In reply, social democrats were heard calling with mock surprise: “Since when are you against capitalism?” To which Weber emphatically responded: “Against this capitalism, I always was” (In Saldern 1993: 35). A true dialectician, this politician had little difficulty in grasping the contradictory nature of capitalism, in telling apart its unruly from its conservative trends, and energetically resisting the former. The strategy adopted by right-wing forces and subsequently the Nazis was to drastically intervene in mass culture in order to drain it as far as possible of all mass, disquieting elements, while preserving and turning to their advantage the new technical ability to reach millions of viewers, listeners and readers. “Whether by radio, trivial literature or film,” writes Saldern (1993: 55), “the attempt was made continually to employ the new mass culture also for politically reactionary goals, and suppress mass products with socially emancipatory contents.”28 A testimony, albeit indirect one, to the way fascism had profoundly transformed popular culture, is provided by the untiring Nazi pedagogue Karl Arnhold (of whom more will be said in the next chapter, in a different context).

252  Fascism and Mass Society I Writing during the Nazi period, Arnhold linked the popular production of the Weimar era with Marxism. He asked his readers not to be led astray by the “the image of the big industrialist as it had been represented by the Marxists of all grades in speech, writings and film” (Arnhold 1938: 29). Consider, also, how the Spanish falangist author, Maximiano García Venero, was deeply preoccupied in 1937 by the way communist ideas were being promulgated by Hollywood productions, notably by Jewish artists. “Really grave are the films created by an Ernst Lubitsch, a Paul Czinner, a Max Reinhardt, Jewish communists, on the pay of Jewish firms and inspired by the 3rd International” (In Puértolas 2008: 392). To curtail the damaging effects of the culture industry, he advocated strict censorship. Again we can see how cinema, before the fascist intervention, was regarded by the fascists as an arena of sedition, not sedation. Wary of the culture industries as they actually were, the fascists attempted, one might say, to artificially transform them into something much more resembling Adorno’s image of the culture industry as a pliant tool for social domination, indoctrination, distraction and pacification. The many scholars stressing the relative rarity of “propaganda” and the abundance of “entertainment” under fascism neglect to consider that fascists essentially disregarded the boundaries between the two, and strove to create a purified realm of entertainment, congruent with the regimes’ purposes and supportive of them, whether directly or indirectly so. The existence of such a realm is thus not evidence of an “imperfect fascistization” (Brunetta 1995: 179) as is often claimed but, on the contrary, of a highly successful political domestication of culture. This the fascists achieved by combining outright repression of undesirable culture and information outlets—to give just one example, in the aftermath of the Nazi Gleichschaltung a staggering number of 3.298 newspapers and magazines ceased publication (Saldern 1995: 64); by active censorship which sought to eliminate contents incompatible with the regimes’ spirit; by the converse promotion of contents deemed beneficial, including sheer state propaganda; and, most subtly, by encouraging compliance with the fascist and Nazi consensus even in works of “entertainment” with little or no explicit political significance. Thus, instead of rejecting the notion that fascism controlled culture in a totalitarian manner, we are perhaps better advised to accept that it came close to doing just that and rethink the meaning of totalitarianism in the cultural sphere. We should consider the possibility that the control of culture is in practice all the more pervasive if it allows for a certain artistic creativity and for room for distraction and relaxation. Bombarding the audiences with incessant explicit propaganda would have been, as some fascists well understood, counter-productive. It is hence problematic to imagine a gap between an initial totalitarian agenda on the part of fascism, which was subsequently imperfectly executed. Entertainment, rather, became a state matter to begin with. “I rarely go to the cinema,” argued Giuseppe Bottai in 1931,

Fascism and Mass Society I 253 but I could always ascertain, that the public is invariably annoyed when the film wants to educate it. The public wishes to be entertained and it is precisely in that regard that we today wish to assist the Italian industry. (In Brunetta 1995: 166–167) And Luigi Freddi combined a stress on the state as an agent of total control with the recognition that such control must be deftly and not too conspicuously imposed. On the one hand, he programmatically stated the need for an institution that will “be in charge, inescapably, of all cinematic activities and will have the authority and the competence to regulate, direct, inspire, control and, whenever necessary, reward and punish, all forms and all initiatives within the space of Italian cinematography.” Or, to the same effect: I do not hesitate to declare that with regards to an industry whose production directly concerns the dignity, the pride, the economic and moral interest of the regime, it is finally necessary that the state intervenes directly, imposing on production the authoritative and severe mark of its will and control. (In Brunetta: 186–187) Yet, on the other hand, Freddi understood his role as censor less in terms of a grim punisher, appearing at the end of the work process to cull unacceptable passages or veto entire works, but as a benign educator, intervening already at preproduction stage to instill scripts with the right, noble, spirit. “State intervention,” he claimed, “should be geared towards developing, by every possible means, an appropriate function of inspiring and arousing” (In Forgacs and Gundle 2007: 224).29 Cesare Zavattini, the great screenwriter who worked under fascism and later on became a major contributor to some of the most path-breaking and socially critical works of Italian neorealism, described such “inspiring” in the following terms: The damage done by censorship is not to be found principally in the highly visible veto or in seizure of works but in the more hidden intimidations and secret pressures to which authors are subjected. [. . .] We know very well that even those authors who believe themselves to be most free and in good faith are exposed to these pressures. (In Forgacs and Gundle 2007: 221) It is highly significant that Adorno himself, who retrospectively insisted on the continuity between the culture industry and Nazism in general, and specifically on the covert fascist spirit of jazz, in real time saw matters quite differently. He realized full well that the Nazis had forcefully

254  Fascism and Mass Society I intervened in the procedures of commercial art and, what is more, could warm up to their initiatives. In 1933, he wrote as follows, in the notorious “Farewell to jazz” article: The regulation that forbids the radio from broadcasting “Negro jazz” may have created a new legal situation; but artistically it has only confirmed by its drastic verdict what was long ago decided in fact: the end of jazz music itself. For no matter what one wishes to understand by white or by Negro jazz, here there is nothing to salvage. [. . .] [T]he reconciliation of art music and music for common use [Gebrauchsmusik], of consumability and “class,” [. . .] is untrue in all its aspects. Looking at things very much from the perspective of a comforted Bildungsbürger, Adorno dismissed the pseudo novelties and sham regeneration of jazz, and belittled them as compared to the achievements of genuine art, choosing the example of a great German composer. “[S] yncopation,” he went on, “is new for popular music, but by no means for art music. In a master like Brahms, for example, it is accomplished with incomparably greater richness and penetrating depth of construction than in the jazz writers” (Adorno 2002a: 496–498). In fact, in another piece written at the same time, but which has remained unpublished and unearthed by the scholar Rolf Tiedemann, Adorno went beyond a mere sympathy for the Nazi cultural measures vis-à-vis commercial art to egg them on to even harsher steps. He proposed that trivial music be exposed “to public ridicule [. . .]. In short, the hit song will be outlawed with the aid of the irresistible methods available to a modern centralized system of propaganda” (In Müller-Doohm 2005: 526). Such tension between fascist regimes and mass culture is easy to lose sight of, as long as one abides by the instrumental notion of the culture industry, seen as a mere appendage of political power, just another tool at the rulers’ disposal for carrying “mass deception” into effect. In contradistinction to such mechanistic concept, even under the tight control exercised by fascist regimes, political power often mistrusted commercial culture and felt obliged to police and limit its activities. Hence the “fascist aim of encouraging the development of an alternative mass culture based on nationally specific aesthetic forms and styles,” precisely because it could not rely on the culture industry to spontaneously do so (BenGhiat 2001: 81).30 Highly revealing are the vicissitudes of the adventurer Sun Koh, hero of a series of fantasy stories published in Germany in 150 installments between 1933 and 1936 (the author was Paul Alfred Müller, using the pen name Lok Myler). The stories originally advocated a cosmopolitan vision of fraternity between the races, as the non-German hero’s quest to discover the lost realm of Atlantis was helped by the black prizefighter Nimba and empathy was shown to the aspiration of the Incas

Fascism and Mass Society I 255 to regain their liberty and dignity. Yet the hostile reception by Nazi critics lamenting the “glorification of colored races” forced the author to introduce racist and German nationalistic elements, such as the sudden assertion that people with foreign blood, such as Nimba, are of inferior value. The pressure to toe the regime’s line went so far as to finally cause the death of Nimba in volume 139, and the subsequent erasure of his image from the covers of later editions of the stories. (See the discussion in Adam 2013: 206–212.) In 1938, to give another example, the Italian Ministry of Popular Culture issued a ban on the publication of foreign comics in Italian papers. This it did because fascist leaders felt they might be overshadowed by comic-book heroes. “Fascism,” argues R.J.B. Bosworth, “was indicating to any who cared to look that its charms, its novelties and its powers could scarcely match those of consumer capitalism.” For many Italians, he adds, the Duce “still came second in appeal behind Mary Pickford or Mickey Mouse” (Bosworth 1998: 67–68). It was not so easy to bring into line such a nimble member of civil society as Mickey Mouse, perhaps because, unlike more direct and tangible political opponents, he could not be subjected to the customary castor oil treatment. In his work on Italian cinema under fascism, James Hay shortly listed several examples of foreign, mostly American films, which were subject to censorship in the late 1930s. These are of great value in providing an insight into what the fascists did not consider legitimate aspects of popular culture. To start with, a scene was cut from the film Penitentiary (1938) in which a prisoner spits in a warden’s face. Insubordination towards one’s superiors was clearly not something to which the Italian public was to be exposed. In another film, “censors cut three meters showing placards in a port strike and replaced them with three meters showing the port of New York.” Labour unrest, needless to say, was not supposed to upset the viewers either. In the film Conquest (1937), Napoleon’s following words are deleted in which he claims that “victories breed revenge, wars of revenge breed wars of reprisal, an endless cycle of bloodshed,” going on to praise “the idea of democracy” (In Hay 1987: 87–88). Freddi campaigned behind the scenes to prevent Jean Renoir’s anti-war film La Grande Illusion (1937) from obtaining the major prize at the Venice Film Festival (Forgacs and Gundle 2007: 225). Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), by contrast, was not censored or tampered with, and indeed was praised by Freddi as a “ferocious satire of socialism and communism and demonstrates how striking workers quickly line up behind a demagogue they know little about” (In Hay 1987: 88). Rather than an astonishingly poor judgment on Freddi’s part, his decision was probably motivated by the realization that showing home audiences a stark view of the wretched working and living conditions in America could be rather serviceable to the regime. In Nazi Germany, according to Volker Koop (2015: 30), audiences could watch only about half of the films produced by American studios, the rest having been disallowed by the censors.

256  Fascism and Mass Society I Thus, it was only after their hyper-McCarthyist campaigns of cultural Gleichscahltung that the fascists could bring themselves, up to a point, to entrust popular culture with delivering the necessary “entertainment” and “relaxation” to their subjects. For Goebbels, for example, it was vital to provide “the people,” particularly in a time of enormous national challenges, opportunities for “recovery, entertainment and stimulation” (In Bollenbeck 1999: 333). Yet this entertainment was understood not as an escape from drill and subjugation but as a temporary release, a safety valve. The goal was better to discipline the Last Humans, make better workers and soldiers out of them. The fascists were proudly aware of the difference between their culture industry and the democratic one, associated with America. Among many other places, this conscious opposition found expression in the pages of the SS weekly Das Schwarze Korps, in a 1944 article addressing “The Danger of Americanism.” There are times when [the German soldier] wants a vacation from himself, from us, from the whole world. [. . .] Nothing is better suited to take him out of the normal world than the complete nonsense of this hot music, this cacophony of animal howls, wild instruments, and foot-stomping Negro lust. It takes him away from human concerns back to the depths of pre-human apedom, returning him to the time when people did not need to think because there was no past and no future. [. . .] And the soldier certainly does not forget his German mission, nor does he lose his character or honor when he occasionally spends an hour relaxing to entertaining music. He is immune to the danger of confusing this rhythmic pig grunting with good music, much less art or culture. The danger, in other words, is when entertainment becomes a goal rather than a mere respite, when it obscures the fact that “dignity comes from doing one’s duty, and both are seen not as a burden but as the joy of life.” To be sure, the author is confident that Nazi youth is immune to such temptation. “Our young Luftwaffe aides and working girls,” he asserts, “would hardly join in a dance marathon. And the winning couple running through the arena in tattered, sweaty clothes would receive not applause, but a beating. But that is our youth. They are made of different stuff.” Yet the danger of Americanism is great nonetheless: “Others, however, are not as immune. That is what those who deny any appeal of Americanism forget.”31 Beyond, and in certain contradiction with, this instrumental view of mass culture which denied its inherent value, the fascists were aware that “entertaining” and educating were by no means mutually exclusive options. In that respect, too, it is useful to think about fascist cultural politics as attempting to artificially engineer the condition that Adorno and Horkheimer regarded as an inherent fact of the culture industry,

Fascism and Mass Society I 257 namely that “to be entertained is to be in agreement.” For under conditions relatively free of political pressure this can by no means be presupposed. Watching the enormously popular comedies of Charlie Chaplin or the Marx brothers or Hollywood blockbusters such as Black Legion (1937) or The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), to name but a handful of notable instances, audiences were lavishly entertained but were at the same time confronted with serious social and political problems. They were shown examples of irreverence towards the high, the mighty and the pompous, were moved by messages of humanism and social justice, contested military values or espoused hedonism. Even the basic “right” to pursue individual happiness, ritually celebrated in Hollywood cinema, would have been a subversive message in the context of a fascist society. There was thus plenty of room for not agreeing with values preached from on high, most especially if these were fascist values. In one of the Marx brothers’ anarchic films, Day at the Races (1937), there is a magnificent scene where Afro-American dancers show their superb skills to the music of the hottest “Negro jazz” conceivable. But, surely, in celebrating the spirit of jazz the brothers were moving as far as possible away from fascism, not towards it. It is hard to imagine any fascist of true convictions not cringing in his seat to the sight and sound of such atrocious, Jewish-Negro co-production, undermining all order, dignity and duty. Under the sanitized conditions of fascism, by contrast, what was often produced was “pure entertainment,” robbed of its license to disturb those in power. As argued by Anna Lucia Natale apropos popular music in fascist Italy, the regime’s paternalism ensured that mass culture could not develop itself a freely as it did during the same time in Western democracies, hence stagnating into sheer escapism, purged of all elements which might be considered “dangerous” for the regime’s “political stability” (Natale 1990: 96–98). As examples one can mention the songs of the Trio Lescano, a group of female performers active from 1936 to 1943, whose successful hits such as Tulipan or Ma le gambe, while influenced by contemporary American styles such as swing, have a thoroughly synthetic and sterile ring and whose lyrics were devoid of even the faintest trace of social impertinence. It is highly indicative, likewise, to compare the many tango hits recorded in Italy during the 1930s with the original songs, coming from Argentina. Argentinean tango lyrics, while seldom directly political, frequently engaged social themes in a way which was critical, bleak and disconsolate. The golden era of tango—the typical mass art of Argentina and Uruguay in the first half of the 20th century—largely corresponded to the progressive presidency of Hipólito Yrigoyen, who, in two terms in office during the 1920s, was responsible for a series of social reforms benefitting the working masses, such as improvement in factory conditions, workers’ pensions, regulation of working hours and the introduction of universal education. In

258  Fascism and Mass Society I such atmosphere of relative liberty, tango lyricists allowed themselves to vent popular grievances, satirize class differences and frankly portray the hardships of urban poverty, usually in the lower-class slang of lunfardo, originally developed by immigrants in the poor neighborhoods of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. The democratically elected Yrigoyen was ousted by a military coup in 1930 led by José Félix Uriburu, who was supported by far-right groups sometimes classified as representatives of “clerical fascism,” thus ushering in the so-called “infamous decade” of severe social repression. Yet even then the irreverent spirit of tango songs could not be completely snuffed out. Their counterparts produced under Italian fascism, by comparison, reduced tango to a blandly sentimental, escapist and romantic distraction with exotic allure. In 1938 Carlo Buti sang a Tango di primavera [A Spring Tango], assuring the listeners that “when it turns spring, every heart falls in love”; in 1939 Luciana Dolliver sang Ho voglia di sposarmi, in which she confesses to having “such a desire to get married but, what a pity, I have no fiancé.” Compare these examples with the following samples from texts written by two of the most celebrated Argentinean tango lyricists such as Enrique Santos Discépolo’s utterly bleak Yira, Yira [Turning, turning], from 192932: Cuando la suerte qu’ es grela, fayando y fayando te largue parao; cuando estés bien en la vía, sin rumbo, desesperao; cuando no tengas ni fe, ni yerba de ayer secándose al sol; cuando rajés los tamangos buscando ese mango que te haga morfar . . . la indiferencia del mundo, que es sordo y es mudo, recién sentirás. Verás que todo es mentira, verás que nada es amor, que al mundo nada le importa . . . ¡Yira! . . . ¡Yira! . . . Aunque te quiebre la vida, aunque te muerda un dolor, no esperes nunca una ayuda, ni una mano, ni un favor.

When luck, like a treacherous lover, cheats you over and over again leaving you in the lurch . . . When you’re on the street, without aim, desperate . . . When you have neither faith, nor yesterday’s yerba mate, dried out by the sun; When you tear off your shoes’ soles, looking for that dough that would make you eat . . . the indifference of the world, which is deaf and dumb, only then will you feel. You’ll realize that everything’s a lie, that nothing is love, that the world doesn’t care about anything, it keeps turning! Turning! Even if life breaks you, even if pain bites you, never expect any aid, nor a helping hand, nor a favor.

Another tango song, Pan [Bread], 1932, by the anarchist Celedonio Flores, perhaps the most important tango lyricist, tells the story of a workman who is reduced by abject poverty to stealing bread in order to feed his starving family.33

Fascism and Mass Society I 259 Quisiera que alguno pudiera escucharlo en esa elocuencia que las penas dan, y ver si es humano querer condenarlo por haber robado. . . ¡un cacho de pan! . . .

I wish somebody could listen to him, In this eloquence which suffering bestows, And see if it’s human to wish to condemn him, for having stolen . . . A bit of bread!

These may be extreme examples, and other comparisons might not yield a contrast which is quite as sharp, yet I think they capture nonetheless something of the difference between a lively mass culture and an eviscerated one.34 This is not to say that light music was embraced by fascism without reservations. Particularly in the German context, the commercialization of musical production, the proliferation of hits and operettas characteristic of modern popular culture and of the hated Republic was often castigated as one of the surest symptoms of a depressing fall from the sublime pinnacles of German musical achievements. The hugely popular genre of light-hearted musical films, the Tonfilmoperette, represented “for National Socialism the bogeyman par excellence” (Rother 2015: 241). As pointed out by Christoph Dompke, Nazi critics articulated an approach to commercial music which was in many ways comparable to that of left-wing critics such as Karl Kraus (and, one might add, Adorno and Horkheimer), replete with denunciations of “the exploitation of art as an object of speculation,” the “factory-like” production of operettas, as well as sneering evaluations of allegedly amateurish and uneducated musicians. The only new ingredient such critics added into the mixture was the antisemitic one (Dompke 2015: 410–411). The Last Humans, to be sure, were not completely marginalized in fascist cultural production, which had to take their desires into consideration, at least as long as these were not expressly political, if only in order to absorb their frustrations. Thus, in Paul Martin’s 1936 film, Glückskinder, the actors sing a version of the hit song, Ich wollt ich wär ein Huhn [I wish I were a Chicken], containing mildly subversive last-human lines such as the following ones, freely translated: I wish I were a chicken I wouldn’t have much to do. I’d lay an egg in the morning, and be free in the afternoon. No fame or money would tempt me and if I found a fortune, I would just eat it. I would never again go to the office, I would be stupid, but happy, and that’s why I thought to myself:

260  Fascism and Mass Society I I wish I were a chicken, I wouldn’t have much to do, Every day I’d lay an egg and on Sunday even two. Tellingly, however, even such barely perceptible mutiny did not escape admonition from the regime’s ideologues. “One tries to convince us,” wrote a music critic, that a hit song that expresses the stirring desire ‘I wish I were a chicken’ is even a jot better and more spirited than the often conjured rubbish that from times immemorial some skilful Jazz peddler rolled up to Berlin’s central station. No, this kind of art production is despairingly similar to the gestures of certain firms that do indeed loudly proclaim that they are now ‘Aryan,’ yet maintain their Jewish methods. (In Dompke 2015: 420) Commercial art under fascism could draw nourishment from the most innocuous kinds of contemporary entertainment such as the Tiller Girls’ shows of meticulously coordinated dancing by scantily clad female performers, which Vittorio Mussolini, the Duce’s son, found highly pleasing. “From a moral point of view,” he explained, “our youthful spirit logically finds a chorus line of a hundred beautiful girls less vulgar than the trite farce [. . .] typical of the French” (In Hay 1987: 72). It is worth noting that the Tiller Girls were one of the major instances of popular entertainment critically analyzed by Kracauer in his pioneering essays of the 1920s, where he famously construed them as a reflection and celebration of American, assembly-line capitalism: “The hands in the factory correspond to the legs of the Tiller Girls. [. . .] The mass ornament is the aesthetic reflex of the rationality to which the prevailing economic system aspires” (Kracauer 1995: 79). While aspiring to sophistication, such an unmediated analogy actually veered quite closely to economic reductionism. Also interesting is that for both of these observers the Tiller Girls were a typical product of the American spirit to be contrasted with the European one—affirmatively, in the case of Vittorio Mussolini, critically in the case of Kracauer, who wrote in 1931: “the Girls were artificially produced in the USA and then serially exported to Europe. Not only American products, they demonstrated at the same time the greatness of American production” (Kracauer 1995: 342). Apparently, both critic and admirer were oblivious of the fact that John Tiller was actually an English entertainer who developed the “precision dance” in Manchester, and that it was consequently Europe that first exported it to America, not the other way around. Other fascists, certainly, were not as approving of shallow diversions as Vittorio Mussolini. Film critic Luigi Chiarini countered that the “people don’t go to the cinema to amuse themselves with the legs of girls”

Fascism and Mass Society I 261 but “to be moved, to take in, to penetrate life more deeply” (In Hay 1987: 61). In practice this meant that many films produced under fascism bore an unmistakably pedagogical character, attempting, sometimes slyly sometimes bluntly, to combine entertainment with education and moralization. Films inculcating middle-class and conservative ethics thus thrived at the expense of those problematizing such mores. Gangster films, for example, which were one of the main avenues in popular culture through which violent social conflict was depicted, were downgraded as compared to historical films, celebrating towering heroes—Friedrich the Great, Scipio Africanus, Bismarck or Giovanni de Medici—who have united the people at critical junctures in the national past. Benito Mussolini, often described by critics as a sort of gangster himself, reputedly did not like gangster movies, although he was also bored by Scipione l’Africano (1937), a historical epic meant to pay homage to the Duce (Hay 1987: 97, 155). Under Nazism, likewise, “censors were instructed to fundamentally prohibit American gangster and horror films” fearing the “ ‘brutalizing and corruptive’ impact of realistic depictions of violence and crime” (Koop 2015: 28). In discussing commercial cinema, Kracauer criticized the formula of inter-class marriage, between a rich boss and his poor salesgirl, as a spurious ideological resolution of class conflict, providing consolation to the gullible audience (typically female). Significantly, however, under fascism even vicarious upward mobility became a scarce commodity. Italian films produced during the fascist era, for example, usually advocated an antimaterialist ethos, demonstrating the futility and emptiness of striving to climb up the social ladder. The heroes and heroines of Mario Camerini’s extremely successful comedies and dramas—with the charismatic Vittorio De Sica often cast in the central role—were usually of lower-class background. The plots recurrently began with the protagonists unhappy about their present social condition, their jobs and their future life prospects. But in the course of a cinematic Bildungsroman they came to realize that materialism and hedonism are deceptive, and that a purposeful life consists in cherishing the warm company of people of one’s own milieu and working to promote the greater, national good. The existence of the upward sphere—and hence the perseverance of the class system— was not denied. Yet it was represented as decadent and hollow, and thus unworthy of the good Italian’s aspirations. Rather than the miraculous marriage to a millionaire, therefore, a far more habitual formula was that of intra-class marriage—the initially frustrated and restless hero and heroine eventually realizing that their ideal partner was not a fanciful upper-class lover but one close at hand, of their own social standing, thereby disabusing themselves of the lure of riches and privilege, and finding pride and satisfaction in remaining just where they are.35 Thus, if Kracauer (1995: 292) could criticize even Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925) for providing a consoling ending in which the hero turns into

262  Fascism and Mass Society I a millionaire, in fascism the very desire for gold is deemed unbefitting of the masses. The gold rush remains a strictly upper-class affair. Stressing the radical difference between the way culture industries function in liberal-democracies and when co-opted by fascist regimes is not the same as positing a total difference between the two cases. It would be a grave mistake, to be sure, to paint a rosy picture of capitalist commercial culture as one allowing for unbridled artistic creativity and limitless expression of political dissent. The brusque intervention of Senator Joseph McCarthy in American popular culture in the aftermath of the War is just an extreme example of how liberal capitalism can avail itself of authoritarian or even quasi-fascist techniques for domesticating the cultural field. Nor should one conclude from the foregoing discussion that under fascism and Nazism all traces of creative freedom were hermetically eradicated and that every line in every text was thoroughly ideologically processed by the omnipresent Big Brother. As scholars of popular culture under fascism argue, the very existence of a commercially motivated cultural enterprise next to the ideological state apparatus, to borrow Louis Althusser’s term, meant that the regime’s ideological imperatives could not simply be imposed willy-nilly on audiences, that the latter’s tastes and preference still counted for something, and that a form of interchange still took place between purveyors of culture and the public. Similarly, artists who were not wholeheartedly on the side of fascism could still use roundabout ways to convey critical messages. For instance, one might argue that there is a subterranean element of protest in the very fact that unsatisfied Italians are allowed to appear on screen and vent their various frustrations, even if by the end of the movie they are made to realize their folly. Fredric Jameson’s analysis (1992: 30) is apposite here, apropos the way the culture industry dialectically articulates critical, utopian aspirations even as it tries to discredit them: [T]he works of mass culture, even if their function lies in the legitimation of the existing order—or some worse one—cannot do their job without deflecting in the latter’s service the deepest and most fundamental hopes and fantasies of the collectivity, to which they can therefore, no matter in how distorted a fashion, be found to have given a voice. And a comparable argument informs the work of such scholars of fascist culture as James Hay, Marcia Landy, Stephen Gundle, David Forgacs or Linda Schulte-Sasse. The latter, a scholar of German cinema, argued that even a film such as Josef von Báky’s Münchhausen (1943), often dismissed as a mere case of escapist extravaganza devoid of any artistic or critical merit whose goals were only to glorify national cinema and distract German audiences from the grim realities of war, contains seeds of sedition. With a script written by Erich Kästner, a banned author who

Fascism and Mass Society I 263 was permitted to work solely on this occasion, the film “threatens to overturn the whole ideological ‘system’ of Nazi cinema.” In a language recalling that of Jameson, Schulte-Sasse (1996: 32) claimed that the film “is extreme in its display of internal tension, both unleashing and containing fantastic elements that have a potentially subversive effect.” Likewise, to underscore the fascist revolt against the Last Humans in the field of mass culture is not the same as establishing its unmitigated success. Even under “totalitarian” conditions, where the regime commands especially powerful and invasive means of persuasion and coercion, and where the subjects have been disarmed of various previously available means of resistance to political pressure, it is one thing to aspire to shape the subjects’ minds and mold their personalities and quite another thing to actually accomplish such sweeping domination. Thus, if the Last Humans have been besieged by fascism, this does not necessarily mean that they have in fact been totally subjugated. As Robert Paxton has pointed out, studying the ideology, rhetoric and goals of a totalitarian regime should not obviate a study of the subjects’ responses to such ideology, which could be anything from absolute co-optation to absolute rejection, as well as the many intermediary responses in between these two extremes (cf. Paxton 2004: 215). Instructively, in what might be termed the battle over subjectivity, common people have often availed themselves of remaining avenues of mass culture, not blocked by the regime, in order to symbolically contest fascism and its ideals, or at least to try and escape its claim to total domination.36 As many historians have documented with regards to both fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, mass entertainment was frequently a mode of asserting one’s sense of inner independence vis-à-vis the encroachments of the official ideology and the demands to sacrifice and conform. The case of jazz and swing in Germany as examples of cultural resistance, or at least of “inner emigration,” have been particularly commented on, but the phenomenon was much broader.37 The way that popular culture, specifically of the American, mellow, sentimental and eudemonic variant, served as a foil to the suffocating hardness and pomposity of fascism, was beautifully captured in a scene from Tutti a casa (Everybody Go Home), a 1960 Italian film directed by the great realist and social critic Luigi Comencini. The plot is set during the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943, after the separate surrender signed by General Badoglio’s government, and recounts the journey home of a group of disbanded Italian soldiers, who try to evade the pressure to continue the war on the part of the die-hard fascist forces and the German Wehrmacht. Throughout the film, the main protagonist, a junior non-commissioned officer played by Alberto Sordi, undergoes a spiritual enlightenment and political education as he develops from a loyal, if unenthusiastic soldier, to a fighter in the resistance movement. At one point, he finds shelter in the rural home of a family where an American POW, escaping fascist captivity, happens to be hiding. After an initial encounter marked by

264  Fascism and Mass Society I mutual suspicion, Sordi and the American warm up to each other. The ice is broken, tellingly, when they begin discussion of Hollywood stars, such as Joan Crawford, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and a yearning Sordi starts singing a sentimental love song in English. The American soldier expresses his hope that the war will be over soon, to which Sordi responds: “Soon? For me it’s over already. Me? I’m going home.” The less than total subjugation of the culture industry on the part of fascism granted, the cultural caesura represented by the fascist era remains remarkable, eclipsing any continuities with the past. As was indicated at the beginning of the discussion, those who qualify the radical distinctiveness of fascism frequently do so in explicit opposition to the Frankfurt School, instead drawing inspiration from thinkers associated with cultural studies.38 Yet this choice of theoretical toolkit seems highly problematic. Paradoxically, while the more flexible approach of cultural studies may be helpful when it comes to products of the culture industry in non-fascist times, the classical Frankfurt School matrix seems to offer many advantages in grasping the specificities of popular culture under fascism. Its bleak image of a regimented, ideologically limited field, chastising, directing, moralizing and censoring, applies far better to the cultural habitat one finds in fascist regimes. Mass culture was largely expropriated from the hands of the Last Humans and turned against them. That they, and artists secretly sympathizing with them, could continue to read and write between the lines is true; but the lines themselves were firmly occupied and regimented by their enemies. That a variety of entertainment outlets continued to exist and even expanded quantitatively should not hide from view the fundamental reality that, qualitatively, this was an “amputated variety,” (Saldern 1995: 75) purged of most of what makes mass culture truly an affair of and for the masses. Take the case of Italian neorealism, which from the mid 1940s to the 1970s was routinely represented by both artists and critics as the jewel in the crown of Italy’s artistic and moral regeneration after the dark era of dictatorship and war, a clean break with the legacy of fascist inanity and inhumanity. Yet as later historians and film critics revisiting fascist cinema correctly pointed out, many of the features regarded after the war as typically neorealist and hence ground-breaking—such as the use of realistic settings, employment of non-professional actors, focus on themes drawn from popular life, whether in urban or rural surroundings and so on and so forth—were in truth in evidence in the works of some of the leading filmmakers under fascism, from Blasetti to Camerini, to say nothing of a significant personal continuity: more than a few of the most salient postwar directors and screenwriters began their career during the fascist era, many receiving their education in the celebrated Centro sperimentale di cinematografia, which was established in 1935 and offered an opportunity for creativity and experimentation in a relatively free ideological atmosphere, where even theorists of a Marxist inclination, such

Fascism and Mass Society I 265 as Umberto Barbaro, were allowed to work alongside political agnostics and committed fascists. A very partial list of the future greats of Italian cinema beginning their career under fascism would include such illustrious names as Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica, Giuseppe De Santis, and, last but not least Roberto Rossellini who, beyond simply earning a living under fascism was active in producing propagandistic films during the War.39 Where such revisionist historiography goes wrong, however, is in reducing the distinctiveness of neorealism to a series of formalistic and technical attributes, and losing sight of its true core which was—I would insist—its ethical impetus. Truly sustaining the neorealist claim to a regeneration of art and morality were not some stylistic elements such as shooting a scene on the street or in the field, using an unknown actor or allowing him or her to speak in dialect. All these features only gain their ethical value if they are allowed to form a part of a critical account of society, if such “realism” is mobilized to scrutinize social relations and distress the powers-that-be. Under fascism, on the contrary, they were used to authenticate the regimes’ claim to authenticity, demonstrate that the popular pretensions of fascism were genuine, that its roots in the urban masses and the peasantry penetrated deeply. Hence it was not a critical realism but a mythical one, which is to say no realism at all. This critical commitment as strictly opposed to a mythical, glorifying or soothing function, is what many neorealists embraced as their credo. “So we’re in rags?” programmatically stated Alberto Lattuada, and continued: Then let us show our rags to the world. So we’re defeated? Then let us contemplate our disasters. So we owe them to the Mafia? To hypocrisy? To conformism? To irresponsibility? To faulty education? Then let us pay all our debts with a fierce love of honesty. (In Celli and Cottino-Jones 2006: 44) To those faulting him for portraying poverty Zavattini replied (44): “We have started with misery simply because it is one of the most dominant aspects of our present society. [. . .] To describe poverty is to protest against it.” Celli and Cottino-Jones are therefore right in observing (44) that “neorealism was a cinema of protest, of liberation not only from Fascism, but from injustice in general.” It is therefore all the more striking that, later on in the same book (58–65), the authors underline the supposed continuities between the great director of comedies under fascism, Mario Camerini, and the works of his one-time pupil and postwar beacon of neorealism, Vittorio De Sica. The Camerini–De Sica lineage has been emphasized by several authors—Bondanella (2009: 37–43); Brunetta (2009: 82–83); Landy (1986: 55)—and so deserves a closer look.

266  Fascism and Mass Society I So was De Sica’s Camerini’s “natural heir” (Brunetta 2009: 83)? Certainly, if one applies a formalistic yardstick; the evaluation changes drastically, however, if the all-decisive, substantive criterion of protest against injustice is taken into the consideration. Let us very briefly compare Camerini’s “masterpiece,” (Bondanella 2009: 42) Il Signor Max (1937) with De Sica’s undisputed masterpiece of world cinema, Ladri di biciclette (1948). In the former, De Sica the actor plays Gianni, a newspaper salesman who is discontented with his boring job, low status and modest living standards and, attracted by the allure of the upper-classes, assumes, during his yearly vacations, the fake identity of an aristocratic big spender, Count Max. Gianni’s lavish consumption and his undue social ambitions are reprimanded by his sturdy fascist uncle Pietro, in charge of his nephew’s bank account. Pietro considers Gianni “an imbecile,” “a cretin.” He is exasperated by his nephew’s social pretensions and financial recklessness and in one scene he vehemently confronts him—while all the while, hanging from the wall, the Duce’s grim, helmeted profile, oversees the dispute, as if lending an official status to Pietro’s manly message: PIETRO: I’ve

got it. It’s all on account of your fixation with the lords. These people are not for you. GIANNI:  No? And why is that? PIETRO:  Why? Why?! Because it is not your life! What have you got to do with them? Gianni’s life, according to Pietro, who functions essentially as the mouthpiece of the regime, is rather with his own kind, taking part in the afterwork activities of the OND, where he can look for a suitable match and afford the down-to-earth amusements. In a typical Camerini denouement, Gianni leaves count Max behind him, assumes his proper role in the social pecking order and pairs with the servant girl of the noblewoman he once desired. Fascism is seen to vouchsafe for social harmony and contentment, at the same time that it regains control of the masses’ spending. The plot of Ladri di biciclette is too familiar to require rehearsing, yet it revolves around a lower-class’ individual’s desperate plight to earn a living in a society which is indifferent to his fate and compels him to steal in order to work. The end, far from consoling, exposes the inhumanity of the social order and leaves the audience to ponder a possible solution. As Celli and Cottino-Jones (2006: 64) incisively conclude, “all factions of Italian society treat Antonio disrespectfully: the party, Church, police, mafia. Yet the chief candidate for villain in the film is the Italian state as the collective expression of society.” In Il signor Max, by comparison, the chief candidate for villain is, ultimately, Gianni himself. In the closing scene, he tells his uncle that he plans to confess to his new fiancée about his aristocratic misadventures at some later point. To which Pietro responds “Listen Gianni, do you want an advise? Don’t ever tell it.

Fascism and Mass Society I 267 Do you understand? Never!” Gianni’s undue ambition is targeted as the main evil to be overcome, while the fascist state provided the solution, indicating the correct avenues and the appropriate ethics through which the social tension could be eradicated. Strangely enough, while the fear of social mobility informing Camerini’s films is recognized by most critics, they would still have us look for the roots of neorealism in the stale atmosphere of his conservative, if brilliantly executed, comedies. Similarly, neorealism depicted the misery of workers and peasants in order to propel reform; in Alessandro Blasetti’s technically realistic accounts of peasant life the goal was to celebrate the regime’s efforts to modernize the countryside as well as glorify the peasantry as a foil to corrupt city life, underpinning the fascist call to “Ruralizzare l’Italia” (ruralize Italy). It is of course wholly appropriate that fascist mythical and conservative realist filmmakers such as Camerini and Blasetti were highly honored by the regime under which they operated whereas De Sica, the critical realist, was subject to political pressures, most notoriously by Giulio Andreotti, to stop portraying Italy in such bleak colors (Celli and Cottino-Jones 2006: 71).40 An advocacy of realistic cinema, it should be noted, was not confined to fascist Italy but was also present in National Socialist Germany, conceived as a corrective to the escapism and facile amusement offered by the culture industry (Rother 2015: 247). In the end, the problem with the assumption that under fascism mass culture persisted, let alone gained momentum, since people continued to flock to the cinemas, listen to radio broadcasts or read commercial literature is the substitution of formalistic criteria for substantive ones, whereby one overlooks the forest of the suppressed mass culture and sees only the trees. Perhaps no better testimony to the gulf between fascism and non-fascism in this realm was supplied in postwar Italy, which experienced an explosion of creativity, almost mass festivity, in which, moreover, mass entertainment was in many cases closely allied to radical left-wing politics. Italian communist activists, embracing Palmiro Togliatti’s democratic strategy, were responsible to numerous dance halls for working-class men and women, where billiards was played and competitions held, finally free from fascist paternalism. Moreover, even though the onset of the Cold War meant that left-wing attitudes to “America” soon became tense, American mass culture was still an important source of inspiration for the Italian working class. The Communist women’s organization, for example, “latched on to the strong women of American cinema like Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford, who offered positive role models” (Forgacs and Gundle 2007: 266. See also, for further details on communist culture, 35, 259–270). Add to this the remarkable surge in critical social realism and comedy in Italian cinema, finding expressions in irreverent films which would have been unthinkable under fascism such as Mario Mattòli, La vita ricomincia (1945), Luigi Zampa Vivere in pace (1947) and Anni difficili (1948), Vittorio

268  Fascism and Mass Society I De Sica’s Sciuscià (1946) and Ladri di biciclette (1948), Giuseppe De Santis’s Riso amaro (1949), or Luigi Comencini’s Pane, amore e fantasia (1953), and one gets an idea of the pent-up forces which were liberated once fascism had been ousted. Following the demise of Mussolini, this was a period when, as Gian Piero Brunetta (1995: 182) aptly put it, “for the first time, looking in the direction of this crowd, one truly gets the impression that it might become protagonist of its own story.” Yet this sentence also contains an acknowledgment of a crucial fact which much of recent cultural historiography, including Brunetta’s own impressive histories of Italian cinema, seems otherwise oddly determined to downplay: that fascist claims to create popular art notwithstanding, art under fascism deprived the masses of the possibility of playing the leading role. In the succinct words of the National Socialist film critic Carl Junghans, “Stories whose hero is the amorphous ‘mass’ contradict our concept of history and sound common sense” (In Rother 2015: 246). During the fascist era, in other words, the masses were cast, at most, as extras.

Notes 1 As well as communism in its Soviet variant, but this side of the theory need not concern us here. 2 “It is just as impossible,” wrote Freud in 1927, “to do without control of the mass by a minority as it is to dispense with coercion in the work of civilization. For masses are lazy and unintelligent; they have no love for instinctual renunciation, and they are not to be convinced by argument of its inevitability; and the individuals composing them support one another in giving free rein to their indiscipline. It is only through the influence of individuals who can set an example and whom the masses recognize as their leaders that they can be induced to perform the work and undergo the renunciations on which the existence of civilization depends” (Freud 1991: 186). 3 For a reading placing May in the 19th-century tradition of budding German imperialism, though without truly engaging his stories, see Fitzpatrick (2008: 197). 4 Interestingly, after the National Socialist accession to power, one educator, Wilhelm Fronemann attempted to resist May’s popularity by underlining what he believed were the pacifistic and even Marxist undercurrents in the writer’s worldview. (See Adam 2013: 198.) 5 Many commentators have pointed out the biographical and conceptual affinity between Leverkühn and Nietzsche. See, for example, Rohr Scaff (2002) or Jendreiek (1977). 6 For another approach, likewise emphasizing the intimate links of German fascism and modern German culture explored in Doctor Faustus, yet not via Nietzsche as much as through an Adornian interpretation of postmodernist and late capitalist developments, see Evelyn Cobley (2002 and 2005). 7 It is important to clarify that the difference between the views of Thomas and Klaus Mann is by no means absolute, and that it lends itself to many qualifications. One can find in Thomas Mann’s work negative appreciations of popular culture and a view of fascism as collective hysteria, for example in the novella Mario and the Magician (1930), where the success of fascism is illustrated through the way a charismatic performer hypnotizes the crowd

Fascism and Mass Society I 269 in a theater hall (see the discussion in Stockreiter 1998). By the same token, Klaus Mann did not deny outright the role of the élites in the rise of fascism. My argument, however, concerns the center of gravity of their approaches, and attempts to distill their essences, and here, I believe, a gap emerges between Klaus’s basic elitism and the sharp critique of the élites which is the thread marking Thomas’s major works. 8 On Mann’s early alignment with German conservative and national positions, see, for example, Solheim (2005). The book offers a useful account of Mann’s overall artistic and ideological trajectory. 9 In a short critical piece, Erich Mühsam, the German-Jewish anarchist and anti-militarist who was tortured and murdered by the Nazis in the Oranienburg concentration camp in 1934, also compared Klaus Mann unfavorably with his father. While disagreeing with Thomas Mann’s vision of the world revolution as a force which might save bourgeois culture, he acknowledged its political commitment and readiness to enter battle, while finding his son’s position tired and resigned. See Mühsam (1978: 383–386). 10 Yeats’ identification with fascism as a force that will guarantee freedom for those worthy of it, élite intellectuals like himself, while subordinating the masses, deemed undeserving of liberty or indifferent to it, was at the heart of the fascist appeal to artists and thinkers throughout the continent. Such was the case of those Romanian intellectuals who have lent their support to Corneliu Zelea Codreanu’s fascist Legion of the Archangel Michael. Elevating themselves above the crowd, figures such as Ernest Bernea, Nichifor Crainic, or the internationally renowned thinker Emil Cioran, to name but a few, were attracted to the vision of restored social “order” promised by fascism. As aptly summarized, apropos Cioran, by a biographer: Cioran himself had always been a dedicated rebel, fully rejecting any sort of external constraint, no matter how small [. . .]. He should have realized that if he hated subordination so much it made little sense to suggest that others, the “crowds,” desired nothing else. But since he had always seen himself as unique and the others as a “crowd,” it becomes clear that Cioran’s elitism played a considerable role in the definition of such ultrareactionary political ideas (Petreu 2005: 62). 11 For a comprehensive discussion of Hitler’s fusion of art and politics, see Wolfram Pyta (2015). 12 For a discussion of this facet of Italian fascism, including many references, see Falasca-Zamponi (1997). For an illuminating discussion of the affinities between Luigi Pirandello’s concept of the artist as forcefully giving shape to chaotic, senseless reality and Mussolini’s artistic and poetic pretentions precisely as a tyrant, see Venè (1971: 106–109). 13 On Yeats’ fascination with Nietzsche, beginning as early as 1902, see, among other studies, Bohlmann (1982). On Nietzsche’s formative influence on Marinetti’s ideas, see Berghaus (1996: 23–25). Carol Diethe (1999: 153), however, while affirming that Marinetti was “clearly inspired” by Nietzsche, and adding that “Nietzsche would have agreed with the kernel of what Marinetti was trying to say,” also points out that Marinetti denied Nietzsche’s influence, probably in order to distance himself from the overtly Nietzschean D’Annunzio. 14 This duality, I propose, is the key to deciphering the apparently divided allegiance of fascism between ultra-modernism and classicism, racial “utopianism” and nostalgia, affirmation of “the new” and ferocious clinging to the

270  Fascism and Mass Society I old. Roger Griffin’s key explanatory term of re-birth—palingenesis—is of importance here, in capturing the fascist commitment to innovation which is at one and the same time a replication of the past, as long as it does not become too fuzzy and idealist a concept, which conceals the basic social function of fascism: the neutralization of the masses. See, for a detailed exploration of fascist modernism, Griffin (2007). 15 For a nuanced account of the movement’s politics, see Berghaus (1996). See also Griffin (2007). 16 This is the Nietzsche-inspired cultural process I have elsewhere described under the title “the bourgeois renaissance of aristocratic heroism” (Landa 2007). In Elias’ The Germans, the transformation of the German middle classes from an oppositional force to a dominant one is perceptively described, and the symptomatic part played by Nietzsche in redirecting its ethos is stressed (especially 115–119, 144–170). In truth, similar developments took place not only in Germany but throughout Western Europe, as the Futurists’ case amply attests. 17 For an insightful analysis of the fascist fetish of death, see Neocleous (2005: 72–112). 18 On the way Saint-Point subsumed female pleasure in the patriarchic order where desire is made identical with domination, see the insightful analysis of Locke 1997. 19 On the aspirations to create a Nietzschean-fascist overman on the part of the futurist Arnaldo Ginna, see Chessa (2012: 48). 20 Source: Rhodes (1987: 96). 21 On Hitler’s artistic obsession, and the way he saw himself as continuing the legacy of the creative geniuses whom destiny has blessed, see Schwarz (2009). On the mythical function of art and artistic genius in the National Socialist self-conception, see Michaud (2004). 22 Full details on these collections, as well as an analysis of their practical and ideological significance can be found in Petropoulos (1999). 23 For an analysis of Lewis’s ideas and their relationship to fascism, as well as a general attempt to decipher the not infrequent modernist alignment with fascism, see Jameson (1979). 24 The standard work on Nazi attitudes to jazz and their complexities is Kater (2003). 25 On the fascist ambition to create a distinct variant of mass culture, see also Dunnage (2002: 98). 26 The claim that fascist cinema, or at least cinema produced under fascism, gave genuine expression to popular desires, fears and ambitions recurs throughout the book. For several notable instances, see 111, 113, 144, 150, 202. Shlomo Sand (2002: 179) argued that cinema under Italian and German fascism was produced, for the most part, within a conservative and pettybourgeois framework that was not unlike that of Hollywood. 27 For two useful sources on censorship in American popular culture, see Black (1996); Couvares (2006). 28 On the hostility to the Republic of Weimar reflected by censors’ choices during the 1930s, see Maiwald (1983: 58–63). 29 On the vital function of preventive and molding censorship, applied already during the preproduction stages to ensure ideological conformity and prevent economic waste, see, in the Nazi context, Maiwald (1983: 111). In Goebbels’s instructive words, in order to “timely prevent emerging errors” the work “of the state should be maximal when the film is still in its conceptual

Fascism and Mass Society I 271 stage [im Begriff steht],” and should “commence at the studio” (In Maiwald 1983: 124). See also Rother (2015: 235). 30 See also, on the perennial conflict between the business interests of film producers and the political and ideological concerns of the state, Maiwald (1983: 116). 31 “The Danger of Americanism,” Das Schwarze Korps, 14 March, 1944. < http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/sk03.htm> Last accessed July 2016. 32 For the full text in Spanish, see www.todotango.com/musica/tema/167/ Yira-yira/ It should be noted that the original lyrics are heavily peppered with lunfardo whose authentic sound it is impossible to precisely render in translation. 33 For the full text in Spanish, see www.todotango.com/musica/tema/443/Pan/ 34 This all-important difference is oddly obscured in Franco Monteleone’s otherwise useful discussion of popular culture under fascism. On the one hand, the author points out the centralizing and supervising modus operandi of the regime, “rigorously controlling the official sources of information” and “suppressing non official sources,” in a system prohibiting “all dissenting voices, all minority opinions” (Monteleone 2013: 116). Much more problematically, however, relying on Hannah Arendt’s and Zbigniew Brzezinski’s generic theories of totalitarianism (136) these systemic features are construed as corresponding to the “totalizing logic of modern mass society” itself (116). This overarching conceptual matrix makes it very difficult to grasp the distinctiveness of fascism and its effort, not to forge mass culture but, precisely, to regiment and disarm it. See also page 109 for a particularly blatant fusion of “totalitarianism” with “mass culture.” 35 For numerous examples of such narratives, see Hay (1987, Chapters 1 to 3). Another useful thematic study reaching comparable conclusions is Landy (1986, Chapters 5 and 6). For a rewarding discussion of Camerini’s 1939 film, I grandi magazzini (Department Store), see Spackman (2002). The author perceptively unravels the intricate ways by which the film manages to combine and reconcile two of the regime’s ideological imperatives that seem at first contradictory: reprobation of consumerism and urbanism, on the one hand, with a call for reproduction and autarchic consumption, one the other hand. Thus, while sternly chastising hedonistic and luxury consumption on the part of its lower-class protagonists, the film sanctions consumption that respects the social order, abjures aspirations for social ascent and underscores the campaigns for autarchy and population increase. 36 On working-class dismissal of fascist cultural initiatives as “rubbish,” see Dunnage (2002: 99). With regards to Nazi Germany, one scholar notes that precisely those films preferred by the ruling Nazi circles were “rejected by the broad masses with particular vehemence” (In Koop 2015: 168). 37 In the case of Italy, the following study of popular responses to the regime is especially rewarding: de Grazia (1992). 38 See, for example, programmatic statements to that effect in Hay (1987: 5, 26, 27, 29), and Forgacs and Gundle (2007: 21). 39 For a very scathing but compelling critique of the way Rossellini reinvented himself in the postwar era as a champion of social and artistic truth unflinchingly looking at reality while in fact, in Roma città aperta (1945), creating a powerful myth of Italian unity and victimhood, see Sand (2002: 193–194). Sand is wrong, however, in my view, to generalize from Rossellini’s case to belittle the neorealist experiment in its entirety and accusing it of conveniently creating a screen of historical amnesia surrounding the fascist past. Rossellini’s case is better understood as exceptional rather than typical, not

272  Fascism and Mass Society I primarily on account of his personal entanglement with fascism but because his films lack what I propose is the truly decisive feature of neorealism: the ability to criticize the present social order. I will elaborate on the centrality of this characteristic shortly. 40 In general, the Italian government in the immediate postwar years was willing to sponsor the national film industry, but was “reticent to support films depicting social problems” (Celli and Cottino-Jones 2006: 71).

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Fascism and Mass Society I 275 Kracauer, Siegfried (1995) The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Kraus, Karl (1989) Dritte Walpurgisnacht, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Landa, Ishay (2007) The Overman in the Marketplace: Nietzschean Heroism in Popular Culture, Lanham, MD: Lexington. Landy, Marcia (1986) Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema, 1931– 1943, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lifton, Robert Jay (1986) The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, New York: Basic Books. Locke, Nancy (1997) “Valentine de Saint-Point and the Fascist Construction of Woman,” in Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy, Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff, eds., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 73–100. Lovell, Terry (1980) Pictures of Reality—Aesthetics, Politics and Pleasure, London: BFI Publishing. Lyttelton, Adrian (2014) “Futurism, Politics, and Society,” in Italian Futurism 1909–1944. Reconstructing the Universe, Vivien Greene, ed., New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications: 58–76. Maiwald, Klaus-Jürgen (1983) Filmzensur im NS-Staat, Dortmund: Nowotny. Mann, Klaus (1940) “Karl May: Hitler’s Literary Mentor,” The Kenyon Review, 2, 4: 391–400. Mann, Klaus (2005) Der Wendepunkt—Ein Lebensbericht, Hamburg: Rowohlt. Mann, Thomas (1970) Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend, Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter, trans., New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Mann, Thomas (1975) Letters of Thomas Mann 1889–1955, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Mann, Thomas (1986) “Bruder Hitler,” in An die gesittete Welt, Peter de Mendelssohn, ed., Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer: 253–260. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso (1960) “The Futurist Manifesto,” in Three Intellectuals in Politics, James Joll, ed., New York: Pantheon: 179–184. May, Karl (1949) Old Surehand I, Bamberg: Karl-May-Verlag. May, Karl (2001) Winnetou II, Bamberg: Karl May Verlag. Mehring, Walter (1951) The Lost Library: The Autobiography of a Culture, New York: Bobbs-Merrill. Michaud, Eric (2004) The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Monteleone, Franco (2013) Storia della radio e della television in Italia: Costume, società e politica, 7th edition, Venice: Marsilio. Mosse, George L. (1969) “Review Article. History, Anthropology, and Mass Movements,” The American Historical Review, 75/2: 447–452. Mosse, George L. (1987) Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Mosse, George L. (1990) “The Political Culture of Italian Futurism: A General Perspective,” Journal of Contemporary History, 25: 253–268. Mühsam, Erich (1978) Ausgewählte Werke. Vol. 2, Berlin: Verlag Volk und Welt. Müller, Ingo (1991) Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Müller-Doohm, Stefan (2005) Adorno—A Biography, Cambridge: Polity Press. Mussolini, Benito (1958) Opera Omnia, Florence: La Fenice.

276  Fascism and Mass Society I Natale, Anna Lucia (1990) Gli anni della radio, 1924–1954, Naples: Liguori. Neocleous, Mark (2005) The Monstrous and the Dead: Burke, Marx, Fascism, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Nicholas, Lynn H. (1994) The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War, New York: Alfred Knopf. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1968) The Will to Power, Walter Kaufmann, ed., New York: Vintage. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2003) Writings From the Late Notebooks, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paxton, Robert (2004) The Anatomy of Fascism, London: Penguin. Petreu, Marta (2005) An Infamous Past. E. M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. Petropoulos, Jonathan (1999) Art as Politics in the Third Reich, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Petropoulos, Jonathan (2000) The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Potter, Pamela (1998) Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society From the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich, New Haven: Yale University Press. Puértolas, Julio Rodríguez (2008) Historia de la Literatura Fascista Española, Madrid: Akal. Pyta, Wolfram (2015) Hitler: Der Künstler als Politiker und Feldherr. Eine Herrschaftsanalyse, Munich: Siedler. Rhodes, Anthony (1987) Propaganda. The Art of Persuasion: World War II, Hong Kong: The Wellfleet Press. Rohr Scaff, Susan von (2002) “Doctor Faustus,” in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann, Richie Robertson, ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 168–184. Rother, Rainer (2015) “Entwicklungen des Films im Nationalsozialismus,” in Kunst im NS-Staat. Ideologie, Ästhetik, Protagonisten, Wolfgang Benz, Peter Eckel, and Andreas Nachama, eds., Berlin: Metropol: 233–252. Saint-Point, Valentine de (1914) “Manifesto della donna futurista,” in I manifesti del futurismo, Florence: Lacerba: 69–74. Saldern, Adelheid von (1993) “Massenkultur im Visier: Ein Beitrag zu den Deutungs- und Einwirkungsversuchen in der Weimarer Republik,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 33: 21–58. Saldern, Adelheid von (1995) “ ‘Kunst für’s Volk’: Vom Kulturkonservatismus zur nationalsozialistischen Kulturpolitik,” in Das Gedächtnis der Bilder: Ästhetik und Nationalsozialismus, Harald Wetzer, ed., Tübingen: Diskord: 45–104. Sand, Shlomo (2002) Film as History: Imagining and Screening the Twentieth Century, Tel Aviv: Am Oved [In Hebrew]. Schneider, Michael (1999) Unterm Hakenkreuz: Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung 1933 bis 1939, Bonn: Dietz Verlag. Schulte-Sasse, Linda (1996) Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Schwarz, Birgit (2009) Geniewahn: Hitler und die Kunst, Vienna, Cologne and Weimar: Böhlau. Skradol, Natalia (2011) “Fascism and Kitsch: The Nazi Campaign against Kitsch,” German Studies Review, 34, 3: 595–612.

Fascism and Mass Society I 277 Sloterdijk, Peter (2000) Die Verachtung der Massen—Versuch über Kulturkämpfe in der modernen Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Solheim, Birger (2005) Zum Geschichtsdenken Theodor Fontanes und Thomas Manns oder Geschichtskritik in “Der Stechlin” und “Doktor Faustus,” Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann: 146–147. Soucy, Robert (1995) French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933–1939, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Spackman, Barbara (2002) “Shopping for Autarchy: Fascism and Reproductive Fantasy in Mario Camerini’s Grandi magazzini,” in Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo, eds., Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922–1943, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press: 276–292. Stockreiter, Karl (1998) “Die verführerische Marionette: Mythos und Masse in Thomas Manns Erzählung ‘Mario und der Zauberer’,” in “Die besten Geister der Nation,” Philosophie und Nationalsozialismus, Ilse Korotin, ed., Vienna: Picus: 328–349. Swift, Jonathan (2008) Gulliver’s Travels, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Venè, Gian Franco (1971) Pirandello fascista, Milan: Sugar Editore. Weinreich, Max (1946) Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People, New York: Yiddish Scientific Institute. Yeats, William Butler (1994) The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume V, Later Essays, William H. O’Donnell, ed., New York and London: Scribner’s. Zweig, Stefan (1964) The World of Yesterday, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

5 Fascism and Mass Society II Consumption, Leisure, Americanism

Fascism and Mass Consumption: “A Shower of Hail to All Orchards”1 As was discussed in Chapter 2, already in the 19th century the first signs of mass consumerism—limited and tentative as they may seem in ­retrospect—became a source of apprehension for conservatives and the right-wing. Rejection of the materialistic aspirations of the masses was central to Nietzsche’s new elitist doctrines. “Life is a fountain of delight,” stated Zarathustra, “but where the rabble also drinks all wells are poisoned.” And he continued: And many a one who turned away from life, turned away only from the rabble: he did not wish to share the well and the flame and the fruit with the rabble. [. . .] And many a one who came along like a destroyer and a shower of hail to all orchards wanted merely to put his foot into the jaws of the rabble and so stop its throat. (Nietzsche 1969: 120–122) Very early in his philosophical career Nietzsche saw a strong correlation between the social empowerment of formerly disenfranchised groups, their political radicalization and their material aspirations. “Universal education,” he averred in 1871, “is but a preparatory stage of communism” (Nietzsche 1988, vol. 7: 243). Such education, even under Bismarck’s conservative tutelage, inadvertently breeds the consumerism of the Last Humans—without using the exact term, which he coined much later—a working-class hedonism that Nietzsche associated, furthermore, with the demands of Ferdinand Lassalle. He accused the socialist agitator of teaching the common people that “having no needs is the greatest infelicity,” and instilling in them a lust for “luxury and fashion.” For Nietzsche, this explained the pernicious tendency of the workers’ educational associations to “generate needs” (Nietzsche 1988 vol. 7: 243). Some 50 years later, how did fascism relate to mass consumption? Did it, in its basic posture, become heir to Nietzsche’s effort to conceal the

Fascism and Mass Society II 279 well from the masses? Or was it, on the contrary, determined to share the fruit with the rabble? According to many philosophers and social scientists, and lately many historians, too, the latter is exactly what it did—or at least attempted to as best it could. Within the tradition of social critique inspired by the Frankfurt School, the so-called consumer society is often presumed to be a thinly veiled form of fascism. In the introduction to a recent book on Japanese fascism, for example, the anthropologist Marilyn Ivy (2009: x), subscribing to Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis of the culture industry, wrote about “the virtual fascism of the consumer.” Historians, however, have traditionally been much more careful in their evaluation of this topic, indeed have often pointed to the significant material deprivation suffered by the majority of the subjects under fascist dictatorships and emphasized these regimes’ ideological antagonism to consumerism. Still, in the last two decades or so, the picture has rapidly changed, almost to the point where it now seems to have been painted anew. There is at present a bulky and expanding literature that fundamentally challenges the old assumptions by claiming that fascism, particularly Nazism, brought about significant material benefits to the masses, and that, at the very least, the wish to ameliorate the material lot of the common folk was one of its main impulses. This initially revisionist, but now very prevalent, line has taken two main expressions, which need to be handled separately. After summarizing these arguments, it will be possible to proceed and examine them critically.

Mass Consumption: The Objective Dimension The first, and admittedly less successful, new argument concerns the objective material achievements of Nazism (on which we shall here focus, for this is the variant of fascism most insistently associated with enlarged consumption) in accruing benefits to ordinary Germans. These are emphasized particularly with regard to the Nazi war economy, which is said not only to have been conducted with particular care to not lowering the average German standard of living but also with the special goal, achieved until the late phases of the war, of showering all sorts of material spoils on the masses, hence gaining their broad consent for the brutal war of dispossession and extermination of foreign peoples and “races.” A still relatively cautious articulation of that claim was advanced by the celebrated social historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler (2003: 76), who argued that until very late in the war the German population was well provided for since food products were transported into the Reich from the occupied territories on a massive scale. Much more ambitiously, in a book arousing great controversy, Götz Aly (2006: 326) depicted the Nazi period, including most of the war, as a time of quick enrichment for the German masses, pampered by the Nazis’ “welfare state,” conducted along lines

280  Fascism and Mass Society II of “war socialism.” The war of extermination, according to Aly (38), brought Germans unprecedented rewards. It not only offered common Germans huge benefits, but also “drew its energy” from them. Nazi politics “oriented itself to meet the people’s welfare.” The masses are thus presented well-nigh as the prime agents behind the Nazi catastrophe, itself read as a vicious, gargantuan exercise in ethnic, state-conducted, mass consumerism. The Last Humans are cast as perpetrators, living at the cost of their foreign victims as well as that of their social betters: one of the book’s key points is that domestic Nazi socioeconomic policy was relentlessly anti-elitist, combining “taxation mildness for the masses” with “taxation severity against the bourgeoisie”—two subsections of a chapter instructively titled “the indulging dictatorship” (Gefälligkeitsdiktatur). While treating the subject matter in an incomparably more differentiated and complex way and fully acknowledging that Nazism was in many respects hostile to consumption, Shelly Baranowski, another historian of Nazi “consumerism,” nonetheless on occasion depicts the linkages between Nazi aggression, mass consumption and the welfare state in terms very close to those of Aly. She claims, rather extremely, that for “the military, entertainment, tourism, and consumption became not merely ancillary to combat, but the very ends of warfare” (Baranowski 2004: 224). “Consumption,” she argues (226–227), “saturated German imperial expectations” and “framed the racist assumptions of soldiers.” She also highlights the Nazi ambition to install “a massive state-financed and administered welfare state, which would parcel out rewards according to individual merit and racial fitness” (224). Given the largely empirical nature of the claims made by Aly—by far the most radical and salient representative of this approach—they were quickly pounced upon by a host of historians, many of whom specializing in economic history, and subjected to devastating criticism. Led by Adam Tooze, these attacks have left Aly’s thesis in tatters. The numerous critics did not, needless to say, question the ruthless Nazi plundering of occupied countries or the dispossession of the Jews, both of which were never in doubt in any case; what they did dispute was the claim that this systematic pillage was sufficient to finance the war effort without causing much inconvenience to the German masses let alone provide them with a comfortable war-time cruise, amidst copious spoils and rising social egalitarianism.2 On the contrary, as the critics have compellingly argued, mass consumption by no means benefited from the war, and the ordinary German experienced much material hardship and deprivation even before the war’s tide started to turn against Germany. In Tooze’s words, written in a 2007 review of the English translation of Aly’s book, “as 18 months of sustained criticism in the German language media have revealed, Aly’s calculation is profoundly flawed. In fact, at least two thirds of the burden of the war was born by the Germans themselves, much of it falling on the working class, whose standard of living was significantly lower than that

Fascism and Mass Society II 281 of their counterparts in Britain” (Tooze 2007).3 In a scathing critique, another notable British historian, Richard J. Evans dismissed Aly’s insistence that the Third Reich prioritized consumer satisfaction over attainment of military goals. “The leadership,” he observed (2016: 132), “did not divert resources to fulfilling consumer desires ‘to the detriment of rearmament’—rather, the opposite.” Elsewhere (2010: 18), Evans countered Aly by pointing to the fact that, already in the 1930s, far from building up “socialism,” the Nazis imposed numerous sacrifices on common Germans in order to promote their war preparations, and with the onset of the war, these only increased steeply. In another noteworthy, empirically founded counter-argument, which includes a detailed overview of the consumption levels of key food items between 1937 and 1944, the economic historian Christoph Buchheim refused any notion that average consumption rose under Nazism, insisting that “civil consumption remained in general massively limited,” and that the regime’s socioeconomic policy was all about “ensuring the provision of the most necessary things, not with permitting ‘good living’ ” (Buchheim 2010: 301). Aly’s attempt to undermine the long-standing notion that Nazism curtailed civil consumption and kept the Germans’ standard of living low, as compared to its massive investment in war, can thus safely be said to have failed. There seems to be little ground to question the conclusions reached by past historians concerning low consumption under Nazism, a scholarly tradition of which the following references are meant to serve as mere examples. According to Mary Nolan (1994: 233), “Militarism, not mass consumption, was the Nazis’ preferred solution to the problem of demand for the expanded productive capacity.” Norbert Frei (1987: 134) documented the Spartan existence of most Germans before the outbreak of the Second World War. David Bankier (1996: 99) discussed the prospering of weapon manufacturers under Nazism and the comparative difficulties of “consumer-goods manufacture.” Ian Kershaw (2002: 124), similarly, in a study of conditions in Bavaria, underlined the fact that under the Nazi regime “morale was poor in those branches of business dependent on increased consumer spending.” Richard Overy (1995: 215) explained that during the late 1930s in Germany the “pressure of consumer demand was relieved by withholding goods from the shops, by high taxation, and through propaganda campaigns to encourage savings and investment.” And long after Aly, Geoff Eley (2013: 69) asserted that the hectic rearmament effort of the 1930s “translated necessarily into a running squeeze on consumption.” In a useful survey of the debate, S. Jonathan Wiesen (2013: 446) perceptively commented, “If Götz Aly writes of a fundamental level of satisfaction during the war, we are forced to question what it means to be satisfied during a period of rationing, wartime controls, and dying loved ones.” During the fascist era in Italy, we may note in passing, individual per capita consumption virtually stagnated, albeit especially with the regards to foodstuffs, whereas

282  Fascism and Mass Society II non-foodstuff consumption did increase. And while the regime boasted of an expansion of “the welfare state,” its “social security provision was not particularly impressive,” and pioneering steps towards making national insurance for pensions compulsory were undertaken by the liberal government in 1919—at a time, that is, when the working class was at its strongest and most militant (Zamagni 1993: 315; see Chapter 10 for a good overview of the “slow social progress under fascism”). According to Robert Soucy, the standard of living of Italian workers and peasants steeply declined under Mussolini. “Between 1928 and 1932,” he writes, “real wages in Italy dropped by almost half. Between 1926 and 1934, the purchasing power of Italian farmworkers declined by 50 to 70 percent” (Soucy 1995: 13).

Mass Consumption: The Subjective Dimension If, in terms of objective conditions, the consumerist interpretation of Nazism, if it may be called that, is very much a tiny minority’s position, matters are quite different when it comes to assessing the subjective aspect of consumption. For as most historians linking Nazism with consumerism in fact concede, the linkage had little to do with actual improvement in the standard of living, which was at most modest, partial and temporary, and more with subjective expectations of common Germans under Nazism. The masses are said to have believed, even without much tangible evidence, that the regime was committed to furnishing them with the consumer goods they so craved. Among the many scholars embracing this view, a rough distinction can be drawn between three main subgroups. The first consists of those who claim that this widespread belief was the result of skillful propaganda on the part of the ruling Nazi élite, deft at hoodwinking their followers into believing that they were busily at work ushering in a bright future for them. This is what one historian aptly described as the Third Reich’s “beautiful façade” (Reichel 1991). Such historians see consumerism largely as a dummy tantalizing the populace, deceitfully employed by the rulers who had little intent of keeping their promises, but used them to induce consent to political disenfranchisement and acquiescence in the face of war preparations. In this literature, emphasis is often put on the “virtual consumption” characteristic of Nazi Germany. As Hartmut Berghoff claimed, while “suppressing overall consumption” the Nazis were “making noticeable concessions and [. . .] impressive as well as credible promises.” He underlined the way in which “the regime created virtual consumption by opening up new horizons and promising unprecedented advances into modernity. To make this propaganda effective it concentrated on prestigious consumer goods with high levels of symbolic meaning, such as cars and holidays” (Berghoff 2001: 173). The cynicism behind this tantalizing pseudo-consumption is

Fascism and Mass Society II 283 evident in the way Berghoff ends his essay (183–184) by discussing how the regime, reluctant to alarm the people by fully exposing its military project, encouraged saving for the future purchase of consumer durables, such as cars, houses and even sail boats, and then confiscated this money for armament. If a mere “enticement” was all there was to it, there would have been little reason to revisit the older theories stressing limited consumption, apart perhaps from taking into consideration the expectations of the populace in explaining relatively weak resistance to the regime. A second group of historians, however, goes significantly deeper than that surface level to insist that the Nazi leaders themselves, from Hitler downward, sincerely believed in the cause of German mass prosperity and directed as many economic resources as they could afford to, under adverse conditions, in order to obtain it. If consumption during the 1930s and 1940s remained fundamentally restricted, and even underwent further reductions in some areas, this was because the objective economic conditions did not enable the Nazis to do otherwise. Discussing “the failure of Nazi consumer society,” Wolfgang König argued that the Nazis were arduously trying to create their own brand of völkisch consumerism, marketing a whole series of mass-produced goods to which the term Volk had been affixed—the people’s car, the people’s radio and so on. This project, however, was doomed from the start given the unfavorable context in which it was embedded—that is, the world economic crisis—and, most particularly, since it conflicted with the regime’s ultimately more primordial goals, those of rearmament, autarky and expansion. But a failed consumer society, of course, is a qualitatively different thing from a deliberately deceptive one (König 2004). In a comparable study, S. Jonathan Wiesen (2010) closely examined the approach to consumerism in Nazi Germany and found a contradictory mixture of ideological repulsion, on the one hand, and a consumerist policy, on the other hand, finding expression in marketing and publicity.4 If, in this account, a tension still sharply splits the consumerist goals of Nazism and its military ones, a third group of historians goes even further by deconstructing this very dichotomy. For them, the Nazi regime did not simply use consumerism to cover up the path to war, nor was it forced to subordinate consumerism to militarism. The war itself, rather, was significantly motivated, in some accounts even primarily so, by the desire to raise the German standard of living. From this perspective, virtual consumption was not so much a ploy, but the best the regime could put on offer until Germany won “the living space” it required to become an economic superpower. Newly examined, argue these scholars, taking the consumerist interpretation of Nazism to its utmost limits, the Nazi alternative was not between consumption and war, but rather between poverty and war. The war was meant as a passageway to a better future, where ordinary Germans, deserving members of the master race, could

284  Fascism and Mass Society II finally enjoy the material standard of living of other Western nations, in particular the United States. “Talk of the primacy of an arms policy that overshadowed consumption,” a representative of this approach recently argued, “is far too sweeping. Besides, arms and consumption were interlinked. The regime declared that consumption was important for its arms policy: it was part of the psychological arming of the civilian population for total war. Conversely, sacrifices for the sake of a build-up of arms were not necessarily a rejection of consumer society, but could be seen as an investment in the future” (Kundrus 2014: 163). According to Adam Tooze, in an acclaimed work on the economics of the Third Reich, the conventional macroeconomic opposition of “guns versus butter” is inadequate in capturing the essence of Nazi policies, which were characterized precisely by a conviction that guns—military ­investment—are the precondition for attaining butter—consumer goods (Tooze 2008: 62–65). In the Nazi ideology, certainly, military vigor was seen as indispensable for economic expansion. Addressing German industrialists in 1932, Hitler spelled out his vision of a military-industrial complex: There is no thriving economy, which does not have at its front and at its back a thriving, powerful state to shield it, there was no Carthaginian economy without Carthaginian navy and no Carthaginian trade without a Carthaginian army. And naturally in modern times too, when the going gets rough and the interests of the nations come to a collision, there can be no economy unless it has behind it the absolutely powerful and determined political will of the nation. (In Domarus 1973, vol. 1: 80) This interdependence between economics and politics has thus led some scholars to conceptualize the Nazi socioeconomic model in terms of a consumerism projected onto the future, a form of delayed gratification, as it were. For Baranowski (2004: 74), the anti-consumption of the regime was not least the product of its pro-consumption: “The permanent solution for a high material standard of living—a land empire— necessitated rearmament and war, neither of which could tolerate rising wages or an inflated consumer demand.” By the same token, Nazi antimaterialism was ensconced in materialism (221): “In the future, the master race would revel in material largesse after Germany won the war, no longer bound by the antimaterialism of the regime’s pre-war definition of the standard of living.” Building on Tooze’s work, Geoff Eley (2013: 72) concluded that for “Hitler and the Nazi leaders, the dialectics of guns and butter always involved a wager on deferral,” and that the imperial project for the acquisition of Lebensraum was geared towards future prosperity. Paradoxically, although soundly defeated on the objective terrain, Götz Aly is smuggled in through the back, subjectivist, door: the war may not have actually brought the German masses the material

Fascism and Mass Society II 285 benefits they sought, but it was conducted with their material well-being very much in mind. In essential consonance with Aly, the war is seen not least as a big consumerist gambit, meant to procure the Germans welfare and comforts; the main difference is that in this version the war quite literally misfired.

A Critical Assessment of the Consumerist Interpretation While there is a measure of truth in this approach, there are obvious limits to its interpretive reach. It radically downplays the reservations, and often outright enmity, of the Nazis toward mass consumption, which were many and variously motivated. There was, to begin with, the strong Nazi affiliation with small-business owners and shopkeepers who resented the big department stores catering to the masses at low costs as well as the workers’ consumer cooperatives; representing a significant part of the Nazi party social base, the ideology of these middle-class sections impinged on Nazi ideology and rhetoric (Schanetzky 2015: 19). In cultural terms, Nazism absorbed many of the classical sensitivities and grudges of the Bildungsbürgertum, whose members—as was seen above in the discussion of mass culture—were particularly prone to lament “massification,” “commercialization” and the proliferation of “kitsch,” as well as so-called Schund und Schmutz cultural products. As will also be recalled, this opposition was not simply aesthetic, but profoundly political inasmuch as mass culture was perceived as subversive of the social order, challenging the hegemony of the old élites (with which the Bildungsbürger felt largely emotionally affiliated). Finally, there was a strong economic rationale in opposing mass consumption, since it was closely associated with the socialist and trade-unionist demand for higher wages for workers, which German business obviously resisted and which the Nazis strongly disapproved of since it conflicted with rearmament.5 Thus, in objective terms, it cannot be emphasized enough that, whatever its future goals, the Nazi drive to war meant a curtailment of mass consumption in the present and overwhelming state investment in military industry from which civilians did not gain. Tooze himself discusses a good case in point, by looking at an industrial sector which was totally negligible prior to 1933: production of airplanes. “In 1932,” he recounts, the German aircraft industry employed 3,200 people and had the capacity to produce no more than a hundred aircraft per year. Less than ten years later, [it] employed at least a quarter of a million people and was capable of turning out every year more than 10,000 of the most sophisticated combat aircraft in the world. Of all the industrial effects of rearmament this was by far the most significant. (Tooze 2008: 125)

286  Fascism and Mass Society II The case of the aircraft industry is highly revealing in that, unlike other industrial branches whose benefits were also civilian, its goals were purely military. Similarly, Germany was covered during the 1930s with a network of fast highways, whose role in wartime was enormous whereas its benefits for German citizens, the huge majority of whom did not have cars, were minimal. This gave occasion to Brecht’s satirical poem “On a Milepost of the Motorways”: “We who built these roads/Will drive on them only/In tanks and trucks” (In Möser 1998: 221). These policies dramatically lowered the number of the unemployed—from six million in 1933 to one million in 1937—yet the workers’ wages were also significantly reduced in this period, while their weekly working hours grew (Evans 2005: 328–333). As D. G. Williamson (2002: 154) points out, “the Nazi regime was able to keep down wages with considerable success. Profits, on the other hand, rose by 36.5 percent between 1935 and 1939.” Yet subjectively, too, the attempt to wed Nazism and consumerism is fraught with problems. Regarding Nazi military policies centrally as long-term economic investment greatly exaggerates the rational and instrumental nature of the regime, at the expense of its ideological commitments. The notion that behind the sacrifice of millions of German lives and the enormous hardships of war—to leave the non-German suffering out of it, for it clearly counted for nothing as far as the Nazis were concerned—stood a simple vision of German welfare and higher standard of living, and that the war was conceived as a long detour to consumer satisfaction, is unconvincing, to put it mildly. This neglects the fundamental, existential, quasi-libidinal investment of the Nazi worldview in war, and its no-less visceral opposition to peace as a way of life (a mindset discussed in Chapter 3, with relation to the enthusiastic welcoming of the First World War, which clearly escapes a merely utilitarian explanation). And peace was despised not least on account of its association with consumerism, the cowardly and hedonistic fixation, precisely, on welfare and higher standard of living. The Nazi plunge into war was less a deed of homo economicus and more an act in accordance with Nietzsche’s dictum (1997: 112): “I know of no better aim of life than that of perishing, animae magnae prodigus, in pursuit of the great and the impossible.” Surprisingly, Tooze offers little textual evidence in support of the overarching claim of his book, that is, that Nazi economic policy, and hence foreign policy as well, were geared towards future consumerism and were seen as the only means available to Germany of matching the United States’ emerging power. In fact, his case hinges heavily on the following quotation from Hitler’s Second Book, which is described as one of the book’s “key passages”: The European today dreams of a standard of living, which he derives as much from Europe’s possibilities as from the real conditions of

Fascism and Mass Society II 287 America. Due to modern technology and the communication it makes possible, the international relations amongst peoples have become so close that the European, even without being fully conscious of it, applies as the yardstick for his life, the conditions of American life. (Hitler, in Tooze 2008: 10) Given that Hitler regarded America’s enormous territory and internal market as the vital conditions of its prosperity, he concluded that only territorial expansion in the sole direction available to it—that is, ­eastward— would allow Germany to catch up with the standard of living of the United States. “Fordism, in other words,” Tooze sums up (10), “required Lebensraum.” While this inference seems plausible enough, and without a doubt, attaining economic greatness and independence was a pillar of the Nazi project, can one really place consumerism at its heart? Was the future buying power and pleasures of ordinary Germans really such an indispensable, let alone central, aspect of Hitler’s imperialistic vision? There is ample reason to be wary of such a thesis. In fact, one needn’t go further than Hitler’s Second Book, where one finds another passage that deals with the challenge of the United States, but with very different implications. It deserves being quoted at some length: [T]he danger arises that the significance of racially inferior Europe will gradually lead to a new determination of the fate of the world by the people of the North American continent. In any case, a few already recognize that this danger is threatening all of Europe. But the fewest want to know what this means for Germany. If in the future our people continues living with the same political thoughtlessness as in the past, it will ultimately have to renounce the claim to international significance. It will become more and more stunted racially, until it finally deteriorates into degenerate, brutish gluttons who will not even remember the past greatness. In the context of the future international state hierarchy, it will be at most what Switzerland and Holland were in the previous Europe. (Hitler 2006: 111–112) What is noteworthy about this passage is the way Hitler here by no means suggests that the rationale of the National Socialist movement is to raise the German standard of living, or that consumerism can only be obtained via a colossal push to the East. On the contrary, he tacitly admits that consumerism and a decent standard of living for the German masses can be obtained without Nazism. Yet he rejects precisely that as the nightmarish scenario of the Last Humans, in which Germans will become “degenerate, brutish gluttons.” Gluttons, needless to say, are well fed and live comfortably, nay luxuriously. But this is not what Hitler is after: what he desires is political greatness, world power. Notice again

288  Fascism and Mass Society II that Switzerland and Holland, which Hitler uses as admonitions to Germany, were by no means examples of impoverished countries whose civilians suffer deprivation. On the contrary, they were, and remain, prime examples of prosperous nations, which enjoy a high standard of living based on thriving economy and commerce. Yet, from Hitler’s fundamentally Nietzschean perspective, they lack “greatness.” “That,” he goes on (112), “will be the end of the life of a people whose history has been world history for two thousand years.” Thus, at stake is not consumerism, but “world history,” which Hitler of course understands not as the Hegelian-Marxist process of the emancipation of the masses, but in the sense of an imperial bid for world domination.6 In general, the consumerist interpretation of fascism, particularly in its radical variant, has little use for the visceral Nazi opposition to consumerist values, an opposition which, at most, it cursorily handles. But it is highly questionable if in the absence of such opposition, one can truly make sense of the distinctiveness of Nazism (and fascism) as historical phenomena. It is useful in this context to recall Hitler’s horror, cited above, at the thought that historical trends seemed to “remodel the whole world into one big department store” (Hitler 1999: 157). Consumerism, for Hitler, was not merely a contemptible pursuit as compared to the heroism of war; it was actively opposed to such heroism, compromising the nation’s will to fight. But here he believed Germany held a decisive advantage, precisely on account of its low level of consumerism. During the Second World War, he expressed his confidence that the United States, with its “hen-brained” populace spoiled by consumerism, would hardly prove a serious challenge to Germany, whose “standard of life” was admittedly “lower,” but boasted of an incomparably superior culture. “Why,” he mused, “should a people of that sort fight—they’ve got everything they want! Anyway, the ardour for battle will soon wane when the individual finds himself called upon to endure a further curtailment of the amenities of life!” (Hitler 2000: 605). Hitler’s reasoning distinguished mass luxuries, such as refrigerators, superfluous goods that serve to spoil one’s character and generally debilitate a nation, from modest consumption needs, which he countenanced, affirming in the same book that, if “we make things uniform, the masses will be able to enjoy the material amenities of life,” and mentioning the typewriter and the radio (Hitler 2000: 75). He deemed variety of consumer goods and choice between different versions of the same product the results of mere money-grabbing on the part of greedy merchants: “These practices exist only because they give shopkeepers a chance of making more money. That’s the only explanation of this infinite variety. In a year or two from now, this scandal must have been put a stop to” (75). And while the consumerist interpretation stresses the Nazi concern for generalized prosperity, Hitler could be heard, as late as 1942, warning precisely against such

Fascism and Mass Society II 289 prospect, significantly in private conversations not meant for the wider public: If England will come to lose India, the English plutocrats would be forced to tighten the belt as well. This statement should not be misunderstood, as if he [Hitler] had something in principle against rich people. As long as their political influence is held within reasonable limits, their existence is by no means to be negated. For since a rich man cannot eat ten times as much as a poor man, the nutrition capacity of a people in hard times would not be taxed so heavily by a hundred thousand rich people amongst seventy millions, as when the poor people will suddenly become well-off bourgeois [Mittelständler] and would triple their previous food consumption. The rich person as such is thus no harmful social phenomenon. (In Picker 2003: 299) Hitler, certainly, had intimate knowledge of what he was talking about, for he was at this point a very rich man, enjoying a wartime diet infinitely superior to that of the German everyman (a point which will be revisited below). A denunciation of mass consumption ought to be seen as part of the pessimist tradition denigrating the worthless civilization of the Last Humans. This is a tradition that Nazism, far from interrupting, brought to a climax. An interesting case in point of this pessimistic discourse is Ernst Jünger’s influential essay On Pain, which was written and published in 1934. Very much in Nietzsche’s spirit, Jünger deprecated consumerist modernity as a pseudo-culture characterized by a superficial attempt to deny the inexorability of pain and create a heaven here on earth. Jünger (2008: 12) zoomed in on the way in which mass democracy and mass entertainment intertwine: The breadth of people partaking of goods and pleasures is a sign of prosperity. Perhaps most symbolic are the grand cafés [. . .]. They can be called the true palaces of democracy. Here one senses the dreamlike, painless, and oddly agitated ease that fills the air like a narcotic. On the streets it is striking how the masses are dressed in such undeniable poor taste, yet in a uniform and “respectable” fashion. Bare and blatant poverty is rarely seen. From Jünger’s elitist vantage point, such unheard-of degree of mass comfort is indeed consternating. Yet the essay displays a sense of satisfaction and assurance, which is explained by the fact that it was written at a time and in a place in which “the palaces of democracy” had already been

290  Fascism and Mass Society II toppled. Writing a year after Hitler’s rise to power, Jünger (2008: 13) felt that he could afford to pronounce the Last Human a disease from which humanity had recovered: “The prophecy of the Last Human has found rapid fulfillment. It is accurate—except for the assertion that the Last Human lives longest. His age already lies behind us.” The materialistic utopia of the masses must be exposed as an illusion; and what better candidates for demolishing the popular palaces of democracy than cannons and machine guns? Jünger recalled how in 1921 he witnessed how three policemen with a machine-gun clashed with a demonstration of thousands of participants. Once the order to fire was given, the demonstrators disappeared from the scene even though nobody had actually been injured. To Jünger (2008: 24–25) this proved that The masses are nothing other than an abstract idea [. . .]. The sight of this event had something magical about it; it evoked that deep sense of delight which takes hold of one when an ignoble demon is unmasked. In 1932 he had a similar experience in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, when a police wagon “cut right through” the impotent masses, forcefully repelling their “unfounded claim to authority.” Fascist military dictatorship in this way cuts short the progress of history and eliminates the project of the masses. This was written in 1934, the same year in which, returning from a visit to Berlin, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, one of the most important French fascist intellectuals, praised the Nazis for lowering Germany’s standard of living. “I found,” he reported, “that Berlin seemed poorer, Germany seemed poorer. [. . .] Fascism facilitates the open acknowledgment of one fact: universal impoverishment, the necessary reduction of the general standard of living. But this poverty can be richness” (In Soucy 1979: 139). In Drieu La Rochelle’s opposition to mass consumption, as in that of so many of his contemporaries, the fear is clearly discernible that consumerist capitalism would lead, via democracy and creeping egalitarianism to socialism, or worse. “Capitalism,” he insisted (135), “wishes to communize consumption, that is to say, it wants to render it egalitarian; standardization can mean nothing else.” This explains his gratification at the way Hitler had managed, in his view, to lower consumption. He praised the historical phenomenon of Hitlerism for arresting the encroachment of European decadence, and envisioned it as an enlivening cure to the depressing complacency of the French Last Humans: “At bottom, the French want above all to sleep, to go fishing, to enjoy their cuisine, to make love a little, and to read news items which vaguely remind them of a time when there were still passions” (101). For Drieu La Rochelle, fascist anti-materialism supplied encouraging evidence that “there is in Hitler’s Germany a moral force as there is in Mussolini’s Italy” (140).

Fascism and Mass Society II 291 And indeed, Italian fascism exhibited similar trends. From its embryonic stages, it was saturated with a critique of the materialistic spirit of the masses and their socialist leaders, a materialism which a timid bourgeoisie did not dare resist, and which was corroding the unity of the nation and weakening its moral stamina. As early as 1903, Enrico Corradini, the ardent nationalist whose ideas and agency were vital in creating “the fascist synthesis,” (Sternhell 1994) diagnosed mass materialism as the main hindrance to national regeneration: All the other classes were outlawed in favor of one class alone and the manual laborers’ wages became the be-all and end-all of human society. Every value came under furious attack from the masses. And before those massive hordes, there came the onslaught of the frenzied men of Saturn, malevolent and faint-hearted, little men who, thanks to the baseness of the age, represent a deadly peril like to that of shrill-voiced Byzantine eunuchs. (Corradini in Lyttelton 1973: 137–138) Worse still, this mass Saturnalia was met with a degenerate bourgeoisie, encumbered by “outmoded respect for transient human life, outmoded pity for the weak and humble.” Everywhere, Corradini fumed (139), the greater is driven out by the less, [. . .] driven out of teaching, literature, art, the theater, philosophy, science, history, wherever the materialistic democracy of tiny little men could drive out an idea and replace it by matter. And this antagonism to materialism when espoused by the masses remained at the heart of Italian fascism for its entire career. Mussolini paid lip service to the cause of elevating the Italians’ standard of living but more than once exposed his own objections to that very cause. “Many of the crowds which the Socialists sway,” he declared in July 1919, “are not worthy of blandishments, because they consist of masses of brutes infected and barbarised by the ‘Red’ gospel.” “We must not,” he continued, “present ourselves to the masses as charlatans, promising Paradise within a short time, but as educators [. . .]” (Mussolini 1923: 94). He then went on (94–45) to promote a productivist ethic, as opposed to a consumerist one: Produce! Produce! Produce! [. . .] It is pleasant to provoke loud applause by telling the audience at meetings that we are overstocked with commodities, and that they can consume without limit and enjoy comfort by imposing wages proportionate to their desires without increasing production. [. . .] Courage lies in saying that an economic revolution draws substance from labour, and that it

292  Fascism and Mass Society II is strengthened, advanced, and carried out by the intensification of production whether in the fields or in the factories. Some 15 years later the productivist credo remained unaltered, its ascetic undertone, if anything, further accentuated. In May 1934 the Duce publicly declared: It is clearly easier to stand before a crowd of workers and say: “we will raise your wages.” This will win the speaker much applause. But the contrary duty of the fascist is to say: “make this sacrifice, for it will allow us to face competition in international markets, enhance our export, give you continual work and new jobs for those who are unemployed. (vivacious applause) We are nearing a period in which mankind will find its equilibrium on a lower standard of life. But this ought to give no cause for anxiety. That mankind can be a strong mankind, capable of both enthusiasm and heroism. (Mussolini 1958, vol. 26: 251–258) Directly continuing (259), Mussolini clarified that one should not recoil from war, because, as Heraclitus said, it is “the origin of all things.” In another speech, the Duce spurned the lamentable demographic trend of bored people “rushing” from the countryside and the small towns to the metropolis, with its consumerist temptations, “the big cities, where one can find all pleasant and silly things” (Mussolini 1958, vol. 22: 367).7 Elsewhere, Mussolini (1958, vol. 34: 126) credited Ernest Renan with “prefascist intuitions” and cited his fear that democracy would culminate in “a social state in which a degenerate mass would have no concern beyond that of enjoying the ignoble pleasures of the vulgar human being.” In direct polemics against “historical materialism,” the Duce affirmed that fascism denies “the equation well-being = happiness, which will have human beings reduced to animals concerned with one thing only: to be fed and fattened, thus reduced to pure and simple vegetative life” (125). It can be observed how closely akin were Mussolini’s and Hitler’s views on “the brutish gluttons”: their way of satirizing the Last Humans. Mussolini repeatedly rebuffed the concept of happiness as implying social tranquility and material well-being. He dismissed, for example, as “morbid” the 18th-century notion promoted by the philosophers of the Enlightenment that “it is possible to reach ‘happiness’ on earth,” and proclaimed that “we fascists reject any static concept of material or moral happiness. Our happiness is in the struggle” (Mussolini 1958, vol. 26: 25–26). In 1939 Goebbels, for his part, made a point of underlining the unanimity of fascism and Nazism in that respect. “National Socialism and fascism,” he wrote, “have in common above all the contempt for a comfortable and therefore pleasant life.” This was stated in an article dedicated to chastising the spoiled “coffee

Fascism and Mass Society II 293 aunts,” who bemoan the shortages of coffee in the shops at a time when the nation requires individual sacrifices (Goebbels, 1941: 64). Similarly, according to Hermann Göring’s famous dictum, “Ore has always made an empire strong. Butter and lard, at most, have made a nation fat” (In Schanetzky 2015: 7). One way to conceptualize this anti-consumerist stance is to situate it in the context of what Victoria de Grazia, in an important contribution to the historiography of modern consumerism, has referred to as the entrenched European resistance, up until the 1950s, to the American mass-consumption model mainly associated with Fordism and revolving around mass production, large-scale retailing, relatively high wages and low-cost products. In Europe, by contrast, the “bourgeois” and “neomercantilist” mode of consumption, which centered on small retailers, resisting demands for rising wages and conducted at the expense of consumers, prevailed. It is somewhat difficult today, given the post-1968 anti-consumerist slant of the Western Left, to mentally recreate the conditions of the first half of the 20th century, when social democrats and communists were incomparably more supportive of workers’ demands for higher wages and increased consumption, whereas opposition to mass consumption came very much from the Center and the Right. The élites and middle classes struggled to regulate mass consumption to match their ideological and socioeconomic interests, and specifically to press consumption into “national,” rather than “class,” patterns (De Grazia 1998: 78). A nice illustration of the gap between the old and the new Left, is obtained when one compares one of the well-known anti-consumerist slogans of the 1968 student movement: “Consommez plus, vous vivrez moins” [The more you consume, the less you live] with the older motto of French cooperativism: “Je depense, donc je suis” [I consume, therefore I am] (De Grazia 1998: 77). Furthermore, while fascism cannot be said to have been strictly anti-Fordist—for one thing, mass-scale production offered obvious advantages when it came to quick militarization—it clearly took over many of the central tenets of “the bourgeois mode of consumption,” such as the subordination of consumption to national goals; fundamental suspicion toward large retailers and preference, albeit largely rhetorical, for small ones; denigration of the supposed deterioration in quality of goods and services associated with massification or the denunciation of “Americanism” (the latter, a point that will be pursued toward the end of the chapter). In the attempt to curb the expansion of mass consumption, was there not a significant exception in the form of “the people’s car,” the Volkswagen (the name itself was not a Third-Reich innovation, but was mentioned during the 1920s [Möser 1998: 219])? Hitler effusively promoted the mass production of cars that an average German could afford. For that purpose, a special factory was established in Wolfsburg under the aegis of the state, since private industry saw no prospect for profits in a

294  Fascism and Mass Society II car so priced. Yet the Volkswagen is only a partial exception to the rule we have been outlining. First, the project did not deliver on its promises during the Third Reich. It was based on a weekly saving plan, in which the customer puts aside a sum of five Marks in order to finally obtain the car, at the total price of 990 Marks: “5 Mark die Woche musst Du sparen— willst Du im eigenen Wagen fahren!” (Five marks a week you must save, if you want to drive your own car!) went the advertisement. Four years of savings were therefore needed to obtain the car, a model in which ascetic self-denial was at least as important as the act of consumption proper. It is telling that in his recent critical history of the idea of austerity, Mark Blyth (2013: 132) identifies the mid-20th century German notion of “Erst sparen, dann kaufen!” (First save, then buy!) at its very center. In the end, none of the tens of thousands who invested in the program—of whom only about 5 percent were workers to begin with (Schanetzky 2015: 113)—received a car. The war completely changed the plans—unless of course one was to suspect that it was meant to disrupt them in the first place. Be that as it may, the project was undeniably attractive from a military point of view, since thousands of new cars that could be confiscated for military purposes in times of emergency would have been an asset of some strategic importance. For that reason, the Nazi “support of consumerism in the field of vehicles also had a very real military context” (Möser 1998: 219).8 Furthermore, it is worth bearing in mind that the car industry of the Third Reich, Volkswagens apart, was decidedly a luxury business, providing extravagant vehicles to a narrow élite of rich and privileged, among them of course the members of the Nazi leadership. Mercedes-Benz’s prestigious models were particularly salient, produced according to a notion of quality, distinct from the mass production that aimed to reduce costs by standardization and leaving out special luxury additions. The prices were accordingly exorbitant. Hitler himself owned several such cars, in which he made spectacular public appearances.

The Last Humans and the Blond Beast: Two Models of Consumption? The centrality of consumption for Tooze’s understanding of the Nazi economy becomes evident when one considers how he extrapolates from the domain of militarism to that of consumption. At one point he asserts that “there can be very little doubt that rearmament in the 1930s was as much a popular spectacle as it was a drain on the German standard of living, a form in other words of spectacular public consumption” (Tooze 2008: 164). Popular enthusiasm for the renewed strength of the Wehrmacht, and workers’ pride in producing and handling hugely expensive military equipment, is construed as a manifestation of vicarious consumerism: “Whatever the limitations on the supply of sophisticated consumer

Fascism and Mass Society II 295 goods to civilian society, the Wehrmacht enrolled especially the male population in the collective consumption of the full fruits of industrial modernity” (164). Similarly, one might question Baranowski’s readiness to associate war pillage with “consumption,” referred to above. On such terms, Attila the Hun’s hordes may be described as proto-consumerist, too. If that is “consumerism,” then it clearly has nothing to do with the “little pleasures” of the Last Humans, but rather with orgiastic destruction unleashed by self-proclaimed overmen, a consumerism predicated not on peace, but on war. Then again, here, perhaps, an avenue is opened through which one might salvage something of the consumerist approach to Nazism, especially in the more insightful way framed by the likes of Tooze and Baranowski, who emphasize the uncanny Nazi linkages between war and consumption. With the aid of Nietzsche, it is possible to draw a distinction between two kinds of consumption that are not only different, but also implacably opposed: the consumption of the Last Humans and that of the blond beast. In On the Genealogy of Morality, as part of an endeavor to facilitate a renaissance of the morality of the masters, Nietzsche famously characterized the noble man as one who freely defines himself, creating and affirming his “goodness” in his own terms, as opposed to the base man of ressentiment who can only define himself in opposition to the nobleman whom he morally vilifies. Yet Nietzsche fully admitted that, dealing with their enemies, particularly foreign ones, these noble men became the most savage conquerors and torturers. What Nietzsche described reads almost as if it were written in anticipation, and confirmation, of Elias’ thesis on Nazism as a “breakdown of civilization.” Shaking off all the inhibitions of civilization, which noble men strictly obey amongst themselves, “they are not much better than uncaged beasts of prey in the world outside where the strange, the foreign, begins.” Here, moreover, the nobility, the masters, are seen not simply as a narrow caste, but as a race, a broad collectivity assaulting foreign, weaker ones and, in a sense, consuming at their expense: There they enjoy freedom from every social constraint, in the wilderness they compensate for the tension which is caused by being closed in and fenced in by the peace of the community for so long, they return to the innocent conscience of the wild beast, as exultant monsters [. . .]. At the centre of all these noble races we cannot fail to see the blond beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast avidly prowling round for spoil and victory. (Nietzsche 1994: 25) While Nietzsche makes clear that such predatory, noble races, can have different ethnic roots—he mentions “Roman, Arabian, Germanic,

296  Fascism and Mass Society II Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings”—in European context they are historically above all of Germanic provenance. The deep and icy mistrust which the German arouses as soon as he comes to power, which we see again even today—is still the aftermath of that inextinguishable horror with which Europe viewed the raging of the blond Germanic beast for centuries. (25) Immediately thereafter Nietzsche stresses that “between the old Germanic peoples and us Germans there is scarcely an idea in common, let alone a blood relationship.” But is this to be understood as a critique of German national chauvinism, as numerous Nietzsche defenders insist? Or is it just as much a taunt, a challenge? The following passage, written some two years earlier, strongly supports the latter possibility. “Could one,” Nietzsche asks (1988, vol. 11: 238), find this German Reich of interest? Where is the new ideal [Gedanke]? [. . .] Peace and laissez-faire are no politics I hold in respect. To rule and to help the higher ideal to attain victory is the only thing which might interest me in Germany. At any rate, modern Germans were quick to demonstrate that if imperial aggression, consisting of a “hideous succession of murder, arson, rape, and torture” (Nietzsche 1994: 25) be the measure of nobility, they were not quite as detached from the idea of the blond beast as Nietzsche was prone to assume. Germanic or otherwise, the blond beast does not appear in isolation in Nietzsche’s discussion; significantly, it is soon followed by the Last Human, albeit without using that exact term. Nietzsche laments the way in which “a tame and civilized animal, a household pet” was bred “out of the beast of prey ‘man,’ ” and the slaves, those who have done the taming, are now in control. And he leaves little doubt as to where his preferences lie (26): These [. . .] descendants of all European and non-European slavery, in particular of all pre-Aryan population—represent the decline of mankind! These “instruments of culture” are a disgrace to man, more a grounds for suspicion of, or an argument against, “culture” in general! We may be quite justified in retaining our fear of the blond beast at the centre of every noble race and remain on our guard: but who would not, a hundred times over, prefer to fear if he can admire at the same time, rather than not fear, but thereby permanently retain the disgusting spectacle of the failed, the stunted, the wasted away and the poisoned?

Fascism and Mass Society II 297 We are therefore confronted with two distinct models of consumption: the one massified, peaceful and egalitarian, earning the fascist contempt; the other neo-aristocratic, operating under Nietzsche’s aegis and based on violence, plunder and war. The Nazi aim, seen from this angle, was to decouple material pleasures and consumption from their long-standing association with peace and commerce and affiliate them with war and conquest instead. In Werner Sombart’s (1915) famous dichotomy, the goal was to transfer consumption from the English Händler (merchants) to the German Helden (heroes).

“Workers Should Learn to Feel Like Soldiers”—Strength through Joy and the Beauty of Labor A model of mass leisure and recreation that was acceptable for fascists, indeed avidly driven by them, were the cultural, touristic, sporting and vacation activities organized by the state, notably as part of the huge Nazi enterprise of Kraft durch Freude, in which tens of millions of Germans have taken part in the late 1930s, but also the after-work activities and events of the Italian variant, the dopolavoro. Prima facie, the KdF at least, being infinitely more ambitious than the dopolavoro, seems to fly in the face of Nietzsche’s elitist invectives against the Last Humans and vouch for a strongly opposing, populist Nazi tendency to gratify average and below-average wage earners. Indeed, what could be further removed from Zarathustra’s strictures against the little pleasures of the masses than the massive campaigns to cater to the tastes of the common Aryan and satisfy his appetites for travel, sight-seeing and cultural edification, often done in explicit espousal of egalitarianism and proud claims to having transcended class snobbery? Indeed, as already discussed in the former chapter, many historians have regarded the KdF as evidence of the Volksgemeinschaft’s radical break with the class rigidity underlying both conservative and capitalist politics. However, deeper scrutiny of both its intellectual provenance and its social goals reveals the conservative, rather than radical, nature of the KdF. Indeed, such a closer look exposes the KdF, alongside the concomitant organization of Robert Ley’s German Labour Front (DAF), the Schönheit der Arbeit (SdA, Beauty of Labor), as a profoundly Nietzschean project. While the KdF and SdA can be construed as a partial fascist accommodation to consumerist motifs, they were more fundamentally modes of channeling mass recreation in ways that harmonized with the regimes’ ideologies and served their purposes, diverting the masses away from consumption9: the emphasis was placed not on buying power and individual choices, but on strengthening the bond between the people, homeland and national heritage, achieved through spending time in natural surroundings, concerts and other happenings that highlighted the achievements of German culture and so on. Enjoyable as these activities were,

298  Fascism and Mass Society II they were undertaken under the grim shadow of militarism and fitted its ambitions: physical exercise was also meant to steel the people for the imminent war effort. The very term, “strength through joy,” indicates the instrumental view it implied of joy per se, and the real order of priorities underpinning the enterprise. As nicely put by Hermann Weiß (1993: 302) in a very useful short overview of the KdF’s history, activities, and rationale, “The defining factor of the National Socialist vacation-politics was not regeneration, but socialization.” Moreover, such activities were, to a large extent, a continuation of decidedly anti-modern and anti-consumerist traditions, notably the conservative Wandervogel youth movement, founded in the late 1890s, with its stress on a necessary return to nature, away from decadent urban life. In many ways, the activities of the KdF and SdA were meant as forceful antidotes to consumerism, substituting non-commercial recreation for actual buying, removing advertisements from the shop floors, promoting a “straightforward rejection of materialism,” (Baranowski 2004: 143) and, in general, aiming to show that the workers’ standard of living could be enhanced spiritually and culturally, rather than materially, and that low wages were no hindrance to their well-being. The latter point is crucial in grasping the main difference between the Nazi model of “consumerism”—if that name is at all applicable—and its competitors, the American Fordist variant and the socialist one. Both of these, albeit parting from radically different political perspectives, advocated greater workers’ buying power. As for organized labour, the demand for higher wages was inextricable from the demand for fewer working hours. As Mary Nolan observed, Social democrats and trade unionists viewed mass consumption as necessary but [. . .] encountered staunch capitalist resistance to their proposals for mass-consumption in the earliest stage of the debate about Fordism and rationalization, and would continue to encounter it throughout the late 1920s. (Nolan 1994: 118) In his critique of the austerity measures advocated by German industry during the 1920s, the influential Social Democrat and trade unionist Fritz Tarnow argued that “the economic recipe of working more and consuming less is just as sensible as ordering a fever patient to take aspirin tablets and then lie naked in the snow” (In Nolan 1994: 53). Rhetoric of honoring labor aside, the Nazis strove to achieve the exact opposite: keeping wages low and increasing working hours, which was precisely what German business was insisting should be done throughout the years of the Weimar Republic.10 The ambivalence, or rather double purpose, characteristic of the KdF and the SdA, the willingness to concede in order better to control, is by no means a departure from a supposed Nietzschean intransigence; far from it, it corresponds quite closely to Nietzsche’s own stick-and-carrot

Fascism and Mass Society II 299 approach to the workers: while denying any degree whatsoever of workers’ autonomy and self-determination vis-à-vis the masters, he had shown himself at various points not averse to the idea of social policies taking into consideration the needs of the workers in order to pacify them into compliance and further subordination, assuring the long-term endurance of social hierarchy. The following passage, where Nietzsche criticizes naked exploitation of labour for the way in which it exacerbates class hostilities, perhaps best encapsulates this pacify-and-conquer scheme: What we now refer to as justice, is from this point of view a highly refined usefulness, which does not take in consideration only the present moment and exploits the opportunity, but rather reflects with responsibility on the lasting consequences, therefore taking care of the well-being of the worker as well, of his physical and spiritual satisfaction, in order that he and his descendants will continue to work for our descendants, and will be available for a longer period of time than a single individual’s life. The exploitation of the worker was, as one now understands, a stupidity, a ruthless enterprise at the cost of the future, which endangered society. (Nietzsche 1988, vol. 2: 681–682) These observations, in a book published in 1880, registered fundamental agreement with the double-strategy employed by Bismarck at roughly the same time: welfare measures, on the one hand, combined with the Anti-Socialist Laws of 1878. Yet the continued thriving of socialism underground and the refusal of the workers to abandon their radical aspirations, resulted in disillusion with the conciliatory path. Towards the end of the 1880s Nietzsche lamented the very weakness that allowed “The labour question” to become one at all, since “about certain things one does not ask questions: first imperative of instinct.” The European worker, Nietzsche continued, finds himself far too well placed not to go on asking for more, or to ask more and more impudently. After all, he has the great majority on his side. [. . .] But what does one want?—to ask it again. If one wills an end, one must also will the means to it: if one wants slaves, one is a fool if one educates them to be masters. (Nietzsche 1990: 106) One of the most promising solutions Nietzsche envisaged to this conundrum was a restructuring of employer-worker relations along military lines, where instead of the mediocre and uninspiring industrial boss, charismatic figures would take over capable of drilling the workers while simultaneously winning their trust and obedience. On the lack of noble manners.—Soldiers and leaders still have far better relationships with each other than workers and employers. So

300  Fascism and Mass Society II far at least, culture that rests on a military basis still towers above all so-called industrial culture [. . .]. The manufacturers and entrepreneurs of business probably have been too deficient so far in all those forms and signs of a higher race that alone make a person interesting. If the nobility of birth showed in their eyes and gestures, there might not be any socialism of the masses. (Nietzsche 1974: 107) Elsewhere he put forth the proposition that “workers should learn to feel like soldiers” (Nietzsche 1988, vol. 12: 350). These ideas became the bread and butter of the DAF ideology, which was centered precisely on the claim of a quasi-military camaraderie uniting workers and employers. “Then and today—we remain comrades” proclaimed a 1933 DAF propaganda poster showing a worker and an engineer holding hands, while in the backdrop a silhouette of two helmeted soldiers drives home the message of a strife-free war community still in vigor. Quite in the spirit of Nietzsche’s propositions, DAF propaganda emphasized the mutual bond between a genuine industrial leader and his workers, and the notion that the boss was not—or was no longer under National Socialism—a greedy exploiter bent on private profit, but a committed member of the Volksgemeinschaft working toward the common good of the nation, who deserves obedience and loyalty. The proper employer-worker relationship, established under Nazism, was thus the one between a leader (Führer) and his followers (Gefolgschaft) requiring discipline and readiness to sacrifice. In a DAF publication, the indefatigable pedagogue and propagandist Karl Arnhold asserted that under Nazism the essential transformation had taken place from the anonymous industrial “management” of the Weimar Republic years, where narrow-minded materialism and class struggle between mere “employers” and “employees” were rife, to the present condition in which proper industrial leaders (Betriebsführer) earn the due allegiance of their Gefolgschaft (Arnhold 1938: 33). In another publication, Arnhold (1939) drew a direct analogy between military service and labour achievement, speaking about “the commitment of the soldiers of labour.” The leader-principle was upheld not just in the workplace, but also during tours and excursions, where vacationers were repeatedly reminded of their duty to obey the directives of the tour guides, behave in a disciplined way and, in general, like good Aryans, make their personal wishes subordinate to the collective purpose (Baranowski 2004: 138). Nietzsche’s legacy, it is important to clarify, was not restricted to creating a general intellectual climate that came to infuse National Socialism (a process that in itself is a highly significant one, to be sure). The analogies drawn above between the philosopher’s ideas and the ideology of the DAF are more than simple affinities; they should be seen as a culmination of a very real line, leading from Nietzsche’s texts to National Socialist

Fascism and Mass Society II 301 labour policies. The key intermediary link here is the Dinta Institute (German Institute for Technical Labour Training), founded in 1925 by the aforementioned Karl Arnhold and a group of Ruhr industrialists at the head of which stood Albert Vögler, later one of Hitler’s financers, in order to try to change labour relations and draw the workers away from socialism and communism. The organization was welcomed by the managers into numerous firms and was quickly becoming so pervasive as to elicit the following alarmed observation from Social Democrat Fritz Fricke: A great enveloping assault by German industrialists on the soul of the German worker is in progress. The goal of this attack consists in nothing less than a complete restructuring of the mentality of millions of male and female workers. (In Nolan 1994: 179) Among the main intellectual influences behind Dinta were the brothers Ernst and August Horneffer, both of whom were leading exponents of Nietzscheanism. They worked at the Nietzsche Archive and edited the philosopher’s Nachlass, and Ernst had delivered the funeral oration at Nietzsche’s grave in 1900. They espoused Nietzsche’s elitism and contempt at materialism, and tried early on to find ways to wean the German workers off their consumerist ambitions and political aspirations and integrate them, fully re-educated, into a reborn Germany.11 Another key player in Dinta’s inception was Oswald Spengler—himself profoundly indebted to Nietzsche of course—who impinged on Arnhold’s ideas. Many of the supposedly most distinctive innovations of the KdF and SdA were in fact organically linked to Dinta—beatifying of the work environment, after-work “community” activities, promotion of a new work ethic and so on—and thus not only to the Weimar Republic, but also specifically to the efforts of German industry to integrate and disarm the workers (cf. Mason 1997: 162). During the Third Reich, Dinta and many of its key ideologists, including Arnhold and the Horneffer brothers, were smoothly integrated into the new regime. In 1934 Ernst published a short book explaining how Nietzsche had been a forerunner of Nazism (Horneffer 1934). The seamless absorption of Dinta into the DAF is indicative of a very important point, which is often marginalized by discussions of the Volksgemeinschaft: far from representing an introduction of socialism or even egalitarianism into German society, the Nazi work and consumption policy signified in many ways a continuation of initiatives originally made by German capitalists. Somewhat amusingly, in fact, as Baranowski recounts (2004: 108), Karl Arnhold found cause to disagree with the Nazis not on account of going too far in placating the workers, but because he found them too lenient towards the employers, preferring to persuade them via patient aesthetic means, whereas he would have better liked straightforward indoctrination. In the final

302  Fascism and Mass Society II account, thus, Peter Stearns’s (2006: 73) judgment appears quite sound, claiming that the KdF was “an alternative to any significant consumer gains,” and that the dopolavoro movement “was designed to wean workers [. . .] from both socialism and consumerism.”

“The Best Belongs to Me and Mine”: The Consumption of the Nazi Élite It is possible to question the extent to which the fascist recoil from consumerism was specifically an anti-mass move, an attack on the Last Humans and their horizontally distributed happiness; might it not have been part of a general alternative ethos, embracing Spartan and ascetic values, in a way which affects the masses, certainly, but not them alone or especially, but society as a whole, including the elites? If fascists abhor comfort and luxuries, why should they make an exception of the common people? Yet here as elsewhere it would be a mistake to take fascist rhetoric at face value. In reality, behind the attacks on consumerism conducted by the fascists, their leaders and their entourages conducted lives that were often extravagant. The demand to settle for little and make sacrifices in times of economic hardship was broadcast to the masses but did not form a binding code of behavior as far as the upper circles were concerned. It was seen how the Nazi bigwigs vied with each other for the acquisition of enormously valuable art collections; and this was no isolated instance. It reflected, rather, the general glamour and comfort to which they treated themselves. Many details on these various pleasures are provided by Fabrice d’Almeida in his exploration of Nazi highlife. While Nazi propaganda disseminated an image of the leaders as simple men, with modest habits like those of the people, reality was very different. For example, Hitler and Ribbentrop had billiard rooms, and Göring was fond of astonishing his guests by showing them a room entirely dedicated to miniature trains. The French ambassador reported that in order to make a strong impression on him, one of Göring’s nephews asked Göring to start up ‘the French train.’ The marshal approached the table and threw several switches. Then François-Poncet saw an aeroplane attached to a wire fly over the train and drop a small bomb with an explosive cap that made the train go off the rails. (d’Almeida 2008: 132) This was, without a doubt, an emphatic way of combining luxury consumption with properly heroic and manly virtues. During the war, when ordinary Germans had to tighten their belt and reduce their daily calorie intake, the Führer was described by official propaganda as satisfied with modest portions, and newsreels showed him eating his soup standing,

Fascism and Mass Society II 303 like the common soldier. In fact, his doctors’ reports indicate that Hitler was gaining weight at the time (d’Almeida 2008: 208). Many other historians, among them Claudia Koonz, drew attention to the deceit involved in the public image of Hitler and his cohorts as ascetic people, giving up, for Germany’s sake, the pleasures of this world. One poster presented Hitler sitting on a bench, in natural surroundings, laughing. The caption explained this to the readers: Relaxation. Far from the noise and disorder of the cities, here the Führer recovers from the stress of the struggle. In the broad meadow near his little house, he reads opponents’ newspapers. How he laughs at the tales of his champagne cellar, Jewish mistresses, luxurious villa, and French funding. “In fact,” Koonz (2003: 78) comments, “Hitler enjoyed a sumptuous lifestyle but hid from public view his luxury automobiles, private art collection, and lavishly furnished homes.” The double standard in the Nazi attitude to consumerism—preaching against the search for comfort of the common citizen while the upperclasses lead a profligate, neo-aristocratic existence—was well represented in the propaganda against the alleged lack of patriotism of spoiled middle-class characters, as in the caricatures that were distributed in Austria in 1942, depicting Frau Keppelmeier and Herrn Semperer—from the verbs keppeln and sempern, to criticize and to complain in the Austrian and Bavarian slang. These figures were shown, for example, rushing to the black markets to satisfy their hedonist whims.12 In reality, the true profiteers from the black market were not, as suggested here, typical middle-class individuals, for they did not have high enough incomes to cope with the soaring prices of unofficial markets. Those who could avail themselves of black-market goods even at such costs were the members of the tiny circle of the truly rich, both of the prewar society and the new rich in and around the Nazi party’s highest echelons. In his methodical dismantling of Aly’s notion of “popular good life” at the expense of the bourgeoisie during the Third Reich and the war, Christoph Buchheim reaches the opposite conclusion: that the income gulf that already existed during the 1930s between the “highest earning one percent of the population” and “the mass of the German people” directly expressed itself during the war in their respective consumption levels (Buchheim 2010: 324). Apart from the sheer income gap, protection and corruption were significant as well in making the war a much more agreeable time for the privileged upper class. Buchheim (323) tells an anecdote concerning a certain luxury food shop in Berlin that was investigated in 1942 for irregularities, in the process discovering that “big quantities of delicacies were delivered without the necessary food stamps to a whole series of ministers, heads of police and presiding judges, as

304  Fascism and Mass Society II well as other prominent individuals.” Amongst the greatest beneficiaries was Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick, to whose household were supplied enormous quantities of various high-quality provisions. In order to avoid a public outrage, the affair was handled discreetly, which in that case meant that no prominent buyers were harmed, and only the shop owner was arrested for investigation and committed suicide. One is reminded of Zarathustra’s defiant affirmation: “The best belongs to me and mine; and if we are not given it, we take it: the best food, the purest sky, the most robust thoughts, the fairest women!” (Nietzsche 1969: 296). Far from ushering in an egalitarian Germany, the war, Buchheim concludes (328), “cemented the elevated position of the upper layer” and “created new, and sometimes unexpected, dividing lines.” In concluding the discussion of fascism and consumption—the focus here was mainly on Nazism, but it should be emphasized again that this choice is justified since this is the variant of fascism that has been most insistently associated with consumerism—there seems to be ample reason to distance oneself from the consumerist interpretation of fascism. Particularly in its objective form, but also in its subjective ones, the consumerist interpretation has difficulties in grasping the specificity of fascism which more traditional approaches were better able to capture, regarding it as a sharp reaction against mass consumerism. In spite of its vast ambitions, the new approach does not do enough to justify a fundamental revision of such traditional views. A more productive interpretation could perhaps emerge, however, were the consumerist view as it currently stands to be boosted by a distinction between the consumption of the blond beast and that of the Last Humans. While fascism was strongly opposed to mass consumption within the framework of a peaceful, democratic and egalitarian society, it was considerably more willing to countenance “consumerist” practices, if they may indeed still be called such, which were predicated on aggression, national and racial aggrandizement, war and conquest—a consumerism, in other words, that shifts its center of gravity from peaceful enjoyment to the ecstatic sensation of power. Nietzsche, once again, is very useful in drawing a sharp demarcation line between the life-denying welfare signified by socialism and the exciting alternative based on the redeeming quality of pain: To this day you have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief—and in the last analysis socialists and politicians of all parties have no right to promise their people more than that—or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet, . . . making new galaxies of joy flare up. (Nietzsche 1974: 86) But such an alternative conceptualization would not signify a simple finetuning; it would alter the very prism through which fascism is seen: no

Fascism and Mass Society II 305 longer as a plebeian-driven movement busily catering to the masses, as the consumerist interpretation habitually suggests, but as a Nietzschean one, aiming at an aristocratic renaissance to terminate the reign of the Last Humans.

“No American Future!”: Fascism and Americanism In Chapter 2 we have seen how one of the loci of the critiques of mass society was its identification, on the part of conservatives, with developments grouped under the title “Americanism,” which included, among other things, cultural democratization, expansion of consumerism and a symbolic undermining of canonic culture. Fascism largely inherited this discourse. Hitler, for example, shared the conviction that Europe and Germany were culturally superior vis-à-vis affluent but philistine America: [T]he German Reich has two hundred and seventy opera houses— a standard of cultural existence of which they over there have no conception. They have clothes, food, cars and a badly constructed house but with a refrigerator! This sort of thing does not impress us. I might, with as much reason, judge the cultural level of the sixteenth century by the appearance of the water-closets of the time—an apartment which was not then regarded as of particular importance! [. . .] To sum it up, the Americans live like sows—in a most luxurious sty! (Hitler 2000: 605) Europe was often presented by conservatives as the beleaguered fortress of culture and the old world, inveighed upon by the new, collective spirit, emanating in unison from West and East alike, from both capitalist America—Europeans generally found little cause to disagree with the United States’ appropriation of an entire continent’s title—and communist USSR, whose common denominator seemed broader than the diverging aspects. This trope was also taken over by fascism. As expressed in 1935 by Martin Heidegger, by that time formally a Nazi philosopher: This Europe, [. . .] lies today in the great pincers between Russia on the one side and America on the other. Russia and America, seen metaphysically, are both the same [. . .]. [W]hen time is nothing but speed, instantaneity, and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from all Dasein of all peoples; when a boxer counts as the great man of a people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph; then, yes then, there still looms like a specter over all this uproar the question: what for?—where to?—and what then? (Heidegger 2000: 40) As an alternative to such worldwide degeneration, in which Americanism and communism jointly lead the way in “the reduction of human beings

306  Fascism and Mass Society II to a mass,” Heidegger (41) summoned the Germans, “the metaphysical people,” to a spiritual reawakening, that will allow it to break free of the American-Bolshevik “pincers.” This spiritual revival was envisioned as the profound essence and mission of National Socialism. The analogy drawn between the United States and the USSR and the presentation of Germany as embodying a sublime cultural content, was wholly in line with Nazi propaganda of the same years (cf. Zimmerman 1992: 86). During the Second World War, in 1942, Heidegger ascribed to Germany the task of enacting the role of a modern Greece, protecting the heritage of the West from the United States, whose civilization is a shallow, rootless and non-historical concoction of “the bourgeois democratic sprit” and “Christianity” (Tertulian 1992: 224). And comparable positions were defended by many other fascist intellectuals, such as the Italian Julius Evola (1995: 357), who wrote about the mass danger represented by the “communist world and America, [. . .] persuaded of a having a universal mission to accomplish.” The similarities between these two countries were so great, that Evola—“a vociferous pro-Nazi fascist” (Griffin 2007: 39)—believed they could be seen as “two faces of the same coin” (Evola 1995: 356). In a strange confirmation of the clichéd, standardized and repetitive nature of the narrative of individuality and originality, he claimed, in a manner nearly identical to Heidegger, that “Russia and America are like two ends of the same pair of pincers, that are closing in from the East and the West around the nucleus of ancient Europe” (344). This conviction reappeared with different stresses, but nearly always revolving around the idea that both communism and Americanism are united by their massification. “What in Bolshevism was programmed” as a “systematic activation of the masses, in America found its equivalent long ago but on a larger scale and in a spontaneous form” (356). America was therefore deemed an even greater menace than Bolshevism, since it reflected the masses’ own desires rather than a top-bottom phenomenon. America thus represents “a mankind that accepts and even wants to be what it is, that feels healthy, free, and strong and that implements the same tendencies as communism” (356). Or, consider the following dismissal of mass culture qua communist in spirit: In the early days of Bolshevism somebody formulated the ideal of a cacophonous, collectivist music [. . .]. This is what America has realized on a large scale and spread all over the world through a very significant phenomenon: jazz. In the ballrooms of American cities where hundreds of couples shake like epileptic and automatic puppets to the sounds of black music, what is awakened is truly a “mass state” and the life of a mechanized collective entity. (355) Drieu La Rochelle, the fervent French Nietzschean, was long convinced that communism and Americanism are intimately interconnected. “Ford

Fascism and Mass Society II 307 and Lenin,” he wrote, “are like two miners who are pick-axing their way toward one another along two dark tunnels” (In Soucy 1979: 126). A similar belief that America and communism were interchangeable and that the former represented the ultimate adversary of Europe and Germany was expressed in the SS weekly Das Schwarze Korps, in the aforementioned article addressing Americanism. There, too, the attack on the Last Humans permeates virtually every line. Americanism consists of a complete trumping of political and national duty by a reckless pleasure-seeking, an orgy of mass culture orchestrated by the conniving Jew, which could only be resisted by the National Socialist mobilization of “a common Germanic will, a common European will”: Americanism [. . .] leads those who fall prey to it away from political thinking, away from responsibility, even to their nation, away from decency, even from national decency. [. . .] Americanism is a splendid method of depoliticization. The Jews have used jazz and movies, magazines and smut, gangsterism and free love, and every perverse desire, to keep the American people so distracted that they pay no attention to their own fate. Even in politics, they are no longer influenced by the head, only by what is under the belt.13 For the Nazi author Adolf Halfeld, writing in 1941, the United States was the country which had “cultivated in its ideal purity the modern mass man,” (Halfeld 1941: 168) and which stood at the vanguard of a leveling attack on the spiritual foundations of Europe (20–21). Already in 1927 Halfeld was writing extensively on the dangers of American mass society, engaged in nothing less than a “transvaluation of all values” (Halfeld 1927: 121, 146). That this cultural subversion was clearly not the one Nietzsche had in mind but its very opposite, becomes perfectly clear when the author cites Nietzsche’s early criticism of German materialism in the aftermath of the foundation of the Reich, as relevant for 20thcentury America. And to similar views, another important fascist thinker, Carl Schmitt, continued to adhere even after the demise of fascism. Writing in 1952, he criticized the masses of both the American West and the Soviet East for clinging fast to the Last Humans’ philosophy of history, at the center of which stand the belief in progress and material welfare: The masses however are not interested in such doubts and probably consider the fragmentation of the concept of progress a mere sophist talk on the part of a decadent intelligentsia. They persist by their ideal [. . .] of a unified world, proclaimed by Lenin, when he talked about the unity of an electrified earth. Here, Eastern and Western beliefs converge. Both claim to be the true humanity, the true democracy. And they have the same origins, in the philosophy of history of the 18th and 19th centuries. [. . .] West and East are today separated by an Iron Curtain but the waves and corpuscles of a common

308  Fascism and Mass Society II philosophy of history penetrate the curtain and form the imperceptible unity. (Schmitt 1995: 503) In all this, the fundamental contours of Nietzsche’s geopolitical vision appear vindicated. At one point, Nietzsche (1988, vol. 11: 584) preached the need for Europe to overcome petty state feuds, discard “the rule of ‘public opinion’ and of parliament,” close ranks with England and its colonies, and coalesce into an empire that will be able to contend for world supremacy. Against whom will the fight for “the government of the Earth” be waged? Nietzsche merely stated, cryptically, that “it is selfevident against whom this battle will be directed.” Elsewhere, however, he provided us with what looks like a vital clue, when pointing out the urgency of an alliance with Russia, and adding (Nietzsche 1988, vol. 11: 239): “No American future! [. . .] I don’t think we wish to constrain ourselves within neither Christian nor American perspectives.”14 That Nietzsche would have found a Bolshevik, as opposed to a Czarist Russia, just as little attractive as Christianity and Americanism, if not in fact more repellent, may be safely assumed. When these propositions are compared with the future course taken by the Nazi bid to unite Europe, the single major difference that stands out—a very substantial one, certainly—is Nietzsche’s conviction that the supposed financial wizardry of the Jews will not be an obstacle to an imperial Europe but its indispensable ally: “We also absolutely need the most skillful money men, the Jews, in order to obtain mastery of the Earth” (Nietzsche 1988, vol. 11: 238). One might object that the war with England also departed from Nietzsche’s “script,” but it should be remembered that Hitler was keen to obtain British acquiescence with his plans, was willing to respect the integrity of the British Empire as long as it accepted the new German empire, and blamed Churchill alone (apart from Jewish influence, of course) for undermining these prospects.15 “I will not experience it myself,” Hitler reputedly said in September 1941, “but I am happy for the German people, that it will one day see England and Germany unite to take on the USA.” Uncannily reproducing Nietzsche’s scheme, the Führer went on to affirm the philosopher’s pan-European and anti-American vision: “If one considers together the creative powers slumbering in the European space—in Germany, England, the Nordic countries, France, Italy—then one has to say: compared to that, what are the American possibilities?” (Picker 2003: 95–96) Alongside these struggles against the egalitarian and democratic implications of mass society, the fascists enthusiastically took over techniques of advertising and suggestion developed by public relations experts, which they then deftly employed for their anti-mass and bellicose goals. Goebbels, the propaganda master, was apparently greatly influenced by the methods devised by Edward Bernays, who is regarded as the great

Fascism and Mass Society II 309 pioneer in the field of public relations and the attempt to shape public opinion via carefully staged campaigns and gimmicks. In his autobiography, Bernays (1965: 652), a Jew and Freud’s nephew, recalled how amazed he was to learn that Goebbels took inspiration from his books in his campaigns against the Jews.16 In Mein Kampf, Hitler expected political propaganda to conduct itself according to the same criteria which one uses when promoting ordinary consumer goods: What, for example, would we say about a poster that was supposed to advertise a new soap and that described other soaps as “good”? We would only shake our heads. Exactly the same applies to political advertising. The function of propaganda is, for example, not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly. (Hitler 1999: 182) In that regard, the fascists were entitled to see themselves as faithful disciples of Gustave Le Bon, the avowed connoisseur of the mass psyche. Yet it should not be forgotten that Le Bon considered such knowledge a useful means to combat the ascendancy of the crowds, and provide their leaders with tools which will allow them as far possible to control and neutralize them. “To whom,” asked Hitler (179), “should propaganda be addressed? To the scientifically trained intelligentsia or to the less educated masses? It must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses.” And yet, as we have seen, Nazi propaganda harvested its greatest success precisely among the educated classes, those considered immune to manipulation, while the allegedly susceptible masses proved significantly more resilient. How did fascism stand with relation to other important facets of mass society? It generally applied a twofold strategy of rejection, on the one hand, with selective appropriation, on the other hand. In that way those massified aspects that disturbed the fascists were repressed or eliminated, while other aspects, of “national” or elitist potential, were absorbed into fascist practice, often in exacerbated form. The fascists made a great investment in sport, for example. Like all other political regimes in the 20th century, sport was widely employed by fascism for propaganda purposes and self-aggrandizement. Yet it identified in sport several aspects which were particularly favorable from its point of view: the stress on a healthy and well exercised body dovetailed to perfection with the ideal of the soldier, prepared at all times for military action. Thus, on the one hand, the Spanish fascist Ernesto Giménez

310  Fascism and Mass Society II Caballero lamented the way “international” modern sports, such as golf, tennis and particularly boxing and football, increasingly displace the hallowed “national” ritual of bullfighting, which seemed to him to be undergoing a process of “decadence.” “With the French Revolution, in the modern age,” he argued, bullfighting “ceases being aristocratic and becomes bourgeois, gets plebeianized” (Giménez Caballero 2005: 12). On the other hand, however, he identified the redeeming aspect of modern sport in its converse effect of enhancing national pride and in its potential contribution to military prowess (10): I do not know why Unamuno has insisted so much against football. When the majority of Spain’s boys will possess the sufficient vigour that sport demands, things of some importance can take place. In case war starts, for one thing, they will not go to it, as happened in Morocco a few years ago,17 out of sorts, intimidated, ridiculous. Maybe they will seek to confirm in other spheres the fortitude which they feel today on the sporting field. If there was of late an encouraging international politics, we owe it to the footballers, who have given a new respect, a new impulse, to the word Spain. International tournaments likewise corresponded to the fascist belief in the necessity of competition over primacy among the nations and the races, and achievement at such competitions was seen as indicative of the nation’s value and its rank—a dimension, certainly, which preceded fascism and continues, albeit in milder forms, in our own times. An interesting example of the fascist concept of sport is provided by someone who was not strictly speaking a fascist, Richard Washburn Child, the United States’ ambassador in Italy from 1921 to 1924. Child was a keen supporter of Mussolini and advocate of fascist politics and culture on the international arena. His affinity with Italian fascism and intimacy with the highest echelons of the regime was such that in 1928 he even ghost-wrote Mussolini’s My Autobiography, which was published serially in the United States. In June 1923 he delivered a speech in Rome in which he sang the praises of the new political order. Mussolini was struck by the way the ambassador’s words “reveal an exact understanding of the phenomenon and of our movement,” a fact that was all the more remarkable since most strangers, he said, cannot fully comprehend fascism. “You, Mr. Ambassador,” Mussolini affirmed (1923: 341), constitute the most brilliant exception to this rule. Your discourse, I say, contains all the philosophy of Fascismo and of the Fascismo endeavour, interwoven with an exaltation of strength, of beauty, of discipline, of authority, and of the sense of responsibility.

Fascism and Mass Society II 311 Interesting in the present context is the way Child underscored the importance of sport in attesting to national vigour, cohesion and obedience to the leader: It is a fact which goes almost unnoticed, that the training of masses of youth in the spirit of discipline and fair competition and of loyalty to a cause is largely to be found in athletic games. It is a fact which almost always is forgotten, that nations of history or those of to-day which have engaged in athletic games are the strong nations, and those which have had no athletics are the weak nations. [. . .] There must be a voluntary submission to discipline and absolute loyalty to a captain in order to avoid the humiliation of disorganisation and defeat. Athletic games are not for the weak and complaining, but for the strong and for the lovers of fair play. Finally, they furnish oft-repeated lessons of the truth that when flesh and muscles and material agencies seem about to fail, human will and human spirit can work miracles of victory. (339–340) Italy won the football world cup twice during the 1930s, and hosted the 1934 tournament, assiduously propagated and exploited by Mussolini, who was indifferent to the game itself but not to its wider implications (Cavallaro 2009). During the quarter-final match of the 1938 tournament, held in France, the Italian players even wore the black shirts. In 1936 Germany, the triumph of boxer Max Schmeling over the black American Joe Louis was widely celebrated; two years later, during the re-match which saw Louis beat Schmeling in a first round knockout, the disappointed Nazis interrupted the broadcast. The famous apex of the fascist employment of sport for international vindication was the 1936 Olympic Games held in Berlin. Germany finished at the top of the medalwinners list, earning 33 medals more than the country ranked second, yet the dazzling success was somewhat marred by the many achievements of black American athletes, especially the four Gold medals harvested by sprinter Jesse Owens, as if in defiance of the theory of Aryan superiority. Fascists therefore harnessed existing sports for their specific goals, while loading them with added meanings: national, racial, imperial. Certain sports fitted particularly well the fascist ethos, underlining the way it strove to rekindle illustrious past traditions such as hunting, especially promoted by Göring, “Reich Master of the Hunt,” and horse-riding, which involved the breeding of fine animals, in a way which tallied with racial improvement ideology, and corroborated the claim of the Nazi élite to form a new nobility (D’Almeida 2008: 123–125, 168). These sports revolved around the motifs of physical struggle and risk taking, which explains the fascist attraction to another sport—motor racing. Here the

312  Fascism and Mass Society II Futurist fixation on speed and dynamism could find a fitting outlet. Italian fascism went to considerable length in this direction when, under the initiative of Alessandro Pavolini—one of the most brutal and excessive figures in the fascist leadership, who was also one of the better educated: his father was a famous linguist and he himself an outstanding student— the regime revived the ancient renaissance tradition of Calcio fiorentino, a form of pre-modern football, pronouncedly aristocratic and violent, in which skill and finesse are marginal. It is still played several times a year today, and remains particularly appreciated by right-wing and conservative circles: a 2012 contest in Florence gave rise to a public outcry after one of the players boasted a Neo-Nazi tattoo. Fascist use of sport was thus both similar and different to that made elsewhere. Perhaps the main distinction to be noted is the fact that, unlike its common function in mass society, sport under fascism was not a surrogate for war and violence, a way of adding spice to everyday life by way of escapism, the vicarious participation of mass spectators in agonistic exploits and a “quest for excitement” (Elias and Dunning 2008). In modern sport, too, a civilizing process is observable, towards greater sublimation and regulation of violence, largely if imperfectly internalized by players and spectators alike. Even the long-term retreat in the West of a sport once so popular as boxing, nowadays considered by many as barbaric, seems to confirm the general trend, although such a decline gained in momentum especially after the period we are addressing in this study (Grasso 2014: 522). Modern sport still contains, of course, highly popular games which are markedly rough, for example rugby, yet even here a tendency to delimit violence has historically asserted itself (Elias and Dunning 2008: 227–229). For fascism, on the contrary, one of the main purposes of sport was to prepare and habituate the population to war and violence. In Italy, via Mussolini’s image as an avid athlete and aviator relishing extreme physical challenges, sport was conceived as corresponding to the Nietzschean injunction to “live dangerously” (Pivato 2005, vol. 2: 662). If, as we have seen, Giménez Caballero (2005: 13) saluted modern sport in so far as it boosts military potential, he equally protested against the way the plebs dilute the barabaric, cruel and sanguinary aspect of bullfighting, “drifting away from the idea of danger,” and introducing into the ancient, tragic event, a comic and pathetic element, which “only the rabble finds amusing.” Fascism—Calcio fiorentino being perhaps the best example—tapped the past precisely for pre-civilized resources, harking back to epochs and traditions in which violence was not yet as closely monitored and stigmatized as in modern mass society. Italian fascists approached sport “in more or less paramilitary terms,” rather than seeing it as an end in itself; they were therefore troubled when athletes and champions became celebrated in terms worthy of real heroes, truly contributing to national greatness. Similarly problematic from a fascist point of view was the commercialization of sport which resulted

Fascism and Mass Society II 313 in audiences “passively” consuming mass sporting spectacles. (See Forgacs and Gundle 2007: 240–242, 276.) The latter point compares very interestingly with Elias’s suggestion that one of the most characteristic developments of the civilizing process and its concomitant “humanization” is the fact that, with increasing regulation of violence and inhibitions placed on physical expression, pleasure becomes in general a much more visual experience, proper of the spectator. This applies to spectator sports as well as to the cinema: “in a similar way to the ear, or perhaps even more so,” wrote Elias (2000: 171) in the late 1930s, the eye “has become a mediator of pleasure.” It is highly unlikely that this was written with Marx in mind, yet the elective affinity with the latter’s youthful vision of a state in which, with increasing social emancipation, the senses themselves are humanized is striking nonetheless: The suppression of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes [. . .]. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object [. . .]. The senses have therefore become theoreticians in their immediate praxis. [. . .] Obviously the human eye takes in things in a different way from the crude non-human eye, the human ear in a different way from the crude ear, etc. (Marx 1992: 352) Fascism, for its part, aimed to restore the immediacy of violent and “crude” physical experience, and reverse the modern process of humanization and sublimation. An important forerunner of this de-surrogating, as he was of other fascist tendencies, was Ernst Jünger. Writing in 1922, Jünger had recognized, so to speak with Elias, the way that modern mass entertainment supplants the violence of the past; he, too, realized the process whereby the eye replaces the hand. Yet for him this was precisely a reason to resist sublimation and inhibition and call for an unleashing of the passions: In sites where the people are looking for intensified life, in every funfair, every amusement-park, it is horror which attracts, painted on the screen with lurid colors. Lust murders, executions, wax bodies covered with purulent boils, a long series of anatomical atrocities: he who puts this on display knows the mass and fills the purse. Often and long did I stand in front of such dens and examine the faces of those coming out. There was almost always a laughter, yet one which sounded too strangely embarrassed and constrained. What did this laughter conceal? And why did I stand there? Was it not my craving for horror? The craving of children and the populace is foreign to no one. (Jünger 1980: 18–19)

314  Fascism and Mass Society II From these observations, Jünger proceeded immediately to justify war, presented as a direct realization of the repressed desires of the human, better said male, psyche. “The baptism of fire!” he enthused. “Oh, the hearts of men, capable of such emotion!” From a (proto)-fascist perspective, thus, the whole point is for the hand to follow the eye. Satisfying themselves for any length of time with sheepish laughter is not for real men but for the Last Humans, those who Jünger, as will be recalled, will pronounce dead in 1934. * * * In 1908, the cultural critic Werner Sombart, who began his career as an important Weberian sociologist and ended it endorsing the “German socialism” ushered in by the Third Reich (he died in 1941), wrote an article lamenting the eroding egalitarianism brought about by democratic capitalism. Reflecting widespread dejection amongst the German Bildungsbürgertum, he decried the spread of mass culture, “the collectivization of consumption,” the “leveling-down” caused by universal, simplifying education, and the fact that Berlin has declined into a mere suburb of New York, which itself, with its traffic, theaters and amusement parks, was a “a big graveyard of culture.” The main culprit in all this was in his eyes “the mass,” which had signified “the end of the Volk’s forms of life [volkstümlichen Lebensformen].” Using strikingly Nietzschean terms less than ten years after Nietzsche’s death, Sombart equated the mass with “the proletarian transvaluation of all values” (In Bollenbeck 1999: 166). Soon enough, however, forces came to power, first in Italy and then in Germany that were able to stop the rot. Combining direct attack with more sophisticated tactics of appropriation and neutralization, the fascists made sure that, for as they long as they reigned, the Last Humans will not march on.

Notes 1 The discussion of fascism and consumption is a revised and extended version of materials that were first published as the following essay: Ishay Landa, “ ‘A Shower of Hail to All Orchards’: On the Consumerist Interpretation of National Socialism,” Dapim, Studies on the Holocaust, 2017. 2 Aly’s approach was also repeatedly chastised for its crude materialism, neglecting the ideological sources—anti-Semitism, fervent nationalism, etc.— for the support given to the Nazis. For one example, see Friedlander (2007). This, however, is a point which need not concern us in the present context. 3 For his influential original intervention, see Tooze (2005). 4 See also Wirsching (2014). A similar argument distinguishing the objective reality of consumer scarcity under Nazism from the subjective commitment to increasing consumption is advanced in Schanetzky (2015: 3–4, 19, 69–71). 5 In the first chapter of her study of Nazi “consumerism,” Shelley Baranowski in fact usefully summarizes those main sources of Nazi rejection of consumerism. One of the subsections of this chapter is instructively titled “Taming

Fascism and Mass Society II 315 Mass Consumption: Nazism’s ‘German’ Capitalism” (Baranowski 2004: 25). This makes the book’s argument somewhat difficult to classify, for it documents Nazi anti-consumerism just as often as it does consumerism. However, by choosing to theoretically foreground the latter aspect, the author creates, perhaps against her intentions, a problematic impression. 6 Tooze (2008: 11) paraphrases this passage but without drawing from it what seems to me the unavoidable conclusion, namely that Hitler considered economic well-being for the Germans feasible within a peaceful framework but contemptuously rejected such an option. 7 See also, for a nuanced account of Italian fascism’s approach to consumerism, De Grazia (1996). 8 For a study dedicated to the history of the Volkswagen, see Rieger (2013). 9 The most comprehensive single study of the subject matter, Baranowski (2004), is instructive in both regards but, as observed, tends to foreground pro-consumerism. 10 Concerning the broad, although not universal, agreement among German socialists and trade unionists on the tenet of “shorter hours, higher wages,” see also Campbell (1989: 234–235). 11 For further details, see Campbell’s painstaking exposition of German attitudes to work (1989: especially pp. 245–250). Also useful on the Horneffers’ Nietzscheanism, though without touching on the practical import of their interventions, is Aschheim (1994). 12 “Herr Semperer und Frau Keppelmeier! Propagandaaktion gegen Ger üchtemacher und Meckerer im Gau Steiermark,” Der Propagandist. Mitteilungen des Gaupropagandaamtes Steiermark, November-December 1941, pp. 6–8.   Internet source: < www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/steiermark.htm> Last accessed, October 2015. 13 “The Danger of Americanism,” (1944) Das Schwarze Korps, 14 March: 1–2. Last accessed: May 2017. 14 For two detailed expositions on Nietzsche’s affinity and support for imperialism, see Domboswky (2014); Conway (2002). 15 On Hitler’s general admiration for the English, particularly their empire, see Milton (2007). 16 While Bernays was shocked by such use of his ideas, it is worth mentioning that he himself by no means recoiled from putting public relations at the service of blunt political use, and he is attributed an important part, for example, in the military coup organized by the CIA against the democratic government of Guatemalan president, Jacobo Árbenz. 17 The reference is to Second Moroccan War of the early 1920s, where Spanish forces performed poorly.

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Fascism and Mass Society II 319 Soucy, Robert (1995) French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933–1939, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Stearns, Peter N. (2006) Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire, 2nd edition, New York: Routledge. Sternhell, Zeev Mario Sznajder, and Maia Asheri (1994) The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, Princeton, NJ: ­Princeton University Press. Tertulian, Nicolas (1992) “The History of Being and Political Revolution: Reflections on a Posthumous Work of Heidegger,” in The Heidegger Case: On Philosophy and Politics, Tom Rockmore and Joseph Margolis, eds., Philadelphia: Temple University Press: 208–230. Tooze, Adam J. (2005) “Einfach Verkalkuliert,” die Tageszeitung, 13, March 12, 2005. Tooze, Adam J. (2007) “A New Look at Nazi Plunder,” The Telegraph, August 2007. www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3667059/A-new-lookat-Nazi-plunder.html Last accessed July 2016. Tooze, Adam J. (2008) The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, London: Penguin. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich (2003) Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, Vol. 4: Vom Beginn des Ersten Weltkriegs bis zur Gründung der beiden deutschen Staaten 1914–1949, Munich: C. H. Beck. Weiß, Hermann (1993) “Ideologie der Freizeit im Dritten Reich: Die NS-Gemeinschaft ‘Kraft durch Freude’,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 33: 289–303. Wiesen, S. Jonathan (2010) Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third Reich, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiesen, S. Jonathan (2013) “National Socialism and Consumption,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, Frank Trentmann ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press: 433–450. Williamson, David G. (2002) The Third Reich, 3rd edition, London and New York: Longman. Wirsching, Andreas (2014) “Volksgemeinschaft and the Illusion of ‘Normality’ from the 1920s to the 1940s,” in Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering & Private Lives, Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto, eds., Oxford: Oxford University Press: 149–156. Zamagni, Vera (1993) The Economic History of Italy 1860–1990: Recovery After Decline, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Zimmerman, Michael E. (1992) “Ontological Aestheticism: Heidegger, Jünger, and National Socialism,” in The Heidegger Case: On Philosophy and Politics, Tom Rockmore and Joseph Margolis, eds., Philadelphia: Temple University Press: 52–92.

6 The Wandering Womb Fascism and Gender

“The crowd,” Mussolini once said, “loves strong men. The crowd is like a woman”; “women,” he also averred, “exert no influence upon strong men” (In Ludwig 1933: 62; 112). Such sayings nicely encapsulate the official fascist “solution” to the evolution in the role of women taking place in the Western world in the course of the 19th century and at the start of the 20th century, as well as the way that “the question of woman” was regarded as impinging not solely on the relation between the sexes, but as having a general, extended social meaning, pertinent to the relation between the classes, the élite and the mass. The revolt of the masses and the revolt of women were considered two sides of the same coin, and both called for a similar remedy: as long as the élite remained strong and masculine it could hope to keep the feminine masses under its sway; the fact that this was no longer the case in modernity was a symptom of the decay of strong leadership under weak liberalism and justified the renewal of virility that fascism claimed to represent. It should be noted that this restoration of the “natural order” was never complete under fascism, nor was the interchangeability of woman and mass regarded as absolute: in practice, the class defense (as well as attack) mechanism that was at the heart of fascism also served to mobilize many women for the fascist cause. The paternalistic approach to the mass allowed women organizations, typically run by the upper and middle classes, to establish bases of influence and highly visible public presence at the center of the fascist system in many countries. In tandem with the feminization of the mass, one can find examples of fascist women adopting—sometimes with the support of the leading fascist politicians and thinkers, who were almost always men, and sometimes in a certain tension with them—masculine characteristics and images as part of their enrollment in the nationalist and class project. On other occasions, such organizations were seen as having something distinctly feminine to contribute to the domestication of the mass. To be sure, not all women socially belonged to the ranks of the masses, while many men did. Yet this did not impede the subsuming of political categories under sexual ones, aided by the fact that, in most European

The Wandering Womb 321 languages, “the mass” is a feminine noun: la massa, la plebe, la folla, la moltitudine in Italian, la foule in French, die Masse, die Menge in German, etc., whereas “the state” or “the people” are usually masculine nouns (although other concepts dear to the fascists such as nation or race, are often feminine nouns). The fashionable studies of the masses and their “psychology” and “soul,” which began in the 19th century as part of the effort to find solutions to social unrest, including among its salient practitioners such figures as Scipio Sighele, Wilfred Trotter, Gabriel Tarde and, most notably, Gustave Le Bon—who sent Mussolini at least four of his books after the First World War, a gift that was enthusiastically received (Barrows 1981: 179)—frequently linked perceived effeminacy with the wave of massification. Le Bon (1960: 39) asserted that “Crowds are everywhere distinguished by feminine characteristics.” The masses were regularly ascribed traits which were originally ascribed to women (35–36): “impulsiveness, irascibility, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgment and of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of sentiments,” and—perhaps most significantly—hysteria. Talk about “hysterical masses” or “mass hysteria” was common, and the psychic disturbance called hysteria was mainly identified with women, derived from the Greek term hystera (ὑστέρα), uterus, and based on the hoary belief in the harmful effects of “the wandering womb.”1 By extension, the apparent whims of the feminine mass could be accounted for with recourse to hysteria. And the treatment of such pathological condition also seemed to be similar in both cases: just as the ideal treatment for hysterical women involved hypnosis, so the hysterical masses need to be politically hypnotized. As was discussed in Chapter 2, woman’s advancement was regarded by its critics as symptomatic of a general social decay. If even women, subjugated from times immemorial to men’s rule, dare to demand equal rights, civilization must have come to a very hard pass indeed, and its very survival appeared uncertain. That woman strayed away from her femininity, desired to engage in “masculine” activities, was perceived as mirroring the way in which man was losing his virility and drifting towards femininity. As Mussolini put it, “the crowd loves strong men;” “women exert no influence upon strong men,” implying that weak men invite trouble. Fascist gender policies were thus of a two-thronged approach, seeking to redress both femininity and masculinity. They were nearly always expressly anti-feminist both in the literal sense—the relations between men and women—and in the metaphorical one, regarding the rapport between the élite and the mass. Let us again listen to Mussolini (In Ludwig 1933: 170–171): Woman must play a passive part. She is analytical, not synthetical. During all the centuries of civilisation has there ever been a woman architect? Ask her to build you a mere hut, not even a temple; she

322  The Wandering Womb cannot do it. She has no sense for architecture, which is the synthesis of all the arts; that is a symbol of her destiny. My notion of woman’s role in the State is utterly opposed to feminism. Of course I do not want women to be slaves, but if here in Italy I proposed to give our women votes, they would laugh me to scorn. As far as political life is concerned, they do not count here. In England there are three million more women than men, but in Italy the numbers of the two sexes are the same. Do you know where the Anglo-Saxon countries are likely to end? In a matriarchy! Mussolini here freely vents his contempt for women, verging on outright misogyny. Such deprecating views were very common among fascist men and some went a great deal farther than Mussolini, among them the Futurist writer Giovanni Papini, who in April 1914 assured his readers that the ability to create masterpieces in any domain is reserved to men alone. Papini reports that three men of note have recently emerged as acute interpreters of the female nature: Friedrich Nietzsche, August Strindberg and Otto Weininger. Papini summarizes some of these men’s shared opinions using a crude metaphor. He says that, according to them, women are “orinali di carne” (“urinals of flesh”) for men’s pleasure, and good only for their procreative function. (Sica 2016) It is true that Mussolini did not always express himself so bluntly as in the above quotation. Elsewhere, he applied a subtler approach, combining flattery with aggression. For example, in a speech addressing the issue of women’s vote, Mussolini praised the Italian woman’s modesty and moderation and paid tribute to the heroics displayed by many women during the great war, at the same time that he revealed himself pessimistic with regards to women’s abilities and asserted his belief that “woman lacks the skills of synthesis and is therefore deprived of the ability for great spiritual creation” (Mussolini 1958, vol. 21: 303). On the one hand, he promised that woman’s role will be even greater in the next war, while, on the other hand, he concluded the speech (305) by strongly emphasizing the need for discipline and obedience to the leader. The general direction striven at by fascism with relation to gender, however, was highly authoritarian and conservative, drawing upon crude binary images of woman as mother and man as a warrior. “War,” Mussolini speculated (1958, vol. 26: 259.), “may be man’s tragic destiny. War is to man what motherhood is to woman.” As discussed in Chapter 3, the First World War was meant to discontinue the rise of a generally massified social ethos, which was eo ipso a “feminine” one: the long peace was frequently seen as facilitating a feminine way of life—hedonistic, squeamish, consumerist—unbefitting

The Wandering Womb 323 of real men, who long for the ultimate risk and trial of war. Yet the war proved doubly disappointing: it managed to reign in neither the mass nor woman. The impudence of the former only increased, and its social and political demands became even more sweeping, while the latter gained a significant foothold in domains traditionally regarded as exclusively male: non-domestic labour and public activity. Instead of re-accentuating the boundaries between the genders, the war merely blurred them farther: soldiers came back home to find women much more visible in the labor market. And given that the mass was feminine, fascism faced the task of re-subjugating both the populace and women. Fascist politics was always codified in gender terms: just as the mass was feminine, fascism boasted of its virility, and the state recovering its honor after the rise of fascism could thus be presented as a patriarch reestablishing his rule over women and children. In the following speech given by Mussolini in 1923 social conflicts were construed along gender lines. It should be born in mind that the noun ‘state’ is in Italian a masculine one—lo stato: The problems of public order are related to questions concerning the definition of the authority of the state. [. . .] One should compare the condition of Italy in the years 1919–1920 [the biennio rosso of workers and peasants’ agitation] and in 1921–1922 [the years of the fascist repressive activity]. The main fact of 1919–1920, [. . .] which we will call the years of the demagogic orgy, is the occupation of the factories. The main fact of the next couple of years is the fascist punitive expeditions. [. . .] Today, all this is over, today public-service workers do not strike, nor will they strike. [. . .] Public order in the latter half of the previous year, reached the nadir of its disintegration. In August a strike begins, the anti-fascist strike, totally paralyzing the state. The state does not react, those who react in its stead are the fascist forces. [. . .] As soon as the state becomes irrelevant [inattuale], drained of all its virile attributes, and another, potential state, forms and rises, a very strong state, capable of imposing discipline on the nation, it is necessary to replace, through a revolutionary act, the irreparably decaying state with the one that is rising. (Mussolini 1958, vol. 19: 251–252) Fascism transforms the state from a malfunctioning, emasculate man, unable to restrain the “demagogic orgy,” into a man that has been rehabilitated, and can impose his will on the lower orders. The old liberal élite was weak, passive and feminine, easily overwhelmed by the mass, while the new, fascist élite, is properly virile. In a 1934 article, Mussolini (1958, vol. 26: 378) thus boasted of “the Italy of fascism, masculine and warrior Italy of today and tomorrow,” that has brushed aside the old Italy, “of democracy in slippers and long johns, weak-kneed, defeatist and cowardly.”

324  The Wandering Womb The fascist leader was perceived as embodying triumphant masculinity, asserting itself vis-à-vis the mass, which has imagined itself in possession of manly virtues such as force and independence, only to be shown what it really is: a weak woman who needs, and secretly desires, to be commanded by a man. Italian fascism carefully cultivated Mussolini’s public image as the personification of masculinity. Photographs were widely distributed showing him engaged in demanding physical action, hard work in the field or sporting activity such as skiing, often with a naked torso, and attention was drawn to his many mistresses whereas his role as father and family man was marginalized, for fear that it might dent his tough image (Spackman 1996: 3). The restoration of virility and the subjugation of femininity were central to fascist politics, an aspect that some scholars regard as key to understating its entire Weltanschauung, a crimson thread linking its different components.2 An early example of this discourse is provided by Ernst Jünger, the glorifier of militarism, in a book describing the exhilaration of fighting in the First World War. In the following passage, Jünger (2002: 19) not only presented fighting as the exclusive domain of men, but also as one that provides a quasi-erotic elation that in fact overshadows the actual love making between the sexes: The blood storms through the brain and the veins as in a long anticipated night of love, but much more passionate, much wilder. [. . .] The baptism of fire! The air was so charged with masculinity, that every breath was intoxicating: one could cry without knowing why. Oh, the hearts of men, capable of such emotion! For many, the war signified the catastrophic bankruptcy of the cult of battle with its hollow masculine clichés. It thus served as a starting point, whether this was done consciously or not, for the construction of new and non-dichotomous conceptions of masculinity and femininity, stressing equality, openness and reconciliation. This was a move that Jünger and his like, returning anxious from the battlefield, were determined to undermine. In 1922, when for most European women and men the war was a nightmare they were trying to put behind them, Jünger vindicated its honor—and virility. And a year later, in a speech from which we have already quoted, Mussolini too emphasized the way that fascism rejected the subversion, characteristic of the postwar period, of traditional boundaries and differences between social and political categories. His words did not refer to differences between the sexes but are applicable to them as well, and some would say to them especially: In a profound sense, what was the source of the affliction of Italian life in the last years? [. . .] There were never any clear boundaries. [. . .] The whole atmosphere was one of middle shades, of uncertainty; nowhere to be seen were clearly defined contours. Well, this is

The Wandering Womb 325 exactly the part filled by fascism in Italian life. It seizes the individuals by their collars and tells them: you should be what you are. (Mussolini 1958, vol. 19: 261) From men, therefore, fascism demanded to be “men,” and from women “women,” that is, to remold themselves according to the old templates, the very ones whose inadequacy was put into evidence by modernity and the Great War.

Fascism and “the tremendous reason of Asia” At this point, many fascists encountered a paradox. On the one hand, they stressed the way the old gender roles and images corresponded to the biological nature of men and women. This innate order was violated by unnatural, revolutionary developments. Yet at the same time it was clear that nature was greatly unreliable, failing to provide the firm bedrock that was called for: thus, in order to create the sharp distinction between the sexes, to put an end to the intermingling and interpenetration of spheres and attributes, one had to rely precisely on culture, and employ artificial means to supervise the proper development of a masculine man and a feminine woman. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was one of many deeply disturbed by the man’s loss of virility, and hence demanded to “finally put an end to the mixture of males and females that during the earliest years always produces a harmful effeminizing of the male.” He insisted that boys should be separated early on from the girls to ensure “that their first games be clearly masculine, that is, free of emotional morbidity or womanly delicacy, lively, feisty, muscular and violently dynamic.” Short of such separation, the development of the masculine character is hampered, since young boys “always succumb to the charm and the willful seductiveness of the little female” (In Spackman 1996: 8). On these plans, which clearly expose the fascist fear of the natural course of development and de facto acknowledge the artificiality rather than biological character of gender roles, Barbara Spackman wittily comments (8): “The logic of this passage runs counter to the commonplace that ‘boys will be boys’: given half a chance, boys will be girls.” Wyndham Lewis, who occasionally lent fascist ideas a greater degree of sophistication, dealt with this paradox in an original way. Discarding the notion of biological differences between the sexes to which most fascists held fast, he readily acknowledged that masculinity and femininity are not natural patterns of behavior but depend heavily on culture and conventions. In that respect he came close to the positions later developed by feminist theories according to which the hierarchical relations between man and woman are a product of gender rather than sex: Men were only made into “men” with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally “a man” any more than the

326  The Wandering Womb woman, he has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse. [. . .] A man, then, is made, not born: and he is made, of course, with very great difficulty. From the time he yells and kicks in his cradle, to the time he receives his last kick at school, he is recalcitrant. And it is not until he is about thirty years old that the present European becomes resigned to an erect position. (Lewis 1989: 247–248) And yet, while accepting that the role of man has always been a difficult and unpleasant task, a determined rowing against the currents of nature, only in modern times was the question raised: ought one to go there at all? Would it not be better to give up such manliness which is so hard to earn? The roots of the rebellion against this gender role Lewis traced back to the trauma of the First World War, during which man’s nature cried “never again” and he decided to defect from civilization. It was during the war that men “were saying to themselves subconsciously that at last, beyond any doubt, the game was not worth the candle: [. . .] that the institution of manhood had in some way overreached itself or got into the caricatural stage” (Lewis 1989: 247). Yet this acute insight did not make Lewis abandon the model of manhood or subject it to any criticism. On the contrary: his opposition to feminism, an attitude coming from both men and women, was only deepened. The approximation between the sexes is natural, it perfectly fits the inclinations of both women and men, and this is precisely why it should be condemned. The artificiality of the relationship, the enormous difficulty with which it is structured against the natural impulses, is its great attainment, which must be preserved. Conversely, the way of the Last Humans, of the masses, leading to greater equality and relaxation in the rapport between the sexes was easy, comfortable and natural. And on that account it must be categorically rejected. An unnatural thing, manhood is the glory of human culture and as such must be protected against men who seek to shirk their duty to culture, evade “responsibility” and “heroism”: There are very many male Europeans who never become reconciled to the idea of being “men” (leaving aside those who are congenitally unadapted for the rigors of manhood). At thirty-five, forty-five, fiftyfive, und so weiter, you find them still luxuriously and rebelliously prostrate; still pouting, lisping, and sobbing [. . .]. He does not want, if he can possibly help it, to be a man, not at least if it is so difficult. [. . .] So “a man” is an entirely artificial thing, like everything else that is an object of our grudging “admiration.” [. . .] The snarling objurgations of the poor man’s life [sic] such as “Be a MAN!” (banteringly and coaxingly) or “CALL YOURSELF A MAN!” (with threatening contempt), arouse “the man” in the male still: but we can

The Wandering Womb 327 confidently look forward to the time, now, when this feminine taunt will be without effect. (Lewis 1989: 248) Here Lewis rehearses the common argument against feminism, namely that women, in their heart of hearts, at least real women, for all their complaints against patriarchy, long for a real—i.e., artificial—man, one who has accepted the burden of culture. Feminism—and here Lewis is reminiscent of Nietzsche—is first and foremost a result of a male dysfunction, a response to a vacillating masculinity, shedding off its assets. As likewise explained by Hitler in a 1934 speech to the members of the NSF, The National Socialist Women’s League: The slogan “Emancipation of women” was invented by Jewish intellectuals [. . .]. In the really good times of German life the German woman had no need to emancipate herself. She possessed exactly what nature had necessarily given her to administer and preserve; just as the man in his good times had no need to fear that he would be ousted from his position in relation to the woman. In fact the woman was least likely to challenge his position. Only when he was not absolutely certain in his knowledge of his task did the eternal instinct of self and race-preservation begin to rebel in women. There then grew from this rebellion a state of affairs which was unnatural and which lasted until both sexes returned to the respective spheres which an eternally wise providence had preordained for them. (In Noakes and Pridham 1984, vol. 1: 449)3 And as Mussolini indicated, the rebellion of women is a protest not against the rule of men as such, but against weak men, who do not know how to rule. The feminine mass turns hysterical in the absence of manly élites to govern it. Not only does the womb tend to wander, but it is gripped by the desire to roam mainly when no strong man is about. This, incidentally, was part of the theory of the wandering womb to begin with, as originally developed by Hippocrates and Plato. As explained by cultural historian G. S. Rousseau (1993: 118), the theory held that “the uterus, when deprived of the health-giving moisture derived from sexual intercourse, would rise up into the hypochondrium [. . .] in a quest for nourishment.” Fascism, in that sense, was a form of libidinal politics, aiming to mobilize for its purposes the sexual drive. In an interview given a few years ago, Roger Griffin commented as follows on Wilhelm Reich’s influential theory of fascist authoritarianism as feeding upon sexual repression: There was a major book by a guy called Wilhelm Reich who said what drove nazism was sexual frustration. Well, Europe has changed

328  The Wandering Womb sexually now, there are not so many sexually frustrated people wandering around. I think if there had been plentiful marijuana in Weimar, than [sic] maybe Hitler would not have been quite so successful either.4 (Faschisten sind immer die anderen 2012) Be the case as it may, fascism in truth presumed to supply some form of collective sexual healing. “Presumed” is perhaps too strong a word, for this intent was not, for the most part, openly proclaimed in official fascist texts, speeches, doctrines and the like. But between the lines its presence can certainly be felt. Mussolini was prone to interpret politics with reference to an erotic subtext, and to sexually construe political and social entities—the state, the mass, the nation and so on and so forth. We have already had a couple of occasions to witness this procedure, but many more cases could be cited. For instance, conversing with one of his colleagues in the late 1930s, Mussolini explained the tension between England and Italy as stemming from the sexual frustration of English women. “Four million superfluous women,” he affirmed. “Four million women sexually unsatisfied, artificially creating a host of problems to arouse or calm their senses. Unable to embrace one man, they embrace humanity” (In Ciano 2006: 187). And in 1925, in one of his most famous speeches, called “the speech of June the 3rd,” a discourse appreciated by many historians as signifying a turning point after which fascism abandoned the rule of law and began to unabashedly embrace authoritarianism, Mussolini presented fascists, with himself at their head, as men coming to impose authority on Italy, a female entity. If Italy will yield, this will be done with love; if she will refuse, with force: Italy, gentlemen, wants peace, wants tranquility, wants industrial calm. We will give her this tranquility, the industrial calm, with love, if possible, and with force, if that shall be necessary. [. . .] Everybody knows that there is no personal caprice in my soul, or a lust [libidine] for ruling, or a sinister passion, but only boundless and mighty love for the nation. (Mussolini 1958, vol. 21: 240) On this wrote Barbara Spackman (1996: 142), in an incisive analysis of the entire speech: the introduction of a feminized ‘Italia’ here is not merely a clichéd flourish but rather plays a crucial interpellative role in redirecting the violence that threatened to erupt among men [. . .] toward a ‘woman’ to be loved or raped. Such ideas were not invented by the fascists nor did they disappear with them. They echo throughout Western culture and find expression,

The Wandering Womb 329 for instance, in the best-selling novels of two authors who have been sometimes charged with displaying some affinities with fascism, Ayn Rand and Ian Fleming.5 In both their books one finds criticism of democracy and equality as shallow fictions, running counter to human nature, specifically that of woman, who intimately longs—as much as she will refuse to admit it, perhaps even to herself—to be dominated by a strong man, and dominated drastically enough to include being raped by him. In Rand’s The Fountainhead, published in 1943—that is when Mussolini and Hitler were still in power—love between the sexes is portrayed as an act of war, a clash between two hostile forces, in the course of which the man subjugates the woman and takes violent possession of her body. Yet rape is not simply an act of imposition, for it accords with the secret longings of the woman herself. The lover of Howard Roark, the novel’s indomitable hero, feels that her body being possessed by him in a scornful way, in the course of an act involving conquest and humiliation, is precisely for what she longs. Any love or tenderness of his part would have left her totally indifferent (Rand 1993: 217). Incidentally or not, one may add, Roark’s profession happens to be the very one that Mussolini chose to underline the innate superiority of man over woman: architecture. In the James Bond stories similar motifs recur: women covertly desire to be raped. Such messages are conveyed, not by the hero himself, but through his foreign friends who divulge to him, as it were, profound truths about women’s nature. Marc-Ange Draco, the amiable Corsican Mafioso who would become Bond’s father-in-law, tells him about the way he had met his English wife: “She had come to Corsica to look for bandits”—he smiled—“rather like some English women adventure into the desert to look for sheiks. She explained to me later that she must have been possessed by a subconscious desire to be raped. Well”—this time he didn’t smile—“she found me in the mountains and she was raped—by me.” (Fleming 2002: 52) Another good friend of Bond, and a loyal ally of the British secret service, the Turk Darko Kerim, generalizes this into a theory of female desire: “All women want to be swept off their feet. In their dreams they long to be slung over a man’s shoulder and taken into a cave and raped.” And he himself acts upon such insights with his partner: “I got to her place and took away all her clothes and kept her chained naked under the table. When I ate, I used to throw scraps to her under the table, like a dog” (Fleming, 1988: 111–112).6 Such positions are in profound harmony with Nietzsche’s recommendation to treat woman according to Asia’s wisdom. Already quoted above, it is useful to recall its bottom line in order to establish the ideological and political continuity we are facing: “A deep man,” Nietzsche

330  The Wandering Womb averred (1998: 127), “can think about women only like an Oriental: he has to conceive of woman as a possession, as securable property, as something predetermined for service and completed in it. He has to rely on the tremendous reason of Asia.” It is important to realize, again, that this theory is not confined to the bedroom, or even to relations between the sexes more generally conceived; rather, it ultimately applies to the relations between the manly élite (if it is manly, and an élite which is not, will soon cease to be one) and the feminine masses. Authority and violence have a general social application. Thus, according to Darko Kerim, not only women long to be raped but all his lower-class compatriots: Kerim harangued the waiter. He sat back smiling at Bond. “That is the only way to treat these damned people. They love to be cursed and kicked. It is all they understand. It is in the blood. All this pretence of democracy is killing them. They want some sultans and wars and rape and fun. Poor brutes, in their striped suits and bowler hats. They are miserable. You’ve only got to look at them.” (Fleming 1988: 110)7 This is a discourse that presents democracy as a recipe for misery, a denial of one’s drives, while authoritarianism, up to and including its fascist variant, is incomparably more suited to human nature, which is sadistic and masochistic. In this regard the assumption should be avoided that fascism was a merely conservative force, bent on reverting to past norms and codes. Considered as a sexual politics, fascism combined highly conservative tropes, denouncing the alleged depravity of modernity, with radically anti-conservative ones, calling for liberation from the moral inhibitions of Christianity. As historian Dagmar Herzog (2005) forcefully argued apropos National Socialist attitudes to sexuality, German fascism consisted of a complex and contradictory combination of puritan attitudes and dissipation, in a way that managed to confuse even many of its supporters. To begin with, Nazis presented themselves mostly as prim champions of traditional family values determined to put a stop to the lewdness and abandon of the republic; this made many conservatives and devout Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, rally to their cause. Yet alongside this posture there always existed another tendency, that grew in significance as years went by, creating alienation among some of their erstwhile supporters: as part of their criticism of Christianity as a meek and unnatural way of life and their espousal of the purportedly healthy and uninhibited cult of nature of the pagans, many Nazis—doctors, moralists and politicians—saw themselves as destined to do away with the conservative-Christian taboo on sexual lust, vindicating it as beautiful, natural, wholesome, even sacred. As a result of such ambivalence, alongside Nazis who stressed the sanctity of the family, there were those who encouraged extra-marital

The Wandering Womb 331 sex, arguing, among other things, that it was natural and conducive to a higher birth rate. They also sought to acknowledge “bastards,” and some voices went as far as advocating changing the traditional model of marriage and allowing polygamy—for men. This was not, it is important to clarify, an unqualified permissiveness but one that normally placed the needs and pleasures of men above those of woman; that welcomed only heterosexuality and persecuted homosexuals; and, of course, that encouraged intercourse amongst Aryans and strictly prohibited one involving Jews. Yet it was still inclusive enough to allow those many Germans who did not belong to any of the categories that were discriminated against, a relatively high degree of sexual liberty, in a way which partly continued modern trends, and which may explain part of the support given to Nazism (Herzog 2005: 17). While this (qualifiedly) permissive side of Nazism may surprise, one should realize that sexual freedom does not necessarily entail political freedom. As argued by Eric Hobsbawm, the reverse correlation may more often be established: Indeed, if a rough generalization about the relation between class rule and sexual freedom is possible, it is that rulers find it convenient to encourage sexual permissiveness or laxity among their subjects if only to keep their mind off their subjection. Nobody ever imposed sexual Puritanism on slaves, quite the contrary. The sort of societies in which the poor are strictly kept in their place are quite familiar with regular institutionalized mass outbursts of free sex, such as carnivals. In fact, since sex is the cheapest form of enjoyment as well as the most intense (as the Neapolitans say, bed is the poor man’s grand opera), it is politically very advantageous, other things being equal, to get them to practice it as much as possible. (Hobsbawm 2009: 308) The twofold emphasis of many fascists on the inferiority of woman and the glory of man created a very strong homo-social ethos, celebrating the camaraderie of warriors, their closeness and friendship, sometimes to the point, as evidenced by Jünger, of elevating the wondrous sensual ecstasy of war above the banal release of sexual intercourse. In this way, the boundaries between manhood and femininity were again accentuated. This, however, came with the disadvantage that the homo-social bond, in excluding woman, overemphasized masculinity, so to speak, and thus culminated in a strange reversal whereby manhood was again put in doubt. Instead of facilitating the emergence of a man whose masculinity could no longer be doubted, the fascist ethos paradoxically ran the risk of creating a hybrid man, the homosexual, identified precisely with what fascism came to overcome: indistinct gender boundaries. The hatred of homosexuals was common to all fascisms but Nazism, in particular, humiliated, persecuted, repressed and even murdered thousands

332  The Wandering Womb of homosexuals, whose concentration-camp uniforms were affixed with a reverse, pink triangle. The first argument against homosexuality concerned the homosexual’s infertility, undermining the central goal of demographic growth that will provide the human raw material needed to sustain fascist empires. In an important private speech given to his SS subordinates on February 18, 1937 in the Bavarian town of Bad Tölz, Heinrich Himmler began by stressing the demographic peril of homosexuality. He denied any notion that homosexual relationships are a matter of the individual’s private life. Far from being a private matter, it is one of crucial national importance: The sexual sphere could determine the fate of a people, to life or death, making the difference between world rule and shrinking to the importance of Switzerland. A people of many children can aspire to world hegemony, world control. A people of noble race that has too few children has acquired its ticket to the grave: in 50 or 100 years it will cease to be of importance, in 200 or 500 years it will be dead. This goal was so important, that in Italy a tax was levied on bachelors, shirking their national duty. Yet in truth homosexuality posed more of a moral than a demographic problem for fascism (and in any case no necessary contradiction exists between homosexuality and procreation): it damaged the image of fascism as manly and tough, pushing it nearer to the presumably weak and feminine model of manhood that it came to displace to begin with. This, more substantial problem, Himmler addresses in direct continuation: However, beyond the problem of numbers, [. . .] such a people can be obliterated for other reasons. We are a state of men, and for all the flaws in this method, we must cling to it at any price, for there is no better. There have been in the course of history women’s states. You must have heard of the concept “a matriarchal order.” [. . .] For hundreds and thousands of years, the Germanic peoples, and especially the German people, have been ruled by men. Yet this men-state is now undergoing a process of self-destruction on account of its tolerance for homosexuality. Himmler then goes on to criticize the misogynic tendencies rife in the Nazi movement and the excessive appreciation of male bonding as promoted by such authors as the ultra-nationalist Hans Blüher, since they drive the movement to homosexuality and hence to its destruction. Women should be respected and relationships with them not frowned upon, not because they are equal to men but in order to curb the worst excesses of male bonding and prevent homosexuality. Himmler waxes nostalgic about the good old days of the Germanic ancestors, where the

The Wandering Womb 333 homosexual could without further ado be “drowned in a swamp,” not in order to punish him, “but simply to exterminate abnormal life.” Nazi rule, however, enables contemporary Germans to deal with homosexuals almost as straightforwardly. The head of the SS explains that he has taken the decision to “publicly humiliate” the exposed homosexuals in the organization (he speaks of eight to ten such cases every year), to put them on trial and once they have served their punishment, to take them to “a concentration camp and shoot them while ‘trying to escape.’ ” A pivotal element in Himmler’s anti-homosexual campaign is the association of homoeroticism with a perverse Judaeo-Christian and protosocialist assault on healthy, pagan imperialism, a conflict that goes back two thousand years: A hundred and fifty years ago a thesis was written in a Catholic university under the title: “Does woman have a soul?” This testifies to the tendency of Christianity to destroy woman and expose her inferiority. I am totally convinced that the whole essence of priesthood and Christianity is to establish male erotic bonding, and preserve this Bolshevism, two-thousand years old. I am well familiar with the history of Christianity in Rome, and this strengthens me in my position. I am convinced that the Roman emperors who exterminated the first Christians acted just as we did with the Communists. In those days, the Christians were the worst seditious element in the big cities, the worst Jews, the worst Bolsheviks one can imagine. Bolshevism in that era had the courage to rise, stepping over the corpse of dying Rome. The priests of that Christian Church—who then defeated the Aryan Church, after tremendous struggles—try, since the 4th or 5th centuries, to obtain the celibacy of priests. [. . .] In its essence, the organization of the Church, in its leadership and its priests, is a male erotic bonding that is terrorizing humanity for 1.800 years. Discussing this speech, Himmler’s biographer Peter Longerich points out (2012: 237) that the fears it conveys contain a considerable measure of implied self-criticism, since the values of militant, reclusive masculinity that Himmler laments are ones he himself advocated when younger. Interestingly, this “shadow” of homosexuality that was a source of concern for the fascists, was seized upon by many anti-fascists in the 1930s and 1940s wishing thereby to destroy the manly and powerful image of fascism. As Mark Meyers (2006) demonstrated in a fascinating essay, many critics of fascism in Europe—mainly in France and ­Germany—instead of taking the fascists to task for their express hostility to the masses and their equally boisterous machismo, tried to attack them from a vantage point that was itself male chauvinist and hostile to the masses. Thus, the fascist leaders, particularly Hitler, were denounced as

334  The Wandering Womb marionettes of the masses and as feminine, hysterical figures, tainted by latent homosexuality. In this kind of anti-fascist literature, whose representatives include such highly visible figures as Theodor Adorno or Jean Paul Sartre, one can identify the paradoxical seeds of the criticism of fascism as mass hysteria that became so prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s, and that continues to reverberate to our days. Victorian Values: The Fascist Version In a sense, fascism could be said to have returned, in theory if not always in practice, to the Victorian model of gender relations, described in Chapter 1, revolving around the principle of the “separate spheres,” according to which man is in charge of the public, the economic and the political domain, and woman runs the domestic, family sphere. Production was deposited in the hands of man, and reproduction in those of woman, or more to the point, in her womb. Zarathustra’s dictum will be remembered, that “Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has one solution: it is called pregnancy. [. . .] Man should be trained for war and woman for the re-creation of the warrior: all else is folly.” The German philosopher typically opts for rhetorical extremism, and strives for the most provocative possible formulations. Hitler, by comparison, lends the same ideas a much more banal expression: Whereas previously the programmes of the liberal, intellectualist women’s movements contained many points, the programme of our National Socialist Women’s movement has in reality but one single point, and that point is the child, that tiny creature which must be born and grow strong and which alone gives meaning to the whole life-struggle. (In Noakes and Pridham 1984, vol. 1: 450) Hitler also lent the separate-spheres doctrine a very succinct formulation, as if he were the dummy and the Victorian, patriarchal tradition, the ventriloquist: If the man’s world is said to be the State, his struggle, his readiness to devote his powers to the service of the community, then it may perhaps be said that the woman’s is a smaller world. For her world is her husband, her family, her children, and her home. But what would become of the greater world if there were no one to tend and care for the smaller one? [. . .] The two worlds are not antagonistic. They complement each other, they belong together just as man and woman belong together. We do not consider it correct for the woman to interfere in the world of the man, in his main sphere. We consider it natural if these

The Wandering Womb 335 two worlds remain distinct. To the one belongs the strength of feeling, the strength of the soul. To the other belongs the strength of vision, of toughness, of decision, and of the willingness to act. (In Noakes and Pridham 1984, vol. 1: 249) The trespassing of the boundaries between the spheres on the part of the woman bears destructive consequences, both for the man, who risks losing his employment and his ability to produce, and for the woman herself, who becomes masculine and loses, somehow, her reproductive abilities. Women’s labor, declared Mussolini (1958, vol. 26, 311) in 1934, brings about her independence, and entails physical and mental conditions that counter birth-giving. The man, confused and above all “unemployed” in all senses, finally gives up the family. [. . .] The exiling of woman from the field of labour will doubtlessly have economic consequences for many families, yet it will restore the pride of legions of humiliated men, and an infinitely greater number of families will at once reenter the national life. It should be realized that the same labour which in woman causes the loss of the attributes of birth-giving, creates in man a very strong manhood, physical and spiritual. The harking back to lost Victorian times is reflected in the following, pedagogic illustration (Figure 6.1), lamenting the “decline in matrimonial fertility.” It shows the ever increasing number of married women needed to bring a child to the world, from just three in 1890, to ten women in 1932, a year before Nazism began reversing this destructive trend (Helmut 1939: 7). Women, it is shown, increasingly shun their duties as mothers. As years go by, they become ever more emancipated, hedonist and consumerist. From the chaste Victorian woman depicted in the uppermost frame, clad in heavy garments, one descends—both literally and figuratively—in the direction of the modern, reckless and noncompliant Last Woman: the dresses get shorter, so does the hair, and fashionable handbags, hats, furs and the like multiply. In the opposite page (6), the following explanation shores up the visual message: In woman’s womb lies the future of the people. Woe to the country whose women have so degenerated that they have lost the natural desire for a child and whose heart is more attracted by delicate manners, the pleasures of life and personal comfort than by a flock of growing kids. Once installed in power, fascism set about to discontinue the advances made by women, partial and tentative as they may have been. In Germany and Spain, writes Inbal Ofer (2015: 381), fascism brought about

336  The Wandering Womb

Figure 6.1 “Decline in matrimonial fertility” (Helmut 1939: 7)

“a tremendous retreat in the professional, legal and political status” of women. In Spain, Franco’s regime restored the Napoleonic code. This code defined married women as legal minors and perpetuated their complete dependency on their husbands not only in managing their

The Wandering Womb 337 property or reaching decisions concerning their children, but also with regards to receiving work permits, relocating, etc. (Ofer, 2015: 381) The continuity with 19th-century values and their resumption, however, were only partial. Beyond the sexual defiance that was an important aspect of fascism, it also “upgraded” the Victorian ethos, giving it a comprehensive, totalitarian version in which, theoretically at least, the private space that Victorianism so cherished no longer existed, not even in the family’s bosom. The family became a cell in the national organism, which meant that woman, even at her home, was no longer seen as isolated or protected from public life, but quite the contrary: she was ascribed a vital role in the public arena. To the commitment to the husband and family, emphasized in the 19th century, was now added a further and even more important obligation, to the nation and the race. Bearing offspring, producing the future warriors that the nation needed in order to realize its expansionist ambitions, was a national imperative. In Italy and Germany, fascism encouraged childbirth with marriage and parenthood grants, and economically aiding mothers and their kids, whereas failure to fulfill this duty carried penalties: in Italy, starting from 1927, shirking men, i.e., bachelors, had to pay a “bachelor tax” that in certain ages (35 to 50) amounted to a 25 percent of the income tax. The tax, from which priests and soldiers were absolved, was raised in 1928, 1934 and 1936, so that in the latter year a 30-year-old bachelor needed to pay an income tax twice as high as the normal one. In addition to that, bachelors were discriminated against in the labour market and faced greater difficulties in finding jobs as compared to married men, particularly those with kids (Albanese 2006: 54). Paradoxically, the fact that the private, feminine and domestic sphere, centering on the family and motherhood, was invested with a civil and national duty of the first order, meant that fascism in a sense introduced many women into politics, albeit of a kind that was largely deprived of the ability to promote women’s independent agendas and defend their collective interests. Women, formerly isolated in the domestic space, suddenly became potential agents of the regime and great efforts were undertaken, crowned with considerable success, to integrate them into diverse fascist organizations, such as the Fasci Femminili in Italy or the NS-Frauenschaft in Germany. Such organizations ultimately counted millions of women and girls as members.8 “Fascist regimes,” writes Kevin Passmore (2002: 126), invariably implemented repressive measures against women. They attempted to remove women from the labour market and restrict their access to education. [. . .] There was, however, a contradiction in these policies, for [. . .] in order to teach women their domestic

338  The Wandering Womb duties, fascists mobilized them in organizations linked to the party— to return women to the home, fascism took them out of the home! Fascism, therefore, perhaps more than any other movement before it, recruited women in great number to its ranks. Women’s organizations were subjected to the male party hierarchy and were used to spread fascist propaganda in as many households as possible; but they also allowed a significant female presence in the public sphere. Fascist women served as welfare workers, organized activities for poor women’s children, distributed clothes and food to the needy and also served as the regimes’ agents in prying into the private affairs of lower-class families, reporting unsocial or politically suspicious behavior and helping to discipline the unruly. While neutralizing any opposition to the regime, fascism eagerly enrolled women as supporters and mouthpieces. While doubtlessly in many cases filling these activists’ lives with a satisfying sense of purpose, their work was done for the most part on a voluntaristic basis or with a small economic recompense (De Grazia 1992). This also served to enhance the upper-class character of these movements’ leadership, by de facto blocking the path for lower-class women who could not afford to work for, at best, a meager salary (Ofer 2015: 384). In accordance with the fascist basis of social support, most activities were undertaken by, and under the supervision of, upper- and middle-class women, who identified with fascism as a buffer of lower-class discontent and as an agent of national regeneration and ethnic purification, even as some of them contested the crude patriarchal model of fascism and tried to create a more egalitarian gender environment, where women’s social achievements would not be obliterated. As pointed out by Ofer (2015: 383), “for fascist women in general class and national/racial identity were more central than that of gender.” In Italy, women of the nobility occupied most of the key positions in the Fasci Femminili for the duration of the regime (Willson 2003: 24), and while organizations were set up for peasant and working-class women, the motivation to join them seemed to have been primarily pragmatic and in any case women had little genuine alternative: in Italy of the 1930s, without a fascist party card the chances for working-class or middle-class women of getting a job was seriously diminished in many occupations, for instance teaching. And a similar de facto compulsion existed in Germany and Spain. This development, it is important to clarify, did not simply break with past traditions: during the 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th century the boundaries between the private and the public spheres became in general much more porous, and questions of a presumably personal nature, such as choosing a spouse, giving birth and educating one’s children, were perceived by the eugenic movement in Europe and the United States more and more as issues of decisive importance for the national and racial future, and hence as matters in which the nation—by

The Wandering Womb 339 proxy of its educated and expert representatives—was well entitled to intervene. For Nietzsche it was vital to deposit in the hands of physicians “a new responsibility [. . .], in determining the right to reproduce, the right to be born, the right to live” (Nietzsche 1990: 99). That aspect of fascism thus needs to be seen as a continuation, completion and exacerbation of preexisting trends. The fascist fixation on the strength of the national body, the desire to forge robust and aesthetic men and women and shake off the decadence of urban modernity need also be located within a national and bourgeois tradition developed in the course of the 19th century, as George Mosse analyzed in a series of important studies (especially, Mosse 1997). Similarly, the welfare and nursing tasks fulfilled by women under fascism continued their involvement in similar roles during the First World War, when they were already credited with performing a hugely important national work—in agreement, of course, with their nature and abilities. Such a continuity permitted some women to consider fascism a direct extension of the war experience and to identify with it, and occasionally even to regard it as part of the movement to extend women’s rights, if not in a feminist sense—although a small number of avowed feminists did espouse feminism, such as Teresa Labriola in Italy, Mary Allen in England or Emma Hadlich in Germany—then at least in deepening the bond between women and the nation, an idea that many women of the upper and middle classes found greatly appealing (Willson 2003: 13–14).

Fascism as the elimination of home The reader may notice a certain unresolved contradiction in the discussion of the fascist attitude to women: strongly conservative and sometimes even outright misogynic, fascism at the same time very successfully recruited women to its ranks and centrally involved them in its task of national and racial palingenesis; contemptuous of women and eager to reinstate masculinity, it also incessantly paid effusive homage to women’s indispensable role in sustaining the new politics; a morbid manifestation of “male fantasies,” to put in Klaus Theweleit’s famous terms, it also corresponded, it turns out, to many female fantasies. So was fascism, with regards to gender relations, a strongly reactionary force, or was it, strangely enough, a highly modern and possibly even progressive and egalitarian force? Even more confusingly, could it have been both at the same time? Over the last two or three decades, social historians have increasingly moved away from the traditional views of fascism as a misogynic brand of politics, and emphasized the way fascism involved many women in its activities and even opened up avenues of employment and of recreation that have been largely closed to them in the past. Magali Della Sudda (2014: 97) thus draws attention to what she terms “an unacknowledged

340  The Wandering Womb paradox during the interwar era in France: The presence of female agency within conservative movements. [. . .] [T]he use of gender analysis has challenged the traditional view of Rightist hostility toward women’s emancipation.” And Geoff Read likewise notes (2014: 127) that “Some authors have emphasized that within the far-Right movements of interwar France women achieved a great deal of autonomy. [Caroline] Campbell’s recent doctoral dissertation, for example, emphasizes that women in the CF/PSF were ‘effective sociopolitical actors.’ ” And while these scholars focus on interwar France, others have reached comparable conclusions with regards to other European fascisms, in Italy, Germany, Britain or Spain. (See, respectively, Graziosi 1995; Koonz 1987; Gottlieb 2003; Ofer 2009.) While the question is admittedly a difficult one, and the checkered evidence will not admit of a single, let alone a straightforward answer, certain pointers may help us approximate a possible conclusion. To begin with, the fascist break with conservative traditions that have excluded women from the public space should not be overstated. Rather than a break, in fact, fascism seems to have taken over conservative positions and puffed them up, so to speak, pushing them to another level in terms of the sheer scale on which it operated and the radicalism it involved. The very existence of women’s organizations working alongside predominantly male political parties, far from representing an exciting innovation, corresponded to an old European tradition, preceding the First World War, that Della Sudda (2014: 107–108) refers to as “the conjugalist pattern.” While men were engaged in politics more narrowly defined, “social institutions and philanthropic work characterized female citizenship” (99). Fascist movements may have been more successful in mobilizing women, but they can scarcely be credited for introducing the concept. As Geoff Read (2014: 136) argued apropos the Croix-de-Feu, “whatever claim it has to distinctiveness in this regard lies with its succeeding where others failed.” Fascism did not eliminate the old separate–spheres division, as much as it extended these spheres to cover public areas of activity: in this division of labor women were in charge of welfare, persuasion and indoctrination, while men took most of the strategic decisions and ran the military apparatus. This leads to a second, important aspect of the fascist version of gendered politics, which may be called “the paradox of family.” As we have seen, Hitler was holding fast to a textbook notion of the separate spheres, when distinguishing the greater world of man, from the “smaller world” of woman: “For her world is her husband, her family, her children, and her home.” But, as was already indicated, precisely such a neat Victorian differentiation between public and private spaces, fascism had rendered untenable. The “smaller world” was now by definition anything but small. Underpinning fascism was a familial vision of politics. The nation itself was seen as one huge family connected by organic ties of blood. “Fascism,” according to Daniella Sarnoff (2014: 141), “was, at heart,

The Wandering Womb 341 a domestic ideology.” This, by implication, bestowed on women a great importance, for “as representatives of the family, women also were representative of the patrie—that extended family—and hence they were also representative of the essence of French fascist life” (151). And while league rhetoric did often replicate the familiar gender hierarchies of traditional family, it was not simply a matter of leaving domestic cares to the women and public labor and politics to men— the family was the highest calling for men and women. (151) From this however, it seems to follow that, if women were highly evaluated by the fascists, this was not qua emancipated human beings whose individual wills and desires are now to be considered on equal footing with those of the male, but precisely as servants of the nation’s familial cause. Women were celebrated precisely, and only in so far, as they refused the modern temptation of consumption and self-indulgence; the fascists played upon the clichés of women as responsible savers and housekeepers, selfless beings living for the sake of their offspring. The irony was that, by remaining just as she was or, in case she has strayed from the righteous path, by being pulled back to her former role, woman was suddenly not just a domestic, minor player, but one invested with critical importance, a leading actor in an old-new play. Chauvinist and traditionalist as fascism certainly was, it portrayed both men and women as humble servants of “the extended family,” the nation, which created a certain appearance of equality. But this was, if anything, the equality of slaves: under fascism, rather than women getting to enjoy some of the individual liberties previously available to men, these were denied to men as well. The new-found importance of women under fascism, which bemuse so many scholars, was due not least to their age-old ability— produced and reproduced of course by the hegemonic system—precisely to efface themselves, subordinate themselves to a higher cause. Hence the routine fascist praise for women’s “selflessness.” And since the new human trumpeted by fascism was precisely a self-effacing one, woman, once weaned off her rebellious whims, presented an excellent candidate for the part, and all she had to do was “act naturally.” Fascism had quelled the revolt of the feminine mass, had tamed the shrew. Woman, under the leadership of a virile élite, was cured of her unnatural fancies and reassumed her submissive position. Therewith the project of the Last Humans—and last women—was cut short, a project intent on ushering in a truly new woman, having her little pleasure for the day and her little pleasure for the night, no longer in thrall to the nation. Needless to say, the re-emphasis on family, and family duties, was perfectly in line with the conservative restoration, as attested to by the way the tripartite motto of the French revolution, “Liberté égalité fraternité,” was replaced by right-wing mottos such as “Deus, Pátria e Familia” in

342  The Wandering Womb Salazar’s Portugal, the Vichy regime’s “travail, famille, patrie” (and of course also the famous “Credere Obbedire Combattere” of Italian fascism). Seen under this light, it is tempting to explain the greater fascist success in mobilizing women when compared to other forces on the left, right and center, not with reference to any thrilling new element, let alone emancipatory message, but precisely on account of the way it managed to single-mindedly appropriate, and politically cash in on, very old and commonsensical notions. Fascism succeeded where others faltered, not because it offered any emancipation, but because it was better able to drum up “the woman” in woman. As rightly observed by Read (2014: 128), the emphasis on the family was not exclusive to fascist rhetoric nor to right-wing circles, but could be found virtually across the political spectrum. Yet such an analogy would go astray if it failed to register the crucial difference in the respective uses of “the family” trope. For in non- and anti-fascist discourses, especially on the left, the family was not primarily the nation’s cell, but the adobe of the Last Human, the safe refuge where she or he were protected from state intervention, relieved of obsequiousness; it was the domain of free consumption, of love making rather than (obligatory) childbearing,9 of crying, cursing and yawning, rather than chanting, saluting and staying awake—apropos Adorno’s perceptive observation (2000: 13) that “under fascism, psychologically, no one is allowed to sleep.”10 As G. K. Chesterton put it in What’s Wrong with the World (1910), rebuffing the elitist attempt to regiment the commoners even in their homes: For the truth is, that to the moderately poor the home is the only place of liberty. Nay, it is the only place of anarchy. [. . .] He can eat his meals on the floor in his own house if he likes. I often do it myself; it gives a curious, childish, poetic, picnic feeling. [. . .] For a plain, hard-working man the home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks. The home is the one place where he can put the carpet on the ceiling or the slates on the floor if he wants to. [. . .] Hotels may be defined as places where you are forced to dress; and theaters may be defined as places where you are forbidden to smoke. A man can only picnic at home. (Chesterton 1987: 72–73) Yet fascism, like other middle-class movements bent on curtailing the liberties of the masses, needed to smoke the anarchic Last Humans even out of their homes. Under modern conditions, even the old truth of “my home is my castle” proved an intolerable obstacle to fascist ambitions to remold humans. The family was too important to be left to the individual. “So to drink coffee in a few minutes!” dictated from on high Ernesto Giménez Caballero, and further specified what he believed was

The Wandering Womb 343 now required of the citizens: “To talk about what the state finds convenient! To economically regulate meals and hours! To seclude oneself more in the home! To get married! To have sons that will be the Empire’s soldiers of tomorrow!” (In Puértolas 2008: 370). Another instructive case-in-point of the pro-fascist campaign against the Last Humans is the French pronatalist propagandist Paul Haury, whose criticism of Republican France is illuminatingly discussed by Cheryl A. Koos. Haury was exasperated by France’s declining birth rate, a process that began, he was convinced, with the watershed of modern individualism and hedonism, the fateful year of 1789. During the 1930s he repeatedly lauded the pronatalist policies of Mussolini and Hitler (and also the mystique of the Soviet Union), and this not only because of their presumed beneficial military effect but also, perhaps even primarily, because they attested to these regimes’ determination to put an end to individual anarchy and discipline men and women for a cause higher than themselves. The following harangue against the pettiness of Republican French men is best read as an echo of Zarathustra’s disdain of the Last Humans and their petty pursuits: For 150 years, Haury complained, French men, have lived for no more than a petit—to acquire a petit house, a petit business, a petit pension [. . .] to protect a petit savings, the petit proprietor, the petit shopkeeper, the petit bureaucrat the object of [their] policies. (In Koos 2014: 121) His eventual, warm embrace of the regime of Vichy, for its renewed emphasis on the family—not as the individual’s refuge but as her reproductive prison cell—was a natural outcome of these views. Fascism, one might say, was paradoxically obsessed with the family at the same time that it obliterated domesticity; fixated on the Heimat, it eliminated home. It sent millions of men away from their homes to face danger and encounter death in foreign lands, and left the women in homes that were under strict vigilance, in the best of cases, and under devastating bombings, in the worst of cases. One of the great postwar films depicting the fascist era in Italy, and precisely its phase of dissolution, is thus very aptly called Tutti a casa—Everybody Go Home. Already discussed in a somewhat different context in Chapter 4, this 1960 film directed by Luigi Comencini is set during the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943 and recounts the journey home of a group of disbanded Italian soldiers. The tragedy of the film is that none of the protagonists actually gets home as one by one they encounter unexpected setbacks and see their most ardent desire frustrated. The soldier coming closest to home is the main protagonist, a junior non-commissioned officer played by Alberto Sordi, who actually finds his way to his apartment, where his old father enthusiastically welcomes him. But even this return proves an

344  The Wandering Womb illusion: while the home is still physically there, it is still occupied by the die-hard fascists, both inside taken and invaded from the outside: the father, namely, a middle-class cellist, still abides by fascism and would see his beloved son return to the fray. And one of the neighbors, a fascist high officer, enters the home to arrange the redrafting. Sordi thus needs to escape his “home” in the early hours, and ultimately join the resistance. Similarly, the parenthood, in particular the motherhood, so hailed by fascist regimes, reveals itself under closer scrutiny rather as a form of surrogacy. The parents served as agents of the nation and the race and were raising not so much their own child but tomorrow’s soldier and mother, who will in due time be taken over by the state to fulfill their public duties. And as the child was not really “theirs” in the sense we think of it today, they were less his or her parents and more the tamers, the educators.11 And in case the surrogate parents neglected their duties, the state was entitled to step in and take their child away from them. According to the Nazi view, as explained by historians Noakes and Pridham (1984, vol. 1: 454), Parents who failed in their duty of bringing up their children in accordance with the precepts of the regime—for example by refusing to send them to the Hitler Youth after 1939—would have their children removed from them and transferred to a state home. A classic illustration of the claim of Nazism to displace the family and take over its functions, especially if the family in question failed to live up to the fascist ideals, is the 1933 Nazi propaganda film Hitlerjunge Quex [Hitler Youth member Quex, director Hans Steinhoff]. The film tells the story of a Berlin working-class youngster Heini Völker who is drawn to the Nazi youth movement, but is obstructed by his vulgar, drunken communist father. Unable to protect her son from the father’s violence and political extremism, Heini’s kindly but hopelessly inadequate mother tries to induce her own death and that of her son by turning on the gas in their apartment. The son, however, survives the grotesque effort to defend him and, recovering in hospital, is virtually adopted by the Nazis. The extended, genuine family of fascism stands in for the failed nuclear family. As argued by Linda Schulte-Sasse (1996: 256–257) in her insightful analysis of the film: Nazism increasingly takes over the family’s function; it becomes a totalizing force pervading all aspects of the private and the public sphere. [. . .] Heini is essentially left without a mother—only with a paternal figure of symbolic identification in the Youth Leader whose blond, slim erectness not only fits the “Aryan” ideal more than the corpulent father, but who looks literally more like Heini’s father. It is Nazism itself that takes on the nurturing, enveloping function of Mother.

The Wandering Womb 345 The fascist ethos expected parents to be ready for every sacrifice, including that of their child, once he grew to become a warrior. As expressed by a female writer in the organ La donna fascista in 1936, amidst the war in Ethiopia: How sad, how very sad it is to be barren at a time when the motherland is asking for sons! And how proud it makes a mother, rich in children, who is able to offer her country not one but two or three sons. The smile of glory enters homes where brave youths have left empty spaces [. . .]. A mother who, today, bent over an unfolded newspaper, reads of the victorious advance and in her soul follows the route of her soldier son, is happier than a childless woman who watches the others’ fervor as if it were nothing to do with her and smiles: but her soul is far away. (In Willson 200: 22) Fascism did its utmost to cultivate fathers and mothers who would readily bind their offspring to the sacrificial altar. In that sense, too, an abysm stretched between fascism and the Last Humans. Fascist surrogate parenthood, in its instrumental, hegemonic form,12 is very different from the notion of parenthood predominant in mass society, according to which mutual love between the parents and their children is not a means to a higher end but a goal in itself, perhaps the very center of life. The dissonance between the two “models” can be illustrated with the help of two highly successful hit songs, patronized by elitists as “tearjerkers,” made famous by the Jewish-American singer and performer Al Jolson, one of the great popular entertainers of the first half of the 20th century, in The Jazz Singer (1927), the first feature-length “talkie,” and its sequel The Singing Fool (1928). The first song, My Mammy, expresses a son’s limitless love to his mother and the second, Sonny Boy, that of a father to his son. These songs, whose popularity was enormous—Sonny Boy, for instance, sold a million records and was at the top of the American chart for 12 successive weeks—radically differ not only from the fascist notion of parenthood but also from the fascist notion of gender. The male singing in both is not a warrior; he is deeply sentimental—a quintessential “female” characteristic. He foregoes what Hitler referred to as the “greater world” of men and falls back on the feminine “smaller world,” centered on his love for his son, confessing that he would not mind losing all friends, as long as he has his son by his side. This juxtaposition of fascist ideology with popular songs, one may object, is misconceived; the latter, after all, are not political texts, they are not a program, or a doctrine, or a speech. Moreover, what has Jolson— an American performer—to do with fascism, coming to power in another continent, in countries where few understood English? Yet fascism

346  The Wandering Womb centrally engaged a protest against “Americanization,” particularly as a manifestation of popular culture. And Jolson’s songs and movies were successful worldwide, including the Republic of Weimar, as attested to by the following placards (Figures 6.2 and 6.3):

Figure 6.2 The Jazz Singer (1)

A German version of Sonny Boy, moreover, was recorded in 1929 by the highly successful Jewish Austrian tenor, Richard Tauber. The Jazz Singer recounts the personal story of Al Jolson, the son of a Cantor. It describes the difficulties experienced by the singer in the move from the synagogue performances to the world of modern jazz, and the conflict this gave cause to with his father. German moviegoers, among them of course were people of an ultraist nationalist and anti-Semitic persuasion, watched a film rooted in the life of Jewish immigrants in New York, including many songs in Yiddish and Hebrew, whose protagonists have names such as Rabinovitz, Yodelson, Levi, Friedman, Ginsberg, Goldberg and so on and so forth—notice, in the second placard, the unmistakable image of the Cantor. And while the films were not political in any overt sense, they dealt intensively with a question which for the fascists was fundamentally political: the relationships between parents and children and the significance of the family. And here it may be assumed that the millions of viewers whose tears were jerked in these movies, including many German ones, and all of whom were themselves either parents or children (or both at the same time) found in them an example for a

The Wandering Womb 347

Figure 6.3 The Jazz Singer (2)

familial rapport with which they could identify and which seemed right to them. And this model, which may be termed that of the “Yiddishe Momme,” the fascists tried to uproot in order to make way for the surrogate parenthood they advocated and on which they sought to erect their imperialistic project. This shows the correctness of Bertolt Brecht’s observation, recalled by Walter Benjamin, that the struggle against fascism is

348  The Wandering Womb never merely “political” in the narrow sense of the term but is conducted comprehensively in all spheres of life and of culture, including the seemingly most innocuous ones: A few days later [Brecht] added yet another argument in favour of including the Children’s Songs in the Poems from Exile: “We must neglect nothing in our struggle against that lot. They’re planning [. . .] [c]olossal things. Colossal crimes. Every living cell contracts under their blows. That is why we too must think of everything. They cripple the baby in the mother’s womb. We must on no account leave out the children.” (Benjamin 1998: 120) Another interesting contestation of the fascist model of parenthood and of its elimination of home, is found in Gli anni ruggenti (Roaring Years), a 1962 film by the great director and pioneering postwar critic of Italian fascism, Luigi Zampa. In this film, one of many cinematic takes on Nikolai Gogol’s Revizor, an insurance salesman played by Nino Manfredi is mistaken for a highly-placed fascist hierarch visiting a small town and is slavishly courted by the corrupt fascist élite, wishing to ingratiate itself with Rome. Throughout the film, Manfredi, oblivious of the error but enjoying the attention he is given, serves as a mouthpiece of the Last Humans’ philosophy. At one point he proclaims: “Our slogan is: better insurance without an accident, than an accident without insurance!” When asked if this is one of Mussolini’s dictums he answers, taken aback: “No, this is of Beppe Daioli, our publicity agent.” The very fact that he sells insurance, of course, is symbolic of his anti-Nietzschean stance, defying the fascist tenet of “live dangerously!” He falls in love with the beautiful daughter of the fascist city mayor and they are engaged to be wed, but when he confesses that he is a mere insurance salesman the girl responds that in that case she can no longer marry him, although she still loves him: ELVIRA:  I know,

you will be a good husband [. . .] and on Sundays you will take everyone for ice cream. OMERO [MANFREDI]:  And what of it? You don’t like ice cream? ELVIRA:  You see, I may be stupid, but I have always dreamt of a man full of medals, a strong and valorous man, ready to fight in peace and in war for the ideals of the patria. To which the salesman responds: “Elvi, but do you want a husband, or a monument?” The consumption of ice cream is symptomatic, too. Much more than a cold, refreshing dessert is involved. It stands, rather, for the ideal of the good, unassuming life, everything that for a fascist must go under the

The Wandering Womb 349 radar. One can of course be a fascist and consume ice cream, too; but not this ice cream, which is a token of peace, simple enjoyment and human fraternity. Only the Last Humans can savor it; that is their prerogative and the reason that, despite all Nietzschean defamations, their appeal can never be truly defeated. According to the historian Andreas Huyssen (1986: 52–53), as will be recalled from the discussion in Chapter 2, critics of mass culture frequently construed “mass culture as woman,” identifying it with “an engulfing femininity” and a chronic loss of masculinity. Yet Huyssen was interested less in mass culture itself than in the way it was interpreted by the élites. An examination of the actual Western mass culture of these decades (the first half of the 20th century) reveals, as the above examples indicate, that this widespread association was not a mere slander or a sheer fantasy. Fascinatingly, contemporary mass culture did in fact challenge the rigid boundaries and hierarchies of the past, including the stereotypes of “femininity” and “masculinity”; so one finds it on many occasions “reacting” to fascism even when this is not done directly or even intentionally. An expression of such—objective—anti-fascism in mass culture is the 1941 hit song of the Ink Spots (also performed by others), I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire. The male protagonist avows that he has no ambition left for worldly acclaim, no desire to set the world on fire, his only goal being to kindle a flame in his lover’s heart. The song was highly successful with the public, reaching the fourth place in the American chart while another version, later that year, after Pearl Harbor, even reached the number one spot. The song variously challenges the “separate spheres:” the “female” sentimentality expressed by the male singers; the falsetto voices highly typical of this period that in themselves defy gender classification; and finally the messages of pacifism, containing a renunciation of the man’s “greater world” and the focus on the woman’s “smaller world” of romantic love. Reflected here, I suggest, is the desire of the masses for relaxation, for a moving away from war and its glorification, from the “manhood” that has demanded so many sacrifices, at the time that fascism is hard at work patrolling and reinforcing the old borders, surrounding them with still more barbed wire. This throws into vivid relief the profound inadequacy of such leftwing criticisms of mass culture that have turned against it its effeminacy and defiance of fixed gender boundaries instead of recognizing precisely this element as one of its great achievements. Given his left-wing Nietzscheanism it is not surprising that Adorno, notably, could not offer any aid to the Last Humans in their hour of greatest need but instead chastised them, repeatedly attacking jazz for its sexual hybridism. “The aim of jazz,” he contended, is a castration symbolism. ‘Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,’ the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and

350  The Wandering Womb proclaims, ‘and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you.’ (Adorno 2002: 352) Elsewhere (497) he derisively wrote of “the sexless saxophone,” managing to see the point exactly, and miss it altogether.

Notes 1 As comprehensively discussed in the various essays gathered in Gilman et al. (1993). 2 The classic study would be Theweleit (1987). For an original development of these ideas in the Italian context, see Spackman (1996). Another insightful contribution, especially valuable since linking the fascist concept of masculinity to its struggle against the masses (which is equally central in Theweleit’s analysis): Falasca-Zamponi (1997). 3 For similar articulations of the tenet of the separate spheres by other National Socialist leaders, see Rupp (1977). 4 Faschisten sind immer die anderen (2012) “Roger Griffin : There won’t be any fascist revival,” May 25, 2012. Internet source: . Last accessed May 2017. 5 See, with regards to Fleming, the criticism of fellow writer, John le Carré (Singh 2010). 6 On the unabashed longing to see patriarchy reestablished on the part of contemporary US American women of the far right, see Miller’s (2017) insightful article. 7 The Nietzschean affinities of Fleming and Rand I first discussed in Landa (2007). 8 For comprehensive data, usefully divided into different countries, see Passmore (2003). 9 On the insidious way Nazism invaded the private sphere of marriage and sexuality, see Czarnowski (1991); Heineman (2003). 10 I thank Harrison Fluss for helping me locate this passage. 11 For a fascinating discussion of the extremely harsh and disciplinarian ideals of National Socialist education, bent on eliminating any trace of the child’s autonomy vis-à-vis the regime, as exemplified by Johanna Haarer’s best-selling pedagogic books for German mothers, see Chamberlain (2016). 12 Here, too, to be sure, one finds ideological inconsistencies, so alongside strictly functional views of the ideal relationship between parents and children there were also fascist pedagogues who stressed the need to lavish affection on the kids, embrace and spoil them. Such, for instance, was the Nazi psychologist Johannes Heinrich Schultz (Herzog 2005: 31).

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The Wandering Womb 351 Barrows, Susanna (1981) Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late ­Nineteenth-Century France, New Haven: Yale University Press. Benjamin, Walter (1998) Understanding Brecht, London and New York: Verso. Chamberlain, Sigrid (2016) Adolf Hitler, die deutsche Mutter and ihr erstes Kind: Über zwei NS-Erziehungsbücher, 6th edition, Gießen: Psychosozial. Chesterton, Gilbert Keith (1987) The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton. Vol. 4, San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press. Ciano,Galeazzo (2006) Diario 1937–1943, Renzo De Felice, ed., Milan: BUR. Czarnowski, Gabriele (1991) Das kontrollierte Paar: Ehe- und Sexualpolitik im Nationalsozialismus, Weinheim: Deutsche Studien Verlag. De Grazia, Victoria (1992) How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945, Berkeley: University of California Press. Della Sudda, Magali (2014) “Right-Wing Feminism and Conservative Women’s Militancy in Interwar France,” in The French Right Between the Wars: Political and Intellectual Movements From Conservatism to Fascism, Samuel Kalman and Sean Kennedy, eds., Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta (1997) “The Gendered Masses: Politics and Aesthetics in the Making of the Fascist Dux,” The European Legacy, 2, 5: 854–867. Fleming, Ian (1988) From Russia With Love, (orig. 1957), London: Hodder and Stoughton. Fleming, Ian (2002) On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, (orig. 1963), London: Penguin Books. Gilman, Sander L., Helen King, Roy Porter, George S. Rousseau, and Elaine Showalter (1993) Hysteria Beyond Freud, Berkeley: University of California Press. Gottlieb, Julie V. (2003) Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement, London: I. B. Tauris. Graziosi, Mariolina (1995) “Gender Struggle and the Social Manipulation and Ideological Use of Gender Identity in the Interwar Years,” in Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism and Culture, Robin Pickering Iazzi, ed., Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press: 26–51. Heineman, Elizabeth D. (2003) What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Helmut, Otto (1939) Volk in Gefahr: der Geburtenrückgang und seine Folgen für Deutschlands Zukunft, 10th edition, Munich: Lehmans. Herzog, Dagmar (2005) Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in TwentiethCentury Germany, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Himmler, Heinrich (1937) “Discours de Heinrich Himmler sur l’homosexualité,” http://triangles-roses-photos.blogspot.co.il/2009/07/discours-de-heinrichhimmler-sur.html Last accessed May 2017. Hobsbawm, Eric (2009) Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz, London: Abacus. Huyssen, Andreas (1986) After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Jünger, Ernst (2002) Essays I, Betrachtungen zur Zeit, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Koonz, Claudia (1987) Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Koos, Cheryl A. (2014) “Gender, the Family, and the Fascist Temptation: Visions of Masculinity in the Natalist-Familialist Movement, 1922–1940,” in The

352  The Wandering Womb French Right Between the Wars: Political and Intellectual Movements From Conservatism to Fascism, Samuel Kalman and Sean Kennedy, eds., Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. Landa, Ishay (2007) The Overman in the Marketplace: Nietzschean Heroism in Popular Culture, Lanham, MD: Lexington. Le Bon, Gustave (1960) The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, New York: Viking Press. Lewis, Wyndham (1989) The Art of Being Ruled, (orig. 1926) Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press. Longerich, Peter (2012) Heinrich Himmler, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ludwig, Emil (1933) Talks With Mussolini, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. Meyers, Mark (2006) “Feminizing Fascist Men: Crowd Psychology, Gender, and Sexuality in French Antifascism, 1929–1945,” French Historical Studies, 29, 1: 109–142. Miller, Sam (2017) “Lipstick Fascism: On Lana Lokteff, the Women of the AltRight, and the Feminization of Fascism,” Jacobin, April 4, 2017. www.jacobinmag.com/2017/04/alt-right-lana-lokteff-racism-misogyny-women-feminism. Last accessed May 2017. Mosse, George (1997) Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe, New York: Howard Fertig. Mussolini, Benito (1958) Opera Omnia, Florence: La Fenice. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1990) Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, Reginald John Hollingdale trans., Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1998) Beyond Good and Evil, Marion Faber trans., Oxford: Oxford University Press. Noakes Jeremy and Geoffrey Pridham, eds. (1984) Nazism: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, 1919–1945, New York: Schocken Books. Ofer, Inbal (2009) Señoritas in Blue: The Making of a Female Political Elite in Franco’s Spain: The National Leadership of the Sección Femenina de la Falange (1936–1977), Sussex: Sussex Academic Press. Ofer, Inbal (2015) “Women and Fascism: A History of Internal Contradictions,” in The Roots of European Fascism, 1789–1945, vol. 2, Ishay Landa, Ra’anana: The Open University [In Hebrew]. Passmore, Kevin (2002) Fascism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Passmore, Kevin, ed. (2003) Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919–45, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Puértolas, Julio Rodríguez (2008) Historia de la Literatura Fascista Española, Madrid: Akal. Rand, Ayn (1993) The Fountainhead, New York: Signet. Read, Geoff (2014) “Was There a Fascist Femininity? Gender and French Fascism in Political Context,” in The French Right Between the Wars: Political and Intellectual Movements From Conservatism to Fascism, Samuel Kalman and Sean Kennedy, eds., Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books. Rousseau, George Sebastian (1993) “ ‘A Strange Pathology’: Hysteria in the Early Modern World,” in Hysteria Beyond Freud, Sander L. Gilman, Berkeley: University of California Press. Rupp, Leila J. (1977) “Mother of the ‘Volk’: The Image of Women in Nazi Ideology,” Signs, 3, 2: 362–379.

The Wandering Womb 353 Sarnoff, Daniella (2014) “An Overview of Women and Gender in French Fascism,” in The French Right Between the Wars: Political and Intellectual Movements From Conservatism to Fascism, Samuel Kalman and Sean Kennedy, eds., Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books. Schulte-Sasse, Linda (1996) Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Sica, Paola (2016) Futurist Women: Florence, Feminism and the New Sciences, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kindle edition. Singh, Anita (2010) “James Bond Was a Neo-Fascist Gangster, Says John Le Carré,” The Telegraph, August 17. www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/james bond/7948363/James-Bond-was-a-neo-fascist-gangster-says-John-Le-Carre. html Last accessed May 2017. Spackman, Barbara (1996) Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy, Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press. Theweleit, Klaus (1987) Male Fantasies, 2 volumes, Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press. Willson, Perry (2003) “Italy,” in Women, Gender and Fascism in Europe, 1919– 45, Kevin Passmore ed., New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

7 The Wandering Jew National Socialism and Antisemitism

Hatred of Jews, as many scholars have pointed out, was not a compulsory component of fascist ideology. Italian fascism, or so it was until recently generally assumed, was mostly free of it until a fairly late stage, the mid 1930s, when it allied itself politically and ideologically with the obsessively antisemitic northern ally, Germany (for example, De Felice 1972; Gregor 1999). Fascism was in fact highly popular among the small Italian Jewish community—although that community also significantly contributed to the anti-fascist resistance. (The following studies provide useful overviews of Italian fascism and its attitudes to the Jews: Stille 1991; Zimmerman 2009.) Lately, however, historians have begun, especially in Italy itself, to challenge the notion that Italian fascism was relatively immune to racism in general and to antisemitism in particular, and to show that it heavily featured both phobias and this prior to the Nazi impact (although the latter certainly gave these proclivities a significant boost).1 Hatred of Jews was central to many fascist movements—in Austria, Romania, Hungary, Britain, France, etc.—and the horror of fascism, its violent and murderous drives, found their ultimate expression in the National Socialist persecution and attempted extermination of the Jews, to the point that many regard the Shoah as the symptom par excellence of the fascist assault on humanity and on humanness. To the historian, the enormity of the Shoah represents a riddle that, as rightly stressed by many scholars, defies all efforts of final signification. It seems as if a kernel of madness, absurdity and evil survives all possible explanations, learned and sophisticated as they may be. This has caused many historians and philosophers to talk about the Shoah as an inscrutable manifestation of bottomless, almost metaphysical evil, which took place in this world but seems to not belong to it entirely.2 The literature addressing this subject matter is virtually infinite: the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem receives yearly some 4.000 new publications pertinent to the Shoah. In this section of the book our goal will not be to survey the gamut of possible approaches; to this task, an entire book will hardly do justice. The goal will be much more restricted: to show that even this most fanatical and enigmatic of phobias can be vitally illuminated when

The Wandering Jew 355 enmity to “the Jew” is considered as part of the fascist opposition to the masses. Modern antisemitism, as usefully suggested by historian Shulamit Volkov, is “a cultural code,” a sort of magnet to which many different motifs can be affiliated—stereotypes, hatreds, dislikes and fears. Revolving on antisemitism, this motley quilt thus acquires a unified and coherent appearance, which can then sustain a political discourse and a movement.3 Antisemites—and here we are addressing only the modern variant of Jew-hating, as it developed from the late 18th century onwards—have blamed Jews for nearly everything they found blameworthy, including opposite phenomena: the Jews were identified with rootless internationalism, on the one hand, and with stubborn, reclusive nationalism, on the other hand; with communism and capitalism; with an insidious modernism and with a no less harmful archaism, and so on and so forth (Lindemann 1997; Julius 2010). The antisemitism of the Nazis was part of their vast array of hatreds, and the violence they directed at Jews fits into a general pattern of aggression, leveled at many groups, encompassing tens of millions of individuals. The Nazis hated and persecuted homosexuals, people of “inferior” nations and races, gypsies, democrats, socialists, communists, people of “lesser value,” “subhumans,” etc. These hatreds were significantly in excess of any—flimsy—rational or instrumental grounds they may be said to have contained. Was it, for example, reasonable and purposeful to persecute homosexuals? Or embark on a campaign to exterminate the Roma and Sinti people? The absurdity of persecuting the Jews is therefore an emanation of the general absurdity underpinning much of the National Socialist worldview. In that sense, the claim made by many, for instance Hannah Arendt, that Nazi antisemitism was unique since lacking any genuinely instrumental dimension, as opposed to the conventional persecution of political enemies that can be easily comprehended if not of course condoned—seems questionable. Such scholars have rightly pointed to the futile squandering of time, energy and resources which went into the attempted extermination of the Jews—wholly fictitious enemies—in the midst of a total war against very real enemies. All of these resources were squandered since no real political, economic or military gain could possibly be had by successfully completing the task, while it only diminished the ability to engage real armed forces. Yet this argument falls short of the mark if it assumes that such an irrational waste of forces was unique to the anti-Jewish campaign: in truth, the determination to repress and decimate many other “enemies”—Slavs, gypsies or homosexuals—was likewise patently useless and seems “logical” only if one accepts the false and fantastic ideological assumptions held by the Nazis. Or is perhaps the persecution of the Jews unique in that the Nazis were bent on exterminating them totally, while their struggles against

356  The Wandering Jew other enemies were limited and did not envisage genocide? This too is a common argument that may be disputed. One might point to the way in which, on the eve of the invasion of Poland in 1939, Hitler instructed the SS—albeit in a non official talk—to exterminate the Poles to the last one: Genghis Khan had millions of women and children killed by his own will and with a gay heart. History sees only in him a great state builder. [. . .] Thus for the time being I have sent to the East only my “Death’s Head Units” with the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians? (In Breitman 1992: 43. See 258 for further details on this speech) The Nazis thus sought to eradicate many peoples. Yet the Jews were not one more enemy for them, not one more target of hatred, not one of many races that they considered would be best enslaved/annihilated. The distinctiveness of antisemitism in the Nazi worldview, setting it qualitatively apart from the many other phobias and obsessions, was the fact that in the Nazi imaginary the Jews were seen as the enemy par excellence, the taproot of all afflictions. “The Jew” was behind all other enemies, be they peoples, armies, social forces or worldviews, manipulating them at will for his own benefit. This accounts for the extraordinary dedication the Nazis had put into the effort to exterminate the Jews and resolve “the Jewish question.” In that sense I concur with Moishe Postone, who tried, in an influential essay, to put his finger on the distinct aspect of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. For Postone (1980: 105–106), antisemitism is not a specific variant of racism, but a unique, unparalleled hatred: Particular aspects of the extermination of European Jewry by the Nazis remain inexplicable so long as anti-Semitism is treated as a specific example of prejudice, xenophobia and racism in general, as an example of a scapegoat strategy whose victims could very well have been members of any other group. [. . .] Modern anti-Semitism, [. . .] is an ideology, a form of thought, which emerged in Europe in the late 19th century. Its emergence presupposed centuries of earlier forms of anti-Semitism, which has almost always been an integral part of Christian western civilization. What is common to all forms of anti-Semitism is the degree of power attributed to the Jews: the power to kill God, unleash the Bubonic Plague and, more recently, introduce capitalism and socialism. In other words, anti-Semitic thought is strongly Manichean, with the Jews playing the role of the children of darkness. It is not only the degree, but also the quality of

The Wandering Jew 357 power attributed to the Jews which distinguishes anti-Semitism from other forms of racism. Probably all forms of racism attribute potential power to the other. This power, however, is usually concrete— material or sexual [. . .]. The power attributed to the Jews is not only much greater and “real,” as opposed to potential, it is different. In modern anti-Semitism it is mysteriously intangible, abstract and universal. This power does not usually appear as such, but must find a concrete vessel, a carrier, a mode of expression. Because this power is not bound concretely, is not “rooted,” it is of staggering immensity and is extremely difficult to check. It stands behind phenomena, but is not identical with them. Its source is therefore hidden—conspiratorial. The Jews represent an immensely powerful, intangible, international conspiracy. In the eyes of the Nazis the Jews were not one more enemy but the enemy. They were inculpated for every trouble or setback: the war, the stab in the back, the surrender, the Republic, the economic crisis, the “degeneration” of culture and of race and so on and so forth: they were all the doing of the Jew (Herf 2006). As Hitler (1999: 87) complained in Mein Kampf, in a way which already completely dehumanized the Jews: “Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often sizzled by the sudden light—a kike!” The centrality of the Jew as the ultimate agent of all evil can explain why a victory over the Jews was regarded by the Nazis as equivalent, somehow, to winning the entire war. As Hitler admonished on January 30, 1939: To-day I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe! [. . .] The nations are no longer willing to die on the battlefield so that this unstable international race may profiteer from a war or satisfy its Old Testament vengeance. The Jewish watchword “Workers of the world unite” will be conquered by a higher realization, namely “Workers of all classes and of all nations, recognize your common enemy!” (In Baynes 1942, vol. 1: 741)

The Jew as the Spirit of Capitalism The purported universality of the Jewish menace, the fact that the Nazis could denounce the internationalist Jewish conspiracy behind the most

358  The Wandering Jew disparate phenomena, must doubtlessly play an important part in every attempt to explain the persecution and extermination of the Jews. But is it the whole answer? Did antisemitism as a cultural code mean a supermarket of phobias, where all obsessions were neatly placed side by side on the shelf, and from which the Nazis could at any given moment pick up the suitable anti-Jewish argument? Or is it possible to discern a certain internal logic to Nazi antisemitism, a center of gravity around which the different hatreds were organized? Postone himself argued in favor of the latter view. According to him, the Jew was destroyed because he embodied the spirit of capitalism, or at least one aspect of this spirit: its elusiveness and abstractness. Although writing from an avowedly Marxist perspective, Postone strongly chastised the left for seeing in Nazism merely a defense of capitalism, and failing to come to terms with its markedly anti-capitalist streak. For him, as for other writers, Nazism was an in-between ideology, trying to eschew both the hammer of proletarian socialism and the anvil of monopoly capitalism. The Nazis, he believed, strove to hold fast to the productive side of capitalism, its concrete side bringing into being goods and material wealth, and to discard its thieving, abstractly financial and parasitic side. And this latter side they identified with the Jews. Postone was well aware of the fantasy such a separation between the seemingly good and bad aspects of capitalism entails, for capitalism is in fact an integral whole and without finance capital, without the stock exchange, modern capitalism cannot exist. Yet the Nazis—taking over from where antisemitic critics of capitalism such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon have left—believed that capitalism can somehow be purified of money, that its productive concreteness could be preserved and its abstract parasitism eliminated. These two sides the Nazi economic ideologue Gottfried Feder respectively called schaffenden and raffenden Kapital (creative and rapacious capitals), the latter being a Jewish one. And this, for Postone, provides the key for understanding the Shoah. Examining Nazi ideology in light of Marx’s categories, it turns out that they attempted—no matter how vainly—to preserve the commodity’s “use-value,” its concrete, useful side, and eliminate its cumbersome, intangible and abstract “value,” embodied in money: When one examines the specific characteristics of the power attributed to the Jews by modern anti-Semitism—abstractness, intangibility, universality, mobility—it is striking that they are all characteristics of the value dimension of the social forms analyzed by Marx. Moreover, this dimension—like the supposed power of the Jews—does not appear as such, rather always in the form of a material carrier, such as the commodity. The carrier thus has a “double character”—value and use-value. (Postone 1980: 108)

The Wandering Jew 359 Jews were thus eliminated since, in the anti-Semitic cliché, they came to represent money, the abstract side of capitalism. And Postone thus concludes his essay (114) as follows: Modern anti-Semitism, then, [. . .] provides a comprehensive worldview which explains and gives form to certain modes of anti-capitalist discontent in a manner which leaves capitalism intact, by attacking the personifications of that social form. Anti-Semitism so understood allows one to grasp an essential moment of Nazism as a foreshortened anti-capitalist movement, one characterized by a hatred of the abstract, a hypostatization of the existing concrete and by a singleminded, ruthless—but not necessarily hate-filled—mission: to rid the world of the source of all evil. [. . .] Auschwitz was a factory to “destroy value,” i.e., to destroy the personifications of the abstract. Its organization was that of a fiendish industrial process, the aim of which was to “liberate” the concrete from the abstract. The first step was to dehumanize, that is, to rip the “mask” of humanity away and reveal the Jews for what “they really are”—“Musselmanner,” shadows, ciphers, abstractions. The second step was then to eradicate that abstractness, to transform it into smoke, trying in the process to wrest away the last remnants of the concrete material “use-value”: clothes, gold, hair, soap. Auschwitz, not 1933, was the real “German Revolution”—the real “overthrow” of the existing social formation. By this one deed the world was to be made safe from the tyranny of the abstract. This is an original and intriguing explanation, but far from totally compelling: can Nazi antisemitism be seen primarily as a revolt against the abstract side of capitalism? (For a comparable argument, see Hanloser 2003.) If that were the case, one would have expected this obsession with eliminating the abstract, this identification of money as the root of evil, to take on a much deeper and more consistent form in Nazi policies. One would have expected them, for instance, to nationalize banks or eliminate the stock exchange. Yet any such policies were conspicuously absent. Postone is right in drawing attention to the anti-capitalism of Nazi ideology and the habitual distinction between “good,” national capital and “bad,” Jewish finance capital. Yet such a conviction that the Nazis had inherited from 19th-century antisemitic movements was ultimately marginalized. Feder, the central representative of this line, identified with the “left-wing” flank of the movement, is mostly remembered as one who had failed in trying to lastingly shape Nazi policies. Like him were marginalized, or even physically eliminated, other representatives of the relatively more radical economic approach, notably Gregor Strasser, Hitler’s great adversary during the 1920s who more than anybody else is linked to the effort to bestow some concrete meaning to the

360  The Wandering Jew term “socialism” included in the party’s title. Strasser left the party in 1932 and was liquidated two years later. Compared to such a shaking off of the criticism of finance capital, what characterized Nazi economics was rather a significant continuity with the Weimar Republic, finding expression, for example, in the appointment of Hjalmar Schacht—president of the Reichsbank from 1923–31—to the Third Reich’s minister of economics, a position which he fulfilled from 1934 to 1937. Postone’s account might lead one to suppose that the Nazis, turning the Jews to smoke and claiming their last concrete possessions, also took a stand against abstract riches. Yet the Nazis by no means recoiled at confiscating the Jews’ money, by massively expropriating their bank accounts. In their deeds, they have shown themselves opposed not to money but to the Jews. (On this systematic robbery, see Dean 2010.) Moreover, depicting the Nazis as devoted to the concrete and as enemies of the abstract would fly in the face of the demonstratively anti-materialistic aspect of fascism and Nazism, expressing aloof disdain for materialism and consumption, to life’s bodily pleasures, and extolling rather heroic abstention, the values of the spirit and of culture. Even if this opposition to a reviled materialism was contradictory and remained in any case more ideological than practical, one is still hard-pressed to reconcile it with the idea of Nazi crusade against the abstract and in favor of use-value. And a final objection: can a struggle against the abstract side of capitalism really explain the urgency, the single-mindedness and obsession with which the Nazis had pursued, in the final months of the war, the extermination of the Jews? Could not the settling of accounts with abstractness wait for a more convenient time? Explaining Nazi antisemitism as a revolt against abstractness thus seems overly-abstract. Such an account shifts the Nazi center of gravity, on the ideological plane at least, to the left, in a way which could scarcely account for the blatant reactionary commitments of the Nazis, the way they came not to overturn the old order but to preserve it, and put an end, precisely, to the enduring revolutionary process that was undermining it. And while there was certainly an anti-capitalist element in Nazi ideology, it is very difficult to see how this aspect, and this aspect mainly, was responsible for the extermination of the Jews. In what follows, an alternative explanation of Nazi antisemitism will be proposed, not one aspiring to finality or exclusiveness, neither of which can be hoped for on this issue, but one that reinforces this book’s general claim. It will be argued that the Jew was persecuted and exterminated by the Nazis because he was seen, not exclusively but very centrally, as a revolutionary. This explanation, it should be stated immediately, does not dismiss the claims, well expressed by Postone, that the Nazis saw the Jew as, in a sense, embodying the spirit of capitalism. While this is true, it is important to realize that capitalism, too, played in modernity a revolutionary role, dialectically destabilizing the present order and

The Wandering Jew 361 empowering the masses. Thus, to the extent that the National Socialists rebelled against capitalism they rejected its massification, I think, more than its abstractness. Yet being responsible for capitalism was at any rate only one, and not the most serious charge, in the Nazi list of accusations against the Jews. Let us generally trace the way in which Jews and Judaism were identified with the spirit of social discontent, with the great revolutionary wave of the modern age and with the mass.

The Jew as Revolutionary Nazi antisemitism certainly fed off the ancient and rich Christian tradition of persecuting Jews and employing them as scapegoats (Braun and Heid 2000). Yet it also significantly departed from that tradition and transformed its contents, to the point that one of the central arguments made by the Nazis against the Jew was that he was himself a Christian of sorts, even the archetypical Christian. This momentous historical novelty brought about by Nazism was commented on by the great AustrianJewish writer Joseph Roth in one of his last books. In the Third Reich, he wrote, “by exterminating the Jews, Jesus is persecuted. For the first time in history, the Jews are killed not for crucifying Jesus but for bringing him to the world” (Roth 2003: 52). And in the same book (106) he drew the readers’ attention to the fact that for the Nazi ideologue and rabid antisemite Alfred Rosenberg, “the Star of David and the cross are related, but never the cross with the swastika.” What is the source of this surprising shift from Christian antisemitism to anti-Christian antisemitism, and what does it signify? It is rooted in the steady taking of distance of intellectual élites from the Christian religion which took place in the course of the 19th century. As we saw in Chapter 2, in the discussion of the formation of a dehumanizing atheism and of the concomitant religion of nature, both philosophical circles (with Nietzsche as a central figure) and scientific ones (Haeckel as a major representative) began to attack Christianity and see it as an anachronistic force, whose social role was subversive. While in the past Christianity was regarded as the firm foundation sustaining the entire social hierarchy, it was now increasingly vilified as the creed of the weak, the sickly, the slaves, the masses, attacked as an antiquated and anti-natural religion with which “the strong,” coming from the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, were being morally and politically inhibited. Christianity was now denounced as an explosive ideology threatening to demolish the existing social order. Nietzsche “condemned” Christianity, deeming it “the extremest thinkable form of corruption.” The espousal of equality, “this explosive concept which finally became revolution, modern idea and the principle of the decline of the entire social order—is Christian dynamite” (Nietzsche 1990a: 198). Eugenicists and social Darwinists equally maintained that Christianity, perpetuating the false belief in a benign deity and traditional

362  The Wandering Jew morality, serves the weak and “parasitical” elements, allowing them to use the welfare state to subjugate the strong and productive social elements, and hamper the beneficial process of competitive, natural selection. This may seem little relevant for Jews, Judaism being Christianity’s perennial foil. Yet in that regard too, the 19th century marked a watershed. For now talk was increasingly heard, not of Christianity versus Judaism but of Christianity with Judaism, of a “Judaeo-Christian” legacy. And once more, this did not rebound in favor of the Jews: to their already brimming can of worms was now added the charge of having originated Christianity, that pernicious religion of slaves and revolutionaries. Although he was not an antisemite, and even strongly attacked antisemitism, Nietzsche’s approach to the Judaeo-Christian tradition is highly significant and instructive. Nietzsche was this tradition’s radical critic. For him, it was indeed a single essence: conscious of the fact or not, Christianity was a direct extension of Judaism, one of its emanations. And Christianity perpetuated and magnified all the worst features of Judaism, representing a more insidious version of the same worldview. In modern terms, one can say that for Nietzsche Christianity was an eruption on a global scale of a hereditary disease already contained in the DNA of Judaism. He therefore proposed to overcome that tradition in its entirety. Nietzsche’s treatment of Jews and Judaism was characterized by extreme ambivalence: as is well known, he combined highly positive and protective utterances with acidic attacks and denunciations. This zigzag movement can be explained as a reflection of Nietzsche’s oscillation between the two main antisemitic stereotypes, i.e., between the image of the Jew as the arch-capitalist and the image of the Jew as an archsocialist. On the one hand, to the extent that the Jews were conceived as a strong race, specializing in the acquisition of power and riches, they compelled Nietzsche’s admiration.4 “The Jews,” he wrote (1990b: 182), “are beyond all doubt the strongest, toughest and purest race at present living in Europe.” He saw them as a conservative power, a bulwark resisting the advances of the “modern ideas” he so detested, forestalling the final descent into a passively nihilist society, where all hierarchies would vanish, a mass society. For that reason, Nietzsche (1990b: 182–183) contemplated the possibility of breeding a new ruling caste for Europe, one that will combine German military prowess with Jewish financial wizardry. He never challenged the cliché of the Jews as expert financiers, yet unlike the antisemites saw this as a reason to praise, rather than condemn them. In general, as Daniel Conway convincingly argued (2002: 186), Nietzsche’s treatment of the Jews remained largely within the limits of the stereotypical views of his time: Here it becomes clear that Nietzsche’s claims to an enlightened cosmopolitanism were often exaggerated. In many respects, in fact, his understanding of the Jews differed little from those of the

The Wandering Jew 363 anti-Semites, whom he meant to oppose. For his understanding of the Jews he drew liberally from a familiar repertoire of stock prejudices. Nietzsche’s positive evaluation of the Jews must be situated within the context of 19th-century debates on the relative health and decadence of different social and “racial” groups, whose respective fitness determines their position in the hierarchy of industrial society, whether as winners or as losers. Nietzsche was among many who believed that the Jews were particularly vigorous and resilient and hence socially and economically triumphant: “Social Darwinism of this sort tended to support the idea of Jewish superiority rather than inferiority [. . .], since Jews were so successful economically in the nineteenth century” (Lindemann 1997: 83). This positive evaluation of the Jew as triumphant capitalist, explains much about Nietzsche’s hostility towards antisemitism. The antisemites were censured not principally and ethically, as viciously targeting a weaker and vulnerable minority, but aesthetically and socially, as themselves weak, inferior, envious creatures, resenting the strong and better-constituted. They were criticized, in other words, qua leftists of sorts, precisely in their resentful opposition to capitalism. This emerges, on occasions, quite explicitly, as in a letter from 1883, where Nietzsche (1986, vol. 6: 356) states that, “observed from a certain distance, ‘antisemitism’ is seen exactly like the struggle against the rich and the means thus far employed to become rich.” Yet Nietzsche saw more to Judaism than simply a healthy, natural (and pro-capitalist) factor. To the extent that Judaism, in Nietzsche’s mind, has begotten Christianity, to the extent that the Jews were the harbingers of the revolution, the priests of the oppressed and leaders of slave revolts, proto-socialists and democrats, they were harshly condemned. And while with him this theory took a primarily cultural and social form as opposed to the biological one espoused by many antisemites, this was by no means exclusively the case. In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche states very programmatically his view of the baneful slave revolt ignited by the Jews. He does so, moreover, in a context which is patently both racist and anti-socialist. Nietzsche (1994: 16) distinguishes the Aryan, blonde master race, constituting the conquering nobility of antiquity, from the subjugated, “dark-skinned, dark-haired native inhabitants.” Closely following (16), he conjectures a racial speculation on the rise of the modern left as the triumph of inferior, dark, non-Aryan races: [W]ho can give any guarantee that modern democracy, the even more modern anarchism, and indeed that predilection for the “commune,” the most primitive form of social structure which is common to all Europe’s socialists, are not in essence a huge counter-attack—and that the conquering master race, that of the Aryans, is not physiologically being defeated as well?

364  The Wandering Jew In this racial war the Jews, “the most fateful nation in world history,” (Nietzsche 1990a: 146) have played a most pernicious part. In spite of being, allegedly, the strongest race in contemporary Europe, they historically express their distinction precisely in their bitter antagonism to the aristocratic principle. No real decadents themselves, for they are motivated by a fierce determination to preserve themselves at all costs, they are nonetheless agents par excellence of Western decadence: the Jews have known “how to place themselves at the head of all décadence movements” (146–147). If socialism, as we saw, was ascribed to “a massive counter-attack” of primitive races, then it was only under the aegis of cunning Judaism that such successful slave revolt was historically conducted: “Nothing which has been done on earth against ‘the noble’, ‘the mighty’, ‘the masters’ and ‘the rulers’, is worth mentioning compared with what the Jews have done against them” (Nietzsche 1994: 18). The Jews are the quintessential revolutionary people, embarking on a “huge and incalculably disastrous initiative,” the “most fundamental of all declarations of war,” in which the masses are incited to rebel against their masters. Nietzsche’s view of world history posits a Manichean struggle, ideological and political, between two great social camps, a struggle that began in antiquity but persists, taking ever new forms, to his own day. The main contours of this struggle for life and death are charted in the following, immensely important passage: “Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome:”—up to now there has been no greater event than this battle, this question, this contradiction of mortal enemies. Rome saw the Jew as something contrary to nature, as though he were its polar opposite, a monster; in Rome the Jew was looked upon as convicted of hatred against the whole of mankind: rightly, if one is right in linking the well being and future of the human race with the unconditional rule of aristocratic values, Roman values. [. . .] So the Romans were the strong and noble, stronger and nobler than anybody hitherto who had lived or been dreamt of on earth [. . .]. By contrast, the Jews were a priestly nation of ressentiment par excellence, possessing an unparallel genius for popular morality [. . .]. Which of them has prevailed for the time being, Rome or Judea? But there is no trace of doubt: just consider whom you bow down to in Rome itself, today, as though to the embodiment of the highest values—and not just in Rome, but over nearly half the earth, everywhere where man has become tame or wants to become tame, to three Jews, as we know, and one Jewess (to Jesus of Nazareth, Peter the Fisherman, Paul the Carpet-Weaver and the mother of Jesus mentioned first, whose name was Mary). [. . .] In an even more decisive and profound sense than then, Judea once again triumphed over the classical ideal with the French Revolution:

The Wandering Jew 365 the last political nobility in Europe, [. . .] collapsed under the ressentiment-instincts of the rabble. (Nietzsche 1994: 34–36) It has been claimed that Nietzsche’s ultimate enmity was directed at Christianity, not Judaism (Yovel 1996: 185. See also, 140–141). Yet, in fact, if Nietzsche set out to demolish Christianity, he did so very much in the belief that it was merely a by-product of revengeful Judaism. The cross was the symbol devised by the Jews to vanquish the strong. Christianity, as the following passage eloquently attests to, was denounced by Nietzsche (1994: 20) as an essentially Jewish conspiracy: Did Israel not reach the pinnacle of her sublime vengefulness via this very “redeemer,” this apparent opponent of and disperser of Israel? Is it not part of a secret black art of a truly great politics of revenge, a far-sighted, subterranean revenge, slow to grip and calculating, that Israel had to denounce her actual instrument of revenge before all the world as a mortal enemy and nail him to the cross so that “all the world,” namely all Israel’s enemies, could safely nibble at this bait? [It] is certain that sub hoc signo Israel, with its revenge and revaluation of all former values, has triumphed repeatedly over all other ideals, all nobler ideals. Nietzsche’s anathema though it certainly is, Christianity is but a shadow cast by Judaism; hardly complete in itself, it is rather a Jewish projection, an enormous plot of social transformation, which must now be recognized as such, and militantly reversed. Nietzsche’s own counter revaluation of values was therefore conceived of as a necessary straightening of the record, of fighting Christianity as an instrument of Judaism. The Jewish “falsification of all nature” was reproduced by Christianity “in unutterably vaster proportions, although only as a copy”; “The Christian Church,” in that regard, “renounces all claim to originality” (Nietzsche 1990a: 146). Nietzsche’s contradictory and convoluted stance vis-à-vis Jewish essence was not, in fact, as idiosyncratic as one might assume. Revealingly, a very similar ambivalence underpinned the position of many conservatives, among them pivotal figures as Bismarck and Churchill. Bismarck’s attitudes have been described as “impenetrably pro- and antiJewish” (Lindemann 1997: 125). Yet, far from being truly “impenetrable,” such ambiguities corresponded to a neat socioeconomic logic, quite comparable to Nietzsche’s one: rich and conservative Jews, the so-called Geldjuden (money-Jews), generally won his respect and occasionally his friendship [. . .]. But

366  The Wandering Jew Jews on the left, the Reformjuden, [. . .] evoked in him an increasingly ferocious antipathy, since they became his most vocal opponents. (125) Winston Churchill was equally ambivalent about the Jews and for the same reasons. “This mystic and mysterious race,” he wrote, “has been chosen for the supreme manifestation, both of the divine and the diabolical.” The diabolism of the Jews was, of course, their revolutionary role. The Jews have been, he asserted, the “mainspring of every subversive movement during the nineteenth century. [. . .] [They have now] gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire” (In Lindemann 1997: 423). For all his criticism of the antisemites of his time, Nietzsche’s view of the Jew as the leader of the slave revolt has found its way into the very core of the Nazi worldview. This is confirmed by an unlikely source, an essay by R. S. Wistrich, which was generally committed to defend Nietzsche from allegations of proto-Nazism. And yet the author is forced to concede that “the Nietzschean image of Judeo-Christianity as ‘the vampire of the Imperium Romanum,’ was a stereotype that found more than an echo in the Christophobia of leading Nazis like Hitler, Bormann, Rosenberg, Ley, and Himmler” (Wistrich 2002: 163). Furthermore, in Hitler’s Table Talk there are references to Rome, Judea, and early Christianity that do sound like a crude and vulgarized version of Nietzschean ideas [. . .]. [S]hortly after the invasion of the USSR, Hitler called the coming of Christianity ‘the heaviest blow that ever struck humanity’ [. . .] Like Bolshevism, Christianity had been invented by the Jews— so he asserted—to subvert and destroy the foundations of culture. (163) Additionally, “when Hitler further denounced Judeo-Christian morality as antithetical to the life-force and the instinct for self-preservation [. . .] he seemed to come uncomfortably close to echoing Nietzsche without ever quoting him” (163). The objective affinity between Nietzsche’s theories and Hitler’s antisemitism, however “crude,” “vulgarized” and “uncomfortable,” is there. Yet how is it to be explained? It appears that Hitler’s Nietzscheanism was basically a second-hand one, given that “there is no evidence that Hitler ever seriously read Nietzsche” (Wistrich 2002: 163). It is probable that the main mediating agent was Alfred Rosenberg. Rosenberg was a decisive ideological influence upon Hitler, without whom, according to Bernd Martin (1981: 298), Mein Kampf would never have been written. Importantly, Rosenberg was both a fanatical anti-Soviet and one of the Nazi ideologues most appreciative of Nietzsche. He was the man who

The Wandering Jew 367 imprinted on Hitler’s mind the notion of a Jewish-Bolshevik world conspiracy, whose significance “for the thematic shaping of Hitler’s antisemitism, until then hollow-emotional, is largely unacknowledged” (Martin 1981: 298).5 Rosenberg might therefore be considered a “missing-link” of sorts in the transition or evolution from Nietzsche’s critique of the Jew as priest of ressentiment to Hitler’s fusion of the Jew with the world Marxist. Be that as it may, Hitler was keen to harness Nietzsche’s vast reputation in right-wing circles to the benefit of his movement, visited the Nietzsche archive in Weimar, developed a relationship of patronage with Nietzsche’s sister and the archive’s director, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche,6 a relationship that included keeping the archive financially afloat after a period of great economic difficulties during the Republic years, (Diethe 1999: 165) and in 1943 he gave Mussolini, his political mentor, the philosopher’s collected works in 24 volumes, to celebrate the Duce’s 60th birthday (Bosworth 2002: 402). Hitler’s few direct comments on Nietzsche, coming from several transcriptions of his private conversations, while terse, are extremely positive. Referring to Nietzsche’s “affirmation of natural laws and of struggle,” Hitler concludes that he is “the real philosopher of National Socialism” (In Pyta 2015). And in his Table Talk Hitler affirmed that “In our parts of the world, the Jews would have immediately eliminated Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Kant” (In Trevor-Roper 2000: 89). These three thinkers he elsewhere celebrated as “the greatest of our thinkers, in comparison with whom the British, the French and the Americans have nothing to offer,” and went on (720) to explain their respective contributions: It is on the foundation of Kant’s theory of knowledge that Schopenhauer built the edifice of his philosophy, and it is Schopenhauer who annihilated the pragmatism of Hegel. I carried Schopenhauer’s works with me throughout the whole of the first World War. From him I learned a great deal. Schopenhauer’s pessimism [. . .] has been far surpassed by Nietzsche. The exact origin of the ideas, however, is less important for our purposes, and it is clear, at any rate, that persecuting the Jews, let alone exterminating them is fundamentally opposed to Nietzsche’s approach who preferred to deal with their “danger” by integrating them in the nation and employing their skills for the formation of a new aristocracy. The crucial point is the Nazi perception of the Jew as a hugely powerful revolutionary, cunning, conspiratorial and mortally dangerous, not one of many plotters but the very leader and organizer, the living force propelling the popular revolt onwards. Taking such a view for a fact, as the leading Nazis did, gave them a very concrete reason to persecute the Jews, a much more pressing reason to seek their elimination than other possible grievances, such as that of embodying the spirit of money.

368  The Wandering Jew “At the heart of Nazism,” observed Philippe Burrin (2005: 43), “lay this imperial mission. Through every page of Mein Kampf can be glimpsed a portrait of Hitler imperator.” But the Jew was perceived as the eternal enemy of empires, the arch-revolutionary (44). Once such a view is taken as a political axiom, and the Jew’s revolutionary zeal is seen as a racial attribute, incorrigible and ineradicable as long as that race exists, one is confronted with a 2000-years’ old, life-and-death struggle between empire and egalitarianism, good and evil, order and subversion, culture and barbarism, which it becomes urgent to settle once and for all.7 With regards to Postone’s thesis that Nazism fought the Jew as part of its anticapitalist crusade, it should be noted, first, that Jewish perniciousness for the Nazis was a perennial attribute, traced back to a period well preceding any capitalism, and, second, that, qua chronic revolutionaries, modern Jews in truth represented a mortal danger to the capitalist system. In his writings, Nietzsche summoned Europe’s élites for a revolt against the Last Humans, those who have “become tame or want to become tame,” commanded them to abolish the rule of Judea with its “unparallel genius for popular morality” and usher in a new Rome. And while he thought that Jews as individuals should be enlisted on the elitist side of the divide, Judaism, in his account, insofar as it was the primary historical incarnation of slave morality, had to be decisively defeated. These widespread notions turned into a wave of panic after the First World War, when many European countries experienced revolutions in which Jews—Trotsky, Luxemburg, or Béla Kun being just three notable examples—frequently occupied central positions. Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin was the title of the antisemitic pamphlet by Nazi propagandist Dietrich Eckart, who exercised a strong influence over Hitler and the Nazi movement early on (Friedländer 1998: 97–98). There one could read of “the crazed masses, led by Jews,” and of Moses as the first Jewish slave inciter in history: “Just as happened with us, the Jews took control of the low class—liberty, equality, fraternity?! [. . .] And the masses believed that and turned against their own flesh and blood for the sake of the chosen people” (Eckart 1924). Rosenberg, similarly, regarded Bolshevism as a “purely Jewish Dictatorship” (In Kellogg 2005: 228). It is certainly true, as numerous scholars have argued, that the Nazis, from Eckart and Rosenberg to Hitler, often denounced some deep conspiratorial link between Bolshevism and capitalism (see, for example, Kellogg 2005: 222–227). Yet this does not warrant the conclusion, often following such a correct observation, that the Nazis were hence both anti-Marxist and anti-capitalist, or that they represented a middle course between these two anathemas (let alone seeing anti-capitalism as the decisive factor in Nazi ideology). For capitalism was never meant to be liquidated, like Marxism/Bolshevism. On the contrary, as Postone for one acknowledges, ruthlessly annihilating Marxism/Bolshevism, capitalism was meant to be saved from a mortal danger. The distinction between

The Wandering Jew 369 good and bad capital, and the absorption of the latter into “Jewish Bolshevism,” meant that in destroying Bolshevism, capitalism could be purified of its nefarious, Jewish side, and emerge all the stronger. (On the way that “anti-capitalist” antisemitism frequently dovetailed with actual pro-capitalism in German politics leading up to National Socialism, providing “a convenient means of having an ideological cake and eating it too,” see Smith 1986: 207; also 92.)

Hitler’s Hatred of the Jews, According to Mein Kampf So was the Jew persecuted by the National Socialists primarily on account of his association with capitalism? Or was the main factor rather his reputed socialism? Hitler’s main book is a useful place to look for an answer. In Mein Kampf, the Jew is described above all else as the rabble rouser, a socialist and a Bolshevik, stirring up working-class’ resentment. It is only as a result of Jewish activity, Hitler (1999: 314) states, that “Between employer and employee there arises that inner estrangement which later leads to political class division.” In the book’s second chapter, Hitler describes his path to antisemitism as one of careful, disinterested social observation, which has gradually driven him, quite against his initial inclinations, to the inescapable conclusion that the Jews are indeed the insidious, subversive factor in Germany as antisemites have always insisted. What is important in this account is surely not its factual accuracy—for without doubt it is a false and self-serving description of the process whereby Hitler actually became an antisemite—but rather the social and political grounds on which this antisemitism is subjectively justified. From the outset, it is made clear where the political affiliation and social function of the Jew are to be sought. As Hitler states (51): Only a knowledge of the Jews provides the key with which to comprehend the inner, and consequently real, aims of Social Democracy. The erroneous conceptions of the aim and meaning of this party fall from our eyes like veils, once we come to know this people, and from the fog and mist of social phrases rises the leering grimace of Marxism. In continuation, Hitler reports on his meticulous research into the social nature of the Jew, ending with an often quoted phrase, on the Jew’s general harmfulness, manifested especially in the cultural sphere (as already quoted). Notwithstanding the all-pervasive perniciousness of the Jews which Hitler’s social studies gradually expose, this is not quite enough to complete his conversion into the antisemitic creed. A further revelation is still required which, once obtained, settles the matter: “When I recognized the Jew as the leader of the Social Democracy, the scales dropped from my eyes. A long soul struggle had reached its conclusion”

370  The Wandering Jew (60). It is not the Jew’s role as the capitalist exploiter of the people, the international tycoon, which Hitler decries—in fact, at that stage in his “narrative” any such role is not even mentioned, let alone given central importance—but the Jew as leader of socialism, as conspirator against capitalism. The Jew is then firmly connected with the slave revolt of the masses against the superior individual, the perversion of nature, the elimination of cultural excellence: As I delved more deeply into the teachings of Marxism and thus in tranquil clarity submitted the deeds of the Jewish people to contemplation, Fate itself gave me its answer. The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight. Thus it denies the value of personality in man, contests the significance of nationality and race, and thereby withdraws from humanity the premise of its existence and its culture. [. . .] If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men. (64–65) Hitler hence aligns himself squarely with the principle of individualism against mass inertia, defining the Jewish peril as a Marxist refutation of civilization. There is nothing here to suggest a middle-of-the-road position in between Marxism and capitalism. Capitalism may have some insalubrious sides, but Marxism is the utmost evil, to be ruthlessly exterminated. As repeatedly stressed throughout Mein Kampf: “the question of the future of the German nation was the question of the extermination of Marxism” (155);8 or: “the struggle against the present day state was removed from the atmosphere of petty actions of revenge and conspiracy, to the greatness of a philosophical war of annihilation against Marxism and its organizations” (547). The stress on the need to extirpate Marxism, rather than simply defeat it, combined with the fact that Jewry and Marxism are perceived as wellnigh interchangeable, are highly significant when it comes to thinking about the Shoah. Here, the Nazi worldview discloses a motivation radical and pressing enough to justify, as far as Hitler was concerned, a war to the very end, which is also a war of extermination. The insistence on the Jew’s harmfulness precisely qua Marxist, the Jew as the arch-plotter against the capitalist order, is an obsessively recurring claim throughout Mein Kampf: The destructive effect of the Jew’s activity in other national bodies is basically attributable to his eternal efforts to undermine the position of the personality in the host-peoples and to replace it by the mass.

The Wandering Jew 371 Thus, the organizing principle of Aryan humanity is replaced by the destructive principle of the Jew. He becomes a “ferment of decomposition” among peoples and races [. . .]. Marxism presents itself as the perfection of the Jew’s attempt to exclude the pre-eminence of personality in all fields of human life and replace it by the numbers of the mass. To this, in the political sphere, corresponds the parliamentary form of government [. . .] and in the economic sphere, the system of a trade-union movement. (447) According to the future Führer, parliamentarianism is dangerous once it becomes an instrument wielded by the masses, put to use against the élite and the superior individual. Far from “establishing a spiritual break with the West,”9 Hitler in fact adheres, in however exacerbated a form, to the liberal legacy which saw the tyranny of the masses as the inevitable product of uncurbed democracy: In precisely the measure in which the economy is withdrawn from the influence of the personality principle and instead exposed to the influences and effects of the masses, it must lose its efficacy in serving all and benefiting all, and gradually succumb to a sure retrogression. (Hitler 1999: 447) The Jew, we are elsewhere told (430), “shrewdly” sees in the fact that a Negro has for the first time become a lawyer, teacher, even a pastor, in fact a heroic tenor [. . .] a new proof for the soundness of his theory about the equality of men that he is trying to funnel into the minds of the nations. Here we see how not only antisemitism but racism in general, are by no means merely some fanatical, “irrational” obsessions, an eruption of dark and unfathomable violent drives, but were functional and explicable within the decisive struggle against egalitarianism. Irrationalism thus finds its rationale in the class struggle, in which it is firmly anchored from the very outset. As Hitler at one point proclaimed (442), in an immensely instructive articulation of the impeccable, albeit perverse, ideological logic behind racist fanaticism: “It would be lunacy to try to estimate the value of man according to his race, thus declaring war on the Marxist idea that men are equal, unless we are determined to draw the ultimate consequences.” The readiness, in principle, to implement even the most extreme racist policies, to “draw” racism to its “ultimate consequences,” is here justified as the only means of mounting a consistent opposition to Marxism. Hence it is incorrect to say that there was no economic and material motivation for exterminating the Jews. For while it is true that

372  The Wandering Jew the perpetrators did not expect to derive immediate material gain from their deed—the last remnants of property looted from the dead aside— once the Jew was cast as a deadly threat to the entire social order it was clear that his removal would be materially beneficial in a way that no immediate looting or profiteering can expect to match, in securing, as it were, the further existence of the present system.10 That in the process the Nazis were also content with making a token gesture to the struggle against “rapacious capital” may be true, but to see this, as Postone does, as the raison d’être of the entire enterprise, seems unwarranted. Hitler’s racial conception of the state, similarly, was explicitly meant to counter the Marxist state-conception which the bourgeoisie fatally embraces. Hitler’s aim is consequently to save the bourgeois state from its foes by founding it upon a racial principle: It was the Jew, Karl Marx, who was able to draw the extreme inference from those false conceptions and views concerning the nature and purpose of a state: by detaching the state concept from racial obligations [. . .] the bourgeois world even paved the way for a doctrine which denies the state as such. Even in this field, therefore, the struggle of the bourgeois world against the Marxist international must fail completely. (Hitler 1999: 391) Hitler’s anti-Marxism objectively far surpasses, in both quantity and quality, anything he said against capital. Quantitatively, the sheer numerical proportion of utterances in Mein Kampf that condemn Marxism, socialism, Bolshevism, etc., is incomparably higher than any analogous statements against capital, international finance, etc. Just for illustration sake, in the index of one English edition of the book—from which I am quoting—references to Marxism (which includes communism and Bolshevism) plus references to Social Democracy appear on 142 pages (113 and 29 pages, respectively). All of these references, needless to say, are completely negative. The term “capitalism,” by comparison, this alleged other anathema of Hitler, is not even indexed. And while Hitler does criticize the workings of “international Jewish capital,” he does so in order to shield productive capital from its rapacious counterpart. He describes, for instance, the way that during the war, the Jewish people had taken over production, centralized and shackled it in order, “little by little, to finish off the national free economy” (193). Again it can be observed how Nazi anti-capitalism was a form of pro-capitalism. Qualitatively, however, no such analogy can be justified by this text, for at least the following reasons: first, and as we already had some opportunity to observe, Hitler’s general discourse revolves centrally around ideologemes deriving from the Malthusian—capitalist and imperialist—discourse of the 19th century and early 20th century, such as the

The Wandering Jew 373 affirmation of the individual, the merit of competition, the survival of the fittest, the critique of mass mediocrity, etc.11 As in the following, typical affirmation: Nature knows no political boundaries. First, she puts living creatures on this globe and watches the free play of forces. She then confers the master’s right on her favorite child, the strongest in courage and industry [. . .]. Mankind has grown great in eternal struggle, and only in eternal peace does it perish. (Hitler 1999: 134–135) Negating such social Darwinism is “always primarily the Jew,” in his attempt “to play a little trick on Nature, to make the hard, inexorable struggle for existence superfluous” (136). These avowals testify to the position of the Nazi ideology well within the broad capitalist discourse, whereas any comparable affinities with socialism are absent. Steven Aschheim (1996: 122; italics added) argued that “while Nazism was obviously anti-Bolshevist it was not merely that. It was equally contemptuous of the liberal democratic and, indeed, the wider Western Enlightenment tradition.” The first problem with such a claim is the proposition that the enmity of Nazism was equally divided between Bolshevism and the liberal West. This, as I have just contended, is quantitatively, empirically, wrong. The second problem is qualitative and it has to do with the choice of the noun “contempt” to describe the Nazi animosity towards the communist East and the liberal West. For, while “contempt” would fairly well characterize Nazi posture facing liberal mushiness, it does not even begin to describe the quite different hostility that was felt and expressed with regard to the Marxist threat. Here, one would do better to speak of an existential hatred and dread vis-à-vis a mortal enemy. Does this identification of the Jew as the eternal revolutionary suffice to explain the Nazi determination to physically annihilate the Jews, and is it concrete enough to clarify the urgency with which this task was pursued in the latter phases of the war? I believe that it is vital, at least, in providing the context in the absence of which the very thought of extermination, to say nothing of carrying it through, would be inconceivable. It can be seen how the Nazi discourse was at its essence, already in the 1920s, a genocidal one, asking not to defeat, depose or even smash the enemy but to eliminate him. The Nazi tendency is thus a murderous one from the start, positing an absolute distinction between “good” and “evil” and seeking to annihilate the latter, that merits, as far as it is concerned, nothing but death. The struggle is presented as the final battle, one waged for the very “life” and “existence” of the nation and the annihilation of its enemies. And it is hence unsurprising that no means are deemed too extreme to attain victory. It is, perhaps, this fundamental Manichean concept of the Nazis, their total dehumanization of their

374  The Wandering Jew enemies, coupled with their genocidal determination, which rebounded against them and contributed to establish their own reputation as the ultimate manifestation of Evil, writ large, in human history. Ideas and acts of course are not the same, and the notion of extermination does not necessarily entail its implementation. This is not the place to enter the old historiographical debate between “intentionalists” and “functionalists,” between those who regarded the extermination of the Jews as the Nazi goal from the very beginning, all the rest being just about finding the best opportunity and method for its execution, and those who saw in the Shoah a more complex process, in the course of which fundamental doubts concerning the goals were raised and alternative solutions to the Jewish “question” were contemplated, such as having them emigrate or settling them in another country. (See Bessel 2003; Bankier and Michman 2008.) Yet this demonization of the Jew, seeing him not as one enemy among others but as the enemy, the centerpiece sustaining the entire enemy camp, allows one to comprehend why his extermination was regarded—not in spite of the complications of war, but precisely because it seemed to have become a hopeless cause—as a last chance, perhaps, of reversing the tides, or at least of striking the enemy where he was still vulnerable, exposed and vanquishable. Some historians (notably Mayer 1990) therefore contended that the extermination of the Jews became a central goal of the Nazis once the situation on the Eastern front turned desperate and it became clear that the Soviet Union would not collapse like a house of cards as Hitler had predicted when launching Operation Barbarossa. And even if such a claim may be overstated, it seems to grasp a basic truth about the urgency with which the extermination was undertaken, representing some Nazi version of “Let me die with the Jews!” If Bolshevism seemed no longer defeatable, one might at least annihilate the quintessence of Bolshevism, the Bolshevism going back 2000 years, the Jewish people. This colossal act of avengement, which was at the same time a form of suicide, was captured with typical brilliance by the great caricaturist David Low (1949: 226), who managed to condense into a small rectangle (Figure 7.1) a political observation whose acuteness still strikes the viewer—it was published in the midst of the war, and at a very early stage, on December 14, 1942!

National Socialist Antisemitism Between Wagner and Nietzsche So far we have discussed the would-be aristocratic vantage point from which the Nazis have attacked the Jews, and construed it as a struggle between the advocates of Empire and those cast as its perennial, subversive opponents. Was there not, however, a strongly plebeian streak running through the Jew hatred of the Nazis? And does not such a streak originate—not in Nietzsche, the arch-enemy of the plebs—but rather in

The Wandering Jew 375

Figure 7.1 “I’ve settled the fate of Jews—And of Germans” David Low/Solo Syndication

his antipode, Richard Wagner, champion of grand music for all—except the Jews? Any assessment of Nazi antisemitism thus requires addressing Wagner’s contribution to the Nazi project in general and the Shoah in particular, and comparing it with Nietzsche’s role. A comprehensive inquiry into this vast, greatly debated and highly controversial theme would here take us too far afield, yet I wish nonetheless to offer a general perspective on the matter. There can be no doubt that Nietzsche fared incomparably better than Wagner as far as contemporary evaluation of the legacies of the two figures is concerned. The undisputed facts that Nietzsche came to resist Wagner while Hitler was the composer’s ardent fan, seems to tell us everything we need to know about the politics of both Wagner and Nietzsche. Wagner, adulated by the Führer, could not but have been a proto-Nazi; consequently, Nietzsche, who opposed Wagner, must have been a prescient enemy of Nazism: “Can we really doubt, then,” claimed Robert Wistrich, where Nietzsche would have stood with regard to the politics of the Nazis? Could the man who saw with such clairvoyance through the original Bayreuth circle (a key link in the German ideology that led

376  The Wandering Jew to National Socialism) have been taken by its plebeian offspring [that is, Hitler: I. L]? (Wistrich 2002: 153)12 But this apparently reasonable syllogism is deceptive in that it does not take into account the concrete content of either Nietzsche’s critique of the composer or of Hitler’s admiration of him. Once such an examination is undertaken, the positions of Nietzsche and Hitler appear far less antithetical than they initially seemed to be. The whole paradox of their respective Wagner-receptions can be summarized as follows: Hitler ardently assimilated everything that was reactionary in Wagner, whereas Nietzsche resolutely discarded everything that was progressive about him; for Hitler, Wagner was never more than a prophet of Aryan supremacy, whereas Nietzsche continued to consider him, well into his quietist Schopenhauer-phase, an essentially left-wing figure: though not quite a revolutionary, he was still regarded by Nietzsche a mouthpiece of the herd, an apostle of the slave revolt, a prototype of the democratic, mass artist. For that matter, not even Wagner’s truly reactionary and pernicious aspects could have been “employed” by Hitler straightforwardly, in their original form, and he therefore needed to reconfigure them for his own purposes. This is most glaringly true in regard to Wagner’s most infamous prejudice, his antisemitism. Before turning to such comparison between Wagner and Nietzsche, a short contextualization of the intellectual climate in which they were writing is indispensable. In addressing the history of modern antisemitism it is vital, I believe, to distinguish between two types of primordial antisemitic grievances and arguments, which, though equally false and hollow, nevertheless substantially differ in their judgment on the perceived Jewish position vis-à-vis capitalism. On the one hand, within the European antisemitic tradition/s of the 19th century, the Jews and/or Judaism were reproached on account of their alleged greed, their protocapitalist role as money lenders and exploiters of the poor (capitalizing, of course, on the legacy of both Christian antisemitism as well as on the long-standing popular complaint against Jewish heartless materialism and rapaciousness). This was an antisemitism to which many figures on the left have subscribed (already at the beginning of the 19th century, the egalitarian Jacob Fries was protesting against capitalism and the Jews. Proudhon, Fourier, Lassalle and Bruno Bauer could also be mentioned and I shall in a moment say something about Marx’s position. For a discussion of antisemitism among socialists, see Lindemann 1997: 163–168). On the other hand, there began to strike root a relatively new stereotype of the Jew as a radical cosmopolitan, a supporter of French Jacobinism and an outsider to the nation’s spirit/body. This was a comparably newer notion, just as the revolution and the nation were modern phenomena, of the Jew as revolutionary, an alien factor, inciting against

The Wandering Jew 377 the established order, and perverting the mores of the people, otherwise properly conservative. A typical example would be the following tirade against the un-German radicalism of Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Börne: Heine’s Reisebilder have greatly provoked my indignation, but the recently published Briefe aus Paris, by Börne, even exceed the insolences there presented [. . .]. The honor of German nationhood is here offended in the most disgraceful and infuriating manner [. . .]. Börne, Heine and Co. love freedom the way a harlot does [. . .] Börne is a Jew, like Heine, like Saphir. Baptized or not, is a matter of indifference [. . .]. It is not the faith of Jews that we hate [. . .], but the many ugly traits of these Asians. (Eduard Meyer 1831, in Heine 1997, vol. 4: 652–653) This was an antisemitic prejudice logically attractive for conservatives, in their endeavor to form an ideal of the nation as a classless, harmonious and tradition-honoring entity. In Germany, in Nietzsche’s time, this antisemitism was represented by such conservative politicians and intellectuals as M. L. von Sonnenberg, F. C. von Fechenbach and, most influentially and “respectably,” by Heinrich von Treitschke: In the socio-economic crisis of 1878–79 [Treitschke] left the nationalliberal party, enthusiastically supported Bismarck’s anti-socialist legislation, and embraced the new anti-Semitic movement [. . .]. The anti-liberal, anti-socialist and anti-democratic stance of the major historian of the second Reich could not have been complete without being anti-Semitic as well. (Volkov 2002: 106; see also 110–111. Cf. Zmarzlik 1981: 255) These two main types of antisemitic arguments did not, of course, develop in strict isolation from each other, each carefully pursuing its own distinct ideological logic. Far from it, in most cases they were integrated, however confusedly, and proved mutually encouraging. Yet, however gradually and incompletely, the left began to abandon “leftist antisemitism,” whereas the right distilled and intensified its own antisemitic slant, making it an essential locus of a comprehensive, reactionary worldview that, in the German case, culminated in National Socialism. Throughout the 19th century it became increasingly clear, particularly in the German context, that antisemitism and anti-capitalism were in fact incompatible, that they could not be simultaneously pursued. Either one persisted in antisemitism, and abandoned the left, or one chose leftism and forsook antisemitism. What happened to most of those who chose antisemitism over leftist radicalism—as Wagner definitely did—was that the “evil of capitalism,” initially so resented, was perfectly absorbed

378  The Wandering Jew into the demonized Jew so that fighting “Jewish capitalism” eventually became a question of fighting the Jew, and the Jew alone. The more the Jew became responsible—in antisemitic imagination—for all modern ills, the less capitalism had to do with them. Thus, antisemitism often functioned as an alibi for deserting any actual radicalism. In other cases it served parties and politicians which were conservative from the outset to generate a radical pose for themselves, in order to attempt to draw working-class support away from socialism. This was notably the case of Adolf Stöcker, the Berlin preacher, founder of the Christian Social Party, “a considerable demagogue who concluded that, in order to take the wind out of the sails of the Social-Democrats, the Protestant church must also go to the people and offer something to the poor, as the Catholic church has done so successfully for so long” (Mann 1992: 465; see also Pulzer 1988: 83–97; Lindemann 1997: 143–147). Real support, however, for such antisemitic parties came only later, during the Weimar Republic, and predominantly from the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie: “The appeal here was mainly to the lower-middle classes—traders, craftsmen, small farmers, lower civil servants—and rooted in a combination of antisemitism, extreme nationalism, and vehement anti-capitalism (usually interpreted as ‘Jewish’ capitalism)” (Kershaw 1998: 135). There was more to antisemitism, to be sure, than a mere “socialism of fools” (according to a famous socialist definition); antisemitism and antisemitic parties proved themselves attractive to many among the middle class not because its constituency was less intelligent or more gullible than those of other social classes; many among that social group were, at any rate, better educated than most members of society: in the words of a leading historian of the Weimar Republic: “Antisemitism—which already in late 19th century, above all thanks to Heinrich von Treitschke, became salonfähig—found, after 1918, among the educated bourgeoisie [Bildungsbürgertum] more ardent defenders than among any other social stratum” (Winkler 1981: 283). Rather, antisemitism corresponded—at least in its rhetoric—to the objective middle-class social position. For many members of that class, antisemitism seemed to resist the two mostly feared evils: socialism, from below, and monopoly capitalism, from above, the latter now blamed on the money-grabbing, international Jew, his insatiable greed swallowing up the modest, small-scale business of the honest, hard-working, German. No less ubiquitous within this rightist “anti-capitalism,” from the 1873 Vienna stock exchange crash to Hitler’s time, was the already familiar distinction “between essentially healthy ‘industrial capital’ and the real evil of ‘Jewish finance capital’ ” (Kershaw 1998: 152; see also, Lindemann 1997: 498). So, while clinging to capitalism as a system, the lower middle class nonetheless denounced the destructive, “speculator” Jew: A lot was wrong about modern economy, politics and morality; it was just a case of finding the guilty party, deflecting the blame from

The Wandering Jew 379 the king and his servants, from the productive capitalist to the Jew in the stock-market, in the mortgage bureau, in the editorial-room. (Mann 1992: 466; see also, Volkov 2002: 94–98) That is precisely why Marx’s On the Jewish Question, notwithstanding its countless detractors who denounce the founder of communism as a leading antisemitic voice, cannot in the last analysis be qualified as a truly antisemitic text; while certainly failing to combat the age-old prejudice of the spirit of Judaism as revolving around greed, selfishness and profit, indeed while lamentably accepting it as his premise, Marx nevertheless emphasized, quite against the sway of the antisemitism of his days, that social struggle must be directed against capitalism, not the Jews. That is why Marx (1992: 237) asked the materialistic question, “what specific social element must be overcome in order to abolish Judaism?” and went on to answer (241): As soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism—the market and the conditions which give rise to it—the Jew will have become impossible, for his consciousness will no longer have an object [. . .]. The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism. In diametrical opposition to the antisemites who, ruling out Jewish emancipation, argued that to fight capitalism one had to fight the Jew— and subsequently, and all too “logically,” abandoned the critique of capitalism altogether to fight the Jew alone—Marx contended, supporting the emancipation of the Jew, that the spirit of Judaism, namely marketsociety, be abolished. For Marx, moreover, the question was exorcizing the spirit of Christianity no less than that of Judaism, or, for that matter, of any other religion, in order to create a society which is simply human, emancipated from both religion and its perceived material cause, the market. It is for that reason that Hannah Arendt, no Marxist, correctly rejected the allegation of Marx’s antisemitism (Arendt 1960: 34; cf. Volkov 2002: 122–123). Thus, eventually, 20th-century left-wing movements, both Communist and Social-Democratic, were relatively free of antisemitism (though by no means completely so),13 and indeed included many Jewish supporters (and leaders) in their ranks, while right-wing parties in many European countries were waving the banner of antisemitism with a vengeance. (For the eventual socialist rejection of antisemitism, see Lindemann 1997: 158–174; Volkov 2002: 122–129.) Highly symptomatic of the latter course is the personal trajectory of Bruno Bauer, the very person against whom Marx’s polemics was directed in On the Jewish Question. A thinker on the far-left to begin with, Bauer strongly rejected Jewish emancipation, eliciting Marx’s response. Later on, however, Bauer increasingly abandoned his youthful radicalism while retaining his

380  The Wandering Jew antisemitic convictions. Interestingly, in his later years he became close to Nietzsche and attempted to call Heinrich von Treitschke’s attention to his works. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche (1992: 55) singled out “the old Hegelian Bruno Bauer,” as “one of my most attentive readers.” And Bauer’s attraction to Nietzsche was clearly facilitated by his own long-standing disdain of the masses, which early on had drawn the criticism of many, not least of whom Marx and Engels in The Holy Family.14 However, the demise of leftist antisemitism—namely, its marginalization in both the theory and the practice of leftist political groups15—does not mean that the leftist antisemitic argument had ceased to exist, that the discourse of the Jew as a voracious capitalist worshipping the god of mammon had disappeared. Rather, it was incorporated and integrated into right-wing ideology. The rhetoric of such agitators and antisemitic “theoreticians” as Wilhelm Marr, Otto Glagau, Adolf Stöcker, Otto Böckel, Friedrich Naumann, Karl von Vogelsang or Karl Lueger, never ceased to exploit the older image of the Jew as a representative of international capital, the stock-market magnate, and so on and so forth. Yet this was used for the purpose of disguising the real acceptance of capitalism, and attempting—usually without much success—to appeal to laborers. We are now better positioned to assess the antisemitism of Wagner and compare it with Nietzsche’s position. Wagner’s approach to the Jews is certainly very different from that of Nietzsche. To start with, there was nothing in Wagner to parallel Nietzsche’s positive views on Jews and Judaism; he was a plain and unambiguous antisemite whereas Nietzsche was not. His negation of Judaism is as free from ambivalence and nuances as can possibly be (leaving aside the question of his many personal relationships with Jews, which need not concern us here). As far as dehumanization and demonizing of the Jew are concerned, Wagner indeed played a significant role in spreading and legitimizing the antisemitic bias. Wagner was a shareholder in the project of marking the Jew as a separate and irredeemable racial element, a particular, and very grave charge, that cannot be leveled at Nietzsche, who did not consistently believe in the racial distinctiveness of Jews (cf. Losurdo 2008: 189–190). Neither, to my mind, are we allowed to accept the commonly held view that Wagner’s antisemitism was restricted to his writings alone, leaving his art untarnished. Such Wagner critics as P. L. Rose, Marc Weiner, Hartmut Zelinsky or David Levin have a strong case when they argue that Wagner’s operas are strewn with negative characters who embody “Jewish” traits, as these were defined in Wagner’s writings (just one example would be Mime, the Nibelung in Siegfried, whose very name indicates his artistic parasitism, capable only of mimesis. The same inherent incapacity to produce genuine art was ascribed to Jews in Wagner’s infamous 1850 tract, Das Judentum in der Musik). (See Rose 1992; Zelinsky 1976; Weiner 1995; Levin 1998.) Yet the content of Wagner’s antisemitism, however virulent, remained still fairly traditional, inasmuch as he maligned the Jew, basically, as the emblem of capitalism, the heartless

The Wandering Jew 381 exploiter of the people, along the classical lines of the leftist antisemitic argument that was rampant in the first half of the 19th century. This can be observed by going over the following list, supplied by Zelinsky, usefully assembling some of the antisemitic adjectives the composer employed in the course of his career: In that regard, Wagner’s language is unequivocal whether we are referring to his musical dramas, to his writings or to Cosima Wagner’s diaries. Throughout several decades the following words (a mere selection) refer to Jews and Judaism: money, gold, property, possession, banker, haggler, haggling, thief, base, nasty, treachery, malice, envy, degeneration, treason, faking, distortion, fashion, modern, sleaziness, corruption, mask, contortion, whore, toad, worm, gnawing, unfeeling, demon, curse. (Zelinsky 2002: 38) The thing to be noted here—apart from the obscene odium of Wagner’s mania—is that the Jew was denounced in terms essentially of leftist antisemitism. Most adjectives would pertain to that particular “cultural code” (again, in reference to Volkov’s term), with the exception of “modern” and “degeneration” (and possibly “envy”) which are of a more rightist vein, and those adjectives which cannot be classified socially such as “toad,” “demon” or “curse.” What is decidedly missing in this list is the inculpation of the Jew as “revolutionary” or “socialist,” charges which constitute the demagogical core of rightist antisemitism in general and Hitler’s one in particular (neither do we find the association of Judaism with morality and with the slave revolt, at the heart of Nietzsche’s critique). Such elements, to be sure, were not completely absent in Wagner; far from it, he sometimes specifically dismissed the revolutions of 1830 and 1848—retroactively disassociating himself from the latter event, in which he was an active participant—as Jewish-led revolutions mimicking the shallow republicanism of the French (for example, Wagner 1995: 166). Indeed, this could hardly have been otherwise given that a genuinely leftist position, as we argued, became incompatible with antisemitism in the last decades of the 19th century. By choosing antisemitism, Wagner by necessity abandoned radicalism and effectively joined the right. Yet the protest against Jewish radicalism remained a relatively marginal aspect in his antisemitic tirades, as compared, on the one hand, with the overwhelming predominance of his “social rhetoric,” denouncing the money-Jew, and, on the other hand, with the decisive role of antisocialism for Hitler. P. L. Rose (1992: 190) was therefore quite right when defining Wagner’s antisemitism in the following terms: More than anyone else Wagner established the Jew in German popular consciousness as a new secularized symbol of absolute evil that would replace the old Christian image of the Jew as Christ-killer. The

382  The Wandering Jew modern Jew no longer crucified Christ, but rather humanity itself. The Jew personified lovelessness, greed, egoism, and the lust for domination of other human beings and nature that found expression in Jewish capitalism and the Jewish conspiracy for world-dominion. Rose’s analysis, however, takes a dubious turn when, directly continuing (190), he defines Hitler’s antisemitism as the straightforward prolongation of such anti-capitalism: “This crux of ideas is what appealed to Hitler, whose world view was soaked in the revolutionary antisemitism of Wagner.” This, however, as we have shown, corresponds to an untenable vision of Hitler as a revolutionary and an anti-capitalist. Hitler shared Wagner’s irrational and unbending hatred of Jews, thoroughly exploiting their demonizing,16 yet he nearly reversed its social content: Hitler’s Jew was no longer predominantly the money-Jew, the essence of capitalism as in Wagner (although he, and other Nazis, continued occasionally to exploit this stereotype). The Jew according to Hitler became above all the prophet of the slave revolt, the inciter of the masses, the Bolshevik, the preacher of ressentiment, disseminating discontent among the laborers, in short the very antithesis of capitalist hierarchy. In that regard, Hitler directed his antisemitism into what were Nietzschean, rather than Wagnerian, channels. The form of Hitler’s antisemitism was markedly Wagnerian whereas the content, to a significant extent at least, was Nietzschean; Hitler set out to exterminate the demonic Jews, following, as it were, Wagner’s cue, yet his extermination campaign was motivated first and foremost by the wish to expunge the Jew as preacher of equality, as revolutionary agitator and inciter of slaves, namely the eradication of all that which Nietzsche regarded as Israel’s pernicious heritage, its “huge and incalculable disastrousness.” And so, where it is least of all expected, at the very heart of Hitler’s antisemitism, a Nietzschean ideological kernel is detected.17 As we saw, the existence of this link was confirmed by R. S. Wistrich (2002: 144), even as he was trying to redress the “serious, not to say scandalous, injustice to Nietzsche’s work and intentions” inflicted by those who “insist on a causal connection between his visionary thought and the genocidal project of the Third Reich.” In some important respects it is true that Wagner’s ultraist antisemitism both anticipated and paved the way for Nazi antisemitism. At the same time, such critics who rely on these irrefutable facts to portray Wagner as Hitler’s direct harbinger proceed to argue from a premise which posits antisemitism as the central aspect of Nazism, virtually the only one worthy of serious consideration. Hence, they limit the scope of their research to decipher antisemitism (as is notably the case with P. L. Rose). The problem with that approach is that the phenomenon of Nazi antisemitism, ideological as well as political, can hardly be understood purely on its own terms, as it were, extracted from the broad historical fabric into which it was initially woven. For example, as I have tried to show in relation to Mein Kampf, Hitler’s antisemitism can hardly be made sense

The Wandering Jew 383 of when abstracted from the broader phenomenon of racism, which, in turn, cannot be properly comprehended unless within the yet broader context of imperialism, which itself develops on the basis of the capitalist mode of production. Failing to situate antisemitism in context engenders the illusion that the Shoah was the implementation of some lethal program underlying Wagner’s operas and writings. Such isolation of the question of antisemitism by necessity overlooks the fact that the extermination of European Jewry could not have taken place unless within a political project based on a general, not just antisemitic but also racist and social Darwinist theory, a systematic ideology ranking “superior” and “inferior” “races,” dividing them between would-be masters and slaves, while postulating competition for supremacy between men, states and races, as an inevitable and beneficial process of sieving the unfits and promoting human and cultural greatness. In that regard, the shortcomings of the Wagner-Hitler causal nexus come into view with particular clarity. Wagner’s belief in the greatness of the German nation and his later concern with German purity, was couched in a general vision of universal brotherhood, which, however vacuous and paradoxical, could not simply be turned into its opposite: a universal struggle for power, whereby a vanquishing Germany can legitimately exact slave labour from other nations. Take even What is German? (1865), an essay in which Wagner’s early revolutionary zeal is all but extinct (to be sure, as late as 1871 Wagner defended the Communards of Paris from Nietzsche’s condemnations, revealing the endurance of basic left-wing sympathies). Nevertheless, his analysis of the historical decay of the German nation is strikingly anti-imperial. Should a future scholar feel an overpowering urge to be Wagner’s Walter Kaufmann and launch a rehabilitation campaign to clear the composer’s name from Nazi “abuse” here would be a perfect place to start:18 German poetry, German music, German philosophy, are nowadays esteemed and honoured by every nation in the world: but in his yearning after “German glory” the German, as a rule, can dream of nothing but a sort of resurrection of the Romish Kaiser-Reich, and the thought inspires the most good-tempered German with an unmistakable lust of mastery, a longing for the upper hand over other nations. He forgets how detrimental to the welfare of the German peoples that notion of the Romish State had been already. (Wagner 1995: 154–155) This is a passage which, unsurprisingly, was not referred to by Hitler. Nor could the Nazis have found much use in Wagner’s critique—in another essay of the same period—of narrow patriotism, contrasted with universal humanism: Though Patriotism may sharpen the burgher’s eye to interests of State, yet it leaves him blind to the interests of mankind in general;

384  The Wandering Jew nay, its most effectual force is spent in passionately intensifying this blindness [. . .]. The patriot subordinates himself to his State in order to raise it above all other States, and thus, as it were, to find his personal sacrifice repaid with ample interest through the might and greatness of the Fatherland. Injustice and violence toward other States and peoples have therefore been the true dynamic law of Patriotism throughout all time. (Wagner 1995: 16) Hitler, likewise, failed to internalize the following statement by his spiritual godfather (19): “never yet has a demagogue or intriguer led a Folk astray without in some way making it believe itself inspired by patriotic ardour.” Not, of course, that from under the banner of Schopenhauer’s quietism Wagner could offer any effective resistance to the imperialist patriotism which he decries, but even quietism is something which fascism must yet root out, or at least incorporate, in its way to power. Moreover, there “lacks” in Wagner contempt for the weak, without which the horrid Nazi puzzle could never have been completed. Not only that: he insisted on the supreme value of compassion, earning Nietzsche’s scorn (1967: 172): “Wagner had the virtue of decadents: pity.” And were not the Jews, in Nietzsche’s estimation, the leaders of all “decadence movements,” and hence, by extension, a people championing pity? And did not Nietzsche, already at the beginning of his career, identify pity as a force endangering the privileges of the élite? “If culture were really left to the discretion of the people,” he warned (1994: 178–179), “the iconoclastic destruction of the claims of art [. . .] would be the cry of pity tearing down the walls of culture; the urge for justice, for equal sharing of the pain, would swamp all other ideas.” For the mature Nietzsche the injunction “thou shall not kill” was a “piece of naiveté” when compared with “the prohibition of life to decadents: ‘thou shall not procreate!’ ” (1968: 389). This was said, moreover, in a passage defining Parsifal as the “typical idiot,” one who had “only too many reasons not to propagate himself.” And in continuance, against such Wagnerian decadence, Nietzsche reveals himself a true campaigner for eugenics: Society, as the great trustee of life, is responsible to life itself for every miscarried life—it also has to pay for such lives: consequently it ought to prevent them. In numerous cases, society has to prevent procreation [. . .]. Life itself recognizes no solidarity, no “equal rights,” between the healthy and the degenerate parts of an organism: one must excise the latter—or the whole will perish.—Sympathy for decadents, equal rights for the ill-constituted—that would be the profoundest immorality, that would be antinature itself as morality! (Nietzsche 1968: 389)

The Wandering Jew 385 Those who so confidently wash Nietzsche’s hands of proto-Nazism will have difficult time confronting such statement, as well as others of a similar ilk: To gain that tremendous energy of greatness in order to shape the man of the future through breeding and, on the other hand, the annihilation of millions of failures, and not to perish of the suffering one creates, though nothing like it has ever existed! (Nietzsche 1968: 506) Yet passages like this are, in fact, rarely honestly confronted. There is a twofold weakness in the standard line of defense which relies on Nietzsche’s aristocratic opposition to mass society and hence proclaims him a prescient critic of Nazism. First, no amount of aristocratic disdain at the vulgarity of mass society should allow us to overlook the philosopher’s fundamental complicity, albeit theoretical one, in the project of mass extermination, the fact that he both shared and propagated the fantasy of the eugenic cleansing of the many-too-many. That Jews would not have formed his target—themselves not being regarded as “failures”—changes little in that respect, for surely it is the principle, not to say the ideal, of mass extermination that counts and not what particular group/s one happens to see as “mass” or “rabble.” If Nietzsche’s “visionary thought” includes the readiness to annihilate millions, then it is not a matter of “scandalous injustice” to connect him with “the genocidal project of the Third Reich,” as Wistrich argued. Second, and even more crucially, it ought finally to be understood that it was not in spite of his aloof aristocratism but because of it that Nietzsche legitimized and spurred mass killing. By the same token, it is indisputably true that Wagner excommunicated the Jew on the fanciful ground that he was the exploiter of mankind; but for such view to evolve into the Third Reich, it had to join these opposite theories which insisted precisely on the legitimacy of exploitation. And here it was from Nietzsche and other social Darwinists that the fascists, including German ones, had taken their ideological cue: “ ‘Exploitation’ does not pertain to a corrupt or imperfect or primitive society: [. . .] it is a consequence of the intrinsic will to power which is precisely the will to life” (Nietzsche 1990b: 194). In that respect, I fully subscribe to the theoretical guideline suggested, in a different context, by Steven Aschheim (1996: 120): “The Holocaust was an anti-Jewish project—but it could be carried out precisely because its murderous impulses operated within far more general shaping processes, structures and modes of behavior that rendered it a ‘human’ possibility.” The debate concerning the part played by Nietzsche and Wagner in the evolution of Nazism conceals the all-important question of accounting for Nazism as a phenomenon of modern mass society. Whether National

386  The Wandering Jew Socialism is seen primarily as a Nietzschean or a Wagnerian project hinges decisively on the way one interprets its relation to the masses. For, if the Nazi period is understood as the destructive orgy of vindictive masses defying their betters under the banner of vulgar egalitarianism, then Nietzsche emerges as the movement’s bitterest antagonist, while Wagner appears—or can be made to appear—as its natural harbinger and ally. If, however, Nazism is seen as fundamentally an élite project designed to contain the masses, put them under iron discipline and deprive them of political power, then it is not so much Wagner but Nietzsche, for all his aristocratic contempt for antisemites, that takes his place as an objective forerunner of fascism. Closely behind the identification of Hitler with Wagner lurks the sociopolitical thesis of Nazism as a plebeian movement of mass hysteria, its central axis being vulgar antisemitism and quasisocialist envy. Whereas the competing view posits Nazism as, in some vital ways, a Nietzschean project, an elitist response to working-class ascendancy, expressing, if anything, a ressentiment from above. To this particular purpose, of containing mass power, the Nazis did employ the most fanatical and murderous racism and antisemitism; yet these were means to an end, functional and fathomable, in the last analysis, as weapons of class struggle. Just as Hitler is seen by many commentators as a critic of capitalism, so he is decreed an egalitarian, mass leader, rising against the élite. Hitler thus becomes, in many accounts, the epitome of mass ressentiment. Once such a political exegesis of Nazism is adopted, the conclusion with regards to the role of Wagner and Nietzsche is decided as a matter of course, in favor of the latter. A typical example is Yirmiyahu Yovel’s essay, Nietzsche contra Wagner on the Jews, which takes a commending attitude in relation to Nietzsche—“linking Nietzsche’s ideas with Nazism is both absurd and contradictory” (2002: 141)—while condemning Wagner as, essentially, proto-Nazi if “not simply and directly” so. Such decisive conclusions are the natural result of the author’s interpretation of Nazism, which is Nietzschean through and through: The laissez-aller advocated by Wagner appealed to common persons who, carried away by negative passions, hailed their lack of self-mastery as if it were a virtue (“sincerity”) [. . .]. His primitive political psychology suited the vulgar masses that nourished the anti-Semitic movements and later the Nazi political orgies. (2002: 138) Nazism is thus judged the product of mass vulgarity, the discharge of the destructive energy of “common persons” in “political orgies.” In such accounts the vital failure of Nazism appears to be a lack of aristocratic pedigree; Nietzsche may have sanctioned the elimination of the weakly and degenerate and the sacrifice of countless human beings, but he did

The Wandering Jew 387 not mean for it to be executed by a bunch of bad-mannered plebeians.19 The fact is discounted that “common people” of the “vulgar masses” have actually shown themselves more resilient to Nazi demagoguery than the elevated élite, cultural as well as political and economic, that the working class formed the greatest obstacle in Hitler’s path, resisting him well after the élites have flocked behind him. In such interpretations as Yovel’s, and comparable examples could be multiplied many times over, the real victims are turned into ruthless perpetrators, whereas those social groups chiefly responsible for Nazism, the German élites and the bourgeoisie, fundamentally Nietzschean, emerge, to the delight of their contemporary descendants, as the noble victims of a plebeian insurrection. To conclude, while it may be true that the Third Reich was in some ways a political Gesamtkunstwerk, employing Wagner’s sense of grandscale dramaturgy and fulfilling some of the composer’s worst obsessions, it was certainly not the antithesis of Nietzsche’s Partei des Lebens. And, after all, it has not been my intention in these pages to claim Wagner as a laudable moral and political role-model; it was rather to question the wisdom of letting Nietzsche assume such role.

The Jew as Mass; the Jew as Élite The National Socialist worldview thus centrally and significantly linked the Jew with the mass. This phenomenon was instructively commented on by John Carey in a study exploring the sharp reaction to the masses on the part of the European intelligentsia in the first half of the 20th century: The threat of the mass was distinctively a Jewish threat because the mass was controlled by Jews, or so Hitler persuaded himself. Jews owned the press, [. . .] Jews, too, were behind Marxism and socialism, so the doctrine of majority rule [. . .] could be viewed as a Jewish invention. But the idea of the Jews and the mass interfused even more closely in Hitler’s mind than these relatively rational arguments would justify. He envisaged the Jews as a mass that could infiltrate and corrupt other masses. They were, as he imagined them, numberless—there was “no limit to the number of such people”—and they infected the masses like a moral pestilence, a “Black Plague” poisoning human souls. In this respect the Jews could be said to represent, for Hitler, the ultimate mass. [. . .] Amorphous, infinite, subhuman, they became, in Hitler’s mythology, the ideal objective for the various dehumanizing drives which the concept of the mass had come into being to justify. [. . .] Contemplating the extermination of the Jews was made easier by thinking of them as mass. (Carey 1992: 205–206)

388  The Wandering Jew The Jew was associated by the Nazis with most of the phenomena that we have analyzed as the fundamental building blocks of mass society and was often attributed a leading role in that society, in his presumed capacity as the “wire puller.” He was conceived as the spearhead of the mass advance, and dispatching him was thus construed as blunting the edge of that attack. Mass politics—both in its reformist, democratic manifestation, and its insurrectionary form—was linked to the Jews. Mass society and mass culture were perceived as controlled by the Jews. And antisemitic literature across Europe identified feminine traits in the Jew, as well: the Jewish male, specifically, was perceived as a hybrid creature, in which the woman is more dominant than the man.20 Antisemitic literature saw many similarities between Jews, women and homosexuals, in which they identified a threat to the proper boundaries between the sexes. “Jews frequently were portrayed as being soft, weak, and passive,” writes historian Hillel J. Kieval (2001: 145), “but they were also hysterical and slaves to uncontrollable passions, simultaneously unmanly and prone to irrational violence.” This identification was so pervasive that rejection of feminism and espousal of antisemitism were often interchangeable. (See Volkov 2002: 130–140.) Nazi propaganda drew attention to the supposed physical inferiority of the Jewish male body as compared to the perfection of his Aryan opposite. Hitler thus maintained that The girl should get to know her beau. If physical beauty were today not forced entirely into the background by our foppish fashions, the seduction of hundreds of thousands of girls by bow-legged, repulsive Jewish bastards would not be possible. This, too, is in the interest of the nation: that the most beautiful bodies should find one another, and so help to give the nation new beauty. (Hitler 1999: 412)21 These antisemitic motifs were by no means a Nazi, or a German invention; one could find them in the right-wing and fascist writings of many other countries.22 The spread of mass consumerism was also ascribed to Jewish influences, mainly on account of the Jewish ownership of several German department stores, drawing much invective from the right. Jews were likewise identified as central agents in the attack on canonic, classical culture, both as promoters of Kulturbolschewismus, distributing modernist, “degenerate” art, and as champions of modern, urbanized, commercial mass culture, swallowing up the wholesome folk traditions of the national past, that were associated with the peasantry. The latter point might come as a surprise, given the widespread image of the Jews as representatives of élite culture, highly educated people, humiliated by the Nazi riffraff, as is reflected for instance in the traumatic recollections of Viennese Jews, many of whom were sons and daughters

The Wandering Jew 389 of the upper-bourgeoisie, of the way they were forced by Nazi gangs to publicly scrub pavements, and the like. The public abuse of these Jews stemmed, among other things, from the desire to use the Jew as a scapegoat whose marginalization might create a sense of unity and proximity among non-Jewish people of different classes, without having to change the social hierarchy itself. This psycho-social mechanism, whereby Jews were targeted to defuse social tensions, was analyzed by Freud in the late 1920s. What is striking in his account, however, beyond its perspicacity, is the way that Freud, looking at society from the vantage point of the élites eager to preserve social order against the uprising masses—Freud was very much a Nietzschean—could strangely countenance it, recognizing its great social value. Freud began by dismissing the communist option for defusing social tensions, since “aggressiveness was not created by property,” pertaining, rather, to human nature and being inseparable from any civilization. Given that this is the case, the question is only how can social aggression be most beneficently released, without posing a fundamental threat to society? He then considered that “it was always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestation of their aggressiveness,” seeing this as “a convenient and relatively harmless satisfaction of the inclination to aggression, by means of which cohesion between the members of the community is made easier.” “In this respect,” he concluded, “the Jewish people, scattered everywhere, have rendered most useful services to the civilization of the countries that have been their hosts” (Freud 1991: 304–305). This was written, ominously, in 1929. But the stratagem itself, as Freud also indicates, is no Nazi novelty: as noted by Albert Lindemann (1997: 222), the French nationalist Maurice Barrès, adopted antisemitism “which he openly described as attractive since it might bind together left and right, the oppressed lower classes and the privileged upper classes,” thus fostering “national reconciliation.” The rabble attacking the Jews was thus a quintessentially elitist stratagem, sanctioned by prominent defenders of the status quo as a useful means of channeling social resentments to where they least hurt. Jewish himself, but looking at things from the overall perspective of the social system, even Freud had to concede, with uncanny objectivity, that all things considered this was a highly useful arrangement. This image of the Nazis as embodying the vile rabble’s revenge against the cultured élite, similar to Klaus Mann’s views of Nazism that were described above, is strongly present to our days. One important example from the postwar period would be the provocative play Heldenplatz (1988), by Austria’s arguably greatest writer in the second half of the 20th century, Thomas Bernhard. This play somberly portrays postwar Austria as a country where high culture has been eradicated together with the Jewish intellectuals, finding itself under mass dominion, facilitated by the Nazis. The Nazi spirit, in fact, identical with that of the mass, continues

390  The Wandering Jew to haunt Vienna, while culture has been effectively terminated. As one of the protagonists, Professor Robert, puts it: In the past, university lecturers came from the upper-bourgeoisie [Großbürgertum] from the Jewish upper-bourgeoisie, today they come from the spoiled petty-bourgeois proletariat and from the retarded peasantry [. . .] In this small country everything is stupid and spiritual needs have been scaled down to the absolute minimum. (Bernhard 1988: 147–148) Given the important role played by Austrian Jews in the cultural and artistic life of pre-Anschluss Austria, as in Weimar Germany, this attitude is to an extent understandable.23 Alongside his symbolic significance as the inciter of the masses, the Jew was an optimal scapegoat brought to the altar of German national unity. Sacrificing him vouched for the “revolutionary” commitment of the Nazis, their fight against the bourgeoisie. The persecution of the Jew as a representative of the upper bourgeoisie, which Bernhard, among countless others, underlined, betokened a symbolic reconciliation between the élites and the mass, the latter including above all the lower bourgeoisie, competing with the Jews for coveted jobs and looking askance at their successes; for while workers were never immune to antisemitism, the appeal of this phobia was felt much more strongly among the middle classes. None other than Hitler had recognized, in a 1928 speech, the class basis of antisemitism in middle-class resentments: We see [. . .] that in Germany, Judaization progresses in literature, the theater, music, and film; that our medical world is Judaized, and the world of our lawyers too; that in our universities ever more Jews come to the fore. I am not astonished when a proletarian says: “What do I care?” But it is astonishing that in the national bourgeois camp there are people who say: “This is of no interest to us, we don’t understand this anti-Semitism.” They will understand it when their children toil under the whip of Jewish overseers. (In Friedländer 1998: 103) The bourgeois Jew’s public humiliation thus allowed the Nazis to perform a ritual of atonement of sorts, one that leaves the social order unchanged, but testifies nonetheless to the Nazis’ vigorous action against the rapacious and parasitic man of the élite. The Jew’s beaten body absorbs the “sins” of class society and his removal thus helps to clear up the air and permits greater fraternity among Aryans, rich or poor.

The Wandering Jew 391 This association of Jews and Judaism with high culture, in gaining something of a monopoly over the collective memory, makes us forget the fact that the Nazis saw in the Jew not just the representative of high culture but in fact, to a large extent, its sworn enemy. In the musical domain, for example, Judaism was often affiliated to jazz—perhaps also on account of such movies as The Jazz Singer. This received a famous graphic expression (Figure 7.2) in the placard designed for the opening of the Nazi exhibition taking place in Düsseldorf in 1938 in denunciation of “degenerate music.” Here were succinctly represented some of the basic features of Nazi ideology: racism, anti-Marxism—the background surrounding the saxophonist, his tie, his suit’s lapels, and his hat’s ribbon are all red—antisemitism and hostility to mass culture. Antisemitism therefore served the Nazis for achieving seemingly contradictory purposes, underlining both anti-elitism and anti-massification.

Figure 7.2 “Entartete Musik”

392  The Wandering Jew But whereas the former part is repeatedly highlighted, the latter is marginalized or forgotten outright. Given this pervasive bias, I wish to conclude this chapter, and this study, with a testimony, which is interesting because it gives us a very different idea about what fascism actually was than its usual association with the masses. The latter view was advanced almost always by theorists, writers and artists of eminent social origins, belonging to the social and cultural élites; in Germany its major representatives were nearly always from the ranks of the Bildungsbürgertum. We are dealing therefore with a theory about the masses put forth by those who do not particularly appreciate them to begin with, and who find it convenient to portray them negatively. Just as often, such theories were linked to a strong disdain of mass consumption, which was denounced for its hedonism, political passivity and even affinities with fascism. It is therefore useful to consult someone with a different perspective, an outsider to the milieu we have described. The person in question, Salman Schocken was, to begin with, an Ostjude, an Eastern Jew, thus belonging to a group that the established German Jewry often scorned, and with whom they denied any familiarity or resemblance; he was, moreover, owner of a major chain of department stores. Under the Nazis, Schocken was forced to emigrate and his stores were expropriated. Yet unlike many other Jews, he was never willing to add Nazism to the masses’ debit column. On the contrary, as his biographer notes, he believed in “a quasimetaphysical chasm separating the vicious ranks of the bourgeoisie from the mass of decent, hardworking, and honest workers” (David 2003: 374). Visiting Germany shortly after the war, he was aggrieved by the suffering the war had brought to lower-class Germans whom he considered victims, not perpetrators. Salman [. . .] was stunned by the ruined cities, the swollen bellies of children [. . .]. Suburban middle-class areas, whose inhabitants had supported Hitler nearly to a man, were spared most of the bombing raids. It was the working-class neighborhoods, situated as they were in the industrial areas of the cities, that bore the full brunt of the British and American bombs. “I will never in my life forget the line of begging women and children near the entrance to my wrecked stores,” he stated. (364) Schocken was thus the representative of a pro-mass and pro-consumption approach that yielded a totally different view of Nazism than the one that was to develop into a predominant paradigm in the decades to come. To him, Nazism was not a product of mass hysteria but the rotten fruit of the German élites and middle classes.

The Wandering Jew 393

Notes 1 Garau (2011) provides a broad survey of Italian racism and antisemitism since the late 19th century, discussing the way these have flown into fascism, thus refusing the innocuous reputation of Italian fascism in that regard. 2 Bauer (2001: 14–38) critically examines the claims that the Shoah cannot in principle be understood, surveying a number of possible explanatory paradigms. 3 For the original argument, see Volkov (1978). This is farther developed in subsequent publications, for example Volkov (2006). 4 For a book examining the historical relationship between the Jews and capitalism, see Muller (2010). 5 The following two studies explore in detail the role played by anti-communist immigrants such as Rosenberg (who was a Baltic German) in spreading the association of Bolshevism with Judaism in German antisemitic circles: Kellogg (2005); Piper (2007). 6 It is customary in Nietzsche scholarship to explain away the fascist and Nazi attraction to Nietzsche by appealing to his sister’s harmful intervention, and the vast changes that as editor she allegedly introduced into his works, changes that have unduly created the impression that he was an antisemite. This strategy presents Elizabeth as a nearly demonic figure while Nietzsche is correspondingly washed clean of all proto-fascism. For an incisive critique of this common maneuver, exposing it as generating a convenient myth, see Holub (2002). 7 This attack on the Jew as arch-revolutionary and proto-Bolshevik was central to many far-right and fascist positions. Charles Maurras saw the Jews, like Nietzsche, as “responsible for the egalitarian principle,” although he also accused them for being “plutocrats” (Harrison 1967: 149). José Antonio accused the Jewish Marx of dirtying and plebeianizing socialism: “But if the first socialists were gentlemen, almost poets, socialism acquired a hideous blackness [negrura] with the appearance of that Jew called Karl Marx” (Primo de Rivera 1976: 231). Antonio Vallejo-Nágera, another Spanish fascist, defined the racial stock of the Spanish Marxist “as Jewish-Moorish, a blood mixture that distinguishes him psychologically from foreign Marxism, which is purely Semitic” (In Puértolas 2008: 353). Ernesto Giménez Caballero (2005: 207; emphasis in the original), for his part, denounced the “turbid, voracious, revolutionary and heretic” modern spirit, “the wandering and oriental spirit of Israel. The Jewish sprit.” In the “Declaration on Race” issued by the Grand Council of [Italian] Fascism, on October 6, 1938, “world Jewry” was denounced as “the animating force of anti-fascism in all camps” and linked with Bolshevism (In Maffei 2010: 260). 8 I changed Ralph Mannheim’s translation from “destroying,” to “extermination”— Vernichtung in the German original. 9 As Shirer (1983: 143) argued early on, attempting to define “the intellectual roots of the Third Reich.” 10 For a thoughtful and comprehensive discussion of Marxist theory and the holocaust, in which the idea is categorically rejected that the extermination of the Jews can be accounted for as reflecting the economic needs of German capitalism, see Alex Callinicos, “Plumbing the Depths: Marxism and the Holocaust,” The Yale Journal of Criticism, 14, 2, 2001, pp. 385–414. 11 For the Malthusian footing of Nazi eugenics, see Ross (1998, especially 71–72). 12 See also, Braun (2000: 181–184). Golo Mann (1992: 471), similarly, described Nietzsche as follows: “He was independent; no success-intoxicated

394  The Wandering Jew representative of his time but its critic. And a more clairvoyant critic there has never existed, at no time and in no other country.” 13 For a nuanced analysis of lingering antisemitic overtones in the rhetoric of German Socialists, see Fischer (2007). This study also compellingly defends Marx himself from charges of antisemitism. 14 The staunch elitism of the young Bauer is usefully summarized in a recent study: [T]he socialist Otto Lünning presented the contentious issues in schematic terms: “In order to get rid of the French Revolution, communism, and Feuerbach, he [Bruno Bauer] shrieks ‘masses, masses, masses!,’ and again: ‘masses, masses, masses!’ ” The Opposition had become manifest [. . .] On the one side, there were the French revolution, communism, and Feuerbach; and on the other, criticism of the revolution, of the masses, and of Gattung (Tomba 2013: 22). 15 The much contested case of Soviet persecutions of Jews, mainly under Stalin, cannot be dealt with here. We are presently concerned with Western antisemitism, particularly its German (and Austrian) variant. For a discussion of Stalin’s attitude toward the Jews, see Lindemann (1997: 448–455). 16 Which is not to say that Wagner was the main, let alone sole influence behind Hitler’s antisemitism as Rose appears to assume. 17 I am in essential agreement on this point with Urs Marti who argued that Nazism was a continuation of Wagner’s Bayreuth project, at the same time that this continuation was more formal than substantial, having to do with a grand-scale aestheticizing of politics, with political religiosity and the cult of the leader as an artist seer, rather than with the more concrete political goals (Marti 2008: 71). Interestingly, the author goes on to argue (72) that “only now does it become possible to appreciate how much more refined, and precisely on that account more threatening, Nietzsche’s idea of great politics is, as compared with that of Wagner.” Nietzsche, Marti argues, emerges as a proto “neoliberal thinker” supporting an insidious sociopolitical order in which human beings are subordinated to a higher power that remains hidden and inscrutable, using them as pawns and running roughshod over their individual liberties (72–73). And while this is a keen insight, and a vital corrective to the widespread notion of Nietzsche as an enlightened thinker, I believe that precisely such a mechanism was very much in action already during The Third Reich, conveniently camouflaged by the colorful Wagnerian paraphernalia one could observe on the stage. 18 Let that scholar be fairly warned that such campaign is not likely to succeed even half as well as Kaufmann’s, given that Wagner has very little to offer the élites in comparison with Nietzsche, but much that is decidedly unhelpful: his plebeian vulgarity, the championing of popular culture or, most irksome, the insistence that slaves be set free. 19 Consider also John Farrenkopf’s (1993: 180) commendation of Oswald Spengler’s “rejection of Hitler as a plebeian figure whom he correctly regarded as unfit to lead Germany.” Unsurprisingly, given the author’s ideological standpoint, we also find there (181) the following reflection, in which mass culture is put on a par with the worst historic catastrophes: “Our century has already witnessed world wars, economic depression, totalitarianism, genocide, the fragmentation of the social fabric of the West and the decay of its urban life, and the rise of a mass, popular culture—one shudders to think what awaits us as the global ecological crisis intensifies.” 20 A well-known and highly influential example of that trope was put forth by Otto Weininger, an Austrian-Jew, whose doctoral dissertation, Sex and Character, held both women and Jews in contempt, questioning the latter’s

The Wandering Jew 395 masculinity. See, for example, Hyams (1995) and Robertson (1998). On the vital importance of the image of the Jew as a feminine, defective man, and as associated with crowd unrest, in the context of interwar France, see Forth (2004). 21 On the Nazi castigating of the Jewish body as different, weak and ugly, see also Neumann (2002: 218–228). 22 The following study, for instance, discusses the way interwar French rightwingers, like their German counterparts, saw Jews as feminine: Sanos (2012). 23 At the same time this portrayal very problematically, if typically, ascribes the success of German Nazism in Austria to the lower orders and the workers, who have supposedly rebelled against high culture. In reality, Pan-German nationalism in Austria during the years of the republic that followed the First World War and under the so-called “Austro-fascism” or “clerical fascism” of Dollfuβ and Schuschnigg, was fueled mainly by well-educated and conservative circles, whereas the masses of the workers supported socialism. This emerges very clearly, for instance, from a report issued by Chancellor Schuschnigg in November 1935 to the Vatican, explaining the political situation in Austria. There it was reported (Maderthaner and Maier 2004: 77) that German nationalism and support for an Anschluβ came mainly from “members of the intelligentsia professions [Intelligenzberufe] [. . .], from gymnastics and singing enthusiasts and from people employed in commerce,” as well as those of “conservative outlook.”

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396  The Wandering Jew Conway, Daniel W. (2002) “Ecce Caesar: Nietzsche’s Imperial Aspirations,” in Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy, Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich, eds., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 173–195. David, Anthony (2003) Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken, 1877–1959, New York: Metropolitan. De Felice, Renzo (1972) Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo, Turin: Giulio Einaudi. Dean, Martin (2010) Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1933–1945, Cambridge: Cambridge university Press. Diethe, Carol (1999) Historical Dictionary of Nietzscheanism, Lanham, MD and London: The Scarecrow Press. Eckart, Dietrich (1924) “Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin: Ein Zwiegespräch zwischen Adolf Hitler und mir,” (published posthumously). http://der-stuermer.org/bolmosesleninde.htm Last accessed May 2017. Farrenkopf, John (1993) “Nietzsche, Spengler and the Politics of Cultural Despair,” Interpretation, 20, 2: 165–185. Fischer, Lars (2007) The Socialist Response to Antisemitism in Imperial Germany, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Forth, Christopher E. (2004) The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Freud, Sigmund (1991) Civilization, Society and Religion, James Strachey, trans., Harmondsworth: Penguin. Friedländer, Saul (1998) Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933–1939, London: Phoenix. Garau, Salvatore (2011) “Between ‘Spirit’ and ‘Science’: The Emergence of Italian Fascist Antisemitism through the 1920s and 1930s,” in Fascism and the Jews: Italy and Britain, Salvatore Garau and Alexander Tille, eds., Middlesex and Portland: Vallentine Mitchell: 41–65. Giménez Caballero, Ernesto (2005) Casticismo, Nacionalismo Y Vanguardia: Antología, 1927–1935, José-Carlos Mainer, ed., Madrid: Fundación Santander Central Hispano. Gregor, James A. (1999) Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Hanloser, Gerhard (2003) Krise und Antisemitismus. Eine Geschichte in drei Stationen von der Gründerzeit über die Weltwirtschaftskrise bis heute, Münster: Unrast. Harrison, John R. (1967) The Reactionaries. Yeats—Lewis—Pound—Eliot— Lawrence: A Study of the Anti-Democratic Intelligentsia, New York: Schocken. Heine, Heinrich (1997) Sämtliche Schriften, Klaus Briegleb, ed., Munich: DTV. Herf, Jeffrey (2006) The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Hitler, Adolf (1999) Mein Kampf, Ralph Mannheim, trans., Boston and New York: Mariner Books. Holub, Robert C. (2002) “The Elisabeth Legend: The Cleansing of Nietzsche and the Sullying of His Sister,” in Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy, Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich, eds., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 215–234.

The Wandering Jew 397 Hyams, Barbara (1995) “Weininger and Nazi Ideology,” in Jews and Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger, Barbara Hyams and Nancy Harrowitz, eds., Philadelphia: Temple University Press: 155–169. Julius, Anthony (2010) Trials of Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kellogg, Michael (2005) The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kershaw, Ian (1998) Hitler—1889–1936: Hubris, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Kieval, Hillel J. (2001) “Imagining ‘Masculinity’ in the Jewish Fin de Siècle,” in Jews and Gender: The Challenge to Hierarchy, Jonathan Frankel ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press: 142–155. Levin, David J. (1998) Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lindemann, Albert S. (1997) Esau’s Tears—Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Losurdo, Domenico (2008) “Vor der Kontroverse: Nietzsche als Anhänger Wagners,” in Nietzsche und Wagner: Geschichte und Aktualität eines Kulturkonflikts, Armin Wildermuth, ed., Zurich: orell füssli: 167–192. Low, David (1949) Years of Wrath: A Cartoon History, London: Victor Gollancz. Maderthaner, Wolfgang, and Michaela Maier, eds. (2004) “Der Führer bin ich selbst”: Engelbert Dollfuβ—Benito Mussolini, Briefwechsel, Vienna: Löcker. Maffei, Ricardo (2010) Introduzione al fascismo: Aspetti e momenti del totalitarismo italiano, Brescia: La Scuola. Mann, Golo (1992) Deutsche Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Marti, Urs (2008)“Wagner und Nietzsche—oder: Die Aussen- and die Innenseite grosser Politik,” in Nietzsche und Wagner: Geschichte und Aktualität eines Kulturkonflikts, Armin Wildermuth, ed., Zurich: orell füssli: 57–73. Martin, Bernd (1981) “Judenverfolgung und -vernichtung unter der nationalsozialistischen Diktatur,” in Die Juden als Minderheit in der Geschichte, Bernd Martin and Ernst Schulin, eds., Munich: DTV. Marx, Karl (1992) Early Writings, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mayer, Arno J. (1990) Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History, New York: Pantheon. Muller, Jerry Z. (2010) Capitalism and the Jews, Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Neumann, Boaz (2002) The Nazi Worldview: Space, Body, Language, Haifa: Haifa University Press [In Hebrew]. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1967) The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, Walter Kaufmann, trans., New York: Vintage. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1968) The Will to Power, Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, trans., New York: Vintage. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1986) Sämtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe in 8 Bänden, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, eds., Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1990a) Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, Richard Hollingdale, trans., Harmondsworth: Penguin.

398  The Wandering Jew Nietzsche, Friedrich (1990b) Beyond Good and Evil, Richard J. Hollingdale, trans., Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1992) Ecce Homo, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1994) On the Genealogy of Morality, Carol Diethe, trans., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Piper, Ernst (2007) Alfred Rosenberg. Hitlers Chefideologe, Munich: Pantheon. Postone, Moishe (1980) “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the German Reaction to ‘Holocaust’,” New German Critique, 19, 1: 97–115. Primo de Rivera, José Antonio (1976) Escritos y Discursos: Obras Completas (1922–1936), Agustín del Río Cisneros, ed., Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Políticos [digitalized PDF file, 2004]. Puértolas, Julio Rodríguez (2008) Historia de la Literatura Fascista Española, Madrid: Akal. Pulzer, Peter (1988) The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany & Austria, London: Peter Halban. Pyta, Wolfram (2015) Hitler. Der Künstler als Politiker und Feldherr: Eine Herrschaftsanalyse, Munich: Siedler. Kindle edition. Robertson, Ritchie (1998) “Historicizing Weininger: The Nineteenth-Century German Image of the Feminized Jew,” in Modernity, Culture and “the Jew”, Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus, eds., Stanford, CA: Stanford university Press: 23–36. Rose, Paul Lawrence (1992) Wagner: Race and Revolution, London: Faber & Faber. Ross, Eric B. (1998) The Malthus Factor—Poverty, Politics and Population in Capitalist Development, London and New York: Zed Books. Roth, Joseph (2003) Die Filiale der Hölle auf Erden: Schriften aus der Emigration, Cologne: KiWi. Sanos, Sandrine (2012) The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism, and Gender in 1930s France, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Shirer, William (1983) The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, (orig. 1950), New York: Fawcett Crest. Smith, Woodruff D. (1986) The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stille, Alexander (1991) Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism, New York: Summit Books. Tomba, Massimiliano (2013) Marx’s Temporalities, Brill: Leiden and Boston. Trevor-Roper, Hugh, ed. (2000) Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944, New York: Enigma. Volkov, Shulamit (1978) “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code: Reflections on the History and Historiography of Antisemitism in Imperial Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 23, 1: 25–46. Volkov, Shulamit (2002) The Magic Circle: Germans, Jews and Antisemites, TelAviv: Am Oved [In Hebrew]. Volkov, Shulamit (2006) Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wagner, Richard (1995) Art and Politics, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Weiner, Marc A. (1995) Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination, Lincoln and Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.

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8 Epilogue Nietzsche, the Left and the Last Humans

The most resolute objection to this study’s construal of interwar fascism as a revolt against the Last Humans might come from the ranks of leftwing and liberal Nietzscheans. In the postwar period the right-wing Nietzschean tradition, far from disappearing, remained quite prolific; yet it was displaced from the center of the political discourse and from respected academic scholarship to the margins, where it maintained something of an underground existence. Since frontal assaults on democracy and egalitarianism and open vindications of hierarchy and authoritarianism were no longer salonfähig, right-Nietzscheans old and young had to operate, for the most part, outside of the political and academic mainstream. The New Right in many Western countries—which was and remains overwhelmingly also a neoNietzschean movement1—conceived of the postwar decades as an “interregnum” of enemy rule, when patient work of regrouping and rearming was needed (a routine occasionally enlivened to be sure, in some cases, by spectacular acts of nihilistic terrorism). The task, as framed by one of the movement’s leading animators, Julius Evola, was to “ride the tiger” until such time as more forceful action would be possible. As shown by Roger Griffin (1999) in a fascinating, unpublished paper, such authors bid their time in eager expectation of a sudden turnaround, the “Umschlag or svolta, the long-awaited transformation from nihilism into the new era,” which “can take place at any moment” given the “spherical nature of time.”2 Compared to the rather obscure existence led by the right-Nietzscheans, postwar theory was dominated by glamorous and highly successful leftwing Nietzscheans of various stamps: Critical Theorists, existentialists, postmodernists, liberals and so on and so forth. But now, right-wing Nietzscheanism seems in the process of making a comeback. Can leftNietzscheans successfully defend their position against their reactionary counterparts? To which of these camps does Nietzsche ultimately belong? There are several basic arguments traditionally made by left-Nietzscheans to justify their espousal of the philosopher. In what follows I wish, with

Epilogue 401 necessary brevity, to address these claims and point to what I think are their fundamental weaknesses.

The Birth of the Last Human Out of the Spirit of Capitalism First, Nietzsche is often seen by left-wing devotees as an important critic of capitalism. His critique is deemed important because it seems to complement the socialist and Marxist critiques or even, as argued by some, to go beyond them. “In certain critical respects,” contended Adorno, “Nietzsche progressed further than Marx, insofar as he had a greater aversion vis-à-vis the bourgeois” (In Marcuse 2001: 134). Nietzsche becomes an important forerunner of Critical Theory in that his gaze was not fixed on the workings of the economy, the distribution of riches, or the control of the means of production, but rather broadened to include fundamental existential and ethical concerns. It is thus apparently with Nietzsche rather than with Marx—the young Marx notwithstanding—that it is possible to tackle head on such issues as the instrumental reason of capitalism, its accompanying standardization and quantification processes, its enshrinement of productivity for productivity’s sake, the disenchantment of a materialistic, post-religious world, the subjugation of cultural pursuits and the pernicious narrowing of individual autonomy; with Nietzsche, too, one can criticize such lamentable epiphenomena of capitalism as commercialized mass culture and rampant consumerism. Thus, if such interpretations do not totally deny the unsavory features in Nietzsche’s thought—although they are seldom looked at from a range too close for comfort—they query the logic of focusing precisely on these conservative or reactionary aspects, which after all can always be attenuated by reminding ourselves that Nietzsche was a child of his times and shared some its prejudices, when there is so much in Nietzsche that is good and useful for a radical confrontation with capitalist society and culture. This extremely common line of argument, running through the works of several generations of left-Nietzschean interpreters, is flawed, because it is based on the assumption that there were—at least—two Nietzsches, and if the one was problematic and should therefore be ignored, the second is highly valuable and should count as an ally. This is a mistake, I argue, for in reality there was only one Nietzsche; what remains fundamentally ambivalent is rather capitalism. Capitalism, as argued by its foremost critic and most radical interpreter, Karl Marx, is a highly complex and contradictory phenomenon that unites progressive and reactionary elements—moments and vectors that push to expand human possibilities and create the potential for emancipation and forces that severely shackle human potential. With that dialectical analysis in mind,

402  Epilogue Marx had variously referred to capitalism as “the living contradiction” or “the moving contradiction,” and often highlighted what he termed “the civilizing aspects of capital.” Among those civilizing aspects are to be counted such features as the socialization of work, the unprecedented enhancement of productivity, the (at least potential) shortening of the working day, made possible by mechanization, democratization of knowledge and culture, and the expansion of needs and of consumption. This means that, for all his opposition to capitalism, Marx considers this mode of production an indispensable phase in the creation of “the social individual,” a highly significant concept that has not received the close attention it merits by scholars of Marx, remaining in general under theorized and understudied. The emergence of the social individual envisaged by Marx, while a mere embryonic phenomenon to be fully materialized in the future, is unthinkable without the thorough socialization of production brought about by properly modern, large-scale industry:3 In this transformation, it is [. . .] the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body—it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. (Marx 1993: 705) Mass production, for Marx, was demeaning but also potentially emancipating: it propelled the socialization of work to a degree never before imagined, up to the point where no longer the isolated individual creates but society, society becoming the individual. In that regard, too, capitalism was sowing, against its intentions, the seeds of the future.4 Paradoxically, Marx, the most trenchant critic of capitalism, was much more sanguine about the future of “civilization” than most of his pro-capitalist bourgeois counterparts. And not merely on account of his faith in the imminent proletarian revolution which will brush aside bourgeois society and its iniquities. It is important to acknowledge the full import of the fact that for Marx the prime revolutionary force in bourgeois society, and in many ways against it, is “the living contradiction,” capital itself (Marx 1993: 421). These insights, first found in the preparatory work the Grundrisse, were later integrated into Marx’s mature argument, unfolded in Capital. I provide just two examples: Modern industry never views or treats the existing form of a production process as the definitive one. Its technical basis is therefore revolutionary, whereas all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative. [. . .] [L]arge scale industry, through its very

Epilogue 403 catastrophes, makes the recognition of variation of labour and hence of the fitness of the worker for the maximum number of different kinds of labour into a question of life and death. [. . .] That monstrosity, the disposable working population held in reserve, in misery, [. . .] must be replaced by the individual man who is absolutely available for the different kinds of labour required of him; the partially developed individual, who is merely the bearer of a specialized social function, must be replaced by the totally developed individual. (Marx 1990: 617–618) This “transformation,” Marx adds immediately, “has developed spontaneously from the foundation provided by large-scale industry.” Similarly, in the third volume of Capital, Marx emphasizes (1991: 958) that it is one of the civilizing aspects of capital that it extorts this surplus labour in a manner and in conditions that are more advantageous to social relations and to the creation of elements for a new and higher formation than was the case under the earlier forms of slavery, serfdom, etc. Significantly, in the very next page of this edition, Marx goes on to delineate the move from a realm of necessity to a realm of freedom. Capitalism points, and actively moves, beyond itself. This aside into Marx’s theory of historical development under capitalism was needed in order to allow us to understand better what was at stake in Nietzsche’s anti-capitalism, such as it was. For it is my contention that to the extent that Nietzsche took capitalism to task it was precisely on account of its “civilizing aspects,” as Marx referred to them. And that Nietzsche’s notion of the Last Human was designed to ridicule and dystopianize the very same “social individual” on whom Marx had pinned such great hopes. This is not to say that Nietzsche was directly responding to Marx. To be sure, he had a strong interest in socio-economic matters and was fairly well read in contemporary literature dealing with political economy; indeed, while he may not have read Marx’s writings directly, he knew of Marx’s economic and political theories from several sources, some of which have discussed and cited Marx extensively, and in one of which he had even underlined Marx’s name (for details see Brobjer, 2002). More significant, however, than any direct response to Marxism, is the fact that both great thinkers were addressing the same processes with remarkable acumen and diagnosing them, moreover, rather similarly, but from the opposing sides of the social divide. Hence what Marx affirmed as a vision of an emancipated, empowered and egalitarian humanity, Nietzsche loathingly rejected as a social nightmare where the puny “herd animal” reigns supreme, displacing human greatness and individualism. For both thinkers, instructively, the social

404  Epilogue individual and the Last Human were not quite a reality as yet but existed only in embryo; it then became a matter, for Marx, of facilitating the emergence of the social individual via a revolutionary social transformation, and for Nietzsche of impeding any such prospect by advocating a counter-revolution of the threatened masters, based on the reevaluation of all values and the notion of the Overman. With respect to capitalism, Marx was counting on its internal dynamics to usher in the desired transformation and bring about a new social order. Nietzsche, on the contrary, longed for a capitalism purified of its internal contradictions, a static one, shorn of any possibility of transcendence. Hence his quietist, circular notions of Amor fati and the eternal recurrence of the same, ruling out any progress, not because it is a fiction—on the contrary, Nietzsche knew the historical social advances of the emancipated slaves to be very real indeed—but because he did not countenance such an outcome and wholeheartedly desired that it may yet be averted. As reflected, for instance, in the last section of The Will to Power, a highly charged passage (1885) from which I extract just a few sentences. To be noticed are the mythopoeic justification of a capitalism that somehow stays still in spite of its perpetual, frenzied movement, the refutation of any progress, and, finally, the fact that Nietzsche openly presents this not as an objective observation of reality, but as the promotion of a counter-reality, designed to overcome what is actually going on. Nietzsche (1968: 549–550) is not showing us the world as it is, but as he would like it to be: And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; [. . .] out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, [. . .] blessing itself as that which must return eternally [. . .]: this, my Dionysian world [. . .], without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal, unless a ring feels good will toward itself. In reality, however, as Nietzsche was all too painfully aware, the world seemed to have a very clearly demarcated goal since, as he himself argued at nearly the same time, it was moving toward the depressing Last Human. Thus, if Nietzsche was highly ambivalent about capitalism, it should be finally realized that he rejected precisely those elements and patterns of development characteristic of capitalism which pressed beyond it or, at the very least, seemed destined to transform capitalism into a far more egalitarian and peaceful system. Nietzsche’s “anti-capitalism” was directed against everything that might eventually eat into the foundations of the class system and veer towards democracy and socialism. He lamented precisely what Marx deemed capital’s civilizing aspects: massification, democratization of society and culture, expansion of needs and mass consumption and so on and so forth.5 Conversely,

Epilogue 405 he considered those elements that Marx wished to see terminated, such as exploitation, competition and class hierarchy eternal and immutable (alternatively put: he believed them to be potentially transient but desired their permanence).6 A few quick reminders of Nietzsche’s basic adherence to what may be called capital’s barbaric aspects will here have to suffice: [L]ife itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation [. . .]. On no point, however, is the common European consciousness more reluctant to learn than it is here; everywhere one enthuses, even under scientific disguises, about coming states of society in which there will be “no more exploitation”—that sounds to my ears like promising a life in which there will be no organic functions. “Exploitation” does not pertain to a corrupt or imperfect or primitive society: it pertains to the essence of the living thing as a fundamental organic function, it is a consequence of the intrinsic will to power which is precisely the will to life. (Nietzsche 1990: 194) And elsewhere, in direct refutation of socialism, Nietzsche discarded as unnatural any attempt to transcend two of capitalism’s most fundamental prerequisites—private property and accumulation: But there will always be too many who have possessions for socialism to signify more than an attack of sickness—and those who have possessions are of one mind on one article of faith: “one must possess something in order to be something.” But this is the oldest and healthiest of all instincts: I should add, “one must want to have more than one has in order to become more.” For this is the doctrine preached by life itself to all that has life: the morality of development. To have and to want to have more—growth, in one word—that is life itself. (Nietzsche 1968: 77) Finally, to those who see Nietzsche, if not as a left-wing critic, at least as an aristocratic defender of individualism against capitalist homogenization, the following passage may provide a pause for thought: What does the Renaissance prove? That the reign of the individual has to be brief. The squandering is too great; the very possibility of collecting and capitalizing is lacking; and exhaustion follows immediately. These are times when everything is spent, when the very strength is spent with which one collects, capitalizes, and piles riches upon riches.— (Nietzsche 1968: 57)

406  Epilogue In short, far from there being two Nietzsches, a bad, conservative one, which one may safely ignore, and a good, anti-capitalist Nietzsche, to which the left can connect, both Nietzsche’s affirmations and critiques of capitalism were directed against socialism. In that, too, Nietzsche anticipated, and informed, the fascist critique of capitalist modernity. So, paradoxically, to the limited extent that Nietzsche rejected capitalism he should be opposed rather than welcomed into the left-wing camp.

Nietzsche and the Useful Herd Second, Nietzsche, precisely qua elitist, is perceived as valuable in countering fascism—construed as a plebeian eruption of resentment, a form of pernicious populism. This argument has always been in circulation, as we on many occasions witnessed throughout the study, but has recently reemerged with renewed vigor apropos Donald Trump’s dismaying success. Given that on the right Trump’s rise has been sometimes hailed as a triumph for Nietzscheanism, left-wing and liberal Nietzsche scholars were quick to retort that Nietzsche in fact would have loathingly rejected the rambunctious 45th President of the United States, and that his philosophy can help us to expose Trumpism as vile rabble-rousing, fueled by the arriviste’s envy of the élites. The eminent US American Critical Theorist Douglas Kellner (2017) has argued that the Trump phenomenon could be thoroughly deconstructed with recourse to Nietzsche’s notion of ressentiment and his opposition to demagoguery.7Another Nietzsche scholar, Hugo Drochon (2016), assures us that “Trump represents everything Nietzsche hated. The philistinism, the mediocrity, the worshipping of money for its own sake—this is exactly the opposite of what Nietzsche advocated.” Jacob Golomb (2017), for his part, insisted that there is nothing in common between Nietzsche and Trump [. . .]. One who hates, molest and abuses his wealth or political power cannot be regarded by Nietzsche as belonging to the small elite of people endowed with positive power patterns. Add to this Trump’s deep feelings of resentment and vengefulness and you definitely approach an Untermensch that is a very far cry from the ideal of Übermensch. He then confidently contends that “Molesting, abusing, swearing, and intimidating, do not belong to the behavioral patterns of the fictitious Zarathustra who personifies in Nietzsche the sublime and authentic personality of a Mensch (also in its recurrent Yiddish connotations).” This is a deeply problematical characterization, for a Mensch in the Yiddish sense is such precisely insofar as he or she abides by the basic tenets of kindness, compassion and altruism, sticking to the old notions of good and evil of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the very “petty virtues,” and “petty prudences, ” that Nietzsche’s prophet urged his

Epilogue 407 followers to overcome (Nietzsche 1969: 298). Moreover, “sublime and authentic” as Zarathustra may be, “molesting, abusing, swearing, and intimidating” emphatically do belong to his “behavioral patterns,” as will be recalled: And like a wind I will one day blow among them and with my spirit take away the breath from their spirit: thus my future will have it. Truly, Zarathustra is a strong wind to all flatlands; and he offers his advice to all that spews and spits: “Take care not to spit against the wind!” (Nietzsche 1969: 122) In truth, to define Trump as “authoritarian populist” (Kellner), is unwittingly to Nietzscheanize him, for Nietzsche can by no means be regarded as an unreserved enemy of populism, but only of its democratic and egalitarian variant. A populism, even a nominally “democratic” one that serves to discipline the masses, by contrast, he looked upon very favorably, which is attested to both by his actual political preferences—seldom consulted by his defenders—and by his political theory. With regards to the former, as has been compellingly demonstrated by Don Dombowsky, on the spectrum of 19th-century political choices, Nietzsche’s politics would best be described as Bonapartist, in the sense that he favored the strongman, imperialist and elitist solution to social disorder exemplified by the Bonapartist rulers and pretenders to the French crown throughout the century, from the original Napoleon, an “authoritarian populist” if ever there was one, through Napoleon III, and up to the unsuccessful pretender Prince Victor, Prince Napoleon (Napoleon V). Nietzsche’s support for the latter in the late 1880s shows that even amidst Bonapartists and Caesarists Nietzsche stands out as an extremist, for Napoleon V was a die-hard reactionary, as compared to his somewhat more liberal challenger (Dombowsky 2014: 122). Such political preferences may come as a surprise only to those who take at face value Nietzsche’s affirmations that he is the last antipolitical German and do not see that he disdained mass politics only inasmuch as it served the masses, and was keen to intervene in it, even if that meant playing the democratic game, to steer it on to a hierarchic course. Undermining Caesar, democracy was pernicious: “I believe that the great, advancing and unstoppable democratic movement of Europe,” Nietzsche wrote in the mid 1880s, fundamentally signifies only the tremendous, instinctive conspiracy of the whole herd against everything that is shepherd, beast of prey, hermit and Caesar, [. . .] a long- drawn-out slave revolt [. . .] against every kind of master, ultimately against the very concept of ‘master.’ (Nietzsche 2003: 68)

408  Epilogue Harnessed by a would-be Caesar, however, and used to foster grand politics, imperialism and Rangordnung, democracy was considered altogether differently: And would it not in fact be a kind of goal, redemption and justification of the democratic movement itself if someone came along who made use of that movement: if, at last, its new and sublime elaboration of slavery [. . .] were joined by that higher species of masterful and imperial spirits which now needed this new slavery. Needed it for new, previously impossible prospects, for its prospects? For its tasks? (Nietzsche 2003: 68–69) Democracy turned against itself was a welcome prospect: From now on conditions will favor more extensive structures of mastery, the like of which have never yet been seen. [. . .] [I]t has become possible for international dynasties to emerge which would set themselves the task of rearing a master race, the future “masters of the earth”—a new, tremendous aristocracy built upon the harshest selflegislation, in which the will of philosophical men of violence and artist tyrants is made to last for thousands of years: a higher species of men, thanks to the superiority of their willing, knowing, wealth and influence, would make use of democratic Europe as their most flexible and tractable tool to take the destinies of the earth in hand, to sculpt at “man” himself as artists. In short: the time is coming where we will learn to think differently about politics. (Nietzsche 2003: 71; emphases added) Consider, finally, the following endorsement of democracy and of the herd animal on Nietzsche’s part: I am glad about the military development of Europe [. . .]. The barbarian in each of us is affirmed; also the wild beast. [. . .] I have as yet found no reason for discouragement. Whoever has preserved, and bred in himself, a strong will, together with an ample spirit, has more favorable opportunities than ever. For the trainability of men has become very great in this democratic Europe; men who learn easily and adapt themselves easily are the rule: the herd animal, even very intelligent, has been prepared. Whoever can command finds those who must obey: I am thinking, e.g., of Napoleon and Bismarck. (Nietzsche 1968: 78–79) Forming rebellious troops, the herd is a phenomenon of dismay, endangering culture; rightly disciplined and coordinated, it proves immensely

Epilogue 409 useful. Detestable, evidently, was not the herd as such, but only the shepherd-less herd.

An Extended Family of Nietzscheans Finally, if, as I have argued, for all his dazzling apparent paradoxes there is only one Nietzsche, and he is not an ally of the oppressed, not a philosopher who could possibly empower the masses, does this mean that leftwing Nietzscheans are simply wrong? That their interpretation somehow ignores or downplays something fundamental about the Nietzschean texts and that a sufficient amount of close reading and focused attention on Nietzsche’s politics will ultimately serve to correct this misperception and establish the fact that, politically, Nietzsche is irredeemable for leftwing purposes? Given the enormous effort put by many scholars in the course of the last hundred years or so to do precisely that, to zoom in on Nietzsche’s political utterances, situate his thought in the historical context in which he was writing, systematically link up the disparate elements in his fiercely anti-democratic and anti-socialistic program, as well as document the devastating applications of his thought against the left, most notably during the fascist era, such a supposition seems unlikely.8 In the end, one is driven to consider the idea that left-Nietzscheanism is not so much a (misguided) reading of Nietzsche as it is a social position. And that, possibly, just as Nietzsche is ultimately one, left- and rightNietzscheanism are not really totally incompatible positions but, for all their feuds, form part of an extended family. Seen thus, the Nietzscheans on all sides of the political spectrum, left, right and center, appear ultimately to be relatives, albeit embarrassed and awkward ones, often not on speaking terms. Such a theory will necessarily gainsay the deceptive parity often posited between right- and left-Nietzscheanisms, according to which Nietzsche’s ideas are versatile, pliant and contradictory enough to accommodate a vast range of different and indeed opposing interpretations, and that they hence cannot be attributed any definitive meaning. In reality, it is argued, precisely their eschewal of final signification pushes Nietzsche’s texts away from the right and closer to the left. Protesting against what he saw as the National Socialist misuse of Nietzsche, Kurt Tucholsky gave such a theory an early expression. “Who cannot lay claim to him!” he exclaimed: “Tell me what you need and I will provide you with a Nietzsche quote. [. . .] For Germany and against Germany; for peace and against peace; for literature and against literature—whatever you wish” (Tucholsky 1932: 54–55). Tucholsky here implied that the Nazi interpretation of Nietzsche was not so much wrong—for given his paradoxes Nietzsche can scarcely be interpreted correctly—as it was bad, produced by boorish and aggressive “analphabets.” In the postwar period, particularly, this thesis became widely established as the postmodernist

410  Epilogue interpretation of Nietzsche as a playful thinker, shifting and restless, defying the laws of philosophical and logical gravity, whose mission is to deflate all Truths and destabilize all systems. And precisely in this protodeconstructivist role, lies Nietzsche’s liberating significance. As claimed by Alan White (1990: 11), endorsing the originally French readings of Nietzsche, the philosopher’s works undermine “the very possibility of the communication, indeed even of the possession, of unambiguously determinable teachings. The Nietzsche that emerges from these readings [. . .] is an advocate not of totalitarian cosmos but rather, in extreme cases, of anarchic chaos.”9 The most systematic attempt to apply this exegetical line to actual historical realities is with all probability Steven Aschheim’s vast and impressive study of Nietzsche’s reception in Germany. “This book is animated by the conviction that [. . .] Nietzsche’s work cannot be reduced to an essence nor can it be said to possess a single and authoritative meaning” (Aschheim 1994: 3). Throughout the decades, Aschheim observes (7), Nietzscheanism was interwoven with “a broad range of cultural and political postures: anarchist, expressionist, feminist, futurist, nationalist, nazi, religious, sexual-libertarian, socialist, völkisch, and Zionist.” Historically, as this list seems to indicate, Nietzsche was at least as present on the left as he was on the right. From which it follows, apparently, that the right-wing Nietzsche is just one possible way of construing the philosopher, and not a very good one at that. Yet this theory, I argue, is deceptive. Two main objections need to be made against it, a quantitative and a qualitative one. Quantitatively speaking, there are a number of problems with the view that Nietzsche was equally present on the left and on the right (my following considerations will take a European perspective, rather than focus on any single country). For while Nietzsche demonstrably found numerous adherents among the broadly defined left, his appeal to right-wing authors, especially fascist ones, was truly endemic. Sporadic criticisms and occasional divergences notwithstanding, Nietzsche was an intellectual hero for fascists in a very broad way, which cannot be said of the left. In fascist literature, praise for Nietzsche is nearly ubiquitous, whether one consults fascist intellectuals or politicians, and whether we are visiting Italy, Germany, Spain, Britain, France, Belgium, or Romania. In the course of this study we had numerous opportunities to corroborate this claim, and we have revealed only the iceberg’s proverbial tip. On the left, by comparison, Nietzsche had roughly as many indifferent or hostile readers as he had admirers. Moreover, a telling internal division should also be noted: on the right, Nietzsche was stronger the more one moves to the radical fringes—fascists were always more likely to pay homage to him than were liberals or conservatives. On the left, the very reverse is the case: Nietzsche’s influence is strongest the more one takes distance from the core. It is felt particularly strongly among left-liberals, anarchists, social democrats or various unaffiliated, maverick authors. Marxism

Epilogue 411 and communism remained relatively, if by no means absolutely, allergic to Nietzsche or indifferent to him. This is an important distinction that needs to be borne in mind as against the notion of Nietzsche’s perfect malleability. More importantly, however, such a presumed parity shuns the really important qualitative issue. The indisputable fact that many people on the left have taken to Nietzsche should not obscure the really important question of exactly what they have taken from him (and, equally, what Nietzsche has taken from them). Nietzsche’s encounter with the left should not be followed by an exclamation mark but by a series of question marks: what does the encounter with Nietzsche do to the right and what does it do to the left? How does it impact both camps? Is it the same sort of impact? According to Aschheim, the answer is yes. Nietzsche radicalizes both, inspires and empowers socialists, anarchists, feminists, no less than he does fascists or Nazis. So if there is a Nietzschean politics at all, it is somewhat like an energy drink; drink it who may, the effect will be the same. Nietzsche, certainly, had always energized the right. His effect could be described as one of exacerbation. Reading Nietzsche legitimizes and boosts one’s anti-egalitarian leanings, escalates them, removes whatever inhibitions or second thoughts one may have entertained, pushes one to the next level in terms of the goal adopted and the readiness to employ beyond-good-and-evil means to attain it. “To restore a good conscience to the evil man,” Nietzsche once wrote (1968: 417), “—has this been my unconscious endeavor? I mean, to the evil man in so far as he is the strong man?” Or imagine the impact the following lines must have on someone who instinctively senses himself, to begin with, superior to the common throng: “The essential thing in a good and healthy aristocracy is [. . .] that it [. . .] accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of innumerable men, who for its sake have to be suppressed and reduced to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments” (Nietzsche 1990: 193). How liberating, how refreshing, how emboldening, must this message resonate in the ears of the would-be aristocratic initiate. If this sounds somewhat speculative, we may consider the testimony of one of the main protagonists of the “alt-right” movement, the white supremacist and neo-fascist, Richard B. Spencer: I remember reading On The Genealogy of Morality for the first time when I was a young person. I was probably around 20 years old. [Nietzsche’s] differentiation between the ancient world’s good and bad and the Christian world’s good and evil, to use a colloquial phrase, really blew my mind. It really made me reconsider some of the most basic precepts of my own worldview. [It] brings all these threads together in terms of someone who is both deconstructive, someone who’s willing to pull the rug out from under the

412  Epilogue post-Christian worldview of his time, but then also someone who’s trying to revive and reinvent an older morality. (Spencer 2016a) Reading this, one cannot but wonder if, were it not for the encounter with Nietzsche, the author would today have been a run-of-the-mill conservative. Nietzsche’s impact on the left has been of a radically different sort. Did Nietzsche, to begin with, really ever convert anyone to left-wing politics? One struggles to think of even a single author or politician who, starting as a liberal, a conservative or a fascist, was moved by Nietzsche to embrace, say, socialism. Conversely, any number or relevant examples spring to mind when it comes to thinking about people whom Nietzsche had weakened in their left-wing resolve, made more susceptible to fascism or eugenics. Take such authors as H. G. Wells or George Bernard Shaw: while they never quite abandoned the left, it seems likely that, not reading Nietzsche, they would have proven so much more resilient to fascism, would have refrained from flirting with eugenic notions and pooh-poohing critics of Mussolini.10 The most one can say of Nietzsche’s left-wing readers is that the impact was not sufficient to unsettle them too much, that they were able to absorb Nietzsche without too many side effects. Jean Jaurès may here be cited as an example. On the other side of the scale, however, are those whom Nietzsche helped to convert from the left to the right, the ultimate case in point being of course Mussolini. In a 1924 interview he claimed that the encounter with Nietzsche’s texts, which he read as a young man in Switzerland, ultimately “cured him of socialism” (De Felice 1965: 59). Nietzsche’s work thus helped not only to sustain fascism but to create it in the first place.11 This is another major distinction between Nietzsche’s impact on both sides of the political divide: while Nietzsche has strongly influenced, say, certain anarchists or feminists, these movements in themselves could hardly be described as generally Nietzschean, and the philosopher could certainly not be credited with originating them. His contribution to the genesis of fascism, however, was very great, perhaps indispensable. Protective of Nietzsche as they generally are, even Derrida and Aschheim are compelled to admit that his link to fascism was of a special nature. As Derrida incisively put it: “There is nothing absolutely contingent about the fact that the only political regimen to have effectively brandished [Nietzsche’s] name as a major and official banner was Nazi.”12 The right, Nietzsche gives wings; the left he encumbers, slows down, elitizes; draws just sufficiently to the right to sow self-doubts, create dissension, nurture a sense of superiority vis-à-vis the very people with whom the struggle against class society ought to be conducted, if it is to have some chance of success. In the wedlock with the right, Nietzsche assumes all the costs; affiliating itself to Nietzsche, the left, however, is the one bringing the dowry.

Epilogue 413 Left-Nietzscheans may imagine that they approach Nietzsche for completely different purposes than their right-wing counterparts; that they take totally different things from him. The notion of an abyss separating left- and right-Nietzscheans was recently articulated by Guy Elgat (2017), in an excellent exposition of Nietzsche’s bifurcated legacy: The secret of Nietzsche’s appeal to people from opposite ends of the political spectrum is thus revealed: To the radical right, it is his rejection of equality and the democratic ideas that are based on it that is scintillating and rings true [. . .]; to the left, it is his anti-essentialism with its emphasis on the plastic nature of identity that promises liberation from societal oppression. But, as it is typical in politics, the catch is that each side, to maintain its political ideology, has to reject the other’s Nietzscheanism. This leads the author to the conclusion that Nietzscheanism can never emerge as a unified movement: “For a political ideal to be realized in actuality and motivate people, some unifying clarion call has to be possible to gather large groups of people behind it.” And while this, in a sense, cannot be argued against, for given their great differences left- and right-Nietzscheans indeed cannot be expected to come together in the future, what this neglects to consider, it seems to me, is the possibility that, in another sense, they already are together, oblivious of the fact as they may be. For even as the left pursues Nietzsche for all the presumably good reasons—the perspectivalism, the playfulness, the keen psychological insights, the fine irony and so on and so forth—and carefully discards all the authoritarian and nasty stuff, it still plays Nietzsche’s game. And that means it is not playing other games that Nietzsche has placed beyond the pale. As benign as it can possibly be made out to be, Nietzscheanism forecloses other alternatives: notably that of the Last Human. In opposing her, Nietzscheans on both sides of the political spectrum are united. But, as this study has implied, and is now being stated explicitly, we may be wise to go precisely to where Nietzsche strictly admonished us not to go. Rather than labor to create a gentle overman, a kind, pluralist and enlightened elitist, it seems politically sensible to finally embrace the mass project, which has been unfolding over the last 250 years, registering notable triumphs as well as massive setbacks. Seen thus, Nietzsche’s success is not in recruiting the left en block to his own project of war, empire and mass extermination (leaving aside many individual recruits); it is rather in fatally weakening the left’s ability to successfully resist such projects. While the Nietzschean right frontally attacks the ideals of egalitarianism, the Nietzschean left turns them unattractive to many. Critical Theorists, notably, have often unwittingly functioned as scarecrows, scaring people away from socialism. Their vehement and indiscriminate

414  Epilogue attacks on consumerism and mass culture—which for Marx happened rather to be instances of capital’s civilizing side—make the left appear elitist, condescending and moralistic, a “bad cop” chastising the masses rather than joining their struggles. As I have argued elsewhere apropos a notable contemporary left-Nietzschean, Alain Badiou, instead of siding with the masses for the attainment of their “true requirements,” as Marx urged his readers to do, the French ontologist and many others have subordinated the Last Humans to the “requirements of Truth” (Landa 2013). That ferocious attacks on consumerism and mass culture have been historically rife on the right as well, particularly the Nietzschean right, shows that here, for one, the Nietzschean family has been heeding a single clarion call. So in the end, if I am correct, we are not dealing here with two distinct phenomena, neatly separated, diametrically opposed. There is a denominator they have in common. And while this is strictly denied by the left, claiming that theirs is not just “the real” Nietzsche but the good one, Nietzsche as he should be, redeemed of his errors and excesses, on the right things are sometimes seen differently. Here, the merits of leftNietzscheanism are being revealingly acknowledged, precisely from a reactionary point of view. In an interview on the legacy of the Frankfurt School, Richard B. Spencer asked his interlocutor, the English farright and ultra-nationalist intellectual, Jonathan Bowden, to say more “on the culture industry because I think that’s a very useful term for us. I think that’s a term we should be using and maybe even using it in a lot of the same ways that Adorno did.” Agreeing with this, Bowden emphasized Adorno’s “idea that the masses were totally degraded by a capitalist and market-driven culture,” and then put his finger on the hard kernel around which the Nietzschean family could coalesce: “It may be a Left-wing elitist position, but it’s an elitist position nonetheless, and once you admit elitism in any area, even if it’s only the cultural one, cultural selectivity, you begin to adopt ramifications elsewhere that are unstoppable” (In Spencer 2016b). This is an author to whom Nietzsche is “the greatest thinker of the non-Left,” one who will provide a cornerstone for the revival of the right: [Nietzsche] certainly thought that the masses can’t lead a civilization, which means they have to be led. You either dupe them by saying that you’ll lead them on behalf of their own ideology [. . .] or you do it with something harsher and essentially stentorian and more Old World against the interests of the masses. [. . .] I also think that any Right that’s got a future will have to partly base itself around Nietzsche’s thinking as I have always done. And there are other examples of the attempt, on the part of the right, to bring the family together. Russell A. Berman, editor of the conservative

Epilogue 415 journal Telos, underlined the similarities between the thought of Ernst Jünger—a major 20th-century right-wing Nietzschean—and “the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School” and suggested that the very division between right and left needs to be rethought. Intelligent observers described the same social transitions, albeit from distinct perspectives, but with enough similarities to warrant comparisons. Although conventional political thinking still tries to police a neat separation between left and right, we should not be afraid to explore the gray zone in between. (Berman 2008: viii) For Berman, this elective affinity serves to legitimize a positive reconsideration of Jünger; one may, however, reach the reverse conclusion, and see this is as a good reason to critically reconsider the Frankfurt School. The common ground between the towering figure in the Conservative Revolutionary camp and Adorno, Horkheimer and Benjamin, for Berman, is in the fundamental pessimism and melancholia underlying their respective positions or the disdain of “facile sentimentality” (ix). But these are relatively superficial affinities, indicative of deeper agreements. For while critical, left-Nietzscheanism, shuns violence, war and authoritarianism, it embraces other beliefs and convictions which are very damaging for an emancipatory project: apart from the already mentioned elitism, and interlinked with it, is the essential jettisoning of such crucial tenets of the revolutionary mass project as progress and the enlightenment. As argued by Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim (2017), in an excellent concise exposition and critique of the thought of two salient representatives of the new right, the English Nick Land and the Russian Aleksandr Dugin (two thinkers who can safely be said to belong to the right-Nietzschean camp), their reactionary theories variously take on themes that were elaborated on the left-Nietzschean camp, such as the deconstruction of progress as a pernicious myth and the “rejection of Enlightenment modernity.” Thus, while virulently opposed to postmodernism to the extent that it implies a destabilization of hierarchies and goalless hedonism and consumerism, Dugin nonetheless sees the new right, whom he summons for a decisive counter-revolution, as inheriting the postmodern dismissal of the idea of progress and the optimism of the Enlightenment: Faith in the progressive development of history [. . .] was the distinguishing feature of the Nineteenth century. But already with Nietzsche and Freud [. . .] this optimistic axiom started to be doubted. And over a period of the Twentieth century, Heidegger, the existentialists, traditionalists, structuralists, and at last postmodernists smashed it to bits. In postmodernity, criticism of historical optimism, universalism and historicism acquired a systematic character and established the

416  Epilogue doctrinal premises for a total revision of the conceptual apparatus of Western European philosophy. (Dugin 2012: 104)13 By taking their stand against the Last Humans, left-Nietzscheans are obstructing the path of the social individual. On July 14, 1942, at the time that the most catastrophic war in human history was waged in Europe, notable members of the Frankfurt School—Adorno, Horkheimer, Günter Anders, Herbert Marcuse, Ludwig Marcuse, and Friedrich Pollock— discussed a paper by Ludwig Marcuse, on the relationship of need and culture in Nietzsche. This paper took as its premise the idea that the horror of fascism and the war were manifestations of the reign of the Last Humans. As stated in the preamble: The bearer of this “domesticated animal culture” is most forcefully depicted in “The Last Man” [viz. Thus Spoke Zarathustra]. With a wink he asks: “What is longing?” Nietzsche identified this “most contemptible being” with his contemporaries; seen from a later perspective, however, this being came to fruition in the terror of two generations hence. (Marcuse 2001: 130) Not one among those eminent social theorists gathering to discuss Marcuse’s paper saw fit to question the Last Human’s alleged responsibility for the cataclysm;14 not one of them thought it in any way relevant to point out that the Last Human was “contemptible” for Nietzsche precisely inasmuch as he had overcome social and economic disparities and was no longer willing to insert himself into structures of subordination; not one of them challenged the notion that Nietzsche denounced the Last Human as a contemporary reality, and suggested that he considered it, in truth, a utopian possibility, which he sought to ridicule. Also, at a time that tens of millions were being put to death—in a conflagration to whose ignition Nietzsche could plausibly be said to have philosophically contributed—none of the assembled Critical Theorists noticed any irony in the fact that one of the charges made by Zarathustra against the Last Human was that “His race is as inexterminable as the flea; the Last Human lives longest.” Adorno went on (113) to argue that When all human beings have enough to eat, they will not be a mass of petty bourgeois philistines; the idea of being a petty bourgeois philistine would itself die out. Here precisely lies the motive that binds us to Nietzsche. But the Last Humans certainly do get enough to eat, indeed across the board, for “nobody grows rich or poor anymore,” and still they are denounced as philistines.

Epilogue 417 Did Adorno and Co.—all highly competent and sophisticated readers as they doubtlessly were—simply miss these obvious elements in Zarathustra’s short harangue? Are we dealing here with a simple misreading? This is unlikely. I repeat my former claim: Left-Nietzscheanism is a social position. It is not remotely fascist or crypto-fascist; it is overwhelmingly, notwithstanding certain borderline cases (such as Shaw or the early Bataille), anti-fascist. But it has been elitized, however slightly; and that is just sufficient to rule out a wholehearted popular commitment. It thus weakens the left’s ability to convincingly challenge reactionary politics, take a resolute stand against outright elitism. Benign and enlightened elitism may be a pleasant and comfortable middle position to occupy. One can be radical, all too radical, while looking with aversion at the great unwashed. But elitism is ultimately neither benign nor enlightened. The time has come, I feel, to make a decision.

Notes 1 Represented by such thinkers as the German Armin Mohler, the French Alain de Benoist, the Italian Giorgio Locchi, and more recently the US Americans Paul Gottfried and Richard B. Spencer, the English Nick Land and Jonathan Bowden and the Russian Aleksandr Dugin. To be noticed is the international spread of the theory. 2 I thank Nicolás González Varela for this source. Notice, incidentally, the parallels of such concept with notable left-Nietzschean conceptualizations of the revolutionary moment of redemption, such as Walter Benjamin’s messianism or Alain Badiou’s “event.” 3 In marked contrast to notable future Nietzschean economists such as Max Weber and Werner Sombart, who idealized earlier stages of capitalist production and invested them with all sorts of ethical and spiritual advantages. 4 For a useful definition of this “objective socialization of production,” see Mandel (1978: 595). 5 Marx, certainly, is widely considered by Critical Theorists as himself a bitter critic of mass consumption, in a way which provides them another reason for drawing parallels with Nietzsche. This, in my view, rests on a stubborn and very harmful misconception and misrepresentation of Marx’s actual position that, while complex, ultimately chastised capitalism for limiting mass consumption. For my full argument, see Ishay Landa, “The Negation of Abnegation: Marx on Consumption,” Historical Materialism, forthcoming. 6 For a more extended comparison of Marx’s and Nietzsche’s stances with regards to capitalism, see Landa (2016). 7 For this author’s general analysis of Trump as an authoritarian populist and “neofascist,” see Kellner (2016). 8 The following works could be mentioned as examples of meticulous and incisive critiques of Nietzsche’s politics (I restrict myself to relatively recent studies): Altman (2014); Appel (1999); Conway (1997); Dombowsky (2014); González Varela (2010); Losurdo (2004); Marti (1993); Rehmann (2004); Sautet (1981); Taureck (2000); Waite (1996). 9 The classic presentation of Nietzsche as a thinker defying any final signification, and hence useful in resisting all totalitarian political claims, remains that of Jacques Derrida, as set forth in works such as Derrida (1981; 1986). 10 As Shaw certainly did: see his exchange with a notable Italian anti-fascist: Salvemini and Shaw (1997).

418  Epilogue 11 On the formative significance of Nietzsche for the young Mussolini, see Nolte (1993). On the weakening of Mussolini’s “orthodox Marxism” and his concomitant approximation to the more idealistic position of Nietzsche and Sorel, see Gregor (1979: 145) 12 Derrida, as approvingly quoted in Aschheim (1994: 317). The Afterword containing this citation—“Nietzsche and Nazism: Some Methodological and Historical Reflections”—is in general highly valuable. 13 The deconstruction of “the myth” of progress is indeed one of the main points on which Nietzscheans, left and right, generally converge. For two right-wing denunciations of progress as a Marxist-Hegelian theory, which can be refuted with recourse to Nietzsche and Heidegger, see Locchi (2016) and Locchi and de Benoist (2015: 130), where contemporary US Americans—eudemonic, consumerist and egalitarian—are expressly chastised as “the Last Humans.” The United States is typically seen, likewise, as a haven of “Neo-Marxism” (162–168). 14 Herbert Marcuse took an apparently more critical view of Nietzsche, at least to begin with, saying that “If Marx is right, then Nietzsche is wrong. His image of the last man is in fact that of the first.” However, he then proceeded and connected Nietzsche with socialism, claiming, rather cryptically, that “it does not have to be the case that a mankind whose needs have been satisfied no longer has any longing. On the contrary. Here Nietzsche stands in agreement with Bebel” (Marcuse 2001: 133). At any rate, his was not a clear statement either in defense of the Last Humans or in opposition to Nietzsche. And Marcuse’s later notion of the “one-dimensional man” need in fact be seen as a left-wing rendition of Nietzsche’s critique of the Last Human and of Heidegger’s treatment of the das Man.

References Altman, William H. F. (2014) Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: The Philosopher of the Second Reich, Lanham, MD: Lexington. Appel, Fredrick (1999) Nietzsche Contra Democracy, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Aschheim, Steven E. (1994) The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890–1990, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Berman, Russell A. (2008) “Preface,” in On Pain, Ernst Jünger, ed., New York: Telos Press. Brobjer, Thomas H. (2002) “Nietzsche’s Knowledge of Marx and Marxism,” Nietzsche-Studien, 31: 298–313. Conway, Daniel W. (1997) Nietzsche & the Political, London and New York: Routledge. De Felice, Renzo (1965) Mussolini il rivoluzionario, Turin: Einaudi. Derrida, Jacques (1981) Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques (1986) “Interpreting Signatures (Nietzsche/Heidegger): Two Questions,” Philosophy and Literature, 10: 246–262. Dombowsky, Don (2014) Nietzsche and Napoleon: The Dionysian Conspiracy, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Drochon, Hugo (2016) “What Nietzsche’s philosophy Can Tell Us About Why Brexit and Trump Won,” [interview]. www.vox.com/conversations/2016/12/20/ 13927678/donald-trump-brexit-nietzsche-democracy-europe-populism-hugodrochon Last accessed May 2017.

Epilogue 419 Dugin, Aleksandr (2012) The Fourth Political Theory, (orig. 2009), London: Arktos. Elgat, Guy (2017) “Why Friedrich Nietzsche Is the Darling of the Far Left and the Far Right,” Tablet, May 8. www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/ 228455/nietzsche-left-right Last accessed June 2017. Fluss, Harrison and Landon Frim (2017) “Behemoth and Leviathan: The Fascist Bestiary of the Alt-Right,” Salvage, 5. Golomb, Jacob (2017) “The Case of Nietzsche Against Trump: Revealing the Shallow Image of the Superman,” The Critique, January 15. www.thecritique. com/articles/nietzsche-against-trump Last accessed May 2017. González Varela, Nicolás (2010) Nietzsche contra La Democracia: El pensamiento político de Friedrich Nietzsche, 1862–1872, Barcelona: Montesinos. Gregor, A. James (1979) Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Griffin, Roger (1999) “Between Metapolitics and Apoliteia: The New Right’s Strategy for Conserving the Fascist Vision in the ‘Interregnum,’ ” Draft paper. Kellner, Douglas (2016) American Nightmare: Donald Trump, Media Spectacle and Authoritarian Populism, Rotterdam and New York: Sense Publishers. Kellner, Douglas (2017) “A Nietzschean Critique of Trump,” keynote lecture ­presented at Nietzsche & Critical Social Theory: Affirmation, Animosity, Ambiguity, San Diego State University, January 28. Landa, Ishay (2013) “True Requirements or the Requirements of Truth? The Nietzschean Communism of Alain Badiou,” International Critical Thought, 3, 4: 424–443. Landa, Ishay (2016) “The Social Individual and the Last Human: Marx and Nietzsche Agree to Disagree,” Critical Sociology [First published date November 28]. 1–13. Locchi, Giorgio (2016) Sul senso della storia, Padua: Edizioni di Ar. Locchi, Giorgio, and Alain de Benoist (2015) Il male americano, (orig. 1976) Rome: Settimo Sigillo. Losurdo, Domenico (2004) Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Mandel, Ernest (1978) Late Capitalism, London and New York: Verso. Marcuse, Ludwig (2001) “Need and Culture in Nietzsche,” Constellations, 8, 1: 130–135. Marti, Urs (1993) Der grosse Pöbel und Sklavenaufstand, Stuttgart-Weimar: Verlag J.B. Metzler. Marx, Karl (1990) Capital. Volume 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, Karl (1991) Capital. Volume 3, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, Karl (1993) Grundrisse, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1968) The Will to Power, Walter Kaufmann, trans., New York: Vintage. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1969) Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Reginald John Hollingdale trans., Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1990) Beyond Good and Evil, Reginald John Hollingdale trans., Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2003) Writings From the Late Notebooks, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nolte, Ernst (1993) Il giovane Mussolini: Marx e Nietzsche in Mussolini socialista, Carnago: SugarCo (orig. 1960, in German).

420  Epilogue Rehmann, Jan (2004) Postmoderner Links-Nietzscheanismus: Deleuze & Foucault. Eine Dekonstruktion, Hamburg: Argument Verlag. Salvemini, Gaetano and George Bernard Shaw (1997) Polemica sul fascismo, Rome: Ideazione Editrice. Sautet, Marc (1981) Nietzsche et la Commune, Paris: éditions Le Sycomore. Spencer, Richard B. (2016a) “The Uses & Abuses of Nietzsche,” an interview with Jonathan Bowden. www.counter-currents.com/2016/04/the-uses-andabuses-of-nietzsche/ Last accessed May 2017. Spencer, Richard B. (2016b) “Frankfurt School Revisionism,” an interview with Jonathan Bowden. www.counter-currents.com/2016/06/frankfurt-school-revi sionism/ Last accessed May 2017. Taureck, Bernhard H.F. (2000) Nietzsche und der Faschismus—Ein Politikum, Leipzig: Reclam. Tucholsky, Kurt (1932) “Fräulein Nietzsche,” Die Weltbühne, January 12. Waite, Geoff (1996) Nietzsche’s Corps/e. Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, the Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. White, Alan (1990) Within Nietzsche’s Labyrinth, New York and London: Routledge.

Index

Note: the terms “fascism,” “National Socialism,” and “masses” were not indexed as they are virtually ubiquitous throughout the book. Abbé Sieyès 35 Adorno, T. 33, 57, 124, 127, 246 – 247, 249, 252 – 254, 256, 259, 279, 334, 342, 349, 350, 401, 414 – 417 Aktion T4 207 Allen, M. 333 Aly, G. 186 – 187, 279 – 281, 284 – 285 Americanism, anti-Americanism, Americanization 21, 58, 118, 128 – 131, 256, 293, 305 – 308, 345 – 346 Ammon, O. 99 Anders, G. 416 Andreotti, G. 267 animals, animalism 4 – 5, 11, 95, 98, 103, 122, 196 – 200, 204, 256, 292, 296, 311, 403, 408, 416 antisemitism 10, 21, 41 – 42, 59n5, 125, 259, 314n2, 346, 354 – 395 Antonioni, M. 265 Árbenz, J. 315n17 Arditi 151, 157 Arendt, H. 5, 7, 139, 193, 218 – 220, 222, 229, 271n34, 355, 379 aristocracy (nobility) see class Arminius 194 Arnhold, L. 251 – 252, 300 – 301 Arnold, M. 68 – 73, 130 Aryan, Aryanism 106, 195, 201, 243, 260, 296 – 297, 300, 311, 331, 333, 344, 363, 371, 376, 388, 390 Aschheim, S. 373, 385, 410 – 412, 418n12 Asquith, H. H. 146 Astaire, F. 264

atheism 93, 95, 97 – 98, 194, 361 Auschwitz 96, 359; see also Shoah, the Badiou, A. 414, 417n2 Bagehot, W. 32, 133n4 Báky, J. 262 – 263 Balla, G. 238 Balzac, H. 86, 126 Bankier, D. 281 Baranowski, S. 280, 284, 295, 298, 301, 314n5, 315n9 Barbaro, U. 265 Baroja, P. 12 Barrès, M. 43 – 44, 389 Barringer, T. 51 Barrows, S. 80, 87, 133n9 Baudelaire, C. 79 Bauer, B. 376, 379 – 380, 394n14 Bauer, Y. 393n2 Bebel, A. 38, 59n14, 418n14 Becker, J. R. 142 Bédarida, F. 95 – 96 Beilharz, P. 179 Bellamy, E. 40 Beneduce, A. 157 Ben-Ghiat, R. 254 Benjamin, W. 79, 241, 243, 246, 347, 415, 417n2 Benz, W. 169, 207 Berg, A. 127 Berger, J. 241 – 242 Berghoff, H. 282 – 283 Berman, R. A. 414 – 415 Bernays, E. 308 – 309 Bernea, E. 269n10

422 Index Bernhard, T. 389 – 390 Bessel, R. 140 Bismarck, Otto von 93, 163, 204, 261, 278, 299, 365, 377, 408 Bizet, G. 126 Blasetti, A. 245, 264, 267 Bloch, E. 224 blond beast, the 211n26, 294 – 297,  304 Blüher, H. 332 Blyth, M. 294 Boccasile, G. 239 – 240 Boccioni, U. 235 Böckel, O. 380 Bollenbeck, G. 246 Bolsehvism, the Bolshevik Revolution 10, 149, 151, 153, 179, 188, 233, 306, 308, 333, 357, 366, 367 – 369, 372 – 374, 382, 393n7 Bonapartism 16, 41, 407 Bormann, M. 366 Börne, L. 377 Bosworth, R. J. B. 255 Bottai, G. 162, 209, 252 – 253 Boulanger, G., Boulangism 42 – 43 Bourdieu, P. 128 – 129 bourgeois/-ie see class Bowden, J. 414, 417n1 Bracher, K. D. 172 Brahms, J. 254 Brasillach, R. 234 Brecht, B. 124, 219, 286, 347 – 348 Broch, H. 3 – 5, 7 Brooke, R. 141 Brookes, L. 52 Brunetta, G. P. 252, 265 – 266, 268 Brzezinski, Z. 271n34 Buchan, J. 141 Buchheim, C. 281, 303 – 304 Buddha 100 Burke, E. 108 Burrin, P. 96, 368 Burroughs, E. R. 200 Buti, C. 258 Cagney, J. 58 Callinicos, A. 393n10 Camba, F. 16 – 17 Camerini, M. 261, 264 – 267, 271n35 Campbell, C. 340 Camus, A. 123 capital 10, 23, 33, 157, 402 – 403; cultural capital 129, 243; good and

bad capital, raffendes, schaffendes 41, 59n5, 358 – 360, 369, 372, 378, 380 capitalism, anti-capitalism, capitalists 8, 10 – 11, 18 – 19, 32 – 33, 38, 41, 49, 55, 65 – 66, 71, 93, 105, 120 – 121, 130, 157, 161, 175, 192, 246 – 249, 251, 255, 260, 262, 290, 297 – 298, 301, 305, 314, 315n5, 355 – 363, 368 – 370, 372 – 373, 376 – 382, 386, 393n4, 401 – 406, 414, 417n2, 417n5 Carey, J. 122, 387 Carlyle, T. 46, 65 – 70, 72 – 73 Catholic, Catholicism 16, 74, 154, 157, 165 – 167, 189, 207, 219, 251, 330, 333, 378 Celli, C. 265 – 266, 272n40 Cervantes, M. 128 CF [Croix-de-Feu] 10, 340 Chaplin, C. 57, 181, 249, 255, 257, 261 Charles X 80 Chartism 39 – 40 Chesterton, G. K. 102, 109, 342 Chiarini, L. 260 – 261 Child, R. W. 310 – 311 Childers, T. 167 – 168 Childs, D. J. 102 Christianity 1, 8, 11, 96 – 99, 158, 195, 219, 225, 227 – 278, 306, 308, 330, 333, 356, 361 – 366, 376, 379, 381 – 382, 411 – 412; see also Catholic, Catholicism; Judaeo-Christianity; Protestantism, protestant Churchill, W. 146, 308, 365 – 366 cinema, film 57, 117 – 118, 124, 245 – 273, 313, 343 – 346,  348 Cioran, E. 269n10 civilizing process, the 20 – 21, 103, 236 – 237, 312 – 313 class: aristocracy, nobility 3, 8 – 11, 13, 15, 31, 36, 66 – 68, 70 – 73, 77, 79, 81, 88, 92, 99 – 100, 104 – 105, 111 – 112, 114, 128, 130, 133n14, 142, 145, 160, 174 – 176, 183, 199, 201 – 202, 207, 210n3, 210n15, 231, 233, 236 – 237, 266, 270n16, 295, 297, 300, 303, 305, 310 – 312, 338, 361, 363 – 365, 367, 370, 374, 385 – 386, 405, 408, 411; Bildungsbürgertum 244, 246, 254,

Index  423 285, 314, 378, 392; bourgeois, bourgeoisie, middle class 2, 4 – 5, 15, 18, 31 – 32, 34 – 36, 40, 42, 50 – 51, 54, 56, 63, 67 – 68, 71, 73, 76 – 79, 80 – 82, 86, 88 – 90, 92, 100, 104, 106 – 107, 109, 117 – 118, 130 – 131, 144 – 156, 159, 163 – 168, 171, 179, 182, 185, 188 – 190, 194, 201 – 202, 206, 211n21, 211n28, 228, 236 – 237, 246, 249 – 250, 261, 270n16, 280, 285, 289, 291, 293, 303, 306, 310, 320, 338 – 339, 342, 344, 361, 372, 378, 387, 389 – 390, 392, 401 – 402; Mittelstand 42, 167, 289; peasants, peasantry 6 – 7, 9, 11, 16, 40, 46, 59n6, 73 – 74, 76 – 77, 144, 153, 155 – 156, 170, 189, 209n1, 265, 267, 282, 323, 338, 388, 390; petty bourgeoisie, Lumpenproletariat, philistines 40 – 41, 42, 59n6, 68 – 69, 118, 144, 167 – 168, 222, 270n26, 305, 406, 416; proletariat 33, 36, 78, 81, 107, 126, 131, 149, 155, 160, 222, 232, 314, 358, 390, 402; working class 2, 5, 19 – 20, 41, 48, 55 – 56, 58, 59n16, 69 – 70, 77, 81, 83, 86, 104, 109, 111, 131, 149, 153, 159, 162, 165, 168, 194, 202 – 203, 210n10, 210n11, 267, 271n36, 278, 280, 282, 338, 344, 369, 378, 386 – 387, 392 Codreanu, Z. 234, 269n10 colonialism 76, 121, 211n29 Comencini, L. 263, 268, 343 communism, communists 10 – 11, 25n6, 39 – 40, 94, 111, 125, 130, 149, 153, 156, 164 – 165, 168,  170, 188 – 189, 210n9, 219, 249 – 250, 252, 255, 267, 278, 293, 301, 305 – 307, 333, 344, 355, 372 – 373, 379, 389, 394n14, 411 Condorcet, N. 59n15 Conrad, J. 104 conservative, conservatism 1, 3, 7, 9, 11, 15, 31 – 33, 35 – 37, 39 – 40, 43, 46, 59n3, 64, 67 – 68, 74, 77, 93, 97 – 98, 115 – 117, 121, 124 – 125, 150, 155 – 156, 160 , 162, 167, 191, 204, 235, 239 – 240, 244, 249 – 251, 261, 267, 278, 297 – 298, 305, 312, 322, 330, 339 – 341, 362, 365,

377 – 378, 395n23, 401, 406, 410, 412, 414 – 415 consumption, consumerism 21 – 22, 25, 32 – 34, 47, 55 – 57, 118 – 122, 132, 145 – 147, 150, 191, 196, 244, 247 – 248, 255, 266, 271n35, 278 – 305, 309, 313 – 314, 322, 335, 341 – 342, 348 – 349, 360, 388, 392, 401 – 402, 404, 414 – 415, 417n5, 418n13 Conti, L. 196 Conway, D. 362 – 363 Corday, C. 238 Corner, P. 162, 187 – 188, 190 – 191 corporatism, the corporate state 69 – 70, 161, 168, 174 Corradini, E. 78, 291 Cottino-Jones, M. 265 – 266, 272n40 Crainic, N. 269n10 Crawford, J. 264, 267 crime, criminality 46, 81 – 85, 96, 104 – 109, 115, 127, 132, 133n9, 152, 164, 172, 198 – 199, 201 – 204,  261 Crispi, F. 74, 76 – 78 culture: high culture 126, 218 – 221, 224, 226 – 227, 230, 246, 389, 391, 395n23; Kulturbolschewismus 244, 388; mass culture, popular culture 6, 21 – 22, 25, 29, 53 – 58, 116 – 119, 124 – 126, 129, 139, 145, 150, 171, 200, 218 – 222, 224, 230, 238 – 239, 241, 244 – 272, 285, 306 – 307, 314, 346, 349, 388, 391, 394n18, 394n19, 401, 414 culture industry, the 21, 32 – 33, 53, 245 – 272, 279,  414 Czinner, P. 252 DAF [German Labour Front] 169, 297, 300 – 301 D’Almeida, F. 241, 302 D’Annunzio, G. 151, 232 Dante Alighieri 128, 232 Darré, W. 195 Darwin, C., Darwinism 93 – 94, 97, 99, 101, 197, 200 – 201; see also social Darwinism das Man [the “they”] 193 – 194, 418n14 David, A. 392 Davis, B. 60n22, 267 Davis, M. 47 – 48

424 Index De Amicis, E. 75 De Benoist, A. 417n1, 418n13 De Cecco, M. 157 De Certeau, M. 247 – 248 De Felice, R. 186 De Gouges, O. 52 De Grand, A. 78, 154 – 156,  162 De Grazia, V. 293 Degrelle, L. 234 Dehn, G. 131 Delacroix, E. 79 – 84, 86 De La Rocque, F. 10 Della Sudda, M. 339 – 340 Delmar, M. 17 democracy 1 – 2, 5 – 9, 13 – 14, 20 – 21, 30, 32, 35 – 41, 56, 58, 63, 70 – 81, 84 – 85, 88 – 89, 92, 94, 98, 99, 102 – 105, 111, 124 – 127, 129 – 130, 139, 142 – 143, 153 – 158, 164, 171 – 185, 188 – 189, 192 – 194, 211n21, 218, 223 – 224, 229 – 232, 242, 249, 255 – 258, 262, 267, 289 – 293, 304 – 308, 314, 323, 329 – 330, 355, 363, 371, 373, 376 – 377, 388, 400, 402, 404, 407 – 410, 413; suffrage 6, 35, 39 – 40, 52, 154, 157, 174, 232 Dennis, D. B. 243 Derrida, J. 412, 417n9 De Santis, G. 265, 268 De Sica, V. 261, 265 – 268 De Stefani, A. 157 Destra storica 74 De Valera, E. 231 Dickens, C. 46, 86, 106, 126 Diethe, C. 269n13 Dietrich, M. 117 Dinta Institute] German Institute for Technical Labour Training 301 Discépolo, E. S. 258 Disraeli, B. 37, 46, 64 “Dixie” Dean, W. R. 57 Dollfuß, E. 395n23 Dolliver, L. 258 Dombowsky, D. 407 Dompke, C. 259 Dreyfus Affair, the 43 – 44 Drieu La Rochelle, P. 290, 306 – 307 Drochon, H. 406 Dugin, A. 417n1 Dumont, L. 98 – 99 Dunnage, J. 73 – 74

Ebner, M. R. 189 – 190 Eckart, D. 368 Eco, U. 54 Eisner, K. 157 Eley, G. 281, 284 Elgat, G. 413 Elias, N. 20, 103, 236, 270n16, 295, 312 – 313 Eliot, T. S. 68 élite, elitism 2, 9 – 12, 14 – 16, 18 – 20, 25, 31 – 32, 35, 37, 41, 54, 56, 59n6, 60n22, 63, 67 – 68, 70 – 78, 81, 88 – 90, 92 – 93, 100, 103 – 105, 107 – 109, 111, 117 – 118, 121 – 122, 124 – 133, 142, 144 – 145, 148, 150, 152 – 160, 168 – 171, 172, 177 – 178, 182, 185, 191, 193, 201 – 202, 206, 218 – 220, 223 – 224, 227 – 230, 235 – 236, 239, 242, 244, 249, 269n7, 269n9, 269n10, 278, 280, 282, 285, 289, 293 – 294, 297, 301 – 302, 309, 311, 320 – 321, 323, 327, 330, 341 – 342, 345, 348 – 349, 361, 368, 371, 384, 386 – 392, 394n14, 406 – 407, 412 – 417 Engels, F. 38 – 40, 46, 59n14, 94, 97, 109, 380 Epicurus 94 eugenics 101 – 102, 104 – 105, 107, 109, 133n7, 194, 201 – 202, 206 – 208, 211n28, 231, 338, 361, 384 – 385, 393n11,  412 Europe, Europeanism 6, 29, 58, 67, 70, 114, 129 – 130, 239, 260, 287, 305 – 308, 362, 407 – 408 euthanasia 101, 196, 199, 207 Evans, E. 35 – 36 Evans, R. J. 25n8, 167, 187 – 189, 192, 281 Evola, J. 13, 33, 306, 400 Fallada, H. 192 Falter, J. 168 family, familial 50 – 52, 116, 324, 330 – 344, 346 – 347; see also parenthood Farrenkopf, J. 394n19 Fasci Siciliani, the 76 – 79 Fechenbach, F. C. 377 Feder, G. 41, 358 – 359 Federzoni, L. 78 feminism see woman, women Fest, J. 141

Index  425 Fichte, J. G. 67 Finaldi, G. 74, 76 Fleming, I. 329 – 330 Flores, C. 258 – 259 Fluss, H. 415 Ford, H., Fordism 55, 287, 293, 298, 306 – 307 Forgacs, D. 248, 262, 267 Förster-Nietzsche, E. 367, 393n6 Fourier, C. 59n14 Frankfurt School, the 3, 32 – 33, 246, 248 – 249, 251, 264, 279, 414 – 416 Freddi, L. 245, 253, 255 Frei, N. 281 Freikorps 10, 152, 210n10 French Revolution, the 2, 6, 30, 34 – 35, 43, 52 – 53, 58n1, 59n3, 92, 105, 114 – 115, 128, 173, 179 – 183, 186, 232, 310, 341, 364, 394n14 Freud, S. 110, 116, 220, 268n2, 389, 415 Friedman, R. E. 114 Fries, J. 376 Frim, L. 415 Fritsche, P. 189 Fronemann, F. 268n4 Fukuyama, F. 144 Futurism 234 – 240, 244, 270n16, 270n19, 312, 322, 410 Galileo, G. 232 Galton, F. 101 – 102 Garau, S. 393n1 García Venero, M. 252 Garibaldi, G. 74, 232 Gaskell, E. 46 Gasman, D. 98, 101, 197 Gellately, R. 186, 188 gender 25n1, 50 – 53, 133n10, 150, 237, 250, 320 – 350 Gentile, E. 16, 184, 191, 237 Gentile, G. 13, 143, 163 George, S. 223 – 224 Giménez Caballero, E. 11 – 12, 233, 309 – 310, 312, 342 – 343, 393n7 Ginna, A. 270n19 Giolitti, G. 13 – 15, 72, 76, 154 – 155, 156, 201n9 Giusti, G. 78 Gladstone, W. E. 64 Glagau, O. 380 Gluckstein, D. 165, 210n10, 210n11 Gobineau, J. 105 – 106, 202

Goebbels, J. 233, 241, 244, 256, 270n29, 292 – 293, 308 – 309 Goethe, J. W. 67, 179, 201, 222, 226 Gogol, N. 126 Goldhagen, D. J. 186 Golomb, J. 406 Göring, H. 195 – 196, 241, 293, 302, 311 Gottfried, P. 417n1 Gramsci, A. 154 Grandi, D. 16 Grant, M. 107 Greece (ancient), Greek 64, 106, 125, 130, 219, 222, 234, 239, 306 Gregory, A. 149 – 150 Griffin, R. 26n11, 270n14, 306, 327, 400 Gründgens, G. 226 Guénon, R. 21 – 22 Gundle, S. 248, 262, 267 Günther, H. F. K. 201, 207 Hadlich, E. 339 Haeckel, E. 98 – 101, 195, 197, 361 Halfeld, A. 307 Hall, S. 247 Hamilton, R. 168, 194 Handel, G. F. 129 Hardy, T. 125 – 126 Hatherley, O. 249 Haury, P. 343 Hay, J. 248, 255, 262 Hegel, G. W. F., Hegelianism 14 – 15, 23, 119, 219, 288, 367, 418n13 Heidegger, M. 193, 305 – 306, 415, 418n13, 418n14 Heine, H. 129, 133n14, 377 Heinz, F. W. 10 Hepburn, K. 267 Heraclitus 143, 292 Herf, J. 239 Herzog, D. 330 – 331 Hesse, H. 224 Heymel, A. W. 141 high culture see culture Himmler, H. 96, 198, 241, 332 – 333,  366 Hippocrates 327 Hitler, A. 2 – 3, 8, 12, 41, 96, 122, 142 – 144, 146 – 147, 152, 164, 167 – 168, 170 – 172, 175, 178, 181, 186 – 188, 191, 193, 204, 206 – 208, 210n15, 210n16, 219 – 221,

426 Index 223 – 226, 228 – 230, 232 – 234, 240 – 242, 244 – 246, 250, 270n21, 283 – 284, 286 – 290, 292 – 294, 301 – 303, 305, 308 – 309, 315n6, 327 – 329, 333 – 334, 340, 343 – 345, 356 – 357, 359, 366 – 376, 378, 381 – 384, 386 – 388, 390, 392, 394n19 Hitler Youth 344 Hobsbawm, E. 30, 148, 331 Hoggart, R. 247 Hölderlin, F. 223 – 224 Hollywood 245, 252, 257, 264, 270n26 Holocaust, the see Shoah, the home, domesticity 50 – 52, 323, 334, 337 – 344, 348; see also family, familial Homer 128 homosexuality, homosexuals 53, 186, 331 – 334, 355,  388 Horkheimer, M. 33, 246 Horneffer, A. 301 Horneffer, E. 301 Horváth, O. 124 Hugenberg, A. 166 Hugo, V. (Les Misérables) 81 humanism, anti-humanism 78, 93 – 97, 99 – 101, 104, 195, 198, 225, 230, 257, 383 Huxley, A. 102 Huxley, J. 102 Huyysen, A. 116 – 117 imperialism 22, 47, 75, 78, 130, 195, 201, 268n3, 287, 333, 347, 366, 372, 383 – 384, 407 – 408 Ink Spots, the 348 insurance 37, 47, 90, 156, 203, 206, 282, 348 Ivy, M. 279 Jacobin, Jacobinism 179 – 183, 376 Jameson, F. 262 – 263 Jaspers, K. 219 Jaurès, J. 412 jazz 57, 127, 131, 244, 247, 249, 253 – 254, 257, 260, 263, 270n24, 306 – 307, 345 – 346, 349 – 350,  391 Jesus 100, 158, 243, 361, 364, 381 – 382 Jews, Judaism 8, 21, 25, 41 – 42, 44, 107 – 108, 130, 144, 151 – 152, 163, 172, 186, 195, 198 – 199, 207,

225, 241, 243 – 244, 251 – 252, 257, 260, 280, 307 – 309, 327, 331, 333, 345 – 346, 354 – 395; Judaeo-Christianity 94, 195, 225, 333, 362, 406 Jolson, A. 345 – 346, 391 Joyce, J. 127 Jünger, E. 1, 147, 206, 289 – 290, 313 – 314, 324, 331, 415 Junghans, K. 268 Kali Yuga, the 13 Kant, I. 6, 219, 367 Kästner, E. 262 Kaufmann, W. 383, 394n18 KdF [Strength though Joy] 297 – 298, 301 – 302 Keaton, B. 249 Kellner, D. 406 – 407 Kemper, F. 16 Kershaw, I. 187 – 188, 191, 281, 378 Kieval, H. J. 388 Kitsch 244 – 245,  285 Kleist, H. 194 König, W. 283 Koonz, C. 303 Koop, V. 255, 261, 271n36 Koos, C. A. 343 Kornhauser, W. 3 Kracauer, S. 246 – 247, 260 – 262 Kramer, A. 140 Kraus, K. 224, 259 Ku Klux Klan, the 225 Kun, B. 368 Kundrus, B. 284 Labriola, T. 339 Land, N. 415, 417n1 Landy, M. 262 Lassalle, F. 278, 376 Last Human, the 1, 20 – 22, 24, 25n1, 30, 103, 119 – 121, 131 – 132, 206, 209, 236 – 237, 256, 259, 263 – 264, 278, 280, 287, 289 – 290, 292, 294 – 297, 302, 304 – 305, 307, 314, 326, 341 – 343, 345, 348 – 349, 368, 400 – 401, 403 – 404, 413 – 414, 416, 418n13, 418n14 Lattuada, A. 265 Lawrence, D. H. 102 Lazarus, E. 130 Le Bon, G. 31, 87, 110 – 112, 117, 133n9, 152, 159, 309, 321 Lederer, E. 3

Index  427 Ledesma Ramos, R. 12 Lee, R. G. 195 Lenin, V. 153, 249, 307, 368 Levin, D. 380 Lewis, W. 122, 244, 270n23, 325 – 327 Ley, R. 169, 366 liberal, liberalism 1, 3, 6 – 7, 9 – 10, 18, 21 – 22, 24, 36 – 37, 52, 59n15, 64 – 66, 68, 70 – 77, 89, 107, 109, 125, 133n4, 151, 154 – 157, 165 – 167, 173 – 179, 182, 185 – 186, 189, 210n9, 226, 229, 232, 249 – 250, 262, 282, 320, 323, 334, 371, 373, 377, 394n17, 400, 406 – 407, 410,  412 Liebknecht, K. 10 Lindemann, A. 141, 144, 355, 363, 365, 389 living space, Lebensraum, spazio vitale 208, 283 – 284, 287 Lloyd, H. 249 Lloyd George, D. 146 Locchi, G. 417n1, 418n13 Lombroso, C. 106, 108, 133n8 London, J. 102 Longerich, P. 333 Losurdo, D. 107 Louis, J. 311 Lovell, T. 248 – 249 Low, D. 184 – 185, 374 – 375 Lowe, R. 64 Lubitsch, E. 252 Lueger, K. 41 – 42, 59n6, 380 lunfardo 258 Luther, M. 219 Luxemburg, R. 10, 368 Machiavelli, N. 219 Maine, H. 72 – 73 Maistre, J. 108 majoritarian hypothesis, the 173, 185 – 190,  192 Malthusianism 372, 393n11 Manfredi, N. 348 Mann, E. 221 Mann, G. 221, 393n12 Mann, H. 117, 221 Mann, Katia 221 Mann, Klaus 221 – 224, 226 – 230, 268n7, 269n9 Mann, M. 19 Mann, T. 9, 30, 124, 226 – 230, 268n7, 269n9

Mao Zedong 153 Marcuse, H. 33, 246, 416 Marcuse, L. 416, 418n14 Marinetti, F. T. 234 – 239, 269n13, 325 Marr, W. 380 Marti, U. 394n17 Martin, P. 259 Marx, K. 10 – 11, 20, 23, 30, 40 – 41, 93 – 95, 97, 158, 248, 313, 358, 372, 376, 379 – 380, 393n7, 394n13, 401 – 405, 414, 417n5, 418n14 Marx brothers, the 257 Marxism 6, 8, 10 – 11, 16, 18 – 20, 40, 42, 59n14, 152, 158, 163, 170 – 172, 188, 248, 252, 264 – 265, 268n4, 288, 358, 367 – 373, 379, 387, 391, 393n7, 393n10, 401, 403, 410, 418n11, 418n13 Mason, T. 169 Matthew H. C. G. 48 Mattòli, M. 267 Maurras, C. 393n7 May, K. 224 – 226, 268n3, 268n4 Mayakovsky, V. 236, 249 Mayhew, H. 106 – 107 Mazzini, G. 73, 232 McClelland, J. S. 153, 210n16 McKeown, T. 59n9 Mehring, W. 220 – 221 Mein Kampf 8, 143, 193, 309, 357, 366, 368 – 374,  382 Mencken, H. L. 102 Meyers, M. 333 – 334 Michels, R. 32, 70 – 72 Mickey Mouse 255 Mill, J. S. 59n15, 133n4 misogyny see woman, women Mittelstand see class Mohler, A. 471n1 monism 98, 195 Monod, G. 87 Monteleone, F. 271n34 Mosca, G. 32, 70 – 72, 177 – 178 Moses 100, 368 Mosley [Mitford], D. 175 Mosse, G. L. 2, 7, 18 – 19, 173 – 175, 179 – 186, 194, 211n21, 218, 220, 224, 226, 239, 339 Mozart, W. A. 126 – 127 Mühsam, E. 269n9 Müller, P. A. (Lok Myler) 254 Musil, R. 123, 127

428 Index Mussolini, B. 1 – 2, 8, 12, 15, 72, 74, 79, 110, 122, 142 – 143, 153, 156 – 161, 162, 175 – 176, 186 – 191, 204, 207 – 208, 232 – 234, 244, 246, 248, 260 – 261, 282, 290 – 292, 310 – 312, 320 – 325, 327 – 329, 335, 343, 348, 367, 412, 418n11 Mussolini, V. 260

Ortega y Gasset, J. 12 – 13, 20, 29, 31 – 32, 34, 44, 48, 68, 79, 87, 108 – 110, 123, 127 – 129, 208,  218 Overy, R. 281 OVRA [Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-fascism] 190 Owen, R. 59n14 Owens, J. 311

Napoleon III 41, 70, 130, 407 Napoleon V 407 Napoleon Bonaparte 35, 241, 255, 407 – 408 Natale, A. L. 257 Naumann, F. 380 Neocleous, M. 96 neorealism 248, 253, 264 – 265, 267, 271n39 Neumann, F. 59n10 Nietzsche, F. 1, 3, 12, 14 – 15, 20, 25, 30, 67, 77, 87, 90 – 95, 97 – 104, 110, 113 – 116, 119 – 120, 123 – 125, 131, 133n7, 133n13, 133n14, 141, 143, 158 – 159, 195, 197, 201 – 202, 219, 223 – 224, 227, 229, 233, 235 – 236, 268n5, 269n13, 270n16, 278, 295 – 296, 299 – 301, 304, 307 – 308, 322, 327, 329, 339, 361 – 268, 374 – 376, 380, 382, 384 – 287, 393n6, 393n7, 393n12, 394n17, 400 – 418 Nietzscheanism 15, 25, 235, 239, 249, 269n13, 270n19, 288, 297 – 298, 301, 305 – 306, 312, 314, 315n11, 348 – 349, 350n7, 366, 382, 386 – 387, 389, 400 – 418; see also blond beast, the; Last Human; Übermensch, overman, superman; the, Zarathustra Nolan, M. 281, 298 Novalis 223 – 224 Novicow, J. 94 NSBO [National Socialist Factory Cell Organization] 168 NSDAP [Nazi Party] 153, 165, 166, 168, 171, 172, 194, 241 NSF [The National Socialist Women’s League] 327

Pabst, G. W. 117 pagan, paganism 12, 97, 158, 227, 330, 333 pain 103 – 104, 196, 206, 236, 258, 289, 304, 384 Palmieri, E. F. 245 Papini, G. 237, 322 parenthood 337, 344 – 345, 347 – 348, 350n12 Pareto, V. 32, 70 – 72, 89, 133n4, 176 – 178 Paris Commune, the 39, 383 Pasetti, M. 161 Passmore, K. 168, 337 – 338 Pasteur, L. 47 Pavolini, A. 312 Paxton, R. O. 263 Payne, S. G. 149 Péguy, C. 141 Petreu, M. 269n10 Petropoulos, J. 241, 243, 270n22 petty bourgeoisie see class Pickford, M. 255 Pirandello, L. 7, 13, 77 – 79, 128, 192 – 193 Plato 219, 327 PNF [Partito Nazionale Fascista] 153, 157 Poe, E. A. 79, 81 – 87, 127, 208 Pollock, F. 416 polygamy 331 Postone, M. 356 – 360, 368, 372 Primo de Rivera, J. A. 10 – 11, 20, 393n7 Primo de Rivera, M. 20 Protestantism, Protestant 120, 131, 167, 219, 330, 378 Proudhon, P. J. 142, 358, 376 Proust, M. 127 PSF [Parti Social Français] 10, 340 Psichari, E. 141

Obregón, A. 230 O’Duffy, E. 231 Ofer, I. 335 – 336 OND (Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro) 266, 297, 302 Oriani, A. 15

race, racism 42 – 44, 75, 100, 102, 104 – 107, 109, 128, 132, 142 – 143, 146, 164, 195, 199 – 201, 208 – 209, 225, 227, 232 – 234, 243 – 244, 255,

Index  429 280, 283 – 284, 295 – 296, 300, 321, 327, 332, 337, 344, 354, 356 – 357, 362 – 366, 368, 370 – 371, 383, 386, 391, 393n7, 408 Raft, G. 58 Rand, A. 329 Read, G. 340, 342 realism 86, 127, 244, 261, 263 – 265,  267 Rebatet, L. 10 Rédier, A. 9 – 10 Rée, P. 114 – 115 Reich, W. 2, 327 – 328 Reichel, P. 282 Reinhardt, M. 252 religion of nature, the 93, 194, 199 Renan, E. 292 Renoir, J. 255 Reventlow, E. 16 – 17 Ribbentrop, J. 241, 302 Richardson, A. 102 Rider Haggard, H. 141 Riley, D. 174 – 177, 185 Risorgimento 16, 73 – 74, 76 – 79 Robespierre, M. 181 Robinson, E. G. 58 Rocco, A. 78, 162 Rodogno, D. 209 Rogers, G. 264 Röhm, E. 169 Rolland, R. 129 romanticism 86, 101, 127 – 128, 194, 234 Rome (ancient), Roman 4, 194, 210n7, 219, 234, 295, 333, 364, 366, 368 Rose, P. L. 380 – 382, 394n16 Rosenberg, A. 195, 361, 366 – 368, 393n5 Rossellini, R. 265, 271n39 Rossini, G. 126 Rossoni, E. 162 Roth, J. 361 Rousseau, G. S. 327 Rousseau, J. J 6, 173  Rumpler, H. 42 Ruskin, J. 50 – 51 Russolo, L. 235 SA (Sturmabteilung) 159, 234 Saint-Point, V. 237 Salazar, A. O. 342 Saldern, A. 251, 264 Salomé, L. 115 Sand, S. 270n26, 271n39

Sarnoff, D. 340 Sartre, J. P. 334 Schacht, H. 360 Schiller, F. 67 Schmeling, M. 311 Schmitt, C. 175 – 178, 308 Schneider, M. 246 Schocken, S. 56, 60n22, 392 Schönberg, A. 127 Schönerer, G. 41 – 42, 59n6 Schopenhauer, A. 367, 376, 384 Schulte-Sasse, L. 262 – 263, 344 Schultz, J. H. 350n12 Schuschnigg, K. 395n23 Schutzstaffel (SS) 198, 256, 307, 332 – 333,  356 Scott, W. 86, 126 SdA [Beauty of Labor] 297 – 298, 301 selection, natural selection 13, 87, 93, 96 – 98, 101, 142, 238, 362 sexuality 51 – 53, 59n17, 106, 115 – 116, 131, 239, 324, 327 – 328, 330 – 332, 337, 349 – 350, 357, 394n20, 410 Shakespeare, W. 128, 145 Shaw, G. B. 102, 412, 417 Shoah, the 354, 358, 370, 374 – 375,  383 Sighele, S. 87, 133n9, 321 Sinistra storica 74 Sloterdijk, P. 2, 7, 221, 229 Smith, W. D. 369 social Darwinism 42, 87, 93, 96 – 97, 99, 101, 104, 142, 195, 197 – 198, 200, 206, 209, 236, 361, 363, 373, 383, 385 social democracy 37 – 38, 39, 52, 98 – 99, 104, 164, 179, 185, 188 – 189, 251, 293, 298, 301, 369, 372, 378 – 379,  410 social individual, the (Marx) 402 – 404,  416 socialism, socialist 2, 6 – 8, 10 – 11, 16, 18 – 19, 22 – 23, 36 – 40, 43, 49, 59n14, 66, 71 – 72, 74, 76 – 79, 93 – 95, 99, 108, 125, 130 – 131, 139, 142, 145, 148 – 149, 151, 153 – 164, 166 – 167, 169, 171 – 172, 179, 185, 210n9, 229 – 230, 247, 250, 255, 278, 280 – 281, 285, 290 – 291, 298 – 302, 304, 315n10, 355 – 356, 358, 360, 362 – 364, 369 – 370, 372 – 373, 376 – 379, 381, 393n7, 394n17, 395n23, 401, 404 – 406, 410 – 412, 418n14

430 Index Sombart, W. 119, 121, 314, 417n3 Sonjevski-Jamrowski, R. 195 Sonnenberg, M. L. 377 Sophocles 128 Sordi, A. 263 – 264, 343 – 344 Sorel, G. 49, 59n11, 418n11 Soucy, R. 43, 218, 282 Spackman, B. 325, 328, 350n2 Sparta, Spartan 206, 281, 302 Spencer, R. B. 411 – 412, 414 Spengler, O. 10, 204 – 206, 211n27, 232, 301, 394n19 Spinoza, B. 98 sport 11, 56, 58, 118, 122 – 124, 297, 309 – 313, 324; bare-knuckleboxing 56; boxing 123, 310, 312; bullfighting 310, 312; Calcio fiorentino 311; cricket 56; football, soccer 56 – 57, 123, 310 – 311; hunting 196, 237, 311; racing 234, 311; rugby 56, 312; skiing 324; tennis 56 Springer, H. 195 Stadtler, E 10 Stalin, J., Stalinist 153, 189, 394n15 Stearns, P. 302 Steinhoff, H. 344 Stendhal 86, 126 Stenglein, L. 172 Stern, F. 3 Sternberg, J. 117 Sternhell, Z. 6, 43, 59n11, 291 Stirner, M. 158 Stöcker, A. 378, 380 Stoddard, L. 107 – 108 Strachan, H. 141 Strasser, G. 359 – 360 Stravinsky, I. 128 Strindberg, A. 322 Sturzo, L. 154 Suttner, B. 224 Swift, J. 228 syndicalism, syndicates 49, 111, 160, 161 Taine, H. 87, 108 Talmon, J. L. 173, 186 tango 57, 127, 257 – 259 Tarde, G. 87, 133n9, 321 Tarnow, F. 298 Tarzan 199 – 200 Tasca, A. 157 Tauber, R. 346

tax, taxation 36, 40, 59n3, 74, 78, 88 – 89, 155, 157, 169, 194, 201 – 202, 280 – 281, 289, 332,  337 Theweleit, K. 25n4, 210n10, 339 Tiedemann, R. 254 Tille, A. 99 – 101 Tiiler, J. 260 Tiller Girls, the 260 Tocqueville, A. 7, 9 – 10, 133n4 Togliatti, P. 267 Tolkien, J. R. R. 150 Tolstoy, L. 126 Tonfilmoperette 259 Tooze, A. 280 – 281, 284 – 285, 286 – 287, 294 – 295, 314n3 totalitarianism, totalitarian 5, 16, 152 – 153, 156, 173, 190, 219, 252, 263, 271n34, 337, 394n19, 410, 417n9 Treitschke, H. 107, 110, 125, 377 – 378,  380 Trio Lescano 257 Tristan, F. 59n14 Trotsky 368 Trotter, W. 321 Trump, D., Trumpism 406 – 407 Tucholsky, K. 409 Übermensch, overman, superman 1, 3, 95, 97, 100, 120, 141, 239, 270n19, 404, 406, 413 Uekoetter, F. 198 Unamuno, M. 310 unions, trade unions 37, 48 – 50, 59n10, 64, 71, 110 – 112, 145, 153, 155 – 156, 159 – 162, 168, 171, 177, 183 Untermensch 108, 403 Uriburu, J. F. 258 Valera, P. 22, 24 Vallejo-Nágera, A. 393n7 Valois, G. 25n6 Verdi, G. 126, 232 Vichy, regime 342 – 343 Victorian, Victorianism 51 – 52, 65, 68, 115 – 116, 334 – 340 Visconti, L. 265 Vittorio Emanuele III 153 vivisection 196 – 197 Vogelsang, K. 380 Vögler, A. 301 Volkov, S. 355, 377, 381

Index  431 Volksgemeinschaft 166, 169, 186, 191, 193, 202, 206, 297, 300 – 301 Volkswagen 293 – 294 Vorticism 244 Wagner, R. 124, 127, 374 – 377, 380 – 387, 394n16, 394n17, 394n18 Wallace, A. 99 Wandervogel 298 war, militarism 16, 24, 51, 98 – 99, 115, 118, 140 – 152, 170 – 171, 230 – 232, 234 – 236, 239, 247, 255, 263 – 264, 269n9, 281, 283 – 284, 286, 288, 292, 294 – 295, 297 – 298, 304, 310, 312, 314, 322 – 325, 329, 331, 334, 339, 345, 348 – 349, 364, 370 – 371, 413,  415 Weber, E. 26n9 Weber, H. 251 Weber, M. 120 – 121, 146, 417n3 Wedekind, F. 117 Wehler, H. U. 188, 209n1, 279 Weiner, M. 380 Weininger, O. 322, 394n20 Weiß, H. 298 Wells, H. G. 102, 412 White, A. 410 White, J. 58 Wiesen, J. S. 281, 283 Wilke, S. 195 Williams, R. 248 Williamson, D. G. 286

Winkler, H. A. 378 Wistrich, R. S. 366, 375 – 376, 382, 385 Wollstonecraft, M. 52 woman, women 17 – 18, 25n1, 35, 40, 50 – 53, 59n14, 59n16, 104, 113 – 118, 122 – 123, 130, 132, 133n10, 148, 150, 193, 198, 228, 235, 237 – 238, 267, 304, 320 – 350, 356, 388, 394n20; feminism 52, 23, 59n15, 113, 321 – 322, 325 – 327, 339, 388, 410 – 412; misogyny 50, 114, 322, 332, 339 working class (proletariat) see class Yad Vashem Institute 354 Yeats, W. B. 102, 231 – 232, 235, 269n10, 269n13 Yiddishe Momme 347 Yovel, Y. 3, 365, 386 – 387 Yrigoyen, H. 257 Zamagni, V. 163 Zampa, L. 267, 348 Zarathustra 11, 24, 91, 95, 100 – 101, 114 – 115, 119 – 120, 132, 209, 278, 297, 304, 334, 343, 406 – 407, 416 – 417 Zavattini, C. 253, 265 Zelinsky, H. 380 – 381 Žižek, S. 144, 179 Zola, E. 56 Zweig, S. 159 – 160, 220